Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Entertainment Tonight in 2005, that psychiatry was a “Nazi science” and that
methadone, a drug used to fight heroin addiction, was originally called
Adolophine after Adolf Hitler? Although neither statement is accurate, Tom’s
popularity as an actor inevitably give his pronouncements weight and
authenticity.
In an era when Tom is much more powerful than the average senator, with a
worldwide reach and influence, he and Scientology are given a free pass, one

---

that they have used to great effect. For example, according to the Mental Health
Matters Political Action Committee, some twenty-eight Scientology bills have
been introduced by members of the Arizona state legislature aimed at limiting
access to treatment and medication for children with mental health disorders. On
its Web site, the lobbying group asks voters if they want Tom Cruise to make
future decisions about mental health care in their state. It is therefore ironic that,
unbeknownst to the actor, Dr. Gary Lebendiger, Tom’s stepbrother from his
father’s second marriage, is a child psychiatrist.
Of course, Tom is merely a smiling conduit for the philosophy of the man he
calls his mentor, L. Ron Hubbard. By definition, everything LRH wrote about
psychiatry—and, for that matter birth, marriage, and life—is deemed sacred and
inviolable. His word is Scientology lore. Neither Tom nor any other
Scientologist can deviate from his teachings or his policies. This is one of the
fatal flaws in Tom’s prognosis for the planet. Take Hubbard’s obsession with
psychiatry. Apart from the personal slight he felt when mental health experts
dismissed his book Dianetics, the bedrock of Scientology, Hubbard was learning
and writing about psychiatry in the 1940s and ’50s, when inquiry into what
makes the brain tick was still in its relative infancy.
Psychiatry, like computing, is an evolving science. For Hubbard to make
universal rules and edicts about the science of mental health is akin to laying out
iron laws about computing based on the cumbersome machines of the postwar
period, when it took rooms full of equipment to perform fewer functions than
today’s microscopic silicon chips. Philosophically, Hubbard’s worldview was
defined by the state of the planet just after World War II. It is intellectually
static, unable to accept or absorb any progress in civilization since then. It is no
exaggeration to state that Scientology is the intellectual equivalent to the Flat
Earth Society, a group locked in a time warp, inexorably bound by the rules
defined by its founder. Even today, for example, high-ranking Scientologists
communicate by encrypted telex—rather than more modern methods such as e-
mail—because Hubbard decreed it.
If, like the Flat Earth Society, Scientology were content to be a parochial,
inward-looking club, there would be little enough harm in it. But it is not. The
relentless expansion of the organization and its front groups has been made
possible by the charm and persuasiveness of its poster boy, whose modernity,
familiarity, and friendliness mask the totalitarian zeal of his faith. Perhaps the
media, politicians, and public should examine Tom’s claims with greater rigor
and skepticism. When comedians ridicule Tom Cruise, the joke may be on him
—but it is also on ourselves.
More than any star today, Tom is a movie messiah who reflects and refracts

