Any hint of criticism of the leader, known as Black PR, was deemed a crime. Miscavige scrutinized even the facial expressions of Sea Org followers, who would be punished for looking hostile or bored. In his book 1984, about mind control in a future society, George Orwell had a term for that offense—“facecrime.” That, however, was a work of fiction.
Understandably, many lived in fear of the man they dubbed Napoleon—even his own family. Karen Pressley, who lived in the same quarters as Miscavige’s parents, recalls, “One day his father looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m afraid of my own son.’ It freaked me out. He was scared of him because he was so powerful and controlling.” Others are more measured, appreciating Miscavige’s energy, focus, and charisma while acknowledging his inappropriate aggression. His assistant Shelly Britt saw him as a Jekyll and Hyde character, the nicest or the meanest boss in the world. “If you are on his good side you are on top of the world, on his bad side you couldn’t get much lower.” Another close aide, Marty Rathbun, averred that in all the years he had known Miscavige he had never been aware that he had hit anyone. “That’s not his temperament,” he told the St. Petersburg Times.
For Tom Cruise, the first meeting with Miscavige in August 1989 was the beginning of an enduring friendship, the Scientology leader becoming a boon companion and adviser, continually challenging, controlling, and competing with the Hollywood star.
If Tom had made a lifelong friend thanks to his faith, his next film was about to change his life. For the previous three years Tom had nursed this movie baby, wanting to make a film about stock-car racing. High on adrenaline and the thrill of speed after doing laps at 190 miles an hour around the famous Daytona International Speedway, he yelled, “I’m going to make a movie about this.” Once Paul Newman had introduced him to the sport during the filming of The Color of Money, Tom had taken it up with his customary enthusiasm. He raced Nissans for Newman’s team, his expertise such that, as far as racing driver Bob Bondurant was concerned, he had the ability to turn pro.
Based on his experience, the actor wrote a crude outline of a story and hired veteran screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart to polish the plot of what became Days of Thunder. It centered on a cocky driver, Cole Trickle, played by Tom, who tries to outgun a rival, the two men ending up badly injured in the hospital. Inevitably, Trickle falls for the glamorous brain surgeon who helps heal him, and ultimately learns humility, conquering his demons sufficiently to go on and win the big race.
Known in early discussions as Top Car, the hope was to do for NASCAR racing what Top Gun had done for the navy flying school in San Diego. Once the project was officially in development, Cruise brought in Top Gun scriptwriter Warren Skaaren, who, after writing several drafts, quit in exasperation at Cruise’s demands. Undeterred, Tom wooed writer Robert Towne by taking him to the racetrack at Watkins Glen, New York. As they soaked up the atmosphere, Towne told the actor: “I get it, Cruise. This is fantastic.” With director Tony Scott and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer on board, the scene was set to make another summer blockbuster.
It wasn’t quite so simple. While Paramount gave the green light for filming to start in November 1989, they didn’t have a completed script, an agreed title, a leading lady, or even a character that a leading lady could play. In October, when Cruise was invited to a private screening of the Australian thriller Dead Calm, which had been making waves for the performances of Billy Zane and Nicole Kidman, he went with a particular sense of urgency. Watching the film with scriptwriter Robert Towne, Tom was as entranced by Nicole’s on-screen authority as by her long, elegant legs and translucent skin. He left the screening suitably impressed, instructing minions to bring her to Los Angeles for a screen test.
That she was in Japan promoting Dead Calm was no obstacle. Nicole was flown to Hollywood to meet Cruise, the producers, and the director, arriving at the Paramount studios jet-lagged and professionally curious, but not expecting much. “I thought, ‘Oh yeah, right,’ ” she said later. “I’d been to America before. You go in, you audition, you don’t get the job.” As insurance, she decided to use the trip as an excuse to visit friends and see her sister, Antonia, in England.
When she walked into the conference room to meet Tom and his colleagues, however, the chemistry between them was unmistakable. “The moment I laid eyes on him, I thought he was just the sexiest man I had ever seen in my life,” she later told Rolling Stone. “He took my breath away. I don’t know what it was. Chemical reaction? Hard to define. Hard to resist.”
