Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Both men had worked with him for thirty years and knew his ways well. Julian once ensured that two hundred and eighty six French cinemas got masques for their projectors so that they could show ‘Barry Lyndon’ correctly in 1:66 ratio. Leon had helped Stanley have a New York theatre painted matte black so that nothing would distract from the press screening of ‘Full Metal Jacket’.

  The thirty second teaser trailer for ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ had Tom and Nicole evidently making love to the strains of Chris Isaak’s “It’s a Bad, Bad World.” The poster had them in a similar embrace but with Nicole’s right eye glancing away from her husband at something – or someone – else.

  The question of whether this soul-searching story had put a strain on their relationship was still alive. Christiane Kubrick had been adamant that Stanley should not embark on the film in the early years of their’s: “Let’s not go there at this stage of our marriage,” she told him.

  Tom was publicly untroubled. “Our marriage is stronger because of it. And our friendship is deeper because of it. And that’s the way it is.”

  Nicole was less so. “The lines of reality and pretend get crossed. It was exciting and dangerous, So much more than just making a film. All of the things that you would not want to explore in a relationship or reveal came out at different times. So that was tough.”

  Stanley vouchsafed to Julian Senior: “There are things you just don’t talk about in a marriage. I worry about Tom and Nicole.”

  By the end of February 1999 he had completed a cut of the film to his satisfaction and with some music tracks still to be dubbed let go of his precious project so that others could see it.

  On March 2nd at 10.45 pm Tom and Nicole went to a private screening room in New York to view the film for the first time. It was rumoured that the projectionist was obliged to turn his back but this seems hardly likely as he had to know when to change reels and most projectionists rehearse a new print beforehand.

  “It was just surreal,” said Nicole. “We watched it again immediately.”

  They loved it. And telephoned Stanley in St. Albans to tell him so.

  Nicole had been playing to another sell-out season of the ‘Blue Room’ on Broadway, although she had been obliged to drop out temporarily with a viral infection. Tom needed to get back to Sydney to continue production on ‘Mission: Impossible 11’. Stanley continued to work with Julian and Leon on the minute details of international release dates and marketing.

  At 7.30 am on March 7th Julian was driving to Stanley’s house as usual. His mobile phone rang. It was Stanley’s assistant editor. “Something has happened,” was all he said. “I don’t think we’ll be working today.”

  Julian stepped on the gas. When he entered the house he recalled: “It was like something out of a Russian movie. Christiane was moaning, her two daughters were in the kitchen crying, her brother, Jan, was wandering around, bewildered and lost.”

  Stanley had died of a massive heart attack during the night. “He wasn’t feeling ill, he was just very tired. Many heart attack victims are like that,” Christiane later concluded. “He was very careless with his health. He was afraid of doctors. That comes from being a doctor’s son. He was very much an optimist.”

  It fell to Leon to call Tom in Sydney. “I broke down when I heard. I was in absolute shock and disbelief. We had shared two years of our lives together.”

  Julian telephoned Nicole in New York. “I was in total shock,” she remembered. “I didn’t want to believe it. It just seemed wrong. He had too many other things to do and say.”

  Curiously the next priority was to feed the dogs. The problem was that there was no dog food left and only Stanley knew where he got the tins that he fed them. Thanks to his aversion to personal publicity, he was able to potter around the shops in St Albans unrecognised.

  The funeral was held on 12th March. It was Stanley’s wish to be buried beside his dogs in his garden. As executive jets from round the world landed at Elstree airport, Jan Harlan, Christiane’s brother who worked for the director, discovered to his horror that a special licence from the local council was needed to do that and they didn’t have one. A registrar was woken late the night before to issue one.

  Tom and Nicole came from Sydney. “I was not in a good way at that funeral,” Cruise said. “Somewhere, deep down, however illogical, I just didn’t believe it was true. I saw the kitchen where we ate and drank and main room with the fire in the fireplace. And there was the coffin. It was absurd.”

  Steven Spielberg, who had agreed to take on the mantle of Stanley’s next project, ‘AI: Artificial Intelligence’, told how he and his wife, Kate, were having people to dinner the night they learned Stanley had died. The meal went ahead anyway but afterwards Steven projected the last reels of Kubrick’s ‘Paths of Glory’ to his guests. “When we reached the part with the captured German girl (Christiane) singing, even those who had never seen it before were crying.”

  Tom was one of the pall-bearers. After the internment he spoke admiringly of Stanley’s rare talent and how he had been both a friend and father-figure to him.

  Nicole shared the sentiments. “Stanley dedicated his life to making films. The great story-tellers of our time are so important to our future and he used film to tell stories. Getting lost in that world is exquisite when it happens.”

