Word: first
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...things have changed. This is the new game plan." With no child support available, Mary Lee juggled three jobs, and the children earned money too -- especially Tom, then twelve. "All of a sudden, I was the guy," he says. "I grew very protective of my family." Cruise remembers the first Christmas without his father: "There wasn't any money for presents. So we picked names out of a hat and did something special for that person. You would find a flower on your bed. Or you'd come in to find your bed made. We also wrote poems to each...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Slumps, of course, are made to be broken. ABC jumped from nowheresville to first place in the mid-'70s, and NBC was a sorry No. 3 before Bill Cosby helped boost it to No. 1 in the mid-'80s. But CBS may be in more desperate straits than either of them was. For one thing, its low ratings are compounded by poor demographics: its audience is not just smaller but also older. What's more, cable and other viewing choices have siphoned away much of the network audience and made it tougher for a weak network to revive itself...