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CHAPTER 1
If truth be told, Tom Cruise Mapother IV has always been something of a ladies' man. Sweethearts, girlfriends, lovers, and wives; it has been a rare day in his life when he has not been wooing, wowing, or wedded to a young woman. In fact, he first walked down the aisle when he was just eleven in an impromptu ceremony under the spreading oak tree in his school playground. There is no record of who officiated or whether there were bridesmaids or even a best man, but the bride, a pretty, open-faced girl with a halo of blond ringlets, felt sufficiently confident of their plighted troth to sign herself Rowan Mapother Hopkins when she autographed her school friends' yearbooks.
Maybe it was a dash of Irish blarney in his soul, as much as his winning smile, that made him so popular with the ladies. There is Celtic ancestry — albeit of confused genealogy and origin — on both sides of his family. Some historians assert that the first member of the Mapother clan to set foot in the New World was an Irish engineer named Dillon Henry Mapother. He was the younger of two sons, age just eighteen, who left his home in southeast Ireland in 1849 to escape famine and poverty. This is endorsed by the passenger list on the ship Wisconsin, which docked in New York on June 2, 1849. A certain Dillon Mapother, who listed his occupation as engineer, was one of the many seeking a new life in the New World. Other genealogists, notably used by the TV show Inside the Actors Studio, tell a different story. They claim that the same Dillon Henry Mapother was a Welshman, from Flint in north Wales, who had arrived in America several decades earlier, in 1816. All are agreed that he settled in Louisville, Kentucky, and married a woman named Mary Cruise, who bore him six children. Tragically, Dillon Mapother, by now a surveyor, died of a severe case of food poisoning in 1874, leaving Mary, then only thirty-one, to bring up her large brood alone.
She was not on her own for long, meeting Thomas O'Mara, who made a decent living in the town as a wholesaler of chemist supplies. While he was born around 1835 in Kentucky, as his name suggested, the O'Mara family hailed from Ireland. The couple married in February 1876 and promptly started a family. Their first son, Thomas O'Mara, was born just over nine months later, on December 29. In the 1880 census, the toddler was still called Thomas O'Mara and was listed as living with his parents and two half brothers, Wible and deHenry, who were both still at school, and a half sister, Dellia, then eighteen, who worked as a store clerk. Mysteriously, at some point during his childhood, Thomas O'Mara's name was changed to Thomas Cruise Mapother. Perhaps it was to give him the same surname as his half brothers and sisters, or his parents later divorced and his mother altered Thomas's name, but as genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner noted, "The reasons for him changing his name are not entirely clear." Indeed, this confusing family tree could serve as a metaphor for the actor's own contradictory and elusive history.
So while the family name of Mapother seems to be Irish rather than Welsh in origin, the actor's paternal bloodline can be traced back to the O'Mara clan from Ireland. Yet Mapother the surname stayed, and for the next four generations the actor's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all named Thomas Cruise Mapother.
Not only did they keep the same name, they lived in the same place, putting down deep roots in the rich Kentucky soil. Over the years the Mapothers, from both the O'Mara and Mapother bloodlines, produced an array of well-to-do professional men: mainly lawyers, but also engineers, scientists — and even a railway president.
The first Thomas Cruise Mapother (born Thomas O'Mara) went on to become one of the youngest attorneys in Louisville. He married Anna Stewart Bateman, who bore him two sons, Paul and Thomas Cruise Mapother II. "They were a good, solid family, pillars of Louisville society and very loyal and dependable," recalled Caroline Mapother, a family cousin.
His younger son, Thomas Cruise Mapother II, born in 1908, followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a lawyer and later a circuit court judge and a well-known Republican Party activist. After his marriage to Catherine Reibert, the couple went on to have two boys. His younger son, William — father of the actor William Mapother — became an attorney, bankruptcy consultant, and judge like his father, while his elder son, Thomas, born in 1934, inherited the family's inquisitive scientific bent. His cousin Dillon Mapother, formerly associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois, is probably the best-known scientist in the family, his work on superconductivity and solid-state physics earning him a considerable reputation. The professor's academic papers alone take up 8.3 cubic feet in the college library.
