Within weeks of his father’s death, Tom found himself with a new name, living in a new country, and consorting with unicorns, goblins, and fairies in an enchanted forest. It was a curious kind of catharsis. Now known as Jack O’ The Green, he was the hero in the battle between light and dark, good and evil, in a film that was the brainchild of British director Ridley Scott. Tom had long admired the hand behind the sci-fi movies Blade Runner and Alien, and was beguiled by the 411 elaborate storyboards that Ridley Scott brought along to convince Tom to star in his latest film fantasy, Legend.
Suitably intrigued, Tom signed up, brushing off the advice of his agent Paula Wagner that, because of his father’s death, he could pass on the movie if he wished. Leaving behind his family, friends, and girlfriend, Rebecca De Mornay, he made his first overseas flight to London, where filming was scheduled for spring 1984.
He had little time to dwell on the past. When he first arrived at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, north of London, Ridley Scott ushered him into Theatre 7 on the lot and showed him the 1970 François Truffaut film, The Wild Child, the true story of a young boy who emerged from a forest in central France, unable to speak and walking on all fours like an animal. It seemed that the youngster had been raised by wolves. Scott was intrigued by the story and wanted Tom to grow his hair and emulate the jerky gestures and wolverine behavior of the wild child, whom he saw as a heroic force of nature. For once, a childhood spent practicing backflips and Evel Knievel stunts did not go to waste.
Unlike his earlier movies Taps and The Outsiders, where he had enjoyed the collegiate camaraderie of his fellow actors, this time he was left to his own devices, regularly hanging around the huge stage, normally used for James Bond movies, during the laborious process of setting up the elaborate fantasy world. He helped his costar Mia Sara, a seventeen-year-old who had never acted professionally before, learn her lines, and the Brooklyn-born actress returned the favor by using her circle of London girlfriends to find Tom dates for the evening. More often than not, he went into the office of unit publicist Geoff Freeman to chew the fat, catching up on news and sports back home.
A brief visit to London by his friend Sean Penn did little to change the mood. Sean was wandering aimlessly around Europe with actor Joe Pesci, drinking and partying hard as he tried to come to terms with his split from actress Elizabeth McGovern. Leaving Joe in Rome, Sean flew to visit Tom on the Legend set for just one day. It was not a success. Tom was focused and working, Sean brokenhearted and drinking. Sean enigmatically describes their meeting as a “kind of disastrous interaction.” He left the following day to go to Belfast in Northern Ireland. “I thought, ‘Take me somewhere violent,’ ” he later recalled, indicating his mind-set at the time.
If being a stranger in a strange land was unsettling enough, the shoot was dogged by accidents. Tom strained his back when a stunt went awry, and was mauled by a live fox he was supposed to cradle during one scene. Four weeks before the end of shooting, Tom and other members of the cast and crew watched helplessly as the giant stage burned down, destroying the carefully constructed polystyrene forest that was the film’s setting. While only four days’ shooting was lost, the accident served as a metaphor for the film, which was enough of a box-office flop to make director Ridley Scott believe his Hollywood career was over and seek work producing pop videos.
As one film reviewer noted: “Performances tend to get lost in productions like this. I particularly noticed how easily Cruise got buried in the role of Jack. Here is the talented young actor from Risky Business, where he came across as a genuine individual, and this time he’s so overwhelmed by sets and special effects that his character could be played by anybody.” Even Tom admitted that he was “just another color in a Ridley Scott painting” and these days treats the movie as a bit of a joke.
Things were not much better when he returned to New York. His relationship with his girlfriend Rebecca De Mornay soon reached the final reel. They had been apart for the best part of a year, and while he had briefly seen her on the set of her movie The Slugger’s Wife, and she had flown to London a couple of times, the strain of maintaining a long-distance relationship in the days before cell phones and e-mails had taken its toll. It was a liaison built on mutual ambition, shared careers, and similar backgrounds of broken homes and constant moving.
