Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (8 page)

When
Endless Love
opened, Tom was one of the first in line to see it, going to the Regency cinema in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with a bunch of friends. Literally as he was coming out of the door after seeing the matinee performance, fellow actor Sean Gauli was lining up to see the evening show. In some ways it served as a metaphor for their respective careers. By then doors were opening for Tom while they were banging shut for Sean, who is now a motor home salesman in Florida. It annoys him that his old school buddy exaggerates his struggle to make it in the industry, as it diminishes those who helped him get his start and, ironically, demeans Tom’s own talent, which includes an uncanny ability to make everything look easy.

Although Tom later told writer Jennet Conant, “I was a starving actor for a few months,” it is an assertion Sean finds difficult to accept. “What he says and what the reality was are two different things,” he recalls, dismissing as myths the stories of Tom hitchhiking around the country seeking fame and fortune. “The plain facts are that he was a natural and didn’t struggle at all. I know because I went to hundreds of auditions and he didn’t do any of that shit. It would be good for the truth to come out instead of this fictitious crap. We were all struggling actors, and when he made it he never made any attempt to help us out.” There remains residual resentment that
the actor has never acknowledged the help of people like his Glen Ridge school friends Steve Pansulla and Lorraine Gauli or his first agent, Tobe Gibson, in promoting his career.

This comes as no surprise to Tom’s onetime friend Vinnie Travisano, now a successful art director. “He is a very talented guy, and very talented people give themselves all the credit for their success and move on.” It is the way of the world. Stars tend to limit their thank-yous to Oscar acceptance speeches.

In fall of 1980, after he returned from filming
Endless Love,
any kind of success still hovered in the distance. While those few days in Chicago had served to confirm his ambitions, back in New York he was still an out-of-work teenage actor busing tables and scraping by. Nevertheless, his experience on the film seemed to have reinforced his confidence and willingness to assert himself. He was furious with his agent for sending out promotional pictures to the most popular teen magazines,
Tiger Beat
and
Teen Beat.
Even though later in his career he was featured on the cover of
Tiger Beat,
he made it clear that he did not want to be pigeonholed as some cheesy pinup. It was a point he made time and again in later interviews. “I’m not locking myself into a teen idol stereotype,” he said.

Far more bothering was a set of black-and-white studio photographs of Tom wearing a gym top and short shorts that reportedly found their way into
Parlée,
a gay magazine that circulated in New York and Long Island. Diane Van Zoeren remembered that it was a big enough issue for him that Tom drove to his agent’s office for a face-to-face confrontation. “He was very serious with her,” she recalled, the incident revealing a young actor who, even this early in the game, wanted to control his image.

Diane also realized that he wanted to control much more than his image; he wanted to be in charge of everything and everyone. She found his behavior oppressive and even relayed her concerns to his younger sister, Cass. “We had a volatile relationship,” recalls Diane, who was then in her senior year at Glen Ridge High School. “I didn’t get how intense and dramatic
he could be. He was so controlling and I wasn’t used to that.”

Still, he was romantic and considerate—when he could afford it. So while she became used to cheap Chinese meals and fooling around in the back of her father’s Oldsmobile—“Typical high-school stuff, doing what you are not supposed to,” recalls Diane—when he returned from filming
Endless Love
he bought her a pretty necklace adorned with a locket and a key which, as he told her romantically, was “a key to her heart.” Their romantic interludes were punctuated by arguments and recriminations. At the Candy Kane Ball in December 1980, they had a huge falling-out because she danced with another boy. The next day he sent her twelve yellow roses to apologize. Single-minded and go-getting, Tom was not in a placatory mood for long. A few weeks later he was furious because she was too busy to read through the script for
Taps,
a rite-of-passage movie about a violent rebellion among military cadets facing the closure of their academy.

Early in 1981, veteran casting agent Shirley Rich was looking for young talent for the film, which already included the legendary George C. Scott and recent Oscar winner Timothy Hutton in the lineup. She was looking for a black actor and a “WASP-type” kid to fill a couple of small parts. So far no one fit the bill. “I told her that I’ve got what you’re looking for,” Tobe Gibson recalls, and promptly sent Tom along for an audition one Friday afternoon.