  Terry Semel, the Chairman of Warner Bros, took Tom and Leon Vitali aside afterwards and asked them if they would take charge of the film now. Leon knew how Stanley worked but he was amazed at the way Tom threw himself into the task, using his immense clout to make sure that there was no cutting of the film, no undue censorship, that the marketing and international distribution would be just as Stanley would have wished. Tom had learnt from the master how important it was not just to give the movie over to dubbing agents for foreign versions (where, traditionally, he had his widest audience) but to seek out the right actors and voices for the leads. He did this religiously. Sky Dumont, who breathed seductive notions into Alice’s ear at the party, although born in Argentina, had worked as the station voice of the German TV network Kabel 1 so he dubbed himself into German. Rade Serbedzija, the dodgy owner of the fancy dress shop, revoiced himself in Italian to ensure it was Italian with a Croatian accent.

  ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ had its American premiere in Los Angeles on July13th 1999. Tom and Nicole were there. Tom said that when he had shown the film to his mother she had hugged him and said how incredible it was, what a moving piece of work.

  Unfortunately all the critics did not share her sentiments. It got mixed reviews, despite being the only Kubrick film to open at number one in the box-office charts and enjoying the highest US gross ($56,000,000) of any of his films.

  Kubrick did not make blockbusters and it was very hard for anyone to take in everything that he has put into a film at a single press viewing. As the critic Jeremy Hellman wrote: “It’s one of the true masterpieces of the 90’s, even if it took me a third viewing to realize just how phenomenal it was.”

  Molly Haskell in the New York Times thought Cruise was a square peg in a round hole. “You have to admire the actor for taking virtually three years out of his career at his bankable prime to offer himself up to the erratic genius of Kubrick,” she wrote. “If the movie proved to be a disaster of overreaching, it was not Mr. Cruise’s but Kubrick’s fault, inasmuch as the director wanted to have it both ways: a moody art film with a Hollywood marquee star to boost the budget and bring in the crowds. The sexual insecurity and introspective bent of the protagonist in the Arthur Schnitzler novel Kubrick chose to adapt is something Cruise simply can’t project. The reflective spirit of an intellectual, self-doubting man, anxious about middle age, is not in his repertory.”

  When Puccini’s Madame Butterfly opened at La Scala, Milan, in 1904 it had a totally hostile reception with vicious reviews, one critic calling it an “automobile accident.” It went on to become one of the world’s most popular operas. ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ certainly seems a little too pensive and
protracted in its execution, but whether it or that year’s Oscar winner, ‘American Beauty’ (directed, paradoxically, by Nicole’s ‘Blue Room’ director, Sam Mendes), will be the movie that stands the test of time is hardly a fair competition.

  Tom and Nicole duly continued to bang the drum for the movie, attracting a crowd of nearly ten thousand at the September London premiere in Leicester Square. In what was to become his trade-mark, Tom got out of their limo and instead of walking up the red carpet began to work the crowd. A little less confidently, so did Nicole.

  She probably paid Kubrick the most heartfelt compliment of all.

  “It changed the way I view film making and it gave me belief in the purity of the art form.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Although throughout the prolonged shoot and publicity the Cruises had remained commendably championing of Kubrick and his genius, maybe somewhere in their subconscious minds was the instinct that the film was not without problems and possibly not very career-advancing for them. It moved at little too stately a pace for multiplex man, the Freudian opportunity that Schnitzler had given the reader that these temptations were one man’s dream was not offered on the screen and the orgy scene was neither serious nor sensuous, more of an elderly man’s reverie.

  Whether this was the case or not, both Nicole and Tom made clever choices to remind the public of their versatility and, equally important, that they marched to the beat of the modern world. Both these choices relied heavily on sex.

  Tom, somewhat surprisingly, agreed to appear in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia’ as the oleaginous Frank T. J. Mackey, a television and video guru who gives men self-help lessons on how to pick up and fuck women under the banner ‘Seduce and Destroy’ – hardly the mantra for a loving relationship. Anderson’s previous contribution to American culture had been ‘Boogie Nights’, a movie about the porn industry.

  By coincidence – or, perhaps, not by coincidence – Nicole’s choice cent’ed on one of the most direct plays ever written about sex, Reigen’. By coincidence – or, perhaps, not by coincidence – it had been written by the self-same Arthur Schnitzler whose ‘Traumnovelle’ had been the source of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.

  Tom endorsed Nicole’s decision to take on a part that would have his wife naked before a very close audience in the small Donmar warehouse theatre in London, and he became a house husband. He even bought a house next to Nicole’s co-star, Iain Glen and his then wife, the actress Susannah Harker, in Dulwich in South London.

  Schnitzler’s ‘Reigen’ had precisely one performance in Vienna in 1926 before the police closed it down as being obscene. It contained - according Oxford English Dictionary Definition of obscenity - ‘the portrayal of sexual matters offensive according to accepted standards of morality.

