Eyes Wide Open: The Consequences of Finding Out, with Tom Junod

From 9/11 and Ali to sharing a bed with Nicole Kidman and outing Kevin Spacey, he was already one of the greatest — and most confrontational — magazine writers of all time. Then Tom Junod decided to investigate his own father's "Mad Men"-Lib of a secret life. What could possibly go wrong? What would Mr. Rogers think? And what the hell was in that briefcase? • Read "In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir" by Tom Junod https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89092/in-the-days-of-my-youth-i-was-told-what-it-means-to-be-a-man-by-tom-junod/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today you're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  The phone rang, and I went and pick up, and there's this voice, "Hey, this is Tom Cruise. Is my wife there?"

• 0:18Speaker 01

  And I said, "You know, yeah, Tom. She's right here, in my bed."

• 0:24Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad. This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes,

• 1:09Pablo Torre?

  from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at Apollo.io. That's Apollo.io.

• 1:33Pablo Torre?

  I am wearing, what I now realize, is a cardigan that's not intentionally an homage to the-

• 1:41Speaker 01

  I was wondering.

• 1:42Pablo Torre?

  -cardigan?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43Pablo Torre?

  And therefore to you?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45Pablo Torre?

  But it hasn't pointed out to me.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Cardigan on the Lou thing, or cardigan on the Fred thing?

• 1:49Pablo Torre?

  I dare say there is resonance in both of those characters.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  I would say so.

• 1:53Pablo Torre?

  I feel like you gotta explain, Tom, you know, who Fred is, because you're on a first-name basis.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Okay, so Fred is Fred Rogers. Fred is also known as Mr. Rogers. He was the children's television host from early 70s on to, just before he died in 2003.

• 2:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And he was the emblem not only of incredibly nerdy children's television, he even pioneered a certain kind of nerdy style consisting of- Ta ta ta, cardigans.

• 2:29Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I walk into this office here in our Metal Arc Media Studios and I go into the closet and I take out this cardigan and I- It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood, a neighborly day for a beauty. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you. I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you. So, let's make the most of this beautiful day. Since we're together, we might as well say, would you be mine?

• 3:14Pablo Torre?

  Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor? Won't you please? Won't you please? Please, won't you be my neighbor? For those who are not familiar, you not only wrote this iconic profile of Mr. Rogers for Esquire-

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:31Pablo Torre?

  It also, years later, became a film-

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:34Pablo Torre?

  And I watched that in theaters, not even knowing you, only to realize that when I met you, I had watched the cinematic adaptation of You.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:42Pablo Torre?

  And what level of cringe does one feel when they're watching a Hollywood actor depict you across from Tom Hanks' Mr. Rogers?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  So, when I first read that script, the guys who wrote it called me and said, "We really love the script and we really would like for you to give it a chance." Which is sort of a warning right away. And I asked them, I said, "Well, so why do I have to give it a chance?" And they said, "Because pretty much everything that involves you and Mr. Rogers is accurate and the family stuff, we all made up."

• 4:22Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  So, I read it and I asked them afterwards to change the name because there were so many things that happened in the script and in the movie that just didn't happen in life.

• 4:33Pablo Torre?

  It was you, Tom Junod, that was the name of the-

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Tom Junod was the name of the character.

• 4:37Pablo Torre?

  Oh, that's great.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And so they-

• 4:38Pablo Torre?

  Or not, I guess.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a scene in there where like me and my father get into a fistfight at my sister's wedding. Don't talk about her.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Oh, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, you don't know the whole story. Your mom really was not the same-

• 4:54Speaker 04

  I'm not my mom!

• 5:00Speaker 01

  My sister eloped, so there was no wedding, so there was no fight at a wedding. And so, yeah, so I asked them to change the name, and they did so. And I sort of, you know, sort of disconnected from the movie a little bit from there. I just like, basically, you know, it's Lloyd Vogel now, and so you can do whatever you want with this.

• 5:24Pablo Torre?

  And so I just gotta jump in here to say that what I wanted to do with the real-life Lloyd Vogel, Tom Juno, comes from a place of believing that truth is often stranger and more narratively satisfying than fiction. It's an enormous reason why I've envied the writing, really, the life of Tom, for a really long time. In his career as a writer, which followed his career as a handbag salesman, which is a whole other story, Tom has reported some of my favorite magazine pieces ever, including about sports, about everything from Muhammad Ali's funeral service to a hidden Penn State football scandal, to all sorts of features about Hollywood. But ever since I saw that Mr. Rogers movie from 2019,

• 6:09Pablo Torre?

  which got Tom Hanks nominated for an Academy Award, I've been wondering how Tom Juno felt about how he, this rigorous journalist, was portrayed.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Matthew Rees was playing me. I mean, he had spent time with me. He had my gestures down. He had a lot of it down. And so seeing yourself like that way, sort of transmuted into cinematic art, you can't be prepared for it. And then that summer, the summer before the movie came out, they invited me in for a screening. And I was like, ah, this is just a thing. And I'm sitting alone in this Sony screening room over on like 25th Street, and I'm just sobbing.

