Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton

how he would address a crowd of fellow recruits. When he watched Tom Cruise in action, he sensed a kindred spirit, another furiously driven young man. “Cruise was like he was training for the fuckin’ Olympics,” he later recalled. “I think he was the first person I ever said ‘Calm down’ to. A fun guy, too.”
    Tom, Sean, and Timothy Hutton soon became fast friends, the youngster from Glen Ridge deferring to the experience and success of the two older men. The high-testosterone trio lived and partied hard, and their rooms on the same hotel floor in Valley Lodge soon became known as Fraternity Row. “Yeah, there was a lot of rock and roll going on on that floor,” recalled Sean Penn. On set, though, friendship was set aside.The characters that Penn and Cruise played were opposites, always at each other’s throats. They matched each other for intensity, Penn insisting that he be addressed by his character’s name of Alex even when the cameras had stopped rolling. During one scene, where Tom’s character shoots off a rifle, director Harold Becker thought Sean and Tom were going to kill each other after Sean said something to Tom, who suddenly started chasing him angrily around the set. It was only when Becker and members of the cast intervened that the fracas ended. “Sean likes to push buttons, and he said something to Tom,” recalled Harold Becker. “So Sean found a way to have Tom not like him for a moment.”
    Tom, too, submerged himself in the character he had taken over, eagerly exploring the cruelly manic qualities of the psychotic cadet. “I remember being nervous, really nervous, because at that point, when you’re young, you just don’t want to get fired,” he later told director Cameron Crowe. It was a nervousness born of ambition and an almost visceral drive to succeed. The experience was so intense that it took him months to come down from the role. “I had no sense of humor whatsoever,” he confessed later to one profiler, who observed drily, “This isn’t hard to believe.”
    During that period of collegiate self-absorption on the movie set, both his screen character and the real Tom were undergoing a rite of passage. Personally and professionally, Tom’s life was changing. Secretly, a new representative, Gerry Silver, the nephew of his existing agent Tobe Gibson, was courting Tom. With the promise of bigger and better roles whispered in his ear, Tom decided to ax the woman who had given him his first break. Midway through the filming of
Taps,
she received a curt telegram from her client telling her bluntly that her services were no longer required. Tobe, who considered herself a second mother to him, was devastated, all the more so because it was her nephew who stole him. She didn’t speak to her nephew for four years as a result of this perceived treachery, and even today finds it difficult to talk about that experience. “He met Tom behind my back, winedand dined him, promised him this and that,” she says. “I treated Tom like a son.”
    Tom later told Lorraine Gauli that he had fired Tobe because she could not take him where he wanted to go. “She was heartbroken about that,” recalls Lorraine. “She knew he was going to be a star and felt that this would catapult her agency as well.” It is the price that talent agents who spot young actors and actresses often have to pay, as Tobe’s daughter Babydol, who hit the headlines herself years later when she was exposed as a Hollywood madam, fully understands. “It is a cross my mother has to bear,” she says. “She finds people, gets them started, and then they leave her. She did, though, play an integral part in developing his career.”
    At the same time that he was severing links with his “surrogate mother,” he was saying good-bye to his longtime girlfriend, Diane Van Zoeren. While he was away, Diane, who always felt that they would eventually go their separate ways, had secretly started dating an old boyfriend. When