Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (9 page)

He wasted little time finding a replacement. Shortly afterward, he took time away from filming
Taps
to escort Melissa Gilbert, a former girlfriend of Timothy Hutton best known as the freckled-faced moppet from
Little House on the Prairie,
to a performance of
Sophisticated Ladies
on Broadway. Dressed in a preppy sport coat and tie, the unknown Tom Cruise looked awkward and rather gauche as photographers snapped the young couple in the theater foyer. By contrast, Melissa, at the time a well-known child star, seemed relaxed and at ease with the publicity. “I date different people and I’m not serious about any of them,” she later said.

It was perhaps his first taste of the life that lay before him. After a short break at an uncle’s holiday home in Kentucky at the end of filming, he flew to Hollywood, where he joined up with Sean and Tim, who had arrived at the airport with his Oscar for
Ordinary People
casually tossed into a duffel bag. To save money, he divided his time between staying with Sean at Zumirez, his Malibu home, and in West Hollywood with composer and longtime friend of the Penn family, Joseph Vitarelli.

According to those who saw him at the time, it was a Spartan existence. He lived in a bare room, a mattress on the floor and a telephone by the pillow. The only decoration was a pile of film scripts, empty beer bottles, and pizza takeout boxes. While the home comforts were rudimentary, as far as Tom was concerned he was living at the best address in the world . . . Hollywood.

For the boy from Glen Ridge it was an intoxicating brew. Not only was there the excitement of being at the heart of the movie industry, but Sean Penn quickly introduced him to the in-crowd of young guns eager to make a name for themselves. They hung out at the then trendy Hard Rock Cafe or On the Rox, a private club on Sunset, spending time with Sean’s brother Chris, whom Tom taught how to wrestle, as well as other longtime friends like Emilio Estevez and Rob and Chad Lowe. Of course, he already knew Tim Hutton. As Sean Penn’s former fiancée Elizabeth McGovern says, “I do
think that Sean is an absolute Hollywood animal.” They would later become known as the Brat Pack, a dismissive term based on the 1950s Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. It was a term that rankled with these young men, not only because they didn’t think their party behavior was so outrageous, but also each considered himself a star in his own right, not part of a group. As Emilio Estevez, who was deemed to be dean of the fraternity, later remarked, “We were just guys being guys. We’d meet to let off steam, that was all.” And part of that behavior was having the good looks and nerve to pick up a
Playboy
centerfold model, as Emilio did one evening at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Certainly Tom was not slow in following his friend’s lead. When he first arrived in Los Angeles, the nineteen-year-old started dating Melissa Gilbert again. According to Melissa, who was later engaged to another member of the Brat Pack, “I can honestly say that he’s a very sexual person. He gave me butterflies in my tummy and there was a lot of making out on the couch in my mom’s living room.” Their brief dalliance ended when he was introduced to Heather Locklear, a beautiful blond model and actress who had already snagged several small parts in TV series, including an episode of
CHiPs.
One day Tom was taking a shower in his Hollywood condo when Heather called him. At the time his best friend from Glen Ridge, Michael LaForte, was staying with him. Michael answered the phone and introduced himself as Tom’s better-looking “cousin”—their joke reference to each other—and started hitting on her. It was, he told Tom afterward, just harmless fun . . . but he repeated the story for years, especially after Heather shot to stardom in the fall of 1981 when producer Aaron Spelling cast her as Sammy Jo Dean in the TV soap
Dynasty
.

Certainly the Brat Pack of arrogant, talented young actors seemed destined to be Hollywood’s future dynasty. Sean’s father, film director Leo Penn, sensed their potential, singling out his son and Tom Cruise for special mention. He told Joseph Vitarelli that if this duo got a couple of breaks in Hollywood, “you could all be in for a hell of a roll.”

Not everyone was so impressed by the cocktail of conceit and ability. Tom’s pal Vinnie Travisano, who came to visit Cruise for a few days during the summer of 1981, noticed the changes in him when he took his girlfriend along to the set of
Diff’rent Strokes
and watched the action in the company of his old school buddy and Sean Penn. Neither he nor his date were impressed by these leading lights of the Brat Pack fraternity. “I got a feel for what an asshole Sean Penn was at that time,” recalls Vinnie. His school friend did not fare much better. He and his girlfriend found the new Tom Cruise to be “insufferably arrogant, utterly self-absorbed and unapproachable.” When Tom suggested that he and Heather go on a double date with Vinnie and his girlfriend, the girl refused point-blank. As Vinnie recalls, “She hated him, she just saw this cocky kid who only cared about himself.” While Vinnie, having known Tom for years, was much more forgiving—“He was a young man feeling his oats,” he says—he was still surprised by the transformation.

