Tom Hanks’ Common Touch
Tom Hanks loves the Cleveland Indians. He loves them so much that he wouldn’t dream of going on the press tour for his new film Nothing in Common without his favorite Tribe T-shirt in his suitcase. He loves them so much that he considers each afternoon he has spent watching them in the nearly empty Cleveland Municipal Stadium a glorious, intimate experience. He loves the Indians so much that even though as a Californian he could lay claim to a far better team – and as a cool guy, to a hipper one – he is strictly an Indians fan, tracking their fate each summer as they sputter to their perennial parking place at the bottom of the American League East.
Somehow you get the feeling that Hanks is perfectly happy with the Indians’ lowly position – and that at most he’d like them to inch into the middle, a place he understands very well. After all, Hanks has made his way to the top portraying the man in the middle. In his first major movie, Splash, he played a regular guy caught between his ordinary life and his extraordinary girlfriend. In Bachelor Party, he was a bridegroom balanced between debauchery and fidelity to his debutante bride-to-be. In Volunteers, he was stuck between his echt-WASP inclinations and his blooming sense of social purpose. In The Man with One Red Shoe, he was unwittingly wedged between rival CIA factions. In The Money Pit, he was caught between a collapsing staircase and a crumbling relationship. And in the recently released Nothing in Common, he is right in the middle of everything: his mother and father, career and conscience, lust and love.
The funny thing is that Hanks doesn’t just play at being a middleman – he is one. A member of the class of ’74, he more or less missed the Sixties and pretty much predated the M.B. Eighties. ”The legacy of my youth,” he says, ”was disco,” By nature, he is something of a loner; by niche – social, cultural and professional – he is, too. While many actors seem to be envoys of their particular demographic bulge, Hanks embodies no era at all: neither the disillusioned idealism of the Hurt generation (William, Mary Beth and everyone else who emerged from The Big Chill) nor the no-illusions ambition of the St. Elmo’s Fire squad. If that’s made him a little opaque, it’s also made him a perfect fulcrum for movies about, as he puts it, ”living in the United States in 1986.”
Nothing in Common shows this balancing act at its best. In his other films, he’d already finessed the role of the adorable wiseacre and could have banked on it indefinitely. Not only is Nothing in Common different because it testifies to his power and agility in a complicated role; it has changed Hanks’s career because it testifies to his willingness to wrestle with something other than vanity turns in star-making vehicles.
”The verdict on Tom Hanks,” says costar Jackie Gleason, ”is that he’s got it.”
For the moment, Hanks is just a man in the middle of his lunch at a French-Japanese power-lunch establishment. The Manhattan high-yup aesthetic of the place is lost on him – ”Boy,” he says, staring at its postmodern turquoise walls, ”this place looks like an aquarium” – and is definitely way too haute for his white undershirt and jeans. This is not screw-you fashion; it just happens to be what Hanks likes to wear. ”Besides,” he says, ”I have no style.” More precisely, he looks like a guy whose personal effects have yet to catch up with his success. No wonder, considering that he has just finished his seventh movie in three years, making his young career virtually an entire section in most video stores.
There was nothing in his beginnings that would have augured this speedy rise. The son of a restaurateur in Oakland, California, he was only the second-funniest child in the family. The funniest, his brother Larry, now studies bugs in Baltimore. ”People used to say, ‘Tom’s loud,”’ says Tom loudly from behind the fashionably oversize menu. ”And then they’d say, ‘But Larry – now, Larry’s funny.”’ Hanks’s parents divorced for the first time when Tom was five; they remarried ”any number of times” before splitting for good. His father was later happily married to an Asian woman with an enormous family. ”Everyone in my family likes each other,” he says. ”But there were always about 50 people at the house. I didn’t exactly feel like an outsider, but I was sort of outside of it.”
After a stint at California State University in Sacramento, Hanks won an internship at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland – yes, the home of the Indians! – where he hung lights, painted backdrops, acted and decided to become an actor. ”I loved Cleveland,” he says. ”After all, I lived there for the last year of my official youth. I really got my stripes as a repertory actor, which means I did a lot of shitty roles. And I spent a lot of days at the ballpark, in that huge stadium with maybe 3,000 people. It was sort of an intimate experience.” In 1978, he moved to New York, married actress-producer Samantha Lewes, became a father and starved his way through a few seasons with the Riverside Shakespeare Company.
He got a bit part in a slasher flick and a role in a made-for-TV movie and then won the costar spot in the screwball sitcom Bosom Buddies. ”The first day I saw him on the set,” says the show’s coproducer Ian Praiser, ”I thought, ‘Too bad he won’t be in television for long.’ I knew he’d be a movie star in two years.” The show’s critical raves were never matched by its ratings, so after two full seasons – and later, a half-season effort at resuscitation – ABC canceled it; if Hanks knew he’d be a movie star in two years, his lack of confidence at the time belied it. ”The television show had come out of nowhere,” says his best friend, Tom Lizzio. ”Then out of nowhere it got canceled. He figured he’d be back to pulling ropes and hanging lights in a theater.”
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