At that time, though, he saw himself and his life in much darker shades. During his days in Manhattan that summer, he recalled how he fed hungrily off cheap hot dogs and rice, living, as he later recalled, “like an animal in the jungle.” Albeit a jungle animal who went home on weekends for his mother’s roast chicken dinners. Indeed, as jungle lairs go, his apartment on the Upper West Side was rather “neat and tidy,” the romantic youngster making sure there were flowers in the room and strawberries and cream waiting in the refrigerator when Diane visited.
All his animal instincts were focused on capturing a career in the movies. When he could afford it, he attended half a dozen or so evening classes run by veteran actor Phil Gushee at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre on Fifty-fourth Street. Not that his agent thought it was money well spent. In Tobe Gibson’s eyes, Tom was a natural talent who could be spoiled by the shaping and molding of an acting studio. It was a view shared by his friend Lorraine Gauli, who recognized, albeit reluctantly, that his raw ability and passion far outstripped her own theatrical talent. When he came to her house one day to practice a scene from David Mamet’s play American Buffalo, she was struck by how natural and instinctive was his acting. “This kid was innately good. He didn’t need any method or training,” she recalls. In fact, he was highly critical of her own decision to take the conventional route and sign up for a three-year course at a New York acting school. He felt she should follow his lead and audition for stage and screen roles immediately. The single-minded young man believed he could pick up acting experience on the hoof.
Even those friends who did not have a background in drama could see the talent bursting forth. One weekend back in Glen Ridge, he stood with his friend Vinnie Travisano in the hallway of his family home, trading lines from the 1980 hit movie Raging Bull. “He got so emotional and into the moment, you could see that this was his calling,” recalled Vinnie. “It was amazing.”
Having given himself ten years to become king of the acting jungle, he was already making a noise in that wild world within ten weeks. “From the minute he started to audition he was a hit,” Tobe Gibson recalls. He snagged a part in a commercial for Hershey’s chocolate and received callbacks for several other TV commercials. Intense and dedicated, he explored every avenue to gain an advantage over all the other hopefuls in search of stardom. For a time he took guitar lessons from Laura Davies, a Glen Ridge High School musician, to give him a better chance of snagging a part in a TV version of the hit movie Fame. The show’s producers were holding auditions in Hollywood, and Tobe managed to get Tom’s name added to a very long list of hopefuls. Somehow he scraped the money together for the flight from New York to Los Angeles, packed a bag, and embarked on a journey that gave him the opportunity to experience firsthand the indifferent, offhanded reality of the industry he was determined to conquer.
The experience left the East Coast boy somewhat perplexed. He arrived at the director’s office and proceeded to give, as he later recalled, a “terrible” reading. When the director asked him how long he intended to stay in town, the young actor, thinking he might get called back to read again, said that he was there for a couple of days. “Good, get a tan while you’re here,” came the reply, and he was promptly shown the door. As he later recalled: “I walked out and thought it was the funniest thing. Tears were coming out of my eyes. I was laughing so hard, I thought, ‘This is Hollywood. Welcome, Cruise.’ ” Given his raw ambition and intense, rather humorless character, it is hard to reconcile his later glib recollection with the likely reality: all those days of hopeful guitar practice and rehearsals dashed in an unforgiving minute.
Certainly one person who wasn’t laughing was his girlfriend, Diane Van Zoeren, who phoned him for two days straight without any response. She only later discovered that he had teamed up with a couple of other acting hopefuls and spent forty-eight hours trying his luck at the gaming tables of Las Vegas.
While he hadn’t made the grade for the Fame TV show, Tobe secured him an audition for a walk-on role in Endless Love, a story of teenage passion and obsession starring Brooke Shields. Tobe had to use all her negotiating skills to get him in to see the director, Franco Zeffirelli. The film’s casting agent, Sally Dennison, wanted a taller, slimmer character for the part of a high-school football player, but Tobe convinced her at least to look at her protégé, who she admitted had the look of a stocky wrestler.
Before he left for the audition, Tobe reminded him of the golden rules for a young actor. At the first meeting, always say thank you, keep eye contact, and arrive fresh and full of enthusiasm. If you get a part, watch the director’s every move on set and never party before the filming is finished. Her words fell on deaf ears. Tom later admitted that he had committed the cardinal sin of drinking heavily the night before his audition and arrived with a hangover. Eventually he was asked to deliver lines from Romeo and Juliet and walk up and down the room, presumably to give the director a sense of his screen presence. For someone so passionate and committed to his craft, his confession that he drank too much before his first big opportunity seems strange. Was it nerves, bravado, or the exaggeration of hindsight?
Hangover or no, Tom won for himself the tiny part of Billy, while another of Tobe’s clients, Sean Gauli, the kid brother of Tom’s actress friend Lorraine, also snagged a “blink and you’d miss it” role. Filming was in Chicago in the fall of 1980, and before he boarded the plane, his mother made sure her young lion was properly attired—taking him shopping for T-shirts, shorts, and fresh underwear. It was a necessary precaution, as his first screen character is notable more for the tiny Daisy Duke shorts he wore during the filming of a soccer kickabout than for any lines he delivered. His role, such as it was, called for him to take off his undershirt before chatting to the lead character, David. During their brief conversation he whimsically suggests that David should set fire to his girlfriend’s family home, a suggestion that has tragic consequences for the star-crossed lovers.
