Stories I Only Tell My Friends

by Rob Lowe

  After the release of Class, I begin a pattern that will take me through the rest of the decade, shooting two movies a year on location and trying to catch up on life (and my sleep!) in the few months in between. It’s a nomadic, transitory existence, punctuated by hotel rooms and brief, heated relationships. I have very little contact with anyone not involved in the world of filmmaking. My dream of a legitimate career in movies has been achieved, but there is no real sense of victory. I’m too busy trying to build on this momentum to take stock of what’s happened so far, or how I feel about it.

  * * *

  New York City is a magnet. I return again and again, using American Airlines Flight 21 like a luxurious shuttle. These were the days when you knew you would find someone interesting on the plane, when flying was fun and not something to be dreaded. With a hiatus between movies and a growing new circle of industry pals to see, I’m back in Gotham. I do have one small piece of business to attend to, and it will put me face-to-face with one of the more memorable icons of the twentieth century.

  Andy Warhol wore a wig, right? The great man has passed and there is no longer need for discretion on this account, correct? Whether he did or he didn’t, to my unsophisticated eye at the time, the hair, the ’50s beatnik glasses, the black uniform, and the skin like tracing paper—they added up to an unforgettable impression. Surely there isn’t anyone reading this who can’t picture him clearly in their mind’s eye, the rare art-world superstar who himself would have a lasting personal image. I first meet Warhol in an unadorned, nondescript warehouse. In the ’80s, if it didn’t happen in a crappy warehouse, it wasn’t cool.

  Andy has a camera team recording as he interviews me for his underground cable-access TV show, which is a mixture of Manhattan celebrity avant-garde art and unapologetic commercialism that only Warhol could create. Think Wayne’s World for people who smoke clove cigarettes. I am not a student of the contemporary art scene, but I am curious to see what a noted cultural genius like Andy Warhol will want to talk about.

  “What’s it like to be famous?” Andy asks. His voice is actually even more striking than his look, if that’s possible—an odd mix of a sly, singsong whine and a sexed-up, ironic Liberace. All of his follow-up questions are in the same vein: queries on “celebrity,” the definition of “beauty,” and the world of “movie stars,” a term he loved. I do my best to sound like I know what I’m talking about, and soon it’s over.

  On my way out he stops me. “I want you to meet Cornelia [Corneeeeeeelia],” he says. I know he is referring to Cornelia Guest, the eighteen-year-old blue-blood heiress, “debutante of the decade” and all-around Manhattan It girl. I’ve seen her picture in the papers and think she’s cute.

  “Sure, that’d be nice.”

  “We will pick you up and go to Diana’s concert tomorrow,” he says, referring to Diana Ross’s free concert in Central Park. We make a plan to meet.

  Andy, Cornelia, Diana. It’s a very different crowd from my pals back on Point Dume. This is the fastest of the fast, intriguing and achieving and in the spotlight at the center of the contemporary cultural stage.

  There are one hundred thousand people crammed into the meadow in Central Park. Dark, ominous clouds threaten on the horizon. Diana Ross insists on doing the show despite alerts for deadly lightning strikes. Before the dangerous weather and torrents of rain force her to stop, she will give what is today considered a historic performance. Sitting in the wings, Cornelia, Andy, and I know we are seeing something extraordinary.

  As the giant storm breaks, the masses run for cover. One hundred thousand people trying to get out of the park on a good day would be pandemonium; with lightning crackling and thunder crashing, it is dangerous chaos.

  The three of us navigate the panicked throngs, wading through ankle-deep mud, and hiding as gangs of hoods exploit the confusion to rip jewelry off the soaked, defenseless concertgoers.

  We take shelter at Café Central, just off Central Park on the Upper West Side. Known as the launching point for any legit night on the town, at this midday hour it is deserted and we take a table at the window to watch the scene outside.

  The bar is famous for its kamikaze, mixed until recently by Bruce Willis, who has just left his position running the best bar in Manhattan to try his hand at acting. Turns out, he is pretty good at that as well.

  “Let’s play a game!” suggests Andy, with little-boy enthusiasm.

