Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (36 page)

The lights went on, he claimed, only in his mid-twenties, after he encountered Scientology techniques and learned to use dictionaries. Looking up words in a dictionary is one of the “technologies” that Scientology offers its members. “No one teaches you about dictionaries,” he told writer Dotson Rader. “I didn’t know the meanings of lots of words.”

As he continued to give interviews about his troubled education, he went even further, claiming that he had never really been dyslexic but incorrectly labeled as such by educational psychologists—the archenemies of Scientology. When he interviewed Cruise in November 2003, talk-show host Larry King asked if he was or ever had been dyslexic. Three times Tom flatly denied it. He looked King in the eye and said that he had never had a problem with reading or writing. Instead, he repeated the story that he had told numerous other interviewers—that he was “labeled” with a learning disability, and it was only when he became a Scientologist in 1986 that the secrets of L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology released him from this false labeling.

The miracle cure of Study Tech was the reason, he explained, that he had given considerable time and money to the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project (HELP), a supposedly secular organization that offered free tutoring to children and adults—using Hubbard’s study technology. It was the same reason that in the summer of 2003 he joined
Jenna Elfman, Isaac Hayes, Anne Archer, and Congressman Lacey Clay to cut the ribbon for the opening of the new headquarters of Applied Scholastics International in St. Louis—a campus entirely dedicated to Hubbard’s teaching techniques.

“Do I wish I’d had something like this when I was a kid?” Tom said. “Absolutely. It would have saved me many hours and days and weeks of pain and embarrassment.” As he modestly told
Marie Claire
magazine, “I can learn anything now. If I had known then . . . oh man, I’d have been through college at age eleven. I’d have been that bullet train that whipped past our school.”

For someone who uses his educational history as a calling card to lobby for government funding, Tom Cruise is cagey when anyone tries to examine his claims. In the past, when journalists have made cursory attempts to review his school days, his response has been the familiar retreat into legal threats and professional bullying. When reporter Stephanie Mansfield spoke to a former school friend, who had only good things to say about Tom, his publicist, Pat Kingsley, angrily told her that she would never work with any of her roster of celebrity clients again. She was true to her word. Although he has lobbied vigorously for freedom of expression for his fellow Scientologists, Tom Cruise has proved relentless at using the law or professional arm-twisting to muzzle others’ freedom of speech.

So just what does he have to hide? Teachers, former pupils, and others give a very different picture of Tom’s education, a picture that does not jibe with the Scientology propaganda. Pennyann Styles, who was a teacher at Robert Hopkins Public School in Ottawa for thirty years, remembers Cruise very clearly. She recalls that from the age of eight he was placed in a special-education class with about ten other children. In order to receive this special education, he had to be assessed by an educational psychologist, who diagnosed him as having a learning difficulty.

Styles doubts Cruise’s claim that Study Tech alone rid him of his problems. “We can’t cure dyslexia, but we can assist children with coping strategies so that they can be successful.
He has said that Scientology cured him, but I don’t think there is a special-needs teacher going who would believe that. Dyslexia is something that is with you throughout your life. He wants to make Scientology out to be the savior of all things. What a shame!”

Cruise’s contention that he was never taught to use a dictionary also provokes a raised eyebrow from his former teacher. “Most certainly dictionaries were used,” recalls Styles. “In Tom’s day, especially as he attended a brand-new school which had been given plenty of money, dictionaries were plentiful. I even remember his classroom teacher teaching specific dictionary skills, often.”

George Steinburg taught drama at Robert Hopkins and had an extremely good relationship with Cruise. It was Steinburg who asked his assistant, Marilyn Richardson, to help Cruise learn lines for drama by reading them out to him. She, too, is surprised to hear Cruise’s claims of being a “functional illiterate.” She recalls: “Tom Mapother could read, but it took him a long time. He had a very good memory, it didn’t take him long to pick up his lines.” Marilyn also remembers Tom’s mother doing the same—working hard to help him learn his parts. Clearly his dyslexia was not that “mislabeling” by a psychologist that he would now have the world believe.

Although he was diagnosed with a learning difficulty early in his academic career, by the time he was a teenager he seems to have been coping well enough not to need any special help. The care and support that he received from his mother and the special-education teachers at Robert Hopkins had helped him go a long way to overcoming his problems—a full twelve years before L. Ron Hubbard became a part of his life.

