Hanks was born into a family that seemed to be constantly on the run. "It was because of my dad's being in the restaurant business. He'd go from restaurant to restaurant, setting up their kitchens and then leaving. And also, both of my parents had been married a lot; between the two of them they had a lot of failed marriages. But we never thought, `Oh, this is terrible.' We had a lot of laughs. It wasn't dull, because, every six months, it seemed, we'd pack up in the middle of the night and move away."
In school, he says, "I was always very manic. I had a lot of energy. But I was able to get away without the connotation of being a bad kid." In fact, he remembers himself as being almost too good to be true. In high school, he says, "I had friends who were involved in a church group; we were essentially healthy, clean-cut, fun-loving kids who liked going to school. I could not wait to get to school. It was just the creative buzz that couldn't be found anywhere else."
At Skyline High, Hanks got mostly Cs-his love for school wasn't scholastic in nature-so when he went to college, it was to nearby Chabot Junior College. There he took a course that involved seeing plays and writing papers about them. Hanks got hooked and saw as many plays as he could afford (he had a job as a bellboy), often alone. "It was hard when I had friends who had Warriors tickets, to say to them, `You want to see Desire Under the Elms with me instead? It's a Eugene O'Neill play that was written in 1924. Let's go, it'll be a grand time!' Not on a bet. So I went by myself."
One night in Berkeley, Hanks saw O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. The play was interesting and entertaining enough: set in a flophouse saloon in 1912, it's about the dreams and illusions held by a barful of bums and prostitutes, and how they're shattered by a visiting salesman, the "iceman." But there was something else about that evening that, to be theatrical, changed Hanks' life.
"To be sitting in this storefront theater and see this play written in 1946 and only done well probably once before, on Broadway.. .and to be totally mesmerized for four and a half hours. I wasn't so much in awe of the actors or the play but of the experience of being in a room and sharing with three hundred other people those particular hours out of a lifetime. I had never had any concept that that was the real scope of what a play could do. I didn't necessarily want to be an actor; I just wanted to be some part of that."
Hanks transferred to Sacramento State University to study theater arts. He never got a college degree, but after a performance at a community theater, he was invited to be an apprentice with the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland.
There Hanks did bit parts, swept floors, and struck sets. Near the end of the season, because of a shortage of union actors, he got a substantial role in The Taming of the Shrew. The next summer, he was invited back, this time for a major role in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
"That," he says, "was really the situation where I said, 'Okay, here's where you have to pull your weight, because your ass is out on that stage in a very, very big way. Here comes the responsibility of being an actor."'
After touring with Verona, Hanks decided it was time to try New York. It was 1978, and by now he was married to an on-and-off sweetheart from California. Hanks isn't anxious to talk about his personal life; he doesn't even volunteer his wife's name (it's Samantha), admitting only that they fell in love during his scuffling days in the mid-seventies, that she also acts, and that they have two kids. He recalls a few highlights of the early days in the Big Apple: the infection of his wisdom tooth upon his arrival, his sleeping on-and bloodying up of-a friend's couch, the arrival of his wife and son from California, an outburst at a bank after a clerk refused to cash his out-of-state unemployment check, and a desire to do bodily harm to actress Marlo Thomas.
"We sat around wanting to kill her for her TV series That Girl, because it was about this actress who moved to New York, had this gorgeous little apartment, and wandered around New York City trying out for parts. We wanted to kill Marlo Thomas 'cause it wasn't anything like that for us."
Hanks attacked auditions with a brash confidence. "I liked auditioning," he says. "I liked the butterflies, the sizing up of the others. I figured, 'I'm as good as half of these people, and I'm better than the other half." Though he went home most of the time without a job, he wasn't fazed by the constant rejections. "Sometimes I knew why I didn't get it, because I just went in and sucked to high heaven. Other times it was because they were going for somebody blond, or they had somebody in mind in the first place-you crack that. I learned a trick, that right after any audition you don't feel good about, go out and buy yourself something. Buy a pen, a Reggie candy bar just do yourself a tiny favor. It'll make you feel a little better."
