Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (16 page)

I turned to Jessica, the very last person I felt like dealing with, and said, “Excuse me,” as I started to feel around the chair for my phone.

“What’s next, chick?” she said with a laugh. “You want to fuck me?”

“No, what’s next, Jess, is I’m going to punch you in your fucking face.”

The weirdness of the night was starting to get to me. When tears started to form in the corners of my eyes, it was Brooke Shields, of all people, who asked me if everything was all right. She was sitting nearby and was witnessing what was going on. She helped me look for my phone, but we still couldn’t find it.

I walked outside the restaurant to take a moment, but Jessica followed me. She held my phone up in one hand. “You still want to punch me in the fucking face?” she asked.

“Now more than ever.”

Just then Marc Anthony appeared. “Lee, don’t be mad at her,” he said. “It was me. I took your phone. I am so sorry. I was just playing with you.”

I didn’t believe it was him at all. I was pretty sure he was just trying to defuse the extremely tense situation.

The next few days leading up to the wedding didn’t get any easier. I felt like Jessica and Tommy were watching my every move and every move I made was wrong. Even on the afternoon of the wedding Jessica was on my ass. We still had a few hours before we needed to be at Odescalchi Castle on Lake Bracciano, an hour outside of Rome, where Tom and Katie were getting married, but Jessica kept texting me that I needed to get down to the lobby of the hotel right away. When I texted back that I was going with Jennifer, and we would leave when Jen’s security team gave us the okay (they were in communication with the security team at the venue), she kept insisting that I go now with the Scientology group, not with a guest of the wedding—as if my role at this wedding was to publicly show my affiliation to the church, rather than to my close friend. Then Jessica told me if I didn’t come now that I would be late.

Jennifer, whom I was getting ready with, per our original plan, finally asked, “Who keeps texting you?”

“Oh, nobody.”

Now I was acting weird too.

“Who’s texting you?”

“Oh, no one. It’s just the—they were just wondering if we were ready.”

“Tell whoever that is that we’ll go when my team gives us the okay, and not before.” And with that I stopped responding to Jessica’s texts. We left a bit later and did arrive late, but Tom’s sister and assistant were arriving at the same time, so I wondered how late could we actually be? I was trying my best to keep my behind-the-scenes drama with the church to myself—it would have been bad PR to do otherwise—but I was on edge as we pulled into the beautiful courtyard of the medieval castle, where trumpeters announced our arrival.

The guests had to hike up the hill to the entrance, and in doing so I stepped on my gown and ripped it. I was immediately taken up to a room where one of the ten in-house seamstresses from Armani, booked for the wedding, sewed it right up.

I then joined the rest of the guests, who were being served champagne in a room with a fireplace that was as big as my living room. It was here, standing among Tom’s assistants, that I casually asked them, “Where’s Shelly? She should be here.” Again, I thought it so odd that she was not there. Total bad PR. In the past Shelly was
always
by David’s side.

They responded with “I don’t want to be part of this conversation,” and walked away.

Afterward I saw Tommy Davis and asked him the same question. I hadn’t seen Shelly for a few years now. I had heard she was on some type of special assignment, but I had my suspicions that the truth was far worse.

“I mean, wherever she is, you could have dusted her off, cleaned her up, and gotten her here,” I said.

Tommy replied, “I think it’s odd that you’re asking.”

“No, it’s odd being that you are the spokesperson for the church that you didn’t have enough sense to realize that not having her here is a bigger PR blunder than anything.”

“You don’t have the rank to be asking about Shelly Miscavige,” he replied, and with that he shut down the conversation.

We filed into the chapel where the ceremony was to take place. Everybody took their seats. Then Norman Starkey and Tom entered and took their places at the front of the chapel, and, inexplicably, for the next twenty minutes (but what seemed like an eternity) Tom stood there with that everything-is-great look plastered on his face even as the crowd grew uncomfortable. Finally Jennifer leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Do you think Katie’s coming?”

