Call it second sight. Call it bullshit. I know the exact moment when Tom Cruise decided he’d have Katie Holmes.
It was in the excellent 2005 movie, “Batman Begins”. Ms Holmes, playing public attorney Rachel Dawes, is strapped in a basement in a tight, heaving dress. The diabolical Dr Jonathon Crane stands over her wearing a creepy hessian mask.
She looked extraordinary. But it was Tom Cruise, not Batman, who decided to rescue her.
Not long after this, the news came through that they became an item. I remember thinking: “That poor girl.”
Some years before, I had an insight into what happens when Tom Cruise wants something. In this case, it was Nicole Kidman. It came from someone who was well-placed to gain firsthand knowledge of Mr Cruise’s courtship of Ms Kidman.
This person described how Tom would ring and ring and ring and ring Nicole, all day, all night, telling her how much he loved her. She would receive up to 20 deliveries of flowers each day.
She simply didn’t have enough vases.
The way it was described to me, he was “passionate” and “wonderful”. To me, he sounded like a right pain in the arse.
It was a comprehensive love bombing. Ten years later, Mr Cruise sacked Ms Kidman, citing irreconcilable differences. She later said something meek about not wanting to raise their kids as Scientologists.
New York’s Village Voice conducted a bit of an investigation recently and found that Ms Kidman, a Catholic, had actually succeeded in keeping her husband’s involvement in Scientology during their 10-year marriage to a minimum.
Mr Cruise, meanwhile, was under heavy pressure to resume his Scientology connections and indeed became once again fully engaged in the cult immediately after the divorce.
According to the Village Voice, a very senior Scientology defector named Marty Rathbun was, in late 2003, travelling in a vehicle with Mr Cruise and David Miscavige, who has been described as the “absolute dictator” of the Scientology cult.
The discussion was about how Arnold Schwarzenegger had just become governor of California.
“Miscavige was driving, and Tom Cruise was in the passenger seat,” Rathbun told the Village Voice. “I was sitting behind Miscavige, and Michael Doven (another Scientologist) was sitting behind Cruise.
“At some point, Tom said, ‘If Arnold can become governor, I can become president.’ And Miscavige got really excited and said, ‘Absolutely!’”
This, by all accounts, was not a lighthearted conversation, but a serious discussion.
Protestant America is currently trying to adapt to the notion that a Mormon, Mitt Romney, might become president.
Is it possible that Mr Cruise, believed to be a Democrat, wants to become the first Scientologist president? Say, in 2016?
This is where all this is going, I’m sure of it. To the White House.
And if so, no American can say they weren’t warned. Especially Ms Holmes. This is what Mr Cruise said in 2004, the year before he carpet love-bombed her: “Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you. Really. Fuck you. Period.”
Presumably she played along for a while, smiling, listening, and weeping privately in the bathroom, unable to tell anyone that one of the world’s biggest stars (her husband) was a grinning extremist.
But then a child came along. Ms Holmes had to start thinking for two.
And this is the kind of deluded, fanatical comments Mr Cruise was making to the press about Scientology during the time of their marriage, in 2008: “We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions. We can rehabilitate criminals. We can bring peace and unite cultures.”
I won’t bother you with how Scientologists believe their life mission is to get “clear” from the Thetans that invade the spirits of Earthlings after they crash-landed on a planet during some sort of intergalactic carnage involving the warlord Xenu, some 75 millions years ago.
The Wikipedia sites on Scientology are very thorough and seem to be managed by renegades who are determined to prevent more people from being “audited” by the cult.
Ms Holmes appears to have finally figured out that her husband was for real. According to reports, she was trying to prevent him from sending their young daughter Suri into a Scientology education camp, to begin her brainwashing.
You can imagine the conversations around the Cruise-Holmes household.
Tom: “Darling, Suri’s got another Thetan.”
Katie: “No, Tom, she needs her nappy changed.”
Ms Holmes staged a careful escape while her husband was in Iceland filming, and came to New York to file for divorce.
Clearly, a face-to-face confrontation with Mr Cruise would have been hard work. Anyone who’s ever seen his deranged performance on Oprah Winfrey’s couch would realise he’d be a difficult man to withstand when he got on a roll.
Why do I care? Because Ms Holmes is my new neighbour. She lives two streets away, on Seventh Avenue, in lower midtown Manhattan. I would be remiss not to care.
Of course, I’m worried about whoever will become Mrs Tom Cruise the Fourth. But the really frightening thing would be a mass American conversion to Scientology.
It is in all our interests that President Cruise be stopped.
tooheyp@newsltd.com.au
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