When the pain became too much for her, she was taken to a hospital, where she underwent surgery to repair the torn knee cartilage. “The rib wasn’t so bad, but the cartilage was a nightmare,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I didn’t really realize the damage I was doing to my body. I just sort of kept going and taking painkillers and getting steroid shots just to get through it. I felt like a footballer.”
For the final scenes, Nicole was on crutches or sitting in a wheelchair. Luhrmann was forced to devise creative ways of filming her so that her injury was not apparent; that meant using close-ups where he previously had planned more expansive images and it meant surrounding Nicole with extras to cover up her disability.
On top of her injuries, she had to endure three-hour makeup sessions each day and costumes that inflicted pain whenever she moved. “The corset itself was just a complete nightmare,” she explained in an interview that accompanied the videotape version of the movie. “Doing high kicks in a full corset—forget it. The other girls, the can-can girls, wore it, too. We’d all have bruises and our nerves went numb . . . not pleasant, but as Baz Luhrmann said, 'Hey, it looks great!'"
Amid all that pain and suffering, Nicole sang her heart out. Many of the songs were done live on stage, with Nicole and Ewan surrounded by hundreds of extras, singing without benefit of the electronic studio “helpers” that recording artists use to make their voices sound better.
Typically, live recording sessions for Hollywood musicals would include an elaborately produced sound track, to which the singers’ voice could be added. Luhrmann did it the hard way: he recorded the songs live, then added the orchestra later, gluing the orchestration around the voices. No one had ever done it that way before, but Luhrmann didn’t care; he thought it could be done and proved the doubters wrong.
Despite all the chaos surrounding the film, Nicole maintained a normal relationship with her children, Bella and Connor, who stayed on the set the entire time. At lunch, she took the children into her dressing room, where, typically wearing fishnet stockings, a corset and four-inch stilettos, she cooked their favorite meals. The children thought nothing about seeing their mother dressed that way; to their way of thinking their mother was a circus performer and the funny clothing was just her work uniform.
“Yeah, I would go back in after doing takes to make sure the homework was being done,” she told Interview magazine. “Then suddenly I’d be doing grade one reading for twenty minutes, and then back on the set. And for their math lesson, they’d be out betting with the crew. Playing poker—now that’s how to do mathematics!”
The production was actually wrapped before it was completed. The death of Luhrmann’s father and Nicole’s injuries had eaten up about six weeks of precious studio time. There was no way to get an extension because the studio had been leased out for Ewan McGregor’s next movie, Star Wars: Episode II. Within minutes after Luhrmann and company left the studio, wrecking balls were in place to demolish the set.
Luhrmann eventually finished filming in Madrid, Spain, where Nicole and Tom went to film the supernatural thriller, The Others, a project for which Tom had signed on as producer. The time that Tom and Nicole spent in Sydney was special in that it allowed them to be together with the children, but it was stressful in a professional sense because of all the problems that plagued both Moulin Rouge and Mission Impossible II. From beginning to end, it took two years to complete work on Mission Impossible II. They were well into production before the screenwriter, Robert Towne, turned in his first lines, long after Tom and director John Woo had worked out the action sequences. It was, after all, a movie that depended on action, not words, for its creative energy.
Woo saw Tom as what he called a “rock star,” meaning that when the actor spoke he generated so much energy it was like he was playing an instrument and dancing. Woo used that energy, he later explained to reporters, to choreograph Tom’s action scenes. It was a good thing that Woo, the master of karate flicks, saw those qualities in Tom, for despite all his action movies, the actor had never been in fight scenes in which he delivered karate chops. Woo pretty much “danced” him through those scenes, making it up as he went along.
Tom was his usual charismatic self on the set, enthusiastic and ever ready to offer suggestions on how a scene could be done better, but there was something different about him, something no one could quite put their finger on. He sometimes seemed preoccupied, distracted perhaps by his trips to the Moulin Rouge set to check up on his wife and children.
Tom also seemed more aggressive, from a director’s point of view, in that he wanted to do some of his own stunts. Was he trying to compete with his high-spirited, daredevil wife? Or was he trying to impress her? She had broken a rib and torn knee cartilage while making a girlie musical, wounds she wore like a badge of honor—and what did he have to show for his efforts on the set of a manly action movie? He had suffered no broken bones or bruises, nor did he walk with a limp.
Woo was stunned when Tom told him he wanted to do his own stunt on the “massive gorge” scene (shot in Utah), where supported only by a single cable, he clung to the face of a cliff over two thousand feet in the air. Everyone tried to persuade him not to do it, including Woo and the studio executives—even Tom’s mother joined in the don’t-do-it chorus and flew to Utah to see for herself—but he insisted, making fun of those who asked him where the nets would be placed (there were no nets or air bags).
Nicole never seemed to be far from his thoughts. He insisted that production on Mission Impossible II begin in Sydney so that he could be there with his wife and children. He went often to the Moulin Rouge set, but no one can recall her ever visiting the Mission Impossible II set. There marriage was undergoing a major shift, but no one but Tom and Nicole were aware of what was happening.
