Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (3 page)

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.”

The fear Tom felt in his father’s presence may help explain his natural affinity for acting, as the great skill of a child in an abusive, difficult home is the ability to split off, to hide in the imagination, to simply no longer be present when things get bad. In short, to fake it. This ability gets in the way later in life, when victims cannot connect to really important emotions
like love and happiness because they are inextricably linked to fear. As adults, they are able to express emotion but not feel it.

At the same time, perhaps the indulgence of his mother, her obvious devotion to her son, generated a primal jealousy and resentment in his father, a rage that only served to diminish his authority and cement the bonds among mother, son, and daughters. Every inexplicable outburst, every ugly tirade against his son, merely served to create protective sympathy for Tom, while edging his father further to the margins of family life.

As he became more of an outsider within the family, Tom Senior seemed to be increasingly at odds with society at large. He slowly transformed into an angry young man, a renegade who had little time for the system. Brought up a Catholic, he denounced organized religion and expressed contempt for doctors and conventional medicine. A restless, seemingly unfulfilled soul, he quit jobs while nursing dreams of making a fortune with various inventions. Doubtless his secret drinking fueled his tirades, the lurching unpredictable moods of brutality and remorse. “He was a very complex individual and created a lot of chaos for the family,” Tom later remarked. Finally, it all got too much for Mary Lee. It is a vivid testament to how difficult life with Thomas Mapother III had become that it was Mary Lee, a stalwart, strong-minded, churchgoing Catholic, who made the decision to leave her husband. “It was a time of growing, a time of conflict” is her only comment on this distressing event.

For a woman with a sense of the theatrical, the family departure was indeed dramatic. Mary Lee painstakingly planned the great escape with the precision of a military operation. She told Tom and her daughters to pack their suitcases and keep them by their beds in readiness for flight. At four-thirty one spring morning in 1974, when for some reason her husband was out of the house, Mary Lee roused her children, packed them into their station wagon, and headed for the border. “We felt like fugitives,” recalls Tom, the secrecy surrounding
their flight predicated on the false assumption that, under Canadian law, Mary Lee’s husband could prevent them from leaving the country.

They drove the eight hundred miles from Ottawa to Louisville, where Mary Lee knew that her mother, Comala, and brother, Jack, were waiting for her. The route was not unfamiliar to the Mapother children, the family often driving to Kentucky during the summer break to spend time with relations from both sides of the family. As they sang along to the radio to keep their spirits up, it is doubtful that any of the children realized that they would only see their father three more times. They hadn’t said any sort of good-bye to him, nor had they a chance to say their farewells to their school friends. Later, Tom’s younger sister, Cass, did take the trouble to send her teacher a “sweet” note thanking her for all her help.

After the initial excitement and sense of adventure wore off, the enormity of what they had done began to sink in. They had left a safe, well-to-do neighborhood, excellent schools, and a familiar circle of friends for an uncertain future. In addition, the full extent of their financial calamity became clear once they realized that Tom’s father was either unable or unwilling to pay child support. At first Mary Lee’s mother, brother, and other family members rallied round to help, paying for a rented house on Taylorsville Road in the eastern suburbs. It also seems that they and the Mapother family helped pay the fees to send Tom to the local Catholic school, St. Raphael, which takes children up to eighth grade.

The move south had at least one advantage for Tom: When he joined the school hockey team, he was a star player thanks to his Canadian experience. During one match in Indiana, the opposing player was so frustrated by Tom’s quicksilver ability that he unceremoniously grabbed him by the collar and threw him off the ice.