Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (42 page)

When Tom was lecturing Matt Lauer in June, his fiancée was watching from the wings, silent and unseen. By late October, Katie Holmes was front row center—she, Tom, and Sea Org disciple Jessica Feshbach Rodriguez guests of honor at the
annual Patron Ball at Scientology’s British headquarters, Saint Hill Manor. At first glance the black-tie evening seemed like a conventional social occasion. It was only when a video came on showing the violent destruction of the psychiatric profession as part of a campaign of “global demolition” that the zealous nature of the gathering became clear. Whatever her misgivings, Katie stood with Tom and applauded wildly as David Miscavige roused his audience with colorful rhetoric about the enemies of Scientology while rattling off rapid-fire statistics about the organization’s successes.

One disillusioned member of Scientology, who attended the event, compared the evening to a fascist rally. “It can be extremely unpleasant to be a live witness to evil,” she said. “It’s not something you’re reading or watching on TV. You’re there. And the indoctrinated are there with you. You see the evil and you want to do something. But you know that if you do, you’ll be taken away, turned over to ‘the authorities,’ and that will be the end of you.”

It was a baptism of fire for Katie Holmes, who was surrounded by Scientology, completely immersed in it. As one former member noted ironically, “Maybe Tom will show a video of the event to Katie’s parents. I’m sure they will love it.” Throughout, Katie looked at Tom with “unblinking adoration,” not only when he received a standing ovation for his donations to the cause, but when he was praised by Mike Rinder, commanding officer of the Office of Special Affairs, for his stance against psychiatry. According to Rinder, such was the impact of Tom Terrific that, just one day after one interview and two days after another, the Food and Drug Administration issued so-called “black box warnings” on two psychiatric drugs. When Tom spoke, the world listened.

As the Scientologists listened to Tom, they watched Katie intently. There was perhaps a knowing curiosity in the way that Sea Org disciples looked at her. Or rather at what she was carrying. Days before the Saint Hill event, Katie had severed one of the remaining links with her old life by firing Leslie Sloane-Zelnick, her publicist since the early days of
Dawson’s Creek.
On October 5, Sloane-Zelnick had been replaced by Lee Anne DeVette, who wasted no time in announcing to the world that Katie was pregnant with Tom’s child. This had not been part of Katie’s career game plan.

During her days on
Dawson’s Creek
, Katie, then twenty-one, had visited a tarot card reader in New York’s East Village. She was horrified when the cards predicted that she would be a mother in 2006. “I don’t want to be a mother at twenty-seven,” she wailed. Her Catholic parents, who had disapproved of Katie’s plans to live with her previous fiancé, Chris Klein, were reportedly unhappy that she was pregnant out of wedlock. Despite a letter from Katie’s new publicist urging parishioners at her church in Toledo to refrain from public comment, a family friend, Kathleen Jensen, spoke out. “I can’t imagine what her parents are going through right now,” Ms. Jensen said. “She really needs to get that baby baptized in a Catholic church.”

Under normal circumstances, Scientologists would also have taken a dim view of pregnancy outside wedlock. As public Scientologists, Tom and Katie would have been forced to appear before an ethics officer and been deemed to have committed an “overt,” a harmful act that is a sin. If a Sea Org disciple had committed the same “overt,” she would have been sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force, the Scientology version of a labor camp.

Tom and Katie, of course, did not live by the same rules as other Scientologists. If Tom was ecstatic at the news of Katie’s pregnancy, inside the world of Scientology there was excitement bordering on hysteria. Some sect members sincerely believed that Katie Holmes was carrying the baby who would be the vessel for L. Ron Hubbard’s spirit when he returned from his trip around the galaxy. True believers were convinced that Tom’s spawn would be the reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard. Some Sea Org fanatics even wondered if the actress had been impregnated with Hubbard’s frozen sperm. In her more reflective moments, Katie might have felt as if she were in the middle of a real-life version of the horror
movie
Rosemary’s Baby,
in which an unsuspecting young woman is impregnated with the Devil’s child.

Ironically, as absurd as this theory sounds, within the sect it was entirely plausible. The Scientology founder predicted he would return to Earth in some form some twenty years after he had “dropped his body.” Nor was this the first time that Scientologists had been gripped by this frenzy. When Hubbard’s daughter Suzette gave birth to a red-haired son—the same coloring as the sect’s founder—the infant was followed around the base at Hemet by curious believers. It became so unnerving that Suzette’s then husband, Guy White, decided it was time to leave the movement. This belief in Hubbard’s return goes to the very top of the organization.

