Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (17 page)

Tom began to live his life by Hubbard’s famous statement of moral relativism: “If it isn’t true for you, it isn’t true.” By slow, almost imperceptible degrees, he would eventually exchange his family, or his unhappy memories of his past life, for the bright, shiny, new family of Scientology. Eventually all decisions, great and small, would be taken with reference to its teachings. Tom embraced the philosophy so thoroughly that in time he would use one of Hubbard’s peculiar phrases to describe his own father. Cruise called him “a merchant of chaos,” a phrase Hubbard used to refer to those—mainly journalists, police, politicians, and doctors—who he believed make the outside world dangerous.

One of the ironies of Tom Cruise’s journey is that a man who is often described as controlling was ultimately shaped and manipulated by the fiercely doctrinaire religion he embraced in 1986. Like other celebrities who joined the cult, their every move, whether they knew it or not, was discussed, debated, and orchestrated by Scientologists working feverishly behind the scenes to ensure that their prize catch swam in the direction they ordained. “These celebrities never had a clue about the octopus that was taking over their lives,” a former Celebrity Centre operative recalled. It would be no exaggeration to say that when they entered Scientology, they were about to take part in a real-world version of
The Truman Show
—Peter Weir’s 1998 film starring Jim Carrey as a man who doesn’t realize that his life is actually a carefully orchestrated TV reality show.

While Tom’s decision to join the Scientology cult would prove to be the most controversial choice of his life, at the time it was all of a piece with his growing intimacy with fellow Scientologist Mimi Rogers. For Tom, the most important decision was asking her to marry him. Not that it was the most romantic declaration of his life. As she later recalled, “He didn’t do anything dashing like going down on one knee.
It just, well, it just sort of happened.” Perhaps with memories of the circus that surrounded his friend Sean Penn’s wedding, Tom and Mimi told no one apart from immediate family. Even his publicist Andrea Jaffe was kept in the dark.

Their wedding was a simple, straightforward, no-nonsense affair. Barefoot and dressed in blue jeans, they were married on May 9, 1987, in a simple Unitarian—rather than Scientology—ceremony, in their rented house in upstate New York. His sisters baked and iced the chocolate wedding cake, his friend Emilio Estevez, who by then had split with Demi Moore, was best man, and his mother, Mary Lee South, shed the customary tears, describing the ceremony as “intimate and beautiful.”

Of the fifteen or so guests, the notable absentees were Paul Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, who were in Cannes promoting his movie version of Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie
. Woodward and Newman had heard about the wedding plans a few weeks earlier when the two couples had had dinner at the fashionable Wilkinson’s Seafood Café on New York’s Upper East Side to celebrate Newman’s Academy Award for Best Actor as Fast Eddie Felson in
The Color of Money
. Newman’s performance on the racetrack a few days after Tom and Mimi’s wedding was not so memorable. As Tom watched from the sidelines, his friend lost control of his Nissan and slammed into the wall at California’s Riverside International Speedway. A long, tense moment passed before Newman climbed out the window and walked away from the wreck.

While the incident did not dampen Tom’s enthusiasm for his new passion, in the first few months of married life he had little time for racing—or his new bride. Both of the newlyweds went straight back to work. Mimi was putting the finishing touches on
Someone to Watch Over Me,
a sexy crime film costarring Tom Berenger and directed by Ridley Scott, who had made
Legend
with Tom a couple of years earlier. She had high hopes that this would be her breakout role.

While Mimi was still laboring up the slopes of Hollywood
success, Tom was now at the summit. In the months after his marriage, he was about to square the artistic circle, embarking on three movies that would not only expand his bank balance, but earn critical praise. In a journey that took him to the heart of who he was as an actor and a man, he traveled from Jamaica and the Philippines back to New York, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Oklahoma, and his home state of Kentucky. While it was hardly the best way to nurture a new marriage, he did pick up a brother on the way.

