He now knew he wanted to be an actor. Another young man once bravely stood up at a lecture in London by the late Rod Steiger and asked for his advice: he would like to become an actor but he was unsure how wise that was. The audience hooted with derision but Steiger stilled them. “That is a very sensible question and I happen to be able to answer it. If you want to become an actor, don’t. If you have to become an actor, you hardly need my advice.”
So it was with Tom. “All of a sudden you are up there and you’re doing something you really enjoy and people who never turned their heads or said anything before are now saying: ‘Gee, look at him.’ And I said to myself: ‘This is it.’ As soon as I started acting I felt from that point on that if I didn’t go for this I would be making a terrible mistake.”
In retrospect he was to tell Barbara Walters: “I felt I needed to act the way I needed air to breathe.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Unlike a twentieth century Dick Whittington, Tom did not expect the streets of New York to be paved with gold. He arrived with a few hundred dollars that he had saved from doing holiday jobs and a loan of $800 from his step-father.
He had told Mary Lee and Jack that he was going to give himself three years to crack it as an actor in the Big Apple. If he wasn’t earning a living by the time he was twenty-eight he would try something else. Only too aware of his steely determination, they put no obstacles in his way. “We felt he had a God-given talent,” said Mary Lee. “We gave him our blessing and the rest is history.”
Her enthusiasm for her son’s chosen profession was such that she drove him, herself, to Manhattan in a green Ford Pinto which Tom had purchased for $50. Thanks in part to being observed in ‘Guys and Dolls’, he had managed to find a female manager but, at seventeen, was to young to sign papers and so Mary Lee was obliged to give her consent as parent.
Tobe Gibson is still in the job today, looking out for up and coming talent. “I knew from the moment he came in he shook my hand and said: ‘Hi, I’m Tommy.’ I am very psychic and I said: ‘I think you’re going to be a major star.’ I never heard him sing, I never heard him read, I never saw him dance. But I knew he could do it.”
Tobe also knew the name Mapother IV was hardly a star appellation and so, as she recalls it: “I had a brochure from cruises by my desk and I suggested he change his name to Cruise. He said: ‘I like that. I think the name was in my family some generations back.’ So he walked in as Thomas Mapother 1V and he walked out as Tom Cruise.”
Having signed on for the status of ‘out-of- work actor’ he found himself doing the traditional round of menial jobs: he unloaded trucks, waited tables and for more than a year was an assistant superintendent at a building on the upper east side at 86th Street and Amsterdam.
The job came to an abrupt end when Cruise’s patience ran out. “People would call me in the middle of the night and say ‘My heating’s not working’. And I replied ‘my fucking heating’s not working, either.’”
He took classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a revered institution, with alumni ranging from Gregory Peck to Diane Keaton, where Sanford Meisner developed what is known as the “Meisner Technique”, a step-by-step procedure of self-investigation for the actor based on the original principles of the Russian acting pioneer, Constantine Stanislavsky.
Harold Baldridge, who was running the Playhouse in Tom’s time, placed great emphasis on risk, something that was undoubtedly helped form the young actor who was prepared to essay ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Interview with the Vampire’.
“The actor in training,” Baldridge taught, “learns by doing, doing it wrong, doing it wrong probably several times wrong before he or she finds the way that works best for him or her. Learning to act is about stretching yourself, venturing into areas where most people are reluctant to reveal themselves. Most times when you get there, they are not such frightening places at all.”
Tom welcomed this approach; he wanted to be pushed. Baldridge passed on the wisdom gained in his career as a director in the theatre. “If you do nothing but perform, then you are stuck with what you know works and there might be other parts of your instrument that you could use. We give you the opportunity to go out on a tightrope saying: ‘I don’t know if this is going to work, but I’m going to try it.’”
Cruise was unable to afford a full-time course but would take classes in the evenings. “It was great,” he recalls. “I was like an animal in the jungle. I didn’t have enough money to buy food, so I’d walk to my classes. Save that $1.25 so that I could buy hot dogs and rice.”
His first part didn’t require too much Stanislavsky. He played Herb in a dinner theatre production of ‘Godspell’. in Bloomfield, New Jersey. This was the musical version of the Gospel According to St. Matthew that John-Michael Tebelak had written as masters thesis. In the famous Toronto production, starring the late Gilda Radner and Martin Short, Eugene Levy (who later found fame in ‘American Pie’) played Herb who ultimately takes on the role of Jesus himself.
In fact the Meisner Technique might not have stood Tom in good stead in his early attempts at a career. It seems to have been the case that he was already far too intense without the introspection. When up for a commercial where he had to tell children to “Eat the Fritos” the general consensus was that he would frighten small children. He never got any commercials. “I guess I’m a kind of obsessive person when I’m working on something,” he acknowledged.
Tobe Gibson maintains: “He took off immediately. The word was out that there was a hot new actor in town. Phone Tobe Gibson and get Tom Cruise.”
