Blum’s article mentioned many films starring young Hollywood, including Ordinary People, Taps, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Outsiders, WarGames, Risky Business, and The Breakfast Club, and argued that these youth-oriented films, along with St. Elmo’s Fire (which was about to be released in theaters when Blum’s article hit newsstands), represented a new wave of movies focusing on the problems of young people and starring a bunch of powerful actors.
Blum’s piece touched on the professional work of various actors from these films—people such as Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn, and Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton—in a mostly positive light. The article also said that the grizzled character actor Harry Dean Stanton—who had costarred with Estevez in the cult film Repo Man and who would go on to portray Ringwald’s father in Pretty in Pink—was the Brat Pack’s unofficial godfather. Looking back on those times with these young actors, Harry Dean Stanton says, “It was just about hanging out. I’ve always hung out with mostly younger people anyway; that’s just the way I’ve evolved.”
Although Blum reported on the professional achievements of plenty of young up-and-coming actors, he provided detailed personal accounts of only three: Lowe, Estevez, and Nelson, the three who showed up at the Hard Rock that evening. Lowe was depicted as a pretty boy who couldn’t decide which girl to flirt with at the restaurant, his acting skills seemingly disregarded when Blum called him the actor with “the most beautiful face.” But that was a glowing compliment in comparison to the Nelson and Estevez portrayals. These two young men would receive by far the most attention in the article—all of it negative.
Judd Nelson, whom Blum referred to as “the overrated one,” is presented as an unlikeable jerk. And Emilio Estevez’s portrayal—as an entitled, cocky…well, brat—was perhaps the most damaging of all. Blum called Estevez “the leader of the Brats,” and implied that the gang used him because he often treated everyone to their nights on the town. Estevez came across as rude, even cruel. “He laughed at her stupidity,” Blum wrote of Estevez’s reaction to a Playboy playmate who confused the bar exam with a test bartenders take. (The playmate couldn’t have been too offended, as she spent the rest of the night on the town with the gang.) “[Estevez] is already accustomed to privilege and appears to revel in the attention heaped upon him almost everywhere he goes,” wrote Blum, who also called Estevez the smartest member of the group, in large measure because he had already written two screenplays.
Blum says that he did not in any way stage the evening of drinks, but it does appear that the friends might have been acting up for his benefit. Ally Sheedy remembers, “Emilio told me, ‘You know, as part of the interview, [Blum] just wants me to be hanging out with you guys.’” Estevez called Sheedy, she says, “and said, ‘Will you come down and hang out?’” Sheedy responded that she wasn’t sure. “They were going to hang out in a bar, and it was the guys, and I didn’t drink, so I didn’t go. I just didn’t want to. Demi didn’t want to, either. So it was the guys…But it was set up,” Sheedy contends. “I mean, the guys didn’t meet each other just perchance and the reporter happened to be there. They made it for Emilio’s interview. And they were all showing off for Emilio and his interview because they were all supposed to be the cool, hot ones. It was completely staged.”
Nelson never felt quite comfortable with Blum’s presence that night. “Why is this guy having dinner with us?” Nelson remembers asking Estevez, perplexed. “He’s writing an article about me,” Estevez responded. To which Nelson replied, “So why is this guy having dinner with us?”
Schumacher remembers that David Blum came to interview him for the New York piece the morning after that night at the Hard Rock. “We did not know St. Elmo’s Fire was going to be successful, so just the fact that anybody was interested in Emilio, one of our actors, we thought it was going to be great. So [Blum] was asking me questions about Emilio, and then he started to tell me about the night,” says Schumacher, “and I knew from his sarcasm—I so smelled about him the person who had never been invited to the party in high school—that he looked at this group of beautiful, talented, perhaps overpaid young people, and I could tell that he had found a way to get even.” Schumacher continues: “And I remember so well thinking, I don’t think Emilio knows what he is in for. [Blum] said that he decided not to just write about Emilio; he would rather write about the group, which on the surface sounded good, until I thought about his sarcasm and vitriol.” St. Elmo’s Fire producer Lauren Shuler Donner believes Blum was probably just envious of the life Estevez was leading. “I didn’t like [Blum],” she asserts. “The article was very hateful. And for no reason other than his own personal problems. It’s like, this is a guy seeing something that he didn’t have.”
