Tom Terrific

By Richard Corliss and Cathy Booth

Decades ago, Alfred Hitchcock said actors were cattle. Today celebrities are meat: junk food for tabloid headlines, canapes for cocktail-party surmise, fodder for Leno and Letterman raillery. Are the charges, whispers and gags true? Hardly matters; they need only be entertaining. Star tattle proceeds from two American impulses: cynicism and sentimentality. Sentimentally we imagine that a popular artist must have hidden depths. Cynically we suspect that every star must have a guilty secret; all that power, money and spare time allow them to act out any sick whim. Gossip has become the purest form of show biz, a story that can be as short as a gerbil joke or as epic as the Monica Follies. It attaches itself to any prominent person, no matter how conventional or innocent he may appear.

Yet in all the annals of tattle, one man stands unsmeared. No one has accused Tom Hanks of being secretly gay, or of enjoying an unnatural relationship with certain varieties of fish, or of having sired a child in each NBA city. That is because (and we've researched this thoroughly) Hanks is a bright, decent, nice guy. You got a problem with that?

It ought to be enough that Hanks is a solid, supple actor who not only takes ornery subjects (AIDS, Vietnam, the U.S. space program) and turns them into hits (Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13), but also gives almost all his movies a moral center. In this age of the outlaw, he defines the ideal norm: he is our best us on our worst day, soldiering on through heartbreak. In Saving Private Ryan, for which he may earn his third Oscar as the tough, paternal Captain Miller, Hanks has a moment when the burden of leadership in war has nearly broken him. He walks over a hillside from his fractious men (far enough away that no one will see him) and sobs (so softly that no one will hear him). He is discreet even in despair.

And Hanks is a hero even when he does bad things. In the perky new comedy You've Got Mail, Hanks runs a giant chain that threatens to ruin a children's bookstore run by Meg Ryan; he is Big Business engulfing and devouring the sweet spirit of independence. In the intimate anonymity of a chat room, he carries on an e-mail affair with Ryan and doesn't tell her that her destroyer is her potential beau. At a literary soiree he scoops up all the caviar. Who is this creep? Tom Hanks. And because he is, he must be decent, searching, a thoughtful lover, natural dad-in-the-making. He reveals that through the comic grace he's displayed since Splash. It is a nice reminder that this ordinary-looking guy--with the repetitive crunches in that pensive space between his eyebrows and, at 42, a bit of a Michelin Man neck--is the avatar of Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy. Our suavest, most grounded light-romantic star.

Hanks has earned the luxury of taking his $20 million a picture and hiding. But this is the Enquirer era: excellence is not enough. He must be an ideal guy in real life; offstage he must be "Tom Hanks." So attend to these testimonials, made under neither threat nor hypnosis:

--Lauren Shuler Donner, producer of You've Got Mail: "I'd love to give you the dirt, but he's the real deal. All the cliches are true. Ask him to work Saturdays, ask him to reshoot a scene--his answer is always 'Whatever you need.' What a good guy! What a dream! What a pleasure!"

--Peter Scolari, Hanks' co-star on his first prominent gig, the engaging '80s sitcom Bosom Buddies: "It's not like there's a movie-star thing with Tom. There's not big aura. O.K., there is an aura, but he doesn't shine it in your eyes."

--Captain Dale Dye, U.S.M.C. (ret.), senior military adviser on Saving Private Ryan: "The guy could be, should have been, a professional soldier. He has the mind, the motivation, the spirit and the body to make a good officer. He's inquisitive and highly intelligent. Strip away the Hollywood crap and he's like Captain Miller: a common man in uncommon circumstances who rises to uncommon levels."

--Steven Spielberg, neighbor: "First he's a wonderful daddy. In between raising his kids, he does pictures. We're friends because his interpretation of family life is so retro. It's car pools, barbecues, play weekends, talk about the PTA, take videos of the kids. The other thing is that he completely, unerringly loves his wife."

Now go to the Man; you will find that even Tom Hanks likes Tom Hanks. "I think I'm a very pleasant person," he says. "I am. I'm a sunny individual. I think I can work with just about everybody. But this is a pretty protective atmosphere we're in here. It's very easy. In all honesty, why not be pleasant? I've never been a fan of people who operate from the school of 'The squeaky wheel gets the grease.' In my mind, the squeaky wheel gets replaced."