• 6:54Pablo Torre?

  But the reason Tom was sobbing, it turns out, wasn't because his life story had been butchered. He was sobbing because there was something in that dramatization, in the conviction of his character that connected to a part of his life that he had never rigorously investigated.

• 7:13Pablo Torre?

  His father, Lou,

• 7:16Pablo Torre?

  a guy whose fictions have now inspired a work of stunning nonfiction, titled "In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man", which speaks to how Tom reported some of his best magazine stories, as you'll see, and also what it means for a journalist to really want to find out the truth.

• 7:37Pablo Torre?

  There's some stuff where I'm like, "I'm shocked you put this into print."

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:41Pablo Torre?

  And one of them, speaking of a conceit, again, that we enjoy on this show, which is sometimes we'll put a briefcase on a desk and we'll

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 7:49Pablo Torre?

  treat it like Chekhov's gun, and we'll figure out when to fire it.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Do you really? Okay, so that, now we're getting real meta.

• 7:55Pablo Torre?

  You know, I dare say that what was in your dad's briefcase was not in Mr. Rogers's.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  It was definitely, well, you can't say definitely, but it was, it was probably not in Mr. Rogers.

• 8:04Pablo Torre?

  If it was, you did a horrific job burying that lead for Esquire.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  So, last night, we did a thing in Atlanta, which is my hometown. And the, the host, whose name is Melissa Faye Green, surprised me by asking me to read this passage out of the Mr. Rogers story. And I read that and realized, as I was reading it, as never before, I hadn't looked at it in a really long time, but as never before, I realized that it was just sort of like a portrait of my dad, like, like an antimatter version

• 8:41Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  of Lucian eye.

• 9:00Pablo Torre?

  You're one of the [bleep] best magazine writers of all time. And you've, it's not even up for debate, you can be self-effacing if you'd like, but, you know, the profiles speak for themselves, the awards, all that stuff.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Goddammit, yes.

• 9:10Pablo Torre?

  From, you know, The Falling Man, the iconic story of the 9/11 jumper that you wrote and beautifully, again, investigated, there's reporting there. Controversially, the Kevin Spacey story, Nicole Kidman, Obama and drone strikes, Mr. Rogers, on, on, and on, right? There's that, but the way that I cannot help but see you Across this desk is the lens of Mr. Rogers and also your dad. But the notion that Mr. Rogers played along in a way that you want and need a subject to.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:42Pablo Torre?

  What did you feel from him that gave him this stature in American life?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  So I grew up with a dad who was like a full-time seducer. There was nothing that my dad did that wasn't for effect. And Fred had that, but to a different end. You know, my dad was always just coming at you in some sort of way. The way he spoke, the way he just conducted himself. Just even just walking across the kitchen to get something out of the refrigerator. And Fred was like, sort of like the same way, you know? I mean, I happened to first meet him when he was at his apartment in New York. I called him, said, you know, hey Fred, I've been assigned this story. Can I talk to you? Yes, Tom, I'm right around the corner from you. Do you want to stop by?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  And so, you know, so I stopped by and he's wearing a bathrobe. It's in the afternoon. He's wearing, come on in, Tom. I'm sure, you know, you weren't expecting this, were you? And, you know, and I walk in there and I'm starting to talk to him and he he comes by and he, you know, with his camera and he, you know, shoots. I'm just talking and he just, you know, shoots a camera with a flashbulb in his dark apartment. And he gets on the phone. He goes with his wife, Joanne. Hi, Joanne, I'm with my new friend, Tom. I just sent, you know, took a picture that I'm going to send to you. And so it was sort of, it was sort of invasive, but you had said that he plays along. The thing that he made me do was play along with him.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I had to either like say this guy is completely insane or bull or just look at the sort of the higher truth that he represented.

• 11:27Pablo Torre?

  But you walk in and I'm imagining being you or Matthew Reese trying to imagine being you and already I'm writing in my head. I'm like, oh my God, is this the lead?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:36Pablo Torre?

