Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (33 page)

As in the early days of his romance with Nicole, Tom kept his new love in the background until his divorce was finalized. So when Tom arrived at the Oscar ceremony in March 2001, he did not sit with Penélope. Both were presenting prizes, Tom for Best Director and Penélope for Best Achievement in Costume Design, while Nicole was notably absent. Even though Tom and Penélope tried to disguise their burgeoning relationship, there was no hiding the hostility between Nicole and the Spanish actress when they were photographed for a “Legends of Hollywood” story in
Vanity Fair
. For the cover, photographer Annie Leibovitz shot a group portrait that included Nicole, Sophia Loren, Meryl Streep, Catherine Deneuve, Cate Blanchett, Chloë Sevigny, and, incongruously, Penélope Cruz, who had scarcely a Hollywood movie to her name. That she was now represented by Tom’s publicist, Pat Kingsley, and under his management umbrella, CAA, might just have worked in her favor. Significantly, Leibovitz placed the rivals, Nicole looking icy and haughty and Penélope looking scared, in opposite corners of the photo.

If including the relatively unknown Penélope in the photo shoot was a not-so-subtle attempt by Tom’s camp to intimidate and humiliate Nicole, their plan was effective. By April, Nicole, still weak from her miscarriage and complaining about her injured knee and a stalker who was hounding her,
was sufficiently softened up by Tom’s media and legal campaign that she was ready to throw in the towel. According to DiSabatino, “Nicole was talking about settling. Tom gave her a figure that was half of what she eventually got. She called me over to the house and said she was going to settle. I begged with her not to settle for that price—if she hung in there she would get so much more. But she said her knees were bothering her and she wanted to move on with her life.” In the end, wiser counsels prevailed and she decided to wait.

Even so, in early May she was telling Oprah Winfrey that her life was “a nightmare . . . You pretend that you’re fine and there’s days when you’re great and there’s days when you’re not great.” She still didn’t understand why Tom had left her. When the cameras stopped turning after an interview on the
Today
show, Katie Couric quietly asked her about the split. “I don’t know why, I don’t know why,” Nicole told her. She continued to be overwrought when she attended the opening of
Moulin Rouge
at the Cannes Film Festival a few days later. Nicole, who suffers from panic attacks, was mobbed by overenthusiastic crowds, later confessing that it was the most frightening moment of her life. Vulnerable and distraught, she felt unable to face the media at the traditional press conference. Seeing his lead actress fading before his eyes, director Baz Luhrmann told her, “Get back up on that horse and be Nicole Kidman.” She took his advice, dancing the night away with Ewan McGregor and DJ Fatboy Slim.

As Nicole flew to London to prepare for her role as author Virginia Woolf in
The Hours
, Tom was squaring up for another battle—this time with his old foes in the media. As writer Richard Goldstein noted, “Tom Cruise sues the way Robert Downey Jr. violates his parole. Downey can’t pass up a snort and Cruise can’t resist a tort.” As he had spent many hours—and thousands of dollars—on the phone with his lawyer Bert Fields, asking for advice on the divorce, he had no hesitation in calling Fields when French gossip magazine
Acustar
reported in May 2001 that Tom had had a relationship with gay porn star and erotic wrestler Kyle Bradford, real name Chad Slater.
Slater was slapped with a $100 million lawsuit, Fields stating, “There is not a germ of truth to this vicious, self-promoting story. While Tom Cruise thoroughly respects others’ right to follow their own sexual preference, he is not homosexual and had no relationship of any kind with Kyle Bradford [Chad Slater] and does not even know him.” Even though Slater denied making the comments and
Acustar
printed a retraction, the gay rumors just kept circulating.

It was turning into a minor cottage industry, not because there was any merit in the stories but because, for those who inhabit Hollywood’s underbelly, there was money in exploiting Tom’s itchy legal finger, particularly his sensitivity to gay slurs. So it was that in June 2001, gay porn star Big Red—“They don’t call me Big Red just because of my freckled face and carrot top”—found himself sitting in the office of Tony Pellicano with fellow private eye and sometimes gay porn producer Paul Barresi. Barresi, who billed himself as Pellicano’s enforcer, had earned notoriety in 1990 by claiming to have had an affair with actor and prominent Scientologist John Travolta. Big Red, aka Nathan Hamilton, told the two detectives an elaborate story about his paid dalliances with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Tom Cruise. Barresi had already tried to sell Hamilton’s account to the
National Enquirer,
but the tabloid had found the porn star’s preposterous story too convoluted and contradictory.

