Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (8 page)

Other than a penchant for garnering tabloid headlines, the couple seemed to have little in common except membership in the science-fiction-inspired religion of Scientology. When things started going badly in their marriage, Mimi turned to the Scientologists for help. She and Tom attended church-supported counseling sessions in an effort to work out their difficulties, but nothing seemed to work. Meanwhile, Tom grew more and more distant.

Things did not come to a head until Mimi’s trip to Florida. It was then that Tom told her that he had fallen in love with Nicole and wanted a divorce. Stunned by the suddenness of it all, Mimi took the next flight out of Daytona Beach. She had gone to be with Tom to repair their marriage, to do the right thing—instead she was humiliated by his unwillingness to even discuss their relationship.

On January 16, 1990, Tom and Mimi announced their impending divorce in a joint statement that said, in part: “While there have been very positive aspects to our marriage, there were some issues which could not be resolved even after working on them for a period of time. Anyone who has been through this type of situation will understand that it is a complicated and difficult decision.”

The divorce was all very clinical, very Hollywoodish and businesslike in its lack of passion. Tom treated it as a changing of the guard. He took responsibility for the failure of the marriage, he was generous to Mimi in the settlement, and he made certain that everyone saw him moving on with his life. “It just seemed right,” Tom told writer James Greenberg. “I think anyone who has met Nicole would understand.”

Mimi exhibited much the same attitude, insofar as moving on with her life was concerned, although she clearly felt she was the injured party. Stargazers wondered about the divorce because rumors had circulated about the couple ever since they got married. Was Mimi bisexual or perhaps a full-blown lesbian? She had encouraged that line of thinking by holding hands in public with other actresses, most notably
Cheers
co-star Kirstie Alley. A
Star
headline once proclaimed:
KIRSTIE ALLEY: I LURED MEN BY PROMISING 3-IN-A-BED WITH MIMI ROGERS.

Not until March 1993, when she did a nude layout for
Playboy
magazine, did Mimi address the rumors. She told the magazine that although she and Kirstie were “wild and crazy single girls,” there was no truth to the rumors that she is bisexual or a lesbian.

In the interview, she also addressed rumors about her divorce from Tom. She denied she had grown tired of him and was responsible for the divorce. Then she dropped a bombshell, one that would prompt speculation that Tom was gay and haunt him for years to come. She and Tom split up, she explained to the magazine, because “Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn’t fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.”

Was Mimi serious about Tom’s lack of interest in sex—or was she simply displaying her wicked sense of humor? If true, it would not necessarily mean that Tom is gay. It could simply mean that Tom had lost interest in her as a sexual partner, perhaps as a result of her celebrated penchant for party hopping.

Of course, none of that was of interest to Nicole, because she had her own agenda. In the blink of an eye, she had been transformed from an obscure Australian actress into the co-star of a Hollywood blockbuster. As the weeks went by, cast by the tabloids as the love interest of America’s sexiest film star.

Could life possibly get any sweeter?

At times, she found all the media attention almost overwhelming. “I didn’t come from America, so I didn’t understand the whole idea of movie stars and the way America deals with it. The scrutiny on your life is . . . weird,” she told the
Los Angeles Times.
“It really was a shock to go to Hollywood. [Before] I was working with really great people like Philip Noyce and George Miller who were writing roles for me. It never really hit me until a few years into it when people would say to me, ‘So your first film was
Days of Thunder,
and I’d say, ‘No, I did all this theater and stuff.’ It was frustrating having to start again.”

Once the first surge of publicity over Tom’s divorce subsided, he and Nicole relaxed somewhat when out in public. They were spotted holding hands and smooching in shopping malls. It was during this time  they discovered they had more in common than simple physical attraction. Both are consummate daredevils, risk-takers who are willing to put their lives on the line. To Nicole’s delight, Tom took her skydiving. At one point, as they fell toward earth in free fall, Tom zoomed in on her and planted a kiss on her mouth, then broke away and yanked his parachute cord. For Nicole, who thrived on adrenaline rushes, romance couldn’t possibly get any better than that.

Once Tom and Nicole became an item, Janelle Kidman wasted no time flying to America to get a personal assessment of the situation. Nicole and Tom met her in New York, where she spent two weeks getting to know her daughter’s new boyfriend. She was surprised at how much alike they were. She described them as “two peas in a pod” and she told her daughter it seemed to her that they had found in each what they always had been looking for—a best friend.

Before Janelle returned to Australia, Nicole gave her one more bit of information: She and Tom planned to live together in his four-million-dollar Pacific Palisades home once work on
Days of Thunder
was completed and Tom’s divorce was finalized in April. Janelle was not entirely surprised, for when it came to affairs of the heart, her daughter had never been overly cautious. She went after love with the same ferocity and determination with which she went after movie roles.

During her first year as a live-in companion to Tom, Nicole did her best to adapt to stardom Hollywood-style. She gave the obligatory interviews, she toned down her Aussie accent, and she attended one party after another, although the latter was her least favorite thing to do. It was during this period that Tom learned that Nicole’s cool, confident exterior was little more than camouflage for a cauldron of emotions that she struggled to keep in check while out in public.

She suffers from what psychologists generically call panic attacks. When photographers and reporters press in around her, the strobe lights from the cameras blinding her eyes, her heart races and she struggles to not run away. Typically, people who are in the throes of a panic attack feel a suffocating sense of doom, as if they are going to die if they cannot escape whatever pressure instigated the attack.

