Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (15 page)

Tommy’s and Jessica’s off-putting presence added to the weird feeling we got at Tom’s house. It was hard to place, but there was an energy in the air, like we were being watched. It was as if at any moment you could be ejected from his Beverly Hills mansion and sent to Flag in Florida to scrub toilets.

As the dinners continued and we spent more time with Tom, I came to think of him as a big kid with his loud laugh, high energy, and goofy ideas of fun. Like when he invited some Scientologists and a few other celebrities like Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, to his house and announced he wanted to play hide-and-seek. At first I thought he was joking, but no, he literally wanted to play hide-and-seek with a bunch of grown-ups in what was probably close to a 7,000-square-foot house on almost three full acres of secluded land.

“I can’t play—I’m wearing Jimmy Choos,” I said.

“Well, good,” Tom said with his signature grin. “So you’re It, then.” And with that he tagged me and ran to hide.

“Huh?”

I pulled my husband aside and in a quiet voice whispered, “Uh,
Angelo, you’re going to go ahead and do this, because I’m not doing it. I’m not trying to play a fucking game of hide-and-seek in five-inch stilettos. Okay?”

People were terrified of offending Tom, and not without reason. Once when Angelo and I were over, Tom decided he wanted to make cookies. He walked into the kitchen, where a batch of prepackaged cookie dough had been prepared and was sitting on the counter, a perfect loaf ready for cutting and baking. Tom was looking for flour and other ingredients and must not have seen the cookie dough, and he instantly got angry.

“Guys, where’s the cookie stuff?” he said, furrowing his brow.

His assistants came running in wanting to explain that it was right there, on a nearby counter, but all one of them could say was, “Uh, Tom.” They both grew more flustered, and Tom got angry. “Goddamn it!”

Looking at the dough sitting on a cutting board, obvious to all of us except Tom, I wished his assistant would say, “Hey, the stuff is right under your nose, dumb-ass.” But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Instead, Katie whispered something to Tom, who repeated, “Can I just get the stuff for the cookies, guys?” Although his voice was lower, there was still a seething quality to his request that made his assistant even more flustered.

Tom seemed like a child who had never been told no. People say that celebrities stop developing emotionally at the age of their success—which for Tom had been with
Risky Business
at twenty-one.

“Get in the fucking present time, is what you need to do,” he then screamed at his assistant. As he lit into her, I thought about the time a friend had mentioned to me that she witnessed him taking his assistant to task for giving him a chipped coffee mug.

“You served me tea in a chipped mug? Do you know who gets served with a mug that’s chipped? Fucking DBs,” he said, using the initials for “Degraded Being,” a term in Scientology that means degraded spiritual being.

Still not noticing the log of pre-made dough on the counter, Tom raised his hand above his head. “LRH is here,” he said, then lowered
his hand to his chin and said, “And Dave and I are here.” Then, with his hand down at his waist, he said, “And you are here.”

An uncomfortable heat rose in my body, just like it used to when I was a little kid being yelled at by my dad. It was horrible to watch someone I admired come undone and even worse to witness the fear in the assistant’s eyes. Tom comes across with an almost presidential charm to the public, but seeing him treat people this way was utterly shocking. I’ve seen celebrities (myself included) treat people or staff poorly, but this was on another level. The whole scene was so painful to watch that I had to step in. “Oh, wait,” I said, as if I had just discovered something. “Tom, is this it?”

He looked at the dough, the assistant looked at him, and I was looking at the both of them, all of us incredulous.

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” And that was it.

It was one thing to act like an overgrown child in his own home, but when Tom had his infamous
Oprah
incident, I picked up the phone and called Shane. I wanted to know what they were going to do about Tom, who proclaimed his love for Katie Holmes by jumping on the daytime host’s couch in a move that creeped out most of America. His behavior reflected badly on Scientology and me.

“Leah, he’s just very up-tone,” Shane said, the term used for high on Scientology’s emotional tone scale. Tom and the church had become a laughingstock, and we were calling it
up-tone
? “The guy’s really happy, and you should be happy for him.” Again, I felt like maybe I am just an asshole and maybe there is something really and truly wrong with me. Is that just a foreign concept to me? Happiness? Real love? I wondered if Angelo would jump on a couch for me.

