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THE NICE MAN COMETH

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Big was good for Tom Hanks big time-and yet also a trap. The charm, the enthusiasm, the guileless sense of sly, happy fun he conveyed as Josh Baskin was seductive. But, in an odd way, Hanks was left like an overstimulated kid in a treehouse filled with toys: What should he play with next? The question tripped him up professionally in the years that followed. After Big came Punchline (shot before Big but released later in 1988), in which Hanks played an angry, aspiring stand-up comic, receiving strong reviews in a movie of only moderate strength. He then churned out work as if searching for solid footing: The 'Burbs (1989), Turner & Hooch (1989), Joe Versus the Volcano (1990). He became a favored guest host on NBC's Saturday Night Live. Even Hanks felt he was working too much. "What had happened was, the kind of glamorous fun of making movies had just completely dissipated for me. And I just felt as though I was no longer the hammer, but I was the anvil instead. I was very, very, very, very tired." Later in 1990 came The Bonfire of the Vanities, based on Tom Wolfe's essence-of-'80s novel. Against type, and against the comprehension of anyone who had ever read the best-seller and envisioned the protagonist, Hanks was cast by director Brian De Palma as Wall Street titan Sherman McCoy. The movie became a benchmark of lavish cinematic wrongheadedness. And it crashed. Hanks, to be blunt, calls it "Vietnam." What, he is asked, was he thinking when he slicked back his hair and fiddled with a lame Southern drawl? "I knew I was not the physical embodiment of Sherman McCoy," he agrees. "But I wasn't about to say, well, gee, I can't do the role. I'm not gonna turn down that any more than I'd turn down a chance to do Richard III." He signed on. "I had people on a plane just leaning over and examining me and saying, 'No, I don't see it, I just don't see it,'" he says. "I bought a sandwich at a place and the lady handed me the sandwich and this piece of information: 'You don't have no Yale chin.' You know?" Hanks laughs. "What could I say? 'Yes, but I will, I'll show you!' I'm trying to figure out, just what exactly is a Yale chin?" He turns his head in profile. His is strictly a few-credits-at-Cal-State- at-Sacramento-before-dropping-out visage. The scrutiny took its toll: What was the right place for the man voted Class Cutup of Oakland, California's Skyline High School in 1974? Should he play to his cute-guyness? To his engaging averageness? Should he stay home with the wife and kid and work on his surfing technique? Then, last summer, the best thing that ever happened in the maturation of Thomas J. Hanks came along: A League of Their Own. Hanks piled on 30 pounds via a Dairy Queen regime to play Jimmy Dugan, the broken-down, bloated, $ alcoholic ex-big league ballplayer, reduced to coaching an all-girls professional team formed as a promotional gimmick during World War II. It was a surprising liberation. "League of Their Own did an awful lot for me, and this is strictly from the crass business point of view," he acknowledges. "I had any number of people saying, 'What the hell are you doing? It's not even your movie, you're just a guy passing through. Do you love Penny Marshall so much that you want to spend the summer and listen to her whine? Look what you could be doing!'" What could he have been doing? "I have no idea. I could have done Popo Goes to the Big Town and Oops, I Tripped on a Lawn Chair. Things like that. I was looking for something to do different and I think the message got out that he'll do anything. Which is a good thing. He'll get fat. He doesn't have to be the cute guy. He will cut his hair in an unattractive manner. He will be disgusting and sit there. He doesn't have to be the king of every scene that he is in. Well, that's a marvelous message to put out there."

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