He was still in the school choir—he has a good voice—and joined his friend Steve Pansulla and other singers like Cathy Carella and Kathy Gauli, Lorraine’s sister, for that season’s Christmas concert. Steve, who had taken him under his wing in his first few months in a new school and encouraged him to join the choir and the wrestling squad, now suggested that he try out for a part in the school’s production of Guys and Dolls. Cathy Carella and Kathy Gauli made up the chorus of encouragement as they tried to wheedle the reluctant teenager into giving it a shot. “Just do it, it will be fun,” Steve Pansulla told him.
After all, now that he could no longer enter the wrestling tournament, what else did he have going on? For a long time, Tom would not entertain the idea. He told his friends that he couldn’t sing or act and that he had never appeared in a drama, let alone a musical. The hesitant thespian was being far too modest—as his family’s theatrical tradition and his enjoyment of the limelight on the various stages of his previous schools demonstrated.
It is testimony to the actor’s ability to disguise his real self, to play a role, that even now, the same school friends who encouraged him to audition for Guys and Dolls at Glen Ridge High are stunned by the knowledge that he had been performing for much of his life. “I didn’t have a clue that he had acted before,” says former school friend Pamela Senif, her shock matched by other thespian school friends. “Wow, I didn’t know that. As far as we were concerned, it was the first time he was in a play,” his friends chorused.
Eventually he was persuaded to go for an audition. Under the critical gaze of the show’s musical director, Nancy Tiritilli, and director, Bill D’Andrea, he sang a couple of songs and read from the script. His friend Cathy Carella was watching the audition and knew immediately that he was going to get the lead of Nathan Detroit. “People were blown away by how good he was. He was a natural. I knew he was going to be famous.” As far as she is concerned, he read from the script without any trouble, echoing the view of his contemporaries that if he had any reading difficulties, he disguised them extremely well.
Before he formally accepted the part of Nathan, he asked permission from his wrestling coach to make sure that he was not needed for the team. Then he began a transformation that would change his school status—and his life—forever. In the beginning, seasoned performers Steve Pansulla, who had the role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson, and Kathy Gauli, who played Agatha, gave him tips on how to handle himself onstage. “Just be yourself, act natural,” Steve told him. “Forget about the audience and don’t be nervous.” Steve, his self-appointed mentor, encouraged him even as Tom was saying that he just couldn’t handle the part.
His diffidence soon evaporated. The cast had not been rehearsing long before they began to realize that they were watching a star being born. “As everyone says, he was a natural from the beginning,” recalls Kathy Gauli. “He could sing and act, it was almost effortless for him. It was amazing. It was really something to watch this creative seed being planted and a natural talent emerging.”
It was not long either before those qualities that have become his trademark—an ability to focus, a fiery intensity, and a relentless professionalism—began to surface. Just as he demonstrated an easy command of the stage, he visibly grew in self-assurance among his peers. The cocky leader of the pack from Ottawa and Louisville now came swaggering back. Even his erstwhile guide Steve Pansulla felt the lash of his tongue. During one rehearsal Tom and his fellow actors were told to use the school cafeteria. At the moment when Steve, as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, was due on the improvised stage, he missed his cue. Without missing a beat, Tom, as Nathan Detroit, said, “Nicely, get your fat ass out here.” Fellow actors didn’t know if it was a performance or if Tom was genuinely annoyed at his buddy. They found Steve in the kitchen raiding the ice cream freezer. “He just didn’t goof around like the others,” recalls Phil Travisano. “He was deadly serious.”
When Guys and Dolls was performed in April 1980, the school’s theater was packed with family, friends, and well-wishers. Phil Travisano’s father, Ronald, a commercial film director, came along to support his son. The movie professional was so “blown away” by Tom Mapother’s performance that he went backstage and told him that he should take up acting seriously. “He was awesome. Most high-school students are self-conscious and just plain bad. He was fluid, outside of himself, and not hung up on who he was.”