While Tom was a lifelong film fan, he was a novice when it came to the mechanics of making a movie. Once he got on the set, he started to realize what a technical process it was. As he later recalled, he spent as much time worrying about camera angles and hitting his marks as about the handful of lines he had to deliver. Even though the film earned lukewarm or downright hostile reviews, Tom was thrilled with the whole experience. While on the set in Chicago, he made a fleeting background appearance in a 60 Minutes TV documentary about the film’s director, Franco Zeffirelli. When it aired, he was literally jumping up and down on the sofa with excitement as he, his girlfriend, and family watched his first appearance on the small screen. It was a precursor of a rather more public performance some twenty-five years later.
When Endless Love opened, Tom was one of the first in line to see it, going to the Regency cinema in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with a bunch of friends. Literally as he was coming out of the door after seeing the matinee performance, fellow actor Sean Gauli was lining up to see the evening show. In some ways it served as a metaphor for their respective careers. By then doors were opening for Tom while they were banging shut for Sean, who is now a motor home salesman in Florida. It annoys him that his old school buddy exaggerates his struggle to make it in the industry, as it diminishes those who helped him get his start and, ironically, demeans Tom’s own talent, which includes an uncanny ability to make everything look easy.
Although Tom later told writer Jennet Conant, “I was a starving actor for a few months,” it is an assertion Sean finds difficult to accept. “What he says and what the reality was are two different things,” he recalls, dismissing as myths the stories of Tom hitchhiking around the country seeking fame and fortune. “The plain facts are that he was a natural and didn’t struggle at all. I know because I went to hundreds of auditions and he didn’t do any of that shit. It would be good for the truth to come out instead of this fictitious crap. We were all struggling actors, and when he made it he never made any attempt to help us out.” There
remains residual resentment that the actor has never acknowledged the help of people like his Glen Ridge school friends Steve Pansulla and Lorraine Gauli or his first agent, Tobe Gibson, in promoting his career.
This comes as no surprise to Tom’s onetime friend Vinnie Travisano, now a successful art director. “He is a very talented guy, and very talented people give themselves all the credit for their success and move on.” It is the way of the world. Stars tend to limit their thank-yous to Oscar acceptance speeches.
In fall of 1980, after he returned from filming Endless Love, any kind of success still hovered in the distance. While those few days in Chicago had served to confirm his ambitions, back in New York he was still an out-of-work teenage actor busing tables and scraping by. Nevertheless, his experience on the film seemed to have reinforced his confidence and willingness to assert himself. He was furious with his agent for sending out promotional pictures to the most popular teen magazines, Tiger Beat and Teen Beat. Even though later in his career he was featured on the cover of Tiger Beat, he made it clear that he did not want to be pigeonholed as some cheesy pinup. It was a point he made time and again in later interviews. “I’m not locking myself into a teen idol stereotype,” he said.
Far more bothering was a set of black-and-white studio photographs of Tom wearing a gym top and short shorts that reportedly found their way into Parlée, a gay magazine that circulated in New York and Long Island. Diane Van Zoeren remembered that it was a big enough issue for him that Tom drove to his agent’s office for a face-to-face confrontation. “He was very serious with her,” she recalled, the incident revealing a young actor who, even this early in the game, wanted to control his image.
Diane also realized that he wanted to control much more than his image; he wanted to be in charge of everything and everyone. She found his behavior oppressive and even relayed her concerns to his younger sister, Cass. “We had a volatile relationship,” recalls Diane, who was then in her senior year at Glen Ridge High School. “I didn’t get how intense and dramatic he could be. He was so controlling and I wasn’t used to that.”
Still, he was romantic and considerate—when he could afford it. So while she became used to cheap Chinese meals and fooling around in the back of her father’s Oldsmobile—“Typical high-school stuff, doing what you are not supposed to,” recalls Diane—when he returned from filming Endless Love he bought her a pretty necklace adorned with a locket and a key which, as he told her romantically, was “a key to her heart.” Their romantic interludes were punctuated by arguments and recriminations. At the Candy Kane Ball in December 1980, they had a huge falling-out because she danced with another boy. The next day he sent her twelve yellow roses to apologize. Single-minded and go-getting, Tom was not in a placatory mood for long. A few weeks later he was furious because she was too busy to read through the script for Taps, a rite-of-passage movie about a violent rebellion among military cadets facing the closure of their academy.
Early in 1981, veteran casting agent Shirley Rich was looking for young talent for the film, which already included the legendary George C. Scott and recent Oscar winner Timothy Hutton in the lineup. She was looking for a black actor and a “WASP-type” kid to fill a couple of small parts. So far no one fit the bill. “I told her that I’ve got what you’re looking for,” Tobe Gibson recalls, and promptly sent Tom along for an audition one Friday afternoon.
