In the halls of Glenbrook North High in 1968, you’d find the popular kids wearing preppy clothes—Brooks Brothers golf shirts, loafers. Most teens are concerned with using clothes as a way to fit in; but the opposite was true for the young Hughes, who instead used fashion as a way to distinguish himself from his bourgeois, middle-class American life. “He was very much into the avant-garde,” says Peterson. “John would go out and do his own thing, and wear something real funky, like checkered tennis shoes, to school—nobody in those days wore checkered tennis shoes. Sometimes people would laugh at him, but the girls thought it was cool, because it was usually something British, like something you’d see on John Lennon.”
It’s only natural that Hughes would’ve emulated the fashion of John Lennon: he deeply loved the music of The Beatles. “The Beatles were everything,” says Peterson, whose older brother brought home a copy of Rubber Soul from England that contained songs not included on the American version of the album. Peterson and Hughes were big hits when they brought the album to parties. “He was up on all the English groups,” says Lamas of Hughes. “We would talk about the music, we would talk about The Beatles, but basically we would talk about John Lennon.” Sometimes, Hughes would make his own music. “John played guitar quite well—he had a Fender Stratocaster,” remembers Peterson. “We’d hang out in his basement, he would play his guitar, and we’d get high, smoke pot.”
Hughes is often portrayed as having been an outsider in high school. There’s some truth to that—he certainly was different from anyone else in his school, and he wasn’t part of the truly popular crowd—but it seems he wasn’t a nerdy “neo-maxie zoom dweebie” (as they say in The Breakfast Club). Rather, his differences—his artistic predilections, his Anglophilic tendencies, his worshipful devotion to music and art, his advanced wit—may have made him stand out in a positive way. “He did not fit in,” says Peterson, “that’s all true—but that wasn’t a negative. It’s what made him cool. It’s part of what our clique was. He was never isolated. He was never made fun of, or chastised, or ignored.” Plus, says Lamas, Hughes “was too good-looking and well dressed and smart to be a nerd.” And some of the adventures Hughes and Peterson would find themselves having were anything but nerdy, like the time the two drove down to Fort Lauderdale “with fake IDs,” says Peterson, “so we could get in to all the college parties on the beach.” While on that trip, a cop nailed Peterson for drunk driving: “He put me in jail,” says Peterson, “and I sent John to the hotel to get money to bail me out.”
The youth-centered movies that played in the neighborhood theaters of John Hughes’s boyhood revealed much about the desires of the American teenage audience, and foreshadowed the extraordinary success Hughes would find in the youth genre decades later. Rebel Without a Cause, a forceful 1955 drama in which the lead character is played by a mesmerizing young James Dean, showed that the everyday problems of a teenager could be explored seriously, passionately, and, yes, darkly—to great cinematic effect. And the ensuing “beach movies,” ranging from 1959’s proto-feminist surfer-chick flick Gidget—“Sandra Dee and Jimmy Darren couldn’t swim,” remembered the film’s director, Paul Wendkos—to the chirpy, sun-drenched Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello squealfests such as Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), showed that teen movies could be their very own genre, and a profitable one at that.
The movies that most deeply affected John Hughes while he was growing up incorporated three key themes that would become his cinematic hallmarks as an adult: physical comedy, unabashed romance, and the triumph of the good-hearted underdog. From classic comedies such as the Cary Grant film The Awful Truth he learned that something small, and physical, can be funnier than the wittiest bon mot (“You love to see somebody pompous sit on a malted Milk Dud,” Hughes later said). Doctor Zhivago enchanted the fifteen-year-old Hughes with its sweeping romanticism—the kind Hughes would one day embrace in his teen films. Zhivago, Hughes would later say, “was the greatest romance movie ever made. It was playing at the Highland Park Theatre, and I went every single night.”
But one filmmaker seems to have affected young Hughes in the most profound way. The influence of Frank Capra, best remembered for his life-affirming optimism in such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, would later be seen in all of Hughes’s movies, in which innocents and underdogs are rewarded with exuberant, possibility-filled endings. “A key moment in my life came when I saw a documentary on Frank Capra,” Hughes once said. “They showed these moments from the end of Meet John Doe…. It just really moved me.” So deep was Capra’s influence on Hughes that Spy magazine would later write, “Hughes has out-auteured the auteur: his films are more Capra-esque.”
