Issue 28: Katie Holmes is Inducted Into the Cult of TomKat
Katie fell in love and the world went "Huh?"
In June 2005, various reports sprang up around a website named Free Katie Holmes. You could order t-shirts with the slogan to show your support for the Dawson's Creek star as she got ready to walk down the aisle with the megastar Tom Cruise. It was part of a growing pop culture movement that saw Holmes, then only 26, as a prisoner to the showboating madness of Scientology’s favourite son. Their courtship was brief (seven weeks from meeting to engagement) but highly publicised. Cruise notoriously jumped onto Oprah’s couch in joy. They were everywhere and people thought it was weird. Comedians made jokes about it constantly. The gossip blogs, like Perez Hilton, were scathing in their scepticism. This was not a celebrity pairing anyone was eagerly rooting for. They missed Chris Klein.
Some corners of the media helped to keep up the fairy-tale story, like Oprah and the Vanity Fair cover story reveal of baby Suri. But it’s surprising in hindsight just how cynical everyone was about TomKat. It didn’t pass the sniff test. They didn’t trust this hyper-focused older multi-millionaire yelling at Brooke Shields’ antidepressant use with Joey Potter. It’s not even that they thought the relationship was fake, although many certainly did. It’s that they thought it was fake and Katie didn’t know it. they thought she’d been tricked into the romance, or that Cruise and Scientology heads had auditioned her for the role of his future wife. Proximity to a notorious organization frequently described as a cult by its former members doesn’t give off the impression of a healthy relationship. In fairness to doubters, neither did Holmes’s own responses.
W Magazine. "Katie Holmes: The Actress Enters a Weird World Called TomKat." August 1, 2005. Robert Haskell.
(Image via eBay.)
This was not an arranged marriage. W Magazine wants to make that clear. But they do open this piece with a note on how statistics on arranged marriages in countries where it is still common practice "has a higher success rate than a so-called “love marriage.”" So, you know, just in case L. Ron's ghost did play matchmaker, the odds are in his favour. It wasn't an arranged marriage, but "it was certainly arranged quickly," Robert Haskell quips. "The awesomely public couple had all of six weeks" to decide they wanted to marry. "Arranged marriages are measured, often solemn affairs; the fist-pumping pomp of the Cruise-Holmes union is another story." This sets the tone for what will be a very odd interview, one where Holmes talks endlessly about how happy she is, how wonderful Tom is, and how everything is just so, so wonderful. And the interviewer… he seems to find it all a tad sus.
“I’ve found the man of my dreams,” is the first thing Holmes says in this piece, as she's dolled up for the photoshoot. “From the moment I met him,” she continues, “it just felt like I’d known him forever. I was blown away. He’s the most incredible man. He’s so generous and kind, and he helps so many people, and, um, he makes me laugh like I’ve never laughed, and he’s a great friend...”
(Man, she looks SO young here, and EXACTLY like Suri. Image via Oprah.com)
It’s typical romantic twaddle, the kind of dewy-eyed rhetoric we expect from people in the first throes of love. I wonder if we’d read it as sinister were it not directed towards Tom Cruise and not coming after those six weeks of very public parading. Granted, Holmes is still only 26 here, and I was a dumb 26-year-old, so I can relate on some level. But you do look at this and, like the journalist, feel it’s just a tad off, right? There’s nothing specific in her descriptions of Cruise, which makes sense given that they’ve barely known one another for two months, but also they’re already engaged?! This would be too much too soon under normal circumstances, but everyone was already weirded out by Cruise’s intensity and anti-psychiatry rants.
This piece wasn’t a hard-hitting profile. It was a quick conversation in the dressing room while Holmes prepared for the shoot. None of this is unusual, but Haskell definitely seems out of step with the whole thing because Holmes is dizzy in love. That could read as snarky or mean-spirited, but he clearly knew that everyone was on the same page as him. They were looking for clues, wondering if they could figure out this strange puzzle and maybe wake up Katie.
He writes, "This is how the conversation begins; this is also how it continues, and how it ends. No question can do much to change its course." Essentially, every question he throws at her -- softball, cheeky joke, attempt at something deeper -- gets a response of pure gushing love towards Tom. Is there anything you guys don’t have in common? He asks. Holmes: "You know, we appreciate each other." Okay? Is it a tough adjustment to move in with someone after a month? Katie: "He's the man of my dreams."
Says Haskell, "It’s impossible, even for a moment, to slip under the halo of cartoon hearts dancing around Holmes’s head—which partly explains why the media has so relished the project of puncturing her happiness ever since it was first broadcast." And yes, Haskell is 100% doing this too. We all were. Even People magazine, as Haskell notes, "published polls indicating that the majority of its readers believe “TomKat” is a hoax."
