Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Room ended, Nicole and Tom watched Eyes Wide Shut for the first time at a
private screening room in Manhattan. Except for two executives from Warner
Bros., they were alone. They watched the movie twice, Tom calling Stanley
Kubrick in London to tell him how much they loved it. Four days later, Kubrick
was dead of a massive heart attack.
“I broke down when I heard,” Tom said about the news. “I was in absolute
shock and disbelief. We had shared two years of our lives together.” Tom was a
pallbearer at the funeral, which was held in a church in St. Albans,
Hertfordshire. At the request of his friend Terry Semel, chairman of Warner
Bros., the stunned actor channeled his grief by taking charge of all things
relating to the movie.
An acknowledged control freak, Kubrick could not have chosen a better
executor, Tom overseeing every detail of the film’s distribution, marketing, and
publicity. He was furious when scriptwriter Frederic Raphael penned a short
book about working with Kubrick without asking permission. For their part,
Raphael’s publishers, Penguin, were astonished at Tom’s reaction to what he
considered an act of treachery. As Raphael recalls, “Penguin said they’d never
seen anything like it—him trying to stop them publishing the book. But then he
is one of these people crazed with wanting total control.”
Tom’s reputation for control faced a further challenge when the noted film
critic Roger Ebert refused to sign a two-page “loyalty oath” before interviewing
the actor about the long-awaited film. The contract insisted on editorial control,
stressing that no interview could portray Tom in a “negative or derogatory
manner” and that “the artist” had the right to delete any parts of the interview he
didn’t like. When Ebert refused to sign, for once it was Tom who caved, the film
critic sitting down for a “frank and forthcoming” chat with the Hollywood star
about the movie.
Much as Tom tried to tame the media tiger, he could never truly control the
unruly beast. Shortly after Kubrick’s funeral, two American tabloids claimed
that two sex therapists had been hired by the director to give Tom and Nicole
lessons in loving. The couple was less than amused, Warner Bros. issuing a
statement denying the story while their lawyers filed suit. Nowhere was Tom’s
hair-trigger sensitivity more exposed than when mention was made of his
involvement with Scientology. During the filming of Eyes Wide Shut, the
magazine Us Weekly stated that Tom felt that actor John Travolta’s involvement
with the production of Battlefield Earth, based on an L. Ron Hubbard novel, was
a “mistake.” Within a week the magazine was forced to print a prominent

---

retraction declaring that Tom was an “active and committed member of the
Church of Scientology,” who had neither said nor even “hinted” at anything
negative to do with Battlefield Earth. That did not stop the film from being
described as the worst movie ever made.
“I don’t like suing people,” Tom told Harper’s Bazaar. “I take no pleasure in
it. But there comes a point where it’s beyond silly; it’s destructive. I will sue. I
will sue every single time that I can until it stops. And when they stop, I will
stop.”
After all the controversy, when Eyes Wide Shut actually opened in July 1999,
it was a huge anticlimax. Even though it was the first of Kubrick’s films to open
at number one at the American box office, the critics were uncertain, some
finding the movie dull and unconvincing, others describing the 159-minute film
as Kubrick’s last masterpiece, a fitting end to a brilliant career. Naturally, much
of the attention focused on the sex scenes, with Nicole viewed as passionate and
sexy in her encounters with Gary Goba, but distant and unengaged when
coupling with her husband. In time, the movie would be seen as much as a coda
to their unraveling marriage as an epitaph to Kubrick’s career.
Tongues were kept wagging that same month when Nicole gave an interview
to writer Tom Junod, who had flown to Sydney, where she was rehearsing