Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Born on the Fourth of July, especially as this was a movie project that had been
hanging around Hollywood for a decade. He might not have even looked at the
script if he had not shared the same agent as the film’s director, Oliver Stone, or
if Tom Pollock, the head of Universal Pictures, had not agreed to provide $14
million in funding because he believed it was one of the “great unmade
screenplays of the last decade.”
At first sight, this true story of Ron Kovic, an innocent young patriot from
Long Island who gets his spine shattered in combat during the Vietnam War and
returns home to indifference and life in a wheelchair, was well past its sell-by

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date. Not only had Hollywood covered the conflict—Oliver Stone’s own
Vietnam movie Platoon had won the Best Picture award in 1987—but the world
itself had moved on. With the Cold War thawing fast—the Berlin Wall fell in
December 1989—the new generation of moviegoers remembered Vietnam
simply as an event, like World War II, in American history.
Tom, however, was intrigued not only by a searing human story that
challenged his acting abilities, but also by a curious sense of destiny about the
movie. His own birthday was the day before July 4, but more significantly his
acting hero Al Pacino had been slated for the starring role a decade earlier,
before production was canceled because funding dried up. Even though he was
researching his part in Rain Man, Tom agreed to meet Oliver Stone in a New
York restaurant in January 1988. Not for the first time, Stone’s passionate
intensity was both mesmerizing and convincing to an actor. By the end of lunch,
Tom was as committed to the part of Ron Kovic as Stone was to Tom. “I chose
Tom because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit,” recalled Stone later.
“They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to
prove something. Like Ron, too, Tom is wound real tight.”
As a result, once Rain Man was green-lighted, Tom found himself researching
and preparing for two demanding roles at the same time, to the point where he
would meet Dustin Hoffman and Barry Levinson in the morning, and Stone and
Ron Kovic in the afternoon. His schedule was so demanding that Paul Newman
sent him a six-pack of beer with a note urging him to sit down, relax, and take a
weekend off. No such luck. The pace was remorseless, and understandably,
Stone, who had spent ten frustrating years trying to shepherd the story onto the
screen, was nervous that it would prove too much for his leading man. He called
Tom constantly for fear that he would pull out. “I will give you everything I
have, trust me,” an exasperated Tom finally told him.
Less sure was Ron Kovic. It may have been a challenging role for Tom and a
“sacred mission” for director Oliver Stone, who had fought in Vietnam, but it
was Ron Kovic’s life. His initial skepticism about the choice of Cruise was
blunted when Tom first visited his home in Los Angeles. After he pulled up to
the house, Tom slowly eased himself out of his car and into a wheelchair—a
clear sign that he was taking the enterprise very seriously. As they sat in his
kitchen, Tom convinced Kovic that he was committed to portraying him in an
understanding and sympathetic way. Kovic recalls looking at Cruise, who then
represented the all-American screen action hero, and thinking: “He’s about to go
through this hell and he doesn’t even know it.” Ironically, it was the nature of
Tom’s public persona that made him so potent in the part—as Oliver Stone and
Universal boss Tom Pollock immediately recognized. Pollock recalled: “The

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film’s journey is more powerful when it is made by the maverick from Top Gun.
It’s not only Ron who goes through this wrenching story, it is Tom Cruise—our
perception of Tom Cruise.”
For the best part of a year, Tom put himself through mental and physical
torture as he tried to convey the anger and agonies undergone by Kovic.
Routinely described as intense and focused, for once Tom met his match in his
director, who was utterly absorbed by the story. Twice Stone sent him to boot
camp. “I didn’t want his foxhole dug by his cousin,” he said afterward. Stone
was constantly encouraging his leading man to read more about Vietnam, to
meet more veterans and visit more hospitals to truly understand the anguish and
helplessness felt by these forgotten heroes.
At one point, in the madness that infects this kind of passionate, close-quarters
project, Stone convinced Tom to allow himself to be injected with a chemical
that would have rendered him paralyzed for two days so that he could more
realistically convey the incontinent, impotent torture of a once-virile young man
confined to a wheelchair. As there was a chance that he would have suffered
permanent incapacitation, the insurance company wisely vetoed the madcap
idea. It was reminiscent of the time Dustin Hoffman went without sleep for two
days during the filming of Marathon Man so he could better express his
exhaustion. His costar, British actor Laurence Olivier, laconically remarked,
“Try acting . . . it’s easier.”
Even without drugs, researching life in a wheelchair showed him how the
invisible half lived. It was exhausting, uncomfortable, and frustrating, leaving
him weary at the end of the day. Tom went around stores and malls with Ron,
watching how he coped with his disability. On one occasion they were asked to
leave a store because their wheelchairs were damaging the rubber carpet. “I
couldn’t believe it,” Cruise recalled. “There were nights when I went home and
couldn’t help but think that this could be me.” He stayed in character for
meetings with movie executives and journalists, who were nonplussed by the
sight of the wild-eyed, wheelchair-bound figure confronting them. Even at home
he remained focused on the character he now inhabited, at night his wife
watching him slowly struggle into bed from his wheelchair. It probably didn’t
help his marriage when, in May 1989, the American tabloid the Globe insinuated
that Tom’s low sperm count was the reason why Mimi was not yet pregnant. It
was a claim that haunted Tom long after he had left his wheelchair behind, the
actor later successfully suing a German magazine for repeating the story.
The three-month shoot, which started in Dallas, with battle scenes filmed in
the Philippines, was as raw as the research. Tom shaved his head, lost weight,
and became so exhausted by the brutal twelve-hour days that there were times

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when he would just fall into Stone’s arms. “I’m not saying it’s the healthiest
thing to do, but it was the right thing to do, and the only way to play that
character,” he later told director Cameron Crowe. It was, as Kovic predicted, a
journey to hell and back as Tom tried to convey the horror of accidentally
shooting a comrade in Vietnam as well as the rage he felt against his broken
body, his unresponsive family, and an uncaring nation. This unrequited fury was
finally channeled into Kovic’s antiwar activism. Tom admitted that he was just
“burnt out” by the intense process. “I have got absolutely nothing left,” he
recalled after the final battle scenes were shot on location in the Philippines.
It certainly won over Kovic. As filming came to a close in July 1989, he
presented Tom with his own Bronze Star as a twenty-seventh birthday present.
“He gave it to Tom for bravery,” said Oliver Stone, “for having gone through
this experience in hell as much as any person can without actually having been
there.”
It was no coincidence that as Tom was researching his role as Ron Kovic, one of
his new, carefully handpicked Scientology companions was Vietnam veteran Pat
Gualtieri. A sensitive, intelligent man, he had served with 5th Battalion 2nd
Artillery north of Saigon and lived to tell the tale when he and his 180-strong
unit were attacked by 10,000 North Vietnamese regulars at the opening of the
Tet Offensive. When the Brooklyn-born draftee returned home in 1968, he found
a nation ill at ease with itself, and headed to California looking for answers
about the mystery of life. He tried numerous “isms” before settling on
Scientology. Easygoing and popular, Pat was an ideal guide who, along with his
superior, Inspector General Greg Wilhere, explained the language and thinking
behind the faith to their star acquisition.
Slowly, carefully, and gently, Tom was eased into the world of Scientology.
By the summer of 1989, senior Scientologists felt confident enough to invite
Tom to their secret, secluded, and heavily guarded Gold Base, deep in the
California desert. When he accepted, new leader David Miscavige gleefully
announced to his closest staff, “The most important recruit ever is in the process
of being secured. His arrival will change the face of Scientology forever.”

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