Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

by Leah Remini

  “We are going to be swarmed by reporters and photographers,” I predicted to Angelo.

  I steeled myself to face the crowd of hundreds who had lined up behind velvet ropes set up around the perimeter of the hotel in hopes of catching a glimpse in real life of the celebrities who were attending the wedding, including of course, me and Angelo. After putting on my very expensive sunglasses and taking Angelo’s arm, I walked out of the lobby and bravely waited for the firestorm of fans and paps clamoring for me.

  Silence.

  I took off my sunglasses.

  More silence.

  “I guess your show doesn’t air in Italy,” Angelo said.

  Angelo, who wanted to go to the Coliseum, grabbed a cab for us. When we got out, there was a large group of tourists waiting to get into the ruin. My time to step in. I walked past the group and up to the man standing at the front of the gate. I asked him if he ever watched the show The King of Queens. He said he did not and told us to get back in line. (Playing hardball, the Italians!) Apparently my street cred as a celebrity did not travel. My feet were killing me. So after Angelo took a picture of us (the only one from the whole trip), we went back to the hotel to get ready for the welcome dinner, the first event of the weekend.

  Almost all of the 150 guests invited to Tom and Katie’s wedding, which included some of the biggest names in all areas of the business—actors and actresses, of course, but also the heads of the major talent agencies, top entertainment lawyers, and well-known producers in Hollywood—piled into Nino, a classic, cozy Roman restaurant about an hour from the hotel. Old Italian waiters in starched white jackets and black bow ties hustled around the bride and groom’s famous friends like Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Victoria and David Beckham, Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy (who were dating at the time), and Brooke Shields and her husband, Chris Henchy.

  I had been totally shocked when I saw Brooke Shields on the chartered plane to Italy that we shared. After the whole brouhaha when Tom attacked her on Today for taking antidepressants, I thought she was our enemy and had even said some shit about her in defense of Tom and my church. “I wouldn’t trust someone who had those feelings with a baby,” I remarked on Entertainment Tonight. “Do I think she needs help? Yes. Can you take a pill for something that deep? That dark? The answer is no. I got through it, but I didn’t get through it by taking a pill.” Then I had the pleasure of being on a private plane with her for eight hours. To my mind, it was clearly a PR move on the part of Tom’s team. And then there were forced photo ops for the press to capture which celebrities and Hollywood big shots were attending the wedding. Thus it looked like they were associating themselves with Scientology and Scientologists. Although the restaurant was located on a street where it was easy for cars to drive right up and drop people off at the entrance, the wedding planners chose instead to have the street roped off, so we all had to get out of our cars on the main avenue and walk down the street to the restaurant with camera flashes going off the entire way. The church, in a very calculating way, could point to this photo or that photo and say Posh and Becks or Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony are associating themselves with this wedding, and therefore with Scientology. It was a smart way of legitimizing the church to the public and an attempt to recover from the bad PR of recent years. It also promoted the illusion of “look how powerful Scientology is in this business.”

  —

  AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, I saw everyone who was from the church for the first time. I spotted a young Sea Org member who worked for David Miscavige, drinking red wine. I was more shocked at the sight of a Sea Org member drinking—something that I’d never seen before and something that was completely against policy. “What are you doing?” I said to the kid. “You know Sea Org members are not supposed to drink.” He responded, “You know what they say—when in Rome…”

  Someone who was representing the church at such a high-profile moment was completely flouting its rules. Most Scientologists, even just parishioners, don’t really drink because they are always on course, and the rule is no drinking twenty-four hours before you are on course or going into session. Sea Org members are held to an even higher standard as they are the ones who deliver Scientology to its parishioners. To see one drinking would be as weird as seeing a priest doing a tequila shot. It’s just not done.

