Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (10 page)

Coppola, whom Matt Dillon dubbed “Father Film,” pushed and stretched his young team in most idiosyncratic and unexpected ways. He encouraged Matt Dillon to go shoplifting and the have-not Greaser characters to mix with real-life greasers for a few days so that they would understand their characters more fully. To make himself fit the part, Tom worked out three times a day, removed the crown from a front tooth he had chipped during a schoolboy hockey game, piled powder into
his slicked-back hair, and had a tattoo painted on his arm so that he looked more rugged and unkempt.

But Coppola went even further. Away from the set, members of the upscale Socs were given better hotel rooms and larger daily allowances, while the have-not Greasers were assigned the shabbiest rooms and given measly expense accounts. Even their social lives differed, so that the Socs sipped cocktails at Tulsa’s glitzier clubs while the Greasers gulped down beer as they watched mud-wrestling matches. The differing treatment gave rise to tensions between the two groups, ill-feeling that spilled over during an overenthusiastic rehearsal for a rumble in the rain. Emilio Estevez got a cut lip, Tom Howell a shiner, and Tom Cruise a broken thumb. The rivalry continued away from the set. Tom joined in a series of pranks on fellow cast members to celebrate April Fools’ Day.

He is widely credited as being the one who smeared honey on Diane Lane’s toilet seat and scrawled “Helter Skelter”—a reference to the Charles Manson cult killers—on her bathroom mirror. As she later recalled: “They ransacked a couple of hotel rooms on April Fools’ Day. They got the keys from the maid because they were so cute.” Not everyone was amused by the actors’ antics, guests at the Excelsior Hotel, where the crew stayed, frequently complaining about the noise. On one memorable occasion Tom came up to the front desk, theatrically took out one of his false teeth, and dropped it on the desk in front of the assistant night manager—who calmly told him that they only accepted cash or credit cards.

At the end of filming, Coppola was impressed enough to offer Tom a small part in his next movie,
Rumble Fish,
the third of S. E. Hinton’s books to get the big-screen treatment. To Coppola’s surprise, the teenager turned down the opportunity to rub shoulders with actors of the caliber of Dennis Hopper and Mickey Rourke, as well as some of his colleagues from the cast of
The Outsiders.
Twenty years later, Cruise still remembers the look of incredulity on Coppola’s face as he found himself explaining that he was declining the chance to work with the director of
Apocalypse Now
to make a film about a suburban teenager who runs a brothel out of his home
while his parents are out of town for the weekend. “Here I am turning him down to do this movie about hookers,” he recalled, trading a bit part in an ensemble movie for a chance at solo glory.

Even so, it was a gamble. The movie, entitled
Risky Business,
was director Paul Brickman’s first film, and the budget was so low that the lead actors wore their own clothes on-screen, paid their own air fares, and stayed in cheap hotels. More than that, Brickman, who also wrote the script, was firmly against Tom’s participation. He had tentatively cast the male and female leads for his brainchild, and his provisional choices, Kevin Anderson and Megan Mullally, had already read with other potential cast members. Brickman felt that Tom, from what he had seen in
Taps,
was much too muscled and tough to play the soft-bodied, rather weak boy who finds himself in a sexual predicament rife with comic possibility.

Tom’s agent, Paula Wagner, heard differently. The Hollywood tom-toms were pounding out the news that whatever the views of novice director Paul Brickman, coproducers Steve Tisch and Jon Avnet were still having trouble casting the male lead. She took Tisch and Avnet for a steak lunch and organized a meeting between the young actor and the moneymen. “Tom stuck his head in the casting office, gave us the twenty-five-million-dollar smile, and that was pretty much it,” recalled Tisch.

When he took time from filming
The Outsiders
for a screen test, Tom was still tattooed and pumped up from his role. Even his famous smile was not quite at full wattage after removing the crown from his front tooth to make him look a more credible greaser. As he told writer Tom Shales, “I was like filthy, dirty, stunk, and my hair’s all greasy . . . and here I am explaining to Paul Brickman which way I’m going to go with the character in terms of losing the weight and what I would wear. So it’s pretty amazing that they cast me in the role.”

