Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

by Leah Remini

  I figured that all I was doing for my church by way of time and money had resulted in Tom’s approval. We were on the same team. Tom and me, super twin powers activate! I was never more ready to do this clear-the-planet thing.

  Not long after that day when I first met Tom in the President’s Office, I began to be invited to events and get-togethers involving Tom by his church liaison, Tommy Davis, who wasn’t just any Sea Org member but from a prominent family within the church. His mother was the Scientologist and actress Anne Archer. With his pedigree and good looks, it was no wonder that he was Tom’s liaison with the church and later became a spokesperson for the church.

  Because of my record, I was approved for Tom’s entourage, a small group of heavily contributing, with-the-program Scientologists that included EarthLink founder Sky Dayton, Marisol Nichols, Ethan Suplee, and Jenna and Bodhi Elfman. (Noticeably absent from the chosen few were Kirstie Alley and John Travolta. I had heard that Tom didn’t like them.) The honor came with its own set of obligations.

  You just didn’t say no to “Mr. Cruise,” even when it came to little things. Like when he invited me and Angelo over when I was pregnant with Sofia because he wanted to learn to dance salsa. Angelo had offered to teach him, but when we were called to come over it was a last-minute invitation, so I tried to get out of it or reschedule, but Tommy Davis, who had made the call to us, said, “Make it go right.”

  We drove onto the massive gated rental estate, which included formal gardens, a sunken tennis court, and a main house. As soon as we walked into the house, we were met by a Sea Org member who said that Tom had only an hour because he had to listen to his congresses, a newly issued set of tapes that we were all mandated to buy and listen to. “I wasn’t the one who called us to come over and do Tom a favor, Tommy,” I replied as we walked into the living room.

  I was surprised by what I saw: in addition to Tommy Davis, there was Jessica Feshbach, another Sea Org member from an extremely powerful Scientology family. In the eighties, her father, Joe Feshbach, built a $1 billion hedge fund business with his brothers by aggressively shorting stocks. The Feshbach brothers credited their success to LRH tech and ran their firm with strict adherence to Scientology’s principles.

  But the most unexpected guest in the living room that night was the actress Katie Holmes. I didn’t know Katie and Tom were dating, but I quickly got the picture since he couldn’t keep his hands off her. What I didn’t understand was Tommy’s and Jessica’s presence. Did they want to learn to salsa too? I felt uncomfortable as Angelo started to go through a few moves with Tom, as if these high-ranking Sea Org members were sitting there to supervise. They certainly weren’t reining Tom in, as he was manhandling Katie, dipping her in a forceful way and then making out with her. “You guys might want to get a room because we haven’t even started yet,” I joked. In response I received a sharp look from Tommy and Jessica.

  From that point on, we were invited to Tom’s compound for dinner regularly. And almost every time we went over there, Tommy and Jessica were also there in the mix. In my view it crossed a line for any Sea Org member to be at Tom’s home, since my and most Scientologists’ understanding was that Sea Org members are here to clear the planet and deliver services, they aren’t supposed to fraternize socially with the public or parishioners. If this had been a church event, and they were there in service to Tom and Katie or protecting them as their church liaisons, that would have been completely different. But this was just dinner with another Scientology couple at home.

  When I got Jessica alone, I asked her what she was doing there.

  “I’m on post,” she said.

  “We’re having dinner. What job are you doing? I don’t get your purpose here.”

  “I work for CC,” she said, which was hard for me to believe given that I was at the Celebrity Centre almost every day and had hardly ever seen her there. It also didn’t answer my question. I knew she and Tommy worked for COB.

  Tommy’s and Jessica’s off-putting presence added to the weird feeling we got at Tom’s house. It was hard to place, but there was an energy in the air, like we were being watched. It was as if at any moment you could be ejected from his Beverly Hills mansion and sent to Flag in Florida to scrub toilets.