Meanwhile, ever since my first time at Tom’s house, I had been questioning why there were Sea Org members constantly hovering around. Well, I had my own theory; it was to make sure nothing upset Tom, and if it did, to immediately report it to the church, specifically to COB David Miscavige.

Once when we were at the compound for dinner, Angelo made a joke about some celebrity we were friends with. Jessica, who was acting as Katie’s Scientology chaperone to keep the actress on track and
doing Scientology, pulled me aside and asked me details about the joke. When I asked her why, she said, “I am just collecting the data.” The next day Jessica wrote a Knowledge Report stating that Mr. Cruise had observed Angelo joking about another celebrity and Leah did nothing about it. We were both pulled into session immediately. I was furious. Tom was a big boy; if he had a problem with me or my husband, he could write it up himself, which was proper policy. And really, all for a joke about one of our friends?

In the church, though, Tom’s status only grew, despite his public behavior. He followed his
Oprah
appearance with his even more infamous one on the
Today
show, where in an interview with Matt Lauer he chastised Brooke Shields for taking psychopharmaceuticals to deal with postpartum depression. The church’s response was to hold a huge event for him at the Shrine Auditorium to present how prescriptions for Ritalin and other psychotropic drugs were down something like 500 percent, thanks to Tom and his recent comments. According to the church, Tom had single-handedly taken down the psychiatric profession. As I watched Tom get a standing ovation from all the Scientologists who filled the massive auditorium, I started to question my judgment.
Look at this guy,
I thought.
He’s doing great things for the world, and you’re criticizing his couch jumping?
I felt more than down-tone.
Maybe I am degraded and an S.P.?

I certainly didn’t think he and Katie deserved the scrutiny they underwent from the press after their daughter was born in the spring of 2006. Because the first pictures of Suri didn’t appear until she was almost five months old, there was wild speculation about whether she existed and what this mystery baby was like.

I experienced a small taste of the media frenzy around this infant when I attended my first Emmy Awards show, a little more than a week before the Annie Leibovitz portraits of baby Suri appeared in
Vanity Fair
.

Tom’s kid was the last thing on my mind that day. Kevin had been nominated for lead actor in a comedy series, which was exciting
for everyone on
The King of Queens
because in our nine seasons on the air no one had been nominated for a single Emmy. While walking the red carpet on a day that was so brutally hot I was sweating everywhere, I stopped to do an interview with Ryan Seacrest.

“So, Leah. This is an exciting time,” he said.

“Yes, it is, Ryan.”

“We heard you saw Suri.”

I didn’t see that coming.

“Yeah. You know what’s also big news, too? Kevin James was nominated for an Emmy for the first time in the history of the show.”

He gave me a kind of look like I had an attitude, which of course I did. But this was only the start of it. Every single fucking interview on that broiling red carpet was about that baby.

“You’ve seen Suri. What’s she look like?”

“You know what Tom and Katie look like? That’s what the baby looks like.”

“What is she like?”

“Well, I don’t know. What are babies like?”

“Is she a real baby?”

“Last I checked.”

(To add insult to injury, after all that bullshit, Tony Shalhoub stole Kevin’s Emmy. It was not my night, despite the fact that I had Kevin’s Emmy speech written out for him, beginning with “I want to thank Remini for…”).

Of course I didn’t bring any of that up the next time I saw Tom and Katie. At the end of the night when they walked us out to our car, Tom said, “Hey, we have some news. You have to keep this hush-hush.”

It wasn’t hard to guess what the news was.

“We’re getting married,” he said, “and we want you guys to come.”

I was excited for them, but I wanted to prove I was theta, not a DB or low-tone—that I could be really happy and up-tone—so I started jumping up and down. (In the car, later, Angelo said, “The jumping up and down was a little much.”) Tom, who seemed pleased
with my reaction, then asked if we wanted to invite our friends Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to the wedding.

“Don’t you think you guys should?” I asked, confused.