Pellicano was less skeptical. “I think the kid is very credible,” he told Barresi after Hamilton left. The unspoken implication was that they could make money out of the hapless Hamilton—and Tom Cruise—by reporting their findings to his lawyer, Bert Fields. They reasoned that Fields would set the legal wheels in motion, sending threatening letters to Hamilton and paying Pellicano, his PI of choice, and Barresi for their trouble. It was a win/win play—at least for them; the only losers were Hamilton and Cruise. As Barresi conceded, “The story is perfect because it is never going to see light of day but it’s going to be enough to incite Cruise by going for his Achilles’ heel. Everyone knows that Cruise goes nuts when he is called a homo. Walking both sides of the
street is a great way of making money. Celebrities are naïve and have deep pockets.”

In the end, Hamilton went into hiding, claiming that after he received threatening letters from Fields, his phones were tapped and he was being followed by unmarked cars. Not that the detective duo had much sympathy. At a subsequent meeting, Hamilton claimed he’d had an affair with Pellicano’s favorite singer, the blind Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. “What a sick bastard,” observed the sultan of sleaze after virtually kicking Hamilton out of his office. For his pains, Barresi eventually received five thousand dollars from Bert Fields, and was so proud of his association with Tom’s lawyer that he carries a photocopy of the check to show to friends and acquaintances.

As fiercely as Tom wielded his legal sword, the media proved a many-headed Hydra. That same month, June 2001, Michael Davis, publisher of
Bold
magazine, offered $500,000 to anyone who had photographic evidence that Tom Cruise was gay. Once again Fields reached for his favorite number, filing a $100 million lawsuit against
Bold
in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The magazine published a retraction.

Even though Tom has successfully—and rightly—won every legal battle about his sexuality, at the time of writing he seems to have lost the war. There are more than 2 million Internet sites today relating to “Tom Cruise gay”—slightly more than for a similar heartthrob, Brad Pitt, who has never taken legal action and has publicly stated he will not marry Angelina Jolie until gay marriage is acceptable in America. Indeed, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty has even spoken publicly about the rumor that he and Tom were caught in bed together by his wife. “If I was gay, Tom Cruise wouldn’t be on the top of my list,” he said. “It would be Brad Pitt.”

The irony did not escape Tom’s inner circle that, in the midst of quashing gay slurs, he was quietly dating one of the world’s sexiest women, Penélope Cruz. In July he took a break from filming his latest movie,
Minority Report,
directed by his friend Steven Spielberg, to fly her on board his private plane—now named
Sweet Bella
rather than
Sweet Nic
—to a
private island near Fiji in the South Pacific. Originally the island’s owner, Canadian entrepreneur David Gilmour, who started the Fiji bottled water company, had offered the private use of the Wakaya Club resort to Tom and Nicole—a further signal that when the invitation was proffered the couple had not been contemplating divorce. As it was, Nicole and her children, as well as her friend actor Russell Crowe used the resort for the first week, Bella and Connor staying on to join their father and Penélope Cruz for a further two weeks. Penélope’s arrival certainly surprised Nicole, the actress later complaining to a friend, “He flat-out swore to me up and down that there was nothing going on. He obviously had her waiting in the wings.”

The children knew before the rest of the world that Tom and Penélope were a serious item, and in late July their spokesman, Pat Kingsley, confirmed for the first time that the couple had indeed been dating. In early August, Penélope was diplomatically absent from the Hollywood premiere of
The Others,
where the leading lady and executive producer walked the red carpet separately. The very next day, on August 7, 2001, their divorce was legally finalized, the couple agreeing to joint custody of the children and promising not to talk to the media about each other.

A few weeks later their finances were settled, Nicole winning twice the original offer. While he retained their compound in Colorado, Nicole kept the houses in Pacific Palisades and Sydney, Australia. When she emerged from her lawyer’s office after signing the divorce papers, Nicole was pictured letting out a piercing scream of relief.

