Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  The Blue Room turned out to be one of Nicole’s most satisfying acting experiences in years. After devoting so much of her time to Eyes Wide Shut, time that did not bring an immediate audience response, she reveled in the instant attention she received from her stage performances. Actors need approval to survive—and she received more than her share in New York and London.

  Unfortunately, about ten days before the play was scheduled to close, Nicole developed a bronchial infection and laryngitis, and she was forced to withdraw from the play. “I am truly devastated not to complete the last week of the run and deeply apologize to the people who have planned to attend those performances,” she said in a press release.

  Yes, she was devastated, but she also was exhausted and in need of rest and relaxation. Little did she know that her much-needed recuperation would be interrupted by traumatic news.

  ~ ~ ~

  In the months leading up to the release of Eyes Wide Shut, rumors swirled around the film with increasing vigor. British newspapers reported there would be scenes in which Tom’s character plays a transvestite. There was talk that Nicole would appear dressed as a man. Rumors circulated that Harvey Keitel was bumped from the film because of a sex scene with Nicole that got out of control. Everyone seemed to agree that, whatever the actual details, it would be the most sexually explicit Hollywood movie ever made, almost certain to receive a NC-17 rating.

  Nicole didn’t know what to think about the rumors, because she really had no idea what was going to be in the film. She had filmed some terribly explicit scenes, especially with Gary Goba, but how much of that would appear in the film was unknown to her.

  On March 1, 1999, amid great secrecy, Nicole and Tom previewed the film for the first time in a midtown Manhattan screening room with a handful of studio executives. Kubrick was so paranoid about details leaking out that he sent word for the projectionist to turn away and not watch the film.

  Nicole and Tom watched the film in silence (she couldn’t speak anyway since she had totally lost her voice) and then they watched it a second time, scribbling and passing notes to each other in the darkened theater. They were dumbfounded by what they saw. Nicole later said it had a hypnotic effect on her. “The first time, we were in shock,” Nicole later told Time magazine. “The second time, I thought, ‘Wow!’ It’s going to be controversial. I’m proud of the film and that period of my life. It was my obsession, our obsession, for two or three years.”

  Tom’s strongest reaction was to the scenes Nicole did with Gary Goba. “Yeah, who the fuck was that guy?” he later joked to USA Today (the newspaper edited the expletive). “You know, I trust Nic. And she is very good about making me feel okay about it. I have scenes that I do also in other movies, and scenes in this movie, and it’s something that is part of what we do as actors. There are moments where you feel a tinge of jealousy. But there’s a trust there.”

  Immediately after viewing the film, Tom telephoned Kubrick to tell him how much they liked it, then caught a flight to Australia where he was working on Mission Impossible II. Nicole remained in New York with the children. Unable to speak, she faxed the director a letter that shared her thoughts about the film. Not talking to him was tough on her, especially during that emotional time, for she had become used to speaking to him three or four times a week.

  On March 6, Kubrick left Nicole a voicemail: “Nicole, call me. Can’t wait to talk to you.” The message left a smile on Nicole’s face. Her voice had returned by that time and she was looking forward to talking to Kubrick again.

  When she awoke the next morning, she thought about calling Kubrick right away, but she put it off a couple of hours so that she could take care of the children. She had just finished baking chocolate croissants for the children when the telephone rang. It was Kubrick’s assistant, Leon. He told her that he had some bad news: Kubrick had died in his sleep from a heart attack. He was seventy years of age.

  Nicole called Tom immediately and told him the news. Amid cries of “no, no, no,” they cried and cried and then cried some more. Tom caught the next flight for New York (a twenty-four-hour journey) and that night Nicole went alone to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to light a candle for Kubrick.

  When Tom arrived the next day, they immediately caught a flight to London so that they could attend the funeral. Nicole was an emotional wreck and sobbed all the way across the Atlantic. At the funeral, they comforted Kubrick’s wife, Christiane, and their daughters. His death was such a shock to everyone; he was not known to have any serious health problems.

