feet for long. During a “wild” cast party, he danced the night away with any number of new admirers. Around this time, the school campus was swept with rumors that vitamin E was good for sexual performance. So there were raised eyebrows among the guys standing in the kitchen when Tom walked in and asked party host Andrew Falk if he had any tablets. After grabbing a handful, he quickly left, leaving the guys rolling their eyesand smiling. “I never saw any evidence other than he was a red-blooded high-school student,” recalls Phil Travisano. “He was a regular masculine guy.”
At times there was just too much testosterone flying around. At the end of yet another cast party, this time at the home of Kim Thorne, he was sitting in the basement shooting the breeze with a handful of stragglers when he tried to pin down two of the girls, including Cathy Tevlin, by their ankles. While he and the other guys laughed uproariously, Cathy and her friend failed to see the funny side, squirming away from his grasp before making their excuses and leaving. “It was kind of gauche and sexual at the same time. These days I don’t think women put up with that goofy kind of behavior,” observes one of those present at that late-night impromptu wrestling match.
Certainly not everyone was impressed by his newfound fame. Ditched by Nancy Armel, he struggled to find a date for the senior prom. Ellen Hurley, for one, turned him down. “I have to tell you he wasn’t a chick magnet. Girls just weren’t that into him,” says her friend Pamela Senif. He managed to convince Ann Stoughton to be his partner for the evening—but only “as a friend.” In the end, it was one of those flouncing, tear-filled, whispering, intense, in-the-moment evenings that teenagers live for. He spent two angst-filled hours talking on the lawn to his old girlfriend Nancy Armel—before going off into the night in his battered green car looking for Diane Van Zoeren. Even though she was a year behind him in school, he had had a crush on her since he first arrived in New Jersey. That night, driving up and down empty streets in Glen Ridge, the lovelorn youngster tried but failed to find out where she lived. Soon after, however, he tracked her down, and for the next year or so he convinced her to be his girlfriend as he made the improbable transition from school to the silver screen.
After his triumph in
Guys and Dolls
, he was seriously bitten by the acting bug. With Hollywood in his sights, he missed much of the last few weeks of his final semester at Glen Ridge because he was traveling to Manhattan for auditions.His next role, though, was not so much “off Broadway” as “off Broad Street,” a local joke about a tiny theater that staged amateur productions in Bloomfield, New Jersey, near Glen Ridge. A few weeks after playing Nathan Detroit, he was rehearsing the part of Herb in the musical
Godspell
, based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew. Big time it wasn’t. But even though it was an amateur production, recruiting aspiring actors from Bloomfield Community College, for Tom it was another step forward into a world that he had edged around since he was a boy.
His enthusiasm and dedication to his chosen career were such that he decided to miss his high-school graduation ceremony in June 1980 rather than drop out of a
Godspell
performance. Later he attributed his absence from the ceremony to embarrassment about his dyslexia: “I graduated in 1980 but didn’t even go to my graduation,” he said. “I was a functional illiterate. I loved learning, I wanted to learn, but I knew I had failed in the system.”
As is often the case, the memories of his contemporaries vary from his own recollections. When he was appearing in
Godspell,
he told numerous friends that he was prepared to skip the ceremony to appear in the show. His friend Lorraine Gauli told him that he was mad to miss this undoubted highlight of the school calendar. He shrugged and smiled,
At times there was just too much testosterone flying around. At the end of yet another cast party, this time at the home of Kim Thorne, he was sitting in the basement shooting the breeze with a handful of stragglers when he tried to pin down two of the girls, including Cathy Tevlin, by their ankles. While he and the other guys laughed uproariously, Cathy and her friend failed to see the funny side, squirming away from his grasp before making their excuses and leaving. “It was kind of gauche and sexual at the same time. These days I don’t think women put up with that goofy kind of behavior,” observes one of those present at that late-night impromptu wrestling match.
Certainly not everyone was impressed by his newfound fame. Ditched by Nancy Armel, he struggled to find a date for the senior prom. Ellen Hurley, for one, turned him down. “I have to tell you he wasn’t a chick magnet. Girls just weren’t that into him,” says her friend Pamela Senif. He managed to convince Ann Stoughton to be his partner for the evening—but only “as a friend.” In the end, it was one of those flouncing, tear-filled, whispering, intense, in-the-moment evenings that teenagers live for. He spent two angst-filled hours talking on the lawn to his old girlfriend Nancy Armel—before going off into the night in his battered green car looking for Diane Van Zoeren. Even though she was a year behind him in school, he had had a crush on her since he first arrived in New Jersey. That night, driving up and down empty streets in Glen Ridge, the lovelorn youngster tried but failed to find out where she lived. Soon after, however, he tracked her down, and for the next year or so he convinced her to be his girlfriend as he made the improbable transition from school to the silver screen.
After his triumph in
Guys and Dolls
, he was seriously bitten by the acting bug. With Hollywood in his sights, he missed much of the last few weeks of his final semester at Glen Ridge because he was traveling to Manhattan for auditions.His next role, though, was not so much “off Broadway” as “off Broad Street,” a local joke about a tiny theater that staged amateur productions in Bloomfield, New Jersey, near Glen Ridge. A few weeks after playing Nathan Detroit, he was rehearsing the part of Herb in the musical
Godspell
, based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew. Big time it wasn’t. But even though it was an amateur production, recruiting aspiring actors from Bloomfield Community College, for Tom it was another step forward into a world that he had edged around since he was a boy.
His enthusiasm and dedication to his chosen career were such that he decided to miss his high-school graduation ceremony in June 1980 rather than drop out of a
Godspell
performance. Later he attributed his absence from the ceremony to embarrassment about his dyslexia: “I graduated in 1980 but didn’t even go to my graduation,” he said. “I was a functional illiterate. I loved learning, I wanted to learn, but I knew I had failed in the system.”
As is often the case, the memories of his contemporaries vary from his own recollections. When he was appearing in
Godspell,
he told numerous friends that he was prepared to skip the ceremony to appear in the show. His friend Lorraine Gauli told him that he was mad to miss this undoubted highlight of the school calendar. He shrugged and smiled,
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