You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation

by Susannah Gora

  As close as many members of the gang were, one young St. Elmo’s cast member felt out of synch socially from the others. “I always felt sort of apart,” Andrew McCarthy says. “I never felt any kind of great camaraderie…I think I went out once or twice with the guys in L.A.” Carl Kurlander remembers that when he’d first picked up McCarthy at the airport in Los Angeles to audition for St. Elmo’s, “there was the feeling almost of someone starting at a new high school. He absolutely felt separate.” McCarthy grew up in New Jersey; Lowe and Estevez, in Malibu. And so the movie industry “was all new to Andrew,” says Kurlander, “whereas people like Rob grew up with this in their backyard.”

  McCarthy also wasn’t particularly enthralled with the group’s social activities. “Emilio was, like, obsessed with going to see Rambo [First Blood Part II],” says McCarthy. “And I thought, who would want to fucking see Rambo? What is this?” McCarthy went to see the movie in Westwood with them, and remembers feeling like Kevin, his cynical character in St. Elmo’s Fire. “I just thought, this is stupid,” he says. “They used to go out a lot.”

  But most of these actors’ times together were a bit more exciting than catching Sylvester Stallone movies. A group that included Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Sean Connery, and Lauren Hutton once “got flown to a tennis tournament in Monaco, at the Palace,” says Loree Rodkin, who was also there. “There was a lot of frivolity to it, and we were getting paid to play.” Rodkin, now an internationally renowned jewelry designer—(Michelle Obama wore Rodkin jewelery on Election Night and to the inaugural balls)—was herself a bit of a rock star back then. A former lover of the Eagles’s Don Henley (he reportedly wrote the line “She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she calls friends” in “Hotel California” about her), the glamorous Rodkin met Judd Nelson in New York through a common friend, the daughter of acting teacher Stella Adler. The two fell in love, and she moved with him to Los Angeles. Rodkin’s clients, who included Brad Pitt, Robert Downey, Jr., and Sarah Jessica Parker, as well as Nelson, were her contemporaries, and as such, she became close with them and their actor pals. “We were out every night,” Rodkin recalls. “We opened all the Hard Rocks for [then co-owner] Peter Morton. They would fly my actors everywhere, as the celebrity quotient. So we were being flown and dined and wined. We were all friends.”

  Amazingly enough, the Hard Rock Café, now an almost painfully inauthentic tourist destination, was, in 1985, new to L.A., exclusive, and of the moment. The Los Angeles HRC was where these young actors, many of whom had special VIP cards that allowed them instant access without having to wait on line, spent many of their happiest times together with their friends. Kurlander would sometimes go there with members of the St. Elmo’s cast. “There was really good lime chicken,” he remembers, “the waitresses were fun, they would sort of flirt, the music was great, and if you were gonna do a shot, it would be of Jagermeister.” Just like the on-screen friends in St. Elmo’s Fire, who had a drinking cheer, when the real-life actors hung at the Hard Rock, says Kurlander, “we would say a Russian phrase: ‘Na Zdorovye!’” which means “good health.” After a long day of shooting, it was the perfect place to unwind. “We were working on the movie,” remembers Kurlander, “and then you’d say, ‘Hey, you wanna go for a drink? And that’s where you’d go. It was usually Rob and Emilio, and then either Judd or Andrew on a few occasions.”

  The Hard Rock was, of course, only one of the spots frequented by the young actors. Nightclubs in the 1980s were impossibly hot and chic, and even more than today were the center of the social scene. The gang particularly liked a huge warehouse nightclub called Power Tools. It featured go-go dancers and art installations, and could accommodate two thousand partiers at a time. The DJs played an eclectic mix, from African music to metal bands like Black Sabbath. “If the sixties were Andy Warhol and his Factory in New York,” says Kurlander, “the eighties in Los Angeles was after-hours at Power Tools. It was the place to go.”

