Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

part in numerous events.
Certainly there was talk that the avuncular Newman had taken on the mantle
of surrogate father to the much younger man. Six years previously, his only son,
Scott, then twenty-eight, had committed suicide, haunted by his own failures as
an actor and his father’s divorce from his mother, Jacqueline Witte. Cruise,
talented, charismatic, and hardworking, seemed to be occupying the place of the
son Newman had lost in such tragic circumstances. As Newman’s biographer
Daniel O’Brien observed, “Inevitably it was alleged that Newman regarded
Cruise as a surrogate son. He enjoyed a close relationship with the young actor,
something he’d never had with Scott.”
Perhaps even more important, Tom’s association with Newman and Scorsese
helped prepare him for the road ahead. He had been working with two men,
especially Newman, who had been exposed in full measure to the blaze of
publicity during their glory years. It had turned Newman from an actor to a star
and ultimately a screen icon, defined by his penetrating blue eyes and easy
swagger. That he had survived with his sense of self firmly intact was not lost on
Tom. “He lives a normal life. He’s got several businesses, a wife, a family.
That’s good for me to see.” Now the fickle flame of stardom beckoned a new
recruit. This time the focus would be as much on Tom’s megawatt if
manipulative smile and the way he handled his Ray-Ban sunglasses as on his
acting prowess.
The promotional firestorm surrounding Top Gun erupted in May 1986, just a
few weeks after Tom had finished working with these Hollywood giants. His
experience with them helped keep him grounded as he skyrocketed to
superstardom. The movie instantly established the Tom Cruise of popular

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imagination. He nailed his future screen persona from the first frame of the
movie, when he flew his plane upside down above a Russian MiG so that he
could snap a Polaroid of the Russian pilot for his collection. While his cocky
panache was as winning as it was reckless, beneath his easy grin was a young
man haunted by the past who found personal redemption through the counsel of
a gruff older man. A sex symbol with a soft center: It was a theme he was to
explore time and again.
The movie itself was huge, grabbing audiences from the first moment, when a
fighter jet roared off the deck of the aircraft carrier, accompanied by a pulsating
rock beat, and holding on for 110 stirring minutes. It was so relentlessly gung ho
that the U.S. Navy attracted its largest influx of recruits since World War II. So
much for Tom’s instincts to make a sports movie; Top Gun was much more than
that. Beyond the fact that it was Paramount’s biggest-grossing film that year or
that it was nominated for eight Oscars, it became, along with Wall Street, one of
the iconic films of the 1980s, representing ideals underpinning the American
dream.
With its glossy, slick-paced photography, hard-pumping soundtrack, and
attractive actors, this was a movie that appealed to almost everyone. As Simpson
and Bruckheimer intended, the target audience of “mom and pop in Oklahoma”
came in droves. The movie also attracted a huge gay following because of the
underlying homoerotic theme of glamorous machismo. A competitive volleyball
match involving rivals Cruise and Kilmer, stripped and oiled, was so appealing
that it took the breath away of readers of the gay magazine Suck, who voted it
“favorite scene” in a movie for three years running. Even though Tom had
pointedly refused to go bare-chested for publicity pictures, the gay vibe was one
that would continue to haunt him.
At the time, he publicly defended this unadulterated beefcake moment as
demonstrating how fighter pilots need to keep fit. “They want to beat each other,
they want to be the best,” he argued in one of an interminable series of
promotional interviews. It was not just the grind of a movie tour that he had to
contend with, but the realization that he was no longer an up-and-coming actor,
but a genuine star. For Tom his life would never be his own again. While the
attention made him feel “isolated and lonely”—he was unable to go out with his
sisters without being mobbed by fans and paparazzi—he recognized, perhaps
instinctively, that the way to control the media was to reveal only what he
wanted about himself.
During the filming of Top Gun he had seen the destructive power of the mass
media, watching helplessly as his friend Sean Penn found himself in their

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crosshairs as a result of his relationship with Madonna. Not only was the
aggressive Penn arrested for throwing rocks at two British journalists, his
wedding on the clifftops at Malibu in August 1985 degenerated into a paparazzi
feeding frenzy where Tom and the other guests, who included old flame Cher,
could barely hear the service above the noise of hovering helicopters.
Tom adopted a different approach, giving away those morsels of his life he
was comfortable discussing rather than refusing to feed an ever-hungry media. It
impressed the hell out of Sean Penn. As his personal assistant Meegan Ochs
recalls, “Sean used to say that Tom Cruise ought to get an award for dealing with
the press. His opinion was that Cruise decided early on a few things that he was
going to share of himself with the public—his dyslexia, his lack of relationship
with his father. Everyone felt they were getting this very sensitive insight, and
because of that, he was golden with the press. But basically he just kept
repeating these few things ad infinitum and never gave anything else up. Instead
of what Sean did, which was just to try and keep things private.”
Others, like movie mogul David Geffen, were equally impressed by the way
Tom handled himself. Keeping a fatherly eye on the media mayhem was Paul
Newman, who had become a star during a gentler, less frenetic time. “It’s tough
when it happens as fast as it did with Tom,” he said. “He’s a very savvy kid, a
very savvy man. So far he’s kept his head on his shoulders, but he’s one of the
very, very few.”
This mutual admiration society was symbolized by the fact that during the
publicity for The Color of Money in October 1986, Cruise and Newman
appeared on the cover of Life magazine, lying on top of a pool table. At the
charity premiere in New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, Cruise, Newman, Joanne
Woodward, and Tom’s on-screen love interest in the film, Mary Elizabeth
Mastrantonio, turned up en famille to face the flashbulbs. A week later Tom
went to Atlanta to watch his friend and mentor in the Valvoline road-racing
classic. He presented Newman with a good-luck floral arrangement. “These are
for your garden. Go get them,” said the note. It was signed Tom and Mimi. It
seemed that stardom was not quite so lonely after all.

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