Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (26 page)

Researching the role with his customary zeal and vigor, Tom set out to prove Rice and her fans wrong. Not only did he read all of Rice’s books, he went on a drastic diet, learned to play the piano, and flew to Paris with Nicole to soak up the decadent atmosphere. They roamed the streets, visiting museums and galleries—mostly at night, just like real-life vampires. “We just went wild,” he recalled. “Drank fine wine and danced till dawn.” Ironically, while Tom interpreted Lestat as essentially a lonely figure looking for love, the film’s director, Neil Jordan, compared the life of a vampire to that of a major Hollywood star—kept away from the daylight and living in a “strange kind of seclusion.” It seemed that no matter how hard Tom tried, he ended up playing himself.

Like the creature of the night he became for a time, he and Nicole enjoyed a restless life, roaming the planet in pursuit of their art, their times together punctuated by innumerable partings. During the filming of
Interview with the Vampire,
Tom was on location or in preproduction from October 1993 onward, spending time in Ireland, Paris, Louisiana, and San Francisco. Only occasionally was he accompanied by Nicole and Bella. As a result, while Hollywood was their home, they used their private Gulfstream jet the way others hail taxicabs. Their differing attitudes to this privileged lifestyle provide some telling insights into the space growing between them.

When he settled back into his kid leather seat, Tom would often look around the beautifully furnished cabin in wonder, literally pinching himself at his good fortune. “I can’t believe I have all this,” he would say. He never forgot that not so long ago he was stealing flowers to give his girlfriend, but now he was able to provide a life of luxury for the woman he loved. Not that she was overly impressed. Even though Nicole was struggling to establish herself as an actress in her own right, on occasion she behaved like a full-fledged Hollywood diva. If the jet wasn’t stocked with beluga caviar and all the trimmings, she appeared deeply irritated, exhibiting a jaded petulance that seems to be the prerogative of the super-rich—or immensely talented.

Perhaps her attitude was born of frustration that her acting career was in a slump. At this stage Nicole was mostly known for her supporting role as Mrs. Cruise, rather than enjoying the spotlight in her own right. A star in Australia, she was seen by Hollywood movers and shakers to be hanging on Tom’s coattails, relying on him for introductions, scripts, and projects. She was being paid, as her biographer David Thomson points out, “bimbo money” to appear in movies where she invariably had to disrobe. While she enjoyed a mutual love affair with the camera, with or without her clothes, it was ultimately discouraging.

Even though she was only twenty-six, she questioned her ability sufficiently to enroll at the Actors Studio in New York to help get the creative juices flowing. In interviews she made
it clear that she wanted to get her teeth into meatier character roles. So it is easy to imagine her utter distress when her friend from Sydney, director Jane Campion, turned her down for the part of the tragically vulnerable Isabel Archer in her proposed film adaptation of the Henry James novel
Portrait of a Lady.
Campion’s decision was the more disappointing as she had initially given Nicole the green light.

As far as the Australian director was concerned, Hollywood—or rather the roles she had accepted since arriving there—had somehow corrupted or blunted Nicole’s talent. Doubtless one of those movies was
Batman Forever,
where she played sexy psychologist Dr. Chase Meridian—interestingly, the very profession her faith vowed to wipe from the face of the planet—playing opposite Val Kilmer. “She’d made quite a few films I didn’t think suited her, and I don’t think she felt suited her, either,” Campion later explained. Eventually, after many tears, much heartache, and the indignity of auditioning, Nicole won Campion over and earned her coveted role.

That was in the future. As Tom marched firmly toward the summit of success, it seemed to Nicole that she was spending her days slipping and sliding in the foothills. Her own difficulties in finding a sure footing in the Hollywood hills, even with the help of an expert guide, serve as another reminder of how far and how quickly Tom had come. It was perhaps a sign of her intense desire, even desperation, to succeed that propelled her to dispense with the usual channels and phone director Gus Van Sant and plead for the lead role in his movie
To Die For.
That the producers’ first choice, Meg Ryan, had turned it down only seemed to spur Nicole on. She told Van Sant that she felt “destined” to play the cold, calculating, ruthlessly ambitious TV weather girl who has her husband killed by her student lover because she feels he is impeding her career.

