Ok, so I couldn't sleep and was on EBay and won this April 1989 issue of New Jersey monthly with AM on the cover. A third of the way through the article, but I will type it out and post it later on tonight. Funny, we went to the same shore point too for vacation...I knew I knew him from somewhere else!
"I'm just a 26 year old businessman who happends to make movies," says Andrew McCarthy, trying to put a practical spin on his fairy-tale career as a young film star. The New Jersey born and bred actor sounds flip and self-assured. But the truth is that this veteram of nine feature films--including the Brat Pack hits St. Elmo's Fire and Pretty in Pink--is more complicated and more confused than he lets on. At 26, McCarthy is one of the most popular actors of his generation, and, unlike some of his contemporaries, he's still in demand by the studios, even in the post-Brat Pack era. But McCarthy's effusiveness hides a darker reality. If you prick this young man's youthfully enthusiatic surface, you find he's uncertain under the skin, and he's more than a little bit cynical. He's Peter Pan with a jaundiced vision.
McCarthy, who is set to fly to Hawaii in 24 hours, scheduled our extended interview at a local watering spot just a few steps from his recently purchased Manhattan home. Sure enough, precisely at the appointed time, he appears in the doorway: a lanky young man wearing a calf-length coat and baseball cap. His light brown hair hangs over his collar, and his face (which has often--too often for McCarthy's taste--been described as boyish) is obscured by the cap's pulled-down visor.
The bar, a combination local hangout and restaurant, is almost empty. But McCarthy's behavior in a public place seems virtually automatic. He approaches like someone who knows how to negotiate a crowd without being noticed. He moves like a ghost. A few words of greeting are passed. Small talk is made. McCarthy, who has icy, pale-blue eyes, glances all around and looks his interviewer up and down. He offers to move the site of the talk to his home. A test of sorts has been passed.
The house--a narrow, three story Federal-style Manhattan landmark that he shares with a former college classmate named Carol--is his pride and joy. But the renovations aren't complete. The plumbing and wiring have been redone. The floors have been sanded, the chimney flues cleaned, and the cable installed. In one of the bathrooms, there's even a Jacuzzi that's been custom-built out of an antique cast-iron tub. But the ground floor is dark, and the furnishings are spare. The only other inhabitant at the moment is a cat.
We settle down on the second floor in a kind of study/entertainment room. Its primary attraction is a massive, black-marble fireplace that was once buried beneath layers of old paint (McCarthy, the proud homeowner, boasts of stripping it by hand). On the mantelpiece are various bric-a-brac, including a water-filled "snow shaker" (Is the figure inside Merlin?) and a reproduction of the Maltese Falcon.
Thanks for the post. That's why I have been his fan for a long time. He is different from other actors. I think his cat's name was "Zelda." Please tell us more about the article. Thanx.
Mikako, you are amazing! I am thinking about you and your beloved country as we approach the sad anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami.
(cont)
A stereo system stands against a far wall, and a side-screen Sony TV and VCR are shoved into another corner. In the VCR cabinet is a selection of videotapes, including copies of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 and Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as From Here to Eternity and The Big Lift, fifties dramas starring McCarthy's favorite actor, Montgomery Clift. A heavy antique sofa and a pair of matching armchairs provide the finishing touches. McCarthy gets his guest a beer. For himself, there's a can of Coke, a bottle of Evian water, and a pack of Camel Filters.
Since Mannequin, the 1987 hit film that made him--in movie industry parlance--"bankable," McCarthy has appeared in three films that were box-office disappointments. In Less Than Zero, an embattled film adaptation of the controversial Bret Easton Ellis novel, he played Clay Easton, the film's world-weary protagonist. In Kansas, a modest drama about an innocent youth caught up in a crime spree, McCarthy teamed up with Matt Dillon. And most recently, in Fresh Horses, he was a middle-class college senior who falls for a backwoods temptress played by Molly Ringwald. Currently, his hopes are riding on a film he completed for director Ted Kotcheff (Uncommon Valor), a youth-oriented comedy called Weekend At Bernie's.
"That's what it's called now, anyway," says McCarthy with a hint of disdain for a system that can't decide on a title without test-marketing it. (In fact, the film's title has recently been changed--again tentatively-- to Hot and Cold.) "There's one guy in it who's very proper, the part I normally play, and another guy who's a total jerk and utterly selfish. They asked me to be the nice guy who gets the girl. But I said, 'You don't know me; I'd be much better in the other part.' After about two weeks they said, 'You're right. You're much more of a jerk.'" He laughs.
