Friends in Lowe Places: Rob Lowe and the Art of the Celebrity Memoir

I love celebrity memoirs, and not in an ironic way. I don’t love them because they’re campy. I hate camp. I don’t love them because they’re full of Hollywood gossip. I’m not interested in Hollywood gossip. Even though I work for Time Inc. and the profits from People magazine probably pay most of my salary. I love them and read them because they are, to me, existential fairy tales about one human being’s triumph over the all-corrupting force of entropy. And I mean that seriously.

It doesn’t particularly matter to me who the celebrity is. I have read Andre Agassi’s memoir and Monica Seles’ memoir, but I have also read Anthony Kiedis’ memoir and Tommy Lee’s memoir (even though I couldn’t have told you what band Tommy Lee was in, or even what instrument he played in it). I’ve read Paul Allen’s memoir. I’ve read Rutger Hauer’s memoir (All Those Moments: Stories of Heroes, Villains, Replicants and Blade Runners), in which we learn that Hauer wanted Matthew Broderick to play his character in Ladyhawke as more of “an androgynous Annie Lennox thing,” but no such luck.

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I may be the only person who read Glen Matlock’s memoir. He was the original bassist for the Sex Pistols. You know, before Sid Vicious. He was kicked out for being too boring. I read his memoir.

I didn’t intend to read Rob Lowe’s new memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. But an advance copy crossed my desk, and I picked it up to skim it for the racy part in which he gets caught on video with two underage girls. I was also vaguely curious about why he left The West Wing for that show about the lawyer that flopped after like two episodes. Then, just like that, it was over, and I’d read the whole thing. And you know what? I really enjoyed it. Like Edith Piaf (author of The Wheel of Fortune: The Autobiography of Edith Piaf), je ne regrette rien.

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Lowe had a crap childhood. Many celebrities do; in fact, the crap childhood is one of the cherished conventions of the celebrity memoir. This may be because it’s necessary to have a crap childhood to acquire the bizarre personality type you need to become a celebrity: wounded and insecure enough to require massive amounts of attention from other people, yet aggressive and determined enough to crush everyone else who wants to become a celebrity in your place. However he did it, Lowe acquired it.

He did this starting in Dayton, Ohio, where he was a drama geek who acted in community theater and doorstepped celebrities when they were in town (including a kindly Liza Minnelli and an indifferent Telly Savalas). His parents divorced when he was 5 — well timed for maximum damage. When Rob was 12, his mom (who struggles with her mental health throughout the book) left her second husband and took the family to Malibu, Calif.

In Malibu we encounter another great convention of the celebrity memoir: the Zelig effect. It’s a strange reality of the lives of future celebrities that everybody they meet seems to be a future celebrity too. There must be a statistical explanation for it — it’s an illusion generated by hindsight — but who knows, maybe celebrities naturally occur in clumps. Like cancer clusters.

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Whatever the reason, Lowe’s memoir has the Zelig effect in spades. When young Rob runs into a bunch of kids running around in a parking lot, they turn out to be Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez and Chris Penn (whose brother Sean is around as well). A guy Lowe randomly meets at a baseball game works for The Muppet Show and introduces him to Bernie Brillstein (who will one day manage him) and John Belushi. Lowe’s mom’s new boyfriend’s brother and sister-in-law take him to a smelly warehouse where they happen to be doing special effects for this weird new movie called Star Wars. (A rancid bantha costume is the source of the smell.) The guy who beats Lowe in a track race grows up to be Dean Cain. The guy he shoots an early commercial with, for a hamburger chain, is a rookie news anchor named Regis Philbin. Janet Jackson makes a cameo, as do Ron Howard, LeVar Burton, Sarah Jessica Parker … you get the idea. Oh, and a girl he dates turns out to be Cary Grant’s daughter.

(If I have one complaint about Stories I Only Tell My Friends, it’s that Lowe succumbs to yet another great convention of the celebrity memoir, which is to complain about how he used to be a nerd. I’m sorry, but nobody who played sports and was that supernaturally good-looking was ever a nerd. For God’s sake, he lost his virginity, untraumatically, at 14.)

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Future celebrities aside, the Malibu of Lowe’s youth is a strange place, part beach-blanket paradise, part horror movie. Everybody is good-looking and about to be famous, but Et in Arcadia ego: death and trauma lurk around the edges of the frame. People are always dying from a car crash or a surfing accident or a drug overdose or getting shot or being eaten by a great white shark. (This happened.) Lowe evokes this dreamy-nightmary atmosphere rather well: “There was a price to be paid for a culture that idealizes the relentless pursuit of ‘self,’ ” he writes. “When you ignore reality for too long you begin to feel immune to, or above, the gravitational pull that bounds everyone else. You are courting disaster.”