But he grew disillusioned with his manager. She would ask him to run errands, fetching groceries or her dry cleaning, so he fired her. She pointed out that he couldn’t: he had signed a five-year contract. He pointed out that he had been under-age when he signed it so it wasn’t legal – and hired a lawyer to back him up, a mature initiative for one so young and a sign of things to come. Tobe Gibson remains bitter about this. “I was very angry. Not angry that he left. That’s his privilege. The way he did it was not very nice. You plant a seed and you want to see it flourish into a flower.”
A change of manager brought a new horizon. He was flown to Los Angeles to try out for a situation comedy. At the end of his audition the casting agent asked him: “How long are you going to be out here?” Tom recalled: “I was thinking ‘I kicked ass in this reading – this guy’s gonna ask me for a callback - he’s probably going to want me to come and read again with someone else.’ So I said: ‘Oh, about a week or so.’ ‘Oh, a week,’ he said. ‘Well, get a tan while you’re here.’ It was just so cold I walked out and I thought to myself: ‘Did that really happen?’ I thought it was the funniest damn thing. Tears were coming out of my eyes, I was laughing so hard. I thought ‘This is Hollywood – welcome, Cruise.’”
Back on the East Coast a producer informed him that he was too intense and not pretty enough for television. He should try features.
Such setbacks might have made most mortals think about an alternative profession, but they merely quickened Tom’s resolve. “I felt that people rejecting me were there to help me in the long run. Sometimes it hurts, but I truly believe there are parts I am supposed to get and parts I am not supposed to get and something else will come along.”
The exotic Italian director, Franco Zefferelli, famed for his work on ‘Romeo and Juliet’(1968) and ‘The Champ’ (1979), took a shine to Tom, calling him “bellissimo” when they met, and cast him in ‘Endless Love’ (1981), Cruise’s first feature.
Bruce Robinson, who wrote the marvelous ‘Withnail and I’, had a small part in Zeffirelli’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Many of the extras were played by Oxford undergraduates and Zeffirelli’s endless pursuit of pretty young Robinson caused him to satirize the director in the character of randy uncle Monty, memorably played by Richard Griffiths in Withnail.
Tom escaped such a fate, apart from the odd gentle pat, not lea
st because he was only in the film for a day. The lead was played by handsome Martin Hewitt whose official biography says he beat five thousand other actors to the part. In fact, Franco encountered him while he was valet parking cars in a Pasadena restaurant.
The raison d’etre for this saccharine romance was 15-year-old Brooke Shields whose barely clad performance in ‘The Blue Lagoon’ the previous year had grossed the producers sixty million dollars. Brooke had made her name at the age of ten when naked photographs of her were displayed in Manhattan’s American Fine Arts Gallery. This was a stepping-stone to her role as a twelve-year-old in a brothel in Louis Malle’s controversial ‘Pretty Baby’. After ‘Endless Love’, Brooke’s film parts did not improve but she remained in the limelight by appearing in an unbuttoned brown shirt and pair of blue jeans on advertising hoardings with the quote: “Want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” being married to Andre Agassi for a couple of years and, most famously of all, having that public spat with Tom Cruise about the correct treatment for post-partum depression.
Tom’s fleeting appearance in ‘Endless Love’ – clad only in cut off jeans and with a high-pitched voice - was to advise Hewitt to set fire to Brooke’s home so he could put it out and gain her family’s approval. It misfired: Hewitt nearly incinerated the lot of them. Using his dangerous intensity, psycho Tom told him: “Hey, I tried that. Eight years old and I was into arson.”
He earned $300 for his day on the movie, more than he would make waiting tables. He was also taking off his T-shirt at the time to reveal a well-toned torso which enabled him to earn some much-needed cash as a model. One set of shots with him shirtless and, in another, wearing some very short shorts ended up in the gay magazine, Parlee. They also ended Tom’s desire to earn money from photo-shoots.
His principles set him on the road to penury. He could no longer afford the rent on his shared Manhattan apartment and decided to return home to Glen Ridge. Before he left the city, he went to an open call audition for a new movie called ‘TAPs.’ Ronald Reagan had become President and patriotism was in the air, a sea-change from the emollient foreign policy of Jimmy Carter. Twentieth Century Fox, sensing this, decided to adapt Dervery Freeman’s novel, ‘Father Sky’, for the screen. The 141-year-old military academy, Bunker Hill, is to be closed down and condominiums built on the site. The cadets revolt and, in the great American tradition of the Alamo, keep the construction crews out by armed force and defend a siege by the military in order to keep the academy going.
Fox had an ace up their sleeve in the shape of George C. Scott, the former real-life marine, who some ten years previously pronounced his patriotism in front of the Stars and Stripes as General Patton. Patton enjoyed ceremony but Scott, personally, did not: he declined his Best Actor Oscar for the role, insisting that he was not in competition with other actors. But he was prepared to play another general for the studio, Harlan Bache, who runs the academy.