During the mid-1990s, Bonnie View, the home built at Hemet especially for Hubbard, was renovated in anticipation of his imminent return. Both David Miscavige and Mike Rinder verbally cracked the whip over the gangs of Sea Org disciples who worked to build and furnish the house, berating them and urging them to work harder because time was running out before the great man returned. At one memorable briefing, Miscavige furiously told Sea Org disciples “If you think you are building a house for nobody to live in, you are all dreaming.” Once the building was completed, Miscavige installed a housekeeper to prepare the mansion for Hubbard’s return. For a true believer like Tom Cruise, already hailed as a messiah by fellow Scientologists, it was entirely plausible that his unborn child was somehow destined to take L. Ron Hubbard’s place.

Certainly the way Tom prepared for the child gave the impression that he was in tune with the mood of breathless anticipation in which Scientologists awaited their spiritual equivalent of the Virgin birth. Even the womb was no hiding place, the actor spending $200,000 on a sonogram machine to monitor the baby’s development. In the first weeks he took endless pictures of the growing embryo. “I’m a filmmaker—I need to see the rushes!” he explained. When he told one incredulous interviewer that the machine was strapped to Katie “twenty-four hours a day,” it was hard to know if he was joking
or not. Katie later downplayed the issue, saying that they only had a sonogram at home for when their doctor was there. When physicians warned that unnecessary use of the sonogram machine could put mother and baby at risk, Tom retorted that he had not exceeded FDA guidelines.

If the sonogram machine was not enough, he also reportedly bought a fetus learning system that was strapped to Katie’s stomach. The device was apparently designed to impart information to the baby in the womb. On one occasion Katie was asked to leave a movie theater in Florida because the device, which emits a low buzzing noise, was annoying other patrons. It was also reported, and subsequently denied, that Tom had fitted Katie’s cell phone with a tracking device so that he would know where she was day and night.

The rest of the universe was more difficult to control. By now Tom was something of a laughingstock. Not only had the phrase “jumping the couch” entered dictionaries, but bloggers were saying that Katie had gone from “A list to alien, hip to hypnotized.” It was perhaps a sign of the panic inside Camp Cruise that only hours after returning from England, where he had basked in the adulation of Scientologists, he effectively fired his sister Lee Anne DeVette as his chief publicist.

On November 7—just a month after taking charge of Katie’s publicity—she was demoted to looking after his philanthropic activities, which were mainly Scientology related. Paul Bloch and Arnold Robinson, of the established Hollywood PR firm Rogers & Cowan, took her place. That Robinson joined Tom on a normally routine trip to Shanghai and Xitang, where he spent two weeks in November shooting
Mission: Impossible III
, demonstrated how little they trusted Tom to stay on track and on message. Once Tom Reliable, he was now seen by many Hollywood insiders as a loose cannon.

Even with Bloch and Robinson piloting the Cruise ship, there was no stopping the tsunami of gossip and ridicule engulfing the Hollywood star. Famously humorless—and litigious—in the face of speculation about his religion and his sexuality, he had little to laugh at later in November 2005 when the cartoon series
South Park
screened an episode,
provocatively titled “Trapped in the Closet,” that poked fun at Scientology and the endlessly mutating rumors about his sexual orientation. It was bad enough that the half-hour show, penned by series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, already had a running joke in which Tom refused to leave a clothes closet, the implication being that he was refusing to acknowledge his homosexuality. But perhaps more damaging was the tongue-in-cheek explanation of Scientology’s creationist myth, dealing with how the evil warlord Xenu sent millions of people to Earth to be blown up, their spirits floating in eternal torment. Not only was the exposition of this myth highly accurate—Stone and Parker had used a Scientology expert to write a background paper—there was a caption underneath that read:
THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE
. It was comedy genius, both funny and informative, eventually earning the show an Emmy nomination. Indeed, Steven Spielberg later told friends that he had learned more about Scientology from
South Park
than he ever had from Tom Cruise.