  When they craved a bit more intimacy, they could head over to Helena’s, a private, invitation-only dinner club where the likes of Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson were regulars. “It was more Old Hollywood,” says Kurlander. “You knocked on the door, and inside would be Prince and Joni Mitchell, incredible people.” Sheedy and Nelson read poems of theirs at Helena’s poetry nights. There was also a place called Club Lingerie, where, says Kurlander, “everyone went to hear this hot new band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

  The music that many of these young actors and their friends were listening to in their cars, in nightclubs, in restaurants, at each other’s houses, was, fittingly enough, much the same kind of music that found its way onto the soundtracks of their films. “We absolutely loved Simple Minds, Psychedelic Furs, Depeche Mode, Human League, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” remembers Rodkin.

  And when they weren’t in L.A. there was plenty of fun to be had on the East Coast. Rodkin remembers lots of good times at New York’s Café Central, where Bruce Willis, newly hot from the TV series Moonlighting, was the celebrity bartender. Recalls Rodkin, “Judd, Rob, and everyone, we would get off the plane and go straight there.”

  Back in L.A., Lowe loved a trendy spot in Hollywood called The Boss Club, which was inspired by Bruce Springsteen, and played only the Boss’s music on Tuesdays. Lowe was such a fan of Bruce that he yelled himself hoarse at an epic L.A. concert, and couldn’t speak on the St. Elmo’s set the next day.

  The gang liked to eat at the Hollywood haunt Barney’s Beanery and the heavy-metal hangout The Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset (where members of the newly formed band Guns N’Roses could often be found), and at power scene The Ivy. “Joel [Schumacher] taught me how to get a table there,” says Kurlander.

  And then, there was Spago. If Hollywood is the epicenter of glamour, then Spago in 1985 was the epicenter of the epicenter. Energized by head chef and owner Wolfgang Puck (one of America’s first celebrity chefs), Spago was a groundbreaking restaurant. Puck was a pioneer of an important culinary movement, “California cuisine.” The food was daring and exciting, but it played only a supporting role. The true star at Spago was its electric, celebrity-studded atmosphere. The New York Times complained that it was nearly impossible to get a table there if the staff didn’t recognize your name, but that exclusivity only contributed to the experience of being in the restaurant. It was also, for the Hollywood elite, an excuse to go out for pizza and not feel guilty about it. It was so dramatic, so sexy, and so compelling an environment that a night of dining there could feel more like a night of theater.

  As elaborately plated, inventive dishes were whisked from oven to table, Wolfgang Puck would come out of the kitchen and schmooze with his customers—the actors, directors, producers, studio execs, authors, artists, and general movers and shakers of the era. In addition to the actors, John Hughes himself came to Spago “all the time,” says Puck. Looking back on Spago’s appeal in those days, Puck says, “I think it was a great mixture of Old Hollywood and New Hollywood.” From the older guard of Hollywood, Puck remembers, “you had [super-agent Irving] ‘Swifty’ Lazar holding court with Gregory Peck…And Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon and Jack Nicholson. And then you had the young kids also.”

  Puck even made special star-shaped designer pizzas for the young actors when they came in. (Molly Ringwald, for one, favored a smoked salmon and caviar pizza.) “It was always a party,” Puck recalls of his famed restaurant, which aspired to be less stuffy than many popular Hollywood eateries. “When Spago opened,” he says, “it was fun, with good music and all different types of people coming in.” Puck was struck by these young actors and actresses taking Hollywood by storm and hanging out in his restaurant. How could you not be? Says Puck, “They were beautiful.”

  They were beautiful indeed, and they were living a beautiful life, filled not just with parties and fancy dinners and romantic adventures, but with true, deep friendship. Whether they had grown up together in L.A.—(Estevez, Lowe, Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, and Robert Downey, Jr., were a
ll pals as teenagers)—or met through their work, these young actors found in each other true friends committed to the craft of acting, and to one another.

  For Ally Sheedy it was a richly meaningful time. She says of her Breakfast Club castmates, “I was totally comfortable with everybody, for the first time, really. I didn’t fit in in high school, and I felt like an outsider in Hollywood,” because she was always a little bit of a different type, says Sheedy, but when she discovered these friends, “I felt like it was fine for me to be that way. We were meshed together.”

