Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  However the fans had not been similarly vetted and when Tom moved along the barriers dispensing signatures and goodwill he encountered a reporter and his television crew. They were fakes: an outfit who were making a ‘comedy’ programme for Channel Four. The reporter had rigged his microphone to squirt water into Cruise’s face.

  The star struggled to maintain his composure and rounded on the man, saying: "Why would you do that ... why would you do that ... why would you do that?"

  As the prankster offered a barely audible excuse, Cruise said: "What’s so funny about that? It’s ridiculous. Do you like making less of people, is that it?"

  After an uncomfortable silence the man started to walk away, but Cruise detained him: "Don't run away."

  He told his assailant: "That's incredibly rude. I'm here giving you an interview, answering your questions and you do that ... it's incredibly rude."

  Cruise then said forcibly: "You're a jerk ... jerk ... you're a jerk."

  The TV crew were arrested by the police who were prepared to press charges.

  An aide brought a towel and despite his soaked shirt, with dignity, he continued his progress along the crowd.

  Curiously, the incident repaired a lot of damage in the British media. When clips had been shown of him jumping the couch on Oprah there had been widespread ridicule; this now gave way to widespread respect as to how well he had comported himself. Even more so when he decided not to press charges against someone who had humiliated himself in a cowardly assault.

  Last stop in Tom and Katie’s grand European tour was Madrid for the Spanish premiere. There Tom was reunited with his quondam partner, Penelope Cruz. The meeting was arranged at the headquarters of the Church of Scientology. Penelope gave Katie a warm hug – they already knew each other – and informed attendant reporters: “I really like her.”

  But the Spanish actress did not choose to dine with her ex. Instead she went out on the town with Ralph Fiennes who was over with a touring production of Julius Caesar. Penelope had played opposite Ralph in his sister’s film, ‘Chromophobia’, which had an outing at the Cannes Film Festival.

  However Penelope’s family were happy to have supper at Madrid’s leading restaurant, Casa Lucio, with the newly-engaged couple. It is doubtful if the disparity in their ages caused any concern since the Cruzes consisted of Eduardo Jnr (brother), Monica (sister), Encarnacion (mother), Eduardo (father) – and father’s girlfriend, Carmen, who, to judge from her photo, looks younger than 31-year-old Penelope.

  Madrid’s sweltering Gran Via was packed with cheering fans, more male than female surprisingly, who yelled ‘torero’, literally bullfighter but slang for macho man, and waved placards with sentiments such as ‘Espana te Quiere’ (Spain loves you) as Tom and Katie emerged from the premiere. He was dressed, as usual, in black but she wore a full-length vivid red ball gown. They looked almost regal. The cuddled, they kissed and Tom swept Katie off her feet in a deliberately flamenco gesture.

  The crowd went wild. Tom’s grand European tour had been an undiluted success and he was left in no doubt of the astonishing reaction he provoked abroad and also his fans’ ecstatic approval of his bride-to-be.

  Matters did not run as smoothly on his return to New York. It is questionable if Pat Kingsley had still been his agent he would have appeared on NBC’s Today Show. In 1999 Pat had informed the producer that her client, Calista Flockhart, was not to be questioned about her weight and the producer responded that nobody told the Today Show what to ask or not to ask. So Pat cancelled Calista’s long-standing booking on the show and Today didn’t cover her film, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (which desperately needed the publicity.)

  When Today subsequently wanted to talk to Cruise and Kidman about Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, Kingsley told them they couldn’t. In retaliation, the show’s executive producer, Jeff Zucker, sent out an edict to his staff that no Kingsley clients would be allowed on the show.

  And so it stayed until two years later when Zucker had departed and Tom was invited on the programme to promote ‘Vanilla Sky’ in an interview with Katie Couric. In the case of ‘War of the Worlds’ his interviewer was the handsome but subtly obdurate host, Matt Lauer. The interview began gently enough with questions about the movie and congratulations on Tom’s worldwide publicity but then Matt put to him what cynics were saying. “This is Tom Cruise in his forties trying to stay relevant for a younger audience and that’s why he’s out there talking about this relationship with this lovely young lady.”

  Cruise seemed wholly unfazed. “You know what? There will always be cynics. I have never worried, Matt, about what other people think and what other people say.”

  The temperature was raised, however, when Lauer started to deal with Cruise’s criticism of Brooke Shields, psychiatry and drugs such as Ritalin, avowing that he had friends who had been helped by it. (More than three million young Americans were taking Ritalin, a controversial stimulant that had proved effective in lessening Attention Deficit Disorder.)

  It was hardly surprising that Cruise would beg to differ with Lauer – his views were well known, after all – but the manner in which he did so was pretty aggressive.

  “To talk about it in a way of saying ‘Well, isn’t it okay?’ and being reasonable about it when you don’t know and I do, I think you should be a bit more responsible in knowing what it is.”

