Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (47 page)

If, like the Flat Earth Society, Scientology were content to be a parochial, inward-looking club, there would be little
enough harm in it. But it is not. The relentless expansion of the organization and its front groups has been made possible by the charm and persuasiveness of its poster boy, whose modernity, familiarity, and friendliness mask the totalitarian zeal of his faith. Perhaps the media, politicians, and public should examine Tom’s claims with greater rigor and skepticism. When comedians ridicule Tom Cruise, the joke may be on him—but it is also on ourselves.

More than any star today, Tom is a movie messiah who reflects and refracts the fears and doubts of our times, trading on the unfettered power of modern celebrity, our embrace of religious extremism, and the unnerving scale of globalization. While advances in science, medicine, and technology give the illusion of modernity, the world is seemingly gripped by a harking back to apocalyptic fundamentalism. Current discourse all too often resembles that of the period before the Age of Reason and Enlightenment when messianical theories held sway. In the marketplace of ideas, rational debate and scientific method are frequently shouted down by the most extreme—and unproven—dogmas. And Tom has been one of those shouting the loudest, selling the dubious, unproven wares of his faith.

In an age of material plenty and spiritual famine, Tom Cruise is compelling—and dangerous—because he stands for something, extolling the virtues of a faith that is parodied and feared in equal measure. This faith, like his own personality, exists and thrives by disguise. Truly theirs is a match made in heaven—if they believed in it.

While he is clearly “one of the premier American actors of his generation,” taking his rightful place alongside such luminaries as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Julia Roberts when he received this honor from New York’s Museum of the Moving Image in November 2007, there is another dimension to Tom’s appeal. What you see is not what you get. With his boy-next-door good looks, energy, and winning smile, he should join the likes of Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart as one of the ordinary guys with universal audience appeal, an actor who makes us feel safe and secure in an uncertain world. Yet his
history suggests that the man behind the smile is altogether more edgy, threatening, and even sinister. Steven Spielberg recognized this quality when he directed him in
Minority Report.
Spielberg instructed Tom not to smile for the role because he understood the iconography of the Cruise grin. On one occasion he burst into a characteristic smile and Spielberg found himself thinking, “I get it. He has that deliciously indescribable magic that cannot be analyzed or replicated. He is in every sense a movie star.”

He is a man, too, of contradictions: an uncertain child waiting for an undeserved blow from his father, an adult searching for certainty and control. An alpha male who does his own stunts, lest there be a challenge he could not meet, seeking approval from the ghost of his bullying father. Now a father himself, he clearly loves family life and yet crusades for a faith that routinely sets loved ones against one another. A romantic who falls in love in a heartbeat and yet walks away without a backward glance. A certain, purposeful presence but a man who hates to be alone. During a career spanning a quarter of a century, he has played pilot, doctor, secret agent, warrior, assassin, vampire, and war hero. Perhaps the most complex character he has ever played is Tom Cruise himself.

It was the Tom Cruise blockbuster of the year, watched by an audience of millions around the world. Yet even though the sensational film was the talk of the water cooler for weeks, the nine-minute solo performance, entitled “Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise,” did not have its premiere in a movie theater.

From this humble debut on the Internet, the film of Tom, unshaven and dressed in a black turtleneck as he talked about his passion for Scientology, rapidly exploded into a global phenomenon. Viewers gawped and giggled as the movie star, in a performance both rambling and inarticulate, tried to explain his religious credo. The only people not smiling were Tom Cruise and his church. As the actor later told Oprah Winfrey about the video, “I was receiving an award that evening for global literacy. It was a very private moment. I’m actually talking to my congregation.”

Actually he was being awarded Scientology’s first-ever Freedom of Valor medal at a 2004 gala for thousands of fellow believers at Scientology’s English headquarters, Saint Hill Manor. Although I mentioned salient features of his pre-taped interview in the original edition of this book, the video proved that a picture, especially a moving picture of the biggest Hollywood star in the world, was worth 10,000 words.

