‘Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!’
– Lord Henry Wooton, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
I WANT TO TALK about Andrew McCarthy’s eyes. And what became of them.
He never quite had classic Hollywood lead looks: his face was sensitive boy-next-doorish; a poetic-looking Anthony Perkins. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why his career stumbled after the fashion for the coming-of-age ensemble cast movies he appeared in faded. But back in his early-to-mid-1980s heyday, McCarthy had some of the best mince pies in the business.
Big, wide, almond, gray-blue Panavision eyes, that caught the light and brimmed with shining, burning, youth. Filled with life. Filled with hope. Filled with future skies. Filled with… jism.
Of all the crop of very early 20-something male actors of those mid-1980s movies, such as Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and St Elmo’s Fire, that Hollywood had discovered were cheap to make box office catnip, McCarthy was also the most self-consciously ‘interesting’. Intellectual, even: he was from New York, not LA, and the only one who went to actor school.
There’s a clip of him from 1985, smoking, half-cut, and reluctant at the premiere of High School prom movie St Elmo’s Fire, he’s asked by a reporter if it reminded him of his own prom: “I didn’t go,” he replies. “I couldn’t get a date”
Although he himself isn’t, many of his characters could have been gay – or British. Which is much the same thing. In Joel Shumaker-directed St Elmo’s Fire (1985), a running gag is made of the fact that everyone thinks he’s gay, and in love with his school chum and roommate, played by Emilio Estevez. Well, who wouldn’t be?
Maybe this and the fact McCarthy was just three years older than me, was the reason I identified a little too much with him in those movies, back in the sensitive-looking day.
Which is why it’s slightly shocking seeing him in his just-released documentary Brats, after all these decades and millennia. Or more to the point, not seeing him.
It takes a while to make him out. It’s like a forty-years-on High School Reunion where you are trying to find fond fragments in the ruins of the face that meant so much to you in your youth – but only finding incontrovertible proof of your own mortality.
His face has probably had less ‘work’ than more successful film actors (who can both afford it and need it more). He goes to speak to some of those more successful actors he used to work with, including Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, and Rob Lowe – some of whom look more like themselves now they did in 1985.
But it’s not as if McCarthy’s face, or still slim physique is neglected. He certainly hasn’t ‘let himself go’. And he still has hair (unlike me). Big hair. Don’t get me wrong, he doesn’t look at all bad for a 59-year-old – his age when the doc was made. But ‘for a 59-year-old’ is quite the qualification, my dear. Besides, he looked younger than his years back then – and I haven’t seen him since.
Finally, it dawns on me what’s missing: those astonishing eyes. Or rather, the eyes of a young, eager, shy-but-egotistical man at the beginning of his adult life. His eyes were his face. Now that they are inevitably somewhat sunken with age – and inexorably dimmed – he no longer has a face, or at least the one we were familiar with.
Though again, I’m probably identifying with him a little too much.
Brats is titled after the ‘Brat Pack’ moniker, a derisive play on ‘Rat Pack’ – the early 1960s cinematic court of Frank Sinatra – that was bestowed (or ‘branded’ as someone describes it in the doc) upon the young actors appearing in those coming-of-age movies in a New York magazine cover article in 1985. It’s almost impossible now, in the post-print, Tik-Tok era, to imagine how powerful a single, snotty, snobby article and phrase in a prestigious, snotty, snobby magazine like that, even though hardly any of the ‘Brat Pack’s’ audience read it, could be.
How it could end an era, and derail careers. Because it was read by the much older people who make movies or dined with the people who make movies, or invest in them – and who probably already resented this new generation of very young, very pretty young adults and their early, insurgent success. Youth, beauty, and success are a toxic combo – for those who only have success. Subscribe
Just as most of them who weren’t John Hughes probably resented the success of MTV, that had been launched in 1981. The coming-of-age movies, particularly those of Mr Hughes – which are undoubtedly the finest examples – managed to combine both trends. After all, the ’brat packers’ were Hollywood’s version of pop stars – and those coming of age movies were Hollywood’s response to the new, rival visual medium of MTV.
And even though the whole premise of the article (which it returns to repeatedly) – that these young actors at the beginning of their careers who appeared in a few movies together, were anything like Sinatra’s Vegas gang of hard drinking, sharp-dressing, forty-something womanisers, or even socialised together when not making movies together – was complete bullshit.
But the derisive moniker for these ensemble actors was catchy and provided a handle on them – as well as a handy way to dismiss them. Important directors declared they wouldn’t call anyone in the Brat Pack. While many Brat Packers themselves scrambled to distance themselves both from the handle – and one another.
