Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (2 page)

Tom has since spoken of the shame he felt as he grappled with the disorder: “I would go blank, feel anxious, nervous, bored, frustrated, dumb. I would get angry. My legs would actually hurt when I was studying. My head ached. All through school and well into my career I felt like I had a secret.” Like other sufferers, he developed coping strategies, rarely volunteering to answer teachers’ questions, or behaving like the class clown to deflect attention from his academic failings. His Woody Woodpecker impersonations now amused his classmates as well as his family.

Tom’s own frustrations were seemingly mirrored by his teachers’ impatience with him. He would later claim that when he was seven—the time he attended Packanack Elementary School—one teacher hurled him over a chair in class, the implication being that the teacher was angered by his inability to grasp the subject. Other teachers, he later recalled, were similarly irritated. The current principal of the five-hundred-pupil school, Dr. Kevin McGrath, who has been teaching for more than thirty years, finds the actor’s claims difficult to accept. “That kind of behavior by a teacher toward a pupil would not have been tolerated then or now,” he says. “It is tantamount to locking a child in a closet or taking a switch to them.”

In the winter of 1971, when he was halfway through third grade, his family packed up yet again and headed north for Ottawa, the Canadian capital, where his father had apparently gotten a job working for the Canadian military. They moved into a tidy clapboard house at 2116 Monson Crescent in Beacon Hill North, a leafy middle-class suburb that attracts government workers, diplomats, and other itinerant professionals. “Hello, my name is Thomas Mapother the Second,” announced Tom proudly if incorrectly when he knocked on the door of his new neighbors, the Lawrie family, and introduced himself. “I liked
him,” recalls Irene Lawrie, whose sons Alan and Scott became regular playmates. “He was always very active, always on the go, but a bit of a loner.”

Beneath the surface bravado there was, as he admitted later, an American youngster understandably worrying about whether he would fit in at a new school with new friends in a foreign country. “You know, I didn’t have the right shoes; I didn’t have the right clothes; I even had the wrong accent,” he recalled. Small for his age, “Little Tommy Mapother,” as he was known by teachers and pupils alike, soon found himself picked on by playground bullies. He had to learn to stand tall. “So many times the big bully comes up, pushes me, and your heart is pounding, you sweat, and you feel you are going to vomit,” he said later. “I’m not the biggest guy in the world, I never liked hitting someone, but I know if I don’t hit that guy, he’s going to pick on me all year.”

Tough lessons from his father, which he painfully learned at home, as well as his own obdurate nature gave him the inner resilience to face down those who opposed him. When his own father was at school, he, too, had been bullied, an experience that emotionally scarred him for life. Determined that young Tom not go through the same trauma, he always pushed him to stand up for himself. If Tom was in a fight and lost, his father insisted that the youngster go out and take on his opponent again. Physically, Tom Senior was “very, very tough” toward his only son, seemingly crossing the boundary between stern parenting and abuse. “As a kid I had a lot of hidden anger about that. I’d get hit and I didn’t understand it,” the actor later told celebrity writer Kevin Sessums.

Young Tom’s bloody-minded obstinacy and refusal to back down soon earned him respect among local youngsters. “Tom was the school tough guy,” recalls Scott Lawrie, now a police officer. “He wasn’t a pushover and could handle himself.” As his brother Alan observes, “If there was trouble with the local kids, he would be the first to say, ‘Let’s get involved.’ ” In the cruel world of playground politics, Tom needed a thick skin. He stood out not only because he was
American but also because of his learning difficulties. “I remember some kids making mockery of him because he couldn’t read,” recalls Alan Lawrie.

Ironically, in spite of the inevitable taunts from thoughtless classmates, Tom was enrolled in the perfect elementary school for a child with his learning needs. So new that pupils had to take their shoes off before walking on the purple carpet, Robert Hopkins Public School was years ahead of its time: progressive, enlightened, and nurturing, with ample funding. When Tom and his sisters were enrolled, his parents alerted the school principal, Jim Brown, to their children’s various learning difficulties. The principal explained that before the Mapother children could be placed into special-needs classes, they had to be given a routine assessment by an educational psychologist.

