While there is no recognized cure for dyslexia, teaching programs help sufferers to make sense of everyday life—from distinguishing the numbers on currency to reading a menu. The fact that he was diagnosed early worked heavily in his favor. At that age—he was at Robert Hopkins between eight and eleven—the brain is at its most adaptable, able to interpret and consolidate the basic building blocks of reading, writing, and arithmetic even in the face of a condition like dyslexia.
While the school was professionally equipped to help children with learning difficulties, the actor later complained about his treatment in the educational system: “I had always felt I had barriers to overcome. . . . I was forced to write with my right hand when I wanted to use my left. I began to reverse letters, and reading became difficult,” he said later. Unsurprisingly, his former teachers meet the actor’s grievances with disbelief. Both Pennyann Styles, who taught him at Robert Hopkins, and special-needs teacher Asta Arnot emphatically reject these claims. Styles, who is left-handed herself, was a self-confessed “zealot” about helping lefties to write as they wished—even bringing left-handed scissors to school.
In spite of his learning difficulties, the teaching staff at Robert Hopkins remembered Tom as a creative pupil who simply needed more time and attention. Another former teacher, Shirley Gaudreau, observes: “He was a right-brain kid—very creative but not in academics. It takes a lot more work with them.” Like other pupils with similar problems, he was encouraged to excel at a nonacademic subject like sports, drama, or art in order to bolster his confidence. He joined the school’s drama club and soon became a regular fixture in plays and other theatrical events. This was not entirely surprising, as there was acting blood on both sides of his family. Among the Mapother clan, his cousins William, Katherine, and Amy were enthusiastic childhood performers, William and Amy later becoming professional actors, while Katherine now works with the Blue Apple Players in Louisville. During their time in Ottawa, Tom’s mother and father were so keen on drama that the American newcomers helped found the Gloucester Players amateur theater group, appearing together in the group’s first-ever performance.
A fellow founder was school drama teacher George Steinburg, who, together with Tom’s mother, was instrumental in kindling the boy’s enjoyment of theater. “He had good raw energy that had to be channeled,” Steinburg recalled. “You could tell there was some talent.” In June 1972, at the end of his first school year in Ottawa, Tom and six other boys represented Robert Hopkins in the Carlton Elementary School drama festival. The group, dressed in tunics and tights, performed an improvised play to dance and music called IT. Their aim was to interpret the full title of the piece, which was “Man seeks out and discovers some unknown power or thing. He is affected by it.”
In the audience was drama organizer Val Wright. Even though she has since watched and judged hundreds of youngsters, she has never forgotten that “superb” production. “The movement and improvisation were excellent. It was a classic ensemble piece.”
Other performances were equally memorable. In her mind’s eye, teacher Wendy Santo can still remember the youngster in a fifth-grade performance where he played the sun, frozen in a sideways pose. “Even thirty years later it still gives me goose bumps. He was just another kid, but you would have been impressed,” she says.
When he took on roles that demanded reading and learning lines, teachers were on hand to help him out. Teacher Marilyn Richardson remembers how she was asked to read his lines out loud to help him memorize them. “He could read, but it took him a long time,” she recalls. “He had a very good memory and it didn’t take him long to learn his lines.” Certainly his performances always left an impression—although sometimes for the wrong reasons. Fellow pupil Louise Giannoccaro (née Funke) recalls the day when the “really cool” Tom Mapother appeared in a school play about Indians and cheekily played to the gallery to get a laugh. “He was supposed to pick an apple and say, ‘An apple, what’s an apple?’ but he was eating the apple and couldn’t say the line.” As his teacher Marilyn Richardson recalls, “He was a joker who liked to kid around. Everything was a bit of a laugh.”
While his acting garnered attention, his sporting prowess was more notable for tough, unbridled aggression than for any natural ability. He scraped into the school’s second team for hockey and earned a reputation for spunk and determination, flinging himself into “impossible situations” where the sticks were flying. “He was rough in floor hockey,” recalled his school friend Glen Gobel. “He was hardheaded but not talented.” For his pains, he ended up chipping a front tooth in one game. His belligerent streak got him into more trouble during a robust game of British Bulldogs—a rough version of “Piggy in the Middle”—in the school playground that left him writhing on the floor in agony. He was taken to the hospital in an ambulance with a busted knee, prompting headmaster Jim Brown to ban the game.
