Is Tom Crazy in Love?

By RICHARD CORLISS

He's 42, he looks about 28, and on Oprah last week, he behaved as if he were 14. Ostensibly on the show to plug his forthcoming movie, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise tried to count the ways his professed passion for actress Katie Holmes had changed his life. He chanted the mantra "I'm in love" as if his soul could speak only in an Oscar Hammerstein lyric. A cheerleader for Team Katie, he bounded from his seat, genuflected before his startled host, jumped on the couch and pumped his fist, NBA-finals style. "I don't know what happened to you, boy," said Oprah Winfrey at her guest's baby-chimp antics. Still in an orgasmic daze, Cruise replied, "Man, I don't know either."

A few phlegmatic souls saw Cruise's effusion as the heedless enthusiasm of a top dog in puppy love. Others found the relationship, and his trumpeting of it, implausible. But for Hollywood, ever ready to flash sharp knives and sharper tongues, Cruise was a superstar in a Three Mile Island meltdown. To all the media heavy breathers--in tabloids, on the gossip shows and blogs--this was big, Michael Jackson big.

Was it all a star's desperation not to proclaim his love but to be loved? "Once you get to the 'I want you to like me' phase," says Josh Baran, a crisis-management p.r. consultant, "then you are lost in confusion. Because now, not only do people not like you, but they think you are creepy and weird. It becomes a caricature, a pathology, and that is what we seem to have now with celebrities like Tom Cruise. You sell your soul to get people to love you."

Others, noting that Cruise's press rep is his sister Lee Anne DeVette, see an isolation from reality. "He probably feels that Oprah performance is a total, 100% success," says a Hollywood insider. "No one around him will tell him anything other than what he wants to hear," according to an acquaintance, who says Cruise doesn't read newspapers or use a computer. "He only knows what they show him." And what Cruise won't be allowed to hear is the giggling behind his back. "The worst thing for a matinee idol," the acquaintance says, "is to have people laugh at him when he's trying to be serious."

It would be goofy indeed if a porn video could make Paris Hilton's career, while one grand-Oprah aria could torpedo Cruise's. But Hilton swims in less elevated waters--the septic tank--than he does. He's Tom Terrific, the very likable guy with the laser intensity and the prom-king smile. Through two busted marriages (with actresses Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman) and questions about his commitment to Scientology (about which he's increasingly ardent--there was a Scientology tent on the War of the Worlds set), Cruise has frolicked in the clean mainstream. For ages. His claim to fame, Risky Business, was 22 years ago. He's been a star longer than Humphrey Bogart was.

So you'd think he would know how to project--and protect--himself in public. His greatest strength as an actor was that he played Tom Cruise brilliantly. As a Mission Impossible hero and a Collateral villain, he got audiences to feel the pleasure he took in being watched. And as an interview subject, he took care to be amiable but reveal little. Now he's playing the impulsive adolescent and the dispenser of stern advice. He slammed doctors for giving kids Ritalin and criticized Brooke Shields, the star of Cruise's first film (Endless Love, 1981), for her brief dependence on prescription drugs. Her response: "Tom should stick to saving the world from aliens and let women who are experiencing postpartum depression decide what treatment options are best for them."

Moguls will endure fewer of Cruise's crotchets if his box-office numbers slip. His movies still gross $100 million or more in North America, but the profits are shrinking. Not that there's much competition; the only actor whose films regularly gross higher is Will Smith. Nothing lasts forever, however, including film stardom. And Cruise is mistaken if he thinks he can reach younger moviegoers by acting their age.

Or maybe he's experimenting with a new form of postmodernist performance art, or put-on, to get back in the spotlight. "People haven't been talking about Tom Cruise like they have in the past couple of weeks," says veteran publicist Liz Rosenberg. "I mean, [his public affection for Holmes] is a little freaky to watch, but that's what enthralls people about it." As an admiring publicist put it, "As usual, Tom has the media exactly where he wants them." That's for sure. All he did was spend an hour with Oprah--and, look, we wrote a page about him. --Reported by Lina Lofaro/New York and Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles

With reporting by Lina Lofaro/New York, Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles