The Passion of the Cruise
Want to meet my Mom?” Tom Cruise asks as we walk through the halls of the Celebrity Centre, ground zero for Scientlogy in Los Angeles.
Um, sure.
We round a corner and enter the president’s office, where Mary Lee (a.k.a. Mom) has just ordered a salad. In town from Florida, she is leaning against a door frame near Lee Anne DeVette, Cruise’s sister and publicist, and Tommy, who manages Cruise’s philanthropy work. Mom is thin and tan, and she beams an even toothier smile than her son when she is introduced.
Considering that she is a practicing Catholic, it is somewhere surprising to see her in the Celebrity Centre. “I just finished taking the Way to Happiness course,” she says. “I learned so much.”
She pauses for a moment and reflects on the day’s lesson: “And I though I was happy before.”
Cruise joined Scientology, the controversial church of religion and life philosophy started by L. Ron Hubbard, after church courses helped him overcome his dyslexia in the Eighties; he was followed, one by one, by his three sisters. His mother was the lone holdout in the clan. A year ago, however, after going through what she describes as “some things,” she relented.
But doesn’t Scientology conflict with her Catholicism? Not at all, she says: “I think Jesus wants me to be here right now. My church may not agree, but I personally know that.”
We sit down on the couch, and Lee Anne puts in a video. It is a tape of Tom Cruise speaking at her daughter’s graduation from the Delphian School, which uses. L. Ron Hubbard’s learning principles. It is a passionate speech, in which Cruise sings the praises of Hubbard’s “Study Tech” and rails against psychiatry and psychiatric medication. After graduation, Lee Anne’s daughter will work in Cruise’s office. They’re a tight little family.
On the surface, Cruise seems to be at a turning point in his life and career. Romantically, he is along, having divorced Nicole Kidman after ten years and broken up with Penélope Cruz after three. And he recently left his longtime — and notoriously overprotective — publicist, Pat Kingsley, preferring representation by his family. Meanwhile, in his movies, he is taking steps to shed his old persona of headstrong-young-hotshot-with-a-good-heart-underneath-it-all in favor of progressively more evil characters — from Lestat in Interview With the Vampire to Frank “T.J.” Mackey in Magnolia to Vincent in his latest film, Collateral. An older character with salt-and-pepper hair, Vincent is not a nice guy: He is a cold-blooded killer and an unredeemable sociopath who leaves a trail of bodies in his wake.
But the most surprising change is that the famously press-phobic Cruise seems more open than ever about his commitment to Scientology, having provided funds for a detoxification clinic to help New York firefighters who became sick after 9/11.
Since Scientology, in the popular imagination, is such a loaded word — often associated with heavy-handed recruitment tactics, strong-arm-lawyer assaults and steep membership and course fees — one would think that Cruise wouldn’t be so willing to take a journalist through that world.
“Who are those people that say those things?” Cruise asks when I bring it up over lunch one day. “Because I promise you, it isn’t everybody. But I look at those people and I say, ‘Bring it. I’m a Scientologist, man. What do you want to know?” I don’t mind answering questions.”
He lists some of Scientology’s selling points: its drug-abuse, prison-rehabilitation and education programs. “Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you.” He rises from the table. “Really.” He points an angry finger at the imaginary enemy. “Fuck you.” His face reddens. “Period.”
It is a beautiful exhibition, and I don’t believe that he’s acting. Before meeting Cruise, I had been warned roundly by my colleagues. They told of restrictions set in interviews, documents that I would have to sign, unprintably generic answers I would receive. They said that he smiles and listens and talks and looks you in the eye, but afterward, when you walk away, you realize that you’ve really been given nothing but a command performance.
Frankly, none of that turned out to be true. My afternoon in the Scientology Celebrity Centre, a church (featuring a restaurant, a hotel, a spa and classrooms) that caters to Scientology’s Hollywood dignitaries, was the cap to a fascinating and unusual week in the world of Cruise that began in the blistering heat of the Mojave Desert.
I‘m training to jump a trailer,” Cruise says when I arrive at a Willow Springs International Raceway wheelie school in Rosamond, California. He is in black bike leathers, with a matching black helmet tucked under his left arm and two days of stubble on his chin. He points out a trailer sitting just off the track. “It’ll be bigger than that one,” he continues. “But it’s not that hard.”
He narrows his eyes and squints at the trailer for a moment, visualizing the feat. “Well, the jumping’s not that hard,” he says. “It’s the landing that’s difficult.”
He cocks his right hand and slugs me in the shoulder. Cruise has spent the day training to be an action hero. The trailer jump is part of his warm-up for Mission: Impossible 3. Earlier in the day, he took his Cessna plane out to practice loops, prepping for his role as a World War Il fighter pilot in his next collaboration with Collateral director Michael Mann, The Few. I have been summoned to the desert to learn to do wheelies with Cruise. There is only one flaw in the plan: I’ve never ridden a motorcycle in my life.
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