  Reigen literally means ‘round dance’ but the play consisted of a daisy chain of sexual intercourse between ten characters – after each coupling one moves on to a new one. Schnitzler’s purpose was to show, regardless of class, we are all similarly driven by sexual desire and fulfilment. Later interpretations would see it as a lethal dose of syphilis being passed from partner to partner

  Two French films, both called ‘La Ronde’, were based on this with the female lead played by Simone Signoret in a classy 1950 production directed by Max Ophuls and Jane Fonda in a crude 1964 version directed by her then husband, Roger Vadim.

  The bate with which the director, Sam Mendes, managed to catch Kidman for ‘The Blue Room’, was to offer her the chance of playing all five female roles, just as Iain Glen would play all the men.

  Kidman, in retrospect, says: “I’m glad I did the play. It was such a risk going it. But I wanted to do theatre again. I’m glad I jumped and did it. It was such a risk doing it but I want to take risks in terms of theatre. Everyone said to me ‘Why are you doing this in a little theatre in London’ and I said ‘I want to play five different characters. I want to risk it.’”

  She felt less bold at the time when she first met Glen at Mendes’ apartment in Primrose Hill. “I was so shy I could hardly speak. I kept feeling like I was going to vomit. I had heard how brilliant Iain was on stage and he was formidable just as a person. I thought ‘I’m out of my league.’ But he really was so gentle. He said: ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to let you fail.’”

  Her fear and worry continued through rehearsals, somewhat allayed by group massage that Mendes introduced and lunch-time sushi provided by Nicole from the expensive restaurant, Nobu, made famous by Boris Becker in a well-chronicled episode of cupboard love.

  The challenge was to mutate into five entirely different characters, from Cockney harlot to a politician’s fancy but faithless wife. There was also a crucial moment in scene seven which ensured the show never played to an empty seat either in London or Broadway. A model has just made love to a playwright (Schnitzler had actually written himself into the original) and stands up, naked, and puts her underwear on. Nicole suggested this might be done under a sheet. Mendes persuaded her: “I think it’s very important. I don’t think it’s exploitative. I think it’s totally character-driven.”

  And so she did it, night after night, with the front row of the audience a few feet away. She stood with her back to the house and pulled on a pair of black knickers while Glen puts on her bra and they exchange philosophies on the nature of happiness.

  That moment and Charles Spencer’s description of the play as ‘pure theatrical Viagra’ in The Daily Telegraph ensured that it became an event of international note.

  “Something happened that was not to do with theatre,” Mendes notes. “Like the Alien in the Ridley Scott movie, the play kind of lived inside the Donmar for a while, exploded out of its chest, left the theatre bleeding on a table somewhere, gasping for breath, and was gone.”

  Sensation apart, Kidman earned reviews for her seductive versatility that put her acting career on a whole new footing. David Benedict in The Independent referred to ‘Kidman’s superbly differentiated gallery of women – from skittish, deer-like prostitute to an hilariously grand, throaty actress.’ ‘Kidman switches personae with consummate ease endowing the prostitute of the opening and closing scenes with a bruised loneliness. She is not just a star: she genuinely delivers the goods,’ enthused Michael Billington in The Guardian. And Charles Spencer simply fell in love. ‘She’s drop dead gorgeous and bewitchingly adorable. The vision of her wafting round the stage with a fag in one hand and her knickers in the other as a delicious French au pair will haunt my fantasies for months.’

  And he may not be alone. Her performance conquered Broadway and her husband. Tom went to see it more than twenty times, sneaking into his seat just after the lights went down.

  “I feel for Nicole it was a very special time. It was the moment she became a quite separate entity from Tom Cruise. And I’m sure she was aware that was happening,” Mendes adroitly observed.

  The author and director of Tom Cruise’s next film was a sort of Schnitzler of the San Fernando Valley. That is where Paul Thomas Anderson grew up and that is where America’s most financially successful films are made – porn films. The industry dwarfs Hollywood. There are more DVD stores renting and selling so-called ‘adult’ videos than there are branches of MacDonalds.

  Anderson was born in 1970 and grew up in an era where sex had become as free as it was in Vienna at the beginning of the century. Except for porn films; you had to pay for those. At the gentle age of ten he used to rummage through his father’s videos and found his first exposure to porn. Ernie Anderson had been something of an unusual character. He hosted a late night horror show on television going under the name of Ghoulardi. He was very much a madcap hippy with long hair, a moustache and a goatee beard who not only dumped on many of the movies he introduced but also edited himself into them from time to time so that he could escape from monsters or emit inscrutable phrases such as “cool it with the boom-boom.”

  Not unsurprisingly, Paul was growingly aware of the decadence that surrounded him and,
at the age of only eighteen, with the new-found freedom of the video camera made his first film ‘The Dirk Diggler Story’, a semi-satire about a famous porn star whose life on top was coming to an end.