Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  There were compensations in his life, as he told Barbara Walters on American TV. His three sisters used to bring girlfriends home and sit eight-year-old Tom on the refrigerator where he would be instructed in the art of French kissing. “The first time I almost suffocated,” he later told Walters. The ramification of this early exposure to women might merit a book in itself.

  Another move in the early seventies took the family to Canada. They lived in a small town on the outskirts of Ottawa. Although Tom was more than proficient in soccer, baseball, wrestling and football, he didn’t even know how to skate and ice hockey was Canada’s national game. Then as now the rules were more honoured in the breach than the observance and every so often the players would break off for an unruly brawl. Fearing for the features of her small son, Mary Lee told Tom not to play the game but with the tenacity that was to become his trademark he learnt to skate – forwards and backwards – on a rink before and after school and made the team. He also escaped injury but somehow managed to chip a tooth while playing tennis. This, it is said, caused him to be shy with girls in his teenage years despite the training he had obtained in osculation in his youth.

  His mother had acting aspirations and might have prefigured her son’s presence in Hollywood were it not for strong Catholic convictions that kept her out of that city of sin.

  So Mary Lee taught creative drama and now was able to indulge in amateur dramatics, even founding an Am-Dram society when the family ended up in the outskirts of Ottowa. Young Tom has memories of attending the rehearsal of a play which she had written and both she and her husband were acting in. He recalled that his father was rather stiff but his mother was good and held herself well – an art in which he was later to excel. For the time being he contented himself with imitations in the kitchen: Mickey Rooney, John Wayne, W.C. Fields and Daffy Duck.

  It was all the more remarkable that his father was prepared to join in the play since his marriage had seriously deteriorated. In the summer of 1974 both parents called their four children into the living room and told them they had decided to get a divorce. It was a shattering blow. Tom went into the garden afterwards to hit a few baseballs with his dad, but tears blinded his eyes.

  The children’s loyalty lay with their mother, however. Fearing she might lose custody of them under Canadian law, Mary Lee ordered them all to secretly pack suitcases and keep them under their beds. Tom even slept with his baseball glove. It was like something out of the Great Escape. A week after the family gathering, she woke the children up at 4.30 am and they tiptoed downstairs with their belongings to the station wagon. Their mother, pent-up with emotion, caned the car to the Canadian border. “We felt like fugitives,” recalls Tom, which in fact they were: fugitives from their father. Mary Lee made for her mother’s house in Louisville, Kentucky. Tom would only see his father twice again.

  Coming south from Canada, Cruise to a certain extent reinvented himself. Certainly he dropped his Canadian twang and adopted a Southern drawl. Through his peripatetic life he was used to change – “In every different place I became a different person.”

  A more serious problem than acclimatization in Louisville was cash. Mary Lee had family there and even the Mapothers were sympathetic to her plight, but she was too proud to take more than the most minimal financial help. Cruise remembers those days with pain. “One time my mother went to apply for food stamps. She saw all these people and she said ‘I don’t care what it takes, I am not coming here again.’ The shame of handing over the stamps at the market where she was known was too much for her.

  No money was forthcoming from her husband and during their marriage she had stayed at home to bring up the four children – Cass was barely a teenager. Now they had to grow up fast. All the girls worked after school as waitresses and Tom worked before school on a five am paper round and knocked the doors of neighbours to get work mowing lawns and clearing up leaves.

  Their house was a small bungalow in a row of similar dwellings, setback from the road by a large swathe of grass so there was plenty to mow. Raymond Wilder, their neighbour, still lives there. He remembers them as “good people” although Tom at thirteen already had a competitive streak. “He was athletic and he challenged me to a game of tennis. If he lost, he threw his racquet down and stomped around and wanted to play again. But I was too old to play again.”

  Tom admits: “I didn’t have a lot of friends. The closest people around me were my family. I think they felt a little nervous about me because I had a lot of energy and couldn’t stick to one thing. If I worked in an ice-cream store – and I’ve worked in a lot of them – I would be the best for two weeks, then I was always quitting or getting fired because I was bored.”

  His mother, meanwhile, attempted to hold down two jobs and, when possible, work as a saleswoman in weekend exhibitions. She had picked up a little about electronics from her husband.

  Tom, not even a teenager had another role: that of paterfamilias. This, too, is a seminal key to comprehending what makes Tom tick. Many people have suggested that his appetite for controlling others and his confidence in doing so was born of his experience with the Church of Scientology; in fact it was firmly in place long before he even heard of L. Ron Hubbard. Although younger than Lee Anne and Marian he was fiercely protective of them.

  Lee Anne, in a rare interview, told Vanity Fair about it in 1994. “Whenever any of us girls started dating anybody we were serious about, having them meet Tom was a big deal. His opinion has always weighed very heavily with all of us.”

  It is said that his youngest sister, Cass, was surprised that a boy she had been dating regularly refused to kiss her. Family legend has it that Tom had threatened to kill the poor fellow if he so much as touched her.