Opinions vary about how Tom Mapother got his first foot on the theatrical ladder. One version has it that school starlet Lorraine Gauli brought her agent, Tobe Gibson, to watch her sister, Kathy, in the hopes that she would sign her. “Ironically, he would not have been discovered that night if my sister’s agent had not come to see me,” Kathy recalls, ruefully admitting that she was never signed herself. Lorraine, who was then riding high on TV, was in the audience with her agent, and realized from the moment she saw Tom’s command of the stage that he had what it took to be a star. So did her agent. “She went gaga about him,” she recalls. “He was so charismatic.”
While Tobe herself has no memory of that evening, she vividly recalls her first encounter with the teenager in her Manhattan office. She had previously asked Lorraine if she knew of any good-looking, talented teenage boys, and she recommended, among several others, Tom Mapother. Tom even took his photographs to the Gauli sisters’ house so that Tobe could look at him before they met. As soon as he walked into her Fifty-seventh Street office, she knew that she had found the gold dust all agents dream of . . . a charismatic youngster with raw talent. As she says, “I am very psychic, and when he came to see me and shook my hand, I said to him, ‘Listen to me. You are going to be a great star.’ ”
His audition, such as it was, was perfunctory. Tobe just knew. As her daughter Amy, who has starred in several TV soaps, says, “Her instincts were uncanny. She has done it several times with clients. It has made me believe in intuition.” Tobe entered Tom’s name and address into her Rolodex and he signed a standard contract, giving her 15 percent of his future earnings. They spent much of the audition discussing his stage name. Various surnames were considered before Tobe, who was going on a vacation to the Caribbean, spotted a holiday brochure in the corner of her office and suggested the name “Cruise.” As corny as it sounds, this was how he came to be known as Tom Cruise. At the time, Tobe didn’t even know it was his middle name—once she found out, it merely confirmed her initial impulse. Indeed, his later assertion that he dropped his family name after his father left when he was twelve seems odd, as he was known at Glen Ridge High School as Maypo, an abbreviated version of Mapother and a reference to a breakfast cereal popular at that time.
Over the next few months Tobe became like a second mother to him, lining up auditions and giving him advice and encouragement. As with much of his own version of the events of his life, she disputes his story that he found an agent only after he and his ever-loyal mother schlepped around Manhattan for days. “That’s not true,” she says. “Lorraine was a client of mine and she recommended him to me. She was the instrument of his success.” Tobe’s former client Lorraine Gauli is much more forgiving of the way she has been forgotten in the later story of Tom’s rise to stardom. Now a flourishing criminal defense lawyer, she believes that he would have been discovered no matter what. “He was a talented, good-looking guy, and that is quite unusual in the business.”
It was perhaps inevitable that the brash, controlling side of his personality began to surface, young Maypo now believing he could be the king of the world. His girlfriend at the time, Nancy Armel, watched the transition and decided there were better fish in the sea. She went to Florida for spring break and started dating an older guy behind his back. When she finally confessed her infidelity, he was furious. “Don’t let that smile and those teeth fool you,” she recalls. “He could have a really nasty streak and was very mean to people. Toward the end of his senior year he felt he could control people and he was starting to show his darker side. He felt that he could do no wrong.”
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While he had every right to feel angry at her behavior, he didn’t let the grass grow under his feet for long. During a “wild” cast party, he danced the night away with any number of new admirers. Around this time, the school campus was swept with rumors that vitamin E was good for sexual performance. So there were raised eyebrows among the guys standing in the kitchen when Tom walked in and asked party host Andrew Falk if he had any tablets. After grabbing a handful, he quickly left, leaving the guys rolling their eyes and smiling. “I never saw any evidence other than he was a red-blooded high-school student,” recalls Phil Travisano. “He was a regular masculine guy.”
At times there was just too much testosterone flying around. At the end of yet another cast party, this time at the home of Kim Thorne, he was sitting in the basement shooting the breeze with a handful of stragglers when he tried to pin down two of the girls, including Cathy Tevlin, by their ankles. While he and the other guys laughed uproariously, Cathy and her friend failed to see the funny side, squirming away from his grasp before making their excuses and leaving. “It was kind of gauche and sexual at the same time. These days I don’t think women put up with that goofy kind of behavior,” observes one of those present at that late-night impromptu wrestling match.
