Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography

Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography Read Free Page B

Book: Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography Read Free
Author: Andrew Morton
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts
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    Tom had a belligerent side, a cussed indomitability that seemed to stop him from knowing when to retreat and move on. One episode demonstrates the stubborn streak of the alpha male in Tom Mapother. He and his friend Glen Gobel were walking home when two older and bigger boys made disparaging remarks about Tom’s new haircut. He fiercely denied having his hair cut, and it was only the intervention of his school friend that stopped a fight—and Tom taking a beating. Afterward, when Glen asked why he had been so insistent, Tom replied, “It’s not a haircut, it’s a hairstyle.” As Glen recalls, “Even though he was a pretty popular kid, this ‘my way or the highway’ attitude did lose him friends.”
    Of course, there was another reason Tom was so concerned about his hairstyle and why he took the trouble to go home at lunch every day to change—girls. “Little Tommy Mapother” punched way above his weight in the romantic arena. His teacher Pennyann Styles remembers him well. “He had charisma. He was a standout because he was so good-looking. Even then he had that smile that he has today. Little Tom was attractive, outgoing, and slightly mischievous, but not bad. The kind of kid you recognize and remember.” He had long eyelashes that the girls adored and, for some inexplicable reason, they swooned over the fact that he had a sty under one eye. “The way his hair fell was so dreamy,” recalls Carol Trumpler, a fellow pupil at Robert Hopkins. “He had a cute way about him, certainly the gift of gab.” More than that, he had a swagger, a confidence that made him seem to stand much taller than he was. “We all had a crush on him; even then he was very cute,” recalls former pupil Nancy Maxwell.
    He was the precocious kid, the one who organized partiesfor girls and boys at his house just as the sexes were becoming interested in each other. “He was sort of a bad boy, on the outside of the rules,” recalls Heather McKenzie, who enjoyed her first smooch with the future star. Even the boys in his gang now have to admit he had something that they lacked. “All the girls liked him and he thought he was pretty hot, too,” recalls his friend Lionel Aucoin pointedly. Tom had a distinct advantage over his friends, as living with three sisters had given him an insight into the fairer sex. “Women to me are not a mystery. I get along easily with them,” he observed later. That his sister Lee Anne, nearly three years his elder, would let her friends use him for kissing practice gave him a practical edge in the endless battle of the sexes. “It was great; there were no complaints,” he recalls.
    One of his first girlfriends was fellow pupil Carol Trumpler. He was her first sweetheart, and even now, two marriages and four children later, she comes across all misty-eyed when talking about her first-ever kiss. “When you talk about first loves, I will always remember mine . . . Tom Cruise,” she says. “He was a very good kisser, very much at ease with it all. But what do you know at eleven?”
    Carol got in trouble when she and Tom were caught smooching behind the picket fence by the playground perimeter. The young lovebirds were hauled up before school principal Jim Brown. As a result Carol was grounded by her parents and ordered to stay in her room. Undeterred, young Tom knocked on her door a few days later, a gray pup tent slung over his shoulder, to ask if she wanted to go camping in the woods. “It was probably so he could spend the day kissing me,” she recalls. “He was quite precocious and promiscuous, as far as you are at that age. He was trying to kiss me all the time.” Even though her father, Rene, sent Tom packing, the youngster was reluctant to take no for an answer, prepared to stand his ground before the older man.
    After Carol—“I was trying to be a good girl, and when I didn’t give in to his ways he moved on”—there was Heather, Louise, Linda, Sheila, and, of course, his

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