  It may have been relief that the girls learnt their brother was going to leave Louisville and continue his education at St. Francis near Cincinatti. This was not just any boarding school; St. Francis Seminary was run by Franciscan monks and its prime aim was to prepare young men for the priesthood.

  It has been perceived by some that this was to enable the newly impoverished Mary Lee to lighten her burden by a quarter for the school would award someone of her means a full scholarship as well as giving her son a bed and a uniform. But it would be idle to suppose that such an extreme step would have been taken on these grounds alone. Did the now teenage Tom realize the full ramifications of the future that lay ahead of him? One can only presume that for a short time, at least, he did and that the priesthood, with its vow of chastity, was not abhorrent to him as a way of life. “I’ve had such extremes in my life,” he observed, “from being this wild kid to studying to be a Franciscan priest in the seminary.”

  The discipline was stern there – but Tom was made of stern stuff. Pedantic rules that gave pleasure to petty minds – certain areas of lawn were out of bounds, a pupil must place his foot on every step when ascending or descending the stairs – were enforced with a rigor that would have endeared itself to Tom Brown’s Flashman. In fact beatings for the more serious infringements of the rules – usually booze and smoking – were not uncommon.

  Tom shared a dormitory with twenty other pupils who were roused at 6.40 am every day to follow a strict regime, the most important hour of which was Mass. The school was a stylish collegiate building surrounded by 150 acres which meant that he was able to indulge in his growing passion for sport.

  Father John Boehman, who taught him, remembers him well: “He was certainly spiritual. I don’t think a boy could come here if he wasn’t spiritual. He used to sit in the front of the chapel because he was the smallest boy in his class. He kept his eyes glued on me when I conducted the service.”

  Being new to the school Tom didn’t know anybody and remained somewhat of a loner. Father Hilarian Kistner, another former teacher, recalls: “I would come over to the gym after lunch and he would be playing around with a basketball. We would play a game together shooting hoops.”

  The place closed down due to lack of pupils. But
their best known alumnus has said: “It was the best year I ever did at school.” Tom only stayed a year. He didn’t feel he had a true calling. But it had been a necessary experiment. Father Kistner says: “They came to the school to find out if that’s what God wanted them to do.”

  Cruise has subsequently said that he didn’t become “too close” to becoming a priest and recalled: “We used to sneak out of the school on weekends and go to this girl’s house in town, sit around, talk and play Spin the Bottle (a kissing game). I just realized I loved women too much to give that up.” However his first wife, Mimi Rogers, perhaps with a degree of animosity, did reveal that he practised celibacy for almost a year of their marriage while he decided if he wanted to go into the Catholic church.

  Much more revealing in the quest for what makes Tom tick is his need for a creed, for rules by which he could make sense of and live his life. The fact that Scientology replaced the Church of Rome is possibly subsidiary to the fact that, given he had no college education nor knowledge of the great philosophers and other beliefs, from the Mormons to the Moonies, he craved something that could make sense of the universe to him and was to find it in Scientology.

  Christmas at home was an exiguous affair. With insufficient money to buy presents the Mapother children wrote poems and gave them to each other and, at a more prosaic level, gave the gift of a task – like making somebody’s bed for a week. Not that it wasn’t festive. Mary Lee still had a desire for the smell of grease paint, something she liberally applied to her son as she dressed him up for a sketch as a Victorian lady with lipstick and eye-shadow, pearls and a feather hat.

  Back in the bosom of his family, Tom seemed to have little room for friends on the outside. In 1986 he told the magazine, Rolling Stone: “After a divorce you feel so vulnerable. And traveling the way I did you’re closed off a lot from other people. I didn’t express a lot to people where I moved. They didn’t have the childhood I had, and I didn’t feel like they’d understand me. I was always warming up, getting acquainted with everyone. I went through a period after the divorce of really wanting to be accepted, wanting love and attention from people. But I never really seemed to fit in anywhere.”

  It doesn’t take a soothsayer to see that this craving for love and attention was to be sublimated in years to come when the superstar went among the crowds at the premiere of his films.

  The image of him sitting on the steps of their house playing his guitar should be set against the fact that every week he would cross the border into Indiana to join in a regular hockey game with boys there.

  Probably nothing hit Tom harder than the lack of money. They had had sufficient and now they had insufficient. Desperate times called for desperate measures. His scholarship had run out, Mary Lee did not make enough to rent a house for her for herself and her four children so she had to forgo her pride and accept the charity of her family. Tom was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, the Barratts.

  Perhaps learning from his brother that Mary Lee was at her lowest, Thomas Mapother 111 made an attempt to re-enter the life of his family. He even took Tom and Cass to a drive-in movie. But he was too late. Mary Lee had met another man at one of her electronics conventions. Jack South, a plastic salesman, married her and moved the family to the genteel surroundings of Glen Ridge, New Jersey a town set in a time-warp with colonial mansions and a Queen Anne style railway station serving as the local post office. It was a safe environment, the sort of place where you wouldn’t bother to lock your car, and the perfect environment to raise a family.

