Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Half an Inch. They became friends and confidantes, Katie asking her to be her
stylist when she did a shoot in December 2006 for the February cover of
Harper’s Bazaar. Even though Katie has her own fashion ideas—she’s a fan of
Marc Jacobs and Armani—it was noticeable that when she revamped her
hairstyle in spring 2007, she appeared in a bob just like her English friend.
It was as if Katie had been given the “Catherine Zeta-Jones” makeover, like
the Welsh actress who changed from fresh and funky glamour to a vision of
classic style following her marriage to Hollywood royalty, veteran actor Michael
Douglas. Similarly, the new Mrs. Tom Cruise was transformed from a
longhaired, laid-back ingenue into a sleek, sophisticated fashionista, her shorter,
more sophisticated locks matched by elegant designer outfits and towering heels.
The changes in the intelligent, if unreflective, actress had come at a high price.
Although she was in love with Tom, the early illusion of romance had long been
shattered. She had fallen for an image that had taken shape in her mind when she
was a carefree teenager who boasted to her sisters that one day she would marry
Tom Cruise. The reality was somewhat different. As commentators made the
inevitable comparisions to Princess Diana’s whirlwind courtship with Prince
Charles, the marriage did indeed seem a bit crowded. Katie and Tom were living

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the lives of Hollywood royalty, always surrounded by people, never alone. At
home there was a team of nannies and governesses to care for baby Suri,
Connor, and Isabella, cooks and housekeepers and gardeners to attend to her
every whim, and if she went shopping—and she shopped a lot for a “career”
woman—she was accompanied by a bodyguard to swat away the swarming
paparazzi. Inevitably, Tom was hard at work giving his studio, United Artists,
the kiss of creative life, as well as breathing the oxygen of publicity into his
controversial faith.
The newly married Katie simply wanted to spend time with her husband—not
share him. She could be excused for beginning to feel isolated and alone, living
separately from Tom in their new home in Beverly Hills, snatching the
occasional hour with him as he focused most of his attention on promoting his
film studio and his faith. In other ways, he was ever-present, constantly phoning
to check on her well-being and that of his precious daughter, asking about her
sleep patterns and eating habits. The controlling behavior that had rankled with
Nicole was now clearly apparent to Katie, who was much less of a prima donna
than her predecessor. Nor did it help that his mother and sister were living with
them, the young mother, according to published reports, sometimes feeling
constrained and “stifled” by the endless proximity to his relentlessly cheerful
mother and his sister and children. She often went shopping in Beverly Hills just
to get out of the house and be her own person for a time.
While in public with her husband she was all smiles, clinging to his side, in
private a rather different Katie was on show. She seemed constantly tired and
rather forlorn, as if she were carrying a heavy emotional burden on her slim
shoulders. “Away from the cameras she was a different person,” noted a
business associate. “I wouldn’t call her happy or acting like a woman in love—
quite the opposite. She seemed so sad and depressed, not at all like a woman
who was just married and looking forward to a new life. Every time I saw her,
she was like this, listless and negative, just a very down person.”
In the first few months after the birth of Suri, Katie’s physical and emotional
fatigue could have been attributed to postpartum depression, a condition that
affects one in ten new mothers. Of course, Tom had publicly criticized Brooke
Shields for taking medicine to cope with the black moods and despair associated
with depression after the birth of her first child. Now that Katie was a
Scientologist, it would have been utterly unthinkable for her to have gone down
this medical path. Certainly the carefree girl of the Dawson’s Creek era was long
gone; those who saw her up close and personal remarked that she seemed older
than her years, sadder, and emotionally and physically worn out. Those who
dared to make any connection between Katie’s new, subdued persona and the

