Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  The release of the movie was delayed until November 1, 1991, due to decisions made during editing that some scenes needed to be re-shot. Reviews were not especially kind. Wrote Rita Kempley for the Washington Post: “In the annals of crime-related entertainment, the adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate ranks up there with Geraldo’s TV special on ‘The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault.’ When thrown open to our prying eyes, the picture, like the vault, is full of nothing but stale air.”

  Also displeased with the film was Jay Carr, who wrote for the Boston Globe: “Every season there’s one big-budget movie that attracts disaster rumors like a magnet. This year, it’s Billy Bathgate, with its re-shot endings and postponed opening dates. [It] isn’t a disaster exactly. It’s more like handsome taxidermy. Director Robert Benton fills the screen with gorgeously burnished pictures, Tom Stoppard’s screenplay transfers the novel’s action and many of its lines efficiently, and the production values are first-rate. But the film mostly just sits there.”

  Most critics were impressed with Nicole’s acting, but some questioned whether her character should have been played by an older actress (Nicole was just a year older than Loren Dean, who was supposed to be of high-school age). One critic, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, pointed out what he thought was a Disney first—a glimpse of Nicole’s pubic hair.

  ~ ~ ~

  Even before Billy Bathgate was released, Nicole experienced a sudden halt in her career. The phone stopped ringing with offers. News media interest in her seemed to focus on her marriage to Tom and not her career. When she did receive attention, it was borderline negative, as if she had done something wrong by coming to America and marrying Tom.

  Rumors surfaced again about Tom’s sexual orientation. Hollywood gossips said the marriage was little more than a devil’s bargain, whereby he got respectability and she got a career by riding on his coattails.

  “I went through a period when I didn’t get any work for a year,” Nicole told Good Weekend, an Australian magazine. “It was a very tough time for me and I wanted to go back to Australia, but Tom’s career was in America.”

  Nicole had to decide whether her first priority was her career or her marriage. She came down solidly on the side of her marriage, discrediting her detractors with the single-minded zeal with which she embraced her new life with Tom.

  Chapter 5

  ‘FAR AND AWAY’

  TARNISHES NIC’S DREAM

  With the wind whipping against her nylon jumpsuit and her heart pounding wildly, Nicole climbed out onto the wing of the airplane and—clutching the braces and guide wires that held the biplane together—slowly made her way to the tip of the wing, where just staying on her feet was a major accomplishment.

  As Tom kept the airplane on a steady course, Nicole did a nearly perfect arabesque and stepped off the wing. Because the airplane was traveling so fast, she appeared to be suspended in air, still holding the arabesque for what seemed like an eternity as the plane pulled away from her, until the moment she began tumbling to earth and then pulled her ripcord, her parachute snatching her back into reality.

  Nicole’s romance with Tom began on a Daytona racetrack, where their emotions was jacked up by the addictive adrenaline rush of mind-numbing speed—and it continued that way well into their marriage. From race cars, they moved to skydiving, and then to airplanes, perhaps Tom’s biggest passion, and then on to daredevil combinations such as wing walking.

  Always, it was about the speed, and about putting everything on the line. Tom loves to fly, especially the two-seat biplane, the wing of which Nicole used as a platform for her arabesque. His favorite maneuver is a Cuban Eight, in which he puts the plane into a dive, flying straight to the ground—only pulling up at the last minute.

  Nicole adored that dangerous quality in Tom—it was so like her mother and so unlike her father—and she made an effort to be at his side whenever he went on a thrill- seeking mission. Asked by Rolling Stone if she felt frightened when doing daredevil stunts, she said: “That’s the point. Sure, I worry about dying, but that’s part of the adrenaline rush. Your whole body is resisting, saying, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t right.’ But you do it anyway. It sounds mad.”

  When Nicole and Tom first met, the attraction was purely physical, a chemical reaction pure and simple. It was only later that they realized how similar they really were. Nicole had always been a daredevil, willing to try anything, whether it involved wrapping killer snakes around her neck, or traveling halfway around the world to sample different cultures. Dare her to do it, whatever the risk—and you could consider it done.