Its release ignited a firestorm of controversy. This was Tom Cruise as never seen before, unguarded, unvarnished and, to many, unhinged. He spoke as though in a dazed reverie, almost
as if he were communing with himself. From time to time, he would laugh maniacally for little or no reason. His speech was peppered with Scientology jargon, confirming his credentials as an ardent follower of his faith.

As the
Mission: Impossible
theme played in background, he explained how Scientologists were the “authorities on getting people off drugs, the authorities on the mind,” and the only people who can bring peace and unite cultures. As an ambassador for his faith, he insisted that the world’s politicians were waiting for Scientologists to provide solutions to global problems. “Traveling the world and meeting the people that I’ve met, talking with these leaders . . . they want help, and they are depending on people who know and can be effective and do it and that’s us. That is our responsibility to do it.” Such was his dedication to “clearing the planet” that he had little time to enjoy his private jets, custom-made motorbikes, race cars, $35-million home in Hollywood, or skiing and snowmobiling at his mountain retreat in Colorado. “I wish the world was a different place. I’d like to go on vacation and go and romp and play . . . but I can’t.”

Despite his absolute certainty that only he and his fellow believers could solve the problems of the planet, he warned his congregation that the journey would be “rough and tumble . . . wild and woolly.” Finally, a portentous voiceover announced that “Tom Cruise has introduced LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] technology to over one billion people of earth. And that’s only the first wave he’s unleashed. Which is why the story of Tom Cruise, Scientologist, has only just begun.”

As comedians around the world ransacked their wardrobes for black turtlenecks and practiced the Cruise guffaw and chopping hand gestures, it became an iconic moment in his career. Just as the famous shots of Tom in
Risky Business
and
Top Gun
cemented his image as a controlled, cocksure, effortlessly attractive boy next door, so the abiding impression left by the Oprah couch-jumping episode and this new video was of a man out of sync with the real world. As Gawker’s Nick Denton noted in his media column, “If Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.”
The
New York Post
was more direct, inviting its readers to vote on whether Tom had gone off his rocker. German historian Guido Knopp ratcheted up the hysteria factor even further after he compared Tom’s rousing sermon at the end of the Scientology ceremony with the call to war by Nazi propaganda minister Joesph Goebbels.

The impact of the Cruise video, which was first leaked by media commentators on the West Coast, was particularly pronounced because it coincided with the January 2008 publication of this biography. As anticipated, its release proved to be a “wild and woolly” ride. In the week before it hit the stores, the book was assailed by Tom’s lawyer, Bert Fields; the Church of Scientology, which released a 15-page rebuttal; and Tom’s public relations agents, Rogers and Cowan, who issued a hostile statement and pressured major media outlets not to publicize the book or interview me as well as the star’s famous Hollywood friends.

His veteran lawyer fumed that my book was “sick and demonstrably false.” For good measure, the legal eagle, who has written contentious books disputing Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays and arguing the proposition that King Richard III never killed the two princes locked in the Tower of London, dismissed as “nutty” my assertion that his client was the
de facto
second in command of Scientology.

He was joined by Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw, who also described the notion that Tom held informal office inside his faith as “ludicrous.” “He is neither second or 100th,” she averred. The actor was merely a “parishioner,” albeit a parishioner who stirred the church into a paroxysm of media activity on his behalf.

His business partner Paula Wagner issued a statement condemning the book and the “mockery” of the Cruise video, while stars like Adam Sandler, Dustin Hoffman and Ben Stiller rode to his rescue, arguing that Tom had the “right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.” There was fevered talk that Bert Fields was considering reaching for his favorite number, $100 million, as he prepared a lawsuit against myself and the publisher. At the time of writing no such suit
has been produced—although Tom’s lawyers did send a cease-and-desist letter to a baby clothes outlet in Hollywood in May for talking about the couple’s possible purchases for their daughter, Suri. The fact that, because of the litigious nature of both Scientology and Tom Cruise, the book was not being published in Britain, Australia or New Zealand, where freedom of expression is hedged by such strict libel and privacy laws that Britain is known as the world’s capital for “libel tourism,” merely fueled the Cruise bandwagon.