When he was at the school, which was open plan, Tom and other youngsters with similar problems—normally there would be eight or so in a class—would go into a smaller room away from the hubbub for more intensive tuition in reading, writing, spelling, and math under the watchful eye of the school’s special-needs teacher, Asta Arnot. Even by today’s standards, this was high-quality care. His mother supplemented the work of the school at home: Tom would dictate the answers to his assignments to her, then she would hand the work back to him so he could painstakingly copy it out.

While there is no recognized cure for dyslexia, teaching programs help sufferers to make sense of everyday life—from distinguishing the numbers on currency to reading a menu. The fact that he was diagnosed early worked heavily in his favor. At that age—he was at Robert Hopkins between eight and eleven—the brain is at its most adaptable, able to interpret and consolidate the basic building blocks of reading, writing, and arithmetic even in the face of a condition like dyslexia.

While the school was professionally equipped to help children with learning difficulties, the actor later complained about his treatment in the educational system: “I had always felt I had barriers to overcome. . . . I was forced to write with my right hand when I wanted to use my left. I began to reverse
letters, and reading became difficult,” he said later. Unsurprisingly, his former teachers meet the actor’s grievances with disbelief. Both Pennyann Styles, who taught him at Robert Hopkins, and special-needs teacher Asta Arnot emphatically reject these claims. Styles, who is left-handed herself, was a self-confessed “zealot” about helping lefties to write as they wished—even bringing left-handed scissors to school.

In spite of his learning difficulties, the teaching staff at Robert Hopkins remembered Tom as a creative pupil who simply needed more time and attention. Another former teacher, Shirley Gaudreau, observes: “He was a right-brain kid—very creative but not in academics. It takes a lot more work with them.” Like other pupils with similar problems, he was encouraged to excel at a nonacademic subject like sports, drama, or art in order to bolster his confidence. He joined the school’s drama club and soon became a regular fixture in plays and other theatrical events. This was not entirely surprising, as there was acting blood on both sides of his family. Among the Mapother clan, his cousins William, Katherine, and Amy were enthusiastic childhood performers, William and Amy later becoming professional actors, while Katherine now works with the Blue Apple Players in Louisville. During their time in Ottawa, Tom’s mother and father were so keen on drama that the American newcomers helped found the Gloucester Players amateur theater group, appearing together in the group’s first-ever performance.

A fellow founder was school drama teacher George Steinburg, who, together with Tom’s mother, was instrumental in kindling the boy’s enjoyment of theater. “He had good raw energy that had to be channeled,” Steinburg recalled. “You could tell there was some talent.” In June 1972, at the end of his first school year in Ottawa, Tom and six other boys represented Robert Hopkins in the Carlton Elementary School drama festival. The group, dressed in tunics and tights, performed an improvised play to dance and music called
IT
. Their aim was to interpret the full title of the piece, which was “Man seeks out and discovers some unknown power or thing. He is affected by it.”

In the audience was drama organizer Val Wright. Even though she has since watched and judged hundreds of youngsters, she has never forgotten that “superb” production. “The movement and improvisation were excellent. It was a classic ensemble piece.”

Other performances were equally memorable. In her mind’s eye, teacher Wendy Santo can still remember the youngster in a fifth-grade performance where he played the sun, frozen in a sideways pose. “Even thirty years later it still gives me goose bumps. He was just another kid, but you would have been impressed,” she says.

When he took on roles that demanded reading and learning lines, teachers were on hand to help him out. Teacher Marilyn Richardson remembers how she was asked to read his lines out loud to help him memorize them. “He could read, but it took him a long time,” she recalls. “He had a very good memory and it didn’t take him long to learn his lines.” Certainly his performances always left an impression—although sometimes for the wrong reasons. Fellow pupil Louise Giannoccaro (née Funke) recalls the day when the “really cool” Tom Mapother appeared in a school play about Indians and cheekily played to the gallery to get a laugh. “He was supposed to pick an apple and say, ‘An apple, what’s an apple?’ but he was eating the apple and couldn’t say the line.” As his teacher Marilyn Richardson recalls, “He was a joker who liked to kid around. Everything was a bit of a laugh.”

