Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  After the release of the movie and his father, Fran’s, subsequent book ‘The Real Rain Man’, Kim Peek, the thirty-five year old who could do seemingly anything with his mental arithmetic and had a recall of some 7600 books, was to become well known through television. He developed greater self-esteem and the capacity to communicate his message: “You don’t have to be handicapped to be different. Everyone is different.”

  He continued to make presentations across America until his death in 2009. Fran calculates that they traveled 1.1 million miles and Kim had spoken to 2.6 million people. A documentary was made about him and Daniel Tammet, the twenty-six-year old Londoner who created a sensation with the ‘Pi in the Sky” when he recited, from memory, Pi to 22,514 decimal places. This was done on Einstein's birthday and took place in front of Einstein's blackboard at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.

  This is not to say that Cruise appeared in the film in the furtherance of all this. He most probably had no idea what the consequences would be but, possibly in the light of this, he went on to make a film that would also have a vast beneficial impact.

  There is little doubt that Ron Kovic, the marine sergeant who was wounded in Vietnam and returned home a paraplegic, would not have such a high profile and platforms to air his anti-war views had it not been for Tom Cruise’s decision – while he was at the height of his fame - to play him in the movie, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’.

  Kovic’s passion has been fuelled by the Iraq war. In 2005 he pronounced: “As I now contemplate another January 20th I cannot help but think of the young men and women who have been wounded in the war in Iraq. They have been coming home now for almost three years, flooding Walter Reed, Bethesda, Brooke Army Medical Center and veterans hospitals all across the country. Paraplegics, amputees, burn victims, the blinded and maimed, shocked and stunned, brain-damaged and psychologically stressed, over 16,000 of them, a whole new generation of severely maimed is returning from Iraq, young men and women who were not even born when I came home wounded to the Bronx veterans hospital in 1968.

  “I, like most other Americans, have occasionally seen them on TV or at the local veterans hospital, but for the most part they remain hidden, like the flag-draped caskets of our dead, returned to Dover Air Force Base in the darkness of night as this administration continues to pursue a policy of censorship, tightly controlling the images coming out of that war and rarely ever allowing the human cost of its policy to be seen.”

  Kovic had been in the vanguard of anti-war protesters since the Madison Square Garden Democratic Convention of 1976 but after the release of the Oscar-winning movie 22 years ago he has become a legend, a rallying point for dissent. Commentators have spoken of him being in the great tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, his hero. Indeed when Bush was about to lead the nation in war against Iraq, Ron invoked King in speeches across the country to students, activists and even National Guardsmen, advocating nonviolent protest, placing blame for the terrorist threat squarely at the feet of the Bush administration. "The leaders, the president ... they are the ones who have brought on Sept. 11. It is their violence that brought the violence to our nation, and it's their violence that we must stop and stop for ever.”

  He even flew to London in 2003 to lobby Bush and present protests at 10 Downing Street.

  There is a perplexing question mark hanging over ‘Born on the Fourth of July’. Why did Cruise want to do it in 1989? After all the American presence in Vietnam had been removed by Congress sixteen years previously and Hollywood had already made hundreds of Vietnam movies from John Wayne’s patriotic ‘The Green Berets’ in 1968 to Michael Cimino’s inspired anti-war film ‘The Deer Hunter’ in 1978.

  The preponderance of these movies was anti-war but that was not naturally representative of the initial mood of the country. (I made documentaries about John Wayne and Clint Eastwood for the American Bicentennial in 1976 and the former was gracious enough to invite me for a holiday on the Pacific on board his converted minesweeper, ‘The Wild Goose’. The ship was covered in regimental plaques and messages of thanks from those who thought their cause had been given a voice.)

  But, by 1988, even Sylvester Stallone had moved Rambo to Afghanistan. Since 1979 there had been US military there thanks to the sinister National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

  The truth is that Ron Kovic’s memoir was all prepped (with a script by Oliver Stone, Dan Petrie directing and Martin Bregman producing) and ready to shoot in Puerta Vallarta in Mexico in the summer of 1978. But not with Tom Cruise. Not surprising as he was only sixteen and still at High School. Al Pacino was due to portray Ron. He even grew a mustache. But when Kovic had his final meeting with him he immediately noticed the star had shaved it off and the project was dead. The official reason was that promised West German finance had not come through. Some of the participants were more skeptical. “Al got cold feet,” says Stone. “If he’d gone ahead any money problems would have been taken care of. It was a heartbreaker for everyone involved. I just gave up at the thought that the studio wouldn’t make a $6m film, not one starring Al Pacino. I became semi-comatose and Ron became a complete basket case.”

  Within two days Kovic had to clear out of his expensive suite in New York’s Drake Hotel and, having whiled away his nights at the late Steve Rubell’s disco, Studio 54, suddenly found he was no longer welcome.

  He needed money and managed to get a job as technical adviser on Jane Fonda’s ‘Coming Home’ (1978), the story of a woman for has an affair with a man not unlike Kovic in a vet’s hospital. Miss Fonda, who had earned the soubriquet ‘Hanoi Jane’ for denouncing American troops as war criminals in North Vietnam in 1972 can never be accused of consistency in her views, later marrying the super-patriot Ted Turner and changing from denouncing cosmetic surgery to availing herself of it. ‘Coming Home’ attracted prizes but small audiences ($32m US) and had the paradoxical effect of putting the kybosh on Kovic’s book – perhaps for ever.

