Venerable, wise Steven in a prerecorded tape seemed to have anticipated what might – and did – happen. “What your audience sees of Tom is the Tom I know. There are no secrets. There is no hidden agenda. This is why you have so many millions of the fans all over the world,” before adding, “I just hope that Tom will say a little bit about ‘War of the Worlds’ and you don’t just obsess about Tom and Katie, Katie and Tom.”
Steven avowed that working with Tom was “one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given by this business” and Tom opined that Steven was the “greatest storyteller the cinema has ever known.”
In truth, Tom had little need to plug the movie. Reminding her vast television audience that Premiere magazine recently named Tom Cruise the greatest living move star of all time, Oprah commanded them to mark their calendars for the June 29th opening date and to get their seats ahead of time. And she hadn’t even seen the film.
Recalling a time she had been at the same hotel as Tom in Oslo, she told the audience how people stood outside it screaming and inquired if he liked that.
Tom was dutifully modest. “I feel really honoured to be where I am. No joke.”
Having got Tom to open up to such an unusual extent, Oprah put to him a question that no journalist had dared mention before. “You have a bi-racial son … you have never mentioned it.”
“He’s from the human race” – Tom had calmed down – “He’s from mankind.”
The programme showed a picture of Tom and his adopted ten-year-old, Connor, kicking a ball around. Unusually the child’s face was not blurred out as it always was in magazines.
Oprah boldly asked him if this was ever discussed in the family. Tom seemed surprised. “What’s there to talk about? I love him. I’ve never thought about colour. We’re all here together and we’ve got to work it out together, okay?”
And there the matter rested. But Oprah did not obtain her reputation for failing to ask bold, even intrusive, questions. Producing the June cover of Details magazine she quoted her guest as saying that he had the best sex when he was in a serious relationship.
“That’s the only time it works,” he confirmed. “It’s that intimacy, that relationship, that communication. That’s what it’s all about.”
“You can tell you’re not a one night stand kind of guy.”
“No.”
“Too intense for that.”
“Too intense. I like intimacy. I want to know about my woman.”
And now it was the audience’s turn to know about his woman – or, at least, look at her.
“I know Katie’s here,” Oprah revealed, “tell her to come out.”
“She’s gonna run, Tom warned.
But it was he who did the running, followed by a camera as he went into the office bowels of the Oprah Show. Katie did indeed seem a little shy but not too shy to spoil the show and permitted Tom to take her by the hand and lead her onto the set.
The audience went wild and Oprah asked her how it felt growing up wanting to marry Tom Cruise and now standing hand in hand in front of millions.
“I’m glad I was a big dreamer,” she smiled and then Tom kissed her.
The audience, applauding, screaming, were in raptures. On the other hand one can speculate what reaction Penelope Cruz or Nicole Kidman might have had to this telecast. Certainly Nicole could hardly be filled with delight that Tom’s avowal that he had never felt like this before would, sooner or later, reach the ears of their children.
One might think that since Hollywood likes nothing more than lovers in love and the cult of celebrity has reached epidemic proportions, America would welcome this demonstration of affection from their most popular star with the unequivocal enthusiasm of the Oprah audience.
This proved not to be universally the case. Most probably any abreaction had been fuelled by the way the press were quite literally ‘fed’ the fact of Tom’s relationship with Katie as if it were a wedding announcement in the local paper. Sceptical writers wondered whether the pairing was just a publicity stunt as not only did Tom have a film to promote but so had Katie, with the imminent release of ‘Batman Begins’.
Even Oprah Winfrey herself later observed: “I was trying to think what to do. I didn’t know how to react. I couldn’t figure it out. I was thinking ‘Is this real?’ And then I realized it was. I’d interviewed him before and he’s been so intensely private, so this was beyond anything I’d expected. I wonder if he regrets it?”
From where we sat in Paramount this seemed unlikely and hardly necessary: when you have, Cruise, Spielberg and a spectacular action picture the addition of a TV teen idol is hardly necessary in the publicity campaign.
Steven, himself, was “a little upset” by the press’s reaction. “Tom lost his cool because he was deliriously happy and now he is being punished for his public display of honesty. What Tom did on Oprah was exactly what Tom did with me when he first told me about Katie Holmes – he bared his soul.”
They certainly got plenty of publicity on covers of Big Three, US Weekly, Star and People plus the ubiquitous Ola/Hello celebrity magazines and their clones throughout the globe. But a certain cynicism was fanned in their readers and when People Magazine conducted a small opinion poll asking them if it was a publicity stunt, 62% replied that it was, a figure mirrored by the 100 people stopped at Rockefeller Centre of whom 65 said they thought it was just a stunt. It should be pointed out that these samples are comparatively small in the light of the hundred plus million people who went to see ‘War of the Worlds’.
