He is widely credited as being the one who smeared honey on Diane Lane’s toilet seat and scrawled “Helter Skelter”—a reference to the Charles Manson cult killers—on her bathroom mirror. As she later recalled: “They ransacked a couple of hotel rooms on April Fools’ Day. They got the keys from the maid because they were so cute.” Not everyone was amused by the actors’ antics, guests at the Excelsior Hotel, where the crew stayed, frequently complaining about the noise. On one memorable occasion Tom came up to the front desk, theatrically took out one of his false teeth, and dropped it on the desk in front of the assistant night manager—who calmly told him that they only accepted cash or credit cards.
At the end of filming, Coppola was impressed enough to offer Tom a small part in his next movie, Rumble Fish, the third of S. E. Hinton’s books to get the big-screen treatment. To Coppola’s surprise, the teenager turned down the opportunity to rub shoulders with actors of the caliber of Dennis Hopper and Mickey Rourke, as well as some of his colleagues from the cast of The Outsiders. Twenty years later, Cruise still remembers the look of incredulity on Coppola’s face as he found himself explaining that he was declining the chance to work with the director of Apocalypse Now to make a film about a suburban teenager who runs a brothel out of his home while his parents are out of town for the weekend. “Here I am turning him down to do this movie about hookers,” he recalled, trading a bit part in an ensemble movie for a chance at solo glory.
Even so, it was a gamble. The movie, entitled Risky Business, was director Paul Brickman’s first film, and the budget was so low that the lead actors wore their own clothes on-screen, paid their own air fares, and stayed in cheap hotels. More than that, Brickman, who also wrote the script, was firmly against Tom’s participation. He had tentatively cast the male and female leads for his brainchild, and his provisional choices, Kevin Anderson and Megan Mullally, had already read with other potential cast members. Brickman felt that Tom, from what he had seen in Taps, was much too muscled and tough to play the soft-bodied, rather weak boy who finds himself in a sexual predicament rife with comic possibility.
Tom’s agent, Paula Wagner, heard differently. The Hollywood tom-toms were pounding out the news that whatever the views of novice director Paul Brickman, coproducers Steve Tisch and Jon Avnet were still having trouble casting the male lead. She took Tisch and Avnet for a steak lunch and organized a meeting between the young actor and the moneymen. “Tom stuck his head in the casting office, gave us the twenty-five-million-dollar smile, and that was pretty much it,” recalled Tisch.
When he took time from filming The Outsiders for a screen test, Tom was still tattooed and pumped up from his role. Even his famous smile was not quite at full wattage after removing the crown from his front tooth to make him look a more credible greaser. As he told writer Tom Shales, “I was like filthy, dirty, stunk, and my hair’s all greasy . . . and here I am explaining to Paul Brickman which way I’m going to go with the character in terms of losing the weight and what I would wear. So it’s pretty amazing that they cast me in the role.”
He was being much too modest. The way he took over the script reading, making slight changes to the dialogue, finding the moment in a scene, left the watching director and producers deeply impressed. He had won over a tough audience. As he had to leave the following morning, he was asked to take a screen test with Rebecca De Mornay, a young actress they had considered and rejected because they were unsure she was up to playing a leading role. Before she snagged the role of the tart with the heart of gold, her screen-acting experience had been limited to one line—“Excuse me, those are my waffles”—in the box office bomb One from the Heart, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
As there was no money in the wafer-thin budget for further screen tests, Tom and Rebecca drove to Tisch’s home and, with Avnet holding his own video camera, played six short scenes. Before shooting began, Tom washed the grease out of his hair, cleaned himself up, and put on a preppy, button-down shirt. At five in the morning when filming finished, the director and his coproducers knew they had their leading man and lady. Producer David Geffen was equally thrilled. In fact, he was so pleased with the handsome youngster that he had a copy of the videocassette made for himself, which he displayed in his office with the name “Tom Cruz” scrawled on the side. The producers had solved their casting problem—although Paula Wagner made them pay the full $75,000 asking fee for Tom’s services. It meant that Brickman’s contender for the lead role, Kevin Anderson, would have to make do with a secondary part.
