Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

parting, said her publicist, Robert Garlock, keen to take Scientology out of the
emotional equation. “She has taken church courses and she’s found them
beneficial.” His careful phrasing was matched by Penélope’s own guarded
comments about the organization, saying that she had read a lot of books and
“some of the things I have studied have helped me with my life.”
Perhaps her reticence was related to the fact that she was called into two
meetings with the Office of Special Affairs, the department of Scientology
responsible for intelligence operations. It has access to the confidential files of
individual parishioners and is able and willing to use previous confessions to
attack the characters of those who have left the group. “Presumably she was
warned not to say anything,” observes a former OSA chief.
Her father was much more open. “She’s happier than I am,” revealed
Penélope’s father, Eduardo, a telling phrase that suggested something of her
fraught experience. When asked if he was saddened by the breakdown of his
daughter’s relationship, he was blunt. “No, I’ve no reason to be.” While the split
may have delighted Eduardo Cruz, his daughter—unlike Nicole Kidman—and
Tom remained friends.
It was not long after the split that the Hollywood rumor mill was linking Tom
to actress Jennifer Garner, who divorced her actor husband Scott Foley around
the time Tom and Penélope announced their own parting. One story suggested
that he had become smitten with the chemistry graduate after seeing her in his
favorite TV show, Alias. Legend has it that he left messages on her voice mail
asking “if she knew what freedom was,” sentiments so trite that Garner
apparently read them to her girlfriends. One wildfire story that made the rounds
inside the higher echelons of Scientology was that Tom learned of Jennifer’s
fascination with tigers and had sent one around to her house in a cage. Naturally,
Garner’s representatives dismiss the notion—after all, real live tigers are hard to
come by even with a Neiman Marcus charge card—but it demonstrates how all
eyes inside Scientology were continually locked on pleasing Cruise.
While his association with Scientology may have harmed his love life, his
faith seems to have helped him understand his movie characters. During the
filming of Collateral during 2004, he explored the personality of Vincent, a
coldhearted hired killer, by studying Hubbard’s examination of antisocial
behavior and personalities. “In Scientology there is a large body of knowledge
about antisocials. So I worked to create Vincent’s moral code from that.” He

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omitted to mention that in Hubbard’s view, these antisocial “merchants of
chaos” included politicians, police, journalists, and, bizarrely, undertakers.
Scientology as character background was one thing, but by the fall of 2004, he
was literally building a base for his faith on the set of his latest movie, War of
the Worlds. Tom, his sister Lee Anne DeVette, agent Kevin Huvane, and
director Steven Spielberg had to appeal personally to the president of Universal
Studios, Ron Meyer, to allow a Scientology tent to be erected at the studio.
Permission was given, provided the tent was not used for recruitment purposes.
As a result, throughout filming, Scientology Volunteer Ministers were on duty
in the large tent in order to give “assists” to actors and members of the film
crew. The delicious irony of a new religion that believes in reincarnation
inveigling itself onto the movie set for a film based on a book written by H. G.
Wells, an outspoken atheist who categorically rebuffed the idea that either he or
his body was immortal, was apparently lost on Tom Cruise—and everyone else,
for that matter. When asked about the religious tent, Spielberg rather
shamefacedly argued that no one was compelled to visit it. Typically, Tom was
much more aggressive when pressed by the German magazine Der Spiegel. “The
volunteer Scientology ministers were there to help the sick and injured. People
on the set appreciated that.” Ignoring the traditional role played by doctors and
nurses, he moved effortlessly into his new role as omnipotent preacher and
healer.
“I don’t care what someone believes. I don’t care what nationality they are.
But if someone wants to get off drugs, I can help them. If someone wants to
learn how to read, I can help them. If someone doesn’t want to be a criminal
anymore, I can give them tools that can better their life. You have no idea how
many people want to know what Scientology is.”
Tom’s zeal was in keeping with his persona as an indestructible godlike
figure, able to solve all the world’s problems on and off the screen. This was a
man who, when he was not saving the planet on the silver screen, was rescuing
damsels in distress in real life. Stories were legion: In 1996 he stopped to help a
hit-and-run victim in Santa Monica and paid her hospital bills. “If he’s not
Superman,” said a grateful Heloisa Vinhas, “he can be my Batman.” That same
year he pulled to safety two children who were being crushed in an excited
crowd at the London premiere of Mission: Impossible, sent a tender from his
yacht to assist five people who had abandoned a sinking boat off the island of
Capri in the Mediterranean, and consoled a sobbing housewife who had just
been mugged of expensive jewelry outside her home near Tom’s rented house in
central London. During the filming of The Last Samurai in 2003, he stopped to

