We were supposed to meet at a Mexican restaurant in the Dallas Galleria. But twenty minutes after the time we'd set, Tom Cruise wasn't there. And this seemed strange, for Cruise is famed for his manners. He lards his conversation with "sir" and "ma'am," he writes bread-and-butter notes—heck, he telexed his thanks for this story even before I flew down to interview him. So where was he?

The assistant who'd driven me to the mall went off to call the production office of Born on the Fourth of July, the film that had brought Cruise to Texas. I wandered through the restaurant again, then watched a lone skater as she cut perfect figure eights on the indoor ice rink. When I eventually looked back to the restaurant, there was a crowd waiting for tables, and, by the door, a thin man in a wheelchair. He wore a baseball cap with a Southern Methodist University insignia, a cheap checked shirt, and jeans. He had dark insomnia smudges under his eyes, and a week's growth of beard. He was watching the skater too, and the contrast between the paralyzed man and the graceful woman was touching.

Then the man in the wheelchair rolled to my side.

"Hey," Tom Cruise said quietly. "Guess it's working." He flashed a smile many watts dimmer than the one which has brought his price per film to $3-million-plus, shook my hand briefly, and kept rolling.

As we moved through the mall, he explained that he was in the chair because he needed to spend more time as his character, a paralyzed Vietnam vet. This was nothing new. Before playing a high-school football star in All the Right Moves, he attended a small-town school's football practice in disguise. He went up in F-14s before Top Gun, played eight weeks of serious pool before The Color of Money, flipped bottles incognito in a New York bar before Cocktail.

So far, so straightforward. But then he signed on to play Charlie Babbitt, the "spiritually autistic" fortune hunter in his current release, Rain Man. Dustin Hoffman, as his autistic-savant brother, Raymond, had it comparatively easy: because his character had been institutionalized for twenty years, Hoffman could figure out how to play him by talking with patients and doctors. But for the first time in his career, Cruise had nothing external he could use to insinuate himself into his role. To master the character, he had to look inside, to what he called "my own autism."

The dive inward worked. Cruise's performance in Rain Man not only announces him as an adult star, it shows anyone who might have doubted it that he's a truly accomplished actor. But Tom Cruise never rests. And Tom Cruise is never satisfied. Instead of gliding from Rain Man into a role he could grin his way through, he has now chosen to play Ron Kovic, the Marine who went to Vietnam pumped up on illusion and returned home, his spinal cord smashed, to confront the war-makers.

Like Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July is rich in metaphor. "It's about twenty years in the life of this country," says director Oliver Stone. For the star, however, the metaphor is more personal. ''You go around like this," Cruise said, with grim determination, "you find everything that's hard to deal with."

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'When Marty Scorsese and I were planning Color of Money, we went through lists of actors," Paul Newman says, "but we never seriously considered anyone else." Why? "I'd only seen Risky Business, but you wouldn't have to see a lot more to know that Tom is a bold, ingenious actor with a lot of actor's courage. He's willing to try anything."

Longtime Cruisettes remember the moment in Risky Business that launched him onto Newman's A list: the scene when his parents are away and he dances around their posh suburban house, playing air guitar, in his Jockeys. In The Color of Money he was a blue-collar pool whiz who twirled his cue like a crazed drum major. The $435 million worth of tickets to Top Gun bought a fighter pilot with a lot of fear simmering under the bravado. And Rain Man introduces another all-new Cruise, ranging from fury to understanding, with stops for irritation, irony, and tenderness. "A full character in a serious piece," Cruise says with understated pride.

The one through-line in his films is the way Tom Cruise fixates on his work. It's reminiscent of Robert De Niro, only without the tics. And he doesn't just get into a character, he plunges right into the shaping of the script. Long before he was the most powerful young actor in Hollywood, he found himself in the offices of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the hottest commercial producers in town. And they, in an unlikely power shift, ended up pitching him.

