He was the Brat Pack actor who oozed charm as the perfect boyfriend in films such as Pretty in Pink and St Elmo's Fire. But in reality he was a celebrity-shy loner who has turned to travel writing to find himself
"So if there's a lull in the conversation feel free to fill it by giving him my number."
"Can you just tell him that I love him?"
This is just a small selection of emails I received from my thirtysomething female friends – all generally sensible members of society – when they heard that I was to interview the actor Andrew McCarthy. If you are from a similar demographic, there is a high chance that you yourself are making various similar squeaks and bleats now. If you are not, your face is likely to be something of a question mark.
So for the benefit of those in the latter group, let us go back to a simpler, more innocent time when young actors didn't have to look computer-simulated to get decent roles in films. This time was called the 1980s and a group of twentysomething actors, soon dubbed the Brat Pack, dominated the American youth film market. Each had their cosy and eventually constricting niche: Molly Ringwald was the princess, Rob Lowe was the pinup, Judd Nelson was the bad boy, no one was really sure what Emilio Estevez was – and Andrew McCarthy was the dream boyfriend. His performances in films such as St Elmo's Fire, Less Than Zero, Mannequin and, most of all, Pretty in Pink, with that puppyish face, those soulful eyes and hesitant but – you just knew – deeply sensitive demeanour, made him the template for the perfect swain for a generation.
McCarthy was the boy for girls who found Judd Nelson too threatening and Rob Lowe too cheesy; in other words, for sensitive girls who would become overly reflective adults who remember those first crushes a little too deeply.
But just as teenage girls grow up, so do the objects of their affections, and the McCarthy that I find in the dining room of the Savoy hotel in London is different in instructive ways. Let's deal with the physical first: he is slim but not, happily, in the pocket-sized proportions one generally expects from actors. Despite being a month shy of 50, he has lustrous hair, but the youthful chubbiness of his face, while still handsome, has been replaced by a sharper profile. Yet he is as jittery as the angst-ridden youths he played in his best-known films, constantly pushing his rolled-up cotton napkin back and forth as he talks at a nervy speed, piling in 10 sentences when one will do. He makes eye contact for about one second out of every 20.
Part of McCarthy's appeal in the 80s was his aloof detachment. His characters would hold themselves at arm's length from the action, inspecting it sceptically (and seeing as he was in Mannequin and Weekend at Bernie's, two films that have good claim to be the daftest of the 80s, one can hardly blame him). In reality, too, McCarthy kept his fame at something of a distance, exaggerating, he now admits, a "mask of casual disinterest" in order to cope with the sudden fame he had run towards but then felt unsure about when he achieved it.
Yet now, he has removed the mask and what is beneath is a lesson to all of us who grew up wanting to marry Blane from Pretty in Pink. In recent years, McCarthy, has become a travel writer, working for publications such as the New York Times and the Atlantic, and he has now written a book, The Longest Way Home, which combines his travel writing with self-exploration. He stresses that it's not a "Brat Pack tell-all", which probably came as an initial disappointment to prospective publishers. Instead, it's something closer to a male Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert's bestseller about how a woman recovered from a painful divorce by going on one hell of a gap year.
In his book, McCarthy sets off on his travels to try to understand his resistance to settling down with his Irish girlfriend, known as D, the mother of his daughter (he also has a son from a previous marriage). As with fame, he ran toward this relationship only then to hold it at bay, repeating a lifetime's emotional pattern of what he describes as "push, pull, forward and retreat". It turns out that the idealised boyfriend is not so great at intimacy.
However, he can write: a review in the New York Times praised the book's "fine writing and sensitive mind", and McCarthy is strikingly honest about himself and the ingrained tendencies that stop him connecting fully with his family. Yet this self-exposure for strangers seems somewhat ironic considering how much of the book is about his inability to communicate with those closest to him.
He makes the first of many nervous laughs when asked about this: "Yeah, um, the book became much more personal as I wrote it, but it's exposing about my human-ness as opposed to stuff and stories. I think we can all hide all day long behind good stories. But I write about human-ness, so hopefully I create in readers a sense of 'Oh yeah, I know that', and I disappear."
Although McCarthy has striven to be seen as something more than "former Brat Packer" I must apologise to him and say that the whole time I was with him I felt I was talking with Kevin Dolenz, the aspiring journalist he played in St Elmo's Fire, a character he admits "particularly suited me". The jitteriness, the urgency to express himself, that sense of ambivalence: it's all so very Kevin that I half expected McCarthy to break out the bongos and sing Respect in the middle of the Savoy. Unfortunately the ambivalence that looked so adorable on-screen proved less appealing off it for those who had to deal with his "limited threshold for intimacy". His passion for writing, which he talks about with the zeal of a convert, is also Kevin-esque, and McCarthy is clearly grateful to have found a new creative outlet, which he only tapped into after giving up alcohol at 29 when that started to become problematic.
"Carl Jung said alcoholism is a low-level spiritual search and then, through writing, I found a new way to try to communicate that. But I've had easy access to my feelings all my life," he says, a phrase that brings to mind a paraphrase of the great Nora Ephron quote: "Beware a man who's in touch with his feelings because the only feelings he's in touch with are his own."
McCarthy was born and raised in New Jersey, the shy third son out of four boys. Never academic, he decided to try his luck at acting and got his first film role at 20 in the schlocky Jacqueline Bisset vehicle Class, alongside Rob Lowe. The turning point was when he was cast in St Elmo's Fire and he became ever after associated with the Brat Pack, a position that brought him fame if not much satisfaction.
"It just wasn't me. I felt unseen and pigeonholed, and once you're pigeonholed, people can dismiss you," he says.
He speaks, and writes, so disparagingly about those years ("They just weren't my kinda movies," he says at one point, heartbreakingly) that tied him for ever to a group of people with whom he was never actually friends, that it comes as a surprise when he then insists it was "a wondrous, wonderful time … And when I go on TV now to promote the book and they show clips from those movies, I see the acting is dubious at times but I can also see the delight in my eyes to be there – with you – in that moment. The unabashed delight in being alive was absolutely communicated. That was appealing to go, Yes! Me! You! Us! Now!" he gasps.
It is not really giving away the ending of the book to say that McCarthy does achieve a kind of happiness and also marries D, or Dolores as she is better known. But if so much of his love of travel was predicated on a need for escape and solitude, hasn't he killed his new career as a travel writer by achieving contentment?
"Oh going away still holds an appeal – I wouldn't go so far as to say contentment," he laughs.
Maturity comes to us all. Eventually.
The Longest Way Home by Andrew McCarthy is published by Simon and Schuster, priced £10.99. To order a copy for £8.79, including p&p, visit the Guardian bookshop, guardianbookshop.co.uk
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/29/andrew-mccarthy-heart-throb-writer
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