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The Mapother home was now largely a tight sorority in which Tom served as father, brother and friend. "Having grown up with women, I trust and believe them more than men," he says. "I love women. I love the way they smell." Today Cruise is just as close to Mary Lee and his sisters, who are frequent visitors to his sets. This month in Charlotte, when Lee Anne's two-year-old was injured in a hotel door, Tom rushed to the rescue, stayed with the child as the doctors stitched the wound, jollying him in recovery, being a great uncle -- perhaps because Cruise missed having a great dad.
By 17, Tom had attended three high schools and studied for a year at a Franciscan seminary, where his desire to become a priest eventually gave way before his love of women. By his senior year he was in Glen Ridge, N.J., where a knee injury dislodged him from the school wrestling team. He was miserable. Then he auditioned for the Nathan Detroit role in Guys and Dolls and got the part. "It was the first thing in my life for a long, long time that I felt excited about," Cruise says. He announced to his family that he was going to be an actor. Within a year he had a movie part.
At first he was vibrant local color, one of the beautiful faces, a hunk for hire. Fast-forward through an early Cruise movie, and you will find him in the corner of the frame, a winsome thing in love with his body, exuding the jock wholesomeness of a baby Christopher Reeve. Superboy. Dozens of such sleek stud puppies pass through Hollywood every year, and in Endless Love (1981) and The Outsiders (1982), Cruise had the chance to scope out his competition: Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, James Spader, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell. Usually boy toys come and go without attracting much more than vagrant pubescent lust. There is little job security in being this week's pinup on the bedroom wall of American girlhood.
Some teen dreams become stars; a few become actors. In one early role, Cruise showed he had the capacity for both. In Taps (1981), where he was up against Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn, he played a military-school cadet who goes picturesquely bonkers and is killed by the National Guard. "It's beautiful, man! Beautiful!" he shouts as he sprays the quad with an orgasm of machine-gun fire. In his first significant film of the '80s, as in his last, Cruise was the gung-ho soldier boy, his body destroyed in the fantasy of combat.
| For a young actor in the early '80s there was plenty of roles, but mostly in the tits-and-zits teenpix that emulated Porky's. Cruise did time in a dim comedy, Losin' It (1982), about some lads who visit Tijuana to mislay their virginity; he played the sensitive one. From its plot synopsis, Risky Business (1983) promised more of the lame same. An affluent high school senior has an affair with a hooker (Rebecca de Mornay), dunks the family Porsche in Lake Michigan, turns his house into a brothel and still gets into Princeton. Sounds like the Reagan era in miniature. But there was wit in Paul Brickman's script and swank in his camera style. For Cruise, there was more. As soon as he tore into an air-guitar rendition of Bob Seger's Old Time Rock 'n' Roll, in his Oxford-cloth shirt, B.V.D.s and socks, pop magnetism burst out of its suburban shell, and a star was born.