The Brat Pack - actor Andrew McCarthy memoir on 80s Hollywood

Jon Cryer, Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy on set of the film 'Pretty In Pink', 1986. Photo / Paramount/Getty Images)

In an exclusive extract from Brat: An 80s Story, actor, writer and director Andrew McCarthy writes about his life in the 80s when he, Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore all became part of a group of iconic actors who came to represent both a genre of film and an era in pop culture.

The Boys of Winter was my first Broadway show. I had been advised not to do the play because of the six-month commitment it demanded. The thinking was that taking myself off the market for so long a stretch might hamper the momentum I'd begun to gather in my film career. But in my mind there was no question. If someone was offering me a job on Broadway, I was going to leap at it.

The show struggled from the start. The cast included Ving Rhames, Matt Dillon and after a few weeks Wesley Snipes took over for another actor who was let go. There were constant rewrites. New scenes were tried out in the show every evening, while other material was jettisoned, including (mercifully) the moment of my stripping naked and falling from a high tree into the waiting arms of my cast mates.

The show was in trouble, yet the visceral response from many of those attending was palpable. Ron Kovic, a Vietnam War hero, activist and author of the memoir Born on the Fourth of July, was there most evenings. Ron usually brought fellow veterans along. And after the curtain came down, we would all retire to the bar around the corner. The vets were grateful someone was trying to tell their story, while we craved their approval. I felt expansive when I drank, in a way I wasn't when sober, my anxieties and fears subsiding. Elbows on tables cluttered with empty glasses, we all talked and cried and hugged — and drank the bar dry every night.

Then the phone rang. The studio on Pretty in Pink had conducted a test screening in which the audience spoke loud and clear. They'd loved the movie until my character stood up Molly at the prom. That Blane turned out to be a jerk had apparently not sat well with the audience, either. They wanted us to be together. [Scriptwriter] John Hughes suggested a reshoot. Paramount agreed. But I was on stage six nights a week in New York, playing a marine with a shaved head. I was measured for a wig. And, because the show didn't end until after the last flight, Paramount sent the jet.

On the evening I was to fly, I became sick on stage and for the only time in my career left in the middle of the performance. My understudy, Rob Morrow, who would go on to television fame a few years later with Northern Exposure, finished the show. As I lay on a cot backstage, I knew I wasn't truly ill. The show was faltering, I was drinking to drunkenness every evening and the idea of a midnight flight, followed by a day of shooting in which I would need to step into true leading man shoes, followed by a quick turnaround to go before the theatre critics — all within 24 hours — weighed on me. Stress had entered my life; I was ill-equipped to deal with it.

The cast of 'St. Elmo's Fire', 1985. Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Mare Winningham, Judd Nelson and Andrew McCarthy. Photo / Getty Images

The scenes to be reshot centred around the prom itself. Instead of skipping the event entirely, as I had in the original ending, I now appeared and approached Molly, expressed my regrets and confessed my belief in her before whispering my love into her ear. The new ending had us kissing outside the dance in silhouette before car headlights at night — an image in perfect keeping with classic 80s MTV iconography. In reality, we shot during the day in the corner of an empty and darkened soundstage.

Audiences loved the changes and everything about the reshoot had the desired effect, including my ill-fitting and cheaply made hairpiece. It lent me a somewhat sickly appearance and enhanced my forlorn look as I approached Molly in my white tuxedo. Had the producers known we would still be talking about the movie all these years later, they might have invested in a better wig.

As the film was set for release, I was called back to Los Angeles once again for a press junket. Instead of us travelling around to promote the film, various members of the media were brought in from throughout the country for a few days of group and one-on-one interviews. It was my first experience of a media onslaught. There was little group playfulness during the interviews. Molly was a private person, John Hughes was naturally wary of the press, and I was locked into my knee-jerk attitude of indifference in nearly all professional settings. My manager, agent, even friends had begun to mention to me that my aloof attitude gave me the appearance of not caring. Instead of looking at the causes, I simply denied that it did.

Brat, an '80s story, by Andrew McCarthy.

If you are out beyond the safety of the herd, exposed and alone on the leading edge, you are fair game. I say this without complaint or even an opinion. It is simply the way that it is, and something of which I was not aware.

Nothing illustrates this point more than a cover story that appeared on the June 10, 1985, edition of New York magazine called "Hollywood's Brat Pack". The photo splashed across the front of the magazine was a publicity shot from St. Elmo's Fire of Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Rob Lowe. I recognised the image because I was originally in it, but for the purposes of the article, I had been trimmed out. The story, by a writer named David Blum, was intended to be a small feature on Emilio in advance of the release of the movie. What it became was a stinging indictment of a group of young, successful actors. Emilio had made a naive error in judgment— which was odd when you consider that he grew up in a showbiz family as the son of Martin Sheen, and should have known to be more media-conscious. He had invited the writer along with him on an evening at the Hard Rock Cafe with some of his buddies, who happened to be Judd and Rob. It was a planned gathering for the press, and it backfired. The three ran into a few other actors, behaved stupidly— as young men who are drinking are apt to do— acting with entitlement, trash-talking other actors, and recklessly flirting with young women. While perhaps not a world away from their typical behaviour, the fact that it was a staged event lent the evening a falseness that omitted the actors' charms, complexity, and humanity. And from this artificially concocted evening, the Brat Pack was born.

Brat: an 80s story, by Andrew McCarthy (Simon & Schuster, $33).