One Tree Hunks: The Unauthorized Biographies of Chad Michael Murray and James Lafferty [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

PART ONE

CHAD MICHAEL MURRAY

CHAPTER ONE

DISCOVERING CHAD

It’s entirely possible that Chad Michael Murray was born to be an actor. And not just because he was always performing for his family at a young age. No, Chad is actually where he is today because of how he was born: specifically, a medical condition he was born with.

An old Hollywood story tells of the young starlet being discovered at the soda counter in a dime store. How many young actors and actresses are waiting tables in New York, while waiting for their big break? Chad didn’t go either of those routes. He was discovered in the hospital.

Born in 1981 in Buffalo, New York, Chad grew up with three brothers and a sister. (Later, half brother Tyler joined the siblings.) He was always goofing around and acting up. He’s told many interviewers that he started performing little skits for his family when he was as young as four years old. He was also very athletic, playing football regularly. (To this day, he still collects sports memorabilia, sometimes at significant expense!) It was football that would land Chad in the hospital in high school, where he would find his future as an actor.

“The Strongest Man I Know”

At the age of ten, though, Chad’s world was upended when his mother left. As Chad told Zap2It.com in September 2003, “I don’t think you can understand what it’s like to be a kid who has a parent just walk out of your life like that unless you’ve actually been through it. I’ve lived it.” He told calgarysun.com, “My mom abandoned me and my four brothers. . . . She put me on the bus for school one morning, saying she was going out of town for a couple of weeks. . . . She didn’t come back ’til I was eighteen.”

Clearly Chad’s father—an air traffic controller—stepped up to the plate and took on the enormous responsibility of raising this family by himself. Chad has only great things to say about his father, though it couldn’t have been easy. He had to raise Chad plus four of Chad’s siblings—five children in all. Five kids can be quite a handful for any family, let alone one headed up by a single parent who is employed full-time. As Chad told Guideposts for Teens, “(My dad) was so strong. He didn’t let the negative things get him down. His attitude was just, ‘Life goes on.’ And he did an incredible job.”

Chad credits his father with helping him to keep his head on straight in the sometimes chaotic world of Hollywood. “My dad put the fear of God in me when I was a little kid,” he told Teenhollywood.com. His father told him he had to pay attention and keep his wits about him if he wanted to succeed in life. Chad clearly took his advice!

Chad = Nerd?!

Chad was far from Mr. Popular in school. In fact, he considered himself a nerd.

Yes, you read that right. Chad will be the first person to tell you, or anyone, that he was a nerd. He told thewb.com, “I was such a nerd in high school. Man, I had no friends. I didn’t have a lot of money so I couldn’t get all the cool clothes like everybody else. I did my own thing. That didn’t go over so well.” He didn’t dress in the latest styles, as the other kids did, settling instead for jeans and a white T-shirt most days. (Little did he know he was ahead of his time and that this simple outfit would become trendy. Or a throwback to one of the actors he admires, James Dean.)

One perk he did have was the use of an old car—a ’79 Mercury Cougar—to get back and forth to school, though he admits that it wasn’t exactly a chick magnet. “It was a wreck,” he tells Girlfriend magazine. “The windows didn’t open so I’d get carbon monoxide poisoning every day. Then every day the tires would be flat so I’d have to go to the gas station and pump them up. No girl wanted to get in that car!” (We’re lucky he’s just joking about the poisoning, right?)

Because he was different, Chad was often the target of bullies while he was growing up. He had two front teeth knocked out when he was seven or eight years old. An older kid at school decided he didn’t like Chad and decided to push him around . . . literally. Because of this bullying, and feeling like a misfit, Chad didn’t like school much. But he says it made him stronger and better able to handle the rough stuff in life.

But don’t despair! Chad’s high school days weren’t all dark. “I had a girlfriend through high school,” he assured YM. “I didn’t date much. I’m very much a monogamist. I like to just get comfortable in a relationship and know everything about each other.” (Sounds perfect!)

Chad often found the best way for him to meet girls was to meet people from other schools, where the chances of girls knowing him, his family, or his nerdy reputation were slim. He dated girls from schools fifteen or twenty minutes away from his own school because they didn’t know him as a “nerd” and got to know him for who he really was: a sweet, smart, handsome guy!

Despite not enjoying the social side of school as much as he might have, Chad did well in his classes and liked learning. He also loved playing football and he joined the school’s team. Through the team, he found a group of kids he could hang out with during the week, but he never quite connected with his fellow players enough to spend time with them outside of school. Once the football season was over, Chad usually went his own way and didn’t socialize with the athletes much. For this reason, playing on the school’s football team was no guarantee of popularity for Chad.

Chad also worked while he was in school. He had a part-time job as a janitor at Donut World, a local donut shop. He liked it because he got donuts for free and he thought the girls who also worked in the shop were cute.

Other than football, Chad wasn’t really active in many school activities. He did go to his prom in 1999, but he admits he didn’t really enjoy it. The music wasn’t to his taste and he didn’t like the food!

So what advice does Chad have for other kids who may not fit in at school, as he looks back on those years? Well, they say revenge is sweet. Chad told Guideposts for Teens, “It’s hard to see when you’re a kid in the middle of it, but the best thing you can do is find what interests you, concentrate on what’s important in your own life. Be different.” I think we can say this advice worked for him, can’t we?

A Lucky Break?

In addition to the family turmoil, Chad endured another kind of problem growing up, this one with his health. When he was born, he had a short mesentery. The mesentery is a membrane that connects your intestines to the inside of your abdomen. This congenital condition (something a person is born with) can result in severe abdominal discomfort.

During Chad’s sophomore year, his intestines twisted because of the strain on the mesentery and he had to have surgery. As a result of the surgery, he was in the hospital for months. He suffered from internal bleeding and couldn’t eat normally for a while.

Chad’s father was devoted to his family (probably why he’s such an idol in Chad’s eyes). He took an entire month and a half off from work to be with Chad in the hospital.

While Chad is the first person to admit the experience was scary—“I was terrified that I’d never get to go home. That everyone was just going to continue on with their lives and I’d just be in the hospital, sick,” he told...