Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

party. As the drink-fueled evening wore on, one assistant recalls that leading
lady Kelly McGillis left the girlfriend with whom she had been dancing, stripped
naked, and jumped into the water. Her costars and pilots from the top gun school
then grabbed Bruckheimer and Simpson and threw them unceremoniously into
the pool. Simpson sank straight to the bottom because he couldn’t swim. “It was
insane,” the assistant told writer Charles Fleming. “Tom had his girls there and
Kelly [McGillis] had hers there. She’s doing the entire navy plus has her lesbian
girlfriend come down on the weekend from Los Angeles. Tony [Scott] has his
girls with the huge boobs, plus Brigitte was there.”
If life was good during the filming of Top Gun, it was about to get a whole lot
better. While he was on board the USS Enterprise, snatching what rest he could
as the jets rumbled overhead, he got a call from the Hollywood director he not
just admired, but revered. Martin Scorsese, the man who made Raging Bull,
wanted him for his latest venture. Just a couple of years before, Tom had been
rapping the script with his friend Vinnie Travisano in his home in Glen Ridge.
Now he had the great man asking if he wanted to work with him. Oh, and there
was the little matter of teaming up with another Hollywood legend—Paul
Newman. As Tom later recalled: “I couldn’t believe this was happening to me.”
The idea was to make a long overdue sequel to the 1961 movie The Hustler,
where Newman played the pool hall king, Fast Eddie Felson. The new film,
entitled The Color of Money, would introduce a younger version of Fast Eddie, a
talented but arrogant pool player called Vincent who plays the apprentice to the

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older sorcerer. Scorsese had seen Tom in All the Right Moves and thought he
would be ideal for the part. Flattered though he was, after a grueling ten-month
filming schedule, Tom was looking forward to taking a break. However, the
opportunity to work—and learn from—two Hollywood greats was too tempting,
and he duly signed up.
This time there was no mythic nonsense about Tom rewriting scripts, editing
the film, or choosing camera shots. He was joining committed and talented
artists at the height of their powers. Newman, Scorsese, and writer Richard Price
had worked on the script and storyboarded the shots for the previous nine
months. When filming began in January 1986, Tom simply had to turn up and
act. That in itself was an intimidating prospect. Cocky as Tom was, he was duly
overawed. Even though they had met before—Tom had read unsuccessfully for
Newman when he was casting his 1984 film Harry & Son—for the first few days
he called the star of the show “Mr. Newman” before the older man told him to
call him Paul.
Unusually, Newman insisted on several weeks of rehearsals before filming
began, the seasoned actor quietly testing the mettle of his young protégé. Tom
practiced pool for hour after relentless hour under the watchful gaze of
professional Mike Sigel. It was a dedication that earned the respect of the
leading man. “He learned to play pool better in six weeks than I did in five
months twenty-five years ago,” Newman recalled. During filming, which took
place mainly in grimy poolrooms in Chicago, Tom did all his own pool shots,
except for a two-ball jump shot executed by Sigel. Even that he could have
managed with more practice, but the tight fifty-day shoot schedule would not
allow that luxury.
The movie was much more than wielding a pool cue like a samurai warrior’s
sword, which Tom did during one scene. At its heart it dealt with the complex
interplay between the old cynic and the young pretender, the older man teaching
his protégé how to hustle and study the psychology of his opponents. Tom had to
step up to the plate as an actor, not just a performer. He realized as soon as he
first met Newman that he was being quietly and subtly assessed. It was a test he
passed. By the end of filming, such was Newman’s respect for the younger man
that when he was nominated for an Academy Award, he sent Tom a telegram:
“If I win, it’s ours as much as mine because you did such a good job.” Newman
did win, and Tom was so proud of the telegram that he framed it and put it on
the wall of his New York apartment.
Indeed, Newman later described the filming of The Color of Money as the
“most creative experience” he had ever had. “During the movie there wasn’t any
ritual dancing. No egos. Tom Cruise and I were just very, very open with each

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other.” From calling him “Mr. Newman” at the beginning of filming, by the end
Tom joined in the “worst joke of the day” competition on set and even gave
Newman a bra and garter belt for his sixty-first birthday. There was a real family
feeling during the production, Scorsese’s wife Barbara De Fina often cooking
pasta and other Italian fare for Tom. The convivial, friendly atmosphere spoke to
Tom’s deep-seated need for family, his yearning for a sense of belonging.
Over the months, his relationship with Paul Newman, rather like the movie
they made together, became much more textured and layered, with mutual
professional respect giving way to a kind of manly friendship. Newman
introduced Tom to his lifelong passion—professional automobile racing. It was a
love affair that had led him to enter the Le Mans twenty-four-hour car rally. At
the end of shooting he arranged for Tom and Don Simpson to have five days of
intensive race training with his driving partner, Jim Fitzgerald. By the end of it,
Tom was hooked, and during the summer race season he watched his friend take