Celebutards (8 page)

H
E SHOT TO FAME
dancing in his underwear in 1983’s
Risky Business
, and came into his own as an action star in
Mission Impossible
. But then, folks coast-to-coast started questioning his sanity after he jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s couch while declaring love for vacant-eyed Katie Holmes. He finally fell to a level of disrepute normally reserved for schoolyard flashers when he slammed Brooke Shields for using prescription medication to quell post-partum depression.

He is Tom Cruise: Scientologist and all-around loon. He’s included here not for any earthly political penchant, but for a stunning and complete lack of judgment and disconnection with reality that very nearly rivals a sober Mel Gibson’s.

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born in Syracuse, New York, on July 3, 1962, to Mary Lee, a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer and, Cruise has said, a bully whose last name he dropped at age twelve. Cruise found acting success early and did not attend college. He claims to have suffered as a child from learning disabilities. But like much else in life, he overcame this hardship not with conventional therapy, but with the religion made popular by the Hollywood crowd, Scientology.

At twenty-three he married Mimi Rogers, six years his senior, who introduced him to the faith. The couple split three years later after Cruise refused to perform his husbandly duties. “He was seriously thinking of becoming a monk,” Rogers told
Playboy
. “He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument, but my instrument needed tuning, and we had to split.”

His second marriage, to actress Nicole Kidman, started in 1990, the same year he was declared
People
magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” It lasted ten years and they adopted two children. According to Andrew Morton’s book,
Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography
, Kidman, who became a Scientologist, was on the outs after conceding in a 1999 interview: “I was raised Catholic, and a big part of me is still a Catholic girl.” She was three months pregnant when she learned about the impending divorce from Cruise’s lawyer. She then lost the baby. Tom sent flowers, but did not visit. Only later, Kidman, who stands five feet, ten and a-half inches, was able to joke about her five-foot-seven ex-mate: “At least now I can wear heels.”

Over the years, Cruise has sued or threatened to sue at least four individuals and publications for advancing persistent rumors that he is gay, which he vigorously denies. Gay porn actor Chad Slater was ordered to pay Cruise $10 million in damages for telling a celebrity magazine about a purported love affair.

Cruise was foolish to concentrate on rumors that no one really cared about. He should have paid more notice to the day the public turned against him en masse. That happened the moment Cruise fired his long-time publicist, Pat Kingsley, who forbid journalists, at the peril of losing access, to talk about Scientology. Cruise replaced her for a time with his sister, Lee Ann Devette, who had no such qualms. And thus, we met the real Tom Cruise—abrasive, wild-eyed. And mean.

Disaster followed. Cruise was freakishly testy during his interview with Matt Lauer, denying the existence of chemical imbalances, declaring that he alone knew the history of psychiatry. And he slammed Lauer as “glib” for defending Brooke Shields’ decision to take medication to conquer the baby blues. Shields called Cruise’s words “irresponsible and dangerous.” But Tom apologized to Brooke, and the stars made up.

On April 18, 2006, Katie Holmes, sixteen years Tom’s junior, gave birth to daughter Suri. During Katie’s pregnancy, Cruise raised the collective blood pressure by telling
GQ
magazine he thought the placenta and umbilical cord would be “very nutritious.” He said, “I’m gonna eat the placenta.” He later cracked to Diane Sawyer, “Yeah, we’re going to do that—a whole family thing. Isn’t that normal and natural?” Then he added, “No, we’re not eating it.”

Message to Tom: it’s not funny if what you say is believable.

Stories were rampant that the birth would be “silent,” in keeping with Scientology dictates. Cruise did not deny this entirely. “It’s really about respecting the woman,” he told
GQ
. “It’s not about her not screaming.” He told Sawyer, “The mother makes as much noise…you know, she’s going through it. But why have other people make noise? You know, you want that area very calm and to make it very special.”

As a present for Katie, Cruise didn’t buy diamonds (or a muzzle). He bought a home ultrasound machine. Very creepy. Doctors complained that sonograms, which check babies’ development, should be performed only by trained technicians. But if Katie had a problem with that or with anything else, absolutely no light was shed on the matter by Diane Sawyer, who had the blank-faced starlet alone in a rare interview for eight-plus minutes in January 2008 on
Good Morning America
. The diva broadcaster talked for five minutes about the Scientology convert’s shoes. But not one substantive question crossed her lips about the state of Katie and Tom’s weird union.

