Pellicano was less skeptical. “I think the kid is very credible,” he told Barresi after Hamilton left. The unspoken implication was that they could make money out of the hapless Hamilton—and Tom Cruise—by reporting their findings to his lawyer, Bert Fields. They reasoned that Fields would set the legal wheels in motion, sending threatening letters to Hamilton and paying Pellicano, his PI of choice, and Barresi for their trouble. It was a win/win play—at least for them; the only losers were Hamilton and Cruise. As Barresi conceded, “The story is perfect because it is never going to see light of day but it’s going to be enough to incite Cruise by going for his Achilles’ heel. Everyone knows that Cruise goes nuts when he is called a homo. Walking both sides of the street is a great way of making money. Celebrities are naïve and have deep pockets.”
In the end, Hamilton went into hiding, claiming that after he received threatening letters from Fields, his phones were tapped and he was being followed by unmarked cars. Not that the detective duo had much sympathy. At a subsequent meeting, Hamilton claimed he’d had an affair with Pellicano’s favorite singer, the blind Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. “What a sick bastard,” observed the sultan of sleaze after virtually kicking Hamilton out of his office. For his pains, Barresi eventually received five thousand dollars from Bert Fields, and was so proud of his association with Tom’s lawyer that he carries a photocopy of the check to show to friends and acquaintances.
As fiercely as Tom wielded his legal sword, the media proved a many-headed Hydra. That same month, June 2001, Michael Davis, publisher of Bold magazine, offered $500,000 to anyone who had photographic evidence that Tom Cruise was gay. Once again Fields reached for his favorite number, filing a $100 million lawsuit against Bold in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The magazine published a retraction.
Even though Tom has successfully—and rightly—won every legal battle about his sexuality, at the time of writing he seems to have lost the war. There are more than 2 million Internet sites today relating to “Tom Cruise gay”—slightly more than for a similar heartthrob, Brad Pitt, who has never taken legal action and has publicly stated he will not marry Angelina Jolie until gay marriage is acceptable in America. Indeed, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty has even spoken publicly about the rumor that he and Tom were caught in bed together by his wife. “If I was gay, Tom Cruise wouldn’t be on the top of my list,” he said. “It would be Brad Pitt.”
The irony did not escape Tom’s inner circle that, in the midst of quashing gay slurs, he was quietly dating one of the world’s sexiest women, Penélope Cruz. In July he took a break from filming his latest movie, Minority Report, directed by his friend Steven Spielberg, to fly her on board his private plane—now named Sweet Bella rather than Sweet Nic—to a private island near Fiji in the South Pacific. Originally the island’s owner, Canadian entrepreneur David Gilmour, who started the Fiji bottled water company, had offered the private use of the Wakaya Club resort to Tom and Nicole—a further signal that when the invitation was proffered the couple had not been contemplating divorce. As it was, Nicole and her children, as well as her friend actor Russell Crowe used the resort for the first week, Bella and Connor staying on to join their father and Penélope Cruz for a further two weeks. Penélope’s arrival certainly surprised Nicole, the actress later complaining to a friend, “He flat-out swore to me up and down that there was nothing going on. He obviously had her waiting in the wings.”
The children knew before the rest of the world that Tom and Penélope were a serious item, and in late July their spokesman, Pat Kingsley, confirmed for the first time that the couple had indeed been dating. In early August, Penélope was diplomatically absent from the Hollywood premiere of The Others, where the leading lady and executive producer walked the red carpet separately. The very next day, on August 7, 2001, their divorce was legally finalized, the couple agreeing to joint custody of the children and promising not to talk to the media about each other.
A few weeks later their finances were settled, Nicole winning twice the original offer. While he retained their compound in Colorado, Nicole kept the houses in Pacific Palisades and Sydney, Australia. When she emerged from her lawyer’s office after signing the divorce papers, Nicole was pictured letting out a piercing scream of relief.