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state of the newlyweds’ marriage very quickly faced the wrath of Tom—or
rather his lawyers, who were vigilant in tackling tabloid stories suggesting that
Katie was anything other than blissfully happy.
While baby Suri was an utter delight, it seemed to those who knew Katie that
she was having doubts about the path she had embarked upon. With her acting
career on the back burner, she appeared miserable, giving the impression that she
was somehow now “trapped,” uncomfortably aware that she had married one of
the most powerful men in Hollywood. However, when she told Harper’s Bazaar
magazine that it would be an “honor” to work alongside Tom in a movie, it was
a sign of how much she wanted the marriage to work both professionally and
personally.
When she took on her first film role since the birth of Suri, Tom vowed to be
by her side during the six-week shoot of Mad Money in Shreveport, Louisiana.
While his intentions were good, in the end his own work commitments meant
that he often flew her back and forth from their Beverly Hills home on a three-
hour commute on board their private jet.
Whatever misgivings Katie may have had about the future of her union to
Tom, the treatment of Nicole Kidman could only serve as a road map—and a
warning. Katie knew that Nicole had been reduced to keeping in touch with her
adopted children by Internet camera or e-mail. Tom effectively had custody,
bringing up both youngsters in his faith. In the summer of 2007, for example,
Isabella and Connor were sent to a Scientology summer camp in Portland,
Oregon, rather than spend time with their mother. Nicole’s revelatory interview
in Vanity Fair in September 2007, where she irritated Tom by revealing that she
had had a miscarriage early in their marriage, was seen by observers as a
warning shot to Tom to give her some parental latitude—otherwise, she would
spill the beans on their ten-year marriage. Indeed, it seemed at one level that the
interview was a coded conversation between Nicole and her former husband.
Not only did she pose with her sister’s baby clutched to her chest—perhaps
symbolizing the baby she longed for—but she hinted that one day she would
fully explain the “complicated” background to the adoption of Isabella in Florida
in 1993. At the time, the hand of Scientology was believed to be behind the
adoption, although neither Tom nor Nicole ever commented on suggestions that
the birth mother was an impoverished Sea Org member or, for that matter, the
identity of the birth mother.
Whatever the private turbulence in her heart, Katie was discreet, her downbeat
demeanor and aura of wistful sadness the only clues she gave to associates and
others in her circle that perhaps motherhood and marriage were not quite how
they had appeared in the brochure. In public, she was the perfect Hollywood

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wife, putting a brave face on her new life. “I have a husband and children I
adore,” she said, looking relaxed and happy by Tom’s side. When David and
Victoria Beckham finally arrived in Los Angeles in July 2007, Katie and Tom
were waiting to welcome them with an exclusive A-list party at the Museum of
Contemporary Art. The six-hundred-person guest list included cohosts Will
Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Steven
Spielberg, and Jim Carrey. Tom was going all-out to impress his British guests.
While in Hollywood there is no such thing as a free lunch—or a free party, for
that matter—at the time of writing, the Beckhams have yet to be beguiled by his
faith.
It may just be a question of time. Few can resist the Cruise squeeze, the actor
concentrating on those who influence specific ethnic or geographical
communities. At the welcoming party, where David Miscavige was a brooding
presence, were numerous celebrities who had at first balked at Tom’s
blandishments, only to succumb later. He tried to recruit actress and singer
Jennifer Lopez, whose father had been a Scientologist for twenty years, in an
attempt to reach a wider Hispanic audience. As with Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith
—who knocked Tom off the top spot to become Newsweek’s “Most Powerful
Actor on the Planet” in 2007—and wife Jada Pinkett Smith became targets
because of their popularity in the African-American community. Similarly, the
woman who got away, Sofía Vergara, had an avid following in South America.
Smiling and ever affable, pressing the flesh, Tom had a way with fellow
celebrities and starry-eyed fans alike. He exuded the confidence and panache of
a politician—or a Hollywood big shot—which is precisely what he now was. In
early 2007, Tom, now heavier and often photographed wearing a suit and tie
rather than his trademark T-shirt and jeans, gave the green light to his first movie
as a United Artists producer, Lions for Lambs, a political drama directed by and
starring screen legend Robert Redford. Billed as Tom’s comeback movie
following his messy divorce from Paramount, the film was already causing
controversy before its November 2007 release in the U.S., the movie’s tagline
—“If you don’t stand for something, you might fall for anything”—infuriating
conservatives, who accused it of being not just antiwar but anti-American.
Interestingly, the world premiere took place in London—high on Tom’s
Scientology target list—rather than in the United States.
Before Tom arrived in London’s Leicester Square for the premiere of Lions