Despite the fact that he often works in Las Angeles, McCarthy lives permanently on the East Coast. "I stay up in a hotel when I'm out there," he says, lighting up a cigarette. "I don't like L.A. and I waste too much money staying in a hotel, but it's just the idea of having a place there, that I don't like. I don't trust the lifestyle or the people. Everyone I know out there is in the film business. Here, I hardly have any friends who work in the movies."
Living in New York also earns him a modicum of respect in West Coast movie circles. "Because New York is a tough town," he explains. "People here start out not liking you, and then you gain their trust. In L.A., everybody's your buddy, and then the minute you walk out the door they stab you in the back. I much prefer not to be liked at first and having to earn whatever friendship or respect I get."
(to be cont. and before I forget, story is by James Verniere)
Born in Westfield, Andrew McCarthy is the product of an upper-middle-class family. His father is in finance, and his mother is in advertising. The couple have three sons who were born within four years and a fourth, born ten years later. In addition to Andrew, there's Stephen, who's an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, and Peter, who's a graduate student in psychology at the University of South Carolina. Justin is seventeen.
"It's suburbia," McCarthy says about Westfield. "It was originally called the Westfields of Elizabeth (that was a fourth-grade assignment I never forgot). You know: a house, a nice yard, the good side of town, the bad side of town, the real bad corner." McCarthy only explored the real bad corner once. It was the day his parents gave him a new bicycle. "It got stolen," he says with the shake of his head.
After attending the local public school for six years, McCarthy enrolled in Pingry, the exclusive prep school in Elizabeth (which has since moved to Martinsville), and shortly thereafter, the family moved to Bernardsville. "I don't know if it's affluent," McCarthy demurs. "Sure, I guess," he decides. "We had acres of land. But I don't really think I fit there."
After graduating from Pingry, McCarthy moved to Manhattan to attend New York University. About th same time, his family moved to Southhampton, Long Island. Since then, they've resettled in Morristown.
Today, McCarthy visits the family home regularly. He also goes to the Meadowlands to play the horses and to cheer for the Giants. But his favorite recollections of growing up center on the Jersey Shore. "We used to spend our summers at Seaside," he says. When he was a high school senior, he even worked as a dishwasher at a Seaside fast-food restaurant called the Pizza Pub. "We worked nights and then dragged the mattresses out to the balcony to try to sleep and get a tan at the same time. We'd work all summer long and still be pale at the end," he says smiling. "But it was a magical place when you were severteen. I remember that I had a crush on a girl fromone of those Shore towns," he continues, summoning up any number of Springsteen tunes. "But it was a love-hate thing. We both loved her and hated me." Ba-dum-bum.
Sandy, thank for your thoughts. Please pray for Japan on March 11. I've been reading his interesting story. I cannot give a birth like Andrew's mom did it at all. I wonder how she managed to raise child(ren) and give a birth. It's nice to look back to good old days. Thanks.
As a child, McCarthy once entertained thoughts of being an architect, but his only talent at school seemed to be getting himself out of trouble. "I was good at winging it and covering my ass when I hadn't done the work. Charming my way out. I don't think I was particularly good at any subject," he says.
"I guess acting was something that I did and nobody else in the family did. I liked doing high school plays. Last night I was watching Oliver on TV, and I was walking around the house singing every word to 'Consider Yourself.' I'd played the Artful Dodger in the tenth grade," he explains. "And I even remember the dance step they taught us."
But McCarthy, whose older brothers attended Hobart and Skidmore, didn't necessarily pick the New York University drama school because of his curning passion to act. He picked it, in part, because he thought his chances of getting accepted were better. "Well, it was easier to get into than their liberal arts school, especially for someone that didn't have the grades or scores. But in the back of my mind, that's what I wanted, and my parents were satisfied. 'That's fine as long as you're going to college. Go be an actor,' they said."
During his first year at NYU, the severteen-year-old was placed in an acting class at the Cincle in the Square theater company, where he met a teacher named Terry Hayden. "She's the first person I met who thought I wasn't wasting my time," he says. "She took me under her wing. I guess everyone needs someone to say you're a little special, to believe in you. I haven't seen her in several months, but I still go to her classes, and she coaches me for some roles.
"Looking back, it seems like it was somebody else," he says about making the transition from Bernardsville to Manhattan. "I was pretty overwhelmed."
