Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (43 page)

In this home environment, the precepts and principles of their faith reigned supreme, Katie accepting and adopting the rituals of Scientology as she approached her due date. If
moving in with the future in-laws was daunting, Katie didn’t let on, saying enthusiastically, “There’s always something going on in the house and I love it.” Perhaps it reminded her of the noisy home life she’d enjoyed in Toledo, where, Katie told TV interviewer Jules Asner, she always felt a little bereft when her older siblings went to school and the house fell silent.

It was the manner in which she would be giving birth that caused the most comment. Hubbard’s followers have adopted a ritual known as a “silent birth,” the assumption being that any loud noises or words uttered as the baby is born, or even in the first week after birth, can have a detrimental effect on the infant. Hubbard is not alone, many believe that the “initial insult of birth,” when the infant goes from a warm, cozy world to bright lights and noise, can cause psychological trauma. The science fiction writer thought that such noise could produce damaging “engrams,” which would increase the need for auditing in the baby’s later life. From start to finish of the reproductive process, Hubbard counseled quiet. “Be silent during and after the sex act,” he exhorted his followers in his book
Child Dianetics.
Shortly before Katie went into labor, a number of six-foot boards were put up in Tom’s Beverly Hills home, reminding everyone who would be around Katie during the delivery to maintain absolute silence and stay calm.

On March 24, 2006, Tom’s nephew Liam even helped carry a stack of large cue cards into the couple’s home: “Be silent and make all physical movements slow and understandable,” read one. As Tom explained, “We’ve been doing seminars with the family just to educate them, so that everyone in the family understands. The kids, and even friends and different people.” He did point out to interviewer Diane Sawyer that the mother was allowed to make noise but not say words. When he announced that he was going to eat the baby’s placenta, it was consistent with the bizarre nature of Katie’s pregnancy.

Staff inside Tom’s compound needed no reminders of the need for quiet—and discretion. From the moment they were
allowed through the high-security gates, they entered a world of controlled calm, with the emphasis on control. Staff were monitored by a German governess, everybody watching everyone else. They were encouraged to remain silent, and if they did speak, it was in hushed tones. The daily cleaning crew, which started at dawn and left by eight
A.M.
so as not to disturb Tom and Katie, was under strict instructions to operate in silence. The home itself had the feel of a tasteful but anonymous upmarket hotel suite or upscale private hospital. As one insider said, “The place was as quiet as you can get. It was unreal.”

At the entrance stood a giant portrait of Tom and Katie, but their closeness in the picture was not reflected in the home. They lived in separate wings, with separate bathrooms, bedrooms, and sitting rooms, Isabella and Connor in their father’s quarters. Ostensibly, they slept apart because of Tom’s snoring. How Hubbard would interpret the effect of that sound on the baby’s development was uncertain. On April 18, 2006—twenty years and three months after the death of L. Ron Hubbard—Katie was driven to St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, where she gave birth, not to a red-haired boy, but to a baby girl, seven pounds, seven ounces, and twenty inches long. After carefully scrutinizing a couple of baby name books, the couple called their first daughter Suri, which they later discovered means “red rose.” Within twelve hours Katie and Suri had left the hospital, Tom flying his precious cargo to his four-hundred-acre ranch in Telluride, Colorado, for their week of Scientology silence.

While her birth was not quite the Second Coming die-hard Scientologists had hoped for, the arrival of Tom’s first biological child garnered worldwide attention, the hospital and their Hollywood home surrounded by dozens of photographers, reporters, and camera crews. As writer Mark Lawson noted drily, “There have previously been children whose birth attracted a certain amount of attention—Jesus Christ, Elizabeth Windsor, Brooklyn Beckham—but the arrival of Suri Cruise set a new record for interest in an infant.”

It did not take the attendant media long to point out the irony that along the same corridor in the same hospital on
the same day, Brooke Shields, so recently berated by Tom for taking drugs for postpartum depression, was giving birth to her second daughter, named Grier. Nor did it escape comment when Nicole Kidman’s publicist pointed out that, contrary to media reports, she had not sent congratulations to Katie on the birth of Suri. It was hardly surprising. Her friends described the announcement of Katie’s pregnancy as akin to a “kick in the stomach.” At the time, Nicole was trying to have children with her future husband, troubled country singer Keith Urban. She was on the margins of Tom’s life—and, it seemed, the world of her adopted children. Not only were Connor and Isabella educated in the gospel according to Ron Hubbard, but Nicole saw them only rarely. Katie had effortlessly assumed the role of their stepmother, she and Tom endlessly photographed watching the youngsters play soccer for their school teams.

