Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  Co-star Neill was left with much the same impression, concluding that she could do just about anything she set her mind to. She has that mysterious attribute that cannot be explained, he decided: You either have it, or you don't.

  When Dead Calm was released in the United States in early April 1989, Nicole was almost overwhelmed by the attention she received. Warner Brothers flew her to Los Angeles and treated her like royalty. “I have limousines all the time at my disposal,” she told the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. “They have two suites for you. Which one would you prefer? ‘Well, I don’t care!’ I said. ‘Whatever you think.’” At every turn, she was asked if she needed anything. If she looked the slightest bit tired, they offered to call in a masseuse. They watched her constantly, ready to respond in an instant to any change in her mood, however slight. “It’s very hard to cope with it without feeling so guilty. You end up walking around going, ‘My God I don’t deserve all this.’ And feeling like you’re bluffing it.”

  When director Phillip Noyce went to Hollywood to observe audience response to the film at Mann’s Chinese Theater, what he saw and heard surprised him. “One woman was yelling, ‘I can’t stand this! I can’t stand this!’” he told Steven Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And the audience was shouting back, ‘Well, leave then!’ And she was saying, ‘I can’t leave!’ And I honestly thought she was going to have a heart attack . . . audiences right across America are building up an enormous agitation during this movie—they scream and they shout at the screen, and people stand up and yell out.”

  Reviews were mixed and displayed some of the same emotions described by Noyce. Wrote Christine Arnold Dolen for the Miami Herald: “Somehow you just sense, when a movie begins with an adorable toddler rocketing through the windshield of a car, that you’re not about to experience a few hours of wholesome family entertainment . . .The best that can be said about Dead Calm is that director Phillip Noyce maintains nearly constant tension and finds a surprising number of ways to evoke menace in confined spaces. As for me, if I want tension, I’ll just drive I-95.”

  Roger Ebert had a different take on the film. “[It] generates genuine tension, because the story is so simple and the performances are so straightforward,” he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times.” This is not a gimmick film (unless you count the husbands’ method of escaping from the sinking ship), and Kidman and Zane do generate real, palpable hatred in their scenes together.”

  ~ ~ ~

  After filming on Dead Calm was wrapped, everyone was optimistic about the work they had done, but the movie business being what it is, they were afraid to be overly optimistic.

  “Every picture that’s made is made by professional people who hope they have made a good product,” says assistant director Stuart Freeman. “I don’t think that anyone thought that it would be the success that it was, but there were a lot of people hoping that it would be a success.”

  Although Freeman and others still had post-production work to do on the film, the actors parted company to pursue new projects. Zane moved on to Back to the Future II, where he played Match, and Memphis Belle, in which he played bombardier Lt. Val Kozlowski. Neill ‘s next film was French Revolution, which he followed up with Hunt for Red October, in which he played Captain Vasily Borodin.

  Nicole moved on to another feature film, Emerald City, and the television miniseries “Bangkok Hilton.” In the latter, she played an innocent Australian girl who goes to Thailand in search of the father she never knew. Along the way, she gets involved with a drug trafficker who uses her as a courier. She is eventually caught by authorities and sent to the “Bangkok Hilton” to await trail.

  Written by Terry Hayes, who wrote the script for Dead Calm, the story also involves a burned-out lawyer, played by Denholm Elliott, who helps navigate the plot through a complex tale of intrigue. When “Bangkok Hilton” first aired in Australia in 1989, Nicole received universal acclaim for her acting. The following year it aired in the United States on cable television’s TBS. Seattle Times writer John Voorhees called it “one of the best thrillers of the season.”

  Emerald City is a drama about success Australian-style. Colin and Kate Rogers are a successful couple—he’s a screenwriter and she’s in publishing—that move from a small town to a big city and get caught up in the greed and selfishness that was so prevalent in the 1980s. Things start to go wrong for them once they meet Mike McCord, a hack of a scriptwriter who dreams of the big payoff.

  McCord’s girlfriend, Helen (played by Nicole), soon becomes the object of Colin’s lust, even as Kate (played by Robyn Nevin) sets her sights on her boss. If there is a moral to the story, it is that in the big city you have to choose between having morals or great wealth, since obviously the two concepts are incompatible.

  The film did not garner any interest when it was released in the United States, but it did find favor with Australian moviegoers. It was nominated for five awards from the Australian Film Institute, including best actress (Nicole Kidman), best screenplay, best achievement in cinematography, best supporting actor (Chris Haywood, who played Mike McCord), and best actor (John Hargreaves, who played Colin Rogers). Only Haywood took home an award, however.

  At this point in her life, Nicole was not certain where her career was headed. She was a star in Australia, but her dream had always been to become a star in America. There were only so many movies you could make in Australia and the pool of available actors and film-makers was small enough that you kept working with the same people.

  The kind of stardom that Nicole did not want to achieve was exemplified by Robyn Nevin, her co-star in Emerald City. Nevin had entered the National Institute of Dramatic Art at the age of sixteen, the same age at which Nicole had unofficially emancipated herself, and over the years she had become one of Australia’s most recognizable television and cinematic faces.