  Stone was more consistent. He later made ‘Platoon’ in 1986, very much an account of his own war in Vietnam for which he had volunteered. As a middle class white this was considered unusual; there was a consensus that this was a white man’s war fought by poor blacks. Stone had been decorated in 1967 for his charge on an enemy foxhole. “Something went crazy in my head,” he remembers. “I was pissed off because I knew the guys that had been killed and I had been smoking a little dope that morning.” His film took more than $170m domestic gross and he was decorated again, this time with the Best Director Oscar.

  Kovic, as single-minded in his business life as he was in his politics, never gave up. In 1987 he told Bregman he was going to sell his book to European television for $25,000. The veteran producer saw this as the Vet selling his birthright for a mess of potage so he called Tom Pollock, boss at Universal, and advised him to buy now. Pollock used to be Stone’s lawyer and a deal was quickly concluded with Kovic.

  The studio must have realised this was a slightly passé project politically which would stand or fall as a human interest story. (The whole ‘domino theory’ that panicked the United States into intervening in Vietnam was no longer sustainable. The Russians had left Afghanistan and Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost had opened up the Soviet Union. Before the film even opened, on November 9th 1989, the Berlin Wall would fall.) So the film certainly needed a big star to support it The usual young actors were considered – Sean Penn, Charlie Sheen, Nicholas Cage – but none of them could truly ‘open’ a picture. As it happened Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner were both pondering the need for Tom to fly solo on a major project – he partnered Paul Newman to an Oscar in ‘The Color of Money’ and was about to do the same for Dustin Hoffman; now he had earned a clear run at the podium by himself.

  As it happened Paula Wagner was also Oliver Stone’s agent – Hollywood, near the pinnacle of the mountain, is very small – and Tom was twenty pages into the script when he committed.

  Oliver Stone, more than once bitten, was ve
ry nervous that he might lose this very big fish. “I remember Oliver just, calling, calling, calling,” Cruise laughs. “Finally I had to say: “Oliver, you just don’t know me. Back off. Just let me do it. Just know it, if you say ‘Do it, ten times,’ I’m going to do it twelve times. If the call time is 6.00 am, trust me, I’ll be there at 5.30. You don’t have to worry. Everything’s going to be organized. I’m committed to you. I’m committed to the film and by the end I will give you everything that I have. Trust me.’ And, from that moment, there was a bond that I felt with him.”

  Ron Kovic, on the other hand, affected to be unimpressed by the landing of the top drawing box-office star of 1988. He wasn’t sure that Cruise was up to it. His Damascan moment came when he was waiting for Cruise to come to his house. Looking out of a first-floor window he saw the star elaborately slide out of his car and into a wheelchair and struggling to get up the curb.

  Soon they were doing ‘wheelies’ in the back garden – and wheeling into shops. “I remember I was going around with Kovic and I was in the wheelchair,” Tom recalls. “I went into this high-tech gift shop and the girl comes up to me and says: ‘Excuse me, sir, I’m sorry but could you please stop rolling around on our carpet or I’m going to have to ask you to leave. ‘ I said: ‘Why?’ She said: ‘Your tyres are leaving marks.’ I could not believe it.”

  He left the shop incandescent with rage. When they were outside he asked Kovic why he had not had a go at the woman. “You’ve only had a month,” the Vet replied. “I’ve had twenty years.”

  Together they paid several visits to the Veterans’ Association Hospital in Long Beach where Cruise intently listened to the stories of other crippled people and they would use the paraplegic work-out room in the basement. The only thing that marred these fact finding visits was the American cult of celebrity: the star would find himself spending more time signing autographs then learning about the disability he was to portray.

  Tom also recalled how he would bring his wheel chair to his bed and climb in with his then wife, Mimi Rogers, as if he were paralysed. “There were times when I came home and I would have long talks with Mimi and you just can’t help but think: ‘This could be me.’” (By the time of the premiere of the film at the end of 1989 he would be hand-in-hand with Nicole Kidman so things must soon have begun to deteriorate.)

  One of the tragedies of Ron’s story was that he would never be able to procreate nor have conventional sex. He was numb from the waist down. A true patriot, inspired by the films of John Wayne, he left the small town of Massapequa, Long Island and volunteered for the Marines. In his second tour of duty in Vietnam, his unit attacked a village where the Viet Cong used the cover of women and children whom his unit then killed. In a confused retreat against a glaring sun he saw a VC coming for him and shot him. It proved to be a colleague, Wilson. The colonel refuses to accept his confession. On a later mission Ron is nearly killed himself by a bullet through his spine. After a nightmare period in the filthy and understaffed Bronx Veteran’s Hospital, he returns home a hero, wearing a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. But from the moment he visits his student sweetheart, Donna, on her Syracuse campus where the she is instrumental in the anti-war movement, he begins to have doubts and eventually joins the Veterans Against the War to disrupt the 1972 Republican Convention which re-elected Nixon. Having written the book about his experiences, he is welcomed as a keynote speaker at the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York.

