‘Full House’ actor delves into sobriety, grief over Saget’s death
John Stamos wants to read you a story. In fact, he insists.
Sure, you could pore over the 352 pages of his new memoir, “If You Would Have Told Me,” recently published by Henry Holt.
But wouldn’t you rather listen to him narrate the audiobook as he guides you through his 60 years with his voice, his emotions?
“I mean, yes, you can put your own thoughts of what things look like or what they sound like,” he said, “but it’s just so real for me.”
Howard Stern took Stamos’ suggestion and listened. “Then he left me the longest message on why he loved it,” Stamos said, replaying it in his Los Angeles office, guitars on the wall behind him, drums to the side, the charm and hair and sincerity that he parlayed into playing bad boys with hearts of gold — Blackie Parrish on “General Hospital,” Uncle Jesse on “Full
House,” Dr. Tony Gates on “ER” — still front and center.
Stamos’ read was excellent, Stern said. He didn’t overplay it; he didn’t underplay it; he played it perfectly. And the anecdotes were compelling and even self-effacing. Stamos didn’t really put down anyone, even when discussing his alcoholism and divorce.
“It did show us a real sign of intelligence, so I think the book’s a home run,” Stern added in the message. “You definitely had a story to tell.”
It’s also the first time Stamos has revealed some of it publicly.
“Whoever decides to read it, they’re going to know a lot,” he said. “I saw a lot of deep, dark stuff. And I thought, ‘If I’m not 100% honest, then why am I doing this?’ But I’ve never been 100% honest before in my life. It wasn’t the way I was raised. My dad was like, ‘Don’t talk about politics. Don’t talk
about religion. Keep it light. Keep it surface-y. Be Dean Martin.’
“And here I was for many years not seeing a clear picture because I was drinking and stuff, trying to fulfill someone else’s idea living vicariously through me,” he added. “I felt it was my duty to be that guy.”
Dark isn’t what typically springs to mind when you think of Stamos. His mother liked to say that he decided to be an actor sometime between being born and arriving home from the hospital. A Southern California kid obsessed with Disneyland, he was intent on being famous. It never occurred to him that he wouldn’t be.
“Then I spent the next 20 years trying to get back to that fearlessness, which I think is where I’m at now,” he said. “Sobriety, I’m telling you, is a huge thing. Because I would go into a party or a meeting, and I’d have to get a little drunk. ‘Hey, that makes me charming. That makes me funny. That makes me fuzzy.’ And people saw that. There was a fuzz around me, women, the business. If I would’ve straightened out 10, 15 years sooner, I think I’d have been closer to a George Clooney career than I am now.”
Stamos doesn’t shrink from that darkness in the book, starting with the first chapter when, in June 2015 — his marriage to Rebecca Romijn long broken, his parents not long deceased, his career not quite the one he’d dreamed of — he swerves in his Mercedes down Rodeo Drive while fans, recognizing that Stamos is dead drunk, yell at him to pull over.
He finally does, and the police find him passed out, put him in an ambulance to the hospital and charge him with a misdemeanor DUI. When he wakes up, his “Full House” co-star Bob Saget is at his bedside. “No judgment, just concern and love,” Stamos writes.
Concern and love abounded.
Even before she really knew Stamos, Jamie Lee Curtis had thought he’d be perfect to play her father, Tony Curtis. “They have the same comic energy, captivating flair, sharp humor, keen intelligence, childlike passion and, dare I say, deep sadness behind the mask of a ridiculously handsome man,” she writes in the book’s foreword.
She had witnessed that sadness firsthand. “I had seen him at a business party in New York, when he wasn’t sober, and looked into his gorgeous eyes, and tried to communicate with mine that there was another way for him.”
By the time he and Curtis co-starred in the series “Scream Queens” in 2016, Stamos was newly sober and in a relationship with Caitlin Mchugh, the actor who would become his wife.
“I have people I talk to every day,” he said. One of them is Curtis.
When Stamos finally agreed to write his memoir — collaborating with writer Daphne Young, who helped him add structure to what he called vomit drafts — he tackled the chapters he thought would be the most daunting: his DUI arrest and the unexpected death of Saget in January 2022, which gutted him.
But as it turned out, those two chapters weren’t his most difficult.
Actor John Stamos, seen Oct. 5 at his home in Hidden Hills, California, recently released his memoir, “If You Would Have Told Me.”
“Guess what the hardest stuff to write about was?” he asked, then answered. “‘Full House.’ ”
Stamos knew how much affection viewers had for the sitcom. But after eight years, he couldn’t wait to leave the show that had made him.
“It was a blessing and a
curse,” he said — one that took him five Broadway plays, including “Cabaret,” “Bye Bye Birdie” and Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man,” to persuade audiences, and perhaps himself, that he wasn’t a one-note wonder. He had range. He had skills.
“It’s always killed me that that’s what everybody knew me from, that mulletheaded ding-dong,” he said.
Lori Loughlin, who played Becky, Uncle Jesse’s on-screen love, in “Full House,” and has known Stamos since their daytime television days, was increasingly aware of his pain.
“He is supremely talented in many different areas, and I think people are finally starting to recognize, ‘Oh, this guy’s the real deal. He’s the whole ball of wax,’ ” she said in a phone interview. “But early on, he had to work to prove that.
“Then, the minute he got his ducks in a row, along came Caitlin, and the birth of Billy has been the greatest gift ever to John,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll tell you that his family now is everything.”
Billy has inherited his father’s charm and looks, though his child’s bathroom humor is closer to Saget’s, but Stamos wants to keep him as unsullied as possible. “It’s going to be great for him, and it’s going to be hard,” he said. “I don’t want him to be living” — he stops — “He can be anything in the world he wants, except for an Instagram model.”
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