If Hanks doesn't squeak, he does squawk on the set. "For an Everyman," Spielberg says, "he's pretty damned opinionated." He can impose his will, and not just through star power. The week before Private Ryan was to begin shooting, Hanks and the film's squad of seven actors were put through some tough basic training. After three days, says Dye, "they were a little shocky, and naturally they began to grumble. But then out of his tent walks Tom Hanks as Captain Miller." Hanks recalls that after he gave an impassioned speech, "we took a vote. I was the only one who voted to stay. So we had another talk." They voted to stick it out. "It was five days of very little sleep at night," says Hanks. "It was not even a fraction of what anybody in the service goes through. But for us, whose job it is--whose job it is--to project that, it was the most important thing we did."

Hanks' hectoring is always about craft and competence: doing it right, getting the job done. Nearly every Hanks director describes him as a maddening perfectionist who is somehow so sincere that he doesn't piss anybody off. More important, he gives directors his fierce dedication to submerging himself in the role. "He's so versatile and has such range," says Frank Darabont, writer-director of Hanks' next film, The Green Mile, "that you don't have to take the character to him. He brings the character to the screen." Hanks also knows how to lighten things up on the set. For the kissing scene in You've Got Mail, recalls Ryan, "we were both uncomfortable. So Tom starts talking about the Microsoft lawsuit. I knew just what he was doing. It was so generous."

Hanks is unusually generous to the press; he tries to give a fresh, incisive quote to each journalist. He even took it well when he heard he would be bumped off the cover of this week's TIME because of some minor congressional skirmish. Caring and articulate, he rarely trips over his own dexterity. And when he does it makes news.

Recently he told the New Yorker that he "regrets" having given $10,000 to the Clinton defense fund. Now, asked about that remark, he goes all stammery, in the early Hanks mode of bluster and fluster, to explain, "Look, if I hadn't given it then, I would have given it now. As a guy who supports the President of the United States, I think he's doing a fabulous job, and I'm glad I gave him the money." Not that he wasn't shocked by the Lewinsky affair. "In the vast, surrealistic expanse of the Story of the Year, who didn't at one point or another slap themselves upside the head and say, 'Holy smoke! Hole ee smoke! Can you believe this?'? And you can't believe it, but it's the reality. But you know what? He's my guy."

In the New Yorker story, Hanks also did not rule out a future campaign for the presidency. Now he does. "I'm not running for President of the United States. I'm an actor who makes movies, and that's how I was answering the questions." His anguish turns briefly impish. "I think Sammy Sosa would be an ideal running mate. His enthusiasm, his joy and feel for the game." Then the agita rises again. "Good Lord Almighty! This is how trivial the times we're living in are. I don't even want to talk about it! Argggghhhh!"

Mr. Nice Guy does not easily wear the albatross of eminence. He may joke about it: "I'm powerful enough now to be taken seriously," he says, snapping his fingers like a born Hollywood sharpie. "Plenty of people take my phone calls!" He can also get plaintive: "Me famous?" he asks. "I can't embrace it for a moment. You guys do that." But he knows he is expected to think he's famous, and to love it: "I was working 18-hour days on That Thing You Do!," he says of the 1996 film he wrote and directed, "and I wasn't seeing my kids as much as I wanted. And I got into an elevator and this lady said, 'Oh, Tom Hanks! What's it like living at the absolute top of the heap?' And I said, 'Lady, life is just one damn thing after another, no matter where you're living.'"

On the set Hanks relaxes in a comfortable but not lavish silver Airstream trailer. (Of another star's trailer, he jokes, "John Travolta's is sorta like the Ritz Carlton. I wouldn't ever want to leave.") His real home--with his wife, actress Rita Wilson, and their two kids--is in west L.A., down the road from Spielberg's. But the star hasn't forgotten his dark roots. "Tom came from a hard place, and he remembers that," says Brian Grazer, producer of Splash and Apollo 13. The two men used to live near each other in a gated community on the Pacific. "I remember Tom sitting on the beach, holding the sand tight in his fist and saying, 'I can't believe this is my place.'"

As the kid from Concord, Calif., Tom Hanks didn't have a place. His parents separated when he was five, and he followed his chef father from job to job. "Basically he ran the kitchen in union dinner houses," Tom recalls. "Places with a net-and-nautical theme, with bamboo barstools and a dirty, disgusting kitchen." Early on, the boy learned the vagabond independence an actor needs. "I thought nothing of getting on the bus and visiting Mom four or five times a year."

A kid on the move--an Army brat or cook's son--typically either crawls into a shell or finds ways to cope with new classmates each school year. Hanks coped, adapted and later found a home in the impromptu family that is any company of actors. "To me it was the natural order of things, this willingness to go off and throw yourself into strange circumstances. I was never afraid to pack up and go off." And when he wasn't going off, he was looking up--at the stars. His obsession with the U.S. space program, which blossomed into Apollo 13 and his own HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, began here.

