Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (5 page)

The frenetic fumblings and mumblings were part of a typical teenage rite of passage. When he and his friends were not looking for girls, they were just barely keeping themselves out of trouble. Even though, at fifteen, he was too young to have
a driver’s license, he cruised around town in borrowed cars. On one occasion he was stopped by police when he tried to drive the wrong way down a one-way street. The police officers watched him impassively as he struggled to turn the car around.

Never one to refuse a dare, he once stripped naked and streaked down the street as his friends watched. He literally ran into trouble when a passing police patrol car caught him in its headlights. According to a former school friend, he had the wit to tell the skeptical officers that he had locked himself out of his home after taking a bath. For his pains he was given a ride home wrapped in the officer’s coat. Tommy Puckett recalls one Halloween when Tom and others dressed as flapper girls for a laugh.

Tom was not smiling, however, when he discovered that his mother was dating plastics salesman Jack South, whom she had met at an electronics convention. For a young man used to being the head of the household, cosseting his mother and vetting his sisters’ boyfriends, the interloper was an affront to his authority. Gruff, tough, and straight-talking, Jack South was more than a match for the young whippersnapper. There was an inevitable clashing of heads, and for a long time their relationship was uneasy. Their common interest in sports, movies, and “guy stuff,” notably gambling, eventually helped bring about a thaw. The fact that Tom made the right choices during their betting duels seemed to forge a degree of friendship between them. After all, Jack South was now permanently in his life. He and Mary Lee were married in 1978, and shortly afterward he took a job in New Jersey. As a result the family was on the move again. But this time all the family traveled together.

She was the heartthrob of her high school. As the beautiful head cheerleader, it was only to be expected that, in the student hierarchy, she would be dating the hunkiest football player. Her fame, though, went beyond the well-heeled but insular borders of her high school. Lorraine Gauli was the star of a teenage TV show,
The New Voice
—a precursor to
Dawson’s Creek
—that regularly took her to Boston for filming. To her fellow students the beautiful blond actress was the girl most likely to hit the big time. Success was hers for the taking. Or so it seemed.

If only her love life had run quite so smoothly. While she and football player Frank Gerard were seen as the school’s glamour couple, they fought like cat and dog. He was possessive and very jealous, a strapping six-footer with a temper. On the night of a party at fellow pupil Kevin Forster’s house, the golden couple was fighting. It was nothing unusual; everyone knew that they would make up later. She was crying and went outside to get some air. The new kid at school was in the yard, too. Short, skinny, one hundred pounds soaking wet, and with prominent teeth, sixteen-year-old Tom Mapother—or Maypo, as he was known—was hardly the catch of the county. But the newly arrived sophomore was a nice enough kid. Lorraine was his partner in chemistry class. He was chatty, easy to talk to, and funny.

Tom asked if Lorraine was okay and tried to comfort her.
Then he made his first big mistake. He put his arm around her, just as her boyfriend and his fellow jocks came outside looking for his girl. It was all the encouragement burly Frank needed. There was a flurry of fists and a torrent of venom. “Since you’ve come to this town you’ve been nothing but trouble” was one of the cleaner insults yelled by the jocks as Frank pummeled the slightly built weakling. Lorraine ran into the house, screaming hysterically, and little Maypo was left lying, barely conscious, in the bushes. Eventually he picked himself up, confirmed he had no broken bones, and made his way home. Welcome to Glen Ridge.

The town of Glen Ridge is the Beverly Hills of New Jersey, a compact, white, upper-middle-class suburb of Montclair, where a Porsche, BMW, or Mercedes is the traditional transport of choice. With streets lined with mature trees and quaint gaslights, and most of the substantial family homes dating back to Victorian days, Glen Ridge is as elegant as it is affluent. While surgeons, accountants, lawyers, and media folk are attracted to the area because of the short commute to Manhattan, many of the 7,500 residents move here for the quality of the schools, particularly Glen Ridge High School, widely acknowledged to be the finest in the state.

The sprawling Victorian house on Washington Street in the desirable South Ender district, which Tom’s stepfather, Jack South, rented for the Mapother brood in 1978, was larger than they were used to, but the well-to-do environment was not unfamiliar. They had seen it all before in Ottawa and Louisville. Although they lived in pleasant surroundings, the family was not well off and often the pantry was literally bare. Tom’s stepfather worked as a plastics salesman and his mother sold real estate, while his sisters worked as part-time waitresses in Glen Ridge and the nearby suburb of Bloomfield. Tom took a part-time job as a waiter at the upmarket Glen Ridge Country Club, where Ridgers, the nickname for Glen Ridge locals, gathered on weekends. Here he served the parents of fellow pupils, and the pupils themselves.

If the family’s means were modest, at least the street where
they lived was rich in history. George Washington stayed at one home after the Battle of Monmouth, and another substantial house was the residence of composer William Bradbury, who wrote the music for such famed hymns as “Jesus Loves Me,” “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us,” and “Just As I Am.”

There was, however, a less-than-angelic side to Glen Ridge that Tom experienced early on: the culture of athleticism. Here the jock was king of a miniature domain where he played hard but partied harder. A decade later, the darker side of young men being lionized by their schools and community for their exploits on the field was graphically exposed when a group of popular athletes from Glen Ridge High School were accused of raping a mentally disabled seventeen-year-old girl. It was an incident that split the community, the social fallout documented in a book (later a TV movie) in which author Bernard Lefkowitz explored the sinister secret life of a seemingly perfect suburb.

For Tom and his sisters, being uprooted at a critical time during their teenage lives meant making friends again. Proving themselves. Fitting in. And Glen Ridge was a tough ticket. Most of the students at the six-hundred-pupil Glen Ridge High School had been together since kindergarten. Everyone knew everyone else. A new kid, especially a short, skinny sixteen-year-old who didn’t have a hope of making a place in the Holy Trinity of sports—football, baseball, and basketball—had to work hard simply to overcome knee-jerk hostility. Tom was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t, as fellow pupils prodded and poked this latest specimen on the social petri dish. “He was in a class of mine in the first couple of days he arrived here,” recalls former Glen Ridge student Philip Travisano. “He called the teacher ‘ma’am,’ so I thought he was kissing ass. Later I realized he was just naturally polite.”

It must have been all the more galling for a teenager who was used to being the leader of the pack to be considered a small fish in a hostile pond. Having learned the art of disguise from his relationship with his father, Tom played out a role, displaying a mask of affability in order to survive the blackboard jungle. Fellow pupil Nancy Armel was asked by
her uncle and vice principal Jack Price to show Tom around his new school. When they first met, she sensed his uncertainties and insecurities. “He was eager to make an impression,” she recalls.

Make an impression he did. As she lived around the corner, he came over, ostensibly to do homework together, but really to hang out. In short order she went from school guide to classmate to girlfriend. They became so close that they were separated in English class for chatting too much. The young couple went horseback riding together and, because they were too young to drive, one of their parents would take them to the movies. Mostly, though, their dates consisted of fooling around at each other’s homes. She liked him because he was fun and personable. Certainly not for his looks. “He was not the Don Juan of the year,” she recalls dismissively of her boyfriend. She did, however, stick around long enough to date him for three years and become his first lover. They even talked of marriage.

At that stage in his life, young Maypo had to get by on sheer personality. “He was fresh meat but kind of goofy-looking,” recalls fellow pupil Diane Van Zoeren. It was at his first school dance that fellow students began to sense that there was more to the kid from Kentucky than they originally thought. Everyone formed circles, and one by one, teenagers went into the middle to show off their moves. When it was Tom’s turn, he stunned the watching crowd with a series of lunges, leaps, and spins that had them mesmerized. “We all realized then that there was something different about this guy,” recalls Travisano. “He was a kid with charisma. After that display he started making friends, and it was totally obvious that he was a cool guy.” Before he arrived at the dance hall, Tom had spent hours rehearsing so that his performance would look relaxed and natural. It was a trick he was to pull off throughout his future career. He watched shows like
Soul Train
and copied the dance moves of teenagers in the audience. “I taught myself how to do the robot spinning and stuff like that,” he once said. But however hard he tried, he was never cool enough to be in with the hot crowd.

Cheerleaders and jocks, the Lorraines and Franks of this little world, ruled the corridors and bowers of Glen Ridge. Tom was on the fringes, mixing with the jocks, but never making the sporting grade. He joined the soccer team, then in its infancy. The fledgling sport, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, at least, had been left in the tender care of the school’s history teacher, Dr. Don Voskian, known imaginatively as “Doc Voc.” Young Tom achieved about the same standard as the rest of the squad, which was, as one spectator observed, “pretty hopeless.” He fared much better in the winter, when he took up wrestling, practicing every day after school under the watchful eye of Coach Angelo Corbo. Not only was it a way for the small boy—in tenth grade he was only around five feet, six inches tall—to compete with others his same weight, but it was a chance to make new friends. “I think he was quite lonely and found it tough to fit in,” recalls Corbo.

Even so, he was unfailingly polite, dedicated, and determined. The sport had such an influence that his mother once told Corbo that the psychology of wrestling, matching up to another, one on one, had been a great help in his later acting career. Of course, in later life his sparring partners were Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, and Jack Nicholson rather than students from rival schools in Jefferson Township and Hillside. What he lacked in technique, he made up for in enthusiasm, and he was thrilled when his picture appeared in the local Glen Ridge paper in January 1979, showing him defeating a rival wrestler. Inevitably his mother, Mary Lee, came along to show her support. His younger sister, Cass, eventually became manager of the team.

If victory was sweet, defeat was hard to bear. “He was a very intense person,” recalls his girlfriend Nancy Armel. “He took things very seriously. If he lost a wrestling match, you couldn’t talk to him for hours. You knew to stay away.”

While he took his wrestling seriously, he could never lay genuine claim to academic ability. He was, as in his previous schools, a middle-of-the-road student, never really excelling at any subject. Still, in the three years that Tom and Nancy
studied English together—and did homework at each other’s houses—she never noticed any signs of a learning disorder. A straight-talking New Jerseyan, Nancy gives little credence to his later claims that he was a “functional illiterate”: “I dated him through high school and it was never an issue. It cracks me up. Maybe he wanted to boost his career by saying that he was dyslexic. He seemed fine to me. I don’t remember him ever going to special classes and I would have known. He was an average student like me, a B/C student. He didn’t stand out academically.” Fellow students also point out that in a small school like Glen Ridge, every little imperfection is noticed and pounced upon. As a contemporary, Pamela Senif, observes, “He wasn’t in those classes for kids pegged as slow. Quite frankly, other kids would have teased him about it. If he was dyslexic, no one knew about it.”

While it may stretch credibility to think that he could disguise his reading disability from his girlfriend for three years, his academic shortcomings were well noted. In a couple of acerbic postings on a Glen Ridge school Internet site, former students were dismissive of the school’s most famous old boy. One student who took history with Tom remembered him as a “phony” who used to charm the teacher, Dr. Voskian, to cover up for his lack of preparation. A great smile but a “confused and empty mind” was his verdict. Others were more forgiving, a former classmate noting that while he wasn’t reading “Tolstoy or Trollope, he could read and write and add and subtract.” That said, European classics are hardly the literary diet of most American teenagers.

Tom may have been only an Average Joe academically, but he was a boy with ambition. When he and Nancy sat around the kitchen table discussing their futures, Tom expressed one burning desire: to be an airline pilot. It was an ambition he had harbored since childhood. As a kid he was plane crazy, collecting every model plane he could lay his hands on. Every time he left for a new home, he brought models of two of the most famous Second World War fighter planes, the Spitfire and the P-51 Mustang. His toy box, stenciled with the lettering
“Tom’s model airplanes,” still remains in the attic of his Glen Ridge home in Washington Street and is enduring testimony to his fascination.

There were other ambitions stirring between Tom and Nancy. By senior year he told her that he loved her, wrote her poetry and love letters. One Easter, because he couldn’t afford to buy her flowers, he stole daffodils from a neighbor’s front yard. It was a typical high-school romance: intense, fanciful, and passionate. By now they were both able to drive, and Tom would borrow his parents’ car for evenings out. As she says, with the rather coy remembrance of times long past, “Yes, he was my lover. Absolutely. I was his first. At least I think I was. I hope I was a good tutor. We definitely fooled around in the parked car like all teenage kids. I was black and blue from the gearshift, I can tell you that.”