Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (7 page)

His enthusiasm and dedication to his chosen career were such that he decided to miss his high-school graduation ceremony in June 1980 rather than drop out of a
Godspell
performance. Later he attributed his absence from the ceremony to embarrassment about his dyslexia: “I graduated in 1980 but didn’t even go to my graduation,” he said. “I was a functional illiterate. I loved learning, I wanted to learn, but I knew I had failed in the system.”

As is often the case, the memories of his contemporaries vary from his own recollections. When he was appearing in
Godspell,
he told numerous friends that he was prepared to skip the ceremony to appear in the show. His friend Lorraine Gauli told him that he was mad to miss this undoubted highlight of the school calendar. He shrugged and smiled, but later she realized that he possessed a quality that she lacked—a burning ambition to succeed and a willingness to sacrifice short-term enjoyment to achieve that goal. As Phil Travisano, who went to see him in the show, recalls, “He was dedicated and so excited about acting that he was prepared to miss the fun of graduation.” So as the names of the graduating students were read out on the lawns of Glen Ridge High, he was pursuing his dream in a different kind of ceremony: singing, dancing, and rousing the audience with songs and stories that popularized the Christian gospels. “Did you like it? Was I good?” he eagerly asked his new girlfriend, Diane Van Zoeren, when she and her mother came to the show. He visibly preened as he accepted her complimentary verdict.

As the senior class celebrated the end of school, there were
endless graduation parties thrown by the parents of departing classmates. That summer, Tom, beer in hand, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, was a familiar fixture at numerous gatherings. At one party Sam LaForte asked Tom about his future plans. His reply was as forthright as it was revealing: “Sam, I am going to New York and I am going to be a star.”

It was the perfect night for romance. Hand in hand, Tom Cruise and Diane Van Zoeren walked along the beach, watching the waves shimmer in the moonlight as they rolled along the New Jersey shoreline. When they paused by a lifeguard stand, it was clear that Tom was not in the mood to whisper sweet nothings. He was more concerned that he
had
nothing—no money, no job, and no contacts. That night in the summer of 1980, just a few weeks after leaving Glen Ridge High School, eighteen-year-old Tom felt vulnerable and frustrated, barely able to hold back his tears as he poured out his fears to his sweetheart.

Rich in ambition—he told Diane he would give himself ten years to succeed as an actor; otherwise he would train as an airline pilot—he was dirt poor financially. Money—or rather the lack of it—had always been a nagging issue in his life. Now it was more pressing than ever. He often talked about being a self-made millionaire by the time he was thirty, and had a standing bet with his great friend Michael LaForte that the first one to earn a million dollars would buy the other a Mercedes. It was a bet he never honored, a failing that still rankles with some members of the Glen Ridge Brat Pack.

On the beach at Lavallette, a popular New Jersey resort, that night, it was not the idea of future millions that consumed his thoughts, but scraping together enough cash to rent an apartment in New York. With his agent, Tobe Gibson,
based in Manhattan, he reasoned that he needed to be in the city so that he would be easily available for auditions and acting classes. But more than just money was worrying him. Even though he had an agent, Tom was concerned that he didn’t have the experience or wider contacts in the film industry to make it big as quickly as he would like. The confidence he had shown after his school success in
Guys and Dolls
seemed to be evaporating.

When the couple returned from Lavallette, Tom made do with the resources at hand. For part of the summer of 1980, he commuted into Manhattan from the family home in Glen Ridge. He was a familiar figure in his dirty green Ford Pinto, rarely parted from a ratty T-shirt that read:
EYEING ICE COLD GIRL
. If his own car was out of commission, he borrowed his mother’s or asked Diane Van Zoeren or his actress friend Lorraine Gauli, who lived around the corner, to give him a ride. If he had an early audition, he spent the night on the couch in the living room of Tobe Gibson’s Sixty-second Street apartment. Tobe’s daughters, Amy and Babydol, were amazed at her enthusiasm for a young man they thought was “nothing special.” At least not in the looks department. They concentrated on the superficial—his rather lumpy, stocky physique and inoffensively polite demeanor—and missed their mother’s instinctive feel for his nascent star quality.

