It's clear that Lowe has managed to overcome this problem in his work, since this is the same guy who says, "I'm so tired of doing movies with the same old group of leading ladies I shouldn't say 'the same old group,' because that infers that there's something tired about it, but I've been opposite everybody Nastassja Kinski, Jodie Foster, Jacqueline Bisset, Cindy Gibb, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Mare Winningham, Jenny Wright. Elizabeth Perkins. Virginia Madsen. They're quite wonderful, but the fact is, it's the same group.

"If I haven't been with 'em, I know 'em, or have been engaged to 'em. I looked at my calendar and said, 'S---, it's a few weeks into the new year, and I haven't been engaged to anyone yet. I'd better get to work.'

Lowe is hardly slowing down. He didn't bother to name his two most prominent leading ladies Melissa Gilbert, the on-off six-year love of his life, and Princess Stephanie, the six-week romp that ended in a royal shaft. Effortlessly cool in T-shirt, shorts, stubble, dyed-for-the-hell-of it hair and shades, he slugs more Corona and amends himself.

"Well," he says, softening, "half of me is really shy about girls. The other half is like, I just prefer women to be around. As opposed to, say, L.A. Lakers. Not have women around? That just ain't gonna happen."

Now we're getting somewhere. Lowe, whose new MGM thriller, Masquerade, has just been released, seems these days to want to unmask something of himself behind that chiseled handsomeness -something more real and vulnerable and searching. Humor, needs, insecurities. Lowe wants to prove that he can act, and Bob Swaim's twisty cliff-hanger does add a new dimension to his screen persona. (Add Meg Tilly, complete with sizzling love scenes, to the leadinglady list.) Lowe plays a treacherously seductive yacht captain who goes after heiress Tilly's bones and bucks; it's a part that demands a menacing, unsympathetic complexity that roughs up and darkens Lowe's often too-delicate beauty.

He also seems willing to express the anxieties of a single guy, as if to show that even with the devastating cheekbones, chin line and blue eyes he has as tough a time as anyone in the search for Ms. Right.

This is a time of pivotal change for Lowe, 24, who has already notched eleven feature films in seven dizzying years. An articulate and often sardonically self-mocking guy, Lowe senses he has to Brat Pack it in and grow up on his own, onscreen and off. As for Gilbert, he's certainly on his own now, since she up and married New York actor-writer Bo Brinkman. The top-secret move left him feeling "surprised and shocked," since only weeks earlier (when much of this interview took place) he was still hedging. "We're letting it go, but, hey, never say never," he said then.

There are other changes going on, too. Lowe has just moved into his own home, having left the Malibu property of his mother and stepfather where, by age seventeen, he had his own high-tech, pastel-hued guest house "that looked more like an Adrian Lyne set than a home."

He has thrown himself into weight-training, bench pressing, at one point, more than 300 pounds, and it's given him a more imposing, manlier cut; as for the stubble, it's not a fashion statement but a "comfort statement -- I prefer to be clean-shaven, because people think it's a Mickey Rourke or something. That's not my idea of the way I want to look."

He is less certain about dealing with women -- lying Lowe, as it were, keeping his distance, living out some of the confusions and self-discoveries he acted out so well in About Last Night...."This is my alone period," he says, "and it's okay to be alone. Nobody's moving in and staying for four and five days and going on trips and things like that."

It leaves a very special kind of lonely-guy approach to meeting new girls. Lowe, a great tale-spinner once he gets going, launches into a story that betrays - or at least caricatures - an endearing insecurity he wants you to embrace as authentic. He was recently watching Sting's We'll Be Together video on MTV and decided he wanted to be together with one of the dancers. So the not-so-shy half of him got on the horn to MTV, got the name of the production company that made the video and, identifying himself, coaxed out the dancer's name and number.

"I didn't think I'd ever get the number," he says. "I was sure she'd be living in the south of France or be Sting's girlfriend. It was the most shameless thing I'd ever done. But I figured, hey, I'm not hurting or pestering this person, she has the right to refuse. I just wanted to meet her."

He pokes his thumb past his shoulder and looks over the house with a disbelieving smirk. "She had an 818 number, she lives in the Valley, seven minutes from this house." The next scene was the tough one - the call. Lowe got so tense he needed three hits of Jagermeister liqueur. "It's the best. It's syrupy, like Nyquil. I serve it frozen. Three of those give you a ride like nothing else."

Except, obviously, success. "I call her up, get the machine, typical: 'Hi, this is Laura. I'm in London...' That triggered Lowe's voice-activated fears. "I knew it, I knew it. She's in London with Sting. I can't possibly compete with that Freud-reading, Jung-quoting rock star. Forget it. Total lost cause.

