But the truth is celebrities signing up to Scientology is not a sign of insanity
Why is it – as oceans rise, jet streams shift, banks swindle, half the world starves as the other half grows obese – we still care, even for a nanosecond, about celebrity? Because celebrity is a guilty pleasure, only it's a guilty pleasure we get wrong. For years at Los Angeles airport, you could buy a T-shirt that said "Welcome to Hollywood: Forty Miles Wide And One Inch Deep". Even Hollywood itself perpetuates the idea that celebrity a) is shallow b) a joke, in order to keep the world from looking any closer.
We're all self-appointed experts on fame. Even the most high-minded reader of the TLS has a PhD in celebrity studies, giving them expertise in Suri Cruise's Thetan paternity, Simon Cowell's sexuality (he's straight. I know, it's unbelievable), Rihanna's tattoo (a giant penis? Harry from One Direction? Who knows?).
Yet in spite of this encyclopedic knowledge of rubbish, we don't actually have a clue how the industrial entertainment complex works. Far from being easily decipherable, it's a closed world as impenetrable as a car engine to me, Cantonese to you, scientology to any of us. When Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes divorce, we get the same old nonsense about how crazy scientologists are, what a freak Cruise is, and how lucky Holmes was to escape the clutches of the church. But the truth is celebrities signing up to Scientology is not a sign of insanity, but a shrewd career move – because in Hollywood, the normal value system is inverted.
People you should trust, such as your family and friends, are in fact those most likely to screw you over: loving mothers spill their guts to the National Enquirer about your teenage lesbianism; devoted dads take you to auditions for the Disney Club aged four and then sign contracts on your behalf that entitle you to precisely 1% of your earnings for the rest of your life. In this world, scientology offers a strange kind of stability: a family of the wary and burned, like Alcoholics Anonymous, but with a copper-bottomed guarantee that, once you pay your subs, anything can be fixed. What the mafia was to Frank Sinatra, without the collateral damage or the bruises.
Plus it's somewhere to go. Hollywood, contrary to the myth, is not a pleasure dome of debauchery, but Milton Keynes with a bit of sun. In Hollywood, your only day-to-day friends are the "bench": the florist who comes to change the flowers in your giant empty condominium [GEC]; the cleaner who vacuums it. No wonder Michael Jackson escaped his GEC and stalked a fan, pleading with her to take him to a library so he could take out books. Britney Spears allegedly sexually harassed her bodyguard – purely because she was bored.
Just as the Inuit are popularly supposed to have 50 words for snow, in Hollywood they have 50 for Yes, which all mean No. Everything is the mirror-image opposite of what it seems. The TV show Entourage may be the insider vision of Hollywood buddie-dom sold to the world, but it's about as realistic as Dick Van Dyke singing Chim-Chimenee as a portrayal of child labour in Victorian London. If you want a glimpse into how the real entourage works, take the careers of two Hollywood insiders: Paul Baressi and the superbly named Bobby Trendy.
Baressi's claim to fame was that he alleged he'd had sex with a young John Travolta, and was thus recently wheeled out during Travolta's Ye Olde Gay Masseur Scandal Part 74. But a couple of years ago, I interviewed Baressi in another guise – his day job as a Hollywood private eye and tough guy, hired to "talk" to people in the dead of night who were making trouble for Baressi's paymasters: Hollywood agents with deals to do. Baressi had "befriended" some now very powerful people back in the 70s, and they owed him.
In the 80s and 90s, Baressi worked with the legendary private investigator Anthony Pellicano – jailed for phone-tapping a network of Hollywood stars. Pellicano reportedly worked for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, informing on both to each other … at the same time (genius); Michael Ovitz, head of Disney, collecting evidence on enemies; Chris Rock, after a model tried to extort money; and Courtney Love, fighting the Nirvana estate. "I'm an old-style Sicilian, and I'm very heavy-handed," Pellicano assured her. "I need heavy-handed," she replied.
Hollywood loves this kind of talk because it sounds like something out of the movies. Baressi is the same thing – he looks the part (former pretty boy, now craggy heavyman), but underneath he's actually just trying to survive. He started out as an actor, then did soft and gay porn in the 70s (like you do) and suffering the same casting couch assaults young starlets suffer, before re-inventing himself as a tough guy, who now calls in favours from people who go way back. Ironically, given his job, he's not tough, not ruthless enough for Hollywood, and that's why he has always remained an outsider.
Bobby Trendy is as cut-throat as they come. As a boy in a midwest bedroom he saw Anna Nicole Smith on TV and thought: "I want what she has." So he goes to Hollywood, befriends her, becomes part of her narcotic nightmare, works his way into her entourage, like Eve in All About Eve. Then Smith overdoses, and Trendy inherits her reality show, because TV execs like what they see.
"Now," Trendy told me when I interviewed him, "I have what she has – the clothes, the jewels, the car, the house … in fact, I am her." Trendy has his own entourage, with a budding new Trendy growing from within, like an alien pod.
No wonder Tom Cruise signed up to scientology because he thinks evil stalks him. It does.