  The star was more vehement on the subject of shrinks. “I’ve never agreed with psychiatry, ever. Before I was a Scientologist I never agreed with psychiatry. And when I started studying the history of psychiatry, I understood more and more why I didn’t believe in psychology.”

  He went on to admonish the TV star: “Here’s the problem. You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”

  Curiously, Matt chose to turn the other cheek to this, but the rest of the media didn’t.

  The following week Princeton-educated Brooke Shields published a piece on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. ‘I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,’ she wrote, ‘but after Tom Cruise’s interview with Matt Lauer, I feel compelled to speak not just for myself but for the hundreds of thousands of women who had suffered from postpartum depression. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Mr. Cruise has never suffered from it.

  ‘The drugs (mainly Praxil), along with weekly therapy sessions, are what saved me – and my family … comments like those made by Mr. Cruise are a disservice to mothers everywhere … if any good can come of Mr. Cruise’s ridiculous rant, let’s hope that it gives much needed attention to a serious disease.’

  Battle lines were drawn with star Scientologists such as John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley and Tom Arnold coming out for Tom and most psychiatrists, not unnaturally, dismissing him.

  Cruise's suggestion that vitamins and exercise alone can cure postpartum depression were denounced as "destructive" by Michael M. Faenza, president of the National Mental Health Association. "Each year, 54 million Americans experience a mental illness, such as depression or an anxiety disorder. Yet, only one- third receive any treatment at all despite very high treatment success rates," Faenza said in a published statement, adding, "Cruise's comments could have very damaging consequences for Americans with mental health needs by increasing stigma and shame, discouraging treatment and forcing people to go without needed care."

  It was just as well, as Tom confessed to Matt, that he didn’t care what other people thought. His outspoken words and behaviour began to attract an adverse press.

  Vanity Fair ran a red stripe in the corner of its cover with the rhetorical question: “DOMINICK DUNNE: HAS TOM CRUISE LOST HIS MARBLES?” The veteran columnist noted: ‘For Cruise, it was a mistake. I think it’s wonderful that his belief in Scientology is so strong, but I resented being preached at by him. Through Scientology, he claimed, he has helped hundreds of people get off drugs with the use of vitamins, and that is very commendable. But when he told Billy Bush that he gets calls at 2 o’clock in the morning from drug add
icts who need his counsel, he lost me. Would the Church of Scientology really make the number of the telephone on Tom Cruise’s bedside table in his gated and guarded mansion available to a street druggie with a needle in his arm? I don’t think so.’

  ‘If vitamins and exercise alone explain why Tom Cruise is so, um, knowledgeable and well-grounded, pass the Prozac,’ was the editorial in The Chicago Tribune

  ‘I'll never quite be able to see Cruise the same way. It will take more than Cruise's power of positive thinking to bring back the nice guy with the megawatt smile. Now, he's the zealot who jumps on Oprah's couch like a love-crazed monkey and lectures America about our nasty pharmaceutical habits.’ - Paige Newman, MSNBC.

  Even cities joined in. In a debate on July 12th the Socialist-controlled Municipal Assembly of Paris approved a resolution ‘never to welcome the actor Tom Cruise, spokesman for Scientology and self-declared militant for this organisation’.

  If Katie hoped her whirlwind romance would generate universal approbation, she must have been disappointed. Nicole Kidman cryptically told Vanity Fair: "In terms of your life, if you start to exploit it, then what's real, and what's not? What's yours, and what isn't?".

  81-year old Lauren Bacall was more blunt in an interview with Time magazine. “His whole behaviour is so shocking. It’s inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially. I think it’s a kind of sickness.”

  It wasn’t all adverse news. “It's Tom Cruise that inspired me to come to the U.S. from a small village of China to pursue my own American dream," said Niki Yan, the young Chinese writer/actress who just finished a book ‘My Love for You, Tom Cruise - a Desperate Chinese Girl's Confession.’ This insightful and inspirational fun book, ran the publicity, is devoted to the person who changed her life forever -- Tom Cruise, the Hollywood movie star who has been her hero and role model since she was 11 years old.

  Innuendo abounded that Katie had not been Tom’s first choice as a new wife but it was nowhere confirmed. However he had wanted to cast Scarlett Johansson in ‘Mission Impossible 111’. When the Daily Telegraph put it to her that he had invited her to meet him at the Scientology Celebrity Centre in LA and then wanted her to eat with a group of Scientologists whereupon the 20-year-old actress made her excuses and left, she merely gave an enigmatic smile. A friend of mine asked her about it, as well. “Tom Cruise is weird,” was all she said.

  Not a sentiment, of course, shared by Katie who had readily signed up with the Church of Scientology. She even got her own personal minder, Jessica Rodriguez, who would sit in on all her ‘Batman Begins’ interviews, somewhat to Warner’s chagrin.

  But Katie had some good news to impart – or rather Lee Anne Devette did – on 5th October 2005 which would certainly silence some, if not all, of the cynics. Tom and Katie were going to have a baby.

