TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122589/12258900.051

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                ├â    └                                                          CINEMA, Page 74

COVER STORY: Tom Terrific


In his fiery new film, Hollywood's top gun aims for best-actor
status

By Richard Corliss


    The souped-up Chevy Lumina circles the track at North
Carolina's Charlotte Motor Speedway. At the wheel is Tom
Cruise, daredevil superstar. The hazel eyes that laser out of
his handsome face focus on the thrill of speed and risk. Nor is
this challenge confined to a roadway's hard curve; it applies
as well to his career in the movies, even if it means taking
dangerous curves toward roles that might confound his fans. This
day, after a dozen laps, Cruise sees a dime, stops on it and
emerges from the Lumina to say hello to a visitor. He extends
a hand and flashes the million-dollar smile -- or, to judge from
the worldwide take of his past four movies, the $1.035 billion
smile. He points to the car and asks, "Want to go around?"

    America wants to go around with Tom Terrific -- that's how
he looks, that's how he makes moviegoers feel. They hitched a
ride with him in Risky Business and made him a star at 21. They
sat in the cockpit of his F-14 as he swaggered through the sky
in Top Gun. They perched in a pool hall and watched him wield
a cue like a master swordsman in The Color of Money. They flew
to the Caribbean to join him in a frothy Cocktail. They traveled
with him on a cross-country journey to fraternal reconciliation
in Rain Man. And with each adventure, audiences adjusted their
estimation of the young man -- from Most Likely to Succeed to
All-American Dreamboat to Serious Actor worth taking seriously.

    At the end of the '80s, Cruise, 27, is the movies' biggest
star, with nothing but promise on the horizon. Just ask two
masters he has apprenticed with: Dustin Hoffman, the decade's
most lauded actor, and Paul Newman, the last golden exemplar of
Hollywood star quality. "There's no sense of a crest in Tom,"
says Hoffman, who won an Oscar as Cruise's brother in Rain Man.
"His talent is young, his body is young, his spirit is young.
He's a Christmas tree -- he's lit from head to toe." Newman, who
played Cruise's mentor in The Color of Money, considers the
young actor's competitors and says, "Tom may be the only
survivor."

    What does he have that separates him from the Brat Pack?
He's not as lovely as Rob Lowe. He doesn't explode, on- or
off-camera, as ripely as Sean Penn. "Tom is at a disadvantage,"
says Barry Levinson, his Rain Man director. "He's got a pretty
face, so his abilities are underestimated. And he's not working
a rebel image, which is associated with being a good actor." But
he does have the image, in the films that made him famous, of
an intense young man with a mission: the total workhorse, the
ultimate party animal. His job -- flying planes, shooting pool,
mixing drinks -- is his life. And he is vulnerable as well as
volatile. His thin, high voice helps him here: it locates a
little boy lost in the clouds of bravado. Moviegoers may also
like what they see in Cruise the man: a dedicated actor, utterly
absorbed with his craft, who uses his celebrity to get better
parts and get better at what he does. With each new film, he has
proved he has more to offer than Ray-Ban Wayfarers and a
charismatic grin.

    Now Cruise has his best shot in a sprawling, squalling film
on Hollywood's favorite serious subject. Born on the Fourth of
July, directed by Oliver Stone (Platoon), is a Viet Nam
melodrama pitched at high decibel level for 2 hr. 23 min. The
movie is a jeremiad not just against the war but also against
the cultural authorities who encouraged it from the pulpit, the
blackboard, the dining-room table and the movie screen. This is
an anti-Hollywood movie too; everything that was terrific in,
say, Top Gun -- the war, the sex, the male bonding -- is found
to be toxic here. It is also a one-character story whose lead
actor must grow and shrivel, rage and endure in every scene. And
Cruise pulls it off. He carries the film heroically, like a
soldier bearing a wounded comrade across a battlefield. He is
the very best thing in a very big picture.

