Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

party outsider to talk of the town.
Pictures of the new couple hit the gossip columns the following day, pushing
talk about Penélope Cruz and Matthew McConaughey down the page. Maybe
this was what Tom Cruise had in mind. The next day, Sofía faced a blizzard of
phone calls, text messages, and e-mails from the remorselessly romantic Mr.
Cruise, who sent her flowers, notes, and chocolates. She was flattered and
excited—as were her friends, giggling over his texts and admiring the bouquets
he sent her.
Naturally, Vergara’s publicist, Karen Tenser, was delighted, eager to see her
client’s name in the headlines with a star of this magnitude. Sofía was cooler.
She took Tom’s wooing in her stride, airily dismissing him as “the shortest guy
she had ever dated.” After all, the shapely Ms. Vergara—at five feet, seven
inches the same height as her new beau—had already dated some very eligible
bachelors. Her first boyfriend had been Latino superstar Luis Miguel, the South
American equivalent of a young Frank Sinatra. Nonetheless, Tom’s charm
offensive was working.
Sofía agreed to delay her return to Montreal, accepting Tom’s offer to hang
out at his Hollywood home. She brought her son, Manolo, born when she was
eighteen, along, too. Manolo played with Cruise’s children, Connor and Isabella,
and was thrilled when Tom took him out on the back of his trail bike. If this
relationship was going to work, both Tom and Sofía knew that their children
would lie at the heart of it. Sofía once told an interviewer that her favorite date
was a night in with her twelve-year-old son. As a close friend noted, “She is a
mother first, not a careerist.”
Besides being single parents, the couple had much else in common, beginning
with early fame. When Sofía was seventeen, a photographer “discovered” her as
she lay on a Colombian beach. That first modeling session earned her other
deals, notably the starring role in a Pepsi commercial shown all over Latin
America. Like Tom, she had a passion for adventure, growing up on a cattle
farm in Barranquilla, Colombia, where she spent her childhood riding horses and
swimming in rivers. This headstrong girl, who her family nicknamed “La Toti,”
was an ideal choice to host a travel show called Fuera de Serie (Out of the
Ordinary) in which she was sent to extreme locations around the globe. For a

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guy who listed skydiving, jet planes, and trail biking among his hobbies, Tom
recognized that this was a woman who spoke his language.
Their spiritual pasts were similar, too. Both Tom and Sofía had been brought
up in the Catholic faith. As she embarked on her acting career, she had relied on
the guidance of the nuns at her school, following their advice to turn down big-
money offers from Playboy magazine to display her 32DD assets. Tom,
however, no longer found guidance from his Catholic past. He now had a very
different moral compass.
It was not long before Cruise casually suggested that Sofía join him on a trip
to what he calls “CC,” the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. When she arrived,
David Miscavige, the diminutive head of the church, was there to greet her and
show her around. He was charming and attentive. She was given some
Scientology literature to leaf through. It was a pleasant introduction to the world
of Scientology.
But it was on this trip that Sofía realized something else: Tom was never
alone. Everywhere he went, he was surrounded by Scientologists. They were at
his home, they were in his car, they were at the restaurant. They were never short
of smiles, but she found them “powerful and authoritarian.”
At the end of February, when she returned to Montreal to complete filming,
Cruise bombarded her with calls. He was obsessed with the new woman in his
life. After she flew back to Hollywood in early March 2005, the couple spent
every moment together. If they were not at his home, they were at the Celebrity
Centre. Sofía even took her mother, Margarita, along for a look around the
palatial Scientology mansion. Unlike her daughter, this devout Catholic was not
given an armful of literature as she left. All conversion efforts were focused on
Sofía—they had been ever since she first met Cruise.
Although they had known each other only for a matter of weeks, the
relationship had become so intense that marriage looked like the logical next
stage. One friend told me: “She met his children, there is no doubt he was
auditioning her for the part of his wife. If she had been interested, she would
today be the next Mrs. Cruise. Was it going to go further? No doubt about it. He
wanted to marry her—that was the idea.” The “audition” was going according to
plan. Cruise had found a feisty, athletic, adventurous woman. The winning factor
was that she had a child. Vergara had a proven track record; she could provide
him with exactly what he was after. They could be together forever—
Scientology’s poster boy and first lady.
As the days passed, however, Sofía started to connect the dots, and didn’t
much like the pattern that was emerging. As affectionate and attentive as Tom
was, she found his world cloying and suffocating, and was never quite sure if his

