Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Paul Newman can be blamed, in part, for ‘Days of Thunder’. As already noted, he had introduced Tom to the track while making ‘The Color of Money’, letting him train with his Nissan team mate, Jim Fitzgerald. Enthused, Cruise dragged Don Simpson along to the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, just north of San Francisco for an intensive course. Bondurant was of the opinion that the 180mph Cruise was proficient enough to turn professional. So he started racing Nissans for Newman’s team. But it was while the two men were having a burn-up round the Daytona International Speedway Track where the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR for short) took place, with its most famous race the Daytona 500, that the muse descended on Cruise and he knew the time had come for him to make a motor racing film.

  He penned a fairly simple plot, probably rightly since stock car racing lends itself more to Boys Own stories than Proust. Cole Trickle – where do they get these names? – (Cruise) arrives on his motorbike at the track at Charlotte, North Carolina where Harry Hogge (Robert Duvall) has come to see if it is worth his abandoning retirement to prepare Cole and build him a car for the Daytona 500. You bet it is: Cole burns up the track like a coiffured meteor. He beats mean rival Rowdy Burns (Michael Rooker) in the next race but then they both end up in hospital, subsequently having wheelchair races down the corridors. Dr. Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman) is a brain surgeon who cures Cole but, alas, she will not allow Rowdy to race again. Cole does and he wins the big one. Tom rounded up his ‘Top Gun’ producers and director, Tony Scott, to make the movie.

  Two things slightly nag at the viewer. The first is that the Hippocratic Oath prohibiting sex with patients can have no purchase in Daytona since Dr. Lewicki is between Cole’s sheets as soon as she has mended him. The other is the way Rowdy’s wife, Jennifer (Caroline Williams) says “Hi, Tom” when she greets Cole. Evidently there were no resources for a retake or even a redub.

  Off screen there was a certain amount of drama. Cruise was caught speeding – 66mph in the 35 mph streets of Darlington, North Carolina. But the kind cop, because he was dealing with a star, dropped the charge to that of careless operation of a vehicle and fined him only $125.

  There is scant evidence of the genius of Robert Towne who was brought in to collaborate on the script, save for the way a joke is set up using the Hollywood technique of ‘laying the pipe.’ First Hogge and the car crew pull a stunt on Trickle whereby he is searched by a policewoman who slips her hand down his underpants and onto his beef bayonet. He is shocked but it proves to be a set-up – she is a stripper dressed as a cop. When those self-same mates come to visit him in hospital, Hogge introduces him to Dr. Lewinski and Trickle, thinking this is another similar jape, unerringly guides her hand to the same spot.

  Robert Duvall is obliged to reminisce about the old days and the deaths of drivers informing Cole, the rookie, that there is a tradition that no racing driver ever attends another’s funeral. In this he is less than correct: at Ayrton Senna’s state funeral in Sao Paulo his fellow Grand Prix drivers escorted the coffin.

  That apart, Towne gives a philosophical underpinning to this seemingly straightforward story. “Cole Trickle is the embodiment of the competitive zeal and talent that believes blindly in itself. Until that critical turning point of the story, a mind-bruising crash. It is then that the young protagonist must discover how much he can control his own fate. His story becomes the struggle of a driver trying to replace his belief in his own infallibility with the true courage of a man who recognises that, even if some things are beyond his control, he must go on to face them if he is to race, to win, to live his life.”

  Indeed Dr. Lewicki tells Trickle: “You’re scared; it’s called denial.” But there is scant evidence of this in his subsequent behaviour – except, perhaps, on the cutting room floor. Instead his life is now suffused by his passion for the doctor herself.

  It is of interest to speculate – and it can only be speculation – why Cruise chose Nicole Kidman for the part. He had seen the frizzy haired young Australian in the movie, ‘Dead Calm’, which she made when she was only nineteen, rather young for someone who a couple of years later would be asked to be credible as a brain surgeon who could make life or death evaluations from brain scans. Or did the sight of Nicole have some further effect on Tom?