“Well, we don’t really know them that well,” Katie said.
Right,
I thought,
exactly my point. And you want to invite them to the wedding?

Although I wondered why they wanted people they didn’t know well enough to invite to their wedding
at
their wedding, I agreed to ask Jennifer and Marc.

This wasn’t the first time I had invited them to hang out with Tom and Katie; the couple had asked me to bring Marc and Jennifer over for dinner previously. Although I wasn’t sure why, Katie wanted to meet Jen. I just assumed she was a fan of J-Lo.

Angelo and I knew Marc way before he was with Jen. Our friendship started when the comedian Sinbad invited me to a Marc Anthony concert where I hung out afterward until four in the morning. (Angelo, who didn’t come with me, kept on texting me to come home. “It’s not like that,” I texted back. Angelo texted in return, “Get your ass home.”)

I loved Marc like a brother, and so was protective when he had Angelo and me meet his new girlfriend, Jennifer. “I want to punch you in your face,” I said when I first met her, “because you are even prettier in person. I was kind of hoping you would be uglier.” Jen, who has a good sense of humor about herself, laughed and we hit it off. We had a lot in common. She was from the Bronx, which if we were back in New York would be like a different country from Brooklyn, but in L.A. it basically made us from the same neighborhood. And although Jen is Catholic, her father is a Scientologist, so she knew all about the church. I thought it would be fun to take a trip with her and Marc to Tom and Katie’s wedding.

So I called Jennifer the next day and said, “Hey, you want to go to Italy?”

“For what? What are you talking about?”

“Tom and Katie’s wedding.”

“I’m invited?…Are there invitations coming?”

“They’re chartering a jet for everybody.”

“Let me ask Marc,” she said, “but why not?”

While I was happy to have my friend joining me at the wedding, I was uncomfortable with being asked to play the role of the intermediary, but I felt like I just couldn’t say no to the request.

T
OM AND
K
ATIE’S WEDDING
WAS
to take place in Rome in November of 2006. I was very excited—and scared, as I had never been out of the country before, and this was going to be a star-studded affair covered by media outlets from all over the globe. The paparazzi would be mobbing us from the minute we stepped off the plane until we returned home. I needed a get-off-the-plane outfit, complete with sunglasses, a shopping-in-Rome outfit, and a sit-in-a-café-and-have-a-cappuccino outfit, not to mention the gowns and dresses for the rehearsal dinner and the wedding. I was going to need some professional help.

Jennifer and I decided to hire a stylist to work with the both of us, which was great for me because the Jennifer Lopezes of the world get free shit from Gucci and YSL, whereas people like me get Sudafed. That’s not true—I don’t even get Sudafed.

The stylist filled the empty room where Angelo and I were building a home library with racks and racks of clothes and used the shelves to display bags, hats, and shoes. It was the ultimate girl fun when Jen, the stylist, and I assembled outfits for every possible scenario in Italy. I mean, I’m half Italian, so they could be planning a homecoming parade for me.

When we got off the plane, the paps were there waiting for us, just as I knew they’d be.

“Jennifer! Jennifer!” they screamed as they photographed her.

Not a single “Leah!”

No one had stopped me for a shot of my fabulous get-off-the-plane outfit. And the only “image” of me getting off the plane is a corner of my forehead, behind Jennifer. But to be fair, it was chaotic with all the fans, security, and camera flashes. Maybe they had just missed me. I
had
been standing behind Jennifer, who towers over me. No problem. There were plenty more outfits where this one came from.

The next ensemble I chose, for a little stroll up the Spanish Steps, was my shop-in-Rome outfit: a ruffled white turtleneck, black slacks capped off by a Chanel coat and four-inch Gucci heels. After three hours of preparation, I was finally ready to grab Angelo and leave the secured hotel right near the steps, where the wedding party was staying.

“We are going to be swarmed by reporters and photographers,” I predicted to Angelo.

I steeled myself to face the crowd of hundreds who had lined up behind velvet ropes set up around the perimeter of the hotel in hopes of catching a glimpse in real life of the celebrities who were attending the wedding, including of course, me and Angelo. After putting on my very expensive sunglasses and taking Angelo’s arm, I walked out of the lobby and bravely waited for the firestorm of fans and paps clamoring for me.

