Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [149]
Cruise and Kidman spent two years working on the film in London, during which time the Dovens filed regular reports on their activities to the Int Base. "Every once in a while, Michael Doven would get pulled to the base to get sec checked [about the Cruises]," recalled Marc Headley's wife, Claire, who worked for the RTC. Miscavige, she said, was looking for any way to recover the star, but the couple was on a new path: Tom took on the role of the predatory self-help guru Frank T. J. Mackey in Magnolia, and Nicole starred in a risqué play by David Hare, The Blue Room.
The couple's edgier new course symbolized an act of defiance for Scientologists taught to look upon marital infidelity, not to mention any form of sexual deviance or exhibitionism, as sinful. Miscavige began to take a hard line toward Cruise, denigrating him as "off-purpose" and "out-ethics" in communications with Scientology staff. "I saw the social interaction between Dave and Tom grow less and less personal until it was down to the formalities of sending Christmas and birthday gifts only," said Tanja Castle, then an RTC staffer who would soon become Miscavige's secretary. "There was no live communication at all."
But Miscavige was even more upset with Kidman, whom he blamed for Cruise's growing detachment from Scientology. Miscavige had initially put aside the fact that Kidman's father, Dr. Antony Kidman, was a psychologist—a hated SP—but he'd become dismayed that Kidman, who'd refused to move on to OT 3 after finishing OT 2, remained extremely close to her father. Now Kidman and Cruise had purchased a house in her hometown of Sydney, where they began to spend an increasing amount of time.
The story told within the private world of the Sea Organization is that David Miscavige, aided by Marty Rathbun and several other deputies, engineered the dissolution of Tom Cruise's marriage to Nicole Kidman and Cruise's subsequent emergence as the Most Famous Scientologist in the World. No one still a member of the Church of Scientology has ever admitted to this, and Kidman has never discussed the reasons why her marriage abruptly ended in January 2001, shortly after the couple's tenth wedding anniversary. But those who have left Scientology since the early 2000s recall that it was widely understood in the combative, rigorously single-minded world of David Miscavige's Church of Scientology that Nicole Kidman was an SP.
SPs were much on the church leader's mind by the late 1990s, as Scientology, still enmeshed in the Lisa McPherson case, became even more embroiled in the ongoing battle with its critics, whose number now included a legion of former members who'd become disillusioned by Scientology's high prices and authoritarianism. This "quiet mutiny," in the words of Sandra Mercer, who would ultimately leave herself, was not always reflected in Scientology's income, which continued to receive a boost from frequent fundraising events. However, according to Jeff Hawkins, who as the church's marketing chief kept careful track of such data, virtually every other indicator showed a church on the decline. This devastating piece of information was widely known but never discussed outside the executive suites at Int, where Miscavige scrambled to reverse the trend, to no avail. At Flag, which as Scientology's chief financial engine was a good indicator of the church's overall health, members had completed 11,603 courses and auditing services in 1989, the year Miscavige assumed full control of the church. That number had decreased to 5,895 in 1997, the year that the Church of Scientology was first implicated in the death of Lisa McPherson.*
That year, hoping to drum up new members and counteract the bad press, the church launched what it called the "largest and most comprehensive" public relations campaign