Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (35 page)

He was not only an advocate, but a teacher, donor, a preacher, and a recruiting sergeant, using his celebrity and his image as a clean-cut action hero to gain access to the levers of power while making Scientology seem like a middle-of-the road institution for regular folk—“just like the Rotary Club or the Baptist Church.” This was a key part of Hubbard’s strategy, using celebrity members to gain recognition and credibility—and recruit more “raw meat.”

Tom set about his task with gusto. When he was filming
The Last Samurai
in New Zealand, he gave James Packer, son of Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer, a role as a samurai extra in the movie. Dominated by his larger-than-life father, James Packer cut a sorry figure, overweight and out of shape. Not only had his One.Tel communications business collapsed, but his wife of just two years had walked out on him. His “ruin” was obvious to anyone—and it did not take long before he was reading Scientology literature, attending courses at the Scientology center in Dundas, and flying to the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. When he attended Tom’s fortieth birthday party in July 2002, it seemed that it was the thirty-five-year-old businessman who was going through the midlife crisis and not the older actor. Packer later said that he admired Cruise “enormously. The way he behaves, his humility, his values, his decency.”

Packer was a perfect recruit. Not only was he wildly wealthy and emotionally confused, he was a well-known
figure in a country that has been hostile to the faith, a 1965 government report accusing Scientology of being “evil.” He was but one of a smorgasbord of celebrities Tom endeavored to bring into his faith, targeting those who were not just rich and famous but who had standing in their countries or communities. For example, actor Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, were courted because of their stature in the African-American community, and Jada apparently home-schools her children using Hubbard’s study techniques. And it didn’t hurt that Tom’s love interest Penélope Cruz came from Spain, a market that Scientology was looking to exploit and develop.

As well as recruiting, he was donating generously to Scientology causes, giving more than $1.2 million in September 2002 to a Scientology-based health center in New York to help 9/11 rescue workers. “When I saw what happened on 9/11, I had to do something. I just knew the level of toxins that would be ripping through the environment. I’d done the reading,” he told
Marie Claire
magazine. His center, called the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, claimed to have no direct association with the Church of Scientology, but it offered treatment exclusively derived from the works of Hubbard. It was set up by the Foundation for Advancements in Science and Education (FASE), a Scientology front organization that had been overseeing the research for Hubbard’s general detoxification program since 1981.

Dr. David E. Root, who served on the project’s advisory board, was full of praise for Tom’s involvement. “We will never forget what Tom Cruise is doing for the uniformed officers who serve New York. His commitment to this project and the remarkable results that are being achieved through detoxification are rare bright spots in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy.”

Nearly three hundred firefighters and rescue workers attended the free clinic in Lower Manhattan, undergoing a detoxification program based on Hubbard’s teachings. It involved sweating in saunas set at high temperatures, drinking polyunsaturated oils commonly used to fry food, and taking
questionably high doses of niacin, a form of vitamin B3, which if overused can lead to liver toxicity, heart palpitations, reddening of the skin, and metabolic acidosis—a potentially deadly buildup of acid in the blood. During the program, some rescue workers even stopped taking such prescribed medications as antidepressants, asthma inhalers, and blood pressure pills.

The detox method was Scientology’s “Purification Rundown” in all but name—the church’s controversial method of “cleansing” its followers. This routine of long saunas and exercise inspired a no doubt apocryphal tale about singer Michael Jackson, who was introduced to the faith by his former wife Lisa Marie Presley in 1994. Jackson had been a Scientology target for much longer than Tom Cruise, Scientology leader David Miscavige learning his famous “moonwalk,” which he demonstrated publicly on board the Scientology cruise ship the
Freewinds
in the excitement of securing such a high-profile recruit. Unfortunately, the apocryphal story goes, when Jackson, who has undergone numerous surgical procedures, took the Purification Rundown, his face started to melt in the sauna. He looked, according to one former Scientologist, “like the witch in the wizard of Oz.” Shortly afterward, Jackson reportedly left the organization.

