Never met him, but I find Tom Cruise to be an intriguing personality. Sumner Redstone, not.
He reveals a mind of his own, which the PTB (Powers That Be) don’t allow celebrities to have, unless it’s to do with some acceptable product or charity.
Scientology to me is also intriguing, and judging by the amount of real estate which features the name writ large hereabouts in Hollywood, they could be on to something. Their Celebrity Center is just down the road, and features one of the best French restaurants in town, possibly contributing in no small measure to the severe case of gout I now find myself having to cope with.
I never did get into the science of Scientology, but was introduced to it in the sixties, and read up on its tenets.
At the time, I had a talented wife who spent hours every week on an analyst’s expensive couch, jointly researching her id for clues as to why she was unable to contribute to family survival in the zoo-like life of New York as it was then and still is. As an Englishman, I had the “pull yourself together” approach to all of the ills of the psyche, which didn’t work for her, and sort of did for me.
By the ninth year, I’d had enough. An acquaintance of mine had given me a dog-eared paperback copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics”, and I couldn’t help but admire his all-round showbiz background and original thinking.
What appealed to me about his approach to life’s problems was that it cornered another part of the brain, the ego, through the superego, if you’re still with me.
In other words, it caused you to expect something of yourself, and get up off that couch. No, I didn’t join, I don’t believe in letting others direct my thinking and doing powers while parting with hard-earned cash, not my style. But it did help me to realize that the relationship had to end. The beginning of the end.
I guess we are all hard-wired into slavish devotion to the things we do at an early age, leaving one with little real desire to change. But Scientology seems to get one to become impatient with oneself and concerned about unattained goals.
Anyway, to Cruise, I say “good on you”, he can bounce on a couch instead of lying on it all he wants, and challenge his audience with ideas born of a fertile mind. Unlike many stars, he has found out that there’s more to life than finding your marks and sitting in a makeup chair for hours on end, and in your trailer on the phone, hoping to set a bomb off under your paid alter ego, manager, agent, or lawyer, praying at the same time that you won’t be causing the Sumner Redstones of this world to be upset or inconvenienced. (Of course, it helps if your producing partner is married to your CAA agent.) And with that, there’s the waiting . . . and waiting . . .