He was being much too modest. The way he took over the script reading, making slight changes to the dialogue, finding
the moment in a scene, left the watching director and producers deeply impressed. He had won over a tough audience. As he had to leave the following morning, he was asked to take a screen test with Rebecca De Mornay, a young actress they had considered and rejected because they were unsure she was up to playing a leading role. Before she snagged the role of the tart with the heart of gold, her screen-acting experience had been limited to one line—“Excuse me, those are my waffles”—in the box office bomb
One from the Heart,
directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

As there was no money in the wafer-thin budget for further screen tests, Tom and Rebecca drove to Tisch’s home and, with Avnet holding his own video camera, played six short scenes. Before shooting began, Tom washed the grease out of his hair, cleaned himself up, and put on a preppy, button-down shirt. At five in the morning when filming finished, the director and his coproducers knew they had their leading man and lady. Producer David Geffen was equally thrilled. In fact, he was so pleased with the handsome youngster that he had a copy of the videocassette made for himself, which he displayed in his office with the name “Tom Cruz” scrawled on the side. The producers had solved their casting problem—although Paula Wagner made them pay the full $75,000 asking fee for Tom’s services. It meant that Brickman’s contender for the lead role, Kevin Anderson, would have to make do with a secondary part.

Tom returned to Oklahoma penciled in for the role of Joel Goodsen, a conventional young man eager to explore his sexuality who finds himself running a brothel from his parents’ home. After he finished filming
The Outsiders,
he flew home to Glen Ridge for a couple of weeks before heading off to Florida, where he had asked his friend Michael LaForte, now in the Marine Corps, to help organize a training schedule so that he could sweat off the twelve pounds of muscle he had agreed he needed to lose to give his new persona the soft, preppy look of a middle-class teenager from the Chicago suburbs.

One day, while he was out jogging around Glen Ridge, he
bumped into his old flame Nancy Armel, who had by then realized her own dream and was working as a flight attendant for People Express. They started dating again, and one night he called her to say that he had tickets for a new musical on Broadway,
La Cage aux Folles.
Tom was unaware of the story line—about two gay men living together in St. Tropez, where one of them runs a nightclub featuring drag artists—until they had taken their seats in the theater. As Nancy recalled: “Men dressed as women, he couldn’t handle it. We had to leave before the intermission. It really bothered him. He was definitely homophobic.”

He was much more comfortable with the joshing male camaraderie that he found when he flew to Sarasota, Florida, with Michael LaForte to begin serious training for his second lead role. As fit as he was ferociously competitive, Michael was a down-to-earth man’s man with a robust sense of fun and an eye for pranks and mischief. He lived by the catchphrase “Life is a cabaret.” “When they were together after a long absence, they picked up like it was yesterday,” recalled Michael’s older brother Sam. “That’s the kind of relationship they had. Nobody put a spike in their friendship.”

Michael had the grace to make himself scarce in their Sarasota condo when Tom invited Nancy Armel to join him for a long weekend. While Tom worked out, she went to the beach or joined her friends at the bar. After a couple of years’ absence, she found him a changed person, more confident, rather smug but still pleasant to be around. Before he flew to Chicago to begin filming, his former school friends got the chance to catch up with Tom when he arrived for a beach party at Lavallette resort on the New Jersey coast. Wearing a beret at a rakish angle and what was described as a “Hollywood getup,” he left no one in any doubt that he felt he was doing them all a favor just by turning up.

But if the cool dude from the West Coast had meant to impress them, he signally failed. “He just looked silly,” recalled his old girlfriend Diane Van Zoeren. The dubious beret aside, he was confident, in control, and “on fire” with drive and ambition,
no longer the dorky high-school kid of two years before. He took himself very seriously indeed. At one point during the evening, he took his former girlfriend to one side and announced gravely, “I have taken Hollywood by the balls.”

For the self-confessed geek in school, the sudden transformation to cool dude seemed uncomfortable and confusing, his surface brashness possibly a way of coping with the spotlight. One evening he and Nancy left a restaurant prematurely because a fellow diner recognized him from his appearance in
Taps.
“Initially he found the attention somewhat overwhelming,” she recalls.

Ironically, it was his portrayal of another geek, Joel Goodsen, the suburban Nice Guy with an ambitiously anarchic streak, that was to propel Tom further into the limelight. When he first arrived on the set of
Risky Business
in Highland Park, Chicago, there was no indication that this movie was going to skyrocket his career. In fact, there was concern on the set that, even though he had lost the requisite twelve pounds in Florida, he was still too chubby to be a believable teen idol. Tom had such a sweet tooth that he had always worried about his weight. Such was his self-absorption that he often wondered out loud if other major actors ate as much candy as he did. “I bet Al Pacino [his all-time screen hero] doesn’t have a sweet tooth,” he told colleagues.

“He was on the phone endlessly discussing his diet with his agent,” recalls his screen mother, actress Janet Carroll. While she found him “attentive, gracious, and serious,” a young man who was prepared to listen and take direction, she had no inkling that she was watching the making of a megastar. “Absolutely not,” she recalls. “The movie launched many careers. He was in good company.” It was a cast that included not only Rebecca De Mornay, but also Bronson Pinchot and Curtis Armstrong.

Tom did apparently try to throw his weight around on set. In the early days of the shoot, the actor complained that he and Rebecca De Mornay were just not jelling on camera. When he told coproducer Steve Tisch that he felt she was
miscast, Tisch gave Tom short shrift, explaining that they thought she was doing a terrific job and had no intention of replacing her.

This episode did not particularly endear him to other cast members who, even twenty years later, have little praiseworthy to say. It seemed, at least to those who worked with him, that behind the polite “yes sir, no ma’am” veneer was a young man out to take social and professional advantage of every possible situation. A frequent comment was that he liked to expose the vulnerability in others and then crush them—perhaps reenacting his own father’s behavior toward the young Tom Cruise. “It was just put-down after put-down of everyone and everything,” observed a former colleague who described him as “bland as tofu but without the flavor.”

Yet that blandly disingenuous screen persona and his vulnerable sexuality struck a chord with the teenage audience, who flocked to see the witty, low-budget sleeper film that grossed more than $70 million. As thrilling for Tom was that his childhood idol, Steven Spielberg, took the trouble to send a letter congratulating him on his performance. “He’s the all-American everyboy,” observed director Paul Brickman. “He has an archetypal quality that makes audiences connect.”

The iconic moment in the film, much parodied, was when the actor, dressed in white socks and underpants, danced around his parents’ living room to Bob Seger’s song “Old Time Rock and Roll.” It was an ad-libbed scene that resonated both with the actor and his audience. “I loved it, because of course I’d done it myself. It was a moment I understood,” he told Cameron Crowe. Certainly his Glen Ridge friends remember him miming to music and running around their backyards in his underwear—in short, acting just like Joel Goodsen.

Unlike the real lives of teenagers, in the movie world the sexually frustrated boy does get the girl. In a dreamily erotic sequence, Joel has sex with Lana, his hooker girlfriend, on board a Chicago commuter train. While Tom and Rebecca were nervous before playing the scene, those who snuck onto the closed set are convinced that the answer to the question of “did they, didn’t they” really get it on on camera is a firm yes.
As Paul Brickman commented afterward, “It was hard to get them started, but it was harder to get them to stop.” By then the couple had chemistry both on and off the screen, spending all their time with each other and eventually living together. He made her Toll House cookies while she introduced him to Nicolas Roeg’s scary thriller
Don’t Look Now.
“He seemed to be looking for somebody to love and somebody to love him back,” Rebecca later recalled.

In a moment of social triumph, he returned for the last time to Glen Ridge High School in June 1983 to watch the outdoor graduation ceremony of his sister Cass. With
Risky Business
playing in the local movie theaters and Rebecca De Mornay on his arm, it was easy to flash his increasingly famous grin as his former classmates jokingly pestered “Mr. Cruise” for his autograph.

Tom was now a fully accredited teen heartthrob, his disarming smile and boy-next-door good looks appealing to mothers and daughters alike. As critic Gary Arnold of
The Washington Post
noted, “In Tom Cruise the movies have a new star to conjure with.” Nor did it hurt his burgeoning status that he was dating the delectable Ms. De Mornay—even though some thought it was a publicity stunt to promote the film. No matter, in New York they were followed by the paparazzi, asked to pose for the cover of
People
magazine, and gossiped about in the Hollywood trade papers.