  Jessica Feshbach and Tommy Davis, the Sea Org members who had become constant fixtures at Tom and Katie’s house in L.A., were in Italy, without their respective spouses, and had their hands all over each other at the restaurant—another major taboo. Sea Org members are absolutely forbidden from touching members of the opposite sex aside from their spouses. So at dinner, when Marc and Jen, having no idea who Tommy and Jessica were, asked if they were married, my face went red with embarrassment. But then Jessica took it to a whole other level.

  “No, I’m married to a beaner,” she said, using a racial slur for her Mexican husband.

  “Jessica!” I interjected.

  “What? I can say it. I mean I’m married to a Mexican.”

  “I’m telling you it’s offensive.”

  She was married to a high-ranking Sea Org member. I wanted her to stop embarrassing herself and get her shit together.

  Back in L.A. a few weeks before the wedding, I had asked my assistant at the time to call ahead to the hotel to check on the rooms. I asked her to make sure I was in a big enough room so that Jennifer and I could get ready together. She upgraded the smaller room I had been assigned and verified that the new room wasn’t one from the block reserved for the wedding party and that it was charged to my credit card, not to the wedding party.

  The next thing I got was a nasty call from Jessica: “Who are you to be changing rooms?”

  I couldn’t believe I had a Sea Org member calling me about rooms. It was like a rabbi calling you about why you switched the mimosa for a Bloody Mary at brunch.

  “You’re ungrateful,” she said.

  “Why should I be grateful? I’m going to a wedding.”

  “Because you’re going to the wedding of the century.”

  —

  SO WHILE I MIGHT HAVE come off as “ungrateful” to them, Jessica and Tommy still pulled me in as the church’s unofficial liaison to Jennifer and Marc. I had to answer tons of questions. (What kind of car does she need? What does she like to have in her hotel room? What kind of security does she need?) Why is this of concern to them? I wondered.

  I found it odd that top church officials, Sea Org members, were so involved in the planning of Tom and Katie’s wedding. This was unprecedented and off policy, to my mind.

  Not only were these high-ranking executives involved in orchestrating the event, they were also all in attendance at the event. To me it could only be viewed as Tom and Katie’s wedding now being regarded as “official church business.” I could not shed the thought that Tom must be an unofficial executive of the church. When I brought this up to church officials later on, they went to great lengths to deny it.

  “All parishioners, including Tom Cruise, are considered equals and treated accordingly” was their pat response.

  My confusion and anxiety about what was going on with my church only increased that night at Nino, where David Miscavige was one of the guests. The bizarre part about him that evening was that his female assistant Laurisse Stuckenbrock was sitting next to him like she was his date. It would have been okay if she had stood off to the side, ready to assist him when needed. But this was just weird. She was in the seat that should have been reserved for his wife, Shelly. Where was she, anyway? Strange not to have your wife, who was also COB Assistant, at an event like this.

  Suri was also there that night. I heard a baby crying from the direction of the bathroom. She was a seven-month-old up late in a loud, crowded, dark restaurant, so what else was she going to do? The crying kept up, and Katie didn’t seem to notice. Other people took notice, though, and started to look arou
nd to figure out what was going on with the baby. I too kept looking around. Is anyone going to do anything? I thought.

  After about five minutes I headed to the bathroom to offer some help. When I opened the door, I found three women, including Tom’s sister and his assistant, standing over the baby, who was lying on the tile floor. I didn’t know if they were changing her diaper or what, but the three women were looking at her like they thought she was L. Ron Hubbard incarnate. Rather than talking to her in a soothing voice, they kept saying, “Suri! Suri!” in a tone that sounded like they were telling an adult to get her shit together.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for an answer. “She’s a baby. Pick her up!”

  I’m hardly mother of the year, but even I knew that she was probably hungry and tired. But when I asked where her bottle was, they said it was outside, in the main part of the restaurant. It had to be heated up and they seemed helpless. “Oh, my God, you guys. We’re in a restaurant, where typically there’s a kitchen,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

  I grabbed the bottle from Suri’s diaper bag, went into the kitchen, asked someone to warm it up, which of course was no problem, and returned to the bathroom, where Suri was still on the floor and still crying! “Pick her up!” I yelled. They picked her up, gave her the bottle, and finally she stopped crying. Then Tom’s sister turned to me and said, “Thank you,” as if I were being dismissed.

