Scientology and the Kidman-Cruise split

When David Miscavige, the leader of the Church of Scientology, heard that Tom Cruise had an unfulfilled fantasy of running through a field of wildflowers with Nicole Kidman, he decided to make it happen. It was the American summer of 1990. A few months earlier, Kidman and Cruise had hooked up on Days of Thunder. Things can move fast when you're on the set of a film about a stock-car racer. Cruise began the shoot married to Mimi Rogers and ended it in the arms of his young co-star. In the delirious early weeks of their relationship, Kidman agreed to shack up with Cruise in one of the strangest places imaginable.

At the base of the San Jacinto Mountains in California lies Scientology's secretive 200-hectare compound known as International Base. Referred to more commonly as "Gold" or "Int", it houses hundreds of Sea Org members. (Sea Organization is the name given to Scientology's religious order, which comprises its most dedicated followers.) Around 20 of them were assigned to work through one crazy night to make the movie star's field of flowers fantasy come true.

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Louis Theroux won't take no for an answer when his request to enter the Church of Scientology's Los Angeles headquarters is turned down.

As harsh rain pelted down, a platoon of members tore up a large section of the compound's highly manicured lawn. The grass was carefully cut and rolled up before being transplanted onto pallets. Drenched to the bone, the workers pushed through till dawn, ploughing the field by spotlight to have it ready to be fertilised and seeded over the weekend.

Sea Org member and ex-marine Andre Tabayoyon estimated the project cost tens of thousands of dollars. It was money ploughed into the dust. The wildflowers did not blossom in the way Miscavige anticipated. Some shot up as tall green stalks, others wilted in the harsh desert sun. Weeds sprang up and overtook what was left of the wildflowers. "Miscavige inspected the project and didn't like it," said Tabayoyon. "So the whole meadow was ploughed up, destroyed, reploughed and sown with plain grass." Cruise and Kidman never got to run through that field of flowers.

What began with dreams of fields of flowers would end with wiretaps and marital sabotage. Nicole Kidman would find out what it was like to be both the beneficiary and victim of David Miscavige's obsession with Tom Cruise. In the beginning, Scientology's leader had actively encouraged their relationship, but before long the Australian actress came to be seen as the greatest threat to Scientology's greatest asset.

At the beginning of 1990, though, Miscavige had a problem with Cruise's wife, Mimi Rogers, and the brand of Scientology that she preached. Rogers had introduced Cruise to Scientology in 1986. Her father, Phil Spickler, had worked with L. Ron Hubbard – the former science-fiction writer who started Scientology in the early 1950s and who died in 1986 aged 74 – at the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, DC, and set up a Scientology mission in the Bay area of San Francisco. But in the early '80s, Spickler and other mission holders left Scientology, disillusioned by the direction the organisation was heading. 

While Miscavige was thrilled when Spickler's son-in-law first came to Int Base in 1989, there were concerns about his connections. In Scientology terms, Spickler was  considered a "squirrel", someone who practised Scientology outside of its formal structure, and it was assumed his daughter followed suit. Cruise received his first auditing at the Enhancement Center in Sherman Oaks, a mission set up by Mimi Rogers and her former husband, Jim. (Auditing is a central practice in Scientology: it uses techniques from hypnosis to create a "reverie" or light trance that is then meant to "clear" a person of negative influences or "engrams".)

Tom Cruise had first seen Nicole Kidman on the big screen in her breakthrough film, the 1989 Australian thriller Dead Calm. She played the role of Rae Ingram, the young wife of a navy officer who becomes trapped on a yacht in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a sociopath (played by Billy Zane). Dubbed by The Washington Post as an "Amazon for the '90s", she shone in the role. Cruise, who was preparing to shoot Days of Thunder, was mesmerised by her and convinced the producers to cast the 21-year-old in the role of Dr Claire Lewicki, a neurosurgeon who falls for Cruise's character, Cole Trickle.

On set, the pair fell in love. According to Marty Rathbun, a former senior church executive who left Scientology in 2004, David Miscavige used Greg Wilhere, one of his top lieutenants, to encourage Cruise to cheat on his Scientologist wife. "It just shows you how twisted and corrupted Scientology is," Rathbun told journalist Tony Ortega (one of America's most well-known commentators on the Church of Scientology, who writes a daily blog on the subject called The Underground Bunker). "Why would Scientology want to promote Tom's promiscuity? Because Mimi was connected to her father, Phil Spickler, and Miscavige wanted to own Tom outright."