After a day in the city, he would regularly take the commuter bus to Glen Ridge, sometimes bumping into neighbors and old school friends at the Port Authority bus station. Curiously, Tom’s version of events is much more exotic. He later claimed that he had so little money that he would often walk to the Holland Tunnel, which takes traffic under the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. In those days, whores offered sex to commuters on their way home. “There were prostitutes, who used to be around the tunnel, who knew me,” he told writer Dotson Rader. “They’d see me and they’d go, ‘Look, I’ll pick up a john, and you jump in.’ So I’d ride through the tunnel to New Jersey. The driver’s a little like, ‘What’s this guy doing in the backseat?’ but he saw I’m just this eighteen-year-old kid. I didn’t look dangerous. And
they didn’t do anything sexual in front of me. I’d get out in New Jersey and say, ‘Thank you very much.’ Then I’d hitchhike home.”

This extraordinary story seems as implausible as it is impractical. Why would a hooker risk a trick so that a teenage boy could hitch a free ride through the Holland Tunnel? And why would a nervous driver, worried about being stiffed or mugged, allow him to get in his car in the first place? Unsurprisingly, Diane Van Zoeren has no memory of this unusual method of transportation. “Tom borrowed his mother’s car, but I don’t recall him hitchhiking or catching rides with hookers,” she said.

At some point during the summer, Tom very reluctantly swallowed his pride and asked his stepfather, Jack South, for a loan to help pay his rent and expenses in Manhattan while he got a professional toehold in the city. “How much is this going to cost me?” his stepfather asked warily when Tom outlined his vision of his future. He borrowed around $850, which he agreed to pay off on an informal installment plan. While the incident has now become a standing family joke, at the time Diane Van Zoeren recalls that Tom was loath to ask his “intimidating” stepfather for anything. He wanted to make it on his own and did not wish to be beholden to the rather grudging largesse of a man he frequently clashed with.

With money in his pocket, he found a small apartment on the Upper West Side, which he shared with a fellow struggling actor. To supplement the loan from his stepfather, he worked as a porter and cleaner in his new apartment building, got a part-time job busing tables at the now-defunct Mortimer’s restaurant, and spent the summer unloading trucks. It was a time of transformation. “He lost that dorky look,” recalls Diane. “He was running and working out. Quite frankly, he was adorable.” One of her favorite memories of that time is a fun shot of Tom taken during one of the weekends they spent in Lavallette. Bare-chested to show his “cut” physique, a beer in hand, he and a friend covered their faces in shaving cream before the picture was taken.

At that time, though, he saw himself and his life in much
darker shades. During his days in Manhattan that summer, he recalled how he fed hungrily off cheap hot dogs and rice, living, as he later recalled, “like an animal in the jungle.” Albeit a jungle animal who went home on weekends for his mother’s roast chicken dinners. Indeed, as jungle lairs go, his apartment on the Upper West Side was rather “neat and tidy,” the romantic youngster making sure there were flowers in the room and strawberries and cream waiting in the refrigerator when Diane visited.

All his animal instincts were focused on capturing a career in the movies. When he could afford it, he attended half a dozen or so evening classes run by veteran actor Phil Gushee at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre on Fifty-fourth Street. Not that his agent thought it was money well spent. In Tobe Gibson’s eyes, Tom was a natural talent who could be spoiled by the shaping and molding of an acting studio. It was a view shared by his friend Lorraine Gauli, who recognized, albeit reluctantly, that his raw ability and passion far outstripped her own theatrical talent. When he came to her house one day to practice a scene from David Mamet’s play
American Buffalo
, she was struck by how natural and instinctive was his acting. “This kid was innately good. He didn’t need any method or training,” she recalls. In fact, he was highly critical of her own decision to take the conventional route and sign up for a three-year course at a New York acting school. He felt she should follow his lead and audition for stage and screen roles immediately. The single-minded young man believed he could pick up acting experience on the hoof.

Even those friends who did not have a background in drama could see the talent bursting forth. One weekend back in Glen Ridge, he stood with his friend Vinnie Travisano in the hallway of his family home, trading lines from the 1980 hit movie
Raging Bull.
“He got so emotional and into the moment, you could see that this was his calling,” recalled Vinnie. “It was amazing.”

