Ultimately, though, the process is seen by many former Scientologists as self-defeating and delusional. Many high-level Scientologists decide to leave the faith when they realize that it is not working for them—and costing them dear. Alexander, for example, reckons he spent around $1 million during his twenty-year membership. With his customary bluntness, Jesse Prince sums up the views of many former high-level devotees: “After a time you either lose your mind or lose your faith. You can spend hours talking to your thumb, elbow, or the crack of your ass, but it is not going to make you a spiritual demigod. Once you realize that, you are gone.”
Whatever doubts Tom had, they did not seem to last too long; the actor has been described by his Scientology mentors as a “dedicated and intense” student. There was, however, a question mark about how sincere he was, a sneaking suspicion that he was reading a line from a film script rather than being himself. Longtime Scientologist Bruce Hines, who audited numerous celebrities, including John Travolta, recalls: “My sense was that he was just acting rather than being genuine.” He was not the first, nor the last, to come away from an encounter with Tom wondering if his whole life was just an elaborate act.
Hines, a thoughtful former physics student from Denver who was drawn to Scientology because of the scientific claims underpinning Hubbard’s book Dianetics, became an unwitting participant in the relationship among Tom, Nicole, and David Miscavige. During the heady first months of her romance with Tom, the Australian sailed through the entry-level courses of Scientology, reaching the level of Operating Thetan II. Not only had she learned how to self-audit, she was seen as a candidate to go through the Wall of Fire, to be admitted into the inner sanctum. Yet she hesitated, citing film commitments. Even though she was shooting the bittersweet drama My Life in spring 1993, David Miscavige wanted to probe her explanation a little further.
Hines was asked to audit her, looking for any reasons why she was not making further progress. It seemed to Hines that there had been some conversation between David Miscavige and Tom Cruise about Nicole, and the session had been arranged to find a problem and use that to pull her back into line. The fact that she was close to her psychologist father—she began returning home to Sydney with increasing frequency—would always, by Hubbard’s definition, be a cause for concern. In preparation for the session, Hines reviewed her confidential files, which gave no clue about any issues or difficulties she had with her new faith. Previous auditors had the impression that she was a young woman who got on with life, suffering few upsets or setbacks.
During the twenty-minute question-and-answer session with Hines, Nicole made it clear that she was perfectly happy and nothing was bothering her. Nor did she give the impression that she was hiding anything, either verbally or while using the E meter. When he proffered his report, saying that there was nothing wrong with her, Hines was accused of making a mistake and punished for failing to find a problem. It was clear that the point of the session had not been to help Nicole, but to find any difficulty to use as an excuse to “handle” her and pull her back into the fold. As Hines now recalls, “They must’ve been concerned because from this point she started to drop out of Scientology. Obviously they blamed it on me. All they could say was that I didn’t ask the questions right. And I still to this day don’t think I made a mistake.” While Scientology teaches that we are all responsible for our own actions, that clearly does not apply to celebrities.
One woman Tom couldn’t “handle” was best-selling novelist Anne Rice. While Nicole may have been having private doubts about Scientology, Rice publicly voiced her concerns about Tom when he was cast in the role of the sinister, sexually deviant Lestat in the movie based on her book Interview with the Vampire. Rice much preferred Dutch actor Rutger Hauer for the role, and was equally displeased with Tom’s costar, Brad Pitt. “It’s like casting Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in the movie,” she raged. “Cruise is no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.”
Nor did it help that her comments coincided with calls in September 1993 for an investigation into the celebrity couple’s adoption, erstwhile Republican candidate for Senate Anthony R. Martin criticizing “Florida’s corrupt interstate adoption baby sellers.” While Martin was easy to dismiss as a frivolous publicity hound, Rice proved harder to shake off. Her public campaign, which incited thousands of her fans, resulted in death threats days before Tom began filming. These threats were taken seriously enough for the producers to erect a covered walkway from Tom’s trailer to the set, which also stopped paparazzi from taking shots of Tom in full vampire makeup, adding to the air of mystery surrounding the production.