As a teen, John Hughes would have found in movies a much-needed escape from a sometimes difficult home environment. “His mom and dad criticized him a lot,” says Jackson Peterson. It seems that Hughes’s parents, Marion and John Sr., weren’t all too pleased with their son’s passion for the arts. “She would be critical of what John would want to do,” says Peterson of Marion, “that he would never be successful because of all the artsy things that he was into…. His parents were pressuring him to get real.” Hughes would go on to explore the theme of parental pressure in all of his 1980s youth dramas, and even in the comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which a subplot involving a domineering parent brings dark shading to the otherwise buoyant story. There wasn’t much relief to be found in Hughes’s relationships with his three younger sisters, either, with whom, according to Peterson, he had no connection. “They were in their own world, and he was in his own world.”
The teen films Hughes would later make would explore in powerful ways the painful realities of class distinction as seen through the eyes of teenagers, something John Hughes was all too familiar with as a boy. Part of Marion Hughes’s harshness may have stemmed from a sadness (or at least a frustration) regarding her changed station in life. She had been born into a politically powerful and wealthy family in suburban Detroit and, upon reaching adulthood, was part of the Junior League. Interestingly, when Hughes would later describe the character of Brenda Baker to Carlin Glynn, the actress who would portray her in Sixteen Candles, Glynn remembers him saying, “She’s a really good mom…. She’s not a brittle Junior Leaguer.” Says Jackson Peterson of Marion Hughes, “She brought that whole aura of how much better they were than everyone, coming from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and that they had all this money.”
But the Hughes family might have been more challenged economically than Marion would’ve wanted to let on to her Junior League friends. John Sr. had a rough go of it in Chicago—he purchased a beauty school, but that soon went bankrupt. “It was a big drop for the family,” says Peterson, “and I think a portion of their nest egg was lost in that business.” Hughes Sr. became a traveling salesman, visiting clients throughout the tristate Chicagoland area (not unlike Del Griffith, the goofy yet tenderly written Hughes character who would be played by John Candy in 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles). Hughes Sr. “was always getting criticized by the mother,” says Peterson. “I think it was a big step down for her to come from upper middle class in Grosse Pointe to middle class in Northbrook. And I think John was being affected by that.”
It’s also possible that Hughes felt some class strain within his close friendship with Peterson, who came from a wealthy family that owned a country club. (He and Hughes putted away many an afternoon on the Peterson family golf course.) “John was pretty solidly middle class,” says Ann Lamas, “and Jackie was upper middle class.” At an age where everyone at school scrutinizes what brand of jeans you’re wearing and how expensive your car is, the teenage Hughes was quite aware that his family lived “on the lower end of a rich community,” as he later told the New York Times. It instilled in him a deep distaste for snobs: “I just don’t care for birthright,” Hughes once said. So deeply did the adolescent Hughes ponder this issue of class hierarchy that he came up with the idea for Pretty in Pink—in wh
ich a lower-middle-class girl and a rich boy fall in love—while he was still in high school. Actor Jon Cryer says of working with Hughes on that film, “You absolutely sensed that he came from the other side of the tracks, at least in his perception. You knew where his sympathies lay.”
Turmoil may have been brewing in John Hughes’s teenage heart, but that was nothing compared to the turmoil churning in America and abroad in 1968. In Hughes’s last semester of high school, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of young people—the same young people who were eligible to be drafted to fight in Vietnam—were marching for peace. “He was antiwar,” says Peterson of Hughes. “We didn’t want to be drafted. We had student deferments, but we talked about that if our numbers got called, we would go to Canada or Sweden.”
But even in the midst of all this national and international upheaval, Northbrook, Illinois, remained relatively sheltered. “The boys were not allowed to have long hair,” says Lamas of their high school’s dress code. “We were getting, through the music, hints of what was happening on both coasts, but it really hadn’t hit Northbrook yet. No one looked like hippies.” But John Hughes, ever ahead of his time and constantly intrigued by whatever in the culture was au courant, may have managed to find a hotbed of hippiedom close to home: Old Town. The North Chicago neighborhood was to the Midwest what Greenwich Village was to New York. That summer the bohemian neighborhood gained international notoriety after violence erupted there during the Democratic National Convention. “I heard a rumor [during high school] that John Hughes went down to Old Town and propositioned this girl,” recalls Lamas, “and they started making out, and he found out that the girl was a boy.”
