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

Embry-Riddle flying school in Florida to learn to be a pilot. Nancy was going to be a flight attendant—which she eventually became—and they planned to work side by side. “We were going to spend the rest of our lives together, children, a white picket fence, the whole nine yards,” recalls Nancy, who now has two boys from two marriages. “Back then I would have married him; we were high-school kids in love.”
    But even in the midst of their dreams, Nancy was beginning to sense the changes in her boyfriend. She didn’t entirely like what she saw. By the fall of 1979, his senior year, he was hanging with the jock crowd, now accepted as one of the guys. His crowd included Michael LaForte, who later became a Marine, Randy MacIntosh, Mark Worthington, Joe Carty, Mario Ponce, now a top attorney in Manhattan, Steve Pansulla, John Jordan, now a model, and the Travisano brothers, Vinnie and Phil. Several of them would remain Tom’s lifelong friends. They went to the Meadowlands to watch the Giants football team, drank in the Star Tavern—in those days the legal drinking age was eighteen—went to the Regency cinema in nearby Bloomfield, or just hung out in the school parking lot. They got into the usual scrapes, rumbles, and fights that come withteenage territory. As Sam LaForte, Michael’s older brother, recalls, “They knew how to enjoy themselves, they were a tight-knit group, just like the Rat Pack. They always got attention when they went out, and if they were in trouble, they would come running to me, the big brother.”
    Typically, it was Tom Mapother who was caught drinking beer before a school football game—in his senior year he made the third team—and was unceremoniously kicked off the squad. He was not the only one drinking; he was just the only one who got caught. Banished from the football team and with no chance of earning academic honors, he seemed to be drifting. Nancy Armel noted with some concern that while other students were applying to colleges, Maypo had not stirred himself even to send off for a brochure from the flight school in Florida.
    Even his wrestling career seemed to be taking a tumble. Ironically, over the past year the skinny little kid had filled out, putting on so much weight that he was now over the limit for his class. If he wanted to wrestle in the individual, rather than team, events at the end of that winter’s wrestling season, his coach told him that he would have to scale down a tad. Even though he would not have gotten very far in the competition, where he would have been up against much more accomplished athletes, he was determined to take part. In an effort to lose weight, he ran up and down the stairs of his Washington Street home. As he was coming down the stairs, he tripped on a pile of school papers left by his sister Cass and tore a ligament in his ankle. Crestfallen, the teenager told his wrestling coach that he would have to pull out of the tournament. “He felt pretty bad about it because he wanted to go out and wrestle,” recalls Coach Corbo. It seemed that the final months of his school career were simply petering out.
    He was still in the school choir—he has a good voice—and joined his friend Steve Pansulla and other singers like Cathy Carella and Kathy Gauli, Lorraine’s sister, for that season’s Christmas concert. Steve, who had taken him under his wing in his first few months in a new school and encouraged him to join the choir and the wrestling squad, now suggestedthat he try out for a part in the school’s production of
Guys and Dolls
. Cathy Carella and Kathy Gauli made up the chorus of encouragement as they tried to wheedle the reluctant teenager into giving it a shot. “Just do it, it will be fun,” Steve Pansulla told him.
    After all, now that he could no longer enter the wrestling tournament, what else did he have going on? For a long time, Tom would not entertain the idea. He told his friends that he couldn’t sing or act and that he had