Silence
.

I took off my sunglasses.

More silence.

“I guess your show doesn’t air in Italy,” Angelo said.

Angelo, who wanted to go to the Coliseum, grabbed a cab for us. When we got out, there was a large group of tourists waiting to get into the ruin. My time to step in. I walked past the group and up to the man standing at the front of the gate. I asked him if he ever watched the show
The King of Queens
. He said he did not and told us
to get back in line. (Playing hardball, the Italians!) Apparently my street cred as a celebrity did not travel. My feet were killing me. So after Angelo took a picture of us (the only one from the whole trip), we went back to the hotel to get ready for the welcome dinner, the first event of the weekend.

Almost all of the 150 guests invited to Tom and Katie’s wedding, which included some of the biggest names in all areas of the business—actors and actresses, of course, but also the heads of the major talent agencies, top entertainment lawyers, and well-known producers in Hollywood—piled into Nino, a classic, cozy Roman restaurant about an hour from the hotel. Old Italian waiters in starched white jackets and black bow ties hustled around the bride and groom’s famous friends like Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Victoria and David Beckham, Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy (who were dating at the time), and Brooke Shields and her husband, Chris Henchy.

I had been totally shocked when I saw Brooke Shields on the chartered plane to Italy that we shared. After the whole brouhaha when Tom attacked her on
Today
for taking antidepressants, I thought she was our enemy and had even said some shit about her in defense of Tom and my church. “I wouldn’t trust someone who had those feelings with a baby,” I remarked on
Entertainment Tonight.
“Do I think she needs help? Yes. Can you take a pill for something that deep? That dark? The answer is no. I got through it, but I didn’t get through it by taking a pill.” Then I had the pleasure of being on a private plane with her for eight hours. To my mind, it was clearly a PR move on the part of Tom’s team. And then there were forced photo ops for the press to capture which celebrities and Hollywood big shots were attending the wedding. Thus it looked like they were associating themselves with Scientology and Scientologists. Although the restaurant was located on a street where it was easy for cars to drive right up and drop people off at the entrance, the wedding planners chose instead to have the street roped off, so we all had to get out of our cars on the main avenue and walk down the street to the restaurant with camera flashes going off the entire way. The church,
in a very calculating way, could point to this photo or that photo and say Posh and Becks or Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony are associating themselves with this wedding, and therefore with Scientology. It was a smart way of legitimizing the church to the public and an attempt to recover from the bad PR of recent years. It also promoted the illusion of “look how powerful Scientology is in this business.”

A
T DINNER THAT NIGHT,
I saw everyone who was from the church for the first time. I spotted a young Sea Org member who worked for David Miscavige, drinking red wine. I was more shocked at the sight of a Sea Org member drinking—something that I’d never seen before and something that was completely against policy. “What are you doing?” I said to the kid. “You know Sea Org members are not supposed to drink.” He responded, “You know what they say—when in Rome…”

Someone who was representing the church at such a high-profile moment was completely flouting its rules. Most Scientologists, even just parishioners, don’t really drink because they are always on course, and the rule is no drinking twenty-four hours before you are on course or going into session. Sea Org members are held to an even higher standard as they are the ones who deliver Scientology to its parishioners. To see one drinking would be as weird as seeing a priest doing a tequila shot. It’s just not done.

Jessica Feshbach and Tommy Davis, the Sea Org members who had become constant fixtures at Tom and Katie’s house in L.A., were in Italy, without their respective spouses, and had their hands all over each other at the restaurant—another major taboo. Sea Org members are absolutely forbidden from touching members of the opposite sex aside from their spouses. So at dinner, when Marc and Jen, having no idea who Tommy and Jessica were, asked if they were married, my face went red with embarrassment. But then Jessica took it to a whole other level.

“No, I’m married to a beaner,” she said, using a racial slur for her Mexican husband.

“Jessica!” I interjected.

“What? I can say it. I mean I’m married to a Mexican.”

“I’m telling you it’s offensive.”

