Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (12 page)

When she did speak publicly about the breakup, she admitted that it was a painful experience. “We were both ambitious and hardworking. I’m afraid the ending was not very amicable.” Her reasons touched on the clash of egos underlying the amicable public façade. “There’s the potential threat of competition, there’s a continual threat of long separations, of major love scenes, of adverse publicity, and the transitory nature of the business itself.” Tom was much more pragmatic and stern. “When something is not working, you have to face it and move on.”

Move on he did, trading the up-and-coming for an established Hollywood star. At thirty-nine, his new girlfriend, Cher, was nearer in age to his mother than to the twenty-three-year-old actor, but she was 24-carat movie royalty, their outings guaranteed to make headlines and keep Tom’s name in the news. As a sign of how far and how fast he had traveled, he met Cher at a fund-raising event for dyslexia at the White House in the presence of First Lady Nancy Reagan. Tom, Cher, and Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, among others, were presented with an award for Outstanding Learning Disabled Achievement. Both Cher and Tom had experienced learning difficulties caused by dyslexia. While Tom was diagnosed early, Cher learned that her problems in reading, telling time, and writing checks were caused by dyslexia only after her daughter, Chastity, had been diagnosed with the condition.

“If I read a script, I read it very slowly and memorized it the first time I read it,” she told the White House audience, which included youngsters from the Lab School, which helps students cope with learning difficulties. Tom admitted that he
had a dictionary by his side to help him read scripts. “I couldn’t read
The New York Times
because I couldn’t read the big words,” he has said. “It was humiliating for me. When I started working on films, I had to buy a dictionary. I started out with the
Young Reader’s Dictionary
and worked my way up to bigger dictionaries. I’d sit on an airplane with a script and a dictionary.”

While their perceived mutual disability helped break the social ice, Tom’s rising star and Cher’s existing place in the Hollywood firmament also drew them together. Cher, who was known for dating younger men before it became fashionable, was instantly attracted to the young actor. His yearlong sojourn in London had brought one benefit—he had lost the preppy, pudgy
Risky Business
persona and had honed and toned his body from his role in
Legend.
“I can’t take my eyes off the guy,” Cher told an associate admiringly. “He’s so damn handsome, all I want to do is stare at him.” They dated off and on for a few months, becoming regular gossip column fodder. Of course, it didn’t hurt that both Tom and Cher had films to promote in 1985. Her second major feature,
The Mask,
a true-life drama about a disfigured teenager growing up in Southern California, cemented the singer’s growing reputation as a serious actress.

Even though the age difference meant that neither side really took the relationship that seriously—Cher’s daughter, Chastity, was only eight years younger than Tom—they liked hanging out together. “Cher is funny and bright and we’re good buddies and that’s it,” he told
People
magazine. He stayed with her in her Malibu home, and when Cher visited New York she often stayed at his apartment, whether or not he was in residence. In fact, Chastity was staying at Tom’s apartment when she made the most painful phone call of her life. A lonely, troubled child, she confessed to her father, Sonny Bono, that not only was she a lesbian, but she had been having an affair with a friend of her mother’s who was also gay. Cher was furious and ordered her to leave Tom’s apartment and see a therapist. “Mum did not comfort me with kisses and cuddles, because it was not the family
way,” she later recalled. “Instead, she sent me to a therapist.” It took Cher nearly a decade to come to terms with her daughter’s sexuality. “It’s a difficult thing for a parent,” she said later. “It’s one thing to be completely liberal when it doesn’t affect you. When it does, you really have to search your soul long and hard.” It seems that Tom, who had his own issues with homosexuality, played little part in this family drama other than giving Chastity shelter in his New York home. Certainly she always got on well with her mother’s younger boyfriends. “It doesn’t matter to me if they’re closer to my age than hers,” she said.

When he was out on a date with Cher in New York one night, there was a poignant reminder of Tom’s past. They were dining at a restaurant called Fiorella’s on Sixtieth and Third. By chance their waitress was Lorraine Gauli, his friend from Glen Ridge. When he had first arrived at the high school, she was a TV personality and seemingly destined for fame and fortune. After drama school, her acting career had petered out into a sad procession of failed auditions and screen tests. Now the woman who had encouraged him to try his hand at acting faced the indignity of serving as waitress to her protégé. “I was so humiliated,” she recalls. “I had told everyone he was a friend of mine, and here I was waiting tables.”