Nowadays, it feels like any time we see two celebrities get together, we’re barraged by people on social media claiming it’s all a hoax or a PR set-up. Increased awareness of classic celebrity gossip is a good thing, especially for people like me, and it’s smart to be aware of how gossip narratives are formed. But let’s be honest: sometimes a romance is just a romance, and not every power couple was forged in the fires of CAA’s office. This wasn’t as common a conversation in 2006 when TomKat happened, yet many felt so put off by the pairing that they assumed it was fake. Why?
Just on a surface level, the pair seemed mismatched. There was an age gap of 16 years and a professional gap of a former teen TV star versus the biggest movie icon of his generation. They didn’t move in the same circles or have friends in common. Cruise’s last public girlfriend was Penelope Cruz, who was not a star in America at the time but was an established and award-winning actress (and Almodovar muse) in her native Spain. It wasn’t exactly an opposites attract thing so much as a rush job whose speediness only further exacerbated the scepticism surrounding the match.
When the pair started dating, they were both in the midst of promoting two very big movies: Holmes had the token lady role in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and Cruise was headlining Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. The romance quickly engulfed coverage of both movies, mostly because they made it so. At several premieres of the latter, Cruise dramatically threw Holmes into a kiss akin to the famous image of the nurse and soldier embracing at the end of the Second World War. For the New York one, they turned up on a motorcycle. They were the Event, not the movies (although both did very well financially, so any publicity is good publicity, right?)
(Image via Warner Bros. Bless, she is not good in this movie.)
And, of course, there was the Scientology of it all. During his War of the Worlds press tour, Cruise was more vocal about his allegiance to the “church” than ever. In an infamous interview on NBC’s Today Show, he called Matt Lauer “glib” for pushing back on cruel comments Cruise had made about Brooke Shields when she opened up about her postpartum use of antidepressants. Scientology is notoriously anti-psychiatry. Even other anti-psychiatry groups think they’re weird. 2005 wasn’t a great time for menta health advocacy but everyone knew that Cruise was being a d*ck, and all in the name of Scientology, which had been controversial from its founding days. It got to the point where you couldn’t look at Cruise, the legendary box office king and Oscar nominee beloved by mothers the world over, without thinking about thetans, Sea Org, and Battlefield Earth.
Scientology is evident in the W Magazine piece too. Haskell asks if Holmes dropped out of the Edie Sedgwick movie because of its depictions of drugs, which Scientology disapproves of, but she denies it (the role went to Sienna Miller.) A couple of days after the interview, Holmes would announce that she had joined the church, although she’d denied converting to Haskell. She’s effusive about being audited and how it's helping her “to celebrate my own spirit, my own being.” This would sound iffy enough without the inclusion of one Jessica Rodriguez, who was described to Haskell as Holmes's "Scientologist chaperone." She's present for the interview despite his protests and seems to act like a publicist and cheerleader for TomKat.
If you’re trying to refute claims that you’re trapped in a romance with a weird cult dude, having one of said cult’s loyal goons following you around at your job is not going to help.
Now known as Jessica Feshbach, she was born into Scientology and was characterized in 2005 by MSNBC as a "Senior Scientologist." At this point in time, she started working with Cruise as his assistant. The New Daily News reported that Warner Bros. had made special accommodations for Rodriguez to accompany Holmes during the Batman Begins promotional tour. Rodriguez describes herself in the W interview as Holmes’s “best friend.” When asked how long they’ve known one another, she mumbles back, “Oh, a while. I don’t know.” The answer, by the way, was about six weeks, the same length of time she’d known Cruise.
If Holmes is lovestruck, Rodriguez is the defensive publicist trying to strengthen the fairy-tale. “You adore him,” Rodriguez says after Holmes explains that she can’t keep her hands off Cruise. When asked about the widespread disbelief over their relationship, Holmes leaves it to Rodriguez to react. “The truth is, we don’t read that stuff because it’s just rude. Have you ever been in love? You just want to share it with the world.” Note the "we." "No one close to Holmes will venture to say exactly what Rodriguez’s role in the actress’s life is these days," writes Haskell.
The piece ends with a security guard delivering a present to Holmes from Cruise of a Chanel diamond necklace. “He’s my man! He’s my man!” screams Katie, then she "jumps up on her chair to do an impression of her fiancé’s now-famous sofa shtick from Oprah." Cheered on by her team, Holmes then does the splits on the floor. As Haskell suggests they start the photoshoot, Katie gets the closing line. “On that note,” she replies, “I love him.” You sure do, Katie.
