Nicole Kidman: The Princess Bride

I recently read in People that Tom caused a riot in Charlotte, N.C. just by walking into a department store. How does Kidman--his wife, after all--react to such insanity? "I can understand it! If I wasn't married to him and I was a girl I'd be pretty interested in him too."

Tom Cruise has played the game well, and no doubt Kid-man is learning quickly. Take their wedding day, for example. They pulled it off--the marriage itself--with no muss, no fuss, no helicopters, mad paparazzi, secret agents, etc. Cruise knows how to keep a secret. Better than Michael J. Fox. Better, certainly, than Sean and Madonna.

"Tom and I never have bodyguards, anything like that," says Nicole. "We go out and people will kind of wave if they see you. There's a great interest in him wherever he goes, but it's not a sort of mobby-type ripping of clothes. It's more like, 'Hey man, loved that film.' A lot of guys do that. And with girls it's more like--'Tee-hee',"she giggles demurely "and gazing sort of lustfully, I suppose. Seeing the way he gets treated took a few months to get used to. But also Tom--one of the first things I thought when I met him was, he's a nice guy. Sure he has a nice car and he seems to--to have a lot of money! And a beautiful smile. But when it comes down to what he's really like in his heart--his whole approach is just like anybody else. Honestly, I've never noticed any dangerous situation. And I'm not going to let it get to the point where I'm not able to go to the super-market."

Because that would take all the fun out of--"Living!" Nicole laughs. "It's not that I love to go to the supermarket, but to me it means that I'm still in touch with the kinds of people I'm playing...One day, suddenly, Tom says 'Ah, well, yeah, the Cinderella Story.' And I was like, 'Hey, you, shut up!'

And here Nicole does this rapid karate-like neck hold thing in the air in front of me. Christ, he's shorter than she is. That must have hurt.

"He was joking," she goes on. "It was just something he read, some press--you know, young girl from Australia just snatched up. So we joke about that." Nicole pauses thoughtfully. I try to change the subject. No luck. "Ah-ha, the Cinderella story!" Nicole says again. "As if I was some sort of poor girl working as the housemaid for some family and I was snatched up--"

But is it any wonder that Nicole is imagined by an uninformed, media-addled few to perhaps have been the Down Under victim of some weird British class structure, now rescued by Prince Top Gun? Never mind that her father is a biochemist--an author of books--that her family's descended from a cattle baron named Sir Sydney. Americans like to reduce things they don't know or understand to something familiar. It's really nothing more dangerous or permanent than, oh...than a headline in a magazine.

"Oh God, don't you use it!" Nicole squeals. "This is the title of this article, right? The Cinderella Story. Quite!" And here she's reduced to gales of laughter.

It's infectious. "We'll be photographing you with the glass slippers," I say, delightedly.

"And rags, right? For before and after!"

"It was hard to find them in your size--the slippers, I mean!" And we fall about the room amidst peals of laughter. But I stop first. For all I know, of course, that's exactly what's planned. Oh, what the hell--it's not such a terrible idea, I guess. Not my decision, thank God. I'm just the writer. Anyway, I tell her, there is one burning topic in her personal life that I have to ask her about. I watch her frown slightly. Skydiving--I understand she and Tom Cruise do a lot of jumping out of airplanes together. "I've done ten jumps free-fall," says Nicole. "Everyone who does it says there's nothing else like it in the world. When you're stand-ing up there at 14,000 feet with the cold air hitting your face. I've always wanted to fly--"

You mean like a pilot, like in Top Gun?

"No, no. Fly. You know, having a dream about flying. And when you're free-falling, you fall 45 seconds with nothing. And that to me is the closest thing to flying. I can't recom-mend it more highly." And to me it sounds like the closest thing to jumping out of an airplane, so you'll never get me up there, but I guess that's the difference. "Tom doesn't even jump with an instructor," Nicole says proudly. "We've kissed in the air and everything. That's like--unn-unn-unn-smack! Very quick. It's not a long passionate kiss, but we certainly have kissed. Tom says, 'You got guts, honey'," Kidman gleefully relates. "He says, 'That's cool--that's cool when your wife will jump out of a plane with you'." The more I hear about this guy Cruise, the more it strikes me that he has a wacky sense of humor--and pretty wicked confidence that things will go his way. He and Kidman do seem a bit like birds of a feather.

I remember to ask her about the Ron Howard film she and Cruise are about to start shooting. It's called, so I've read, The Irish Story. "Oh no, it's not called that," says Nicole. "That sounds like a history lesson. Just call it 'The Ron Howard Project.' But what do you think of Sure as the Moon?.

Shore as the Moon?

"Sure."

It's an old Irish expression, right? But people will think it's "shore," and maybe they'll wonder if it's set on the moon.

"God, yeah," says Kidman. "Hmmm. Just checking. Getting opinions."

It's a romantic comedy. Cruise and Kidman play Irish immigrants in America in 1895. "I read the script and then Tom read it, and he said we should both do it. 'Hey Nicole!' "she goes, wide-eyed, turning Cruise into an excitable young lad with a new toy" 'We can--we can do a film together!' So then it just happened. He can get a film made like that."

As a media couple, and as an acting couple--as a couple that plays together and is currently staying together--there must be some kind of additional expectation while filming a romance. "Yeah, we're married, so there's all this pressure to have these sparks and this chemistry." It can't be easy, I say, for about a million reasons, to make a movie with the person you're married to. "Well I don't know," Kidman answers quite logically, and with quite a smile. "I've never been married before. And I've never married a movie star."

Things seem to have worked out so far for Nicole Kidman, in part because she expects them to. I admire that about her. I like her as much as I can like any beautiful woman who's spent 90 minutes talking to me out of a sense of obligation and nothing more. But I'll tell you this: I don't know Nicole Kidman much better now than when we started, and yet mostly all we talked about was her. Perhaps that's part of what it means to have entered the rarefied top levels of Hollywood--this is what you have to learn quickly if you want to remain there.

And now our time is up, even though I'm beginning to sense that Kidman maybe trusts me a little. No time to ask if that's even true--her publicist comes in and seems alarmed that we're still talking. I could point out that Nicole was half an hour late, but I don't. It's Friday night and I imagine that someone like Nicole will have plenty on her dance card for the evening. What do Tom and Nicole do of a Friday night anyway, with the whole world as their oyster? Perhaps nothing more than a quiet evening at home in their big house in the Pacific Palisades, watching videos of their airplane jumps. You'd be surprised at how close to the truth that might be; glamour is wearying, and these people are professionals.

At home I watch the video of Dead Calm. I've been inspired by Nicole's go-get-'em attitude towards life and career. I figure it might help me even more than this no booze/no meat diet I've been on for, well, 12 hours now. On screen, I'm watching her kick the crap out of screwie Hughie. He's had experience with killing, but he's no match for her. She drugs him, trusses him up like a turkey. He breaks free. She smashes him between the legs with a harpoon gun, and then fires one of the darts into his shoulder, pinning him to the door. He's history. Earlier in the film, when he's still in control of her yacht and her destiny, Hughie mocks her attempts at survival. "You're being very aggressive. That could be a real problem on a small boat."

But Hughie doesn't take her seriously enough, and that's why he gets a rocket flare through the tonsils in the end. Aggression is exactly what you need when dealing with psychopaths in confined spaces--and that goes for Hollywood. Smooth sailing is an illusion, and in the meantime, you do whatever it takes to keep your sails filled. Or your parachute open.

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Christopher H. Hunt believes that if the shoe fits, wear it.

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