At the time, the girl who was nicknamed “Stalky” by her school friends thought she was unlikely to win a part where, at five feet, eleven inches, she was four inches taller than the leading man. She read a couple of pages of script, though not from the movie in question, and left, ready to enjoy herself in California. So she was surprised when producer Jerry Bruckheimer called the next day to tell her they wanted her to play Tom’s love interest. There was a caveat: Her character, like much of the film, had yet to be fully conceived. In the end, the twenty-two-year-old rather improbably played a brilliant brain surgeon, Dr. Claire Lewicki.
What was not in doubt was the attraction the leading man felt toward his new leading lady. “My first reaction to meeting Nic was pure lust,” he later recalled. “It was totally physical.” At first sight, it was a curious coupling, the tall, ginger-haired, willowy Australian so different from his voluptuous dark-haired wife. While physically different, however, both women had reputations as being aloof, ambitious, and coolly unattainable—perfect foils for a man who liked the challenge of an endless romantic chase.
Tom was soon smitten, the couple sharing a sense of humor as well as the thrill of living on the edge. As with David Miscavige, the Hollywood star seemed to have met his match in the slim shape of a young woman who cited strong, determined actresses like Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn as her inspiration. Nicole also sensed his unhappiness, his need for a closer connection than his current relationship. A few weeks later, in late November, scriptwriter Robert Towne had dinner with the couple at Toscana in Brentwood. He immediately recognized their rapport and realized that Tom’s two-year marriage to Mimi was surely over.
Certainly Tom was true to form, disposing of his first marriage with the matter-of-fact alacrity with which he had ended previous love affairs. In the late fall he moved out of their home in Brentwood and went to stay with his friend—and best man—Emilio Estevez for a few days. Then he and Mimi went to the Scientology base in Hemet for what the sect calls “chaplain counseling.” Ostensibly, this was to discuss and attempt to resolve their differences by discussing them with a Scientology counselor. Once everything is out in the open, Scientologists argue, there is no reason to split up. In some circumstances this procedure is successful, but in this instance there was a hidden agenda. The Scientology leadership felt such hostility toward Mimi’s father that Mimi was stained by association. “They no longer wanted her on the team,” says a former Scientologist who was involved in the charade. “The impetus was to help Tom Cruise, and within twenty-four hours they had agreed to split up.”
The Hollywood actor was even given the services of a senior Scientology trustee, Lyman Spurlock, director of client affairs, to help sort out the intricate financial fallout. “He was lost, he didn’t know what his rights were or understand what Mimi should get,” recalls former senior Scientologist Jesse Prince. “They made it as painless as possible for him.” Mimi’s final settlement was a reported $10 million—with a clause enforcing confidentiality on both sides. Word was that Mimi made it clear that if the Scientology leadership used its black propaganda to try to discredit her, she would open her own Pandora’s box of secrets about the cult.
While Tom was dealing with his domestic matters in a typically businesslike manner, Nicole was saying her farewells to her family in Sydney, Australia. She did not, however, say a final good-bye to her longtime boyfriend, fellow actor Marcus Graham, the former star of Australia’s top
soap E Street. Although he was one of the first she told about her new part, she gave no hint of a flirtation with her new leading man. In fact, when she landed in Los Angeles, she called him with the news that legendary New York agent Sam Cohen, whose clients included Woody Allen and Meryl Streep, had flown out west to sign her to a contract. Although he was in something of a career slump, Graham had no reason to believe that their romance—they were living together before she left for America—was over. They planned a holiday in the Pacific, and while she was filming Days of Thunder, he racked up over thirteen hundred dollars in phone bills chatting to his erstwhile lover.
