Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (14 page)

Certainly there was talk that the avuncular Newman had taken on the mantle of surrogate father to the much younger man. Six years previously, his only son, Scott, then twenty-eight, had committed suicide, haunted by his own failures as an actor and his father’s divorce from his mother, Jacqueline Witte. Cruise, talented, charismatic, and hardworking, seemed to be occupying the place of the son Newman had lost in such tragic circumstances. As Newman’s biographer Daniel O’Brien observed, “Inevitably it was alleged that Newman regarded Cruise as a surrogate son. He enjoyed a close relationship with the young actor, something he’d never had with Scott.”

Perhaps even more important, Tom’s association with Newman and Scorsese helped prepare him for the road ahead. He had been working with two men, especially Newman, who had been exposed in full measure to the blaze of publicity during their glory years. It had turned Newman from an actor to a star and ultimately a screen icon, defined by his penetrating blue eyes and easy swagger. That he had survived with his sense of self firmly intact was not lost on Tom. “He lives a normal life. He’s got several businesses, a wife, a family. That’s good for me to see.” Now the fickle flame of stardom beckoned a new recruit. This time the focus would be as much on Tom’s megawatt if manipulative smile and the way he handled his Ray-Ban sunglasses as on his acting prowess.

The promotional firestorm surrounding
Top Gun
erupted in May 1986, just a few weeks after Tom had finished working with these Hollywood giants. His experience with them helped keep him grounded as he skyrocketed to superstardom. The movie instantly established the Tom Cruise of popular imagination. He nailed his future screen persona from the first frame of the movie, when he flew his plane upside down above a Russian MiG so that he could snap a Polaroid of the Russian pilot for his collection. While his cocky
panache was as winning as it was reckless, beneath his easy grin was a young man haunted by the past who found personal redemption through the counsel of a gruff older man. A sex symbol with a soft center: It was a theme he was to explore time and again.

The movie itself was huge, grabbing audiences from the first moment, when a fighter jet roared off the deck of the aircraft carrier, accompanied by a pulsating rock beat, and holding on for 110 stirring minutes. It was so relentlessly gung ho that the U.S. Navy attracted its largest influx of recruits since World War II. So much for Tom’s instincts to make a sports movie;
Top Gun
was much more than that. Beyond the fact that it was Paramount’s biggest-grossing film that year or that it was nominated for eight Oscars, it became, along with
Wall Street,
one of the iconic films of the 1980s, representing ideals underpinning the American dream.

With its glossy, slick-paced photography, hard-pumping soundtrack, and attractive actors, this was a movie that appealed to almost everyone. As Simpson and Bruckheimer intended, the target audience of “mom and pop in Oklahoma” came in droves. The movie also attracted a huge gay following because of the underlying homoerotic theme of glamorous machismo. A competitive volleyball match involving rivals Cruise and Kilmer, stripped and oiled, was so appealing that it took the breath away of readers of the gay magazine
Suck,
who voted it “favorite scene” in a movie for three years running. Even though Tom had pointedly refused to go bare-chested for publicity pictures, the gay vibe was one that would continue to haunt him.

At the time, he publicly defended this unadulterated beefcake moment as demonstrating how fighter pilots need to keep fit. “They want to beat each other, they want to be the best,” he argued in one of an interminable series of promotional interviews. It was not just the grind of a movie tour that he had to contend with, but the realization that he was no longer an up-and-coming actor, but a genuine star. For Tom his life would never be his own again. While the attention made him feel “isolated and lonely”—he was unable to go out with his
sisters without being mobbed by fans and paparazzi—he recognized, perhaps instinctively, that the way to control the media was to reveal only what he wanted about himself.

During the filming of
Top Gun
he had seen the destructive power of the mass media, watching helplessly as his friend Sean Penn found himself in their crosshairs as a result of his relationship with Madonna. Not only was the aggressive Penn arrested for throwing rocks at two British journalists, his wedding on the clifftops at Malibu in August 1985 degenerated into a paparazzi feeding frenzy where Tom and the other guests, who included old flame Cher, could barely hear the service above the noise of hovering helicopters.