The other key player was the officer cadet who was to lead the revolt and, again, Fox had another Oscar winner in place – twenty-year-old Timothy Hutton who won Best Supporting Actor in Robert Redford’s debut film as a director ‘Ordinary People’ (1980).
The rest of the film was not that hard to cast. Director Harold Becker just had to find a couple of hundred young men who could be trained to act as military cadets. Cruise knew the odds as he looked round the thousand other actors in the rehearsal room but felt he acquitted himself well in his brief conversations with the director and producer, Stanley Jaffe.
Then he hitched home to New Jersey and, as legend has it, as he was walking up the garden path his mother called from the kitchen window saying his agent was on the phone and he had got a part. True or not, the image is a heartening one.
Cruise’s focused intensity was just right for the role of rebellious cadet Billy Harris. In fact it proved too right. Two weeks into shooting Becker decided him up to a much bigger part, that of David Shawn, the true psycho in the revolt who wants to shoot it out to the last cadet standing. It was a similar experience to the one Tom had had in ‘Guys and Dolls’ but, this time, he declined: he didn’t want to put another actor out of a part and was content to learn from the likes of Scott and Hutton. It was, after all, only his second film. “I just thought ‘oh, fuck’. I said: ‘Thank you very much but I don’t think I want to play David Shawn.’ I was in a small role and that is the way I wanted it to be. I was learning so much by just being around, watching everything that was happening. They had already increased my role a lot because I had so many ideas.”
But he was no match for Stanley Jaffe. “It was a battlefield promotion,” he recalled, “he just blew me away with his ideas.” The producer informed Cruise that the options open to him were either play Shawn or leave the movie.
He played Shawn. “I am very aggressive,” he conceded. “You’ve got to be aggressive – there’s too much responsibility not to be. I need a creative outlet. Now I get up and work out for forty-five to sixty minutes every day. Discipline is very important to me.”
The military bit was drummed into the actors by having them go through parade ground drill, eating and sleeping with real cadets at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. The repeated mantra of ‘honor – duty – country’ was also drummed into them from the lips of their commander, General Harlan Bache.
Scott had a reputation as a moody and difficult actor to work with. There is a famous story that one of his co-stars (Maureen Stapleton) told the director of Neil Simon 's Plaza Suite: "I don't know what to do, I am scared of him". The director replied: "My dear, everyone is scared of George C. Scott!"
But on ‘TAPs’ he was warm and willing. Although only fifty-four he engendered a ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ sympathy from the audience, not least when he has a heart attack and is taken to Intensive Care.
Cruise was in awe of him. “I’m sitting with Patton and General Buck Turgidson from ‘Dr. Strangelove’, this brilliant actor. And Hutton had given that extraordinary performance in ‘Ordinary People’ and just won an Academy Award. I remember being nervous, really nervous because at that point, when you’re young, you just don’t want to get fired. You have that ‘it’s so much fun I can’t believe this is happening.’ And Harold Becker was really smart, taking these young actors and putting us through four weeks of boot camp which helped us and acclimated us to making movies and working on characters. So we had all that time to get familiar and comfortable with the environment. And he created a bit of tension, you know. I mean, I was a young actor, getting into character and not wanting to leave any stone unturned. But I remember I was nervous, man I was nervous. I thought: ‘this is too good to be true. I wonder what’s going to happen.’” He was also pleased with his $100 per diem which, he reported home, enabled him to dine off steak and lobster most nights.
The other new boy with a leading part was Sean Penn but his parents had been in the business, his father a director, his mother an actress and Sean had already worked on Broadway in ‘Heartland.’ Cruise was also impressed by Hutton and Penn since they lived in California and he had only been there once for his unfortunate TV audition.
“I really don’t know if me and Penn ever slept during that movie. We’d stay up all night and just talk about the film and about acting. We were really scared and nervous and excited. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Unlike Scott’s general, Cruise’s character engendered little sympathy. Shawn was a dangerous fanatic, ramming the sheriff’s car and shooting to kill at the National Guard. “A lot of the character was my childhood,” he said. “I wasn’t intense like that but the character is just fear. That’s what he does when he’s afraid – he fights.”
He emerged creditably from his first major part. Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote: ‘Whenever the action of’TAPs’ begins to flag, we recommend that you keep an eye on the show-stopping performances of Sean Penn (in his movie debut) and Tom Cruise as two of the cadets.’
With the $50,
000 he had earned from the movie, he took himself off to grandfather Mapother’s log cabin by Lake Cumberland in Kentucky to review his situation. His judgement, however, did not prove as sound as that of his new friend, Sean Penn. The latter became Jeff Spicoli, a sempiternally stoned surfer, in Amy Heckerling’s hit, ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982). It was written by and based on the experiences of Rolling Stone journalist Cameron Crowe who was later to play a major part in Tom’s life directing him in ‘Jerry Maguire’ and ‘Vanilla Sky’.
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 7