When Tom had first met acting legend Dustin Hoffman in New York a couple of years earlier, it was something of a dream come true. When he was new in Hollywood, Tom and his friend Sean Penn had driven by Hoffman’s Beverly Hills home and dared one another to ring the doorbell. Neither had had the nerve to do it. So when Hoffman offered him two tickets to watch his Broadway performance in Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman,
Tom needed no second invitation. After the show he went backstage and spent more than three hours chatting to the veteran actor in his dressing room. “There was something between us,” recalled Hoffman later. “He was like family. He was treating me like I was his big brother.” During their conversation, they recognized striking similarities in their backgrounds. “Neither of us had a nice childhood,” recalled Hoffman. “Like we had come out of the same house.” Even their career trajectory was remarkably similar: Eighteen years earlier, Hoffman had become an overnight star with
The Graduate
, just as Cruise had with
Top Gun
. After their late-night tête-à-tête, Hoffman went home and told his wife Lisa about the “weird connection” he felt with the younger man.

Filial rapport or no, Tom did not immediately spring to Hoffman’s mind when he was discussing actors to play alongside him in his latest movie project. The film, called
Rain Man,
was the story of two brothers; Charlie Babbitt is a normal if avaricious salesman, while his elder brother, Raymond, is an autistic savant who has spent much of his life in an institution.
They meet properly for first time only after the death of their father, who has left his fortune to Raymond. This spurs Charlie into finding his long-lost brother, initially with the aim of fleecing him. During a road trip where, among other adventures, they use Raymond’s astonishing memory to win at the gaming tables in Las Vegas, Charlie undergoes an epiphany, learning to love his elder handicapped brother—and himself.

Originally, Hoffman considered Jack Nicholson to play the fast-talking con man brother, and then Bill Murray. It was Michael Ovitz, president of Creative Artists, the biggest agency in Hollywood, who suggested Tom Cruise, not only because he was younger and had terrific box-office appeal, but because both Tom and Dustin were on his books. As in
The Color of Money,
this was a chance for Tom to work with a man he both respected and liked, as well as on a film with artistic integrity that would stretch him as an actor. His challenge was to get the audience to empathize with a character who comes across as a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work.

By September 1987, just four months after his marriage to Mimi, Tom was Dustin Hoffman’s neighbor, moving into a beachfront house in Malibu next door to the legendary actor so that they, together with screenwriter Ron Bass and director Steven Spielberg, could work on
Rain Man.

Both Hoffman and Cruise embraced the research with their customary immersion, Tom taking only a couple of days off in October to accompany his new wife to the premiere of
Someone to Watch Over Me,
which opened to mixed reviews. Then he rejoined Hoffman. In the course of their journey they consulted medical specialists in San Diego and on the East Coast, and hung out with dozens of people with autism, some with extraordinary gifts such as the ability to calculate math problems faster than a computer. The movie stars dined with them, laughed with them, took them bowling, and met their families. Eventually Hoffman was able to perfectly mimic the gestures and movements of a typical sufferer of autism—even down to not making eye contact.

Still, the very nature of the condition proved a considerable artistic stumbling block. The first three directors, used to the convention that called for a character to develop in the course of a movie, found the immutability of autistic people disconcerting. For a central figure to stay the same throughout—and not even make eye contact—was a problem. One director, Martin Brest, had cut and run over endless disagreements with the notoriously perfectionist Hoffman. Brest felt that it was wrong that it took fifteen minutes before Hoffman’s character, Raymond Babbitt, first appeared on-screen. “My God, Tom’s the biggest star in the world; he can hold a movie for two reels,” retorted Hoffman. Next up was Steven Spielberg, who left the project to make a sequel to
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
giving all his notes to the final director, Barry Levinson, who had made
Tin Men
and
Good Morning, Vietnam.
Before he left, Spielberg told Levinson that the movie would make $100 million.

First, however, the movie had to get made. As Tom now realized, there is no such thing in Hollywood as an automatic green light, and for a long time it seemed that the project would get lost in the mire of development. So Tom flew to New York and did a major tour of the bars of Manhattan. He even took up bartending, learning how to mix the perfect martini under the watchful gaze of bartender John “JB” Bandy. In a few weeks he visited around thirty-four bars as he learned his new craft—with the promise of a $3 million payday for a maximum of three months’ work at the end. Nice work if you can get it. His new life hanging out with barflies in Manhattan was part of his research for the Disney movie
Cocktail,
which he agreed to make while the production glitches for
Rain Man
were being ironed out.