When he reached the seventh grade, Tom moved from Robert Hopkins to Henry Munro Middle School in Ottawa. His homeroom teacher, Byron Boucher, taught him in a variety of subjects, including English and math. Now retired, Boucher remembers all the children in that year, and, as far as he is concerned, Tom Mapother had no special learning difficulties.
He was certainly never classified as needing special services. If he had struggled with reading and writing, Byron, who later became a special-needs teacher, says that the school principal would have been informed and necessary remedial action taken. “He was just an average kid with no learning disability. The description ‘functional illiterate’ does not fit with my recollection. I can’t believe that story. An illiterate is someone who cannot read or write, and that is not the case with this student. It is not true, simply not true.”

According to Boucher, Cruise was at neither the top nor the bottom of the class, but right in the middle. He was not a special-needs student, simply an average student. Boucher’s is a common assessment. From middle school to high school, fellow pupils like Glen Gobel and others use exactly the same phrase, “middle of the road,” to describe Cruise’s modest academic ability.

Certainly his girlfriends like Nancy Armel and Diane Van Zoeren, who sat with him at his kitchen table and did homework, never noticed any problem with reading or writing. When he read scripts with Kathy and Lorraine Gauli, there was no indication that he was having difficulties. This was, after all, a young man who could stand in front of his drama coach and his friends and declaim from the script in front of him.

Perhaps more accurately, the actor’s reading trajectory conforms to scientific research that has discovered that while dyslexia cannot be cured, it can be dealt with if caught at a sufficiently early age and a program of remedial education put into effect. This is precisely what he received at his elementary school, Robert Hopkins. By the time he reached Henry Munro Middle School, he was no longer considered to have special needs. As dyslexia is caused by “miswiring” in the brain, it can effectively “rewire” itself while the young brain is growing. This process is more difficult when the brain is fully mature—certainly in one’s twenties, which is when Tom said that Study Tech helped him.

Rather than floundering for years among teachers who “didn’t have the tools to really help me,” Cruise seems to have
been fortunate to encounter a series of dedicated teachers—as well as a caring mother—who intervened early and effectively, so that he was able to cope on his own from middle school on.

Of course, the plain fact that conventional teaching works does nothing to help the cause of Scientology or further their applications for tax breaks and government funding for their educational programs. Therefore, history had to be rewritten: Tom owed everything to Scientology.

The new gospel according to Cruise has not gone without criticism. The International Dyslexia Association has publicly attacked the actor’s assertions. As executive director J. Thomas Viall commented, “When an individual of the prominence of Tom Cruise makes statements that are difficult to replicate in terms of what science tells us, the issue becomes what other individuals who are dyslexic do in response to such a quote unquote success story. There is not a lot of science to support the claim that the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard are appropriate to overcoming dyslexia.”

Once again, Cruise brushed aside such criticism, utterly convinced of his superior knowledge. As he was to say time and again, he had done the reading. But that reading was invariably works by L. Ron Hubbard; to explore further would have been heresy. In the hermetically sealed universe beginning and ending with LRH, no other worldview or even point of view is tolerated. It is the North Korea of religion.

Clearly Tom was comfortable in this country of commitment. In January 2004, not only did he become a gold-level “Patron Meritorious” for donating $1 million to his faith, he reached the exalted level of Operating Thetan VII, where Hubbard promised that man would become his own god. It meant that several times a day Tom clutched his E meter and scoured his body in search of dead spirits. The questioning routine was similar to earlier levels, except that the spirits were harder to discover and eliminate.

The process puts practitioners into a self-induced hypnotic trance that can disconnect them from reality. As former Scientologist
Peter Alexander, who reached OT VII, observes, “You believe that all your problems are due to these thetans. So when you come back into reality, you’re like, ‘Wow, this is a nice day, my dog’s been killed but that doesn’t matter, I realize that I am a being who has lived endlessly contacting all these long-lost body thetans. So nothing is really a problem.’ That is the behavior that you can see in Tom Cruise.”

