Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (8 page)

Dear Mr. Rob Lowe:

I enjoyed you very much on the TV show The New Kind of Family. You are a great actor. Can you please send me an autographed photo of yourself? If possible in a bathing suit or in your underwear.

Sincerely,

Michael LeBron

#4142214 Pelican Bay Prison

In our second week, our ratings are even worse. (Although today any network would absolutely kill to have our numbers. In 1979, if fourteen million people watched you, you were at death’s door. Today, a huge smash like
Two and a Half Men
averages about that.) Our executive producers are two smart and energetic women, both of whom are married to powerful husbands who run movie studios. This is their first big producing job, and they go on the offensive to boost our ratings, orchestrating a press barrage, personal appearances, and a trip to New York to compete against actors on other ABC shows on
The $10,000 Pyramid
. (That’s right,
The
$10,000
Pyramid
—can you imagine that amount of prize money today? You’ve made it all the way to the final rounds and you’ve won
almost
enough to buy a used car!)

The network doesn’t want to be known as a home for idiot actors, so they gather their young stars for a “game show” audition, to pick out who goes to New York. I religiously watch
Pyramid
and am no slouch at charades, trivia, or similes (thanks, Mom), so I’m chosen to go to New York.

On the big day, I draw a cute twenty-something actress from
Eight Is Enough
as my partner. We will play Tony Danza, a young ex-boxer who is a huge hit on the smash comedy
Taxi
, and a sultry brunette, about my age, from ABC’s other big new comedy hope,
Out of the Blue
, starring some young comedian the network thinks will be the next Robin Williams. (He won’t be.)

I love Dick Clark, the host of
Pyramid
and already a TV legend—and I will continue to. But the man is absolutely mangling my introduction.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ron Loeb!”

I stop. He stops. I go back to enter again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Rob Lone!”

This goes on for a good ten minutes until finally the game begins. The woman from
Eight Is Enough
reads me the clues.

“Okay, um, okay … it’s … it’s … something the astronauts…”

“TANG!” I shriek.

Ding!
Yessss. I don’t know what’s gotten into me; I’m in the kill zone and I can’t miss.

“Okay … okay … um … um … It’s a … It’s a … um … they’re really old. They are really old … um…”

“THE PYRAMIDS!” I yell. Come on, girlfriend, we’ve got ten grand to win.

Ding!

We easily beat Danza and his little minx partner in straight rounds. At the final round in the Winner’s Circle, I figure we have to cut our times down. I’m treating this celebrity charity show like it’s Wimbledon.

“Let me give the clues.”

“You sure?” says Eight Is Enough.

“Yes.”

Dick Clark has my name right now. “Rob, for ten thousand dollars, here is your first clue … GO!”

It appears in the screen in front of me.

“Founding Father. Flew kite.”

“Benjamin Franklin!”

Ding!

“Cordoba.”

“Ricardo Montalbán!”

Ding!

And so it goes. We win with ten seconds to spare.

I donate my winnings to the Cleveland Amory Fund for Animals and the Wilderness Society. As we all squeeze together for the “good-bye shot,” Tony Danza’s young partner surreptitiously puts her hand on my backside. And keeps it there. “See you on the plane,” she whispers.

On the flight home, I have what is to be the first in a long series of lessons about the temptations of actresses. Although Corrie’s waiting back in Malibu, the excitement and glamour of the enfolding romantic drama in the first-class cabin quickly overpower my fifteen-year-old male willpower. What happens on the plane isn’t anywhere near Erica Jong territory, but I’m definitely not going to be sharing any traveling stories with my girlfriend.

*   *   *

Back in L.A., the battle to save our show continues. I’m sent to Riverside, California, for a personal appearance. Even at fifteen I don’t see how walking through the Riverside fairgrounds will boost our ratings enough to put a dent in
60 Minutes
. But I like snow cones as much as the next guy, especially when they are free. So, off I go.

There is a line of mostly young girls waiting to get autographs. This time I am on the other end of the line, and I’m not sure what the protocol is. I make a rookie mistake.

Dear Marie-Sue:

Thanks for watching
A New Kind of Family
. I hope you like it. Good luck at UCLA in the fall. Go Bruins!

All my love,

Rob Lowe

I will learn that this is not the way it’s done—too much time, too many people to get through. In spite of wanting to connect personally, you have to keep it simple. “Just write Marie-Sue and sign your name,” the network handler tells me afterward.