After Days of Thunder wrapped in May 1990, Mimi Rogers demanded she be given access to Scientology's version of marriage counselling. The process took around a week, but went nowhere. With Miscavige determined to undermine the marriage of his new star recruit, the sessions were doomed to fail.

Rogers received confirmation her marriage was over when Rathbun paid her a visit. Accompanied by Sherman Lenske, a former personal lawyer to L. Ron Hubbard, Rathbun arrived carrying divorce papers; their visit was designed to intimidate and it was clear to Rogers what she had to do. She signed the divorce papers and quit the Church of Scientology.

By meddling in Cruise's private life, Miscavige had solved one problem, but created another. Nicole Kidman, whom Cruise was now planning to marry, was the daughter of the prominent Sydney psychologist and author Dr Antony Kidman. In Scientology, psychologists are considered "Suppressive Persons" – antisocial personalities who will cause harm to the organisation. As the daughter of a psychologist, Kidman was what Hubbard called a "Potential Trouble Source". According to Marty Rathbun, Miscavige asked Greg Wilhere to try to undermine Cruise's new relationship in his next auditing session. "He thinks this Nicole thing is for real!" Miscavige reportedly screamed at Wilhere. "You son of a bitch, you better start planting a seed!"

Tom was absolutely obsessed with Nicole from the moment he met her. If she said, �Jump,’ he would say, �How high?’ 

John Brousseau, a former personal chauffeur to L. Ron Hubbard, had come to know Miscavige when the pair worked as cameramen on training films for Hubbard in the late 1970s. When impressing Tom Cruise became Miscavige's most important project, Brousseau was at the ready. "I was the guy who did all the fancy stuff for Tom," he says, "whether it was painting his motorcycles, building limousines or million-dollar motorhomes, and helping make his aircraft hangar in Burbank look better than anybody else's."

C​ruise and Kidman were moving into Int Base so they could study Scientology full-time. This meant the organisation's international headquarters would soon harbour a Potential Trouble Source and its gun new recruit would soon have a Suppressive Person as his father-in-law. 

Brousseau says Miscavige had to do whatever it took to please Cruise. Brousseau became a key player of the team overseeing the preparation for the couple's arrival. "A huge amount of work was done," he says. "Probably millions of man hours went into it. I am talking hundreds of staff working 12- to 16-hour days, renovating buildings, painting, laying sods, getting ready for their arrival."

A VIP bungalow was custom-built for Cruise near the golf course on the base. A private gymnasium was fitted out so he and Miscavige could pump iron together. A tennis court was laid out with a special form of rubber coating. There was a private rose garden, Sea Org valets on call and a personal chef at the ready to prepare whatever meal Tom and Nicole felt like. A special course room was set up to help fast-track the pair through Scientology's upper-level courses.

Sea Org staff were pulling 16-hour days in the desert heat, for just $US50 ($66) a week. Sinar Parman, assigned to be the couple's personal chef, remembers sudden outbreaks of conspicuous consumption amid the extreme austerity of Sea Org life. "A silver Mercedes 500SL convertible was delivered to the Int Base as a present to Nicole," Parman says. "The Motorpool guys then had to take care of it, keeping it spotless in their garage facilities."

According to Marty Rathbun, the couple stayed at Int Base for around two to three months. In that time, Kidman had a meteoric rise up Scientology's bridge, going higher than some Scientologists do in a lifetime. Kidman rose to Operating Thetan Level II (OT II). She was now just one level away from learning about the evil galactic overlord Xenu, his spacecraft and the exploding volcanoes. 

As Scientology's worldwide quality control man for auditing at the time, Bruce Hines was responsible for evaluating Kidman's sessions. "She was given kid-glove, one-on-one treatment all the way," says Hines. Kidman was also about to be well and truly welcomed into the Scientology family. On Christmas Eve 1990, she and Cruise were married in a rented cabin outside the resort town of Telluride, Colorado. It was the full Scientology extravaganza. Cruise's auditor Ray Mithoff officiated, Miscavige was the best man and the Sea Org supplied free labour.

As 1990 came to a close, David Miscavige must have felt on top of the world. Aged 30, he had been Scientology's leader for close to five years. He'd just been best man at the Scientology wedding of Hollywood's hottest couple. The film industry's most marketable star was about to make Scientology the world's most marketable new religion. 

But within six months, a public relations disaster would engulf Scientology and help trigger Tom Cruise's drift away from David Miscavige's orbit.

