Tom Cruise was so eager to get David Beckham into Scientology that he built him a soccer field.
This is one of the anecdotes that Mike Rinder, a former cult official, recounts in his new book A
Billion
Years: My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology
. high echelons of Scientology).
According to Rinder, “a professional-grade soccer field was built on the Gold [Base, church headquarters in California] property.
The land was leveled, irrigation was installed, a perfect lawn was installed and the goals were raised”.
All of this was done with church money and “for one purpose: so Tom Cruise could woo his friend David to come to Gold.
It never happened,” he adds.
Mike Rinder entered Scientology when he was five years old.
Upon leaving the institute and reaching the age of majority, he signed a contract for a defined time: one billion years (Scientologists believe in immortality and his contracts are adapted to that belief).
In the 1980s, he was Scientology's international spokesman and head of its powerful Office of Special Affairs, leading to his association with famous members of the organization such as Tom Cruise, Lisa Marie Presley and John Travolta.
Rinder broke his contract 999,999,966 years ahead of schedule.
At 52, faced with the new leadership, he left the cult to become one of its biggest public detractors.
His new book, which a spokesman for the Church of Scientology has already defined as "incendiary propaganda and fraudulent stories",
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In its pages, the author unravels the secrets and mechanisms of one of the most controversial religions in the world, a cult with more than 1,000 churches around the globe and an undetermined number of faithful.
They claim to gain four million followers each year, external experts put the total at less than half a million.
Scientology is one of the most mediatic religions and, at the same time, enormous secrecy surrounds everything that happens within it.
It has its own television network and several Hollywood stars play modern apostles.
John Travolta, Elisabeth Moss or Kirstie Alley are some of the familiar faces that have joined their ranks, but none (perhaps Travolta, who is also discussed in the book) has known how to promote the cult like Cruise.
In 2019, actress Leah Remini, a longtime follower of this doctrine,
Mission: Impossible
had entered the category of "deity", and that above him was only its current leader, David Miscavige.
In his book, Rinder also refers to the headquarters that the church has in Madrid, in the neighborhood of Las Letras.
"Tom had been dating Spanish actress Penelope Cruz, which contributed to so much money being spent buying and renovating the beautiful building there," he writes.
12 million euros were invested in its acquisition, rehabilitation and decoration.
"So it's a bit ironic that by the time it was completed Penelope had broken up with him."
It was in 2004, when the interpreter of
Top Gun
He came to Spain, in an opening ceremony that his ex-partner did not attend, but her sister, Mónica Cruz, and some other Spanish actors did.
It was during this event that, according to Rinder, Cruise complained that his sister couldn't get him a girlfriend.
Frontman Miscavige "took it to heart" and allegedly started a special project in which "auditions" were held to find the star a girlfriend and, ultimately, a wife.
Actor Tom Cruise, during his speech at the inauguration of the new headquarters of the National Church of Scientology in Madrid, on September 18, 2004. JJ Guillén (EFE)
It was not the first time, according to the book, that the church put the actor's personal life on track.
According to Rinder, when Cruise developed a crush on his co-star Nicole Kidman during the filming of
Days of Thunder
(1990) the church was in motion.
A manager was assigned to convince his first wife, actress Mimi Rogers, "to agree to a divorce so that Tom could marry Nicole," noting that this was "highly unusual and would never have happened with a normal Scientologist. ”
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were married that same year, with Dustin Hoffman as witness, at a chapel in Telluride, Colorado, where the couple owned a cabin.
But things with his second wife did not go well for the church either.
Cruise introduced Kidman to Scientology, but she "never expressed any particular enthusiasm for her courses," writes Rinder.
In the end, Cruise himself began to drift away from the cult, something that became clear to him as he filmed, along with Kidman,
Eyes Wide Shut .
(1997), which was Stanley Kubrick's last film.
The star then began to ignore Miscavige's calls.
This, supposedly and always the book version, led the Scientology leader to send a top church executive to London (where the film was being shot) to change things.
Cruise, Rinder writes, "was gradually drawn back into the world of Scientology," which "created a distance between him and Nicole."
Apparently, the church felt threatened by the actress's influence over its most prominent celebrity and hired a private investigator "to spy on Nicole and tap her phone," Rinder writes.
Finally, the couple ended up divorcing in 2001 and Cruise was left with the care of the two children they had adopted, Isabella and Connor, who were then eight and nine years old.
They are now two prominent members of the Church of Scientology and have little to do with Kidman.