Later, on the way to the car, I see them. They are swarming, gathering in the shadow of the Tilt-A-Whirl, twenty to thirty girls who look to be between twelve and sixteen years old. They are whispering, pointing, and staring at me. One starts to shake. Another lets out a sort of whimper and runs with her feet in place like she has to go to the bathroom. Another pushes the girls in front of her to the ground and runs toward me. The girl on the ground screams, then they
all
scream; low at first, then building to a point where it sounds like a sonic knitting needle is puncturing my eardrum. And then … they charge. I don’t know it yet, but I will come to learn that being charged on the African savannah by a rhino is only fractionally more dangerous than being bull-rushed by a gang of fourteen-year-old girls whipped into a lather by hormones, group think, and an overdose of
Tiger Beat
magazine.

“Hi there,” is about all I manage before they are all over me. One girl grabs me by the arm, another by the hair. One girl is literally untying my shoes while another steals the laces. The network representative does nothing. “I bet this doesn’t happen to Morley Safer,” he says. I can only hope this kind of mauling will help our ratings, but something tells me it won’t.

On the long drive back from Riverside, I have a lot of time to ponder the conflicting emotions welling up in me. On the one hand, how cool is it to be mobbed by a bunch of girls my age? It’s any guy’s dream, right? And it is part and parcel of being a star. Right? All true, more or less. But on the other hand, the whole experience feels a little shitty. And feeling shitty about something that’s meant to be exciting makes me feel worse. The girls’ reactions seemed almost programmed, like they were both the performers and the audience in a teen-angst drama that had nothing to do with me. It certainly wasn’t about what a good actor I was. And if I was such a hottie to them, why didn’t I have the same effect on those who knew me well at school? And so the first wisps of an idea appear on the horizons of my consciousness. And the idea is this: If you
really
knew me, you wouldn’t like me nearly as much.

CHAPTER
8

The network has shut down our show. It’s not canceled, they say, it’s on a “creative hiatus.” I have no idea what that means, but the practical ramification is that I get to make my first appearance in a real high school.

I still don’t have my learner’s permit, so I take the bus the twenty-two miles from Point Dume to Santa Monica High. It’s a huge monolith of a school, with thousands of students of all races, backgrounds, and economic standings. There are also gangs, although not on the level of rival school Venice High, a few miles down the road. I have a lot to navigate, particularly coming in a few weeks after everyone else, and it doesn’t help that Corrie and I are having trouble. She watched
Pyramid
and saw the cute actress put her hand on me. She has retaliated against my tacit flirtation on national television by hanging out with a rough, young surfer (who will in later years become Malibu’s resident paparazzo, causing Barbra Streisand to take out a restraining order against him). It is the beginning of the end for us.

If I was expecting a reception from the girls at “Samohi” like the one I received in Riverside, I was mistaken. When I walk the “Quad,” there is no indication that my TV career was noticed. The Mexicans don’t care, the whites don’t care, the blacks don’t care, and the Malibu kids never cared. Part of me is disappointed and part of me is relieved. I am just like any other sophomore newbie. I dive into the subjects I love (history, marine biology, French) and grind it out in the ones I don’t (anything math-related). I spend time with my small clique and try to fit in with this huge new pool of faces. And, I wait. I know our show’s fate is hanging in the balance, but I try not to think about it.

Soon, I get the call to come back to work. As Clark drives the harrowing road between the Pacific Coast Highway and the 405 freeway that has killed so many truckers, I notice that he seems out of it. When he passes a car by driving on the shoulder of the road, I know something’s up.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Mmmm. Long night. Sorry.”

We pull up to the soundstage, and I can see all the producers and even some network executives milling around. We are late, so Clark pulls right up to them at the stage entrance. I open my door and wave hello. Clark opens his door and vomits on his shoes.

It’s all downhill from there.

As I get my usual morning coffee and doughnuts, I notice a young black girl with pretty eyes grabbing the last glazed twist.

“Hi. I’m Janet.”

“Hi. I’m Rob.”

“Nice to meet you. Have you met Telma yet?”

“Who?”

“Telma! C’mon. I’ll take you to say hi.”

I have no clue who this girl is or why she’s on our set. But I go with her to meet Telma, who turns out to be a tall, dark beauty who could be Janet’s mother. It is then that I notice that the two actors who play the members of the other family living with us on the show aren’t anywhere to be seen.

“Have you guys met Gwyn and Connie?” I ask.

They both look at me blankly as a production assistant ushers us to our seats around the table where we read through the scripts.

