Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

the Prairie, to a performance of Sophisticated Ladies on Broadway. Dressed in a
preppy sport coat and tie, the unknown Tom Cruise looked awkward and rather
gauche as photographers snapped the young couple in the theater foyer. By
contrast, Melissa, at the time a well-known child star, seemed relaxed and at ease
with the publicity. “I date different people and I’m not serious about any of
them,” she later said.
It was perhaps his first taste of the life that lay before him. After a short break

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at an uncle’s holiday home in Kentucky at the end of filming, he flew to
Hollywood, where he joined up with Sean and Tim, who had arrived at the
airport with his Oscar for Ordinary People casually tossed into a duffel bag. To
save money, he divided his time between staying with Sean at Zumirez, his
Malibu home, and in West Hollywood with composer and longtime friend of the
Penn family, Joseph Vitarelli.
According to those who saw him at the time, it was a Spartan existence. He
lived in a bare room, a mattress on the floor and a telephone by the pillow. The
only decoration was a pile of film scripts, empty beer bottles, and pizza takeout
boxes. While the home comforts were rudimentary, as far as Tom was concerned
he was living at the best address in the world . . . Hollywood.
For the boy from Glen Ridge it was an intoxicating brew. Not only was there
the excitement of being at the heart of the movie industry, but Sean Penn quickly
introduced him to the in-crowd of young guns eager to make a name for
themselves. They hung out at the then trendy Hard Rock Cafe or On the Rox, a
private club on Sunset, spending time with Sean’s brother Chris, whom Tom
taught how to wrestle, as well as other longtime friends like Emilio Estevez and
Rob and Chad Lowe. Of course, he already knew Tim Hutton. As Sean Penn’s
former fiancée Elizabeth McGovern says, “I do think that Sean is an absolute
Hollywood animal.” They would later become known as the Brat Pack, a
dismissive term based on the 1950s Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and
Sammy Davis Jr. It was a term that rankled with these young men, not only
because they didn’t think their party behavior was so outrageous, but also each
considered himself a star in his own right, not part of a group. As Emilio
Estevez, who was deemed to be dean of the fraternity, later remarked, “We were
just guys being guys. We’d meet to let off steam, that was all.” And part of that
behavior was having the good looks and nerve to pick up a Playboy centerfold
model, as Emilio did one evening at the Hard Rock Cafe.
Certainly Tom was not slow in following his friend’s lead. When he first
arrived in Los Angeles, the nineteen-year-old started dating Melissa Gilbert
again. According to Melissa, who was later engaged to another member of the
Brat Pack, “I can honestly say that he’s a very sexual person. He gave me
butterflies in my tummy and there was a lot of making out on the couch in my
mom’s living room.” Their brief dalliance ended when he was introduced to
Heather Locklear, a beautiful blond model and actress who had already snagged
several small parts in TV series, including an episode of CHiPs. One day Tom
was taking a shower in his Hollywood condo when Heather called him. At the
time his best friend from Glen Ridge, Michael LaForte, was staying with him.
Michael answered the phone and introduced himself as Tom’s better-looking

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“cousin”—their joke reference to each other—and started hitting on her. It was,
he told Tom afterward, just harmless fun . . . but he repeated the story for years,
especially after Heather shot to stardom in the fall of 1981 when producer Aaron
Spelling cast her as Sammy Jo Dean in the TV soap Dynasty.
Certainly the Brat Pack of arrogant, talented young actors seemed destined to
be Hollywood’s future dynasty. Sean’s father, film director Leo Penn, sensed
their potential, singling out his son and Tom Cruise for special mention. He told
Joseph Vitarelli that if this duo got a couple of breaks in Hollywood, “you could
all be in for a hell of a roll.”
Not everyone was so impressed by the cocktail of conceit and ability. Tom’s
pal Vinnie Travisano, who came to visit Cruise for a few days during the
summer of 1981, noticed the changes in him when he took his girlfriend along to
the set of Diff’rent Strokes and watched the action in the company of his old
school buddy and Sean Penn. Neither he nor his date were impressed by these
leading lights of the Brat Pack fraternity. “I got a feel for what an asshole Sean
Penn was at that time,” recalls Vinnie. His school friend did not fare much
better. He and his girlfriend found the new Tom Cruise to be “insufferably
arrogant, utterly self-absorbed and unapproachable.” When Tom suggested that
he and Heather go on a double date with Vinnie and his girlfriend, the girl
refused point-blank. As Vinnie recalls, “She hated him, she just saw this cocky
kid who only cared about himself.” While Vinnie, having known Tom for years,
was much more forgiving—“He was a young man feeling his oats,” he says—he
was still surprised by the transformation.
Vinnie and his girlfriend were not the only ones. Even Tom’s loyal family was
concerned. His mother and his sisters—then working in local restaurants—felt
that everything was happening too fast for him. Calls to his mother and the rest
of his family had become more and more infrequent. He had “gotten cocky” and,
as his sister Cass confided to friends, he was “hard to be around,” which, given
his busy schedule, was not often. Tom had sufficient self-awareness to realize
that, as he later admitted, he was “the most unpleasant person to be around,”
blaming his aggression in part on his intense role in Taps.
His friend Sean Penn was worried about him, too—not because of his
behavior, but because of his next career choice. Tom had followed Sean’s lead
and signed up with the influential Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills.
While Sean had gone with Todd Smith, Tom had chosen Paula Wagner, a former
Broadway actress and sometime playwright. Their introduction, in July 1981,
was tentative—but it was to last much longer than most Hollywood marriages.
“How do you do, Miss Wagner,” said the polite young man in the same brown
corduroy jacket he had worn when he took Melissa Gilbert on a date on

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Broadway. “Nobody had a clue who he was,” Wagner told writer Fred Schruers.
“But from the day I met him, there was something about his eyes and his
presence. He was all there.”
While his choice of agent met with Sean Penn’s approval, his next film pick
did not. Tom signed on for that season’s Hollywood fashion—the teenage
coming-of-age film. The movie Losin’ It was in the same genre of the successful
Porky’s series, where horny adolescents spend ninety minutes trying to raise a
laugh and lose their virginity on the way. “That is when his tension started to
go,” recalled Sean rather censoriously. “I said to him, ‘What are you doing?
You’re gonna destroy your career.’ ”
Tom didn’t see it that way. He was rather flattered that word was out about
him even before Taps was released. Producer Garth Drabinsky was looking for a
“handsome, fresh-faced kid” for Losin’ It and had heard about young Cruise. He
made inquiries and approached Taps director Harold Becker as he was in the
editing room cutting his film. After watching a mere eight seconds of Tom, the
Canadian producer decided to sign him. Even though he was only offered
$35,000 for a three-picture deal, Tom quickly agreed, eager to see his name in
lights. He began to have doubts when he looked at the script more closely. Tom
later recalled, rather shamefacedly, “When I first read it, it was worse than the
released film. I worked hard, but it was a terrible time in my life.”
However bad the movie, it was his first starring role. Tom played one of a
group of California school friends who go to a brothel in Mexico to lose their
virginity. When confronted with a group of prostitutes, his sexual desire, like the
film, flops badly. In his best dramatic moment, he stands in front of the whores,
hands in pockets, confidence and desire draining from his face. Finally he finds
romance in the arms of a young divorcée played by Shelly Long.
Whatever Tom’s misgivings—and those of his friend Sean Penn—the movie
helped launch the careers of Shelly Long, who starred in the TV comedy Cheers,
and director Curtis Hanson, who went on to make the film noir L.A.