“There’s no question that the impact of the ‘Brat Pack’ article was extraordinary,” says film critic Leonard Maltin. “New York is essentially a regional magazine, but the region happens to be the media capital of the world. The label was so catchy and seemed to express in shorthand terms so well who they were, and what they represented at that moment, that it stuck. And it stuck irrevocably.”
The reaction to the Blum article was swift, and negative. New York’s offices were flooded with angry calls from the actors’ PR people, and Blum recalled that Rob Lowe bitterly, and not particularly helpfully, told the Chicago Sun-Times: “David Blum burned a lot of bridges. He took on the wrong people, though. He’s not Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe, he’s David Blum living in a cheap flat.” When asked about the phrase a year later, a sour Lowe responded to the Associated Press, “Will it ever end?” Lowe eventually came to terms with the phrase. “I was certainly aware that the guy was having a run at us, but,” he says now, “I never really got worked up about the term ‘brat pack’ one way or the other, because to me it was pretty clear that it got picked up, and that it took on a life of its own, more as an easy catch-all for journalists to describe this group of actors because there were so many of us…I sort of got that.”
Those friendly with the cast took it very personally. Loree Rodkin says that “from that night, and them all being glib and funny and having a couple beers and trying to make the writer feel included,” Blum twisted a fun evening into an “arrogant, self-mutilating piece—an evil article.” When Rodkin found herself later sitting next to Blum at a screening, she says, “I humiliated him into leaving. I said, ‘You vile human being. How dare you.’ I just humiliated him until he got up and left.”
Michelle Manning also thought that Blum had completely misread them. “It was like, going out to dinner with your friends,” she says of the evening. “That’s all it ever was. I remember reading the article and thinking, ‘No, we were all just being friends. Why are you picking on us’?”
And there does seem something intrinsically unfair about the fact that everyone at the Hard Rock that night believed Blum was there to write a piece about Estevez, and Estevez only. They might’ve known Blum was a reporter, and they might have been showing off for him—but surely they would have had their guard up a bit more, would’ve watched what they said and how they acted had they known that they, too, would be the subject of the article (and a lengthy, detailed cover story at that).
Some of the actors went on Donahue and said that Blum was an unethical creep. Blum remembers that Rob Lowe told Phil Donahue that Blum “was jealous of their fame and their wealth and success.” Blum doesn’t deny it. “Yeah, I [was],” he says. “I wasn’t a loser, but I was willing to cop to the fact that I, like everybody else in America who isn’t a Hollywood movie star, thinks that being a Hollywood movie star is probably a pretty cool thing. But if I were a Hollywood movie star,” says Blum, “I would probably spend more time focusing on my craft than on going to the Hard Rock Café and picking up girls.”
On that emotionally charged episode of Donahue, “they all started saying what a jerk I was,” remembers Blum, sounding still a bit wounded, “and how it was all off the record, and how I was lying to them the whole time.” Time magazine film
critic Richard Schickel was on the program with the actors, taking their side, which irritated Blum. “Schickel said, ‘I think it’s really sleazy when journalists take off-the-record information and print it.’ I actually wrote to Schickel afterward,” says Blum, “and said, ‘You don’t know the truth of it, and in fact there was never any discussion of off the record, and they knew I was a journalist the entire time.’” And yet, as Blum suggests, the actors probably gave the piece more power by raging against it publicly than if they had just let it roll off their backs. “Maybe if they had just shut up and not attacked me it might have just gone away,” says Blum of the moniker. “But it was one of those classic Hollywood things: they weren’t thinking intelligently and by attacking me all they did was increase my celebrity and promote the phrase.”
