People may assume that Tom Hanks has always enjoyed a happy home life, given his sterling reputation as “America’s dad” and his marriage to Rita Wilson, which has defied the Hollywood norm by lasting for nearly 40 years.
But he’s endured much more than the occasional controversy and legal problem involving his “black sheep” son Chet Hanks. The Bay Area-reared Oscar winner spent nearly two decades dealing with a nasty custody situation involving his troubled first wife, according to a new memoir by his only daughter, E.A. Hanks.
Sadly, this custody arrangement left his two older children, E.A. and Colin, in the care of a mentally unstable mother, Susan Dillingham, who subjected them to neglect and violence, E.A. Hanks writes in the book, “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road.”
SANTA MONICA, CA – JUNE 22: Actor Tom Hanks and his daughter Elizabeth (E.A.) walk down Broadway June 22, 2002 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
At one point, Dillingham suddenly disappeared with Hanks’ children — a nightmare for any divorced parent, according to an excerpt from the book published in People. She took E.A. and Colin away from Los Angeles without notifying Hanks, leaving him to frantically try and track them down.
The Concord-born actor and Dillingham, who went by the stage name Samantha Lewes early in her career, met while both were studying theater at Cal State Sacramento. They married in 1978 and had their children, Colin, now 47, and Elizabeth Anne, or E.A., now 42. After Hanks began to establish himself in Hollywood with roles in TV, then in hit comedies like “Splash,” he and Dillingham divorced in 1985.
Dillingham got primary custody. But at one point, she suddenly disappeared, moving her young children away from Los Angeles without giving Hanks any notice.
“My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there,” E.A. Hanks recalled in her book. “And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down.”
It turned out that Dillingham had moved her children back to Sacramento.
“I was born in Burbank, but after my parents split up, my mother took my older brother and me to live in Sacramento,” E.A. Hanks also wrote. “I have few memories of the early years in Los Angeles.”
In Northern California, from the ages of 5 to 14, E.A. Hanks said she was “a Sacramento girl” who lived “in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall,” perhaps befitting the child of a major movie star, according to the People excerpt. But the situation was far from idyllic. Those years also were filled “with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love,” Hanks said.
“As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog (feces) that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke,” E.A. Hanks wrote. “The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible.”
E.A. Hanks said her mother was never diagnosed but believes she had bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion, according to People.
“One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade,” E.A. Hanks wrote. It sounds like Hanks managed to get the custody arrangement “switched,” allowing his daughter to live in Los Angeles with him, Wilson, whom he married in 1988, and E.A.’s half-brothers Chet and Truman.
During her senior year of high school, E.A. Hanks learned that her mother was dying. Dillingham died in 2002 at age 49 of bone cancer.
But during one summer, when E.A. Hanks was 14, she and her mother went on a road trip, driving in a Winnebago to Florida along Interstate 10. E.A. Hanks repeated that road trip on her own in 2019, visiting the town in Florida where her mother grew up. The six-month trip inspired her to write her memoir and provided the idea for a title.
On Instagram, Hanks said she read her mother’s diaries along the 2,460-mile route, looking for answers about her mother’s past and what set her life “on such a disturbed and volatile path.”