If anything, Rebecca’s early life was much more exotic and sophisticated, as she enjoyed a peripatetic upbringing with a bohemian mother and lived in a number of European countries. “I was desperate to fit in. . . . I’ve worked hard to be accepted,” she once explained. While Tom learned to speak with a Canadian or Kentucky twang, when Rebecca lived in Austria she spoke German with a perfect regional accent. They were two souls striving for acclaim and adulation. “There’s definitely something different about kids who come from broken homes,” observed Rebecca. “They have this sort of searching quality, because you’re searching for love and affection if you’ve been robbed of a substantial amount of time with your parents. I think that is true of Tom.”
Lurking in the background was the old green-eyed monster of jealousy and envy. Both Tom’s and Rebecca’s careers took off after the success of Risky Business. At the time it seemed that Rebecca, who was a much less experienced actor than her boyfriend, had made much smarter choices. During the year or so they were together, she was ostensibly the more successful partner. In 1984, while Tom spent months playing a woodland creature in London, Rebecca notched up three movies that went on to earn critical acclaim.
It is not hard to imagine how Tom, competitive and controlling, would have responded as he watched his girlfriend outstripping him in both the quality and quantity of her film work. Even the $500,000 fee for Legend and the magical word “starring” might not have provided enough compensation. For a young man who had grown up bolstered by the uncritical acclaim of an adoring mother and cheerleading sisters, it would probably have been difficult to come to terms with a live-in companion who seemed to be outstripping him in his chosen career, the spotlight shining more brightly on Rebecca, who was then more worldly, polished, and stylish.
In her movie The Trip to Bountiful, she was praised for her performance as a young woman who befriends an old lady, played by film veteran Geraldine Page, who won an Oscar. In Rebecca’s second film that year, the gritty drama Runaway Train, actors Jon Voight and Eric Roberts received Academy Award nominations for their roles as escaped criminals on an out-of-control train. Movie fans regularly vote the film, where Rebecca plays a railway worker on the wrong train at the wrong time, one of the best ever.
On the surface, the third film she made that year, The Slugger’s Wife, also oozed quality. Not only was she working with a script by Neil Simon, who wrote The Odd Couple, but she was directed by the legendary auteur Hal Ashby, who shot Being There with Peter Sellers. While Tom was spending his days in makeup, surrounded by fairies and goblins, waiting to utter risible dialogue, his girlfriend was working with the cream of Hollywood. Or so it seemed.
If that wasn’t bad enough for Tom’s ego, she played a sexy nightclub singer who has a torrid affair with a baseball star played by Michael O’Keefe. For a young man who had been cheated on by his two previous lovers, it was hard to be completely trusting, especially as he knew all about the chemistry that could easily be generated between a leading man and lady. After all, it was how he had met Rebecca. Nor did it help that billboards advertising the film showed Rebecca and her screen lover in an openmouthed kiss. “I go to a movie and see Rebecca doing a love scene with another guy, telling him that she loves him. I’m always facing my fears,” he admitted at the time.
Behind the scenes, the movie was suffering from competing egos—Neil Simon refused to countenance changes to his script, and director Hal Ashby was fired for drug abuse. For Rebecca, still learning her craft, her role as singer and actress was too far a stretch. As her costar Michael O’Keefe recalls, “She was in a bit over her head.” A long-distance relationship between two ambitious actors on
the brink of stardom was also too far a stretch. The parting of the ways was, as an actress friend of Rebecca explained, “a very unpleasant experience for her. She didn’t really want to talk about it. It was very abrupt.”
When she did speak publicly about the breakup, she admitted that it was a painful experience. “We were both ambitious and hardworking. I’m afraid the ending was not very amicable.” Her reasons touched on the clash of egos underlying the amicable public façade. “There’s the potential threat of competition, there’s a continual threat of long separations, of major love scenes, of adverse publicity, and the transitory nature of the business itself.” Tom was much more pragmatic and stern. “When something is not working, you have to face it and move on.”