  You know, I'm like, I can't, I wouldn't be able to help myself. But then the follow-up thought I'm imagining is I'm getting everything that I want here.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I wasn't, I wasn't. You know, the thing about him is I'd ask him a question and he would give a completely non-committal answer. He wouldn't even, or he wouldn't even answer at all. He would just pivot. Like, "Tell me about your, your childhood, Fred." "Well, Tom, you know, how about your childhood? Did you have anything that was very special to you in your childhood?" "Yes, Fred, I had something called old rabbit." "Oh, oh, I imagine that once he was a very young rabbit, right, Tom?" You know, and so it's just that. And he just, you know, eventually just sort of, by sheer force of like his attention that he paid, his kindness, he just sort of won me over.

• 12:27Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, which is to say that on some level, maybe the guy coming in to write an aspirationally interesting profile of a man who has a very carefully manicured image.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:38Pablo Torre?

  Maybe you're finding that there is some frustration in how he is in control. But it also sounds like the guy whose dad was Mr. Rogers, but inside out, the opposite on some level.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 12:49Pablo Torre?

  It sounds like you also enjoyed being fathered by Mr. Rogers.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  I kind of did. And I guess I was, I guess I was looking for that. I guess I was, this was 1998. I was a little bit adrift since going from GQ to Esquire. The Kevin Spacey thing had happened. I had gone through this whole thing. I might as well explain it now.

• 13:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, please.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  I'd gone through this whole thing where I sort of outed Kevin Spacey. I really got my, I got my ass kicked on that story.

• 13:22Pablo Torre?

  So just because we're in 2026,

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:24Pablo Torre?

  it's worth saying Kevin Spacey is gay.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:28Pablo Torre?

  At the time, you framing it as a conceit in this magazine piece.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:33Pablo Torre?

  And using, I think, your mom.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used my mom.

• 13:35Pablo Torre?

  As, by the way, this was a rumor in the question that I am grappling with all of the time on this show and to varying success, I suppose, that you were grappling with as a magazine writer was there is this conversation that's happening in private. And to what extent can that be had in public?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:51Pablo Torre?

  And in this case, of course, there are good societal guardrails, ideally for how we respect privacy, but the inherent tension of anybody who wants to write and report confrontationally.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:03Pablo Torre?

  And has a discerning taste for what qualifies as public interest, which can be both serious drone strike, political level.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  But this was a celebrity profile, so that's a little bit different from the start.

• 14:17Pablo Torre?

  Exactly.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  The journalist, especially at that time, was supposed to play ball.

• 14:22Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 14:23Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  And, you know, on that particular story, I didn't play ball. I think that the, you used a word just a few minutes ago, conceit. It was the conceit of how I talked to my mom, she was like, isn't Kevin Spacey gay? And it was the conceit that everybody knew. And so I think that's the thing that got me in trouble, that I didn't sort of like, take on this question genuinely. I did it as a conceit. I did it like a little sort of dance around, just to be, it was my first, it was the first story I wrote for Esquire after leaving GQ.

• 14:58Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I didn't realize that.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  It was basically of like, oh my, look, look at, look at how provocative I can be. And I think that that is the thing that, that really sort of turned people against that particular story.

• 15:12Pablo Torre?

  I get why people had such a negative reaction to it. I get why you have since effectively owned up to saying, I wish I didn't do it in that way.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  In that way, yeah.

• 15:22Pablo Torre?

  But all of which is the setup for the fact that Esquire magazine assigns hotshot magazine reporter who loves provocation, Mr. Rogers.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  And that was definitely is sort of part of the whole thing. I think people thought it would be sort of interesting for that to happen. But I was, like I said, I was, I was a little bit adrift at the time and had taken a beating and didn't know exactly what to do next because being self-consciously provocative did not work for me.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And then I went, I see Fred and he definitely gave me another direction to go in.

• 16:02Pablo Torre?

  The notion, though, of being a confrontational writer. And just what that means and how you decided I need to turn that approach, which is fundamentally investigation.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about finding out.

• 16:18Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  It's about finding out.

• 16:20Pablo Torre?

  Yes. This, this book was in the works for how long?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  I began it in 2015 and finished in 2024. So I guess that's nine years. I mean, I'd been writing about my dad a number of times. I had written about my dad by writing about other people. I mean, one of the first things I did when I got GQ was write a story about Frank Sinatra Jr. I wrote a story after that about Tony Curtis. And then I wrote a story about my dad himself.

• 16:50Pablo Torre?

  I do like the idea of us sort of traveling through your career with this as the inevitable endpoint. But Frank Sinatra Jr.

• 17:06Pablo Torre?

