on the theatrical ladder. One version has it that school starlet Lorraine Gauli brought her agent, Tobe Gibson, to watch her sister, Kathy, in the hopes that she would sign her. “Ironically, he would not have been discovered that night if my sister’s agent had not come to see me,” Kathy recalls, ruefully admitting that she was never signed herself. Lorraine, who was then riding high on TV, was in the audience with her agent, and realized from the moment she saw Tom’s command of the stage that he had what it took to be a star. So did her agent. “She went gaga about him,” she recalls. “He was so charismatic.”
While Tobe herself has no memory of that evening, she vividly recalls her first encounter with the teenager in her Manhattan office. She had previously asked Lorraine if she knew of any good-looking, talented teenage boys, and she recommended, among several others, Tom Mapother. Tom even took his photographs to the Gauli sisters’ house so that Tobe could look at him before they met. As soon as he walked into her Fifty-seventh Street office, she knew that she had found the gold dust all agents dream of . . . a charismatic youngster with raw talent. As she says, “I am very psychic, and when he came to see me and shook my hand, I said to him, ‘Listen to me. You are going to be a great star.’ ”
His audition, such as it was, was perfunctory. Tobe just knew. As her daughter Amy, who has starred in several TV soaps, says, “Her instincts were uncanny. She has done it several times with clients. It has made me believe in intuition.” Tobe entered Tom’s name and address into her Rolodex and he signed a standard contract, giving her 15 percent of his future earnings. They spent much of the audition discussing his stage name. Various surnames were considered before Tobe, who was going on a vacation to the Caribbean, spotted a holiday brochure in the corner of her office and suggested the name “Cruise.” As corny as it sounds, this was how he came to be known as Tom Cruise. At the time, Tobe didn’t even know it was his middle name—once she found out, it merely confirmed her initial impulse. Indeed, his later assertion thathe dropped his family name after his father left when he was twelve seems odd, as he was known at Glen Ridge High School as Maypo, an abbreviated version of Mapother and a reference to a breakfast cereal popular at that time.
Over the next few months Tobe became like a second mother to him, lining up auditions and giving him advice and encouragement. As with much of his own version of the events of his life, she disputes his story that he found an agent only after he and his ever-loyal mother schlepped around Manhattan for days. “That’s not true,” she says. “Lorraine was a client of mine and she recommended him to me. She was the instrument of his success.” Tobe’s former client Lorraine Gauli is much more forgiving of the way she has been forgotten in the later story of Tom’s rise to stardom. Now a flourishing criminal defense lawyer, she believes that he would have been discovered no matter what. “He was a talented, good-looking guy, and that is quite unusual in the business.”
It was perhaps inevitable that the brash, controlling side of his personality began to surface, young Maypo now believing he could be the king of the world. His girlfriend at the time, Nancy Armel, watched the transition and decided there were better fish in the sea. She went to Florida for spring break and started dating an older guy behind his back. When she finally confessed her infidelity, he was furious. “Don’t let that smile and those teeth fool you,” she recalls. “He could have a really nasty streak and was very mean to people. Toward the end of his senior year he felt he could control people and he was starting to show his darker side. He felt that he could do no wrong.”
While he had every right to feel angry at her behavior, he didn’t let the grass grow under his
While Tobe herself has no memory of that evening, she vividly recalls her first encounter with the teenager in her Manhattan office. She had previously asked Lorraine if she knew of any good-looking, talented teenage boys, and she recommended, among several others, Tom Mapother. Tom even took his photographs to the Gauli sisters’ house so that Tobe could look at him before they met. As soon as he walked into her Fifty-seventh Street office, she knew that she had found the gold dust all agents dream of . . . a charismatic youngster with raw talent. As she says, “I am very psychic, and when he came to see me and shook my hand, I said to him, ‘Listen to me. You are going to be a great star.’ ”
His audition, such as it was, was perfunctory. Tobe just knew. As her daughter Amy, who has starred in several TV soaps, says, “Her instincts were uncanny. She has done it several times with clients. It has made me believe in intuition.” Tobe entered Tom’s name and address into her Rolodex and he signed a standard contract, giving her 15 percent of his future earnings. They spent much of the audition discussing his stage name. Various surnames were considered before Tobe, who was going on a vacation to the Caribbean, spotted a holiday brochure in the corner of her office and suggested the name “Cruise.” As corny as it sounds, this was how he came to be known as Tom Cruise. At the time, Tobe didn’t even know it was his middle name—once she found out, it merely confirmed her initial impulse. Indeed, his later assertion thathe dropped his family name after his father left when he was twelve seems odd, as he was known at Glen Ridge High School as Maypo, an abbreviated version of Mapother and a reference to a breakfast cereal popular at that time.
Over the next few months Tobe became like a second mother to him, lining up auditions and giving him advice and encouragement. As with much of his own version of the events of his life, she disputes his story that he found an agent only after he and his ever-loyal mother schlepped around Manhattan for days. “That’s not true,” she says. “Lorraine was a client of mine and she recommended him to me. She was the instrument of his success.” Tobe’s former client Lorraine Gauli is much more forgiving of the way she has been forgotten in the later story of Tom’s rise to stardom. Now a flourishing criminal defense lawyer, she believes that he would have been discovered no matter what. “He was a talented, good-looking guy, and that is quite unusual in the business.”
It was perhaps inevitable that the brash, controlling side of his personality began to surface, young Maypo now believing he could be the king of the world. His girlfriend at the time, Nancy Armel, watched the transition and decided there were better fish in the sea. She went to Florida for spring break and started dating an older guy behind his back. When she finally confessed her infidelity, he was furious. “Don’t let that smile and those teeth fool you,” she recalls. “He could have a really nasty streak and was very mean to people. Toward the end of his senior year he felt he could control people and he was starting to show his darker side. He felt that he could do no wrong.”
While he had every right to feel angry at her behavior, he didn’t let the grass grow under his
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