Playgirl Magazine
Beautiful Dreamer
Thinking Out Loud With the
Leader of the Brat Pack
By Roberta Smoodin
January, 1987
Rob Lowe picks up the white electric guitar and postures with it,
looking like a real musician, his instrument cocked and ready to play. His face
mimes a musician's rapt intensity. Then he relaxes into a regular, blazing Rob
Lowe smile. You have to admit to yourself that he looks a little silly -- the
snazzy guitar, coupled with the gray gym shorts, white T-shirt with a child's
primitive drawing and lettering on it, gym socks and shoes, single stud earring
in his right ear, Clark Kent glasses, hair standing straight up. The room is
decorated with a couple of movie posters, another electric guitar, a speaker and
a view of the Columbia Pictures studio lot, other office buildings across the
way.
"Do you play?" you ask. "No," Lowe says, sheepishly. Then "A
little, actually." He wants to produce a movie about singer Eddie Cochran, and
has written and turned in the screenplay just today to the studio brass. Maybe
he's nervous. Every so often, when he speaks he stammers slightly, repeating
three or four times, softly, the first syllable of a word. But it is charming.
Rob Lowe is beautiful and charming. You might even have to admit that he's
smart. Taken in parts, all of Rob Lowe is pretty stunning. The problem, you
think, is when you add all the parts together. He looks so very young and
handsome, as long as he's quiet. Then he speaks, and he sounds like a Hollywood
veteran of 20 years. The shrewdness under the perfect surface is disconcerting.
You wonder how long he has been 22 going on 50. You wonder if he has ever been
in psychotherapy.
"I'm full of angst," he says, about waiting for the studio to pass
judgment on his Cochran project. "But my guitar is getting better. I've had
coach come in."
Lowe has had a peculiar career, based until very recently on
little more than his outrageous handsomeness. A couple of after-school
television specials, a short-lived TV series, a small role (supposedly massacred
on the cutting room floor) in director Francis Ford Coppola's The
Outsiders and a co-starring role in Class. Then the
teenaged girls noticed him and the film critics took umbrage to this notice. In
The Hotel New Hampshire, Oxford Blues, St. Elmo's Fire, and
Youngblood, little girls screamed at the sight of him. The critics, for the most part,
screamed too -- that he had little or no talent other than what was superficially visible.
That changed last summer when About Last Night, with Demi Moore, got terrific reviews,
and Lowe got taken seriously. And Lowe got hot -- trying to produce his own starring vehicles,
sitting in his office at Columbia as the phones ring off the hook. You think
that his affiliation with that group of scowling young method actors, the Brat
Pack, certainly hasn't hurt him. And, to his credit, he doesn't scowl. Polite,
you think. Articulate. Slick? His rumored success with women hasn't hurt
either.
He's about to be seen in a new film, Squaredance, in a surprising, small role
opposite Jane Alexander and Jason Robards as, in his words, "a mentally retarded
Texan." He dyed his hair red to play this character, and braved a summer in
Texas -- "Guerrilla moviemaking," he calls the experience. This sounds so
offbase for this young, romantic leading man that you wonder if he is being
completely on the level.
"It's a Rob Lowe movie," he says. "There's gotta be a scene where
he kisses the lead actress." He laughs. "The movie is about a 13-year-old girl
coming to grips with her family, her past and who she is. My character falls in
love with her and, mentally, we're the same age. But she's growing up, and I'm
not growing up. It's a very dear story. Anyway, she's my love interest. There is
a sweet scene where I kiss her."
So you ask about his obvious integrity in choosing roles, and he
segues into what a crapshoot working in Hollywood can be. He's pleased with the
success of About Last Night. "It's not an event picture,
it's not a sequel. It's a good, quiet picture," he says, and then muses about
his friend Tom Cruises's enormous summertime hit Top Gun. He says,
"All it would have taken is one stray missile blowing up some kids in Libya, and
Top Gun would have been in the toilet. I said, 'Tom, you better hope our
military never fucks up before your movie opens, or you're in bad shape.'"
