|
The New York Times
Books of the Times
Tom Cruise and His
Bully Pulpit
By JANET MASLIN,
nytimes.com from the Web, January 14, 2008
Published: January
10, 2008
If Andrew Morton’s “Tom Cruise:
An Unauthorized Biography” is published peacefully next Tuesday, one of its
basic assertions will be undermined. That is because if Mr. Morton is
right about the litigious fervor of either Mr. Cruise, who is the book’s
ostensible subject, or the Church of Scientology, which is its real one, the
publication will be met with dirty tricks, messianic anger and relentless
harassment. If Mr. Morton is wrong about that, there will be fewer
fireworks. After all, among this biography’s revelations is the fact that
Tom Cruise was a cute kid.
Mr. Morton, “a leading authority on modern celebrity” (according to this book’s
jacket copy) and the mouthpiece for 1992 payback to the royal family by Diana,
Princess of Wales (“Diana: Her True Story”), is best equipped for one
thing: treating the travails of the famous as matters of earth-shaking
consequence. He has gravitated to subjects who either appreciate (Monica
Lewinsky) or wield (Madonna) some form of intoxicating power.
In the case of Mr. Cruise, Mr. Morton sees a domineering, aggressive character
who has joined forces with Scientology to catapult his activities beyond the
realm of mere glitter. “More than any star today,” Mr. Morton writes,
“Tom” — naturally he’s on a first-name basis — “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.” The book asserts that “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.”
It goes without saying that biographers do not ordinarily assail their subjects’
religious beliefs with impunity. Nor do investigative reporters seize on
Scientology as frequently as they might. Yet Mr. Morton has found a number
of former Scientologists who are willing to speak freely, and in some cases
vengefully, about the group’s purported inner workings. Mr. Morton’s
eagerness to include their voices leads him to push the limits of responsible
reporting. In the absence of any hard information whatsoever, for
instance, he notes that if Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, now his wife, fed their
daughter Suri the barley-based baby formula recommended by L. Ron Hubbard,
Scientology’s founder, “they kept it secret.” And that despite Mr.
Cruise’s legal victories over publications that have described him as gay, that
assertion lives on in the form of widespread Internet rumors.
The Tom Cruise of this book is emphatically, unremarkably heterosexual
throughout its tedious opening chapters about his boyhood. “I was black
and blue from the gearshift, I can tell you that,” says a high school girlfriend
who spent time with him in a car. Mr. Cruise is also said to have
collected model airplanes, impersonated Woody Woodpecker and done a standout job
of playing the Sun in a fifth-grade pageant. “Even 30 years later it still
gives me goose bumps,” one of his schoolteachers recalls about the budding
star’s performance.
“The film will never sell and Tom Cruise will not be an important actor,” a Fox
executive once memorably said. Still, the book describes Mr. Cruise’s
speedy rise from walk-on obscurity (“Endless Love” in 1981) to the Hollywood
stratosphere (“Top Gun” in 1986) while placing more emphasis on the evolution of
his private life. By 1985 he had become involved with Mimi Rogers, his
first wife, who provided entrée into the world of Scientology. Even though
Scientology abhors psychiatry, Mr. Morton plays doctor by speculating that Mr.
Cruise made an especially receptive recruit because he is “an uncertain child
waiting for an undeserved blow from his father.”
Although Mr. Morton is readily assailable for making such facile remarks, he is
in some larger sense an astute observer. His overall impression of Mr.
Cruise makes sense. He provides a credible portrait extrapolated from the
actor’s on-the-record remarks and highly visible public behavior. This
book describes a controlling, fervent figure (“He was like a walking light
bulb,” recalls one observer) whose personal needs dovetailed with the strict
hierarchical structure of his newfound faith and who, at some point, decided to
dedicate himself wholeheartedly to proselytizing spiritually, emotionally and
politically on its behalf. The book surmises that it was a small leap from
this outlook to jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa.
Among the pivotal players in this slow-starting but eventually scalding book are
Stanley Kubrick, whose manipulative treatment of Mr. Cruise and his second wife,
Nicole Kidman, during the marathon filming of “Eyes Wide Shut” is made to seem
especially damaging here; Ms. Kidman herself, though her troubles with Mr.
Cruise have been dissected by other biographers; and David Miscavige, the Church
of Scientology’s powerful leader. Mr. Miscavige is presented as someone
whose outlook and gestures Mr. Cruise has visibly appropriated and who himself
shares Mr. Cruise’s gung-ho proclivities.
It is the nature of this book to depict Mr. Miscavige also as a kind of
mustache-twirling villain, complete with the requisite B-movie dialogue.
After Mr. Cruise agreed to visit the church’s heavily guarded Gold Base compound
in the California desert in the summer of 1989, the book says, Mr. Miscavige
“gleefully announced to his closest staff, ‘the most important recruit ever is
in the process of being secured. His arrival will change the face of
Scientology forever.’ ” Mr. Morton would be on much more solid ground had
he backed that quotation with direct or even second-hand attribution.
If “Tom Cruise: The Unauthorized Biography” attracts as much flak as it
does interest, the fuss will be less about blind quotations than about
interpretation. The terminology and precepts of Scientology (“Teegeeack,”
“Xenu,” “MEST”) can be treated as exceedingly weird. And at times the book
seems to go out of its way to misunderstand them. The phrase “merchant of
chaos” has been used by Mr. Cruise to excoriate his father, and Mr. Morton
treats it as a sinister epithet. Maybe it is. But it is also used by
the literature of Scientology to describe those who profit by promulgating
disturbing thoughts. Authorities on celebrity are not immune to this
accusation.
|