  ‘Dead Calm’ was the tense, unnerving story of a mass-murderer, Billy Zane, who has killed and dismembered the women and crew of the Orpheus in the Pacific. He boards the yacht which Nicole alone is sailing, her husband having gone to check on the Orpheus. Zane rapes her and she succumbs in the hope of surviving. What follows is a deadly game of psychopath and gutsy teenager as she tries to outwit him. Nicole is plausible, powerful and pretty in the part.

  Mimi Rogers, meanwhile, had made a quantum leap from television actress to a lead in a Columbia feature, ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’, directed by Ridley Scott who directed Tom in ‘Legend’ (and whose brother, Tony, subsequently helmed ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Days of Thunder’.) Her co-star, Tom Berenger, the cop who had to watch over her and did rather more, was later to appear in ‘Born on the Fourth of July’. Mimi looked classy and alluring but the chemistry between them was less so, possibly because the director seemed to spend more time on the look of the film – Mimi’s four poster bedroom was a mirage of voile and muslin shot through smoke – rather than the romance. The late Adrian Biddle, Scott’s regular cameraman, once vouchsafed to me that when shooting ‘1492: The Conquest of Paradise’, the director would spend all day at sea filming the eddies and ripples of the schooner’s sails in the ever-changing sunlight and had to be reminded that at the end of the day that Christopher Columbus and his crew have some dialogue to deliver.

  So ‘Someone to Watch Over’ me was a flop and Mimi’s big break was never to be. She was clearly supportive to Tom in helping him with the part of Ron Kovic – Mimi had actually volunteered for hospital work with the mentally ill and Veterans of the Vietnam War - and nervously watching him at the race track. But there appeared to be fissures in their relationship as Tom spent more time in their East 13th Street apartment in New York (in a block that also accommodated celebrated Brits such as Keith Richards and Phil Collins) and Mimi preferred their Los Angeles home. It was thought that they tried Scientology counselling to keep their marriage going. Even when Tom stayed in L.A. papers reported that they had substantial rows causing him to sleep elsewhere, sometimes with his friend, Emilio Estevez. After the marriage was over, Mimi was to reveal that they didn’t make love for a year as Tom was contemplating becoming a priest. Later she recanted on this, saying it had only been a joke. Not a terribly hilarious joke, one feels.

  Tom was on the cover of Time Magazine and Rolling Stone in January 1990 in anticipation of him winning the Best Actor Oscar for ‘Born on the Fourth of July’. To put an end to the Mimi rumours Tom told Time how much he loved his wife and confessed to Rolling Stone. “I couldn’t imagine being without her or being alone. I care about my wife more than anyone in the world. She’s my best friend. I love her.”

  The same month he filed for divorce.

  Ten years later Nicole Kidman was to undergo virtually the same experience. But during that decade they were, beyond a peradventure, Hollywood’s golden couple.

  Was it love at first sight? Nicole was at the Tokyo Film Festival promoting ‘Dead Calm’ in the autumn of 1989 when she was informed by her agency, ICM, that the producers of an American film about motor racing called ‘Daytona’ would like her to read for a role.

  She was surprised and knew she wouldn’t get it – whatever it was – but relished the thought of a free first-class trip to Los Angeles. She even made a booking to fly on to London the next day to visit her sister, Antonia, whom she hadn’t seen for some time.

  Nicole duly presented herself at Paramount at the appointed time and was escorted into a room where she was introduced to Jerry Bruckheimer, Don Simpson, Tony Scott and Tom Cruise. The star greeted her warmly, put her at her ease and invited her to
read a passage – although it wasn’t actually from the film.

  She was nervous but was a good enough actress – she had been good in the television series ‘Vietnam’ and quite brilliant in the subsequent ‘Bangkok Hilton’ – to hide this and give an authoritative performance. It was interrupted by Tom breaking into laughter and, soon, she started laughing, too.

