It’s almost impossible to fathom, in the current “content mill,” clickbait-centric climate, a magazine writer’s words having the kind of impact on the cultural lexicon that could span across decades and continue to endure. And yet, that’s precisely what David Blum managed to do in June of 1985 when arbitrarily coining the phrase “Brat Pack” on the cover of New York magazine. From the moment that Blum, who bears the perennially smug expression of most born-and-bred New Yorkers, unleashed that piece on June 10th, the pop culture-caring masses glommed onto it and decided never to let it go. And just as the careers of “core Brat Pack members” Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy were taking off in a direction that might have eventually had them Oscar-bound on the Serious Actor front. With one flick of his pen, Blum decimated those chances. Two words, one cataclysmic consequence (or, as Andrew Clark in The Breakfast Club might put it, “Two hits: me hittin’ you, you hittin’ the floor”).
More than anything, though, one has to marvel at how powerful the words of a writer for a magazine were at that time (even if the headline does amount to something like “archaic clickbait”). With such clout dissipating as the internet democratized writing, and “any asshole with dial-up” could say their piece. Even more so once dial-up gave way to broadband and wi-fi. This is to say that perhaps Blum’s coinage of the phrase wouldn’t have stood apart from all the rest of the noise if it had been bandied today. If he, instead, had written it for a website rather than a “glossy magazine” still looked to as a tastemaking entity. But, unfortunately for the Brat Pack, a fair portion of Blum’s writing career/most impactful work existed in a pre-internet world. Audiences had few other outlets or mediums to turn to when it came to being inundated with other “resources” for “information” (a.k.a. opinion) or distraction.
In 1985, New York had established its prowess in the magazine publishing world after seventeen years in business, with its first issue released in April of 1968. Although, initially, the magazine sought to focus primarily on New York-centric “culture” (quelle surprise), it didn’t take long for the publication to start mining other, more “far-reaching” sources for material. Hollywood included. Enter Blum, on an expenses paid assignment while under a legitimate contract with the magazine (as opposed to being subjected to the present-day “Wild Wild West” nature of a freelance arrangement), who was supposedly only doing a profile on Emilio Estevez when the latter made the fatal error of inviting him for a night out on the town.
Like most writers looking to make a name for themselves, Blum ended up grossly exploiting the opportunity (much like Vanessa Grigoriadis with her now infamous pieces entitled “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” in 2008 and “Madonna at Sixty” in 2018) he got to spend time in an “unfettered access” sort of way with a celebrity who wouldn’t ordinarily offer the keys to his castle to just any commoner. Perhaps, in his naïve, still-too-young-and-sheltered-from-being-a-nepo-baby way, Estevez simply thought Blum would have a good time. That he was doing him some kind of favor by showing him how the other half lives. In the end, he was only fucking himself (and every other actor in his age bracket) over. And at the tender age of twenty-three, to boot. His age naturally came up in the article as well, with Blum stating, “Barely twenty-three years old, he is already accustomed to privilege and appears to revel in the attention heaped upon him almost everywhere he goes. He is living the life that any American male might dream of—to be young, single and famous.” Which, yes, makes it come across a lot like that was the life Blum was dreaming of when he disemboweled these actors.
By the time the article was released, Estevez’s two seminal “Brat Pack films”—The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire—were already in the can. He was somehow positioned as the ringleader of the “pack,” with auxiliary reinforcements in fellow “party boys” Rob Lowe and Judd Nelson. These latter two appearing on the cover with Estevez in the piece, in an image taken from St. Elmo’s Fire that actually makes it look as though Blum captured a photo of them partying in real life. Further solidifying the perception of most Brat Packers as “frivolous” and simply in on the acting game for a “good time,” or what Madonna would call “a lot of available drugs.” To drive home the point of the cartoonish image he was crafting, Blum majorly ripped apart as many names as he could name among the group of Hollywood’s young actors—including Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage and Sean Penn (Hutton and the latter two also being nepo babies)—coming to prominence by using Nelson’s words against him when he quoted, “You can be ‘hot’ and be a shamelessly poor actor. It’s possible, now it’s possible to be at the top for half a second and then disappear. It’s such a strange thing, to try to build a career on this heat.”