  As the dinners continued and we spent more time with Tom, I came to think of him as a big kid with his loud laugh, high energy, and goofy ideas of fun. Like when he invited some Scientologists and a few other celebrities like Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, to his house and announced he wanted to play hide-and-seek. At first I thought he was joking, but no, he literally wanted to play hide-and-seek with a bunch of grown-ups in what was probably close to a 7,000-square-foot house on almost three full acres of secluded land.

  “I can’t play—I’m wearing Jimmy Choos,” I said.

  “Well, good,” Tom said with his signature grin. “So you’re It, then.” And with that he tagged me and ran to hide.

  “Huh?”

  I pulled my husband aside and in a quiet voice whispered, “Uh, Angelo, you’re going to go ahead and do this, because I’m not doing it. I’m not trying to play a fucking game of hide-and-seek in five-inch stilettos. Okay?”

  People were terrified of offending Tom, and not without reason. Once when Angelo and I were over, Tom decided he wanted to make cookies. He walked into the kitchen, where a batch of prepackaged cookie dough had been prepared and was sitting on the counter, a perfect loaf ready for cutting and baking. Tom was looking for flour and other ingredients and must not have seen the cookie dough, and he instantly got angry.

  “Guys, where’s the cookie stuff?” he said, furrowing his brow.

  His assistants came running in wanting to explain that it was right there, on a nearby counter, but all one of them could say was, “Uh, Tom.” They both grew more flustered, and Tom got angry. “Goddamn it!”

  Looking at the dough sitting on a cutting board, obvious to all of us except Tom, I wished his assistant would say, “Hey, the stuff is right under your nose, dumb-ass.” But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Instead, Katie whispered something to Tom, who repeated, “Can I just get the stuff for the cookies, guys?” Although his voice was lower, there was still a seething quality to his request that made his assistant even more flustered.

  Tom seemed like a child who had never been told no. People say that celebrities stop developing emotionally at the age of their success—which for Tom had been with Risky Business at twenty-one.

  “Get in the fucking present time, is what you need to do,” he then screamed at his assistant. As he lit into her, I thought about the time a friend had mentioned to me that she witnessed him taking his assistant to task for giving him a chipped coffee mug.

  “You served me tea in a chipped mug? Do you know who gets served with a mug that’s chipped? Fucking DBs,” he said, using the initials for “Degraded Being,” a term in Scientology that means degraded spiritual being.

  Still not noticing the log of pre-made dough on the counter, Tom raised his hand above his head. “LRH is here,” he said, then lowered his hand to his chin and said, “And Dave and I are here.” Then, with his hand down at his waist, he said, “And you are here.”

  An uncomfortable heat rose in my body, just like it used to when I was a little kid being yelled at by my dad. It was horrible to watch someone I admired come undone and even worse to witness the fear in the assistant’s eyes. Tom comes across with an almost presidential charm to the public, but seeing him treat people this way was utterly shocking. I’ve seen celebrities (myself included) treat people or staff poorly, but this was on another level. The whole scene was so painful to watch that I had to step in. “Oh, wait,” I said, as if I had just discovered something. “Tom, is this it?”

  He looked at the dough, the assistant looked at him, and I was looking at the both of them, all of us incredulous.

  “Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” And that was
it.

  It was one thing to act like an overgrown child in his own home, but when Tom had his infamous Oprah incident, I picked up the phone and called Shane. I wanted to know what they were going to do about Tom, who proclaimed his love for Katie Holmes by jumping on the daytime host’s couch in a move that creeped out most of America. His behavior reflected badly on Scientology and me.

  “Leah, he’s just very up-tone,” Shane said, the term used for high on Scientology’s emotional tone scale. Tom and the church had become a laughingstock, and we were calling it up-tone? “The guy’s really happy, and you should be happy for him.” Again, I felt like maybe I am just an asshole and maybe there is something really and truly wrong with me. Is that just a foreign concept to me? Happiness? Real love? I wondered if Angelo would jump on a couch for me.