She also didn’t ask about suggestions in Morton’s biography that Tom was No. 2 man in his church, or even that Suri was not Cruise’s child at all, but was conceived,
Rosemary’s Baby
–style, from the frozen sperm of late Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Cruise’s lawyer, Bertram Fields, called that and everything else in the book “a pack of lies.”

I got an up-close peek at the “hyperactive midlife crisis and sometime actor,” as I referred to Cruise, as he took New York—by helicopter, motorcycle, fire truck and rented subway car—in May 2006 to promote
Mission Impossible 3
. What a shock. Cruise over the years had morphed from teen looker, to Arnold Scwarzenegger-wannabe, to attention-starved “Norma Desmond, croaking for his close-up,” as I duly noted. He would try to make me pay for that.

From the cheap seats in the press, you see how much control a single, little man can exert on an entire city in the middle of a busy work day in the interest of self-promotion. Arriving on the back of a fire truck, Tom brought traffic to a halt in bustling Times Square. He demanded that I, a lowly columnist, sit through his new movie before being allowed to approach. A publicist told me this rule came down “from the top.” The top?

A screening was arranged on that very day. Though the theater was designed to seat 1,000, only one journalist and I attended. Fortunately for Cruise, the movie was pretty good. But then, I’m a sucker for action flicks.

Not so good was the reception we got later, as Tom, looking like a toddler taken off his Ritalin by drug-hating Scientologists, ridiculously played New York City action hero. I was shoved in the chest by a cop and threatened with arrest by a press bunny when I innocently bisected his air space on a public street. Under peril of bodily harm, I did manage to retrieve an autograph for my then-seven-year-old daughter, who remains strangely loyal to Cruise. Well, they
were
the same size. But the actor no doubt regretted signing after he read my column on his wild and wooly day. It led him to personally ban a photographer from the
New York Post
from the Los Angeles premiere
of Mission Impossible 3
. The news was actually encouraging. Tom reads!

So is Tom Cruise whacked? You decide. I now present Tom—in his own words. Here is a partial transcript of a 2004 videotape produced by the Church of Scientology as a recruitment tool. It’s Tom at his most maniacal.

(Not surprisingly, the church succeeded in getting countless copies pulled off the Internet by threatening to take legal action for “copyright infringement.” But after Morton’s book came out, the folks at gawker.com refused to remove it. They did the sane, movie-going public a tremendous service.)

It starts with an announcer:

“But if that’s what Mr. Cruise has brought to this world, there still remains one more word on the man. Call it: Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise, Scientologist.

Music that sounds like the distorted theme music from
Mission: Impossible
plays in the background. Tom punctuates his words with karate chops and “whoops.”

Here he is:

“I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it’s something you have to earn. And because a Scientologist does, he or she has the ability to create new and better realities, and improve conditions. Uh, being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them.

“There’s a time I went through this and I said, ‘You know what?’ When I read it ah, you know, I just went phooo. This is it; is exactly it.

“Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else, it’s, you drive past, you know you have to do something about it. You know you are the only one who can really help.

“But that’s…that’s what drives me is that I know that we have an opportunity and, uh, to really help for the first time and effectively change people’s lives, and ah I’m dedicated to that. I’m gonna, I’m absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that.

“Orgs [Scientology organizations] are there to help, OK. But we, also as the public, we have a responsibility. It’s not just the orgs. It’s not just [church leader] Dave Miscavige. You know, it’s not just not just me. It’s you. It’s everyone out there kinda rereading KSW [“Keep Scientology working”] and looking what needs to be done and saying, okay, am I gonna do it or am I not gonna do it? Period. And am I gonna look at that guy or am I too afraid because I have my own out-ethics [ethics are tools needed to apply the principles of Scientology; out-ethics go against Scientology] to put in someone else’s ethics? And that’s all it comes down to…

“We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions. Crimanon [a program that treats criminals]. We can rehabilitate criminals. We can bring peace and unite cultures. That once you know these tools and you know that they work, it’s not good enough that I’m just doing okay.

“Traveling the world and meeting the people that I’ve met, you know, talking with these leaders in various fields, [pause] they want help, and they are depending on people who know and who can be effective, and do it, and that’s us. That is our responsibility to do that. It is the time now. Now is the time. It is being a Scientologist, people are turning to you, and you better know it, and if you don’t, you know, go and learn it. [Laughs] but don’t pretend you know it, or whatever.

