Three-way cherub

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, June 25-26, 2011

Rob Lowe has always had the ideal American face. It looks plastic, but it’s real. It’s the face of a cherub: a cherub who filmed himself having two separate three-ways (in one of which he wasn’t the only dude) and got away with it, back in the days when things like that were still considered mildly embarrassing. It’s the face Michael Jackson’s surgeons always seemed to be chiselling their way towards.

Placed on the cover of an autobiography, Lowe’s face threatens the kind of skin-deep entertainment you get from a Lowe movie. He became a star during the blandest decade in the history of American film, and his performances in those home-made pornos were by no means the most wooden of his career: he was the kind of actor who, in order to portray a tortured saxophone player, simply messed up his hair and walked everywhere with a sax around his neck.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear people talking as if Lowe’s autobiography has substance. It’s even more of a surprise to discover they’re not wrong. The blurb writer who hails the book as “a major publishing event” undoubtedly goes a bit far. But Lowe has solid instincts as a memoirist: he knows what sort of things you’ll want to hear, and he’s much more perceptive and thoughtful than you expect someone who looks that good to be.   

He recounts his early childhood in a series of rapid fades: a shrewd way of fast-forwarding to the showbiz stuff without missing any essentials. His parents separated when he was four – a trauma he evokes with some effect. His teen years in Malibu are packed with cameos from past and future stars. He plays baseball in Martin Sheen’s backyard with Charlie and Emilio; makes home movies with the Penn brothers; dates a girl whose father turns out to be Cary Grant.

We’ll have to take Lowe’s word for it that he was unpopular at school, especially with the ladies. But at fifteen he got cast in a half-successful sitcom. This failed to impress girls who actually knew him, but girls who didn’t were suddenly interested. Mobbed and palpated at a publicity appearance, the young Lowe gets an insight into the hollowness of fame. “If you really knew me,” he thinks, “you wouldn’t like me nearly as much.”

The book’s centrepiece is an admirably detailed account of Lowe’s work on The Outsiders, his first feature. It wasn’t a bad film to debut in: Coppola was directing, and Lowe’s co-stars included Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane. (Dillon won the hotly fought contest for Lane’s affections.)

Come to think of it, Lowe’s account of the film’s making is a lot more interesting than the film itself. He has an excellent memory for detail. His big breakdown scene required him to cry on cue for take after take. He did so. Then the ineffable Francis strolled onto set and announced it was time for the close-ups: Lowe had blown out his ducts on wide shots.

After the cast scatters to make other films, Lowe pays a telling visit to Cruise on the set of Risky Business. The old fraternal spirit has waned. “Tom has a new perspective on his acting style, telling me, ‘I want to spend time hanging with you but Joel [his character] doesn’t.” Is Lowe taking a wry jab at the great man here? It seems distinctly possible – unless you’re ready to accept that Tom really needed the Method to help him dance around in his Y-fronts and go toe-to-toe with the guy who played Booger in Revenge of the Nerds.

If the whole book had the intensity of the pages about The Outsiders, it would be one of the most interesting actors’ autobiographies of recent times. But Lowe covers nothing else in quite the same detail. Writing about his videotaped ménages, he’s decidedly stingier with behind-the-scenes anecdotes. He does, though, explain how he managed not to notice that one of the female participants was underage. The bar he met her in, you see, had a doorman who was hyper-vigilant about checking IDs.

The book gets sketchier as it goes, and there are some strange omissions from its later pages. Lowe never finds room to mention the illness and death of his on-screen brother Swayze. And although he makes frequent mention of his “deep interest” in politics, he never gets around to discussing that interest in any substantial way. Why, for instance, does he prefer Democrats to Republicans?

By the time he gets to The West Wing, his big comeback, he seems to be in a distinct hurry. We only get about fifteen pages on it. By the standards of the average showbiz autobiography, that’s quite a bit. But by the standards of Lowe’s earlier chapters, it feels like short weight.   

There is mention, in the book’s acknowledgements, of a “tight deadline." This explains a lot. But why was it a matter of such urgency to get Lowe’s book out? Couldn’t the publishers have waited till it was ready, or readier? As it stands, it’s not as disposable as most showbiz memoirs, but it leaves you wondering about the even less disposable book it might have been.

(Originally published in The Weekend Australian, June 25-26, 2011) 

Jack the Lad

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, November 13-14, 2010 

There is a revealing scene in Michael Caine’s new autobiography. Caine is at a lavish Oscar party, sitting next to the socialite Arianna Huffington. As the ceremony plays live on a big screen, Caine gives Huffington his “uninhibited” views about the winners. After a while, he asks her why she keeps fiddling with her BlackBerry. She tells him she’s transmitting a live blog of the proceedings. Caine is horrified: he fears she’s been telling the world what he really thinks about his peers.

