Such was her obsession with the part that she insisted on wearing a corset that squeezed her waist to a mere nineteen inches, so she could feel the pain that Isabel felt. Several times filming was halted when the actress went pale with fatigue or even collapsed in a dead faint. It was no surprise that at the end of filming in November, she spent two weeks in bed with exhaustion and a temperature of 104 degrees. As with her husband on Born on the Fourth of July, the ghost of Laurence Olivier could be heard whispering, “Try acting, it’s much easier.”
As Nicole was putting herself through self-imposed agony for what she called “her baby,” Tom was juggling home, career, and children, filming Mission: Impossible at Pinewood Studios but finding time to read Isabella a bedtime story as well as indulge his hobby of flying. He even had the opportunity to flirt a little with Diana, Princess of Wales, when she brought her elder son, Prince William, to the studios. While she was dazzled by his smile and charm during the two-hour visit, he was not her type, the princess preferring tall men.
In the midst of this hectic schedule, Tom found time to read a script by the journalist-turned-director Cameron Crowe, whom he had first met more than a decade earlier through Sean Penn, who worked with him on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Crowe’s latest project, Jerry Maguire, was about a cynical, world-weary sports agent who quits his high-powered job in a ruthless company, taking on just one client, football player Rod Tidwell, and his secretary with him. The clever script had Tom from the get-go, the actor gripped by the story of Maguire’s journey from selfishness to self-knowledge. He was so intrigued that he flew to Los Angeles to see Crowe and his producer, reading the part aloud for the assembled throng before even asking them to show him the money.
Crowe explained that, as Cruise’s name was synonymous with success, it would be interesting to explore a character who fails on-screen. The film eventually earned Tom an Oscar nomination, an Oscar for Cuba Gooding Jr., who played Rod Tidwell, and introduced Renée Zellweger to a wider audience. As Tom’s screen love interest, she noticed a quality in the performer that made him a truly effective actor but difficult to read as a human being—the ability to switch off his emotions in a heartbeat.
“His acting was so good it was almost bizarre. You’d look into his eyes and he’d really be there, he’d really be in love with you. You could see his heart and soul. And then the director would shout ‘Cut,’ Tom would leave the set, and you’d have to go into therapy for six months.” It is a not uncommon observation. Those who have interviewed and even audited him have come away from an encounter feeling that they have been subjected to a performance rather than a personality.
Tom’s on-screen persona intrigued and attracted the public as well as his peers. Not only did he go on to win a Golden Globe for Jerry Maguire, but by 1996 he was the first actor ever to star in five consecutive films, including Jerry Maguire and Mission: Impossible, to gross over $100 million each at the American box office. Moreover, in his first outing as a producer in his own right, he had seen Mission: Impossible earn more than $450 million in box-office sales. He was Hollywood’s undisputed Top Gun, a man who was able to make every artistic mission commercially possible.
Yet taking pride of place on the wall of his office in Hollywood were not posters from his latest blockbuster, but a framed, if rather faded, fax message. It was sent by the legendary but reclusive director Stanley Kubrick, the genius behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Dr. Strangelove. The note simply said that he would like to work with Tom and Nicole on a future project and that a script would be sent to them in the next few months. That Tom chose to display the letter showed that even he was not immune to high-caliber flattery. The framed fax was a daily reminder that the breadth and drawing power of his talent went beyond his popularity with the public.
“It was just a damn miracle that he wanted me and Nic to do this,” he later recalled. When the script by Oscar-winning screenwriter and author Frederic Raphael eventually arrived, “it took us about two seconds to say yes,” recalled Nicole. “And that was it.” Even though their previous screen collaborations had not been especially successful, the chance to work with a film legend outweighed all other considerations. “They thought they were working on a masterpiece, a career-defining movie,” an associate later recalled.
It was the beginning of a bizarre collaboration that would test the limits of their acting, their health, their patience, and their marriage. Their first encounter with Kubrick, in the winter of 1995, set the tone for the strange, surreal life they were to inhabit for the next few years. As Nicole was still busy filming Portrait of a Lady, they hired a helicopter to fly them the short journey from London to Kubrick’s home near St. Albans in Hertfordshire. Even though they arrived in true Hollywood style, they were as nervous as a couple on a first date, Nicole later confessing herself “terrified” as she shook hands with the figure in a one-piece blue boiler suit waiting to greet them on the lawn of his sprawling estate.
They were there to discuss the film Eyes Wide Shut, based on the novel by Arthur Schnitzler, about the sexual fantasies of a married couple, the blurring of dreams with reality, and the unforgiving emotions this can unleash. As Kubrick told them, “This film is about sexual obsession and jealousy. It is not about sex.” Even so, he made sure that Nicole agreed to a nudity clause in her contract so that he could film proposed sex scenes with her. Kubrick’s idea was to convey the mysteries of what goes on between a married couple by casting a real-life couple to play the central characters.