  This is the story of a man who has been to hell but, sadly, not quite back. The Christian patriot yells to his parents: “God is as dead as my legs.” Take away the political and battle reasons for his paraplegia and it remains the cry of someone who screams: “I want to be a man again.”

  Oliver Stone shot the movie in his customary in-your-face style, plunging us into the horror of warfare with his Steadicam and spelling out the message. Tom has to get his tongue round dialogue such as: “Ever since I was a kid I wanted to serve my country. I wanted to go to Vietnam and I’ll die there if I have to.”

  Using the technique he had honed on ‘Platoon’, Stone engaged retired Captain Dale Dye to put the troops (Cruise included) through a two week boot camp so they would know what it was like to dig a fox hole and sleep in it. Probably the most important piece of casting after the star was that of Ron’s parents. Their faces must carry the pain, sympathy, incredulity and shattered values of middle America. Again Stone went back one of his previous movies – ‘The Year of the Dragon’ – and cast Raymond Barry and Caroline Kava who, in their gentleness, expressed their repressed emotions doubly powerfully.

  But the crux of the film is Cruise. He is in nearly every shot. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy. “Artistically it was the most challenging role I’ve ever had.” But he was ready for the challenge and rose to it with instinct and intelligence.

  “My head was shaved, I’d lost weight, I was exhausted and I got into that mind-set, and I saw it in Ron’s eyes. You couldn’t fake it. You had to go there. When Ron got angry he just wanted to explode. And I found it hard to disassociate those moments. It just became the world. And Oliver wanted it, created it, lived in that world. I’m not saying it’s the healthiest thing to do, but it was the right thing to do and the only way to play that character. I felt it was a defining time for me.”

  It is doubtful if he will ever again be offered a role of such rich texture and plangent despair. Quite simply, he plays it perfectly. The innocent jingoism of small town boy, eager to make a reputation even in the cannon’s mouth. The confident sergeant in ‘Nam who, on learning a rookie is from Venus, Georgia, informs him that “this is my second tour and I haven’t seen a Georgia boy hurt yet”. (Later, he would accidentally shoot him.) The helpless horror of this and seeing the women and children they have killed. Stone is not afraid to close in on Cruise’s eyes to communicate a sentiment. The cries from the heart in the Dickensian bedlam of the Bronx hospital, with guts on the beds and rats on the floor. The self-deluding determination to walk when he has been told there is absolutely no hope. The agonizing show of dignity and self reliance when he comes home. The mad debauchery of Mexico where Mescal offers him temporary balm and whores can do little for him, ending in a lunatic wheelchair fight in the desert with Willem Dafoe. The realization “they had lied to me; they tricked me into going to war – the leadership of this government sickens me”. Finally, his finest hour when has found his purpose in life and can define his life through that purpose. It is an overwhelming sweep of compelling emotions.

  Cruise didn’t win the Oscar. Daniel Day Lewis did for ‘My Left Foot’ – another wheelchair part. But he was nominated and Oliver Stone won for Best Director for the second time in four years.

  A greater reward, perhaps, came from Ron Kovic who gave Tom his Vietnam Bronze Star towards the end of filming on his birthday, the third of July. He knew what the film star had done for him. “Young kids can sit in the same theatres we sat in thirty years ago with their popcorn and watch the movie the way we watched John Wayne,” Kovic says, “and they’re going to see Tom Cruise and it’s going to change the way the way they think about war. And maybe they won’t have to be hurt like I was. I feel like I have turned a terrible tragedy into a triumph. No matter what happens with this film, I have won.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It is truth universally acknowledged that every male Hollywood star in possession of fame and fortune must, when he has achieved the clout, make a motor racing film. For example:

  James Cagney. ‘The Crowd Roars’ (1932)

  Pat O’Brien. ‘Indianapolis Speedway’ (1939)

  Mickey Rooney. ‘The Big Wheel’ (1949)

  Clark Gable. ‘To Please a Lady’ (1950)

  Kirk Douglas. ‘The Racers’ (1955)

  Elvis Presley ‘Spinout’ (1966)

  Elvis Presley’ Speedway’ (1968)

  Paul Newman. ‘Winning’ (1969)

  Steve McQueen. ‘Le Mans’ (1971)

  Al Pacino. ‘Bobby Deerfield’ (1977
)

  Tom Cruise. ‘Days of Thunder’ (1990)

  Sylvester Stallone. ‘Driven’ (2000)

  They are rarely particularly successful. The main reasons for this are that, as the late World Formula One Champion, James Hunt, noted: people go to motor racing to see crashes – and movie crashes aren’t real. The fact that in ‘Days of Thunder’ the director managed to get two stunt cars into the real Daytona 500 for the first forty laps might have been good for some exciting shots but could hardly induce excitement. Also most sports films suffer from the fact that there is an artificial and pre-planned outcome to who wins. People attend most sports for precisely the opposite reason – because they don’t know who is going to win. Only films that capture the iconography of a sport – baseball films often work for this reason – manage to supersede these inbuilt flaws.