At Grand Central I got a cab to take me to Sullivan Street. My cabbie was a young black man, born and raised in Manhattan. He was cheerful, voluble, full of information about places to go and neighborhoods to avoid. The Village was still festooned with brightly colored banners in honor of the Bicentennial celebrations the previous month. He helped unload my luggage outside the apartment building, and as he turned back to his cab he gave me a smile I’ll never forget and said, “Welcome to the Big Apple!”
I got through that first day on a cocktail of excitement and dread. But by the time I was lying in my loft bed sweltering in the August heat, all that was left was the dread. In the street below I could hear the faint screaming of two men in dispute mingling with the alien music of a New York summer’s night. As the hours crept by I could hear the sinister skittering of the rats in the walls and the gentle rustlings of the cockroaches in the cereal boxes from the kitchen below.
It’s common knowledge now that New York in the seventies was a far dirtier, more dangerous and more dysfunctional city than today. Nevertheless, it’s possible to overstate the peril in which we walked in those days. In the eleven years I spent in New York I was only mugged once, and that was when I was in Pittsburgh. Once, when walking down Forty-second Street by Ninth Avenue, I felt my checkbook being dexterously lifted from my outside pocket. I was on the verge of spinning around and pursuing the guy when I recalled there were no checks in the book. Discretion being the better part of valor, I kept walking. Suddenly there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see the man holding my checkbook out to me.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. “I think you dropped this.” I thanked him and we went our separate ways.
My apartment was burgled only once during that period, but it was by a junkie named Pietro, who lived on my street. Somehow, the fact that the guy lived in the neighborhood took some of the sting out of it. He was about my size and mainly took clothes. I realized he was the culprit when, some weeks later, I saw him wearing a sports jacket I had valued rather highly.
“Nice jacket, Pietro,” I said.
“Oh, thanks, man!” he replied, revealing a mouthful of unspeakable teeth in a genuine smile. “Have a great day!”
For a while my story became every actor’s story: a blur of uncertainty and fumbled auditions. I needed to work for food and rent, but never waited tables. Instead, I found myself peculiarly adapted to working in—and eventually running—mailrooms for Manhattan companies of all sorts, in buildings from the then new World Trade Center to Columbus Circle (including, strangely enough, the mailroom for the company that would one day publish this book).
Acting jobs came at what seemed like a snail’s pace but looking back I realize what a deceptive mistress memory can be. The point was, they came. When I was finally cast in Hugh Leonard’s Da in 1979, it was a turning point in more ways than one. I was in a national tour—an extensive one—of a Tony Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning play that was to prove another step up the ladder professionally. Personally, it was even more significant.
It was during Da that I met and fell in love with one of my costars, Cynthia Carle. The affair began on the road, as they often do, but this one was different. By the time we were done with the first half of the tour, we were besotted. Back in New York, during a long hot summer with no work, the two of us wound up in her apartment with a pack of cards. She asked if I’d like to play some poker. I admitted it was a game I’d never learned.
“You’ve never played poker? Poker?” It was clear, she said, that my education had been lacking in a significant detail and she proceeded to teach me poker there and then.
As with most games involving that part of my brain—or any part of my brain, really—I was a little slow on the uptake, but finally got the hang of it. After a few hands of five-card draw, she said, “Of course it’s more interesting when you’re actually betting.”
We were flat broke at that time, but an idea occurred to me. “How about,” I suggested, “we try it this way. One hand: if you win, we stay as we are, living in our separate apartments. If I win, we get married and move in together.”
We looked at each other for a long moment. This was my idea of a marriage proposal. Some women might have been offended. Not Cynthia. She shrugged.
“Okay,” she said, and started shuffling the cards. We played the hand. I stared at the cards, the blood draining from my face. “Okay,” I said, putting as bright a face on it as possible. “I guess we stay in our separate apartments.”
She looked at me with a slow smile. “Um, no. Actually,” she said, arranging the cards so I could see them, “you won.”