After more than a few months of auditions and enough Reggie bars to fill a dugout, Hanks landed a role in a nasty little movie called He Knows You're Alone, "about a moron slashing up brides," he says. His most pleasant memory of that film, he says, was: "We could afford Christmas out of the $800 I got for that."
He survived by doing readings of plays for playwright friends, then heard that ABC-TV was conducting interviews in town. "They come into every city and look at actors and take some of them off and stick them in their TV shows, and this is exactly what happened to me."
Hanks wound up in a situation comedy called Bosons Buddies, about two struggling advertising agency types dressing up as women in order to live in a cheap-and all-women-hotel. "It was stupid, no doubt about that," says Hanks, "but I read the script and said, 'It doesn't really matter; this thing is funny."'
The show debuted in 1980 and lasted two seasons; it never got great ratings, but Hanks put his acting skills and prime-time exposure to good use. He came across as a dry, quick-witted, and comic rebel, and when the series ended, he began receiving film scripts.
It wasn't long before he was cavorting with mermaids and bachelors, although in the future he hopes to be able to mix theatrical work and drama along with films.
Not that he's ungrateful for the movies he's made and the rewards of his profession, chief among them a sense of continuing education. Hanks still has some residual guilt about not getting a college degree. He says he does a lot of reading: "nonfiction, biographies, semi-historical things, and it's partly because I probably have an inferiority complex about not finishing college. I think I should become learned in some way, so I can go"-here, Hanks cranks up his stuffiest voice-"'Well, you know what Manchester said in his biography of Churchill...a very fascinating expo-se!"'
He looks over to a violin on a nearby counter. He's been learning it for The Man With One Red Shoe, in which he portrays a concertmaster who's mistaken for a spy. He doesn't play in the film, he says, but he knows the fingering for the pieces he appears to be playing.
"This is probably the hardest instrument to fake. You've got two hands doing two completely different things. And I play some of the pieces horribly, as dismal as you're going to get. But if I were just going to learn how to fake the damn thing, it wouldn't have had the oomph. It was demanding, and that meant taking it with me, picking it up in my spare time. It's not just that the role commands it. It just helps me out, and it makes me feel a tad proud."
For Splash, he learned scuba diving. And of course, there was his potato-juggling in Bachelor Party, which he actually learned while doing Bosom Buddies.
Next, he says, "I would like to learn to fly. Man can now fly like a bird and swim like a fish. Okay, I have swum like a fish. Time now maybe to fly like a bird. Then I'll have the planet earth covered, and I'll be able to go anywhere."
-1985
Campus Voice
The first hint, for most of the country, came when he accepted his Oscar for Best Actor in Philadelphia, when he thanked his high school drama teacher.
Tom Hanks remembers.
But, I learned not so long ago, he doesn't reserve his powers of recollection for special, showbiz moments.
In May of 1995, I was invited to emcee the National Educational Media Network's scholarship awards presentation at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. T
om Hanks would be a special guest presenter of one of the awards, named after the same teacher he'd thanked the year before.
In the flurry backstage, we ran into each other. It'd been ten years, he'd become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and he'd done a thousand interviews. The Man With One Red Shoe, along with any media he did for it, should have been long forgotten. But no. He greeted me like some bosom buddy, instantly recalling our time together, singing "Oakland, We're for You."
On stage, he responded to my introduction of him by telling the audience about our interview, and about a Linda Ronstadt profile he remembered from Rolling Stone.
I felt as though I'd been part of an Oscar acceptance speech. He liked me. He really liked me.
But will he read this script I'm working on?...
R!ck!e Lee Zones:
SAY GOODBYE
TO THAT SLINKY BLACK DRESS
Q was a nice, three-year ride. No free threads, but a good time, nonetheless. My job was to give the magazine's readers a quick dip into the pop scene every month. I visited radio programmers and top deejays like Rick Dees; musicians ranging from Jan Hammer, on fire with his music for Miami Vice, and Lou Reed to Hank Ballard and Pia Zadora.
