You call this a marriage? I’ve seen less painful root canals.
The union between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes was from the start a case of “Are you kidding me?” — a scam of gargantuan proportions ripped straight from the Kim Kardashian playbook.
It was a union cooked up in an agent’s office and sold to a skeptical moviegoing public in a ludicrous attempt to make the diminutive Tom look manly.
Next to Katie, he only looked short.
PHOTOS: TOM CRUISE AND KATIE HOLMES
The vacant-eyed Katie, 33, had high hopes for dramatic success by attaching herself to a man who, at the time, was one of the world’s most bankable stars. Instead, she got a part playing a weak Jackie Kennedy in a TV movie, a hyperactive Scientologist for a pretend husband and a quickie heir named Suri, 6.
By the age of 3, poor Suri adorned her parents on endless red carpets, her arches compromised by a pair of kitten heels on her tiny feet. It made the world wonder:
Who’s minding the child?
The romance started with Tom, 49, jumping around on Oprah’s couch, declaring, a bit too energetically, “I’m in love!”
“I’m in love!”
Katie should have paid more attention.
Tom’s protestations of masculine adoration were belied by his first wife, actress Mimi Rogers, herself a Scientologist, whom he wed in 1987. She later complained that Tom refused to perform his husbandly duties.
“He was seriously thinking of becoming a monk,” Rogers told Playboy. “He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument, but my instrument needed tuning, and we had to split.”
His second marriage in 1990, to actress Nicole Kidman — mother of his two adopted children — ended when Nicole, three months pregnant, learned of her impending divorce from Cruise’s lawyer. She lost the baby.
Later, the 5-foot-10 Kidman joked of her 5-foot-7 ex-spouse, “At least now I can wear heels.”
But signs of trouble — or simple weirdness, on Tom’s part — were always swept under the rug during TomKat’s marriage of 5 1/2 years, an eternity in Hollywood time.
While she was pregnant in 2006, Tom got folks worried when he told GQ magazine that he thought the placenta and umbilical cord would be “very nutritious.”
“I’m gonna eat the placenta,” he said, as serious as bubonic plague.
Busted! He later made a joke of the idea of placenta ingestion to Diane Sawyer. “Yeah, we’re going to do that — a whole family thing. Isn’t that normal and natural?”
Trouble is, no one laughed.
And funny bones were not tickled when, as a present for Katie, Tom didn’t buy diamonds (or a muzzle for the allegedly “silent” birth he advocated). He went the creepy route, buying an at-home ultrasound machine.
The best insight into Tom’s beliefs came from a videotape he made to promote Scientology. No wonder the church worked hard to keep it quiet. When it went viral, people everywhere wondered:
Has Tom Cruise lost his mind?
“We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind,” he intoned. “We are the authorities on improving conditions.
“We can rehabilitate criminals. We can bring peace and unite cultures . . .
“I’d like to go on vacation, play, and just do that. Know what I mean? I mean that’s how I want it to be. There’s times I’d like to do that, but I can’t because I know, I know, so, you know, I have to do something about it . . .”
It goes on.
But the blame for this divorce cuts both ways. Katie, too, fed into this fiction in a naked attempt to get ahead.
The one I feel sorriest for is Suri. Divorce is always tragic. But this one is also a joke.