  I came out, and from his table, David Miscavige mouthed to me the words “Is she okay?” To which I silently replied, “Yes.”

  When I got back to my seat next to Jennifer, however, I found that Jessica had taken it. I didn’t care so much about my seat, but I wanted my phone, which I had left on my seat. I wanted to call home and check on Sofia. I hovered near her and looked for the phone but didn’t see it by my place setting. “Did anybody see my phone?” I asked. But no one had. I started to get hysterical as people either shrugged no or ignored me altogether.

  I turned to Jessica, the very last person I felt like dealing with, and said, “Excuse me,” as I started to feel around the chair for my phone.

  “What’s next, chick?” she said with a laugh. “You want to fuck me?”

  “No, what’s next, Jess, is I’m going to punch you in your fucking face.”

  The weirdness of the night was starting to get to me. When tears started to form in the corners of my eyes, it was Brooke Shields, of all people, who asked me if everything was all right. She was sitting nearby and was witnessing what was going on. She helped me look for my phone, but we still couldn’t find it.

  I walked outside the restaurant to take a moment, but Jessica followed me. She held my phone up in one hand. “You still want to punch me in the fucking face?” she asked.

  “Now more than ever.”

  Just then Marc Anthony appeared. “Lee, don’t be mad at her,” he said. “It was me. I took your phone. I am so sorry. I was just playing with you.”

  I didn’t believe it was him at all. I was pretty sure he was just trying to defuse the extremely tense situation.

  The next few days leading up to the wedding didn’t get any easier. I felt like Jessica and Tommy were watching my every move and every move I made was wrong. Even on the afternoon of the wedding Jessica was on my ass. We still had a few hours before we needed to be at Odescalchi Castle on Lake Bracciano, an hour outside of Rome, where Tom and Katie were getting married, but Jessica kept texting me that I needed to get down to the lobby of the hotel right away. When I texted back that I was going with Jennifer, and we would leave when Jen’s security team gave us the okay (they were in communication with the security team at the venue), she kept insisting that I go now with the Scientology group, not with a guest of the wedding—as if my role at this wedding was to publicly show my affiliation to the church, rather than to my close friend. Then Jessica told me if I didn’t come now that I would be late.

  Jennifer, whom I was getting ready with, per our original plan, finally asked, “Who keeps texting you?”

  “Oh, nobody.”

  Now I was acting weird too.

  “Who’s texting you?”

  “Oh, no one. It’s just the—they were just wondering if we were ready.”

  “Tell whoever that is that we’ll go when my team gives us the okay, and not before.” And with that I stopped responding to Jessica’s texts. We left a bit later and did arrive late, but Tom’s sister and assistant were arriving at the same time, so I wondered how late could we actually be? I was trying my best to keep my behind-the-scenes drama with the church to myself—it would have been bad PR to do otherwise—but I was on edge as we pulled into the beautiful courtyard of the medieval castle, where trumpeters announced our arrival.

  The guests had to hike up the hill to the entrance, and in doing so I stepped on my gown and ripped it. I was immediately taken up to a room where one of the ten in-house seamstresses from Armani, booked for the wedding, sewed it right up.

  I then joined the rest of the guests, who were being served champagne in a room with a fireplace that was as big as my living room. It was here, standing among Tom’s assistants, that I casually asked them, “Where’s Shelly? She should be here.” Again, I thought it so odd that she was not there. Total bad PR. In the past Shelly was always by David’s side.

  They responded with “I don’t want to be part of this conversation,” and walked away.

  Afterward I saw Tommy Davis and asked him the same question. I hadn’t seen Shelly for a few years now. I had heard she was on some type of special assignment, but I had my suspicions that the truth was far worse.