  He clears the flatware on the paper tablecloth and grabs a bunch of crayons at the center of the table.

  “I want everyone to draw their best version of a pussy,” he says mischievously. “Don’t let anyone look at it until we are all finished.”

  If nothing else, I feel this exercise will provide a good source of conversation with Cornelia, who I’ve been trying to chat up, without gaining much traction. She grabs a crayon and starts drawing furiously, as does Andy. I cover my part of the tablecloth so they can’t watch and begin my artwork. I make a calculated call to go hyperrealistic. I begin to work on an almost gynecological rendition of a vagina, a subject I am having more and more experience with these days. The three of us work in concentrated silence. Soon we are all done.

  “Okay, show yours, Cornelia,” orders Andy, and she presents a fairly demure-looking pussy of the Patrick Nagel school. I go next, unveiling my hypergyno masterwork. With a flourish and a cackle, Andy Warhol reveals his sketch. It’s a rudimentary stick figure version of a cat.

  “Now that’s a pussy!” he says.

  Later we all sign our names below our work at Andy’s instruction, because “that’s what artists do.”

  Youthful pride and a desire to seem cool prevented me from taking Andy’s drawing as we left. This glamorous world was new to me and I didn’t want anyone to know how unsure I felt in it. Only now do I see how often this held me back, kept me from making real connections and, more specifically, a signed original Warhol!

  Years later, after Andy’s death, The Warhol Diaries was published. I was happy to see that our day together had made its way into his amazing journal of an extraordinary life.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1983 I arrive in London to shoot a movie called Oxford Blues. It’s the first script to come my way that will give me the true lead, complete with first billing—a big step in a young actor’s career. The film deals with a cocky American who has a crush on a European princess and schemes to meet her. I suggest we try to get Princess Stephanie of Monaco for the role. It would require little acting on her part, or mine either, since she’s a real princess and I have a crush on her from afar. Inquiries are made. There is no response.

  The shoot is entirely on location in Oxford, England. I’ve never been to Europe, and I have a horrible time with jet lag in the first few weeks. On a weekend trip to London, the city is paralyzed when an IRA bomb detonates in front of Harrods department store at the start of the Christmas shopping season, killing a number of innocent shoppers. I’m getting to see the world from beyond the traditional American perspective, and some of the things I’m seeing are troubling. But some are thrilling.

  I become close with the young producer of the film, an Englishman named Cassian Elwes. One weekend he invites me to his family’s country estate, Runnymede House. Jet lag once again has me awake at sunrise, so I’m killing time by walking in his enormous backyard, or “garden,” as he calls it. I come upon a giant elm tree and underneath it is a massive rock, about the size of a dining room table. It’s covered with leaves, but my eye catches something beneath the debris. I clear away the dirt, leaves, and cobwebs to reveal a metal plaque, its lettering worn by time and weather. I climb up onto the rock to read it. It says, “On this site the Magna Carta was signed by King John in 1215.” My on-set love affair in England was not with a costar, but with the country itself—the history at your fingertips, the traditions that are still embraced and revered, and the cleverness of her people. I was smitten and still am.

  With Oxford Blues complete, I fly to New York Cit
y to do publicity for the opening of The Hotel New Hampshire. For the press tour of Class a few months earlier, Andrew McCarthy and I did a sort of two-man bus-and-truck tour of the country, appearing on local morning news and talk shows, staying in giant suites, and getting to know various locals somewhat intimately. It was an adventure in room service and benign debauchery. Believe me, after you do your tenth morning show where they want you to cook an omelet while asking you what Jacqueline Bisset is like, you’re looking to blow off some steam. (This publicity road show is so gruelingly banal that for the movie the studio released before Class, all the actors refused to do it. The studio was forced to send a parrot that appeared in the movie instead.)

  But this trip to New York holds more promise. I land at JFK and get into a limousine for the ride to the hotel (this being back in the day when actors didn’t insist on street-cred SUVs or enviro-cred Priuses). Then I’m off to meet Jodie Foster and her roommate at Yale, Jon Hutman (later to be the production designer on The West Wing), and their group of friends. We are to rendezvous at a new underground club called Area.