“It’s like, we’re here to help. If you’re a Scientologist, you see life, things, the way they are, in all it’s glory, in all of its complexity, and the more you know as a Scientologist, the more you become overwhelmed by it. [Laughs again, clapping hands]

“I wish the world was a different place, I’d like to go on vacation, play, and just do that. Know what I mean? I mean that’s how I want it to be. There’s times I’d like to do that, but I can’t because I know, I know, so, you know, I have to do something about it…It’s not…

“You can just see the look in their eyes. You know the ones who are doing it, and you know the spectators [dabblers in Scientology, the worst], the ones who are going, ‘Well, it’s easy for you. That thing, I’ve canceled that in my area.

“[Laughs] It’s like, man, you’re either in or you’re out. That spectatorism, I’ve no time for it. That is something we have no time for now.

“So it’s our responsibility to educate, create the new reality. We have that responsibility to say, hey, this is the way it should be done. We do it this way and people are actually getting better. Let’s get it done. Let’s get it really done.

“Have enough love, compassion and toughness, that you’re going to do it, and do it right.”

Announcer: “A Scientologist can be defined by a single question: ‘Would you want others to achieve the knowledge you now have?’ In answering that question, Tom Cruise has introduced LRH[L. Ron Hubbard] technology to over one billion people of Earth, and that’s only the first wave he’s unleashed, which is why the story of Tom Cruise, Scientologist, has only just begun.”

In another video to emerge, Tom Cruise takes credit for saving the lives of hundreds of poisoned workers at the World Trade Center site, and calls federal officials “liars.”

He saves workers. Unites world cultures. Rehabilitates criminals, performs sonograms. And the one billion people on Earth he’s reached are just the start.

Next: Tom walks on water. Or is there water in outer space?

T
HEY GO TOGETHER
,
like Hollywood and glamour. Like tattoos and body piercings. Like celebutards and their self-appointed mission to save the planet. They are Angelina Jolie, the bisexual, blood-obsessed, brother-kissing, Illustrated Woman who could badly use a sandwich, and Brad Pitt, the somewhat dim, Angelina-obsessed hunk who could badly use a shave.

Without the benefit of marriage, they have adopted children from around the world, and birthed one of their own in a Namibian clinic and two more in France. Despite demanding film careers and a globe-trotting life-style—their kids have attended more schools in a single year than some of us have seen in a lifetime—this strange and golden couple, collectively known in the press as “Brangelina,” has found time to do high-profile humanitarian work, Brad for victims of Hurricane Katrina and Angie for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. However well-meaning her volunteerism, Angelina Jolie has failed to address the extreme controversies that have shamed other UN efforts, specifically the Oil for Food scandal and allegations that women were raped by UN peacekeeping troops in Congo. And no interviewer, not even Anderson Cooper, who had Angelina all to himself for a couple of hours, has pressed her to speak out about such unpleasant things.

William Bradley Pitt was born December 18, 1963, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and raised in Springfield, Missouri, the son of Jane Etta, a high school counselor, and William Alvin Pitt, a truck company owner. Angelina Jolie Voight, as she was known at birth, followed Brad into the world nearly a dozen years later, on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Bertrand, who died from ovarian cancer in 2007, was French Canadian, Voight German and Slovak. Her parents split up a year after her birth, and Marcheline gave up acting to raise Angelina and her older brother. Angelina’s relationship with Dad has always been fraught. Now she won’t speak to him.

Brad’s background was the more conventional. He attended the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, but left two credits short of graduating to move to California, initially supporting himself by driving strippers in limousines, moving refrigerators, and dressing up as a giant chicken for the restaurant chain el Pollo Loco. He got noticed, big-time, in a supporting role as a hustler in 1991’s
Thelma and Louise
in which he took off his shirt, donned a cowboy hat, and worked his way into the fantasies of millions of women and more than a few men. Like his buddy and
Oceans Eleven
,
Twelve
and
Thirteen
co-star George Clooney, he’s twice been named
People
magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. In 2000, he married
Friends
TV star Jennifer Aniston, a marriage that, for years, seemed like the rare Hollywood keeper. That is, until he met Angelina Jolie.

Angie, as she’s called, was a self-described “drama queen” who, as a child in Palisades, New York, wore glasses and braces, and failed as an early model. She complained that she looked like a Muppet, all skinny and goofy. As a self-loathing teen, she started cutting herself. She lived with a boyfriend, and as Jolie boasted in too-much-information interviews, the pair was heavily involved in sado-masochistic sexual activity. She was so obsessed with death, she fantasized about becoming a funeral director, but instead attended acting classes and majored in film at New York University before dropping out to act.