Other criticisms of Hubbard’s detoxification program were much more coherent, sober, and alarming. After doctors employed by the New York Fire Department checked out the Rescue Workers Detoxificiation Project, they concluded it was not a legitimate detoxification course. Deputy Commissioner Frank Gribbon told the New York
Daily News
: “We don’t endorse it.” Not only did the city’s largest union yank its support, but medical officers employed by the fire department counseled firefighters to keep taking their prescribed medications. “There’s no evidence [the clinic’s program] works,” said Deputy Chief Medical Officer David Prezant.

The conclusions of other experts who had spent time investigating Hubbard’s methods were even more damning. In what
The New York Times
called a “blistering report,” toxicology expert Dr. Ronald E. Gots, who analyzed a similar
event in Louisiana in 1988, called the regimen “quackery” and noted that “no recognized body of toxicologists, no department of occupational medicine nor any governmental agencies endorse or recommend such treatment.”

A Canadian doctor, David Hogg, M.D., described many of Hubbard’s claims about the Purification Rundown as “fallacious or even mendacious.” In a five-page analysis written in 1981, he concluded: “Hubbard is a very ignorant man. He consistently demonstrates a complete and at times dangerous lack of knowledge concerning biochemistry, physics, and medicine. His theories are based on fallacies and lies; there is no scientific data to support any of them. Furthermore his program not only fails to deliver what it promises but may actually be detrimental to the health of those taking it. As such it cannot be recommended that anyone take this program.” Another expert, Bruce Roe, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma, similarly dismissed Hubbard’s detoxification program as “pure, unadulterated cow pies. It is filled with some scientific truth but mainly it is illogical and the conclusions drawn by Mr. Hubbard are without any basis in scientific fact.”

As for Cruise, in his head it was simple: He knew more than the doctors. He was now a medical expert, simply because he had read Hubbard. “I’m the kind of person who will think about something, and if I know it’s right I’m not going to ask anybody. I don’t go, ‘Boy, what do you think about this?’ I’ve made every decision for myself,” he later told writer Neil Strauss. In fact, his claims went further than his religion, which describes the Purification Rundown as “a religious practice . . . solely for spiritual benefit.”

Scientology had convinced him that he already knew all the answers. He knew the truth because Hubbard
was
the truth; he was Source, as Scientologists see it. Any other point of view was pure ignorance. “A lot of doctors don’t have much experience in that area,” he said with the confidence of a bar-stool expert. “There are all kinds of toxins in the environment that can act on a person emotionally. When you talk
about lead poisoning, for example, that can make a person act as if they’re totally insane, depressed. I thought, there are people still living now. These men and women who are risking their lives in the rescue effort. And I knew I could do something that could help.”

Celebrity recruiting sergeant, generous donor, and medical expert. Now he tried his hand at lobbying the movers and shakers in Washington as an authority on human rights and education. Scientology had come a long way from the days when it considered the government an enemy and David Miscavige once quizzically asked a fellow Scientology executive why he even bothered to vote. Scientologists now employed high-powered professional lobbyists to argue their cause, augmented by the glitz and glamour of their Hollywood celebrities.

On June 13, 2003, one of the most powerful men in America, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, met privately with Tom Cruise, together with his friend Tom Davis, head of the Hollywood Celebrity Centre, and Kurt Weiland, an Austrian Scientologist who was director of external affairs for the organization’s Office of Special Affairs. For thirty minutes Armitage listened as they expressed their concerns about the treatment of Scientologists in some foreign countries, particularly Germany.

At first, even Tom’s star wattage could not obtain a meeting with Armitage, the actor instead palmed off to John Hanford, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for religious freedom. But Tom persevered, writing to Armitage personally to say that he was most interested in speaking with him: “I am familiar with your history and your duties as Deputy Secretary and I am certain that I can, in a brief amount of time, communicate to you what is on my mind.”