Move on he did, trading the up-and-coming for an established Hollywood star. At thirty-nine, his new girlfriend, Cher, was nearer in age to his mother than to the twenty-three-year-old actor, but she was 24-carat movie royalty, their outings guaranteed to make headlines and keep Tom’s name in the news. As a sign of how far and how fast he had traveled, he met Cher at a fund-raising event for dyslexia at the White House in the presence of First Lady Nancy Reagan. Tom, Cher, and Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, among others, were presented with an award for Outstanding Learning Disabled Achievement. Both Cher and Tom had experienced learning difficulties caused by dyslexia. While Tom was diagnosed early, Cher learned that her problems in reading, telling time, and writing checks were caused by dyslexia only after her daughter, Chastity, had been diagnosed with the condition.
“If I read a script, I read it very slowly and memorized it the first time I read it,” she told the White House audience, which included youngsters from the Lab School, which helps students cope with learning difficulties. Tom admitted that he had a dictionary by his side to help him read scripts. “I couldn’t read The New York Times because I couldn’t read the big words,” he has said. “It was humiliating for me. When I started working on films, I had to buy a dictionary. I started out with the Young Reader’s Dictionary and worked my way up to bigger dictionaries. I’d sit on an airplane with a script and a dictionary.”
While their perceived mutual disability helped break the social ice, Tom’s rising star and Cher’s existing place in the Hollywood firmament also drew them together. Cher, who was known for dating younger men before it became fashionable, was instantly attracted to the young actor. His yearlong sojourn in London had brought one benefit—he had lost the preppy, pudgy Risky Business persona and had honed and toned his body from his role in Legend. “I can’t take my eyes off the guy,” Cher told an associate admiringly. “He’s so damn handsome, all I want to do is stare at him.” They dated off and on for a few months, becoming regular gossip column fodder. Of course, it didn’t hurt that both Tom and Cher had films to promote in 1985. Her second major feature, The Mask, a true-life drama about a disfigured teenager growing up in Southern California, cemented the singer’s growing reputation as a serious actress.
Even though the age difference meant that neither side really took the relationship that seriously—Cher’s daughter, Chastity, was only eight years younger than Tom—they liked hanging out together. “Cher is funny and bright and we’re good buddies and that’s it,” he told People magazine. He stayed with her in her Malibu home, and when Cher visited New York she often stayed at his apartment, whether or not he was in residence. In fact, Chastity was staying at Tom’s apartment when she made the most painful phone call of her life. A lonely, troubled child, she confessed to her father, Sonny Bono, that not only was she a lesbian, but she had been having an affair with a friend of her mother’s who was also gay. Cher was furious and ordered her to leave Tom’s apartment and see a therapist. “Mum did not comfort me with kisses and cuddles, because it was not the family way,” she later recalled. “Instead, she sent me to a therapist.” It took Cher nearly a decade to come to terms with her daughter’s sexuality. “It’s a difficult thing for a parent,” she said later. “It’s one thing to be completely liberal when it doesn’t affect you. When it does, you really have to search your soul long and hard.” It seems that Tom, who had his own issues with homosexuality, played little part in this family drama other than giving Chastity shelter in his New York home. Certainly she always got on well with her mother’s younger boyfriends. “It doesn’t matter to me if they’re closer to my age than hers,” she said.
When he was out on a date with Cher in New York one night, there was a poignant reminder of Tom’s past. They were dining at a restaurant called Fiorella’s on Sixtieth and Third. By chance their waitress was Lorraine Gauli, his friend from Glen Ridge. When he had first arrived at the high school, she was a TV personality and seemingly destined for fame and fortune. After drama school, her acting career had petered out into a sad procession of failed auditions and screen tests. Now the woman who had encouraged him to try his hand at acting faced the indignity of serving as waitress to her protégé. “I was so humiliated,” she recalls. “I had told everyone he was a friend of mine, and here I was waiting tables.”
In the circumstances it would have been easy for him to ignore his onetime helpmate, but he introduced her to Cher and made pleasant small talk. He had made it, she hadn’t: He could afford to be Mr. Nice Guy. It was an episode that symbolized how far and how quickly he had come. Tom had closed the chapter on his past life and opened another book where he was finally in control of his destiny. One that had “success” embossed on the cover.
