FERRIS BUELLER'S YEARS OFF; Twenty-five years ago Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a cult movie. But what happened to the kid who was too cool for school? Well...(Features)

Byline: by Paul Lynch

WHATEVER happened to Ferris Bueller? Remember the kid who bunked off school in 1986 and spent the day with his best friend Cameron and his girlfriend Sloane living it up in Chicago?

They borrowed Cameron's dad's 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California, visited the stock exchange, peered down Sears Tower (then the world's tallest building), caught a baseball at Wrigley Field, bluffed their way into an exclusive restaurant, saw Nighthawks at the Art Institute of Chicago and ended the day with Ferris leading the Von Steuben Day parade.

Ferris was a kid with big ideas. But his school principal disagreed. 'Fifteen years from now, when he looks back on the ruin his life's become, he is going to remember Edward Rooney.' Well, 25 years later, nobody remembers Ed Rooney. But we all remember Ferris Bueller. So what did happen to him?

Ferris did not marry Sloane. He went to a small Mid-West college where it was hard for the relationship to keep going. (She went to Harvard. She now runs a business consultancy). He studied marketing but dropped out in 1988. He denies this has anything to do with a student dorm Ponzi scheme. He felt gratified though when the entire college, including some lecturers, did a whip-round for his departure.

He disappeared backpacking to South America. He turned up some time later in a small gambling den in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where he celebrated his 21st birthday and got everyone, including a table of dangerous gangsters, to do the conga.

He phoned Cameron at 4.21am on the same night and convinced him to get on a plane and join him. (He did.)

AT 24, he was overheard in a Seattle bar saying all books, in the future, would be sold on the internet. He claims no part for the inspiration and subsequent setting up of Amazon.com but his friends disagree. He set up his own dot-com startup in 1995 -- a boutique travel agency -- and later sold it to an English firm for a cool million.

He lost most of it the following year staging a rock concert in Belgrade, but he did get to meet David Bowie. He bought his first sports car with what was left of the money -- an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. He wrote it off the next year singing along to Frank Sinatra while driving too fast around a bend in Pasadena. He was there visiting Cameron, now a film director, who was there shooting the Oscar-nominated film A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte. He met, the very next day, his future wife Hillary, a nurse at the hospital, and proposed to her after a week. He made sure that his proposal was elaborate -- which it was, involving the use of the hospital's air ambulance (ferrying both Hillary and Ferris in large body cast to a nearby zoo) -- and to this day nobody knows how he swung it.

He had an idea in 1999 that coffee would be the next big thing and he spent the following two years developing Starbueller's, a small corner cafe on Willow Street in Chicago, into a bustling nationwide chain. He became a regular fixture in the newspapers, where people remembered him from the 1986 film. He was still known, however, to talk to himself in asides as if he was talking to a camera.

(He learned to ignore the strange looks.) He also coined the popular phrase, 'If you can smell it across the street, it's Starbueller's'.

He celebrated the millennium by becoming the proud father of boygirl twins at one second past midnight.

He denied to Hillary that he had arranged it this way, while USA Today took their photograph for the front page. He persuaded Hillary to name the children Mork and Mindy after his favourite TV show. (He then told her this was a joke.) The following year, he was one of the early adaptors who bought a hybrid fuel Prius. (He believes very much in the environment, is a big fan of Al Gore, and knows him personally).

In 2004 he ran the Chicago area campaign for Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry. He was bitterly disappointed when George W. Bush was elected for a second term.

In 2005 he spotted his first grey hair on his right temple. He has refused ever since to use hair dye and today is considerably grey. He tells his wife every day that he loves her. He (usually) gets on great with his sister Jeanie and took over the stage unexpectedly at her wedding to sing Moon River, for which he was carried out of the hotel on the shoulders of an ecstatic crowd. (He had to apologise to his fuming sister the next morning on the telephone for taking over her special day. True to form, she slammed the phone down.)

He studied for two months how to play the kazoo, but after protestations from family and neighbours he gave in. He celebrated his 40th birthday by riding around Europe on a motorbike. (In Paris, he was propositioned by a beautiful woman half his age, but he declined.) He took a phone call on the last day of the holiday to receive the bad news that his father had suddenly died. He took the shock badly and regretted not spending enough time with Tom, who, after retiring from the TV advertising agency in 2007, took a villa with his wife, Katie, in Florida by the sea.

FERRIS became depressed for a while, found little interest in his work and took to going for long walks on his own, but after a couple of months bounced back. He bumped into Sloane one day on Clarke Street in Chicago and they caught up over coffee -- at Starbueller's. (He was secretly pleased that his wife had aged better than her.) He tries to catch up with Cameron once a year. He has learned how to bake chocolate brownies, but only once in a while because he believes in staying trim.

In 2010 he learned that his wife Hillary had a suspicious spot on her breast and spent many weeks worrying.

He was finally able to relax after the nodule was removed and was found not to be cancerous.

He is now 43. He realises he is probably halfway through his life, but he says he is the happiest he has ever been. He has quietened (somewhat) with age. He feels less the need to be the centre of attention, though nobody can stop him taking over at karaoke. He still plays the clarinet. (Badly.) He runs a marathon every second year. He denies he cheats at bridge. His wife still catches him falling asleep in the afternoon.

He is arranging to run his coffee business from home so he can keep a close eye on his twins as they become teenagers. He says he does not want them to bunk off school. He laughs at the irony. The future, he says, is looking bright.

CAPTION(S):

Too cool for school: Matthew Broderick played Ferris Bueller in the hit 1986 movie