Tom returned to Oklahoma penciled in for the role of Joel Goodsen, a conventional young man eager to explore his sexuality who finds himself running a brothel from his parents’ home. After he finished filming The Outsiders, he flew home to Glen Ridge for a couple of weeks before heading off to Florida, where he had asked his friend Michael LaForte, now in the Marine Corps, to help organize a training schedule so that he could sweat off the twelve pounds of muscle he had agreed he needed to lose to give his new persona the soft, preppy look of a middle-class teenager from the Chicago suburbs.
One day, while he was out jogging around Glen Ridge, he bumped into his old flame Nancy Armel, who had by then realized her own dream and was working as a flight attendant for People Express. They started dating again, and one night he called her to say that he had tickets for a new musical on Broadway, La Cage aux Folles. Tom was unaware of the story line—about two gay men living together in St. Tropez, where one of them runs a nightclub featuring drag artists—until they had taken their seats in the theater. As Nancy recalled: “Men dressed as women, he couldn’t handle it. We had to leave before the intermission. It really bothered him. He was definitely homophobic.”
He was much more comfortable with the joshing male camaraderie that he found when he flew to Sarasota, Florida, with Michael LaForte to begin serious training for his second lead role. As fit as he was ferociously competitive, Michael was a down-to-earth man’s man with a robust sense of fun and an eye for pranks and mischief. He lived by the catchphrase “Life is a cabaret.” “When they were together after a long absence, they picked up like it was yesterday,” recalled Michael’s older brother Sam. “That’s the kind of relationship they had. Nobody put a spike in their friendship.”
Michael had the grace to make himself scarce in their Sarasota condo when Tom invited Nancy Armel to join him for a long weekend. While Tom worked out, she went to the beach or joined her friends at the bar. After a couple of years’ absence, she found him a changed person, more confident, rather smug but still pleasant to be around. Before he flew to Chicago to begin filming, his former school friends got the chance to catch up with Tom when he arrived for a beach party at Lavallette resort on the New Jersey coast. Wearing a beret at a rakish angle and what was described as a “Hollywood getup,” he left no one in any doubt that he felt he was doing them all a favor just by turning up.
But if the cool dude from the West Coast had meant to impress them, he signally failed. “He just looked silly,” recalled his old girlfriend Diane Van Zoeren. The dubious beret aside, he was confident, in control, and “on fire” with drive and ambition, no longer the dorky high-school kid of two years before. He took himself very seriously indeed. At one point during the evening, he took his former girlfriend to one side and announced gravely, “I have taken Hollywood by the balls.”
For the self-confessed geek in school, the sudden transformation to cool dude seemed uncomfortable and confusing, his surface brashness possibly a way of coping with the spotlight. One evening he and Nancy left a restaurant prematurely because a fellow diner recognized him from his appearance in Taps. “Initially he found the attention somewhat overwhelming,” she recalls.
Ironically, it was his portrayal of another geek, Joel Goodsen, the suburban Nice Guy with an ambitiously anarchic streak, that was to propel Tom further into the limelight. When he first arrived on the set of Risky Business in Highland Park, Chicago, there was no indication that this movie was going to skyr
ocket his career. In fact, there was concern on the set that, even though he had lost the requisite twelve pounds in Florida, he was still too chubby to be a believable teen idol. Tom had such a sweet tooth that he had always worried about his weight. Such was his self-absorption that he often wondered out loud if other major actors ate as much candy as he did. “I bet Al Pacino [his all-time screen hero] doesn’t have a sweet tooth,” he told colleagues.
“He was on the phone endlessly discussing his diet with his agent,” recalls his screen mother, actress Janet Carroll. While she found him “attentive, gracious, and serious,” a young man who was prepared to listen and take direction, she had no inkling that she was watching the making of a megastar. “Absolutely not,” she recalls. “The movie launched many careers. He was in good company.” It was a cast that included not only Rebecca De Mornay, but also Bronson Pinchot and Curtis Armstrong.