  Was that a sad character to you?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  He was the leader of his dad's orchestra. But the guy that he idolized wasn't Frank. It was Nelson Riddle, the guy who did the great swing and arrangements for that orchestra. And I saw in him a guy who had dealt with just the huge shadow of his dad. By just being like sort of off putting, he didn't really do anything to make people like him or even notice him. And I think that that was the thing about him that really struck me was that he didn't want to be noticed. Cause you know, he had gotten kidnapped and he sort of survived that whole thing

• 17:51Speaker 01

  by memorizing like everything the kidnappers did. He was that guy. He lived inside himself, never went outside of himself. And that's how he survived being Frank Sinatra Jr. But I guess I saw that in him because I had a little bit of it in myself.

• 18:09Pablo Torre?

  When you are doing that profile, how much are you already self-aware of like, ah, I'm doing, I'm kind of doing therapy?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think I was that self-aware at the time. So when I was a kid, you know, I grew up in Long Island and Sunrise Highway was one of the big thoroughfares by Wantagh on the South Shore there. And we used to go to this steakhouse in Belmore called McCluskey's. It was a great steakhouse. But on the way back, we'd pass this old dance hall called the Sunrise Bohemian Village. It was huge. It's been long knocked down. But I used to occasionally see the sign there. Tonight, Frank Sinatra Jr. And I was like five or six years old and there was a part of me that said, oh, that poor bastard, you know?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  So I was always fascinated with Frank Jr. And when I went to GQ and my editor, David Granger, said, you can basically write whatever you want to write, what do you want to write about? I was like, Frank Sinatra Jr. And he was like, okay.

• 19:19Pablo Torre?

  But Frank Senior, as a matter of how your dad carried himself.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 19:25Pablo Torre?

  That's pretty on the nose.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Oh, it's very on the nose. So he was a Sinatra kind of character to the extent that during World War II, so he got, he was an infantryman, got wounded in Normandy. And he was about to be sent back to the front when a lieutenant heard him crooning, heard him singing. And, you know, the troop truck came in, my father got on, and then a lieutenant took him off. And he became, he became a, you know, a roving crooner around, around Western Europe.

• 20:00Pablo Torre?

  We need more of those.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Singing to the troops.

• 20:03Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  In a traveling show called For Men Only.

• 20:08Pablo Torre?

  Oh, my God.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  And so the For Men Only sort of became the theme of my dad's life in a certain way.

• 20:14Pablo Torre?

  I like that now it's like USO tours and it's very fancy people.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:17Pablo Torre?

  Now, back then, it was Lou.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  It was Lou, it was, you know, some comedians, a guy from New Orleans who could play hot jazz trumpet. It was that kind of thing. I mean, my father sang Silent Night to the troops on Christmas Eve during the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, they would, they would go as close to the front as they could, and they did it for the men, and they did it for the troops.

• 20:45Pablo Torre?

  So for men only, and this is a key part of this because there are lots of women in this book.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Lots of women.

• 20:50Pablo Torre?

  And, and we will get to that, but just the notion of who you're performing for.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:55Pablo Torre?

  When your dad has these commandments.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  I can name, you know, some of them right off the bat, you know, from always look a man in the eye, always have a firm handshake, always wear white to the face. Uh, the turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear. Don't bullsh*t a bullsh*t. So my dad had this way of speaking that I try to sort of reproduce in the actual sort of prose of the book.

• 21:24Pablo Torre?

  With ellipses, yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  With the ellipses. My dad had this way of

• 21:28Speaker 01

  pausing in mid-sentence and then landing on a word of emphasis. And he did that in, in virtually anything he'd say. So if you're gonna be a bear, be a grizzly.

• 21:42Pablo Torre?

  But, but how much of that do you think was him performing for women versus performing for men?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  So that's a great question. I would say that the

• 21:53Speaker 01

  the employment of the maxims, he would say it for men, but he would do it for women. So he would like wear white to the face or wear a turtleneck, you know, for women. And, you know, my father's day wasn't complete unless he could turn some woman's head. That was his, that was the, the mark of a good day. And so he That was my childhood, was watching my father enter rooms and people turning around to take a look at him.

• 22:21Pablo Torre?

  And so, did he find it thrilling when you became men's magazine celebrity profile writer?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  My father really enjoyed and took great pride in my magazine career, half of it. He loved the celebrity profiles. He really loved that. Like, after I wrote about Tony Curtis, he thought that, for some reason, that Tony and I, you know, were best friends. Anytime I went, like, into the city, he would say, "Did you see Tony?" And, but he didn't, he didn't read the other stuff, like The Falling Man, all of this. Like, why, he couldn't understand why I would even do that. That story, it's a downer.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  And with Mr. Rogers, he didn't get that, he didn't get that at all. Because he thought that Mr. Rogers was effeminate.