This time he was clearheaded as he read out lines before director Harold Becker, who asked Tom to put up his hair so that he would get an idea of what he would look like as a shaved army cadet. It was a brief audition, leaving the teenager uncertain about whether he had made the cut. By the time he arrived back in Glen Ridge, the beaming grin on his mother’s face gave the game away. She told him, “You got Taps!” It was a moment he will never forget, a moment that changed his life forever. Not only did his reputed $50,000 fee enable him to pay off the $850 loan from his stepfather, it was his first step on the ladder to stardom. The part he had landed was that of a friend to one of the main characters, David Shawn, an uptight cadet at the military academy who goes violently off the rails during the student rebellion. “He was acutely aware that this role could make or break his attempt at a career in Hollywood, and so took it very seriously,” recalls Diane Van Zoeren.
In many respects Harold Becker was the ideal director for a raw, inexperienced actor like Tom Cruise. He insisted on a long rehearsal period, putting the kids through forty-five days of basic training at a real boot camp—Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania—to get a true flavor of the brutal gung ho camaraderie of cadet life. They spent half the day rehearsing their roles, the rest undergoing military training and learning to march and handle weapons, as well as studying the relentless intricacies of military protocol. By the end, Becker reasoned, they would feel like the characters they were playing and give the film an air of authenticity. Later, when filming began in earnest, he let Tom view the day’s rushes, talking him through the technical process.
All the young actor cadets thrived in the military atmosphere except for one—a talented youngster from a Shakespeare youth theater in Tennessee. He was earmarked to play the part of David Shawn, the gung ho war lover who acts as a macho foil for the more conciliatory voices in a cadet rebellion. “But he couldn’t cut it, which was heartbreaking,” recalled Becker. With the youngster from Tennessee now out of the picture, Becker looked closely at the other actors to see who had the power, as he recalled, to “walk the walls.” A young man with the build of a wrestler who was already outmarching the other kids on the parade ground came to mind. It was Tom Cruise. “There was something in Tom that attracted me,” recalls Becker. “He’s one hundred percent. He was able to strut down that field and he had a crispness that a kid at a military academy might work three or four years for. I can’t say I thought, ‘This kid is going someplace.’ But I put him in.”
To his credit, Tom was more concerned about the fate of the young man originally chosen to play David Shawn than taking his own opportunity. Becker explained that, even though Tom and the other actor had become friends, he had to replace him, and if he didn’t want the part, Becker would look elsewhere. So Tom took it.
Watching from the wings with wry amusement as this off-screen drama unfolded was a young Sean Penn, who was inked in to play Alex, a thoughtful soldier who becomes the dramatic linchpin between the warring cadet factions. The son of director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan, the California-born actor, two years older than Cruise, was already a theater and film veteran. He had directed his first movie, Echoes of an Era, about a Vietnam veteran’s experiences, while he was a student at Santa Monica High School. It helped that the screenplay was by his school friend Emilio Estevez, whose father, Martin Sheen, was the star of the seminal war movie Apocalypse Now.
After Sean left high school, where, perversely, he studied auto mechanics and speech, he obtained small parts in several TV series, including Barnaby Jones and The Killing of Randy Webster, before buying himself a one-way ticket to New York to try his hand at off-Broadway theater. Knowing and cynical about the workings of Hollywood—his father had been blacklisted for refusing to testify during the notorious McCarthy Communist witch hunts during the 1950s—he was a passionate, intense, and talented actor, with the curmudgeonly self-confidence to challenge directors and fellow actors, but above all himself. At his audition for Taps, for example, Sean jumped on the desk to illustrate how he would address a crowd of fellow recruits. When he watched Tom Cruise in action, he sensed a kindred spirit, another furiously driven young man. “Cruise was like he was training for the fuckin’ Olympics,” he later recalled. “I think he was the first person I ever said ‘Calm down’ to. A fun guy, too.”
Tom, Sean, and Timothy Hutton soon became fast friends, the youngster from Glen Ridge deferring to the experience and success of the two older men. The high-testosterone trio lived and partied hard, and their rooms on the same hotel floor in Valley Lodge soon became known as Fraternity Row
. “Yeah, there was a lot of rock and roll going on on that floor,” recalled Sean Penn. On set, though, friendship was set aside. The characters that Penn and Cruise played were opposites, always at each other’s throats. They matched each other for intensity, Penn insisting that he be addressed by his character’s name of Alex even when the cameras had stopped rolling. During one scene, where Tom’s character shoots off a rifle, director Harold Becker thought Sean and Tom were going to kill each other after Sean said something to Tom, who suddenly started chasing him angrily around the set. It was only when Becker and members of the cast intervened that the fracas ended. “Sean likes to push buttons, and he said something to Tom,” recalled Harold Becker. “So Sean found a way to have Tom not like him for a moment.”
Tom, too, submerged himself in the character he had taken over, eagerly exploring the cruelly manic qualities of the psychotic cadet. “I remember being nervous, really nervous, because at that point, when you’re young, you just don’t want to get fired,” he later told director Cameron Crowe. It was a nervousness born of ambition and an almost visceral drive to succeed. The experience was so intense that it took him months to come down from the role. “I had no sense of humor whatsoever,” he confessed later to one profiler, who observed drily, “This isn’t hard to believe.”
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