Andrew McCarthy on Male Friendship

Andrew McCarthy sits with Rich to talk about his fifth book, Who Needs Friends, An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America. The impetus came from his 21-year-old son Sammy, who looked up from a story about his own buddies and said, you don't really have any friends, do you, Dad. McCarthy told him he had friends, he just did not see them. The line stayed with him. He got in his car and drove 10,000 miles on back roads to visit the guys he had run with since he moved to New York at 17.

The best part of the trip turned out to be the random encounters. McCarthy started chatting up strangers in gas stations, bars, and motel lobbies, then mentioned he was on his way to see an old friend. That single prompt opened the door. Cops in Ohio. Blues musicians in Mississippi. Oil rig workers in Texas. Most of them said they never talked about friendship with anyone, and most wanted to keep talking long after McCarthy was ready to wrap.

The stats frame the problem. Nineteen percent of men now say they have no close friends, up from three percent in 1990. Twenty-five percent of men with only a high school diploma say they have no friends at all. McCarthy thinks part of it is devices, and part of it is a cultural block around words like intimacy and vulnerability. He met men whose wives were their best friends, and wives who noted their husbands had no one else. He also met two former cops in Ohio, friends for 60 years, one of whom said if the other died, he would have to go on ice.

Rich pulls out the Brian Regan bit about playing golf with a newly divorced friend and coming home to a wife who wants to know the details. They did not talk about it. They played golf. Rich had the same story with his own wife. McCarthy's line for this is that women make friends face to face and men make friends shoulder to shoulder.

The second half of the segment runs Celebrity True or False. Jacqueline Bisset drove an 18-year-old McCarthy to auditions in her Cadillac convertible. True. A Spago dinner with Rob Lowe ended with Liza Minnelli, a house call to Sammy Davis Jr., and McCarthy drunkenly singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow in Liza's Rolls-Royce on the way home. True. He shaved his head for a different role before the Pretty in Pink reshoots, which is why he wears an obvious wig in the final prom scene. True. He and Jonathan Silverman made up most of the Weekend at Bernie's gags on set, including the Monopoly bit, which McCarthy still calls his most brilliant work. True. And Jonathan Silverman's rabbi father, who officiated McCarthy's wedding, signed the wrong line on the marriage license. McCarthy's wife was legally married to the rabbi for about 24 hours.

McCarthy closes with a reflection on the Brats documentary and St. Elmo's Fire, which he still calls his best fit of that era. The romance in those movies was friendship. He was too young and scared at the time to know the films meant anything beyond himself. Hindsight did the rest.