Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (18 page)

At first sight, this true story of Ron Kovic, an innocent young patriot from Long Island who gets his spine shattered in combat during the Vietnam War and returns home to indifference and life in a wheelchair, was well past its sell-by date. Not only had Hollywood covered the conflict—Oliver Stone’s own Vietnam movie
Platoon
had won the Best Picture award in 1987—but the world itself had moved on. With the Cold War thawing fast—the Berlin Wall fell in December 1989—the new generation of moviegoers remembered Vietnam simply as an event, like World War II, in American history.

Tom, however, was intrigued not only by a searing human story that challenged his acting abilities, but also by a curious sense of destiny about the movie. His own birthday was the day before July 4, but more significantly his acting hero Al Pacino had been slated for the starring role a decade earlier, before production was canceled because funding dried up. Even though he was researching his part in
Rain Man,
Tom agreed to meet Oliver Stone in a New York restaurant in January 1988. Not for the first time, Stone’s passionate intensity was both mesmerizing and convincing to an actor. By the end of lunch, Tom was as committed to the part of Ron Kovic as Stone was to Tom. “I chose Tom because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit,” recalled Stone later. “They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron, too, Tom is wound real tight.”

As a result, once
Rain Man
was green-lighted, Tom found himself researching and preparing for two demanding roles
at the same time, to the point where he would meet Dustin Hoffman and Barry Levinson in the morning, and Stone and Ron Kovic in the afternoon. His schedule was so demanding that Paul Newman sent him a six-pack of beer with a note urging him to sit down, relax, and take a weekend off. No such luck. The pace was remorseless, and understandably, Stone, who had spent ten frustrating years trying to shepherd the story onto the screen, was nervous that it would prove too much for his leading man. He called Tom constantly for fear that he would pull out. “I will give you everything I have, trust me,” an exasperated Tom finally told him.

Less sure was Ron Kovic. It may have been a challenging role for Tom and a “sacred mission” for director Oliver Stone, who had fought in Vietnam, but it was Ron Kovic’s life. His initial skepticism about the choice of Cruise was blunted when Tom first visited his home in Los Angeles. After he pulled up to the house, Tom slowly eased himself out of his car and into a wheelchair—a clear sign that he was taking the enterprise very seriously. As they sat in his kitchen, Tom convinced Kovic that he was committed to portraying him in an understanding and sympathetic way. Kovic recalls looking at Cruise, who then represented the all-American screen action hero, and thinking: “He’s about to go through this hell and he doesn’t even know it.” Ironically, it was the nature of Tom’s public persona that made him so potent in the part—as Oliver Stone and Universal boss Tom Pollock immediately recognized. Pollock recalled: “The film’s journey is more powerful when it is made by the maverick from
Top Gun.
It’s not only Ron who goes through this wrenching story, it is Tom Cruise—our perception of Tom Cruise.”

For the best part of a year, Tom put himself through mental and physical torture as he tried to convey the anger and agonies undergone by Kovic. Routinely described as intense and focused, for once Tom met his match in his director, who was utterly absorbed by the story. Twice Stone sent him to boot camp. “I didn’t want his foxhole dug by his cousin,” he said afterward. Stone was constantly encouraging his
leading man to read more about Vietnam, to meet more veterans and visit more hospitals to truly understand the anguish and helplessness felt by these forgotten heroes.

At one point, in the madness that infects this kind of passionate, close-quarters project, Stone convinced Tom to allow himself to be injected with a chemical that would have rendered him paralyzed for two days so that he could more realistically convey the incontinent, impotent torture of a once-virile young man confined to a wheelchair. As there was a chance that he would have suffered permanent incapacitation, the insurance company wisely vetoed the madcap idea. It was reminiscent of the time Dustin Hoffman went without sleep for two days during the filming of
Marathon Man
so he could better express his exhaustion. His costar, British actor Laurence Olivier, laconically remarked, “Try acting . . . it’s easier.”