---

the fears and doubts of our times, trading on the unfettered power of modern
celebrity, our embrace of religious extremism, and the unnerving scale of
globalization. While advances in science, medicine, and technology give the
illusion of modernity, the world is seemingly gripped by a harking back to
apocalyptic fundamentalism. Current discourse all too often resembles that of
the period before the Age of Reason and Enlightenment when messianical
theories held sway. In the marketplace of ideas, rational debate and scientific
method are frequently shouted down by the most extreme—and unproven—
dogmas. And Tom has been one of those shouting the loudest, selling the
dubious, unproven wares of his faith.
In an age of material plenty and spiritual famine, Tom Cruise is compelling—
and dangerous—because he stands for something, extolling the virtues of a faith
that is parodied and feared in equal measure. This faith, like his own personality,
exists and thrives by disguise. Truly theirs is a match made in heaven—if they
believed in it.
While he is clearly “one of the premier American actors of his generation,”
taking his rightful place alongside such luminaries as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro,
and Julia Roberts when he received this honor from New York’s Museum of the
Moving Image in November 2007, there is another dimension to Tom’s appeal.
What you see is not what you get. With his boy-next-door good looks, energy,
and winning smile, he should join the likes of Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart as
one of the ordinary guys with universal audience appeal, an actor who makes us
feel safe and secure in an uncertain world. Yet his history suggests that the man
behind the smile is altogether more edgy, threatening, and even sinister. Steven
Spielberg recognized this quality when he directed him in Minority Report.
Spielberg instructed Tom not to smile for the role because he understood the
iconography of the Cruise grin. On one occasion he burst into a characteristic
smile and Spielberg found himself thinking, “I get it. He has that deliciously
indescribable magic that cannot be analyzed or replicated. He is in every sense a
movie star.”
He is a man, too, of contradictions: an uncertain child waiting for an
undeserved blow from his father, an adult searching for certainty and control. An
alpha male who does his own stunts, lest there be a challenge he could not meet,
seeking approval from the ghost of his bullying father. Now a father himself, he
clearly loves family life and yet crusades for a faith that routinely sets loved ones
against one another. A romantic who falls in love in a heartbeat and yet walks
away without a backward glance. A certain, purposeful presence but a man who
hates to be alone. During a career spanning a quarter of a century, he has played
pilot, doctor, secret agent, warrior, assassin, vampire, and war hero. Perhaps the

---

most complex character he has ever played is Tom Cruise himself.

---

UPDATE
It was the Tom Cruise blockbuster of the year, watched by an audience of
millions around the world. Yet even though the sensational film was the talk of
the water cooler for weeks, the nine-minute solo performance, entitled “Tom
Cruise on Tom Cruise,” did not have its premiere in a movie theater.
From this humble debut on the Internet, the film of Tom, unshaven and
dressed in a black turtleneck as he talked about his passion for Scientology,
rapidly exploded into a global phenomenon. Viewers gawped and giggled as the
movie star, in a performance both rambling and inarticulate, tried to explain his
religious credo. The only people not smiling were Tom Cruise and his church.
As the actor later told Oprah Winfrey about the video, “I was receiving an award
that evening for global literacy. It was a very private moment. I’m actually
talking to my congregation.”
Actually he was being awarded Scientology’s first-ever Freedom of Valor
medal at a 2004 gala for thousands of fellow believers at Scientology’s English
headquarters, Saint Hill Manor. Although I mentioned salient features of his pre-
taped interview in the original edition of this book, the video proved that a
picture, especially a moving picture of the biggest Hollywood star in the world,
was worth 10,000 words.
Its release ignited a firestorm of controversy. This was Tom Cruise as never
seen before, unguarded, unvarnished and, to many, unhinged. He spoke as
though in a dazed reverie, almost as if he were communing with himself. From
time to time, he would laugh maniacally for little or no reason. His speech was
peppered with Scientology jargon, confirming his credentials as an ardent
follower of his faith.
As the Mission: Impossible theme played in background, he explained how
Scientologists were the “authorities on getting people off drugs, the authorities
on the mind,” and the only people who can bring peace and unite cultures. As an
ambassador for his faith, he insisted that the world’s politicians were waiting for
Scientologists to provide solutions to global problems. “Traveling the world and
meeting the people that I’ve met, talking with these leaders . . . they want help,

---

and they are depending on people who know and can be effective and do it and
that’s us. That is our responsibility to do it.” Such was his dedication to “clearing
the planet” that he had little time to enjoy his private jets, custom-made
motorbikes, race cars, $35-million home in Hollywood, or skiing and
snowmobiling at his mountain retreat in Colorado. “I wish the world was a
different place. I’d like to go on vacation and go and romp and play . . . but I
can’t.”
Despite his absolute certainty that only he and his fellow believers could solve
the problems of the planet, he warned his congregation that the journey would be
“rough and tumble . . . wild and woolly.” Finally, a portentous voiceover
announced that “Tom Cruise has introduced LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] technology
to over one billion people of earth. And that’s only the first wave he’s unleashed.
Which is why the story of Tom Cruise, Scientologist, has only just begun.”
As comedians around the world ransacked their wardrobes for black
turtlenecks and practiced the Cruise guffaw and chopping hand gestures, it
became an iconic moment in his career. Just as the famous shots of Tom in Risky