"We told him how we thought Top Gun could be, but we didn't show him the script," Simpson recalls. "Cruise said, 'I like that movie,' so we gave him the script. He read it, came back, and said, 'I don't like that movie. But here's the deal: you involve me in the process as a creative partner and I'll do it.' When he left, I thought, Wow, this guy has long-distance savvy."

"I always thought I was an actor pretending to be a movie star."

Cruise says he has no plan, that he simply takes the best roles he's offered. Which is not to say he doesn't have his dreams—like making a film with both a legendary actor and a star director. On The Color of Money, he got exactly that. "Scorsese and I were maniacal," Newman says. "We were always rehearsing, working on the script, looking for a new way to do it. More than he'd been able to in his earlier films, Cruise was getting his feet wet in the communal effort. I don't think he showed his hand so much. He watched a lot, which is smart."

When the Rain Man project started up in 1986, Cruise was ready to show his hand—to, as it would turn out, four consecutive directors and twice that many writers. Indeed, it's partly because of Cruise's ideas for his character that the original director, Marty Brest, dropped out. "While Marty was on the project, I found a family that had parallel aspects of the Rain Man story," says Dustin Hoffman. "Tom and I started going bowling with this family. And we began to have a strong feeling that Marty didn't share. In the original plan, my character grew too much. Doctors who'd been asked to read the script were responding, 'Only in Hollywood ... ' Tom had a wonderful instinct to bend the movie to fit the disability, not vice versa. So it became clear to us that my character wouldn't change very much. Tom's character would become much more important."

Hoffman wasn't concerned that his co-star would be onscreen for at least fifteen minutes before he came on—"My God, Tom's the biggest star in the world, he can hold a movie for two reels!"—but Brest wanted them together faster. And Brest was sufficiently unhappy with the cross-country drive that is the heart of the story to worry that the film would be "two schmucks in a car."

When Brest left, Steven Spielberg and Sydney Pollack each struggled with the script. Cruise turned down other offers, took up racecar driving, and married actress Mimi Rogers. And, because he has what Oliver Stone calls "a charisma that needs exercising," he also got very edgy. In 1987, with Rain Man in limbo, he did Cocktail, a watered-down melodrama that on the strength of his name grossed $70 million. It wasn't until Barry Levinson agreed to direct Rain Man that Cruise finally got to show Dustin Hoffman just what it is he does. And even Hoffman—who's famous for wanting to get everything just exactly so—was surprised by Cruise.

"I don't usually meet people with my work habits," Hoffman marvels, "but Tom and I both like to get up before dawn and exercise. We'd drive to the set together, using the time to rehearse. Neither of us much like lunch; we both stayed in the trailer and worked on the material. At night, Tom was constantly knocking on my door. He'd say, 'Why don't we do it this way?' And he'd do my lines so well he could have played my part. I tell you, all the two of us did is work. We didn't do anything else."

Cruise's passion for roles of ever increasing difficulty is the result less of his formal training—he took acting classes only for a few months—than of an actor's best friend, a miserable childhood. Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer, moved his wife, their son, and their three daughters to a dozen cities before Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was twelve. Then, just as he hit puberty, his parents divorced.

"From that time on, all the kids worked," Cruise said matter-of-factly. "We had to. In Kentucky, where we lived, the public-school system wasn't very good. My mother wanted us to go to private schools, but they cost something like $1,000 a term. My mom was carrying three jobs, so we had to pay for private school ourselves."

That effort to stabilize the family was short-circuited by a new cycle of migration. After a relatively peaceful freshman year in a Franciscan seminary, Cruise attended three high schools in three states in three years. Hampered by dyslexia, he was also a permanent new boy. "I spent all my time getting into the right clique at school," he said. "I'd finally get the right pair of sneakers, and then we'd move and they'd be wrong. I used to get into a lot of fights. The school bully would come over to kick the hell out of the new kid, and you'd learn: you either fight or the next guy's going to come over and pound you, and then on down. So it's sink or swim. I chose to swim. It was about surviving, and going after what you want."

