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.
In a r
emarkably well-organized and coordinated campaign, some 8,300 people worldwide gathered in protest outside Scientology buildings in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, London, Melbourne, Dallas, Houston, and elsewhere. (Tom and Katie were resident at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre during the protests, as their home was under renovation.) Wearing Guy Fawkes masks—from the movie V for Vendetta—to protect their identity, they chanted anti-Scientology slogans against a background of the 1980s pop song, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” by singer Rick Astley. As writer Chez Pazienza wryly observed, “It’s kind of satisfying to watch someone turn the tables on Scientology, using the same brand of furtive cloak and dagger absurdity to publicly shame an adversary that the church has used for decades.”
While the demonstrators, mainly young college students, did not take themselves too seriously, Scientology did. In retaliation, they made their own video of allegations accusing the group of terrorism and hate crimes. They claimed they had received harassing phone calls, death and bomb threats, and envelopes containing white powder that could be anthrax. To long-time anti-Scientology activists, their protests had the familiar ring of humorless exaggeration and hysteria that greets even moderate criticism of the church. No infraction escapes notice. A snarky comment by a US Weekly writer about a shiny suit worn by Nicole Kidman—“Bonus: This specially designed suit repels Scientologists”—earned a lawyer’s letter from celebrity Scientologist Kirstie Alley demanding that the writer be fired and that the publication “apologize and commit to a thorough examination of why you have chosen to foster animosity and bias against Scientologists.”
Meanwhile, many former senior officials and upper-echelon members came out publicly in support of my book. The response of one former high-ranking official who worked at the Hemet base for twenty years was typical: “I saw Scientology’s denial of all sorts of things you reported which just burned me up, especially how they don’t separate families—biggest lie in the world.” Another former member posted the names and details of thirty couples who had been split up because of Scientology.
Most prominent was Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of church leader David Miscavige, who wrote an open letter to spokeswoman Karin Pouw in January 2008. The 24-year-old former Scientologist, who was brought up in the faith, launched a withering assault on the church and its most prominent supporter, Tom Cruise: “I am absolutely shocked at how vehemently you insist upon not only denying the truths that have been stated about the church in that biography, but then take it a step further and tell outright lies.” She went on to denounce Tom Cruise for “supporting a religion that tears apart families, both in the media and monetarily.”
Jenna described how her own family—her father Ron is David Miscavige’s elder brother—was scattered by the organization’s policies. When her parents left the church in 2000, she decided to stay but was prevented from contacting them. She said that Scientology officials intercepted letters from her parents and friends, kept her from speaking to them on the phone, and only allowed her to visit them once a year for four days—and then only after her parents threatened legal action. “Hell, if Scientology can’t keep his family together then why on earth should anyone believe the church helps bring families together,” she wrote. For her pains, Jenna, who teamed up with other disillusioned Scientology “aristocrats” to form an organization to help Scientology children, ExScientologyKids.com (Motto: “I was born. I grew up. I escaped.”), found herself harassed by church officials. She told the New York Post that the church ordered friends to “disconnect” from her.
Her experience failed to deter celebrity Scientologist Jason Beghe from speaking out several weeks later. The one-time Scientology poster boy and star of G.I Jane and TV series like Melrose Place and American Dreams blew the whistle on the fourteen years—and one million dollars—he had spent inside the organization. He accused the church of being a “rip-off” and a “dangerous cult” whose purpose was to create a “brainwashed, robotic version of you.”
As Beghe and others spoke out, other former high-ranking Scientologists were simply baffled by the church’s insistence that Tom Cruise held no official or unofficial position inside the organization. For example, film producer Marc Headley, who was brought up inside the faith and worked closely with David Miscavige for fifteen years, recalled that the church leader had told him and others at Gold base in Hemet: “If I could make Tom Cruise IG [Inspector General, second in command] I would.” Moreover, Headley considered the actor effectively the “dean” of the organization’s celebrities, recalling the time that Tom ordered fellow Scientology stars including Anne Archer, Giovanni Ribisi, Jenna Elfman, and Jason Lee to attend a meeting at Celebrity Centre, where he lectured them for failing to work hard enough for the cause, accusing them of being “out ethics,” essentially not pulling their weight. The message got home.
