The Secret Misery of a Gen-X Heartthrob

W hen I was 19, I wanted to be Andrew McCarthy — the St. Elmo’s Fire McCarthy, not the rich-jerk McCarthy from Pretty in Pink. I wanted to be tall and literary and cynical-yet-sensitive and wear cool sports jackets with baggy pants.

It turns out that Kevin, the character McCarthy played in St. Elmo’s Fire, was “very much like me,” he writes in his long-awaited (by me, anyway) memoir Brat: An ’80s Story. The overlap was so striking that McCarthy found it unnerving to play the young scribe. But while in the movie, Kevin yearns for Ally Sheedy’s Leslie, in real life McCarthy had a huge crush on his other co-star, Mare Winningham, one that would “hang over me for several years.” Winningham was not only not interested but pregnant with her third child during filming. “Mare suffered my adoration as patiently as her already full life would allow,” he writes.

That kind of flameout happens often to McCarthy in the book: Even as he outwardly appeared to be steadily climbing the Hollywood ladder, on the inside he wasn’t enjoying any of it. He made only $15,000 from his first movie, 1983’s Class, then had to give it all to his dad, who begged him so pitifully he could hardly say no. After that (underrated) movie flopped, McCarthy ended up living in a scuzzy one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, which he furnished with a queen-size mattress he found dumped on the street. The floor sloped so badly that anything on wheels would wind up sliding toward the door. Despite having been the lead actor in a major summer movie, he was out of work and forced to take a fast-food commercial, playing “Pepsi Guy” to Elisabeth Shue’s “Burger King Girl.” Smitten by Shue, he asked her out, and they had one date — but he never saw her again.

He bungled a meeting to discuss St. Elmo’s Fire so badly that he was driven to it in a stretch limo but driven back in a VW Bug. After the director, Joel Schumacher, insisted on casting him anyway, and he made a splash in the movie, New York magazine managed both to tar him forever as a member of what a cover story dubbed “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” — though he wasn’t part of the L.A. clique that included Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, and Rob Lowe, and has not seen Nelson or Estevez since making the movie — and to sideline him: The story’s sole mention of him came from an unidentified costar (it had to be Nelson, Estevez, or Lowe) who said, “He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it.” Ouch.

Based on the memories related in Brat, McCarthy’s early life, up to and past the point at which he became a hot young leading man in profitable Hollywood movies, was a traffic jam of woe, humiliation, embarrassment, disappointment, anxiety, loneliness, and frustration. He coped with it all by downing enough alcohol to impress Jim Morrison. At the peak of his life, during the premiere of Pretty in Pink — no one took his picture on the red carpet, he recalls, even though he was the male lead, and the female lead wasn’t posing for pictures because she’d just had her wisdom teeth out — he slunk away and went across the street to swig vodkas, alone, at the bar of a Hamburger Hamlet.

I’m very glad McCarthy wrote Brat, not only because it’s an incessantly grabby page-turner (though nothing can top Lowe’s own memoir for amazing anecdotes) but because it has cured me of whatever remains of my 1985 hero worship. Who knew a guy who had this much going for him could be so miserable? Jeez, even my life wasn’t that bad. At least my dad didn’t cadge money off me and then humiliate me by turning up in front of my friends to grandly stuff cash in my pockets. At least I didn’t make a movie so awful (1988’s Kansas) that my own mother turned to me, as McCarthy’s did, to say, “I think you’ve seen one too many Montgomery Clift films, dear.” Nor have I ever been pulled over by a cop with a mound of cocaine in the back seat of my car. (“Slow down” was all the unobservant officer said to McCarthy, fortunately.)

1987’s Less Than Zero wasn’t just one of McCarthy’s credits, it was the sum total of his life, at least as he perceived it. If this book is the truth, he hardly enjoyed a single moment of being a teen idol, a magazine cover boy, a guy with whom Warren Beatty demanded a meeting (nothing came of it) and to whom Dustin Hoffman said, “We’ll work together.” (They didn’t.) While he was acting in Pretty in Pink, that movie’s writer-producer, John Hughes, liked him well enough to drop a script in his Camaro: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. McCarthy thought it was really funny, but Hughes never mentioned it to him again. (Instead, he was offered Some Kind of Wonderful and turned it down, noting that it was simply Pretty in Pink with the sexes reversed. Hughes was miffed and lost his number.)

Okay, once in a great while, something nice happened: Tommy Hilfiger sent him a shirt one time. Oh, and his Class costar Jacqueline Bisset let him bunk down in her house, which she shared with her partner, Alexander Godunov. One time, he was looking at a glamour shot framed on her wall when she walked in and asked what he was doing. “Looking at your photo,” he said, and then she kissed him, deeply. But only once.

McCarthy was so racked by doubts that, when he was among the few dozen actors invited to pose for a photo to mark the 75th anniversary of Paramount Pictures, and shyly asked to meet Jimmy Stewart, “I felt as if he looked through me with a knowing and slightly sad disapproval.” If you ever formed the impression that all Hollywood stars are arrogant, Brat is strong evidence to the contrary. Even when McCarthy succeeds, it seems to be the result of dumb luck; he heard about the audition for Class only because a friend drew his attention to it, and he flailed badly in an audition tape for which he was so nervous that he adopted a frozen stare. When the tape was shown later to the film’s producer in Los Angeles, the casting directors were trying to skip over his section but couldn’t figure out how to work the fast-forward function on what was then new tech. As they were fumbling with the machine, though, producer Marty Ransohoff said, “Kid’s weird. Those crazy eyes remind me of a young Tony Perkins,” so he got a callback. He was walking out of a Pretty in Pink meeting at which he had completely failed to impress Hughes, but his costar Molly Ringwald was also present, and as he was leaving she piped up, “He’s the kind of guy I would fall for.” Starring actors hardly ever show up to audition costars, but Hughes trusted Ringwald, so McCarthy was in. (You may not remember the second collaboration between McCarthy and Ringwald, the 1987 drama Fresh Horses, but only because no one remembers that.)

McCarthy did manage to pause his drinking as he filmed the comedy Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), his last (modest) hit as an actor. He gave up the bottle for good in 1992. In rehab, fellow addicts cheerfully dubbed him “Zero.” Later he found stability with his second wife, Dolores, raised three children, and enjoyed subsequent careers as a travel writer and television director (Orange Is the New Black, New Amsterdam, and other New York-based shows are among his credits). He’s also returning to acting, filming appearances in the series 13 Reasons Why (Netflix) and Good Girls (NBC).

Now that his life is stable, McCarthy says he recalls a line about Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: “a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything else savors of anticlimax.” For him, it was the opposite: In his prime, the 40th-greatest teen idol of all time (his co-stars Ringwald and Lowe are Nos. 1 and 2) was his own worst enemy. In middle age, free of both alcohol and the glare of stardom, he’s doing just fine. As for the cursed magazine sobriquet that bedeviled him 35 years ago, he doesn’t mind it anymore. “The Brat Pack label has grown over the years to radiate a warm nostalgia,” he writes. “It was a stigma that ultimately transformed into . . . a term of great and enduring affection.” His Eighties films “have placed me firmly in the world and among my generation in a way that is both singular and communal. What better place could I hope to land?”