Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Read Free Book Online

polite.”
    It must have been all the more galling for a teenager who was used to being the leader of the pack to be considered a small fish in a hostile pond. Having learned the art of disguise from his relationship with his father, Tom played out a role, displaying a mask of affability in order to survive the blackboard jungle. Fellow pupil Nancy Armel was asked byher uncle and vice principal Jack Price to show Tom around his new school. When they first met, she sensed his uncertainties and insecurities. “He was eager to make an impression,” she recalls.
    Make an impression he did. As she lived around the corner, he came over, ostensibly to do homework together, but really to hang out. In short order she went from school guide to classmate to girlfriend. They became so close that they were separated in English class for chatting too much. The young couple went horseback riding together and, because they were too young to drive, one of their parents would take them to the movies. Mostly, though, their dates consisted of fooling around at each other’s homes. She liked him because he was fun and personable. Certainly not for his looks. “He was not the Don Juan of the year,” she recalls dismissively of her boyfriend. She did, however, stick around long enough to date him for three years and become his first lover. They even talked of marriage.
    At that stage in his life, young Maypo had to get by on sheer personality. “He was fresh meat but kind of goofy-looking,” recalls fellow pupil Diane Van Zoeren. It was at his first school dance that fellow students began to sense that there was more to the kid from Kentucky than they originally thought. Everyone formed circles, and one by one, teenagers went into the middle to show off their moves. When it was Tom’s turn, he stunned the watching crowd with a series of lunges, leaps, and spins that had them mesmerized. “We all realized then that there was something different about this guy,” recalls Travisano. “He was a kid with charisma. After that display he started making friends, and it was totally obvious that he was a cool guy.” Before he arrived at the dance hall, Tom had spent hours rehearsing so that his performance would look relaxed and natural. It was a trick he was to pull off throughout his future career. He watched shows like
Soul Train
and copied the dance moves of teenagers in the audience. “I taught myself how to do the robot spinning and stuff like that,” he once said. But however hard he tried, he was never cool enough to be in with the hot crowd.
    Cheerleaders and jocks, the Lorraines and Franks of this little world, ruled the corridors and bowers of Glen Ridge. Tom was on the fringes, mixing with the jocks, but never making the sporting grade. He joined the soccer team, then in its infancy. The fledgling sport, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, at least, had been left in the tender care of the school’s history teacher, Dr. Don Voskian, known imaginatively as “Doc Voc.” Young Tom achieved about the same standard as the rest of the squad, which was, as one spectator observed, “pretty hopeless.” He fared much better in the winter, when he took up wrestling, practicing every day after school under the watchful eye of Coach Angelo Corbo. Not only was it a way for the small boy—in tenth grade he was only around five feet, six inches tall—to compete with others his same weight, but it was a chance to make new friends. “I think he was quite lonely and found it tough to fit in,” recalls Corbo.
    Even so, he was unfailingly polite, dedicated, and determined. The sport had such an influence that his mother once told Corbo that the psychology of wrestling, matching up to another, one on one, had been a great help in his later acting career. Of course, in later life his sparring partners were Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, and Jack Nicholson rather than students from rival schools in Jefferson Township and Hillside. What he lacked in technique,