Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (23 page)

In the beginning of their marriage, Nicole had made a major effort to be at his side, offering support, even when it was not needed. Now it was Tom who was making an effort to be at her side, going out of his way to be supportive of her career. People who witnessed his public displays of support and affection toward Nicole sometimes marveled at his dedication to a marriage that Nicole seemed to take for granted.

When he became a producer on
The Others
, he insisted that Nicole be given the starring role. That, in itself, was no big deal because everyone associated with the film thought she would be perfect for the part.

Tom has always insisted that that casting decision was purely professional, but skeptics might be forgiven for suggesting that it had a personal element as well. Had Nicole not been cast, she surely would have accepted an offer for another film, a decision that would have left Tom alone and isolated in Spain. Besides, he had learned early in the marriage that the best way to keep Nicole happy was to keep her working.

The Others
was written and directed by Alejandro Amenabar, a Chilean-born filmmaker who fled to Spain in 1973 with his family on the eve of a military coup-de-etat. He made his first film in 1992 and quickly gained a reputation as one of Spain’s hottest new directors and screenwriters. Tom liked his work very much and thought they had a future together.

  Nicole was asked to play the part of Grace Stewart, an eccentric mother of two children who lives in a darkened old house located far out in the countryside. When Nicole arrived in Spain and realized that she would be playing a mother who had obsessive thoughts about her children (she had not read the script beforehand), she became distraught and tried to back out of being in the film. After a week of going back and forth with Tom and the director, she realized they were not going to release her from the film and she agreed to stay. However, by that time, she was so worked up emotionally that she was in character to play the part. All it took to complete the characterization was a pair of old-lady lace-up shoes. 

The movie begins with Grace screaming in bed, obviously the recipient of a bad dream. Her skin is very pale and there is something about her that telegraphs trouble.

After her servants mysteriously disappear, Grace places an ad in the local newspaper for new employees. To her surprise, three would-be servants appear at her front door looking for work. Grace assumes they have come in response to the newspaper ad, but, as it turns out, the postman never picked up the letter containing the information for the ad. They have arrived quite by chance.

Grace hires them on the spot. As she shows them about the house, she says, “You’ll notice what I’m doing,” at which point she closes a door. “No door must be opened without the previous one being closed first . . . There are fifteen different keys for all of the fifty doors, depending on which area of the house you are in at the time.”

She explains that there is no radio, no electricity, no telephone. “Silence is something we pride in this house.” In a roundabout way she explains to the servants that her two children are light sensitive and must be kept in the dark at all times. A single ray of sunshine could have a deadly effect on them.

As the story progresses, the little girl says she hears voices, the ramblings of a little boy named Victor. Soon after that, Grace begins to hear voices. “There is something in this house,” she says. “Something diabolic. Something that is not at rest.”

The housekeeper offers an explanation of her own: “Sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living.” Horrified by that thought, Grace tells the housekeeper that the Lord would never allow such a thing to happen.

Finally, Grace decides to go seek help from a priest in dealing with what she perceives to be demon-related problem. In the fog, she runs into her missing husband (who was killed in the war). She takes him back to the house and introduces him to the housekeeper. Gradually, it becomes apparent the servants know something everyone else doesn’t know.

Soon it becomes clear that Grace has issues with her husband over him going off to war. They make love and when she awakens, she discovers that he has disappeared and presumably taken all the curtains in the house with him. Emboldened by the incident—and determined to protect her children—Grace wanders about the house with a loaded shotgun, ready to shoot anything that seems out of place.

From that point on, the story assumes a bone-chilling clarity that makes everything suddenly make sense. No one is who he or she appears to be and nothing that seemed certain remains so for long. There is, indeed, a mystery associated with the house. Although the unsettling story appears to end well, it is not without Hickcockian harbingers of doom.

  Nicole delivered a breathtaking performance, the full extent of which was not apparent until the movie ended. How odd it was that Tom would choose this story for Nicole. In its own way, it seemed to mirror their marriage, down to the smallest detail. Both Grace and Nicole had two children they sought to protect from “outside” influences, both lived in a household that was never what it seemed, both had a difficult time holding onto servants, both were fastidious about the smallest of details, and both had husbands whose roles in their lives was in question.

Was art imitating life, or was life imitating art? Would Nicole, like Grace, end up raising her two children alone? Had Tom finally proved to Nicole that he was the better actor?

Chapter 9

After ten years of marriage, Hollywood’s power-glam couple was in trouble, but friends and work associates saw only the glossy exterior they presented to the outside world. They saw Nicole holding Tom’s hand and clinging to him in public (when reporters were present he continued to lean over to whisper into her ear, talking her down from her frequent panic attacks), and they saw Tom showing up on her movie sets, glad-handing her associates and praising his wife’s acting abilities.

Of course, marriages don’t suddenly go bad, not the way milk with last week’s expiration date does.  It takes a series of events over a long period of time. The earliest sign that Tom and Nicole’s marriage might be in trouble was also a sign that some people interpreted as a sign of strength: their adoption of two children.

