Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (11 page)

Losing her professional identity was not something she had counted on. She had gone from being a big fish in a small Australian pond to being Tom’s fish in an aquarium illuminated with spotlights. She was in love. Other people who fell in love could do so without losing their identity, so why should that be a special problem for her?

 Tom did everything he could to make her feel special. He lavished expense gifts on her, ostentatious displays of affection such as a red Mercedes, and he gave her a Labrador retriever to cuddle and play with while he was away at work putting together multi-million-dollar movie deals.

Nicole once told him that she did not like to shop, so he went shopping for her, purchasing expensive gowns for her to wear, clothing that he thought would look good on her. There was nothing overtly manipulative in Tom’s behavior, no sinister motives, but it was as if he had borrowed a page from Antony Kidman’s book,
Family Life: Adapting to Change
, which makes the case that classic, gender-based power struggles between men and women sometimes revolve around who controls the purse and the toys.

Nicole was aware of what was happening—she was, after all, her father’s daughter—but, truthfully, she did not care. For the first time, she was in a relationship with a man who was both her friend and her lover, and together they were headed down the same creative road, dreaming the same fantasies. She willingly gave up her independence because she felt, for the first time in her life, she had found someone to love that was going to love her back—and not hurt her.

“I’m not sort of running around and going, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, who can I be with, where’s someone I can spend the rest of my life with?’” she told
Women’s Weekly
, an Australian publication. “I’ve found that person now and it’s just a warm, comforting, incredibly trusting and supportive environment. That’s given me a base to shoot out from, to grow from. And he’s just a great person to be with.”         

Once Tom had Nicole driving the car he wanted, wearing the clothing he picked out for her, and playing with the puppy of his choice, he went off to make another movie. Next up was a courtroom thriller named
A Few Good Men
, directed by Rob Reiner, who had a major hit in 1989 with
When Harry Met Sally
. The script was based on a true incident that was adapted into a Broadway play by Aaron Sorkin, who ended up writing the screenplay as well.

Tom was asked to play Lt. Daniel Kaffee, an inexperienced Navy lawyer who defends two Marines, played by Wolfgang Bodison and James Marshall, who have been charged with murdering a colleague during a hazing incident. The Marines claimed they were following orders and the death was accidental.

Lieutenant Commander Jo-Anne Galloway, played by Demi Moore, is put in charge of overseeing the Marines’ defense. She is nudged by her superior officer to assign Kaffee to the case, primarily because he is lazy, the type of bureaucratic legal mind that would rather plea-bargain than fight. With Kaffee in charge, the top brass feel the case has a better chance of quietly disappearing.  However, the deeper Kaffee and Galloway get into the case, the more convinced they are of their clients’ innocence. Kaffee also discovers he has a real passion for investigative legal work.

A requirement for all good thrillers is an immovable object, someone who has the power to make or break the case. That person, in this instance, is Colonel Nathan Jessup, a hard-line Marine played by Jack Nicholson. Did he give his tacit approval for the hazing incident or did he simply look the other way after the fact? The real fireworks of the film are generated by Kaffee’s confrontations with Jessup. In the climatic courtroom scene, Jessup lunges at Kaffee and has to be restrained by two Marine guards.

Even though Tom was the star—and Nicholson became an important character only toward the end of the movie—it was the older man who had the best lines. At one point, he says: “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns .  .  . You don’t want the truth because, deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

In many ways,
A Few Good Men
was Tom’s biggest challenge to date. Not just because he had to play opposite a movie legend, but because he had to memorize so many legal phrases and complicated dialogue, not an easy task for someone with reading problems. Co-star Kevin Bacon, who played Captain Jack Ross, the prosecutor assigned to convict the two Marines, also had problems with his lines. Sometimes, during make-up, the two men rehearsed each other.

An additional challenge for Tom was that the movie provided him with no opportunity to flash his heralded charm in the face of the opposite sex. His scenes with Demi Moore were business-like, devoid of romance and sex appeal (indeed it later was suggested the role was originally meant for a male, but was changed to a female without making gender changes in the script). The closest the two characters come to romance is a debate over when an invitation by Galloway for dinner constituted an official date. Galloway said definitely not. Kaffee said it sounded like a date to him. And so it went.

Although there was no romance in the movie, there was plenty on the set whenever Nicole showed up to visit Tom. Typically, they found a dark corner and kissed, while embarrassed crew members tried not to watch. She may not have enjoyed playing the role of the girlfriend in the movies, but she demonstrated a real talent for it in real life.

For the most part, film critics were enthusiastic about
A Few Good Men
. Peter Travers, writing in
Rolling Stone,
described Tom as a “fireball” and Nicholson as a “marvel .  .  . coiled to spring.” Then he adds, “There is no bigger kick in movies right now than watching Nicholson pull out all the stops as he takes on Cruise. Maybe it isn’t art. Sometimes witty, suspenseful, knockout entertainment is enough.”

Rita Kempley, writing in the
Washington Post
, described the movie as a “brass-buttoned, square-jawed huzzah for military justice that’s thankfully free of the messy moralizing of the Vietnam age .  .  . it’s a grand undertaking that wrangles with the heavy questions that cropped up at Nuremberg and My Lai, questions that deserve and get lots of imposing shots of monuments and not a little swashbuckling from the big stars.”