My lead paragraph for the Zadora piece, in fact, landed me an approving mention in the first issue of Spy magazine. The column was headlined: "She's Zadorable," and I began:
I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't bothered to read even this far. After all, the title implies that the subject this time is that laughingstock of pop culture, that compact queen of kitsch, Pia Zadora.
Spy didn't continue into the next paragraph, but, just to be clear, I will:
But it's not. It's about a serious singer of fine old songs. About a lifelong entertainer who's been down longer than a porn queen but who's shown the resilience of the box springs she tested out in one of her tawdrier cinematic efforts.
Yep: It's about Pia Zadora.
My other columns were about payola and about the use of rock and roll in advertising; about the return of swing and jitterbug-this was in spring of 1985-and about rock fashions. (This was, after all, GQ.)
I happily entertained ideas from record companies, which is how I came to visit with Boz Scaggs and Chris Isaak, with David Byrne and Iggy Pop. And, for one electric afternoon, with Rickie Lee Jones.
It wasn't even a whole afternoon. The day I was meeting Rickie Lee, I was also tracking Huey Lewis & the News, who were singing the National Anthem at a baseball game in Oakland that evening. So I flew into Hollywood on a Friday morning, and hooked up with Rickie Lee at noon. By three, I was off to the airport to catch up with the News. By Monday, the column was on its way to New York. And, that night, I wrapped up a piece for the Chronicle, all about a new pop phenomenon being tagged "Bimbo Rock." The eventual title of the story was, "Boy Toy Rock: Sex Sirens of the Decade."
And no, silly. I wasn't talking about Huey & the News.
" I'M GONNA GET ONTO S U N SET, " says Rickie Lee Jones, who's leaning forward, looking interested, behind the wheel of her jag. "We'll have more fun." I just nod. As far as I'm concerned, she's the boss.
We're headed out to the beach because she needs to get away from this wretched sky. It's like God's been smoking a cigar and coughing all over Hollywood. "I just want to miss these two hours," says Rickie, "'cause I get asthma when the air is bad."
She's the boss with her words, which she delivers in any number of ways: enthralled little girl, jaded hipster/punk, wearied show-biz vet, ethereal poet and storyteller. And she's the boss because-well, because on this brown-dirty day, with the heat just coming on, she looks like such a refreshing quencher.
Fresh in from Arizona, where she was visiting her father, she shines with a golden tan, which she shows off against an abbreviated hot-day outfit: a peachy pastel top and a short, layered, tie-dyed skirt. The red straps of her sandals match the red outline of her shades.
Rickie is smaller than I expected her to be. Her musical history is a long, flowing river of jazz, poetry, dreams, and psychology; elegance from waste; determination from despair. In the beginning there was the cool, streetwise jitter patter that surrounded her first and still only big hit, "Chuck E.'s in Love," in 19 79. Then the album Pirates, a rollercoaster paean to lost love. Next, her form-breaking ten-inch mini-album in which she embraced both Billy Strayhorn and the Drifters. And last fall, The Magazine, which in her mind's eye is a theater piece. Anyway, I expected her to be a tall, cool one.
"Yeah," she says, agreeing that she's smaller than her music. She says yeah a lot, only she doesn't just plain say it. She often stretches it out into a soft, satisfied coo. When she gets worked up-usually about the business side of art-the voice thickens, shoots up high, like a grotesque Lily Tomlin character in an uncontrolled furor. Driving along Sunset Boulevard, she is talking about the evolution of her art. 'And I feel now that I can give something much more spiritual, 'cause now I have some direction. And my intention is...." She looks at the sky ahead of her and explodes: "Fuck! Is that fuckin'-What is that! Smog?" She decides it's fog-"Oh, good"-and flips her switch back to calm. "I think if my intention is to try and bring the highest thing I can be in touch with, it just can't fail."
I look for my seat belt. This is going to be an interesting ride.
"This is a very disciplined time for me," says Rickie. "I want to know what I'm doing." Right now she's between projects. A theatrical version of The Magazine, which she'd like to see on Broadway; a long-form video of that production; her next album and an accompanying feature film; a new manager; and maybe a new record company are all up in the dense air.