But as frustrated as Blum was by the personal attacks made against him very publicly, he did feel saddened by a phone call he received from Emilio Estevez shortly after the piece ran. Estevez said, simply, “You’ve ruined my life.” “Yes,” says Blum, “Emilio called me the day the piece came out and he said, ‘How could you do this to me? My friends hate me now, and won’t speak to me. You completely betrayed me. I thought we were friends. I thought you liked me, I know I liked you. You know I invited you to come along,’ and all this stuff. And you know,” says Blum, “I give him a lot of credit for that, a lot of people wouldn’t do that…To be honest with you,” says Blum, softly, “I really did feel bad about it, because I really did like him. He was a nice guy.”
Of all the actors mentioned in the piece, it was hardest for Estevez, since he must have felt somewhat responsible for the whole debacle. “How could Emilio not feel betrayed?” asks Kurlander. When the article came out, he says, “Emilio was not happy, mostly because you trust [journalists] to get the heart right. That’s what was so sad.” Even as young men and women, these actors were growing wary of the press. One night, Kurlander remembers, he and Lowe went to the home of Michael J. Fox, who “worked all the time; he didn’t have a lot of friends, he was a workaholic,” says Kurlander. Fox and Lowe told Kurlander “these stories of how journalists would come into their homes and, while they were turned around, would go through their drawers.”
The scrutiny of the actors’ personal lives bothered Judd Nelson. He didn’t understand why it mattered that his coworkers were also his friends. The focus, he believed, should be on the work, not the palling around. “Nobody asks Isaac Stern if he gets along with the second violinist,” he told a reporter.
Andrew McCarthy recalls sitting in John Hughes’s office when Lauren Shuler Donner entered and told him that an article would soon be published in New York labeling him and his colleagues the “Brat Pack,” which, to Hughes and Donner, seemed like a pretty neat moniker. But McCarthy’s heart sank. “Oh, no,” he remembers thinking, “this is fucking awful.” When he read the article, he must’ve felt worse. The article mentions him only once, when an actor anonymously opines that McCarthy “plays all of his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it.” (“Horrible and meanspirited” is how McCarthy describes the article now.)
The photo on the magazine’s cover shows a boastfully beaming Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, and Emilio Estevez in a bar, surrounded by beers, wildly roughhousing with one another as young male best friends often do. A tiny caption identifies the picture as a publicity still for St. Elmo’s Fire, but a casual reader would all too easily assume that this was a journalistic photo capturing the offscreen Lowe, Nelson, and Estevez, hanging out at a bar—and as such, the group’s cocky, chauvinistic body language is particularly misleading. It’s rare for a magazine of New York’s stature to run a publicity still on its cover; New York had tried to arrange a group shot featuring many of the actors in the piece. When the magazine phoned the actors’ publicists to try to set it up, the publicists learned the story wasn’t just about Estevez. They felt aggrieved and refused to arrange a shoot, and so the publicity still was used. The shot that would go on the cover included another actor in it, but just barely. “My elbow’s in the picture,” notes McCarthy dryly.
Whether the article was an accurate assessment or not, within days of its publication newspapers across the country had taken the term “Brat Pack” and run with it. Soon enough, any actor mentioned in the article was more often than not referred to with the phrase “Brat Pack” near his or her name (sometimes “Brat Packer”). “It’s such a catchy phrase,” says Andrew McCarthy, a touch of pained irony in his voice. Some actors, such as Demi Moore, were mentioned in the article only in passing (in Moore’s case, as part of a snide aside having to do with Emilio Estevez being a ladykiller when he wasn’t with Moore)—yet she, too, was soon frequently referred to as a member of the “pack” in the press. And because the piece was adorned with publicity stills from other teen movies, actors like Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and Ally Sheedy got labeled with the moniker as well, even though they weren’t mentioned in the text of the article.
“It was one of those phrases that just clicked in,” says then New York editor in chief Ed Kosner, “and everybody loved the phrase, so it took off. It’s a perfect magazine phrase, and that was before the Internet, and before things were instantly disseminated—so that shows that it really moved, because the only way people would hear about it was through other print.” Lowe remembers his friend Michael J. Fox walking up to him at the time and jokingly complaining, “How come I’m not in the Brat Pack? I’m gonna start my own thing, called the Snack Pack.”