One notable dissenter was Roger Ebert, writing in the
Chicago Sun-Times
: “Nicholson is always fun to watch, as he barks and snarls and improvises new obscenities. Cruise is an effective contrast, as the immature young officer who discovers himself . . . But the movie doesn’t quite make it, because it never convinces us that the drama is happening while we watch it; it’s like the defense team sneaked an advance look at the script.”

For all the grand visions seen in the film by some critics, the ticket-buying public flocked to theaters (it grossed $237 million worldwide) not to see a discourse on the abuse of military power, but to see Tom and Nicholson, representing Hollywood’s young gun and old guard, clash in face-to-face combat, however symbolic it might be. The most memorable confrontation between the two men, the one that made all the television sound bites, occurred when Kaffee pressed Jessup on the witness stand.

“You want answers?” asks Jessup

“I think I’m entitled.”

“You want answers?”

“I want the truth!” says Kaffee.

“You can’t handle the truth!” snarls Jessup.     

The financial success of
A Few Good Men
proved the box-office drawing power of stars such as Tom Cruise, Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, and Kiefer Sutherland, but it raised new questions in Tom’s mind about the direction his career should take. He was the star of
A Few Good Men
, but it was Nicholson who got the best lines. When movie-goers left the theater, they did not mimic him saying, “I want the truth”—no, they mimicked Nicholson’s, “You can’t handle the truth!”

What Tom wanted more than anything else was a role he could really sink his teeth into—and, for whatever reasons, that continued to elude him.  In 1992, no one in Hollywood was any bigger than Tom Cruise—he was a box-office leader, earning in excess of $10 million per film—but he felt that despite his enormous success, he should be doing better things with his talents. 

~ ~ ~

In January 1992,
Parade
magazine reported that Nicole and Tom were expecting a baby in February. “Not true!” countered a spokeswoman for Nicole. She demanded—and received—a retraction by the magazine. Anyone with half a brain could see that Nicole was not eight months pregnant.

Actually, there was some truth to the story. The couple, in fact, was expecting a baby—an adopted child—and somehow word had leaked out and the story had gotten twisted in the telling and the re-telling. Horrified by the story, Nicole and Tom put their secret adoption plans on hold.

For months, the tabloids had been filled with speculation about whether they could have children of their own. Some stories suggested that the couple had been tested and had learned that Tom was sterile. Others suggested that it was Nicole who was unable to conceive. The couple was outraged by the
Parade
story, which they felt was an invasion of their privacy, because it spotlighted their so-called marital “inadequacies” and made it difficult for them to pursue adoption.

Heartbroken by the experience, Nicole put her emotions aside and began work on her next movie project, one that would not feature her husband.
Malice
is a thriller that was carved from the same psychological putty as
Dead Calm
. Directed by Harold Becker (
Sea of Love
and
The Onion Field
), it featured a strong cast made up of Alec Baldwin, George C. Scott, Bill Pullman, Anne Bancroft, and Bebe Neuwirth.

Nicole was asked to play Bill Pullman’s wife, Tracy—yes, she did accept another “girlfriend” role, but this one has a wicked twist and hardly counts—opposite both Bill Pullman, who plays her husband Andy, and Baldwin, who plays a hot-shot surgeon named Jed Hill. The supporting cast included Bancroft as Tracy’s mother and newcomer Gwyneth Paltrow as a student/murder victim. It was only Paltrow’s third feature film and she would be hardly noticeable in the film today had she not gone on to better things.

Malice
begins with a pastoral look at a women’s college as classes are let out and the students pour out onto the campus. With an uplifting chorus in the background, a student rides her bicycle home, where she is raped and badly beaten as she feeds her cat. She is rushed to the hospital, where Dr. Jed Hill saves her life with aggressive sleight-of-hand in the operating room.

When Andy, a dean at the college, shows up at the hospital to inquire about the student, he meets Dr. Hill and realizes that they attended the same high school. He offers to rent Dr. Hill a room on the third floor of the house he shares with Tracy—a school teacher— until he can find a home of his own.

Tracy voices disapproval over her husband’s decision to rent the room because she says it gives them little privacy (he says they need the money), but she seems unconcerned about a young boy in the house next door who sits at the window and watches them have sex.

When Tracy experiences mysterious stomach pains and is taken to the hospital for emergency surgery, it is Dr. Hill who performs the operation. He removes both her ovaries and it later turns out that the second ovary did not have to be removed. Since that means that Tracy will no longer be able to have children, she gets a lawyer and sues Dr. Hill. She ends up winning a huge settlement from the hospital.

Angry with her husband, whom she also blames for the unnecessary surgery, she goes home to visit her mother. Although Tracy is the focus of the story, it is slow to develop and her best lines occur late in the movie, when her role in the plot is understood.

One of Nicole’s best scenes is with Pullman.  After she finds a hypodermic needle in the bed, obviously placed there to injure her, she sets up a meeting with Andy and confronts him with her suspicions. “Sweetie, I’m going to talk for a minute, so it’d be better if you didn’t interrupt me, okay?” she says, her voice sweetly menacing. “I found a hypodermic needle in my bed. I don’t know who put it there. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I didn’t think it was funny .  .  . So what I’m saying is this—whoever played that joke is playing in a league they’re not ready for. Now I came here hoping we can reach an understanding.”

Later, fearing that Andy has learned their secret, Dr. Hill tells Tracy to pay him off. She brushes that suggestion aside and suggests that they commit a murder.