Meantime she keeps moving. In recent months she's taken classes in acting and aikido; if she had the time, she'd take a sign-language class as well. Her mother works with a number of deaf people at a nursing home in Olympia, Washington; last winter Rickie celebrated her 30th birthday at her mom's. She was inspired by signing. "It's a beautiful language," she says. `And they insist you use your emotions and your face when you use it."
Rickie, of course, could use the language onstage.
Yeah... "In an abstract way. On the last tour I was doing some poetry, and there's different ways to do poems. I was thinking of a way where the spoken language was secondary to the position your body was in. Your body was the poem. Now, I had just broken up with somebody and I lay back on the floor with my hands on my head." In the car, moving at a leisurely twenty-five or so, Rickie leans back and places her hands over her ears. `And I lay back like this, and it seemed to me everything I was going to say was already being said.
"Somewhere in there is where I'm looking for. Just write down little pieces, different kinds of poems. Give them subjects, but assign them a body instead of words."
Rickie, who's from Chicago, was a teenage runaway; in Olympia she was kicked out of high school for insubordination. Now she's anxious for some "real structured learning, taking exactly what I want." This, then, is her way of going to college? She looks away from the road and fairly purrs: "Ye-ah."
While she goes to school, Rickie is on vacation from the record business, which to her mind is an evil necessity. The Magazine, despite a chorus of positive reviews, generated no hit singles and sold only 350,000 copies. (Her first LP sold 1.75 million and went platinum; Pirates managed 860,000.) Rickie blames Warner Bros. Records for not pushing The Magazine properly and for picking the wrong singles; she blames a fouled-up video of "The Real End." And she blames herself.
"I understand why it's not on the radio," she says. "I'm not vibing radio to play me. I don't like them. I don't like what they play, and I don't want to be part of it."
Without radio support, though, Rickie feels lost. She yearns for the days of free-form FM stations. "That's how the shit exploded in the sixties. But FM now is just like AM. They've turned everything that was ours and private into something that's to be merchandised. All I can do is what makes me feel right." And yet she understands: "You can't get too eccentric, 'cause you'll eccentric yo
urself right out of a career."
Still, Rickie herself got across in the late seventies with a stylized image. She was hanging out with Tom Waits, the seedy-voiced nighthawk who slept (when he slept) at the Tropicana Motel, and whose motelmate, Chuck E. Weiss, inspired a certain hit ditty. Rickie knew the beat/cool thing, the slinky black dresses, and always the beret-she knew it could be exploited. "People want something defined; you have to give them something they can hold on to."
Rickie gave them a jazzy, latter-day Janis Joplin. She was always on the edge: when would she spill over? It happened in 1982, on tour: "I was drinking like a fish." Tapes of some of the shows remind her that she had a fine band. "The music was fuckin' great." But between songs, she swigged Jack Daniel's and screamed at the audience. She stripped off a sweatshirt to reveal a negligee and lace underwear, and she moved like a soused Little Egypt.
"I used to wear incredible things onstage," says Rickie. "It was my alter ego."
Did her other self feel good performing in lingerie?
Rickie touches herself, "Ye-ahh....
"It's real feminine and seductive, but it changed." Now she sounds almost betrayed. "It turned into whorey. I don't know how it got there."
But now she's into real life. "It's too fucking hard to make up somebody. 'cause I keep growing. I don't wanna be Madonna, to be a simple flat image. The problem is that it's show business. I've some show business in me, so I think I'll find a way, but right now I don't care too much about people buying my image. If people like poetry and music, then they'll buy it."
We roll into Santa Monica, it's darker and breezier than it looked from a town away. "We can go to the smog or the clouds," says Rickie. "Let's eat lunch." She sashays into the Belle-Vue, an old world French restaurant she's favored since she came to L.A. twelve years ago. She sounds like a kid as she orders up a seafood salad. "I usually don't eat animals," she announces, "but I'll have one of the little critters today."
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 50