Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (11 page)

So when the actor arrived at his alma mater, it was not so much as the hometown boy made good as it was the outsider, the guy who didn’t make the football team or get a date for the school prom, finally showing his former classmates that there was life beyond Glen Ridge. It was a valedictory moment, a knowing acknowledgment of his achievements.

In some ways it was his lesser-known film
All the Right Moves,
released in the same year as
Risky Business,
that more clearly reflected his real life. That movie, coproduced by Lucille Ball, portrayed a high-school football star, Stefen Djordjevic, struggling for a college scholarship to avoid following his father and brother into the steel mills. While the gritty, rather downbeat blue-collar movie did poorly at the box office,
it spoke to Cruise’s own desire to move on from an unhappy youth and childhood. “I remember getting through high school and thinking, ‘Boy, I’m glad I got that behind me,’ ” he has often said when discussing his formative years. It is a feeling he expressed during conversations with
All the Right Moves
director Michael Chapman, whom he admired for his work as cinematographer on his favorite movie,
Raging Bull.
“I know that as a teenager and a child he had felt a kind of fear of not escaping whatever it is children want to escape from.” Cruise’s Stefen Djordjevic is the roughly drawn blueprint for the generic character to come, an egotistical, self-absorbed but ultimately successful hero. His character’s relentless ambition eventually translates into glorious triumph, an arc of achievement that seemed to mirror the actor’s own life.

If
Risky Business
cemented his popular appeal,
All the Right Moves
showed that he had acting range. This young man, still only twenty-one, had started as a junior member of the Brat Pack, but was now showing his rivals a clean pair of heels, consolidating his position as one of the leading stars of his generation.

There is no noise in Hollywood quite like the sweet sound of success. While failure is a silent, rueful companion, the friendly ringing of the telephone, the satisfying thump of the latest delivery of film scripts, and the swish of backs being slapped makes for the most pleasing music. It was a sound Tom Cruise was beginning to enjoy, his future golden with possibilities. But in the fall of 1983, with
Risky Business
the talk of the movie world, it was his past that returned to haunt him.

A phone call from his paternal grandmother, Catherine Mapother, was as unwelcome as it was disturbing. His estranged father, the man he hadn’t seen for ten years, had terminal cancer. His grandmother asked if Tom would agree to his father’s request and visit him in the Louisville hospital where he was being treated. There were conditions, too. His father did not want any recriminations, any talk of the past. For a young man becoming used to making his own rules, this must have been an irritating imposition, especially coming from a man he at once despised, feared, and still loved.

He agreed, probably reluctantly, to his father’s conditions, the last request of a dying man. Financially secure after his $75,000 payday from
Risky Business
, he paid for his three sisters to fly from New York to join him at his father’s bedside. It was a trying, emotionally charged, and yet, in time, cathartic encounter. When he had last seen his father, Tom
was a twelve-year-old boy watching him marry a woman he had never met. Now he was a young man who had made his own way in the world without any help or guidance from the man lying before him on his hospital bed. The gift he brought to the hospital was a poignant reminder of the happier times they had once shared. It was a musical statue of a ragged Tom Sawyer–like figure that played tunes from his father’s favorite film,
The Sting
, one of the few occasions father and son had enjoyed a harmonious public outing.

Since the abrupt splitting of the Mapother family in Ottawa, Tom’s father had largely dropped out of sight. After his marriage to Joan Lebendiger, he went to Florida for a time and then headed out west. When that union foundered after just a year, he returned to Louisville, where he apparently lived in poverty and obscurity. “He was a drifter. He obviously regretted what he had done. I felt sorry for him,” recalled his cousin Caroline Mapother. For a time he took up with Jill Ellison, the estranged wife of a local journalist, who seemingly helped nurse him during his cancer treatment.

While he was aware that his son had made a name for himself in the movies, Thomas Senior hadn’t made the time, or perhaps more accurately the effort, to see any of his work. His seeming indifference served as an epitaph to their uneasy relationship. Ever since their parting a decade before, it seems that his father had adhered resolutely to his son’s angry demand to “stay the hell out of everything.”