It was a relief, too, for Penélope, who could now appear in public with her lover. First, though, she wanted him to meet the other man in her life, flying her father, Eduardo, to Los Angeles to see her and Tom. For all her spiritual exploration, Penélope was very family oriented, and her father’s approval was important to her. If he had doubts about her twice-married boyfriend, Eduardo kept them to himself, at least for the time being. It would only be later that he looked more carefully—and skeptically—at the man and his controversial religion.
As for Penélope, she was delighted, as Nicole had been a decade earlier, that she no longer had to be kept in the shadows. As her personal assistant Kira Sanchez said, “Penélope has told her friends she’s mighty relieved it’s all out in the open. She told Tom she didn’t like skulking around.”
CHAPTER 10
It was Michael LaForte’s thirty-ninth birthday, and normally he took the day off to play golf or go fishing. For once he decided to head into the office. He ordered his usual large coffee—milk and one sugar—from Bill Schamber’s stand on the train platform in Middleton, New Jersey, before the hour-long ride into Manhattan. As Bill poured the coffee, they chatted about the wonderful weather. It was such a glorious morning that Bill had already decided to shut his stand early and go fishing. Michael was tempted, but kept to his plan—to leave work early and have a birthday party with his two young children and pregnant wife, Fran, at their home in Holmdel, New Jersey.
He never made that birthday party. At 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael was in his office on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when American Airlines Flight 11 ripped into the building, some fifteen floors down from where he was sitting. At 8:51, Michael phoned home, leaving a farewell message on the answering machine. He told his wife, who was dropping the children at school, that there was no way out. “Franny, I love you. I love you and the kids. A plane hit the building. I don’t know what’s going on. I will talk to you. Love you, bye.”
Although his voice was tense, Michael wasn’t the type to panic. Not only had he spent four years as a captain in the Marine Corps, he had been inside the World Trade Center during the 1993 bombing. Of the thousands who faced their fate that day, few would have battled harder to survive than Michael LaForte. He was an easygoing but totally driven, competitive man who had worked his way up to the position of vice president at his brokerage firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.
It was an aggressive spirit that Tom Cruise knew well. He and Michael had been friends since the Glen Ridge days, staying in touch long after his other high-school buddies had gone their own ways. As young men they had gone barhopping and carousing together, and when Tom became famous, he took his friend to the Super Bowl, film premieres, and other Hollywood events. Every so often, Michael and his wife, Fran, had joined Tom and his then-wife, Nicole, for dinner, even though Nicole preferred more glamorous friends.
As Michael’s older brother, Sam LaForte, joined Fran in looking for Michael, he thought about the times when his kid brother and Tom had come running to him after getting themselves in some scrape. This was different. Like thousands of others, Sam and Fran walked around New York, looking in hospitals and handing out flyers, searching for anything to end the uncertainty. A heavily pregnant Fran even appeared on NBC TV appealing for information: “You just want to die. I don’t know where he is. And I know if he made it out of that building he would have called me up immediately because that’s what he did the last time. So I know he’s hurt somewhere.”
Days later, Sam LaForte got a call saying that they had found Michael. “They said he was okay, in the sense that they had found his body intact. It was a kind of awful closure.”
On September 21, Cruise
joined a host of other celebrities in front of 89 million viewers on the “Tribute to Heroes” telethon to raise money for victims of 9/11. Before the program, he nestled on a sofa with his lover, Penélope Cruz. When his slot came, Cruise delivered a tribute to Father Mike, the New York Fire Department priest who died during the rescue mission, but made no mention of his good friend Michael LaForte.
For people who knew Tom, this was a surprise. During the same telethon, Sting dedicated his song “Fragile” to his friend Herman Sandler, who had been killed in the attacks. Tom’s failure to make a similar public tribute to Michael LaForte baffled and angered many in Glen Ridge. His high-school buddy Vinnie Travisano knew how close Tom and Michael had been. “I soured on him a lot after that. We watched, waiting for the moment when he would talk about the loss of his good friend Michael. He never said a word. That blew us all away, all of us from Glen Ridge who knew him. It would have brought it home for a lot of people. For Tom not to say anything was so hurtful.” Although he sent flowers to Fran LaForte and his mother, Mary Lee South, and attended the funeral, Tom has never publicly acknowledged the loss of his friend.