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change the flat tire of a couple stranded in the remote New Zealand countryside.
A year later, in November 2004, he explained why he was a Good Samaritan
in a long congratulatory interview before he was awarded Scientology’s first-
ever Freedom Medal of Valor at a gala event at Saint Hill Manor in England. He
told his audience, “You can’t drive past an accident, because as a Scientologist
you are the only one who can help.” While his assertion confirmed fellow
Scientologists in their assumptions that they were a superior species—and that
Tom was supreme among these advanced beings—his tone of arrogant, self-
righteous certainty was beginning to play badly in the outside world.
That evening, though, everyone was there to worship Tom, his achievements
lauded in a lengthy video preceding his award being presented by his great
friend David Miscavige. The bond between the star and his spiritual leader was
on show for everyone to see. As they met on the stage, they looked each other
straight in the eyes, unblinking, then traded effusive words and crisp salutes.
Miscavige said that Tom was “the most dedicated Scientologist I know,” before
presenting him with his unique award. The adulation did not stop there.
Miscavige went on to describe his friend in terms befitting a prophet: “Across
ninety nations, five thousand people hear his word of Scientology—every hour.
Every minute of every hour someone reaches for LRH technology . . . simply
because they know Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.” That Tom had also donated
more than $2.5 million warranted a second award, the Platinum Meritorious.
Even though he doesn’t believe in heaven, Tom looked as if he had died and
gone there as he soaked up the adulation of this huge congregation. Then it was
his turn to laud David Miscavige. “I have never met a more competent, a more
intelligent, a more tolerant, a more compassionate being outside of what I have
experienced from LRH. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders. I’ve met them all.”
He then turned his verbal firepower on SPs—Suppressive Persons—before
announcing that as Scientologists, “We are the authorities on the mind.”
When the cheers had faded, however, there were mutterings of discontent
among Scientology’s most committed followers. Sea Org members know what
sacrifice means. They have all signed billion-year contracts, promising to put the
advancement of the organization before anything else: money, family, fame,
prestige. They are the elite. Yet here was a man who already had it all, being
showered in glory and awarded honors because of his celebrity rather than his
sacrifice. It was as if their unseen, unstinting efforts behind the scenes counted
for nothing against the glamour of Tom Cruise.
A month later, Scientology’s poster boy was asked, together with Oprah
Winfrey, to host a concert in Norway to honor the Nobel Peace Prize winner,
Kenyan environmentalist Professor Wangari Maathai. Before the event, Tom

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spoke not as an actor but as a man of religion. “One of the things that we believe
in [as Scientologists] is peace, freedom. I’m just proud to be here, and very
proud to be a Scientologist here and to be part of this.”
If Cruise expected the kind of reception in Oslo that he had received at the
Scientology gala, he was mistaken. Noisy protests were staged against the choice
of such a controversial figure for the occasion. The newspapers quoted one priest
from Stockholm as saying, “They’re a manipulative sect that takes over people’s
lives and finances.” Another Scientology foe, Andreas Heldal-Lund, also spoke
out: “It’s very wrong to let Cruise lead the gala. I’ve met tons of people who
have had their lives devastated by Scientology, and this is such an important
event.”
These critics meant as little to Tom as any others. They were so far beneath
him, he barely heard them. He was on top of the world, at the top of his game.
Celebrity advocate, expansive donor, skillful lobbyist, human-rights activist,
medical expert, education guru, healer, inspirational preacher: There was nothing
this man could not do. He was a full-fledged master of the universe.

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