Tom Cruise Sacks His Rubbish Publicist, Spoils Our Fun

In the future, people will look back and see that Summer 2005 was a golden time - the time when Tom Cruise went completely berserk. It was a fascinating thing to watch.

The smarter of you will realise that Tom Cruise going publicly loco coincided with the appointment of new publicist Lee Anne DeVette - Cruise’s sister. But now Cruise has sacked DeVette; so mental highlights like the Tom Cruise couch-jump, the Tom Cruise psychiatry-rant and the Tom Cruise hyperactive spazzing will soon be no more.

But it’s not all bad news - Lee Anne DeVette still represents Katie Holmes.

When Tom Cruise (DVDs) promoted War Of The Worlds earlier in the year, he
embarked upon one of the strangest publicity campaigns the world had
ever seen. He’d sacked his controlling old publicist Pat Kingsley, and
under his sister he could finally be the real Tom Cruise. Only, nobody
was expecting the real Tom Cruise to be such a freaking oddball.

Getting engaged to the virgin Katie Holmes, leaping all over Oprah’s
sofa, punching the ground in delight, signing Holmes over to
Scientology, getting squirted in the face at a premiere, criticising
Brooke Shields (and thousands of women who have suffered from
postpartum depression), shouting Matt Lauer down about prescription
drugs during a televised interview, seemingly getting his virgin fiance
… for a few months, a day wouldn’t go by without a story about Tom Cruise
getting a little crazier.

The effects of this strange publicity campaign were not difficult to
miss. A New York marketing and research company discovered that in
Spring 2005, Tom Cruise was the 11th most-liked celebrity among 13-49
year-olds - but by the Summer, he was languishing as the 197th
most-liked. Not only that, he was named in a list of the five most
polarising celebrities along with David Spade, Pauly Shore, Ashton
Kutcher and Tom Green, a man who swung a new-born baby around his head
by it’s umbilical cord once.

But, sadly, Tom Cruise seems to want to put an end to this brilliant
weirdness, Lee Anne DeVette has now been sidelined so that she can
"exclusively oversee the day to day operations of Tom Cruise’s
philanthropic activities," whatever that means, and Rogers & Cowan
have been lined up to make sure Tom doesn’t go publicly off-message
again.

Is this really the end of the Tom Cruise Fun Bus, though? We’d like to
think not. After all, Lee Anne De Vette is still the publicist of Katie
Holmes - if DeVette could only get Katie to do something more exciting than just
repeat the words "amazing" and "exciting" over and over in every single
interview she ever does, maybe we’ll see a slight repeat of the weirdness.

And don’t forget, Rogers & Cowan is also home to John Travolta. So
maybe it’ll allow a few well-timed Scientology gaffes out now and
again. You know, for old time’s sake.

Read more:

Cruise Control Shifts Gears - E! Online

[story by Stuart Heritage]