  Meanwhile, ever since my first time at Tom’s house, I had been questioning why there were Sea Org members constantly hovering around. Well, I had my own theory; it was to make sure nothing upset Tom, and if it did, to immediately report it to the church, specifically to COB David Miscavige.

  Once when we were at the compound for dinner, Angelo made a joke about some celebrity we were friends with. Jessica, who was acting as Katie’s Scientology chaperone to keep the actress on track and doing Scientology, pulled me aside and asked me details about the joke. When I asked her why, she said, “I am just collecting the data.” The next day Jessica wrote a Knowledge Report stating that Mr. Cruise had observed Angelo joking about another celebrity and Leah did nothing about it. We were both pulled into session immediately. I was furious. Tom was a big boy; if he had a problem with me or my husband, he could write it up himself, which was proper policy. And really, all for a joke about one of our friends?

  In the church, though, Tom’s status only grew, despite his public behavior. He followed his Oprah appearance with his even more infamous one on the Today show, where in an interview with Matt Lauer he chastised Brooke Shields for taking psychopharmaceuticals to deal with postpartum depression. The church’s response was to hold a huge event for him at the Shrine Auditorium to present how prescriptions for Ritalin and other psychotropic drugs were down something like 500 percent, thanks to Tom and his recent comments. According to the church, Tom had single-handedly taken down the psychiatric profession. As I watched Tom get a standing ovation from all the Scientologists who filled the massive auditorium, I started to question my judgment. Look at this guy, I thought. He’s doing great things for the world, and you’re criticizing his couch jumping? I felt more than down-tone. Maybe I am degraded and an S.P.?

  I certainly didn’t think he and Katie deserved the scrutiny they underwent from the press after their daughter was born in the spring of 2006. Because the first pictures of Suri didn’t appear until she was almost five months old, there was wild speculation about whether she existed and what this mystery baby was like.

  I experienced a small taste of the media frenzy around this infant when I attended my first Emmy Awards show, a little more than a week before the Annie Leibovitz portraits of baby Suri appeared in Vanity Fair.

  Tom’s kid was the last thing on my mind that day. Kevin had been nominated for lead actor in a comedy series, which was exciting for everyone on The King of Queens because in our nine seasons on the air no one had been nominated for a single Emmy. While walking the red carpet on a day that was so brutally hot I was sweating everywhere, I stopped to do an interview with Ryan Seacrest.

  “So, Leah. This is an exciting time,” he said.

  “Yes, it is, Ryan.”

  “We heard you saw Suri.”

  I didn’t see that coming.

  “Yeah. You know what’s also big news, too? Kevin James was nominated for an Emmy for the first time in the history of the show.”

  He gave me a kind of look like I had an attitude, which of course I did. But this was only the start of it. Every single fucking interview on that broiling red carpet was about that baby.

  “You’ve seen Suri. What’s she look like?”

  “You know what Tom and Katie look like? That’s what the baby looks like.”

  “What is she like?”

  “Well, I don’t know. What are babies like?”

  “Is she a real baby?”

  “Last I checked.”

  (To add insult to injury, after all that bullshit, Tony Shalhoub stole Kevin’s Emmy. It was not my night, despite the fact that I had Kevin’s Emmy speech written out for him, beginning with “I want to thank Remini for…”).

  Of course I didn’t bring any of that up the next time I saw Tom and Katie. At the end of the night when they walked us out to our car, Tom said, “Hey, we have some news. You have to keep this hush-hush.”

  It wasn’t hard to guess what the news was.

  “We’re getting married,” he said, “and we want you guys to come.”

  I was excited for them, but I wanted to prove I was theta, not a DB or low-tone—that I could be really happy and up-tone—so I started jumping up and down. (In the car, later, Angelo said, “The jumping up and down was a little much.”) Tom, who seemed pleased with my reaction, then asked if we wanted to invite our friends Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to the wedding.

