John Stamos desires to learn you a narrative. In actual fact, he insists.
Certain, you might pore over the 352 pages of his new memoir, “If You Would Have Informed Me,” to be printed by Henry Holt on Oct. 24.
However wouldn’t you relatively take heed to him narrate the audiobook as he guides you thru his 60 years along with his voice, his feelings?
“I imply, sure, you’ll be able to put your individual ideas of what issues appear to be or what they sound like,” he mentioned, “however it’s simply so actual for me.”
Howard Stern took Stamos’s suggestion and listened. “Then he left me the longest message on why he beloved it,” Stamos mentioned, replaying it in his Los Angeles workplace, guitars on the wall behind him, drums to the aspect, the attraction and hair and sincerity that he parlayed into enjoying dangerous boys with hearts of gold — Blackie Parrish on “Common Hospital,” Uncle Jesse on “Full Home,” Dr. Tony Gates on “ER” — nonetheless entrance and middle.
Stamos’s learn was glorious, Stern mentioned. He didn’t overplay it, he didn’t underplay it — he performed it completely. And the anecdotes had been compelling and even self-effacing. Stamos didn’t actually put down anybody, even when discussing his alcoholism and divorce.
“It did present us an actual signal of intelligence, so I feel the e book’s a house run,” Stern added within the message. “You undoubtedly had a narrative to inform.”
It’s additionally the primary time Stamos has revealed a few of it publicly.
“In a month, whoever decides to learn it, they’re going to know rather a lot,” he mentioned. “I noticed loads of deep, darkish stuff. And I believed, ‘If I’m not one hundred pc trustworthy, then why am I doing this?’ However I’ve by no means been one hundred pc trustworthy earlier than in my life. It wasn’t the way in which I used to be raised. My dad was like, ‘Don’t speak about politics. Don’t speak about faith. Hold it mild. Hold it surface-y. Be Dean Martin.’”
“And right here I used to be for a few years not seeing a transparent image as a result of I used to be ingesting and stuff, making an attempt to meet another person’s thought dwelling vicariously via me,” he added. “I felt it was my responsibility to be that man.”
Darkish isn’t what sometimes springs to thoughts while you consider Stamos. His mom preferred to say that he determined to be an actor someday between being born and arriving residence from the hospital. An Orange County child obsessive about Disneyland, he was intent on being well-known. It by no means occurred to him that he wouldn’t be.
“Then I spent the subsequent 20 years making an attempt to get again to that fearlessness, which I feel is the place I’m at now,” he mentioned. “Sobriety, I’m telling you, is a big factor. As a result of I’d go into a celebration or a gathering, and I’d need to get just a little drunk. ‘Hey, that makes me charming, that makes me humorous — that makes me fuzzy.’ And other people noticed that. There was a fuzz round me, ladies, the enterprise. If I’d’ve straightened out 10, 15 years sooner, I feel I’d have been nearer to a George Clooney profession than I’m now.”
Stamos doesn’t shrink from that darkness within the e book, beginning with the primary chapter when in June 2015 — his marriage to Rebecca Romijn lengthy damaged, his mother and father not lengthy deceased, his profession not fairly the one he’d dreamed of — he swerves in his Mercedes down Rodeo Drive whereas followers, recognizing that Stamos is lifeless drunk, yell at him to drag over.
He lastly does, and the police discover him handed out, put him in an ambulance to the hospital and cost him with a misdemeanor D.U.I. When he wakes up, his “Full Home” co-star Bob Saget is at his bedside. “No judgment, simply concern and love,” Stamos writes.
Concern and love abounded.
Even earlier than she actually knew Stamos, Jamie Lee Curtis had thought he’d be excellent to play her father, Tony Curtis. “They’ve the identical comedian power, charming aptitude, sharp humor, eager intelligence, childlike ardour and, dare I say, deep disappointment behind the masks of a ridiculously good-looking man,” she writes within the e book’s foreword.
She had witnessed that disappointment firsthand. “I had seen him at a enterprise social gathering in New York, when he wasn’t sober, and appeared into his beautiful eyes, and tried to speak with mine that there was one other method for him.”
By the point he and Curtis co-starred within the sequence “Scream Queens,” in 2016, Stamos was newly sober and in a relationship with Caitlin McHugh, the actor who would develop into his spouse.