"And so I just said, 'Hi, my name is Rob Lowe and we've never met, but I saw you on the video and I tracked your number down, and I'd like to take you to lunch if you'd ever like to go; here's my number, but if you feel bad about this, believe me, I wouldn't blame you at all. If you feel this is really out of line, I believe it, because it probably is, but, you know, you only live once and I thought you were really pretty and a great dancer and I'd love to meet you, but if you don't call I wouldn't blame you at all.'

Who could resist? She called a day later and from there it was lunch at first sight, no Stings attached. Lowe has seen her several times since. He has also been out with "good friend" Virginia (Slamdance) Madsen and was recently spotted in a New York restaurant dining with Fawn Hall. But he isn't jumping into anything. "I have things to resolve with myself, with time. I don't open the falling-in-love door."

If he is casual offscreen, Lowe is calculating and driven about his work. Each role is selected to offset the previous one. Masquerade, with its gritty film noir intrigue and torrid sex scenes, was to counter Rob's twerpy character work in Illegally Yours, the screwball comedy directed by Peter Bogdanovich for De Laurentus Entertainment Group. (With the collapse of DEG's film distribution, Illegally's release is still uncertain.) Comedy seemed the right move after Rob's fine but solemn work in Square Dance, a low-budget, no-box-office affair in which he played a mentally retarded kid. Square Dance won him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Lowe hopes Masquerade will win him respect. "This is the first movie," he says, "where the cards [they hand out at previews] say guys go crazy for my character. At first I'm, like, the movie-star guy, here to save the day. Then, they go, 'Whaaaat?' They love me because I'm such a sneaky, underhanded guy. Women are booing and hissing and ready to kill me. I'm as pleased with it as I can be with a film."

Masquerade director Bob Swaim (Half Moon Street) gives Lowe high marks for his "departure" performance. "Rob's underestimated by a lot of people. They ought to give him a break. He's a very bright kid, a director's dream."

Even Meg Tilly (who's best known for The Big Chill and Agnes of God) came away with an immaculate perception, despite her discomfort at losing her screen virginity. "I was surprised at how professional and serious Rob was," she says. "He was on time and knew his lines, not like some other young actors." During the love scenes, Tilly, the wife of producer Tim Zinnemann and the mother of two young children, "felt awfully vulnerable and exposed. I was self-conscious about my body, because of my kids and my husband. I put tape across my chest. I had to take off my robe and get from here to there. Rob was in bed with no clothes on. He told jokes, and that relaxed me. He's done it in all his movies. I also had to come to a climax. I think I'm a good actor, but I never made love to a man onscreen. Believe me, murdering my baby in Agnes was much easier compared to this."

Lowe found his big challenge in Square Dance. "I pulled it off, but if I hadn't, people would've asked, 'Who does he think he is, playing a retarded person with a shaved head and his underwear sticking out? He's a leading man making a fool of himself.' It was the scariest thing I ever did. That film could have been a disaster, could have ended it all."

The Golden Globe nomination will, he hopes, "put an end" to the doubts about his craft. "To sit there at the awards with [co-nominees] Sean Connery and Richard Dreyfuss was, like, the thrill of my life. It was, like, f---in' A." He knows he's in good company in his struggle not to be just another pretty face. "It took Redford, took Newman, took Warren [Beatty] a couple years," he says. "The press, the fans, the box office don't hire you. There are five guys in suits who hire you - the players, the deal makers. And some time in the last two years they said, 'Let's quit worrying about what the kid looks like.' I've seen who's hot, who's not. Guess what? Eleven movies and I'm still here."

Gilbert, however, his mainstay for most of those years, is not. 'I want to get in a relationship with myself, which I never have done," he says. "Melissa has always been omnipresent. Even when I was broken up, it wasn't really over."

To hear him describe it, their attachment was at times so intense that they could hardly stay in touch by phone: "Talking leads to cabs, which leads to airports, which leads to planes, which lead directly to Melissa's living room, which leads to other places. We always dated behind our respective new mates' backs." Indeed, anyone interested in Rob was getting herself into "kind of a package deal with Melissa. Emilio Estevez or Demi [Moore] once said something great, 'Rob, whenever you're in a room alone with a woman, there are really three of you there.' Now it's only two. Which is a big victory for me.