Then you mention his steamy love scenes in About Last Night with actress Demi Moore,
who happens to be his friend Emilio Estevez's girlfriend. "I talked to Emilio," he says, "and
he was kind of uptight about it. I said, 'You've got to be kidding me, champ.' He said, 'Well, what if
it was me and your girlfriend?' I said, 'Well, I guess I'd rather it would be
you than someone I didn't know.' He said, 'Yeah, yeah, that's true. I hadn't
thought of that.' It's very difficult going out with anybody in this business,
and this kind of thing is the first step to paying the price. It hasn't affected
any of our relationships. It's great, because now Demi and I have a common
ground, as well as Emilio and I. It's a source of a lot of good jokes,
actually."
You watch Rob Lowe's eyes drift toward the outer office as the
phone rings. You know he's itching to answer it, yet holding himself back. He
explains that his assistant is on vacation in London. You ask him if he
considers himself driven, obsessive, or merely wildly ambitious. "Not
obsessive," he says, listening to the phone ring. Finally it stops. ''Driven
wouldn't be bad. Obsessive is a little strong for my taste. An obsessive person
would have run out and answered that phone. I just let it ring. It can only be
the studio calling to say that they hate the first 10 pages. Let it ring." He
laughs. But you've struck some sort of nerve -- he worries this line of thought
like a dog with a chewbone. "Obsessive implies that something is lacking, it
isn't quite right. I wouldn't want to be obsessive about anything -- your focus
is too narrow, you're not seeing the whole picture. You have to have a sense of
humor about yourself. I sometimes feel that the Reality Police are going to bust
into the office and say, 'OK, Mr. 'Lowe, where are your credentials?' I'm just a
kid from Ohio." The phone rings again; his face looks pained. "Now;" he says, "a
driven person can answer the phone when it rings a second time." He answers the
phone.
You witness a real display of acting. Lowe pretends to be his own
assistant, stating that "Mr. Lowe isn't here," and politely answering questions
mononosyllabically for 10 seconds. Then he hangs up. He tells you that it was
two girls on the phone, one pretending to be the operator placing a collect
call, the other playing the caller. He says there was a lot of giggling. He
claims this happens all the time. The phone interrupts twice more, and each time
Lowe pretends to be his assistant. One of the times it is a radio station
calling for an interview. Lowe rolls his eyes as he tells the radio station to
call his publicist. He can't remember the publicist's phone number, nor can you.
He fakes it, skewing a couple of digits.
You comment on how successful Lowe has been; a kid from Dayton,
Ohio, with no Hollywood connections turned into a real star. You're surprised to
find out that he's the type who always thinks he's got miles to go before he
sleeps -- hard on himself. "I haven't had a $100 million film," he says, as
though checking off items on a list in his head. "I haven't won any Oscars" --
you note the plural. "My producing credit isn't on the screen yet. There's all
kinds of stuff. I feel like I'm just starting. People say, 'Isn't it great the
way things are going for you. Smell the roses,' and I do. I do. But not a lot. I
hate that kind of ambition; it's just nauseating. I'm not like that. There was a
time when my work really took up my whole life, and it doesn't anymore. I'm
concentrating on other things, too, like relationships. Or this antitoxics
initiative I'm working on, or voter registration. I'm 22 years old and I've
never voted. I want to do some public service announcements on that. You have to
find other things to balance out your work."
So you ask Rob Lowe about his politics, expecting lip service
rather than passion. But he gets worked up. The suggestion that actors ought to
keep their politics to themselves irks him. "It's everybody's right to be
political," he says. "Maybe I'm being irresponsible, but I feel that I'm a
citizen of this country and a person first, an actor second." He talks about his
work on the antitoxics initiative on the California ballot in November, then
says, "but I have yet to take a public stance on any real political issue. I
have feelings on issues, but I haven't taken any abortion stance, for
example."
You know where you're heading. First, you ask him about his
feelings on the Reagan administration, and he makes pithy comments on defense
paranoia, communism paranoia and a general inability to admit to being wrong.
"I'm not a rabble-rouser," he finishes, looking a little paranoid. "Reagan has
done certain things that I like, and certain things that I don't
like."
>
Next, you ask him about South Africa. He rubs hands together.
"Here we go, here we go. I'm just warming this," he says, and addresses the evil
of our government's economic concerns when so many people in that country are
living in misery and privation. "Like most Americans, I don't know the history
of South Africa. I mean, what are we calling for? Their government to collapse?