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actions were motivated by passion or were part of a well-practiced performance.
She felt she was being followed or watched and that her phone calls were being
monitored. It was as if he and Scientology were trying to take over her life.
Certainly her longtime manager, Luis Balaguer, and his team thought their days
were numbered, fearing that they would be replaced by management chosen by
Cruise.
It was made clear that if their relationship were to continue, she would have to
renounce her Catholic faith and convert to Scientology. For Tom, this was
supremely important. It would be unacceptable for Hollywood’s and
Scientology’s leading man to be married to anyone other than a member of his
faith. “She was fundamentally terrified by Scientology,” recalls a friend. “She
sincerely believed that she would be struck down by God and burn in hell if she
joined. That is what she said.” The lighthearted frivolity that had characterized
her early discussions with friends was replaced by their genuine concern for her
well-being. “Her friends got scared for her,” admits one of her close circle.
They need not have worried. Although educated by nuns, Sofía had graduated
from the school of hard knocks. Not only was she a single mother, but her
brother had been killed in a botched kidnap attempt and she had survived thyroid
cancer three years before. As she later admitted, “It was terrifying. But I knew
I’d beat it.” Sassy, street smart, and obstinate, she proved immune to the
blandishments of Cruise and Scientology. Her friend said, “Sofía comes from
Colombia, where the women have balls. There is no sense you can control her. If
you know her, it makes perfect sense. . . . She had plenty of opportunity to hitch
her wagon to Hollywood and to Tom. She is not swayed by that—she is her own
person.”
Sofía told her friends that she had been deliberately targeted not only as a
possible bride for Tom, but as a high-profile Scientology recruit who would be
an alluring figurehead for a future recruitment drive in Latin America. The
unexpected invitation to Will Smith’s party, the “impromptu” decision to go to
Jerry’s Famous Deli, the “casual” visits to Celebrity Centre—they all began to
make sense. They were to impress and ultimately win her over.
Instead of impressing her, all this drove her away. Tom’s constant “love
bombing”—the endless texts, calls, and e-mails—was too much. She saw it as a
performance to serve the higher purpose of his faith. On Easter weekend—
March 27, 2005—she and Tom had arranged to go to Clearwater, the
Scientology center in Florida. Instead, she stood him up, packing a bag and
“disappearing” for a few days. For five days he left messages and texts, but she
resolutely refused to return his calls. Even now, the location is kept secret in case
she needs to use the same bolt-hole again. As one friend put it, “The guy’s a

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freak and she ran for the hills.”
Sofía is kinder. While she admits that she likes Tom as a friend and found
their affair “fun,” having seen him in action she has a very clear vision of who
he is and how he operates. “You have to have respect for his beliefs and trying to
get his religion out there in any way possible,” notes a close member of Sofía’s
circle. The bottom line was that she was not prepared to sacrifice herself or her
faith to further her career—or to become the next Mrs. Cruise.
Sofía was savvy enough to see the consequences of the game being played. It
seems that Tom, for all his protestations of love and affection, saw it as a game,
too, albeit a game with high stakes. Even before the blooms on Sofía’s flowers
from him had faded, Tom was already sending bouquets to a new girl—a
wholesome, wide-eyed actress from America’s heartland.
For days, John Carrabino’s phone had been ringing off the hook. Every call to
his Beverly Hills office seemed to be about the young actress he was managing
—Katie Holmes—and her love life. Since March 5, 2005, when she had publicly
called off her engagement to longtime boyfriend Chris Klein, star of the teen
comedy American Pie, all the talk had been about a new man in her life. She had
been spotted kissing heartthrob actor Josh Hartnett in a coffee shop in New
York. The rumor mills whirred into action. Managing this kind of attention is
never easy; Carrabino was deflecting inquiries from all over the country. So it
must have been something of relief, as well as a surprise, when in early April he
received a call from the office of Tom Cruise rather than from another gossip
columnist. The request, which came out of the blue, was for a meeting between
Hollywood’s leading man and the aspiring star.
If her manager was surprised by Tom Cruise’s invitation, Katie Holmes was
ecstatic. She had dreamt of meeting the Hollywood action man since she was a
little girl growing up in Toledo, Ohio, her childhood crush a long-standing
family joke. She told her three older sisters that she would marry him someday
and live in a beautiful mansion where she would start the day by sliding from her
bedroom into her own swimming pool. Even in 1996, when she snagged the part
of Joey Potter, a teenage girl growing up in a suburban town, for the hit teen
soap Dawson’s Creek, her crush continued. Indeed, it was her unworldly
innocence—and her playful green eyes—that won her the role in the first place.
“She had these incredible eyes, it was all about the eyes,” recalled writer
Kevin Williamson. Educated by nuns and raised by a protective, God-fearing
family, Katie, just seventeen, was a real greenhorn when she first arrived on the
TV set in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her artlessness was exploited by her
costars, James Van Der Beek and Josh Jackson, who teased her about her

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teenage crush and sexual naïveté.
Close to her family and friends from Toledo, she daily phoned her mother,
Kathy, who was recovering from ovarian cancer. Kathy visited the set often,
while Katie’s longtime pal Meghann Birie, who impressed the cast with her
loyalty and levelheaded nature, stayed with her friend for six months to keep her
company. Her father, Martin, a partner in a law firm, was on hand to look over
the contract when she bought her first condo, just as he was there when she
signed up for the series. “She trusted him absolutely, and rightly so,” said a crew
member.
The family became anxious when they realized their youngest daughter was
caught in a tug-of-love contest between Josh and James. The love triangle was
like a real-life episode of Dawson’s Creek. At first she dated the mild-mannered,
likable James, but then fell for the bad-boy charms of Josh, who once claimed
that his Irish roots gave him a divine right to get drunk. The two young men, so
close that they shared a room during the first season, became sworn enemies, on
numerous occasions nearly coming to blows. They couldn’t even be in the
makeup trailer together.
Katie’s relationship with Josh, a notorious womanizer, worried her parents. As
her sex education from school boiled down to the nuns telling the girls to
practice abstinence, a Dawson’s Creek crew member decided to give her more
practical advice. “I talked to her about condoms and the need for contraception,”
the crew member recalled. “I can tell you she was certainly careful after that.”
This tug-of-love made her grow up. By the third season she was no longer the
sweet little innocent thing from Toledo, but a determined young woman—more
savvy and cynical about the industry, yet still determined to make her mark in
Hollywood. After her first film, Go, an action comedy, in 1999, she had small