  For Carl Kurlander, the experience of working on St. Elmo’s Fire, a film about friendship, enriched his life in powerful and unexpected ways, including becoming close with its young cast and filmmakers. “I had a hard childhood,” says Kurlander, “and I was very shy and isolated in college at Duke. But by making this movie, I did get the gang—I got the gang that I would never have had.”

  The acting life can be a strange and difficult one, and the bonds that form between young thesps as they are coming up can be intensely powerful. “We all kind of grew up together,” says Eric Stoltz, who shared a one-bedroom apartment with his friends and fellow USC students Ally Sheedy (whom he dated) and Anthony Edwards (later of Top Gun and E.R. fame), “and whenever we’d get auditions we would all just sort of go,” Stoltz remembers. Of the very early days, recalls Stoltz, “I think Ally had the audition for Fast Times, and Tony Edwards and I went with her and ended up auditioning.” (Although Sheedy wasn’t cast in the film—director Amy Heckerling thought she didn’t seem helpless enough for the role that eventually went to Jennifer Jason Leigh—Edwards and Stoltz were cast as stoner buddies of Sean Penn’s character Jeff Spicoli.) “We were all sort of helping each other out and hanging around together and just being teenagers together,” remembers Stoltz, “looking for work and trying to figure out how to function in the world.” Of his St. Elmo’s Fire cast, Joel Schumacher says, “Rob and Emilio were best friends before we did the movie. Ally and Demi were very, very close when we were making the movie.” Thinking back on how the young actors blended together, Schumacher remarks, “No one felt they were more important than the other. I saw that they were very protective of one another.”

  It wasn’t all platonic. Michelle Manning, who was a producer on St. Elmo’s, says of that film’s actors: “There was a lot of hooking up by various parties of the cast. And it never lasted very long, but unlike most people who break up, they were all still best friends. So it was weird—it was like ‘Oh, they’re going out?’ ‘Not this week.’ ‘Oh, okay, whatever, so who’s going out this week?’”

  Hookups were not confined to costars. “Outside of the cast there was an enormous amount of opportunity,” says Kurlander. “I’m not saying if you went to the Hard Rock, and you were one of the actors, that you weren’t able to go home with somebody. But that was true of a lot of people in the eighties, and it was right before AIDS, and there was no reason not to. Was there sex going on? Yes. People were in their twenties and were not unsightly. It was remarkable how many girls would come up to them at the clubs or in restaurants or walking down the streets.” Kurlander remembers these young women being in two main categories: “the slutty girls, and the girls who were actually trying to have relationships.”

  For recent NYU student Andrew McCarthy, becoming a movie star had one very powerful effect: “I became, suddenly, a viable sexual commodity,” he says, “whereas I was fairly invisible up to that point.” After becoming known for his first handful of movie roles, “I could get laid whenever I wanted,” he says bluntly. “Frankly, that was the difference in my life. I was attractive to women when I was not attractive to them before. Which, for a twenty-odd-year-old guy, is a great thing.”

  McCarthy wasn’t the only one catching the eye of the ladies. “Women would come up to Rob wherever he was,” says Kurlander. “Wherever you were in a room somewhere in 1985, if a woman was going to want to sleep with someone, it would be Rob Lowe. And that was very hard for him to handle—like, what do you do in that situation?” (Lowe’s on again, off again relationship with Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert was “passionate,” says Kurlander, “but they weren’t always together.”)

  It was an intoxicating time. Charlie Sheen once told a reporter that “after sitting for three years alongside my brother, my friends Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, and Tom Cruise, just watching all the attention they got and the women that went with it—it’s like something you yearn for, pray for.” But it seems to have been something of a mixed blessing: Remembers Kurlander, “Rob said, ‘I was a nerdy kid! I didn’t grow up this cool kid.’ But now this was available to him, so he had learned to deal with it.”

  Sheen’s brother Estevez had, of course, fallen hard for one girl in particular: Demi Moore. When their relationship ended in 1987, the aftermath was quite painful. Not long after their breakup, Estevez had a birthday party at the 1950s-themed restaurant Ed Debevic’s. The guests included Sheedy, Tom Cruise, and Mimi Rogers. “People were having a good time,” says Kurlander. “Then Demi walked in.” Moore had come to the party, says Kurlander, “to be thoughtful, because she still cared about him. But it was clear they didn’t have that relationship anymore. They ended up talking for a long time. It was clear she didn’t want to hurt him, and that he was vulnerable and still cared for her deeply.”