The clamor in the mainstream media was reminiscent of the hue and cry that followed the publication of my biography of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1992. Then the British media were baying for blood, eager to pay obeisance to the royal family as they attempted to undermine the book, which, unknown to them or anyone else, was written with her full cooperation and involvement.

Although my biography of Tom Cruise was deliberately unauthorized—as I have argued frequently, a book authorized by Scientology would lack credibility—the response from some sections of the established American media was as deferential toward Hollywood royalty as the British media were to the House of Windsor.

There was, for example, deafening silence from the Hollywood entertainment media when it came to author interviews. The reason became clear when the press office at St. Martin’s received a hysterical phone call from a senior producer at an entertainment show. She had been contacted by a rep from Rogers and Cowan, Cruise’s publicity agents, who had erroneously suspected the show of planning to air an interview with me. Dire consequences were threatened, so the agitated producer pleaded with St. Martin’s to call Rogers and Cowan and tell them no such interview was scheduled.

The self-censorship of some in the mainstream media was demonstrated most clearly when Katie Holmes was doing the publicity rounds for her film,
Mad Money
, a crime caper also starring Diane Keaton and Queen Latifah. Anyone who wanted to interview Katie had to stick to certain topics. TV host Diane Sawyer, who sat on the sofa with the young actress
for eight long minutes, was castigated by the
New York Post
for giving Katie a “free ride,” asking only innocuous questions about her hair, her clothes, baby Suri, and her movie. When quizzed about Suri’s first words, Katie replied, “She said Mama, then Dada and then everything else. She’s a great mimic.” Although the show’s producer Jim Murphy insisted that its coverage was not a whitewash,
The Washington Post
let the cat out of the bag when it explained why they had passed on interviewing the latest member of Hollywood royalty: “The
Post
was not able to acquiesce to Holmes’ publicist’s requests—especially that the celeb not be asked about a certain Los Angeles-based church.”

Meanwhile, the original video and comments about the book, both positive and negative, were spreading like wildfire in the anarchic world of the Internet. Even as Scientology spokespeople were saying the video had been good publicity for their faith, their lawyers were sending threatening letters to media sites ordering them to take down the offending film. At Scientology’s request, YouTube and other sites removed the copyrighted video, but Gawker refused. The site claimed fair use, arguing that the nine-minute film was only a fraction of the three-hour filmed event, and said “it’s newsworthy; and we will not be removing it.” (It also made commercial sense. The site’s traffic, normally steady at one million hits a month, soared to 3.9 million hits.) Others did heed the church’s threats, Bill O’Reilly explaining on Fox News that his station, like many others, had decided to stop showing the movie in the face of hostile letters from Scientology lawyers. It seemed that the church was going out of its way and at some cost to aid Tom Cruise, parishioner.

Yet there was a whiff of rebellion in the air. The bullying Goliath of Scientology was about to face its David, a faceless, leaderless group of tech-savvy youngsters. Initially this merry band of hackers and Web geeks were infuriated by the removal of the Cruise video from YouTube. They decided to investigate Scientology further and didn’t like what they saw, angered by what they saw of Scientology practices, but
mainly what they viewed as Scientology’s history of “speech-suppression tactics.”

On January 21—just a week after Tom’s Scientology video first appeared—the anarchic group, appropriately called Anonymous, declared war in a mission statement on YouTube. It was a creepy but highly sophisticated piece of agitprop, with a flat, computer-generated voice warning the leaders of Scientology that “with the leakage of your propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed.”

The declaration, which attracted three million hits, ended with a phrase that was to become their signature: “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.” They were as good as their computer-generated word. Within hours, they launched a coordinated series of attacks on the main Scientology website, effectively shutting it down. This was followed by “black fax” transmissions to Scientology offices across the country, prank phone calls, and the inevitable bogus pizza deliveries. For three days they maintained their Internet war, until long-time critics of Scientology asked them to call off their attacks, arguing that they were behaving just like the church by denying freedom of speech. They complied but planned a series of worldwide demonstrations for February 10—to commemorate the death of Lisa McPherson while in Scientology’s care.