The time I interviewed Tom Cruise

feeling green, but not with envy…

Me with Tom Cruise. Just Seventeen, October 1st 1986, p17

I was lucky to start in journalism during the boom years of the 1980s when print magazines were flourishing and people still got paid to write.

In 1986 I was Features Editor on teen bible Just Seventeen. Upwards of 200,000 young readers forked out 47p every Wednesday to get their hands on a copy. It offered advice, beauty, fashion, fiction and a broad range of features, including celebrity interviews.

As sister publication to Emap’s mighty Smash Hits, we’d had access to the stars right from the off.

In 1984 I’d turned down a chance to interview Madonna during her first visit to the UK, because I had to have my wisdom teeth out. (Still kicking myself about that.) My colleague Louise Chunn met her in Manchester and wrote a single-page feature on Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, titled Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. They were both newly into the charts.

When the chance came up to fly to Hamburg to interview Tom Cruise, star of the upcoming action movie Top Gun, which was tipped to be a blockbuster, I nabbed it.

1986 was a rollercoaster for me. I was 25, relishing my work, but tired of being single. In January I placed a lonely hearts ad in London listings magazine, City Limits. In February I met the love of my life through it. By May it dawned on us that I was pregnant (failed IUD). By the end of the year, we had triplets. (Reader, I didn’t marry him, but we’ve been together 38 years.)

But in late June of ’86, when I interviewed Tom Cruise, I had no idea that I was incubating a trio. In those days the first ultrasound scan wasn’t until 16 weeks. Awash with triple the pregnancy hormones, no wonder I felt like my body had been invaded by aliens. I struggled to keep any food down. Just days before, I’d regurgitated my Weetabix in front of my landlord, Jeremy, who’d popped in to see about fixing the roof.

I’d thrown up in railway station waste bins, on pavements, and regularly had to disappear to the loo at work. The slightest whiff of food – in fact any odour at all – could set me off. As could being too hot, too cold, too tense, too empty, too full, anyone asking me how I was… pretty much anything was a trigger.

So my uppermost thought during the trip to Hamburg, nibbling on dry biscuits and taking teeny sips of water, was: Must Not Vomit On Tom Cruise.

Waiting in the hotel lounge for my turn with Tom, I was reading through the press cuttings file and jotting down notes (“Tom Cruise is frighteningly polite”; “Tom Cruise’s favourite four-letter word is ma’am”. Huh!). Then the press officer broke the news to me that I wouldn’t after all get a one-to-one with him, because he was so in demand.

“Fuck! I’ve got to interview him with three Dutch journalists,” I jotted in my notebook. “It’s like a cattle market. And he’s been doing interviews all week, so he’ll be tired/bored I imagine.”

I didn’t repeat that exact wording in the feature, you understand, but I did in the end write about the whole experience (minus the nausea) and titled it Just Me, Tom Cruise, and three Dutchmen.

Fortunately, he was fizzing with energy and the line of questioning from the Dutchmen made it a more interesting and revealing piece than if I’d got my exclusive time with him.

One of the journalists kept hinting at a homo-erotic aspect to Top Gun that Tom studiously ignored. And he asked a question that the actor clearly found alarming: “Each time when the scene becomes serious you have a special look in your eyes which tells the public you don’t take it too serious. Do you do that on purpose?”

“No, I don’t actually. Which scene is it?”

“Every time,” says the Dutchman. Then he dug himself in deeper: “But even with the love scenes you look that way – some wrinkles around your eyes.”

Everyone laughed, including Cruise, but he looked unsettled by the criticism.

For me, the worst moment came when he talked about how he’d immersed himself in the pilots’ social lives as part of the research, joining in with one of their rowdy drinking sessions and ended up throwing up over his friend’s car. I could feel the bile rise in my throat at the mere mention of the V word, so took a sip of water, breathed deeply and prayed for the subject to change. Thankfully it did.

At the end of the interview, we all stepped into the lift together, as Tom was straight off to the airport.

I flew back to London later that afternoon and managed to keep nausea at bay until I was about 20 yards from home, where I threw up violently by a streetlamp.

The piece came out in the October 1^st 1986 issue of Just Seventeen to coincide with the UK cinema release of Top Gun.

Just Seventeen, October 1st 1986, p.16

Just Seventeen, October 1st 1986, p17

I reviewed the movie in the same issue. I was later amused to spot myself quoted on ads and posters for the film: “Top Gun… it’s exciting; it gets the adrenalin flowing. Wendy Varley – Just Seventeen”.

As a former sub-editor, I’m mortified by the typo! Adrenaline!

It was my final feature for the magazine before I had the babies. By then, I was incapable of waddling in to the Carnaby Street office every day. But at least the nausea had subsided.

Me in the Just Seventeen office in Carnaby Street, 1986. Photo by Ian Winter

My leaving do was at a Malaysian restaurant in Soho. A bunch of brilliant Emap colleagues showed up, including Editorial Director David Hepworth who had put faith in me as a freelance contributor when he launched the magazine in 1983 and then brought me onto the staff team. And Neil Tennant, who had just switched from being a journalist who interviewed pop stars for Smash Hits (his favourite question was “Does your mother play golf?” because his mother played golf) to being an actual pop star in the Pet Shop Boys.

My colleagues were a talented bunch. Many are still writing, and some are here on Substack. Novelist and journalist Fiona Gibson wrote a wonderful account of her Just Seventeen years on her Substack All Grown Up.

The magazine lasted in one form or another for twenty years. In a lovely tribute to it in Stylist magazine, David Hepworth reminisced about the early days: “I used to get outraged letters from parents. ‘Someday you may have a daughter and you won’t want her to read it,’ huffed one. By then I was able to reply, ‘I already have a daughter and she’s sitting at my feet right now, literally eating a copy’.”

© Wendy Varley 2024

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Thank you for reading! This is the second time I’ve been inspired to write here after looking back through old diaries (top tip: keep a diary!). Here’s my piece about leaving home at 18 to volunteer in a psychiatric hospital and happening on the extraordinary sculptor Rolanda Polonsky during her 35-year stay there.