Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

The New York Times: “To suggest that I was wrong to take drugs to deal with my
depression, and that instead I should have taken vitamins and exercised shows an
utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in
general.” David Rice, president of the National Coalition of Human Rights
Activists, agreed, urging Tom to “stand on a milk crate and apologize to Ms.
Shields face-to-face for the gross insult he has committed against her and
hundreds of thousands of other women who suffer from postpartum depression.
He should also learn to shut up on matters he is utterly ignorant about.”
Tom’s views were not just inflammatory but potentially life-threatening.
Medical experts and psychiatrists were concerned that vulnerable individuals
might listen to Tom and stop taking their medication, with dire consequences.
Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who studied psychiatry during her research for
a psychological thriller, described his comments as “ridiculous” and “incredibly

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irresponsible,” while The Journal for Clinical Investigation, published by an
honor society of physician-scientists, warned that his celebrity could prevent
those in need going for treatment. That was just the start. The Congressional
Mental Health Caucus, a bipartisan coalition of over ninety members of
Congress, criticized his remarks, saying that he reinforced negative perceptions.
The American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally
Ill, and the National Mental Health Association issued a joint statement
condemning the actor: “Mental illnesses are real medical conditions that affect
millions of Americans. . . . It is irresponsible for Mr. Cruise to use his movie
publicity tour to promote his own ideological views and deter people with
mental illness from getting the care they need.” They pointed out that around ten
children every day die from suicide as a result of untreated mental illness.
Republican congressman Tim Murphy said if attitude adjustment, as advocated
by Tom, had any sway, then mental illness could have been cured during the
Salem witch trials: “By promoting such a theory, Cruise is providing false hope
that deters people from getting the help they need.”
Shortly after Tom’s appearance on the Today show, a concerned mother
anonymously posted this message on the NBC Web site:
I would like to tell how Tom Cruise has impacted our family’s life. I
have a daughter who is bi-polar and must take medication. It is a
disorder that, so far, no one can help other than with medication.
When Tom was everywhere doing his rants about medication, she
listened intently (bi-polar folks can be led very easily so please
don’t pre-judge) and decided that Tom probably was right. She was
feeling just great so she decided to stop her meds and then she
began a downward spiral. We were told last night, since she has
now decided to self-medicate with alcohol, that she may have 2
weeks to live. Thank you, Tom, so much. You are a complete fool
and I’d like you to come and do your magic on her and help our
family through our grief.
There were similar posts on the Web site for the Dr. Phil show after he hosted an
on-air discussion of the issues raised by Tom.
While there was no way to verify the accuracy of the posting, and
Scientologists could dismiss an unsigned comment as mischief making, there is
nothing anonymous about Jeannine Udall. As she watched Tom’s rant on the
Today show from her home in California, she could barely contain her anger. A
tall woman from a solid Mormon family, Jeannine joined Scientology at the age

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of twenty-five, when she was working as a secretary at Universal Studios. A
fellow staff member had been pestering her for months, but what finally sold her
was the fact that John Travolta and Tom Cruise were members. If it was good
enough for Tom Cruise, she reasoned, it was good enough for her. That
reasoning nearly cost her her life.
At first all was well. She joined a Scientology-front organization and earned
good money in sales, progressing to Operating Thetan V. Jeannine spent
seventeen years as a loyal and hardworking foot soldier for the Scientology
cause, then a combination of unfortunate events sent her into a downward mental
spiral. In 2001 this once happy-go-lucky girl drove to Santa Barbara, wrote notes
to her friends and family, and prepared to throw herself in front of an oncoming
train. She was suffering from severe mental illness and had become morbidly
depressed.
Yet because of her Scientology beliefs, Jeannine refused to see a psychiatrist.
Even when her family forced her to go for help, her conditioning fought against
it. Eventually, after treatment at the WindHorse Clinic, in Boulder, Colorado,
she checked into the Wellspring retreat in the Midwest. After many hours of
counseling, she was finally able to address her guilt and sense of worthlessness
after escaping Scientology. Her message to Tom Cruise? “God forbid he or his
children ever gets sick as a Scientologist. Psychiatry saved my life. It is not the
evil he says it is.”
Jeannine was lucky: She is still alive today. For others the association with
Scientology has proved fatal. After Tom’s appearance on Today, an ad appeared
in LA Weekly that blamed the actor and his church for the death of Scientology
auditor Elli Perkins, a fifty-four-year-old wife and mother who was stabbed
seventy-seven times by her schizophrenic son. He had stopped taking the
medication prescribed for his condition because of the precepts of Scientology.
Significantly, the stabbing took place on the annual celebration of L. Ron
Hubbard Day, March 13. The ad read: “Thanks, Tom Cruise and the Church of
Scientology, for your expert advice on mental health. Elli Perkins was killed on
March 13, 2003, by the schizophrenic son she was told to treat with vitamins
instead of psychiatric care.”
When Tom was lecturing Matt Lauer in June, his fiancée was watching from the
wings, silent and unseen. By late October, Katie Holmes was front row center—
she, Tom, and Sea Org disciple Jessica Feshbach Rodriguez guests of honor at
the annual Patron Ball at Scientology’s British headquarters, Saint Hill Manor.
At first glance the black-tie evening seemed like a conventional social occasion.
It was only when a video came on showing the violent destruction of the

