‘Mumm’s the word on Cruise & Scientology
ON his latest press tour for “The Mummy,” Tom Cruise has taken questions about his stunt work, his co-stars, his “Top Gun” sequel — all the toothless boilerplate stuff he usually gets asked.
But why won’t anyone pose the one question he really should answer: How can Cruise possibly remain not just a Scientologist but its leading ambassador?
Even those with a glancing knowledge of the organization understand it is deeply sinister. And over the past few years, the American public has learned more about Scientology, and Cruise’s crucial role in it, than ever.
Lawrence Wright’s award-winning book “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief” in 2015 exposed allegations of the abusive, corrupt and demented space-alien fiction it was long rumored to be. A harrowing HBO documentary followed, as did apostate Leah Remini’s memoir, “Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology” and her docu-series, “Scientology and the Aftermath,” which A&E picked up for an expanded second season, out this summer.
Cruise, 54, has been an avowed Scientologist since the early 1990s, saying that the group helped him with his dyslexia. As he aged, things got weirder: He offered “detoxification therapy,” which Scientologists believe can eliminate toxins and drug addictions through vitamins and saunas, to 9/11 rescue workers. In 2004, he went on TV and castigated a “glib” Matt Lauer for not believing, as Cruise did, that “psychiatry should be outlawed.” The following year, he publicly blasted Brooke Shields for taking medication for postpartum depression, calling her “irresponsible.”
“These drugs are dangerous,” Cruise told “Access Hollywood.” “When you talk about postpartum, you can take people today, women, and what you do is use vitamins.”
Shields replied, “Tom should stick to saving the world from aliens.”
The spectacular end of Cruise’s third marriage, in 2012, with the impression of Katie Holmes fleeing in the night with daughter Suri, aroused genuine suspicion. If someone with the protections of Holmes’ wealth and fame was afraid, what was really going on with Scientology?
It strains credulity to think Cruise, Scientology’s most important member and primary beneficiary, is unaware of the public perception of mind control, physical abuse and slave labor.
In an exposé that same year for Vanity Fair, Maureen Orth detailed Cruise’s highly enmeshed relationship with David Miscavige, the head of Scientology. After declaring Cruise’s second wife, Nicole Kidman, insufficiently devout, Miscavige had Kidman declared a “suppressive person” — or “S.P.” in church parlance — and reportedly helped turn the couple’s two children, also Scientologists, against her. (Scientology vigorously denied basically all the claims made in the Vanity Fair article and other reports.)
After Kidman and Cruise split, Miscavige and his wife, Shelly, were tasked with finding Cruise’s next girlfriend in-house. Only a fellow Scientologist would do.
As if it were a movie, audition tapes were submitted. The stakes were high. “You can’t do anything to displease Scientology,” said Marc Headley, the then-member who watched the reels, “because Tom Cruise will freak out.”
According to Vanity Fair, a 25year-old Iranian-born member named Nazanin Boniadi was chosen. In October 2004, she was prepped for one month without ever meeting Cruise or hearing his name; she was told only that she would meet a high-level church official. No matter that she had a boyfriend she hoped to marry; the church convinced her to end it. She was told to change her hair and remove the braces on her teeth prematurely. She was made to write a 20-page essay, single-spaced, on what she wanted from life. She was also made to sign two nondisclosure agreements and warned if she made one mistake, she’d be exiled.
“That’s how important this project is,” Boniadi was told.
For the first three weeks of their relationship. Boniadi was allowed to talk only to Cruise and his entourage, no one else. Cruise didn’t like the way her incisor teeth looked; he wanted them redone. Her hair also met with scrutiny, and Cruise’s own stylist, Chris McMillan, was called. When Cruise received the church’s Freedom Medal of Valor, Boniadi told him, “Very well done” and subsequently spent hours per day undergoing treatments to help her understand one did not speak to Tom Cruise like this. They might be sleeping together, but they were not equals.
Orth’s piece also detailed how other Scientologists were put to work for Cruise. One high-ranking member called J.B., former brother-in-law and bodyguard to David Miscavige, said he customized Cruise’s airplane hangar, movie trailer and personal vehicles, cleaned his guns, and ran Cruise’s homes in California and Colorado, overseeing Cruise’s vast staff, all at a salary of $50 per 80-hour work week.
As of 2015, Tom Cruise’s estimated net worth was $470 million.
Think of all questions that await Tom Cruise. How is it that such a stratospherically famous person — one so publicly involved in an organization that, based on all that’s come to light, most closely resembles a brutal cult — remains so coddled?
It’s no surprise that the Hollywood Industrial Complex protects such a proven moneymaker, but it’s journalistic malpractice to allow Tom Cruise to continue his greatest role — that of a decent human being — uninterrupted.