Tom emphasized that he was well informed about the supposed human-rights abuses of Scientologists in Germany: “I have taken it upon myself to become somewhat educated in these matters and to stay abreast of what continues to occur,” he wrote portentously. “I do keep a close watch on the
situation in these countries and within the last month, I learned of attempts to sabotage the performances of two American artists solely because they are members of the Church of Scientology.”

Cruise was keen to remind Armitage of his various lobbying trips to American embassies in Europe, noting that he had made a number of visits to the U.S embassies in Germany, France, and Spain, and “spoke to each ambassador about the problems of religious intolerance in those countries.” He mentioned that he also hoped to arrange a discussion with Vice President Dick Cheney.

The day after his meeting with Armitage, Tom sat down with Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby. In testimony given two years later, when Libby was on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice, Craig Schmall, the CIA intelligence officer who had given daily briefings to the chief of staff, recalls Libby being “excited” and bragging about having a face-to-face meeting with Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz. Once again, the subject of the meeting was Tom’s concern about Germany’s treatment of Scientologists.

This episode, which coincided with the government’s increasing concerns over the Iraq debacle, illustrates the access and authority that celebrities can wield at the highest levels of government. Tom Cruise was not given an audience with any of these busy, powerful men because of what he knew, but because of who he was. In the old days, political influence was based on class, money, and status. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, starstruck politicians are putty in the hands of the new breed of hustlers from Hollywood.

That same month of June 2003, Tom quickly swapped hats, changing from an authority on human rights to an expert on education, visiting Washington in an attempt to win government funding for L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Tech through the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” program. This time he cited his personal experience, crediting Hubbard’s teaching methods with curing his own learning difficulties. “We have some serious problems with education. I know
a lot about it,” he said categorically, referring to his own battle with dyslexia. “There are eight million kids that are being medicated with educational medication.”

His expertise seemed to know no bounds. “Do you know about Ritalin, Adderall, psychotropic drugs?” Cruise went on. “When you break down the chemical compound, it’s the same as cocaine. Bet you didn’t know that.” As the drug company Novartis, which has been manufacturing the drug Ritalin for more than fifty years, soberly noted, “Ritalin is not addictive when taken as indicated while cocaine is highly addictive. Ritalin and cocaine are two very different substances. While they affect similar parts of the brain, Ritalin and cocaine work differently in those areas of the brain.”

Whereas millions of American teachers and educators will never get the chance to speak in person to the man in charge of education, Tom Cruise had lunch with then education secretary Rod Paige and his chief of staff, John Danielson. They were impressed by his coherent and passionate presentation, listening intently as he told them that before Scientology, he had trouble learning to fly jet planes because he couldn’t read the manuals. It was only when a friend introduced him to Hubbard’s Study Tech that he was able to overcome his difficulties and pass the tests for his pilot’s license. It is a testament to the effectiveness of Cruise’s lobbying that he and Danielson, who now works in the private sector, became close friends, the two men often meeting for lunch and Danielson eventually visiting a Study Technology center in Missouri.

For once Tom seemed to be speaking from personal experience. But just how true is his story? Over the years he has given two differing accounts of his battle to overcome dyslexia. His first version, before his conversion to Scientology, credits his iron will and his mother’s help for enabling him to learn to read. Indeed, in 1985 he was happy to receive an award at the White House from Nancy Reagan for his efforts to raise global awareness of the learning disorder.

After he joined the Church of Scientology in 1986, the story changed. In the flurry of interviews he gave during 2003
to promote Scientology learning techniques, he claimed that before he discovered Hubbard, he was “a functional illiterate.” By his own account, young Thomas Mapother had been unable to read or write effectively. The implication was that thirteen years of traditional education had let him down. In a story in
People
magazine titled “My Struggle to Read,” he sympathized with his teachers, arguing that they had failed him only because they didn’t have the correct educational tools. “I had so many different teachers and I really feel for them. I see how they struggled with me. They were rooting for me and cared about me and wanted to see me do well, but they didn’t have the tools to really help me.” The tools they lacked, of course, were the tools of Scientology.