Even more overwhelming was landing a leading role in the film Class, two years later. McCarthy wa just about to start his junior year at NYU when an ad appeared in Backstage for a vulnerable, eighteen-year-old, "sensitive" type to play a part in a movie. "I didn't even read it, " he says. "A friend called me about it." But McCarthy was intrigued. He went to the Ansonia Hotel with an eight-by-ten photo and sat for three hours. "Then you get into the room and hand the picture to some guy, and it's over in two minutes," he says. "I left with sweaty palms and thought, 'What a waste of time!'"
But it wasn't. "I guess because I looked like the right type," he says. At the second meeting, McCarthy read for the film's director, Louis Carlino. "Then I screen-tested--alone--and I was terrible. None of it was very real to me. But I knew I had screwed up. I was lying in bed that night--I hate talking about this because it sounds so corny--but I thought, 'God, that was my chance. I could've been an actor.'" He called the filmmakers up in desperation. "But they said, 'No, no you did fine.'"
About two weeks later, they called him back again. "It was a funny story, why I got called back. I was basically out of the competition. But the producer and the director were going over the videotapes. When my tape came up, the director said, 'Skip it.' But Marty Ransonhoff, the producer, said, 'No, no wait. This one's really weird. Look at his eyes.' My eyes really lock when I'm nervous. 'I'm gonna put this kid in one of my horror movies,' Marty said."
McCarthy laughs. "I was the comic relief!" But they asked him back a third time, and then four finalists--including McCarthy and his eventual co-star, Rob Lowe--were flown to Chicago for a last test. Although he was offered the part that day, McCarthy had yet to meet the star, Jacqueline Bisset. She was set to play the order woman with whom McCarthy has an illicit affair, and she had final approval of her co-star.
Making his first flight to L.A., McCarthy met Bisset in her home in Benedict Canyon. "I was a green kid out of college somewhere, who'd never done anything. She could've done a scene on me. But she was so generous. I would've been dead without her." Still, when the shooting started, McCarthy felt as if he was barely treading water. "I'm glad I went to school. But it didn't teach me how to survive. The only way to do any of that stuff was to do it."
After shooting Class in the fall of 1982, he decided not to return to college, and for a year he didn't work at all. "It was a mess, but it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I feel sorry sorry for people who get a big break their first time out because they'll eat you up. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know enough about the business. But I didn't want to be in school anymore, either."
Wow - Mikako you know everything - I am in awe of you!!!!! (And I will take time to remember Japan on Sunday).
Sandy - this article is the most indepth I have ever seen - wow, thanks for sharing - this is a wonderful read. Thanks so much for taking the time to write it up for us xxxxx muchly grateful xxxx
See, as I said, Andrew and Rob Lowe have differing accounts of how Andrew got his role on Class. Rob stated in his book Andrew was only accompanying a friend to the audition and ended up taking the role instead after being noticed by the casting people.
At the same time, he didn't enjoy auditions. "They can be horrible," he says. "Some actors get their personal worth mixed up in the audition, and if they don't get the job they don't feel valid as people. I think that once you can make the distinction between yourself and your work, you're better off. You have to learn that you can be a wonderful actor, but if you're not what they're looking for, it doesn't matter. To rest your self'worth in that process is sad, and you'll never work because people can smell the desperation on you."
McCarthy's second break came when he was cast in Catholic Boys, a satire set in 1965 that was released under the title Heaven Help Us. Although the film was popular with the critics and has become a cult item, it failed at the box office. "It could've been a really wonderful, funny, melancholy movie," says McCarthy, sounding a recurrent note. "But Tri-Star [the studio that released the film] wanted more farts. They tried to make it Porky's in Catholic school."
For someone who's been described as being almost pathologically shy, McCarthy is extremely articulate and ouspoken. As it turns out, the truth is that he's not shay at all. "It's just stuff you say to interviewers," he admits. "Sitting in that bar, I probably would have said the same thing to you. I shouldn't have brought you to my house. I think the whole interview process is weird," he continues. "I don't like to read interviews with other people because I usually get embarrassed for them. I don't mind talking about my work, but some interviews are humiliating experiences. I don't want to go on the Today show and show off my engagement ring. I think people just set themselves up to be made fools of."