Vinnie and his girlfriend were not the only ones. Even Tom’s loyal family was concerned. His mother and his sisters—then working in local restaurants—felt that everything was happening too fast for him. Calls to his mother and the rest of his family had become more and more infrequent. He had “gotten cocky” and, as his sister Cass confided to friends, he was “hard to be around,” which, given his busy schedule, was not often. Tom had sufficient self-awareness to realize that, as he later admitted, he was “the most unpleasant person to be around,” blaming his aggression in part on his intense role in
Taps.

His friend Sean Penn was worried about him, too—not because of his behavior, but because of his next career choice. Tom had followed Sean’s lead and signed up with the influential Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills. While Sean had gone with Todd Smith, Tom had chosen Paula Wagner, a former Broadway actress and sometime playwright. Their introduction, in July 1981, was tentative—but it was to last much longer than most Hollywood marriages. “How do you do, Miss Wagner,” said the polite young man
in the same brown corduroy jacket he had worn when he took Melissa Gilbert on a date on Broadway. “Nobody had a clue who he was,” Wagner told writer Fred Schruers. “But from the day I met him, there was something about his eyes and his presence. He was all there.”

While his choice of agent met with Sean Penn’s approval, his next film pick did not. Tom signed on for that season’s Hollywood fashion—the teenage coming-of-age film. The movie
Losin’ It
was in the same genre of the successful
Porky’s
series, where horny adolescents spend ninety minutes trying to raise a laugh and lose their virginity on the way. “That is when his tension started to go,” recalled Sean rather censoriously. “I said to him, ‘What are you doing? You’re gonna destroy your career.’ ”

Tom didn’t see it that way. He was rather flattered that word was out about him even before
Taps
was released. Producer Garth Drabinsky was looking for a “handsome, fresh-faced kid” for
Losin’ It
and had heard about young Cruise. He made inquiries and approached
Taps
director Harold Becker as he was in the editing room cutting his film. After watching a mere eight seconds of Tom, the Canadian producer decided to sign him. Even though he was only offered $35,000 for a three-picture deal, Tom quickly agreed, eager to see his name in lights. He began to have doubts when he looked at the script more closely. Tom later recalled, rather shamefacedly, “When I first read it, it was worse than the released film. I worked hard, but it was a terrible time in my life.”

However bad the movie, it was his first starring role. Tom played one of a group of California school friends who go to a brothel in Mexico to lose their virginity. When confronted with a group of prostitutes, his sexual desire, like the film, flops badly. In his best dramatic moment, he stands in front of the whores, hands in pockets, confidence and desire draining from his face. Finally he finds romance in the arms of a young divorcée played by Shelly Long.

Whatever Tom’s misgivings—and those of his friend Sean Penn—the movie helped launch the careers of Shelly Long, who starred in the TV comedy
Cheers,
and director Curtis Hanson, who went on to make the film noir
L.A. Confidential.
Certainly Drabinsky was more enthusiastic about the movie and Tom’s input than the actor himself. “He was terrific,” he says. “Respectful, hardworking, and humble, with a very professional approach on set.”

As in his school days, however, trouble had a way of finding Tom. When a late-night fight broke out near his trailer on the set of
Losin’ It,
rather than call for assistance, he tried to break up the brawl himself. He later claimed that he “nearly got killed.” As the actor held down one guy, he kept dodging his pumping fist, and it was only after members of the crew heard the shouting and came to help that they discovered that the thug was trying to hit Tom with an ice pick.

Even after film production moved from the border town of Calexico back to Los Angeles, Tom got himself into more scrapes. He was apparently threatened with a gun when he and several members of the film’s production team visited the infamous Lingerie Club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. The young actor was dancing with an attractive Asian girl while some crew members were drinking at the bar. The next thing they knew, she had pulled a gun on her dance partner. “We grabbed Tommy and got the hell outta that club as fast as possible,” an anonymous cast member told writer Wesley Clarkson.

