Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

CHAPTER 9
Suddenly it was over: Out of the blue Tom was gone. She faced the new year—
and the rest of her life—without the man she thought loved her beyond measure.
Yet the husband who had once smothered her in red roses, love notes, and
adoration did not even tell her face-to-face, man to woman, that their ten-year
marriage was over. Nicole learned that she had been written out of the script of
Tom’s life from a go-between, his lawyer. The parting in the first weeks of 2001
was blunt, brutal, and businesslike. No mess, no fuss. Now she knew what Mimi
Rogers must have felt like. As one of his first lovers, Diane Van Zoeren, had put
it, “When he was done with you, he was done with you.” Tom in love—or in
love with the idea of being in love—and Tom out of love were stark opposites.
While Nicole was away from their home at Pacific Palisades, a moving van took
away all his personal belongings, the actor hiring five cottages at a Beverly Hills
hotel for himself and his entourage.
As Nicole sat in her study, twisting a white handkerchief sodden with tears
and rubbing her knee, injured during the filming of Moulin Rouge, the telephone
on her desk was a mute, reproachful reminder of what she had lost. She might
have resented her life in a cocoon of caviar and control, might have pulled away
from her husband, but this sudden rupture tore at her heart and her spirit. Their
personal friends, their professional colleagues, and their business acquaintances
all saw which way the wind was blowing and went with the gardeners, the
housekeepers, the communicators, and the personal assistants. With Tom. It was
the way of the world—certainly the way of Hollywood.
She was left with only her loyal driver, Dave Garris, outside polishing her
$72,000 black GMC Denali, for company. As she pondered her future, she spent
hours on the phone to Sydney, talking to her parents and sister, who were furious
at Tom’s abrupt treatment of her.
Inevitably, her thoughts turned to going home to Australia. In her darkest
moments, her faith—her Roman Catholic faith—sustained her. She talked
through her options with her mother and father. She had heard of nunneries in
Australia that would admit women who had been married, and wanted to explore
the idea further. At the very least she wanted to spend time in a Catholic retreat,
regrounding herself, finding out who she was and where she was headed. After
that, who knows? Maybe she would enroll at the University of Sydney to take
the English degree she had talked about for so long.

---

With the dawning of 2001, it certainly seemed that her days in Hollywood
were numbered. If the exodus of staff and friends was not enough of a clue, the
belligerence of Tom’s lawyers expunged any doubts. They told her she would
never make another movie and recommended she buy a one-way ticket back to
Sydney. She knew they were projecting the anger of their client; hell had no fury
like a scorned Tom Cruise. Meanwhile, the mass media screeched with stories,
presumably orchestrated by Tom’s circle, that blamed her cold, selfish
temperament for the split and speculated that she had had dalliances with other
men.
Things got worse when the shock jock Howard Stern announced that Tom had
hired the notorious private investigator Tony Pellicano, known as the
“celebrities’ thug,” to investigate Nicole’s behavior. Still, Tom’s reps insisted
that this was “an amicable parting.” Nursing a broken heart, an injured knee, and
a shattered career, Nicole then discovered she was expecting her husband’s
baby. As she looked back over the last few months, she thought, “How has it
come to this?”
Perhaps it all began in the summer of 2000, as Tom sat through a private
screening of the Spanish movie Abre los ojos, about the relationship between
Sofia, a beautiful dancer, and a rich publishing tycoon. As with Nicole ten years
before, he was enticed by the screen presence of the leading lady, twenty-seven-
year-old Penélope Cruz. As he watched the title credits, he was on his cell phone
trying to buy the rights to remake the film in English. Later that summer, when
he met the film’s director and screenwriter Alejandro Amenábar in New York,
Tom said that he wanted Cruz to reprise her role for the English version, to be
called Vanilla Sky.
While Cruz was not well known outside Spain, many men had been similarly
entranced by her darting eyes, slim figure, and vivacious, teasing personality.
“As a person, and on film, she invites you in, and she’s incredibly romantic and
yet real,” Tom would later observe. The daughter of a Madrid hairdresser and a
businessman, Penélope had been romantically linked to several Hollywood stars,
including Matt Damon. When Cruise’s chosen director, his friend Cameron
Crowe, went to Greece, where she was filming Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, it
was rumored that she was having an affair with her married leading man,
Nicolas Cage.
Tom had worked with Amenábar before, on The Others, with Nicole as the
lead. When filming for The Others began in Madrid in August 2000, Tom, as
executive producer, was with his wife and children. Indeed, the movie was the
first of a six-film deal between Nicole and Cruise/Wagner Productions—which

---

suggested that, in spite of her distance and dissatisfaction, she and Tom planned
to stay together at least professionally. Meanwhile, as Nicole was playing a wife
left by her soldier husband in The Others, Tom departed the set in November for
New York to take the lead in Vanilla Sky. As director Cameron Crowe later
pointed out, the chemistry between Tom and Penélope was crucial if they were
going to sustain the intense love story that lies at the heart of the film. “Penélope
had to appear to fall truly in love. And Tom’s character falls in love with her.
You watch them going through that hideous great, awful, intoxicating moment.
Without it we couldn’t have a movie. The first time we screened the movie—just
in-house—it was the kind of situation where at the end you get a reaction of
‘Wow! They really were in love.’ ” It didn’t take long for fiction to become fact.
While Tom was filming in New York, Nicole completed work on The Others
and returned to the U.S. from Spain just before Christmas. In spite of their hectic
filming schedules, the couple was together to celebrate Paula Wagner’s fifty-
fourth birthday in New York on December 20. Guests reported that as Tom
moved from table to table, laughing with friends and signing menus, a silent and
sullen Nicole sat on her own, making little effort to speak to other revelers.
From this date forth, Tom’s story and the actual events differ markedly. In his
court filing, Tom claimed that the couple separated in December 2000,
presumably while Nicole was in Spain finishing filming. His camp made it clear
that they went their separate ways on December 21, the day after Paula
Wagner’s birthday party and the day before their daughter Bella’s seventh
birthday. (It was thought, wrongly, that his choice of separation dates was
influenced by California law, where a marriage lasting ten years or more is
classified as a “lengthy” union. While a “lengthy” marriage ruling can affect the
size of alimony payments, it does not affect the division of assets. California is
one of nine “community property” states where from day one of the marriage all
assets are split equally. With houses around the world, private jets, and a reputed
$450 million fortune to be split fifty-fifty, alimony was never going to be an
issue for Tom and Nicole.)
On the day that Tom says they separated, they flew home to Hollywood. A
couple of days later, on Christmas Eve, they hosted an intimate party at their
Pacific Palisades home to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. By the
accounts of those present, both Tom and Nicole, given their private heartache,
put on Oscar-worthy performances, dancing to their favorite songs and gazing
lovingly into each other’s eyes. They were even said to have renewed their
wedding vows during the evening.
While this may be open to question, what is incontestable is that the Cruise
entourage then decamped to Las Vegas for the Christmas holidays. Tom even

---

arranged for the Big Shot ride at the Stratosphere Hotel to stay open late so that
Nicole and the others could enjoy the thrilling experience. Just to confuse
matters further, at the time Tom said that they had separated, Nicole later
claimed that they’d had sex and she’d conceived a child. Finally, if Tom had
paid a lawyer to tell her their marriage was over in December, why was he in her
company at all during Christmas? For a couple on the eve of a bitter divorce
fight, this was an odd way of drawing up the battle lines.
As soon as the family returned from Las Vegas, Tom was back on the set of