Chapter One INTRODUCTION Tom Hanks and the "Why Me?" Syndrome "I've got kind of a bizarre body, a big ass, and fat thighs. I've got a goofy-looking nose, ears that hang down, eyes that look like I'm part-Chinese and are a funny color. I've got really small hands and feet, long limbs, narrow shoulders, and a gut I've got to keep watching. My hair makes me look like a Talmudic scholar." That was Tom Hanks describing himself for a full-scale Esquire magazine fashion spread in Spring 1987, his first major cover story. It appeared just before Hanks would explode into the public consciousness with his Oscar-nominated performance as a 12-year-old in an adult's body in Penny Marshall's Big. Indeed, except for a salary that is now in the $7-$10 million range, three straight hits in Sleepless In Seattle, Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, as well as an Oscar under his belt, 38-year-old Tom Hanks continues to be the quintessential nice guy next door. Tom Hanks has become the pre-eminent actor of his generation. During summer '94, with Forrest Gump closing in on $300 million in grosses, Hanks also found himself the top box-office draw in Hollywood, even topping the venerable Arnold Schwarzenegger. When I first began writing this bio seven years ago, it was a different story. After tracking down his publicist, at one of the better-known power agencies in Hollywood, even she was a little bewildered. "Why Tom Hanks?" she queried over the phone when I informed her, hoping for an interview, that I was writing a biography of one of her clients. "What are you going to say about someone who's done only eight movies?" Her surprisingly sarcastic attitude was audible over the line. While I'd hardly expected her to do cartwheels, fully aware that unauthorized biographies tend to be frowned upon by agents as well as the stars themselves, who obviously prefer the control inherent in "official" self-penned or ghostwritten stories, I was still a bit taken aback by the seemingly small regard she had for the career of one of America's most popular actors. "Most popular" is no hyperbole these days. Tom Hanks has more than proven he is one of our leading movie stars. Very quietly but very steadily, through the accumulation of good to great work in the midst of some questionable vehicles, he had staked his ground as one of our leading movie stars by 1987. At that point, he was earning about $1 million per film, which seemed like a lot of money for a guy who'd had but one bonafide box-office success to his credit before Big broke the $100 million mark. At that point, his biggest commercial hit was the $60 million plus-grossing Splash, his debut as a leading man. In fact only two of his other six films to that point -- Bachelor Party and Nothing In Common -- were even qualified successes. The rest were out-and-out bombs at the box office and, in most cases, with the critics. These included such films as Volunteers, The Man With One Red Shoe, The Money Pit and the Israeli film Every Time We Say Goodbye, as well as such subsequent failures as The `Burbs, Joe Vs. the Volcano and the mega-flop adaptation of Tom Wolfe's best-selling Bonfire of the Vanities. So when colleagues and friends asked me what I was possibly going to write about in a biography of Tom Hanks, I blithely replied that I'd be doing semiological analyses of Bachelor Party. It seemed a hopeless task on any kind of serious, scholarly level. Especially if Tom wouldn't talk to me. And by the way his publicists were protecting him, it was clear that getting face to face with the man himself would be little more than an impossible dream. But that was not the end of the world, because Tom Hanks has, more often than not, lived out his relatively brief career very much in public. Though an intensely private man about his family, young Hanks has done an admirable job of letting it all hang out for a variety of publications. He's been interviewed and profiled extensively for each of his films, all of them high-visibility, big-studio projects. He's talked at length about his childhood, his college years, his apprenticeship in repertory theater, his days as a starving actor in New York, his marriage, his separation ... and that tale is here, although it is not at all the whole story. For a young actor, Tom Hanks boasts an amazing body of work. And a lot of it. Much of his early filmed experience comes in the thirty-eight episodes of the short-lived television series, Bosom Buddies, in which he co-starred with Peter Scolari. A major portion of our story will deal with that historic television sitcom and the classic comedy of Hanks and Scolari, which made it so. Their relationship, a very special one, goes a long way toward revealing the depths of Tom Hanks's character. Even in films that were duds, though, Tom Hanks always stands out as a refreshing presence, someone we feel we want to know better because he always comes up with the right quip, the funny pun, the off-the-wall comment which loosens everyone up and makes us feel good. When he's on, which is pretty much all the time -- especially if the camera is running -- Tom Hanks is the idealized view we all have of ourselves as the endlessly Witty ever inventive, suave, debonair sophisticate who's still capabale of emitting a Bronx cheer at a strategic