That said, Scientologists view death in a cold, matter-of-fact way. They call it “dropping the body,” believing that an individual’s spirit will inhabit another body at some point in the future. As far as they are concerned, Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, will return any day now, hence the construction of lavish homes around the globe for the dead leader.
While the showman in Michael—his catchphrase was “Life is a cabaret”—would have loved the fame of a televised tribute, the trauma of 9/11 had apparently woken something deeper inside Tom. As Sam LaForte reflects, “I look at life 200 percent differently now; a lot of people do. It doesn’t surprise me that Tom Cruise was changed.” The feelings of helplessness, confusion, and disbelief that people around the world experienced after 9/11 did not sit well with the self-assured conviction by which Tom had always led his life. “After 9/11, I was so angry. I was devastated. I thought, ‘What can I do to help?’ ” he said later.
Tom Cruise was not so much a man in mourning as a man incensed, those in his inner circle witnessing a genuine transformation. From the smoke clouds over the Manhattan skyline was born Scientology’s most influential advocate. He later described the moment when he saw the catastrophe: “Once the towers had gone down and we were faced with the aftermath of their collapse, I could not get out of my mind that huge cloud billowing across Manhattan.”
When his close friend and Scientology leader David Miscavige called 9/11 a “wake-up call,” Tom was certainly listening. As one Scientology insider observed, “I have no doubt Tom Cruise had conversations with Miscavige about what more he could do to spread Scientology, because obviously time was running out.” Certainly the events surrounding 9/11 seemed to confirm L. Ron Hubbard’s apocalyptic worldview. Scientology followers were urged to work harder, run faster, to save a planet overrun by “merchants of chaos.” They sent scores of so-called Volunteer Ministers in distinctive yellow shirts to Ground Zero, to offer “contact assists”—a kind of spiritual massage—to rescue workers, to recruit new members, and to interfere with the work of mental health professionals. Such was their persistence that the National Mental Health Association warned the unsuspecting public that Scientologists were operating at the site.
Hubbard’s words provided clarity for Cruise, showing him the chaos and evil in the world’s events from a broader perspective. The vision of time that Scientology provided was inviting. It removed the uncertainty and the desolation that presented itself, by revealing the bigger battle that had been running over several millennia, of which these flashes of devastation were just a part. For Tom, the days of hiding in the shadows were over; he now saw himself as part of his faith’s larger purpose. More had to be done by everyone, but on Tom’s shoulders rested even greater responsibility. With his fame came a duty to bring Scientology to the masses.
On November 16, 2001, the day that Fran LaForte gave birth to the son who would never meet his father, Tom sealed the final financial settlement in his divorce with Nicole. He was now working from a fresh slate, withdrawing into the intimacy and security of his own family and the family of Scientology. His sisters and their children moved into his new Hollywood home; his mother was a regular visitor, and, in time, like Penélope, would start taking courses at the Celebrity Centre. There was talk that he and Penélope were on the brink of marriage.
The evidence of 9/11 was matched by the siren calls inside his extended family. Without any dissenting voice from Nicole, the message from Tom’s sister Lee Anne, a dedicated Scientologist, was to rededicate himself to the church. Scientology had the tools to help him through his marital breakup, the gay rumors, and the destruction of 9/11. While Tom had always been committed to his faith, he had never been vocal, at times almost embarrassed by his association with the organization. In fact, in 1993 his publicist, Pat Kingsley, had attacked questions about his religion as “un-American.” At that time, he was indeed questioning his commitment, Scientology leaders working assiduously behind the scenes to “recover” their high-profile Hollywood star. Now the man who had spent so long deflecting questions about Scientology was transformed into a celebrity crusader.
