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But the second restriction was even more shocking: PMK demanded approval of wording of the on-air “teasers” that television stations used to announce any Cruise interviews. “Teasers are fine, but sometimes they’re very misleading,” Kingsley said. “We have no problem if they announce that they have an exclusive interview with Tom Cruise, but if it gets into a lengthy description of what the interview is about, we want approval.” An embarrassed Columbia told irate reporters that other stars from
A Few Good Men
—including Kevin Bacon and Kevin Pollack, as well as director
Rob Reiner—would be happy to chat with journalists who didn’t sign the consent forms. “That would be like doing a story on U2 and not getting Bono,” grumbled one broadcaster, who reluctantly signed the agreement. “We’re signing it because our station was already expecting the interview. It’s Tom Cruise and it’s a big movie.”

Pat Kingsley could have her choice of covers, and with the release of
A Few Good Men,
a men’s magazine like GQ seemed a good place for a cover story on Cruise. Writer Stephanie Mansfield interviewed the actor at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles; Pat Kingsley was sitting in the next room.

“The interview lasted probably the requisite hour and a half,” Mansfield recalled. “He seemed very congenial if somewhat—I would say—aloof. He’s not a real easy person to get to know—certainly in that situation.” But, according to Mansfield, she felt she and Cruise had “bonded in a mutually self-serving way” that journalists and their subjects often do.

Shortly after the interview, Mansfield mentioned to a friend that she was profiling Cruise. “My friend said ‘This is such a coincidence. You should call my cousin who grew up with him,’ ” said Mansfield. “So I called this young girl who went to Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey with Tom Mapother … As it turned out, she was very positive about Tom. She thought he was a really nice guy.”

When Cruise telephoned Mansfield for a scheduled follow-up interview, she casually mentioned the conversation with Cruise’s old classmate. “He went ballistic,” Mansfield recalled. “He started yelling into the phone: How dare I talk to someone he went to school with. What is this, a profile or a biography? He accused me of conducting a ‘covert operation.’ He was so
irrational.
He didn’t make any sense. I tried to explain that the former friend didn’t say anything negative, but it didn’t matter. He was obviously very upset that I had done any reporting, that I hadn’t just taken the interview with him and printed it verbatim.”

Cruise slammed down the phone, and Mansfield just sat there, somewhat stunned. In a few minutes, the phone rang again. It was Pat Kingsley. “She basically threatened me,” said Mansfield.

“I’ve been in the business too long to threaten someone,” said Kingsley. “What I did say is that it would be a long time before I would subject a client to be interviewed by her.”

But Mansfield has a different recollection. “She said, and this is a direct quote, ‘Tom is going to be around for a long time and I’m sure that you want to be around in your business for a long time.’ I said, ‘Pat, I don’t know what you’re driving at.’ She made it very clear that if I used any of this interview from this young girl, I would be blacklisted from her clients.”

Mansfield decided to use the material anyway, and when the piece was published, it was one of the most revealing portraits ever written about Cruise. Kingsley decreed that Mansfield would never interview another one of her clients. “Am I stupid?” she said of such blackballing tactics. “If they burn me once, won’t they burn me twice? I will absolutely not work with them again. I’ll tell a magazine, ‘Listen, this writer has a bad history with my clients so give us another writer.’ The same with a photographer. If a client doesn’t wish a particular photographer to shoot him, why should we allow it?”

“I guess I’m perceived in the industry as a junkyard dog by making a phone call and doing some reporting,” Mansfield said. “If you want to stay in the business of interviewing celebrities, you better write the sort of piece that is fawning and adoring and has no facts.”