  Loree Rodkin and Judd Nelson’s relationship was also a very special one. The gorgeous couple, a matched pair with their dark hair and sensual features, had an apartment in New York and a house in L.A., where Cher would come by to visit. (“She adored Judd,” says Rodkin.) When Rodkin and Nelson started living together, Rodkin recalls that Nelson “sweetly said to me, ‘Right now it says, ‘Loree Rodkin Plus One [on invitations],’ but soon it is going to say, ‘Judd Nelson Plus One.’ And it was true.”

  The watershed night at the Hard Rock, aside from the journalist present, was just another fun evening. New York’s David Blum was scarcely older than most of the young actors there. But as the actors talked, laughed, and partied into the night, the journalistic realization that would change the course of their careers was sweeping across Blum’s mind. Rather than focusing just on Estevez, he began thinking of these actors as part of a whole. Over the course of his time with them, he viewed some of their behavior as bratty—such as Estevez pulling all sorts of strings to avoid paying six dollars to see Ladyhawke, or Estevez et al. asking Blum to invite novelist McInerney out on the town with them, only to ignore him all night.

  While in L.A. to interview Estevez, Blum had had dinner with a group of his own friends, including a food writer, who joked that they were all eating so much they were “the fat pack,” a pun on the 1960s Las Vegas–based posse that included Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. “That made us all laugh,” says Blum, “and the next day I was driving somewhere and that joke popped into my head—the Fat Pack, and I was riffing on that in my head and my mind went to ‘brat pack,’ and I thought, ‘Boy, that’s the perfect description of these guys that I’m writing about.’ I had already grouped them together in my mind as a possible way of writing the piece when that phrase hit.”

  Then, the June 10, 1985, issue of New York magazine containing David Blum’s article hit the stands. It was not an inside feature, and it was not just about Emilio Estevez. It was the cover story, and it was about the entire group of actors. It was also, in many ways, the beginning of the end.

  One can only wonder whether the article would have been quite so impactful without the cover, but the piece almost didn’t get such a prominent placement. A week before the “Brat Pack” article ran, New York had run a cover story on “wolf packs,” groups of teenage thugs who were mugging people in Central Park. According to Blum, New York editor in chief Ed Kosner “at the last minute said, ‘I don’t know—Wolf Packs, Brat Pack…’ [but] to his credit he was persuaded that [the Brat Pack story] was worth doing as a cover.” He was indeed. Ed Kosner says the Brat Pack piece was
chosen to run on the cover because “it was fresh. [Blum] had found something new. New York magazine’s job was to identify new trends.”

  Blum’s New York piece said that the Brat Pack, like the Rat Pack before them, was “a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women, and a good time.” Much of the article focused on what Blum saw the night he joined Estevez, Lowe, Nelson, and pals for an evening at the Hard Rock, and the picture he painted is one of privileged, cocky young men who are happy only when they’ve got a beer in one hand and a babe in the other. The actors “seemed to exude a magnetic force,” wrote Blum. “As the boys toasted each other and chugged their beers, the prettiest of the girls would find some excuse to walk by the table…The boys knew that they had this force, and they stared back with equal vigor.” In the article, Blum even mockingly referenced the drinking cheer the boys had created on the set of St. Elmo’s Fire.

  Blum says that when he called these young actors the “Brat Pack,” he actually meant the phrase in a positive way. “I was thinking of it more in terms of pack,” he says, “this cool group of people. I really did think it was something they would all think was kind of funny. The Rat Pack—those guys didn’t mind—those guys thought it was cool…I’d rather be called a brat than a rat.” Blum also believes that partying and serious dramatic work need not be mutually exclusive: “Look at Warren Beatty, he was more of a Casanova than any of these guys in terms of having fun in Hollywood and having a great time. But at the same time, he was making Bonnie and Clyde and Splendor in the Grass, developing important movies. These guys didn’t seem to be taking it all very seriously.”