Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Breakfast Club star Ally Sheedy turned down the romantic lead of Charlie, the
female flying instructor eventually played by Kelly McGillis. “I didn’t think
anyone would want to see a movie about fighter pilots,” she said later. A similar

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reaction came from actor Val Kilmer, who flatly refused a role and only
reluctantly agreed to be involved—he eventually played the part of Iceman—
after contractual arm-twisting.
Other stars rejected the lead role of Maverick, the cockily charismatic navy
pilot who grows up during the movie—and gets the girl. Chisel-featured
Matthew Modine, the star of Birdy, the story of the damage inflicted on
homecoming soldiers by their Vietnam experience, did not like the film’s pro-
war sentiments and passed on the lead role. He had just returned from a visit to
East Berlin and discovered that the Russian soldiers were “just people.” The
heartthrob from Happy Days, Scott Baio, said no, as did brooding bad boy
Mickey Rourke. Charlie Sheen was considered, but, at only twenty, was thought
to be too young, while John Travolta, an authentic pilot, was then seen as a
failure at the box office. Finally, they hit on a young man with long hair fresh
from the plastic forests of Pinewood, who, at five feet, seven inches, was an inch
shorter than the minimum required height for a navy pilot. Rather
disingenuously, Bruckheimer would later claim, “There was never anybody in
our minds other than Tom Cruise. When the script was first delivered to our
doorway, we saw Tom playing the part.”
At the time, even Tom Cruise was not wholly convinced. Like other actors, he
was not sold on the film’s gung ho ethos, worried that it would be “Flashdance
in the sky.” In any case, the actor, who had started his own production company,
Kid Cruise, had other projects he was more interested in pursuing. But Simpson
and Bruckheimer would not take no for an answer.
It was at this point that the myth of Tom Cruise and Top Gun was born.
During a two-hour meeting with the two producers, he insisted that he would
sign up only if he were involved in the whole production process. He wanted
two months to develop the script, which meant that he would effectively be
working gratis if there was no deal at the end. Simpson later recalled that Tom
would show up at his house and they would grab a beer and spend five or six
hours going through the script. “We had a lot of fun,” he said. As part of his
hard-nosed deal, Tom secured the choice of his costars, oversaw director Tony
Scott’s work on set, and was consulted during film editing. As Simpson recalled:
“I was against it because I like to run things. To me, an actor is generally a hired
hand. I like to be the boss. But we talked at great length, and he proved himself
to us, and when he walked out of our office, he shook our hands firmly and said,
‘Gentlemen, I’m on-board.’ ” It seemed that the decision to let him become the
first actor in their company to be involved in the whole production process was
an indication of Tom’s ballsy self-confidence and artistic altruism, along with

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recognition of his as-yet-unseen talents as a cinematic wunderkind.
Others remember the negotiations rather differently. Far from wanting to
rework the script without payment for a couple of months, Tom insisted the
producers show him the money before he would even contemplate being in the
movie. As he played hard to get, Don Simpson relentlessly pursued him,
eventually nailing him for a fee of over a million dollars. A final meeting was set
for April 1985, but with his agent, Paula Wagner, out of town, Tom was terrified
about meeting the two producers on his own in their offices at Paramount
Studios. “I can’t go over there, they will devour me,” he complained. Simpson
curtly dismissed Tom’s plea to have the meeting in the offices of his
representatives, Creative Artists Agency. Instead, CAA head Michael Ovitz
accompanied this relatively new young client to Paramount to hammer out the
deal.
Still only twenty-two, Cruise had every right to be nervous. In the piranha
tank of Hollywood, Bruckheimer and Simpson were authentic sharks. As one
industry veteran observed, “Bruckheimer is the one to really watch out for. He’ll
stab you in the back. Simpson at least will stab you in the chest.” Simpson even
liked to intimidate visitors to his office by leaving a nine-millimeter handgun on
his desk. When director Marty Brest was asked for advice on how to deal with a
meeting with Simpson, he said: “Wear a fucking bullet-proof vest.”
Simpson liked to pose as a tough guy, once boasting, “I would kill someone
with absolutely no compunction.” In meetings he was notorious for haranguing
scriptwriters, actors, and agents. Only those who did not crumble beneath his
bullying earned his respect.
In the weeks when he was wooing Tom Cruise, Simpson’s wild excesses were
more pronounced than ever, thanks to his wanton drug and drink abuse. He was
often so wasted from a combination of hard liquor and lines of cocaine that by
four in the afternoon he could barely talk—let alone walk. He became so
paranoid that for a time he refused to visit his offices at Paramount because he
thought the Mafia had ordered a hit on him. He spent his days barricaded inside
his Cherokee Avenue house. The occasional visitor he allowed through the gates
noticed numerous surveillance cameras outside the compound. There was
copious evidence of drug abuse, as well as an armory of weapons, which he
casually brandished.
“He was coked out of his mind,” observed screenwriter Chip Proser, who
completed the major rewrite of the Top Gun screenplay in April 1985, shortly
before Cruise came on board. That rewrite, with only a little further tinkering,
was essentially the finished script, complete with detailed descriptions of the
characters and the story. In fact, at this critical time, Simpson was so delusional

