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

forget, a moment that changed his life forever. Not only did his reputed $50,000 fee enable him to pay off the $850 loan from his stepfather, it was his first step on the ladder to stardom. The part he had landed was that of a friend to one of the main characters, David Shawn, an uptight cadetat the military academy who goes violently off the rails during the student rebellion. “He was acutely aware that this role could make or break his attempt at a career in Hollywood, and so took it very seriously,” recalls Diane Van Zoeren.
    In many respects Harold Becker was the ideal director for a raw, inexperienced actor like Tom Cruise. He insisted on a long rehearsal period, putting the kids through forty-five days of basic training at a real boot camp—Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania—to get a true flavor of the brutal gung ho camaraderie of cadet life. They spent half the day rehearsing their roles, the rest undergoing military training and learning to march and handle weapons, as well as studying the relentless intricacies of military protocol. By the end, Becker reasoned, they would feel like the characters they were playing and give the film an air of authenticity. Later, when filming began in earnest, he let Tom view the day’s rushes, talking him through the technical process.
    All the young actor cadets thrived in the military atmosphere except for one—a talented youngster from a Shakespeare youth theater in Tennessee. He was earmarked to play the part of David Shawn, the gung ho war lover who acts as a macho foil for the more conciliatory voices in a cadet rebellion. “But he couldn’t cut it, which was heartbreaking,” recalled Becker. With the youngster from Tennessee now out of the picture, Becker looked closely at the other actors to see who had the power, as he recalled, to “walk the walls.” A young man with the build of a wrestler who was already outmarching the other kids on the parade ground came to mind. It was Tom Cruise. “There was something in Tom that attracted me,” recalls Becker. “He’s one hundred percent. He was able to strut down that field and he had a crispness that a kid at a military academy might work three or four years for. I can’t say I thought, ‘This kid is going someplace.’ But I put him in.”
    To his credit, Tom was more concerned about the fate of the young man originally chosen to play David Shawn than taking his own opportunity. Becker explained that, even though Tom and the other actor had become friends, he had to replace him,and if he didn’t want the part, Becker would look elsewhere. So Tom took it.
    Watching from the wings with wry amusement as this off-screen drama unfolded was a young Sean Penn, who was inked in to play Alex, a thoughtful soldier who becomes the dramatic linchpin between the warring cadet factions. The son of director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan, the California-born actor, two years older than Cruise, was already a theater and film veteran. He had directed his first movie,
Echoes of an Era,
about a Vietnam veteran’s experiences, while he was a student at Santa Monica High School. It helped that the screenplay was by his school friend Emilio Estevez, whose father, Martin Sheen, was the star of the seminal war movie
Apocalypse Now.
    After Sean left high school, where, perversely, he studied auto mechanics and speech, he obtained small parts in several TV series, including
Barnaby Jones
and
The Killing of Randy Webster,
before buying himself a one-way ticket to New York to try his hand at off-Broadway theater. Knowing and cynical about the workings of Hollywood—his father had been blacklisted for refusing to testify during the notorious McCarthy Communist witch hunts during the 1950s—he was a passionate, intense, and talented actor, with the curmudgeonly self-confidence to challenge directors and fellow actors, but above all himself. At his audition for
Taps,
for example, Sean jumped on the desk to illustrate