    Born on the Fourth of July is the true story of Ron Kovic,
a kid from Long Island, N.Y., who got his spine shattered in
Viet Nam. Back home he became bitter, questioning his old values
of family and patriotism, before convincing himself he could
best serve his country as a squad leader in the war against the
war. This morality play could be a turnoff if it weren't for
Cruise's presence. Says Tom Pollock, head of Universal Pictures,
the film's patron: "Tom Cruise is all America's all-American
boy. The film's journey is more powerful when it is made by the
maverick from Top Gun. It's not only Ron who goes through this
wrenching story, it is Tom Cruise -- our perception of Tom
Cruise."

    Casting against type, of course, can lead to a miscast
movie. But Cruise jumped at the dare. "I demand a lot of
myself," he says. "I want to learn. I can't sit back. I like a
challenge, so I create a lot of challenges for myself." For the
actor, many of his films provide the perk of being able to test
himself, master a new skill. He flew in Navy jets before making
Top Gun. He played serious pool for eight weeks before The Color
of Money. For Cocktail he tended bar in Manhattan. He plays a
race-car driver in his next movie, Days of Thunder, a spin-off
from Cruise's latest perilous hobby. But for Born on the Fourth
of July he faced a different challenge: spending almost a year
sporadically in a wheelchair, as Ron Kovic.

    Stone, who planned the movie for more than a decade, was
ready to do battle too. "Tom has the classical facial structure
of an athlete, a baseball player," he says. "He's a kid off a
Wheaties box. I wanted to yank the kid off that box and mess
with his image -- take him to the dark side." So the kid goes
off to war and sees a slaughtered Vietnamese family. In the
chaos of a skirmish, he kills one of his own men. Paralyzed from
the chest down, he finds his sex life over before it begins. In
horrifying rants, he abuses his parents, his country and
himself. This Ron is not a nice person or even, in his hippie
garb, a nice-looking one. Moviegoers who expect to find the best
of America in Cruise's face will instead discover a haunting mug
shot of the nation's Viet Nam nightmare.

    The film spans two decades, beginning on July 4, 1956. Ron
Kovic's tenth birthday is the U.S.'s 180th, and his hometown of
Massapequa, N.Y., is parading its patriotism down Main Street.
Disabled veterans are wheeled out, including one (played by the
real Kovic, co-author of the film's screenplay) who flinches at
the sound of a firecracker. It must remind him of a war that
demands elegies. But young Ron -- too busy watching skyrockets
that night to pay attention to a first kiss from his precocious
friend Donna -- sees organized gunplay as the short road to
manly glory.

    Ron knows only what he has been taught: by his family's
suffocatingly pious Catholicism, by the suave belligerence of
President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, by his drill sergeant of
a high school wrestling coach, by the Marine recruiter looking
for a few good men. Men! Ron wants to be one of them, in the
nifty new theater called Viet Nam. He hardly has time for a
dance at the senior prom -- just a promise of sexual pleasures
with sweet Donna (Kyra Sedgwick), deferred till after he has
done his duty. After he finds his manhood.

    Instead of finding it, he loses it, and so much else: his
unexamined ideals, his blinkered innocence, his respect for
those who still believe the lies that nurtured him. Ron would
give up all those values just to be whole again. The film spends
only 17 minutes in Viet Nam, but the war overshadows all that
precedes and follows it.

    Here, the disasters of war are at home. The Bronx veterans'
hospital where Ron is sent to recuperate is an open sewer
teeming with rats, drugs and whores. Back in Massapequa, Ron is
now the flinching veteran used as a prop for patriotism, and
family life is a ceaseless, sickening debate about the war. Even
in Mexico, at a kind of seraglio for impotent veterans, he finds
little sympathy among his own crippled kind. He looks into the
angry face of his buddy Charlie (Willem Dafoe) and finds a
mirror of his own grotesque despair. He has hit bottom.

    For Ron, regeneration is painful and partial. He never, in
the film, reconciles with his parents; there is no fade-out kiss
with Donna. His conscience has more urgent needs. To expiate the
guilt of killing a fellow soldier, he must confess to the boy's
family. To purge his horror of the village massacre, he must
speak out against the war. He infiltrates the 1972 Republican
Convention in Miami Beach and gets on TV. When a security guard
dumps Ron out of his wheelchair, he fights back with a Marine's
heedless bravery. "We're gonna take the hall back!" he cries to
his troops. "Fall out! Let's move!"

