It was a subject to which he was to return eight years later when he had established professional credentials as a film director. New Line Pictures bankrolled him to the tune of fifteen million dollars and he expanded his story to chronicle the rise and fall of Mr. Diggler. Leonardo Di Caprio would have played the part, so we are told, but he had an appointment with destiny in the shape of ‘Titanic’ and suggested Mark Wahlberg. Burt Reynolds (whose career was in free-fall at the time) took the part of the porno-impresario who transformed Dirk from nightclub host to a man with a prosthetic penis. The American critics made this film a success d’estime and Burt, Julianne Moore (with her innocent porcelain features cleverly counter-cast as a coke-addicted porn star, Amber Waves) and Anderson himself were all nominated for Oscars. Enough people went to see it for it to turn a profit for New Line, considerably enhanced by the nine deleted scenes on the subsequent DVD.
Two years later Anderson made another examination of life in the Valley, this time compressing into twenty-four hours the lives (and several deaths) of nine people in ‘Magnolia’ (1990), so called because of the boulevard that runs through it.
Their lives are tangentially linked by a television show, ‘What Do Kids Know?’, in which gifted children compete with less-gifted adults and the owner producer, presenter, participant and their various partners.
Anderson used his dependable repertory company from ‘Boogie Nights’ of Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Ricky Jay (the sinister magician), Philip Baker Hall and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The last was to be a fortuitous encounter for Cruise who cast him as the villain in ‘Mission Impossible: 111’ which opened just three months after Seymour Hoffman had been ennobled with an Oscar for ‘Capote.’
To some observers it seemed strange that Cruise would forfeit his status as a leading man to join in the rep, especially as the foul mouthed misogynist who makes a living lecturing men on how to meet and persuade the fair sex to, as he so delicately puts it, “suck my big fat fucking sausage.”
Others assumed it was the reconciliation scene with his father, Jason Robards, the patriarch of the TV company who is dying of cancer. Robards had come to the movie having gone through nine weeks of a true life or death coma. He was to die of cancer a year later. It was known that Tom had had a death bed reconciliation with his own estranged father but he denies that this was a reason for taking the role.
“No, it isn’t the reason. When I read the script I thought ’When do you get to have a chance to create seminars like that?’ I’m an actor. I’d never played a character like that. I like humour. I thought it was dark and funny. And that’s what I focused on, working on the humour. In the script it says ‘When he gets to his father’s door he breaks down.’ I said ‘Look, I don’t feel that.’ I was looking for a way to make this guy human. I thought it was funny that he was afraid of his father’s dogs. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I got to the house. The whole time with the character I was skating on the edge.”
The part certainly gives Cruise the chance to go down the descending steps of arrogance. At first, as this, slightly improbable, sex guru unshavnd with long greasy hair and a crude waistcoat to match, he almost apes the madness of Peter Finch in ‘Network’ as he howls “I will not take it anymore” when he hears of a young man’s rejection by a woman. “You think she’s going to be there when things go wrong?” he assures him. Offensively, he dismisses the opposite sex as mere ‘bushes’, a phrase he delights in when he meets a black female television interviewer. He salivates like a dog with his tongue hanging out but is reduced by this artful woman to a stunned silence when she proves that he is mythomaniac. No wonder he tells his audience to dismiss the past – his own is a tissue of lies, even denying the death of his mother. When he watches over his father dying – a man he has previously claimed was already dead – he needs no words just eyes that telegraph his true fear of reality. It was quite a triumphant performance.
The rest of the film is well played but too ambitious. “We may be through with the past but the past ain’t through with us,” says the epilogue. For three hours Anderson manoeuvres these largely tragic people to illustrate the inevitability of fate, chance and mere happenstance in human life. It ends with a plague of frogs, a metaphor that is a little unsteady. God and Moses failed to liberate the Israelites by this ruse since, according to Exodus, Pharaoh reneged on his promise the following day as soon as it stopped. But its did provide the director with some arresting amphibian imagery.
Cruise can have no complaints about the hand he was dealt. He was given various critics’ awards, a Golden Globe and another Oscar nomination. Like his wife before him, he had taken a bold risk and won widespread admiration for it.
They were both in their prime. Not just Hollywood’s golden couple, famous for their exceptional beauty, wealth and celebrity, but demonstrably gifted and powerful actors, the Burton and Taylor of the late twentieth century. When interviewed they would pore out their love and admiration for each other and their plans for a golden life ahead.
But, as we know, it was not to be. Why? Well, a film critic is ill qualified to play marriage guidance counsellor and, were Cruise the sort who chooses to keep his romantic life a guarded secret, it might not be relevant to any assessment of him as a man. But he doesn’t. He jumps on sofas to tell the world about it. So maybe, if presented with a brief chronicle of the events leading up to the announcement on February 5th 2001 that they were to break up, the reader might deduce more than the writer.
After the obsequies for Stanley Kubrick were concluded both Tom and Nicole turned their thoughts to major movies in Australia. He was going to produce and star in ‘Mission: Impossible 111’; she was going to sing and star in ‘Moulin Rouge’, an original musical by Baz Lurhmann, a Sydney writer-director who made his mark with the deadpan comedy ‘Strictly Ballroom’ and the bold, hip reinterpretation of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Leonardo Di Caprio.