  That was it. Before she left for the airport the next day to see her sister Jerry Bruckheimer called to say they would like her to be in the film. But it wouldn’t be called ‘Daytona’, it would be ‘Days of Thunder’ and, in fact, her character had not been created yet, but they would work on it. She would be Tom’s love interest.

  Nicole has a breathless recall of that meeting with the star. “I thought: ‘Oh, my God, he’s this huge movie star. He was like this huge powerhouse. He sort of filled the room. He sat down and started talking and got really intense He started using his hands and his eyes started to sparkle. I couldn’t believe the energy coming out of this person. I thought he was an incredible man, totally self-confident about who he was and what he wanted. The kind of person who inspires confidence right off the bat. The moment I laid eyes on him I thought he was just the sexiest man I had ever seen in my life. He took my breath away. I don’t know what it was. Chemical reaction? Hard to define. Hard to resist.”

  Tom’s reaction was more succinct. “Pure lust.”

  Whatever their feelings for one another they tried to suppress them in public during the shoot, although many suspected romance was in the air and there were, inevitably, paparazzi photos of Tom leaning into Nicole’s car and kissing her. Robert Towne said he knew Tom’s marriage to Mimi was over when he had dinner with Tom and Nicole at the start of shooting.

  After the film wrapped, the couple went for a two week holiday in the Bahamas. Nicole certainly came from a different background than Tom’s. Her father, Dr. Anthony Kidman, was an eminent biologist who had written books on psychology which her mother, Janelle, a nurse and social worker, would edit. Nicole was actually born in Hawaii (on June 20th 1967) – which handily gave her dual American-Australian nationality and enabled her to work in Hollywood – but she grew up in Sydney where, apart from her acting, she enjoyed the healthy outdoor life which is the birthright of young Australians.

  So she proved the perfect mate for Tom – swimming with whales, wind-surfing and scuba diving. He even introduced her to skin-diving while they were shooting ‘Days of Thunder’ – not a fact he mentioned to the film’s insurers. It was an experience that appealed to the athletic Nicole. She later declared: “It’s an amazing sensation. Not as good as sex – but almost.”

  ‘Days of Thunder’ failed to emulate the success of ‘Top Gun’ at the box office, taking less than half as much. Director Tony Scott ruefully remembers. “The Paramount executives said that Tom could sit behind the wheel of a racing car and smoke a cigarette for a hundred minutes and we’d make a huge amount of money. They were wrong.”

  Tom and Nicole’s first public appearance together was at the Academy Awards in March 1990. She held one of Tom’s hands and his mother, Mary Lee, the other. This was received with general approbation save by a soap star, Marcus Graham, who was under the impression that he was living with Nicole at their apartment back in Sydney. Alas, no more. She was to move with Tom to the penthouse suite of the Bel-Air Hotel, then a five million dollar mansion in Pacific Pallisades, his Manhattan apartment, a ranch and seventy-seven acres in Colorado and, eventually, a home in Sydney to which they could commute in his private jet.

  Anxious to demonstrate that her prowess as an actress was not dependent on her boyfriend, Kidman accepted an offer from director Robert Benton to star in ‘Billy Bathgate’. This was E. L. Doctorow’s thirties tale of a young teenager entering the gangster world of Dutch Schultz. Dustin Hoffman plays Dutch, a newcomer, Loren Dean, was Billy – his career was not enhanced by reviews that deemed his performance being of “colourless vapacity” - and Nicole as a rich married woman who had affairs with them both. The film did her career no harm – some thought she stole the show – but it had a maladroit and cluttered screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Benton could have benefitted from studying the scripts of ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘The Godfather Part 111’ which had recently been released.