In the beginning of their marriage, Nicole had made a major effort to be at his side, offering support, even when it was not needed. Now it was Tom who was making an effort to be at her side, going out of his way to be supportive of her career. People who witnessed his public displays of support and affection toward Nicole sometimes marveled at his dedication to a marriage that Nicole seemed to take for granted.
When he became a producer on The Others, he insisted that Nicole be given the starring role. That, in itself, was no big deal because everyone associated with the film thought she would be perfect for the part.
Tom has always insisted that that casting decision was purely professional, but skeptics might be forgiven for suggesting that it had a personal element as well. Had Nicole not been cast, she surely would have accepted an offer for another film, a decision that would have left Tom alone and isolated in Spain. Besides, he had learned early in the marriage that the best way to keep Nicole happy was to keep her working.
The Others was written and directed by Alejandro Amenabar, a Chilean-born filmmaker who fled to Spain in 1973 with his family on the eve of a military coup-de-etat. He made his first film in 1992 and quickly gained a reputation as one of Spain’s hottest new directors and screenwriters. Tom liked his work very much and thought they had a future together.
Nicole was asked to play the part of Grace Stewart, an eccentric mother of two children who lives in a darkened old house located far out in the countryside. When Nicole arrived in Spain and realized that she would be playing a mother who had obsessive thoughts about her children (she had not read the script beforehand), she became distraught and tried to back out of being in the film. After a week of going back and forth with Tom and the director, she realized they were not going to release her from the film and she agreed to stay. However, by that time, she was so worked up emotionally that she was in character to play the part. All it took to complete the characterization was a pair of old-lady lace-up shoes.
The movie begins with Grace screaming in bed, obviously the recipient of a bad dream. Her skin is very pale and there is something about her that telegraphs trouble.
After her servants mysteriously disappear, Grace pl
aces an ad in the local newspaper for new employees. To her surprise, three would-be servants appear at her front door looking for work. Grace assumes they have come in response to the newspaper ad, but, as it turns out, the postman never picked up the letter containing the information for the ad. They have arrived quite by chance.
Grace hires them on the spot. As she shows them about the house, she says, “You’ll notice what I’m doing,” at which point she closes a door. “No door must be opened without the previous one being closed first . . . There are fifteen different keys for all of the fifty doors, depending on which area of the house you are in at the time.”
She explains that there is no radio, no electricity, no telephone. “Silence is something we pride in this house.” In a roundabout way she explains to the servants that her two children are light sensitive and must be kept in the dark at all times. A single ray of sunshine could have a deadly effect on them.
As the story progresses, the little girl says she hears voices, the ramblings of a little boy named Victor. Soon after that, Grace begins to hear voices. “There is something in this house,” she says. “Something diabolic. Something that is not at rest.”
The housekeeper offers an explanation of her own: “Sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living.” Horrified by that thought, Grace tells the housekeeper that the Lord would never allow such a thing to happen.
Finally, Grace decides to go seek help from a priest in dealing with what she perceives to be demon-related problem. In the fog, she runs into her missing husband (who was killed in the war). She takes him back to the house and introduces him to the housekeeper. Gradually, it becomes apparent the servants know something everyone else doesn’t know.
Soon it becomes clear that Grace has issues with her husband over him going off to war. They make love and when she awakens, she discovers that he has disappeared and presumably taken all the curtains in the house with him. Emboldened by the incident—and determined to protect her children—Grace wanders about the house with a loaded shotgun, ready to shoot anything that seems out of place.
From that point on, the story assumes a bone-chilling clarity that makes everything suddenly make sense. No one is who he or she appears to be and nothing that seemed certain remains so for long. There is, indeed, a mystery associated with the house. Although the unsettling story appears to end well, it is not without Hickcockian harbingers of doom.
Nicole delivered a breathtaking performance, the full extent of which was not apparent until the movie ended. How odd it was that Tom would choose this story for Nicole. In its own way, it seemed to mirror their marriage, down to the smallest detail. Both Grace and Nicole had two children they sought to protect from “outside” influences, both lived in a household that was never what it seemed, both had a difficult time holding onto servants, both were fastidious about the smallest of details, and both had husbands whose roles in their lives was in question.
Was art imitating life, or was life imitating art? Would Nicole, like Grace, end up raising her two children alone? Had Tom finally proved to Nicole that he was the better actor?
Chapter 9
DAYS ASUNDER:
DIVORCE HOLLYWOOD-STYLE
After ten years of marriage, Hollywood’s power-glam couple was in trouble, but friends and work associates saw only the glossy exterior they presented to the outside world. They saw Nicole holding Tom’s hand and clinging to him in public (when reporters were present he continued to lean over to whisper into her ear, talking her down from her frequent panic attacks), and they saw Tom showing up on her movie sets, glad-handing her associates and praising his wife’s acting abilities.
Of course, marriages don’t suddenly go bad, not the way milk with last week’s expiration date does. It takes a series of events over a long period of time. The earliest sign that Tom and Nicole’s marriage might be in trouble was also a sign that some people interpreted as a sign of strength: their adoption of two children.