That may have been how others saw him, but he had a different view. Beneath the cocky, self-assured persona was a young man not entirely comfortable with his newfound fame. In media interviews he was stiff and overly serious, endlessly talking about his “craft.” He found the attention of the public, particularly his growing teen fan base, disconcerting. Just as he had walked out of a restaurant in Florida with old flame Nancy Armel because he was being stared at, so in a New York eatery, Serendipity 3, he generously overtipped a waiter who asked a quartet of teenage girls to stop gawking at him. At his Upper West Side apartment he played detective when he noticed that he was being spied on from an adjoining block by someone using binoculars. After confronting the startled apartment owner, he discovered that the spies were the man’s teenage daughters and their friends.
As when looking at a painting close up, he was not yet truly aware of his place in the bigger picture. His only fixed references were his contemporaries. By his standards, the class of ’82, the group of young actors who’d appeared with him in his first movie, Taps, were all doing just as well—none more so than his wayward friend Sean Penn. While Tom was seemingly making excuses for dating Cher, in January 1985 his buddy met Madonna and fell for the controversial charms of the hottest female in showbiz. With a critically acclaimed movie, Desperately Seeking Susan, to her name and a second album, Like a Virgin, that outraged the establishment and delighted her teenage audience, she was a startling and unique talent.
Artistically, the career trajectory of his contemporaries should have given him pause for reflection. His friend Tim Hutton, who up to that time was the youngest-ever Oscar winner for his work in Ordinary People, had chosen to embrace serious projects, pointedly turning down the lead role in Risky Business, the film that jump-started Tom’s career, as too lightweight. Although Tom won a coveted Golden Globe nomination for the role of Joel Goodsen, his appearance in Legend would have raised eyebrows among his Hollywood peers. While the sets and special effects were extraordinary, the script was laughable—as was Tom mouthing lines like “When I get to heaven I know just how the angels will sound.” Meanwhile, Sean Penn and Tim Hutton were working together on The Falcon and the Snowman, a stern movie about two young men who are convicted of selling secrets to the Russians. “Two finer performances it would be difficult to find,” said People magazine when the film was released in January 1985.
After Legend, released in the same year, sank without a trace, Tom and agent Paula Wagner were determined to choose his future projects more carefu
lly. His two bombs—Losin’ It and Legend—had struck out because of poorly scripted stories. While there were all kinds of offers on the table, the knack of choosing the right script was ultimately a lottery. As screenwriter William Goldman observed, the first rule of Hollywood is “Nobody knows anything.”
This truism perhaps helps explain why the gestation period of the average movie is so long. In May 1983, when Tom was learning his lines for Risky Business, producer Jerry Bruckheimer was in his offices at Paramount Studios, absorbed in an article in California magazine called “Top Guns,” by Ehud Yonay, about the flight school for the U.S. Navy’s best pilots in San Diego. “Star Wars on earth,” he thought to himself as he slid it over the desk to his producing partner, Don Simpson. Simpson was on the phone, and when he glanced at the upside-down story that Bruckheimer put in front of him, he waved it away, thinking it was a “Western.” By the time he’d read it, the two hotshots behind the smash hits Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop had a new blockbuster in mind: Top Gun.
In a way, Simpson’s first instincts were exactly right. It was a Western; these sexy young pilots were modern-day cowboys with wild names like Viper, Jaws, and Mad Dog, who pushed the edge of life’s frontiers with their testosterone-fueled behavior. For all their arrogant swagger, the young men in their flying machines lived by an old-fashioned code of self-sacrifice, comradeship, and patriotism. It seemed like a slam dunk. “It’s about Yankee individualism, nobility, excellence of purpose, and commitment to excellence,” Simpson explained in his pitch to movie moguls as he tried valiantly to turn the concept into a movie.
The studios and many screenwriters thought otherwise. After some initial interest, Paramount Studios eventually told them, “Who wants to see a movie with too many planes?” Don Simpson was reduced to falling to his knees in a meeting with Paramount boss Michael Eisner and begging him to keep faith with the project. “If they are this desperate, we’ve got to let them keep developing it,” said Eisner. But top screenwriters were not especially interested, and, according to screenwriter Jack Epps, after several drafts of the script, the film “just died.”
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