McCarthy whose career faltered afterwards, is still deeply wounded by the moniker and has not ‘moved on’ – the way that, say, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Emilio Estevez have. Or at least, that is the role he has cast himself in for the sake of this project. “I’ve never talked to anyone about this before,” he says – which seems unlikely, but I’m willing to suspend disbelief. The doc is, he explains, his attempt to finally get to grips with the ‘Brat Pack’ fallout and finally get past it.
He is insistent that he knew the fateful article was really bad news, the moment he saw the cover: “Oh fuck! This is terrible!” he recalls saying to himself.
So, McCarthy tracks down the other ‘members’ of the ‘Brat Pack’ that he didn’t really socialise with at the time, and hasn’t seen in decades, and tries to get them to return his calls. “When I told my wife I was going to be making a film about the Brat Pack she said it would be ‘a good lesson in humility’.”
Most do return his calls, eventually, and meet him and his camera crew. Notable exceptions include Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald (who said she would “think about it”). And Judd Nelson, who apparently no one has a number for. Tom Cruise, who was named as a Brat Packer in the original article, does not appear.
McCarthy also speaks to writers Malcolm Gladwell and Bret Easton Ellis about the cultural significance of that time. “This was this moment where it seemed so surprising to have a movie like The Breakfast Club, which is really just basically a therapy jam for an hour and a half” enthuses Ellis.
And so is Brats – though at the other end of the life cycle, and missing maestro Hughes, who died in 2009 (but clips from his movies are liberally employed). In fact, the doc could be subtitled: The Early Supper Club.
Emilio Estevez, who is still recognisable, if much chunkier (aren’t we all?), conducts his entire interview with McCarthy standing up in his kitchen, mostly with his arms folded across his chest. And, I think, a work surface between them. But he is quite candid and, to “clear the air”, fesses up to booting McCarthy off his upcoming movie shoot after the New York magazine article came out because he didn’t want to give grist to the ‘Brat Pack’ mill.
He also admits that, even at just-turned 23, he should have known better than to trust a journalist (he was from a Hollywood family, after all). The New York magazine feature was originally intended to be a profile of him – his first – pegged to St Elmo’s Fire. But because friendly Estevez foolishly invited the scribbler to join him, Nelson, and Lowe at that super-exclusive venue the Hard Rock Café in LA (that’s sarcasm btw), it became the disdainful, generic ‘Brat Pack’ piece. Difficult to imagine a worse outcome for a rising star.
“It was naive of me to think that this journalist would, in fact, be my friend,” he tells McCarthy. “I think that was the most upsetting about it – because I had already seen a different path for myself, and I felt derailed”. Estevez had ambitions be a script writer.
After working so hard to distance himself from it for decades, he’s finally embraced the fact that it will probably say “part of the Brat-Pack” on his epitaph. “You don’t control how you are remembered… The toothpaste is out of the tube.”
It may also be that, in our sunset years, any backhanded reminder that we were young and hot once is welcome. Even if it wasn’t quite what we wanted to hear at the time.
Rob Lowe, when McCarthy finally manages to pin him down after several cancelled dates, is surprisingly funny, self-deprecating and warm, as well as still ridiculously pretty. He even sits down with McCarthy. There was, apparently, a certain amount of animosity/rivalry between them, back in the day. But now they seem to get on famously, at least with cameras present.
Talking to Lowe, McCarthy shares a realisation about the investment others (like me) have in him:
“And they look at you. They look at me. And they go, ‘Oh, the Brat Pack movies.’ And I see their eyes glaze over because they’re really talking about themselves and their own youth… We are the avatars of that moment in their life. And I’ve come to realise that’s a beautiful thing.”
“Totally,” affirms Lowe.
Of all the contributors, Demi Moore shines out – not only visually (whatever ‘work’ she’s had was totally worth it), but in terms of insight and wisdom: giving McCarthy the proper therapy session that he’s been looking for – perhaps because of her own early problems with addiction: she had a ‘sober companion’ on the set of St Elmo’s Fire, provided and paid for by Shumaker.
“Why did we take it as something bad?” she asks.
AM: “Well, because you’re called a ‘brat’.”
DM: “But it was like there was a belief that you were holding underneath that you made that mean something about you that then created a limitation in your expression…”
AM: “Say that again! That’s exactly right! Fear was such a dominant part of my life when I was a kid. And it’s still something I contend with on a daily basis. I always felt like I was being stabbed right between my shoulder blades by some unknown kind of thing. And that’s what I felt like when I first heard the term ‘Brat Pack’.”