When Tom accepted the award for Actor of the Decade at the Chicago International Film Festival in October 1993 shortly before filming started, he put a brave face on the personal mauling, saying that he “hoped to prove a lot of people wrong.” In an attempt to defuse the situation, Tom claimed he had read Rice’s 352-page tome when he was a teenager—no mean feat for a young man who’d described himself as a “functional illiterate” when he left high school.
In public Tom was placatory, but in private he was “deeply hurt” by Rice’s ferocious assault on his artistic integrity. Legendary producer David Geffen, who’d convinced Cruise to take the role in the first place, soothed him by saying that Rice was a woman gone mad. Nonetheless, it must have been a bewildering experience for a man who was now constantly surrounded by those who deferred to his will, sang his praises, and soothed his ego. What probably rankled most was the fact that there was no appreciation for the artistic and commercial risk he was taking by embracing the role of a creature of fluid sexuality.
For the first time here was the world’s sexiest man, whose audience had become used to seeing him in the role of clear-eyed hero, playing a villain, a character who seeks love beyond gender. It was all the more commendable, given the previous judgments of his friend David Miscavige, who had advised against his taking on the role of Edward Scissorhands because of that character’s ambivalent sexuality. The role of Lestat was much darker and riper. Whatever misgivings Miscavige may have had, Tom put his faith in the judgment of his wife and David Geffen, the man who had acknowledged his talent a decade earlier by choosing him for the lead in Risky Business.
Researching the role with his customary zeal and vigor, Tom set out to prove Rice and her fans wrong. Not only did he read all of Rice’s books, he went on a drastic diet, learned to play the piano, and flew to Paris with Nicole to soak up the decadent atmosphere. They roamed the streets, visiting museums and galleries—mostly at night, just like real-life vampires. “We just went wild,” he recalled. “Drank fine wine and danced till dawn.” Ironically, while Tom interpreted Lestat as essentially a lonely figure looking for love, the film’s director, Neil Jordan, compared the life of a vampire to that of a major Hollywood star—kept away from the daylight and living in a “strange kind of seclusion.” It seemed that no matter how hard Tom tried, he ended up playing himself.
Like the creature of the night he became for a time, he and Nicole enjoyed a restless life, roaming the planet in pursuit of their art, their times together punctuated by innumerable partings. During the filming of Interview with the Vampire, Tom was on location or in preproduction from October 1993 onward, spending time in Ireland, Paris, Louisiana, and San Francisco. Only occasionally was he accompanied by Nicole and Bella. As a result, while Hollywood was their home, they used their private Gulfstream jet the way others hail taxicabs. Their differing attitudes to this privileged lifestyle provide some telling insights into the space growing between them.
When he settled back into his kid leather seat, Tom would often look around the beautifully furnished cabin in wonder, literally pinching himself at his good fortune. “I can’t believe I have all this,” he would say. He never forgot that not so long ago he was stealing flowers to give his girlfriend, but now he was able to provide a life of luxury for the woman he loved. Not that she was overly impressed. Even though Nicole was strugg
ling to establish herself as an actress in her own right, on occasion she behaved like a full-fledged Hollywood diva. If the jet wasn’t stocked with beluga caviar and all the trimmings, she appeared deeply irritated, exhibiting a jaded petulance that seems to be the prerogative of the super-rich—or immensely talented.
Perhaps her attitude was born of frustration that her acting career was in a slump. At this stage Nicole was mostly known for her supporting role as Mrs. Cruise, rather than enjoying the spotlight in her own right. A star in Australia, she was seen by Hollywood movers and shakers to be hanging on Tom’s coattails, relying on him for introductions, scripts, and projects. She was being paid, as her biographer David Thomson points out, “bimbo money” to appear in movies where she invariably had to disrobe. While she enjoyed a mutual love affair with the camera, with or without her clothes, it was ultimately discouraging.
