Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography Read Online Free PDF

fiercely loyal,” he says. His eldest sister, Lee Anne, observes that he has always acted more like a big brother than a little brother. “He was very caring and protective of us,” she recalls. “Whenever any of us girls started dating anybody we were serious about, having them meet Tom was a big deal. His opinion has always weighed very heavily with all of us.”
    While he always felt comfortable surrounded by women, once observing that he trusted women more than men, they did get to be too much at times—so he called on his cousin William Mapother for company. “He only has sisters and I only have sisters, so we turned to each other for protection,” recalls William. “We have a lot of strong verbal women in both our lives.”
    A hero to his uncritical mother, adored by his sisters, and with a father now held in contempt, it all rather went to his head. “It gave him a real sense of entitlement,” recalls a family friend, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “He was the king of all he surveyed.” Tom’s authority quickly extended beyond his immediate family, the youngster displaying the daredevil leadership that had made him so popular among his Ottawa friends. His tall tales of his life outside the provincial confines of Kentucky, combined with his edge of dangerous audacity, gave him a patina of glamour and excitement. “To the neighborhood kids he became leader of the pack,” recalled his onetime pal Tommy Puckett. “He would reward our loyalty by either buying or stealing cigarettes from the corner store for all of us to smoke.” The youngsters would go off intofields with Puckett’s BB gun and take potshots at the local wildlife. Tom was apparently a good shot.
    Still, he wasn’t quite the master of all he surveyed. On one occasion he came close to severely injuring himself when he rode a motorbike into the side of a house. He had boasted to older teenage friends that he was experienced with motorbikes, when in fact he had never ridden one. Mistaking the accelerator for the brake, he roared through a clump of bushes and into a brick wall. “I nearly killed myself trying to be one of the guys,” he later admitted.
    Closer to home, the new monarch had an unexpected and uneasy encounter with the deposed king, his father, on the streets of Louisville. Tom’s father had eventually followed his family back to Kentucky, where he reportedly tried unsuccessfully to reconcile with his estranged wife. Tom Senior had abandoned all pretense of a professional life, living hand-to-mouth and taking on casual, unskilled work. At one point it was said that he was working on the crew of a highway construction gang. During his awkward encounter with them after months of separation, Tom Senior asked Tom and his sister if they wanted to go to a drive-in movie with him—a once-happy family event. While Tom has never spoken of this confrontation, his father later said to a local reporter that his son had told him to “stay the hell out of everything.”
    In fact, he came back into his son’s life in a way that many in Louisville found incomprehensible. On August 1, 1975, just three weeks after Tom’s thirteenth birthday, Mary Lee and Thomas Mapother were officially divorced and Mary Lee reverted to her maiden name of Pfeiffer. Just six weeks later, after a whirlwind courtship lasting all of two weeks, Tom’s father remarried. In August 1975, the month he officially divorced, he met Joan Lebendiger, the widow of a well-respected local doctor who had died the previous November at the age of just forty-six. The attraction was instant and mutual, and within a matter of days they decided to wed.
    Certainly Joan Lebendiger was measuring up to the translation of her German surname: “full of life.” If the Mapother clan was surprised, the four Lebendiger children were utterlystunned. “My mother told us on a Tuesday over dinner that she was getting married, and they married on the Saturday,” recalls Jonathan