Tom adopted a different approach, giving away those morsels of his life he was comfortable discussing rather than refusing to feed an ever-hungry media. It impressed the hell out of Sean Penn. As his personal assistant Meegan Ochs recalls, “Sean used to say that Tom Cruise ought to get an award for dealing with the press. His opinion was that Cruise decided early on a few things that he was going to share of himself with the public—his dyslexia, his lack of relationship with his father. Everyone felt they were getting this very sensitive insight, and because of that, he was golden with the press. But basically he just kept repeating these few things ad infinitum and never gave anything else up. Instead of what Sean did, which was just to try and keep things private.”

Others, like movie mogul David Geffen, were equally impressed by the way Tom handled himself. Keeping a fatherly eye on the media mayhem was Paul Newman, who had become a star during a gentler, less frenetic time. “It’s tough when it happens as fast as it did with Tom,” he said. “He’s a very savvy kid, a very savvy man. So far he’s kept his head on his shoulders, but he’s one of the very, very few.”

This mutual admiration society was symbolized by the fact that during the publicity for
The Color of Money
in October 1986, Cruise and Newman appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine, lying on top of a pool table. At the charity premiere in New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, Cruise, Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Tom’s on-screen love interest in the film, Mary
Elizabeth Mastrantonio, turned up
en famille
to face the flashbulbs. A week later Tom went to Atlanta to watch his friend and mentor in the Valvoline road-racing classic. He presented Newman with a good-luck floral arrangement. “These are for your garden. Go get them,” said the note. It was signed Tom and Mimi. It seemed that stardom was not quite so lonely after all.

Even by Hollywood standards she was an exotic creature, her statuesque beauty matched only by her colorful background. Born in 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, Miriam Spickler’s parents soon realized that they had a child prodigy on their hands. Clever, quick, and blessed with a near-photographic memory, young Miriam, or Mimi, as everyone called her, effortlessly rose to the top of her class, especially in science, even though her father Phil’s job as a civil engineer meant that they often moved from state to state, school to school. When she was just seven, her parents parted, she and her younger brother Paul opting to stay with their father.

It was a decision that would change her life. Her evident academic ability enabled her to skip several grades so that she graduated from high school by the age of fourteen. Instead of going on to college, she joined her father on his regular forays to the casino resort of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. He had folded his career as a civil engineer and opted to try his hand as a professional gambler. With her good looks and better memory, the voluptuous teenager became an accomplished poker and blackjack player—even though she was under the legal age limit. Years later she competed in professional tournaments.

It wasn’t long before her father swapped the vagaries of the gaming table for a surefire bet—selling a man-made religion. He had long since discarded his Jewish faith to become an adherent of Scientology, a cult founded by science fiction
writer Lafayette Ron Hubbard in 1954, four years after the publication of Hubbard’s best-selling book
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
. It was one of the first of the now-familiar genre of self-help books and became a founding text for Scientology. Soon his eager customers were parishioners and his business repackaged as a religion. Hubbard was making good on a boast he had made to a conference of science fiction writers in 1947: “If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion.”

Hubbard described Dianetics as a revolutionary and scientifically developed alternative to conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy, arguing that it could alleviate all manner of illnesses, including asthma, arthritis, alcoholism, ulcers, migraines, conjunctivitis, morning sickness, the common cold, and heart disease. In addition, he claimed it could hugely increase intelligence and eliminate burdensome emotions as well as cure conditions like atheism and homosexuality. The basic premise was that the brain remembers everything, and that by recalling and cleansing negative experiences, or “engrams,” a person can free himself from repressed feelings and so arrive at a “clear” mental state. Hubbard maintained that the widespread use of Dianetics would lead to a “world without insanity, without criminals and without war.” It was an audacious application of the notion of mind over matter.

Hubbard founded his own Church of Scientology not only to exploit the financial success of his book, but also to bypass constant criticism by psychiatrists and other scientists that his theories were little more than untested and unproven pseudoscience, intellectual snake oil for the gullible. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi declared in
Scientific American
: “This volume probably contains more promises and less evidence per page than has any publication since the invention of printing.”

