Breaking out of the Pack
For a guy who has walked 484 miles across Spain’s Camino de Santiago — twice — Andrew McCarthy shows admirable patience at constantly being asked to stand still.
McCarthy obliges dozens of fans who ask him to pose for photos as he signs copies of his fourth book, “Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain” during an appearance at Stamford’s Ferguson Library Thursday evening. The line forms a ribbon along three of the auditorium walls.
He is equally composed juggling repetitive queries and comments about the movies he made in the 1980s. McCarthy claims he is not a nostalgic person, but seems at peace with persistently being tugged into endless walks down Memory Lane.
I’d just interviewed McCarthy from the stage of the sold-out event. His prose in the book is rich enough to make your feet hurt. If I’d had my druthers, we’d have conversed while walking, but that gets unwieldy with a couple hundred people trying to listen. It is such a fun crowd that I get the sense they would have been up for the adventure.
When I invite the last question of the night, a woman asks McCarthy, “Would you like to give me a hug in representation for the love you have for all of your fans?”
McCarthy steps down from the stage and dutifully complies. If there’s one thing this guy should never be called, it’s a “brat.” Yet the tag has stalked him ever since David Blum used it in a New York magazine article (McCarthy doesn’t need a librarian to correctly reference “June 10, 1985”) to define a generation of young actors. Two words (actually one) changed everything for them. McCarthy is only mentioned once in the piece, and was chopped out of the cover photo of his “St. Elmo’s Fire” co-stars Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson. Yet it has followed him as closely as his shadow under the noon August sun over the Meseta.
When I note that the precursor term “Rat Pack” is hardly complimentary, McCarthy quips that his crew was about 22 and insecure, while Frank Sinatra was older and could have just had the writer “whacked.”
As most of this Ferguson crowd is of a certain age, McCarthy asks, “Can we talk about turning 60? Wow. I was famous for being young and this happened.”
While we’re here to talk about the book, McCarthy takes plenty of detours to throw in some fan service. After several minutes speaking intimately about father-son relationships, he starts calling me “doctor” and referring to our exchange as a “therapy session.”
“We can talk about Molly again,” he jokes to the crowd.
“Molly” of course, is Molly Ringwald, his costar in the 1986 John Hughes film “Pretty in Pink.”
He’s road-tested anecdotes on other tour stops, and they get reliably warm responses (the book tour is scheduled to end at Athena Books in Greenwich on Friday, June 2). At one point the audience seems to sigh as one, creating a gush of noise I thought only existed in reel life. It’s the sound people make when you bring a movie star from their youth into the room.
But there is other common ground here for much of the audience, and it’s called parenthood. In addition to Sam, who was 19 during their walk in 2021, McCarthy has two younger kids. When he talks about the need to stop and listen to a teenager at the moment they engage, I glance at an audience of bobbing heads. They’ve seen this movie before too.
Unlike the typical guest author, McCarthy spills the ending of his book by revealing that when they finished the walk, Sam said, “Dad, that’s the only 10-out-of-10 thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
“It’s about the journey, you still have to read the book,” McCarthy teases.
Sam, alas, still has not read the book that bears his name. Or, at least, he hasn’t read all of it. The audio version offers the treat of hearing Sam co-star with his father when his own dialogue appears.
“He called me yesterday and said ‘Dad, I stopped listening to the audio book, I’m terrible,’ ” McCarthy says.
Sam is an actor as well, appearing as a regular on the Netflix series “Dead to Me” (during a 2020 interview, Sam says “my dad was an actor a while ago,” though Andrew’s IMDB credits remain reliably active). Sam’s other roles include the 2018 movie, “All These Small Moments,” where he played the son of Molly Ringwald.
There will be a reunion of sorts for the Brat Pack (which never was a real thing). McCarthy, who is also a director (“Orange is the New Black,” “The Blacklist,” “Gossip Girl”), is making a documentary companion to his 2020 book, “Brat: An ’80s Story,” connecting with actors he hasn’t seen in decades. He briefly impersonates Ally Sheedy locking eyes with him.
“It made me want to start crying,” he says. “Basically, she’s saying, ‘I see you, and I know you see me.’ ”
He expects the film to debut this fall. As a well-regarded travel writer (National Geographic, The New York Times), McCarthy favors projects that involve a quest. The Brat Pack film falls into that category, as Demi Moore, Lowe, Estevez, etc. could have slammed the door on the past.
Coincidentally, Estevez directed a 2010 fictional movie about the Camino de Santiago he starred in with his father, Martin Sheen. McCarthy, who had done the walk solo in the early ’90s, calls it a “wonderful” film. But he can’t resist teasing that “they didn’t walk it. They just made a movie about it. They didn’t get blisters or anything.”
Like McCarthy’s iconic films, “Walking with Sam” is a coming-of-age story. Sam grieves a recent breakup with his girlfriend as he treks across Spain. An audience member asks if there has been any word about the book from “The Ex.”
“We haven’t heard,” McCarthy responds. Sam was able to blow off steam by venting at cyclists who passed them along the trail. A biker (who clearly had not read the book) innocently asks McCarthy about the topic. I sense the question coming before McCarthy does and try to slow her roll. I fail.
“Walkers hate bikers. Are you a biker?” he asks playfully. “We hate you … You’re a biker, maybe you can explain this. Why do bikers have to wear all these spandex outfits to go biking? When I go play basketball with my kids, I don’t put on a Knicks outfit. What’s wrong with shorts and a T-shirt?”
If nothing else, the book should inspire readers to get moving, to rediscover the bliss of a good walk.
“(Walking has a) natural rhythm to which we should process things,” McCarthy says. “Emotionally and mentally. We’ve gotten so away from that.”
His quest for walking with Sam was to “reestablish the ground rules for our relationship.”
The month of walking and talking seems to have accomplished that. A few days ago, Sam called to ask, “Hey Dad, do you have seven minutes?”
“Go,” McCarthy replied.
That’s always good advice.
Get walking.
Go.