Even though she was only twenty-six, she questioned her ability sufficiently to enroll at the Actors Studio in New York to help get the creative juices flowing. In interviews she made it clear that she wanted to get her teeth into meatier character roles. So it is easy to imagine her utter distress when her friend from Sydney, director Jane Campion, turned her down for the part of the tragically vulnerable Isabel Archer in her proposed film adaptation of the Henry James novel Portrait of a Lady. Campion’s decision was the more disappointing as she had initially given Nicole the green light.
As far as the Australian director was concerned, Hollywood—or rather the roles she had accepted since arriving there—had somehow corrupted or blunted Nicole’s talent. Doubtless one of those movies was Batman Forever, where she played sexy psychologist Dr. Chase Meridian—interestingly, the very profession her faith vowed to wipe from the face of the planet—playing opposite Val Kilmer. “She’d made quite a few films I didn’t think suited her, and I don’t think she felt suited her, either,” Campion later explained. Eventually, after many tears, much heartache, and the indignity of auditioning, Nicole won Campion over and earned her coveted role.
That was in the future. As Tom marched firmly toward the summit of success, it seemed to Nicole that she was spending her days slipping and sliding in the foothills. Her own difficulties in finding a sure footing in the Hollywood hills, even with the help of an expert guide, serve as another reminder of how far and how quickly Tom had come. It was perhaps a sign of her intense desire, even desperation, to succeed that propelled her to dispense with the usual channels and phone director Gus Van Sant and plead for the lead role in his movie To Die For. That the producers’ first choice, Meg Ryan, had turned it down only seemed to spur Nicole on. She told Van Sant that she felt “destined” to play the cold, calculating, ruthlessly ambitious TV weather girl who has her husband killed by her student lover because she feels he is impeding her career.
For once the outlook was sunny, Nicole winning the role in what was to be her breakout movie. During her research for the part in late 1993, she proved herself as single-minded and driven as her husband, who was on hand to help her with character research. On one occasion the couple checked into a hotel in Santa Barbara on the California coast, not leaving for three long days as they immersed themselves in schlock television. Her new project meant that the Cruise family was on the move once again, renting a house in Toronto, Canada, for the summer of 1994.
While Nicole filmed—she banned her husband from the set when she was involved in steamy sex scenes with costars Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix—he earned his pilot’s license, on at least one occasion taking Nicole for a joyride in a two-seater biplane where she climbed out onto the wing, performed an arabesque, and then parachuted to safety. The actor later credited Hubbard’s teaching techniques for enabling him to read sufficiently well to understand the technical jargon in the flying manuals. He claimed that when he first became interested in learning to be a pilot, during the filming of Top Gun before he joined Scientology, he had to drop out because he couldn’t understand the technical terms.
Fortuitously, the high-profile Scientology couple left Toronto before their church was embroiled in yet another controversy. In February 1995, hearings started in a libel case that resulted in the Church of Scientology being ordered to pay $1.6 million in damages, the largest amount in the country’s history. The high-profile case made the church’s boasts that it had left its dark past behind seem rather hollow. After almost a decade of David Miscavige’s leadership, Scientology was as litigious and aggressive as ever.
If his faith was not for turning, one lady was: Tom’s toughest critic, Anne Rice. Shortly before Interview with the Vampire was released in November 1994, producer David Geffen took the risk of sending a video of the movie to the New Orleans home of the author. She was entranced and told Geffen so. He in turn called an astounded Cruise with the news. “She likes you, she loves it, you know. She really loves it.” Tom was amazed at Geffen’s chutzpah. “You have the luck of the Irish, David Geffen,” Cruise said. The about-face was complete when Rice took out advertisements in The New York Times and Vanity Fair praising the film and Tom Cruise for a performance that “perfectly captured” Lestat’s strength, humor, and boldness.
While his bisexual character encouraged yet more rumors about his own sexuality, Nicole and Tom were focused on adding to their family. After spending their fifth wedding anniversary that Christmas in their own ski chalet in Telluride, the chic Colorado resort where they married, the couple quietly filed adoption papers. In late February they became parents for a second time, adopting a baby boy they named Connor Antony Kidman Cruise. His mother was an African-American New Yorker who had given birth on February 6, 1995.
While Connor and his sister, Bella, were too young to appreciate it, they were now part of a family of traveling troubadours. Only weeks after Tom and Nicole signed the paperwork for the adoption, baby Connor was flown out of America. It marked a new stage in the couple’s marriage, a journey that took them away from their home for longer than any of them anticipated.
CHAPTER 8
At last he was truly where he felt at home, a place where he instinctively belonged. In the driver’s seat. In the cockpit. At the helm. Finally master of his own craft, producing, starring in, and fine-tuning his first blockbuster, Mission: Impossible. For the greenhorn producer, still only thirty-two, it was truly a risky business, as he steered a choppy course between the breezy demands of director Brian De Palma and the rocky financial realities of making a movie based on a half-forgotten 1970s TV show about maverick secret agents who foil endless dastardly plots of evildoers who want to take over the world.
Not only did he have the mental and physical pressures of playing a convincing leading man, in this case Special Agent Ethan Hunt, he also had to keep a weather eye on the budget and all the other routine details of sailing a multimillion-dollar project to the safe harbor of myriad multiplex screens. All that, as well as surviving an exploding fish tank, performing a backward somersault on a speeding train, and, famously, starfishing out his limbs as he was lowered 110 feet into a tightly guarded vault while carefully avoiding security laser beams. Perhaps his most difficult feat was not so much evading red lasers as finessing his way through the labyrinth of red tape in the former Communist Czech Republic, where filming took place in the winter of 1995.
For a controlling, driven perfectionist, the convoluted bureaucracy tested his patience to the limit. “Prague ripped us off. They are still getting used to democracy,” he said drily. Even a man-to-man chat with the country’s new President, playwright Vaclav Havel, failed to bring costs down. Still, one bonus of filming in the Czech capital was being able to stroll around the cobbled streets with Nicole, baby Connor, and Bella without attracting attention. It was a change to go sightseeing in daylight—normally the couple went out at night to avoid the attentions of fans and paparazzi.
Not that he had much chance to soak up the sights. As filming progressed in Prague and finally at the Pinewood Studios outside London, there was no doubt who was in command. Even th
ough De Palma was twenty-two years his senior, the novice producer insisted he have the final say over every detail of the production: from ordering daily script rewrites to rerecording the film score so that he could hear more flutes. Perhaps his focus on sound quality was inspired, or even recommended, by his spiritual Svengali, David Miscavige, whose sensitive ear was the final arbiter of Scientology’s own musical offerings.
Certainly there were those in Cruise’s faith who saw in his depiction of Ethan Hunt, a secret agent who lived on the edge, distinct similarities to the character of the Scientology leader. “Mission: Impossible is fascinating because in Ethan Hunt I could see David Miscavige,” observed Karen Pressley. “Both the character and the man were striving for the ultimate thrill. Just as David was living vicariously through Tom Cruise, I could see that Tom Cruise was slowly becoming David Miscavige. That transposition in itself was worthy of a movie script.” It was an early appreciation of the direction in which Tom was headed.
While Tom’s superagent role echoed the character of his close friend, Nicole was finally breaking free of the “wife of Tom Cruise” tag. In May 1995, Nicole flew to Cannes where her movie To Die For was showing at the film festival. For the first time she walked the red carpet on her own, her dress, slit to the hip, making almost as big a splash as her movie. Not only was she nominated for twelve awards, including a Golden Globe for best actress, which she eventually won, she was finally acknowledged as an actress to be reckoned with on her own merit.
As she basked in the critical glow—the film itself was only a modest financial success—she embarked on a serious role, which meant leaving Tom holding baby Connor and his sister, Isabella. Even though, in the summer of 1995, the couple were living in a palatial $15,000-a-week mansion in London, Nicole decided that she needed to be alone to focus on her role as heiress Isabel Archer for Jane Campion’s movie of Portrait of a Lady. It was a sign of her absorption, some would say self-absorption, and intensity that she had to immerse herself in the character without any distractions.
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