Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Page A

Tom’s friend Michael LaForte confronted her and asked if she was cheating on his buddy, Diane denied it. In a frantic last-ditch attempt to save her eighteen-month romance, she hailed a taxi, headed for the Newark railroad station, and caught a train to Valley Forge, where she knew Tom was rehearsing. She was in such a hurry to make up with her boyfriend that she didn’t have enough cash to pay the taxi when she arrived at his hotel. They spent two days together, but both knew it was their last hurrah. With his shaved head, muscular body, serious demeanor, and easygoing friendship with Tim Hutton and Sean Penn, Tom had changed almost overnight. He looked good and knew it. More than that, he truly realized that he had found his true calling. Diane was no longer part of the package.
    In truth she was rather starstruck, silenced by the presence of Tim Hutton, who was then a teen pinup. Her parting with Tom was friendly, but final. She recalls: “He said, ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you anymore.’ I was cheating with someone else, and we were growing apart. He could be very cold—when he was done with you, he was done with you.” Insome ways her behavior had done them both a favor. They were both moving on, Diane to college and Tom to Hollywood.
    He wasted little time finding a replacement. Shortly afterward, he took time away from filming
Taps
to escort Melissa Gilbert, a former girlfriend of Timothy Hutton best known as the freckled-faced moppet from
Little House on the Prairie,
to a performance of
Sophisticated Ladies
on Broadway. Dressed in a preppy sport coat and tie, the unknown Tom Cruise looked awkward and rather gauche as photographers snapped the young couple in the theater foyer. By contrast, Melissa, at the time a well-known child star, seemed relaxed and at ease with the publicity. “I date different people and I’m not serious about any of them,” she later said.
    It was perhaps his first taste of the life that lay before him. After a short break at an uncle’s holiday home in Kentucky at the end of filming, he flew to Hollywood, where he joined up with Sean and Tim, who had arrived at the airport with his Oscar for
Ordinary People
casually tossed into a duffel bag. To save money, he divided his time between staying with Sean at Zumirez, his Malibu home, and in West Hollywood with composer and longtime friend of the Penn family, Joseph Vitarelli.
    According to those who saw him at the time, it was a Spartan existence. He lived in a bare room, a mattress on the floor and a telephone by the pillow. The only decoration was a pile of film scripts, empty beer bottles, and pizza takeout boxes. While the home comforts were rudimentary, as far as Tom was concerned he was living at the best address in the world . . . Hollywood.
    For the boy from Glen Ridge it was an intoxicating brew. Not only was there the excitement of being at the heart of the movie industry, but Sean Penn quickly introduced him to the in-crowd of young guns eager to make a name for themselves. They hung out at the then trendy Hard Rock Cafe or On the Rox, a private club on Sunset, spending time with Sean’s brother Chris, whom Tom taught how to wrestle, as well as other longtime friends like Emilio Estevez and Rob and Chad Lowe. Of course, he already knew Tim Hutton. As Sean Penn’s former fiancée Elizabeth McGovern says, “I dothink that Sean is an absolute Hollywood animal.” They would later become known as the Brat Pack, a dismissive term based on the 1950s Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. It was a term that rankled with these young men, not only because they didn’t think their party behavior was so outrageous, but also each considered himself a star in his own right, not part of a group. As Emilio Estevez, who was deemed to be dean of the fraternity, later remarked, “We were just guys being guys. We’d meet to let off steam, that was all.” And part of that behavior was having the good