From the beginning he was a sweet blend of humor and earnestness. In high school in Oakland he quit track (he ran the 440 in 61 sec.) for the stage because his actor friends laughed more than the jocks. "I was attracted to acting because it was fun," says Hanks, dismissing any deeper motives. "I'd rather laugh all day long than anything."

Tom also got an eclectic religious education. His mother took the kids to Roman Catholic Mass. A stepmother brought in some Mormon proselytizers. His aunt, with whom he lived for a time, had converted to the Nazarene Church ("What did I know from fanatical?" he asks). In high school his Jewish friends inducted him into the sacred rituals of seder, bagels and lox. At the same time he joined "a great group of people" who were born-again Christians; for four years he led Bible readings. But Tom was a man with his own mission. The mission was acting.

Before he was 20, he was seen playing Yasha the footman in The Cherry Orchard in Sacramento and hired as an intern at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. Soon he was making $50 a week and, best of all, "Boom, I had a card in my wallet that said I am a professional actor." He and his first wife Samantha went to New York City for the requisite starving-actor years; they had a baby and some thin patches. "It was a year and a half of horrible scary days," he recalls.

Big Break No. 1: a leading role in Bosom Buddies, a sitcom about two young admen who dress as girls to live cheaply in a women-only building. The show had one claim to must-see TV: the comic chemistry between Scolari, all neurotic flutters, and the more bullyish Hanks. "There was no reason to hire me," Hanks says. "I was a new guy." Yet here he was, at 23, earning $9,000 an episode: "I made more money in two weeks than I'd made in my entire career." Scolari recalls that "Tom lived in a Leave It to Beaver house with Samantha and their two children." The Hankses separated in 1985.

Big break no. 2: the 1984 Splash, in which Hanks falls for a mermaid. The modestly budgeted film grossed $62 million in North America, and Hanks was suddenly the new surefire romantic-comedy guy. In three years he did seven films, mostly raffish comedies. It took Penny Marshall's Big (Break No. 3) to change that. Now he was so hot he was cast in roles that didn't suit him, like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities or the thinks-he's-going-to-die hero of Joe versus the Volcano.

"I was manufacturing reasons to make the movies," Hanks says. "Then I realized there was a way to control my fate: by saying no to movies I didn't want to do." And saying yes to A League of Their Own: Break No. 4, the last he would need. Every film he has starred in since then has been a hit.

You've Got Mail, an easy comedy with a disturbing subtext--it is less about saving Meg Ryan than showing how the large overwhelm the small with clout and charm--looks to continue the streak. But there is always the past to give him perspective. "It's a checkered career. They can't all be gems, man," he says, and winces. "People rent your bad stuff!" He would seem to have one guaranteed hit in his future: a sequel to the computer-animated delight Toy Story, for which Hanks gave voice to Sheriff Woody. He still gets a charge when kids ask him to "do" Woody. "It's just my own voice," he says with incredulous joy.

What about his own kids? Are they starstruck by having Tom Freakin' Hanks drive them to school? Naaah. "My work doesn't make much of a blip at the house," he says. "There's always a hubbub of activity because we're going somewhere, but they don't say, 'Hey, Dad, you're on TV!'" His son Colin, now 21, has tried acting, with Dad's cautious encouragement. "All my kids can look and see what I do for a living and see that it's really fun. It produces a vast amount of joy. It's hard work if you can get it, but it's great work too."

That's as much home talk as you'll get out of Hanks, whose personal life is a gated community. He is knowing but, for all his affability, not telling. Even his closest colleagues speak of him as if he were a planet yet to be colonized. Spielberg: "Tom is a bit of a mystery." Says Ryan, his co-star in three films: "I know him, but I don't know him. None of us really knows him." Perhaps this sense of his own unknown is what attracted him to the role of Captain Miller, who for much of Private Ryan is an enigma to his men, and to Dino, a Martin Scorsese film in which Hanks would play Dean Martin to Travolta's Sinatra. "Nobody gets to know me," Martin once told a producer. Does Hanks want it that way too?

We stare at a star as the young Tom watched the sky, seeking not the answer to mysteries but mystery itself. An artist of Hanks' resourcefulness must be working out some primal ache, mustn't he? Maybe not. He could be just Joe Actor, a sphinx with no secret. What's at the center of this perplexingly lovely man? A black hole? A barbecue pit? Or the all-American heart?

Give Tom Hanks the privacy he so fervently seeks, and let him try to relax in the hammock of his achievements. Because we know--don't we, America?--that one secret nags at him. Hanks has to be thinking: If only I'd had some fabulous character flaw, I could've been really big. --With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles