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Rob Lowe Talks Pretty Boy Past, Revisits That 1989 Disaster At The Oscars

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 01:23 PST, Jun 2, 2016

Rob Lowe has had an interesting career, and now that his Fox comedy, The Grinder, has been canceled, fans are waiting to see what he does next. (Hint: It may not involve network TV.) Lowe recently sat down for a Hollywood Reporter roundtable alongside fellow comedy actors Aziz Ansari, Jeffrey Tambor, Tony Hale, Anthony Anderson, Keegan-Michael Key, and Jerrod Carmichael to dish on some horror stories from his Hollywood past.

During the roundtable chat, Lowe joked about his days as a teen heartthrob and member of the Brat Pack. Lowe said he was cruising along just fine until one day he got a major wake-up call.

“I was doing a lot of work as a young actor, big leads in movies, and then one day I saw this agent whom I thought was an idiot driving in front of me in this tricked-out Porsche and I’m driving my Mazda 626 that I’ve had forever,” Rob said. “I said, ‘Wait a second, if that mother***er can have a Porsche … I’m on the cover of Tiger Beat!’ ”

https://twitter.com/BlazerMc88/status/718996847071666176

Rob also revealed that early in his career, a lot of doors weren’t opened for him because he was perceived as a “pretty boy.”

“You can’t play cops, you can’t play detectives,” Rob said of the roles that weren’t offered to him. “The list is actually kind of long.”

Rob Lowe has long been vocal about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, but the actor has been sober for more than 25 years. But early on he learned an important lesson about the perils of fame.

“Fame is the only drug for which there is no 12-step program.”

Rob Lowe was also asked about his most embarrassing experience as a celebrity, and it’s no surprise that he chose the infamous opening at the 61st Academy Awards in which he teamed up with Snow White for a bizarre song and dance extravaganza. Lowe was just 24-years-old at the time, just months before a sex tape scandal would rock his career. The 1989 Oscar debacle remains one of the most notorious moments in the history of the annual awards show.

“The idea, in theory, was that I would sing and dance with Snow White, and Merv Griffin would then appear singing, ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,’ and all of the old Hollywood establishment would be acknowledged and finally Lily Tomlin would come out of a bunch of fruit. Sounds great, right?” Lowe told THR.

Rob explained that the newcomer Snow White (Eileen Bowman) became starstruck when interacting with the actual Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks during the live number after rehearsing with placards and not people.

“She’s like an Anaheim Disney girl, so she freaks, and her voice goes up one whole octave,” Lowe said. “I finally come out and give her that look like, ‘Whoa, hey, it’s me and you, we got this.’ I start doing my bump and grind. By the way, I’m singing ‘Proud Mary…’ ”

Lowe said that while he thought things were going well, he caught the stunned expression of Rain Man director Barry Levinson and then he realized, “Oh, that’s not good.”

Things improved for Lowe temporarily when he went backstage after the agonizing 15-minute production.

“So I finish, and I go into the green room, and this redheaded older woman says: ‘Young man, I had no idea you were such a good singer.’ It was Lucille Ball. She says, ‘Come sit with me.’ She grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let it go, and we watched the Oscars for 20 minutes, just the two of us,” Lowe continued. “And then she said, ‘Darling, I have a splitting headache, could you get me some aspirin?’ So I went and got Lucy what I thought was an aspirin. I gave it to her, and she died 48 hours later.”

Lowe’s story is a little off — the I Love Lucy legend actually died four weeks later — but all in all, his bad night in Hollywood was still pretty bad. So much so that the 1989 Oscars is still known as the worst Oscars production ever.

After the critically panned production, Oscars producer Allan Carr was blacklisted, and more than a dozen Hollywood A-listers signed an open letter slamming the telecast as “an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry.” To make matters worse, Disney filed a lawsuit against the Academy for the unauthorized use of its copyrighted version of Snow White.

In a 2013 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Eileen Bowman said she was paid scale for her performance as Snow White.

“We rehearsed for a week and a half,” she said. “It was my first AFTRA job, and I was paid scale, $350 a week. They brought Rob Lowe in to be my Prince Charming … He could see where things were headed at the dress rehearsal and took me aside and warned: ‘You need to be careful. There are sharks in the water, and you have to be really careful who you work with after this.’ He had never sung before and was kind of insecure about that, so we bonded.”

The faux Snow said her Bob Mackie-designed Snow White outfit was later purchased for $23,000 by someone involved with the production who was buried in it.

“It was a man. I’m leaving it at that,” she said.

As for his part in the cringe-worthy performance, in 1992, Lowe told the New York Timeshe knew the gig was a risk for him.

“Look, the academy asked me to take that role so I was a good soldier and did it,” Rob said. “You can’t be your own manager and agent and soothsayer — you have to take risks. And on that one I got shot in the foot.”

Take a look at the video below to see Rob Lowe’s performance at the 1989 Academy Awards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ0XGi_LVOU

[Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images]

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