Doubtless it was an incident that made his father proud. Tom Senior’s robust approach to teaching his son sports emphasized taking the knocks without complaint. When they played catch with a baseball glove in their backyard, Tom’s father would throw the hardball violently and fast at the head and body of his nine-year-old son. “Sometimes if it hit my head, my nose would bleed and some tears would come up,” he later recalled. “He wasn’t very comforting.” Noticeably, it was Tom’s mother rather than his father who took him to his first ball game. This tough training did help Tom win a place on the North Gloucester baseball team, and as he adapted to local sports, he became much more proficient. When neighbor Scott Lawrie played against him in an ice hockey match, he couldn’t believe how good Tom was. “I just couldn’t get the puck by him,” he recalls. “He became a good hockey player, always ready to try new things.”
It should not have come as too much of a surprise. Tom and his gang, which included Scott and Alan Lawrie, Lionel Aucoin, Scott Miller, Glen Gobel, and Tom Gray, spent endless hours playing street hockey or baseball in the summer and ice hockey in the winter. For a change they played pool on a miniature table given to Tom by his sister Lee Anne’s boyfriend, rode their bikes to nearby Ottawa River, or went fishing in Green’s Creek.
The same reckless daring he showed on the sports field was evident when his gang was out having fun. Tom was the acknowledged tough guy, a thrill seeker who pushed the edge of the envelope when his friends cried chicken. “He was cocky, confident, and cool,” recalls Alan Lawrie. “When the kids got together, he set the agenda.” At Tom’s prompting, the boys became blood brothers, pricking their fingers with a pin and then mixing their blood together. When they went bike riding, he was the one who constructed rickety ramps to perform Evel Knievel–style stunts, the one who used a hockey net hung on a frame or a tree to perform Tarzan tricks, and the one who performed a daring back flip from the roof of his house but missed the soft landing of a snowbank and broke his foot when he landed on the sidewalk. This experience failed to curb his daredevil antics. At a nearby building site, he climbed on the roof or started the builder’s tractor while the rest of his friends ran off. “He was pushing limits all the time,” recalls Alan Lawrie. “I never thought of him ever becoming an actor. He was more of an Al Capone character, a maverick, the kind of kid who wouldn’t back down.”
Tom had a belligerent side, a cussed indomitability that seemed to stop him from knowing when to retreat and move on. One episode demonstrates the stubborn streak of the alpha male in Tom Mapother. He and his friend Glen Gobel were walking home when two older and bigger boys made disparaging remarks about Tom’s new haircut. He fiercely denied having his hair cut, and it was only the intervention of his school friend that stopped a fight—and Tom taking a beating. Afterward, when Glen asked why he had been so insistent, Tom replied, “It’s not a haircut, it’s a hairstyle.” As Glen recalls, “Even though he was a pretty popular kid, this ‘my way or the highway’ attitude did lose him friends.”
Of course, there was another reason Tom was so concerned about his hairstyle and why
he took the trouble to go home at lunch every day to change—girls. “Little Tommy Mapother” punched way above his weight in the romantic arena. His teacher Pennyann Styles remembers him well. “He had charisma. He was a standout because he was so good-looking. Even then he had that smile that he has today. Little Tom was attractive, outgoing, and slightly mischievous, but not bad. The kind of kid you recognize and remember.” He had long eyelashes that the girls adored and, for some inexplicable reason, they swooned over the fact that he had a sty under one eye. “The way his hair fell was so dreamy,” recalls Carol Trumpler, a fellow pupil at Robert Hopkins. “He had a cute way about him, certainly the gift of gab.” More than that, he had a swagger, a confidence that made him seem to stand much taller than he was. “We all had a crush on him; even then he was very cute,” recalls former pupil Nancy Maxwell.