This time he was clearheaded as he read out lines before director Harold Becker, who asked Tom to put up his hair so that he would get an idea of what he would look like as a shaved army cadet. It was a brief audition, leaving the teenager uncertain about whether he had made the cut. By the time he arrived back in Glen Ridge, the beaming grin on his mother’s face gave the game away. She told him, “You got
Taps
!” It was a moment he will never forget, a moment that changed his life forever. Not only did his reputed $50,000 fee enable him to pay off the $850 loan from his stepfather, it was his first step on the ladder to stardom. The part he had landed was that of a friend to one of the main characters, David Shawn, an uptight cadet
at the military academy who goes violently off the rails during the student rebellion. “He was acutely aware that this role could make or break his attempt at a career in Hollywood, and so took it very seriously,” recalls Diane Van Zoeren.

In many respects Harold Becker was the ideal director for a raw, inexperienced actor like Tom Cruise. He insisted on a long rehearsal period, putting the kids through forty-five days of basic training at a real boot camp—Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania—to get a true flavor of the brutal gung ho camaraderie of cadet life. They spent half the day rehearsing their roles, the rest undergoing military training and learning to march and handle weapons, as well as studying the relentless intricacies of military protocol. By the end, Becker reasoned, they would feel like the characters they were playing and give the film an air of authenticity. Later, when filming began in earnest, he let Tom view the day’s rushes, talking him through the technical process.

All the young actor cadets thrived in the military atmosphere except for one—a talented youngster from a Shakespeare youth theater in Tennessee. He was earmarked to play the part of David Shawn, the gung ho war lover who acts as a macho foil for the more conciliatory voices in a cadet rebellion. “But he couldn’t cut it, which was heartbreaking,” recalled Becker. With the youngster from Tennessee now out of the picture, Becker looked closely at the other actors to see who had the power, as he recalled, to “walk the walls.” A young man with the build of a wrestler who was already outmarching the other kids on the parade ground came to mind. It was Tom Cruise. “There was something in Tom that attracted me,” recalls Becker. “He’s one hundred percent. He was able to strut down that field and he had a crispness that a kid at a military academy might work three or four years for. I can’t say I thought, ‘This kid is going someplace.’ But I put him in.”

To his credit, Tom was more concerned about the fate of the young man originally chosen to play David Shawn than taking his own opportunity. Becker explained that, even though Tom and the other actor had become friends, he had to replace him,
and if he didn’t want the part, Becker would look elsewhere. So Tom took it.

Watching from the wings with wry amusement as this off-screen drama unfolded was a young Sean Penn, who was inked in to play Alex, a thoughtful soldier who becomes the dramatic linchpin between the warring cadet factions. The son of director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan, the California-born actor, two years older than Cruise, was already a theater and film veteran. He had directed his first movie,
Echoes of an Era,
about a Vietnam veteran’s experiences, while he was a student at Santa Monica High School. It helped that the screenplay was by his school friend Emilio Estevez, whose father, Martin Sheen, was the star of the seminal war movie
Apocalypse Now.

After Sean left high school, where, perversely, he studied auto mechanics and speech, he obtained small parts in several TV series, including
Barnaby Jones
and
The Killing of Randy Webster,
before buying himself a one-way ticket to New York to try his hand at off-Broadway theater. Knowing and cynical about the workings of Hollywood—his father had been blacklisted for refusing to testify during the notorious McCarthy Communist witch hunts during the 1950s—he was a passionate, intense, and talented actor, with the curmudgeonly self-confidence to challenge directors and fellow actors, but above all himself. At his audition for
Taps,
for example, Sean jumped on the desk to illustrate how he would address a crowd of fellow recruits. When he watched Tom Cruise in action, he sensed a kindred spirit, another furiously driven young man. “Cruise was like he was training for the fuckin’ Olympics,” he later recalled. “I think he was the first person I ever said ‘Calm down’ to. A fun guy, too.”

