John Stamos desires to learn you a narrative. The truth is, he insists.
Positive, you could possibly pore over the 352 pages of his new memoir, “If You Would Have Instructed Me,” to be revealed by Henry Holt on Oct. 24.
However wouldn’t you moderately 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 possibly can put your individual ideas of what issues appear to be or what they sound like,” he mentioned, “but it surely’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 appeal and hair and sincerity that he parlayed into taking part in unhealthy boys with hearts of gold — Blackie Parrish on “Common Hospital,” Uncle Jesse on “Full Home,” Dr. Tony Gates on “ER” — nonetheless entrance and heart.
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 guide’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 quite a bit,” 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 best way I used to be raised. My dad was like, ‘Don’t discuss politics. Don’t discuss faith. Hold it gentle. 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 consuming and stuff, attempting to satisfy another person’s concept residing vicariously by means of me,” he added. “I felt it was my obligation to be that man.”
Darkish isn’t what sometimes springs to thoughts if you consider Stamos. His mom appreciated to say that he determined to be an actor someday between being born and arriving dwelling 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 attempting 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 might go into a celebration or a gathering, and I’d should get a bit 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, girls, the enterprise. If I might’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 guide, 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 good to play her father, Tony Curtis. “They’ve the identical comedian vitality, 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 guide’s foreword.
She had witnessed that disappointment firsthand. “I had seen him at a enterprise celebration in New York, when he wasn’t sober, and seemed into his attractive 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 and author who would turn into his spouse.
“I’ve folks I discuss to daily,” he mentioned. “One in all 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 essentially the most daunting: his D.U.I. arrest and the sudden demise 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 daily. In order that’s one of many classes that you just 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 best way, 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 depart 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 Greatest Man,” to steer audiences, and maybe himself, that he wasn’t a one-note marvel. He had vary. He had expertise.
“It’s at all times killed me that that’s what all people 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 identified Stamos since their daytime tv days, was more and more conscious of his ache.
“He’s supremely proficient in many various 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 telephone interview. “However early on, he needed to work to show that.”
“Then the minute he received 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 could be every thing.”
Billy has inherited his father’s appeal and appears, although his youngster’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 residing” — he stops — “He might be something on the earth he desires apart 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 keep in mind what it felt like the subsequent morning, what it tasted like,” he mentioned of his consuming. “It’s nonetheless very recent 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 Seashore Boys on the SeaHearNow pageant in Asbury Park, N.J. — one thing he has executed when time permits since 1983 when, at a live performance in San Diego, Mike Love watched women scream and chase after Stamos and determined to faucet into that frenzy by bringing him onstage for “Barbara Ann.”
“The truth of all of it is past my wildest goals,” Stamos writes of that have. “The minute it ends, I need to do it yet again. It’s like nice intercourse; that lusty, primal second the place you out of the blue discover your groove and determine every thing out.”
However he wasn’t so positive when Love advised him about SeaHearNow — one thing about it not being the correct place for an oldies group and an ex-teen idol. Then he acquiesced.
“There have been most likely about 50,000 of our closest mates there, and he was drumming like a champ, and all people was on the prime of their recreation,” mentioned Love, who officiated Stamos’s wedding ceremony to McHugh. “John was actually, has at all times been, an inspiration and a bit bit of additional vitality and completely a complete 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 imagine it,” he mentioned. “I’m not usually a cynic, however swiftly you get some respect from these youthful folks. It’s kind of an elder statesman factor. And then you definately’re like, ‘Nicely, what’s subsequent? Demise?’”
“However you possibly can’t suppose like that,” he went on. “Simply maintain creating. That’s the place my head is — get higher at what you do.”