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psychiatric profession as part of a campaign of “global demolition” that the
zealous nature of the gathering became clear. Whatever her misgivings, Katie
stood with Tom and applauded wildly as David Miscavige roused his audience
with colorful rhetoric about the enemies of Scientology while rattling off rapid-
fire statistics about the organization’s successes.
One disillusioned member of Scientology, who attended the event, compared
the evening to a fascist rally. “It can be extremely unpleasant to be a live witness
to evil,” she said. “It’s not something you’re reading or watching on TV. You’re
there. And the indoctrinated are there with you. You see the evil and you want to
do something. But you know that if you do, you’ll be taken away, turned over to
‘the authorities,’ and that will be the end of you.”
It was a baptism of fire for Katie Holmes, who was surrounded by
Scientology, completely immersed in it. As one former member noted ironically,
“Maybe Tom will show a video of the event to Katie’s parents. I’m sure they
will love it.” Throughout, Katie looked at Tom with “unblinking adoration,” not
only when he received a standing ovation for his donations to the cause, but
when he was praised by Mike Rinder, commanding officer of the Office of
Special Affairs, for his stance against psychiatry. According to Rinder, such was
the impact of Tom Terrific that, just one day after one interview and two days
after another, the Food and Drug Administration issued so-called “black box
warnings” on two psychiatric drugs. When Tom spoke, the world listened.
As the Scientologists listened to Tom, they watched Katie intently. There was
perhaps a knowing curiosity in the way that Sea Org disciples looked at her. Or
rather at what she was carrying. Days before the Saint Hill event, Katie had
severed one of the remaining links with her old life by firing Leslie Sloane-
Zelnick, her publicist since the early days of Dawson’s Creek. On October 5,
Sloane-Zelnick had been replaced by Lee Anne DeVette, who wasted no time in
announcing to the world that Katie was pregnant with Tom’s child. This had not
been part of Katie’s career game plan.
During her days on Dawson’s Creek, Katie, then twenty-one, had visited a
tarot card reader in New York’s East Village. She was horrified when the cards
predicted that she would be a mother in 2006. “I don’t want to be a mother at
twenty-seven,” she wailed. Her Catholic parents, who had disapproved of
Katie’s plans to live with her previous fiancé, Chris Klein, were reportedly
unhappy that she was pregnant out of wedlock. Despite a letter from Katie’s new
publicist urging parishioners at her church in Toledo to refrain from public
comment, a family friend, Kathleen Jensen, spoke out. “I can’t imagine what her
parents are going through right now,” Ms. Jensen said. “She really needs to get
that baby baptized in a Catholic church.”