• 23:17Pablo Torre?

  Oh, that's funny.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Why would you, why would you write about somebody who is effeminate?

• 23:21Pablo Torre?

  Who's not wearing white nearly as often to the face as he should.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Right, right. Even though, it was really interesting with my dad. So he had a uniform that he would wear in Christmas season. And it was gray slacks, a white shirt, a narrow black tie, and a red cardigan.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  So he wore, it was the, it was like the one sort of Venn diagram overlap spot between my dad and Fred Rogers was the red cardigan.

• 23:52Pablo Torre?

  I'm not saying that your dad was evil, Mr. Rogers. I'm just saying, in the yin and yang.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  No, that's my, that's my first no comment.

• 23:59Pablo Torre?

  But your dad, to put a finer point on where a lot of the danger and the tension is in this book and in his story, I'm wondering what he thought of your profile of Nicole Kidman?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Oh, he loved that. The obvious sort of flirt, you know, flirt, flirtation that occurred there.

• 24:17Pablo Torre?

  It's such a memorable story because, number one, you're like, who the [bleep] is this writer who's putting himself literally in bed with Nicole Kidman?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  This was 1999, and, summer of 1999, and Nicole and Tom Cruise were...

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Coming out with and promoting Eyes Wide Shut, which was, if you remember that time, it was supposed to be a little bit of a view into, you know, beyond the veil of their marriage.

• 24:51Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  That was like the sort of the subtext of a lot of the promotion.

• 24:55Pablo Torre?

  Right. To what extent are there masks, orgies?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. All that, all that stuff.

• 25:00Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  And, you know, they were sort of, they were showing a little leg, as the old statement used to go. And so I went down to Australia to meet with Nicole and, you know, had a really wonderful time with her. She was a wonderful person to hang around with. We went to some cops bar in Australia and all these, you know, sitting at a table with her. It was just me and her and, you know, people waited a really long time to approach her. But once they did, the whole place was just all over her and she was just fantastic. So she was really cool. And, but then, you know, came the day that I was supposed to leave and I called and told her I was gonna leave. And she said, "Well, Tom, you know, I'm gonna come down and see you." And I was in my hotel room, which I had been in for like eight days by that time

• 25:45Speaker 01

  because you can't go to Sydney without spending, you know, time there because the, you know, the flight there is so punishing. So, you know, my room is horrible, but I'm thinking I'm just gonna go down into the lobby, you know, to meet her, that I'll get a call. They say, "Miss Kidman's here" and I'll go down there. Instead, I get a call that says, you know, "Miss Kidman's on her way up." And so I, so I'm running around the room, like sticking my socks and my underwear like under the bed. And, you know, she walks in in jeans and a black turtleneck and just walks right to my bed and lies down. And I'm like, "So what do I do?" So I, what could I do?

• 26:25Pablo Torre?

  What would Lou do?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  And there is some of that. There's no doubt some of it. But I did go in, you know, laid next to her. And then the phone rang. And I went and pick up and there's this voice, "Hey, this is Tom Cruise. Is my, is my wife there?" And I said, you know, yeah, Tom, she's, she's right here in my bed.

• 26:52Pablo Torre?

  Ellipsis.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Ellipsis.

• 26:53Pablo Torre?

  In my bed?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  In my bed. And he goes, yeah, right. In your dreams, man. And, uh, and that's, that's how, that's how that scene ended. And it's been, you know, I've, I've thought of it a lot since, um, basically like what was really going on there? And I've always wondered whether it was a little bit of a setup.

• 27:24Pablo Torre?

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases like groceries or merch or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter where you shop, Apple Card is here to help you tackle game day. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 28:01Pablo Torre?

  I don't want to put too fine a point on the tease here,

• 28:06Pablo Torre?

  but the point at which you discover that your dad has been living a life that is so

• 28:13Pablo Torre?

  destructive to how your mom would feel and

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 28:17Pablo Torre?

  how your household had been constructed.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:20Pablo Torre?

  A life of, I don't know, infidelity and more.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:24Pablo Torre?