But the wisest words Demi has to offer are probably these: ”We all made it mean something in varying degrees, and it actually wasn’t even really about any of us. It was about the person who wrote it, trying to be clever and get their next job.”
As a kind of climax to his doc, McCarthy goes to meet that person, David Blum, in his Manhattan apartment. A slightly awks encounter, but perhaps not as much as it should have been.
“A lot of people were coming around the table. And especially, you know, no surprise, Rob Lowe was getting a lot of the special attention,” recalls Blum about that evening at the Hard Rock café with Estevez, Nelson and Lowe. “But everybody was. I was getting the least attention of all, you know, which was, you know, fine. I was just really able to observe.”
It clearly wasn’t ‘fine’. That ‘observing’ was not exactly objective – Blum’s account of the evening, which takes up most of the first thousand words of his feature, reads like an essay in sexual jealousy. The “people” bestowing all that “special attention”, according to his article, were all girls. The “prettiest of the pretty” girls.
‘As the boys toasted each other and chugged their beers, the prettiest of the girls would find some excuse to walk by the table and they would eye the boys as languorously as they possibly could, hoping for an invitation to join them. The boys knew that they had this force, and they stared back with equal vigor – choosing with their eyes the prettiest of the pretty and beckoning them with their smiles. Without fail, the girls would come, and they would stay, bringing with them all the charms they could muster.’
At the time, Blum was 29. Estevez was 23. Lowe was 21. Contrary to the canon used today – which includes Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Demi Moore – the long list of Brat Pack members Blum includes in his piece is comprised entirely of men. Men younger than him. (And the standfirst includes the presumably unintended double entendre: ‘They’re Rob, Emilio, Sean, Tom, Judd, and the rest – the young movie stars you can’t quite keep straight’)
I guess as nasty scribbler and ‘catchy’ phrasemaker myself – my own ‘brat’ turns 30 this year – I should be identifying more with the journalist than the film stars. Particularly after those things I said about McCarthy’s eyes. But I’m not. Which is another reason, I guess, to hate them.
I can understand why Blum wants to defend his piece, and why pleasing needy actors wasn’t his job. (Though things have changed a lot since then – in many ways, pleasing PRs is the job of celebrity interviewers today.) It’s also probably the case that fickle fashion was going to turn against those ensemble movies and many of their stars anyway, ending their brief glimmering. Nevertheless, it would have been wiser to admit, forty years on, that he was jealous. How could he not have been?
Instead, he tells McCarthy he has “no regrets” about the piece. The only thing he seems uneasy about is being defined by it.
DB: “Like I said, I’m proud of it. It’s fine. I think – I think I have no regrets, and I’m glad it’s lived on forever, but it’s not the great–I hope it’s not the greatest thing I ever did. I really do.”
AM: “When you say that, ‘I hope I’m not known for’, you sound like a member of the Brat Pack.”
McCarthy, who is likeable, if perhaps too keen to be liked, even by the standards of his profession, is impressively affable with Blum. Again, possibly too affable. He seems to realise this as he and his crew are leaving, turning to Blum and asking, plaintively, “Um, but do you think you could have been nicer?”
Blum blows his final chance:
DB: “I mean, it’s collateral damage, in my view, to making the point that here was a bunch of people that had become very famous and popular, and I’m calling them the ‘Brat Pack’, and here’s how I’m saying it.”
“But there was collateral damage.”
“Oh yeah. I guess I feel like, you know, sticks and stones.”
Although neither of them brings it up, the article included an unattributed quote about McCarthy, allegedly from a St. Elmo’s Fire co-star: “He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it.”
Sticks and stones.
Back in the winter of 1983, when I was a skinny eighteen-year-old, fresh-faced and, er, jism-eyed fresher at Oriel College, Oxford, I walked past a strange, tiny, birdlike creature caked in make-up, clad in baseball jacket and jeans, with sculpted hair that seemed to make up most of his diminutive stature, hanging around my college quad.
“Who the fuck was that?” I asked a friend, in my snotty, snobby way.
“Oh, that’s Rob Lowe, an American film star. They’re shooting a film here.”
The camera, like journalism, always lies.
I ran away from Oxford the following term. Oxford Blues, which co-starred Ally Sheedy, was released in the summer of 1984 – and was a rare flop for the ‘young adult’ genre. But resounding proof that I was absolutely right to run.
