Tom Cruises ex-publicist dishes on being dumped before the couch jump

These are some new movie stills from Tom Cruise’s upcoming alien-invasion popcorn flick, Edge of Tomorrow, which is a lame (and vague) title change from what it used to be called, All You Need is Kill. The Twitter hashtag for this movie is #LiveDieRepeat, which tells you everything you need to know about this movie. Tom plays a soldier who keeps dying in battle only to wake up and relive the same day over and over again. Basically it’s Groundhog Day with a heaping dose of explosive Cruise craziness tempered only by a badass-looking Emily Blunt. The opening moments of this trailer features Tom telling the truth about his own life: “What I am about to tell you sounds crazy … ” Hahaha. Here’s the trailer:

It looks better than Oblivion, which isn’t saying much. Honestly I’d look forward to seeing the battle scenes, but it sounds like the whole movie is one big repeat with slight tweaks at the end. Who wants to see Tom Cruise make the same “Tom Cruise” face in the same setting several times in a row? Someone will watch it.

Now time for a trip down memory lane with Xenu. The Dec. 20 issue of Hollywood Reporter contains a super-long interview with Pat Kingsley, who is Tom’s former high-powered publicist. She kept the crazy under wraps for over a decade, which is quite a feat. Kingsley and Tom worked together throughout much of the 1990s, and Tom let her go in 2004 (more about that at the end of this post). Then he entered his PR era of doom from which he has never recovered. Pat has been retired for years. She’s now 81 and clearly doesn’t give a f— who she upsets, so she’s dishing on some former clients, including our favorite lift lover. Here’s what she said about Tom:

“I met with [Tom Cruise] on the set of [1992’s] A Few Good Men, and he grilled me in his trailer,” she says. “It was fabulous! ‘What do you think about this? How important do you think Japan is? And how important do you think TV is opposed to print?’ I was quite taken with him. And then he called me and said, ‘Let’s start tomorrow.'”

Over the next few years, they became so close “we could almost finish each other’s sentence. We never really had a disagreement about direction or any particular interview. The trust became pretty complete on both sides.”

They would talk every day, often at 11 p.m. “We talked constantly. He was an insomniac. I liked the fact that he was so much fun. And he was so thoughtful. He remembered birthdays, my daughter’s birthday. He came to her wedding; she was registered somewhere for the china, and he bought out everything. They’ve got things they haven’t even opened yet, and they’ve been together 15 years!”

Once, she remembers, “He took me up in this little airplane he had in Santa Monica. It was a two-seater, one in front and one in back. You could pick it up with your hands, practically. I went to the airport, and they said, ‘Tom’s flying around, he’ll land soon.’ So he lands the plane, and out comes Barry Diller — ‘I’ve got to get me one of these.’ Then it was my turn. You had to put all these straps on. I said, ‘Which one’s the parachute?’ They said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ We took off and started going to Malibu. I said, ‘Tom, I don’t want to wave at anybody, I just want to fly straight.’ He said, ‘Well, there’s Jeffrey Katzenberg.’ I said, ‘I don’t care!’ It was scary, I’m telling you. He said, ‘Next time, I’ll take you over to Catalina for lunch.’ But I never wanted to get in that plane again.”

The end of their relationship in many ways meant the end of Kingsley’s run at the top. She realized it was coming: The late-night chats had dried up, and she wasn’t traveling with Cruise as much as before. “I’d had so much control over everything,” she observes. “I think he wanted to be more personally involved in all those decisions. He felt, ‘Look, it’s been 14 years. I think it’s time I tried something different.’ And I certainly had no quarrel with that. It was his life, his career. It was not working. I was not having the rapport. I felt a kind of pulling back, and I knew it was going to happen.”

Cruise’s Scientology played a role, but only toward the end. Before that, there had been just one serious conflict with reps for the religious organization, “but it was taken care of very early in the game,” says Kingsley. “I felt that they were involved in a story that I was doing on Tom, and I said: ‘It’s not your story, it’s Tom’s. You have to step aside.’ And they did.”

Later, however, Cruise wanted to be more vocal about his beliefs. “I did have that conversation with Tom, about cooling it,” notes Kingsley, saying she told him: “‘You want to do a tour for Scientology? Do a tour for Scientology. But Warner Bros. is sponsoring this tour.’ That was for [2003’s] The Last Samurai. He didn’t say yes or no, except he did not discuss Scientology on that European tour.”

It was clear Cruise wanted to do things differently, and now it was just a question of whether he or Kingsley would end their work together. The rupture took place in March 2004; she has not seen him in private since. (Through a rep, Cruise declined comment.)

Regardless, says Kingsley, “Tom Cruise was a prince.”

[From Hollywood Reporter]

Notice that Kingsley says that Tom “was a prince.” Not that he “is a prince.” His reputation has certainly been worse for wear ever since he dumped Kingsley as his publicist in 2004. From there Tom leapt immediately onto the couch for the 2005 tour of crazy. I get the sense that Tom’s relationship with Kingsley went off the rails right as he got pulled back into the CO$. Tom wanted to proselytize, and Kingsley told him not to do so on the studio dime. So Tom fired her, hired his own sister as publicist, and proceeded to stick his finger into Matt Lauer’s face to promote War of the Worlds. And the rest … is pop culture history.

Poster & photos courtesy of Warner Bros

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