In May 1991, Time magazine published a searing exposé on Scientology by investigative journalist Richard Behar, which was titled The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power. In his eight-page cover story, which was built on 150 interviews as well as hundreds of court records and internal Scientology documents, Behar concluded that Scientology was a "hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner". He published allegations that close to half a billion dollars of Scientology money was buried in offshore accounts and aired claims that John Travolta feared his sex life would be exposed if he left Scientology. Behar wrote that critics found themselves "engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death".

Nicole Kidman was only 25 at the time, but she knew enough to form her own character assessment of Scientology's secretive and abrasive leader, David Miscavige. She was from a well-read family with a keen interest in politics and international affairs. Her parents had campaigned against the Vietnam War. Her mother, Janelle, was a member of the Women's Electoral Lobby, a feminist group aimed at increasing women's political power and representation. As a child, Nicole would hand out how-to-vote cards for the Labor Party on election day. Dinner-table discussions were dominated by talk of politics, injustice and human rights. When confronted by both Miscavige's personal behaviour and the revelations contained in the Time exposé, she was never going to let it slide. It was time to withdraw from Scientology and take Tom with her.

"The Time magazine article had a big influence on Nicole," says Rathbun. "She was already pushing him away from Scientology. Tom [had] started acting like Miscavige, like a little zealot and Nicole abhorred it. The Time article gave her a wedge to stop Tom's involvement and it worked."

Rathbun says Kidman and Cruise started to drift from Scientology around 1992. By now, Kidman had also been exposed to its teachings on her father's profession. "I was assigned to get her to understand the evils of psychology and psychiatry," says Rathbun, "and to come to the correct conclusion about her father. It was a dismal disaster."

Rathbun says that initially Kidman was drawn to certain aspects of Scientology. "In reality there's a lot of neat little things that Scientology does," he says, "and she thought they were pretty neat. [But] when it got to that point where she needed to ... come to the realisation that her connection to her psychologist father was a negative, I think that ... sent red flags up for her."

Former staffers to both Cruise and Kidman gave me rare insights into what was going on behind the scenes in their relationship and how Scientology had meddled in their marriage. They spoke anonymously, but at great personal risk: both Cruise and Kidman make their staff sign strict confidentiality agreements. One former member of Cruise's staff told me the actor stopped getting audited and attending Scientology events because he was besotted with his new wife. "He was absolutely obsessed with Nicole from the moment he met her," he told me. "If she said, 'Jump,' he would say, 'How high?' I'm not kidding you. So if she didn't want to be involved in Scientology anymore, he wouldn't be involved anymore."

Cruise's obsession with Kidman was obvious to those around the couple. One former staffer described it as "suffocating", others found it endearing. His infatuation was on display each time his driver took him back to the pair's Los Angeles mansion after a day's filming. "He would be dropped off at the front lawn, which was maybe 25 yards from the front door," a former staffer told me, "and he would sprint to the front of the house and open the door and yell, 'Nic! Nic!' and run to wherever she was."

Michael Doven – or "The Dovenator", as Cruise called him – was the actor's personal assistant from around the time he and Kidman were shooting Far and Away, Ron Howard's 1992 feature. A native of Colorado with an interest in extreme sports and photography, Doven was a devout Scientologist. He would lay claim to being the first person to complete and be tested on Scientology's Golden Age of Knowledge for All Eternity. This involved watching 1500 hours of Hubbard's lectures and reading thousands of his essays and bulletins. "He was a robot of Scientology," a former co-worker tells me.

Doven may have been paid by Cruise, but there was little doubt within Scientology's executive where his loyalties lay. "His job was to facilitate Tom Cruise's career, but he had a separate brief to keep [Cruise] on board and loyal to Miscavige," says Rathbun. He says that Doven, for more than two decades, was a "card-carrying, deep-cover mole into the life and family of Tom Cruise". Mike Rinder, who attended top-level meetings with Doven when the pair were trying to get the infamous South Park episode on Scientology pulled, agrees. "It was very clear that Doven's loyalties were first to Miscavige and second to Tom Cruise," says Rinder.

It infuriated Miscavige that Kidman and Cruise had moved away from his orbit. The couple were shooting more films outside of the US and spending more time in Australia. In 1995, they bought a $4.2 million villa in the exclusive Sydney suburb of Darling Point. The drift away from Scientology certainly wasn't harming their careers. Kidman won a Golden Globe in 1995 for her role as a pathologically ambitious TV reporter in To Die For. In 1996, Cruise won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as the hyperactive sports agent in Jerry Maguire. The same year he released the first of his blockbuster Mission: Impossible series. It was his first film credit as a producer in his own right and a runaway success, grossing more than $US450 million.