After the junket for
A Few Good Men,
a few editors grumbled that it was high time to take action against publicists like Kingsley. The cause was taken up by Lanny Jones, the top editor at
People.
Pat Kingsley had been battling with
People
for some time, ever since she claimed that the magazine reneged on a promise to give Mary Tyler Moore photo approval in the early eighties. The feud intensified when, according to Kingsley, the magazine used some pictures of Goldie Hawn without her permission. “The photographs made her look heavy,” Kingsley says. The accompanying article—a “write around” done without the cooperation of the subject—further infuriated Kingsley, who accused the magazine of “subterfuge” and “misrepresentation” by using quotes that had appeared elsewhere. Kingsley started withholding her clients from
People.
That July, Jones invited a group of top journalists from
Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Time,
El,
Premiere,
and
TV Guide
to a meeting at the Regency Club in Westwood, California. Jones urged them to establish a written set of rules that every publication and television show—except “the bottom feeders like the tabloids”—would follow when dealing with press agents. “He’s just mad because
People
has lost the monopoly it used to have on celebrity interviews,” according to another journalist, who said that
People
still hadn’t recovered from the backlash to its 1988 Robin Williams interview.
“People
used to be able to call the shots. Now it’s finding it hard to find any big stars who’ll sit down for an interview.” The problem wasn’t just the fallout from the Robin Williams debacle.
People
had to compete for interviews with mainstream magazines like
Time
and
Newsweek,
upscale newcomers like
Premiere
and
Vanity Fair,
and men’s and women’s magazines like
Mademoiselle
and
Esquire
that almost never used to put celebrities on their covers.
People
magazine was still hugely successful, but by the time of the junket for
A Few Good Men,
celebrities were no longer coming to it. In its early years, virtually all of
People’s
covers were done with the celebrities’ cooperation, ten years later that number was closer to 75 percent, by the mid-1990s, it was down to about 20 percent. “One problem we at
People
face in a seller’s market is that, while we can stand on principle and say, ‘No, we won’t allow you photo approval,’ or whatever, someone like a Pat Kingsley can always go to another magazine who will,” Jones complained.

“Jones said that if we bond together and agree to stop making deals with publicists,” one attendee recalled, “they will lose their grip over us.”

Kingsley wasn’t worried. “The media is incapable of sticking to any code,” she said. “All you have to do to break one of those alliances is offer someone an exclusive interview.”

The alliance crumbled.

After the Mansfield fiasco and the failed
People
rebellion, Kingsley decided to deny most of the print media access to her bigger stars. “The articles are just too tough, have too much of an edge,” she said. “It’s easier to do television. The public sees
what you have to say, rather than some writer’s interpretation of what you said…. Besides, people don’t read anymore.”

At junkets for Cruise’s next film,
The Firm,
TV reporters were given interviews but print reporters were greeted with a note from Cruise, explaining that he had to leave town. “I look forward to the opportunity to speak with you again in the future.” That opportunity did not come. Even Kingsley’s ally Liz Smith was told that Cruise didn’t want to speak with her. The actor was, it seems, upset by an extraordinarily gentle barb that less sensitive types would have taken as a compliment. Smith had written that Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn’s characters in
The Firm
“are wildly good-looking, have fabulous bodies and a fantastic sex life [so] don’t be surprised if the real-life Mrs. Cruise, Nicole Kidman, appears on the set with Tom’s lunch once in a while.”
*

“Tom was hurt by your item,” Kingsley told Smith, “he may not want to do an interview with you.” The gossip columnist was flabbergasted. “Here is a guy I’ve praised to the skies—his looks, his talent, his obvious adoration of Nicole Kidman. I even loved
“Far and Away”!
†
… I suppose I should be used to this irrational supersensitivity. But it’s always a surprise. And always a disappointment.’

Pat Kingsley and other celebrity protectors argued that Tom Cruise’s personal life—his religion, his romances—were nobody’s business. “Where is it written that stars are public figures? That the press has a right to know?” Kingsley said. “If they were elected officials, I could see it…. But where is it written that the star’s life is news?” Cruise’s life was news, some journalists countered, because he used his tremendous clout behind the scenes to advance his agenda. There was the issue of his religion, which, on the face of it, would certainly seem to be Cruise’s
private business. It was, however, a factor in the film industry; Cruise reportedly put pressure on studios he was working with to use ClearSound—a sound system developed by the Church of Scientology. While some, including non-Scientologists, swear by ClearSound, others are less taken with the system. Cruise tried to get producer Don Simpson to use ClearSound in
Days of Thunder,
but Simpson refused. When the producer, after having spent $25,000 on Scientology classes at Cruise’s urging, called the church “a con,” Cruise reportedly retaliated by having Simpson eased out of directing a
Top Gun
sequel. Cruise did succeed in persuading director Ron Howard to use the system in
Far and Away
—although it cost $120,000, when most sound systems cost about $5,000. Cruise, who also got Reiner to use ClearSound in
A Few Good Men,
was angered by reports that ClearSound was a “squeak-suppressing system” designed to lower the actor’s sometimes high-pitched voice. “Bullshit!” he said. “Alls it is, is a recording system, designed to capture the voice—not to enhance or change it.”