Seasoned adoption workers know that one of the most common reasons couples decide to adopt is to bolster a shaky marriage. In such cases, couples view children as a means of cementing a fragile emotional bond or compensating for an inadequate sexual relationship. Social workers can usually weed those couples out in quick order.

For couples with low or moderate incomes, that is usually the end of the story. They eventually separate and divorce, and hopefully find more compatible partners the second time around. For wealthy couples, however, there is a way to skirt the scrutiny of social workers: They can hire attorneys and pursue private adoptions that can be shielded from the prying eyes of social agencies.

None of this is to suggest that Tom and Nicole had ulterior reasons for adopting children (couples who apply for children are seldom aware of their reasons for doing so). Tom and Nicole both longed for a family and they have proved to be exemplary parents. However, professional social workers, given an opportunity, would have spotted the problems in their marriage, even at that very early stage.

In retrospect, signs of marital problems were plentiful. Over the years, perhaps disappointed by her “Mrs. Tom Cruise” label, Nicole spoke, publicly at least, less and less about her husband, while he seemed to toss her name about with greater frequency. It was like a dance: she withdrew, he charged ahead, overcompensating.

When
Days of Thunder
and
Far and Away
did poorly at the box office, it killed any dreams they had of becoming Hollywood’s newest Bogart and Bacall incarnation, which meant that they had to pursue separate career opportunities. For two actors whose careers had been built on sex appeal (Tom’s more so than Nicole’s), that opened the door for temptations and frustrations of a magnitude seldom experienced by ordinary married couples.

For Tom and Nicole, the previous year and a half had been a nightmare. The Kubrick adventure—or was it more of an experiment?—opened the door to a wide range of insecurities in their personal lives. Tom had no idea that his friend the director and Nicole had filmed such sexually explicit scenes; it was not until he saw the finished product that he asked about Gary Goba’s role in the film. More than anyone else, he could see the chemistry between Nicole and Goba; it was a chemistry he did not see in his own scenes with her.

For Nicole to step so quickly from
Eyes Wide Shut
into
The Blue Room
, which featured on-stage nudity of a explicitness seldom engaged in even by professional strippers, demonstrated, more than anything else, how emotionally and sexually needy she was. All of that was followed by Nicole’s embarrassing encounter with the
Esquire
writer, then with rumors of an affair between Nicole and Ewan McGregor. Was Nicole sending Tom a message? Or was she self-medicating her deepest inner needs?        

On December 24, 2000, Tom and Nicole celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in Los Angeles with a small group of friends, away from the prying eyes of the media. Shortly thereafter, Tom returned to New York, where he was filming
Vanilla Sky
, with Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, and Kurt Russell. Written by Alejandro Amenabar, who had directed and written
The Others
, the film was being directed by Cameron Crowe, who also had directed Tom in
Jerry Maguire.

 Early in February 2001, Nicole and Tom separated. It happened quickly. Like awakening from a bad dream and stumbling into the light of day. Tom had been sleeping on a sofa in the screening room for several days and one day, while Nicole was away from their Pacific Palisades home, he backed a moving van up to door and loaded all of his personal possessions.

When it became apparent that the
National Enquirer
was going to print a story about their marital problems, Tom and Nicole issued a press release on February 5 that officially announced the split and blamed their difficulties on “divergent careers which constantly kept them apart.” The day before the announcement, Tom gathered the cast of
Vanilla Sky
around him and broke the news to them himself.

The breakup of Hollywood’s most glamorous power-couple was big news around the country, but especially in Los Angeles, where rumors about their marriage had circulated for years. Almost immediately, reports were published that linked Tom to Penelope Cruz, his love interest in
Vanilla Sky;
other reports linked Nicole to Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, and her former boyfriend Marcus Graham.

USA Today
reported that it was Nicole who initiated the split. Citing sources close to the couple, the
National Enquirer
reported that Tom dumped Nicole because she had cheated on him. Others still blamed the problem on Nicole’s refusal to embrace Scientology. The media didn’t know about the secret sex scenes in
Eyes Wide Shut
or that would have been offered as an explanation as well.

Nicole was two weeks into filming a suspense movie,
The Panic Room
, at the time of the separation and withdrew from the film, citing a new injury to the knee she hurt while making
Moulin Rouge.
Director David Fincher quickly replaced her with Jody Foster, who, in turn, had to withdraw from her position as president of Cannes International Film Festival. Foster said she was “mortified” at letting down festival organizers and she expressed hope they would understand.   

 No sooner had the dust settled on the separation, than Tom dropped a bombshell. He filed for divorce on February 7, citing—what else?—irreconcilable differences. He requested joint custody of their two children, Bella, who was eight, and Connor, who was six. Apparently, Nicole was just as surprised as everyone else, especially at the date Tom established as the date of separation—early-to-mid December 2000, just shy of ten years marriage. In court papers, Nicole challenged the date of separation, stating that they had been intimate during the balance of December and well into the new year.

Then she dropped a bombshell of her own: she had become pregnant with Tom’s child during that time and had suffered a subsequent miscarriage on March 15. Perhaps anticipating a denial of paternity, she asked doctors to keep DNA samples of the fetus so that she could prove that Tom was the father.

