Rob Lowe: High on Lowe

The guy who was the Brat Pack's resident looker in the '80s stepped out of the spotlight to become Rob Lowe the stable family man in the early '90s. Now, with a role in Robert Zemeckis's Contact, a TV deal, and a directing debut of his own, he's proving to be a Hollywood survivor, too.

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Outside, it's a blisteringly bright and hot L.A. day, but Rob Lowe and I are high up in Beverly Hills, in his manager's plush screening room, which is pitch black and ice cold.

We are watching American Untitled, a short film made for Showtime. It's Lowe's directorial debut. I was expecting the worst (oh, come on, you would have, too), but now, less than 10 minutes into the film, I'm dead surprised. This is not some actory, embarrassingly studied piece of film noir. It is noir--the story is about a man who fails for one split second to do the right thing, and ends up paying for that lapse forever--but it's funny, and strangely moving.

I steal a glance at Lowe, who is sitting next to me. He still looks like Gatsby's heir apparent--ridiculously handsome, perfectly put together. It's hard to believe that the hardpartying Brat Pack days he shared with Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy and Judd Nelson ended nearly 10 years ago.

We move out of the screening room and sit beside the pool. "What made you want to direct?" I ask him. Given Lowe's spotty acting output over the last few years, I figure the answer could 'be, "Free time."

"I felt there was a place for me," says Lowe. "It was time to put my toe in the pool. My agent said that the easiest way to get this thing going would be if I wrote something myself. So I sat down to write, and I don't think I put one word on my computer screen for five hours. I got up to get a glass of water and I passed the television, and there was one of those horrific live telecopter shots of this Linda Sobek body recovery [she was the model found buried in the Angeles National Forest]. And they were saying, 'We have a suspect in custody, he's a photographer, he was able to lead police to the site where he apparently buried the body, although he is saying he did not kill her, that it was an accident. 'And I'm thinking, obviously that's a preposterous lie. Which it was. But I thought, is there a way that it could be true, where a guy does something by accident that's so incriminating he figures, 'No one will ever believe me, I've gotta get rid of her, I can't go for help, I can't call the police'? And I came back to my computer and it literally vomited out of me."

"That's a funny expression to use as a writer," I say. "Would you rather direct or act?"

"I liked directing--loved it, actually," Lowe tells me. "I spoke to Sean [Penn] and he was so excited that I was directing. He said, 'I never had a pleasant moment in front of the camera, ever.' And I was shocked, because I love acting."

People think of Rob Lowe as the cheating boy-beautiful from St. Elmo's Fire _or the bachelor who's too handsome to commit to Demi Moore in _About Last Night... That's not the stuff that got me.

"For Square Dance you got a Golden Globe nomination for playing a retarded guy who tries to cut off his penis--"

"Was it my penis or my arm?" Lowe asks. There isn't a trace of a smile, much less a smirk, on his face.

"Honey, if you don't know the difference, I'm not about to tell you." Now he laughs, but I get the idea he'll be watching Square Dance later this week. "So anyway. I rented all of your old films, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I used to think your looks were your only drawing card, and yet in Square Dance, Masquerade, The Hotel New Hampshire and a number of other films, you turned in solid performances. Why hasn't Hollywood figured out what to do with you?"

Lowe thinks this over. "I think people have never really known how to use me well. That's the problem now and it's been the problem ever since I first started working. There have been roles that I would have killed for, but I couldn't get them because people have this preconceived notion about me."

Maybe this is so not only because Lowe broke through as a spoiled, shallow looker, but because offscreen he lived the life of a hard-drinking, hard-living Hollywood brat. "I have this celebrity quiz I give to young actors who are starting out here in Hollywood," I tell Lowe. "The first question is: which of the following are you allowed to have with you in a hotel room at one time: (a) a naked woman, (b) drugs, © guns, (d) a video camera? If they say more than one, I give them a one-way ticket back to where they came from."

Lowe laughs. "At one time, I would have failed that test miserably."

No kidding. Lowe's infamous videotaped tryst with two women, one under age, at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta ranks as one of the memorable movie-star embarrassments of the decade. It was widely rumored to be a classic setup, no criminal charges were ever filed, and Lowe, who says he has done his mea culpas to death, refuses to talk about it even now--and I don't blame him.

"I don't think they ought to let kids move to Hollywood until they're 30," I tell Lowe. "Hollywood should be treated like a trust fund, and you can't have any of it until you've reached an age where you won't do something stupid."

But at least Lowe didn't spend the following years looking at life through the bottom of a martini glass, like several of his contemporaries from the swinging '80s. Instead, he married makeup artist Sheryl Berkoff in '91, had two kids and became landed gentry in rich, bucolic Santa Barbara. For the last few years he's been on a slow road back to Hollywood and has picked up a variety of roles, from a sleazy TV baron in '92's Wayne's World to a starring role as a deaf mute in the enormously popular TV miniseries eries The Stand, to a cameo in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Now he's in director Robert Zemeckis's Contact, a big-budget adaptation of Carl Sagan's saga about a radio astronomer (Jodie Foster) who receives a coded message from outer space.

"What kind of a character do you play in Contact?"

"A Ralph Reed type," he says, referring to the articulate, shiny-faced Christian Coalition leader. "I'll tell you a funny thing. One night I was in bed with Sheryl watching 'Nightline,' and Ralph Reed was talking about the Christian Coalition. I said to Sheryl, 'Someday I'm going to play that guy in a movie.' The next day, Bob Zemeckis calls and asks me to play this character, Richard Rank, who is very much like Reed. He's very beguiling, very smart."

"How does an actor prepare to play a religious zealot?" I ask.

"I read the Bible," says Lowe matter-of-factly. Lowe has worked before with good directors--Coppola (_The Outsider_s), for example--but he's done lots of movies with what he refers to as "hideous" directors, too. He does not take his opportunity to be in a Zemeckis film lightly, particularly now.

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