  When does the tonnage of this begin to sink in? When do you first realize that, oh, my God, like, I've seen maybe hints of an iceberg, but there's so much underneath.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  The answer to that question is that is both really early and then much later. When I was three years old, my father had an affair with the mother of one of, like my first friend, the guy who I shared a crib with. And so he had an affair with her, you know, longstanding affair with her. That was definitely going on when I was three. So I was quite aware that something was happening there because I was so tuned in to my mom. And I could see how unhappy the whole situation was making her. I was definitely aware of it. And so I went through a whole life with my dad, knowing that there was a secret

• 29:18Speaker 01

  life that he was leading, whose resonances could be felt without ever being spoken of, without ever being articulated. When I was 16, I cracked the combination of his of his briefcase and took a look inside to see what was there. Because I knew something was there. I knew I knew something was going on. And so I had to I had to find out. All that said, I started writing this book in 2015. And right away, I started calling people who knew my dad and was confronted with stuff I didn't know yet. And I thought I knew everything by this time. I thought it was almost going to be a matter of just sort of

• 30:03Speaker 01

  writing from memory without really even requiring an investigation. But I started making those calls and realized that I was in the freaking deep end of the pool.

• 30:16Pablo Torre?

  I laugh because I can imagine, again, that this starts off being like, this is going to be a real quest of interiority. I'm gonna have to negotiate within myself what I'll be putting on the page. And what I get in reading this is you traveling around the country interviewing the women your father cheated on your mother with.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:37Pablo Torre?

  And getting details.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Even somewhat graphic details.

• 30:40Pablo Torre?

  I mean, what's the most graphic detail that still feels like, oh, wow, that's a lot?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  How graphic do you want me to get?

• 30:49Pablo Torre?

  I would like you to be so graphic that I'm wondering if it's time for me to pull out the part of the book that I've been gesturing towards.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:55Pablo Torre?

  Well, what's the most what's the most graphic part to you?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  One of my father's lovers described how my father seduced her and how that went. And

• 31:06Speaker 01

  She had borrowed money from him. And she had, she offered to pay him back. And he said, "Why don't we take it out in trade?" And so he invited her to his room at the Essex House, of course.

• 31:27Pablo Torre?

  Yes, an iconic New York.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Iconic New York hotel. And she got up there. And there was a bottle of champagne waiting and two steaks under, under glass. And as she said,

• 31:47Speaker 01

  you know, within, you know, in 15 minutes, "He was giving me the greatest [BLEEP] that I ever had." So that's a lot. Hearing that about your dad.

• 31:57Pablo Torre?

  Put that on your book cover, Tom.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Is a lot. It's a blurb of sorts, but it's a lot. I believe my editor, Bill Thomas, was just like, "We don't need that." And I was like, "I think you do." Because I wanted to account for my father's hold on women. And I also, also wanted to say to the reader that that hold was not something he was making up. My father, you know, also talks about having affairs with, with various movie stars and so on. And so the question is, is whether is this just in his head?

• 32:36Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Or is just all bullshit? The details that I got from that woman that day seemed in the investigative trade confirmation.

• 32:49Pablo Torre?

  Zsa Zsa Gabor.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  And Ava Gabor.

• 32:51Pablo Torre?

  And Ava.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Don't forget that.

• 32:53Pablo Torre?

  Some of this is just like a Mad Lib, admittedly.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  It's a Mad Men lib.

• 33:00Pablo Torre?

  It brings me to this briefcase.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  The briefcase.

• 33:04Pablo Torre?

  And I'm gonna have you read this part because I.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Really? Okay.

• 33:07Pablo Torre?

  Page 72, of the galley at least. If you can just read for a while and then.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Sure. Okay.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  "Like a lot of other men, I have sought out transformative experiences in the belief that I need to be transformed. Unlike a lot of other men, I have found them while trying to find out the truth about my father."

• 33:33Speaker 01

  There is an automatic light overhead, the light in his closet. Although mom and dad have gone out and I am alone in the house, I don't want the doors to be wide open because I don't want to be, well, exposed if they come home and somehow sneak up on me in the middle of my investigation. Unfortunately, a floor-to-ceiling mirror covers the back of each door, and I can see myself cross-legged in front of the briefcase, revealed as I seek revelation. I do not walk away. I open the lid and I look. For a second, I think that my father has stowed in his briefcase something that was once alive,

• 34:17Speaker 01

  that I am gazing at a package of chicken parts he bought at the supermarket and then forgot about. I told myself that I was opening the briefcase to find the joy of sex and two vibrators of generic providence note. Two days before, two weeks before, two months before, I had gone into my father's bag and found two vibrators and the joy of sex.

• 34:43Pablo Torre?

  Which feels like a lot on its own.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  A lot on its own.

• 34:45Pablo Torre?

  Side note.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  But of course, I needed to go to the next.

• 34:48Pablo Torre?

