Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

CHAPTER 4
There is no noise in Hollywood quite like the sweet sound of success. While
failure is a silent, rueful companion, the friendly ringing of the telephone, the
satisfying thump of the latest delivery of film scripts, and the swish of backs
being slapped makes for the most pleasing music. It was a sound Tom Cruise
was beginning to enjoy, his future golden with possibilities. But in the fall of
1983, with Risky Business the talk of the movie world, it was his past that
returned to haunt him.
A phone call from his paternal grandmother, Catherine Mapother, was as
unwelcome as it was disturbing. His estranged father, the man he hadn’t seen for
ten years, had terminal cancer. His grandmother asked if Tom would agree to his
father’s request and visit him in the Louisville hospital where he was being
treated. There were conditions, too. His father did not want any recriminations,
any talk of the past. For a young man becoming used to making his own rules,
this must have been an irritating imposition, especially coming from a man he at
once despised, feared, and still loved.
He agreed, probably reluctantly, to his father’s conditions, the last request of a
dying man. Financially secure after his $75,000 payday from Risky Business, he
paid for his three sisters to fly from New York to join him at his father’s bedside.
It was a trying, emotionally charged, and yet, in time, cathartic encounter. When
he had last seen his father, Tom was a twelve-year-old boy watching him marry
a woman he had never met. Now he was a young man who had made his own
way in the world without any help or guidance from the man lying before him on
his hospital bed. The gift he brought to the hospital was a poignant reminder of
the happier times they had once shared. It was a musical statue of a ragged Tom
Sawyer–like figure that played tunes from his father’s favorite film, The Sting,
one of the few occasions father and son had enjoyed a harmonious public outing.
Since the abrupt splitting of the Mapother family in Ottawa, Tom’s father had
largely dropped out of sight. After his marriage to Joan Lebendiger, he went to
Florida for a time and then headed out west. When that union foundered after
just a year, he returned to Louisville, where he apparently lived in poverty and
obscurity. “He was a drifter. He obviously regretted what he had done. I felt
sorry for him,” recalled his cousin Caroline Mapother. For a time he took up
with Jill Ellison, the estranged wife of a local journalist, who seemingly helped
nurse him during his cancer treatment.

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While he was aware that his son had made a name for himself in the movies,
Thomas Senior hadn’t made the time, or perhaps more accurately the effort, to
see any of his work. His seeming indifference served as an epitaph to their
uneasy relationship. Ever since their parting a decade before, it seems that his
father had adhered resolutely to his son’s angry demand to “stay the hell out of
everything.”
The bullying young man of Tom’s childhood was now reduced to a pathetic
figure in a hospital bed. His son’s “powerful” reaction to the enforced reunion
has swung between sympathy and fury, pity at his father’s plight and anger at a
life of missed opportunities and shared family experience. Tom later told TV
host James Lipton that his family was very special and his father had
deliberately rejected “a huge life force.” Over the years he has become more
philosophical about his father’s behavior, believing that he created his own
suffering and isolation. “He had made some mistakes and he knew it. I wasn’t
angry at him, I wasn’t, I was just looking at a man who was my father who I
loved no matter what happened.”
They held hands and, in a vainglorious gesture, his father promised that he
would soon be well enough to take his son for a steak and a beer. They never had
that steak, his father dying of metastatic rectal cancer on January 9, 1984, at the
age of just forty-nine. The funeral was a quiet family affair, laying Thomas
Mapother III to rest at the Calvary Catholic cemetery in Louisville.
Within weeks of his father’s death, Tom found himself with a new name,
living in a new country, and consorting with unicorns, goblins, and fairies in an
enchanted forest. It was a curious kind of catharsis. Now known as Jack O’ The
Green, he was the hero in the battle between light and dark, good and evil, in a
film that was the brainchild of British director Ridley Scott. Tom had long
admired the hand behind the sci-fi movies Blade Runner and Alien, and was
beguiled by the 411 elaborate storyboards that Ridley Scott brought along to
convince Tom to star in his latest film fantasy, Legend.
Suitably intrigued, Tom signed up, brushing off the advice of his agent Paula
Wagner that, because of his father’s death, he could pass on the movie if he
wished. Leaving behind his family, friends, and girlfriend, Rebecca De Mornay,
he made his first overseas flight to London, where filming was scheduled for
spring 1984.
He had little time to dwell on the past. When he first arrived at Pinewood
Studios in Buckinghamshire, north of London, Ridley Scott ushered him into
Theatre 7 on the lot and showed him the 1970 François Truffaut film, The Wild
Child, the true story of a young boy who emerged from a forest in central

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France, unable to speak and walking on all fours like an animal. It seemed that
the youngster had been raised by wolves. Scott was intrigued by the story and
wanted Tom to grow his hair and emulate the jerky gestures and wolverine
behavior of the wild child, whom he saw as a heroic force of nature. For once, a
childhood spent practicing backflips and Evel Knievel stunts did not go to waste.
Unlike his earlier movies Taps and The Outsiders, where he had enjoyed the
collegiate camaraderie of his fellow actors, this time he was left to his own
devices, regularly hanging around the huge stage, normally used for James Bond
movies, during the laborious process of setting up the elaborate fantasy world.
He helped his costar Mia Sara, a seventeen-year-old who had never acted
professionally before, learn her lines, and the Brooklyn-born actress returned the
favor by using her circle of London girlfriends to find Tom dates for the
evening. More often than not, he went into the office of unit publicist Geoff
Freeman to chew the fat, catching up on news and sports back home.
A brief visit to London by his friend Sean Penn did little to change the mood.
Sean was wandering aimlessly around Europe with actor Joe Pesci, drinking and