14 DAY TRIAL // In 2004, just a short while before he went on Oprah and jumped on her couch and then on Matt Lauer to rant against anti-depressants, Tom Cruise parted ways with his longtime publicist Pat Kingsley, the woman who literally turned him into an A-lister. She is now talking with The Hollywood Reporter about her famous ex-client and the role Scientology played in their parting.
When Cruise fired Pat, the media went wild with speculation about how much of a role his involvement with Scientology had played in his decision, especially since, right after he did, he started to be more open about his religious beliefs.
At the same time, his career took a turn for the worse, since the two TV appearances mentioned above ruined his credibility and got him lots of criticism online. He never recovered from that, and Pat is now telling the trade publication that Scientology did play a part in his decision to fire her.
She was never OK with him talking about his involvement in the cult with the press. “I did have that conversation with Tom, about cooling it,” she says, adding that she told her client that, “Scientology is fine. 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,” Pat explains.
One year later, he had decided to fire her and, while Pat is simply too gracious to state it directly, she hints that, from the very start, Scientology was like a wall between herself and her client.
“It was taken care of very early in the game,” she says of how she and Scientology leaders came to butt heads. “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,” she adds.
When Cruise came to personally let her know that he’d decided to be “more personally involved in all decisions,” Pat had already guessed that the time was coming and had made peace with the idea. The parting was amicable, she recalls, and she even took him around the office to say goodbye to the entire team that had worked until then on his career, including the mailman.
He was very nice to everybody, she says.
After Pat, Tom cruise hired his sister Lee Anne Devette as his publicist, and is now being repped by Amanda Lundberg.