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I'm supposed to be smack in the creamy centre of Tom Cruise's target demographic. I was almost twelve when Top Gun came out, and god knows all my friends had serious crushes on him then. By the time I was a senior in high school, he was showing off his brainy idealism in A Few Good Men. I had just finished university and was soon to marry when he taught us all how to love in Jerry Maguire. And I was just starting to get the two-year itch (well, not really) when he took on the subject of marital infidelity in Eyes Wide Shut. By all rights, Tom Cruise probably should really boil my potatoes, but he doesn't, and he never has.
Despite my misgivings about him, Tom Cruise is undeniably the biggest, most famous movie star in the world. Sure, Harrison Ford's movies have made more money than Tom Cruise's have, but Ford has been in the business fifteen years longer and has churned out almost three times as many movies. Tom Hanks has more Oscars, but since Hanks wasn't saddled with model-perfect, hunky features, it's been easier for him to play the showy elder-statesman roles Oscar loves so well. When it comes to sheer, unadulterated star power, Tom Cruise has got more than any other actor his age. He's a supernova. His fame is so unfathomably unshakeable, in fact, that it's scarcely possible for anyone not to have an opinion on him. He's like the President of the United States of Fame.
And, frankly, looking over his CV, it's easy to see why. Sure, there are the high-profile flops (Legend, Far and Away), and some of his early work hasn't aged well (your Risky Business, your Losin' It), and his streak of Young [Blank] Who Ignores His Crusty Mentor And Plays By His Own Rules roles probably should have ended before Days of Thunder, and he occasionally veers into mawkishness that would make Robin Williams roll his eyes (Rain Man). Even so, he has been fairly choosy in his roles -- if you had to guess, would you have thought he'd only starred in twenty-four films since 1981? When Cameron Diaz has starred in twenty-six since 1994? -- and his choosiness has yielded a succession of certified box-office hits and three Oscar nominations.
So we may agree that Cruise's professional standing accounts for some measure of his fame -- the fact that when he goes on Oprah or Rosie, he gets the full hour, and the appearance is hyped for several weeks before the event, or the understanding that he will appear on the cover of Vanity Fair at least once every two years. But as we all know, there is a component of Cruise's fame that has nothing to do with his track record as an actor. There is a reason that the details of his recent divorce from Nicole Kidman was fodder not just for the tabloids but for People and Entertainment Weekly, and that the question of who was to blame was a topic of speculation far longer than when, say, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore split up a few years ago.
Despite all the Oscar nominations and $25 million paydays and such, Tom Cruise is as famous as he is in large part because he is widely believed to be a weirdo. Because we at Fametracker don't know Mr. Cruise personally, and because we don't want to get sued, we aren't saying that Cruise is a weirdo on the scale of, say, a Michael Jackson. We certainly can't comment on the veracity of any of the stories that, despite Cruise's best efforts (and those of his publicist, the legendary Pat Kingsley) to project an image of himself as the ultimate all-American boy next door, hang around him like a bad smell -- and when the news broke about his impending divorce from Kidman, those stories became part of the speculation surrounding the reasons for the separation as if they were facts in the public record. (Again, of the following scenarios, we are not saying any are true -- just that commentators and observers may have given voice to them in public. We were not among said commentators and observers, and we're still not now. As far as we know, none of the following statements is in any way true, just so we're clear, Tom Cruise's lawyers.) Was Tom ditching Nicole because he was getting set to trade her in for a new beard -- since we all know Tom is a closeted homosexual? Did it have anything to do with those sex therapists who had to be hired to work on the set of Eyes Wide Shut and teach Cruise and his wife how to relate to each other sexually, since they were apparently not accustomed to doing so? What about the baby Kidman miscarried? Since Cruise clearly couldn't be the father, who was? Had Kidman decided to leave Cruise because she was no longer willing to pretend to believe in the tenets of Cruise's faith, Scientology?
In the middle of all the bad press -- since People and InStyle quickly sided with Kidman -- Cruise decided to bring even more public humiliation upon himself by declaring war on some poor (male) porn star who'd told some tabloid that he'd had sex with Cruise, and suing him for the completely ludicrous sum of $100 million. Because, as we all know, the best way to defuse rumours that you're gay is to get hysterically angry in front of, literally, the entire world. I mean, $100 million? We surely don't have to spell out how that looks to us, because it probably looks much the same to you. (And also, we don't want to get sued.)
The strange thing, then, is the way in which Tom Cruise plays off the two sides of his fame against each other. Half the people who know of him (and, okay, given that he's probably among the top ten most famous people in the world, that's...half the world) thinks of him as a crookedly grinning, artfully tousled, squeaky-clean, mom-loving superstar. The other half think of him as an L. Ron Hubbard-brainwashed, sham-marrying, closeted homosexual who's only taken up with Penélope Cruz because she's so eager to crawl the fame ladder that she doesn't mind pretending to be in love with a gay man. (Which is certainly not to say that L. Ron Hubbard or any of this followers is actually in the habit of brainwashing anyone.) There isn't anything he can do to win over those who regard him as a phony or a weirdo -- or, rather, he seems to go out of his way, as with the $100 million lawsuit, to convince those who think he's hiding something that their impression is correct. And on the other side, those who've fallen in love with the public image he and Pat Kingsley have constructed will only get more and more convinced, with each successive white-bread movie role, that their impression is correct. Both sides are so deeply entrenched that there's no way for them to meet in the middle.
Given this détente, there's no reason to believe Cruise's fame will ebb any time soon. And it's not as though he could be any more famous than he is now, given that he's already Tom Cruise. Hugely famous though he is, we must grudgingly concede that he is exactly as famous as he should be.
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