Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (26 page)

 Nicole and Tom signed the papers before leaving the office that evening and then, avoiding the awkwardness of a handshake, embraced as the friends they once were. “Nicole is relieved that everything is finally over,” a friend told
Newsweek,
“and that she and Tom will have some kind of amicable relationship.”

Most experts considered the final agreement a victory for Nicole, but since the non-property aspects of the settlement were sealed, it is not known how she fared with alimony or child support, or with other aspects of their wealth such as cash, stocks and bonds, and investment properties.

After wrapping up the agreement, Nicole said goodbye to Bella and Connor—it was Tom’s turn to have them with him for the remainder of the month at his $45,000-a-month Tudor-style mansion he rented in Beverly Hills—and flew to Sydney to be with her mother and sister, with whom she had invested in a chain of manicure salons.

 In an interview with Liz Smith for
Good Housekeeping
, Nicole was asked if she had given any thought to dating again. “No, but everyone keeps telling me I have to,” she answered. ”Everyone keeps telling me I have to start dating, and I keep saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

Smith, sympathetic to her plight, suggested that dating was a horrible concept. “At this moment, it’s not horrible,” said Nicole. “I look forward to it. I hope that one day I can fall in love again. I mean, I still am a romantic, and I still believe in love. But in terms of right now, I don’t have anything to give. That’s not fair, to enter into something with somebody when I don’t have enough to give them.”

Nicole returned to Sydney in early November and appeared on a local television show hosted by Ray Martin. Perhaps lobbying for Nicole to have a romance with Russell Crowe, Martin played a video clip for her of an interview he had done with Crowe.

Said Martin: “There was a quote, in which you said, ‘She’s not just the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, but the most beautiful woman in the universe.’”

“Did I?” asked Crowe. “Did I say that? If she’s watching, yes. Of  course I say that about Nicky just about every day.”

After seeing the clip, Nicole said, “Now, you’ve got to ask me about him. Is he the most beautiful man . . .”

“Is he?” asked Martin.

Nicole laughed. “If he’s watching, absolutely!”

Nicole ended 2001 with an unexpected honor. She was chosen “Entertainer of the Year” by
Entertainment Weekly.
“In case anyone missed it—and given her string of provocative, nuanced performances in movies like
To Die For, Portrait of a Lady
, and
Eyes Wide Shut
, we should have been more alert—Kidman has become one of the more interesting actors working in movies,” declared the magazine, which rated her above the actors in
Sex and the City
, the
Producers,
singer Alecia Keys, and talk show host Bill O’Reilly. “This year, she gave a pair of performances so fearless and assured that even if she had not owned a half share in the year’s most headline-making celebrity split, the ‘Mrs. Tom Cruise’ label would have been banished permanently.”

Not everyone was happy with the magazine’s selection. Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith, who write the daily “Ask Marilyn” column on E! Online took exception to the honor. “Oh, gag us with a spoon—or whatever,” they wrote. “The fact that her marriage to Tom Cruise bit the dust is a shame, but the only things that differentiate her from millions of other divorced women is that she’ll never have to worry about supporting her children .  .  . but we don’t see why she should be singled out as a woman of the year for ‘making it on her own.’”

“Was it a good year?” Nicole wondered aloud in response to the honor. “It was an interesting year. A strange year. A Cathartic year. Creatively, it was very fulfilling, but there were some pretty dark times. If everything had fallen apart—if
Moulin Rouge
and
The Others
had tanked—that would have been too many blows. But somebody was looking out for me.”

                            Nicole in a scene from
The Interpreter
            Photofest

Chapter 10

HEELS-EYE VIEW: LIFE WITHOUT TOM

Nicole began 2002 by reading a cover story article about Tom in
Vanity Fair
. In the story, headlined
The Naked Truth
, written by Evgenia Peretz, the actor once again answered questions about the divorce. “[Nicole] knows why, and I know why,” Tom said. “She’s the mother of my children, and I wish her well. And I think that you just move on. And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say that with anything. Things happen in life, and you do everything you can, and in every possible way, and there’s a point at which you just sometimes have to face the brutal reality.”

Told by Peretz that his answer would only pique people’s curiosity, Tom responded, “I don’t care if it piques people’s interest. Honestly, people should mind their own damn business. And get a life of their own . . . My personal life isn’t here to sell newspapers.”

Tom disclosed that he kept in touch with his children by telephone and by satellite television. When they were with him, he said, he used an elaborate chart system, which, in keeping with Scientology doctrine, established a point system of duties and rewards, along with a dialogue about helping each other. If he asks them how they think they can help him—and they say they don’t know—he suggests that they can clean up their rooms or put up their plates up after meals.