In a certain sense, this was Blum’s “La Côte Basque, 1965,” as he sought to essentially eviscerate a particular group of prominent people in the same way Truman Capote did with “his” Swans. Why else would he blithely write, “What distinguishes these young actors from generations past is that most of them have skipped the one step toward success that was required of the generation of Marlon Brando and James Dean, and even that of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino: years of acting study.” Along with describing the air of privilege and superiority that night he was asked to join Estevez and co. at the Hard Rock Café in Hollywood. There were plenty of phrases to wield for that purpose, all dripping with venom. For example, his mention of Nelson loudly remarking of a “fangirl” that tried to sit at their table, “You can let them get close, but you can’t let them sit down.”
The pervasiveness of privilege and misogyny among a group like this obviously goes without saying, particularly in 1985, when so much of the world remained entrenched in patriarchal values. And yet, Blum still ends up looking like the asshole in the situation, for he used his writerly powers to settle some kind of score that had little to do with the “Brat Pack” and seemingly more to do with his own personal insecurities. As Joel Schumacher, the director of St. Elmo’s Fire, said, “[Blum] smelled about him the person who had never been invited to the party in high school—that he looked at this group of beautiful, talented, perhaps overpaid young people, and…he had found a way to get even.”
But, the more time goes on, the less vindicated Blum is likely to feel. What with Andrew McCarthy’s recent documentary, Brats, exploring how the power of this phrase fucked his career up in long-lasting ways. Eventually, he confronts Blum himself, getting him to admit that there was, indeed, collateral damage involved in the instant gratification of using this term. One that was, in fact, hardly that gratifying, as Blum also admitted to McCarthy that he hoped then editor of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, would summon him to his office and offer a job as a result of his “insightful” reporting on Hollywood’s erstwhile cream of the crop. Instead, he continued to plod along in the article-writing realm, becoming just as stuck with the name as any Brat Packer.
As for the actors’ initial reaction to seeing it, anger and fear ensued, with Nelson rightfully prophesizing, “When I saw it, I just knew, that’s it.” In today’s world, of course, the article’s effect might not have been as terminal. What with celebrities having their own platforms to “set the record straight.” Sort of like Taylor Swift tweeting at Damon Albarn (after he was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying, “She doesn’t write her own songs”), “I was such a big fan of yours until I saw this. I write ALL of my own songs. Your hot take is completely false and SO damaging. You don’t have to like my songs but it’s really fucked up to try and discredit my writing. WOW.” But, during the height of Brat Packers’ success, such instantaneous resources were not available for the purposes of celebrity damage control.
What’s more, while the 1980s signaled the height and all-out exaltation of neoliberalism, therefore the onslaught of corporate advertising, it hadn’t yet figured out that the future was personal branding. Thus, in a pre-branding world, the Brat Pack “members” were branded against their own will. And, again, during a period when social media wasn’t around for celebrities to directly “correct” information in a “straight from the source” manner.
With the advent of the twenty-first century, many “young Hollywood” celebrities (especially women) still had a hard time shaking the image that tabloid journalism (effectively jumpstarted by “Hollywood’s Brat Pack”) fortified with daily and weekly photos and images serving to perpetuate the idea of people like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan as quintessential “hot messes” whose careers were secondary to the partying it afforded them. Like the Brat Pack, they were consistently cut down to size for their “not seriousness.” What’s more, in the aftermath of the Brat Pack article, it seemed that young talent in Hollywood generally began to be looked upon as “lesser than” (treated accordingly so on a kids/preteens-centered network like Nickelodeon). As needing to “earn their stripes” in a way that wasn’t as much of a thing before Blum came along to put these rich, famous youths in their place.
In all honesty, there’s no doubt that, without the release of “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” into the world, the careers (ergo, lives) of each so-called member of the Brat Pack would have been entirely different. Hell, maybe Estevez would have stayed engaged to Demi Moore, maybe there would have been a St. Elmo’s Fire II (as Schumacher wanted), or maybe Estevez and McCarthy would have actually co-starred in Young Men With Unlimited Capital (a project that ultimately never got off the ground) instead of avoiding each other like the plague once they had all been rendered career “kryptonite” to each other.
And surely, this young group of actors might have actually continued to foster their friendship and camaraderie as well. Alas, Ally Sheedy confirmed the shift in affection for one another after the article came out, noting, “[It] just destroyed [what we had]. I had felt truly a part of something, and that guy just blew it to pieces.”
As for Blum being confronted about it yet again in 2024, he shrugged to McCarthy, “I hope it’s not the greatest thing I ever did. I really do.” He needn’t worry, for it’s probably the worst.