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"  I wanted to be a dad at a very early age. I always loved kids \u2014 but it was more than that. It was this thought: What would it be like to be a father? Being the kind of guy who takes care of things? I remember looking at my dad and wanting to understand him. I didn&amp;#039;t want to just write the guy off. He was lost. I can&amp;#039;t speak specifically in terms of why and how he got to where he was \u2014 that was his journey. All I can tell you is, he was overwhelmed by life. He was an electrical engineer moving between jobs, and we moved a lot. My mother basically did all the work, and then they got separated and I didn&amp;#039;t see him for a long time. He didn&amp;#039;t try to help the family financially or spiritually, and I lived with the effects of the chaos. I remember massaging my mom&amp;#039;s feet when she&amp;#039;d come home from work. There were times she had three jobs. I have three sisters, and I felt very protective of them, too. I&amp;#039;d be massaging my mother&amp;#039;s feet, thinking, I gotta figure this out. I don&amp;#039;t know how. I don&amp;#039;t know what I&amp;#039;m gonna do. But I&amp;#039;m gonna figure this out. There was always food on the table. But there was no money. Every time my birthday was coming, I&amp;#039;d ask for a go-kart or a minibike. My mom&amp;#039;s way of saying it wasn&amp;#039;t going to happen was to ask me what kind of cake I wanted. That&amp;#039;s what I got \u2014 the kind of cake I wanted and a trip to the movies. My mom can&amp;#039;t sing a lick, okay? She&amp;#039;ll admit it, and she&amp;#039;s got a sense of humor about it. She&amp;#039;s got the most wonderful laugh. But let me tell you something: We&amp;#039;d get in the car in the morning, she&amp;#039;d put on a song and just start singing, and it was so bold and uninhibited that you just had to smile. We&amp;#039;d all have to sing with her to start the day.  And you know something? After about fifteen minutes, damned if I didn&amp;#039;t feel better. I was eight years oldwhen I started to figure it out: You work. Someone told me about greeting cards. You could sell them door-to-door. But you gotta figure out how. How do I get the job? How do I do the job? I figured it out. A feeling of accomplishment and independence came along with it. It helps if I can buy myself a pair of sneakers. These small steps of personal awareness came with the work. You know what else I found out? The better I became at the job, the better I could do it. The better I got at delivering newspapers, the more clients I got. And if I missed delivering the paper to a certain house one day, it was: Wow. This guy&amp;#039;s pissed. Then it becomes: What do I do here? And I realized, Oh, I gotta talk to this guy. Handle it. Then you see: Oh, I can fix this. By taking responsibility, I can fix this. I was lost in so many other areas that a kid couldn&amp;#039;t possibly figure out. But I could deliver that paper route. Even with everything else whirling around you, you can have little wins. We were always moving, so I was always the new kid. When you&amp;#039;re the new kid, you&amp;#039;re a curiosity to most people. But there were always guys picking a fight because I wore different clothes or had a different accent. Moving to Canada, there was the French-English thing. Then to go from Canada to Kentucky...  There was this classic moment when I was little. You see it in movies all the time. The big kid that picks on the other kids, the schoolyard terror who just won&amp;#039;t let up, is right in front of you. I&amp;#039;d just made something for my mother and the kid knocked it down. He was just standing in front of me. There was no getting away, nowhere to run. I remember him swinging and hitting me. I remember punching as hard as I could, him going down, me picking up what I&amp;#039;d made for my mom and getting out of there. I remember trying to get rid of the blood in my nose before my mother could see it. You never tell your parents.  You hear about people who have lifelong friends. I never was in a place long enough to have them. So that role was filled by my family.  If anyone was teasing my sisters, I really felt it. I tried to develop a kind of calm in the presence of confusion. I&amp;#039;d create different characters and ad-lib sketches to make my sisters and my mother feel better. I&amp;#039;d try to make them laugh. I&amp;#039;d do Donald Duck as John Wayne. I&amp;#039;d watch Soul Train and imitate the dancers. If I went to a movie, I&amp;#039;d come home and do it for them. I guess you can say that&amp;#039;s where it started. I always had a dream to be in movies, and I was fortunate to have a family that never crushed the dream. They didn&amp;#039;t say, That&amp;#039;s impossible. They laughed.   I was fifteen, working at an apartment complex in Kentucky as an assistant maintenance guy. Take out the garbage, cut grass, rake the leaves \u2014 that kind of stuff. The go-get-the-hammer guy. One day we were in a basement and we came across this minibike that didn&amp;#039;t work. One of the guys said, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s get rid of this thing.