As a teenager, Thomas Mapother III continued that tradition. After graduating in the early 1950s from St. Xavier's, a private Catholic school in Louisville that has been the alma mater to generations of Mapother boys, he went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Kentucky. At the time it was viewed as one of the better colleges in the country, but was mainly for white kids — the university was not desegregated until 1954. After graduating in the mid-1950s, he started seriously courting an attractive brunette, Mary Lee Pfeiffer, who was two years younger and had a family history equally established in Jefferson County, Kentucky. Like her future husband, she could trace her lineage back to Ireland and her roots in Louisville to the early nineteenth century. Her father, Charles, had died in March 1953, so only her mother, Comala, who lived to the ripe old age of ninety-two, and her brother Jack were present to watch the twenty-one-year-old walk down the aisle at a Catholic church in Jefferson County just a few days after Christmas Day, on December 28, 1957.
For a young electrical engineer like Thomas Mapother, it was an exciting time. Recruited by the giant General Electric Corporation, he apparently took a keen interest in the development of laser technology, which had just been introduced in a paper by scientists Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow in 1958, their pioneering work ultimately revolutionizing the world of medicine and communications. "Thomas was fascinated by technological developments of the day," Professor Dillon Mapother later observed. "He spent every waking moment on new projects." While he was establishing himself in his new corporation, it was not long before the newlyweds began a family: four children born in just four years. Their first child, Lee Anne, was born in 1959 in Louisville, their second, Marian, two years later, after the family had moved to Syracuse, New York. Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on July 3, 1962 — the day before Independence Day. His younger sister, Catherine — known as Cass — who was named after her paternal grandmother, arrived a year later.
It did not escape notice that with his dark hair, strong jaw, straight nose, blue eyes, pouchy dimpled cheeks, and slim, well-proportioned features, together with a winning smile, little Tom was very much his mother's son. The two developed an intensely close bond of mutual love and admiration, an adoration he has never been shy of expressing. "My mother is a very warm, charismatic woman, very kind, very generous," he later told TV interviewer James Lipton. As the only boy in the family, he found himself doted on by his sisters as well as his mother.
A young child with a vivid imagination — often caught daydreaming instead of helping his mom — he was constantly creating his own real-life adventures, eagerly exploring the domain beyond his backyard on his tricycle. At times his daring spirit caused a degree of consternation in the Mapother household, the youngster regularly having to be gently coaxed down by his mother from the trees he had climbed. It did not help his mother's equanimity that he dreamed of emulating his hero, G.I. Joe, a plastic action man who came complete with a parachute. Then only three or four years old, he achieved his ambition with potentially tragic results. He remembers pulling the sheets from his bed, using monkey bars to climb onto the garage roof, and then jumping off. "I knocked myself out. I was laying there looking at stars," he later recalled.
Even as early as the tender age of four, he daydreamed of becoming an actor. "It just evolved," he once recalled, and it was no surprise that from a young age he was fascinated by the drama, action, and adventure of the movies. A family treat was to go to a drive-in, buy popcorn, and let young Tom lie on top of the station wagon to watch the film. He was mesmerized by the wartime yarn Lawrence of Arabia, even though nothing in his young life enabled him to grasp the notion of an endless rolling desert. Around the dinner table he enjoyed performing, making his family laugh with impersonations of cartoon characters like Woody Woodpecker and Donald Duck. Later he graduated to the voices of Elvis Presley, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney. His mother, who had a love of theater, encouraged Tom and his sisters to perform skits she had written.
In some ways his early experience of school was a more painful adventure than jumping off the roof. When he was still a toddler, the family moved frequently, living for a time in New Jersey, then moving to St. Louis, Missouri, and returning to New Jersey when he was six. In 1969 he was at the Packanack Elementary School in Wayne Township. It soon became apparent to his teachers that young Tom was struggling to learn the rudiments of reading. He felt humiliated and frustrated, embarrassed every time he was called upon to read aloud in class. It was not long before he was diagnosed as suffering from dyslexia, a learning disability that apparently affected his mother and, to a greater or lesser degree, his three sisters. Dyslexics find it difficult to distinguish letters, form words, spell, or read with any degree of comprehension. Even though sufferers are of average or above-average intelligence, this invisible handicap, if unrecognized, can produce deep psychological trauma, notably a sense of isolation, inadequacy, and low self-esteem.