The bullying young man of Tom’s childhood was now reduced to a pathetic figure in a hospital bed. His son’s “powerful” reaction to the enforced reunion has swung between sympathy and fury, pity at his father’s plight and anger at a life of missed opportunities and shared family experience. Tom later told TV host James Lipton that his family was very special and his father had deliberately rejected “a huge life force.” Over the years he has become more philosophical about his father’s behavior, believing that he created his own suffering and isolation. “He had made some mistakes and he knew it. I wasn’t angry at him, I wasn’t, I was just looking at a man who was my father who I loved no matter what happened.”

They held hands and, in a vainglorious gesture, his father promised that he would soon be well enough to take his son for a steak and a beer. They never had that steak, his father dying of metastatic rectal cancer on January 9, 1984, at the age of just forty-nine. The funeral was a quiet family affair, laying Thomas Mapother III to rest at the Calvary Catholic cemetery in Louisville.

Within weeks of his father’s death, Tom found himself with a new name, living in a new country, and consorting with unicorns, goblins, and fairies in an enchanted forest. It was a curious kind of catharsis. Now known as Jack O’ The Green, he was the hero in the battle between light and dark, good and evil, in a film that was the brainchild of British director Ridley Scott. Tom had long admired the hand behind the sci-fi movies
Blade Runner
and
Alien,
and was beguiled by the 411 elaborate storyboards that Ridley Scott brought along to convince Tom to star in his latest film fantasy,
Legend
.

Suitably intrigued, Tom signed up, brushing off the advice of his agent Paula Wagner that, because of his father’s death, he could pass on the movie if he wished. Leaving behind his family, friends, and girlfriend, Rebecca De Mornay, he made his first overseas flight to London, where filming was scheduled for spring 1984.

He had little time to dwell on the past. When he first arrived at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, north of London, Ridley Scott ushered him into Theatre 7 on the lot and showed him the 1970 François Truffaut film,
The Wild Child,
the true story of a young boy who emerged from a forest in central France, unable to speak and walking on all fours like an animal. It seemed that the youngster had been raised by wolves. Scott was intrigued by the story and wanted Tom to grow his hair and emulate the jerky gestures and wolverine behavior of the wild child, whom he saw as a heroic force of nature. For once, a childhood spent practicing backflips and Evel Knievel stunts did not go to waste.

Unlike his earlier movies
Taps
and
The Outsiders,
where he had enjoyed the collegiate camaraderie of his fellow actors, this time he was left to his own devices, regularly hanging
around the huge stage, normally used for James Bond movies, during the laborious process of setting up the elaborate fantasy world. He helped his costar Mia Sara, a seventeen-year-old who had never acted professionally before, learn her lines, and the Brooklyn-born actress returned the favor by using her circle of London girlfriends to find Tom dates for the evening. More often than not, he went into the office of unit publicist Geoff Freeman to chew the fat, catching up on news and sports back home.

A brief visit to London by his friend Sean Penn did little to change the mood. Sean was wandering aimlessly around Europe with actor Joe Pesci, drinking and partying hard as he tried to come to terms with his split from actress Elizabeth McGovern. Leaving Joe in Rome, Sean flew to visit Tom on the
Legend
set for just one day. It was not a success. Tom was focused and working, Sean brokenhearted and drinking. Sean enigmatically describes their meeting as a “kind of disastrous interaction.” He left the following day to go to Belfast in Northern Ireland. “I thought, ‘Take me somewhere violent,’ ” he later recalled, indicating his mind-set at the time.

If being a stranger in a strange land was unsettling enough, the shoot was dogged by accidents. Tom strained his back when a stunt went awry, and was mauled by a live fox he was supposed to cradle during one scene. Four weeks before the end of shooting, Tom and other members of the cast and crew watched helplessly as the giant stage burned down, destroying the carefully constructed polystyrene forest that was the film’s setting. While only four days’ shooting was lost, the accident served as a metaphor for the film, which was enough of a box-office flop to make director Ridley Scott believe his Hollywood career was over and seek work producing pop videos.

As one film reviewer noted: “Performances tend to get lost in productions like this. I particularly noticed how easily Cruise got buried in the role of Jack. Here is the talented young actor from
Risky Business,
where he came across as a genuine individual, and this time he’s so overwhelmed by sets and special effects that his character could be played by anybody.” Even Tom admitted that he was “just another color in
a Ridley Scott painting” and these days treats the movie as a bit of a joke.