  “I mean, wherever she is, you could have dusted her off, cleaned her up, and gotten her here,” I said.

  Tommy replied, “I think it’s odd that you’re asking.”

  “No, it’s odd being that you are the spokesperson for the church that you didn’t have enough sense to realize that not having her here is a bigger PR blunder than anything.”

  “You don’t have the rank to be asking about Shelly Miscavige,” he replied, and with that he shut down the conversation.

  We filed into the chapel where the ceremony was to take place. Everybody took their seats. Then Norman Starkey and Tom entered and took their places at the front of the chapel, and, inexplicably, for the next twenty minutes (but what seemed like an eternity) Tom stood there with that everything-is-great look plastered on his face even as the crowd grew uncomfortable. Finally Jennifer leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Do you think Katie’s coming?”

  Eventually she did walk down the aisle. Tom and Katie wed in a Scientology ceremony, where they vowed “to never close their eyes in sleep on a disagreement or an upset.” David Miscavige acted as Tom’s best man, and Jessica was by Katie’s side most of the time. Then we all headed to the receiving line to greet the newlyweds. Tom and Katie hugged and said hello warmly to everyone—except Angelo and me. They bypassed us completely and moved on to kiss Jennifer and Marc.

  “What did we do?” Angelo said as we walked into the reception. I just shrugged, because I really didn’t know. Was it the fact that we were late that set them off, and if so, why weren’t they mad at Jen and Marc too? Or the fact that I asked for a different room? I didn’t think either of those things warranted their flat-out dismissal of us.

  Along with the rest of the guests, who were talking and mingling, we filed into the castle’s grand Hall of the Caesars to find our tables and take our seats for dinner. The opera singer Andrea Bocelli filled the dark hall with Italian love songs in his booming voice. Jennifer, who had picked up our table assignment cards, realized we weren’t at the same table and asked what was going on. When I said I didn’t know, she replied, “Well, I don’t want to sit with people I don’t know.”

  I wasn’t sure what was going on either, except that church members had been trying to separate me from Jen ever since we had arrived in I
taly. The only explanation I could come up with was that they viewed me as just a springboard for Tom and Katie to get to Jennifer and Marc and for the church to get to them for recruitment. The day before the ceremony, when we were leaving for the rehearsal dinner at the Villa Aurelia, Jessica and Tommy had wanted me to go in a van with other church people even though I told them I was driving with Jen and Marc, who had their own car and security. In the hotel lobby, Tommy tried to pull me aside. “Leah,” he said, motioning for me to go toward the van. But Jen, who didn’t know what was going on, said, “She’s with us.”

  “Oh, yeah. No problem,” he replied.

  The same thing happened at the dinner hosted by Katie’s parents, who had very little presence at the wedding. As the four of us sat down at a table, Tommy called over to me: “Leah and Angelo, you’re over here.” But again, Jennifer said, “No, she’s with us.” And again, Tommy backpedaled. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I think there was a mistake on the tables. Let me just change some things around.” Although we returned to the hotel at four in the morning after a long night out with some of the other wedding guests, as soon as Angelo and I left Jen and Marc, Tom and Katie knocked on their door to see if they wanted to take a walk on the beach with them alone. I thought, It’s almost like someone has been watching and knew the moment we left, but I’m sure I’m being paranoid.…

  When it turned out that Jennifer and I weren’t at the same table at the wedding reception, she asked me to talk to the wedding coordinator to see if we could sit together. I felt responsible for Jennifer, since I had invited her and Marc to the wedding on Tom and Katie’s behalf. I’m sure she thought that I could communicate more easily with other Scientologists since I was one. For me to say to her otherwise would have been bad PR. What I failed to realize at the time, and what would later go down as a transgression, was the fact that me sitting with Jen meant that I was not placed at an assigned table where I could be used effectively by the church to promote Scientology among non-Scientology guests at the wedding. They viewed this as a hostile act.