  At the funeral, all Nicole could think about was how much Kubrick hated funerals. “I’m surprised he didn’t will himself out of [his own],” Nicole told Rolling Stone. “But it was really for Christiane and the girls. I found it quite traumatic. I went to Princess Di’s funeral—Tom knew her; I’d only met her a few times—but I’d never been to a very intimate, private funeral.”

  After Kubrick was laid to rest, Nicole returned to America, where she tried to prepare herself for the release of Eyes Wide Shut. Before his death, Kubrick had told Nicole about the piece of film that he was going to release for the movie’s trailer. It was the scene in which she stands nude at a mirror as Tom makes love to her as Chris Isaak’s song, “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing,” plays in the background.

  She wondered what people would think. She was so lost in the character at the time they filmed it that she lost all perspective. Making love in front of a mirror was something the characters did. Now she had to face the fact that millions of people would see Tom touch her breast and, because it was only a brief piece of film, the people that saw it would see them—Tom and Nicole—making love because they had not yet been exposed to the characters. How would theatergoers react to that?

  In April 1999, before the trailer was released, Star magazine published a story alleging that two British sex therapists, Wendy and Tony Duffield, were paid to teach Tom and Nicole how to make love in front of the cameras. According to the published story, Kubrick sought professional advice from the therapists after Tom and Nicole were unable to make some scenes look realistic enough for Kubrick.

  Tom and Nicole responded to the story with a lawsuit. Said Star editor Phil Bunton to the London Daily Telegraph: “If Tom and Nicole want to sue over this it means they are leaving themselves open to be questioned in court about extremely intimate details of their marriage. I can’t imagine why they want to pursue this unless there is some hidden Scientology agenda I am not aware of. Scientologists are against psychotherapy—and presumably sex therapy, too—so maybe that has something to do with it.”

  The lawsuit was later dismissed, with both Tom and Nicole and the magazine cooling their jets over the controversial story.

  By June, Nicole and Tom were so frustrated over tabloid intrusions into their lives that they told reporters they might retire from acting to pursue personal and family interests. Nicole said that a trip to the beach with the children was looking good to her.

  ~ ~ ~

  With the death of Stanely Kubrick came a reassessment of his career. Was he a genius with a unique vision of life? Or was he simply a good photographer with extraordinarily good luck and a convincing bluff? Inquiring minds were stumped.

  Ty Burr, writing for Entertainment Weekly, saw Kubrick as “America’s most prominent contribution to the ranks of visionary postwar directors, on equal footing with Bergman and Kurosawa, Godard and Fellini.” That seemed to be the consensus among thoughtful observers, although when Eyes Wide Shut was released on July 16, 1999, reviews were mixed and Kubrick was treated as a film-maker, not a saint.

  Movieline’s Michael Atkinson threw down the gauntlet with the questions: “Is it a masterpiece or a boondoggle? Fascinating or laughable? Destined to be venerated in years hence, like most Stanley Kubrick movies, or shrugged off for eternity?”

  Under the headline Shut Your Eyes: Kubrick's Final Film Long, Dull, Supporting Actors Shine, But Cruise and Kidman Are Unconvincing and Unerotic, Philadelphia Inquirer cri
tic Steven Rea wrote: “Long and dull, despite the sumptuous production design and light-shimmering photography (and the orgy), Kubrick’s thirteenth and final film is a study of fidelity, infidelity, and how easily impressed people still get when somebody identifies himself as a doctor.”

  The Boston Globe’s Ed Siegel could not have disagreed more. He found the film to be a “near-perfect coda to a most brilliant career” and viewed the success of the film as existing in the eye of the beholder. “I was with Cruise every step of the way in what has to be his best piece of acting,” wrote Siegel. “(Kidman continues to be an impressive actress). However many takes it took, the simultaneous expressivity and ambiguity on his and Kidman’s faces are worth it.”

  With critics slugging it out over the importance of the film, it was inevitable that Nicole and Tom would join in the debate. “People were expecting it to be A Clockwork Orange with sex, which it’s not,” Nicole told the Miami Herald. “The first time I saw it, I kept saying to Tom, ‘This is so elegant!’ It’s a disturbing film, but it has great subtlety. I’ve used the word ‘Kubrickian’ to describe it, and some people look at me funny. They ask me to define it, and I say, ‘Why Define it? Don’t you just know what I mean?’”

  As the initial shock of the film wore off, questions were raised about the relationship between the film and Nicole’s and Tom’s marriage. Did they adapt to the film or did the film adapt to them? Did Kubrick help them understand their marriage better or did he initiate an irreparable split in their relationship? Was Eyes Wide Shut fiction or was it the ultimate documentary on the break up of a marriage?

  One of the aspects of the film that attracted attention was the different level of interest and passion that Nicole showed in her sex scenes. With Tom, she was cool and distant, almost passionless—and there seemed little physical chemistry between them. With Gary Goba, she was just the opposite—passionate, totally engaged in the encounter, oozing with hot-blooded sexuality.

  Some observers attribute those differences to different directions in the script. Perhaps Kubrick wanted her to be passionate with Goba and cool to Tom’s advances. That’s possible, but the script gives no indication of that. The script instructs her to “respond to his caresses by taking her glasses off and putting her arms around him.”

  Goba’s friends joked with him about it. Asked to compare Tom’s encounter with Nicole to his own encounter, Goba was too much the gentleman to offer an analysis. All he could say about it was that it was “a surreal experience.”

  After the film was released, Nicole and Tom remained staunch supporters of Kubrick’s vision and tactics, even though both their health and their marriage had been affected by the long ordeal involved with making the film. The issues that Bill and Alice dealt with in the movie were some of the same issues that Tom and Nicole were struggling to deal with—jealousy, marital independence, the demands of career, sexual communication within a marriage, and fantasy versus reality.

  Kubrick worked with Tom and Nicole separately and forbade them to compare notes or to discuss the movie when they were alone. Nicole understood the reason for that to be because he feared that in a three-way situation—which is what it had come down to in their working relationship—two members would find it irresistible to gang up on the third member, perhaps without even meaning to.

  Kubrick was a control freak, obsessive and at times paranoid, there is no doubt about that, so Nicole’s explanation is certainly plausible. However, since the director’s tactic of isolating Tom and Nicole and then working with them separately is a well-known mind-control technique, some weight must be given to the possibility that he had a less laudable goal in mind—namely, to experiment with their marriage, for the sake of the movie, the way a researcher would do in a laboratory setting. It is almost as if he was asking Tom and Nicole to examine their own sex lives within the confines of the film, and then to discern between reality and dream-like fantasy.

  The most damning evidence against Kubrick lies in the relentless manner in which he pursued the sex scenes between Nicole and Gary Goba. He asked Nicole to do things that he knew damned well would never make it onto film. It was abusive behavior cloaked in a mantle of professional necessity.

  “Every time he set up a scene, he said in a teasing voice, ‘What about this Nicole—we’ll put you underneath him, eh?’” recalls Goba. “He was doing stuff like that, antagonizing her. He got a rise out of her for sure. She would say, ‘All right, Stanley, that’s enough.’ She loved him, but he was trying to piss her off in a fun way, but who knows . . .”

  In the film, Nicole’s sexual encounters with Goba were only a fantasy, but Tom’s character obsessed over them as if they were real; in real life, Nicole’s encounters with Goba were actual, insofar as intimate touching was concerned, but Tom viewed them as fantasy. Tom had no idea how intimate those sex scenes were, primarily because of Kubrick’s dictum that the couple must refrain from exchanging information—and to this day, Tom is still in the dark about the explicitness of the scenes.

  Was it Kubrick’s intent to push Nicole and Tom to the point where they no longer could discern reality from fantasy—and then to document that cinematic experiment for posterity? From that perspective, Eyes Wide Shut can be viewed as a documentary on the dissolution of a Hollywood marriage. Diabolically brilliant, if true—but the question remains, was Kubrick clever enough to bring it off?