At seventeen, after appearing in a high-school production of Guys and Dolls in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cruise decided to go after what he'd wanted since he was six. Skipping his graduation, he moved to New York, took a succession of minimum-wage jobs, and went to auditions. A bit part in Endless Love led to another in Taps. Two weeks into rehearsals, he was asked to replace the third lead. In the climax, he turns his machine gun on the National Guard with a cheery "It's beautiful, man." That, according to Cruise, "was my childhood coming out."

A few small films later, Cruise was a teen idol. "You wouldn't believe the amount of money I was offered after Risky Business," he said with a dry laugh. "But I've never done a film for money. I don't have to—I've lived with nothing my whole life. If the big offers vanish, they can't erase what I've learned and what I've done. It takes away from your soul when you do what you don't believe in."

Easy words, but Cruise acts on them. To keep goopy stills from love scenes out of circulation, his contracts stipulate that the studio can't release his photograph without his approval. He vetoed a Budweiser proposal to start the Color of Money videotape with a beer commercial. He turned down the lead in Bright Lights, Big City because "I'm not sure that seeing people do drugs on-screen doesn't glorify drugs, no matter how anti-drug the piece." On the other hand, like Oliver Stone, he's completely deferring his salary on Born on the Fourth of July because he knew, after reading ten pages of the script, that he had to make this movie.

This penchant for Cruise Control may be a problem when he's off the set. He was very pleasant about it, but he was also firm: no chance to talk to his wife, no interviews with his family. And because he was working so furiously, it was hard for him to carve out the time for a personal conversation.

Even in our abbreviated encounter, Cruise may have been unusually careful. The production assistant who casually debriefed me during our half-hour drive to the mall introduced himself as William Mapother. A relative of Thomas Cruise Mapother IV? "A coincidence," William said. It was, Cruise later admitted, a coincidence of birth—they're cousins. A more intriguing coincidence, from my point of view, occurred in the mall when William drifted off to phone the production office. Did Cruise just happen to turn up while William and I were separated? Or had William rendezvoused with his cousin and told him what to expect?

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Oliver Stone thinks he has an explanation for all of Cruise's behavior, from his high-risk approach to acting to his preference for low-risk encounters with professional inquisitors. "He's destiny-oriented," Stone told me. "He has a Homeric, heroic aspect. He's a star, he knows it, and he's conscious of his destiny—he's a kid off a Wheaties box."

Perhaps. But I had to wonder if Cruise, at twenty-six, is in danger of becoming a prig. This idea surfaced as I watched The Color of Money the weekend before I met him. When it was over, I went through the tape again, counting the grins. There were twenty-two, each a magic money-in-the-bank moment, suggesting that the actor who plays the young pool hustler knows a thing or two about fun. Now comes Rain Man: it is being talked about as a comedy, but although there are great scenes galore, Cruise doesn't exactly laugh his way through it. As for Born on the Fourth of July, I doubt that it will offer many chuckles. Has Cruise decided, after only eight years in the business, that he'd rather harangue us than entertain us?

"Nah," he said, pulling away to do a wheelie in his chair. "I still enjoy action-adventure movies. People like to separate the actor and the movie star. Well, I always thought I was an actor pretending to be a movie star. That's fun for me. I like doing both."

Yes, but will it be so easy, after Rain Man and Born, to break out that grin?

Cruise (shooting the question down): "I get up every morning, and I look in the mirror, and I grin. And then at night, before I go to bed, I make sure it's still there." (He softened.) "The character I was playing... I was looking for something offbeat."

It's got nothing to do with you?

Cruise (faintly annoyed): "Yeah, it's like: Take 10, walk from A to B. That's acting."

I didn't want to badger the guy, but that smile is his signature. It's what made him a movie star. When writer-director Paul Brickman and his producers, Jon Avnet and Steve Tisch, were casting Risky Business, there was no great enthusiasm to meet Cruise. "Paul and Jon had seen him in Taps, when he was stocky and had short hair," Tisch recalls. "They felt he was simply wrong for the part. But Paula Wagner, Tom's agent, really pushed— over lunch, she came up with a ruse to get him into our office. The idea was that he'd drop in on me as if we were old friends and I'd take him in to meet Paul and Jon. One afternoon, we did that. Tom's hair was longer, he'd dumped the weight he'd gained for Taps, he was honest and charming—and he had that great nonthreatening smile that lights up a room. I said, 'Gents, this is Tom Cruise.' Ten minutes later, Tom was gone, and we were talking about testing him."