Ten days later, we were married at Manhattan City Hall. Our honeymoon was the completion of the seventy-seven-city tour of Da …
That all came much later, though, long after my first solitary arrival in New York. There were certainly adventures ahead, but when I woke up, exhausted, from my first night at 71 Sullivan Street, I could see no future at all. I wandered out into the street, bought a paper and a cup of coffee. I had no idea where I was, but like a salmon traveling upstream, I headed north to Washington Square. I sat on a bench there and took it all in. Aging communists playing chess; couples in the first flush of love, taking dogs for obligatory walks before going back to bed for the day; drunks lying in fetid heaps, steaming in the sun; dark-eyed Puerto Rican boys streaking past on skateboards.
Day One.
RISKY BUSINESS
CHICAGO, 1982
I auditioned for movies before Risky Business, but usually I found these fairly cut-and-dried experiences: get the audition, do the audition, get rejected. You could pretty much set your watch to it. For different reasons, only one or two stood out.
One of my earliest auditions in New York was for the Milos Forman film of the Broadway musical Hair. It was a general audition, a cattle call, for which some hundreds of us showed up at a space in Times Square, shuffling defensively through a stark hall, with resumes and sheet music for a song of our choosing. I had never sung on a stage and had no agent or anyone else to advise me at the time, so I chose “As Time Goes By,” a poor choice for a rock-and-roll musical but so me. Forman and various casting people were at a long table, shuffling papers and consulting audibly throughout the process. He never looked up. The pianist charged through the song with a kind of reckless abandon, as if he were competing for a Guinness World Record for getting through a ballad in the shortest time. I was trying to sing like Nilsson while my accompanist played like Carl Stalling.
Another standout was reading for the lead role in Lady Hawke for the director Richard Donner. I entered the small office where the man himself was seated, looking like he didn’t have a friend in the world. An aura of dejection and ennui settled round him like a toxic cloud. Without preamble, I went into my piece, which was fairly lengthy, and I figured I should get out as much of it as I could before he could stop me and go blow his brains out in the men’s room.
Surprisingly, this did not happen. I was aware early in the reading that he seemed to perk up. Something about me or my choices appeared to have gotten his attention. He sat up straight. His eyes were focused on me intently. When it was over, he said, “You committed.”
“I what?” I asked.
“You committed. The lines. You committed the lines to memory. No one does that.”
“Well,” I said, a little awkwardly, “that’s kind of my job.”
“You would be amazed,” said Donner, “how few actors seem to understand that. I liked the choice you made with the character, too. That was really excellent. Very good. Thank you!”
I went out in a daze. No one had ever been so lavish with praise for an audition of mine before. This job, I imagined, was in the bag.
And it was, but for Matthew Broderick. And I never got the chance to read for Richard Donner again.
But good, bad or indifferent, the audition process was generally swift. There are seldom appeals in this business. Once you’ve presented yourself,
the verdict is fairly swift and pitiless. That wasn’t the case for Risky Business.
It started in the usual manner. I had the sides, including the “what the fuck” scene. This appeared kind of light and rather banal as a statement of philosophy, but I figured it should probably be delivered as though the character, Miles Dalby, truly believed it. Actually, while there are always exceptions, believing what you’re saying when acting is usually a pretty good rule of thumb. In this case, it was only part of what got me the role.
Months would elapse before that was official. In the meantime, I’d been offered a summer of repertory at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, including roles in Henry IV parts 1 and 2. Work tended to dry up in New York during the summer, and NJ Shakespeare was one of the plum jobs for young actors at the time. It would start in May and run into September. But could I commit to it when there was a good role in a movie in the offing? A movie that, by the way, I didn’t want to do anyway! Because I was a stage actor, you remember, and even though the movie would presumably pay much, much better, well, that’s just crude mammon, isn’t it, and you get into that kind of habit and you cease being an artist at all and become nothing more than a stooge in pursuit of great wealth for evil influence. And that way lay the worst kind of debasement and self-betrayal. The choice was obvious: I passed on the New Jersey Shakespeare job and took my chance on the movie and in doing so opened the door to a very different future.
