Tom Cruise’s contract with Paramount Pictures has been severed after 14 years. No specific reason was given, but apparently he has suffered a significant decline in popularity. People aren’t flocking to see his films the way they once did. He’s put them off with all his talk about the Church of Scientology, which makes him look slightly mad. John Travolta is a Scientologist too, but he has the good sense to shut up about it.
Too much religion and proselytising is never attractive in a star. It’s not attractive in anyone at all, really, because it reeks of obsession and obsessive personalities are frightening. This makes it particularly repellent in individuals whom we prize purely for their entertainment value. If our entertainers are going to turn into the public equivalent of the zealot at the dinner-party, then we don’t want to know.
It wasn’t just the religion that did it. The trouble really started when Tom Cruise was invited on Oprah Winfrey’s show. He stood on her sofa and bounced up and down like a madman shouting “I love her! I love her!” (correct use of exclamation marks – forgive me for pointing it out) in reference to his fresh liaison with the relatively minor actress Katie Holmes. That set the alarm bells ringing harder than ever. Much as we love public declarations of love in Hollywood films, when it comes to real life we are suspicious of them. We know in our hearts that a man who finds it necessary to jump on a sofa like a three-year-old, shouting his love in front of the world’s single largest television audience, is trying to prove something, and that something is not his love for a woman, but the lack of it. Those who really love don’t find it necessary to shout about it.
It was a completely unconvincing performance from one of the most highly-rated actors in the film industry. The makers of South Park (some of my favourite television viewing, along with other highbrow shows like Eastenders and Top Gear) were quick to rush out with their cartoon take on events, which can be summed up briefly as “come out of the closet, Tom”. But that particular rumour has been going on for many years, precisely since his oddly cold and remote relationship with Nicole Kidman. They came across as the chilliest couple on the planet. She still puts me in mind of a piece of lard that has spent rather too long in the fridge. The whispers about a mariage blanc – a sexless but mutually beneficial marriage between a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman – became even stronger when this sexless pair with the dysfunctional dynamic suddenly decided to adopt children. It came across as a strategic publicity stunt.
The Penelope Cruz blip (hot sexy Spaniard) rescued Cruise from confused-weirdoland and the closet talk briefly subsided. For a moment there, he looked like he wasn’t pretending about anything – his passion for the woman, or his sexual inclinations. There was plenty in it for Ms Cruz, a Spanish actress trying to make it in Hollywood, which is notorious for casting Latina types as maids or as the love interest in films set in Old Mexico, except for Zorro, when they chose the Welsh woman Catherine Zeta Jones. One of the best ways to get noticed and hike up your ratings is to be seen on the arm of somebody much more famous than you are. Ask Elizabeth Hurley, whose renown largely hinges on her long-time status as Hugh Grant’s girlfriend (and that was another curious set-up). Then, as suddenly as it happened, the “passion” for Cruz was all over and Tom Cruise pulled Ms Holmes out of his hat, like a rabbit at a magic show. Within minutes, they were married and she fell pregnant (or the other way round), and she had been sucked into the crazy, creepy vortex of Scientology, a wacky pseudo-religion invented by an American author called L. Ron Hubbard in 1952. He couldn’t have been more successful at it had he set out to try and prove that thousands of people will believe anything at all.
Cruise’s ratings really plummeted when news leaked out of how he was subjecting his wife to Scientology-approved tests, and how the birth would be a Scientology one, with all kinds of freakiness attached, like the demand for complete silence during the birth, including by the mother. Maybe they gag them, or knock them over the head with a coal scuttle. They can’t knock them out with anything chemical, because no anaesthetic is allowed, and you’re not allowed to wash the baby when it pops out, either.
Now Cruise talks about Scientology all the time – he is the main reason I know so much about it – and that on top of everything else is making people sick. Any religion would be bad. Look at Richard Gere and his bore-for-Buddha campaign, or Mel Gibson and his rosary-touting Jew-bashing. When Gibson was caught drunk at the wheel of his car, he laid into the arresting officer with a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse. Then there was that awful film he made, The Passion – all blood and gore and with Jews as Hitler would have depicted them, to say nothing of his much-trumpeted belief that his sainted wife, who has borne him rather too many children, will go to hell because she is a Protestant. He, of course, will go straight to heaven, having bribed God with a gruesome film about his son. It won’t be long before Mel Gibson goes the Tom Cruise way, possibly by brandishing a large crucifix on the Oprah Winfrey show.
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The trouble with these actors is that they won’t accept they are just that – actors. They achieve fame because of a combination of good looks, charisma, acting ability, luck and clever marketing. It isn’t long before the less intelligent ones, the ones who don’t keep their eyes on the ball, decide they want to be taken seriously for something else: their thoughts and opinions, the very factors for which they are not sought after. They become activists for a cause, discover strong political opinions which they inflict on everyone else, campaign for this and that (usually dogs or Tibet), and then they wonder why no one wants to know and why it’s damaged their career.
It’s not a new story. Jane Fonda tried it with the Vietnam War, and look where it got her. Nobody took Barbarella seriously in combat gear, posing with weapons, particularly not when she was on the wrong side. It took her ages to put her career back together again, and she never really got there. Brigitte Bardot, with whom she shared a husband, at least had the good sense to announce that she was retiring from films before she devoted herself to animals and racist literature.
Could we take a politician seriously if he tried to become an actor? It’s the same the other way round. However good a performer Bill Clinton may be, if we were to see him as the love interest in a Hollywood film – for example, in the role of the enigmatic photographer in the most boring film ever made, Bridges of Madison County (yawn – get the DVD and see for yourself) – all we would see is the former president of the United States making a damn fool of himself. The only man who managed to cross the divide from acting into politics was Ronald Reagan, and he took his hair-dye with him – enough said. The reverse of this is politician who should have been an actor, Tony Blair. Everything about him screams out the fact that he is an actor manqué, and like Ronald Reagan, he dyes his hair. The London newspapers were full of before and after shots the other day. I can’t imagine how he isn’t embarrassed.
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Whenever I meet mothers who complain about their babies and toddlers, I tell them to appreciate this relatively calm period because they really have no idea how much worse lies ahead. Better a 2am bottle (yes, bottle – that dirty word) than a 2am call from the police to say that your son/daughter/has crashed and been hospitalised/is in custody for brawling while drunk/has been caught in possession of illegal substances/has fallen off a high place while in good spirits and died. The good thing about babies is that if you put them in a cot or a play-pen, they stay there, and the good thing about toddlers is that if you say “No” and put on an angry face, they’re impressed. Enjoy it, because it doesn’t last long. Babies and toddlers don’t ask for money, either. I forgot about that one.
I am dismayed to see that it doesn’t get any easier. The news reports tell us that the one-time socialite, Brooke Astor, 104, is suing her son, 82, for keeping her in discomfort and generally getting on her nerves. At 82, surely she can have him strapped into one of those adult cots with retaining sides? Then she can turn off her hearing-aid at night.