Given PMK’s demonstrated willingness to retaliate, few journalists dug into the story of Cruise’s involvement in Scientology, a subject he went to great lengths to keep out of the press. “He didn’t want people to know he belonged to the church, and they had promised him anonymity,” said
Star
gossip columnist Janet Charlton, who broke the story of Cruise’s membership. “It created a big stir. They went insane and they tried to track down my source.” Someone claiming to be from the phone company tried to get her phone records, she said. A man who said he was the
Star’s
lawyer tried to get Charlton to tell him the name of her source. Charlton said she later found out he was working for the church. “Reporting on Scientology can by very intimidating,” Charlton said. “But I deeply believe it’s an important, newsworthy story. Tom Cruise is a very powerful guy.”

In Germany, an anti-Scientology movement was led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who said that the religion bore a resemblance to organized crime and posed a threat to democracy. When some Germans organized a boycott of
Mission Impossible,
thirty-four non-Scientologist celebrities—including Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Stone, and Goldie Hawn—signed a letter to Chancellor Kohl,
comparing Germany’s persecution of Scientologists to the oppression of the Jews during the Holocaust. “In the 1930s, it was the Jews,” said the ad. “Today it is the Scientologists.” The letter, which ran as an ad in the
International Herald Tribune,
turned out to have been placed by Bert Fields, the Los Angeles lawyer who represented Cruise as well as fellow Scientologist John Travolta. When asked if he had attached his name to the letter for moral or more pragmatic reasons, one signer replied, “Do we all want to be in business with Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and would we sign a letter just to make them happy, make them like us? What do you think?”

Pat Kingsley was having to deal with questions not just about Cruise’s religion, but also his sexual orientation. In 1987, when Cruise was twenty-four, he had married Mimi Rogers, who was seven years his senior. The ceremony was so secretive that even Andrea Jaffe, who was his publicist at the time, didn’t know about it. Stories soon began to circulate that the couple was having trouble conceiving a child. Cruise denied any problems. In late 1989, he told a number of publications how happy he and his wife were. “I just really enjoy our marriage,” he said to Jann Wenner’s
Us
in December 1989. “I couldn’t imagine being without her.” One month later, Cruise announced that they were splitting and refused to discuss it. When
Playboy
asked Rogers if she had dumped Cruise, she bristled. “Is that the story—that I was bored with that child and threw him over, chewed him up and spit him out?” Rogers said. “Well, here’s the real story. Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. 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. My instrument needed tuning. Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.”

Almost immediately, Rogers withdrew the comment. According to some reports, Cruise’s lawyers had warned Rogers that she could lose her multimillion-dollar divorce settlement if she didn’t keep quiet about the marriage, but Rogers insisted she got no pressure from Cruise. She went on the
Tonight Show
and told Johnny Carson that she had made the comments as a spoof of
the way tabloids make up outrageous stories. “I came up with the most implausible thing I could think of,” she said. “Like a guy thinking of becoming a monk would be doing
Days of Thunder!”
*
Speculation about the actor’s sex life didn’t die down after his marriage to Nicole Kidman. Cruise’s new wife was put in the awkward position of defending her husband’s sexuality to the media. “I don’t know what [Mimi Rogers] meant, but I can assure you my husband’s no monk!” Kidman once said. “He’s a very sexual guy.” Kidman was even asked, point blank, if her husband was gay. “Gay? Really?” she said. “Well, ummm, he’s not gay in my knowledge. You’ll have to ask him.”