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll take it!&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;How much would it cost?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Fifty dollars.&amp;quot; I didn&amp;#039;t have fifty dollars. I couldn&amp;#039;t even ask to have the money taken out of my paycheck because we needed it at home. No way could I ask my mom for the fifty dollars \u2014 I didn&amp;#039;t even want her to know that I was buying a minibike. So I asked if there was some extra work I could do in exchange for it. That&amp;#039;s how I got my minibike.  One of my sisters&amp;#039; boyfriends was a mechanic, and he came by and showed me how to take the engine apart, change the plugs, and then we put it back together. It was two in the morning by the time we finished. Now, I&amp;#039;d ridden bikes a lot. When I was a kid, I&amp;#039;d set up ramps for jumps, like Evel Knievel, and crash all the time. I&amp;#039;d done it all \u2014 but never on a minibike. I got on. Of course, all I wanted to do was go fast, so I hit the throttle. I started off by a neighbor&amp;#039;s yard, went past our yard, which had a little hump, and suddenly I was airborne.  The neighbors had these two beautiful cars that they loved, matching cars, and \u2014 oh, my God \u2014 I&amp;#039;m going to ram right into one of them.  You know what I&amp;#039;m thinking? Not that I&amp;#039;m gonna die. I&amp;#039;m headed straight for these cars, thinking, This is going to be the most expensive day of my life. There was a narrow opening between the bumpers and I aimed right for it. It was like a cartoon, and I&amp;#039;m Wile E. Coyote. Next thing I know, I&amp;#039;m in the air, flying into another neighbor&amp;#039;s yard, and I come down hard. I was lying in the grass, alone, thinking, I hope I&amp;#039;m dead. &amp;#039;Cause I don&amp;#039;t want to wake up and have to deal with what just happened. Rrrrrrrrrrr! The minibike is still going. Oh, no, I&amp;#039;m alive. Okay, I&amp;#039;m alive. I stood and ran toward the sound. The minibike was wedged between the bumpers of the two cars \u2014 it went from a full throttle to a dead stop between the bumpers. It was a miracle! There wasn&amp;#039;t a scratch on either car. What a lesson: Know before you go. It&amp;#039;s not like you have to curb your enthusiasm. Just fill it in with a little knowledge. I went to audition for this movie Taps. I hadn&amp;#039;t done anything up to that point. Well, my mom was in amateur theater, and I&amp;#039;d done a couple of musicals. But basically, my experience was a one-day shoot on Endless Love. The audition was in New York. Taps was being directed by Harold Becker and produced by Stanley Jaffe. Both were at the audition. I said one line. That was it. The film is set at a military school and I had long hair at the time, so they said, &amp;quot;Hold up your hair.&amp;quot; Then &amp;quot;Thank you.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t know why, but as I walked out I thought I&amp;#039;d get it. It wasn&amp;#039;t arrogance. I had a quarter in my pocket \u2014 and that was it. I&amp;#039;m telling you: I didn&amp;#039;t have bus fare to get back to where my mom was living in Jersey. I remember walking downtown, standing outside the Holland Tunnel, and hitchhiking.  I walked up the driveway and saw my mother on the phone through the window. It was a distance, but I remember her face. She looked at me and I looked at her, and I thought, I got it. It was hard for me to sleep. There I was, eighteen years old, in a private dream.  Stanley Jaffe had just produced Kramer vs. Kramer. Tim Hutton had just won an Oscar for Ordinary People. Sean Penn was one of the main characters. He was young like me, but his dad was an actor and a director and his mom was an actress. He&amp;#039;d seen how it works. Me? I didn&amp;#039;t know anything. But that&amp;#039;s okay, I&amp;#039;m thinking, my part will only be a few lines. It&amp;#039;ll be a learning experience. I get called into Harold&amp;#039;s office and hear: &amp;quot;We want you to play David Shawn.&amp;quot; This was not a few lines. This was a pivotal character. Now I&amp;#039;m sick to my stomach with nervousness. Also, I was aware that another actor was supposed to have that part.  &amp;quot;Thank you very much,&amp;quot; I told Harold, &amp;quot;but I don&amp;#039;t want to do that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Excuse me?&amp;quot; Harold said. &amp;quot;What?&amp;quot; I explained that I didn&amp;#039;t feel comfortable taking another actor&amp;#039;s part. Harold told me to trust him to work it out \u2014 what a wonderful man \u2014 but his tone was also saying, &amp;quot;Kid, I&amp;#039;m the director, okay?&amp;quot;  There were four weeks of rehearsal. I showed up telling myself, Listen! Listen! Listen! You don&amp;#039;t know anything. Just listen! Like that Mark Twain expression: Don&amp;#039;t open your mouth and remove all doubt.  All those moments on the newspaper route and selling greeting cards led up to this. I might not know what they were talking about, but I knew what I could do. I could work. Let me figure this out.  