It appeared that Katie’s parents were as much on the sidelines as Nicole Kidman. While their daughter was giving birth according to Scientology ritual, they were three thousand miles away in their vacation home in Florida. It was Tom’s Scientologist mother, Mary Lee, who lived with the couple, who was present when a Scientology-sanctioned epidural was administered to Katie to ease her pain during labor. It was another two weeks before Katie’s parents, who had been by her side throughout her Hollywood career, saw their granddaughter. In the tabloid soap opera that Tom and Katie’s life had become, her lawyer father, Marty Holmes, was characterized as fighting a futile rearguard action to protect his daughter’s interests. If he couldn’t stop her from becoming a Stepford wife, at least he could ensure that she was a wealthy Stepford wife. By the end of May, Katie’s father and Tom had come to a $52 million prenuptial agreement, the deal reportedly ensuring Katie $3 million a year for every year of marriage as well as a $19 million trust fund for his daughter and grandchild whether the marriage went ahead or not. Marty may have lost his daughter, but Katie had gained a small fortune. It was said that the reason Katie was pushing for a prenuptial agreement was to speed up the
marriage so that, once they had gone their separate ways, she could fight him for custody of Suri. Otherwise, she would be no match for his financial big guns—or his formidable clout in Hollywood.
Newsweek
magazine quoted a Holmes family friend as saying: “If she walks now, Tom will fight her for custody of Suri and Katie can’t outlast him in court. She knows she needs to marry him to get the money to fight him for custody.” This constant speculation was hard on Katie, who admitted to seeing all the gossip in the tabloids and on entertainment television. “Some of the crap that’s out there—the stuff that’s said about my parents and my siblings—it’s really frustrating,” she told writer Jane Sarkin.

While she put on a brave face in public, it was not long before cracks began to appear in the façade.

While Katie and baby Suri were quietly bonding in the Rocky Mountains under the watchful gaze of Scientology staff members, Tom was making as much noise as he could promoting
Mission: Impossible III.
In April 2006, less than a week after Suri was born, he flew to Rome for the film’s premiere, and for the next few weeks toured the planet attempting to re-create the movie’s breathless excitement. For the New York premiere in May, he traveled around Manhattan by motorbike, speedboat, sports car, subway, taxi, and helicopter before arriving at the movie theater. When he promoted the film in Japan, he hired a bullet train for himself and 150 of his fans.

Although the movie, directed by J. J. Abrams, the creative force behind the TV series
Lost
and
Alias
, had its fair share of leaping from skyscrapers, exploding bridges, and edge-of-the-seat, life-and-death drama, the star of the show, at least as far as the media was concerned, was sleeping in a crib in the Cruises’ mountain retreat in Telluride, Colorado. Nothing was too much trouble for mother and daughter, Tom reportedly dispatching his Gulfstream jet to California for crates of diet cherry soda and special organic food. When Katie appeared at the Hollywood premiere in May, the eyes of the world were on the young mother.

While Tom talked gaily of having ten children and getting Katie back in shape for their wedding, professional Katie
watchers concluded that she appeared “tired and miserable.” Then she was whisked back to Colorado for what Tom called “b and b.” She did the breast-feeding and he did the burping—and changed the diapers. If they fed Suri on Hubbard’s barley baby formula—a recipe he claimed he recalled from Roman soldiers two thousand years ago—they kept it secret. Mother and daughter spent the summer out of the limelight, surrounded by his and her family, who entertained themselves with golf, gliding, and barbecues. While Tom took Isabella and Connor on the homemade motocross course, Katie diligently made a quilt that incorporated family photos in the patchwork.

The couple’s seclusion and the fact that it took a further three months for Suri to make her public debut—naturally on the cover of
Vanity Fair,
photographs courtesy of celebrity snapper Annie Leibovitz—caused all kinds of wild speculation that her parents were afraid to show her off because she had a birth defect. When the world finally got a glimpse, it was clear that she bore no resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard. With a head of thick black hair and big, wide brown eyes, she was the image of both parents. The shoot itself took five days, rather more than the thirty minutes it took Leibovitz to photograph the Queen of England.