But there is a tremendous public interest in celebrities. "I didn't understand it at all at first," he says. It made me very uncomfortable. Now, in the last year, I've realized that it has nothing to do with me. It's what people project on me. So I just put myself in a shell and give then what they want: the smile, the eye contact, the name on a piece of paper (which I really don't understand)." He does, however, recognize that it's part of the territory. "It's a reason that a lot of people get into it, " he says. "I think a lot of people get into this business to be stars, not actors."
At this point in his career, McCarthy is not just outspoken, he's eager to break away from the vulnerable types he's already played. "They've wanted me to do the same thing over and over again," he says wearily. "You play the young, sensitive type who gets the girl in one movie, and it's easy for them to see you doing that again. You really have to fight to get out of a mold if they put you in one."
To do that, McCarthy has turned to the New York stage. In 1985, after completing Pretty in Pink, he landed a part in the Broadway production of The Boys of Winter, a pre-Platoon drama about Vietnam that featured a cast of ypung actors. In 1987, he appeared at Lincoln Center in the play Bodies, Rest and Motion. His other stage credits include performances at Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Playwright's Horizon Theatre. He's also a regular at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in Utah, where he collaborates with new writers and directors.
He also found an alternative to working for the makot studios. In 1987, for example, he played a young idealistic American on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War in Waiting for the Moon, a modest, art house film about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
But in spite of his alternatives, McCarthy still finds it difficult to reconcile ow seriously he takes his work with the mercenary aspect of the American film industry. He has, however, become more mature about it. "They don't care if it's good," he laments. "They just wnat it Tuesday, and they want it to gross over $6 million on the first weekend. But it's always been that way, and I'm not a virgin anymore. I think you have to believe--and sometimes you believve it too much--that when you're making a film, you're doing the best job you can under the circumstances. After that, the committee takes over."
Less Than Zero, one of the most talked-about novels of the decade, was nihilistic expose of the sex, drugs, and nightclubs scene enjoyed by rich, young people in modern-day Beverly Hills. The film adaptation, which was directed by Marek Kanievska (Another Country), was supposed to be failful to its source. But as usual for film adaptations of controversial literary works, the movie lost its edge--and its nerve--somewhere between page and screen. "Despite everything, despite the fact that they turned it into a 'Just Say No' movie, I enjoyed making it," McCarthy explains. "I thought the film depicted a lifestyle--the lifestyle of the privileged, rich youth in Bevenly Hills--that really exists. But I think the problem was that half the kids into that scene are the children of studio executives. So we kept having to reshoot and change it. I fought like hell to do that part. Maybe in hindsight I shouldn't have."
Still, there are payoffs. "I love the act of making a movie and being on a movie set, trying to get that last shot, working with the crew and the director. There's this incredible energy: I wouldn't trade that for anything. It's so exciting, and you feel so lucky. So much money--an exorbitant and unnatural amount of money--is involved, so much so that there's an unnatural amount of pressure and deviousness, too. But if you can deal with that, it's worth it. It's the people that buy into the whole thing that get eaten up by it.
"Hollywood is not a place that nutures talent. It doesn't nuture anything. It exploits it and always has. I think that's why they pay you so much. But if you know that you're stepping into the lion's den, at least you know what you're dealing with. Being trapped on a movie set in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, for twelve weeks, you can lose your mind," he continues. "Butit's kind of magical, like being a part of a fraternity of freaks."
Is it easy to form lasting friendships with his fellow actors? "Not generally," MccArthy says, ill at ease with what sounds suspiciously like a personal question. "I don't have many actor friends. One is Jimmy Spader [an actor from Boston who costarred with McCarthy in Prety in Pink and Less Than Zero]. We can talk about work because we're both on the inside, and he understands what it's about."
For relaxation, McCarthy currently finds himself working on his new home. "Remember when they used to send crazy epople out to rusticate?" he asks. "I don't rusticate; I strip paint."
Between acting jobs, does he sometimes feel a little bit helpless? "Waiting for the phone to ring?" he says, completing the thought. "Yeah, you're just a commodity waiting to be purchased. I suppose your ultimate goal is to create your work. But I'm lazy. I just want Alan Pakula [the director of Klute and Sophie's Choice, to name a few] to call me." In a joking mood, McCarthy even imagines himself washed up and appearing on Hollywood Squares. "I'm scared of heights, so I'll probabl be the one on the bottow-right-hand corner."
When the interview ends, McCarthy walks to the front door, where the young actor gives one more indication that he realizes that illusions can be short-lived.