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that he believed Proser and director Tony Scott were trying to take his movie
away from him. It meant that the director and scriptwriter met in cafés in Santa
Monica rather than taking the chance of being spotted together in a Hollywood
restaurant and incurring Simpson’s paranoid rage.
So the idea of Simpson, this wasted genius whacked out on coke, sitting down
over a beer with Tom Cruise—who at the time was claiming that he needed a
children’s dictionary to read a script—to whip the screenplay into shape appears
fanciful, especially as the producers were already paying professional
scriptwriters $30,000 a week to spin this slim thread of an idea into box-office
gold. But that didn’t stop the publicity machine for Top Gun from repeating the
story to anyone who would listen. As Tom Cruise—and the navy—found to their
chagrin, truth doesn’t always have the same meaning in Hollywood as it does in
the rest of the world. This late-night exchange between two movie moguls,
reportedly overheard at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, sums up this
philosophy:
First man: “You’re lying! You’re lying to me!”
Second man: “Yes, I know. But hear me out.”
It was simply part of the negotiation for Bruckheimer and Simpson to promise
the Earth to land their quarry, whether it was the cooperation of the navy or the
signature of a potential leading man. During filming they simply ignored retired
Admiral Pettigrew’s concerns regarding accuracy. “I’m just trying to keep them
from turning Top Gun into a musical,” he complained at one point, although he
agreed that the changes improved upon reality. So when Tom Cruise, in an
initial meeting with the producers and their navy adviser, talked about exploring
and developing the film’s locker room scenes to make it more like a sports film
than a warmongering movie, Simpson and Bruckheimer listened carefully and
nodded sagely. When Tom went out of the room and Pettigrew pointed out that
navy pilots have private rooms, Simpson was blunt. “Look, we’re paying one
million bucks to get him. We need to see some flesh,” he said cynically.
Once he signed in April, with filming due to start eight weeks later, the reality
was that Tom had to concentrate on his own job—doing background research,
learning the script, and spending three weeks with a personal trainer working out
so that he looked like a trim navy pilot. In fact, his trainer did such a good job in
“totally transforming” the actor that producer Jerry Bruckheimer hired him later
to get him into shape.
Tom, still sporting his long mane after his performance in Legend, didn’t even
have time to get a haircut, let alone rewrite a script, before heading down the
freeway to hang out with the “top gun” pilots at Miramar. For all his initial

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reservations, when Cruise drove past the base’s gate, he found himself in boy
heaven. Ever since childhood he had dreamed of becoming a pilot, and now he
had the chance to mess around with $36 million fighter jets. It was exhilarating
for him to fly in F-14 jets and soak up the lifestyle of a group of professional
men who had a technical focus, drive, and sense of daring that matched his own.
“That was a dream come true,” he later recalled. “I dug it, I dug making that
movie.”
He and his fellow actors soon became familiar figures on the base. Instructor
Dave “Bio” Baranek remembers his first encounter over a beer with a “skinny
kid with long hair” one Wednesday night in the Miramar club. “Tom asked me,
‘What’s the most fun part of flying, what’s the scariest part?’ ” recalled Dave.
“He was polite and sincere, but like a sponge soaking up the stories we loved to
tell. I told him about high-G dogfights, about flying at low altitude and high
speed, and the almost unlimited power and maneuverability of the jets.”
After that first meeting, a call went around the squadron for a single guy who
would like to be a drinking buddy for Tom. Lieutenant Jim Ray answered the
call, becoming the squadron’s “designated drinker.” Instructor Dave Baranek
recalls: “He was nothing wild, but they went to lots of parties and had a good
time.” Mostly Cruise and his fellow actors met at the Rusty Pelican, a seafood
restaurant in San Diego, where they would pepper the real-life top guns with
questions. Before very long he was walking like a pilot, talking like a pilot, and
thinking like a pilot. “The thing that’s so impressed me about him is that he’s
taken so much time to make sure he’s doing the job right. He’s done his
homework,” noted Jim Ray approvingly.
Finally, after testing for F-14 certification, which involved learning to
withstand high G forces, eject, and escape an ejection seat in water, he was
allowed to go for a ride. It was a thrill seeker’s dream come true. As Tom
recalled, “It’s very sexual. Your body contorts, your muscles get sore, and the
straining forces blood from your brain. You grab your legs and your ass and
grunt as sweat pours over you. I had this grin on my face that wouldn’t leave.”
The making of the movie reignited what was to become a lifelong need for
speed. This time, rather than “drag racing” up and down the streets of Louisville
in his mother’s car, he was sitting next to studio boss Ned Tanen roaring through
the boulevards of Santa Monica at dawn in his vintage Porsche, a car so highly
tuned that it burned high-octane aircraft fuel and was housed in an airplane
hangar. “He just fell in love with racing,” Tanen later recalled. His induction into
the world of motorcycles was rather less glamorous, learning to ride in the
parking lot next to the House of Motorcyles in El Cajon, California. However,
the vision of him hurtling along a desert road, framed by a blood-red setting sun,

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became one of the iconic images of the movie and helped establish Cruise as an
all-action hero.
Filming, it seems, was just as much fun. Every Friday night was treated like a
wrap party, with drinking and carousing by the pool at the officers’ club.
Director Tony Scott, whose then affair with statuesque actress Brigitte Nielsen
ended his marriage, got into the habit, according to navy adviser Pettigrew, of
“auditioning” young actresses long after all the roles had been cast. While Scott,
a close friend of Timothy Leary, the champion of LSD, kept his activities behind
closed trailer doors, the parties really got started when Don Simpson, who
jokingly referred to himself as “Beverly Hills Cock,” made his raucous arrival
on set, often so high on coke that he crashed his black Pontiac Trans Am in the
parking lot.
Perhaps the most memorable night was the party held in July at the North
Island Officers Club to celebrate Tom’s twenty-third birthday. Simpson and his
assistants Dave “the Rave” Robertson and Dave Thorne, known as Baby Dave,
headed to the beach and invited bikini-clad girls to join the cast and crew for the