Rob Lowe Tells Imus Some Stories; Unclear if They Are, in Fact, "Friends"

The actor Rob Lowe, perhaps best known as a member of the “Brat Pack” in the 1980s, is all grown-up now, and he’s telling tales normally reserved for his closest cronies in his autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. First, however, he told Imus where he was on the morning of September 11, 2001.
 
“I was shooting ‘The West Wing,’” he recalled. “We had shot really, really late the night before. I was in bed, about to get up to go to work.”
 
The phone rang, he turned on the television, saw the second plane hit the South Tower, and immediately phoned his brother, the actor Chad Lowe, who lives in New York City.  “We talked on the phone as the towers fell,” he said. “He could see it go down.”
 
Just a few days ago, Lowe was at dinner when the message came up on his iPhone that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces. “Like most people, I didn’t think it was real,” he said. He soon learned that President Obama would address the nation, and promptly changed his mind. “I know enough form being on ‘The West Wing’—if the President is speaking, it’s real.”
 
He agreed with Imus that Obama’s decision to send in a group of Navy SEALs to fetch Bin Laden, rather than drop a bomb, was “a big time call.” Having once played a Navy SEAL in a movie, Lowe got a taste of the intense training these “studs,” as he called them, undergo.
 
“It’s one of those things where you look at the SEALs obstacle course, and you go, ‘Yeah, I’m in shape, I could do that,’” he said. “Until you get on it, and you realize it’s designed where everything is exactly four inches farther away than it should be.”
 
The decision to write Stories I Only Tell My Friends came about because Lowe, a self-described “raconteur,” loves telling, well, stories to his friends. “Inevitably, after a long dinner with me, or a weekend in the country, people would be like, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got to write a book about this stuff,’” he said.
 
Once he figured out what the “thrust” of the book would be, Lowe sat down and started writing; writing about painful things, like his trip to rehab 21 years ago and his mother’s untimely death, but also about happier events.
 
“There’s so much joy and positivity in it,” he insisted, then wondered if positivity is even a word. “I just don’t want to get the tweets, ‘He said positivity. He’s clearly a moron.’”
 
Stories I Only Tell My Friends is not, Lowe told Imus, an entrée into the political realm for him, though he admitted he’s been acting for a long time and enjoys new challenges. He currently appears on the NBC sitcom ‘Parks and Recreation,’ on which he said he plays “the world’s most positive, enthusiastic man.”
 
Lowe’s outlook was the exact opposite as he prepared to read the reviews for his book, which have been largely glowing. He confessed, “I had my Hazmat outfit on when I picked up the New York Times.”
 
Sounds like the beginning of another story he can tell his friends, or, at the very least, Imus.
 
-Julie Kanfer