Fortunately, Hughes’s other amorous adventures proved more felicitous: he was extremely popular with the girls in his high school. “The girls loved him,” says Peterson. “One girl told me she was hanging around with me so that she could get close to John. This girl was sizzling hot.” Ann Lamas remembers being schooled by Hughes in the finer art of smooching. “He was really heads above me,” she says. “When I was a freshman, my friend had some kids over on a Friday night for a Coke and Fritos party; her parents were home. We were downstairs in their family room, and John and I, like everyone else, coupled up and started making out. He wasn’t the first boy that I had kissed,” says Lamas, demurely, “but he was the first boy I ever made out with.” At the end of the evening, Hughes walked Lamas out of the party and, as she recalls, said to her, ‘Thanks a lot, Ann. You kiss like my maiden aunt.’ Looking back, Lamas says, “I didn’t know you were supposed to open your mouth when you kissed! From then on I practiced kissing with my mouth open.” Yes, there were plenty of girls for John Hughes. And then, there was Nancy.
Nancy Ludwig was one year younger than John, and was a cheerleader. She and her best friend, Jeannie, were the types to be “elected queen of the prom,” says Peterson, who later married Jeannie. Ludwig was a well-dressed blonde with a nice figure who “wasn’t the artistic type,” says Lamas. The rumor going around school was that Nancy’s family were the owners of the Chicago-based Ludwig Drum Co., makers of the legendary drums used the world over by musicians including Ringo Starr of Hughes’s beloved Beatles. Nancy and John started dating when he was in eleventh grade, and a few short years later they were married.
Hughes may have stayed a teenager at heart, but when high school ended, he had to find a way to grow up. Unsurprisingly, his traditional parents wanted him to pursue a business career, like John Sr. Struggling once again with the notion of conforming versus beating a different path, Hughes decided to attend the University of Arizona to study painting. But he dropped out after only one year (in which, ironically, he flunked creative writing), and in a show of self-doubting angst worthy of any Breakfast Club character, he threw all of his paintings away during a bulk trash pickup in his neighborhood.
At twenty, the newlywed Hughes wrote and submitted unsolicited jokes to big-name comedians. Before long, the likes of Henny Youngman and Rip Taylor were buying his one-liners to use in their acts. Hughes figured that since he could write comedy, he should try writing for advertising. Sample jokes in hand, he persuaded execs at ad agency Needham, Harper and Steers to hire him at the tender age of twenty-one-a step that would prove to be invaluable in his journey toward his true destiny.
When he began working there in 1971, Hughes was by far the youngest guy in the office. This might seem irrelevant, were it not for one thing: his colleagues were old enough to have teenage kids of their own, providing Hughes with a real-world glimpse into high-school life just when his own teenhood had come to an end. His relationships with his colleagues’ kids cemented Hughes’s role, in his own mind, as someone who truly connected with teens, and seemingly made permanent his youthful worldview. Being around his colleagues’ teenage children, Hughes would later say, “reminded me of how things were back then, how deeply you felt about things, and how you couldn’t conceive of a future different from high school.”
Easy access to the minds of the Clearasil crowd proved to be valuable for Hughes, but it was only one of the many ways in which advertising gave him experiences that would forever shape him as a filmmaker. After making the jump from Needham to Leo Burnett and Company, he began working on accounts such as Edge shaving cream (the well-known ad where a man scratches a credit card along his face to prove there’s no stubble was a Hughes brainchild). He learned the art of using marketing as a means of telling—or, more accurately, selling—a story. He attended monthly focus groups to discover what people wanted to get out of a product, an experience Hughes would later say made him savvy when it came to the marketing of his own films.