I had agonized over this decision, and as the weeks crawled by I cursed myself for it. It turns out, the delay had been due to difficulties in the casting of the lead, Joel Goodson, and the beautiful young prostitute who comes into his life. Paul Brickman, the writer and director, had a very clear sense of exactly how this film would go and the casting of these two roles was essential. At that point, he had seen most of the big or promising young actors around. Actors Brian Backer and Megan Mullally were two early favorites, as were Tom Hanks and Linda Hamilton, among many others, but the perfect combination of costars had remained elusive.
During this interminable period our casting director, Nancy Klopper, was generous and dutiful in keeping my agent up to date and assuring her that I was still being considered. This assiduous attention to a mere supporting actor I now put down to her youth and inexperience. Most casting directors at that point wouldn’t have bothered.
After a few weeks, Paul and the producers flew into New York to settle on the rest of the cast. I read for them on my own and with two of my eventual costars, Bronson Pinchot and Raphael Sbarge, as well as with Brian Backer. Weeks passed. While in this limbo, I punished myself by rereading the script and actually working on scenes that I might never get a chance to play.
I was no expert in judging the quality of screenplays. I’m still not. Years later I even turned down an audition with Quentin Tarantino because I found the screenplay of Reservoir Dogs revolting. But the Risky Business screenplay spoke to my deeps. In 2015, I asked Paul Brickman, with thirty years of hindsight, what he’d had in mind in 1982.
“The whole intent of this movie, before there was a story, before there was a theme—actually the story came last—but the intent was the style. I wanted to do something in a stylized way that had never been done before. I wanted to combine elements in a way that had never been done before, certainly for a teenage film. I wanted a very stylized, romantic look that had sexuality, darker themes and humor. How would that mix? That was the challenge. I wanted to make a film that I would’ve wanted to take a date to in high school. It was kind of ass-backwards, it’s easier to do the story first. Then I was working out the themes. The whole idea of capitalism, what a myth it was, how it was being romanticized, how it was not really true, that it takes its toll. Some people suffer enormously from this. And then add to that mix a character who’s beside himself because he’s so full of fear about his future.”
The road to the making of the movie was an all-too-common one. Paul was writing it as part of a two-picture deal for Warner Bros. The other film, for which he was only writing the script, was the black comedy Deal of the Century, eventually directed by William Friedkin (a movie Brickman utterly disavows). The second film Brickman was contracted to do, he was to write and direct, and that was Risky Business. But the unexpected success of another teen comedy gave Warner’s cold feet.
“Risky Business was at Warner’s,” Paul told me, “but they put it in turnaround: they got the script, but they didn’t want to make the movie. They didn’t think it was funny enough. They wanted it to be more like Porky’s. Jon [Avnet] and I started shopping it around, we were thinking, how hard can it be? It’s fresh material, wouldn’t cost a lot to make. But we were turned down everywhere. We could not get this movie made. But then when Geffen wanted to do it, it was back on, and it went back to Warner’s, because that’s where his deal was. So they were doing Risky Business, even though they didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Finally, Paul had his stars and they were worth the effort and then some: Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay were his Joel and Lana. I got the word at last, and I was off to Chicago to make my first movie. At that point, it almost seemed anticlimactic.
I recently came across a scrap of paper with the scribbled information I received during a phone call with my agent the day I was told I’d be doing Risky Business. I kept it at the time because I felt it was, in a small way, historic. It documented my first day as a film actor! Why I have kept this scrap for three decades but at the same time managed to lose an ounce of pure gold I inherited from my paternal grandfather, I’m at a loss to say.
As a historic document it doesn’t amount to much. It’s the usual sort of stuff—where we were shooting (Chicago); for how long (eight weeks!); what my income would be (considering I was on unemployment at the time, it was princely); the names of the screenwriter and director (Paul Brickman); the producers (Jon Avnet, Steve Tisch and David Geffen); and finally, the star—“Tom Crewes,” as I wrote it down on that day. I was told later that it was actually spelled “Cruise,” which struck me as improbable. I remember thinking that was a mistake, and he might want to consider changing it for professional purposes. Later, I found out he already had.
