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Recently he told the New Yorker that he "regrets" having given $10,000 to the Clinton defense fund. Now, asked about that remark, he goes all stammery, in the early Hanks mode of bluster and fluster, to explain, "Look, if I hadn't given it then, I would have given it now. As a guy who supports the President of the United States, I think he's doing a fabulous job, and I'm glad I gave him the money." Not that he wasn't shocked by the Lewinsky affair. "In the vast, surrealistic expanse of the Story of the Year, who didn't at one point or another slap themselves upside the head and say, 'Holy smoke! Hole ee smoke! Can you believe this?'? And you can't believe it, but it's the reality. But you know what? He's my guy."
In the New Yorker story, Hanks also did not rule out a future campaign for the presidency. Now he does. "I'm not running for President of the United States. I'm an actor who makes movies, and that's how I was answering the questions." His anguish turns briefly impish. "I think Sammy Sosa would be an ideal running mate. His enthusiasm, his joy and feel for the game." Then the agita rises again. "Good Lord Almighty! This is how trivial the times we're living in are. I don't even want to talk about it! Argggghhhh!"
Mr. Nice Guy does not easily wear the albatross of eminence. He may joke about it: "I'm powerful enough now to be taken seriously," he says, snapping his fingers like a born Hollywood sharpie. "Plenty of people take my phone calls!" He can also get plaintive: "Me famous?" he asks. "I can't embrace it for a moment. You guys do that." But he knows he is expected to think he's famous, and to love it: "I was working 18-hour days on That Thing You Do!," he says of the 1996 film he wrote and directed, "and I wasn't seeing my kids as much as I wanted. And I got into an elevator and this lady said, 'Oh, Tom Hanks! What's it like living at the absolute top of the heap?' And I said, 'Lady, life is just one damn thing after another, no matter where you're living.'"
On the set Hanks relaxes in a comfortable but not lavish silver Airstream trailer. (Of another star's trailer, he jokes, "John Travolta's is sorta like the Ritz Carlton. I wouldn't ever want to leave.") His real home--with his wife, actress Rita Wilson, and their two kids--is in west L.A., down the road from Spielberg's. But the star hasn't forgotten his dark roots. "Tom came from a hard place, and he remembers that," says Brian Grazer, producer of Splash and Apollo 13. The two men used to live near each other in a gated community on the Pacific. "I remember Tom sitting on the beach, holding the sand tight in his fist and saying, 'I can't believe this is my place.'"
As the kid from Concord, Calif., Tom Hanks didn't have a place. His parents separated when he was five, and he followed his chef father from job to job. "Basically he ran the kitchen in union dinner houses," Tom recalls. "Places with a net-and-nautical theme, with bamboo barstools and a dirty, disgusting kitchen." Early on, the boy learned the vagabond independence an actor needs. "I thought nothing of getting on the bus and visiting Mom four or five times a year."