Fortunately for him, he doesn’t hang around. Lowe signs with an agent in junior high and gets some small-time work, including a spot on a short-lived sitcom. The work dries up and he’s about to chuck it all and go to college when he gets a call. He’s got (celebrity-memoir convention alert) one last shot at the big time: Francis Ford Coppola is casting The Outsiders.

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We all know the universe is dominated by entropy and that everything is dissolving inevitably and irreversibly into chaos and emptiness. Thermodynamics tells us that, on average, you can’t win, and you can’t break even either. But we also know that on a small scale, over short stretches of time, entropy can reverse itself. Miracles happen. Order arises out of chaos spontaneously. That’s what happens when a celebrity gets his big break. That’s what happens to Lowe.

The Outsiders casting call is the book’s great set piece. Everybody is there: Dennis Quaid, Scott Baio, Mickey Rourke, that kid from E.T., that kid from On Golden Pond. After endless rounds of readings and auditions, orchestrated to Italian opera by the eccentric Coppola, the cast gets finalized, and it’s a Who’s-Going-to-Be-Who of young Hollywood: Lowe, Tom Cruise, Thomas Howell, Estevez, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze. (Also Leif Garrett!) It’s like the Big Bang of 1980s movies, with all that beefcake and hairspray compressed into one infinitely hot, dense dot, about to explode. It’s a thermodynamic anomaly.

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It’s also the best part of the memoir: everybody’s happy and poor and idiotic and talented and achingly ignorant of all the rubbish to come. They get drunk and pick up girls (Matt Dillon is the alpha male) and learn their craft and have backflip contests and earnest, tearful, bonding conversations. In the end, most of Lowe’s big scenes will be edited out, and he’ll wind up as a minor character in The Outsiders. But he doesn’t know that yet.

What follows is more familiar, though still thoroughly entertaining: the Brat Pack years, the Wayne’s World years, the alcoholic obscurity, the glamorous romances (Princess Stephanie of Monaco!), the inevitable rehab and the triumphant comeback on The West Wing. It’s all quite entertaining, and the writing really isn’t bad (though the record suggests that I would have kept reading even if it were), and Lowe shows a lot of self-awareness for a celebrity. He’s nice about his mom, for example, who seems, reading between the lines, to have put him through a lot. “[She] will never be in the ranks of eight-by-ten-clutching, armchair-directing, aggressively hustling stage mothers that haunt every waiting room in show business,” he writes. “Mostly she guides me from the sidelines, quietly. And the message to me is: This game is yours to win.”

There’s not a lot of attitude. And not a lot of whining either, which is good, because even when things are at their worst — the Brat Pack label; the sex tape (“it never occurred to me that there could be anyone in the club who wasn’t of age”); throwing up on-air while stumping for Michael Dukakis; dating Fawn Hall; singing a duet with Snow White at the Oscars — Lowe’s life is pretty charmed. He hung out with Andy Warhol. He had an affair with Nastassja Kinski. He presumably made tons of money. (He swapped some of his up-front fee on Wayne’s World for a back-end deal instead. Good call.)

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If you’re an aficionado of the form, Lowe’s memoir will give you every satisfaction that a cheesy celebrity memoir can give. It also gave me a keener understanding of the fluky psychological makeup that being a celebrity requires, and of how close to insane almost everybody Lowe meets is. You have to be right on the brink to make it work. Lowe gives us a nice closeup look at Cruise: he’s inhumanly focused, a true psychological outlier, a land shark with an agent. (Lowe happens to be in Chicago while Cruise is shooting Risky Business, but Cruise declines to meet up: “I want to spend time hanging out with you,” he says, “but Joel doesn’t.”) His ascent parallels Lowe’s but with a staggeringly steeper slope: five years after The Outsiders, while Lowe is still struggling along in Illegally Yours, Cruise is making Rain Man. Maybe Lowe wasn’t damaged quite enough?

But then take a look at the doomed Chris Farley, on the set of Tommy Boy, chugging an espresso before every take and plowing through two porterhouse steaks for dinner. On each bite of steak — each bite — he places an entire pat of butter. “It needs a hat!” he giggles. Even in Hollywood, there’s such a thing as being too crazy. You can only hold off entropy for so long.

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