Nicole’s father, Antony, describes panic attacks this way: “Physically, symptoms appear—rapid heart beat, muscle tension, perspiration, trembling. Cognitively the person thinks he may die, go mad or lose control of himself.”

Early on in the relationship, Nicole learned to depend on Tom to get her through situations like that. The public saw photographs of Nicole holding Tom’s hand, their bodies pressed close together, his lips close to her ear whispering sweet nothings—and they thought it was the most romantic thing imaginable.

Beyond any doubt, Tom and Nicole were very much in love at that point, but those romantic images of them were not always what they seemed. More likely, especially in a public arena, Nicole pressed in close against Tom because she was experiencing a panic attack. Tom helped her get through those times by holding her hand tightly and whispering into her ear that everything was going to be all right.

After weeks of public scrutiny of their relationship, Nicole was relieved when the time came to take Tom to Australia to meet the rest of the family. She gleefully told him that they would encounter no paparazzi in Australia.

When they arrived in Sydney, she felt a great sense of relief, though it turned out to be short-lived. Since Nicole had given her apartment to her sister Antonia—and since bunking with Tom in her parents’ home did not seem a viable option—they checked into a hotel and discussed all the places they wanted to visit.

Unfortunately, reporters surrounded them the moment they stepped out of the hotel. Nicole was horrified by the intensity of their interest. They were followed every place they went. That had never happened to her before. She had considered Sydney a safe haven and now that bubble had been burst. They did manage to have several fun-filled visits with Antony and Janelle, and Nicole was able to show Tom the places that were important to her, especially the Harbour Bridge.

Then, for some reason, known only to Nicole, she took Tom by Marcus’s apartment to meet him. Presumably, she felt their friendship would survive his broken heart. The visit was well intentioned, but it was much too soon for the friendship card to be played. Marcus, still bruised by the breakup, was at home when they arrived, but he asked a friend to answer the door and say that he was not there. Nicole still had volumes to learn about men.

After a few outings escalated into mob-like chaos, Tom and Nicole retreated to their hotel room, where Nicole sat down at the window and wept, gazing out at the skyline that had earlier held so much promise. For the love of a man, she had given up her country, her friends, and her family—not to mention a big part of what she was. Now, facing the painful realization that you really can’t go home again, she understood, for the first time, what it meant to be a prisoner of her own fame.

~ ~ ~

After a courtship of less than a year, Tom and Nicole were married on December 24, 1990, in a sunset ceremony in Telluride, Colorado. Surrounded by snow in a lily-and-rose arbor outside a cozy cottage they had rented, Nicole wore the off-white, vintage bridal gown she had purchased in Amsterdam years ago and kept in her hope chest.

Antony and Janelle Kidman, along with Nicole’s sister Antonia, who served as her bride’s maid, were in attendance, as were other friends from Australia. Also present were Tom’s mother, Mary Lee Mapother, Tom’s best man, actor Emilo Estevez, and actor Dustin Hoffman and his wife.

At age twenty-three, Nicole was embarking on the greatest adventure of her life, although she never really saw it as a radical change in her lifestyle. ”We have so much in common that it’s almost as if we are the same person,” she explained to
Cosmopolitan
not long after the ceremony
.
“People who know us see that so clearly. Marriage won’t change my life. I mean, it is a commitment, but it doesn’t really change anything.”

Or so Nicole thought. One thing that did change was her concept of religion. Although she and Tom had both been raised Catholics, he had veered in another direction as an adult. Tom was a member of the Church of Scientology, a multi-billion dollar religious organization built on the writings of the late L. Ron Hubbard, whose books, according to his publisher, have sold over 120 million copies in thirty-two languages.

 Celebrities have been a recruiting target of the religion almost from the beginning. “Celebrities are well-guarded, well-barricaded, overworked, aloof quarry,” Hubbard once wrote. “They are important people because they reach a lot of people. They set trends in society.” In addition to Tom Cruise, the church’s Hollywood recruits include John Travolta, Jenna Elfman, Kirstie Alley, Dustin Hoffman, and Goldie Hawn.

The focus on celebrities is so great, according to
Variety
, that the organization operates an ornate “Celebrity Center” in a building constructed by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, a magazine titled
Celebrity
, and a movie production company named Golden Era Studios. With all its high-profile celebrity connections, you would think the church would be revered by the mainstream Hollywood media—but that’s not the case, primarily because of the organization’s sometimes hostile reaction to media coverage of its activities. Books with titles such as
The Scandal of Scientology
by Paulette Cooper and
L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman
by Bent Corydon have prompted lawsuits and what Corydon has described as “hounding” by church officials.

L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, seems like an unlikely messiah. For most of his life he financed his research to discover what he called the “basic principle of existence” by writing science fiction novels and short stories. He traveled extensively and, for three months in 1948, he worked with inmates in a Georgia mental hospital. In 1950, he expressed his theories in a book titled
Dianetcs: The Modern Science of Mental Health,
a bestseller that catapulted him into an international spotlight.

For twenty-five years, Hubbard toured the world, giving lectures and demonstrations of his powers (followers claim to have witnessed him read minds, change his body size, and move objects with telekinetic power). To true believers, he was the reincarnation of a prophet with one foot in the Far East and the other set squarely in the new power center of the new universe—Hollywood, California.