  Tom had a duality of emotion towards his stepfather: he had usurped the young man’s role as chief male but on the other hand he was happy to bet against him on football games and – surprise, surprise – nearly always lost.

  Tom enrolled in his fifteenth and final school, Glen Ridge High. It was an austere concrete block compared to the mock-Gothic buildings and rolling lawns of St. Francis. But it was to be there that he experienced the decisive moment that would change his life for ever.

  He tried out for the school wrestling team and greatly impressed his coach, Angelo Carbo, enough for the man to suggest to him that a wrestling scholarship might be the best method of paying his fees at university. “At first he had to learn a lot about wrestling not having done it before. He learnt it here. It is the most demanding sport in high school and he gave it a hundred per cent. It was an advantage to be small – you wrestle fewer upper classmen.”

  The notion of college appealed to Tom. He had a long term plan to become a pilot in the Navy Air Force. This was born of his passion for the film ‘Midway’, (released as ‘The Battle of Midway’ in the UK), which had the stellar cast of Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, Robert Wagner, Edward Albert, Glenn Ford and Toshiro Mifune.

  It told the story of an epic encounter between the Americans and Japanese in June of 1942. A large Japanese carrier force attempted to break the Pacific stalemate by occupying the American island of Midway in the hope of engaging the American fleet and causing it irreparable damage. But, through ignorance or arrogance, they hadn’t factored in the might of the Naval Airforce which, operating off just three aircraft carriers, after a fierce and valiant three day battle, decimated the Japanese fleet and turned the fate of the war in the Pacific in America’s favour.

  Guts, heroism, patriotism all impacted on the teenage Cruise who had an immediate vision of his mission in life. Ironically, it would only be realized on celluloid.

  On the eve of an upcoming wrestling match with a neighbouring school, Tom found that he was a pound overweight for the category in which he was to fight. So he decided to lose it by running up and down the stairs at home. Recklessly, without fear or much forethought, he tripped and tumbled to the bottom of the stairs, fortunately not breaking his neck but tearing a tendon in his leg which put an end to his wrestling career and any hope of a university scholarship.

  The Chinese ideogram for ‘calamity’ is the same as the one for ‘opportunity’. It is a more concise way of expressing the Western idioms ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ and ‘when one door closes another opens.’ In the case of Tom Cruise, all three were to have their most potent proof.

  Unable to play sport, he was still anxious to make a good impression at Glen Ridge and volunteered for a part in the chorus of the school production of ‘Guys and Dolls.’ Early in rehearsal the drama teacher caught Cruise’s gift for mimicry which had been homed in the kitchen doing Mickey Rooney and John Wayne impressions for his mother. Could he catch the Brooklyn drawl of Nathan Detroit? Indeed he could, as well as assume the shady Damon Runyon character who ran a floating crap game, a part played by Frank Sinatra opposite Marlon Brando as Sky Masterton in the 1955 film.

  His friend and contemporary at Glen Ridge, Tom Tapke Jr., acknowledged Tom was good but had no inkling of the life that lay ahead of him. “I would say he was one of the top performers in the play. He just had a lot of charisma and really absorbed himself in whatever he did. He was somewhat of a perfectionist. I remember he had a love for automobiles and I figured he might be a real good mechanic when he got older.”

  However Cruise was getting a standing ovation at each performance to the amazement of everybody except Mary Lee. She had always known he was a gifted performer from the early kitchen days. “He had it in him then. But as he got older he was more into sports and it stopped completely.”

  Tom was seventeen when his mother and step-father attended the first night of ‘Guys and Dolls.’ “I can’t describe the feeling that was there,” Mary Lee recalled, “It was just an incredible experience to see what we felt was a lot of talent coming forth all of a sudden. It had been dormant for so many years – not thought of or talked about or discussed in any way. Then to see him on that stage.”

  The experience of playing Nathan totally changed Tom’s life. “I just loved it. At the schools I grew up in sensitivity was not accepted. Especially being the new kid, I felt vulnerable a lot of the time, constantly havi
ng to put up these guards to take care of myself. You didn’t sit around with the guys and say: ‘God, that really hurt my feelings, what you said.’ It was more like: ‘Yeah, let’s go out, have some beers and kick some ass.’ That was really frustrating to me. So the first time I did the play, all the guys came and saw it and said ‘Whoa, we didn’t know you could do that.’ I felt good about it. Not just the fact that they saw it, but I felt good about it in my heart..”

  It was his epiphany and he recognised it as such. Perhaps the lines of Nathan’s he had to speak each night infiltrated his intuition, “You only get one chance to roll the die of life. Make it wisely.” In tandem with his impetuosity was an almost eerie confidence. “If I could just focus in and do something, I know I’ve got the creativity and the energy to be great.