Tom’s attitude was sanguine. "It's amusing at first. It's funny. But then you sit back and realise how sad it is that there are people who can't even imagine feeling like this. But my friends are happy for me. The people who know me are happy. My mom is happy. My family is happy.”
Satirical websites popped up such as TomCruiseIsNuts.com and freekatei.,net, the latter selling T-shirts with ‘Free Katie’ or ‘Save the Couch’ splashed on them. The online Urban Dictionary which provides new slang definitions added ‘jumping the couch’ which now means, apparently, ‘1. The defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end, or 2. Acting wildly foolish.”
Tom was cognizant of the fact that people were sending him up. So when he went on the Jay Leno show and the host made a point of alluding to his ‘silly behaviour’, Tom replied: “When I start to think about her, things happen. So cease talking.” The audience whooped with delight as he climbed up on the couch, victoriously raising both hands in the air. So, too, was Katie: when she announced Tom as winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2005 MTV Awards she entertained the audience with a visual parody of her new boyfriend’s gesture on Oprah going down on her knee and pumping her fist in the air. Then, to good-natured laughter, she went back-stage to drag him out.
Nicole Kidman was in the audience. Subsequently she told David Letterman: “Honestly, if Tom’s in love I’m so happy for him and that’s a very good thing.”
Perhaps Tom’s greatest problem was that with one bound (literally) his attitude towards his private life had gone from famine to feast, from obsessive secrecy to over-communication. Writing in The New York Times, Mireya Navarro opined: ‘Cruise and Holmes may very well be head over heels, but they should not be surprised that even their most star-struck fan seems to be having trouble embracing their romance’. Stephen Silverman, the news editor of People.com, commented: “’In the cases of outright romantic convenience, the basis for doing it remains the same: to get publicity. But today you have the extra added attraction that the public is celebrity crazy, whether it’s with cynicism or adoration.’
Had the Cruise Controversy of the summer of 2005 merely been about his antics on Oprah it would most probably have faded away like the grin on the Cheshire Cat.
But it wasn’t. Tom gave other interviews.
The actor’s views on psychology, psychiatry and prescription drugs are well known. Such things are wrong, evil even. Two years previously, when he was on the
Larry King Show to promote ‘The Last Samurai’, he confirmed that this was the case, knowledge that he had acquired by his adherence to the Church of Scientology (of which more later).
Interviewed on Access Hollywood on May 26th, he reiterated and expanded on these views, citing an example of how he and fellow Scientologists had weaned a child off prescription drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and onto vitamins and food which caused her to grow seven inches in four months. “I have an easier time stepping people off heroin than these psychotropic drugs. Any drug is a poison.”
It so happened that the actress Brooke Shields had recently published a well-received book entitled ‘Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression.’ It chronicled in detail the difficulty she had in conceiving and giving birth to her first baby, Rowan.
But worse was to follow: after the birth she descended into a depression so deep that she couldn’t even communicate with her daughter let alone the world. But she slowly fought her way back to mental health thanks to psychiatry and the drug, Paxil.
Tom was asked about Paxil and post-partum depression and did not hold back his views. “It is not a cure; it is actually lethal. I care about Brooke Shields because she is incredibly talented but look at where her career has gone. Is she happy? Is she really happy? She doesn’t know what these drugs are and for her to promote them is irresponsible. I wish her well in life but it is irresponsible to do that.”
This ad hominem – or ad feminam - attack on a fellow star shattered every rule in the Hollywood public relations book. Commentators were not slow to point out that Cruise’s first movie part was a few lines as Billy, a chum of Martin Hewitt who starred with Brooke Shields in the Franco Zeffirelli film ‘Endless Love’ (1981.) In the movie Martin and Brooke visit the Planetarium and he says: “I’m going to name a star after you” whereupon, at the New York Press Show, some wit yelled out: “Brooke Shields already is a star.”
Indeed she had been one since the age of twelve when she played a child prostitute in a 1917 New Orleans brothel in Louis Malle’s controversial ‘Pretty Baby’ (1978). Her face was already famous; urged on by her fiercely ambitious mother, Teri, Brooke had been the face of Ivory Snow soap when she was only eleven.
She became the dream girl of teenage boys as she frolicked barely clad through Blue Lagoon the year before ‘Endless Love’. Although Tom was two years older he was, at the time, unknown.
His implication that her career had not soared from then is valid. Brooke continued to act in movies and television but none became blockbusters. Possibly she was more interested in her academic life at university or her romances, evidently ranging from Michael Jackson to Prince Albert of Monaco with a quick marriage to Andre Agassi before she settled with the writer and producer, Chris Henchy.
However, with her depression beaten, she flew to London to star in the West End as Roxie Hart in ‘Chicago’. It was during this run that Tom’s criticism came to her ears. And she didn’t take it lying down.