  During the Christmas break from the film, Tom rented a place in the Colorado town of Telluride. The owner of the house had been told that the renter – it cost two million dollars – was a rich studio executive but in fact it was for Tom and Nicole’s wedding. They married on Christmas Eve. Tom was twenty-eight and Nicole was twenty-two. His mother and sisters were there and he flew her parents in from Sydney. Dustin Hoffman (who was staying with his wife, Lisa, and their four children) was best man and presented the couple with a pair of balls – ‘his’ and ‘hers’. They had recently evinced an enthusiasm for ten-pin bowling.

  “When I was younger I thought I’d be a a political journalist because my father is very interested in politics,” Kidman confessed. “Or maybe a lawyer. I thought I’d never marry. I’d be like my idol, Katherine Hepburn, doing everything for my art.”

  Tom had not worked for a while – Scientology had now become his dominant religion and he spent some time with John Travolta while Nicole was on location in North Carolina – but had been reading scripts and found one that might give him and Nicole a belated honeymoon (she and Dustin had returned to work soon after the wedding.) It was something that Ron Howard, once of ‘Happy Days’ but now the acclaimed director films such as ‘Splash’ and ‘Cocoon’ had given him some years previously called ‘Sure as the Moon.’

  It was based on the life of Howard’s great-grandfather who had left an impoverished existence in Ireland to cross the Atlantic and join the Great Land Rush of 1893. Although conventional wisdom has it that Europeans stole all the land of the American Indians, in 1893 Congress bought six million acres of Oklahoma from the Cherokee for eight million dollars and President Grover Cleveland instituted a race between the 100,000 people who competed for the forty thousand quarter sections.

  Tom’s great-great-grandfather had not been in the race but had emigrated from the west of Ireland some years previously and Nicole’s great-great-grandparents had grown up in the town of Ventry on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry where the Irish sequences were to be shot.

  It was time to go home. Cruise put in a call to Howard who was shooting the fire fighting film, ‘Backdraft’, on the lot at Universal. It is said that Ron was surprised to hear from him since Tom had turned down a part in that movie unlike Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, Scott Glenn and, his first movie love, Rebecca de Mornay. It is also said that when Ron asked this cast to quieten down since it was Tom Cruise on the phone, Kurt Russell, said “Oh, Tom Cruise. Let’s all take ten.”

  Howard was delighted. The fact that Cruise had come on board meant that Sid Sheinberg and Lew Wassserman of Universal Pictures, where Ron and his Imagine Films Entertainment had a deal, would at long last greenlight this personal project. There was one problem: when Ron and Tom met and the latter informed him that his wife would be rather good for the female lead, Ron had to confess he had never seen any of her work. This was unlikely to be an impediment. Screenings were rapidly arranged for him and, to no-one’s amazement, Nicole got the role of Shannon Christie.

  Tom and Nicole went on the Oprah Winfrey Show – shades of events to come – where they sat on the sofa and hugged and assured the hostess that working together would present no problem as they wanted to be together twenty-four hours a day.

  Having cemented his cast, even during shooting Howard was having problems finding a title for the film. It went from ‘Sure as the Moon’ to ‘Distant Shores’ to ‘The Irish Story’. Eventually he erected a board on the set so the crew could come up with suggestions. One wag wrote ‘Tom and Nicole’s Excellent Adventure’ and he wasn’t far off the mark. They had a caravan as big as a castle - some said it had marble floors - with deep freezes from which the
ir own chef could choose their menu and in it they played endless games of cards and chess and backgammon. When in Dublin they had a court set aside at a private club where they would compete furiously in a daily game of squash.

  But most furious of all was the horse riding, especially the big Land Rush chase. Nicole was already a proficient rider which provided Tom with the sort of challenge he relished. Throwing safety to the winds and once again ignoring the film’s insurers, they tried to ride like Derby winners, both taking many falls in the attempt. There remains a degree of doubt over who was the faster. Nicole’s camp maintained they both attained speeds of 37mph while some of Tom’s people felt he managed 39mph to her 35mph.