In 1995, while filming the movie
Hackers
, she met her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. She said about him, “You’re young, you’re drunk, you’re in bed, you have knives; sh*t happens.” How romantic. She wore black leather pants to her wedding and a white shirt with Miller’s name written across the back in her blood. No surprise the marriage was doomed.

After starring with Jenny Shimizu in
Foxfire
in 1996, the pair were said to have an openly lesbian relationship. Jolie told
Elle
magazine, “When I was twenty, I fell in love with somebody who happened to be a woman.” Asked by Barbara Walters if she was bisexual, she said, “Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it’s okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!” Only much later, ensconced with Brad Pitt, Jolie had second thoughts. “I’ve never hidden my bisexuality, but since I’ve been with Brad, there’s no longer a place for that or S&M in my life.” Shimizu didn’t buy it. Lesbianism is “like a drug and she was hooked,” she told the United Kingdom’s
News of the World
in 2007.

Jolie hit the big time in 2000, accepting the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her convincing portrayal of mental patient Lisa Rowe in the 1999 film,
Girl, Interrupted
. In the audience, she was seen manically tongue-kissing and caressing her older brother, James Haven. Ew.

“I’m so in love with my brother right now,” she said while thanking the academy. Even in Hollywood, this attracted attention. The pair, by the way, have denied having an incestuous relationship.

Jolie engaged in one more starter marriage, wedding actor and director Billy Bob Thornton in 2000. He was forty-four. She was twenty-four. The pair wore each other’s blood around their necks so they might remain close when filming in remote locations. Apparently, they were unaware that cellphones were a more sanitary option. I’ve seen them on TV, making out so fervently, it was enough to make one ill. They adopted Angie’s first child, a son named Maddox, in Cambodia, just months before divorcing in 2002.

That year, Jolie’s sometimes estranged father, Jon Voight, went to the celebrities’ favorite counseling center,
Access Hollywood
, to declare that his daughter had “serious emotional problems.” Angie dropped the name “Voight” legally from her moniker. She said, “My father and I don’t speak…I don’t believe that somebody’s family becomes their blood. Because my son’s adopted, families are earned.”

Her tattoos are the stuff of Hollywood legend and Middle-American ridicule. Space prohibits me from naming all her body illustrations, but they include: A lower case “h” inside her left wrist in honor of her brother, James Haven, and also for Timothy Hutton, whom she once dated. (After they broke up, she said it was only for James.) A quotation from Tennessee Williams on her left forearm. The global coordinates representing the birthplaces of her first four children on her left arm, covering an earlier “Bill Bob” tattoo. An Asian tiger on her back. The saying, “that which nourishes me also destroys me.” And an “M” on the palm of her hand for her late mother, Marcheline. She was so covered in tattoos, it was joked at the 2007 funeral of murdered “Realtor to the Stars” Linda Stein that the woman bullied Angie into concealing her ink while applying to snooty Manhattan co-op boards for apartments.

During the filming of 2005’s
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
, Angie met Brad. Evidently, the couple’s on-screen chemistry was matched by the fireworks off-screen. But Jolie denied that she engaged in a sexual relationship with Pitt until he’d split from Jennifer Aniston, telling Britain’s
Grazia
magazine that sleeping with another woman’s husband is “one of the worst things you can do.”

“He was married to his best friend who he loves and respects,” she said.

She told an interviewer, “To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.”

Conventional wisdom had it that Jennifer lost Brad partly because she did not want his children, which she denies. It did not help Brad’s image in the eyes of his “best friend” when pictures surfaced of Brad and Angie together in Africa with son Maddox while Brad was still married to Aniston. “The world was shocked and I was shocked,” she told
Vanity Fair
.

Pitt proceeded to pose with Jolie in a photo shoot he helped devise for
W
magazine, in which the pair is done up like a 1963 couple and posed with a passel of children at the dinner table. Brad said he wanted to explore the “unidentifiable malaise” that can haunt a seemingly happy couple. “You don’t know what’s wrong, because the marriage is everything you signed up for.”

Aniston retorted that the exercise proved, “there’s a sensitivity chip that’s missing,” in Brad.

Brad and Angie set out to create a village. In 2005, an Ethiopian baby, Zahara, joined Maddox, whose initial father, Billy Bob, had dropped out of the picture.