Nicole further stated in court papers that she had protested Tom’s intention to dissolve the marriage and had “urged him not to leave but to enter marriage counseling with her or to take other steps to address whatever problems may have existed in their marriage relationship. [Tom] said his decision was final, and he departed the parties’ home.”

In her response to Tom’s lawsuit, Nicole insisted on face-to-face meetings with Tom and said that his request for joint custody was “contingent upon [his] agreement to communicate, consult, and—from time to time—meet directly with [Nicole] as to all important issues affecting the children’s general welfare.” She also stated her interest in living with the children primarily at her home in Sydney or “elsewhere in the United States.”

News of a miscarriage only whetted the appetite of the news media. Tom had been sexually active for almost two decades and had gone through two marriages, all without ever fathering a child. Was it within the bounds of reason that he would suddenly do so in the final weeks of his marriage with Nicole? There was speculation that someone other than Tom had fathered the baby. Why, skeptics argued, would Tom divorce Nicole if she was carrying his child? 

Ewan McGregor was so concerned about the finger pointing revolving around the miscarriage and breakup that he issued a statement denying that he had ever had an affair with Nicole: “I don’t know anything about it—it wasn’t anything to do with me.” The other men identified as possible lovers, George Clooney and Marcus Graham, issued similar statements describing the rumors as nonsense.

News reports described Nicole as being shattered by the divorce, distraught enough to lose the baby. Reported the
Star
: “She had tried all these years to get pregnant by Tom and when she finally manages to, he is not here for her. She has absolutely no doubt that it was his treatment of her that caused her to lose the baby. She was up crying night after night after night. She was a complete emotional wreck.”

Tom’s response to the miscarriage and divorce was markedly different. When news of the miscarriage reached him, he reacted “coolly,” according to
People
magazine, which also reported him telling a friend that, “Nic knows exactly why we are getting a divorce. But she’s the mother of our children and I wish her well.”

Immediately after Nicole informed her family about her marital problems, her sister, Antonia, and her mother, Janelle, flew to Los Angeles to be with Nicole and the children. Janelle’s choice of therapy for her daughter was to encourage her to paint. She set an easel up next to a pair of French windows where the light cascaded into the house and she showed her how to work with color on canvas. Nicole quickly learned that she had absolutely no talent as an artist, but just as her mother promised, she found the exercise relaxing.

Antony stayed behind in Australia, but he spoke to Nicole often on the telephone, giving her, we must presume, the advice he offers in his books. “Another myth that keeps coming up in connection with suggested divorce is the belief that because two people once enjoyed life together, there must be a basis for reconciliation,” Antony wrote in
Family Life: Adapting to Change.
“This is always worthy of consideration, but to feel that people who were once happy together can inevitably, with sufficient effort, reestablish marital bliss is often unrealistic. Interests, attitudes, activities and goals of people change. To assume that every boy and girl who married in the spring of a youthful romance at twenty-one will find life delightful and interesting together at age forty-one is to believe in fairy tales and magic.”

 If there was one thing that Nicole no longer believed in, it was fairy tales and magic. Thanks to the emotional support she received from her sister and mother, and thanks to the no-nonssense advice she received from her psychologist dad, she was able to rebound from the initial trauma with an attitude that one magazine described as a “textbook example of how to handle a personal crisis.”

Nicole dropped her efforts for reconciliation and focused instead on her children, her career, and her ongoing battle with Tom over how their estimated $250 million estate would be divided up. Tom wasted no time going after the lion’s share of the estate and the ferocity of his lawyers’ demands at first caught Nicole off guard. She bounced back quickly, however, and hired estate-hungry lawyers of her own.

Los Angles observers saw the divorce as shaping up to be the celebrity legal battle of the century. Some commentators wondered if the “secrets” of the marriage would somehow slip through the publicity that the couple had in place and find their way into court documents. If so, they would be disappointed, for lawyers on both sides were given strict orders to keep Nicole and Tom out of the headlines.

Nicole told the
Sydney Morning Herald
that news coverage of her divorce was very “upsetting” and “invasive” during a period she described as the toughest time of her life. “I understand that people are interested, but it’s my life—my personal life,” she said. “It’s very difficult seeing your life being dragged through the newspapers and the tabloids and your children being dragged through it.”

Along with Nicole’s name was dragged another name—Penelope Cruz, Tom’s love interest in
Vanilla Sky.
Nicole didn’t know what to think. Tom denied any involvement with her, but the rumors had just enough credibility in them to make Nicole suspicious. In her own mind, Penelope was the reason for the divorce, at least that’s what she confided to friends.

The situation was not helped by a “Legends of Hollywood”
Vanity Fair
over story. For the cover, photographer Annie Leibovitz shot a group portrait that included, in addition to Nicole, Vanessa Redgrave, Sophia Loren, Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Catherine Deneuve, Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Chloe Sevigny, and—horror of horrors—Penelope Cruz, though why Penelope was chosen was a mystery since her Hollywood presence was almost non-existent.