For once the outlook was sunny, Nicole winning the role in what was to be her breakout movie. During her research for the part in late 1993, she proved herself as single-minded and driven as her husband, who was on hand to help her with
character research. On one occasion the couple checked into a hotel in Santa Barbara on the California coast, not leaving for three long days as they immersed themselves in schlock television. Her new project meant that the Cruise family was on the move once again, renting a house in Toronto, Canada, for the summer of 1994.

While Nicole filmed—she banned her husband from the set when she was involved in steamy sex scenes with costars Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix—he earned his pilot’s license, on at least one occasion taking Nicole for a joyride in a two-seater biplane where she climbed out onto the wing, performed an arabesque, and then parachuted to safety. The actor later credited Hubbard’s teaching techniques for enabling him to read sufficiently well to understand the technical jargon in the flying manuals. He claimed that when he first became interested in learning to be a pilot, during the filming of
Top Gun
before he joined Scientology, he had to drop out because he couldn’t understand the technical terms.

Fortuitously, the high-profile Scientology couple left Toronto before their church was embroiled in yet another controversy. In February 1995, hearings started in a libel case that resulted in the Church of Scientology being ordered to pay $1.6 million in damages, the largest amount in the country’s history. The high-profile case made the church’s boasts that it had left its dark past behind seem rather hollow. After almost a decade of David Miscavige’s leadership, Scientology was as litigious and aggressive as ever.

If his faith was not for turning, one lady was: Tom’s toughest critic, Anne Rice. Shortly before
Interview with the Vampire
was released in November 1994, producer David Geffen took the risk of sending a video of the movie to the New Orleans home of the author. She was entranced and told Geffen so. He in turn called an astounded Cruise with the news. “She likes you, she loves it, you know. She really loves it.” Tom was amazed at Geffen’s chutzpah. “You have the luck of the Irish, David Geffen,” Cruise said. The about-face was complete when Rice took out advertisements in
The New York Times
and
Vanity Fair
praising the film and Tom Cruise for a performance that “perfectly captured” Lestat’s strength, humor, and boldness.

While his bisexual character encouraged yet more rumors about his own sexuality, Nicole and Tom were focused on adding to their family. After spending their fifth wedding anniversary that Christmas in their own ski chalet in Telluride, the chic Colorado resort where they married, the couple quietly filed adoption papers. In late February they became parents for a second time, adopting a baby boy they named Connor Antony Kidman Cruise. His mother was an African-American New Yorker who had given birth on February 6, 1995.

While Connor and his sister, Bella, were too young to appreciate it, they were now part of a family of traveling troubadours. Only weeks after Tom and Nicole signed the paperwork for the adoption, baby Connor was flown out of America. It marked a new stage in the couple’s marriage, a journey that took them away from their home for longer than any of them anticipated.

At last he was truly where he felt at home, a place where he instinctively belonged. In the driver’s seat. In the cockpit. At the helm. Finally master of his own craft, producing, starring in, and fine-tuning his first blockbuster,
Mission: Impossible
. For the greenhorn producer, still only thirty-two, it was truly a risky business, as he steered a choppy course between the breezy demands of director Brian De Palma and the rocky financial realities of making a movie based on a half-forgotten 1970s TV show about maverick secret agents who foil endless dastardly plots of evildoers who want to take over the world.

Not only did he have the mental and physical pressures of playing a convincing leading man, in this case Special Agent Ethan Hunt, he also had to keep a weather eye on the budget and all the other routine details of sailing a multimillion-dollar project to the safe harbor of myriad multiplex screens. All that, as well as surviving an exploding fish tank, performing a backward somersault on a speeding train, and, famously, starfishing out his limbs as he was lowered 110 feet into a tightly guarded vault while carefully avoiding security laser beams. Perhaps his most difficult feat was not so much evading red lasers as finessing his way through the labyrinth of red tape in the former Communist Czech Republic, where filming took place in the winter of 1995.

