Tom Hanks didn’t own winter clothes when he moved to New York.
The 63-year-old star was born in California but was urged to relocate to the Big Apple by actors George Maguire and Michael John McGann – who he met at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland in 1978 – and he’ll never forget their kindness in helping him settle into the city.
He said: "The New York City winter was new to me, so cold that a walk outside made my jaw hurt. I did not have winter clothes. George gave me a jacket. He also came by with milk to go with the Entenmann’s blackout cakes that Michael John would bring by. George gave me his old portable black-and-white TV (with coat hanger antenna), a pair of chairs with broken cane seats, and a kitchen-size table that was nuts to have in a fourth-floor walk-up."
Michael John even helped Tom find his first apartment but before then, he let the ‘Captain Phillips’ star sleep on his sofa for "too many weeks".
Writing about friendship for AARP The Magazine, he recalled: "Michael John and I drove east on I-80 together, from the Cuyahoga to the Hudson, delivering a transported car to the docks of Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. I slept on his couch for too many weeks, in the apartment he shared with a playwright and actor who didn’t know me from Adam but made me laugh all day.
"Michael John typed up my résumé on his battleship of a Royal typewriter (which he has since given me). When I finally found a horridly dark and busted-up fourth-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, he cosigned the lease for me — a moment of risky generosity I will never, ever forget."
Tom’s friends even showed him how to look after his financial affairs and their friendship still makes him feel like he "won the lottery" back then.
He wrote: "In the depths of February, the three of us met at George’s ground-floor studio apartment, just off Central Park West, the walls covered with the 8-by-10s of so many of his actor friends, and we did our taxes as a snowstorm howled outside.
"I had never done my taxes before. When these two pros showed me how to file my return so I’d get a refund from the IRS for nearly $600, the first moment of solvency in my adult life, I thought I had won the lottery.
"And I had. They were, and are, my friends. You would not be reading these words otherwise."
Tom Hanks wasn’t prepared for New York winter