His first thought was to approach Kim Basinger, who had proved in 9½ Weeks that she was not afraid of exploring sex on the screen, and her husband, Alec Baldwin. Screenwriter Frederic Raphael was wary. “I think it was an odd idea. He thought that if he got a married couple to impersonate a married couple then he’d necessarily get something true or real. It’s a naïve idea of what acting and what marriage is.” In the face of Kubrick’s insistence, Raphael took another tack, suggesting he go for the most famous married couple in Hollywood. Hence Kubrick’s fax to Tom.
If Nicole and Tom were nervous as they sat together holding hands on the sofa in the living room of his house, Kubrick was “thrilled” to have snared Hollywood’s golden couple, later telling Raphael that they looked “sweet” together. Raphael was more cynical. “Somehow, those words coming out of Kubrick sounded curious. Who knows whether they sit holding hands in meetings all the time or not. But still, it seems that they gave him what he wanted. And he took it that this is what they were actually like as a couple, rather than at least having some cynicism about it. Because after all, if you are putting on a show—however genuine—it is a sign that you are putting on a show.” If, as Raphael suspected, this marital display of affection was an unspoken audition for Kubrick’s benefit, at that time they had no clue that the show would come to dominate their hearts and their minds.
For a couple who furiously and relentlessly researched their characters, their decision to play effectively themselves, or a version of themselves, left them nowhere to go but on a journey into their emotional interior. Even though they hired acting coach Susan Batson and rehearsed separately at their rented London home, they were, as Nicole admitted, entering “dangerous subject matter” that had frightened even Stanley and his wife, Christiane, when the director first suggested tackling the Schnitzler novel during the early days of their marriage. As Nicole recalled, rather presciently, “But Tom and I decided to take the plunge. It meant talking to each other about jealousy and attraction for other people—things you usually skirt around or pretend aren’t there. It would be difficult and, at times, very confronting. It was something that was going to either draw us close together or pull us apart.”
While the reported $20 million fee was substantial, so, too, was the commitment, the couple agreeing to an open-ended contract. They were so keen to work with Kubrick that, even knowing his reputation for endless retakes, not just during filming but in rehearsal, they signed on for
a lengthy shooting schedule of five months. In fact, while the cinematic action takes place in Manhattan over just three days, the filming took four hundred days, landing it in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest constant movie shoot in history. Shooting went on for so long that two cast members, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh, dropped out in order to pursue other commitments. They were replaced by Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson. The change had one by-product. During the endless schedule, Pollack and Tom explored their mutual love of aerobatics—Pollack was amazed at how quickly Tom learned complicated maneuvers—while Pollack taught Tom how to cook.
Not that Tom could really enjoy the food, as during filming the actor, then thirty-four, developed a stomach ulcer, a condition often associated with stress. It was not entirely surprising. Tom, who played Dr. Bill Harford, was on set for all but six days of the marathon shoot. During her downtime Nicole organized play dates for Isabella with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the daughters of Sarah, Duchess of York, visited the Lake District to study the poetry of William Wordsworth, learned Italian, and joined the local riding school.
Looking back, Nicole realized that they were living in a “strange, cocooned” world for eighteen months, spending much of their time in an enclosed room. “We didn’t see many people,” she recalled. “Tom and I had a trailer that we shared, we also had a smaller room, and I would go into that room a lot and read.” In the insular world they inhabited, their immediate staff became close companions. Tom spent hours hanging out with his driver Tommy Lee, an avuncular Cockney, as well as with his bodyguard Mickey Brett, a fatherly figure who is popular not just with Tom but also with Angelina Jolie and Julia Roberts.
The shoot was all the more taxing as Tom, an actor whose signature was the release of energy, both physical and emotional, didn’t enjoy playing the “contained,” disconnected medical man he represented on screen. Containment was not a word normally associated with Tom, an experience he found “unpleasant.” A man of dynamic movement and authority, he found his match in the sly subtle manipulations of his director. If Tom was a prince of control, Kubrick was king. He did not just demand control, he desired total obedience, from the script, his cast, his producers, and the studio. Even Nicole, who adored the director, was taken aback by his obsessive behavior. “When you work with Stanley,” she said, “you live the way he wants you to live. He wouldn’t want me to leave the house. He would get anxious if I was going out. He wanted me to be so dedicated—I mean as every director does, they don’t want to think that any other films exist in the world, other than the film you are working on.”
For all Tom’s star power, it was Kubrick who was ultimately in charge. After all, he was the one who had forced actress Shelley Duvall to perform 127 takes for one scene in The Shining, who almost blinded Malcolm McDowell by pinning his eyes open for a scene in A Clockwork Orange, and who drove George C. Scott to the brink of insanity during the filming of Dr. Strangelove. As Tom said, “He liked filming things in long takes, so we did scenes over and over again, until we got them right. Sure, there were scenes that we did sixty, seventy takes. And there were times when, contrary to popular belief, we’d get something in only a few takes.”
When filming started in November 1996 at Pinewood Studios outside London, Kubrick, then sixty-eight, became the third wheel in the lives of Tom and Nicole, a delicately invasive and controlling presence in their work and marriage, which soon became one and the same. Kubrick worked with the couple separately, forbidding them to compare notes or discuss the movie when they were alone, lest they change the existing dynamic where he had ultimate say. During their collaboration they discussed the most intimate details of their lives together, and he, like an avuncular father figure, would intrude into their private lives, on one occasion chastising Nicole for speaking harshly to her husband. In the power play between leading man and director, Tom and Kubrick rarely went head to head, the two men using their aides to relay instructions, tricky messages, and news that might upset and annoy.