  You couldn't help but find out.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  I couldn't help but find out. But while the joy of sex has not returned, the vibrators have mutated, metastasized, into two dildos so large they seem prosthetic. They are sheathed in sleeves of venous rubber, each remarkably realistic in detail but outlandish in scale, the size of fungal bats. They share space in the briefcase with a stack of invoices and order forms from various handbag lines, as well as several boxes of pornography, all of it on film in Super 8 format.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Dad occasionally brings Playboys and penthouses at home, and I do not read them for the articles. But I have never seen real pornography before. Is this real pornography? It is in that the photos on the boxes depict human beings engaged in identifiable acts of copulation. It's not in that the acts in the photos are as different from what I imagine to be normal pornography as Dad is from normal people.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  They are extreme even by porno standards. There are about five films and the only one I can bring myself to look at is the one called Her Master's Piss. The rest are captioned in German and scare me. Everything in the briefcase scares me. When I came across the vibrator stashed away in the Corret leather bag with the joy of sex, I hopefully remembered that they were called marital aids. But these look like martial aids, like truncheons, the kinds you used in riot control. I have no idea what dad does with them, nor with whom. You made quite a move there by, you know, getting the sports angle in with the fungo

• 36:46Speaker 01

  bats. The fungo bats metaphor.

• 36:48Pablo Torre?

  I mean, never mistake this show for anything but a sports show. But the idea that you are...

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Sixteen at the time and I had never been kissed. So, and so that was my sort of, that was the door opening into some sort of strange world.

• 37:08Pablo Torre?

  Eyes wide shut or eyes wide open.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:10Pablo Torre?

  The notion that you saw all of this and at some point committed to secrecy.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Sure.

• 37:18Pablo Torre?

  To not telling.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the, that is the, that is the, the consequence of finding out.

• 37:24Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  So I go there, I am obviously, I've been determined to find out since I'm a really little kid. I mean, I used to, I used to tape my family's dinners and, you know, listen to it later to find out what was really said.

• 37:37Pablo Torre?

  Were they aware that they were being...

• 37:39Speaker 01

  They were and they weren't, just like the way interview subjects are and are...

• 37:43Pablo Torre?

  They forget.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. They forget it. But the consequences of, of finding out in this case was this decision I had to make. Do, you know, do I tell my mom? Do I tell anybody? And that's a huge decision because you've been given the nuclear codes to your parents' marriage. I mean, all you have to do is just say, "Hey, Mom, it's done." But of course I didn't, I didn't want that.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  So I didn't do it. And I've wondered, you know, many a time whether, whether I should have gone and done it. And there's so, there's so much that happens like that, you know, I am. There's my, my, my aunt who falls into a coma and then comes out of her coma. And when she comes out of her coma, I'm like, well, what did you think of my dad? You know?

• 38:40Pablo Torre?

  He's 91 years old.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  She's 91 years old and she, you know, she's, she's dying.

• 38:43Pablo Torre?

  And has a tape recorder ready in front of her.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  I'm right there, you know, reporter on the spot.

• 38:48Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, but before you go.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  You know, I'm so, I'm pretty, I'm pretty obsessed and the, you know, the, the searching, you know, never, never stops, but the, the telling only starts here with the book.

• 39:05Pablo Torre?

  How much of what you were feeling inside as you're gathering all of the evidence and you're finding out, how much of it was anger or other emotions that surprised you?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  You know, I was [__] terrified, but as far as, as far as anger, I mean, it's a really, it's a really interesting question. There is a part of you that says, at least I'm not crazy. I was right. And, and, and so that is the whole thing with my dad. I'm always suspicious and I'm always right. There's never, there's never anything that like I suspect that of my father, that does not pan out.

• 39:48Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  And so the question of anger is, is an interesting one because in, in a lot of ways I, I never sort of conceded that I was angry. And in fact, I'm on a bus heading for New York City and I'm sitting next to a woman. It's right after Christmas and she makes the mistake of asking me, how was your holidays?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  I'm like, you wanna know? And like, she's sitting there, you know, trapped on the bus next to this guy telling like,

• 40:26Speaker 01

  intimate details about his family for the next two hours.

• 40:29Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  But she was incredibly smart and she was incredibly cool. And I'm getting off and she says, can I ask you one question? Why are you not angry at him?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  And I have a long response to that in, in the book. But my answer to that at the time was, he gave me who I am. He gave me my life. How can I be angry at him?

• 41:13Pablo Torre?

  It is important to note, and you make this clear, that your dad, as always, we're trying to like, clarify and even subvert the traditional caricatures of what it is to be a guy like this.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:24Pablo Torre?

  And your dad said that he loved you all the time.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 41:28Pablo Torre?