He was the precocious kid, the one who organized parties for girls and boys at his house just as the sexes were becoming interested in each other. “He was sort of a bad boy, on the outside of the rules,” recalls Heather McKenzie, who enjoyed her first smooch with the future star. Even the boys in his gang now have to admit he had something that they lacked. “All the girls liked him and he thought he was pretty hot, too,” recalls his friend Lionel Aucoin pointedly. Tom had a distinct advantage over his friends, as living with three sisters had given him an insight into the fairer sex. “Women to me are not a mystery. I get along easily with them,” he observed later. That his sister Lee Anne, nearly three years his elder, would let her friends use him for kissing practice gave him a practical edge in the endless battle of the sexes. “It was great; there were no complaints,” he recalls.
One of his first girlfriends was fellow pupil Carol Trumpler. He was her first sweetheart, and even now, two marriages and four children later, she comes across all misty-eyed when talking about her first-ever kiss. “When you talk about first loves, I will always remember mine . . . Tom Cruise,” she says. “He was a very good kisser, very much at ease with it all. But what do you know at eleven?”
Carol got in trouble when she and Tom were caught smooching behind the picket fence by the playground perimeter. The young lovebirds were hauled up before school principal Jim Brown. As a result Carol was grounded by her parents and ordered to stay in her room. Undeterred, young Tom knocked on her door a few days later, a gray pup tent slung over his shoulder, to ask if she wanted to go camping in the woods. “It was probably so he could spend the day kissing me,” she recalls. “He was quite precocious and promiscuous, as far as you are at that age. He was trying to kiss me all the time.” Even though her father, Rene, sent Tom packing, the youngster was reluctant to take no for an answer, prepared to stand his ground before the older man.
After Carol—“I was trying to be a good girl, and when I didn’t give in to his ways he moved on”—there was Heather, Louise, Linda, Sheila, and, of course, his “bride,” Rowan Hopkins. Athletic, adventurous—she loved camping and hiking—and with a lively imagination, Rowan was one of the darlings of her year. As Lionel Aucoin recalls, “When you look back, it was just one of those funny things, Tom Cruise marrying his sweetheart in the school playground.”
In his official class photograph, taken in 1974 when he and his classmates had moved from Robert Hopkins to Henry Munro Middle School, it is easy to imagine why the eleven-year-old American was known as the coolest kid in school. With his head half cocked at the camera with a look of inquisitive insolence, his long hair in a fashionable, almost pageboy cut, and his checked shirt daringly unbuttoned, as was the style in the early 1970s, he looks more confident and at ease than other youngsters standing beside him. “As a kid he was famous even before he became properly famous, if that makes sense,” recalls Scott Lawrie. “He was one of those kids that you wanted to be around. I thought it was cool that Tom Mapother lived next door to me.” (Tom did, however, have competition to be king of the heap. On the next street lived Bruce Adams, now better known as rock star Bryan Adams, who also attended Henry Munro Middle School at the time.)
Cool, confident, charismatic, energetic; an occasionally cussed but popular boy: This is the presenting portrait of Tom Cruise Mapother IV as he approached his teenage years.
While academically he was seen as a middle-of-the-road student, it seems that he was coping well enough with his dyslexia not to need any extra help or coaching at Henry Munro. His homeroom teacher, Byron Boucher, who later specialized in special-needs children, taught him in a variety of subjects, including English and math, and as far as he is concerned, twelve-year-old Tom Mapother had no unusual learning difficulties. If he had struggled with reading and writing, the school principal would have been automatically informed and necessary remedial action taken.
At his new school he continued to excel at acting, taking part in Friday-afternoon drama sessions where, if they had worked hard, pupils were allowed to perform in front of the class. “He liked that very much and was very convincing,” recalls Boucher.
Less convincing was his behavior. During the transition from Robert Hopkins to Henry Munro, Tom’s image as a boy who got up to mischief but not into trouble began to change—for the worse. It wasn’t just the parents of his sweetheart Carol Trumpler who now viewed him with suspicion. He gained a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker, a youngster whose friendship should not be encouraged. “Parents would say, ‘Watch that kid,’ ” Alan Lawrie recalls.
He had started to get into more serious scrapes toward the end of his time in elementary school. His teacher Sharon Waters was hauled up by the school principal and threatened with dismissal when Tom and another student played hooky from Robert Hopkins. The local police escorted the pair, then eleven, back to class, and Sharon was severely reprimanded for failing to take attendance. On another occasion, Tom and Lionel Aucoin found a cache of firecrackers, which they threw into backyards in the neighborhood before running off. One irate householder gave chase, caught them, and threatened to turn them over to the police. Another time, Alan Lawrie’s father, Murray, cuffed him around the ear when he spotted him using three pine trees he had just planted in his garden for high-jump practice. (Tom didn’t do permanent damage to the trees, which are now over thirty feet tall.) As Tom later admitted, “I was a wild kid. I’d cut school. Everything had to do with my wanting always to push the envelope to see: Where do I stand with myself? How far can I go?”
In truth, his truculent behavior coincided with the collapse of his parents’ marriage, his wilder excesses a manifestation of his confusion and unhappiness. In an attempt to sort out his personal problems, his father sought professional counseling. “After the breakdown you could see big changes,” recalls George Steinburg. “Tommy was a problem. His dad was coming home from therapy and teaching him about opening up. Tommy really got into it and got into some trouble at school. You know, cussing and swearing.”
During the three years they lived in Ottawa, stresses and strains were developing that neighbors and friends could only imagine. It had all started so well. When they first arrived in Ottawa, the family made an effort to fit into their new community.
Tom’s mother earned the nickname “Merry Mary Lee” for her sunny personality. For a time she worked at the local hospital and helped out at the children’s school, taking part in school trips and other activities. “The first year and a half they lived here I think was a very happy time for the whole family,” recalled George Steinburg. “They were all popular.” The children pitched in, too, Tom remembering how he and one of his sisters took part in a forty-mile walk (the distance has probably been exaggerated) to raise money for local charities. Tom remembers that grueling walk mostly for the fact that a woman gave him a quarter for a soda to quench his thirst just as he was silently praying for a cool drink.
Around the neighborhood, he and his gang were seen as helpful kids who made two dollars a job for mowing lawns. Tom himself earned a little extra by cleaning out people’s yards. But after the first flush of neighborliness, the general judgment on the
block was that Tom’s father was distant and uncommunicative—a shadowy, elusive figure. “He was not sociable at all,” recalls his neighbor Irene Lawrie. “He could barely bring himself to give you the time of day.” There was talk that he had quit his job to write a book—certainly the family never had any money—rumor that he was a heavy drinker, gossip, too, that social services had been called in to help the family.
After the early efforts to socialize during their first years in Canada, it became clear to friends, teachers, and neighbors that the Mapother marriage was unraveling. “It was not a happy time for the family,” recalls Tom’s former teacher Shirley Gaudreau. The polarized local opinion about the Mapothers matched the schisms inside the family. While Tom has never uttered a critical word about his “beautiful, caring, loving” mother, who doted on her only son, he has rarely had a kind comment about his father. The relationship seemed one of mutual, confusing antagonism, his father singling his son out for his own interpretation of tough, almost brutal, love. While Tom and his sisters could not do enough for their strong, jovial mother, they tiptoed warily around their unpredictable father.
On one occasion the Mapother children asked Irene Lawrie for help in secretly baking a cake as a surprise for their mother’s birthday. Their oven wasn’t working and they didn’t have any baking equipment, so they threw themselves on her mercy. Irene ended up baking the cake, but the affection the Mapother children felt for their mother was clear from their excitement. By contrast, when Tom’s father took him for a two-hour drive to go skiing in the hills outside Ottawa, he refused to stop to let his hungry son buy a snack. Perversely, he told Tom to eat imaginary food, the duo spending a long time making and then eating a make-believe sandwich, complete with soda and chips. “And we had nothing,” Tom later recalled of his father’s bizarre behavior.
He would eventually describe his father as a “merchant of chaos” and life as “a roller-coaster ride” where he could never trust or feel safe with his father. For a boy who once said that all he really wanted was “to be accepted” and be given “love and attention,” life with a father who was a “bully and a coward” was almost unbearable. One of his more poignant memories concerns seeing the movie The Sting, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, which spoke to him not only because of the catchy theme song and audacious story line about con men, but because it was one of the few pleasurable experiences he remembered sharing with his father. His verdict on his father is damning: “He was the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. He was an antisocial personality, inconsistent, unpredictable.”
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