moment. Tom Hanks, eternal cut-up, ends up becoming the guy who always ends up on top; sometimes -- in fact, most of the time -- despite his own clumsiness. It's an attractive self-image, one that's been promulgated by a variety of movie stars Tom Hanks has been compared to, among them Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon, Henry Fonda, and Bill Murray. It is this quality, this basic likability, which has come out in each and every one of Tom Hanks's movies. You wanna know this guy. He's fun to be around. Hanks's effortless amiability comes across quite strongly on the screen. There's a magic sense about Tom Hanks, almost as if he's living out our own most deeply felt fantasies, whether it's by marrying the mermaid of one's dreams, or by building a house, or by thwarting enemy agents, or by having one last fling before marriage, or by marrying a nice Israeli girl, or by being a top advertising executive. Or even by dressing up as a girl to live in a women's hotel. Hanks has performed all these roles, and notice how many of them deal with wish fulfillment. For nearly every television viewer or movie fan, it's intensely satisfying when someone as ordinary as Tom Hanks, complete with those big lips, fat thighs, and a gut he has to keep on watching, receives his chance to come out on top through the force of sheer will ... as well as with a quick-on-his-feet ability to pop up with a perfect rejoinder. (Tom Hanks has honed that skill into a fine art.) For this son of a San Francisco chef, who grew up in a constantly shifting and slightly unusual family atmosphere, is pretty sharp with an ad-lib. Both Bosom Buddies and his movies show Hanks to be a master of the drop-dead comeback. In Splash, when Daryl Hannah's mermaid breaks every television set in the Bloomingdale's showroom with her telekinetic powers, Hanks deadpans to the stunned clerk, "How about those Knicks?" In Bachelor Party, when one of his friends rents a film called Nymphos without Pants, Hanks retorts with a straight face, "Olivier's in that, right?" We will leave any number of classic Hanks -- Scolari epiphanies until the chapter on Bosom Buddies, but at this point it will suffice to say that Tom would more likely than not break into one of his Curly (of the Three Stooges) impressions at a moment's notice. But what is most interesting to me about Tom Hanks is the simple fact that he seems like a pretty regular guy. And his manager, Si Maslow, who answered his own phone when I dialed his New York number, confirmed that impression. He is confident that Tom is one of the leading actors in Hollywood, but he also knows that reputation isn't built so much on reality as it is on the illusion of success. Take the myriad of magazine covers, for example, or the tabloids ... even those Bosom Buddies episodes currently running in syndication. At first Si, who has been Hanks's manager for a number of years, was all too willing to cooperate, even promising to get me to one of Tom's standup appearances around town, one of the actor's methods of preparation for his role as a comic in the movie Punchline with Sally Field. But a quick phone call to the publicists in charge made it clear that cooperation was not to be. Which is just as well, because I was able to concentrate on the man's career with a degree of equanimity and objectivity. After all, Tom Hanks represents a throwback to an extremely natural acting style, one in which the method is invisible yet tied, nevertheless, directly to the classical tradition. For unlike many of his so-called peers, actors who graduated from improvisational companies like SCTV, Second City, or Saturday Night Live, Hanks's background was in the theater. He immersed himself in the stage early on in his life and literally worked his way through all the dirty work and low-level jobs, from lighting and set design to stitching costumes and selling tickets. Hanks, of course, was trained in the classics after spending a number of years in repertory companies in Cleveland and New York. What seems to have come so easily turns out to have been extremely hard work, which is probably why Tom Hanks is such a private man. He saves his best face for the public, and doesn't want the illusion punctured by the intrusion of harsh reality, tending as it does to reveal personal foibles. And Tom Hanks is nothing if not a very guarded individual. At the exalted age of thirty-eight, Tom Hanks is the perfect age to stand in for that Madison Avenue creation of baby-boomer culture: the Yuppie. In fact, he's acted out many Yuppie dreams and aspirations on the silver screen. He's run his father's business in Splash, he was a rock'n'roll lawyer in The Money Pit, the eternal adolescent in Big, the heartbroken young widower of Sleepless in Seattle, and most tragically, the AIDS-afflicted attorney in Philadelphia. Like many other Yuppies, Hanks was born just a touch too late to really become a part of the counterculture, yet still close enough to it to be able to relate to a certain something missing from his life in terms of spirituality. That duality -- between material happiness and spiritual unrest -- returns as a theme in much of Tom Hanks's work, from Bosom Buddies through his most realized roles, Nothing in Common and Philadelphia. Doughboy face and lumpy body aside, Tom