  Of course, married life for Nicole that first year or two was not a constant roller coaster ride. They settled into a life of domestic normality that was almost sitcomish in its predictably. They vowed never to be apart for more than two weeks at a time and they made it a point to eat dinner with each other every day, no matter what was happening in their professional lives. Sundays became a day for family get-togethers, depending on where they were and who was available at the time. It was the day when Nicole did the cooking. Working in the kitchen was something that she enjoyed, something that kept her grounded and in touch with the real world.

  Tom’s marriage to Nicole was very different from his marriage to Mimi, and those differences were due, in no small measure, to Nicole’s concept of marriage, a viewpoint influenced by her psychologist father, whether she realized it or not. Relationship parity is a must to Nicole—and it is no mystery where that belief came from.

  We know what Nicole heard around the house with her parents because Antony aired his concepts of marriage in his self-help books. On the matter of parity, he once wrote: “Power and dependency are linked and in any relationship are determined by who controls the reinforcers or resources such as the material goods, the affection and the support. When these resources are roughly equal, the power balance in the relationship will be the same. When they are not, the partner who controls more of the desired resources will have more power in the relationship.”

  Parity was not the only guiding principle in Nicole’s relationship with Tom. Another important belief is that couples should never take each other for granted. Shortly after they got married, Tom was astonished to learn that if he wanted Nicole to accompany him somewhere, he had to ask her out on a date. He could not assume that she always would be available. When she explained the “dating” procedure to him, he shook his head in amused disbelief. “You mean, you might turn me down?” he asked, to which she responded in her deep Aussie accent, “Yep!”

  ~ ~ ~

  After Nicole completed work on Billy Bathgate, she and Tom looked around for another project they could do together. Producers jumped at the chance because the chemistry between the actors in Days of Thunder was palatable, there for everyone to see, and the prospect of magnifying that chemistry in an epic production excited everyone.

  Far and Away seemed to be the perfect vehicle. Directed and co-written by former child actor Ron Howard, who had just come off a losing streak with Backdraft and Parenthood, it told the story of two Irish immigrants who come to American in the late nineteenth century to make new lives for themselves.

  Tom was asked to play the role of Joseph Donnelly, a young Irishman who left Ireland after being faced with eviction from his father’s farm, and Nicole was cast as Shannon Christie, an aristocratic, head-strong girl who goes to America to escape the blandness of her family life, not to mention a suitor who is obsessed with her.

  For Nicole, that meant switching from her newly acquired American accent to an Irish one, a creative process she was getting used to. Tom had a more difficult time. He had made a career of playing himself in movies and changing his speech patterns was not as easy as he had expected. Nicole and Tom eased the transition by hanging out with local Irishmen and picking up their speech patterns. When that proved to be inadequate, Tom employed the services of a speech coach who taught him how to master the basics.

  For Nicole and Tom, rom
antic locations like Dublin and County Galway only intensified their infatuation with each other. When they were not reciting their lines before the camera, they hugged and kissed in full view of the crew, except when they disappeared into their trailer for unexplained absences of two hours or more.

  Ron Howard had never seen anything quite like it. Sometimes he would call out “action,” then turn to see the couple clinched in a passionate kiss. Crew members sometimes jokingly offered to pour buckets of water on them. More than once, the scene would be set with Nicole before the camera and Tom’s voice, capped with affectionate awe, would filter over Howard’s shoulder with the observation that, “Isn’t she beautiful!”

  Nicole was just as bad, often making comments to no one in particular about his good looks or, when he was filming his fight scenes, extolling the attractiveness of his bare chest. It was obvious to everyone working on the film that she was very much in love, almost to the point of schoolgirl giddiness.