It was a forlorn waste. Within days of starting her new life in America, Nicole was spending every moment, both professionally and romantically, with Tom. She was smitten. “I was consumed by it, willingly,” she said later. At the end of November the couple was not only filming together in Charlotte, North Carolina, but quietly flying to the Scientology Gold Base, arriving by helicopter in the compound. They had their own VIP bungalow in a remote part of the five-hundred-acre compound, with Sea Org disciples under strict orders to stay away from the area, as well as the services of Sinar Parman as butler and chef. When the couple did emerge, they spent time with David Miscavige, his wife, Shelly, and Tom’s handler, Greg Wilhere.
Whatever they did, Wilhere was either with them or watching over them, making sure everything was perfect. “It was clear that they were very much in love, very tactile and all over each other,” recalls one former Scientologist who was privy to what was then a closely guarded secret. “Within a matter of days of Tom splitting with Mimi, he and Nicole were coming to Gold. Senior Scientologists helped facilitate this.” In fact, Greg Wilhere played such a pivotal role in smoothing the path of romance that Tom named a character in Days of Thunder after him. When the name of a “Dr. Wilhere” is mentioned, it was an in-joke between the lovebirds and their Scientology friends.
On December 9, 1989, with filming for Days of Thunder in full swing, Tom’s lawyers quietly filed a suit for his legal separation from Mimi, the actor citing “irreconcilable differences.” Yet Tom continued to play the happily married husband in a series of interviews to promote Born on the Fourth of July, released just before Christmas. As high-performance cars burned rubber and fuel around North Carolina’s Charlotte Motor Speedway, Cruise spoke affectionately about his wife to selected journalists. “The most important thing for me is I want Mimi to be happy,” writer Richard Corliss quoted him as saying during a flattering Time magazine cover profile entitled “Tom Terrific”: “I’m just happier now than I’ve ever been in my life,” Tom said, Corliss noting how he and Mimi had visited the Brazilian rain forest as part of their work on the board of Earth Communications Office, an entertainment-industry organization, subsequently infiltrated by Scientologists, that promotes environmental causes.
During another chat with writer Trip Gabriel for Rolling Stone, which, because of Tom’s friendship with owner Jann Wenner, was effectively his house journal, he stonewalled questions about rumors of marital troubles. As for Us magazine, he told them: “I just really enjoy our marriage.” It helped cement the fiction of marital bliss when Mimi visited the Days of Thunder set during his publicity jag.
Looking back, Richard Corliss sees Cruise’s dissembling as part of his character and par for the course in Hollywood. “His marriage to Mimi Rogers was a fiction he wanted to maintain—at least until the magazine profiles attending the release of Born on the Fourth of July were published. I wasn’t astonished by his insistence that he was sticking with Mimi when he had decided he wasn’t. That dodge is a movie star tradition as old as Hollywood.”
Tom’s faith not only helped ease his separation from Mimi Rogers, it also helped him keep a straight face as he related his story of domestic harmony. The art of controlling the media forms an integral part of Scientology practice, and one of the entry-level courses, on communications, teaches effective techniques for “outflowing false data.” Cruise proved himself a nimble and able student, receiving favorable coverage in December for his on- and off-screen personae and winning a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his role in Born on the Fourth of July. “Tom Cruise’s portrayal of Ron Kovic is proof positive that he is one of the most versatile actors working in Hollywood today,” wrote movie critic Edward Gross.
As the flattering profiles of Tom hit the newsstands, his divorce lawyer flew out from Los Angeles to Daytona Beach, Florida, where filming was now taking place, on January 12 so that the actor could sign his divorce papers. A day earlier, Tom had quietly met with Mimi at the Charlotte Hilton University Place Hotel. Some observers believe it was a last-ditch attempt by the actress to save her marriage. More realistically, it was to finalize their official statement and outstanding financial matters. In fact, in keeping with the speed of the split, the divorce papers were filed four days later, the couple releasing a brief statement the next day. “While there have been positive aspects to our marriage, there were some issues which could not be resolved even after working on them for a period of time.”
In an interview in Playboy three years later, Ms. Rogers mischievously elaborated on those mysterious “issues.” Scorned for a younger woman, Mimi got her revenge by kicking her former husband, whom People magazine had named the “sexiest man on earth,” in the cojones. “Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk,” she told interviewer Michael Angeli. “At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn’t fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. Therefore it became obvious that we had to split.” As for her own instrument: “Oh, my instrument needed tuning,” she said. While her comments would help float a flotilla of sexual gossip about her former husband, she admitted afterward that she was just having fun with the clearly besotted interviewer.
