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

he made up for in enthusiasm, and he was thrilled when his picture appeared in the local Glen Ridge paper in January 1979, showing him defeating a rival wrestler. Inevitably his mother, Mary Lee, came along to show her support. His younger sister, Cass, eventually became manager of the team.
    If victory was sweet, defeat was hard to bear. “He was a very intense person,” recalls his girlfriend Nancy Armel. “He took things very seriously. If he lost a wrestling match, you couldn’t talk to him for hours. You knew to stay away.”
    While he took his wrestling seriously, he could never lay genuine claim to academic ability. He was, as in his previous schools, a middle-of-the-road student, never really excelling at any subject. Still, in the three years that Tom and Nancystudied English together—and did homework at each other’s houses—she never noticed any signs of a learning disorder. A straight-talking New Jerseyan, Nancy gives little credence to his later claims that he was a “functional illiterate”: “I dated him through high school and it was never an issue. It cracks me up. Maybe he wanted to boost his career by saying that he was dyslexic. He seemed fine to me. I don’t remember him ever going to special classes and I would have known. He was an average student like me, a B/C student. He didn’t stand out academically.” Fellow students also point out that in a small school like Glen Ridge, every little imperfection is noticed and pounced upon. As a contemporary, Pamela Senif, observes, “He wasn’t in those classes for kids pegged as slow. Quite frankly, other kids would have teased him about it. If he was dyslexic, no one knew about it.”
    While it may stretch credibility to think that he could disguise his reading disability from his girlfriend for three years, his academic shortcomings were well noted. In a couple of acerbic postings on a Glen Ridge school Internet site, former students were dismissive of the school’s most famous old boy. One student who took history with Tom remembered him as a “phony” who used to charm the teacher, Dr. Voskian, to cover up for his lack of preparation. A great smile but a “confused and empty mind” was his verdict. Others were more forgiving, a former classmate noting that while he wasn’t reading “Tolstoy or Trollope, he could read and write and add and subtract.” That said, European classics are hardly the literary diet of most American teenagers.
    Tom may have been only an Average Joe academically, but he was a boy with ambition. When he and Nancy sat around the kitchen table discussing their futures, Tom expressed one burning desire: to be an airline pilot. It was an ambition he had harbored since childhood. As a kid he was plane crazy, collecting every model plane he could lay his hands on. Every time he left for a new home, he brought models of two of the most famous Second World War fighter planes, the Spitfire and the P-51 Mustang. His toy box, stenciled with the lettering“Tom’s model airplanes,” still remains in the attic of his Glen Ridge home in Washington Street and is enduring testimony to his fascination.
    There were other ambitions stirring between Tom and Nancy. By senior year he told her that he loved her, wrote her poetry and love letters. One Easter, because he couldn’t afford to buy her flowers, he stole daffodils from a neighbor’s front yard. It was a typical high-school romance: intense, fanciful, and passionate. By now they were both able to drive, and Tom would borrow his parents’ car for evenings out. As she says, with the rather coy remembrance of times long past, “Yes, he was my lover. Absolutely. I was his first. At least I think I was. I hope I was a good tutor. We definitely fooled around in the parked car like all teenage kids. I was black and blue from the gearshift, I can tell you that.”
    When they weren’t making out, they were talking about their future together. He wanted to go to the famous