Stories I Only Tell My Friends

The memoir opens with a non-chronological prologue about Rob Lowe's connection to John F. Kennedy Jr. Lowe recalls meeting JFK Jr. at a political event when Lowe was 24, bonding over their shared experience of living under public scrutiny. Years later, at a holiday party in Sun Valley, Idaho, JFK Jr. asked Lowe how he managed to settle down with his wife, Sheryl, and Lowe encouraged him to marry his girlfriend, Carolyn. In June 1999, JFK Jr. watched a pilot for The West Wing and insisted on placing Lowe on the cover of his magazine, George. Weeks later, JFK Jr. died in a plane crash with Carolyn and her sister Lauren. His editors proceeded with the cover shoot on the show's Oval Office set, honoring his last editorial decision. Lowe frames this moment as a bittersweet threshold: JFK Jr.'s journey had ended, while Lowe's new chapter was about to begin.

Lowe then turns to his earliest memories in Dayton, Ohio. His father, Chuck, was a pragmatic, combative Indianan and former law student at the University of Virginia; his mother was a bookish English major from small-town Ohio. Their marriage deteriorated through infidelity and conflict, and when Lowe was five, he asked his mother in a lumberyard whether his father was ever coming home. She told him they were getting a divorce. The revelation devastated him and triggered a lifelong pattern of emotional shutdown and conflict avoidance.

Acting became Lowe's escape. After seeing a local production of Oliver!, he was electrified by the connection between performers and audience and began performing in community theater. His mother married a second husband, Bill, a politically minded man who moved the family to a rough neighborhood in North Dayton. When that marriage also collapsed, his mother relocated the family to Malibu, California, in 1976, accompanied by Dr. Steve Wilson, her boyfriend from a Chicago allergy hospital where she had been treated for mysterious health problems.

In Malibu, Lowe struggled to fit in at school, where rigid social hierarchies were enforced by surfers and athletes. He befriended Chris and Sean Penn, Charlie Sheen, and Emilio Estevez, neighborhood kids who spent their time making amateur 8mm movies. Point Dume's youth culture concealed a dangerous undercurrent: a popular surfer named Peter disappeared after a night of drugs and swimming and was never found, the first in a string of tragic deaths Lowe describes as the Lost Boys of Malibu.

Lowe acquired his first agent and began taking hours-long bus rides to Hollywood auditions, landing a Coca-Cola Super Bowl commercial and a blender commercial. At 15, he won a role on the ABC series A New Kind of Family, starring alongside veteran actress Eileen Brennan. The show was canceled after 13 episodes, but it gave Lowe his first taste of screaming fans and the disorienting sensation of being treated as an object rather than a person.

Back at Santa Monica High School, Lowe faced repeated rejections for major film roles and applied to UCLA and USC, planning to abandon acting for film school. Then, just after Christmas 1982, his agents called with one last opportunity: a reading for Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of S. E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders.

The audition process was grueling. Roughly 25 young actors, including Dennis Quaid, Scott Baio, Tom Cruise, and Tommy Howell, auditioned simultaneously on a soundstage while Coppola played Italian opera. Lowe panicked before his reading but dropped his script and performed from memory, channeling his own experiences of family loss. After additional screen tests in New York against actors including Matt Dillon and Ralph Macchio, Lowe was cast as Sodapop Curtis.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Coppola subjected the cast to two weeks of unconventional rehearsals: tai chi, gymnastics, nights spent with local former greasers, and a tackle football game on cement. Patrick Swayze arrived as the eldest Curtis brother, a decade older than the others and physically imposing. The shoot averaged 14-hour days with a minimum of 12 takes per scene. For Lowe's climactic breakdown scene, Coppola shot all wide shots first, exhausting Lowe's emotional reserves before announcing close-ups were needed. Tommy rescued him, pulling Lowe aside and delivering an improvised monologue about their characters' shared history as orphaned brothers, replenishing Lowe's emotions just in time. When Lowe saw the finished film, he discovered that nearly all of his scenes had been cut without warning. Yet The Outsiders launched the careers of its entire cast.

What followed was a rapid succession of films. Director Tony Richardson gave Lowe the lead in The Hotel New Hampshire opposite Jodie Foster and Nastassja Kinski. Class paired him with Andrew McCarthy. He won the role of the saxophone-playing Billy Hicks in St. Elmo's Fire, a box-office hit whose poster became ubiquitous in dorm rooms. Then came About Last Night, adapted from David Mamet's play, which Lowe considers his best work of the decade. A New York magazine reporter whom Emilio had invited to a dinner coined the term "Brat Pack" in a cover story that branded an entire generation of actors as pampered and vacuous, though fans largely embraced the label.

By his midtwenties, Lowe was at the height of 1980s stardom but increasingly hollow inside. A whirlwind romance with Princess Stephanie of Monaco was facilitated by his security advisor, Glenn Souham, a mysterious Franco-American operative. The romance ended abruptly when Glenn was assassinated outside his Paris home days after Lowe departed. Career missteps followed: Illegally Yours with director Peter Bogdanovich was deemed unreleasable. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, where Lowe was campaigning for presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, a personal videotape scandal erupted that dominated national news. A widely panned appearance singing with Snow White at the 1989 Academy Awards compounded the damage.

On May 10, 1990, after a night of drinking left him unable to answer his mother's call about his grandfather's heart attack, Lowe confronted himself in a mirror and called a drug-and-alcohol counselor. In an Arizona rehabilitation center, he discovered that he had been medicating deep discomfort with alcohol for years. Sheryl Berkoff, a makeup artist he had reconnected with on the film Bad Influence, visited weekly despite an arduous commute from a set in Seattle.

Sobriety transformed Lowe's life. He proposed to Sheryl on Mulholland Drive on June 20, 1991; she insisted on a wedding date only one month away. They married in a secret ceremony with 30 guests who believed they were attending a charity lunch. Wayne's World, produced by Lorne Michaels and starring Mike Myers, became a massive hit. He starred opposite Chris Farley in Tommy Boy, bonding with Farley over their shared experience of being reduced to public personas; Farley later died of a drug overdose at 33. Lowe's sons, Matthew and Johnowen, completed the family, and he moved to Santa Barbara seeking normalcy.

Agent Tiffany Kuzon sent Lowe the pilot script for The West Wing, written by Aaron Sorkin. Lowe felt an unprecedented connection to the character of Sam Seaborn, a White House deputy communications director he saw as an idealized version of himself, shaped by years of political engagement. He auditioned by reading directly with Sorkin, delivering Sam's signature speech from memory, and accepted a 50 percent pay cut to take the role.

The West Wing became a phenomenon, winning more Emmys than any other first-year series in history. But tensions mounted over Lowe's compensation and creative role. Several costars negotiated raises without including him, and his request for a comparable increase was refused. Drawing on the emotional clarity of sobriety, Lowe left after four seasons and roughly 80 episodes.

The memoir closes with Lowe reflecting on life after The West Wing. He reveals he had been on American Airlines Flight 77 out of Dulles on August 31, 2001, 11 days before the September 11 attacks, when that same flight was flown into the Pentagon. He starred in three television series simultaneously, and with his friend Tom Barrack, purchased Miramax Studios from Disney. His mother died of breast cancer at 64; his manager Bernie Brillstein died in 2007. On a flight home to Los Angeles, Lowe considers his enduring love for Sheryl after nearly 20 years of marriage, his pride in his sons, and his gratitude for a life shaped by dreams.