In the circumstances it would have been easy for him to ignore his onetime helpmate, but he introduced her to Cher and made pleasant small talk. He had made it, she hadn’t: He could afford to be Mr. Nice Guy. It was an episode that symbolized how far and how quickly he had come. Tom had closed the chapter on his past life and opened another book where he was finally in control of his destiny. One that had “success” embossed on the cover.

That may have been how others saw him, but he had a different view. Beneath the cocky, self-assured persona was a young man not entirely comfortable with his newfound fame. In media interviews he was stiff and overly serious, endlessly talking about his “craft.” He found the attention of the public, particularly his growing teen fan base, disconcerting. Just as he had walked out of a restaurant in Florida with old flame
Nancy Armel because he was being stared at, so in a New York eatery, Serendipity 3, he generously overtipped a waiter who asked a quartet of teenage girls to stop gawking at him. At his Upper West Side apartment he played detective when he noticed that he was being spied on from an adjoining block by someone using binoculars. After confronting the startled apartment owner, he discovered that the spies were the man’s teenage daughters and their friends.

As when looking at a painting close up, he was not yet truly aware of his place in the bigger picture. His only fixed references were his contemporaries. By his standards, the class of ’82, the group of young actors who’d appeared with him in his first movie,
Taps,
were all doing just as well—none more so than his wayward friend Sean Penn. While Tom was seemingly making excuses for dating Cher, in January 1985 his buddy met Madonna and fell for the controversial charms of the hottest female in showbiz. With a critically acclaimed movie,
Desperately Seeking Susan,
to her name and a second album,
Like a Virgin,
that outraged the establishment and delighted her teenage audience, she was a startling and unique talent.

Artistically, the career trajectory of his contemporaries should have given him pause for reflection. His friend Tim Hutton, who up to that time was the youngest-ever Oscar winner for his work in
Ordinary People,
had chosen to embrace serious projects, pointedly turning down the lead role in
Risky Business,
the film that jump-started Tom’s career, as too lightweight. Although Tom won a coveted Golden Globe nomination for the role of Joel Goodsen, his appearance in
Legend
would have raised eyebrows among his Hollywood peers. While the sets and special effects were extraordinary, the script was laughable—as was Tom mouthing lines like “When I get to heaven I know just how the angels will sound.” Meanwhile, Sean Penn and Tim Hutton were working together on
The Falcon and the Snowman,
a stern movie about two young men who are convicted of selling secrets to the Russians. “Two finer performances it would be difficult to find,” said
People
magazine when the film was released in January 1985.

After
Legend,
released in the same year, sank without a trace, Tom and agent Paula Wagner were determined to choose his future projects more carefully. His two bombs—
Losin’ It
and
Legend
—had struck out because of poorly scripted stories. While there were all kinds of offers on the table, the knack of choosing the right script was ultimately a lottery. As screenwriter William Goldman observed, the first rule of Hollywood is “Nobody knows anything.”

This truism perhaps helps explain why the gestation period of the average movie is so long. In May 1983, when Tom was learning his lines for
Risky Business,
producer Jerry Bruckheimer was in his offices at Paramount Studios, absorbed in an article in
California
magazine called “Top Guns,” by Ehud Yonay, about the flight school for the U.S. Navy’s best pilots in San Diego. “
Star Wars
on earth,” he thought to himself as he slid it over the desk to his producing partner, Don Simpson. Simpson was on the phone, and when he glanced at the upside-down story that Bruckheimer put in front of him, he waved it away, thinking it was a “Western.” By the time he’d read it, the two hotshots behind the smash hits
Flashdance
and
Beverly Hills Cop
had a new blockbuster in mind:
Top Gun.

In a way, Simpson’s first instincts were exactly right. It
was
a Western; these sexy young pilots were modern-day cowboys with wild names like Viper, Jaws, and Mad Dog, who pushed the edge of life’s frontiers with their testosterone-fueled behavior. For all their arrogant swagger, the young men in their flying machines lived by an old-fashioned code of self-sacrifice, comradeship, and patriotism. It seemed like a slam dunk. “It’s about Yankee individualism, nobility, excellence of purpose, and commitment to excellence,” Simpson explained in his pitch to movie moguls as he tried valiantly to turn the concept into a movie.