Tom went on to talk about how he and Penelope had enjoyed the company of the children at his home in Telluride. “She’s beautiful,” he told Petez. “She’s a very skilled actress, but has an effortless quality about her. You look at Audrey Hepburn. She had that kind of elegance and yet was accessible.”

Nicole did not mind him talking about their divorce—he had his opinions and she had hers—nor did she mind him discussing his point system for disciplining the children (it wasn’t the way she did it, but she could hardly argue against it), but there was something about him lumping the children in with his and Penelope’s activities that annoyed her. Most divorced women feel a certain amount of discomfort when their children are exposed to the father’s new love interest—and Nicole was no exception.

Vanity Fair
wrote about
her
children as if she were no longer in the picture. Just when she thought the nightmare that was 2001 was over, new issues arose to aggravate old wounds. Always prone to sudden changes in her health during times of emotional upheaval, Nicole was stunned to learn from her doctor, after a routine office visit, that her Pap smear had come back positive for possible cervical cancer.

According to press reports, a follow-up biopsy came back negative to cancer, but doctors cautioned her that such results can be wrong. She was urged to undergo another test in several months to be certain. The
Star
reported that she was “freaked out” by the news, prompting a friend to say, “She’s been praying that everything’s okay, but she can’t get the fear that she has cancer out of her mind.”

The cancer scare proved to be groundless, but it did take its toll on Nicole, leaving her emotionally and perhaps even spiritually bruised and battered by the experience. Because of what had happened to Janelle, cancer was the most menacing word in the Kidman vocabulary.

Following on the heels of the cancer scare, Nicole had a fight with Tom, after which, according to news reports, she was taken to the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center, where he received emergency treatment for what was diagnosed as a panic attack. Witnesses said she was shaking and sobbing, nearly out of control.

Even though she continued to live in a whirlwind of emotions, Nicole pulled herself together and faced the tasks at hand, the most pressing of which was work on a new project,
Dogville
. Written and directed by Lars von Trier, the film was set in an American town in the Rocky Mountains in the 1930s, but it was shot primarily in a studio in Sweden, where the actors all lived in a hotel and dined dormitory-style together. To Nicole’s delight, she co-starred with screen legend Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Blair Brown, and Chloe Sevigny.

With the Golden Globe Awards scheduled for January 20, 2002, she took a couple of days off from shooting
Dogville
to fly to Los Angeles to attend the ceremony, which was going to be broadcast on live television from Merv Griffin’s Beverly Hilton Hotel.

The night before the awards show, Nicole was a guest on the
Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
Wearing jeans and a low-cut, white blouse worn beneath a gold jacket, she appeared radiant and a little bit jittery. She wore her hair pulled back, an unfortunate decision since it high-lighted her darting eyes.

 Since she was nominated for best actress in a comedy or musical for her role in
Moulin Rouge
—and for best actress in a drama for her role in
The Others
—Leno asked her if she preferred one film over the other. She laughed and said she could not pick a favorite. When she learned she had two nominations—a distinct rarity—she said she thought, “I really have to appreciate this because this will never happen again and it’s one of those things were you go, ‘Wow!’”

What she really wanted to talk about was Sweden, which she found—at minus twenty degrees—to be such a “serious” environment. Inexplicably, Nicole shifted the conversation to the topic of trolls. She explained that the part of Sweden where she was filming was famous for inventing the troll doll. “We went shopping for the trolls’ ‘cause I wanted to get trolls for my kids, and they all have—it was so strange—they all have genitalia,” she exclaimed. “They do! We went into this store. It’s weird.” She went on describe one troll as having a “huge red penis.” 

 The following night, wearing a black strapless gown that was slit up to her upper thigh, Nicole arrived at the Golden Globes with her father and mother. Before going into the hotel, she introduced her father and mother to a television interviewer and confessed that she was “very nervous” about the event.

Antony was asked if he was proud of his daughter. “Very proud indeed,” he said. “We’re hoping for a good result tonight.”

Inside the hotel, when the award was announced for best actress in a drama, Nicole lost to Sissy Spacek for her performance in
In the Bedroom
. Nicole’s luck changed when actor Michael Caine came on stage to present the award for best actress in a musical or comedy. There were five nominations: Thora Birch for
Ghost World
, Cate Blanchett for
Bandits
, Reese Witherspoon for
Legally Blonde
, Renee Zellweger for
Bridget Jones’s Diary
, and, of course, Nicole Kidman for
Moulin Rouge
.

When Caine called out Nicole’s name, she energetically bounded to the stage. Taking the award from Caine, she said: “Wow! Thank you Hollywood Foreign Press.” Then she admitted that her hands were shaking. “This is really, really special,” she continued, “because I never thought I would be in a musical, let alone win an award for one. So I have to thank for that Mr. Baz Luhrmann. He believed I could do it. He’s innovative and a visionary and his partner Katherine Martin, they’re such a powerful creative force and I’m proud to say they are my friends. There is another man I would never have done this without—and that is Ewan McGregor. He’s so special. A magnificent person, a magnificent actor and he just makes you better being in a scene with you.”