Janet and Telma sit in the seats usually occupied by the two missing actors. What’s going on here? As we read the first scene it all becomes clear. Janet and Telma are replacing the missing actors. In the script there is no explanation of what happened to the original family that was living with us, or why these new folks have moved in. To this day, I have no idea what happened. I can only assume someone at the network felt that our ratings would improve with the more dramatic concept of a black and a white family living together. Amazingly, they thought viewers would simply accept the switch without even a good-bye to the previous family.

Janet comes from a big family with a ton of show business savvy. She is painfully shy but we are about the same age and we become confidants. On the day when our show is mercifully canceled, we console each other.

“I’m done with acting,” she says.

Ever the optimist, I fill her head with a rosy vision of her acting future.

“I tell you, I’m done. I’m going into music. If my brothers can do it, so can I.”

I wish her luck, hug her and the rest of the cast good-bye, pack up my dressing room, and leave.
A New Kind of Family
shot thirteen episodes, five of which aired in 1979.
60 Minutes
survives to this day. Next to me as I write this is today’s newspaper. In it, I see a photo of my old friend Janet. The caption reads, “Janet Jackson sells out opening night of new world tour.”

*   *   *

You think star athletes have a tough re-entry when they retire? Try going from endless free doughnuts, screaming girls, and a starring role on television to tenth-grade driver’s ed. It’s almost as if my show never happened. It certainly didn’t lead me to any new jobs, at least temporarily disproving the old adage about just getting your foot in the door. In fact, with money so tight at home, I go back to work on the weekends as a busboy at the Nantucket Light. (You’d think I could have at least landed a gig as a waiter.) On the positive side: It’s easy to keep your head on straight when you are signing an autograph while clearing someone’s lobster dinner. I go back to the life of any other teenager, except for the few times when someone yells out
“A New Kind of Family!”
while I’m getting gas or walking down the street. But that is very rare. I guess our bad ratings didn’t lie.

Back at school, friends are trying out for the school’s tennis and baseball teams. Charlie Sheen has an absolute bazooka for an arm and wants to be a pro ballplayer. We are constantly in his backyard batting cage or playing “tennis ball baseball,” the Malibu version of stickball. Every once in a while his dad, Martin, will join us, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and completely crush a ball out of the park. He laughs at us and then, maddeningly, runs the bases backward. Charlie’s brother, Emilio, still wants to be an actor, and has taken their original family name, Estevez, to ensure he is not riding his dad’s coattails. Emilio is a few years older than me; he’s got a car and is really making the rounds, auditioning for tons of roles. Charlie and I (and often my brother Chad) still make the occasional 8 mm movie together, but now that I’ve been to the “bigs” I see little point in backyard movies. I’m a pro now; I’m moving forward—not backward.

My mom’s health has taken a turn for the worse. She is in bed most days, and even when she’s up and about, she remains in her pajamas. I hate seeing her like this, in the grips of something she can neither understand nor explain. Both she and Steve feel her bad spells are from reactions to everything from smog, perfume, household cleansers, mold, and food, to air-conditioning, paint, dust, water, and plastics. We finally replace our terrible Volvo and the new car sits outside the garage, all windows open for six weeks “outgasing” before Mom will enter the vehicle. She doesn’t use her oxygen mask and gardening gloves to ward off the “fumes” like she used to, but instead has become a sort of recluse. There are never dinner parties at our house. She and Steve do not entertain friends. They don’t go out to dinner or the movies. Mom remains a whip-smart conversationalist, a lover of books, and a loyal supporter of my brother and me, and from time to time she even surprises us with her former adventurous spirit. But mostly, she’s just checked out, and I miss her. To this day, I have a terrible, visceral reaction to a woman in pajamas.

When engaged, my mom is a fairly astute advisor, but she’s got two younger kids to worry about and she’s battling her own issues. Dad is two thousand miles away. So there is no “career planning.” There is no “Team Lowe,” full of lawyers, agents, publicists, personal trainers, and the like that would today assemble around a fifteen-year-old kid with a little bit of success under his belt. There’s just me.

Eventually, however, I’m “poached” from my little agency (where I was one of the few up-and-comers, despite my current status in the hospitality business) by a much larger, more sophisticated agency. That’s the way it works in show business (and in life); if you have some success, you often outgrow those who were there in the beginning, but you give them a shot to grow with you. If they can’t—or won’t—you move on.

My new representatives are able to get me my first movie auditions. Now I am competing with kids who have much more experience, most of whom are over eighteen and, by law, able to work full-time on the set without any child-labor restrictions. Like for a boxer moving up a weight class, the prize will be bigger, but I’m not sure I can compete. My first movie audition is for a film about the music business in the late 1950s called
The Idolmaker
. I don’t even make it past the first meeting.