TomKat never stopped being weird, let’s be honest. It always felt like an uncanny performance of movie-star love, like they were waiting for the director to call “cut.” Holmes gave birth to Suri a year after she met Cruise, and the secrecy around their baby made TomKat seem odder to the gawking public. Her career faltered, although everything she did was covered with avid attention, from a cameo appearance on the TV series Eli Stone to her Broadway debut in All My Sons. Reports swirled that Tom demanded that everyone call Holmes Kate rather than Katie, and that he maintained a tight grip on both her work and personal life. She filed for divorce after five and a half years of marriage in 2012. Allegedly, she left because she was worried about Scientology taking control of Suri’s life. Since then, she and Suri have lived in New York. Tom Cruise hasn’t been seen with his daughter since then.
Truly, I think Katie Holmes is kind of inspiring. Her much-speculated-over escape from Scientology with Suri is the stuff of pop culture legend. After being one of the world’s most watched women for several years, she managed to make a new life for herself as a jobbing actress and director who seems to be, by all accounts, a cool lady and good colleague. Suri, who has reportedly dropped the surname Cruise and goes by Noelle (Katie’s middle name), is now an adult and, aside from the occasional paparazzi shot, lives quietly. Holmes apparently dated Jamie Foxx for several years and kept it highly private, which many claimed was due to a clause in her divorce but was probably just her wanting to avoid the press. Nowadays, she’s back behind the camera and working on a film with Joshua Jackson. The paparazzi shots of the production are pure nostalgia bait for Dawson’s Creek nerds, and a masterclass in selling a story.
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A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Pajiba on how I felt that post-TomKat Holmes was essentially living the life she would have had she never married Cruise. She’s a B-List actor who works regularly, attends glitzy galas, and occasionally appears in People and Us Weekly, but she’s not as obsessed over as she once was. That she’s been able to return to this semblance of normalcy after years in the orbit of Tom f*cking Cruise is kind of miraculous.
Cruise, who seems to have avoided public relationships since his third divorce, is reportedly dating Ana de Armas, who is 37 years old to his 63. All of the tabloid write-ups of this pairing are oddly cold and professional, like they’re colleagues who occasionally hold hands. It’s a sharp contrast to the couch-jumping days. That’s a smart idea given that it took him a good few years to get audiences back on his side and to stop seeing him as a weirdo. Now, they view him as The Last Movie Star, a showstopping stunt spectacular who has largely shaken off the shackles of normalness. De Armas is older than Holmes was when she met Cruise, and she’s perhaps a little more established as a celebrity. Maybe she’s all-in on becoming a new moon around Planet Cruise.
Going Clear, perhaps the definitive book on Scientology, detailed an alleged relationship between Cruise and actress Nazanin Boniadi, a Scientologist who was prepped for the role of being his partner. Unbeknownst to her, she was picked as a suitable girlfriend for Cruise by the church. After a year, it ended poorly and Boniadi was allegedly punished for insulting Cruise. Scientology denied that any such project existed, but, according to Tony Ortega's reporting on the group, Boniadi gave testimony to the FBI that described how the Church's Office of Special Affairs selected her to be Cruise's girlfriend. Boniadi left Scientology and has occasionally posted social media messages in support of fellow ex-members Leah Remini and Mike Rinder, who have done a lot of great work in exposing the church's crimes.
(Image via Vanity Fair.)
We didn’t find out about this until after Holmes left Cruise. Vanity Fair delved into it in a fascinating piece that made all of the TomKat sceptics feel highly validated. It certainly didn’t help to debunk claims that Holmes may have inadvertently auditioned herself to be the next Cruise girlfriend. It’s a point W Magazine even mentions because the rumour was so prevalent at the time (Scarlett Johansson, Kate Bosworth, and Jessica Alba are cited as other possible candidates.)
I don’t think Katie Holmes was brainwashed or forced into a romance with Tom Cruise. I do buy that Scientology had big plans for her from the get-go that neither she nor her team were aware of. What I think happened on her end was that she was a 20-something TV star who had just gotten out of a long-term relationship and found herself swept off her feet by a legendary charmer who gave her the world. Tom effing Cruise focused on her, took her to Paris, kissed her like she was the only girl in the world, and it worked. It would have worked on me too. Maybe now, we’d call that lovebombing. At the time, it must have felt like a fantasy come true. Who among us would be immune to that?
There’s no celebrity I want a tell-all memoir from more than Holmes, but I doubt she’ll ever do it. Even if there aren’t iron-clad NDAs in place or the threat of a Scientology lawsuit, I just don’t see her wanting to open herself up like that again. She wouldn’t have much to gain from something like this, certainly not more than she already got from getting herself out of that mess. Besides, I think Cruise has rehabilitated his image enough that plenty of people would be anti-Holmes if she were to speak out. We just hate women that much. Let Katie live in peace. She’s more than earned it.
(Image via Giphy.)
Thanks for reading. I’m heading off to Toronto next month for the film festival, which I’ll be covering for my home base on Pajiba but stay tuned for some fun fest piece on the Gossip Reading Club. Poutine and maple leafs shirts for all!