In June, as a telling counterpoint to the media madness engulfing Tom, Katie, and baby Suri, Nicole Kidman married country singer Keith Urban in a traditional white wedding in a Catholic church in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. “For Nicole this is a spiritual homecoming, to the church and her faith,” observed Father Paul Coleman, who married the couple. The conventional ceremony drew a line in the spiritual sand, the actress clearly and completely distancing herself from her former dalliance with Scientology.

While the rest of the world cooed over baby Suri, in Hollywood all eyes were on Tom’s latest movie offspring,
Mission: Impossible III.
Even though Tom’s bold decision to let TV director J. J. Abrams helm the movie had paid off with generally favorable reviews, the crucial U.S. opening weekend took in only $48 million, compared to $58 million for
M:I
and
II.
While the movie, which cost $200 million to make, went on to earn nearly $400 million worldwide and half as much again from DVD sales, the consensus in Hollywood, particularly at his parent company, Paramount, was that Tom’s proselytizing on behalf of Scientology had cost up to $100 million in profits. This was a high crime in Hollywood, where you can worship any God you like, so long as it is Mammon.

Tom was now on trial in the court of his peers. Witnesses for the prosecution cited the fact that, according to a Gallup/
USA Today
poll in May 2006, just over a third of the public had a favorable opinion of the star, a sharp drop from nearly 60 percent a year earlier. More than half now viewed him unfavorably, compared with under a third in 2005. Most significantly, the onetime World’s Sexiest Man had lost considerable ground among his female fan base, primarily because of his attack on Brooke Shields. By the end of August, when Tom visited Shields’s Hollywood home and made his peace with her over tomato and basil omelets, it was way too late.

As leading marketing guru Paul Dergarabedian observed, “It’s hard to ever know why a film fails to live up to expectations, but in this case you can’t fault the marketing campaign. The reasons lie elsewhere.” In his defense, producer Garth Drabinsky, who gave Tom a starring role in his early movie
Losin’ It,
lauded his achievement in making the
Mission: Impossible
series so commercially and artistically successful. As he said, “The
MI
trilogy is a staggering accomplishment as an actor and producer. It took a Herculean effort to do this and you cannot make light of it. He works his ass off on the movie set, and as a producer he will continue to produce great work.”

The fact that
Forbes
magazine named Tom the world’s top celebrity in June 2006 cut little ice with the suits at Paramount. When his contract came up for renewal at the end of July, he was found guilty of committing a mortal sin: Tom simply cost too much. Even though he had earned the studio over a billion dollars during his fourteen-year association
with them, during contract negotiations Paramount executives tried to reduce his production company overheads from $10 to $2 million a year. Tom and his production partner, Paula Wagner, balked. At the time, they were looking for another studio to call home, but not one had invited them in. As negotiations continued, it was reported that, when leaving his office one night, Paramount Studio boss Brad Grey was approached by a dozen or so Scientologists who attempted to put pressure on him to give Cruise a good deal. Grey, apparently, stood his ground and refused to bend to coercion.

When the sentence was finally pronounced, it was Tom’s Scientology faith rather than his up-front costs that took the rap. Sumner Redstone, the octogenarian chairman of Paramount’s parent company Viacom, made the announcement in an interview with
The Wall Street Journal
: “As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal,” Redstone said. “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.” In a stinging barb, he added: “It’s nothing to do with his acting ability, he’s a terrific actor. But we don’t think someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot.”

He later told
Vanity Fair
that Cruise had become a “hate figure” for women over his criticism of Brooke Shields. “He didn’t just turn one off, he turned off all women and a lot of men.” There was talk that Steven Spielberg, who was effectively employed by Paramount, stood by as Cruise was taken down, Tom’s behavior during the
War of the Worlds
tour apparently still rankling. Soon, however, fingers were pointing at Redstone’s wife, Paula Fortunato, who was “incensed” by Tom’s criticism of Brooke Shields, telling friends, “I never want to see another Tom Cruise movie.” A Viacom spokesman conceded that Fortunato “disagreed” with Tom’s views, but insisted that she saw all his movies.