Andrew Morton - Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography

Meet Tom Cruise

I get it. He has that deliciously indescribable magic that cannot be analyzed or replicated. He is in every sense a movie star.

Steven Spielberg

He was pushing limits all the time. I never thought of him ever becoming an actor. He was more of an Al Capone character, a maverick, the kind of kid who wouldnt back down.

A childhood neighbor

Dont let that smile and those teeth fool you. He could have a really nasty streak.

A high-school girlfriend

His acting was so good it was almost bizarre. Youd look into his eyes and hed really be there, hed really be in love with you. You could see his heart and soul. And then the director would shout Cut, Tom would leave the set, and youd have to go into therapy for six months.

Rene Zellweger

Ill bet all the money Ive ever made, plus his, that he doesnt have a mistress, that he doesnt have a gay lover, that he doesnt have a gay life.

Nicole Kidman

You cant drive past an accident, because as a Scientologist you are the only one who can help.

Tom Cruise

Also by Andrew Morton

Madonna

Monicas Story

Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words

AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

Andrew Morton

St. Martins Paperbacks

TOM CRUISE: AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

Copyright 2008 by Andrew Morton.

Cover photo Rene Johnston/Toronto Star/Zuma Press.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

ISBN: 0-312-94337-7

EAN: 978-0-312-94337-0

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martins Press hardcover edition/January 2008

St. Martins Paperbacks edition / February 2009

St. Martins Paperbacks are published by St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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For Max and new beginnings

If truth be told, Tom Cruise Mapother IV has always been something of a ladies man. Sweethearts, girlfriends, lovers, and wives; it has been a rare day in his life when he has not been wooing, wowing, or wedded to a young woman. In fact, he first walked down the aisle when he was just eleven in an impromptu ceremony under the spreading oak tree in his school playground. There is no record of who officiated or whether there were bridesmaids or even a best man, but the bride, a pretty, open-faced girl with a halo of blond ringlets, felt sufficiently confident of their plighted troth to sign herself Rowan Mapother Hopkins when she autographed her school friends yearbooks.

Maybe it was a dash of Irish blarney in his soul, as much as his winning smile, that made him so popular with the ladies. There is Celtic ancestryalbeit of confused genealogy and originon both sides of his family. Some historians assert that the first member of the Mapother clan to set foot in the New World was an Irish engineer named Dillon Henry Mapother. He was the younger of two sons, age just eighteen, who left his home in southeast Ireland in 1849 to escape famine and poverty. This is endorsed by the passenger list on the ship Wisconsin, which docked in New York on June 2, 1849. A certain Dillon Mapother, who listed his occupation as engineer, was one of the many seeking a new life in the New World. Other genealogists, notably used by the TV show Inside the Actors Studio, tell a different story. They claim that the same Dillon Henry Mapother was a Welshman, from Flint in north Wales, who had arrived in America several decades earlier, in 1816. All are agreed that he settled in Louisville, Kentucky, and married a woman named Mary Cruise, who bore him six children. Tragically, Dillon Mapother, by now a surveyor, died of a severe case of food poisoning in 1874, leaving Mary, then only thirty-one, to bring up her large brood alone.

She was not on her own for long, meeting Thomas OMara, who made a decent living in the town as a wholesaler of chemist supplies. While he was born around 1835 in Kentucky, as his name suggested, the OMara family hailed from Ireland. The couple married in February 1876 and promptly started a family. Their first son, Thomas OMara, was born just over nine months later, on December 29. In the 1880 census, the toddler was still called Thomas OMara and was listed as living with his parents and two half brothers, Wible and deHenry, who were both still at school, and a half sister, Dellia, then eighteen, who worked as a store clerk. Mysteriously, at some point during his childhood, Thomas OMaras name was changed to Thomas Cruise Mapother. Perhaps it was to give him the same surname as his half brothers and sisters, or his parents later divorced and his mother altered Thomass name, but as genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner noted, The reasons for him changing his name are not entirely clear. Indeed, this confusing family tree could serve as a metaphor for the actors own contradictory and elusive history.

So while the family name of Mapother seems to be Irish rather than Welsh in origin, the actors paternal bloodline can be traced back to the OMara clan from Ireland. Yet Mapother the surname stayed, and for the next four generations the actors father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all named Thomas Cruise Mapother.

Not only did they keep the same name, they lived in the same place, putting down deep roots in the rich Kentucky soil. Over the years the Mapothers, from both the OMara and Mapother bloodlines, produced an array of well-to-do professional men: mainly lawyers, but also engineers, scientistsand even a railway president.

The first Thomas Cruise Mapother (born Thomas OMara) went on to become one of the youngest attorneys in Louisville. He married Anna Stewart Bateman, who bore him two sons, Paul and Thomas Cruise Mapother II. They were a good, solid family, pillars of Louisville society and very loyal and dependable, recalled Caroline Mapother, a family cousin.

His younger son, Thomas Cruise Mapother II, born in 1908, followed in his fathers footsteps, becoming a lawyer and later a circuit court judge and a well-known Republican Party activist. After his marriage to Catherine Reibert, the couple went on to have two boys. His younger son, Williamfather of the actor William Mapotherbecame an attorney, bankruptcy consultant, and judge like his father, while his elder son, Thomas, born in 1934, inherited the familys inquisitive scientific bent. His cousin Dillon Mapother, formerly associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois, is probably the best-known scientist in the family, his work on superconductivity and solid-state physics earning him a considerable reputation. The professors academic papers alone take up 8.3 cubic feet in the college library.

As a teenager, Thomas Mapother III continued that tradition. After graduating in the early 1950s from St. Xaviers, a private Catholic school in Louisville that has been the alma mater to generations of Mapother boys, he went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Kentucky. At the time it was viewed as one of the better colleges in the country, but was mainly for white kidsthe university was not desegregated until 1954. After graduating in the mid-1950s, he started seriously courting an attractive brunette, Mary Lee Pfeiffer, who was two years younger and had a family history equally established in Jefferson County, Kentucky. Like her future husband, she could trace her lineage back to Ireland and her roots in Louisville to the early nineteenth century. Her father, Charles, had died in March 1953, so only her mother, Comala, who lived to the ripe old age of ninety-two, and her brother Jack were present to watch the twenty-one-year-old walk down the aisle at a Catholic church in Jefferson County just a few days after Christmas Day, on December 28, 1957.