Even without drugs, researching life in a wheelchair showed him how the invisible half lived. It was exhausting, uncomfortable, and frustrating, leaving him weary at the end of the day. Tom went around stores and malls with Ron, watching how he coped with his disability. On one occasion they were asked to leave a store because their wheelchairs were damaging the rubber carpet. “I couldn’t believe it,” Cruise recalled. “There were nights when I went home and couldn’t help but think that this could be me.” He stayed in character for meetings with movie executives and journalists, who were nonplussed by the sight of the wild-eyed, wheelchair-bound figure confronting them. Even at home he remained focused on the character he now inhabited, at night his wife watching him slowly struggle into bed from his wheelchair. It probably didn’t help his marriage when, in May 1989, the American tabloid the
Globe
insinuated that Tom’s low sperm count was the reason why Mimi was not yet pregnant. It was a claim that haunted Tom long after he had left his wheelchair behind, the actor later successfully suing a German magazine for repeating the story.

The three-month shoot, which started in Dallas, with battle scenes filmed in the Philippines, was as raw as the research.
Tom shaved his head, lost weight, and became so exhausted by the brutal twelve-hour days that there were times when he would just fall into Stone’s arms. “I’m not saying it’s the healthiest thing to do, but it was the right thing to do, and the only way to play that character,” he later told director Cameron Crowe. It was, as Kovic predicted, a journey to hell and back as Tom tried to convey the horror of accidentally shooting a comrade in Vietnam as well as the rage he felt against his broken body, his unresponsive family, and an uncaring nation. This unrequited fury was finally channeled into Kovic’s antiwar activism. Tom admitted that he was just “burnt out” by the intense process. “I have got absolutely nothing left,” he recalled after the final battle scenes were shot on location in the Philippines.

It certainly won over Kovic. As filming came to a close in July 1989, he presented Tom with his own Bronze Star as a twenty-seventh birthday present. “He gave it to Tom for bravery,” said Oliver Stone, “for having gone through this experience in hell as much as any person can without actually having been there.”

It was no coincidence that as Tom was researching his role as Ron Kovic, one of his new, carefully handpicked Scientology companions was Vietnam veteran Pat Gualtieri. A sensitive, intelligent man, he had served with 5th Battalion 2nd Artillery north of Saigon and lived to tell the tale when he and his 180-strong unit were attacked by 10,000 North Vietnamese regulars at the opening of the Tet Offensive. When the Brooklyn-born draftee returned home in 1968, he found a nation ill at ease with itself, and headed to California looking for answers about the mystery of life. He tried numerous “isms” before settling on Scientology. Easygoing and popular, Pat was an ideal guide who, along with his superior, Inspector General Greg Wilhere, explained the language and thinking behind the faith to their star acquisition.

Slowly, carefully, and gently, Tom was eased into the world of Scientology. By the summer of 1989, senior Scientologists felt confident enough to invite Tom to their secret, secluded,
and heavily guarded Gold Base, deep in the California desert. When he accepted, new leader David Miscavige gleefully announced to his closest staff, “The most important recruit ever is in the process of being secured. His arrival will change the face of Scientology forever.”

As anxious as a teenager on his first date, David Miscavige, the young leader of Scientology, impatiently paced around the immaculately arranged cabana as he waited for his guest on a Saturday night in the late summer of 1989. While no expense or effort had been spared to impress his visitor, by the agreed arrival time of eight o’clock there was still no sign of Tom Cruise. Watches were nervously checked, and as minutes turned into hours, cult minions made frantic phone calls. David Miscavige was not a man who liked to be kept waiting. But wait he did, becoming more and more furious as his carefully laid plans came to naught. By the time Tom, who had recently finished filming
Born on the Fourth of July
, arrived at the Gold Base Scientology fortress, it was long past eleven o’clock, and the actor, tired by the journey from Beverly Hills, went straight to bed.

He had missed a greeting as elaborate as it was incongruous. In the heart of the desert scrub, he was to have been taken to a swimming pool next to a $565,000 life-size replica of a three-masted schooner. In the tropically themed cabana, complete with parrots and other exotic birds, Miscavige and other senior Scientologists would have formed a welcoming committee. Doubtless, as he was being shown the nautical artifacts, he was to have been told about the history of the landlocked ship, the
Star of California,
which had been built on the express instructions of cult founder L. Ron Hubbard.