Three years later, in 1986, the Top Gun version of that smile made the motion-picture exhibitors name Cruise the box-office draw of the year, beating out Eddie Murphy, Paul Hogan, Stallone, Eastwood, and Newman. Clearly, it's a gift. Apparently, I suggested, it's also a cross to bear.

Cruise (suddenly all attention): ''Why a cross?"

Because it's what people really want from you, and you don't want to do it in films right now.

Cruise (demanding, with an edge in his voice like Al Pacino in The Godfather): ''Why is that a cross to bear?"

Because Hollywood would rather make Rocky II than Rocky.

Cruise (with sarcasm flowing): "That's not the way it is. There's not a committee that tells me what to do. People go to the movies—it amazes me what they think. They don't understand what I'm doing, and that's O.K.—I don't want them to understand. They should enjoy the movie or not, whatever. To preconceive what I can be or do, well, that's human nature, but it's not what's going on here."

Just then, three salesgirls from Saks appeared at the wheelchair. "Can we have your autograph?" they chorused.

Cruise relaxed. "You sure can. What are your names?"

Pam, Maureen, Lori-with-an-i.

"You work here?" Cruise asked.

"Yeah."

"Working hard?"

"Obviously not."

Cruise flashed the famous grin as he handed the autographs over. The salesgirls gushed thanks. "No," Cruise said. "Thank you."

When they left, I asked Cruise if his good manners are also acting.

"Manners aren't developed," he said pointedly. "They're what you come from. I was taught to treat people well, and I like it. I don't think you get away with that star stuff. After a while, it comes back and eats you. You start asserting 'who you are,' you lose perspective on the work."

For Cruise, there may be a worse fate than loss of perspective or loss of control. He may be in the wrong business. "He has a big gift," Paul Newman says, "as a racecar driver. I took him around at Lime Rock, and he got a jolt—a bigger jolt than he got in an F-14. He's loose behind the wheel, and he's loosest on weekends. You see, there's got to be some respite from the horseshit. And cars give you that. They're primitive. Your success doesn't depend on someone's evaluation of you, just on crossing that finish line. So if Tom is competitive—and he is—there's one way to avoid that human factor. And that's to race."

Cruise has raced with Newman's team fifteen times in the last two years, enough for the team leader to have a sense of his style. Predictably, Newman's judgment of Cruise the driver is a beat more critical than his assessment of Cruise the actor. "He's a risk-taker in a car," says Newman. "His head has got to catch up to his balls."

Cruise has set out to do just that. Two years ago, he and Don Simpson spent a week together at the Bob Bondurant racing school. "I was there to play, Cruise was there to learn," Simpson says. "I discovered how intense he was about it on the fourth day. Tom and I were going out for pizza and beer that night, knowing there was a test the next day. Cruise showed up with his books. I said, 'This is racecar school. If you get a B, they don't fail you.' Cruise said, 'No, we're going to study.' Thanks to Cruise, we both got A's."

Cruise tried to sound flippant about his racing—"just another chance for public humiliation"—but it's clearly a deep passion. "It's like acting," he finally admitted. "It challenges you physically and mentally. You can't go in and put your foot to the floor and expect to win. You have to think it out. Like acting, you sometimes get the shit kicked out of you. And then you get upset with yourself. You know, hitting the wall at a hundred miles an hour isn't what I'd call a lot of fun."