I listened to Penn and Hutton tell their stories. I sat down with George C. Scott. What I realized is that everyone has a different point of view on life, and every actor has his own way of accessing the character. The choices of what my character should be, these are choices that I&amp;#039;m making. So I started to create a character the same way I&amp;#039;d told stories for my sisters and my mother: by instinct.  Four days before we started shooting, I went into town on lunch break. I&amp;#039;m thinking, Sean looks perfect. Tim looks perfect. Each is distinctive. My character is an extreme guy. So I went into a barbershop and had him shave my head. Then I went back to rehearsals with a wool cap on. We&amp;#039;re doing the scene where I&amp;#039;m marching. I was in sweats and this wool cap, and I said, &amp;quot;Harold, I want you to see something.&amp;quot; I pulled the hat off and Harold gasped. &amp;quot;Oh, my God, Cruise! What happened?&amp;quot; And I realized, maybe I should have discussed it with him first. For an hour, I was thinking, do I get a wig? Then Harold came over and said, &amp;quot;You know what, it&amp;#039;s gonna work.&amp;quot; Risky Business had become a hit. I hadn&amp;#039;t seen my father in about ten years. I found out he was dying, and I went to see him in the hospital. He knew. My mother is very special, and he knew that he&amp;#039;d blown it. There was deep regret. I think he was torturing himself. We tend to do that. All I could do was tell him, &amp;quot;Look, it&amp;#039;s okay.&amp;quot; I wasn&amp;#039;t going to live in blame and regret. I wanted to understand what happened. I wanted to understand, so I could answer the question, What can I do to make things better? I looked at my father there dying and thought, How can I not be that guy?  The things you remember are the little things. The time he told you that he&amp;#039;d take you to a ball game and we didn&amp;#039;t go. You said you were going to do it. &amp;quot;No&amp;quot; would&amp;#039;ve been better than &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m gonna do this with you&amp;quot; and then not being there. So you think, Who am I? What are the little moments that I want to create to reflect on my life? The day I was going to go at it with Jack [Nicholson] in the courtroom scene of A Few Good Men, a big audience developed on the lot. It just became a pressure cooker. How do I describe it to you? Jack just started to cork it down: His movements became less and less, his hat didn&amp;#039;t move. The more he hooked into Colonel Jessep, the more I hooked into him. It was like we just locked into each other. We shot the entire thing in one go. You could sense how it was going to be edited \u2014 like butter. At a certain point it goes beyond work, which is when it&amp;#039;s fun. All I can tell you is, I remember being sad afterward that it was over. Dustin Hoffman? Paul Newman? Gene Hackman? Robert Duvall? Jack Nicholson? It always goes beyond your expectations.  I&amp;#039;ll never forget the moment I became a dad. But it&amp;#039;s hard to describe \u2014 that level of responsibility, the desire to give such joy. The clarity: Nothing is more important than this. I remember that first night, just staring at Bella. I was checking her every second, just looking at her, feeling that immediate bond. I was probably looking at her so much that I was keeping her up. I made a promise to her: All I can do is the best I can. But I&amp;#039;m not going to say I&amp;#039;m gonna do something and then not do it. If I tell you we&amp;#039;re gonna have ice cream on Friday night, we&amp;#039;re gonna have ice cream on Friday night. If I say I&amp;#039;m gonna take your call anytime you need me, and I&amp;#039;m in the middle of something on the set, my world is gonna stop for you. I made that promise to all of my kids. I never really discussed it with them, but talking with Bella and Connor now that they&amp;#039;re teenagers, I know I&amp;#039;ve accomplished that. When I think of my successes, that&amp;#039;s right up there. From the moment he was born, Connor would basically drool over bikes and motorcycles. I was waiting for him to become big enough \u2014 I thought we&amp;#039;d start later. But he must&amp;#039;ve started at two and a half. We&amp;#039;d ride slowly, with me on the back controlling the motorcycle. We got him the smallest helmet. It was dangling on his head. He used to wear his motorcycle gear around. Miniature boots, shin guards, chest plate, gloves, everything. We&amp;#039;d get him on the bike in a very controlled environment, let him learn and feel good. So it was very gradual. I&amp;#039;d never just let him go. As time passed, he was allowed to ride on a small bike slowly around in a circle with people on different sides so they could catch him. He got used to building up speed. The faster he went, the bigger the circle. One day years later, when I was riding next to him, my bike stalled and he went off, just jumped ahead. I&amp;#039;m freeeeee! He just pushed the limits. Dude! But no matter how many times you tell someone, we still have to learn for ourselves. Until it&amp;#039;s real, it doesn&amp;#039;t matter \u2014 which is why I had him in full armor. He went and laid the bike down. I mean, crash is a big word for a tiny bike and a little body. But he went down, and when he did, I didn&amp;#039;t say, I told you so. I just went over to him and asked, &amp;quot;What do you think happened?