Hanks ends up with a beautiful woman in each of his films: Daryl Hannah in Splash, Tawny Kitaen in Bachelor Party, Shelley Long in The Money Pit, Sela Ward in Nothing in Common, Elizabeth Perkins in Big, Meg Ryan in Joe Vs. the Volcano and Sleepless in Seattle -- and, in Philadelphia, Mr. Too Good To Be True, Antonio Banderas. It is, naturally, the way he wins over these luscious females (and male!) that ends up winning over the moviegoer's admiration. Not through pushiness or narcissism, but with never-say-die charm, turning every pratfall to quicksilver advantage. Without doubt, Tom Hanks is the stand-in for every one of us who ever dreamed of getting the girl -- while remaining mired in our less-than-perfect bodies, of course -- with the perfectly timed witty remark, the hip rejoinder, the bon mot to end all bon mots. ... Like Woody Allen as Humphrey Bogart in Play It Again, Sam. Sam. Or Cary Grant in Notorious. Tom Hanks brings back that kind of romance, with the flip attitude of the postmodern hipster. "I would hope to come off as a guy that's hip," Hanks confessed to Esquire magazine. "Richard III was hip. Iago was hip. Brando. Star Trek. And of course, Cary Grant. He was the embodiment of hip." Keeping your cool in a world gone mad. ... "We live in very confused times. The rules are constantly being rewritten on us. But it's okay. Civilization is not crumbling at our feet -- and those of us who are hip to this and can adjust are going to be just fine." Which, as Esquire doesn't fail to point out, makes Tom Hanks perhaps the perfect actor for our era. All right, admittedly he's not Anthony Hopkins, but then again who is? With his work in Philadelphia and his passionate embrace of the AIDS cause, he has proven to be a committed performer, if not an overtly political one. He has personified Hollywood's ability to dream up possible perfect worlds, then militantly demand we change the faulty one in which we live. And Tom Hanks is a believer ... in retaining a semblance of grace under pressure, in a willingness to abandon practicality in the pursuit of heartfelt dreams (whether this means joining a mermaid in the ocean, battling AIDS or running a shrimp boat). The audience in the '90s is drawn to Tom Hanks as it once was to similar bumbling dreamers like Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda. Except this time, those dreams have emerged from a common core of post-Beatles popular culture and media-drenched trivial pursuits. Tom Hanks has managed to transcend the Brat Pack which he was never a part of in the first place. Although in his early career, one might have been tempted to dismiss Hanks as a glibly precocious cut-up who hadn't fully paid his dues, his performances in movies like Big, League of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle, Philadelphia and Forrest Gump have proven he deserves a place among the all-time greats. Back in 1987, Hanks was on the cusp of stardom, though. A movie like Nothing in Common, though not exactly a box-office smash, helped change the public perception of Hanks. Of course, Nothing in Common's subplot, with Jackie Gleason and Eva Marie Saint as Hanks's parents, did tend towards the three-Kleenex weepie side, but the theme -- that today's Yuppies will soon be responsible for the fates of their parents -- was an undeniably powerful one, and one that Tom pulled off with aplomb. It is because no matter how rich, successful, witty, beloved by our colleagues, and blessed we are, we all go one-to-one with our Maker in the end. Tom Hanks seems to have the ability to plumb the depths of his soul as well as flip off the punchline. For many young American actors, it would be a joke to suggest that they could tackle the classics. Sean Penn as Romeo? Emilio Estevez as Prince Hal? Could you believe Tom Cruise as Hamlet? That thought may be risible for the star of Top Gun, yet it would be much less surprising if, one day, Tom Hanks played the role of the melancholy Dane. Or, as he would put it, "Olivier's in that, right?" Returning to the original question: Why Tom Hanks? Not simply because he's there, but because he's made a difference. He's the kind of actor who's played roles where the characters look skyward and wonder aloud, "Why me?" Why do I have to fall in love with a mermaid? Why do I have to be the host of this bachelor party? How could I have bought this lemon of a house that won't stop falling down around me? Why are my parents choosing this time, when I'm at my professional peak, to separate, to get sick, to die? How did I get stuck managing this lousy women's softball team? Why did my wife die and leave me to raise my son alone? Why did I have to get AIDS? Why me? Because the Lord above only tests those He loves the most, and Tom Hanks, a devout Catholic, understands only too well His system of checks and balances. Therefore, when he does get the girl, whether it's beautiful Donna Dixon, nearly naked Daryl Hannah, or cute-as-a-button Meg Ryan, he can't quite believe his good fortune. And that hesitation, that wink past the imaginary fourth wall to the audience beyond the screen, is what wins us over. How can we not share the life and loves of this character? We all have something in common with him. Copyright © 1995 Roy Trakin and 2M Communications Ltd.. All rights reserved.
