You're probably wondering about whether John Stamos made love to Heather Locklear in Detroit, after an auto show, in the '90s. Back then the car people would fly the John Stamoses and the Heather Locklears into town for junket weekends. And sometimes they'd find each other—just two television idols standing suggestively near Ford Tempos. And things would happen, as they sometimes do, among consenting former soap stars with aerated hair and great bone structure. I won't tell you yet if that relationship was consummated on the banks of Lake St. Clair. This is known as withholding information, a kind of narrative cheat familiar to anyone who watched network television between 1980 and 2003.
In person John Stamos—also known as Uncle Jesse from Full House, earlier known as Blackie Parrish during his two years on General Hospital, more recently appearing on Netflix in both You and Fuller House—comes off as thoughtful. Maybe even perspicacious? Possibly even wistful? Slightly? He is 55 now, and we sit together in the office of his house off Mulholland Drive, in L.A., among the artifacts of a life worth being kind of wistful about: his drum kit, platinum albums from the Beach Boys (with whom he's played on and off for more than three decades), a Sonos speaker from which the sounds of “Rubber Duckie” will sometimes spontaneously issue because his son, Billy, is having his bath. Could it be, I asked, that this was his first time in GQ? “It has always taken longer for me to get in anywhere for some reason,” he says.
“I think you were too good-looking,” I offer. I don't mean it in a fake-insult-that's-actually-ass-kissing way. Or not merely that. He was boringly good-looking. He looked like the picture Michael Jackson showed to his plastic surgeon.
“Pfft,” he says. “It's always been a fight. To get into talk shows or television shows.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I think the Full House thing has been a blessing and a curse. I think sometimes I don't conduct myself as a serious person. But I am. I mean, I can be.”
I ask him a bit about his fellow icon of nostalgia Lori Loughlin, who played his wife on Full House and now stars in an unscripted drama of moral indignation after being charged in a bribery scheme to get her daughters into college. (Loughlin has pleaded not guilty.)
There's no shame in having one signature scent, but the world of smelling good gets much bigger when your aroma game is as varied as your closet. So we paired four of the freshest colognes with four impeccable suited looks, with a little help from the ridiculously handsome John Stamos.
“I gotta be careful,” he says. “I want to wait until the trial happens, if it does, or whatever the result is, and then talk about it.”
Are you close with her?
“Yes. And I'll tell you one thing that has been strange is: Honestly I can't figure it out. It doesn't make sense. I talked to her the morning everything hit. I just can't process it still.”
He's decided not to speculate on the case. “Whatever happened,” he says, “I'm pretty sure that the punishment is not equal to the crime, if there was a crime.”
Gravitas. I'm saying that Stamos has gravitas now. A charming, reflective quality. He recently got sober, got married, had a kid. But it took a minute to get to this place. “Everybody has their own bottoms,” he said. “I haven't been through anything more than anyone else has. In fact I've had a beautifully charmed life. I think it was a fear of growing up. I mean, you throw a stick in this town and you'll hit six guys with Peter Pan syndrome.”
I ask whether he'd include himself. “I'm a poster boy for it,” he says. “I shoulda had six months as a free fall, but I dragged it out about 10 years.”
Why is he in GQ now? Because he kind of grew into his face. Because he spent the past decade being a working actor, like lots of working actors you've never heard of—a pilot, roles on short-lived series with names like Thieves and Jake in Progress. Only he did all that while also being Stamos. Because I tend to think we're on the brink of a Stamos-saissance. You heard it here first.
“Was it fun?” I ask. “All those years you should have been more grown-up?”
“Yeah,” he concedes. “Some of it was a lot of fun.”
Like that time in Detroit. A lonely car show. A roomful of people interested in cloth interiors and odometer design. The souls of two soap stars connect across the room. Later, they meet at the bar. The way he remembers it, she could handle her liquor better than he could. Does Stamos detect a spark? She gives him her room number. Only the next thing he remembers, someone's banging on his hotel door. He'd stopped by his room, thrown up, passed out, and never made it out again.
Did that kind of thing happen a lot?
“I have 50 of those stories,” he says. He's not bragging. But maybe bragging a little.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2019 issue.
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