Tom, Sean, and Timothy Hutton soon became fast friends, the youngster from Glen Ridge deferring to the experience and success of the two older men. The high-testosterone trio lived and partied hard, and their rooms on the same hotel floor in Valley Lodge soon became known as Fraternity Row. “Yeah, there was a lot of rock and roll going on on that floor,” recalled Sean Penn. On set, though, friendship was set aside.
The characters that Penn and Cruise played were opposites, always at each other’s throats. They matched each other for intensity, Penn insisting that he be addressed by his character’s name of Alex even when the cameras had stopped rolling. During one scene, where Tom’s character shoots off a rifle, director Harold Becker thought Sean and Tom were going to kill each other after Sean said something to Tom, who suddenly started chasing him angrily around the set. It was only when Becker and members of the cast intervened that the fracas ended. “Sean likes to push buttons, and he said something to Tom,” recalled Harold Becker. “So Sean found a way to have Tom not like him for a moment.”

Tom, too, submerged himself in the character he had taken over, eagerly exploring the cruelly manic qualities of the psychotic cadet. “I remember being nervous, really nervous, because at that point, when you’re young, you just don’t want to get fired,” he later told director Cameron Crowe. It was a nervousness born of ambition and an almost visceral drive to succeed. The experience was so intense that it took him months to come down from the role. “I had no sense of humor whatsoever,” he confessed later to one profiler, who observed drily, “This isn’t hard to believe.”

During that period of collegiate self-absorption on the movie set, both his screen character and the real Tom were undergoing a rite of passage. Personally and professionally, Tom’s life was changing. Secretly, a new representative, Gerry Silver, the nephew of his existing agent Tobe Gibson, was courting Tom. With the promise of bigger and better roles whispered in his ear, Tom decided to ax the woman who had given him his first break. Midway through the filming of
Taps,
she received a curt telegram from her client telling her bluntly that her services were no longer required. Tobe, who considered herself a second mother to him, was devastated, all the more so because it was her nephew who stole him. She didn’t speak to her nephew for four years as a result of this perceived treachery, and even today finds it difficult to talk about that experience. “He met Tom behind my back, wined
and dined him, promised him this and that,” she says. “I treated Tom like a son.”

Tom later told Lorraine Gauli that he had fired Tobe because she could not take him where he wanted to go. “She was heartbroken about that,” recalls Lorraine. “She knew he was going to be a star and felt that this would catapult her agency as well.” It is the price that talent agents who spot young actors and actresses often have to pay, as Tobe’s daughter Babydol, who hit the headlines herself years later when she was exposed as a Hollywood madam, fully understands. “It is a cross my mother has to bear,” she says. “She finds people, gets them started, and then they leave her. She did, though, play an integral part in developing his career.”

At the same time that he was severing links with his “surrogate mother,” he was saying good-bye to his longtime girlfriend, Diane Van Zoeren. While he was away, Diane, who always felt that they would eventually go their separate ways, had secretly started dating an old boyfriend. When Tom’s friend Michael LaForte confronted her and asked if she was cheating on his buddy, Diane denied it. In a frantic last-ditch attempt to save her eighteen-month romance, she hailed a taxi, headed for the Newark railroad station, and caught a train to Valley Forge, where she knew Tom was rehearsing. She was in such a hurry to make up with her boyfriend that she didn’t have enough cash to pay the taxi when she arrived at his hotel. They spent two days together, but both knew it was their last hurrah. With his shaved head, muscular body, serious demeanor, and easygoing friendship with Tim Hutton and Sean Penn, Tom had changed almost overnight. He looked good and knew it. More than that, he truly realized that he had found his true calling. Diane was no longer part of the package.

In truth she was rather starstruck, silenced by the presence of Tim Hutton, who was then a teen pinup. Her parting with Tom was friendly, but final. She recalls: “He said, ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you anymore.’ I was cheating with someone else, and we were growing apart. He could be very cold—when he was done with you, he was done with you.” In
some ways her behavior had done them both a favor. They were both moving on, Diane to college and Tom to Hollywood.