But stars of this magnitude plan well ahead and after these long shoots, needed to have future projects on their respective horizons. It could be said, at that time, that Cruise was the most powerful man in Hollywood and what he wanted he got. A surreal Spanish love story, ‘Abre los ojos’ (Open Your Eyes) by the young director, Alejandro Amenabar, had caught his eye. It had done very well in Spain, featuring the luminously gorgeous Penelope Cruz romping naked in bed with Eduaro Noriega., But there was little market for foreign language films in the States. So Tom decided to remake it in English with a New York setting. Having acquired the rights, he handsomely paid his friend, Cameron Crowe, to rewrite it.
Amenabar was also well-rewarded, even to the extent of Cruise asking to see his next script. This was a ghost story ‘The Others’ set in Santander, a Spanish coastal town on the Bay of Biscay. Tom liked it and Amenabar was flown to New York for talks with Cruise, Kidman and the Miramax producers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein. “At first you couldn’t help but be impressed,” Amenabar recalls. “But they are so obsessed with the work and quality, you quickly forget to be star-struck – you have to work hard.”
To Amenabar’s delight Cruise agreed to co-produce ‘The Others’ with the Weinsteins, and Nicole was cast in the leading role. The film would have to be made in English to stand any chance of recouping its costs.
Down under, Tom endeared himself to the natives by giving money to the Aboriginals after they claimed a Mission Impossible helicopter landed on a sacred burial site. And Nicole endeared herself to Baz by four months hard training on her singing and dancing and even taking lessons from circus performers to swing on a trapeze seventy feet in the air. The plots consisted of the Scot from ‘Star Wars’, Ewan McGregor, an impoverished poet, falling in love with Satine (Kidman) the star of the Moulin Rouge who is both a courtesan and a consumptive. The period was turn-of-the-century but the songs more recent ranging from Jules Styne’s ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s best Friend’ to Lennon and McCartney’s ‘All you Need is Love.’
The Cruises lived in their house in Sydn
ey and were able to make use of the harbour. Tom took the children, Isabella, now seven, and Connor, five, on a fishing expedition but unfortunately the engine of their converted smack, Alibi, gave up and the barbecues Tom was cooking caught fire. He threw it overboard but then, typically, dived in to retrieve it.
He teamed up with the Australian actor, Russell Crowe, and jumped in his Gulfstream jet to fly up to Coff’s Harbour five hundred kilometres north of Sydney, home of Australia’s motorbike enthusiasts where they rented and raced Harley Davidsons.
The new century came to Sydney sooner than most of the rest of the world and was celebrated with a firework display on the Harbour Bridge which was bigger and brighter and more spectacular than any that had gone before. Tom booked part of Café Sydney, which is high in the Old Customs Building overlooking the harbour, so that his guests and retainers could have the best view in town. Nicole’s family were there and Iain and Susannah Glenn who had remained firm friends since ‘The Blue Room’ flew out from England.
The new millennium dawned auspiciously for Cruise. With Nicole back at work on ‘Moulin Rouge’ he invited her sister, Antonia, for a trip on his jet to Los Angeles. On 23rd January 2000 she accompanied him to the Beverly Hilton for the annual Golden Globes ceremony. He had been invited as a presenter but, to his evident surprise, he was named Best Actor in a Supporting Role for ‘Magnolia’ beating a strong field of nominees: Michael Caine for ‘The Cider House Rules’, Michael Clark Duncan for ‘The Green Mile’, Haley Joel Osment for ‘The Sixth Sense’ and Jude Law for ‘The Talented Mr Ripley.’
"Wow. God, I didn't expect this," Cruise said when he grasped the Globe.
He gained renewed respect in the Hollywood community for a heartfelt tribute to Jason Robards who was to die before the year was out and then sang the praises of his absent wife: "Her generosity, her support, her sacrifices, her talent - she inspires me."
Nicole, meanwhile, was having her ups and downs on ‘Moulin Rouge.’ Baz Luhrman had organized week-end parties to keep the performers in the spirit of the night club with bottles of absinthe, dancing on tables and attendant hangovers on Monday mornings. Unfortunately, on set, Kidman was going through one of her acrobatic routines, being thrown from person to person, when she cracked a rib and production was closed down for two weeks But she was fit enough to attend her mother’s sixtieth birthday party in March, accompanied by her bodyguard, Peter Crone.
Tom was intensely busy on post-production for ‘Mission: Impossible 11’ and pre-production for ‘Open Your Eyes.’ He liked Cameron Crowe’s script and his new title, ‘Vanilla Sky’ which had little to do with the story but was an alternative name for Monet’s classic 1873 painting ‘La Seine at Argenteuil’ – which was to hang in Cruise’s bedroom in the film, evidence the character’s extreme wealth.
‘Vanilla Sky’ is a complex, not to say convoluted story, of a handsome, rich publishing tycoon who falls in love with a Spanish dancer, has a car crash, is grotesquely disfigured, dies but manages to continue on earth courtesy of the Life Extension Corporation who put him into a ‘lucid dream’ so that he can hallucinate a fictional existence.