In
Cocktail,
Tom played a former serviceman who comes to New York to make his fortune and ends up working in a bar with Australian Bryan Brown, where they fall out over a girl, played by Elisabeth Shue. Eventually their pursuit of easy money—and rich women—ends in tragedy, a fitting metaphor for the “greed is good” ethos of the 1980s. During
filming on location in Jamaica and elsewhere, Cruise experienced the ugly side of celebrity, whispers circulating in the American tabloids that the recently married star was having an affair with Elisabeth Shue. In fact, the Harvard-educated Shue was wondering why she was involved in a film that was so “empty and superficial.” Dismissing the rumored affair as one of the “silliest stories” about her, she later remarked, “If I’d known it was just going to be about these guys throwing drinks around, then I might have had some second thoughts.”

While the film was, as Tom’s agent Paula Wagner put it, “eviscerated” by the critics as a cocktail of emotional clichés, it demonstrated Tom’s star quality nevertheless. Not only did he refuse to knock a penny off his $3 million fee, forcing economies among the production and cast, but, in spite of the critical drubbing, the movie cleaned up at the box office, becoming the seventh most popular film of 1988. “Congratulations, you are now able to open a movie,” a delighted Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney studios, told him. It was the biggest opening in Disney history, taking in $11.8 million, proof that a big name could carry a bad movie. While Tom didn’t quite appreciate it at the time, it was a defining moment in his Hollywood career.

In any event, Tom had little time to reflect on his career trajectory. No sooner had he forsaken his cocktail shaker than he was rehearsing for
Rain Man,
which finally started shooting in May 1988. It meant that Tom missed his first wedding anniversary and was on the road for his twenty-sixth birthday and the July opening of
Cocktail,
which, given the reviews, was perhaps just as well. It also meant that he was too focused on filming to get particularly agitated about tabloid stories suggesting that Mimi was finding it difficult to get pregnant. The fact that they were both working hard, often in different parts of the world, was discounted by the gossips. These emotional discomforts were a small price to pay for working alongside Dustin Hoffman. As with his initial collaboration with Paul Newman, he harbored doubts that his own ability would be able to match the
older man’s screen presence. He saw himself as the student, Hoffman the tutor. “I wasn’t sure if I could play in that league. I was excited enough just to be there.”

As on the shoot for
The Color of Money,
the chemistry between the two leading men and the coaxing creativity of director Barry Levinson ensured a happy if hardworking set. “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and I didn’t want to finish at the end of the day,” recalled Tom, who started the day with a 4:30
A.M.
workout. “He was like a machine in that sense,” commented Hoffman. “There is a joy in achieving excellence. It’s all about the work.”

The work paid off handsomely, artistically and financially.
Rain Man
made more than $400 million at the box office and, in another first for Tom, he received a share of the final profits as well as a $5 million fee. It was compensation for the disappointment he felt at failing to receive an Oscar nomination. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were apparently unmoved by his performance as the cocksure hotshot who by the end of the third act is a reformed egomaniac.

However, it pleased the audience and some reviewers, Roger Ebert describing him as a “genuine star and a genuine actor,” though not everyone was impressed. Acerbic, influential film critic Pauline Kael described him as “patented”: “His knowing that a camera is on him produces nothing but fraudulence.” She was no kinder to his screen partner, dismissing Hoffman’s efforts as “a one-note performance.” Hoffman’s note, however, struck a chord with Oscar voters, his quirky performance earning him the award for Best Actor. The film itself went on to win Oscars for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture.

While hindsight gives the impression that Tom’s acting career was a series of carefully considered stepping-stones, in reality much depended on chance and the clout of his agency, Creative Artists. For example, had it not been for the delays and uncertainty surrounding the production of
Rain Man,
he would not have had time to star in
Cocktail,
the movie that sealed his reputation as an actor whose name alone could
carry a film. Nor would he have tackled his next film,
Born on the Fourth of July,
especially as this was a movie project that had been hanging around Hollywood for a decade. He might not have even looked at the script if he had not shared the same agent as the film’s director, Oliver Stone, or if Tom Pollock, the head of Universal Pictures, had not agreed to provide $14 million in funding because he believed it was one of the “great unmade screenplays of the last decade.”