In early 1997, Cruise and Kidman moved further away from Miscavige when they flew to London to begin work on Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, which eventually took 15 months to make and broke a Guinness World Record for the longest continual movie shoot. 

While in London, Kidman was interviewed by Anne Summers for the Sydney Morning Herald. For the first time, she publicly declared that she was no longer a Scientologist. She didn't mention that her husband had also stopped receiving Scientology services. Summers wrote about the parallels between Kidman and her mother and how the latter had temporarily embraced Catholicism: "In the past, Kidman has said she is a Scientologist but now she seems to have left that behind her: 'I wouldn't classify myself as a Scientologist, but my husband is.' She is, she says, her own woman: 'I am who I am and I don't credit anybody except my parents with helping me.' "

Michael Doven had also been instructed to bring Cruise back to the Scientology fold. Two years after a one-off auditing session he had with Marty Rathbun, Cruise returned to be audited in October 1998. The sessions lasted a week and were done in secret in the Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard, away from the scrutiny of the Celebrity Centre. Cruise entered via a private car park and a back door that led to a hallway in the basement. He then caught the lift up to level 11, where Miscavige and Rathbun both had their private offices. While Greg Wilhere's attempt to undermine Cruise and Kidman's relationship back in 1990 had failed, this time Miscavige was determined that the job be done properly. 

Rathbun says the instructions to Doven were clear: "Miscavige said Nicole was the problem and you want to reinforce that with Tom as subtly as you can without making it sound like you are trying to break them up. That's how it started in '98 and all the while from '98 to 2000 I'm constantly being told to reinforce with Doven, who is reporting to me probably on a weekly basis on everything that is going on with Tom, to keep planting the seed to drive a wedge because she's been determined by Miscavige to be what's keeping Tom separated from Dave, keeping Tom separated from Scientology."

It would take a few years before Michael Doven's hard work paid off. In January 2001, Rathbun took a call from Cruise's personal assistant. In it, Doven relayed that Cruise needed help, that his life was a shambles, he needed auditing and wanted a divorce. Rathbun swung into action. "Tom wanted to know exactly who [Nicole] was talking to," Rathbun said in Alex Gibney's 2015 documentary, Going Clear. "When I reported that to David Miscavige I reported it like, 'I mean he wants to tap her phone.' He said, 'Goddamn it, get it done!' "

Rathbun arranged through a Scientology lawyer to get a private investigator on the case to wiretap the phone in the couple's mansion in Los Angeles. Kidman soon knew about it. The actress was already distraught about the prospect of a divorce; now she was dealing with the paranoia that comes with having your conversations monitored. Kidman paid thousands of dollars to have surveillance experts check her home for listening devices. But the private investigators avoided detection. "There was no bug in the house," says a former Kidman staffer. "The lines were being tapped at the main phone company. We found that out later."

Tom Cruise would not respond to any allegations put to him via his lawyer, Bert Fields. But Fields says Cruise had nothing to do with any phone-tapping operation. "Tom did not seek or want to tap Kidman's phone at any time and did not ask Rathbun or anyone else to do any such thing … Tom Cruise is a decent, honest man, who has caused no harm whatsoever to Rathbun and his fellow anti-Scientologists. Their continuing attempt to smear him with lies is despicable." In a statement, Scientology's lawyer Patrick George said, "The Church denies the allegations concerning Nicole Kidman."

On February 6, 2001, it was announced that Kidman and Cruise were splitting. A press release put out by Cruise's then-publicist stated the couple had regretfully decided to separate, "Citing the difficulties inherent in divergent careers which constantly keep them apart, they concluded that an amicable separation seemed best for both of them at this time."

Kidman was shocked. So, too, were those close to her: they had seen how infatuated he was with her. At the time it was reported that he had explained the sudden divorce by saying, "Ask Nicole. She knows." One ex-staffer said to me, "I would like to know from the Scientologists the real reason that Tom walked out the door. Was there something explosive in those recordings?" I couldn't get an answer to that; the tapes have never been made public.

The Scientology-sponsored wiretapping of Kidman's phone went on for around a month. According to Marty Rathbun, Cruise wanted to find out more about the conversations she was having with her long-term friend, Russell Crowe. "I'm not sure who else," Rathbun tells me, "but I definitely knew he came up because we got in a big background number on Crowe. We went and investigated him to find out everything about him."

