The Eternal Cutup at Work

By Gerald Clarke

"I guess you could say I'm somewhat attractive, but not stunning," Tom Hanks admits somewhat ruefully. "I'll look in the mirror and if the lighting's right, think, 'This ain't bad.' At other times I look as if a squirrel has slept in my hair and as if I've been slugged in the nose. My butt's too big, and my chest's too small."

It might be added that many women find his crooked grin and the glint in his hazel eyes downright sexy. But it is also true that in preparing for Big, one scene of which displays all but a few centimeters of Hanks' pelt, he had to work out for weeks at a Manhattan gym, huffing and puffing to reduce that upholstered posterior, expand that narrow chest and flatten that soft stomach. Even so, he will not give Arnold Schwarzenegger any competition. In fact he found himself gasping at the end of a tough scene in which he and Robert Loggia dance a duet on giant piano keys embedded in the floor of a toy store. "It was exhausting, like jumping rope for ten hours," recalls Hanks.

What then is it about Hanks, 31, that has prompted comparisons with such old-fashioned leading men as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Jack Lemmon? "A tremendous sense of timing and great believability," says Larry Brezner, producer of The 'Burbs, the movie Hanks is now shooting. "He picks out the character and stays with it until the bitter end. Tom's better at acting funny than funny acting. He's an actor first and a comedian second."

In Big, his credibility faced its biggest challenge. The trick was to avoid doing a Jerry Lewis-like routine of a man impersonating a burbling brat. Hanks wanted his twelve-year-old to be one who just happens to look 20 years older than the other kids on the block. "The hardest part -- and also the appeal -- of the role was to strip myself of all the adult layers," he says. "It was to regain the kid's sense of play. I dug up memories -- or scars -- of myself in junior high school."

Fortunately or not, there were enough scars to go around. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His parents divorced when he was five, and while one child stayed with his mother, Hanks and two others went with his father, who married a woman with five children of her own. Other divorces followed for both parents, and by the time he was ten, says Hanks wryly, "I had three mothers, five grammar schools and ten houses." His own first marriage, which produced two children, also ended in divorce, and only last April, Hanks married his second wife, Actress Rita Wilson, whom he had met while filming Volunteers.

Once Hanks was hooked on acting, the result of a junior-college theater course, his path was fairly smooth. In 1980 he was chosen as the co-star of Bosom Buddies, a short-lived comedy about two young advertising copywriters. A year after the show was canceled in 1982, Hanks landed the part of an ordinary guy who falls in love with a mermaid. Before you could say Splash, he was a star.

None of the films that followed Splash -- Bachelor Party, Volunteers, The Money Pit, Nothing in Common and Dragnet -- attracted quite the attention that his first hit had. Big will almost certainly bring the spotlight back, and his next two pictures, Punchline, the story of a stand-up comic, and The 'Burbs, a dark comedy about a suburbanite's fixation on his weird neighbors, may even raise Hanks' asking price, which is now something more than $1 million a picture.

But he is unlikely to change from blue jeans into a suit or trade in his Dodge van for a Mercedes. Nor is he likely to drop the role of the eternal cutup. "I'll have the grilled baby chicken," he said last week as he sat down for an interview in a Santa Monica restaurant. "And the cuter the better."

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles