Decades ago, Alfred Hitchcock said actors were cattle. Today celebrities are meat: junk food for tabloid headlines, canapes for cocktail-party surmise, fodder for Leno and Letterman raillery. Are the charges, whispers and gags true? Hardly matters; they need only be entertaining. Star tattle proceeds from two American impulses: cynicism and sentimentality. Sentimentally we imagine that a popular artist must have hidden depths. Cynically we suspect that every star must have a guilty secret; all that power, money and spare time allow them to act out any sick whim. Gossip has become the purest form of show biz, a story that can be as short as a gerbil joke or as epic as the Monica Follies. It attaches itself to any prominent person, no matter how conventional or innocent he may appear.
Yet in all the annals of tattle, one man stands unsmeared. No one has accused Tom Hanks of being secretly gay, or of enjoying an unnatural relationship with certain varieties of fish, or of having sired a child in each NBA city. That is because (and we've researched this thoroughly) Hanks is a bright, decent, nice guy. You got a problem with that?
It ought to be enough that Hanks is a solid, supple actor who not only takes ornery subjects (AIDS, Vietnam, the U.S. space program) and turns them into hits (Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13), but also gives almost all his movies a moral center. In this age of the outlaw, he defines the ideal norm: he is our best us on our worst day, soldiering on through heartbreak. In Saving Private Ryan, for which he may earn his third Oscar as the tough, paternal Captain Miller, Hanks has a moment when the burden of leadership in war has nearly broken him. He walks over a hillside from his fractious men (far enough away that no one will see him) and sobs (so softly that no one will hear him). He is discreet even in despair.
And Hanks is a hero even when he does bad things. In the perky new comedy You've Got Mail, Hanks runs a giant chain that threatens to ruin a children's bookstore run by Meg Ryan; he is Big Business engulfing and devouring the sweet spirit of independence. In the intimate anonymity of a chat room, he carries on an e-mail affair with Ryan and doesn't tell her that her destroyer is her potential beau. At a literary soiree he scoops up all the caviar. Who is this creep? Tom Hanks. And because he is, he must be decent, searching, a thoughtful lover, natural dad-in-the-making. He reveals that through the comic grace he's displayed since Splash. It is a nice reminder that this ordinary-looking guy--with the repetitive crunches in that pensive space between his eyebrows and, at 42, a bit of a Michelin Man neck--is the avatar of Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy. Our suavest, most grounded light-romantic star.
Hanks has earned the luxury of taking his $20 million a picture and hiding. But this is the Enquirer era: excellence is not enough. He must be an ideal guy in real life; offstage he must be "Tom Hanks." So attend to these testimonials, made under neither threat nor hypnosis:
--Lauren Shuler Donner, producer of You've Got Mail: "I'd love to give you the dirt, but he's the real deal. All the cliches are true. Ask him to work Saturdays, ask him to reshoot a scene--his answer is always 'Whatever you need.' What a good guy! What a dream! What a pleasure!"