  When they made Emerald City, Nevin was forty-six years of age and really had little to show for her success, except name recognition, among Australian television viewers and moviegoers. She was at the top professionally, but the distance from the middle to the top did not seem like a very big leap. Eventually, she became frustrated and gave up acting entirely to become the artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company.

  That type of life was not what Nicole envisioned for herself. At the age of twenty-one, she already was about as famous as you could get in Australia—and that simply was not enough to placate her! She found herself in a similar place in her personal life. Her romance with Marcus Graham was satisfying and comfortable, but she was not ready to go to the next level—marriage and a house full of kids.

  For Marcus, it had been love at first sight. Their adolescent years had been filled with the same nebulous angst—a dyslexic, he had left school at fifteen to work as a hamburger cook—and they had navigated through those turbulent teen years by using the same unlikely compass, drama school and its promise of a fanciful life.

  When Marcus looked at Nicole, he saw his soul mate, the person with whom he expected to live the rest of his life. Even though she already lived with him in his luxurious Sydney apartment, he wanted more from her. He wanted her to work on movie projects with him and to extend that professional partnership into a more traditional family relationship.

  Nicole’s feelings toward Marcus were much more complicated. She was attracted to him because of his dark, smoldering good looks and his James Dean-like affability, but she did not share the same emotional commitment to the relationship, because to do so would be to acknowledge that she somehow had reached the end of the line and was ready to settle into some sort of mindless mediocrity. At twenty-one, the still-coltish Nicole had her inquiring eyes set squarely on the distant horizon.

  Chapter 4

  TOM CRUISE ARRIVES

  WITH ‘DAYS OF THUNDER’

  In 1989, nearly six months after Dead Clam was released in the United States, actor Tom Cruise was invited to a private screening of the film. Rehearsals were scheduled to begin soon fo
r his next movie, a car racing drama titled Days of Thunder, and neither he nor the director were happy about their available choices for the female lead. Warner Brothers had generated a buzz about Nicole Kidman’s performance in Dead Calm and Tom went to the screening to see what all the fuss was about.

  What he saw was a twenty-year-old redhead playing a difficult role written for an older women and bringing it off with flawless authenticity. He could not believe his own eyes. He was so totally mesmerized by her performance that he decided, on the spot, that she would be perfect for Days of Thunder. There were plenty of beautiful actresses that were capable of playing a race car driver’s girlfriend, but since the girlfriend was also a physician, it was mandatory for the believability of the character that her face reflect a semblance of professional competence and intelligence.

  Nicole was in Japan promoting Dead Calm when she received word that Tom Cruise wanted to meet with her about a role in Days of Thunder. “I thought, ‘Oh yeah, right,’” she told Premiere magazine. “I’d been to America before. You go in, you audition, you don’t get the job.”

  Landing a role in a Tom Cruise film could not possibly be as easy as that. Ever the pragmatist, she decided that she would do the audition, but only to spend a few days hanging out with Dead Calm director Phillip Noyce and his family—and then on to England for a long overdue visit with her sister, Antonia.

  When Nicole walked into a conference room for a meeting with Tom and five other men, she was suffering from jet lag, the result of the long flight from Tokyo. She felt (but did not appear) disheveled, tired, and oddly out-of-rhythm. Tom rose to his feet as she entered the room and she walked directly over to him to shake his hand.

  At five-foot-eleven, Nicole was shocked to see how much taller she was than the five-foot-seven leading man. She knew what the movie was about, so she figured she lost the part as soon as she walked into the room. Why would they give the role to an actress who was four inches taller than an actor who was going to play the part of a macho race car driver? Casting her in that role made no sense, or so she thought.

  Nicole was handed a couple of pages of script to read and told that she was being considered for no role in particular. She gave the reading, then left the conference room, convinced that it all had been a waste of time. At the very least, she thought, she had received a free trip to Los Angeles.

  What she did not know—could not possibly know—was that Tom’s reaction to her had been instantaneous. “My first reaction to meeting Nic [the name she prefers from family and friends] was pure lust,” Tom said over and over again about that audition. “It was totally physical.”

  The following morning Nicole received a telephone call from one of the producers. The female-lead was hers if she wanted it. Nicole was stunned. What about the differences in our height, she asked? The producer said that it did not bother Tom and was of no concern to him or the other producers.

  Nicole said yes without further delay.

  ~ ~ ~

  At age twenty-seven, Tom Cruise was on top of his game. Over the past eight years he had starred or co-starred in thirteen feature films, including his first big hit Risky Business (1983), Top Gun (1986), Rain Man (1988) and the heralded Born on the Fourth of July (1989), movies that ranked among the top grossing films of the 1980s.

  Careerwise, Tom’s success worked both sides of the street. Despite his average height, female moviergoers were attracted to his boyish good looks and his affable, non-threatening sexuality. Male moviegoers liked him because, despite his slick, “pretty boy” image, he seemed to be a man’s man at his core, someone to whom they could relate in the ongoing battle against the feminization of America.

  Born Tom Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, he never had a stable family life. His father, Thomas Cruise Mapother III, was an engineer at General Electric and considered it his responsibility to relocate whenever the company needed him to participate in a new research project. His mother, Mary Lee, saw her role as wife and mother as a supportive one and she followed her husband about the country without complaint. During the first eleven years of Tom’s life, the family, which eventually included three daughters, moved a total of seven times.

  In his early years, Tom was a dreamer. He frequently isolated himself from other family members and sought adventures that he could enjoy alone. Mary Lee was a little bit like that herself. Each time they moved to a new city, she sought out the local playhouse and volunteered to participate in any way that was needed. At one point, she even established her own dramatic group. Once she saw that Tom enjoyed a rich fantasy world, she encouraged him to mimic his favorite television characters.

  By the time Tom got used to exploring his neighborhood in Syracuse, the family moved to Ottawa, Canada, where Tom got interested in sports, especially skating. Mary Lee was happy to see him engage in extracurricular activities because it became apparent soon after he started school that he was not going to be a good student, at least not academically. What the family did not know then—but later discovered—was that Tom had a learning disorder called dyslexia. Simple reading was a nightmare for him.

  The Mapother family lived in Ottawa longer than it had lived anyplace else, thus allowing the children to grow into a comfortable routine with neighborhood friends and classmates, but what fate gave with one hand, it took away with another. When Tom was twelve, Thomas and Mary Lee set the children down and explained to them that the marriage simply was not working out. They announced plans to get a divorce. After that stunning admission, Thomas took Tom outside to play baseball, probably to distract him, but it only served to alienate him from a world that he no longer saw as safe and secure.

  Tom was devastated, along with his sisters. Things had been going so well. He could not understand how his family could fall apart so quickly. His perception of family, indeed his perception of gender roles, was altered in an instant. What he remembers most about that year are the voluminous tears that flowed.

  After the divorce, Mary Lee took the children and moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she and Thomas had first began their life’s journey. It was not a glamorous homecoming, for she had little money and had to move her children into a low-rent house, the best she could afford on a sales clerk’s salary.

  “After a divorce, you feel so vulnerable,” Tom told Christopher Connelly in a 1986 interview for Rolling Stone. “And traveling the way I did, you’re closed off a lot from other people. I didn’t express a lot to people where I moved . . . I didn’t feel like they’d understand me. I was always warming up, getting acquainted with everyone. I went through a period, after the divorce, of really wanting to be accepted, wanting love and attention from people. But I never really seemed to fit in anywhere.”

  Growing up, Tom had male friends, but he later admitted that he found it easier to trust females. That attitude is due, in part at least, to the fact that after the divorce he grew up in a household in which he was the only male. When he needed comforting and understanding—and for a pre-teen boy that is fairly often—it always was offered by the females in his life. As a result, his adolescent concept of “maleness” derived from his still evolving concept of self.

  By the time he was fourteen, Tom had some serious issues to resolve, both personal and educational. He was not doing well because of his reading problems and his mother did not earn enough money to enroll him in the type of private school where he could get specialized attention. In addition, he was having a difficult time envisioning where he would fit in as an adult.

  The solution to all of his problems, or so it seemed at the time, was to become a Catholic priest. With that in mind, in the fall of 1976 he enrolled in St. Francis’s Seminary, a Franciscan order located near Cincinnati. There he would get an education and prepare for a vocation as a priest.

  Life changed radically for Tom at St. Francis’s. Now, instead of being surrounded entirely by females, he was in a female-free environment. He slept in a dormitory with about two dozen boys a
nd he went to classes that were taught by male priests. Students were not required to pledge a lifetime of celibacy, but the priests that ran the school offered the priesthoodt as an alternative. Most of the students eventually rejected celibacy, but the percentage of “keepers” was high enough to keep the church supplied with a steady supply of priests.

  Tom only stayed at the school for one year. The brothers suspected they were losing him as a potential priest when they discovered that he was sneaking out of the dormitory to go to the homes of local girls. They knew that they had lost him for certain when he asked one of the brothers if he thought girls would be disinterested in him because of his diminutive stature.

  When he was sixteen, he moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with his mother, his sisters—and his new stepfather, a plastics worker named Jack South. Tom never took to his step-father and there always seemed to be tension between the two. Perhaps because of that, Tom began looking for activities outside the family to occupy his time.

  At Glen Ridge High School, he took up wrestling and soccer in an attempt to make new friends. He also decided to try out for the school production of Guys and Dolls. He landed the role of Nathan Detroit in the stage play and to the great pleasure of his mother and sisters he demonstrated a real talent for acting.

  After the play, a talent agent approached Tom and told him he had natural ability and should pursue a career as an actor. That was all the encouragement that he needed. After graduation from Glen Ridge High School, he told his mother and step-father that he had decided to go to New York to pursue a career as an actor. They encouraged him to go to college first, but Tom would have none of that. There was nothing in life that he wanted more than to become an actor.

  ~ ~ ~

  Soon after Nicole signed on for Days of Thunder she telephoned her boyfriend Marcus Graham, who was still in Australia, and told him the wonderful news. His first reaction was envy—he was in the midst of a temporary career slump and felt a tinge of jealousy—but he quickly recovered and voiced his support.