TOM CRUISE SECRET SCIENTOLOGY LIFE!
He’s treated like a king – but watched like a hawk!
HOLLYWOOD Top Gun Tom Cruise is one of Scientology’s most important assets, so the religion’s leaders bend over backward to please their poster boy by managing his love life and indulging his every whim to make sure he’ll never defect, according to a former church official turned whistleblower!
In his gripping new book, A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology, Mike Rinder, who left the church after nearly 40 years, writes the faith’s leader, David Miscavige, meddled in Cruise’s love life as well as ordering worker-bee members to customize the star’s vehicles, remodel his homes — and keep tabs on his every move.
At one point, when Tom griped his sister Lee Ann “can’t set me up with a girlfriend,” Miscavige assigned his second banana Greg Wilhere to hold “auditions” to recruit a galpal for the star, says Rinder, who was a high-ranking insider before his defection.
Rinder claims Miscavige went even further when married Cruise fell in love with flame-haired future wife Nicole Kidman while shooting the 1990 racing flick Days of Thunder. The author says church officials brokered Tom’s divorce from much older first wife Mimi Rogers, a Scientologist who brought the heartthrob into the space alien religion.
“Miscavige no doubt saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate his ability to make Tom’s wishes come true,” writes Rinder, who was with the faith from ages 17 to 52.
Miscavige had Wilhere “clear” any guilt Cruise felt by dumping Rogers through auditing, a form of Scientology therapy, and “assigned” his aide “to get Mimi to agree to a divorce so he could marry Nicole,” pens the author.
They wed Christmas Eve 1990 after Cruise and Mimi had divorced the previous February.
Miscavige served as Cruise’s best man, and the personal chef of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who’d died four years earlier, was flown in to cook the wedding din-din, says the book.
“It was indicative of how far Miscavige was willing to go to ally Cruise,” writes Rinder.
Nine years later, Miscavige plunged into meddling again when Kidman, who was never crazy about the church, was reportedly drawing her hubby away from the faith while they filmed Eyes Wide Shut in England, charges Rinder.
The kingpin ordered top exec Marty Rathbun to audit Cruise, who “was gradually drawn back into the world of Scientology,” writes the author, adding the actor’s renewed dedication to the church “created a distance between [Cruise] and Nicole.”
Before the couple’s 2001
divorce, Rathbun also got prominent Hollywood lawyer and Scientology mouthpiece “Bert Fields to hire infamous P.I. Anthony Pellicano to spy on Nicole and tap her phone,” Rinder claims.
However, a livid Pellicano tells GLOBE Rinder’s tale “is a f**king lie! Bert Fields never asked me to do anything with Tom Cruise. It never happened! In fact, Bert and I had a fight over Cruise a couple years earlier!
I’ve never been a friend of Scientology.” A Scientology spokesperson also blasted Rinder’s claim as “ludicrous,” saying, “The church never ordered or participated in any illegal wiretapping.
“Mike Rinder is an inveterate liar who seeks to profit from his dishonesty. He supports himself by orchestrating the harassment of his former church and its leader through false police reports, incendiary propaganda and fraudulent media stories.”
But Rinder insists his book is spot-on about the religion’s role in Tom’s love life.
He writes when Cruise was romancing Spanish beauty Penélope Cruz in 2004, the group spent “so much money to buy and renovate” a building for a Scientology center in Spain, notes the author.
By the time it opened, “Penélope had broken up with him,” adds Rinder.
The group also picked staff to serve the actor and saved him a bundle by “installing high-end audio/visual equipment for Cruise’s houses in Pacific Palisades, Beverly Hills and Telluride and his
Santa Monica plane hangar,” according to Rinder, who insists church workers also customized his cars, limos, motorcycles and an RV.
But all that pampering came at a price, says Rinder, who insists Miscavige’s wife, Shelly, planted spies on Cruise’s household staff — who reported his every move back to her.
However, a church spokesperson denies the claims, insisting, “Tom Cruise most certainly has his own staff. And to say the church worked on his vehicles is another blatant invention.”
Meanwhile, Rinder insists Cruise, one of Hollywood’s biggest box office draws, was used as bait to recruit other big names to join the church, including soccer god David Beckham and his Spice Girls wife, Victoria.
The author claims the church built a professional-level soccer field at the Gold Base headquarters in San Jacinto, Calif., where “the ground was leveled, irrigation installed, perfect turf, goals raised and a full-time caretaker was appointed.” Says Rinder, “It was built for one purpose only: so Tom Cruise could woo his friend David to come to Gold.”
But even after all that expense: “It never happened.”