While his acting garnered attention, his sporting prowess was more notable for tough, unbridled aggression than for any natural ability. He scraped into the school’s second team for hockey and earned a reputation for spunk and determination, flinging himself into “impossible situations” where the sticks were flying. “He was rough in floor hockey,” recalled his school friend Glen Gobel. “He was hardheaded but not talented.” For his pains, he ended up chipping a front tooth in one game. His belligerent streak got him into more trouble during a robust game of British Bulldogs—a rough version of “Piggy in the Middle”—in the school playground that left him writhing on the floor in agony. He was taken to
the hospital in an ambulance with a busted knee, prompting headmaster Jim Brown to ban the game.

Doubtless it was an incident that made his father proud. Tom Senior’s robust approach to teaching his son sports emphasized taking the knocks without complaint. When they played catch with a baseball glove in their backyard, Tom’s father would throw the hardball violently and fast at the head and body of his nine-year-old son. “Sometimes if it hit my head, my nose would bleed and some tears would come up,” he later recalled. “He wasn’t very comforting.” Noticeably, it was Tom’s mother rather than his father who took him to his first ball game. This tough training did help Tom win a place on the North Gloucester baseball team, and as he adapted to local sports, he became much more proficient. When neighbor Scott Lawrie played against him in an ice hockey match, he couldn’t believe how good Tom was. “I just couldn’t get the puck by him,” he recalls. “He became a good hockey player, always ready to try new things.”

It should not have come as too much of a surprise. Tom and his gang, which included Scott and Alan Lawrie, Lionel Aucoin, Scott Miller, Glen Gobel, and Tom Gray, spent endless hours playing street hockey or baseball in the summer and ice hockey in the winter. For a change they played pool on a miniature table given to Tom by his sister Lee Anne’s boyfriend, rode their bikes to nearby Ottawa River, or went fishing in Green’s Creek.

The same reckless daring he showed on the sports field was evident when his gang was out having fun. Tom was the acknowledged tough guy, a thrill seeker who pushed the edge of the envelope when his friends cried chicken. “He was cocky, confident, and cool,” recalls Alan Lawrie. “When the kids got together, he set the agenda.” At Tom’s prompting, the boys became blood brothers, pricking their fingers with a pin and then mixing their blood together. When they went bike riding, he was the one who constructed rickety ramps to perform Evel Knievel–style stunts, the one who used a hockey net hung on a frame or a tree to perform Tarzan tricks, and the one who performed a daring back flip from the roof of his
house but missed the soft landing of a snowbank and broke his foot when he landed on the sidewalk. This experience failed to curb his daredevil antics. At a nearby building site, he climbed on the roof or started the builder’s tractor while the rest of his friends ran off. “He was pushing limits all the time,” recalls Alan Lawrie. “I never thought of him ever becoming an actor. He was more of an Al Capone character, a maverick, the kind of kid who wouldn’t back down.”

Tom had a belligerent side, a cussed indomitability that seemed to stop him from knowing when to retreat and move on. One episode demonstrates the stubborn streak of the alpha male in Tom Mapother. He and his friend Glen Gobel were walking home when two older and bigger boys made disparaging remarks about Tom’s new haircut. He fiercely denied having his hair cut, and it was only the intervention of his school friend that stopped a fight—and Tom taking a beating. Afterward, when Glen asked why he had been so insistent, Tom replied, “It’s not a haircut, it’s a hairstyle.” As Glen recalls, “Even though he was a pretty popular kid, this ‘my way or the highway’ attitude did lose him friends.”

Of course, there was another reason Tom was so concerned about his hairstyle and why he took the trouble to go home at lunch every day to change—girls. “Little Tommy Mapother” punched way above his weight in the romantic arena. His teacher Pennyann Styles remembers him well. “He had charisma. He was a standout because he was so good-looking. Even then he had that smile that he has today. Little Tom was attractive, outgoing, and slightly mischievous, but not bad. The kind of kid you recognize and remember.” He had long eyelashes that the girls adored and, for some inexplicable reason, they swooned over the fact that he had a sty under one eye. “The way his hair fell was so dreamy,” recalls Carol Trumpler, a fellow pupil at Robert Hopkins. “He had a cute way about him, certainly the gift of gab.” More than that, he had a swagger, a confidence that made him seem to stand much taller than he was. “We all had a crush on him; even then he was very cute,” recalls former pupil Nancy Maxwell.