“I’ve folks I discuss to each day,” he mentioned. “One in every of them is Jamie.
When Stamos lastly agreed to put in writing his memoir — collaborating with the author Daphne Younger, who helped him add construction to what he known as vomit drafts — he tackled the chapters he thought could be probably the most daunting: his D.U.I. arrest and the surprising dying of Saget in January 2022, which gutted him.
“It’s like he by no means left something on the desk,” Stamos mentioned of Saget. “When he died, I knew he beloved me. I knew he cared about me. He advised me each day. In order that’s one of many classes that you simply study: Tomorrow’s by no means promised, so make the very best of the place you’re at, who you’re with. And by the way in which, these are all straightforward issues to say. They’re exhausting to do.”
However because it turned out, these two chapters weren’t his most troublesome.
“Guess what the toughest stuff to put in writing about was,” he mentioned, then answered. “‘Full Home.’”
Stamos knew how a lot affection viewers had for the sitcom. However after eight years, he couldn’t wait to go away the present that had made him.
“It was a blessing and a curse,” he mentioned — one which it took him 5 Broadway performs, together with “Cabaret,” “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Gore Vidal’s The Finest Man,” to steer audiences, and maybe himself, that he wasn’t a one-note marvel. He had vary. He had abilities.
“It’s all the time killed me that that’s what everyone knew me from, that mullet-headed ding-dong,” he mentioned.
Lori Loughlin, who performed Becky, Uncle Joey’s onscreen love, in “Full Home,” and has recognized Stamos since their daytime tv days, was more and more conscious of his ache.
“He’s supremely gifted in many alternative areas, and I feel individuals are lastly beginning to acknowledge, ‘Oh, this man’s the actual deal. He’s the entire ball of wax,’” she mentioned in a cellphone interview. “However early on, he needed to work to show that.”
“Then the minute he acquired his geese in a row, alongside got here Caitlin, and the start of Billy has been the best present ever to John,” she mentioned. “I’m positive he’ll let you know that his household now’s every part.”
Billy has inherited his father’s attraction and appears, although his little one’s rest room humor is nearer to Saget’s, however Stamos desires to maintain him as unsullied as potential. “It’s going to be nice for him, and it’s going to be exhausting,” he mentioned. “I don’t need him to be dwelling” — he stops — “He may be something on the earth he desires aside from an Instagram mannequin.”
Following his D.U.I., Stamos went into rehab, the place he lastly accepted duty for his function within the disappointments that plagued him — and, upon leaving, acknowledged how a lot he nonetheless needed to lose.
“I nonetheless bear in mind what it felt like the subsequent morning, what it tasted like,” he mentioned of his ingesting. “It’s nonetheless very contemporary to me. I used to be like, ‘I don’t need that in any respect.’”
A few days earlier than our interview, Stamos had performed drums with the Seaside Boys on the SeaHearNow competition in Asbury Park, N.J. — one thing he has accomplished when time permits since 1983 when, at a live performance in San Diego, Mike Love watched ladies scream and chase after Stamos and determined to faucet into that frenzy by bringing him onstage for “Barbara Ann.”
“The fact of all of it is past my wildest goals,” Stamos writes of that have. “The minute it ends, I wish to do it over again. It’s like nice intercourse; that lusty, primal second the place you immediately discover your groove and determine every part out.”
However he wasn’t so positive when Love advised him about SeaHearNow — one thing about it not being the suitable place for an oldies group and an ex-teen idol. Then he acquiesced.
“There have been in all probability about 50,000 of our closest buddies there, and he was drumming like a champ, and everyone was on the prime of their recreation,” mentioned Love, who officiated Stamos’s marriage ceremony to McHugh. “John was actually, has all the time been, an inspiration and just a little bit of additional power and completely an entire lot of charisma.”
Then, as Stamos walked offstage, he noticed that Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters was behind him, videotaping. Finally, the entire band got here to his trailer. So did the drummers from Greta Van Fleet and Weezer.
“I couldn’t consider it,” he mentioned. “I’m not usually a cynic, however rapidly you get some respect from these youthful folks. It’s type of an elder statesman factor. And then you definately’re like, ‘Effectively, what’s subsequent? Dying?’”
“However you’ll be able to’t suppose like that,” he went on. “Simply maintain creating. That’s the place my head is — get higher at what you do.”