    Whereas Platoon had news value, Born on the Fourth of July
tells a familiar story; it wants to teach us what we already
know. The movie's uniqueness is in its tone. Stone plays
director as if he were at a cathedral organ with all the stops
out. Each scene, whether it means to elegize or horrify, is
unrelenting, unmodulated, rabid with its own righteousness. And
yet, frequently, the crazy machine works because of its
voluptuous imagery. When Ron is wounded in Viet Nam, he
collapses backward, and from his mouth a stream of blood spurts
like the fountain of lost youth. The hospital sequence is an
insider's tour of hell, and the Mexican brothel is an endless
emotional purgatory.

    Stone's canniest directorial decision was to choose Cruise.
The actor remakes himself in the film, trashing preconceptions,
showing a range that astonishes. Ron's furious arguments with
his family become primal screams of frustrated love. In the
Mexican scenes, where Ron meets a prostitute who treats him
gently, Cruise's tearful face expresses wonderfully conflicting
feelings of joy and fear, peace and release. He makes sense of
the story even when the movie doesn't. No wonder that at the end
of the filming, Kovic gave Cruise his Bronze Star. "He gave it
to Tom for bravery," Stone says, "for having gone through this
experience in hell as much as any person can without actually
having been there." The presentation was made for the actor's
27th birthday.

    Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on the third of July,
1962, the third child of Mary Lee and Thomas Cruise Mapother
III, an electrical engineer. Cruise has three sisters: Lee Anne,
30; Cass, 26; and Marian, 28. Dad had to follow the work, and
the family followed Dad; young Tommy attended a dozen schools
before he was twelve. Cruise learned to adapt. "I'd assume the
role of what I thought kids were, what I thought was In. Sports
was one way of fitting in. But I was never Mr. All-Star Athlete.
It was something that got me out, as opposed to staying home and
reading a book. Which I didn't understand anyway."

    Tom had dyslexia, a reading disability that bred
frustration and a poor school record. "I didn't have any tools
to study with," he says. "I didn't know what studying was." A
grind for perfection, Cruise today often carries a dictionary
so he can look up unfamiliar words. "He comes into my office,"
says Top Gun co-producer Don Simpson, "and goes over my stack
of books, taking notes. Last night he used the word plethora.
Two years ago, he didn't know the word."

    In 1975 the Mapother family faced a plethora of problems.
The parents divorced, and Mary Lee moved her children to
Louisville. Tom missed his dad, but says, "My father was not a
guy to go out and hit baseballs to me. It was my mother who took
me to my first ball game." In 1984 Cruise's father died of
cancer. He had never seen any of his son's films. Though there
was no reconciliation, Tom's father finally acknowledged his
domestic mistakes. An edge of anger creeps into Cruise's voice:
"But he never said it to me."

    In Louisville, Mary Lee rallied the children. As Lee Anne
recalls, her mother said, "O.K., things have changed. This is
the new game plan." With no child support available, Mary Lee
juggled three jobs, and the children earned money too --
especially Tom, then twelve. "All of a sudden, I was the guy,"
he says. "I grew very protective of my family." Cruise remembers
the first Christmas without his father: "There wasn't any money
for presents. So we picked names out of a hat and did something
special for that person. You would find a flower on your bed.
Or you'd come in to find your bed made. We also wrote poems to
each other telling what we did."

    The Mapother home was now largely a tight sorority in which
Tom served as father, brother and friend. "Having grown up with
women, I trust and believe them more than men," he says. "I
love women. I love the way they smell." Today Cruise is just as
close to Mary Lee and his sisters, who are frequent visitors to
his sets. This month in Charlotte, when Lee Anne's two-year-old
was injured in a hotel door, Tom rushed to the rescue, stayed
with the child as the doctors stitched the wound, jollying him
in recovery, being a great uncle -- perhaps because Cruise
missed having a great dad.