Tom did apparently try to throw his weight around on set. In the early days of the shoot, the actor complained that he and Rebecca De Mornay were just not jelling on camera. When he told coproducer Steve Tisch that he felt she was miscast, Tisch gave Tom short shrift, explaining that they thought she was doing a terrific job and had no intention of replacing her.
This episode did not particularly endear him to other cast members who, even twenty years later, have little praiseworthy to say. It seemed, at least to those who worked with him, that behind the polite “yes sir, no ma’am” veneer was a young man out to take social and professional advantage of every possible situation. A frequent comment was that he liked to expose the vulnerability in others and then crush them—perhaps reenacting his own father’s behavior toward the young Tom Cruise. “It was just put-down after put-down of everyone and everything,” observed a former colleague who described him as “bland as tofu but without the flavor.”
Yet that blandly disingenuous screen persona and his vulnerable sexuality struck a chord with the teenage audience, who flocked to see the witty, low-budget sleeper film that grossed more than $70 million. As thrilling for Tom was that his childhood idol, Steven Spielberg, took the trouble to send a letter congratulating him on his performance. “He’s the all-American everyboy,” observed director Paul Brickman. “He has an archetypal quality that makes audiences connect.”
The iconic moment in the film, much parodied, was when the actor, dressed in white socks and underpants, danced around his parents’ living room to Bob Seger’s song “Old Time Rock and Roll.” It was an ad-libbed scene that resonated both with the actor and his audience. “I loved it, because of course I’d done it myself. It was a moment I understood,” he told Cameron Crowe. Certainly his Glen Ridge friends remember him miming to music and running around their backyards in his underwear—in short, acting just like Joel Goodsen.
Unlike the real lives of teenagers, in the movie world the sexually frustrated boy does get the girl. In a dreamily erotic sequence, Joel has sex with Lana, his hooker girlfriend, on board a Chicago commuter train. While Tom and Rebecca were nervous before playing the scene, those who snuck onto the closed set are convinced that the answer to the question of “did they, didn’t they” really get it on on camera is a firm yes. As Paul Brickman commented afterward, “It was hard to get them started, but it was harder to get them to stop.” By then the couple had chemistry both on and off the screen, spending all their time with each other and eventually living together. He made her Toll House cookies while she introduced him to Nicolas Roeg’s scary thriller Don’t Look Now. “He seemed to be looking for somebody to love and somebody to love him back,” Rebecca later recalled.
In a moment of social triumph, he returned for the last time to Glen Ridge High School in June 1983 to watch the outdoor graduation ceremony of his sister Cass. With Risky Business playing in the local movie theaters and Rebecca De Mornay on his arm, it was easy to flash his increasingly famous grin as his former classmates jokingly pestered “Mr. Cruise” for his autograph.
Tom was now a fully accredited teen heartthrob, his disarming smile and boy-next-door good looks appealing to mothers and daughters alike. As critic Gary Arnold of The Washington Post noted, “In Tom Cruise the movies have a new star to conjure with.” Nor did it hurt his burgeoning status that he was dating the delectable Ms. De Mornay—even though some thought it was a publicity stunt to promote the film. No matter, in New York they were followed by the paparazzi, asked to pose for the cover of People magazine, and gossiped about in the Hollywood trade papers.
So when the actor arrived at his alma mater, it was not so much as the hometown boy made good as it was the outsider, the guy who didn’t make the football team or get a date for the school prom, finally showing his former classmates that there was life beyond Glen Ridge. It was a valedictory moment, a knowing acknowledgment of his achievements.
In some ways it was his lesser-known film All the Right Moves, released in the same year as Risky Business, that more clearly reflected his real life. That movie, coproduced by Lucille Ball, portrayed a high-school football star, Stefen Djordjevic, struggling for a college scholarship to avoid following his father and brother into the steel mills. While the gritty, rather downbeat blue-collar movie did poorly at the box office, it spoke to Cruise’s own desire to move on from an unhappy youth and childhood. “I remember getting through high school and thinking, ‘Boy, I’m glad I got that behind me,’ ” he has often said when discussing his formative years. It is a feeling he expressed during conversations with All the Right Moves director Michael Chapman, whom he admired for his work as cinematographer on his favorite movie, Raging Bull. “I know that as a teenager and a child he had felt a kind of fear of not escaping whatever it is children want to escape from.” Cruise’s Stefen Djordjevic is the roughly drawn blueprint for the generic character to come, an egotistical, self-absorbed but ultimately successful hero. His character’s relentless ambition eventually translates into glorious triumph, an arc of achievement that seemed to mirror the actor’s own life.