“As far as I know Tom Cruise has never given birth to a baby,” came her dry riposte. “He should stick to saving the world from aliens and let women who are experiencing postpartum depression decide what treatment options are best for them."
Show-business journalists booted up their laptops with glee, tired of being manipulating PRs (or flacks as they called them – only behind their backs).Here, at last, was a story with some seltzer in it. And they were determined to make it run and run.
Of course, it should have been cut off at the pass with a diplomatically arranged rapprochement between the two stars (even if a false one). Indeed, it should never have happened in the first place.
So why did it?
CHAPTER THREE
The explanation goes back to April 5th 2004. On that day it was announced that Tom Cruise had split up with Penelope Cruz, the siren from Spain whom he had cast in ’Vanilla Sky’ (2001) and who had been his partner on the red carpet since his divorce from Nicole Kidman.
But as Adam Sternbergh of National Public Radio concluded: “Strangely this wasn’t the most momentous split Cruise experienced that week.”
Tom had dispensed with the services of his long-time personal publicist, Pat Kingsley. The announcement of his break with Penelope was made by his new publicist, his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, (who later spread the emphatic news that Tom and Katie were an item). Lee Anne had worked for Cruise-Wagner Productions for many years and, as I have personally observed, is obsessively protective of her brother’s image. She is also a committed Scientologist and that may well have paved her path to the job.
Friends in the Warner Bros marketing department (for whom I had done work over the years with Clint Eastwood, Spielberg and Jo Rowling) mentioned that they were slightly concerned that, as they paid for Tom to circle the globe to promote ‘The Last Samurai’ (2003), too much time in his interviews was spent extolling Scientology rather than Samurai.
It fell to Pat Kingsley to inform him of this. The news did not fall on receptive ears. The people at Warners said that Tom did the honourable thing when he decided to part company with Pat: he went to headquarters of PMK, the company she had founded, and explained face-to-face. She in turn took him round the offices to meet the people who had been working for him for the past fourteen years. Did this happen? I don’t know; I wasn’t there.
What I do know is that he had engaged her fourteen years previously when he was making ‘Far and Away’ (1992) with Nicole and she had been by his side when needed on every press occasion since then.
Kingsley grew up in a Hollywood where big-name columnists such as Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons ruled the roost. The studios deferred to them believing, as Kingsley recalls, “they could make or break a star.” Thus she learnt the business in the sixties as a ‘planter’ – someone who places items these celebrity columns. She was further schooled at Rogers and Cowan, the original pre-eminent international movie publicists (Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Ronald Reagan). But when she sensed the time was right to leave and start her own firm, Pat Kingsley slowly and boldly rewrote the rules. The power should no longer repose with the press; it lay with the stars – and her staff. She was happy to turn away much publicity but if a major magazine wanted to talk to one of her top clients (Tom Hanks, Al Pacino,) she would usually require approval of the copy and the photos and, quite often, obtain an agreement that it would be the cover story.
When Cruise became king, he had an unimpeachable press. Would Kingsley have counselled him to temper his exuberance on the Oprah Winfrey show? The answer can be best given in form of the old Irish joke of the motorist who stopped and asked a farmer who was ploughing a field how to get to Killarney Castle. The answer came: “If I was you I wouldn’t start out from here.”
Pat Kingsley would never have announced in Rome that Tom and Katie were a couple. Apart from anything else, it took away from the mystique of the star. At much the same time Cindy Guagenti, Brad Pitt’s publicist, was telling the press it was ‘absolutely untrue’ that he and Angelina Jolie were romantically involved while there was incontrovertible photographic evidence to the contrary. In Tom and Katie’s case, the Rome picture told a thousand words.
With no announcement about his private life, Tom’s subsequent appearance on Oprah would have been less open to ridicule.
Kingsley has said: “I believe in the freedom of the press. Most people agree there is a line between a person’s private life and public lives. It’s just that I could never find a member of the press who could tell me where that line was.”
Tom’s acquiescence to questions about his private life, even to the extent of parading his girlfriend on a TV show, thus went completely against the philosophy of his erstwhile publicity guru.
As for the attack on Brooke Shields, Kingsley would have had that cut out of the tape before you could have said ‘scissors’.
But Kingsley insisted to the New York Daily News it was an "amicable parting." She would, wouldn’t she?
"I adore the guy," she went on. "I have the greatest respect for him professionally and personally. We've had a great ride."
Although, as Adam Sternbergh observed at the time on National Public Radio: “Their breakup isn't just the end of the most successful partnership of its kind. It may well mark the demise of the very tactics this tandem perfected. There may never be another flack quite as powerful as Kingsley or a star quite as inscrutable as Cruise. In an age of scandal and non-stop scrutiny, Cruise is a curious celebrity conundrum: the world's most famous movie star and the one about whom the least is known or understood.”
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 3