It was a relief, too, for Penélope, who could now appear in public with her lover. First, though, she wanted him to meet the other man in her life, flying her father, Eduardo, to Los Angeles to see her and Tom. For all her spiritual exploration, Penélope was very family oriented, and her father’s approval was important to her. If he had doubts about her twice-married boyfriend, Eduardo kept them to himself, at least for the time being. It would only be later that he looked
more carefully—and skeptically—at the man and his controversial religion.

As for Penélope, she was delighted, as Nicole had been a decade earlier, that she no longer had to be kept in the shadows. As her personal assistant Kira Sanchez said, “Penélope has told her friends she’s mighty relieved it’s all out in the open. She told Tom she didn’t like skulking around.”

It was Michael LaForte’s thirty-ninth birthday, and normally he took the day off to play golf or go fishing. For once he decided to head into the office. He ordered his usual large coffee—milk and one sugar—from Bill Schamber’s stand on the train platform in Middleton, New Jersey, before the hour-long ride into Manhattan. As Bill poured the coffee, they chatted about the wonderful weather. It was such a glorious morning that Bill had already decided to shut his stand early and go fishing. Michael was tempted, but kept to his plan—to leave work early and have a birthday party with his two young children and pregnant wife, Fran, at their home in Holmdel, New Jersey.

He never made that birthday party. At 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael was in his office on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when American Airlines Flight 11 ripped into the building, some fifteen floors down from where he was sitting. At 8:51, Michael phoned home, leaving a farewell message on the answering machine. He told his wife, who was dropping the children at school, that there was no way out. “Franny, I love you. I love you and the kids. A plane hit the building. I don’t know what’s going on. I will talk to you. Love you, bye.”

Although his voice was tense, Michael wasn’t the type to panic. Not only had he spent four years as a captain in the Marine Corps, he had been inside the World Trade Center
during the 1993 bombing. Of the thousands who faced their fate that day, few would have battled harder to survive than Michael LaForte. He was an easygoing but totally driven, competitive man who had worked his way up to the position of vice president at his brokerage firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.

It was an aggressive spirit that Tom Cruise knew well. He and Michael had been friends since the Glen Ridge days, staying in touch long after his other high-school buddies had gone their own ways. As young men they had gone barhopping and carousing together, and when Tom became famous, he took his friend to the Super Bowl, film premieres, and other Hollywood events. Every so often, Michael and his wife, Fran, had joined Tom and his then-wife, Nicole, for dinner, even though Nicole preferred more glamorous friends.

As Michael’s older brother, Sam LaForte, joined Fran in looking for Michael, he thought about the times when his kid brother and Tom had come running to him after getting themselves in some scrape. This was different. Like thousands of others, Sam and Fran walked around New York, looking in hospitals and handing out flyers, searching for anything to end the uncertainty. A heavily pregnant Fran even appeared on NBC TV appealing for information: “You just want to die. I don’t know where he is. And I know if he made it out of that building he would have called me up immediately because that’s what he did the last time. So I know he’s hurt somewhere.”

Days later, Sam LaForte got a call saying that they had found Michael. “They said he was okay, in the sense that they had found his body intact. It was a kind of awful closure.”

On September 21, Cruise joined a host of other celebrities in front of 89 million viewers on the “Tribute to Heroes” telethon to raise money for victims of 9/11. Before the program, he nestled on a sofa with his lover, Penélope Cruz. When his slot came, Cruise delivered a tribute to Father Mike, the New York Fire Department priest who died during the rescue mission, but made no mention of his good friend Michael LaForte.

For people who knew Tom, this was a surprise. During
the same telethon, Sting dedicated his song “Fragile” to his friend Herman Sandler, who had been killed in the attacks. Tom’s failure to make a similar public tribute to Michael LaForte baffled and angered many in Glen Ridge. His high-school buddy Vinnie Travisano knew how close Tom and Michael had been. “I soured on him a lot after that. We watched, waiting for the moment when he would talk about the loss of his good friend Michael. He never said a word. That blew us all away, all of us from Glen Ridge who knew him. It would have brought it home for a lot of people. For Tom not to say anything was so hurtful.” Although he sent flowers to Fran LaForte and his mother, Mary Lee South, and attended the funeral, Tom has never publicly acknowledged the loss of his friend.