Having given himself ten years to become king of the acting jungle, he was already making a noise in that wild world
within ten weeks. “From the minute he started to audition he was a hit,” Tobe Gibson recalls. He snagged a part in a commercial for Hershey’s chocolate and received callbacks for several other TV commercials. Intense and dedicated, he explored every avenue to gain an advantage over all the other hopefuls in search of stardom. For a time he took guitar lessons from Laura Davies, a Glen Ridge High School musician, to give him a better chance of snagging a part in a TV version of the hit movie
Fame
. The show’s producers were holding auditions in Hollywood, and Tobe managed to get Tom’s name added to a very long list of hopefuls. Somehow he scraped the money together for the flight from New York to Los Angeles, packed a bag, and embarked on a journey that gave him the opportunity to experience firsthand the indifferent, offhanded reality of the industry he was determined to conquer.

The experience left the East Coast boy somewhat perplexed. He arrived at the director’s office and proceeded to give, as he later recalled, a “terrible” reading. When the director asked him how long he intended to stay in town, the young actor, thinking he might get called back to read again, said that he was there for a couple of days. “Good, get a tan while you’re here,” came the reply, and he was promptly shown the door. As he later recalled: “I walked out and thought it was the funniest thing. Tears were coming out of my eyes. I was laughing so hard, I thought, ‘This is Hollywood. Welcome, Cruise.’ ” Given his raw ambition and intense, rather humorless character, it is hard to reconcile his later glib recollection with the likely reality: all those days of hopeful guitar practice and rehearsals dashed in an unforgiving minute.

Certainly one person who wasn’t laughing was his girlfriend, Diane Van Zoeren, who phoned him for two days straight without any response. She only later discovered that he had teamed up with a couple of other acting hopefuls and spent forty-eight hours trying his luck at the gaming tables of Las Vegas.

While he hadn’t made the grade for the
Fame
TV show, Tobe secured him an audition for a walk-on role in
Endless
Love,
a story of teenage passion and obsession starring Brooke Shields. Tobe had to use all her negotiating skills to get him in to see the director, Franco Zeffirelli. The film’s casting agent, Sally Dennison, wanted a taller, slimmer character for the part of a high-school football player, but Tobe convinced her at least to look at her protégé, who she admitted had the look of a stocky wrestler.

Before he left for the audition, Tobe reminded him of the golden rules for a young actor. At the first meeting, always say thank you, keep eye contact, and arrive fresh and full of enthusiasm. If you get a part, watch the director’s every move on set and never party before the filming is finished. Her words fell on deaf ears. Tom later admitted that he had committed the cardinal sin of drinking heavily the night before his audition and arrived with a hangover. Eventually he was asked to deliver lines from
Romeo and Juliet
and walk up and down the room, presumably to give the director a sense of his screen presence. For someone so passionate and committed to his craft, his confession that he drank too much before his first big opportunity seems strange. Was it nerves, bravado, or the exaggeration of hindsight?

Hangover or no, Tom won for himself the tiny part of Billy, while another of Tobe’s clients, Sean Gauli, the kid brother of Tom’s actress friend Lorraine, also snagged a “blink and you’d miss it” role. Filming was in Chicago in the fall of 1980, and before he boarded the plane, his mother made sure her young lion was properly attired—taking him shopping for T-shirts, shorts, and fresh underwear. It was a necessary precaution, as his first screen character is notable more for the tiny Daisy Duke shorts he wore during the filming of a soccer kickabout than for any lines he delivered. His role, such as it was, called for him to take off his undershirt before chatting to the lead character, David. During their brief conversation he whimsically suggests that David should set fire to his girlfriend’s family home, a suggestion that has tragic consequences for the star-crossed lovers.

While Tom was a lifelong film fan, he was a novice when
it came to the mechanics of making a movie. Once he got on the set, he started to realize what a technical process it was. As he later recalled, he spent as much time worrying about camera angles and hitting his marks as about the handful of lines he had to deliver. Even though the film earned lukewarm or downright hostile reviews, Tom was thrilled with the whole experience. While on the set in Chicago, he made a fleeting background appearance in a
60 Minutes
TV documentary about the film’s director, Franco Zeffirelli. When it aired, he was literally jumping up and down on the sofa with excitement as he, his girlfriend, and family watched his first appearance on the small screen. It was a precursor of a rather more public performance some twenty-five years later.