It's not, however, scary. "I'm not going to die in a racecar," he said with absolute assurance, "and I'm not going to get hurt in one." This, too, is consistent with his feelings about taking on large challenges in films with stars like Hoffman and Newman. "You want to play with the best," he said. "The first meeting is intimidating. Then you start working, and it's just doing the work. Sometimes I'd be watching rushes and I'd sit back and say, 'Wow, that's Dustin Hoffman!' But Hoffman's not pretentious. He doesn't remind you he's a genius. It's like working with Newman. You want to sit down with these guys and talk about acting and go through scenes, but you don't have time. So every day you wake up and feel: I want to remember this day. I mean, the process of developing a movie is frustrating and painful. I do it, but it bores the hell out of me. What I like is to shoot. Because then we've done the research, we've chosen the behavior, we've worked out where we're going to ad-lib. And that's when it really starts getting hot."

In Rain Man, that began to happen in the second week. "We were shooting in the car in Oklahoma, and all of a sudden, we just knew it. After that, it was butter. Even our big scene, in the motel. Dustin and I were both nervous about that. It wasn't quite there, so we kept on. Rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. We go to shoot it, we kind of look at one another and say, Well, here it goes..." Barry Levinson shot one three-minute take. He sat for a moment, considering the performances while the crew stood around in stunned silence. And then Levinson said, "Let's move on."

Moments like that make Cruise want more of the experiences that have helped him reach another level as an actor. He'd certainly welcome a second chance to work with Paul Newman. "I'm all for that, but I'm not sanguine about it," says Newman. "Hell, Redford and I have been looking—actively looking—for something to do together for twenty years!" And Cruise definitely would like to make another film with Levinson. "What I love about Levinson's style is that it's life. There's no one point when everything changes. So at the end of Rain Man, you look back and ask, 'What happened to him? When did he become this other guy?' And you can't pinpoint it. Now I talk to Barry, and he tells me stories, and I go, 'That's a movie, Barry. Let's make it.' Then he tells me another, and I say, 'You've gotta write that script. Let's do it.' " He paused, then laughed knowingly. "But Barry doesn't work that way."

Cruise was in a fine mood as we turned back toward the skating rink to meet his cousin. We'd spent enough time together for me to forget that he was in a wheelchair, that the Tom Cruise I was seeing wasn't the Tom Cruise who wears the expensive Italian clothes in Rain Man. And he was now comfortable enough with me to talk—in general terms—about the way the emotional comfort of marriage helps him take bigger risks in his work, and how hard it then becomes to balance that peace against the violent emotions of a powerful script.

Then we saw the kid in the wheelchair.

He was looking out over the skating rink. He couldn't have been more than nine. And his wheelchair wasn't something he'd borrowed for a movie.

Cruise rolled right over to him.

"Hey, man, what's your name?"

The boy told him.

"Some shopping center, huh?"

The boy agreed that the Galleria was something else.

"Where are you from?"

Cruise had friends there. They talked about the Olympics, the restaurant where the boy and his family had eaten lunch, and the skating lessons the boy was watching. They haven't fallen over once, he reported.

"Well, you take care of yourself," Cruise said. He patted the boy's arm and we moved on.

Dead silence.

Doesn't it kill him that he can walk away from his wheelchair?

"Listen, you talk to people in wheelchairs, they don't want to see me in a chair," he said, less sharply than I might have. "And they don't want you to feel sorry for them. They work like hell to live and be alive; if they didn't want to be alive, they wouldn't be. But seeing a boy in a wheelchair like that.. .it's not easy. It's not easy to go home and say, 'Hey, I'm getting it.' "

Another silence.

"It was painful getting involved in this movie, just as it was painful confronting the part of my life that was shut down and unreachable for Rain Man. You're sitting there as an actor and you say, 'This is a great role.' You read the script as an actor. And that's what it's about, and that's why it's strange. You like to hear stories, you like to know what happens to people. And as an actor, your reaction is: 'That's incredible, what that person has been through.' No matter how painful, right?"

We'd gotten to the car. Cruise wrenched himself into the front seat. His legs, still limp, dangled out. With difficulty, he reached over and lifted them in, one at a time. "I have to practice my transfers," he said at the end of this long procedure. He settled back and made small talk, but he had filed that flaw in his character. I knew that he'd practice this move many more times. And that, long before he had to be filmed in a car, he'd have it right—because in the universe Tom Cruise now inhabits, even the defects have to be perfect.