If Risky Business cemented his popular appeal, All the Right Moves showed that he had acting range. This young man, still only twenty-one, had started as a junior member of the Brat Pack, but was now showing his rivals a clean pair of heels, consolidating his position as one of the leading stars of his generation.
CHAPTER 4
There is no noise in Hollywood quite like the sweet sound of success. While failure is a silent, rueful companion, the friendly ringing of the telephone, the satisfying thump of the latest delivery of film scripts, and the swish of backs being slapped makes for the most pleasing music. It was a sound Tom Cruise was beginning to enjoy, his future golden with possibilities. But in the fall of 1983, with Risky Business the talk of the movie world, it was his past that returned to haunt him.
A phone call from his paternal grandmother, Catherine Mapother, was as unwelcome as it was disturbing. His estranged father, the man he hadn’t seen for ten years, had terminal cancer. His grandmother asked if Tom would agree to his father’s request and visit him in the Louisville hospital where he was being treated. There were conditions, too. His father did not want any recriminations, any talk of the past. For a young man becoming used to making his own rules, this must have been an irritating imposition, especially coming from a man he at once despised, feared, and still loved.
He agreed, probably reluctantly, to his father’s conditions, the last request of a dying man. Financially secure after his $75,000 payday from Risky Business, he paid for his three sisters to fly from New York to join him at his father’s bedside. It was a trying, emotionally charged, and yet, in time, cathartic encounter. When he had last seen his father, Tom was a twelve-year-old boy watching him marry a woman he had never met. Now he was a young man who had made his own way in the world without any help or guidance from the man lying before him on his hospital bed. The gift he brought to the hospital was a poignant reminder of the happier times they had once shared. It was a musical statue of a ragged Tom Sawyer–like figure that played tunes from his father�
�s favorite film, The Sting, one of the few occasions father and son had enjoyed a harmonious public outing.
Since the abrupt splitting of the Mapother family in Ottawa, Tom’s father had largely dropped out of sight. After his marriage to Joan Lebendiger, he went to Florida for a time and then headed out west. When that union foundered after just a year, he returned to Louisville, where he apparently lived in poverty and obscurity. “He was a drifter. He obviously regretted what he had done. I felt sorry for him,” recalled his cousin Caroline Mapother. For a time he took up with Jill Ellison, the estranged wife of a local journalist, who seemingly helped nurse him during his cancer treatment.
While he was aware that his son had made a name for himself in the movies, Thomas Senior hadn’t made the time, or perhaps more accurately the effort, to see any of his work. His seeming indifference served as an epitaph to their uneasy relationship. Ever since their parting a decade before, it seems that his father had adhered resolutely to his son’s angry demand to “stay the hell out of everything.”
The bullying young man of Tom’s childhood was now reduced to a pathetic figure in a hospital bed. His son’s “powerful” reaction to the enforced reunion has swung between sympathy and fury, pity at his father’s plight and anger at a life of missed opportunities and shared family experience. Tom later told TV host James Lipton that his family was very special and his father had deliberately rejected “a huge life force.” Over the years he has become more philosophical about his father’s behavior, believing that he created his own suffering and isolation. “He had made some mistakes and he knew it. I wasn’t angry at him, I wasn’t, I was just looking at a man who was my father who I loved no matter what happened.”
They held hands and, in a vainglorious gesture, his father promised that he would soon be well enough to take his son for a steak and a beer. They never had that steak, his father dying of metastatic rectal cancer on January 9, 1984, at the age of just forty-nine. The funeral was a quiet family affair, laying Thomas Mapother III to rest at the Calvary Catholic cemetery in Louisville.
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