Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Outsiders, he flew home to Glen Ridge for a couple of weeks before heading off
to Florida, where he had asked his friend Michael LaForte, now in the Marine
Corps, to help organize a training schedule so that he could sweat off the twelve
pounds of muscle he had agreed he needed to lose to give his new persona the
soft, preppy look of a middle-class teenager from the Chicago suburbs.
One day, while he was out jogging around Glen Ridge, he bumped into his old
flame Nancy Armel, who had by then realized her own dream and was working
as a flight attendant for People Express. They started dating again, and one night
he called her to say that he had tickets for a new musical on Broadway, La Cage
aux Folles. Tom was unaware of the story line—about two gay men living
together in St. Tropez, where one of them runs a nightclub featuring drag artists
—until they had taken their seats in the theater. As Nancy recalled: “Men
dressed as women, he couldn’t handle it. We had to leave before the
intermission. It really bothered him. He was definitely homophobic.”
He was much more comfortable with the joshing male camaraderie that he
found when he flew to Sarasota, Florida, with Michael LaForte to begin serious
training for his second lead role. As fit as he was ferociously competitive,
Michael was a down-to-earth man’s man with a robust sense of fun and an eye
for pranks and mischief. He lived by the catchphrase “Life is a cabaret.” “When
they were together after a long absence, they picked up like it was yesterday,”
recalled Michael’s older brother Sam. “That’s the kind of relationship they had.
Nobody put a spike in their friendship.”
Michael had the grace to make himself scarce in their Sarasota condo when
Tom invited Nancy Armel to join him for a long weekend. While Tom worked
out, she went to the beach or joined her friends at the bar. After a couple of
years’ absence, she found him a changed person, more confident, rather smug
but still pleasant to be around. Before he flew to Chicago to begin filming, his
former school friends got the chance to catch up with Tom when he arrived for a
beach party at Lavallette resort on the New Jersey coast. Wearing a beret at a
rakish angle and what was described as a “Hollywood getup,” he left no one in
any doubt that he felt he was doing them all a favor just by turning up.

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But if the cool dude from the West Coast had meant to impress them, he
signally failed. “He just looked silly,” recalled his old girlfriend Diane Van
Zoeren. The dubious beret aside, he was confident, in control, and “on fire” with
drive and ambition, no longer the dorky high-school kid of two years before. He
took himself very seriously indeed. At one point during the evening, he took his
former girlfriend to one side and announced gravely, “I have taken Hollywood
by the balls.”
For the self-confessed geek in school, the sudden transformation to cool dude
seemed uncomfortable and confusing, his surface brashness possibly a way of
coping with the spotlight. One evening he and Nancy left a restaurant
prematurely because a fellow diner recognized him from his appearance in Taps.
“Initially he found the attention somewhat overwhelming,” she recalls.
Ironically, it was his portrayal of another geek, Joel Goodsen, the suburban
Nice Guy with an ambitiously anarchic streak, that was to propel Tom further
into the limelight. When he first arrived on the set of Risky Business in Highland
Park, Chicago, there was no indication that this movie was going to skyrocket
his career. In fact, there was concern on the set that, even though he had lost the
requisite twelve pounds in Florida, he was still too chubby to be a believable
teen idol. Tom had such a sweet tooth that he had always worried about his
weight. Such was his self-absorption that he often wondered out loud if other
major actors ate as much candy as he did. “I bet Al Pacino [his all-time screen
hero] doesn’t have a sweet tooth,” he told colleagues.
“He was on the phone endlessly discussing his diet with his agent,” recalls his
screen mother, actress Janet Carroll. While she found him “attentive, gracious,
and serious,” a young man who was prepared to listen and take direction, she
had no inkling that she was watching the making of a megastar. “Absolutely
not,” she recalls. “The movie launched many careers. He was in good company.”
It was a cast that included not only Rebecca De Mornay, but also Bronson
Pinchot and Curtis Armstrong.
Tom did apparently try to throw his weight around on set. In the early days of
the shoot, the actor complained that he and Rebecca De Mornay were just not
jelling on camera. When he told coproducer Steve Tisch that he felt she was
miscast, Tisch gave Tom short shrift, explaining that they thought she was doing
a terrific job and had no intention of replacing her.
This episode did not particularly endear him to other cast members who, even
twenty years later, have little praiseworthy to say. It seemed, at least to those
who worked with him, that behind the polite “yes sir, no ma’am” veneer was a
young man out to take social and professional advantage of every possible
situation. A frequent comment was that he liked to expose the vulnerability in