Eventually she did walk down the aisle. Tom and Katie wed in a Scientology ceremony, where they vowed “to never close their eyes in sleep on a disagreement or an upset.” David Miscavige acted as Tom’s
best man, and Jessica was by Katie’s side most of the time. Then we all headed to the receiving line to greet the newlyweds. Tom and Katie hugged and said hello warmly to everyone—except Angelo and me. They bypassed us completely and moved on to kiss Jennifer and Marc.

“What did we do?” Angelo said as we walked into the reception. I just shrugged, because I really didn’t know. Was it the fact that we were late that set them off, and if so, why weren’t they mad at Jen and Marc too? Or the fact that I asked for a different room? I didn’t think either of those things warranted their flat-out dismissal of us.

Along with the rest of the guests, who were talking and mingling, we filed into the castle’s grand Hall of the Caesars to find our tables and take our seats for dinner. The opera singer Andrea Bocelli filled the dark hall with Italian love songs in his booming voice. Jennifer, who had picked up our table assignment cards, realized we weren’t at the same table and asked what was going on. When I said I didn’t know, she replied, “Well, I don’t want to sit with people I don’t know.”

I wasn’t sure what was going on either, except that church members had been trying to separate me from Jen ever since we had arrived in Italy. The only explanation I could come up with was that they viewed me as just a springboard for Tom and Katie to get to Jennifer and Marc and for the church to get to them for recruitment. The day before the ceremony, when we were leaving for the rehearsal dinner at the Villa Aurelia, Jessica and Tommy had wanted me to go in a van with other church people even though I told them I was driving with Jen and Marc, who had their own car and security. In the hotel lobby, Tommy tried to pull me aside. “Leah,” he said, motioning for me to go toward the van. But Jen, who didn’t know what was going on, said, “She’s with us.”

“Oh, yeah. No problem,” he replied.

The same thing happened at the dinner hosted by Katie’s parents, who had very little presence at the wedding. As the four of us sat down at a table, Tommy called over to me: “Leah and Angelo,
you’re over here.” But again, Jennifer said, “No, she’s with us.” And again, Tommy backpedaled. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I think there was a mistake on the tables. Let me just change some things around.” Although we returned to the hotel at four in the morning after a long night out with some of the other wedding guests, as soon as Angelo and I left Jen and Marc, Tom and Katie knocked on their door to see if they wanted to take a walk on the beach with them alone. I thought,
It’s almost like someone has been watching and knew the moment we left, but I’m sure I’m being paranoid
.…

When it turned out that Jennifer and I weren’t at the same table at the wedding reception, she asked me to talk to the wedding coordinator to see if we could sit together. I felt responsible for Jennifer, since I had invited her and Marc to the wedding on Tom and Katie’s behalf. I’m sure she thought that I could communicate more easily with other Scientologists since I was one. For me to say to her otherwise would have been bad PR. What I failed to realize at the time, and what would later go down as a transgression, was the fact that me sitting with Jen meant that I was not placed at an assigned table where I could be used effectively by the church to promote Scientology among non-Scientology guests at the wedding. They viewed this as a hostile act.

So, knowing I was already in trouble I approached the wedding planner with a very light touch. “Um, is there any way we can add two chairs to our table? Or is that too much? I don’t want to make a big deal about this.” She assured me it was no problem, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

The reception made my stomach turn as a Scientologist. I watched Jessica openly flirting with Tommy, which was nothing compared to the sight of Norman Starkey, the Scientology minister who had performed the wedding ceremony, getting handsy and inappropriately dancing with Brooke Shields. Starkey was a church leader who had captained one of the original Sea Org ships when LRH was still alive and who was close to Scientology’s founder.

I kept my mouth shut, though, through the whole night, which
included the traditional cake cutting with, of course, Tom making out with Katie; fireworks set to classical music; a party after the reception at another castle hall that turned into a nightclub with superstar DJ Mark Ronson spinning. With all eyes on Tom, he put on quite a performance reprising his famous
Top Gun
moment by singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” (an odd choice of song for a groom to be serenading his new bride with, but okay) directly to Katie, who played the part of the perfect bride. So I was relieved when at some point the hall seemed to empty out of A-listers. Angelo, Marc, Jennifer, and I climbed into her car and headed back toward the hotel. But about halfway through the drive home, I got a call on my cell phone from one of Tom’s lackeys, Michael Doven.

