Free Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Page A

his first agent, Tobe Gibson, in promoting his career.
    This comes as no surprise to Tom’s onetime friend Vinnie Travisano, now a successful art director. “He is a very talented guy, and very talented people give themselves all the credit for their success and move on.” It is the way of the world. Stars tend to limit their thank-yous to Oscar acceptance speeches.
    In fall of 1980, after he returned from filming
Endless Love,
any kind of success still hovered in the distance. While those few days in Chicago had served to confirm his ambitions, back in New York he was still an out-of-work teenage actor busing tables and scraping by. Nevertheless, his experience on the film seemed to have reinforced his confidence and willingness to assert himself. He was furious with his agent for sending out promotional pictures to the most popular teen magazines,
Tiger Beat
and
Teen Beat.
Even though later in his career he was featured on the cover of
Tiger Beat,
he made it clear that he did not want to be pigeonholed as some cheesy pinup. It was a point he made time and again in later interviews. “I’m not locking myself into a teen idol stereotype,” he said.
    Far more bothering was a set of black-and-white studio photographs of Tom wearing a gym top and short shorts that reportedly found their way into
Parlée,
a gay magazine that circulated in New York and Long Island. Diane Van Zoeren remembered that it was a big enough issue for him that Tom drove to his agent’s office for a face-to-face confrontation. “He was very serious with her,” she recalled, the incident revealing a young actor who, even this early in the game, wanted to control his image.
    Diane also realized that he wanted to control much more than his image; he wanted to be in charge of everything and everyone. She found his behavior oppressive and even relayed her concerns to his younger sister, Cass. “We had a volatile relationship,” recalls Diane, who was then in her senior year at Glen Ridge High School. “I didn’t get how intense and dramatiche could be. He was so controlling and I wasn’t used to that.”
    Still, he was romantic and considerate—when he could afford it. So while she became used to cheap Chinese meals and fooling around in the back of her father’s Oldsmobile—“Typical high-school stuff, doing what you are not supposed to,” recalls Diane—when he returned from filming
Endless Love
he bought her a pretty necklace adorned with a locket and a key which, as he told her romantically, was “a key to her heart.” Their romantic interludes were punctuated by arguments and recriminations. At the Candy Kane Ball in December 1980, they had a huge falling-out because she danced with another boy. The next day he sent her twelve yellow roses to apologize. Single-minded and go-getting, Tom was not in a placatory mood for long. A few weeks later he was furious because she was too busy to read through the script for
Taps,
a rite-of-passage movie about a violent rebellion among military cadets facing the closure of their academy.
    Early in 1981, veteran casting agent Shirley Rich was looking for young talent for the film, which already included the legendary George C. Scott and recent Oscar winner Timothy Hutton in the lineup. She was looking for a black actor and a “WASP-type” kid to fill a couple of small parts. So far no one fit the bill. “I told her that I’ve got what you’re looking for,” Tobe Gibson recalls, and promptly sent Tom along for an audition one Friday afternoon.
    This time he was clearheaded as he read out lines before director Harold Becker, who asked Tom to put up his hair so that he would get an idea of what he would look like as a shaved army cadet. It was a brief audition, leaving the teenager uncertain about whether he had made the cut. By the time he arrived back in Glen Ridge, the beaming grin on his mother’s face gave the game away. She told him, “You got
Taps
!” It was a moment he will never