Free Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life by James L. Dickerson Page B

service. I’m a lousy driver myself. At home, I drove Mum’s old VW and put more than a few dents into it while trying to park. I didn’t know one car from another and couldn’t care less .  .  . [Tom] drove me around the Daytona track at one hundred eighty miles an hour. I ended up with a sore neck because at that speed your head gets pulled back. But it did get my adrenaline pumping.” 
    Everyone in the film company knew what was going on between Tom and Nicole. They could see it in the secretive glances Nicole tossed Tom’s way and in the way he grinned at her whenever their eyes met. They were so ga-ga over each other that it would have been embarrassing, if it had not been so entertaining to watch from the sidelines.
    Not entertained by the spark-filled romance was wife Mimi, who flew to Daytona Beach in December to talk to Tom about their two-year-old marriage. Six years his senior, she had taken him under her wing in 1987, after Tom had been involved in a high-profile romance with Risky Business co-star. Rebecca De Mornay. High-profile romances were nothing new for Mimi who had been linked by the tabloids with Tom Selleck, Christopher Reeves and Kennedy clansman Robert Shriver.
    Other than a penchant for garnering tabloid headlines, the couple seemed to have little in common except membership in the science-fiction-inspired religion of Scientology. When things started going badly in their marriage, Mimi turned to the Scientologists for help. She and Tom attended church-supported counseling sessions in an effort to work out their difficulties, but nothing seemed to work. Meanwhile, Tom grew more and more distant.
    Things did not come to a head until Mimi’s trip to Florida. It was then that Tom told her that he had fallen in love with Nicole and wanted a divorce. Stunned by the suddenness of it all, Mimi took the next flight out of Daytona Beach. She had gone to be with Tom to repair their marriage, to do the right thing—instead she was humiliated by his unwillingness to even discuss their relationship.
    On January 16, 1990, Tom and Mimi announced their impending divorce in a joint statement that said, in part: “While there have been very positive aspects to our marriage, there were some issues which could not be resolved even after working on them for a period of time. Anyone who has been through this type of situation will understand that it is a complicated and difficult decision.”
    The divorce was all very clinical, very Hollywoodish and businesslike in its lack of passion. Tom treated it as a changing of the guard. He took responsibility for the failure of the marriage, he was generous to Mimi in the settlement, and he made certain that everyone saw him moving on with his life. “It just seemed right,” Tom told writer James Greenberg. “I think anyone who has met Nicole would understand.”
    Mimi exhibited much the same attitude, insofar as moving on with her life was concerned, although she clearly felt she was the injured party. Stargazers wondered about the divorce because rumors had circulated about the couple ever since they got married. Was Mimi bisexual or perhaps a full-blown lesbian? She had encouraged that line of thinking by holding hands in public with other actresses, most notably Cheers co-star Kirstie Alley. A Star headline once proclaimed: KIRSTIE ALLEY: I LURED MEN BY PROMISING 3-IN-A-BED WITH MIMI ROGERS.
    Not until March 1993, when she did a nude layout for Playboy magazine, did Mimi address the rumors. She told the magazine that although she and Kirstie were “wild and crazy single girls,” there was no truth to the rumors that she is bisexual or a lesbian.
    In the interview, she also addressed rumors about her divorce from Tom. She denied she had grown tired of him and was responsible for the divorce. Then she dropped a bombshell, one that would prompt speculation that Tom was gay and haunt him for years to come. She and Tom split up, she explained to the magazine, because