Later, in the evening the nominations were announced for best film (musical or comedy). Named were:
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Gosford Park, Legally Blonde, Shrek, and Moulin Rouge.
To no one’s surprise,
Moulin Rouge
was declared the winner, vindicating Baz Luhrmann, who went on stage to accept the award.

Backstage, the show’s producer Dick Clark, asked Nicole if she was really all that nervous, to which Nicole responded, “My teeth are chattering.” He probably thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t. She went on to say that she and Russell Crowe, who was nominated for his roll in
Beautiful Mind
(he didn’t win) wanted the award committee to seat all the Australian nominees at one table. “But they wouldn’t allow us,” she said. “Thought we’d be too rowdy.”

Nicole and Luhrmann were ebullient over their two awards, for it was the first recognition they had received for
Moulin Rouge.
Besides the obvious benefit of winning the awards, there was the possibility that they were a precursor to the Academy Awards scheduled for presentation in February. Historically, the Golden Globes have been accurate indicators of how academy members cast their votes.

Nicole returned to the
Dogville
set, floating on a cloud back to Sweden. Seemingly following her were a contingent of tabloid reporters and photographers, eager to eavesdrop on her new life without Tom. One evening, they caught her having an “intimate dinner” with Jonas Ohlsson, a twenty-two-year-old production assistant, but when they attempted to take a photograph, the two separated, only to meet up again at Nicole’s chauffeur-driven car.

Back on the set of
Dogville
the next day, Nicole resumed the persona of Grace, a woman on the run. Director Lars von Trier based the story on the song “Private Jenny” from
The Threepenny Opera
by Bertolt Brecht, which is about a servant girl, a newcomer to a village where she is treated as an outsider, only to become the only survivor of an attack against the town. Von Trier wrote the part with Nicole in mind after he received word that she wanted to be in one of his films. He was surprised by her acceptance of the role, because
Dogville
, which is about as character-driven as a story can become, is closer to being an art-house film than a Hollywood blockbuster.

Dogville
was wrapped in plenty of time for Nicole to return to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards ceremony on March 24, 2002. Nicole was nominated for an Oscar in the best actress category for her role in
Moulin Rouge
, but, unlike the Golden Globes, which saw her nominated for both M
oulin Rouge
and
The Others
, the Academy Awards nominating committee overlooked the latter film.
Moulin Rouge
was also nominated in the best picture category and six additional minor categories, though Baz Luhrmann did not make the director’s list.

The week before the awards ceremony, Nicole made her obligatory visit to the
Tonight Show with Jay Leno
. Wearing a tight-fitting black dress, she walked out onto the stage to a standing ovation, which seemed to make her even more nervous. She longs for public adoration, yet when she receives it, it always makes her feel uncomfortable, as if she didn’t really deserve it.

Nicole talked about
Moulin Rouge
, about how Luhrmann first approached her to discuss the role—and later in the show Luhrmann joined her on stage to talk about the film from his vantage point—but the highlight of the interview was her revelation about her family’s penchant for gambling. She explained that she had just returned from a movie distributors’ exhibition in Las Vegas, where she had had a good time at the gaming tables.

Leno asked her if she lost big money, to which she responded, “No, not very much. I’m actually like a little old woman when I gamble. I sit there and I put my glasses on and I watch the cards and I hate for anybody to talk to me. So, I’m not a lot of fun—and I have a limit and as soon as I hit the limit, you have to walk away. That’s how you win when you gamble. Yes, because gambling can be an addiction, so if you don’t allow it to be an addiction, you can actually win at it.”

Nicole went on to explain that she was careful about gambling because members of her family had found it addictive. “I’ve been warned that I may have it in my blood—so I’m fighting it.”

The Leno interview confirmed what was becoming increasingly apparent—namely, that despite her great beauty and charm, she was ill-at-ease in social situations. She performed well when she did question-and-answer interviews that focused on her movie projects, but when it came to chit-chat she had a difficult time keeping the conversation flowing with inane batter, the mainstay of all social interactions.

When placed in social situations, such as free-ranging television interviews, she tended to use hot-button topics such as gambling addiction or trolls with big penises to attract attention. That was the biggest change in her life, not having Tom at her side to glide her through anxiety provoking situations.

On the night of the Oscars, that became even more apparent when she and actress Renee Zellweger, an adoring Tom Cruise supporter, were corralled by a television interviewer outside the Kodak Theatre, the new, 3,300-seat home of the Oscars.

When asked if they were sweating in their “fabulous dresses,” Nicole committed a Hollywood gaffe and glanced down at her armpits (she had on a bare-shoulder pink gown) and answered that she was indeed sweating.