Cruise and Crowe determined to put together a top cast for the project: Kurt Russell, hot from ‘Backdraft’, and Cameron Diaz, who had come to the fore with ‘There’s Something About Mary.’ Crowe was finishing the autobiographical ‘Almost Famous’ and brought in his top two players from that: Jason Lee and Noah Taylor.
But who should play the exotic Spanish dancer? Why not the girl who had played her in Amenabar’s film? She had made the leap to American cinema having starred with Billy Crudup (the lead in ‘Almost Famous’) in ‘The Hi-Lo Country’.
Penelope Cruz came from a humble family but, at the age of fifteen, danced her way from the working class suburbs of Madrid and into a music video for the famous Spanish pop star, Nacho Cano, and into his arms as well for the next seven years.
By sixteen she was a national personality on children’s television and, with her alluring onyx black eyes, siren smile and traffic-stopping figure, it was not long before she made her way into films – or films made their way to her. A propensity to disrobe in most of her movies did nothing to inhibit her career, indeed her prolonged naked table-top writhing in Bigas Luna’s ‘Jamon, Jamon’ was the main talking point among critics at the 1992 Venice Film Festival.
Wives and girl-friends were rarely overjoyed when their partners starred with Penelope: Matt Damon split with Winona Ryder when he worked with her in ‘All the Pretty Horses’ and Nicolas Cage’s marriage to Patricia Arquette foundered when he romanced Cruz in ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.’
Such mishaps did not dissuade the producers from thinking she would be an asset to ‘Vanilla Sky.’ Crowe was dispatched to the island of Kephallonia in Greece, where she was filming Corelli, to see if she was interested. She was and, after the shoot, she came to New York where Cruz met Cruise and the deal was done.
Nicole’s chapter of accidents had not come to an end. Wearing a pair of high heels she fell down a stairway and tore the cartilage behind her kneecap in the last weeks of shooting. She had to dance through the pain and recuperate in a wheelchair between shots.
Despite having an operation, when Tom flew her to Spain to start work on ‘The Others’, she was still on crutches. However she bravely she adhered to the thespian motto: ‘The show must go on.’
But when rehearsals approached for this eerie story about a neurotic mother in an echoing mansion with two children, who are allergic to light, who discovers that the three servants who come to work for her are revenants who have stepped out of their graves, she got cold feet and wanted to quit.
She was to tell BBC Breakfast at the time of the film’s release in the UK: "When I got there and was just about to start rehearsals I really didn't want to do it. My whole being, my whole psyche was rejecting it, and I was desperate to try to get out of it. I begged them to let me out. I was so involved in ‘Moulin Rouge’, with stars in my eyes, and all I wanted to do was make love stories and musicals and be happy."
But her husband (and producer) stood by her and she was coaxed into continuing. The shoot was to last from October until mid-December and Tom was obliged to leave her and the children and return to New York to at the beginning of November where he had to start work on ‘Vanilla Sky’ – ironically yet another story of the confusion between reality and unreality from the pen of Amenabar.
Filming in New York evidently went well. They were due to move to the Paramount Studios in Los Angeles after Christmas to shoot the interiors. After they showed it, Cameron Crowe expressed delight with his work – and Tom’s. “We really have an intense love story. Penelope had to appear to fall truly in love. And Tom’s character falls in love with her. You watch them going through that hideous, great, awful, intoxicating moment. Without it we couldn’t have a movie. The first time we screened the movie – just in-house – it was the kind of situation where at the end you get a reaction of ‘Wow! They really were in love.’”
Nicole finished in time to return to their Pacific Palisades home for Christmas. There, on their tenth wedding anniversary – December 24th 2001 – they held a party for families and friend and renewed their wedding vows before them.
After Christmas, the Cruise family went to Vegas where, on December 28th, Tom used his clout and cash to have the Big Shot Ride at the Stratosphere Hotel kept open late, so that he and his wife could soar through the skies.
On January 1st 2001 Tom returned to work on ‘Vanilla Sky’ at Paramount and Nicole began a new movie, ‘Panic Room’, again playing a mother with two children in a mansion who hide in the aforementioned location when burglars invade the house.
On January 19th she dropped out of the movie, the reason being her continuing leg injury. The director, David Fincher, wanted to close down the production and claim the insurance but Jodie Foster stepped in to fill the breach.
On January 23rd Nicole honoured her commitment to present the Golden Globe t
o her co-star in ‘The Peacemaker’, George Clooney, for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ Her parents must have remained in Los Angeles as her father accompanied her to the Beverly Hilton. Tom presented the Globe for Best Supporting Actress to Kurt Russell’s stepdaughter and daughter of his wife, Goldie Hawn, to Kate Hudson for her role in Cameron Crowe’s ‘Almost Famous.’
Hollywood can be a small town and that night it was observed by many that relations between Tom and Nicole were not at their best.
This was confirmed on February 5th 2001 when Cruise’s publicity agent, Pat Kingsley, issued a terse press release.
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 25