It turns out that she hasn’t been doing that. And naturally Caine is not about to tell us, either, as he narrates this incident in his book. He will divulge his true opinions, for free, to a quasi-celebrity with the table manners of an eight-year-old. But it doesn’t strike him that an autobiography might be an appropriate place to speak his mind. And who can blame him? We have long since given up expecting anything like full candour from books like this one. Celebrity autobiographers are celebrities first and autobiographers second. The image must be preserved.

Caine’s autobiography never threatens these conventions, but it’s an unusually good book of its kind. For one thing, Caine genuinely seems to have written it himself. If he didn’t, it was ghosted by a master impressionist. For instance, Caine informs us that he used to be “a bit of a jack-the-lad.” Try not to hear Caine’s voice, genially skimming over the consonants, as you read that. No doubt some of Caine’s non-Cockney readers will be puzzled, even alarmed, by such sentences as “I opened my mouth to give the thief a bollocking.” But his lingo gives the book charm.

Caine was born in a London slum called the Elephant and Castle: hence the first part of the book’s title. His unpromising real name was Maurice Micklewhite. A congenital disease gave him permanently swollen eyelids. Then he got rickets from malnutrition. During the blitz, German bombs rained perilously close to his home.

They don’t self-make them like Michael Caine any more. After a near-fatal stint of national service in Korea, he patiently built his career. His early struggles are evocatively described. But let’s be honest: in books like this, it’s the part after the struggle that really interests us. What’s Hollywood really like, assuming it’s really like anything?

Inevitably, Caine’s most vivid impressions of Hollywood come from the late 1960s, when he was first making it there. On the subject of his more recent films, he can’t always rustle up much narrative verve. “I played Nicole Kidman’s father in Bewitched and then went on to play Nicolas Cage’s father in The Weather Man. Neither movie was a big hit …” And that’s pretty much all we hear about both films, and both Nics.

Caine has better fun with his inability to ride horses – a recurrent theme. After early fiascos, he instructs a film company to provide him with a docile mare. Instead he gets a large-testicled steed named Fury. Fury bolts, with Caine on top of him: “We were eventually brought to a screaming halt (it was me doing the screaming).”

Improbably, Caine doesn’t seem to have run across a famous actor he doesn’t like – although he does call Joaquin Phoenix “somewhat strange.” You shudder to imagine what this might mean, because Caine, when it comes to his fellow stars, seems oddly tolerant of aberrant behaviour. His stories about his iconic buddies almost always, inadvertently, end up making the icons sound kind of nasty. Frank Sinatra, for example, was a “great friend”, but “everything was on his terms … there was no equal partnership.” 

Similarly, he considers Sylvester Stallone an old mate, but recalls an incident when Sly deliberately kept an entire film set waiting for three hours. Who would want to be friends with someone like that?

There may be a clue in a story Caine tells about himself and Jack Nicholson. The two are overdue on set, and Caine starts to run. Nicholson says: “Don’t run, Michael. They’ll know it’s us who are late.”

Like most Hollywood maxims, this is clever, but it embodies a monstrous ethical code. You half-expect the no-nonsense Caine to realise this, and give Jack an outraged bollocking on behalf of the common man. Instead, he embraces the Nicholson creed as his own: he hasn’t hurried to a film set since. So Caine is a bit less like us than we might hope, and a bit more like Jack and Sly.

Still, Caine has stayed remarkably sane, considering the ego-deforming pressures of movie-star existence. His book hints at how weirdly hollow that existence can be. Off set, there is constant recognition. On set, there is boredom, “hanging about,” and – in more exotic locations – diarrhoea. Nor does Caine try to conceal – how could he? – that sometimes it’s only about the money. “You get paid as much for a bad film,” he says, “as you do for a good one.” When he won the Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters, he couldn’t accept it in person: he was busy in the Caribbean, filming Jaws 4.

Despite having made over a hundred films, Caine runs out of things to say about them well before the book is done. Maybe, you feel, there’s just not that much to report. The last fifty pages feature a lot of repetition and padding. Finally Caine is reduced to imparting several pages’ worth of cooking tips, including his personal recipe for toast.

Reading Caine is like watching him. You can’t dislike him. He’s the right man to confront us with the deflating realities of his trade. His won his second Oscar was his work in The Cider House Rules. He played Charlize Theron’s obstetrician – which sounds like a promising role. But when Charlize turned up for the big examination scene, and placed a foot in either stirrup, she proved to be wearing a pair of hideous male Y-fronts. 

(Originally published in The Weekend Australian, November 13-14, 2010)