Tom has since spoken of the shame he felt as he grappled with the disorder: "I would go blank, feel anxious, nervous, bored, frustrated, dumb. I would get angry. My legs would actually hurt when I was studying. My head ached. All through school and well into my career I felt like I had a secret." Like other sufferers, he developed coping strategies, rarely volunteering to answer teachers' questions, or behaving like the class clown to deflect attention from his academic failings. His Woody Woodpecker impersonations now amused his classmates as well as his family.
Tom's own frustrations were seemingly mirrored by his teachers' impatience with him. He would later claim that when he was seven — the time he attended Packanack Elementary School — one teacher hurled him over a chair in class, the implication being that the teacher was angered by his inability to grasp the subject. Other teachers, he later recalled, were similarly irritated. The current principal of the five-hundred-pupil school, Dr. Kevin McGrath, who has been teaching for more than thirty years, finds the actor's claims difficult to accept. "That kind of behavior by a teacher toward a pupil would not have been tolerated then or now," he says. "It is tantamount to locking a child in a closet or taking a switch to them."
In the winter of 1971, when he was halfway through third grade, his family packed up yet again and headed north for Ottawa, the Canadian capital, where his father had apparently gotten a job working for the Canadian military. They moved into a tidy clapboard house at 2116 Monson Crescent in Beacon Hill North, a leafy middle-class suburb that attracts government workers, diplomats, and other itinerant professionals. "Hello, my name is Thomas Mapother the Second," announced Tom proudly if incorrectly when he knocked on the door of his new neighbors, the Lawrie family, and introduced himself. "I liked him," recalls Irene Lawrie, whose sons Alan and Scott became regular playmates. "He was always very active, always on the go, but a bit of a loner."
Beneath the surface bravado there was, as he admitted later, an American youngster understandably worrying about whether he would fit in at a new school with new friends in a foreign country. "You know, I didn't have the right shoes; I didn't have the right clothes; I even had the wrong accent," he recalled. Small for his age, "Little Tommy Mapother," as he was known by teachers and pupils alike, soon found himself picked on by playground bullies. He had to learn to stand tall. "So many times the big bully comes up, pushes me, and your heart is pounding, you sweat, and you feel you are going to vomit," he said later. "I'm not the biggest guy in the world, I never liked hitting someone, but I know if I don't hit that guy, he's going to pick on me all year."
Tough lessons from his father, which he painfully learned at home, as well as his own obdurate nature gave him the inner resilience to face down those who opposed him. When his own father was at school, he, too, had been bullied, an experience that emotionally scarred him for life. Determined that young Tom not go through the same trauma, he always pushed him to stand up for himself. If Tom was in a fight and lost, his father insisted that the youngster go out and take on his opponent again. Physically, Tom Senior was "very, very tough" toward his only son, seemingly crossing the boundary between stern parenting and abuse. "As a kid I had a lot of hidden anger about that. I'd get hit and I didn't understand it," the actor later told celebrity writer Kevin Sessums.
Young Tom's bloody-minded obstinacy and refusal to back down soon earned him respect among local youngsters. "Tom was the school tough guy," recalls Scott Lawrie, now a police officer. "He wasn't a pushover and could handle himself." As his brother Alan observes, "If there was trouble with the local kids, he would be the first to say, 'Let's get involved.'" In the cruel world of playground politics, Tom needed a thick skin. He stood out not only because he was American but also because of his learning difficulties. "I remember some kids making mockery of him because he couldn't read," recalls Alan Lawrie.
Ironically, in spite of the inevitable taunts from thoughtless classmates, Tom was enrolled in the perfect elementary school for a child with his learning needs. So new that pupils had to take their shoes off before walking on the purple carpet, Robert Hopkins Public School was years ahead of its time: progressive, enlightened, and nurturing, with ample funding. When Tom and his sisters were enrolled, his parents alerted the school principal, Jim Brown, to their children's various learning difficulties. The principal explained that before the Mapother children could be placed into special-needs classes, they had to be given a routine assessment by an educational psychologist.
When he was at the school, which was open plan, Tom and other youngsters with similar problems — normally there would be eight or so in a class — would go into a smaller room away from the hubbub for more intensive tuition in reading, writing, spelling, and math under the watchful eye of the school's special-needs teacher, Asta Arnot. Even by today's standards, this was high-quality care. His mother supplemented the work of the school at home: Tom would dictate the answers to his assignments to her, then she would hand the work back to him so he could painstakingly copy it out.
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Tom Cruise"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Andrew Morton.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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