Their society thrown into the toilet? Those are really radical thoughts. Who am
I to say whether that's right? I just know there are millions of black South
Africans who live in a totalitarian state. That's not right. What to do about
it, I don't know," he says.
Now that he's warmed up, you ask Lowe, "What about women's rights
issues, like abortion?" But his poise is unshakable. "It's tough," he says,
"because the arguments people use against abortion, that it will be used as
birth control that's ludicrous. Anyone who would use abortion as a means of
birth control is sick. The worst-case scenario for me is, my girlfriend is
walking along the street one night and, God forbid, gets raped and gets
pregnant. She should be able to have an abortion if she wants to. I'm sorry, I
can't see any argument against it. That's the most black and white case I can
think of. Other than that, I can't pretend know anything about it. A lot of the
laws they're talking about passing would outlaw abortion across the board. At
the very least there has got to be some exceptions." He's cool, he's sharp, he's
22 years old. Most people of 22 are thinking about the gift they're going to get
from their parents when they graduate from college, or what graduate business
school they want to go to.
You're forced to resort to gossip; maybe this will expose some
latent streak of adolescentness. "What about your relationship with Melissa
Gilbert?" you ask. Lowe and Melissa Gilbert, star of tv's " Little
House on the Prairie," have been an item for over four years, though the
press has made much of Lowe's reputed philandering, especially with Hotel New
Hampshire co-star Nastassja Kinski, and, lately with Monaco's Princess
Stephanie.
Lowe makes an apologetic disclaimer about having to give a stock
response, then says, "Melissa and my mother are the most important women in my
life, and both of them always will be. Other than that, my relationship with
Melissa is something I keep private. It's very important to me."
But, as smooth as Lowe is, he's also talkative. You ask about this
reputation as a ladies' man, knowing he won't be able to resist. You're right.
"I love women," he says. "That's my Achilles' heel in relationships. I've always
preferred their company to men, though that's starting to change a little now. I
wonder why that is? Gee. But nobody likes intelligent, pretty girls better than
me!" He laughs at this, and at what he is about to say. "And a lot of times, if
you find one there's another one right there, too!" More laughter. "That's
always been my problem!"
You wonder if he has a notion of his ideal woman. He says,
quickly, list at the ready. "There are three things that basically are of equal
importance to me. Two of them are intelligence and a sense of humor. I can't
stress how important those things are to me. It's not that I want to date Sandra
Bernhardt -- she's hostile. It's aliveness, wittiness, sparkle that I want. And
then a woman who's attractive. I used to have a classic package in mind. I was
into blonds with blue eyes. Now it's really important for me to laugh and feel
challenged by a girl."
"You're not threatened by smart women?" you ask.
He answers quickly again. "No, I love 'em. I think Melissa is
borderline genius. Her mind is incredibly quick, even quicker than I am. It's
very attractive. She's also got a great sense of humor. Not that she's the ideal
woman. Melissa, if you're reading this, don't get your panties in a wad, babe!"
He pauses, and concludes, "I always like to feel like I have a real
catch."
You've forgotten to mention the fidgeting. Lowe displays his long,
lean legs in such a variety of ways, using his office chair as a prop, that he
could, you think, easily be a Rockette. He doesn't like sitting still. When you
ask him about settling down with one woman, he fidgets some more, draping his
legs over the chair arm, then crossing them in front of himself. "I used to
think that marriage and having kids was something that happened to adults,
happened to other people. Never to me," he says. "It was kind of like dying --
inevitable. Recently, I started thinking, hmmm, marriage -- maybe. Now I can
picture it for myself. As time goes on, the picture becomes clearer. I wonder if
this is growing up?" He says this as if it is an academic question, an
interesting concept, maybe quantum physics or semiotics. "I've had everything
else," he continues. "My life has so much high-stimulus stuff in it anyway that
I must need some kind of stability."
"What does that mean, 'high-stimulus stuff'?" you ask, hoping for
some more insight into Lowe-life.
But he remains professional. "I get bored really easily with a lot
of things," he says vaguely, purposely. "I like to change things around. I've
got a lot of energy, I'm pretty antsy. I always like to have something to work
on. I drive myself crazy creating problems that don't really exist."
Playgirl Magazine ~~ January 1987
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