  ~ ~ ~

  The same month that Eyes Wide Shut was released, Esquire published a feature story about Nicole that painted a picture of the actress that was devastatingly unflattering. Tom Junod, a Georgia-based feature writer who went to Australia to interview Nicole for the article, walked away with a story that was kinky enough to ensure his own celebrity.

  Nicole was most generous with her time, giving the writer a tour of the bridge that her grandfather helped build, drinking with him at a colorful pub called the Glenmore Hotel, and dining with him at a Japanese restaurant. The way Junod told it, Nicole had a bit too much to drink and got a wee bit tipsy . . . well, drunk.

  On Junod’s last night in Sydney. Nicole insisted on dropping by his hotel to tell him goodbye. According to Junod, when she arrived at his room she glanced at his computer screen and then climbed into his bed to get “comfortable.” No sooner had he climbed into the bed to lay beside her, than the telephone rang. It was Tom and he was looking for his wife, since he and the children were waiting for her at a Chinese restaurant and everyone was getting hungry.

  “Yeah, Tom,” Junod answered. “She’s right here, in my hotel room. In my bed.”

  There was a pause, according to Junod, and Tom said, “Yeah, in your dreams, buddy.”

  With that, Junod held the telephone out in Nicole’s direction and asked her to confirm that she was, indeed, in his bed.

  “I’m afraid so, darling,” Nicole called out to her husband. “I’m afraid I’m in his bed at this very moment.”

  If true—and he did seem to suggest that he and Nicole were having an intimate encounter of some kind—it was an odd thing for Junod to write about in his article. So odd, that Junod himself became the subject of media attention. In an interview with USA Today, he seemed to back away from suggesting a sexual encounter. He explained it by saying, “The story is and was a flirtation. I was flirting with her, not only when reporting, but when writing. It’s that genre of celebrity journalism. And she flirted back. I just think we kind of liked each other. Of course, it was professional.”

  Nicole was oddly silent about the article. After the stresses that she underwent making Eyes Wide Shut, dealing with the real-life jealousies and insecurities that had crept into her marriage, Junod’s article was the last thing she needed in her life, even if it was written in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek style. No one knows for certain, since neither she nor Tom has ever discussed the article publicly, but it surely must have caused a rife.

  Emotionally, Nicole and Tom were depleted. The publicity surrounding Eyes Wide Shut was nearly as draining as makin
g the film itself. The marriage of Hollywood’s most perfect couple was headed for trouble, not because of the article, but because of an accumulation of marital stresses. The article merely demonstrated how truly needy Nicole was at that time in her life.

  Even before the release of Kubrick’s work, Tom had retreated into another film—this time into a comic drama titled Magnolia. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the film examines nine lives in the course of one day, all taking place in San Fernando Valley, California. Tom took the supporting role of Frank T. J. Mackey, the leader of a cultish, self-help group of macho womanizers who want to improve their game. Mackey’s advice is to “seduce and destroy.”

  When the film was released in December 1999, Tom received rave reviews for the manner in which he had developed the character (was he listening more and more to Nicole?). Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bob Graham had praise for the actor: “The role of Frank T. J. Mackey demands a mesmerizing performance, and Cruise delivers one.” Agreeing with that assessment was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated him for an Oscar (he didn’t win).

  Chapter 8

  NIC GAMBLES ON ‘MOULIN ROUGE’

  When Nicole first read the script for Birthday Girl, what most impressed her was that she was unable to predict what was going to happen on the next page. She saw the story as being character-driven, one in which she could lose herself and adopt a new persona: in this case, as a Russian mail-order bride. What also impressed her about the project was that it initially would be filmed in Sydney, which meant she could take the children and join Tom while he was shooting Mission Impossible II.

  Nicole did have one reservation about making the film. It would require her to learn Russian, at least enough to make her character convincing, and she was not certain she could bring that off. Even so, she threw herself into it, learning not only the Russian language, but the Russian attitude as well, even though she was still physically exhausted by the emotional investment she had put into Eyes Wide Shut and The Blue Room.