In May 2006, Jolie gave birth to Brad’s daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, in Namibia, Africa, by a scheduled Caesarean section. And in March 2007, Jolie adopted a three-year-old Vietnamese boy, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt. Brad has lent his surname to all the children. Yet while the countries from which the Jolie-Pitts obtain their progeny willingly hand the kids to Angie, they refuse to grant adoptions to a man, not her husband, for fear of boosting child trafficking. And still, the family has had little trouble growing. This has led to considerable criticism of Angie and Brad. Isn’t there room in their lives to save American-born orphans?

Angie slammed her sister in international adoption, Madonna, after the singer drew international outrage by taking home African non-orphan David Banda. “Personally, I prefer to stay on the right side of the law,” Angie sniffed. “I would never take a child away from a place where adoption is illegal.” But later, she backtracked, saying that she was “horrified” by the attacks on the singer.

Jolie got a small taste of what can happen when you’re not careful to ensure that the child you save is really motherless, when the supposed Ethiopian birth mother of little Zahara emerged in the press, claiming the child was the product of rape. But the woman backed off of her claim to the baby. She said she was glad Zahara was being raised by such a fabulous couple.

To thank Anderson Cooper of CNN for his reports about African refugees, Angelina sat for a two-hour interview in 2006 that the network hoped would capitalize on the birth of her daughter. Angelina hoped the chat would help her pet cause. To Cooper, she revealed that she donated one-third of her “stupid” income to help save the world, and intended to have even more children. She also demonstrated incredible naivety about the institutions she supports. Cooper prodded her with kid gloves about the United Nations Oil for Food scandal, in which UN officials and enemies of our country conspired to piggishly enrich themselves by looting a program created to exchange Iraqi oil for food and medicine. He never mentioned rape accusations against UN peacekeepers in Congo. He did gently mention the UN’s criminally slow response to the genocide in Rwanda.

Jolie jumped to the defense of the United Nations.

“I think we hear a lot of—we certainly hear a lot of the negative things and—about the UN. You know, you hear—you hear about the negative things that have gone on. You don’t hear on a daily basis the amount of people that are kept alive or protected by the UN. And if that list was plastered everywhere, I think people would be in shock and have a little more respect. I certainly think it needs to—it needs reform. I mean, it’s certainly not a perfect organization, by any means. It’s the closest thing that we have got, you know, to—to a real international institution that listens to all sides, represents all sides, and—and can make a certain—certain kinds of decisions….

“I have gone to countries where I have wanted to be angry about something. And you realize there’s such a fine balance, because you also have to be—they have to be allowed to work in these countries.”

She was on fire, but she had no solutions. “And you just, God, feel—feel like, you know, how—how many times are we going to let these things go on this long? Or when are we going to finally be united internationally to be able to handle these things immediately and…” she said about the genocide in Darfur.

Cooper asked no follow up questions.

On December 5, 2007, Brad Pitt took a turn with Larry King, in which the broadcaster interviewed him in New Orleans, where he was building houses. As always, the conversation turned to family. But Larry, in his fashion, was not nearly as credulous as Anderson Cooper. The interview soon resembled comedy.

KING: One other thing about your kids. How did you bang, bang?
Maddox, Zahara, Pax and Shiloh—that is not Jane/Mary.

PITT: No. We—I can’t—I can’t tell you anything more than it just felt right. And…Yes. It just kind of—we stumbled on it and after much deliberation and—when it felt right, it felt right. I can’t explain it.

KING: Do you want more children?

BRAD: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes…. We’re just getting started.

KING: Four and you’re just getting started?

PITT: We’ll see. We’ll, you know, we’ll probably crap out somewhere. I don’t know. But, yes, we’re not done.

KING: Doesn’t it hit a point where there’s too many?

Lest you think the Bradster misspoke, the comedy kept on coming a couple of weeks later, when he spoke to Charlie Rose.

“I think we’ll crap out somewhere between seven and nine children,” he said. “Yeah, somewhere in there, we’ll crap out.”

In 2008, it happened again. Jolie gave birth to Brad’s twins, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Léon. Brangelina were paid $14 million by
People
magazine for the happy, grinning faces of the twins.
New York
magazine speculated that the pictures were Photoshopped after
Parenting
magazine reported that babies less than two to three months old “do not smile from exterior stimulation.” The couple planned to marry, finally, in New Orleans.

Six kids down. One or two to go. The crap out point is drawing near.