  It made television news bulletins around the world and newspaper headlines, with the British tabloids devoting most of their front pages to the excited couple. Lee Anne would not be drawn on when the child was due or whether they already knew its sex.

  The only thing that could be safely assumed was that, if it were a girl, they would be unlikely to call her Brooke.

  CHAPTER FOUR.

  There is a scene near the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s ‘War of the Worlds’ (2005), before the aliens appear, in which Tom Cruise as Ray Farrier and his son, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) throw a baseball to one another in the front yard. It is something nearly every American father and son must have done since the game became popular. But, in this instance, there is a vicious undertone with Ray chucking the ball harder and harder, indicating to us the bitter rift between the two of them.

  There was no need for any scriptwriter to invent this scene: Tom Cruise had experienced it himself at his father’s hands when he was only nine. “Every kid’s a little afraid of that hardball when you go from T-ball to hardball. He’d take me out there - and this guy’s six foot two – and he’d just start lightly with the ball, then just start hammering this baseball into my glove. Sometimes, if it hit my head, my nose would bleed and some tears would come up. He wasn’t very comforting.”

  His father, Thomas Cruise Mapother 111, was clearly something of a sadist. No wonder when the family was finally rid of him, Tom also got rid of the Mapother and the 1V. Once they went skiing together in Canada. It was a two-hour drive and Tom complained that he was starving. But his father was not prepared to stop. Instead, he suggested they create imaginary sandwiches. “It was like ‘What do you want on this sandwich?’ ‘Oh, I want ham on the sandwich.’ ‘What else?’ ‘Lettuce,’ We took a long time to create this sandwich and then we took a lot of time eating it, with chips and soda. But we had nothing.”

  To his credit, Tom has subsequently tried to rationalize why Mapother 111, an electrical engineer with a degree from Louisville University, had this cruel streak. In other respects he was a sensitive man, happy to write and participate in amateur theatricals. “He was a very complex individual and created a lot of chaos for the family before we left him. If I came home from a fight and I had lost, then I had to go back out there. ‘You do it again and you don’t lose. Period.’ And I certainly wasn’t the biggest guy on campus. It had to do with his own way of loving me. He was the kind of guy who really got picked on at school a lot when he was growing up. He also had been small, though he ended up being six foot two. People had been quite brutal to him. Inside, I believe he was a really sensitive individual. He just didn’t want me to have to go through the kind of pain he had felt in his life. I think that all this was a solution to solving that problem. He was very tough on me in many ways. As a kid I had a lot of hidden anger about that. I’d get hit and I didn’t understand it.”

  The Jesuits say that if they can have a child for its first seven years, it will be their’s for life. Although Cruise was without his father in his teenage years, his character had already been shaped by what could be considered a form of child abuse. It was a cruel formative experience but a key to understanding what makes Tom tick today. You don’t mix with Tom Cruise. Behind that beguiling smile, he is as hard as diamond. Apart from his school yard fights – for which he got suspended – he was a member of the school wrestling team. Much of his adult life – racing cars, planes, helicopters, sky diving, scuba diving – is an assertion of this toughness. It appears almost as if he is without fear. And this has spilled over into his dealing with people. Actors, tempered by auditions, rejections and the need to please, usually tend to be gentle, accommodating people. Cruise is not prepared to take any personal criticism from anyone and, as we have seen with Peter Overton and Matt Lauer, can be abrasive to the point of belligerency if crossed.

  His father’s brutish behaviour did not extend to Tom’s three sisters. Thomas Mapother 111 had married Mary Lee Pfeiffer from Louisiana. Their first daughter, Lee Anne – who has worked diligently and devotedly for her younger brother for nearly twenty years - was born in Louisville, but Thomas was posted by General Electric to Syracuse, New York where Mary Lee gave birth to Marian, Tom (on the third of July 1962) and Cass.

  Tom’s father was something of a dreamer and, later, something of a drinker. He came from a family of Irish immigrants who established themselves as eminent Louisville lawyers. Indeed, his brother, William, was a judge by the age of 29. But Thomas wanted to do better than that. He wanted to make millions and he felt certain that, with the right breakthrough, he could quit GE and achieve that.

  But it never came. Accordingly his frustration increased – and his temper. He dragged the family across America – Tom is variously estimated to have attended fifteen or eighteen high schools – to pursue his ambition. So the family rarely settled and this hit his son the hardest.

  Tom looks back at a time of bullying because he was the new guy on the block and he was regarded as hick, not being up to fashion with the latest Nikes. He stood up for himself. “It was either sink or swim and I decided to swim.” Moreove
r he had severe dyslexia (as did his mother and sisters) which he was reluctant to reveal to each new school and thus it was some time before he got the necessary Special Needs help. And then it would soon be time to move on again. Schooldays were definitely not the happiest days of his life. “I can’t wait to grow up; it’s got to be better than this,” he told his sisters as they walked to school, advising them, “let’s just get through today.”