Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Runaway Train, actors Jon Voight and Eric Roberts received Academy Award

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nominations for their roles as escaped criminals on an out-of-control train.
Movie fans regularly vote the film, where Rebecca plays a railway worker on the
wrong train at the wrong time, one of the best ever.
On the surface, the third film she made that year, The Slugger’s Wife, also
oozed quality. Not only was she working with a script by Neil Simon, who wrote
The Odd Couple, but she was directed by the legendary auteur Hal Ashby, who
shot Being There with Peter Sellers. While Tom was spending his days in
makeup, surrounded by fairies and goblins, waiting to utter risible dialogue, his
girlfriend was working with the cream of Hollywood. Or so it seemed.
If that wasn’t bad enough for Tom’s ego, she played a sexy nightclub singer
who has a torrid affair with a baseball star played by Michael O’Keefe. For a
young man who had been cheated on by his two previous lovers, it was hard to
be completely trusting, especially as he knew all about the chemistry that could
easily be generated between a leading man and lady. After all, it was how he had
met Rebecca. Nor did it help that billboards advertising the film showed
Rebecca and her screen lover in an openmouthed kiss. “I go to a movie and see
Rebecca doing a love scene with another guy, telling him that she loves him. I’m
always facing my fears,” he admitted at the time.
Behind the scenes, the movie was suffering from competing egos—Neil
Simon refused to countenance changes to his script, and director Hal Ashby was
fired for drug abuse. For Rebecca, still learning her craft, her role as singer and
actress was too far a stretch. As her costar Michael O’Keefe recalls, “She was in
a bit over her head.” A long-distance relationship between two ambitious actors
on the brink of stardom was also too far a stretch. The parting of the ways was,
as an actress friend of Rebecca explained, “a very unpleasant experience for her.
She didn’t really want to talk about it. It was very abrupt.”
When she did speak publicly about the breakup, she admitted that it was a
painful experience. “We were both ambitious and hardworking. I’m afraid the
ending was not very amicable.” Her reasons touched on the clash of egos
underlying the amicable public façade. “There’s the potential threat of
competition, there’s a continual threat of long separations, of major love scenes,
of adverse publicity, and the transitory nature of the business itself.” Tom was
much more pragmatic and stern. “When something is not working, you have to
face it and move on.”
Move on he did, trading the up-and-coming for an established Hollywood star.
At thirty-nine, his new girlfriend, Cher, was nearer in age to his mother than to
the twenty-three-year-old actor, but she was 24-carat movie royalty, their outings
guaranteed to make headlines and keep Tom’s name in the news. As a sign of
how far and how fast he had traveled, he met Cher at a fund-raising event for

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dyslexia at the White House in the presence of First Lady Nancy Reagan. Tom,
Cher, and Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, among others, were presented with an
award for Outstanding Learning Disabled Achievement. Both Cher and Tom had
experienced learning difficulties caused by dyslexia. While Tom was diagnosed
early, Cher learned that her problems in reading, telling time, and writing checks
were caused by dyslexia only after her daughter, Chastity, had been diagnosed
with the condition.
“If I read a script, I read it very slowly and memorized it the first time I read
it,” she told the White House audience, which included youngsters from the Lab
School, which helps students cope with learning difficulties. Tom admitted that
he had a dictionary by his side to help him read scripts. “I couldn’t read The New
York Times because I couldn’t read the big words,” he has said. “It was
humiliating for me. When I started working on films, I had to buy a dictionary. I
started out with the Young Reader’s Dictionary and worked my way up to bigger
dictionaries. I’d sit on an airplane with a script and a dictionary.”
While their perceived mutual disability helped break the social ice, Tom’s
rising star and Cher’s existing place in the Hollywood firmament also drew them
together. Cher, who was known for dating younger men before it became
fashionable, was instantly attracted to the young actor. His yearlong sojourn in
London had brought one benefit—he had lost the preppy, pudgy Risky Business
persona and had honed and toned his body from his role in Legend. “I can’t take
my eyes off the guy,” Cher told an associate admiringly. “He’s so damn
handsome, all I want to do is stare at him.” They dated off and on for a few
months, becoming regular gossip column fodder. Of course, it didn’t hurt that
both Tom and Cher had films to promote in 1985. Her second major feature, The
Mask, a true-life drama about a disfigured teenager growing up in Southern
California, cemented the singer’s growing reputation as a serious actress.
Even though the age difference meant that neither side really took the
relationship that seriously—Cher’s daughter, Chastity, was only eight years
younger than Tom—they liked hanging out together. “Cher is funny and bright
and we’re good buddies and that’s it,” he told People magazine. He stayed with
her in her Malibu home, and when Cher visited New York she often stayed at his
apartment, whether or not he was in residence. In fact, Chastity was staying at
Tom’s apartment when she made the most painful phone call of her life. A
lonely, troubled child, she confessed to her father, Sonny Bono, that not only
was she a lesbian, but she had been having an affair with a friend of her mother’s
who was also gay. Cher was furious and ordered her to leave Tom’s apartment
and see a therapist. “Mum did not comfort me with kisses and cuddles, because

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it was not the family way,” she later recalled. “Instead, she sent me to a
therapist.” It took Cher nearly a decade to come to terms with her daughter’s
sexuality. “It’s a difficult thing for a parent,” she said later. “It’s one thing to be
completely liberal when it doesn’t affect you. When it does, you really have to
search your soul long and hard.” It seems that Tom, who had his own issues with
homosexuality, played little part in this family drama other than giving Chastity
shelter in his New York home. Certainly she always got on well with her
mother’s younger boyfriends. “It doesn’t matter to me if they’re closer to my age
than hers,” she said.
When he was out on a date with Cher in New York one night, there was a
poignant reminder of Tom’s past. They were dining at a restaurant called
Fiorella’s on Sixtieth and Third. By chance their waitress was Lorraine Gauli,
his friend from Glen Ridge. When he had first arrived at the high school, she
was a TV personality and seemingly destined for fame and fortune. After drama
school, her acting career had petered out into a sad procession of failed auditions
and screen tests. Now the woman who had encouraged him to try his hand at
acting faced the indignity of serving as waitress to her protégé. “I was so
humiliated,” she recalls. “I had told everyone he was a friend of mine, and here I
was waiting tables.”
In the circumstances it would have been easy for him to ignore his onetime
helpmate, but he introduced her to Cher and made pleasant small talk. He had
made it, she hadn’t: He could afford to be Mr. Nice Guy. It was an episode that
symbolized how far and how quickly he had come. Tom had closed the chapter
on his past life and opened another book where he was finally in control of his
destiny. One that had “success” embossed on the cover.
That may have been how others saw him, but he had a different view. Beneath
the cocky, self-assured persona was a young man not entirely comfortable with
his newfound fame. In media interviews he was stiff and overly serious,
endlessly talking about his “craft.” He found the attention of the public,