    By 17, Tom had attended three high schools and studied for
a year at a Franciscan seminary, where his desire to become a
priest eventually gave way before his love of women. By his
senior year he was in Glen Ridge, N.J., where a knee injury
dislodged him from the school wrestling team. He was miserable.
Then he auditioned for the Nathan Detroit role in Guys and Dolls
and got the part. "It was the first thing in my life for a long,
long time that I felt excited about," Cruise says. He announced
to his family that he was going to be an actor. Within a year
he had a movie part.

    At first he was vibrant local color, one of the beautiful
faces, a hunk for hire. Fast-forward through an early Cruise
movie, and you will find him in the corner of the frame, a
winsome thing in love with his body, exuding the jock
wholesomeness of a baby Christopher Reeve. Superboy. Dozens of
such sleek stud puppies pass through Hollywood every year, and
in Endless Love (1981) and The Outsiders (1982), Cruise had the
chance to scope out his competition: Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe,
Ralph Macchio, James Spader, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, C.
Thomas Howell. Usually boy toys come and go without attracting
much more than vagrant pubescent lust. There is little job
security in being this week's pinup on the bedroom wall of
American girlhood.

    Some teen dreams become stars; a few become actors. In one
early role, Cruise showed he had the capacity for both. In Taps
(1981), where he was up against Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn,
he played a military-school cadet who goes picturesquely bonkers
and is killed by the National Guard. "It's beautiful, man!
Beautiful!" he shouts as he sprays the quad with an orgasm of
machine-gun fire. In his first significant film of the '80s, as
in his last, Cruise was the gung-ho soldier boy, his body
destroyed in the fantasy of combat.

    For a young actor in the early '80s there was plenty of
roles, but mostly in the tits-and-zits teenpix that emulated
Porky's. Cruise did time in a dim comedy, Losin' It (1982),
about some lads who visit Tijuana to mislay their virginity; he
played the sensitive one. From its plot synopsis, Risky Business
(1983) promised more of the lame same. An affluent high school
senior has an affair with a hooker (Rebecca de Mornay), dunks
the family Porsche in Lake Michigan, turns his house into a
brothel and still gets into Princeton. Sounds like the Reagan
era in miniature. But there was wit in Paul Brickman's script
and swank in his camera style. For Cruise, there was more. As
soon as he tore into an air-guitar rendition of Bob Seger's Old
Time Rock 'n' Roll, in his Oxford-cloth shirt, B.V.D.s and
socks, pop magnetism burst out of its suburban shell, and a star
was born.

    "My best work comes when I'm really communicating with the
director," Cruise says, "and I work great with Brickman."
Brickman praises Cruise's ability "to play innocence and heat
back to back. When he read for the part, he stopped himself
halfway through, said, `Wait, I think I can go in this
direction,' and started over again. That was a courageous thing
for a 19-year-old to do, but Tom is a courageous guy. He's got
a will for excellence."

    Cruise's next picture, All the Right Moves (1983), was an
earnest, working-class remake of Risky Business. This time he
was a steel-town senior whose only hope for a college
scholarship was through football stardom. But this was no chic
adolescent fantasy, just a drab ring around the blue collar, and
suddenly Cruise had lost the big mo he earned with Risky
Business. It would take time to win it back. Legend (1986),
which he spent a year shooting in London, didn't help. Ridley
Scott's airless fable had too much fairy glamour and no
breathing room for an intense, American-style actor. As the
peasant boy Jack, Cruise gets to decapitate goblins, but he
looks stranded amid the special effects. The movie made him hide
from his own smartest instincts.

    Top Gun (1986), directed by Ridley's brother Tony, had
enough smarts to cadge $350 million. Enthralling and deplorable
by turns, this tale of hot rodders in the sky limns a life of
quick thrills. Cruise's Pete ("Maverick") Mitchell is a Navy
buzzboy who fills his downtime with volleyball, partying and
swell sex. But Maverick is truly juiced up in his F-14, where
sex and sport fuse into career and patriotism, where an ace can
wage a Nintendo war with death as the penalty. "Your ego is
writing checks your body can't cash," an instructor warns him.
In Top Gun, though, death happens only to supporting players,
and advice is something only a wimp would heed.


