Early on, Cruise and Miscavige shared a powerful sense of identity with each other. They were both short but powerfully built, “East Coast personalities,” as Parman diagnosed them. They shared a love of motorcycles, cars, and adventurous sports. Miscavige was bedazzled by the glamour surrounding the star, who introduced him to a social set outside of Scientology, a world Miscavige knew little about. He had spent most of his life cloistered in the Sea Org. He was thrilled when he visited Cruise on the set of Days of Thunder, and the actor took him skydiving for the first time. Cruise, for his part, fell under the spell of Miscavige’s commanding personality. He modeled his determined naval-officer hero in A Few Good Men on Miscavige, a fact that the church leader liked to brag about.
Just before Christmas, 1990, Sinar Parman was told that Tom and Nicole were going to get married, and that he and a Sea Org pastry chef, along with their wives, would be cooking for the wedding party. Parman was assured that they would get paid for their trouble; in the meantime, they should buy some civilian clothes suitable for a cold climate. Parman went shopping and put everything on his credit card, along with a Christmas present for Cruise. Then Cruise’s private jet flew them to Telluride, Colorado, where the wedding took place. They spent three days preparing meals for guests. Cruise’s auditor, Ray Mithoff, performed the ceremony, and David Miscavige served as best man. Afterward, Parman was informed that Miscavige had changed his mind about paying for his services and the expenses incurred. Parman was left with hundreds of dollars charged to his credit card, which he struggled to pay off on his Sea Org salary—fifty dollars a week at the time.
At first, Tom and Nicole seemed like the ideal Scientology power match. They were intelligent, articulate, extraordinarily attractive people. At Gold Base, Tom reached OT III. He would have spent a considerable amount of time after that self-auditing in order to exorcise his body thetans. Although Nicole didn’t share Tom’s obvious enthusiasm for Scientology—she was a cooler personality in any case—she was drawn along by his intensity. She went Clear in no time. Within a year, she had reached OT II, but then, mysteriously, stopped. A candidate who has begun the OT levels is not supposed to pause until OT III has been achieved. Miscavige suspected the influence of a Suppressive Person—specifically, Kidman’s father, Antony Kidman, a clinical psychologist who had written several popular self-help books in Australia. From the beginning Kidman was privately considered a Potential Trouble Source.
One day at Gold Base, Marty Rathbun summoned a sixteen-year-old Sea Org member, Marc Headley, and told him that he had been selected to undergo special auditing. He was to tell no one about it, including his co-workers and his family. And by the way, the auditor would be Tom Cruise.
Headley reported to a large conference room. Right away he noticed Nicole Kidman, who was also receiving auditing, and Kirstie Alley, who he later came to believe was there mainly as a “celebrity prop,” since she did little other than read.
“Hello, I am Tom,” Headley remembers Cruise saying, vigorously shaking his hand.4 He handed Headley the metal cans that were attached to the E-Meter and asked if the temperature in the room was all right. Then he instructed Headley to take a deep breath and let it out. This was a metabolism test, which is supposed to show whether the preclear was prepared for the session. Apparently, the needle on the E-Meter didn’t fall sufficiently. Headley was so starstruck that he was having trouble focusing.
“Did you get enough sleep?” Cruise asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you get enough to eat?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you take your vitamins?”
Headley said he never took vitamins.
“That might be the problem,” Cruise said. He went into the pantry, which was filled with snacks for the celebrities. Headley was used to the meager Sea Org fare, and he was taken aback by the cornucopia laid out for the stars to nibble on. As Cruise rummaged through the cabinets, Headley bit into a cheese Danish. The actor found several vitamins and then asked, “Do you take a lot of bee pollen?”
Headley had no idea what he meant.
“Never had bee pollen?” Cruise said excitedly. “Oh, that will do the trick for sure.”