Seasoned adoption workers know that one of the most common reasons couples decide to adopt is to bolster a shaky marriage. In such cases, couples view children as a means of cementing a fragile emotional bond or compensating for an inadequate sexual relationship. Social workers can usually weed those couples out in quick order.
For couples with low or moderate incomes, that is usually the end of the story. They eventually separate and divorce, and hopefully find more compatible partners the second time around. For wealthy couples, however, there is a way to skirt the scrutiny of social workers: They can hire attorneys and pursue private adoptions that can be shielded from the prying eyes of social agencies.
None of this is to suggest that Tom and Nicole had ulterior reasons for adopting children (couples who apply for children are seldom aware of their reasons for doing so). Tom and Nicole both longed for a family and they have proved to be exemplary parents. However, professional social workers, given an opportunity, would have spotted the problems in their marriage, even at that very early stage.
In retrospect, signs of marital problems were plentiful. Over the years, perhaps disappointed by her “Mrs. Tom Cruise” label, Nicole spoke, publicly at least, less and less about her husband, while he seemed to toss her name about with greater frequency. It was like a dance: she withdrew, he charged ahead, overcompensating.
When Days of Thunder and Far and Away did poorly at the box office, it killed any dreams they had of becoming Hollywood’s newest Bogart and Bacall incarnation, which meant that they had to pursue separate career opportunities. For two actors whose careers had been built on sex appeal (Tom’s more so than Nicole’s), that opened the door for temptations and frustrations of a magnitude seldom experienced by ordinary married couples.
For Tom and Nicole, the previous year and a half had been a nightmare. The Kubrick adventure—or was it more of an experiment?—opened the door to a wide range of insecurities in their personal lives. Tom had no idea that his friend the director and Nicole had filmed such sexually explicit scenes; it was not until he saw the finished product that he asked about Gary Goba’s role in the film. More than anyone else, he could see the chemistry between Nicole and Goba; it was a chemistry he did not see in his own scenes with her.
For Nicole to step so quickly from Eyes Wide Shut into The Blue Room, which featured on-stage nudity of a explicitness seldom engaged in even by professional strippers, demonstrated, more than anything else, how emotionally and sexually needy she was. All of that was followed by Nicole’s embarrassing encounter with the Esquire writer, then with rumors of an affair between Nicole and Ewan McGregor. Was Nicole sending Tom a message? Or was she self-medicating her deepest inner needs?
On December 24, 2000, Tom and Nicole celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in Los Angeles with a small group of friends, away from the prying eyes of the media. Shortly thereafter, Tom returned to New York, where he was filming Vanilla Sky, with Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, and Kurt Russell. Written by Alejandro Amenabar, who had directed and written The Others, the film was being directed by Cameron Crowe, who also had directed Tom in Jerry Maguire.
Early in February 2001, Nicole and Tom separated. It happened quickly. Like awakening from a bad dream and stumbling into the light of day. Tom had been sleeping on a sofa in the screening room for several days and one day, while Nicole was away from their Pacific Palisades home, he backed a moving van up to door and loaded all of his personal possessions.
When it became apparent that the National Enquirer was going to print a story about their marital problems, Tom and Nicole issued a press release on February 5 that officially announced the split and blamed their difficulties on “divergent careers which constantly kept them apart.” The day before the announcement, Tom gathered the cast of Vanilla Sky around him and broke the news to them himself.
The breakup of Hollywood’s most glamorous power-couple was big news around the country, but especially in Los Angeles, where rumors about their marriage had circulated for
years. Almost immediately, reports were published that linked Tom to Penelope Cruz, his love interest in Vanilla Sky; other reports linked Nicole to Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, and her former boyfriend Marcus Graham.
USA Today reported that it was Nicole who initiated the split. Citing sources close to the couple, the National Enquirer reported that Tom dumped Nicole because she had cheated on him. Others still blamed the problem on Nicole’s refusal to embrace Scientology. The media didn’t know about the secret sex scenes in Eyes Wide Shut or that would have been offered as an explanation as well.
Nicole was two weeks into filming a suspense movie, The Panic Room, at the time of the separation and withdrew from the film, citing a new injury to the knee she hurt while making Moulin Rouge. Director David Fincher quickly replaced her with Jody Foster, who, in turn, had to withdraw from her position as president of Cannes International Film Festival. Foster said she was “mortified” at letting down festival organizers and she expressed hope they would understand.
No sooner had the dust settled on the separation, than Tom dropped a bombshell. He filed for divorce on February 7, citing—what else?—irreconcilable differences. He requested joint custody of their two children, Bella, who was eight, and Connor, who was six. Apparently, Nicole was just as surprised as everyone else, especially at the date Tom established as the date of separation—early-to-mid December 2000, just shy of ten years marriage. In court papers, Nicole challenged the date of separation, stating that they had been intimate during the balance of December and well into the new year.
Then she dropped a bombshell of her own: she had become pregnant with Tom’s child during that time and had suffered a subsequent miscarriage on March 15. Perhaps anticipating a denial of paternity, she asked doctors to keep DNA samples of the fetus so that she could prove that Tom was the father.
Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life Page 18