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others and then crush them—perhaps reenacting his own father’s behavior
toward the young Tom Cruise. “It was just put-down after put-down of everyone
and everything,” observed a former colleague who described him as “bland as
tofu but without the flavor.”
Yet that blandly disingenuous screen persona and his vulnerable sexuality
struck a chord with the teenage audience, who flocked to see the witty, low-
budget sleeper film that grossed more than $70 million. As thrilling for Tom was
that his childhood idol, Steven Spielberg, took the trouble to send a letter
congratulating him on his performance. “He’s the all-American everyboy,”
observed director Paul Brickman. “He has an archetypal quality that makes
audiences connect.”
The iconic moment in the film, much parodied, was when the actor, dressed in
white socks and underpants, danced around his parents’ living room to Bob
Seger’s song “Old Time Rock and Roll.” It was an ad-libbed scene that
resonated both with the actor and his audience. “I loved it, because of course I’d
done it myself. It was a moment I understood,” he told Cameron Crowe.
Certainly his Glen Ridge friends remember him miming to music and running
around their backyards in his underwear—in short, acting just like Joel Goodsen.
Unlike the real lives of teenagers, in the movie world the sexually frustrated
boy does get the girl. In a dreamily erotic sequence, Joel has sex with Lana, his
hooker girlfriend, on board a Chicago commuter train. While Tom and Rebecca
were nervous before playing the scene, those who snuck onto the closed set are
convinced that the answer to the question of “did they, didn’t they” really get it
on on camera is a firm yes. As Paul Brickman commented afterward, “It was
hard to get them started, but it was harder to get them to stop.” By then the
couple had chemistry both on and off the screen, spending all their time with
each other and eventually living together. He made her Toll House cookies while
she introduced him to Nicolas Roeg’s scary thriller Don’t Look Now. “He
seemed to be looking for somebody to love and somebody to love him back,”
Rebecca later recalled.
In a moment of social triumph, he returned for the last time to Glen Ridge
High School in June 1983 to watch the outdoor graduation ceremony of his sister
Cass. With Risky Business playing in the local movie theaters and Rebecca De
Mornay on his arm, it was easy to flash his increasingly famous grin as his
former classmates jokingly pestered “Mr. Cruise” for his autograph.
Tom was now a fully accredited teen heartthrob, his disarming smile and boy-
next-door good looks appealing to mothers and daughters alike. As critic Gary
Arnold of The Washington Post noted, “In Tom Cruise the movies have a new
star to conjure with.” Nor did it hurt his burgeoning status that he was dating the

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delectable Ms. De Mornay—even though some thought it was a publicity stunt
to promote the film. No matter, in New York they were followed by the
paparazzi, asked to pose for the cover of People magazine, and gossiped about in
the Hollywood trade papers.
So when the actor arrived at his alma mater, it was not so much as the
hometown boy made good as it was the outsider, the guy who didn’t make the
football team or get a date for the school prom, finally showing his former
classmates that there was life beyond Glen Ridge. It was a valedictory moment,
a knowing acknowledgment of his achievements.
In some ways it was his lesser-known film All the Right Moves, released in the
same year as Risky Business, that more clearly reflected his real life. That movie,
coproduced by Lucille Ball, portrayed a high-school football star, Stefen
Djordjevic, struggling for a college scholarship to avoid following his father and
brother into the steel mills. While the gritty, rather downbeat blue-collar movie
did poorly at the box office, it spoke to Cruise’s own desire to move on from an
unhappy youth and childhood. “I remember getting through high school and
thinking, ‘Boy, I’m glad I got that behind me,’ ” he has often said when
discussing his formative years. It is a feeling he expressed during conversations
with All the Right Moves director Michael Chapman, whom he admired for his
work as cinematographer on his favorite movie, Raging Bull. “I know that as a
teenager and a child he had felt a kind of fear of not escaping whatever it is
children want to escape from.” Cruise’s Stefen Djordjevic is the roughly drawn
blueprint for the generic character to come, an egotistical, self-absorbed but
ultimately successful hero. His character’s relentless ambition eventually
translates into glorious triumph, an arc of achievement that seemed to mirror the
actor’s own life.
If Risky Business cemented his popular appeal, All the Right Moves showed
that he had acting range. This young man, still only twenty-one, had started as a
junior member of the Brat Pack, but was now showing his rivals a clean pair of
heels, consolidating his position as one of the leading stars of his generation.

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