Even though he served with an utter lack of distinction in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Hubbard liked to think of himself as a military hero, dressing his most fanatical followers, known as the Sea Org, in the regalia and uniforms of a seafaring militia. This fraternal paramilitary organization was zealously dedicated to advancing their faith, signing “billion-year” contracts—pledging themselves to work for Scientology for the next billion years during future reincarnations—as a sign of their utter devotion. In their eyes they were fallen gods, immortal beings or “thetans,” who had lived for millions of years and would be reincarnated for billions of years to come.

From their desert lair, a place that had once been so secret that new Sea Org recruits were brought there blindfolded so that they could not divulge the location to outsiders, they pursued their mission of world domination and the defeat of their enemies. As Hubbard once wrote, “All men shall be my slaves. All women shall succumb to my charms. All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why.” In preparation for the day when they could put the words of the man known as “Source” into practice, they read
The Art of War
by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and
On War
by the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz. No one and nothing from the inferior “wog world”—the term for nonbelievers—could be allowed to get in their way. Certainly not in this existence. Indeed, the outside world was an unwelcome distraction. Believers were once banned from watching TV, listening to the radio, reading newspapers, making telephone calls, or receiving other communications from outsiders, including their families. Security staff even opened their Christmas presents to make sure they did not contain anything that would deflect them from the cause. (Nowadays newspapers are sold and TV played in the staff dining room.)

In its early years, most public Scientologists had never even heard of Gold Base, let alone visited the onetime holiday resort just outside Hemet, California. The organization deliberately disguised its true purpose, listing the five-hundred-acre compound in the local telephone directory as the “Scottish
Highlands Quietude Club.” It was a sign of Tom Cruise’s importance that he was invited to stay at this inner sanctum.

Significantly, the invitation was extended only to Tom, even though his wife had been a Scientologist for most of her life. The reason had less to do with the fact that they now seemed to be leading separate lives than with Mimi’s own position inside the cult. When her father, Phil, left the faith during the cull of mission holders in the early 1980s, he was deemed an enemy, or, in Scientology-speak, a “suppressive person.” Worse, he joined those, dubbed “squirrels” by Hubbard, who offered Scientology-style services at cut prices.

Anyone associated with Mimi’s father was supposed to “disconnect”—sever all relations—with him if they wanted to stay inside Scientology. In short, Mimi was expected to choose between her father and the cult, a dilemma that has confronted thousands of Scientologists over the years, leading to hundreds of family breakups. “Tom was a big star, she was a nothing and tainted by association with her father,” says a former Scientologist who helped plan that first visit. “David Miscavige wasn’t bothered about Mimi. In any case, in his eyes, her father had done all these terrible things to Scientology.”

To emphasize how little value the Scientology leadership placed on Mimi, her husband was accompanied by his assistant, Andrea Morse, daughter of actor Robert Morse. Tom paid for her to take numerous Scientology courses, Andrea in turn recruiting her mother, Carole, and sister Hilary to the faith. It was the beginning of a carefully considered strategy that would ultimately see the actor surrounded by Scientologists both at home and in his office, Odin Productions, which in time came to be operated on strict Scientology principles, where crispness, clarity, and military efficiency are the watchwords.

Both sides were keen that Tom’s first visit to the base be discreet and secret. Scientology’s inspector general, Greg Wilhere—effectively Miscavige’s right-hand man—had been assigned to ferry the Hollywood actor from Los Angeles to the secret retreat. Smooth, urbane, and unflappable, Wilhere
was Tom’s “handler,” the senior figure assigned to deflect any outside hostility toward Scientology and ensure that Tom remained enthusiastic about his new faith. He was the perfect choice to groom Cruise: friendly, sincere, and intelligent, even grudgingly admired by those who had become disaffected with Scientology.

Wilhere needed every ounce of his legendary charm to calm his furious leader. Though he was only five feet, five inches tall, Miscavige was known to have a giant temper, lashing out at subordinates whom he deemed to have crossed him. Wilhere managed to soothe him by explaining that Tom had been delayed for several hours because of movie business. Miscavige’s frustration was perhaps understandable. At the time his organization was on the ropes, facing a massive IRS investigation into its tax affairs. Not only was the cult spending $1.5 million a month on legal fees, but thousands of ordinary Scientologists were being audited by the tax man. “Things were very grim in 1990, and I don’t think a lot of Scientologists knew that,” Miscavige later admitted. “We kept it to ourselves. It was terrible.”