South Park
airs on the Comedy Central network, owned by media conglomerate Viacom—which in turn counted Tom Cruise as one of its most important clients. When the episode aired, it caused a wave of controversy both inside and outside the company. Tom was reportedly so angry that he insisted the show not be broadcast again in America or aired elsewhere in the world. In Britain, Channel Four, which held the
South Park
franchise, pulled the episode for fear of attracting a lawsuit from the actor. Although Tom later denied being aware of the program—a tad disingenuous, given his obsession with his public image—the damage was done, as media and public rallied to the beleaguered writers. Stone and Parker received flowers from the makers of
The Simpsons
for their bravery, while the team behind
King of the Hill
sent them a message that they were doing “God’s work.”

It was a story that refused to go away—much to publicist Paul Bloch’s frustration. In March, singer and Scientologist Isaac Hayes, who had voiced the character of Chef on
South Park,
announced that he was resigning from the show, ostensibly
because the controversial episode was scheduled to be aired again later that month. In his resignation letter, which used the unmistakable language of Scientology, he accused Matt Stone and Trey Parker of “religious intolerance and bigotry.” In response, Stone noted that “in 10 years and more than 150 episodes Isaac never had a problem with the show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons and Jews.” Moreover, when he had talked about the episode in an earlier interview, he had sounded relaxed about it, admonishing Stone and Parker to “take a couple of Scientology courses, and understand what we do.”

It seems that Hayes’s Scientology masters were behind his resignation, especially when it was revealed that Hayes had suffered a mild stroke in mid-January and, according to friends, was still recovering when he decided to “resign” in March. In fact, it was eventually reported that the announcement had actually come from the singer’s Scientologist manager Christina “Kumi” Kimball. Observers concluded that Scientology had made an ailing man, whose wife was expecting a baby, quit his job to protect the organization’s reputation. As
The Washington Post
commented, “Hayes’s action makes Scientologists look like what many, many people assume they are: intolerant, humorless, and under the thrall of a demonic, soul-eating cult that brooks no dissent.”

Still, the dispute rumbled on, Tom Cruise reportedly issuing the ultimate warning—if the show was repeated, he would not do any publicity for his upcoming blockbuster
Mission: Impossible III.
In the face of this threat, the Viacom organization, the company behind both
M:I & III
and
South Park,
backed down. When the episode was finally pulled, Matt Stone and Trey Parker issued a statement saying, “So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for Earth has just begun! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!”

Cruise’s victory over
South Park
came at considerable cost. Hollywood insiders were realizing that Tom Cruise’s championship of Scientology was becoming a nuisance that could affect the bottom line. Previously favorable magazines
became more critical. In March,
Rolling Stone,
edited by Tom’s friend Jann Wenner, carried a thirteen-thousand-word article minutely detailing the nefarious activities of Scientology, while
Vanity Fair
printed a cover banner asking: “Has Tom Lost His Marbles?” Retribution was not long in coming. For once
Rolling Stone
was not given access to the
Mission: Impossible
set to interview Wenner’s friend.

Yet the normal excitement surrounding a Cruise action movie was focused less on the film’s star than on his fiancée, the actor answering endless questions about Katie’s health as the days ticked down to the birth of his first biological child. Even though Katie’s mother attended a baby shower in late March at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood, the tabloids portrayed the actress as a “prisoner of the cult” who was rarely allowed out without Tom or her Scientology minders. Sightings of Katie going out on her own, to a local farmers’ market or for coffee, became regular staples of the gossip columns.

Certainly, when she moved in with her fiancé, she inherited an instant family, joining his mother, Mary Lee Mapother South, and younger sister, Cass Darmody, and her two children, Liam and Aden, in the sprawling Beverly Hills compound. As Katie was embarking on her new life, Mary Lee and Cass were rebuilding their worlds. In an extraordinary about-face, Tom’s mother had abruptly given up everything in 2005 to be with the son she doted on. Not only had she renounced her Catholic faith—she was a Eucharist minister—but also her husband of twenty years, Jack South, and her circle of friends in Marco Island, Florida. As a friend from her local Catholic church observed, “She left her faith and went to Scientology. I’m so sad I can’t believe it.” When Tom’s younger sister, Cass, went through a divorce in 2004, she and her two children came to live with him. Like her brother, Cass was dyslexic but insisted on homeschooling her two children in Scientology’s Applied Scholastics.