The Game

issues who wears a headset during his seminars and orders his students to “respect the cock.”
    “He shouldn’t,” Cruise continued. He swallowed a salt pill and chased it down with a long swig of bottled water. “That’s not okay. It’s not true. Really. That is an invention that PTA had.” PTA is Paul Thomas Anderson. “That guy is not Mackey at all. He is not Mackey.” It seemed important for Cruise to establish this. “I worked on creating that character with Paul Thomas Anderson for four months. And I didn’t use that guy at all.” 10
    Cruise sat me on his 1000 CC Triumph motorcycle and taught me how to start the engine and shift gears. Then he raced around the track, popping wheelies, while I wiped out going five miles an hour on his top-of-the-line bike. Afterward, he brought me into his trailer. The walls were covered with pictures of the children he and his ex-wife Nicole Kidman had adopted.
    “Has this Jeffries guy turned his character more Mackey-ish since the movie?” Cruise asked.
    “He’s arrogant and megalomaniacal like Mackey. But he’s not as alpha male as Mackey.”
    “I’ll tell you something,” Cruise said as he sat down at a table spread with finger sandwiches and cold cuts. “When I did that monolog as Mackey, we didn’t tell the audience anything about what we were doing. And the guys just started getting pumped up as I was talking. So at the end of the day, PTA and I had to get on stage and say, ‘Look, man. We just want to tell you that where this character is going and what he’s saying is not good. And it’s not okay.’”
    Here came the lecture. First Dustin; now Tom Cruise. I couldn’t understand it. What was wrong with learning how to meet women? That’s what we’re here for. It’s how the species survives. All I wanted was an evolutionary edge. So why not work at it and learn to do it well, like I’d done with everything else in my life? Who says you’re allowed to take lessons in motorcycle riding but not in interacting with women? I just needed someone to show me how to start the engine and shift to higher gears. And I wasn’t hurting anyone. No one was complaining after I slept with them, no one was being lied to, no one was being hurt. They wanted to be seduced. Everyone wants to be seduced. It makes us feel wanted.
    “We made this whole speech, because the guys were taking what we were saying and going with it and getting into it. So PTA and I were saying, ‘Hey man, oh my God. Easy.’”
    See, I wanted to tell him. Seduction is seductive. But I couldn’t, because as he remembered that moment, Cruise let out a laugh. And Cruise doesn’t laugh like ordinary people do. His laugh takes over a room. It comes on just fine, a regular laugh by any standards. You will be laughing too. But then, when the humor subsides, you will stop laughing. At this point, however, Cruise’s laugh will just be crescendoing. And he will be making eye contact with you. Ha ha HA HA heh heh. And you will try to laugh again, to join him, because you know you’re supposed to. But it doesn’t come out right, because it’s not natural. He will squeeze out a couple words sometimes between chuckles—“It’s not real,” in this case. And then he will stop, as suddenly as he started, and you will be relieved.
    “Well,” I told him, squeezing out the last breath of an awkward laugh. “That’s easy for you to say.”
    We spent the next week together visiting various Scientology buildings. It’s no secret that Tom Cruise is a member of the Church of Scientology—a religion, self-help group, charity, cult, and philosophy started by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. But Cruise had never taken a journalist into that world before.
    The more I learned about L. Ron Hubbard, the more I realized that he was the exact same personality type as Mystery and Ross Jeffries and Tyler Durden. They were wickedly smart megalomaniacs who knew how to synthesize great bodies of knowledge and experience into personality-driven brands, which they sold to people who didn’t feel like they were getting what they needed out of life. They were obsessive students of the principles that guide human behavior. But the ethics of and motivation for their use of those principles made them controversial figures.
    On our last day together, Cruise took me on a tour of the ScientologyCelebrity Center in Hollywood, where I saw a classroom full of students being trained to use