  Despite the couples’ honeymoon glow, the film did manage to get made. Far and Away begins in Ireland in the 1890s. Joseph is an impoverished farmer who is fighting a losing battle to make a living on rented land. When his father dies, thugs are sent by the landowner to tell the family that their rent is overdue. The thugs burn down the farmhouse and Joseph goes after the landlord to seek revenge.

  When he arrives at the landlord’s house, he falls asleep in the barn, fully intending to murder the man at the earliest opportunity. Fate intervenes when Shannon encounters him in the barn and stabs him in the thigh with a pitchfork. As a result, Joseph is taken prisoner and held against his will in the house.

  One night, Shannon climbs up a ladder to his second-floor room and tells him that she is running away. “Perhaps you are wondering why I’m running away,” she says. “I’ll tell you. I’m running away because I’m modern. I’m modern and I’m going to a modern place. . . I’m very smart and very modern and that’s all you need to know about me.”

  Joseph is resistant at first, but she perseveres and convinces him to escape her father’s house and then to go with her to America. They catch a ship to America, him posing as her servant, a status he is not too keen about.

  Once they arrive in Boston, Joseph becomes a boxer to earn money and Shannon takes a job as a chicken plucker. Life in America is harder than they ever imagined and they are forced to take rooms in a brothel. After a string of boxing successes, Joseph loses a big fight and is beaten senseless. He awakens in the street and sees Shannon’s Irish suitor, who has traveled to American to find him.

  Penniless, Shannon and Joseph are cast out into the street in the dead of winter. They break into a house to get food and the homeowner shoots her. Joseph takes her to the suitor’s house so that she can be cared for, then he disappears, thinking he has done the best thing for her under the circumstances.

  Eventually, Joseph gets a job working on a railroad. One day he sees a wagon train on its way to Oklahoma for the land rush and he joins it. At the camp, he spots Shannon, who is there with her family and suitor.

  “I wondered if I’d ever see you here,” she said. “I suspected that I might.” She is cool toward him at first, hiding her anger over his disappearance. She says, “Time takes care of everything, doesn’t it, Joseph?”

  “Everything’s worked out as it should have,” he says. “Don’t you agree?”

  Shannon nods affirmatively, then tells him good luck with his dreams. Of course, they meet again at the end, when they together claim the land they have wanted so much since their arrival in America.

  When Far and Away was released in May 1992, during Memorial Day weekend, it took in an encouraging $13 million from more than fifteen hundred screens, but that was far less than Universal Pictures expected (by contrast, Alien 3 took in $23 million the previous weekend and Lethal Weapon 3 took in $27 million).

  Critics were decidely less than enthusiastic about the lumbering epic. Hal Hinson of the Washington Post wrote: “Far and Away is such a doddering, bloated bit of corn, and its characters and situation so obviously hackneyed, that we can’t give in to the story and allow ourselves to be swept away . . . Cruise has never seemed more lightweight; his job is to embody the virtues of a larger-than-life Hollywood movie star, and yet he has never appeared more inadequate to the task.”

  Writing in the Chicago Sun Times, Roger Ebert praised the photography and then noted: "Are audiences thought not capable of seeing great pictures and listening to great dialogue at the same time? Are they so impatient they have to be thrown boxing scenes instead of character scenes? Is there any purpose to this movie other than visual spectacle?”

  After it became apparent that the movie was not going to do well (it ended up grossing only $58 million in the United States) Ron Howard did a series of interviews to explain the movie. “Old-fashioned was what I had in mind,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “These are the kinds of movies that made me want to become a director, this style of storytelling. How the West Was Won, The Quiet Man—it’s a certain style of motion picture experience.”

  Nicole and Tom were not much help promoting the film. For some reason, they had decided prior to the movie’s release not to do any joint interviews. Tom had been antagonistic toward the press for several years—often requiring reporters to sign restrictive contracts before he would talk to them—but Nicole always had a more realistic view toward publicity. She did interviews for Far and Away, only not with Tom in the room. “I knew it would be . . . difficult . . . for my career, when we decided to get married,” she explained to W magazine. “But I figured, God, you fall in love with somebody and get married once, properly. I’m not going to do it again.”

  Ironically, the biggest disappointment of Far and Away was not a lagging box office; it was the less-than-enthusiastic way in which fans reacted to Tom and Nicole together on screen. Some people said it was because Tom’s female fans resented Nicole sharing the spotlight with him. Others pointed to the tepid on-screen chemistry between the two actors and suggested that perhaps they should keep their careers separate.

  ~ ~ ~

  After Far and Away, Nicole expressed regret that she and Tom had teamed up on screen again so soon after Days of Thunder. Asked about those regrets by Movieline, she said: “I regretted the way I was viewed as just Tom Cruise’s wife. In terms of the film and the character, I was very appreciative. . . I was trying to have my own identity. I’m sure that happens to a lot of people—I was just experiencing it in a public way.”

  Losing her professional identity was not something she had counted on. She had gone from being a big fish in a small Australian pond to being Tom’s fish in an aquarium illuminated with spotlights. She was in love. Other people who fell in love could do so without losing their identity, so why should that be a special problem for her?

  Tom did everything he could to make her feel special. He lavished expense gifts on her, ostentatious displays of affection such as a red Mercedes, and he gave her a Labrador retriever to cuddle and play with while he was away at work putting together multi-million-dollar movie deals.

  Nicole once told him that she did not like to shop, so he went shopping for her, purchasing expensive gowns for her to wear, clothing that he thought would look good on her. There was nothing overtly manipulative in Tom’s behavior, no sinister motives, but it was as if he had borrowed a page from Antony Kidman’s book, Family Life: Adapting to Change, which makes the case that classic, gender-based power struggles between men and women sometimes revolve around who controls the purse and the toys.

  Nicole was aware of what was happening—she was, after all, her father’s daughter—but, truthfully, she did not care. For the first time, she was in a relationship with a man who was both her friend and her lover, and together they were headed down the same creative road, dreaming the same fantasies. She willingly gave up her independence because she felt, for the first time in her life, she had found someone to love that was going to love her back—and not hurt her.

>   “I’m not sort of running around and going, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, who can I be with, where’s someone I can spend the rest of my life with?’” she told Women’s Weekly, an Australian publication. “I’ve found that person now and it’s just a warm, comforting, incredibly trusting and supportive environment. That’s given me a base to shoot out from, to grow from. And he’s just a great person to be with.”

  Once Tom had Nicole driving the car he wanted, wearing the clothing he picked out for her, and playing with the puppy of his choice, he went off to make another movie. Next up was a courtroom thriller named A Few Good Men, directed by Rob Reiner, who had a major hit in 1989 with When Harry Met Sally. The script was based on a true incident that was adapted into a Broadway play by Aaron Sorkin, who ended up writing the screenplay as well.

  Tom was asked to play Lt. Daniel Kaffee, an inexperienced Navy lawyer who defends two Marines, played by Wolfgang Bodison and James Marshall, who have been charged with murdering a colleague during a hazing incident. The Marines claimed they were following orders and the death was accidental.

  Lieutenant Commander Jo-Anne Galloway, played by Demi Moore, is put in charge of overseeing the Marines’ defense. She is nudged by her superior officer to assign Kaffee to the case, primarily because he is lazy, the type of bureaucratic legal mind that would rather plea-bargain than fight. With Kaffee in charge, the top brass feel the case has a better chance of quietly disappearing. However, the deeper Kaffee and Galloway get into the case, the more convinced they are of their clients’ innocence. Kaffee also discovers he has a real passion for investigative legal work.

  A requirement for all good thrillers is an immovable object, someone who has the power to make or break the case. That person, in this instance, is Colonel Nathan Jessup, a hard-line Marine played by Jack Nicholson. Did he give his tacit approval for the hazing incident or did he simply look the other way after the fact? The real fireworks of the film are generated by Kaffee’s confrontations with Jessup. In the climatic courtroom scene, Jessup lunges at Kaffee and has to be restrained by two Marine guards.