Tom Cruise Scientology secrets

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TANTALISED by the tidbits that had appeared in newspapers and the internet, I was thrilled when my Unauthorized Biography of Tom Cruise arrived in its less-than-authorised cardboard box from the United States.
With warnings not to sell the book in the United Kingdom and Ireland glazed on the cover, lest Cruise’s lawsuit-happy ways strike me down, I was expecting a salacious and riveting read, exposing the Top Gun star’s deepest darkest secrets.

Banned from sale in Australia, Andrew Morton’s book is a fun read, if tending toward the cliched, but it proves little more insightful or revealing than the back catalogue of Who Weekly.

There are unnamed sources, references to other media reports and sketchy details that Morton draws larger conclusions from.

No, the biggest revelations in the book have nothing to do with Cruise, who the world already knew to be a thrice-married lunatic who jumped on Oprah’s couch and berated Brooke Shields for daring to treat post-natal depression. (Cruise, being a man, has about my level of experience carrying a baby to term and then giving birth, so I guess we are both experts. Not.)

The really juicy stuff is about his religion of choice, Scientology. The reason why it appeals to the actor is because you become your own god, and can live forever the type of immortality that no amount of Mission: Impossible sequels can provide.

Scientologists are even waiting for founder and head nutcase L.Ron Hubbard to return from the dead, possibly in the form of Cruise’s baby.

According to Morton, the cult/religion/tax-exempt pyramid scheme was cynical and deliberate when it sought to convert Cruise, undermined his first two marriages and is controlling his third to Katie Holmes. He is their chief public relations man, and his production company is being run by those loyal to the cause.

Apparently, despite 20 years of this control by an organisation that has split hundreds of families, Cruise has only ever wavered in his beliefs once. And that was when he discovered that the religion that can "cure" all mankind’s ills was based on aliens.

Yes, Xenu arrived on the planet 75 million years ago with billions of humans, throwing them into volcanos and blowing the rest up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls scatter the earth still, and cling on to our bodies, somehow, and must be cleansed.

Now, I like my science-fiction fantasy more than most how the writer’s strike affects the final season of Battlestar Galactica is much more worrying than what becomes of Desperate Housewives or Lost but this is nonsense.

Still, Morton says Cruise’s doubts about this were brief, and he soon afterwards turned from believer into zealot. And that is a real worry.

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