As Tom said, “It was just me and Nic and Stanley for years. Sometimes the three of us were literally alone in the room together. He would man the camera himself. The sound guy would mike us for sound and leave. There are things that you do because they’re so personal, and there were things that we did that were sexy for the two of us, and there are moments that he got that he wouldn’t have got had he not created this intense atmosphere of intimacy. It’s confronting for me to have to see it. Nic sometimes said when we were going through it, ‘Oh jeez.’ It was like running marathon after marathon, emotionally.”
This intimacy inevitably changed the dynamics between man and wife, actors and director. While Kubrick encouraged the couple to come up with their own ideas for scenes, he seemed to indulge Nicole far more than Tom, jotting down her ad-libs and accepting her choice of music, Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing,” for a sex scene between them. He described Nicole as a “thoroughbred” and Tom as a “roller coaster.”
There remained the suspicion that, for all the mutual admiration, there was an element of humiliation involved in Kubrick’s treatment of Tom. While Frederic Raphael recognizes but does not endorse the argument, he concedes that for Kubrick “breaking people and feeding them into his machine was maybe a reflex he could not resist.” When Kubrick was rewriting the script, he would often fax Tom pages in the middle of the night, ensuring that his leading man was living his life according to the director’s body clock. Or when Kubrick filmed a scene in which Tom’s character was knocked to the ground by a gang of drunken college louts who accused him of being gay, was this a wink to the audience being aware of the rumors circulating about the actor? Even Raphael is not sure, noting that in the novel the chanting youths accuse the doctor of being Jewish. It was Kubrick who changed the insult.
This ambiguous relationship played out most explicitly when Kubrick filmed the sex scenes involving Nicole and her navy lover. Noticeably, the six-day shoot was the only time in the marathon production that Tom was definitely not needed on set. Not so his scriptwriter. In a knowing aside, Kubrick told Raphael that Nicole had agreed to take off her clothes and he would be filming on a closed set for the next few days. “Might be a good day to happen to drop by the studio, if you wanted to,” he told him. Raphael declined, feeling that it would be “cheap” to take advantage of the situation.
Certainly voyeurism had always interested Kubrick, who enjoyed watching porn movies and talked about the possibility of exploring the genre. The sequence that inspired the closed shoot involved Nicole’s character, Alice Barford, telling her husband about a recurring sexual fantasy, triggered by her lust for a naval officer she had glimpsed in a hotel lobby the year before. Enraged and presumably excited by this confession, Bill embarks on a series of sexual adventures of his own, culminating in attending a ritualistic masked orgy that ends in the possible murder of a beautiful naked woman.
The man chosen to play the lover of Alice’s dreams was Gary Goba, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian model who had never acted before. When he auditioned, he thought it was for the job of an extra who would be wearing a naval officer’s uniform. Instead, in December 1997, he found himself naked on the closed set in front of an equally naked Nicole Kidman. Over the next few days, with barely an introduction, the two strangers performed fifty or so sexual positions, with Kubrick filming from the shadows all the while. The director wanted his naked star to explore every sex act, apart from oral sex, which he dismissed as a cinematic cliché.
“We just tried to do stuff that we had never ever seen before in movies,” recalled Goba. “Sometimes she would come up with an idea or I would or Stanley would.” In the scene that actually made it into the movie, Nicole is lying on her back wearing a summer dress while Goba caresses her and lifts her dress over her breasts to reveal her body. “Leave [the dress] up there and have those hands continue on down, and, like, grab her tits, kiss them if you want, hands all the way down her body and end up between her
legs,” said the director. Goba, trying to be sensitive to Nicole, rested his hand on her thigh, knowing that it could make little difference to Stanley, as her other leg was shielding what his hand might actually be doing from the camera anyway. “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Gary, you’ve got to get right in there!” Kubrick instructed.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Goba. “I just couldn’t believe it. I think he was having fun with it. It was a joke for him, but I think he went a little far for her because as the days went on, she would be like, ‘Okay, cut!’ Like this is getting too intimate, but he just let it go. It was like he was trying to have things done to piss her off—or the opposite. It was weird. He was laughing. He thought it was so funny.”
It was as if he were enjoying the relentless humiliation of another man’s wife—and the unspoken emasculation of her husband—by playing out explicit scenes that would inevitably end up on the cutting room floor. In one scenario, Nicole had a wig glued over her private parts and Kubrick ordered Goba to perform oral sex on her. “He really wanted me to go for it,” recalls Goba. “I did and he was like, ‘You’ve got to really push in there and really move your head around,’ and I’d see him laughing and she would be like, ‘Oh God, Stanley!’ So I was really grinding away in there, with my mouth on her patch—and there was hair in my mouth, too, and I’d be pulling one out.”
As Nicole’s biographer James L. Dickerson caustically observed, “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.”
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