Tom Cruise has tossed off the shackles of Hollywood
oppression and is piloting his Scientology-fueled funny car straight
towards you. The tires are smoking and he's screaming to the stands about
Katie, psychiatry, sex, space aliens, and Brooke Shields.
We would love to have been a fly on the wall during the negotiations
which led Tom Cruise to dump his sister, Lee Ann DeVette, as his flack in favor of hiring Hollywood insider Paul Bloch of Rogers & Cowan.
(For the record, DeVette has said she wants to spend more time on
Cruise's charitable activities.)
What, after all, is the new PR
strategy? For Cruise to go into extended seclusion? Though the
headlines about the megastar leaping on couches, having verbal tugs-of-war with Brooke Shields
and other antics involving impregnated fiance Katie Holmes are now old
hat, those events have led the press to sow new seeds of scandal almost
any time Cruise breathes—whether there’s truth to any of it, or not.
We
recently read in a celebrity magazine (no, we don’t actually buy them;
they just have this habit of landing in our lap), that Katie Holmes’
lawyer Dad was holding up the wedding over the prenup; in another one
we read that Cruise had bought a house for he and Katie in her
hometown, Toledo, to appease the in-laws. Is any of this true?
Unlike
the appearance on Oprah, there’s no footage to verify any of it, but
the normalcy of negative headlines about Cruise these days would have
been unthinkable a few years ago.
Whatever happens from here, people in
PR and marketing will be watching Bloch just as closely as they
surreptitiously scan headlines to catch up on the latest alleged Tom
Cruise scandal.
We would love to have been a fly on the wall during the negotiations
which led Tom Cruise to dump his sister, Lee Ann DeVette, as his flack 