    Give Cruise this: he takes suicidal militarism and makes it
affably sexy. He stares at you, murmurs, "That's right, I am
dangerous," and zaps a grin that tells you how much fun he
expects to have mowing your butt. Maverick is the master of
machismo, his talent nearly matching his arrogance. He needs
only to learn the elements of style. Top Gun shares Cruise's
grinning, winning style; it says that Maverick and his kin are
a better breed. The picture cashed its checks on the actor's
body. So did the Navy, which set up booths outside theaters. But
with its climactic dogfight against Soviet MiGs over the Indian
Ocean, Top Gun also caught flak for being a sort of recruitment
poster for World War III.

    Cruise defuses the criticism. "It was a nice E-ticket
ride," he says, "a simple movie, but involving. These guys risk
their lives every time they go flying. It's tremendous fun and
requires a lot of intelligence and skill." He is impressed with
those who master any dangerous, complex craft, and if offered
the chance, he is determined to match them at it. Producer
Simpson recalls taking Cruise, who was not yet committed to the
project, for his first ride in an F-14: "When he hit the ground,
he said, `I'm in.' "

    Top Gun proved that Cruise could carry the right picture by
himself. In The Color of Money he would see if he could stand
up to a movie icon, Paul Newman, under the gaze of a
world-class filmmaker, Martin Scorsese. Newman is Eddie Felson,
the pool sharp he played 25 years earlier in The Hustler, and
Cruise is Vincent Lauria, a comer in the art of nine ball. The
movie describes two different styles of performance and
personality. The old kind was grace without sweat: the whole
point of Astaire's dancing, Sinatra's singing or Bogart's acting
was to make hard work look easy. The new style (Gene Kelly,
Elvis, Brando and all their successors in the Pop arts) was
manic, sexy, a brilliant workout for the ego.

    So Vincent pokes his dexterity in every side pocket while
Eddie sits nearby, coiled, worldly, wise, a little affronted at
the younger man's blazing cheek. This raw kid is the color of
money -- green -- but at his best he radiates in-your-face star
power. One sensational shot at the pool table reveals Cruise
high on his own showy excellence, whooping, dervishing, twirling
his pool cue like a kendo master: Luke Skystrutter. The force
is with Vincent. And with Cruise.

    When Eddie first spots Vincent's gift with the stick, his
eyes light up. Newman might have felt the same when he noticed
Cruise's determination. "He's prepared to hang himself on a meat
hook," Newman observes. "He'll hang himself out to dry to seek
something. He's not afraid of looking like a ninny. He doesn't
protect himself or his ego. And he's a wonderful experimenter."
Of course, like any actor, says Newman, "when the material is
poor, he falls back on his successful mannerisms: the happy
kitten. I don't know that he's a great mathematician or a
theoretical physicist, but he has what he needs to be a good
actor." A good student too. With Newman's encouragement, Cruise
took up racing and fell in love with the sport. For a while he
even drove for one of Newman's teams.

    His next significant project, Rain Man, took years to get
going. As a kind of vacation from responsibility, he made
Cocktail, a shrewd, soulless marketing of the Cruise charisma.
The star tries hard to appear engaged by the story of a young
bartender seduced and frazzled by Manhattan chic. But he is just
beefcake hanging in the window: smile, flirt with the ladies,
shake your booty. "I tried to sell out to you," he tells a rich
girlfriend, "but I couldn't close the deal." With Cocktail,
Cruise closed the deal. This empty decanter grossed $175
million.