The first indications of his changed perspective came in December 2001, when Tom was promoting Vanilla Sky, interestingly a story about a wealthy publishing tycoon who continues his life on Earth after death with the help of the mysterious Life Extension Corporation. When the subject of 9/11 was broached during an interview with Vanity Fair, the writer noted with surprise how Cruise’s whole appearance seemed to change. His voice fell almost to a whisper and his eyes were “boiling with late-night rap-session intensity,” as he said: “Things mean something different than they did before September 11. It’s a responsibility not only for our country but for the entire planet.” In another conversation, Tom observed, “I think the World Trade Center has kind of ripped the social veneer off this country.”
During the worldwide publicity for Vanilla Sky, which began in the New Year, for the first time Tom used his star status to aggressively sell Scientology. Noticeably, Penélope joined him as they lobbied American ambassadors in France, Germany, and Spain—all countries hostile to Scientology—to help advance the cause of “religious freedom.” When the couple arrived in Berlin, they met with the U.S. ambassador, Dan Coats, lobbying him to urge the German government, which had placed the sect under police scrutiny, to legitimize Scientology. After their meeting, Cruise spent nearly an hour signing autographs and talking to starstruck embassy staff.
This was not the first time Scientology had used celebrities to try to gain a toehold in what they considered an important market. In January 1997, thirty-four Hollywood personalities, including Dustin Hoffman, Goldie Hawn, Larry King, and Oliver Stone, put their names to an open letter to German chancellor Helmut Kohl, likening the plight of Scientologists in Germany to the persecution of the Jews under Hitler. The full-page ad, published in the International Herald Tribune, prompted the U.S. State Department to denounce the letter as an “outrageous charge” that bore “no resemblance to the facts of what is going on there.” It later became clear that almost all those who signed, while not necessarily Scientologists, were linked to Tom Cruise or John Travolta. In response, the German ambassador made it clear that Scientology posed a threat to Germany’s basic democratic principles. “The organization’s pseudo-scientific courses can seriously jeopardize an individual’s mental and physical health and it exploits its members.” Undaunted, in September 1997, celebrity Scientologists Chick Corea, Isaac Hayes, and John Travolta appeared before a congressional commission in Washington to complain about the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.
When the Vanilla Sky tour moved on to Spain, where Scientologists were accused of such crimes as kidnapping, tax fraud, and damaging public health (but were subsequently acquitted), Penélope’s presence in her hometown of Madrid was a significant bonus. The f
act that a famous Spanish Catholic was prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with her actor boyfriend gave the faith an air of legitimacy. Which, of course, was the strategy.
If anything, opposition to his faith merely inflamed Tom’s missionary zeal. He took time off from promoting Vanilla Sky to tell a whooping, near-delirious audience of Scientologists in Hollywood that he had just achieved “the most important thing he had ever done” in his life: He had reached the exalted status of Operating Thetan V. It had been an arduous—and expensive—journey, taking him nearly a decade to progress along Hubbard’s bridge from OT III to OT V. Tom now had credentials beyond his celebrity—he had been cleared to audit people through the lower levels of Hubbard’s New Era Dianetics.
But the attractions of Hubbard’s teachings went far beyond that. Hubbard had the expansive imagination of a science fiction writer and the purpose-driven preaching of a cult leader. He conceived of life in different universes and times, claiming to have visited heaven twice and promising to return to Earth after his death. It was Hubbard’s galactic vision that provided the basis for John Travolta’s much-lambasted 2000 film Battlefield Earth. In this vision, Earth is an empty wasteland, where “vicious Psychlo aliens” rule over what remains of the human population they had destroyed a millennium earlier. It is a story in which the last survivors join together in a desperate attempt to drive the Psychlos from the world before man is lost forever.
For Scientologists, this kind of apocalyptic view is not fiction. The church has spent millions of dollars inscribing hundreds of stainless-steel tablets and disks with Hubbard’s musings, encasing them in heat-resistant titanium so that they will survive a nuclear blast, and storing them in vaults in at least three remote sites in California and New Mexico. One site in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is marked with huge hieroglyphics, akin to crop circles. It is believed that these signs will indicate to aliens from outer space that there was once intelligent life on Earth, and show where that intelligence is stored—just in case we’re no longer around when they arrive. It is revealing that this science-fiction worldview, although widely derided and parodied, could speak to someone like Tom Cruise.
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