But ultimately, advertising’s greatest influence on Hughes’s future career as a filmmaker came from a series of routine business trips. While working on the Virginia Slims cigarette account, he traveled regularly to New York, where he would often forgo lunches with advertising colleagues so he could hang around the offices of the nation’s leading humor magazine and bastion of sophomoric satire, National Lampoon—where he knew no one. He’d sit in the waiting room, trying to get someone to talk to him. Finally, the magazine’s editor in chief, Tony Hendra, invited Hughes into his office. Hendra, who is now best known for his acting role as Spinal Tap’s manager in the faux rockumentary, liked Hughes’s comedic flair; his sardonic humor was a perfect fit for the tone of the magazine. Soon enough, Hughes’s work was accepted at the Lampoon, and in due course he was hired as a staff editor.
National Lampoon founder and chairman of the board Matty Simmons was so impressed with Hughes that he let him work from home in the suburbs of Chicago. “I’ll fly you in every two weeks,” Simmons remembers telling Hughes, “you’ll attend the editorial meetings, and then you’ll go back to Chicago and quit your job [in advertising], and just write. He was so good,” says Simmons. “He came in and became one of the best humor writers in the history of the Lampoon.” Hughes was always naturally funny. His former advertising colleague Bob Richter remembers being at Hughes’s house one night, “and John opening his sock drawer, and he did twenty minutes on the contents of his sock drawer that were twenty of the funniest minutes I’d ever seen anyone do. All I remember is nearly falling on the floor laughing at all the silly stuff that he imagined out of his sock drawer.” (Later, Hughes would tell the Chicago Tribune, “Paper clips can be funny.”)
In the 1970s, while Hughes was making his journey into adulthood, Hollywood was experiencing a youthquake that served to lay the foundation for the teen films Hughes would one day create. It was becoming, said late entertainment exec Bernie Brillstein, “a new world—of youth.” American Graffiti, George Lucas’s nostalgia-infused 1973 ode to the innocence of his high-school days in a pre-Vietnam America—“Where were you in ’62?” its poster asked tenderly—showed the extraordinarily powerful effect that music can have in a story about teenagers—not the scored, sweeping
, orchestral “movie music” used by Hollywood since the early days of the industry, nor the cloying songs customarily written for film, but good pop music, the very tunes those very teenagers in American Graffiti would have been listening to on restless summer nights in 1962 on their car radios.
Lucas’s next film, 1977’s monumental epic Star Wars, featured a youthful hero and heroine (Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia), yet the storyline was a galaxy far, far away from Graffiti’s high-schoolers and hot rods. Nevertheless, Star Wars taught Hollywood about the immense power of the teenage dollar. For much of the unprecedented success of the film could be attributed to young people: everybody saw Star Wars, but teenagers, revealing the fanatical devotion unique to their demographic, would come to the multiplex to see it again and again, and “would bring all their friends,” as Brillstein said.
And then, in 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House hit theaters. The raunchy comedy, cowritten by Harold Ramis, coproduced by Ivan Reitman, and directed by John Landis, was inspired by a short story from the Lampoon, and broke new ground in the art of crudeness. The tale of the Deltas, a fraternity at a college based on Dartmouth, featured plenty of make-outs, gross-outs, and an unforgettable toga party. It also featured a young sketch comic from Chicago named John Belushi, who had made a name for himself as one of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live. In Animal House he portrayed the repulsive yet lovable brute Bluto, a Falstaffian fratboy who, in one memorable scene, imitates an exploding zit. The movie would go on to make a staggering $140 million, and become the highest-grossing comedy the movie industry had ever known. Suddenly, Hollywood was eager to do business with anyone associated with the Lampoon, which, at that time, included John Hughes, then in his late twenties and a contributing editor at the magazine.
In early 1979, a few months after Animal House hit theaters, Hughes was stuck at home with his family as a record snowstorm dumped over sixteen inches of snow on the Windy City in one day. As the snow descended, Hughes sat in his bedroom office with an atlas, typing a short story for the Lampoon about the miserable road trip of a family called the Griswolds (the tale culminates with the father shooting Walt Disney in the leg). The piece was called “Vacation ’58.” “I immediately told him, ‘I’m going to make a movie out of this,’” Matty Simmons remembers saying to Hughes, and sure enough, soon after the story was published in the September 1979 issue of National Lampoon, it was bought by Warner Bros. Though Hughes had never so much as laid eyes on a screenplay, Matty Simmons offered him the chance to write the screen adaptation of his Griswolds story. The studio “wanted to put in a professional screenwriter,” says Simmons, “but I refused to let that happen.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 3
