T. S. Eliot was happily married to Valerie Fletcher for years, but it is only his relationship with Vivien Haigh-Wood that people want to hear about. (‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.’) Lauren Bacall’s second husband was Jason Robards — but who cares about him? In her memoirs and on chat shows it’s Bogie, Bogie, Bogie. Dame Plowright must be irritated to be eclipsed in the Larryographies always by Scarlett O’Hara. So it goes. It is as if there is room only for a single grand passion in a celebrity’s life, and though Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were divorced in 2001 and have since moved on to new partners, they still belong together in the public mind.
Before they met, according to Iain Johnstone, Cruise was the ‘semi-innocent, semi-naive’, apple-cheeked star of Risky Business, Top Gun and Cocktail.
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