Second in command or not, he was treated as anything but an ordinary parishioner. A number of former Scientology executives, several of whom were personal friends of L. Ron Hubbard, recalled the building of Bonnie View, the home designated for the church’s founder after he had finished his planetary peregrinations. For the overwhelming majority of Scientologists, this shrine to Hubbard—with a freshly laundered set of clothes laid out every day in case the founder turns up unexpectedly—is strictly off-limits. Not only did Tom regularly tour the mansion, he was wined and dined there by David Miscavige. As always, he was treated like royalty when he visited the remote base; for example, if he was arriving by helicopter, the hillsides had to be freshly planted and brown patches of grass removed and replaced.
Then there was the surprise birthday party for Tom on Freewinds, the church’s own cruise ship. Every year the church organizes a special celebration to commemorate the birthday of L. Ron Hubbard, flying in musicians, entertainers, cooks and camera crew at an estimated cost of $300,000. After the festivities in the summer of 2004, they were all flown back again for Tom’s lavish birthday concert—along with the chefs and staff from his favorite sushi restaurant. When he walked into the ship’s ballroom, a solo guitarist on stage played the Top Gun theme. For the next hour, singers and dancers entertained the star, singing a medley of tunes from his movies while film clips played in the background. At the end, Tom, casually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, joined singers and dancers on stage to reprise the Bob Seger hit, “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which he had danced to as a fresh-faced actor in Risky Business. “It’s the best birthday ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, and I mean ever,” he told the assembled throng, which included David and Shelley Miscavige. Probably the most expensive, too. Former Scientologists who helped organize the bash estimate it cost the church $300,000—the same as the Hubbard birthday celebration—to entertain the multimillionaire. As Gawker wryly noted when they first aired the video on their website in March 2008: “If Cruise was merely a humble parishioner why in Xenu’s name did the sect spend six figures to celebrate his birthday in 2004?”
Why, too, did David Miscavige personally supervise every aspect of the event, from the camera positions to the dance choreography? According to Scientology producer Marc Headley, he also edited and approved the commemorative video, which he presented to Tom. He did the same thing before the now-infamous gala at Saint Hill where Tom told the world that only Scientologists could help at the scene of a car accident. Not only did Miscavige produce the video preceding Tom’s award of the Freedom Medal of Valor, according to Headley, he instructed the camera crews filming the audience what and what not to shoot. Strictly off-limits were photos of Tom and his new girlfriend, aspiring actress Yolanda Pecorara. Tom had first met the 19-year-old daughter of a Nicaraguan mother and Italian father at the opening of a new Scientology centre in Madrid in September 2004, a few months after his breakup with Penelope Cruz. With her big brown eyes and striking looks, she bore a remarkable resemblance to the Spanish actress. There was, however, one big difference: Yolanda had been a Scientologist since the age of 13. The 42-year-old actor and his teenage girlf
riend, whose only claim to fame was appearing as a bikini babe in the TV drama Dr. Vegas, dated for a few months. Tom invited her to join the Beckhams and the Miscaviges at a Real Madrid soccer game in October 2004, and a month later, dressed in a long coral satin gown, she was by his side when he accepted his award. By February 2005, he had moved on to another Cruz look-alike, Sofia Vergara.
That evening the cameramen clearly forgot their orders, as brief shots of the couple were evident when the video surfaced in January 2008. The emergence of a Scientologist teenager as a possible partner encouraged the whispers previously alluded to in the original biography, that church elders had played cupid for the Hollywood star. In March 2008, Marc Headley, who was audited by Tom when he worked at Hemet, claimed in a British tabloid that church officials had actively tried to find him a bride. According to Headley, church officials put out a casting call to actresses for a part in an upcoming Tom Cruise movie. Auditions were held in a room at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood, where Headley was in charge of taping the interviews to be screened personally by David Miscavige. First they rounded up Scientology actresses like Erika Christensen, Erica Howard and Sofia Milos, but none was deemed acceptable. “They had to look outside the herd, so to speak,” Headley told writer Lewis Panther. “They went for Jennifer Garner, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Alba, in that order. Jennifer and Jessica didn’t bite, but Scarlett took the bait and came in for an audition. When she arrived at the audition address and found out it was the Scientology centre in Hollywood, she freaked out and didn’t do a tape.” Finally they hit on Katie Holmes after they read an interview saying that she would like to marry him. Headley claimed they sent a senior Scientologist to New York, where she was then living, to vet her.
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