Tom Cruise’s worldwide superstardom is now such an article of faith that it’s hard to recall a time when he was just kind of a goofy, slightly awkward and insecure kid at the start of his career, still playing roles that any young hunk could play. Basically, before he became “Tom Cruise.” I think I’m safe in saying that Risky Business was the last time he was just “Tom.” The people around him, I’ve always thought, knew better where he was going than he did. But he was not a naïf. His eye, as much as anyone’s has ever been, was fixed upon the prize.
The first time I met him was at the production office the day I arrived in Chicago to begin working on Risky Business. He smiled on seeing me, giving me my first glimpse of those extraordinary chops, all white and straight and sharp and in perfect alignment, which instantly made me feel self-conscious about my own teeth. He appeared so … clean. He gave me one of those handshakes where the arm starts almost perpendicular to his body and arcs around—slowly—until his hand grasped mine, which was already open, just hanging there expectantly. Then he called me “Miles.” He always called me by my character’s name. At the time, I thought it was part of his process. It could be he just didn’t know my name.
He was nineteen, about to turn twenty, and I was twenty-eight, which made me the grand old man in that cast—which included people like Bronson Pinchot, Raphael Sbarge, Joe Pantoliano, Shera Danese, and the beautiful, inscrutable Rebecca De Mornay. Except for Tom, who had done several films at that point, we were all fairly new to film. But everyone, including Tom, was unknown to me. In any but the most superficial of respects, he remains so to this day.
If Cruise’s unprecedented success was a surprise to me, the perpetual rumors regarding his sexual orientation were utterly mystifying. At least at that time, there was no question which side of that particular fence
Tom stood on. It’s no secret that Tom engaged in an intense affair during the shooting with costar Rebecca De Mornay—who, as a woman, managed to maintain her inaccessible sexual mysteriousness under any circumstances, unless you could catch her in a joke, at which point her mask would drop as her eyes lit up and she would burst into a full-throated laugh.
Their romance was some time aborning. Part of the delay was caused by the presence of Harry Dean Stanton, who was involved with Rebecca during this period. During the hours she worked, Harry Dean—an affable man and great actor—spent his days swimming slowly the length of the hotel pool, literally for hours at a time. My room overlooked the pool and usually, on rising, I’d see Harry Dean churning his solitary way through the water with a black bathing cap and goggles. I’d go out for breakfast, come back to my room and there he was, his folded towel untouched, still swimming. I’d go to the set, shoot a scene and by the time I returned in the late afternoon, Harry was still in the pool, stroking away. The man’s stamina was extraordinary, which I suppose it would have to have been if he was dating Rebecca De Mornay. By evening, he would be found parked at a Pac-Man console at just outside the hotel bar, low-ball within reach, playing endless hours of the game with the same focused, unhurried concentration he brought to his swimming. It got to the point that if someone asked where the bar was, they would be told, “Go that way till you reach Harry Dean Stanton, then turn.” I liked and admired Harry Dean immensely. He is a genuinely nice and generous character. He even took my father under his garrulous wing one afternoon when Dad came down from Detroit for a few days and I was stuck at the set.
I suspect that most of Harry Dean’s great qualities were lost on Tom, who I think was beginning to regard him as a guest who was overstaying his welcome. It must have been a little galling to have your heart set on fucking your costar, and just when you think you’re starting to make some headway, her significant other comes popping up out of a trap like a lanky, amiable Banquo’s Ghost. This was a man who, in the eighties, seemed to turn up in every film released. He was ubiquitous, the envy of character men everywhere. You would think a career that hot would require him to be back in Hollywood, busily stealing scenes from entire casts and yet he appeared to be in situ indefinitely. “Can no one,” I imagined Tom thinking, like a modern-day Henry the Second, “rid me of this turbulent actor?”
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