The scorn of the scientific community did not stop Hubbard from incorporating his first church in California, in 1954. He faced stiff competition in a crowded field. In Los Angeles alone there were one hundred or so cults, one of his fiercest rivals being Krishna Venta, who told his disciples that he had
arrived on a spaceship 240,000 years ago. Hubbard’s philosophy was much more subtle, promising the spiritual equivalent of the alchemist’s dream, turning pewter into gold. In this case it was an impregnable synthesis of faith and reason, science and belief.

While scientists saw man as a body, Hubbard argued that man was an endlessly reincarnated spirit. He did not worship God, but was his own god. By following Hubbard’s applied religious philosophy, an individual could fully realize his immortal nature, freeing himself from his body. At its heart, the appeal of Scientology was not to a man’s soul, but to his ego. He could become his own god . . . for a price.

On their journey, new members—whom Hubbard called “raw meat”—would undergo auditing. The process bore similarities to the Catholic confessional, except Scientology’s parishioners would pay handsomely for the privilege. To give the process an air of scientific inquiry, an auditor would use a device called an electropsychometer, or E meter, akin to a crude lie detector, which measures small changes in the body’s electrical current. The theory was that the meter registers thoughts of the reactive mind and can root out unconscious lies. This process of discovery would eventually free the mind.

Gradually—and many thousands of dollars later—Scientologists would go up what Hubbard called “the bridge” to reach a stage of enlightenment. The elite, who had reached upper levels, were seen as superhuman beings who, Hubbard claimed, could communicate telepathically, leave their bodies at will, move inanimate objects with their minds, and be totally free from the physical universe, able to control what Scientologists call MEST: Matter, Energy, Space, and Time. It is possibly the greatest story ever sold: customers spending up to $500,000, or more in today’s terms, to progress through Hubbard’s labyrinthine courses in the hopes of reaching spiritual fulfillment—and the ability to move ashtrays. From mortal man to immortal superman . . . it was an enticing prospect. All that and saving the planet, too.

Hubbard’s particular genius was his ability to create a
parallel universe, a self-contained belief system that promised “total spiritual freedom” while depicting the planet Earth as a dangerous place full of “merchants of chaos.” In the Cold War era, amid the threat of an instant nuclear Armageddon, his philosophy struck a populist nerve, particularly with Roman Catholics and later Vietnam war veterans and hippies, who were disillusioned with conventional religious and political structures and inspired by the notion of saving the world from itself. Mimi’s father, Phil Spickler, was an early follower. He recalled: “There was a strong feeling that I, we, were making or would be making a difference in this world’s future. In the 1950s, after the war, it seemed possible to break the grip that certain institutions held in world affairs, and establish a saner planet.”

Altruism aside, it was also a way to make money. Ron’s church was essentially a franchising operation, expanding its membership by licensing individuals known as mission holders to set up branches in various parts of the country. Like any pyramid selling scheme, the higher up the chain, the more an individual earned. Typically, a Scientologist who introduced “fresh meat” into the church would earn a lifetime commission of 10 percent, plus more on book sales. Spickler opened his own mission in Palo Alto, California, his daughter, Mimi, rising through the ranks so rapidly that by her late teens she was a Class 8 auditor, able to train the most advanced Scientologists, including celebrities. “It was a religious philosophy that I was shaped and formed by, part of my education. So in that sense it will always be there,” she says.

During the 1970s, Mimi was a familiar figure at the Scientology headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, where she took courses. Inside the cult, she was something of a celebrity herself, her high achievement in one so young making her stand out. Even though fellow Scientologists remember her as icy, aloof, and distant, she was beautiful enough to have men falling at her feet. As a teenager she was well aware of her effect on men, dating a string of fellow Scientologists who included fellow auditor James Fiducia, a tall, good-looking New Yorker. When they went their separate ways, she met another
high-level Scientology auditor, Jim Rogers, who was in a similar mold to her previous boyfriend, being tall, older, and easygoing. The couple married in 1977, when she was just twenty-one.