Later that year, when Tom headed back east to meet up with his Glen Ridge buddies, his roving eye nearly cost him his career. Tom and his friends Michael LaForte and Vinnie Travisano were out barhopping in Manhattan and ended up at the Ritz nightclub, which then hosted hip-hop bands like Rock Steady Crew and Bow Wow Wow. As was his wont, Tom started trying to pick up every girl in the joint. He was hitting on two girls at the bar, oblivious to the fact that they were with a couple of unamused muscle men. Vinnie saw one guy reach into his pocket and slip brass knuckles on his hand, ready to punch the budding movie star. Michael and Vinnie intervened and hustled their friend out of harm’s way. “We always used to say that we had saved his career because we saved his beautiful teeth,” recalls Vinnie.

Indeed, Tom’s career was nearly over before it had begun.
When Drabinsky tried to sell his movie, he found the studios cool to hostile. Fox Studios had first option on the film, but when Fox’s vice chairman Norman Levy sat through a screening, his verdict was damning. He hated the film. Nor did he have kind words for Tom Cruise. He told Drabinsky bluntly: “The film will never sell and Tom Cruise will not be an important actor.” Understandably, Drabinsky has never forgotten that meeting—or the verdict on Tom Cruise. At the time the idea of a sequel was out of the question.

What saved his career was the release of
Taps
just before Christmas 1981, several months before the disastrous
Losin’ It
came out. While the movie opened to cool critical notices, it made money, attracting the notoriously fickle youth market and earning plaudits for the central performances of Tim Hutton and Sean Penn. Although Tom passed unnoticed when he attended his first black-tie gala premiere, joining Hollywood notables like Michael Douglas and Ali MacGraw as well as fellow cast members at the AVCO movie theater in Westwood, Los Angeles, his portrayal of the psychotic David Shawn did create something of a stir among Hollywood insiders.

The director and writer Cameron Crowe identified the buzz around the young actor at a party for the film version of his book
Fast Times at Ridgemont High,
which propelled Sean Penn to stardom. “The legend of
Taps
was in the air,” he recalled. “Sean and Tom had acquired these reputations. Sean was sort of Sean De Niro, this character actor extreme. Tom had both moves, character, and leading man. He was The Guy.”

At that time The Guy was still licking his professional wounds after the creative train wreck that was
Losin’ It.
The experience taught the nineteen-year-old a degree of humility. Even though the film put his name up in lights, he realized how inexperienced he was. “I had been offered some lead roles, but I didn’t feel that I could carry a film,” he said of this period in his career. “I hadn’t learned enough and I felt that I would be eaten alive to try and carry a movie by himself.” Not for the first time, however, fortune smiled on the young man.

When he heard that Francis Ford Coppola, the genius behind
The Godfather,
was casting for a screen version of S. E. Hinton’s best-selling book about teenage life,
The Outsiders,
Tom was determined to hustle for a role. At the auditions he literally pulled Coppola aside and told him, “I’ll do anything it takes; I’ll play any role in this.” His tactics paid off: Tom was offered the small part of Steve Randle, a street-smart youngster who works in a gas station. He was a member of the Greasers gang, kids from the wrong side of the tracks, whose sworn enemies were the Socs, kids who get the breaks in life.

Tom was in good company. The cast list reads like a Who’s Who of future Hollywood stars, with Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane, and C. Thomas Howell taking major roles. It was a plus that his friends Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe were also chosen for parts. For the greenhorn actor, the real bonus was that, like
Taps
director Harold Becker, Coppola encouraged his actors to spend weeks together shaping and defining their characters. The fact that Coppola had yet to secure financing for the movie meant that rehearsals were extended while the deal was being thrashed out.

In early March 1982, they gathered in the gym of a local school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where filming was scheduled to take place. For a month the actors were at liberty to explore their roles in convivial but intense daily workshops. It was just what Tom needed. “I remember feeling very good, building up my own instincts on acting,” he later recalled. “And understanding more of each level, learning more about film acting and what I wanted to do.” As he explored his strengths and weaknesses as an actor, he realized he had a flair for ad-libbing and comic timing.