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Under normal circumstances, Scientologists would also have taken a dim view
of pregnancy outside wedlock. As public Scientologists, Tom and Katie would
have been forced to appear before an ethics officer and been deemed to have
committed an “overt,” a harmful act that is a sin. If a Sea Org disciple had
committed the same “overt,” she would have been sent to the Rehabilitation
Project Force, the Scientology version of a labor camp.
Tom and Katie, of course, did not live by the same rules as other
Scientologists. If Tom was ecstatic at the news of Katie’s pregnancy, inside the
world of Scientology there was excitement bordering on hysteria. Some sect
members sincerely believed that Katie Holmes was carrying the baby who would
be the vessel for L. Ron Hubbard’s spirit when he returned from his trip around
the galaxy. True believers were convinced that Tom’s spawn would be the
reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard. Some Sea Org fanatics even wondered if the
actress had been impregnated with Hubbard’s frozen sperm. In her more
reflective moments, Katie might have felt as if she were in the middle of a real-
life version of the horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, in which an unsuspecting
young woman is impregnated with the Devil’s child.
Ironically, as absurd as this theory sounds, within the sect it was entirely
plausible. The Scientology founder predicted he would return to Earth in some
form some twenty years after he had “dropped his body.” Nor was this the first
time that Scientologists had been gripped by this frenzy. When Hubbard’s
daughter Suzette gave birth to a red-haired son—the same coloring as the sect’s
founder—the infant was followed around the base at Hemet by curious believers.
It became so unnerving that Suzette’s then husband, Guy White, decided it was
time to leave the movement. This belief in Hubbard’s return goes to the very top
of the organization.
During the mid-1990s, Bonnie View, the home built at Hemet especially for
Hubbard, was renovated in anticipation of his imminent return. Both David
Miscavige and Mike Rinder verbally cracked the whip over the gangs of Sea Org
disciples who worked to build and furnish the house, berating them and urging
them to work harder because time was running out before the great man
returned. At one memorable briefing, Miscavige furiously told Sea Org disciples
“If you think you are building a house for nobody to live in, you are all
dreaming.” Once the building was completed, Miscavige installed a housekeeper
to prepare the mansion for Hubbard’s return. For a true believer like Tom
Cruise, already hailed as a messiah by fellow Scientologists, it was entirely
plausible that his unborn child was somehow destined to take L. Ron Hubbard’s
place.
Certainly the way Tom prepared for the child gave the impression that he was

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in tune with the mood of breathless anticipation in which Scientologists awaited
their spiritual equivalent of the Virgin birth. Even the womb was no hiding
place, the actor spending $200,000 on a sonogram machine to monitor the
baby’s development. In the first weeks he took endless pictures of the growing
embryo. “I’m a filmmaker—I need to see the rushes!” he explained. When he
told one incredulous interviewer that the machine was strapped to Katie “twenty-
four hours a day,” it was hard to know if he was joking or not. Katie later
downplayed the issue, saying that they only had a sonogram at home for when
their doctor was there. When physicians warned that unnecessary use of the
sonogram machine could put mother and baby at risk, Tom retorted that he had
not exceeded FDA guidelines.
If the sonogram machine was not enough, he also reportedly bought a fetus
learning system that was strapped to Katie’s stomach. The device was apparently
designed to impart information to the baby in the womb. On one occasion Katie
was asked to leave a movie theater in Florida because the device, which emits a
low buzzing noise, was annoying other patrons. It was also reported, and
subsequently denied, that Tom had fitted Katie’s cell phone with a tracking
device so that he would know where she was day and night.
The rest of the universe was more difficult to control. By now Tom was
something of a laughingstock. Not only had the phrase “jumping the couch”
entered dictionaries, but bloggers were saying that Katie had gone from “A list
to alien, hip to hypnotized.” It was perhaps a sign of the panic inside Camp
Cruise that only hours after returning from England, where he had basked in the
adulation of Scientologists, he effectively fired his sister Lee Anne DeVette as
his chief publicist.
On November 7—just a month after taking charge of Katie’s publicity—she
was demoted to looking after his philanthropic activities, which were mainly
Scientology related. Paul Bloch and Arnold Robinson, of the established
Hollywood PR firm Rogers & Cowan, took her place. That Robinson joined
Tom on a normally routine trip to Shanghai and Xitang, where he spent two
weeks in November shooting Mission: Impossible III, demonstrated how little
they trusted Tom to stay on track and on message. Once Tom Reliable, he was
now seen by many Hollywood insiders as a loose cannon.
Even with Bloch and Robinson piloting the Cruise ship, there was no stopping
the tsunami of gossip and ridicule engulfing the Hollywood star. Famously
humorless—and litigious—in the face of speculation about his religion and his
sexuality, he had little to laugh at later in November 2005 when the cartoon
series South Park screened an episode, provocatively titled “Trapped in the
Closet,” that poked fun at Scientology and the endlessly mutating rumors about

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his sexual orientation. It was bad enough that the half-hour show, penned by
series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, already had a running joke in which
Tom refused to leave a clothes closet, the implication being that he was refusing
to acknowledge his homosexuality. But perhaps more damaging was the tongue-
in-cheek explanation of Scientology’s creationist myth, dealing with how the
evil warlord Xenu sent millions of people to Earth to be blown up, their spirits
floating in eternal torment. Not only was the exposition of this myth highly
accurate—Stone and Parker had used a Scientology expert to write a background
paper—there was a caption underneath that read:
THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS
ACTUALLY BELIEVE
. It was comedy genius, both funny and informative,
eventually earning the show an Emmy nomination. Indeed, Steven Spielberg
later told friends that he had learned more about Scientology from South Park
than he ever had from Tom Cruise.