A bully kicked sand in his face. It was exactly the motivation Angelo Siciliano needed to change his physique, change his name (to Charles Atlas), and launch a bodybuilding empire. Meanwhile, when he witnessed the brutal murder of his parents, young plutocrat Bruce Wayne swore vengeance, adopting a bat-inspired persona and monitoring the byways of Gotham. The rest is history.
Then there is John Stamos, best known as music-and-hair-obsessed Uncle Jesse on the long-running ABC sitcom Full House. After getting a black eye in a dispute over a girl in high school, he vowed to best the perpetrator, who, adding insult to injury, dubbed him “Big Nose Stamos.” Have mercy.
“I come to the conclusion that I can’t take this anymore,” Stamos writes in his endearing if awkwardly titled memoir, If You Would Have Told Me. “I need to do something drastic to put an end to this torment. There is only one thing left for me to do.
“I gotta get famous.”
Reader, he got famous. In addition to leading roles on Full House and ER, he starred in the Broadway revivals of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Cabaret, Bye Bye Birdie, and The Best Man. And he has frequently been pressed into service as a drummer for the Beach Boys. Thus, despite a long struggle with substance abuse, a D.U.I. just made for TMZ, a stint in rehab, and a tough divorce from his first wife, the model turned actress Rebecca Romijn, all duly chronicled in the book, Stamos offers convincing evidence that revenge deserves its quite excellent reputation.
He grew up in Orange County, California, a nerdy kid with an economy-size schnoz (Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon later reshaped it), a loving, supportive family, a deep attachment to Disneyland and his drum kit, and a burning desire to become an actor.
That ambition was solidified when, in 1977, a family friend snuck Stamos onto the set of Grease, and he got a load of the movie’s star John Travolta, light on his feet and heavy on charisma.
By Stamos’s own account, he had a very long way to go. He auditioned for the school production of The Wizard of Oz, only to be stopped by the director after one line and asked if, perchance, he knew how to do makeup. “Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Can’t act. A triple threat,” Stamos notes sardonically.
What he had in spades was perseverance and a “can do” attitude, thanks to the example set by his father, a second-generation Greek-American restaurateur. As Dad’s part-time dishwasher and grill man, Stamos learned all about the value of a strong work ethic and the folly of looking for short cuts. He did not, in any case, want to be what he mistakenly understood the phrase to be: a flash in the pants.
Like many actors, he got his start on a soap opera, in his case, General Hospital. (Demi Moore was a castmate.) Viewers responded enthusiastically to his performance as street kid Blackie Parrish; Stamos was soon getting 10,000 pieces of fan mail a week. But no man is a hero to his valet or, apparently, to his father. Many months into the General Hospital gig, Stamos was still expected to show up for Sunday duty at the restaurant.
The Rat Pack seems to have had an outsize role in his career. When Sammy Davis Jr., a guest star on General Hospital, learned that Stamos wanted to show off his drumming skills on-air but was being stonewalled by the director and producer, Mr. Show Business made it happen. When, during lunch at a Beverly Hills restaurant, Stamos was being pressured to sign a long-term if lucrative contract to stay on the soap, Dean Martin, dining at a neighboring table, successfully counseled against it; never mind that he and Stamos had just been introduced. Frank Sinatra puts in a brief appearance, too.
Those who might have been inclined to dismiss Stamos as a shallow pretty boy (um, me, for one) will be pleasantly surprised by his frequently self-mocking memoir. He tells of unwittingly showing up in fetish wear for an audition and, unaware of the identity of a visitor on the set during a difficult scene of General Hospital, hollering, “Will someone get that old woman out of my eye line.” The old woman, it turns out, was Elizabeth Taylor.
Stamos writes with tenderness about his parents, and with candor about the relationship (initially adversarial, later adoring) with his Full House co-star Bob Saget, who died suddenly last year. If he goes on far longer than is necessary or advisable about the significance of hummingbirds and about his adjustment to long-deferred fatherhood, well, he’s built up enough goodwill that surely readers will have mercy.
Joanne Kaufman is a New York–based journalist and critic