&amp;quot; And he said, This and this and this... &amp;quot;What are you going to do next time?&amp;quot; I just put it out there, discussed it, tried to make it so that he could talk to me about anything. He grew to the point where he could teach other people. He knows the limits. I got to talk to an astronaut and I asked him, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s it like going out into space and looking back at the world?&amp;quot; He said that it changed his perspective. Looking back at the world, you think, My God, how small it is. What are we doing? We don&amp;#039;t need barriers and borders. But I already understood that. I understood it going from Canada to Kentucky.  One of the things I always did with my kids before we&amp;#039;d go someplace new was let them hear the language and show them something in the culture that might interest them. I didn&amp;#039;t want them to grow up afraid of differences. But, you know, there are always barriers. You can work hard, you can get resources, you can remove barriers, but there will always be new ones. There will always be new problems to solve. One time, we were in Spain and there were so many paparazzi outside the house. The kids wanted to go out. It was one of those days when I knew I couldn&amp;#039;t do it. The house had a really cool floor, and we just moved all the furniture out of the way and got our Rollerblades on. I created a Rollerblade trail, an obstacle course around the house, and before we knew it we were all racing around, sweating and laughing.  If you can step outside of your difficulties with a sense of humor, you can get to a place where you can fix things. Perception and reality are two different things. I don&amp;#039;t know if you saw the whole Oprah show. What happened, happened. Yeah, the point can be made that I wanted the audience to be happy just like I wanted to make my sisters and my mother happy when I did those skits as a kid. But I&amp;#039;ll take responsibility for my actions.  The thing is, it got spun out. Afterward, wild things were being said about me, and once they&amp;#039;re in the ether, there&amp;#039;s nothing you can do about it. It felt like being the new kid in the schoolyard again and the other kids are whispering and whispering about you and suddenly you hear what they&amp;#039;re saying, and you think, What? That didn&amp;#039;t happen. Look at the reality of the situation. There was a confluence of events. My deal with Paramount was up and it wasn&amp;#039;t extended. At first it was, Huh? I don&amp;#039;t get it. But people have misconceptions about that whole thing, too. Sumner Redstone and I are friends. It&amp;#039;s a business. Those are times you learn a lot about life. You&amp;#039;re back to, How do I figure this out? I&amp;#039;d lived through so many different periods in life that I had a good idea. You just get back to work. You move forward. That&amp;#039;s what I did. Here we are today. Mission: Impossible IV. I remember talking to Cameron Crowe about the last monologue in Jerry Maguire. I love his writing. But he said, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if this line &amp;#039;how we live in a cynical world&amp;#039; is gonna work.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Let me say it. If you don&amp;#039;t like it, you can obviously cut it. But I can&amp;#039;t wait to play that scene.&amp;quot;  Because we do live in a cynical world. It&amp;#039;s easy to be cynical. Making the choice not to be cynical is important. You can keep dwelling on what didn&amp;#039;t work, or you can figure out how to fix it. Which is what being a parent is all about. You know, I&amp;#039;m married to such a special woman. Every night before we go to sleep, Kate and I look at each other and it&amp;#039;s like, How&amp;#039;d we do today?  You hope you were right more than you were wrong. But you just want to feel like you gave it your all. That&amp;#039;s all you can walk away with \u2014 that satisfaction. It goes back to the thought that you can never give too much in life, and you can always not give enough. It&amp;#039;s come full circle. Now I&amp;#039;ll put Suri on a swing and tell her stories when I&amp;#039;m working on a script. I&amp;#039;ll start with the beginning of the movie and take her through the story beat by beat. Of course, I make it age-appropriate. She&amp;#039;s four years old. But she asks all the right questions: Why does that happen? Those are the bad guys? You&amp;#039;re the good guy, right? It comes down to the same thing as when I was a kid. Can I create a character that will make her happy, that will make her laugh? And you know what? She makes me get better and better, because she&amp;#039;s always asking me to do it again. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7459/tom-cruise-bio-0610/>