She was married to a high-ranking Sea Org member. I wanted her to stop embarrassing herself and get her shit together.

Back in L.A. a few weeks before the wedding, I had asked my assistant at the time to call ahead to the hotel to check on the rooms. I asked her to make sure I was in a big enough room so that Jennifer and I could get ready together. She upgraded the smaller room I had been assigned and verified that the new room wasn’t one from the block reserved for the wedding party and that it was charged to my credit card, not to the wedding party.

The next thing I got was a nasty call from Jessica: “Who are you to be changing rooms?”

I couldn’t believe I had a Sea Org member calling me about rooms. It was like a rabbi calling you about why you switched the mimosa for a Bloody Mary at brunch.

“You’re ungrateful,” she said.

“Why should I be grateful? I’m going to a wedding.”

“Because you’re going to the wedding of the century.”

S
O W
HILE
I
MIGHT HAVE
come off as “ungrateful” to them, Jessica and Tommy still pulled me in as the church’s unofficial liaison to Jennifer and Marc. I had to answer tons of questions. (What kind of car does she need? What does she like to have in her hotel room? What kind of security does she need?)
Why is this of concern to them?
I wondered.

I found it odd that top church officials, Sea Org members, were so involved in the planning of Tom and Katie’s wedding. This was unprecedented and off policy, to my mind.

Not only were these high-ranking executives involved in orchestrating the event, they were also all in attendance at the event. To me
it could only be viewed as Tom and Katie’s wedding now being regarded as “official church business.” I could not shed the thought that Tom must be an unofficial executive of the church. When I brought this up to church officials later on, they went to great lengths to deny it.

“All parishioners, including Tom Cruise, are considered equals and treated accordingly” was their pat response.

My confusion and anxiety about what was going on with my church only increased that night at Nino, where David Miscavige was one of the guests. The bizarre part about him that evening was that his female assistant Laurisse Stuckenbrock was sitting next to him like she was his date. It would have been okay if she had stood off to the side, ready to assist him when needed. But this was just weird. She was in the seat that should have been reserved for his wife, Shelly. Where was she, anyway? Strange not to have your wife, who was also COB Assistant, at an event like this.

Suri was also there that night. I heard a baby crying from the direction of the bathroom. She was a seven-month-old up late in a loud, crowded, dark restaurant, so what else was she going to do? The crying kept up, and Katie didn’t seem to notice. Other people took notice, though, and started to look around to figure out what was going on with the baby. I too kept looking around.
Is anyone going to do anything?
I thought.

After about five minutes I headed to the bathroom to offer some help. When I opened the door, I found three women, including Tom’s sister and his assistant, standing over the baby, who was lying on the tile floor. I didn’t know if they were changing her diaper or what, but the three women were looking at her like they thought she was L. Ron Hubbard incarnate. Rather than talking to her in a soothing voice, they kept saying, “Suri! Suri!” in a tone that sounded like they were telling an adult to get her shit together.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for an answer. “She’s a baby. Pick her up!”

I’m hardly mother of the year, but even I knew that she was probably hungry and tired. But when I asked where her bottle was,
they said it was outside, in the main part of the restaurant. It had to be heated up and they seemed helpless. “Oh, my God, you guys. We’re in a restaurant, where typically there’s a kitchen,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

I grabbed the bottle from Suri’s diaper bag, went into the kitchen, asked someone to warm it up, which of course was no problem, and returned to the bathroom, where Suri was still on the floor and still crying! “Pick her up!” I yelled. They picked her up, gave her the bottle, and finally she stopped crying. Then Tom’s sister turned to me and said, “Thank you,” as if I were being dismissed.

I came out, and from his table, David Miscavige mouthed to me the words “Is she okay?” To which I silently replied, “Yes.”

When I got back to my seat next to Jennifer, however, I found that Jessica had taken it. I didn’t care so much about my seat, but I wanted my phone, which I had left on my seat. I wanted to call home and check on Sofia. I hovered near her and looked for the phone but didn’t see it by my place setting. “Did anybody see my phone?” I asked. But no one had. I started to get hysterical as people either shrugged no or ignored me altogether.