He may be resigned and -- if you listen between the lines -- bruised by the suddenness of Gilbert's marriage, but he won't let himself collapse into a crisis of Lowe self-esteem. Yet the way it went down left him feeling stung by the little spouse on the prairie. Melissa, he says, "chose to let me hear about it by calling up a radio station and broadcasting it to the public. Apparently her mother didn't even know. I never met the guy, and I have no idea who he is. But if she's happy, I wish her all the best. She has always wanted to be married, and now she is. In truth, if we hadn't had some sort of completion in my head I'd be more upset. It'll have no effect on me. They say time heals. Well, time also reveals people for who they are, and actions speak louder than words. She didn't handle it with any kind of maturity, but, hey, I'll let that go by. I'm not pining."

Even before Gilbert's marriage, Lowe, while, seeking a clear break from her, remembered their good times fondly. House-hunting: "Melissa would videotape the houses and send me the tapes on location 'Hi, honey, this is the bedroom.' It was great because I got to see her, too. I spent more time freeze-framing on her than the rooms. In a sense, he was still freeze-framing on her, much as America still does through reruns of the beloved Little House on the Prairie series. He could laugh when recalling the time she tracked him down at a hotel room he was not booked into while on location. "I didn't want her to find where I was," he says, "and the phone rings and I pick it up and it's her." He yanks an imaginary receiver away from his face. "I'm like, 'How did you find out?' She was really irate. She said, 'The operator told me.' I specifically asked no calls be put through. And Melissa says - this is a classic - 'Well, the operator told me you were there. See what you get when you f--- with America's Sweetheart?'

Time has allowed Lowe to find greater clarity - and detachment - about his second-most-famous romance, with Princess Stephanie of Monaco. "Yeah," he says, shrugging, "I know Stephanie looks like The Terminator in pictures, but she's actually quite small-boned and refined. I was blown away, fascinated when I met her. It was instantly obvious something was happening."

He says the press got it all wrong when he was cast as the baddie who dumped America's Sweetheart for the Jet-Set Princess. "I can't believe it. If they knew the half of it." Well, part of the half of it is that Melissa, he says, refused to go to Europe with him because "she had another boyfriend." Otherwise, "she would have been with me in Europe, and I never would have met Steph."

The summer of '86 was pretty wild, what with About Last Night. . . coming out, the off-time with Melissa and the Square Dance shoot. "I guess I do my best work when I'm miserable. There were no rules at all," he says. "I mean the weirdest stuff went down at every turn. I should have expected it to end like it began with Stephanie - immediately."

Actually, it was six weeks later. "We were from two different worlds. We weren't relating very well. She speaks French, I don't. She wears a crown, I don't. She sings, I don't. She designs bathing suits, I don't. She doesn't pay taxes, I do. She left me literally standing on a dance floor. I am forgiving, and the least judgmental person. But we don't operate that way in America. This was my turf."

Speaking of turf, Lowe grew up in Dayton, Ohio, until his parents split up, and he moved to L.A. with his mother. He recalls always "being the outcast. I was never in clubs, never hung out with the cool people." While still in his teens, he started hanging out with the preteen Malibu film colony, which included Charlie Sheen and the Penns, Sean and Chris. The future Brat Packers made hundreds of Super 8 home movies, and Lowe endured a two-hour bus commute to go on auditions and interviews. "What team can you play on when you say, 'Coach, I'd love to make that practice, but I got called back for this pilot'?" he asks. "So I never played sports, either, though I was a decent baseball and tennis player."

By the time he was eighteen, Lowe had broken into the big-screen big time - along with Tom Cruise, Mart Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell - in Francis Coppola's The Outsiders. "It was seven guys who really wanted to be the best, all for one and one for all, on the loose on location in Tulsa. It was the beginning for all of us, and we didn't know what was to come.

What was to come, of course, were roles in Class, The Hotel New Hampshire and St. Elmo's Fire, among others. Now, it's the million-dollar fee range for starring roles, not to mention a Porsche ("I bought it to try and impress Melissa"). He has the freedom to take a "ninety-percent pay cut to do a career-stretching role like Square Dance and the luxury to spend a few weeks (last summer) honing his chops on Chekhov at the Williamstown Theater in Massachusetts.

Lowe has even written a script, Melrose, which he hopes to see produced. But he has no illusions about his still-tender status in Hollywood. "It's different to have something in development if you're Jack Nicholson or if you're Warren Beatty, because they can do a disaster that's their own, and they're still Jack, they're still Warren. Jack will still go to Lakers games, and Warren will still sit up in Mulholland. l make a disaster and I'm, like, moving into a condo."

there. "That's my face up there. I gotta be tough as nails. The next five years are telltale for me. I have a chance for smooth sailing, to go forever, or to drop off the face of the business. It takes a lot to rile me, and people think I'm a really Milquetoast white-bread goy boy. Well, let me tell you something. I can be really tough. When it comes to my career, I have the heart of a Jewish agent."

US Magazine ~~ April 4, 1988

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