  There is an absolute mob standing in the bitter cold outside a nondescript metal door to a ramshackle building in an obscure location in downtown Manhattan. Although I still have a decent share of my privacy intact, most people under the age of twenty-five, particularly girls, know who I am, so there is a commotion as the bouncers help me navigate inside to find my friends. I haven’t been to many clubs (I’m still two years away from drinking age), so I feel the kind of exuberant, giddy excitement of possibility that the occasion calls for. As I enter the club and pass the live performance art of a fully naked woman sleeping, I am unaware that this place, at this moment, is the living embodiment of the innocent excess of the ’80s. Every era has its high-water mark—that one irreproducible moment so full of promise that people can spend their entire lives trying to recapture it. For the go-go 1980s big-city club scene, it all crystallized on this night in a Manhattan warehouse. Soon enough, we would learn that cocaine was bad for us and so was conspicuous consumption. We would hear of a new disease called AIDS. But these game changers were unimaginable this night and the club is filled with a level of energy and abandon that might never be seen again. Depeche Mode is blasting as bodies move. The new young voices in literature, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, icons like Andy Warhol, important actors like Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson all hold court, and music stars like the Go-Gos drop by to flirt and mingle. Sitting with the lovely and hilarious Jodie, I am exactly where I want to be, surrounded by this incredible group of creative talent at the top of their game.

  “Jodie, I went to the men’s room and there were girls in there!” I say, never having seen anything like it. “I mean, how can a guy pee with a girl smoking a cigarette next to him?!”

  I leave at sunrise. In a few hours I’ll have rounds of interviews and it will be a struggle to stay awake and focused. Something has occurred to me: With every increasing encroachment of my privacy, with each additional loss of the ability to lead a normal life, to cover my deep discomfort, I will compensate by enjoying the fun that comes with it. And all these years later, looking back, I’m glad I did it. Because for a while, it worked.

  For Hotel New Hampshire, I’m sitting for an interview with People magazine for what is to be my first major exposure in mainstream media. (Today, a hot nineteen-year-old would likely be put on the cover, but this was still a time when that distinction was reserved for those who had a track record of actual achievement. Coverage by the legit press was an honor bestowed on accomplished, “real” stars only, like Redford, Newman, Beatty, Fonda.) After the interview is over I feel an unnameable unease, which will only increase after the photo shoot. I have a vague notion that I’m doing something wrong, but I can’t put my finger on what it is. The press I’m getting is good on one level—it’s putting my name out there and is, in and of itself, an indication of my growing profile in Hollywood. But there is a slight air of condescension and a lack of seriousness in the coverage. I’m hoping that people want to know who I really am and what I’m about, but I’m not getting those kinds of questions.

  In hindsight, I know why. First and foremost was the way I looked. There is just no way anyone is likely to take a nineteen-year-old boy as pretty as I was seriously. Even I wouldn’t. I look at myself in those early movies and pictures and am stunned by the disconnect between how I felt on the inside and what I looked like on the outside. People looked at me and made a judgment. It’s the way of the world. I do it, too, sometimes.

  The other reason that my early press had a lack of seriousness was that, as a good midwestern son and people pleaser, I wanted to be liked and (as I was in school) be a “pleasure to have in class.” The world “no” was not in my vocabulary in spite of my sometimes feeling like I should say it. So, as a result, I posed for photos that I shouldn’t have (I remember letting one photographer paint Brooke Shields–like eyebrows on me) and answered questions that would’ve made de Tocqueville seem like a lightweight. If they asked it, I answered it. No one close to me had the wisdom, experience, or instinct to guide me or play bad cop when needed. And it is always needed if you want to last. The survivors either naturally have that tough, uncompromising side, develop it later, as I thankfully did, or hire or marry someone who has it.

  But however confusing my relationship with my nascent public image might have been, it would become more complicated with time.

  * * *

  Even as a young actor, I knew that any time I could work with an important director, I should jump at the chance. So in early 1989, when Roman Polanski wants me to meet with him in Paris, I immediately hop on a plane.

