Cruise at the Crossroads

Let me tell you something...," Tom Cruise begins in a scolding voice.

Uh-oh. I've ticked him off. The hazel eyes that were gracious moments ago are now as impenetrable as cloudy water, and his wide-set cheekbones seem to be widening even more, stretching the skin taut like a pearly mask. The steel that has suddenly hardened his voice is a surprise, though maybe it shouldn't be, since surely in the Tom Cruise screen persona there is that upfront cockiness, a premonition of violence. It was just this quality that director Oliver Stone wanted in casting Cruise as a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in the new film Born on the Fourth of July. "His aggressivity is what impressed me," Stone says. "I wanted to take his top-dog strength and turn it on its side, to flip it. It's like Top Gun goes to war. You're number one, you're Mickey Mantle, but what happens when you get blown out of the cockpit?"

It was while discussing Born on the Fourth of July that I quite inadvertently pissed off Cruise. The conversation was flowing along just fine, everything going smoothly, in a sunny hamburger restaurant in West L.A., when — Blammo! — he blew me out of the cockpit. In the film, Cruise plays real-life vet Ron Kovic, who goes to war as a patriotic marine in 1967 and comes back in a wheelchair, eventually becoming an impassioned antiwar activist. Despite the involvement of Stone as director and co-writer, this is not Platoon II. Most of the film takes place following Kovic's return, when his disillusionment with his country and his useless, pitiful body boils up. He rails against the war makers, the Catholic church and, most dramatically, his rigid Silent Majority parents, whose withholding of approval when he was a teenager made him think he could prove his manhood by going to war. In a climactic scene, Kovic drunkenly confronts his mother with the fact that now, due to a smashed spinal cord, he has no manhood at all. It's just "me and this dead penis," he cries.

His prudish mother is shocked. "Don't say penis in this house!" she shouts.

"Penis, penis, penis!" yells Kovic, sick of all the hypocrisy he sees. "Big fucking erect penis!"

This is powerful stuff, and Cruise deeply inhabits the role, giving the most ambitious performance of his career and an utterly convincing one. He spares none of the gritty reality in depicting the indignities of the wheelchair-bound. In one scene he has violently yanked loose his catheter and sits besotted in his own urine. It is not a pretty picture, and it's a long way from the sexually magnetic, rambunctiously physical roles in which Cruise became a star. Before the film's trailer came out, Universal Pictures fought a raging battle with Cruise's people to prevent them from releasing stills of Cruise in a wheelchair, for fear of turning off the audience. The studio was concerned about whether the picture would attract the folks who've flocked to Tom Cruise in the past — the guys who find him manly and rebellious, the girls who find him vulnerable and gorgeous, the high-school seniors across the country who in 1988 voted him "Top Hero of Young America." In a word, would these folks come to see Tom Cruise as a guy without a male member?

I ask Cruise whether he had any doubts about accepting the part: "Did you think how your traditional audience might respond to the role?"

"No, I didn't," Cruise says. "What do you mean, 'traditional audience'?"

The audience that on the strength of his name alone made Cocktail, in which he played a "star bartender," a $70 million success despite bad reviews, including some calling it Cruise's first flop. "The audience that will see almost anything if they think they're going to get a character like that from you," I say.

"Like what?" Cruise demands, an edge in his voice. He rarely cuts you any slack in conversation. He'll pick up an unexamined thought and toss it back at you.

"A character who's young, healthy, robust," I say. "With sex appeal. You know, in just the most stereotypical terms ... your image as a film character."

There follows a long pause in which Cruise seems to be doing a slow burn. Finally, he says, "You're the type of person who stereotypes things. That's not the way I think. I have to disagree with you in that. Just the opposite. If you look at the films, there's a range...." And he makes the point that actors who stop taking risks and gambling on new roles grow stale.

Yet the irreducible reality is that there are very few actors whom audiences will accept in any role. The cable channels are gorged with product that moviegoers would not buy from stars they thought they knew. "That has to be a concern," I say.

"Why?" Cruise asks. "From what point of view?"

"I suppose from the point of view of wanting to continue to work successfully and have some clout in the business," I answer.

There is a very long pause. "Let me tell you something," Cruise begins, the sarcasm dripping. This is when it's clear I have pissed him off. "I don't know how many times I have to say this, but having clout in the business has never been a huge concern of mine. And that I have never done a film for money. And that, that ..." He sputters to a halt. "I don't know what else to say."