Perhaps more accurately, their fiercely demanding work schedules, Tom’s stated desire to start a family, the influence of his new faith—and, of course, the sexual chemistry between Tom and a younger woman—all contributed to the breakdown of their brief union. Tom later told Talk magazine, “Before Nicole I was dissatisfied, wanting something more. It was just two people who weren’t meant to work and it wasn’t what I wanted for my life. I think you just go on different paths. But it wasn’t Mimi’s fault . . . it’s just the way it is.”
He spent little time reflecting on what had gone wrong with his first marriage, instead, as was his romantic pattern, racing headlong into a new relationship. Ironically, he was behaving in much the same way as his father, who, weeks after his divorce, had married Joan Lebendiger following a whirlwind courtship. Tom, at least, was more discreet. Just five days after formally announcing his divorce, he faced banks of photographers when he accepted a Golden Globe for Best Actor for his performance in Born on the Fourth of July. He did have a woman by his side as he walked down the red carpet—but it was his mother, Mary Lee. Otherwise, he was spending all his free time with the new woman in his life, his rented white BMW and Harley-Davidson motorcycle spotted outside the rented Daytona Beach bungalow of his Australian costar when the production moved to Florida. The love match between Nicole and Tom was not the only subject of crew chatter on the set of Days of Thunder. Actress Donna Wilson dated producer Don Simpson during the early weeks of filming, then ditched him for director Tony Scott, whom she subsequently married.
Shortly after Tom’s divorce was finalized on February 4, 1990, Nicole told her mother, Janelle, who had taken leave from her job as a nursing instructor to visit her daughter and give Tom the once-over, that when work on Days of Thunder was completed, she planned to move into Tom’s newly purchased $4 million home at Pacific Palisades in California. By all accounts her mother was not surprised, her daughter having pursued previous love affairs with hotheaded abandon.
Like Tom, Nicole had Irish blood coursing through her veins, the Kidman family having immigrated to Australia from Ireland as free settlers in 1839. Born in 1967 in Honolul
u, Hawaii, to Australian parents, Nicole was raised a Catholic, attending Mass every week. Yet she was willful and strong-minded, dropping out of school at the age of sixteen to pursue an acting career. “I was a nightmare to my parents,” she later told Movieline magazine. Rebellious and impetuous, the unconventional seventeen-year-old flew to Amsterdam with her thirty-seven-year-old boyfriend for a vacation. When that relationship foundered, she lived on and off for three years with another older man, fellow actor Tom Burlinson, leaving him after turning down his offer of marriage.
The next man in her life, actor Marcus Graham, never really had a chance once the world’s sexiest man arrived on the scene. While Graham pined for her in Sydney, Tom was wooing Nicole, sending her love notes and flowers, usually red roses, almost daily. Marcus realized what was going on only when he watched Nicole walk along the red carpet with Tom—and Nic’s mother, Janelle, and Mary Lee—at the Academy Awards in Hollywood in March 1990. It was their first public appearance as a couple, Tom missing out for the Best Actor award to Daniel Day-Lewis for his performance in My Left Foot. Tom was gracious in defeat. “It was exciting, just getting nominated. That acknowledgment from my peers.”
The evening was glamorous relief from the expensive growing pains associated with his latest movie baby. Bad weather, an unfinished script, technical problems, and a ballooning budget—escalating from $40 to $70 million, including a handsome $7 million fee for Cruise—made Days of Thunder a seat-of-the-pants production. Working with an incomplete script meant that Cruise and other actors were being fed new pages of dialogue every day, the leading man reading lines off the dashboard of his 180-mile-per-hour stock car. Disaster was not long in coming: After Tom was involved in a high-speed crash as he squinted at his script, writer Robert Towne dictated dialogue to him through his headset.
Tom Cruise Page 16