  I’m picked up at Charles de Gaulle Airport in a torrential downpour. My driver is cursing in French slang that I can’t understand in spite of studying AP French in school. I read Camus’s The Stranger entirely in the language but have no idea what this guy is yelling about. The only words I recognize are “rain,” “strike,” and “fuckers.” Ahead, the Champs-Élysées is barricaded by protesting farmers who have covered the famed avenue with rotting produce. In spite of the stench, my first view of the Arc de Triomphe brings tears to my eyes.

  Roman Polanski has summoned me to Paris to screen-test for Pirates, a movie he’s making with Jack Nicholson, which will reunite the two men who made Chinatown, considered by many to be the greatest movie of the modern era, behind Citizen Kane. If I get the role, I will play a young man kidnapped by Nicholson and indentured into a life of high-seas plunder. It is a huge-budget movie and a rare opportunity to work with two living legends at the top of their powers.

  I’m dropped off at a studio on the outskirts of the city. Roman greets me as I exit the cab.

  “Welcome to Paris.”

  He is small, hard with muscles, and immediately exudes charisma and charm that could knock out an elephant.

  “Shall we get you ready, no?” he asks.

  My character is a shipwreck survivor, so he wants me clinging to the mast, dressed in tatters. His crew puts me in a glorified loincloth and leads me to a small, rudimentary set of a masted ship.

  I’ve always been an instinctual actor. From the start, I’ve believed that confidence in your own instinct trumps the ponderous and often pretentious preparation that is sometimes more lauded because it sounds sexier, more “intense.” That day, my instinct tells me to break out a full French accent, even though it has never been discussed. It’s a risk, I go for it, and Polanski seems pleased.

  I am a little thrown, however, by the great director’s shooting style. He pushes the big Arriflex camera right up into my face, maybe six inches in front of me. The wide lens smashed in tight was a technique I hadn’t encountered, and not many use it today.

  Jack Nicholson is not there to do the scene with me. I figure he’s in L.A., probably watching the Lakers. Instead, I work with a sweet and well-meaning Frenchman who, even if he were scientifically engineered, could not have been less like the actor he w
as filling in for. After a while, we take a break as a local gypsy attempts to sell the crew his hoard of leather goods.

  “He comes to all my sets,” Roman says warmly. “Good jackets, no?”

  Soon we have completed the scene and I’m shuttled back to my hotel, just off the Champs-Élysées. I am wired from the shoot and bursting to explore this city I’ve studied and admired for years. But it’s freezing and rain is still coming down in sheets. I make the best of it by wandering around the hotel, a European classic, complete with the kind of grille-gated elevator that characters in thrillers get murdered in.

  As I wander the halls, a door opens and a bleary-eyed man looks out. I recognize him at once as Bill Murray, one of my favorite actors.

  “I thought I heard room service,” he says.

  “Sorry. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

  “Oh. You’re American!”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Good. These frogs are driving me crazy. Wanna watch some golf?”

  I spend the next few hours learning the finer points of the game from Carl the groundskeeper from Caddyshack. I want to tell him that on The Outsiders we had Caddyshack-watching parties at least once a week, but something tells me I shouldn’t. I explain that I’m here for a screen test for Polanski’s Pirates movie. He tells me he is working on his first serious role, The Razor’s Edge. We talk for hours and he’s funny as hell. What a great surprise to meet a hero under these strange circumstances. Soon I have to meet Roman for dinner and we say our good-byes.

  “Thanks for letting me hang out,” I say as we shake hands.

  “Thanks for not stealing my wallet. Oh, and good luck on that pirate thing.”

  We go to a restaurant called Pacific Palisades and are surrounded by American girls—so much for experiencing foreign culture. There must be fifteen models, all stunning, at our long table in the back of the room. Roman sits at the head, and a few men whom I don’t know are mixed among our group. Roman has taken good care of me, placing me between a fantastic redhead and a breathtaking blonde. I spend most of the dinner like a spectator in a tennis match with my head on a swivel. Both girls are funny, nice, and interested. As the dinner winds down, Roman motions for me to come talk to him.