Amy Sohn’s roman a clef about Tom Cruise’s love life and his marriage to Katie Holmes is being billed as “a big, juicy literary novel” by its publisher, Simon & Schuster. But it’s unclear what “literary” is supposed to mean. Slow? Artistic? Rife with allusions to Henry James? A blurb on the book’s back cover wishfully claims the book is “like Henry James crossbred with the very best of US Weekly.”
It’s true that a few James references have been Hollywoodized for Sohn’s dubious purposes. But only one of them works: when the ambitious title character of this startlingly bigoted book makes a nasty crack about James’ homosexuality.
“Is that the way you think of gay men?” asks her husband, who is pejoratively linked to the word “gay” on virtually every page. “You won’t get very far in this industry.”
Sohn has written about unhappy marriages before (Prospect Park West, Motherland). So perhaps she took the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes union to be the ur-example of a mismatch, and a good way to write about some place other than Brooklyn. In any case, The Actress clumsily tells the story of 20-something Maddy Freed, who turns up at Sundance (called Mile’s End Film Festival here) with an indie film she made with her boyfriend, Dan. Something about Maddy’s fresh new talent and tall, mannish frame (aha) catch the eye of Steven Weller, who sounds just like Cruise with a few Clooney and Travolta traits grafted onto him, and Bridget Ostrow, his longtime minder/hand holder. They’re looking for new talent, and not just the acting kind.
Everybody gossips about Steven’s fake-looking relationships with women. “The man is so gay,” somebody says on the book’s very first page, as the drumbeat begins. He’s also blamed for being too good looking, too shallow and not as talented as such indie types as Dan, whose cure for the blues is getting drunk and watching Claire’s Knee. Since Maddy is young enough to have had a crush on Steven forever (as Holmes did with Cruise), turning Dan into toast is a cinch.
The book blames Steven for everything and Maddy for nothing — not even for being blinded by the perks and fame that come her way when she starts being squired by him to public events. She can’t tell whether she’s high on Steven or celebrity, and the book forgives her many instances of idiocy about her new status. Sohn does a decent job of transcribing Cruise’s style of seduction, so it’s not hard to see what snows Maddy. He doesn’t quite say, “You complete me,” but the book uses a version of that phrase.
Anyway, Maddy is happily agog when Steven whisks her off to his palazzo in Venice, where all the butlers are very hunky (aha). Then, one magical night, he picks her up and carries her a la Rhett Butler up the grand marble staircase “without a grunt.” There’s a lot of steamy sex between these two, which leaves no reason for Maddy not to be blissfully happy for a while. Still, she continues to think gay, gay, gay and have suspicions about Steven’s true nature.
The Actress takes the narrow, benighted attitude that a man and woman who are this smitten and sexually compatible cannot possibly be happy if the man is bisexual. Even though Maddy has had her own bisexual experience, she delves into Steven’s past as if conducting the Spanish Inquisition. And she fumes more and more as she suspects he’s been lying to her. She snoops in his study, looking for evidence, but that’s about as big a secret as this book dares to uncover. However obviously he is modeled on Cruise, Steven has no religious affiliation with a famously litigious church that might go after the author or publisher.
The Actress isn’t enough fun to get by on covert references alone. Yes, there’s “a beautiful Spanish actress with a Jessica Rabbit figure and a thick accent,” just like Cruise’s ex-girlfriend Penelope Cruz. Yes, Steven and Maddy make a sexually explicit film for a renowned reclusive director who did his most awe-inspiring work decades ago and who, like Stanley Kubrick with Eyes Wide Shut, summons them to England. (Of course Cruise did this with his wife Nicole Kidman, but his life has been put into a blender for Sohn’s dramatic purposes, such as they are.) And some of Steven’s film titles have amusing connections to Cruise’s films: He hit it big with something called “Briefs,” while Cruise hit it big dancing in his briefs in Risky Business. But these are tiny semiclever blips in a book that mostly drags on at the slow pace of its heroine’s thinking.
If there’s anything universal about The Actress, it’s an overriding pessimism about the way all marriages eventually turn sour. Neither stardom, secrets nor sexual orientation has much to do with that. Once Steven has grown bored with the rituals of wooing a new conquest, he begins to turn into a fiercely jealous guy who can go ice cold when he’s angry, and a control freak who expects Maddy to sacrifice her career to his. His glamour also wears off, to the point where when she thinks he’s smiling into a mirror, he’s actually stretching his face so he can trim nose hair. To give him one extra touch of the Neanderthal, Sohn has him say, “Are we living in a world where women are no longer expected to show deference to their husbands?”
Maddy grows less sympathetic as the book goes on, too. She gets lonely, bored, shrewish and increasingly determined to advance her own career, even though her creative plans don’t sound all that promising. It comes as a great relief when the lovebirds reach a kind of understanding, thanks in part to Maddy’s visit to the only old friend of Steven’s who won’t take stupid questions like “Did I marry a fraud?” seriously.
“I can’t tell you who he is,” this man says. “Why would I presume to know? I’m not Gay Yoda.”
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