Certainly not everyone was impressed by his newfound fame. Ditched by Nancy Armel, he struggled to find a date for the senior prom. Ellen Hurley, for one, turned him down. “I have to tell you he wasn’t a chick magnet. Girls just weren’t that into him,” says her friend Pamela Senif. He managed to convince Ann Stoughton to be his partner for the evening—but only “as a friend.” In the end, it was one of those flouncing, tear-filled, whispering, intense, in-the-moment evenings that teenagers live for. He spent two angst-filled hours talking on the lawn to his old girlfriend Nancy Armel—before going off into the night in his battered green car looking for Diane Van Zoeren. Even though she was a year behind him in school, he had had a crush on her since he first arrived in New Jersey. That night, driving up and down empty streets in Glen Ridge, the lovelorn youngster tried but failed to find out where she lived. Soon after, however, he tracked her down, and for the next year or so he convinced her to be his girlfriend as he made the improbable transition from school to the silver screen.
After his triumph in Guys and Dolls, he was seriously bitten by the acting bug. With Hollywood in his sights, he missed much of the last few weeks of his final semester at Glen Ridge because he was traveling to Manhattan for auditions. His next role, though, was not so much “off Broadway” as “off Broad Street,” a local joke about a tiny theater that staged amateur productions in Bloomfield, New Jersey, near Glen Ridge. A few weeks after playing Nathan Detroit, he was rehearsing the part of Herb in the musical Godspell, based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew. Big time it wasn’t. But even though it was an amateur production, recruiting aspiring actors from Bloomfield Community College, for Tom it was another step forward into a world that he had edged around since he was a boy.
His enthusiasm and dedication to his chosen career were such that he decided to miss his high-school graduation ceremony in June 1980 rather than drop out of a Godspell performance. Later he attributed his absence from the ceremony to embarrassment about his dyslexia: “I graduated in 1980 but didn’t even go to my graduation,” he said. “I was a functional illiterate. I loved learning, I wanted to learn, but I knew I had failed in the system.”
As is often the case, the memories of his contemporaries vary from his own recollections. When he was appearing in Godspell, he told numerous friends that he was prepared to skip the ceremony to appear in the show. His friend Lorraine Gauli told him that he was mad to miss this undoubted highlight of the school calendar. He shrugged and smiled, but later she realized that he possessed a quality that she lacked—a burning ambition to succeed and a willingness to sacrifice short-term enjoyment to achieve that goal. As Phil Travisano, who went to see him in the show, recalls, “He was dedicated and so excited about acting that he was prepared to miss the fun of graduation.” So as the names of the graduating students were read out on the lawns of Glen Ridge High, he was pursuing his dream in a different kind of ceremony: singing, dancing, and rousing the audience with songs and stories that popularized the Christian gospels. “Did you like it? Was I good?” he eagerly asked his new girlfriend, Diane Van Zoeren, when she and her mother came to the show. He visibly preened as he accepted her complimentary verdict.
As the senior class celebrated the end of school, there were endless graduation parties thrown by the parents of departing classmates. That summer, Tom, beer in hand, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, was a familiar fixture at numerous gatherings. At one party Sam LaForte asked Tom about his future plans. His reply was as forthright as it was revealing: “Sam, I am going to New York and I am going to be a star.”
CHAPTER 3
It was the perfect night for romance. Hand in hand, Tom Cruise and Diane Van Zoeren walked along the beach, watching the waves shimmer in the moonlight as they rolled along the New Jersey shoreline. When they paused by a lifeguard stand, it was clear that Tom was not in the mood to whisper sweet nothings. He was more concerned that he had nothing—no money, no job, and no contacts. That night in the summer of 1980, just a few weeks after leaving Glen Ridge High School, eighteen-year-old Tom felt vulnerable and frustrated, barely able to hold back his tears as he poured out his fears to his sweetheart.
Rich in ambition—he told Diane he would give himself ten years to succeed as an actor; otherwise he would train as an airline pilot—he was dirt poor financially. Money—or rather the lack of it—had always been a nagging issue in his life. Now it was more pressing than ever. He often talked about being a self-made millionaire by the time he was thirty, and had a standing bet with his great friend Michael LaForte that the first one to earn a million dollars would buy the other a Mercedes. It was a bet he never honored, a failing that still rankles with some members of the Glen Ridge Brat Pack.
