Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (25 page)

Even David Miscavige began to wonder whether he was neglecting his faith for his friend, a concern shared by his
father, Ron. Certainly throughout 1993, Miscavige was highly focused on Scientology, primarily on the long-running battle with the IRS to win charitable status. He chaired daily meetings in the base’s windowless high-tech “situation room”—based on the underground military nerve center in the White House—where lawyers, Scientology executives, and private investigators met to discuss tactics. At one point the cult was said to be spending $1.5 million a month on lawyers and investigators who were hired to probe the private lives of IRS senior staff to give them bargaining leverage in their quest for charitable status.

Although Scientologists like to perpetuate the myth that the Scientology leader walked in unannounced to see the director of the IRS, the reality was that it took years of intense negotiations before tax officials granted them tax exemption. As New York tax lawyer Robert Fink, who reviewed the agreement, observed, “The IRS normally settles on tax issues alone. What the IRS wanted was to buy peace from Scientology. You never see the IRS wanting to buy peace.”

This led to fevered discussion, possibly ill informed, that the unusual tax exemption was granted less because of any legitimate charitable status than because Scientology had dug up enough dirt on senior IRS officials to effectively blackmail them into submission. This gossip mattered little to the ten thousand cheering Scientologists who were told by Miscavige in October 1993 that “the war” was over. It was truly a triumph of the will, David Miscavige’s finest hour, the moment the image of Scientology began the transition from a shadowy criminal cult to a law-abiding church. One of the first people he told about his audacious victory was his friend Tom Cruise.

Yet just a few weeks before, the actor had publicly bridled when John H. Richardson, in an article published in the September issue of
Premiere
magazine, questioned his friendship with Miscavige and his involvement with Scientology. The actor was affronted that his religion was up for discussion, dismissing interest in his “good friend” David Miscavige as “off the wall.” He denied that Scientologists visited him on film
sets, found the idea that he had “handlers” repulsive, and admitted to visiting Gold only once for nonrecreational purposes.

This angry rebuttal came as a surprise to Scientologists at Gold, not least L. Ron Hubbard’s son-in-law Guy White, who vividly recalls struggling to carry a refrigerator on his own to Tom’s VIP bungalow prior to one of his many visits. As Tom himself said in his tart response to Richardson, who spent two years investigating the “sinister” organization and its “vindictive” gospel, “I know more about Scientology and the Church and its staff than any reporter I’ve ever met.”

Certainly Tom had every reason to claim expertise about the secret inner workings of his faith. By then he had progressed to what Scientologists call “the Wall of Fire,” or Operating Thetan III, where the secrets of the universe according to Hubbard were revealed. At that time Scientology’s creationist myth was a closely guarded secret, disciples told that the knowledge could prove fatal if they learned about it before they were ready. In the theatrical buildup, candidates were thoroughly audited and warned that they would have to pay huge damages if they ever divulged the secrets. Then they were given a clear plastic folder containing OT III materials as well as a key that they had to use within a matter of seconds to open the confidential cache. For some, it was an experience that was not so much
Mission: Impossible
as
Mission: Implausible
, as they sat in a special room and read, in a facsimile of Hubbard’s own handwriting, the hidden truth about the origin of man.

The story, which has since been widely parodied, notably on the TV cartoon
South Park,
revealed that 75 million years ago an alien ruler named Xenu solved the overpopulation in this part of the galaxy by sending 13.5 trillion beings to Earth, then called Teegeeack, and vaporizing them with nuclear bombs after first dumping them in volcanoes. These millions of lost souls, known as thetans, were implanted with numerous false ideas about God, Christ, and organized religion. They later attached themselves to human beings and, Hubbard argued, were the cause not just of an individual’s problems but of all the divisive issues in the modern world.

As Tom read this material, he learned that the next stage of his progress up “the bridge to total freedom” was to clear his body of these thetans. While the Hubbardian myth is now widely derided, the story is a test of belief, a leap of faith that vaults over rational doubts. For Tom to make further progress, he had to swallow every last drop of Hubbard’s theological Kool-Aid. “When you join OT III you are in a members’ only club where you are going all the way with Timothy McVeigh [the Oklahoma bomber],” observes Jesse Prince.

Like many other Scientologists who reach this level, Tom found the knowledge he had just received disturbing and alarming, as he struggled to reconcile the creationist myth with the more practical teachings contained in the lower levels of Scientology. This is not an unusual response. Those who have read the Wall of Fire story are very closely monitored for signs that they are backsliding, becoming disenchanted with their faith. Former Scientologists recall that, during this difficult time, Tom seemed uncharacteristically dazed and out of sorts, with dark rings around his eyes. “He went from a firecracker to a wet noodle,” said one insider. It was recalled that around this time relations became “ugly” between David Miscavige and the Hollywood actor, Tom complaining that he had studied all these years and the whole faith was about space aliens. He was treated with kid gloves, carefully wooed back into the fold. A team of senior Scientologists worked diligently to “recover” him, calling the actor into the president’s office at Celebrity Centre in Hollywood for auditing and counseling.

Once Tom had been “handled” to cope with the implications of this bizarre myth, the next stage of the lengthy—and expensive—process of enlightenment was to rid his body of thetans. Three or four times a day he had to go into a quiet, sealed room and locate and remove the thetans clinging to his body. As the thetans are invisible and often in a catatonic state, he could only find them telepathically, using his “E meter” to help detect them. Using his telepathic powers, he then asked each thetan a series of questions. The first question was always “What are you?” The thetan might answer, telepathically, in an infinite number of ways, claiming to be anything
from a car to a dust mite or even Napoleon. Whatever the reply, Tom had to continue asking the same question until the thetan finally responded, “I am me.” Once the thetan had recognized itself, Tom would have successfully rid himself of an unresolved spirit, which would theoretically float away and inhabit another being.

During the twenty-minute session of telepathic conversation he could remove up to ten body thetans. As odd as the process seemed, it had the effect of sending practitioners like Tom into a mild but euphoric trancelike state, the actor feeling good about that day’s “wins.” As former studio executive Peter Alexander, who attained the level of Operating Thetan VII, recalls, “The theory is that the more you exorcise your body thetans, the more you become yourself. It is a very self-absorbed process. It’s all about me, which is why actors love it. It appeals to the narcissist in you. You begin to feel more certain of yourself, that you, and you alone, have the answers to the secrets of the universe. During this time I was walking around spellbound from an endorphin rush. I now realize that I put myself in a light hypnotic trance.”

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.