For a controlling, driven perfectionist, the convoluted bureaucracy tested his patience to the limit. “Prague ripped us off. They are still getting used to democracy,” he said drily. Even a man-to-man chat with the country’s new President, playwright Vaclav Havel, failed to bring costs down. Still, one bonus of filming in the Czech capital was being able to stroll around the cobbled streets with Nicole, baby Connor, and Bella without attracting attention. It was a change to go sightseeing in daylight—normally the couple went out at night to avoid the attentions of fans and paparazzi.

Not that he had much chance to soak up the sights. As filming progressed in Prague and finally at the Pinewood Studios outside London, there was no doubt who was in command. Even though De Palma was twenty-two years his senior, the novice producer insisted he have the final say over every detail of the production: from ordering daily script rewrites to rerecording the film score so that he could hear more flutes. Perhaps his focus on sound quality was inspired, or even recommended, by his spiritual Svengali, David Miscavige, whose sensitive ear was the final arbiter of Scientology’s own musical offerings.

Certainly there were those in Cruise’s faith who saw in his depiction of Ethan Hunt, a secret agent who lived on the edge, distinct similarities to the character of the Scientology leader. “
Mission: Impossible
is fascinating because in Ethan Hunt I could see David Miscavige,” observed Karen Pressley. “Both the character and the man were striving for the ultimate thrill. Just as David was living vicariously through Tom Cruise, I could see that Tom Cruise was slowly becoming David Miscavige. That transposition in itself was worthy of a movie script.” It was an early appreciation of the direction in which Tom was headed.

While Tom’s superagent role echoed the character of his close friend, Nicole was finally breaking free of the “wife of Tom Cruise” tag. In May 1995, Nicole flew to Cannes where her movie
To Die For
was showing at the film festival. For the first time she walked the red carpet on her own, her dress, slit to the hip, making almost as big a splash as her movie. Not
only was she nominated for twelve awards, including a Golden Globe for best actress, which she eventually won, she was finally acknowledged as an actress to be reckoned with on her own merit.

As she basked in the critical glow—the film itself was only a modest financial success—she embarked on a serious role, which meant leaving Tom holding baby Connor and his sister, Isabella. Even though, in the summer of 1995, the couple were living in a palatial $15,000-a-week mansion in London, Nicole decided that she needed to be alone to focus on her role as heiress Isabel Archer for Jane Campion’s movie of
Portrait of a Lady
. It was a sign of her absorption, some would say self-absorption, and intensity that she had to immerse herself in the character without any distractions.

Such was her obsession with the part that she insisted on wearing a corset that squeezed her waist to a mere nineteen inches, so she could feel the pain that Isabel felt. Several times filming was halted when the actress went pale with fatigue or even collapsed in a dead faint. It was no surprise that at the end of filming in November, she spent two weeks in bed with exhaustion and a temperature of 104 degrees. As with her husband on
Born on the Fourth of July,
the ghost of Laurence Olivier could be heard whispering, “Try acting, it’s much easier.”

As Nicole was putting herself through self-imposed agony for what she called “her baby,” Tom was juggling home, career, and children, filming
Mission: Impossible
at Pinewood Studios but finding time to read Isabella a bedtime story as well as indulge his hobby of flying. He even had the opportunity to flirt a little with Diana, Princess of Wales, when she brought her elder son, Prince William, to the studios. While she was dazzled by his smile and charm during the two-hour visit, he was not her type, the princess preferring tall men.

In the midst of this hectic schedule, Tom found time to read a script by the journalist-turned-director Cameron Crowe, whom he had first met more than a decade earlier through Sean Penn, who worked with him on
Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Crowe’s latest project,
Jerry Maguire,
was about a cynical,
world-weary sports agent who quits his high-powered job in a ruthless company, taking on just one client, football player Rod Tidwell, and his secretary with him. The clever script had Tom from the get-go, the actor gripped by the story of Maguire’s journey from selfishness to self-knowledge. He was so intrigued that he flew to Los Angeles to see Crowe and his producer, reading the part aloud for the assembled throng before even asking them to show him the money.