Free Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton

always say thank you, keep eye contact, and arrive fresh and full of enthusiasm. If you get a part, watch the director’s every move on set and never party before the filming is finished. Her words fell on deaf ears. Tom later admitted that he had committed the cardinal sin of drinking heavily the night before his audition and arrived with a hangover. Eventually he was asked to deliver lines from
Romeo and Juliet
and walk up and down the room, presumably to give the director a sense of his screen presence. For someone so passionate and committed to his craft, his confession that he drank too much before his first big opportunity seems strange. Was it nerves, bravado, or the exaggeration of hindsight?
    Hangover or no, Tom won for himself the tiny part of Billy, while another of Tobe’s clients, Sean Gauli, the kid brother of Tom’s actress friend Lorraine, also snagged a “blink and you’d miss it” role. Filming was in Chicago in the fall of 1980, and before he boarded the plane, his mother made sure her young lion was properly attired—taking him shopping for T-shirts, shorts, and fresh underwear. It was a necessary precaution, as his first screen character is notable more for the tiny Daisy Duke shorts he wore during the filming of a soccer kickabout than for any lines he delivered. His role, such as it was, called for him to take off his undershirt before chatting to the lead character, David. During their brief conversation he whimsically suggests that David should set fire to his girlfriend’s family home, a suggestion that has tragic consequences for the star-crossed lovers.
    While Tom was a lifelong film fan, he was a novice whenit came to the mechanics of making a movie. Once he got on the set, he started to realize what a technical process it was. As he later recalled, he spent as much time worrying about camera angles and hitting his marks as about the handful of lines he had to deliver. Even though the film earned lukewarm or downright hostile reviews, Tom was thrilled with the whole experience. While on the set in Chicago, he made a fleeting background appearance in a
60 Minutes
TV documentary about the film’s director, Franco Zeffirelli. When it aired, he was literally jumping up and down on the sofa with excitement as he, his girlfriend, and family watched his first appearance on the small screen. It was a precursor of a rather more public performance some twenty-five years later.
    When
Endless Love
opened, Tom was one of the first in line to see it, going to the Regency cinema in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with a bunch of friends. Literally as he was coming out of the door after seeing the matinee performance, fellow actor Sean Gauli was lining up to see the evening show. In some ways it served as a metaphor for their respective careers. By then doors were opening for Tom while they were banging shut for Sean, who is now a motor home salesman in Florida. It annoys him that his old school buddy exaggerates his struggle to make it in the industry, as it diminishes those who helped him get his start and, ironically, demeans Tom’s own talent, which includes an uncanny ability to make everything look easy.
    Although Tom later told writer Jennet Conant, “I was a starving actor for a few months,” it is an assertion Sean finds difficult to accept. “What he says and what the reality was are two different things,” he recalls, dismissing as myths the stories of Tom hitchhiking around the country seeking fame and fortune. “The plain facts are that he was a natural and didn’t struggle at all. I know because I went to hundreds of auditions and he didn’t do any of that shit. It would be good for the truth to come out instead of this fictitious crap. We were all struggling actors, and when he made it he never made any attempt to help us out.” There remains residual resentment thatthe actor has never acknowledged the help of people like his Glen Ridge school friends Steve Pansulla and Lorraine Gauli or