  He wasn't like absentee in that traditional way.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  He was absentee in that he went away for six weeks and carried on with countless lovers during that time. But when he was home, he was remarkably present. He was not a distant dad. And I can't tell you how many people that I've talked to about him and about this book, or who have read the book and said,

• 41:55Speaker 01

  at least he told you he loved you. My dad never told me that. And he did, my dad was always sort of, you know, love you, love you, love you. I mean, it was, it was not something that we were short-changed on.

• 42:11Pablo Torre?

  It also informs why when you are becoming the, again, the title of the book is, "In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man", when you're becoming not just a man, but eventually a father and a husband. There's a calculation that, okay, I also need to write a part of the book that is not funny, but is like potentially destructive to my own household. And you write in the book about a weekend in 1996.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:42Pablo Torre?

  Could you explain the decision to confess something in public? And what that confession was? And how, again, in the decision, do I do this? Do I not do this? What do I hold back? What do I reveal? How you arrived at a part of the book that is striking? Because as much as dildos are one thing, this is like some real shit.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  This is personal and it's real and it's real shit. I'm definitely gonna like limit how much I talk about this. Because I've, you know, I've caused, I've caused pain. And I don't wanna, I don't wanna go there and cause more pain. But it re, it refers to a brief affair back in, in 1996. And what I put in the book is about my decision years later to reveal that secret to my wife, to confess that to, to my wife. That's what's in the book. And so then I in turn confess that to the reader. And the reason that I do it is I find the woman

• 43:49Speaker 01

  who had the affair with my dad when I was three years old. I go out and find her. And I don't leave the house until she basically confesses up. And that sort of dynamic is played out again and again and again in the book. I mean, how could I do that and not expect the same thing of myself? I'd be dishonest. This, this book, which I think is very honest and is truth telling, it would be, would be dishonest. And I got the chance to tell the truth in writing this book. And I mean, the whole truth about everybody in my family, about my dad and about myself. So how could I, how could I subvert that?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  By pretending that I was somehow above my father's influence? There's several sections in the book where my father is actively trying to coax me into having affairs. I mean, there's a part of the book where I am, during my handbag salesman days, I am, I am held up at gunpoint in a hotel room and nearly executed. And my father's Answer to that, his response to that was trying to hook me up with one of his lovers. How could I pretend that that didn't affect me?

• 45:13Pablo Torre?

  As someone who does investigative journalism in ways that continue to terrify my family.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  It's a weird way to make a living.

• 45:20Pablo Torre?

  It is, and yet, one of the scariest things, of course, is to consider investigating yourself.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:27Pablo Torre?

  And those you love, knowing what it's like and the power that you have given an audience insofar as you could embarrass someone in front of the whole fucking world.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:37Pablo Torre?

  And so, the thing that I am left thinking of near the end here is, what do you think his reaction would have been to this book?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  I do think that he, you know, would have been mortified. You know, what I exposed is a guy who doesn't quite live up to the ideals that he never tired of espousing. So I think that, I think that that would be tough on him. On the other hand, a lot of this book sort of channels his charisma. A month ago, I went to KGB in downtown New York and did a reading. And all I had to do was start doing his voice.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, and the place we sort of responded immediately, there was like, you could feel like this flutter of excitement in the room. I felt like my dad was back there and, by God, he still had it. So the fact that he, the fact that I'm able to sort of give people him, give people that in 2026, and therefore give him at last the celebrity that he always craved, I mean, either it's a payoff or it's a paradox. I don't know, I don't know what it is, but I, I am, I am glad I did it.

• 47:14Pablo Torre?

  What would Fred have said?

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I think, I think, I think that.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Fred would say something, you know, saying, "Gee, Tom, you really like to use those details, don't you?"

• 47:27Speaker 01

  I didn't stay in touch with Fred just for that story. I stayed in touch with Fred for the rest of Fred's life. I wrote the story in 1998. Fred died in early 2003. And for those five years, I was in touch with Fred. And he wrote me emails a lot. And any number of those emails are about my dad. And the thing that Fred was always trying to tell me was, "Your dad would be proud of you, and your dad loves you."

• 47:54Speaker 04

  I know you are a man of conviction.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  A person who knows the difference between what is wrong and what is right.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  Try to remember that your relationship with your father also helped to shape those parts.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  He helped you become what you are.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  So I think that he'd be, I think that he'd be, I think that he'd be good with the book.

• 48:28Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Tom, you know, as I sit here sweating profusely under this cardigan.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Maybe you'd be sweating even without the cardigan, given the content of this interview.

• 48:40Pablo Torre?

  I dare say that I think we've reached our natural end.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  I think, I think we have.

• 48:53Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 48:59Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.