The studios and many screenwriters thought otherwise. After some initial interest, Paramount Studios eventually told them, “Who wants to see a movie with too many planes?” Don Simpson was reduced to falling to his knees in a meeting with Paramount boss Michael Eisner and begging him to keep faith with the project. “If they are this desperate, we’ve
got to let them keep developing it,” said Eisner. But top screenwriters were not especially interested, and, according to screenwriter Jack Epps, after several drafts of the script, the film “just died.”

It was only at the end of 1984—eighteen months after the first discussions—that the new head of Paramount, Ned Tanen, green-lighted the project. They had a budget of $16.5 million to play with. First priority was to bring the navy on board. At a meeting with top brass, including then–Secretary of the Navy John Lehman at the Pentagon in Washington, they gained agreement to film at the navy air base in Miramar, outside San Diego, and on board two aircraft carriers. Mindful of the navy’s reputation, retired two-star admiral Pete Pettigrew was seconded as technical adviser to ensure authenticity.

Hollywood seemed less enthusiastic. The reluctance of screenwriters was followed by that of directors and actors. Apparently both John Carpenter and David Cronenberg turned down the chance to shoot the film, Simpson and Bruckheimer eventually opting for Tony Scott, brother of
Legend
director Ridley Scott, who was back shooting commercials after his debut feature movie,
The Hunger,
was roasted as “agonizingly bad.” His commercial showing a Saab car racing a fighter jet apparently caught the eye of the two producers. Of course, Simpson and Bruckheimer put a brave face on their choice, praising the director for his stylish photography, if not for his storytelling ability. Their pick did not seem to inspire confidence among actors or agents.

Breakfast Club
star Ally Sheedy turned down the romantic lead of Charlie, the female flying instructor eventually played by Kelly McGillis. “I didn’t think anyone would want to see a movie about fighter pilots,” she said later. A similar reaction came from actor Val Kilmer, who flatly refused a role and only reluctantly agreed to be involved—he eventually played the part of Iceman—after contractual arm-twisting.

Other stars rejected the lead role of Maverick, the cockily charismatic navy pilot who grows up during the movie—and gets the girl. Chisel-featured Matthew Modine, the star of
Birdy,
the story of the damage inflicted on homecoming soldiers by their Vietnam experience, did not like the film’s pro-war sentiments and passed on the lead role. He had just returned from a visit to East Berlin and discovered that the Russian soldiers were “just people.” The heartthrob from
Happy Days,
Scott Baio, said no, as did brooding bad boy Mickey Rourke. Charlie Sheen was considered, but, at only twenty, was thought to be too young, while John Travolta, an authentic pilot, was then seen as a failure at the box office. Finally, they hit on a young man with long hair fresh from the plastic forests of Pinewood, who, at five feet, seven inches, was an inch shorter than the minimum required height for a navy pilot. Rather disingenuously, Bruckheimer would later claim, “There was never anybody in our minds other than Tom Cruise. When the script was first delivered to our doorway, we saw Tom playing the part.”

At the time, even Tom Cruise was not wholly convinced. Like other actors, he was not sold on the film’s gung ho ethos, worried that it would be “
Flashdance
in the sky.” In any case, the actor, who had started his own production company, Kid Cruise, had other projects he was more interested in pursuing. But Simpson and Bruckheimer would not take no for an answer.

It was at this point that the myth of Tom Cruise and
Top Gun
was born. During a two-hour meeting with the two producers, he insisted that he would sign up only if he were involved in the whole production process. He wanted two months to develop the script, which meant that he would effectively be working gratis if there was no deal at the end. Simpson later recalled that Tom would show up at his house and they would grab a beer and spend five or six hours going through the script. “We had a lot of fun,” he said. As part of his hard-nosed deal, Tom secured the choice of his costars, oversaw director Tony Scott’s work on set, and was consulted during film editing. As Simpson recalled: “I was against it because I like to run things. To me, an actor is generally a hired hand. I like to be the boss. But we talked at great length, and he proved himself to us, and when he walked out of our
office, he shook our hands firmly and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m on-board.’ ” It seemed that the decision to let him become the first actor in their company to be involved in the whole production process was an indication of Tom’s ballsy self-confidence and artistic altruism, along with recognition of his as-yet-unseen talents as a cinematic wunderkind.