John Hughes might’ve originally thought the Brat Pack moniker sounded kind of cool, but quickly he came to see the label given his young stars in a very different light. “It’s unfair,” he told Molly Ringwald when she interviewed him for Seventeen magazine. The phrase, said Hughes, “suggests unruly, arrogant young people, and that description isn’t true of these people. And the label has been stuck on people who never even spoke to the reporter who coined it…. It’s harmful to people’s careers.”
Even though the press was eager to assign the Brat Pack prefix to dozens of young actors based often on nothing but their age and proximity to one another, many somehow avoided being branded: “I don’t think I was famous enough,” says Eric Stoltz. “I never went out with them, I barely went out at all, I didn’t socialize with them, and I was hard-pressed to go to a premiere of a movie that I was in. I was just terribly shy and didn’t like going out that much, and didn’t drink, and I just had my own set of friends.” The Brat Pack was “a mysterious, glamorous entity outside of myself that I would look at and go, ‘Wow, how do they stay up that late?’ I had no connection to that side of it at all. I like staying home and reading. I was boring. I was part of the Boring Pack.” Actress Lea Thompson quips, “I used to call myself ‘A Not Ready for Brat Pack Player.’”
Ironically, the Brat Pack label stuck to actors it shouldn’t have, but bypassed one of its own members. There were seven equal partners in the St. Elmo’s Fire cast, but only six got tarred with the Pack label for life, a fact not lost on Mare Winningham. “I felt like the invisible woman in all that,” she told the Newark Star-Ledger. So much so that at one point during the St. Elmo’s publicity tour, the limo that was supposed to drive Winningham (who’d just had a baby) never showed. Winningham had just given birth to the son she was pregnant with during the shoot. “I was changing the kid’s diaper in the bathroom, and no one came to pick me up,” she said. It’s only natural that she wouldn’t have been a member of the “pack”—her lifestyle was so different from that of her young costars; a married mother of three wasn’t exactly going to be whooping it up at the Hard Rock. The Brat Pack label, she said, is “a bullet that I dodged.”
David Blum feels he was just trying to write a real, honest article—a rare thing, he says, in the world of entertainment news. “So much of Hollywood journalism is so sycophantic and fawning that I took some pleasure in just reversing that a little and saying, ‘Hey, sometimes journalists really write what they see, as o
pposed to what they’re told to see, or allowed to see.’ Julia Roberts gets this piece in a magazine portraying her as a wonderful person. Do we know she’s a wonderful person? Of course not.”
Blum felt that by following the more compelling story that presented itself to him over the course of his reporting, he was doing what a good reporter is supposed to do. When the angry phone calls came in from publicists, Blum says, the gist of the calls was “‘He lied. He told us it was about Emilio,’ and my response always was, ‘People are always criticizing reporters for writing the story they intended to write before they ever did any reporting. I’m doing the opposite—I’m basing my story on what I actually got, as opposed to what my preconceived notion was.’ And I thought that’s what journalists were supposed to do.” The actors and their publicists didn’t accept this argument.
There was also some truth in what Blum captured. It was the hard-partying eighties, and these were, after all, sexy, well-paid actors with Hollywood wrapped around their fingers. The actors looking back remember it as a sweet, relatively innocent time of dinner parties and hanging out, but perhaps that’s a bit of selective memory on their part. Or, as Lea Thompson jokes, “It was the eighties. If you remember it, you weren’t there.”
Ned Tanen, who was a mentor to these actors and one of their greatest supporters, admitted, “I could see that they would be a handful. They would convey not necessarily an attractive image.”
Things in this period may have gotten, as Lowe’s St. Elmo’s character says, out of hand. “If we all went out for one beer,” Lowe later told a reporter looking back on that time, “I might end up being up for two days drinking. I was what you would call an extremely functional alcoholic.”
There were other ways in which some of the young actors’ lives were veering off course. Estevez fathered a child with model Carey Salley in 1984, and initially didn’t take responsibility. Estevez and Salley had another child in 1986, and he did end up taking full responsibility for both of his kids, apologizing for his earlier behavior. Looking back on it all, he told the Telegraph, “I decided I had to be there for them, which I wasn’t when I was out partying every night.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 16