Things were not much better when he returned to New York. His relationship with his girlfriend Rebecca De Mornay soon reached the final reel. They had been apart for the best part of a year, and while he had briefly seen her on the set of her movie
The Slugger’s Wife,
and she had flown to London a couple of times, the strain of maintaining a long-distance relationship in the days before cell phones and e-mails had taken its toll. It was a liaison built on mutual ambition, shared careers, and similar backgrounds of broken homes and constant moving.

If anything, Rebecca’s early life was much more exotic and sophisticated, as she enjoyed a peripatetic upbringing with a bohemian mother and lived in a number of European countries. “I was desperate to fit in. . . . I’ve worked hard to be accepted,” she once explained. While Tom learned to speak with a Canadian or Kentucky twang, when Rebecca lived in Austria she spoke German with a perfect regional accent. They were two souls striving for acclaim and adulation. “There’s definitely something different about kids who come from broken homes,” observed Rebecca. “They have this sort of searching quality, because you’re searching for love and affection if you’ve been robbed of a substantial amount of time with your parents. I think that is true of Tom.”

Lurking in the background was the old green-eyed monster of jealousy and envy. Both Tom’s and Rebecca’s careers took off after the success of
Risky Business.
At the time it seemed that Rebecca, who was a much less experienced actor than her boyfriend, had made much smarter choices. During the year or so they were together, she was ostensibly the more successful partner. In 1984, while Tom spent months playing a woodland creature in London, Rebecca notched up three movies that went on to earn critical acclaim.

It is not hard to imagine how Tom, competitive and controlling, would have responded as he watched his girlfriend outstripping him in both the quality and quantity of her film work. Even the $500,000 fee for
Legend
and the magical word
“starring” might not have provided enough compensation. For a young man who had grown up bolstered by the uncritical acclaim of an adoring mother and cheerleading sisters, it would probably have been difficult to come to terms with a live-in companion who seemed to be outstripping him in his chosen career, the spotlight shining more brightly on Rebecca, who was then more worldly, polished, and stylish.

In her movie
The Trip to Bountiful,
she was praised for her performance as a young woman who befriends an old lady, played by film veteran Geraldine Page, who won an Oscar. In Rebecca’s second film that year, the gritty drama
Runaway Train,
actors Jon Voight and Eric Roberts received Academy Award nominations for their roles as escaped criminals on an out-of-control train. Movie fans regularly vote the film, where Rebecca plays a railway worker on the wrong train at the wrong time, one of the best ever.

On the surface, the third film she made that year,
The Slugger’s Wife,
also oozed quality. Not only was she working with a script by Neil Simon, who wrote
The Odd Couple,
but she was directed by the legendary auteur Hal Ashby, who shot
Being There
with Peter Sellers. While Tom was spending his days in makeup, surrounded by fairies and goblins, waiting to utter risible dialogue, his girlfriend was working with the cream of Hollywood. Or so it seemed.

If that wasn’t bad enough for Tom’s ego, she played a sexy nightclub singer who has a torrid affair with a baseball star played by Michael O’Keefe. For a young man who had been cheated on by his two previous lovers, it was hard to be completely trusting, especially as he knew all about the chemistry that could easily be generated between a leading man and lady. After all, it was how he had met Rebecca. Nor did it help that billboards advertising the film showed Rebecca and her screen lover in an openmouthed kiss. “I go to a movie and see Rebecca doing a love scene with another guy, telling him that she loves him. I’m always facing my fears,” he admitted at the time.

Behind the scenes, the movie was suffering from competing egos—Neil Simon refused to countenance changes to his
script, and director Hal Ashby was fired for drug abuse. For Rebecca, still learning her craft, her role as singer and actress was too far a stretch. As her costar Michael O’Keefe recalls, “She was in a bit over her head.” A long-distance relationship between two ambitious actors on the brink of stardom was also too far a stretch. The parting of the ways was, as an actress friend of Rebecca explained, “a very unpleasant experience for her. She didn’t really want to talk about it. It was very abrupt.”