My boss at the Nantucket Light is not impressed with the odd tourist asking for an autograph and eventually fires me for my ongoing penchant for pilfering the occasional mud pie. I protest that I’m hardly the only dessert thief in the busboy ranks, but to no avail. My spirits are lifted, however, when ABC signs me to a holding deal (which means that they will keep me “in house” until they figure out what to do with me). It’s not a ton of money, but it’s enough to buy my first car, which I do, on my sixteenth birthday, a white Mazda 626.

It’s a lifesaver on the one hand—now I don’t take the bus for two and a half hours every day to school—and a curse on the other, as Mom has me driving my little brother Micah to and from kindergarten. It’s hard to look cool in your new car with your six-year-old brother in the backseat. I am also delegated to grocery store duty, which I hate with a passion. I stagger around the Mayfair Market for hours trying to find all the obscure items on my mother’s list. But it still beats pulling the weeds out of our gravel front yard by hand.

Each day at lunch, I check the bulletin board just off the Quad to see if my agents have an audition for me. Finally I do land my next job. It’s a test show or pilot for a possible new TV series on ABC called
Thrills and Chills
. It’s about a family of animal trainers, acrobats, and daredevils that form their own traveling circus. I play the young, crazy motorcycle jumper—think a teen Evel Knievel in spandex.

The first day on the set, the director, Ron Howard, who was at that point still playing Richie Cunningham on
Happy Days
, takes me aside. He’s only directed once before, a low-budget B-movie called
Grand Theft Auto
, and he seems as nervous as I am.

“Rob, I need you to really tear out on the bike after your last line. I mean as fast as you can, really crank it,” he asks.

I’m cooking like a sausage in my skintight purple spandex, but with this request my blood runs cold. Clearly no one has told him that I can’t ride a motorcycle (I only just learned how to drive a car!), let alone “really crank it.” I always assumed a stunt double would do the motorcycle work. I break the news to Ron with as much dignity as I can muster. In a mark of what a great director he will become, he just smiles, reassures me, and figures out another way to shoot the scene. I say my last line, something like, “Let me show you what this baby can do! Outta my way!” and two elderly crew members hiding just off camera attempt to roll me out of the frame. It seems to take forever.

Thrills and Chills
never made it on the air. (It never made it onto Ron Howard’s filmography, either.) To my knowledge, the producers didn’t even bother to show it to anyone. I’ve certainly never seen it. Although he’s always gracious when we meet and is one of my favorite directors, I’ve never worked again for Ron Howard.

*   *   *

In a way, ABC’s
Afterschool Special
s were ahead of their time. They could definitely be cheesy, but they dealt with taboo issues like drug addiction, anorexia, and teen pregnancy. And they got great ratings. For a brief and shining moment, I was the King of the Afterschool Special. I did a number of them under my ABC contract, the best being “Schoolboy Father.” In it, I had a baby out of wedlock with the tortured and ill-fated young actress Dana Plato, from
Diff’rent Strokes
. I think it won some sort of Daytime Emmy Award, although honestly I’m not sure. I’ve long since dropped it from my résumé, mainly because I don’t want to be reminded of my David Cassidy hairdo.

A night I will never forget: watching “Schoolboy Father” with my then would-be girlfriend’s father. My romance with Corrie had fizzled out. I had set my sights on a stunning doe-eyed brunette named Jennifer whom I had met along the beach at the Malibu Colony. My lack of mojo with girls has been fairly well documented in the previous pages, but with some early acting successes and a driver’s license to boot, I had upped my game. Nonetheless, I was intimidated. Jennifer attended an elite private school and her mom, Dyan Cannon, starred with Warren Beatty in one of my all-time favorite movies,
Heaven Can Wait
. Warren Beatty was a hero of mine: funny, smart, romantic, and great in both comedy and drama. He was the real deal.

Jennifer had an on-again, off-again boyfriend who was something of a tough-guy idiot. He was just the latest in a string of guys who never cut me any slack, so when he lipped off to Jennifer one day at the Malibu Colony beach, I lit him up, yelling, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up and leave her alone.” The next thing I knew, we were rolling around on the ground and people were pulling us apart. Jennifer must have appreciated the chivalry because when, a few days later, I gathered up my nerve and asked her out, she said yes. (It was like a plot from one of my
Afterschool Special
s!) “Schoolboy Father” was going to air the following week, and Jennifer suggested that I come to her dad’s house in Beverly Hills so that we could watch it together. I was hoping for Dyan Cannon’s house, but whatever.