  “Don’t you think you guys should?” I asked, confused.

  “Well, we don’t really know them that well,” Katie said. Right, I thought, exactly my point. And you want to invite them to the wedding?

  Although I wondered why they wanted people they didn’t know well enough to invite to their wedding at their wedding, I agreed to ask Jennifer and Marc.

  This wasn’t the first time I had invited them to hang out with Tom and Katie; the couple had asked me to bring Marc and Jennifer over for dinner previously. Although I wasn’t sure why, Katie wanted to meet Jen. I just assumed she was a fan of J-Lo.

  Angelo and I knew Marc way before he was with Jen. Our friendship started when the comedian Sinbad invited me to a Marc Anthony concert where I hung out afterward until four in the morning. (Angelo, who didn’t come with me, kept on texting me to come home. “It’s not like that,” I texted back. Angelo texted in return, “Get your ass home.”)

  I loved Marc like a brother, and so was protective when he had Angelo and me meet his new girlfriend, Jennifer. “I want to punch you in your face,” I said when I first met her, “because you are even prettier in person. I was kind of hoping you would be uglier.” Jen, who has a good sense of humor about herself, laughed and we hit it off. We had a lot in common. She was from the Bronx, which if we were back in New York would be like a different country from Brooklyn, but in L.A. it basically made us from the same neighborhood. And although Jen is Catholic, her father is a Scientologist, so she knew all about the church. I thought it would be fun to take a trip with her and Marc to Tom and Katie’s wedding.

  So I called Jennifer the next day and said, “Hey, you want to go to Italy?”

  “For what? What are you talking about?”

  “Tom and Katie’s wedding.”

  “I’m invited?…Are there invitations coming?”

  “They’re chartering a jet for everybody.”

  “Let me ask Marc,” she said, “but why not?”

  While I was happy to have my friend joining me at the wedding, I was uncomfortable with being asked to play the role of the intermediary, but I felt like I just couldn’t say no to the request.

  Chapter Thirteen

  TOM AND KATIE’S WEDDING WAS to take place in Rome in November of 2006. I was very excited—and scared, as I had never been out of the country before, and this was going to be a star-studded affair covered by media outlets from all over the globe. The paparazzi would be mobbing us from the minute we stepped off the plane until we returned home. I needed a get-off-the-plane outfit, complete with sunglasses, a shopping-in-Rome outfit, and a sit-in-a-café-and-have-a-cappuccino outfit, not to mention the gowns and dresses for
the rehearsal dinner and the wedding. I was going to need some professional help.

  Jennifer and I decided to hire a stylist to work with the both of us, which was great for me because the Jennifer Lopezes of the world get free shit from Gucci and YSL, whereas people like me get Sudafed. That’s not true—I don’t even get Sudafed.

  The stylist filled the empty room where Angelo and I were building a home library with racks and racks of clothes and used the shelves to display bags, hats, and shoes. It was the ultimate girl fun when Jen, the stylist, and I assembled outfits for every possible scenario in Italy. I mean, I’m half Italian, so they could be planning a homecoming parade for me.

  When we got off the plane, the paps were there waiting for us, just as I knew they’d be.

  “Jennifer! Jennifer!” they screamed as they photographed her.

  Not a single “Leah!”

  No one had stopped me for a shot of my fabulous get-off-the-plane outfit. And the only “image” of me getting off the plane is a corner of my forehead, behind Jennifer. But to be fair, it was chaotic with all the fans, security, and camera flashes. Maybe they had just missed me. I had been standing behind Jennifer, who towers over me. No problem. There were plenty more outfits where this one came from.

  The next ensemble I chose, for a little stroll up the Spanish Steps, was my shop-in-Rome outfit: a ruffled white turtleneck, black slacks capped off by a Chanel coat and four-inch Gucci heels. After three hours of preparation, I was finally ready to grab Angelo and leave the secured hotel right near the steps, where the wedding party was staying.