On the beach at Lavallette, a popular New Jersey resort, that night, it was not the idea of future millions that consumed his thoughts, but scraping together enough cash to rent an apartment in New York. With his agent, Tobe Gibson, based in Manhattan, he reasoned that he needed to be in the city so that he would be easily available for auditions and acting classes. But more than just money was worrying him. Even though he had an agent, Tom was concerned that he didn’t have the experience or wider contacts in the film industry to make it big as quickly as he would like. The confidence he had shown after his school success in Guys and Dolls seemed to be evaporating.
When the couple returned from Lavallette, Tom made do with the resources at hand. For part of the summer of 1980, he commuted into Manhattan from the family home in Glen Ridge. He was a familiar figure in his dirty green Ford Pinto, rarely parted from a ratty T-shirt that read: EYEING ICE COLD GIRL. If his own car was out of commission, he borrowed his mother’s or asked Diane Van Zoeren or his actress friend Lorraine Gauli, who lived around the corner, to give him a ride. If he had an early audition, he spent the night on the couch in the living room of Tobe Gibson’s Sixty-second Street apartment. Tobe’s daughters, Amy and Babydol, were amazed at her enthusiasm for a young man they thought was “nothing special.” At least not in the looks department. They concentrated on the superficial—his rather lumpy, stocky physique and inoffensively polite demeanor—and missed their mother’s instinctive feel for his nascent star quality.
After a day in the city, he would regularly take the commuter bus to Glen Ridge, sometimes bumping into neighbors and old school friends at the Port Authority bus station. Curiously, Tom’s version of events is much more exotic. He later claimed that he had so little money that he would often walk to the Holland Tunnel, which takes traffic under the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. In those days, whores offered sex to commuters on their way home. “There were prostitutes, who used to be around the tunnel, who knew me,” he told writer Dotson Rader. “They’d see me and they’d go, ‘Lo
ok, I’ll pick up a john, and you jump in.’ So I’d ride through the tunnel to New Jersey. The driver’s a little like, ‘What’s this guy doing in the backseat?’ but he saw I’m just this eighteen-year-old kid. I didn’t look dangerous. And they didn’t do anything sexual in front of me. I’d get out in New Jersey and say, ‘Thank you very much.’ Then I’d hitchhike home.”
This extraordinary story seems as implausible as it is impractical. Why would a hooker risk a trick so that a teenage boy could hitch a free ride through the Holland Tunnel? And why would a nervous driver, worried about being stiffed or mugged, allow him to get in his car in the first place? Unsurprisingly, Diane Van Zoeren has no memory of this unusual method of transportation. “Tom borrowed his mother’s car, but I don’t recall him hitchhiking or catching rides with hookers,” she said.
At some point during the summer, Tom very reluctantly swallowed his pride and asked his stepfather, Jack South, for a loan to help pay his rent and expenses in Manhattan while he got a professional toehold in the city. “How much is this going to cost me?” his stepfather asked warily when Tom outlined his vision of his future. He borrowed around $850, which he agreed to pay off on an informal installment plan. While the incident has now become a standing family joke, at the time Diane Van Zoeren recalls that Tom was loath to ask his “intimidating” stepfather for anything. He wanted to make it on his own and did not wish to be beholden to the rather grudging largesse of a man he frequently clashed with.
With money in his pocket, he found a small apartment on the Upper West Side, which he shared with a fellow struggling actor. To supplement the loan from his stepfather, he worked as a porter and cleaner in his new apartment building, got a part-time job busing tables at the now-defunct Mortimer’s restaurant, and spent the summer unloading trucks. It was a time of transformation. “He lost that dorky look,” recalls Diane. “He was running and working out. Quite frankly, he was adorable.” One of her favorite memories of that time is a fun shot of Tom taken during one of the weekends they spent in Lavallette. Bare-chested to show his “cut” physique, a beer in hand, he and a friend covered their faces in shaving cream before the picture was taken.
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