    Rain Man was the third consecutive film in which Cruise
played a character who could be described as the cool jerk.
Charlie Babbitt is a slick salesman whose estrangement from his
father has cut him off from most human contact. Emotionally, he
is as autistic as his brother Raymond (Hoffman). But Cruise made
character sense out of Charlie and held his own against
Hoffman's brilliant stunt of a performance. "Tom's a
moment-to-moment actor," Hoffman says. "He's there in the
moment. He doesn't have an intellectual idea of what he wants
to do -- he's coming off his gut, and that makes him a pleasure
to play Ping-Pong with. I started out being his mentor. But by
the end Tom was as much directing me as I was directing him."

    In Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise had no Hoffman to
play actor's Ping-Pong with. In front of the camera, he was on
his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone
and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, "because he was the
closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the
same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly
troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the
same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like
Ron too, Tom is wound real tight. And what's wrong with that?"

    Throughout, Stone kept winding Cruise tighter. "I put a lot
of pressure on Tom," he says, "maybe too much. I wanted him to
read more, visit more hospitals. I wanted him to spend time in
that chair, to really feel it. He went to boot camp twice, and
I didn't want his foxhole dug by his cousin. At one point I
talked him into injecting himself with a solution that would
have totally paralyzed him for two days. Then the insurance
company -- the killer of all experience -- said no because there
was a slight chance that Tom would have ended up permanently
paralyzed. But the point is, he was willing to do it."

    Cruise was willing to do anything for the picture; he
tabled his usual multimillion-dollar salary, and will earn no
money until the box office sends some back. He spent hours with
Kovic, peppering the vet with questions, soaking up the man's
life. In matching wheelchairs, the two men would go shopping;
Cruise was rarely recognized. In a Westwood, Calif., electronics
store, he was asked to leave because his wheels were leaving
marks on the rubber carpet. "He was furious," recalls Kovic.
"Everyone in the store turned and looked at him when he shouted,
`I have as much right to be in this store as everyone else!' "

    They shot for 65 exhausting, twelve-hour days (on a slim
budget of $17.8 million), and Cruise would not trade a day of
it. "At the beginning I thought, `Oh, man, I just don't want to
blow this. Every day I am going to give it everything I have.
In the Philippines, where we shot the Viet Nam stuff, I was
thinking, `I don't know how it's going to be, but all I know is,
I have got absolutely nothing left.' I was burned out. Burned
out. But when I think back to the happiest moments in my life,
I think of when we finished Born on the Fourth of July. You're
looking down from the mountain and saying, `Jesus, I had no idea
it was this big.' I love that feeling of conclusion,
accomplishment, overcoming obstacles."

    One obstacle a married movie star must overcome is the time
he spends away from his wife. (Another annoyance is tabloid
tales of imminent splitsville, and Cruise has heard those too.)
But Cruise and his wife, actress Mimi Rogers (Someone to Watch
Over Me), spend as much time together as possible in their New
York City apartment and visit each other when they are filming
in far-flung locations. Cruise says it helps to have a wife in
the business: "It's like trying to explain how driving a race
car feels. You can't do it. They've got to get in the car
themselves. I need someone to understand what I'm doing, so I
get good input, so I'm not in it alone." But Rogers, 34, is
also, obviously, another crucial woman in Cruise's family. "The
most important thing for me," he says, "is I want Mimi to be
happy."

    They do well separately and do good together. Cruise and
Rogers serve on the board of the Earth Communications Office,
an entertainment-industry organization that promotes
environmental causes. The two visited a Brazilian rain forest
this year. At home they limit the water pressure in their sinks
and toilets. On a cable-TV cartoon series, Captain Planet,
Cruise lends his voice to ecologically sound Captain Planet.
Says Bonnie Reiss of ECO: "Isn't this guy too good to be true?
He loves animals, children, people. And he's gorgeous, O.K.? I
mean, please."

    Rogers has been with Cruise in Charlotte on the speedway
set of Days of Thunder. She is there as Tom Terrific, his solid
frame wrapped in a white racing suit with black and red stripes,
steps into the chartreuse-and-yellow Lumina. He carries his
celebrity gracefully, as if he knows he'll have it for a long
time. "I'm just happier now than I've ever been in my life," he
says softly. On the fast track of responsible stardom, he just
keeps cruising along.