“Hey, where are you guys?” he asked.

I explained that we were in the car, on the way to the hotel.

“Right,” he said. “And I’m telling you, you need to come back.”

Not knowing what else to do—this was beyond crazy—I said, “Here, talk to Jennifer,” and I handed the phone over.

“Hey!” I could hear him say on the cell to Jennifer, sounding loud and nervous. “So, Tom and Katie really want you to come back!”

“We’re already forty-five minutes into the drive and really tired. We didn’t know where you guys were,” she said.

“We just went in the kitchen with a bunch of people to make pizza. Everybody was hungry.”

“Oh, well. You know, I loved the wedding. It was great.”

“You sure you don’t want to come back? Tom really, really wants you to come back.”

“No, sweetie. We’re going to go back to the hotel.”

“Are you sure?”

What the fuck? Leave it alone.

Had everyone in my church lost their minds? This was all just too weird. Top officials were here and going against everything I was taught and believed to be right. I had seen behind the curtain. There, in the role of the great and powerful Oz, was not LRH, as I had
come to believe, but instead, it seemed to be Tom Cruise. All of these rules appeared to have been broken because of or in relation to him and his standing in the church. Was my church falling apart? Was Tom in charge?

As soon as I got back to the room, I called my mom and in between sobs I told her everything that had been going on.

“I think Jessica’s cheating on her husband with Tommy,” I ranted. “Norman Starkey is drinking and humping Brooke Shields on the dance floor! I think I saw David Miscavige’s assistant touching him inappropriately at the welcome dinner. And Suri was on the floor and these women were talking to her like she was LRH!”

She was in total disbelief and agreed that I had to write it up in Knowledge Reports.

I then called my assistant back home (who was also a Scientologist) and relayed the details of what I had witnessed to her. She was as devastated as I was.

“I need the facts. Give me the facts,” she kept saying over and over. “I’m writing it up for the Watchdog Committee”—the highest management group in the church, charged with overseeing Scientology activity worldwide. “Give me the details.”

“This is our church,” I said. “How can the highest members of our church, the most so-called devout and esteemed members, just ignore policy and operate so outside the lines of what is expected of them, and of us? How did Tom amass all of this power and why is he treated like a church official? Doesn’t anyone else care that this is happening?”

“Let’s get it handled,” she replied.

I agreed with her that we needed to handle things by solving the problem, which in my view was Tom Cruise and David Miscavige. I was still LRH’s girl and I remained confident that if I operated within his world, by his policies, writing up everything I had witnessed these last few days, that I was going to be the one to solve the church’s problems, and that my friends would stand by me in this important work.

I
COULDN’T WAIT T
O LEAVE
Italy and get back home. But when Jennifer invited Angelo and me to return on the jet she decided to charter on her own (Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, Will and Jada Smith, and the Beckhams all chartered their own jets home instead of taking the one provided by Tom and Katie), I declined. I would have liked nothing more than to go home with her, but if we did that, it would mean another whole day of not seeing Sofia, which I definitely didn’t want to do. The chartered jet that Tom and Katie had provided was going back earlier, so I thanked her but explained that I had to get back.

On the way to the airport from the wedding, Angelo and I found ourselves in the same van as Bella and Connor Cruise.

Over the years at the Celebrity Centre I had watched Tom and Nicole Kidman’s children grow up, but more recently I’d gotten to know them better by spending time with them at Tom’s house. The siblings, who were supervised by Sea Org members, often had their computers taken by the security force at CC to make sure they weren’t up to anything and to keep filters on so they couldn’t go on any websites that might get them asking questions. Still, Connor was a bit of a rebel. He would show up to course a little disheveled from whatever “fun” he was able to steal.

I had always wondered why they didn’t have a relationship with their mom, but I could never ask them, because there was always someone else around. Driving to the airport alone with them, I had my chance.