The length to which some celebrity couples go to make a spectacle of their private lives never ceases to amaze me. But it’s only on rare occasions that I find the tabloid fodder they provide worthy of comment.
(“Married fool: Peter and Stephanie, Ashton and Demi,” The iPINIONS Journal, September 23, 2010)
Not even Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes would deny that they made a complete spectacle of their relationship – not just by Tom jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch to show how crazy in love he was, but by both of them acting as if their love depended on engaging in sappy public displays of affection whenever cameras were around.
Candidly, their marriage always struck me as more of a stage-managed farce than Michael and Lisa Marie’s. The only wonder is that their mission impossible lasted more than twice as long (five years versus 18 months).
But the tabloid fodder I find most worthy of comment in this case stems from all of the crowing over the way Katie supposedly blindsided Tom by filing first and, most shrewdly, by doing so in New York. For their divorce settlement would have been the same even if she ended one of their rumored Tomkat fights by storming out of their California mansion shouting, “I want a divorce!”
In other words, even if he had filed first in California it would still have been in Tom and the Church of Scientology’s best interest to limit the reputational damage no matter the cost – in terms of alimony or child custody. Not least because the media were already running wild with stories about how the Church auditioned Katie to play his wife the way a producer auditions an actress to play a movie role, and about Tom preparing to handover their daughter Suri to Scientology in a manner eerily reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby.
This is why less than two weeks after filing, they announced yesterday that they had reached an amicable divorce settlement – the details of which shall remain confidential.
What is certain though is that it would have been foolhardy for Tom to challenge Katie’s demand for sole (legal) custody of Suri. After all, he can easily father another Suri, and perhaps many others, with a more suitable actress playing the role of his devoted wife.
Of course, given that this is his third strike, Scientologists must be questioning the wisdom of vesting so much faith in Tom as the irresistible face of their Church. Moreover, the subjugating irony can’t be lost on him that, if reports are true, all of his visits with his daughter will be supervised by chaperones chosen by Katie just as every day of her married life was supervised by Scientologists chosen by him.
Not to mention that, just like his previous wives, Katie has probably extracted far more of his reported $250-300 million fortune than their prenup stipulates in exchange for her silence about their marriage … and his religion.
But instead of hailing Katie as some kind of battered woman who finally turned the tables on her abusive husband, she should be criticized for effectively extorting Tom and betraying a religion she gleefully signed on to – even if with star-struck eyes wide shut. She knew (or should have known) what she was getting into; never mind the “for better or worse” vows….
Apropos of which, Scientology is getting a bad rap. For if, as he claims, its teachings and practices cured Tom of his dyslexia and bad temper, these facts alone imbue it with enough redeeming value to respect his abiding faith.
Besides, nothing is more laughable, even hypocritical, than Christians pontificating with righteous indignation about those weird and cult-like Scientologists. After all, Christians are the ones who believe in the fairytale of creationism; who are so cult-like they believe Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and practitioners of every other religion must convert to their religion in order to make it into Heaven; and who once believed that God ordained that Whites should enslave Blacks.
Frankly, anyone who knows anything about the early days of Christianity knows that it was once ridiculed as a weird cult much as Scientology is being ridiculed today. Hell, by Christian standards, Scientology seems positively divine.
And don’t get me started on how weird and cult-like it is that Catholics like Katie are led by a cabal of putatively celibate men whose perverse dictates about human sexuality are surpassed only by their perverse condonation of pedophilia among priests.
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