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Cruise & Winfrey Part Deux
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I didn't do anything on this earlier because I was hoping that Oprah Winfrey was just giving Tom Cruise a false sense of security on Friday and then would hit him with some real zingers Monday. Boy was I wrong. Orpah is a more obsequious star-kisser than Barbara Walters. She gets two hours to nail Cruise about the whole couch-jumping thing, and what does she do? Lobs a bunch of softball questions at him that he can easily knock out of the park.
Okay, yes, she asked the question. But it was so, pardon the pun, couched. She also asked about the Brooke Shields thing and Scientology evangelizing. But when he got stuck, Winfrey helped him out by suggesting reasonable excuses for it all. When talking about the Matt Lauer weirdness, for example, she offered, “Had you had enough sleep?” He took her up on it and agreed.
Perhaps that’s the price you have to pay to get Tom on your show. But is it worth it when she comes off like such a suck-up? Will Cruise deliver the ratings anyway?
Not if you ask Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone. He’s the one who ended the Paramount (a subsidiary of Viacom) deal with Cruise’s production company. Apparently, the odd behavior made Redstone’s his wife start to hate the ‘Mission Impossible’ star. That was all it took. And interestingly, that was the one elephant in the soundstage that Oprah didn’t dare go near. Although Redstone has since changed his tune slightly, grudgingly saying he wouldn’t oppose Cruise taking he lead in MI4.
The sycophantic Cruise-a-thon continued on Monday with a retrospective of his 25 years in film. (27 actually, but we’re only counting from ‘Risky Business.’) Celebrity friends Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, David Beckham and wife Victoria, Renee Zellweger, Jamie Foxx, Steven Spielberg, and Dustin Hoffman all made the right noises about what a great guy “TC” is.
And he does seem like a nice guy. A nice, weird guy who giggles a lot and doesn’t seem to reveal much. Sort of like Michael Jackson.
But Cruise seems bent on turning that perception around. On Monday, he also launched his own website for the first time in order to reach out to fans. I guess that the disappointing performance of ‘MI3’ at the box office finally convinced him that it was time for an image makeover. We’ll see if that isn’t the most impossible mission of all.