Cruise was seething with Scientology, totally immersed in his faith. He was physically surrounded by Scientologists, intellectually and emotionally cocooned, seeing the rest of the world through Hubbard’s ideological prism. Not only did he know all the answers, but in his universe there was no room for nonbelievers, dissenting voices, or even the mildest criticism. Writer Neil Strauss from
Rolling Stone
magazine, which always gave him flattering coverage, was taken aback by the ferocity of Tom’s response when he asked him about his faith. “Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you.” Then, his face reddening, he rose from the table and jabbed a finger at the imaginary enemy: “Fuck you.”

As Tom approached the dark heart of Hubbard’s universe, there was absolutely no place for those Scientologists deemed Suppressive Persons or Potential Trouble Sources. Just as many ordinary Scientologists had sacrificed their personal relationships, shunning wives, husbands, children, brothers, and sisters for their faith, so Tom had little hesitation in disconnecting from his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley, and his girlfriend Penélope Cruz when it became clear that Penélope could not bring herself to join his organization.

Significantly, the ax fell on Pat Kingsley on March 13, 2004, the anniversary of L. Ron Hubbard’s birth, the Hollywood actor replacing her with his sister and ardent Scientologist Lee Anne DeVette. Like so many of his partings, professional and emotional, it was cold and clinical. “If I don’t feel that [my people] are doing what I need from them . . . hey, I fire them!” he later commented. For fourteen years Kingsley had been his shield and iron fist, ruthlessly
protecting him from overexposure and unnecessary intrusion. What
Slate
magazine had called his “Teflon-coated persona” was almost entirely due to Kingsley.

It is commonly believed in Hollywood that the first cracks in their relationship came in the fall of 2003 when Tom, fresh from his lobbying work in Washington, was gearing up to publicize his latest movie,
The Last Samurai.
Feeling that his proselytizing was harming his image and detracting from the films he was supposed to be selling, she came to an informal agreement with CAA, his management agency, and one of Tom’s close friends that they would sit him down and let him know that they thought he had gone too far. When they did eventually sit down, it was only Kingsley who spoke out. As one Hollywood insider observed, “From that moment she was doomed.”

Kingsley paid the price for saying what many in Hollywood had privately thought for some time. As a senior entertainment industry executive observed, “When he started to use his platform to spew personal opinion, he immediately allowed himself to be questioned. You can’t have it both ways. Suddenly everyone has the right to lash back.

“Pat Kingsley did a fantastic job; she sheltered him, his public persona was carefully crafted, but now that the veneer is down and he strongly believes in something the rest of us think is odd, he comes off as self-righteous.”

At the same time that he was dissolving a professional partnership, he was saying good-bye to the woman widely thought to be his future bride. Much as he had tried to woo the Spanish actress to join his faith, his three-year love affair with Penélope Cruz came up against an unexpected roadblock—her father, Eduardo. In the early days of their romance in 2001, Eduardo had given the couple his blessing. But it was a mixed blessing, the Madrid retailer telling local journalists that he had to be “110 percent sure” that the twice-married actor would stick around. “Tom is a nice guy, but I have to make sure he loves my daughter enough for life.”

While Penélope studiously read Scientology texts, attended auditing courses, and, according to at least one report,
even took the Purification Rundown, she was never entirely committed. “I have great respect for all religions, but I do not intend to join any of them at the moment,” she said tactfully. She did, however, join Tom’s diplomatic mission to spread the Scientology gospel in Europe and was by his side during his lobbying campaign in Washington during the summer of 2003.

It seems that Eduardo Cruz became increasingly alarmed by his treasured daughter’s involvement with a group that concerned the Spanish government. Eduardo’s alarm over his daughter’s well-being was entirely in character. For example, when a Spanish TV host announced that Penélope was pregnant out of wedlock with Tom’s baby, he was quick to defend her reputation and that of her family. Now he spent time trawling the Internet for information about Scientology but did not know where to turn for advice. He was concerned that his famous daughter could be drawn into what he considered a cult—and, like so many others, be lost to him and his family forever. Eventually he e-mailed an organization devoted to helping cult members and their families. It was only after a long exchange of correspondence that officials realized that they were dealing with Penélope Cruz’s father. Even today, they are reluctant to identify themselves publicly, lest it discourage other families or those who are trying to escape from Scientology from making contact.