Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lebendiger, who at thirteen was the same age as his future stepbrother. Tom and his sisters attended the civil ceremony, which took place in their home at 2811 Newburg Road, a leafy suburb of Louisville. Apart from making desultory conversation with the four Lebendiger children at the wedding, Tom has never contacted his “second family” again.
    If the wedding was rushed, no sooner had Jonathan Lebendiger, his brother, Gary, and his sisters, Jamie and Leslie, absorbed the news that their mother was marrying for the second time than they literally found themselves abandoned, their mother and her new husband setting off for a new life in Florida. In this family crisis the Lebendiger children were taken in by relatives or family friends, with only the money left by their dead father to support them. Neither their mother nor her new husband contributed in any way to clothe, feed, or educate the children, just as Tom Mapother Senior did nothing to help his blood family.
    Understandably, this incident has left the Lebendiger children with a legacy of anger and bitterness toward the man who turned their lives upside down. “He was the black sheep of the Mapother family,” says Jonathan Lebendiger, now a real-estate agent in Philadelphia. “I don’t know what his relationship was like with his son, but I know that he was a bad apple. His family were all lawyers and he opposed everything they stood for. I was angry about it at the time but I am not anymore.” This union—a grand passion or passing desperation—lasted for just a year before Jonathan’s mother and Tom’s father went their separate ways. Joan Lebendiger, a bridge fanatic, eventually retired to Los Angeles. She and her children were reconciled before she died in 2005. “She said that she did the best she could but admitted that she didn’t have the normal parenting skills like other people,” recalls Jonathan. “Let’s leave it at that.”
    If the Lebendiger circle was aggrieved, the Mapother clan was “appalled” by Tom Senior’s behavior. “I don’t think anyone normal would go off and abandon a wife and four childrenlike he did,” Caroline Mapother told writer Wesley Clarkson. The family did not hear from Thomas Mapother III for years—not a note or a letter or even a Christmas card. Tellingly, Tom recalls the first Christmas after the 1975 divorce as the best ever. As they only had enough money to put food on the table, his mother suggested that they each pick a name out of a hat in advance, then perform secret acts of kindness for the recipient and reveal their identity on Christmas Day. On that day they all read poems and put on skits for one another. “We didn’t have any money and it was actually great,” he has since said of this life of hand-me-downs, early-morning paper rounds, and making do.
    Curiously, at that time, they lived in a handsome four-bedroom house on Cardwell Way, a neighborhood where backyard swimming pools are not uncommon. For their part, the greater Mapother family bridles at suggestions that they abandoned Mary Lee and her children to a life of struggle and poverty. As Caroline Mapother observed, “These claims make me angry because his grandmother did everything in the world to try and help support those children, especially after Tom III went off.”
    Tom became particularly close to his grandfather Tom Mapother II, a retired lawyer with a wealth of tales about the colorful characters he’d encountered in his practice, as well as stories about Tom’s now-absent father when he was young. One summer he took Tom and his cousin William on a visit to Washington to see the sights; and after Tom left St. Raphael in 1976, he offered to pay the fees at St. Xavier’s, a prestigious all-boys Catholic high school that William was destined to attend.
    Tom spurned his grandfather’s generous offer, arguing that unless he could pay for his sisters to attend private schools, too, he was reluctant to be singled out simply