Two years earlier, Cruise had been photographed sitting next to Crowe as his South Sydney Rabbitohs football team played the Auckland Warriors. Now the Church of Scientology was compiling a file on the Gladiator star. Rathbun says there was no evidence Crowe was being anything other than a good friend at a time of deep personal despair for Kidman. "I was privy to all these calls," he says. "I had to be briefed on them and I had to understand them because I had to relay them to Miscavige."

Once the surveillance stopped and the divorce was finalised, the Church of Scientology did not leave Nicole Kidman alone. According to former senior Scientologists, its next step was to turn her children against her. Marty Rathbun claims Scientology official Tommy Davis was indoctrinating Isabella (Bella) and Connor Cruise. "Tommy told them over and over again that their mother was a sociopath, and after a while they believed him," he told the Hollywood Reporter. But when Tommy Davis was still an active Scientologist, he denied the claim. In a written statement in 2012, he said, "Marty Rathbun never witnessed conversations between me and Isabella and Connor Cruise about their mother because no such conversations ever occurred."

TV star and former Scientologist Leah Remini recalls sharing a ride with Connor and Bella to the airport after the 2006 wedding of Cruise and Katie Holmes. When The King of Queens actress asked the siblings, "How's your mom? Do you see her a lot?", Bella shot back, "Not if I have a choice. Our mom is a fucking SP." A former Kidman staffer says that after the divorce Nicole remained scared of the Church of Scientology. "She knew they were powerful," he says. "She knew they were dirty."

Privately, Miscavige might have belittled Scientology's star recruit but publicly Miscavige was full of praise for Cruise, suggesting that he, like him, had superhuman powers. "Miscavige convinced Cruise that he and Tom were two of only a handful of truly 'big beings' on the planet," recalled Rathbun. "He instructed Cruise that LRH [Hubbard] was relying upon them to unite with the few others of their ilk on earth to make it on to "Target Two" – some unspecified galactic locale where they would meet up with Hubbard in the afterlife."

At the International Association of Scientologists' 20th anniversary gala in 2004, Miscavige presented Cruise with a special award struck in his honour, the Freedom Medal of Valor. As he hung the diamond-encrusted medal around the actor's neck, Miscavige described him as "the most dedicated Scientologist I know". It was a deeply offensive comment to all those Sea Org members who had dedicated their lives to the cause, slaving away for just $US50 a week. As Cruise received his award, saluted Miscavige and then hugged him, there in the front row applauding was James Packer – the son of Australia's richest man. Unbeknownst to most of the Scientologists in the room, the recruitment of James Packer was to become Miscavige's next big priority. The man who would deliver the young mogul to Scientology was, of course, Tom Cruise.  

Edited extract from Fair Game: The Incredible Untold Story of Scientology in Australia, by Steve Cannane, published on Monday by ABC Books, $33.

Scientology's $57 million Sydney HQ

Nestled on the edge of Lane Cove National Park in Sydney's north sits a grey, sprawling, 13,470 square metre concrete building – a bunker, some say – that was once the National Acoustic Laboratory. Now it's something entirely different: the Church of Scientology's largest centre outside of the US and its spiritual HQ for the Asia-Pacific region.

On a Sunday earlier this month, 2500 Scientologists gathered to mark the grand opening of this new centre, called the Ideal Advanced Organisation for Australia, New Zealand and Asia. David Miscavige – Scientology's global leader who flew in from California to cut the ribbon – described the site as "breathtaking", offering "timeless freedom of eternity", and a place "that gives meaning to the spirit of Scientology itself".

The sobriquets provide little solace to the local Chatswood residents, who've complained about the $20 million renovation (the Church bought the facility and two nearby houses for $37 million in 2014). "The Church's Australian president, Vicki Dunstan, argues its facility is a better outcome than the 60 apartments planned by the previous owners. "We are delighted to be part of our new community in Chatswood," she told Good Weekend.

The centre, which can host 450 students, features the Church's management arm (the Continental Liaison Office), 60 "auditing" rooms, a bookstore, training rooms adorned with pictures of founder L. Ron Hubbard, a chapel, an auditorium, a studio and a purification centre to treat drug abuse.

The opening featured a performance by Australia's best-known Scientologist, singer Kate Ceberano, and an odd mix of what the Church called "city and national dignitaries", including Le Lam – former mayor of Sydney's suspended Auburn Council.   - by Melissa Fyfe