After months of tabloid guessing games about their new baby, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes decided to have Suri meet the world in the pages of Vanity Fair, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Hanging out at the couple’s Colorado retreat, Jane Sarkin learns all about their reaction to the media madness, anger over bizarre rumors, and overwhelming joy in bonding with their daughter.
I am sitting in Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s bedroom with his children Isabella, 13, and Connor, 11. For a good part of a week now, I’ve been ensconced at their 400-acre retreat in Telluride, Colorado. During that time I’ve become virtually a part of the extended Cruise family. For every activity, I’m a welcomed tagalong: riding horses, hiking in the hills, driving through the countryside. Every day, all day, I observe Katie and Tom taking on their latest roles—as the Ultimate Hands-On Mom and Dad to their baby girl, Suri Cruise, born April 18.
We eat almost every meal together: Tom and Katie, the kids, Tom’s mom, Mary Lee, and his sister Cass and her children, along with many of Katie’s family members—15 Holmeses in all—including her parents, Martin and Kathleen, and her brother and sisters and their kids, who have come from Ohio for a summer visit. (Also on hand are photographer Annie Leibovitz, a small crew, and Vanity Fair’ s fashion and style director, Michael Roberts.)
The kids and I flop around in the master bedrooom, making jokes, chatting, and just hanging. If Bella and Connor (adopted when Tom was married to Nicole Kidman) were slightly younger, or if these were any other children in America, I think I’d have a remarkable bedtime story to tell them—a parable about family, privacy, and fame in an age of media overload.
It would not be a story about Tom Cruise’s film career or the specifics of Scientology. Instead, I would tell them a story about a beautiful baby girl. I would relate the curious chronicle of how a three-and-a-half-month-old (now going on five months)—previously unseen by the media—became so sought after by the prying public eye that her first pictures have metamorphosed from a collection of family photos into a bona fide pop-culture event. And I would tell them how it feels to live 24-7 inside a story about a story.
Each morning the family wakes up in a room dominated by large windows with a stunning view of the Rockies. Bella and Connor, their hair mussed, arise from their red flannel sheets and stumble across the room from their mattresses, which are laid out in the master suite (due to the abundance of houseguests). The kids make their way into the king-size bed with Tom, Katie, and Suri, crawling over a quilt that Katie has made for Tom, which incorporates family photos in the patchwork. Most mornings, everyone tries to be the first to pick up the baby from her crib or to offer her a morning bottle.
Lining the walls of the stairway leading up to the bedroom are photos of the children as well as pictures from Tom and Katie’s first year together. In June of 2005, within eight weeks of their first date, he famously proposed to her atop the Eiffel Tower, overlooking the lights of Paris at night. Before asking her to marry him, he got down on one knee and recited a two-page poem he had written. (They have not yet finalized their wedding plans.)
Today, as every day, Mom and Dad are cooing about Suri, born seven pounds seven ounces, 20 inches in length, replete with what appears to be her father’s famous helmet of dark-brown hair.
“She has Kate’s lips and eyes,” says Tom. (Others call her Katie.) “I think she looks like Kate.”
“I think she has Tom’s eyes,” Katie says. “I think she looks like Tom.”
They sound like any other doting new parents. “The moment the doctor handed me Suri,” Katie insists, “I was just ready. The feeling is indescribable. All I can say is the moment I looked in her eyes I felt like … Mom.”
Suri was born exactly one year, to the day, after Tom and Katie went on their first date. “She’s a glorious girl,” Katie says. “She’s the miracle of our life.”
Soon, talk turns to the pregnancy and to Katie’s inkling, at the time, that she might be having a girl.
“I was craving pink the whole nine months,” she says.
In fact, even before an ultrasound test had determined that a girl was on the way, the parents-to-be had settled on her name. “We had the name before we found out because we both thought the baby would be a girl,” says Tom. “Some friends of ours sent us two [baby-naming] books. When we came to the name Suri, we both loved it. And we both said, ‘Suri Cruise.’ We later found out that it meant ‘red rose,’ and that was just a bonus. Suri—it was perfect.”
The house has the feel of a sprawling lodge or chalet, with rustic, log-cabin touches—informal, airy, built with honey-colored deadwood from Oregon. The family room has a vast stone fireplace made by local craftsmen. The Cruises spend long hours in the kitchen, dining room, and living room. There is a guesthouse, called “the bunkhouse,” set, like the main quarters, amid stands of aspen, which residents call “quakies.” The white bark of the trees has been rubbed dark brown by herds of wandering elk. Around the grounds are a sleep-in tepee and an in-ground trampoline. Tom, who began planning his refuge in 1990, has now realized his dream of having a getaway in the mountains, a home filled with family and friends, a place where he can raise his children.
“My whole life I always wanted to be a father,” Tom says. “I always said to myself that my children would be able to depend on me and I would always be there for them and love them—that I’d never make a promise to my kids that I couldn’t keep. I’m not one of those people who believe you can spoil a child with too much love. You can never give a child too much love. There’s just no way.”
The Cruise athleticism and competitive spirit are everywhere in evidence. The kids, with Dad in the lead, roar around their homemade motocross track. Katie, Tom, and the family ride horses, fish, exercise, hike—and play round after round of Take Two, a quick-paced crossword-style game, using Scrabble tiles. Tom seems proud to have encouraged his kids to share in his need for speed. Meanwhile, many of the relatives are off flying over the mountains in sleek white gliders. Tom takes the opportunity to fit in a round of golf with his future father-in-law and various Holmes men.
Many nights there’s a cookout at the family’s favorite spot, simply called the Lookout, with its commanding view of Wilson Peak. Everyone assembles at the fire pit, its stones stacked and shaped by the children. The family gathers around the fire and talks, trading stories while sitting on hewn-timber benches. One night it’s hot dogs and s’mores; another night, back at the house, a barbecue is followed by 39 flavors of ice cream.
Attention and talk, nowadays, seem to naturally gravitate to Suri.
Early on, Tom’s publicists asked the couple if they wanted to release a single picture of her just to get the media off their backs. They understood that the scoop-starved public felt it was owed a look at the baby. But, for the first three months of Suri’s life, Tom and Katie say, they just wanted to be new parents. They kept to themselves in Los Angeles: having friends over, including Penélope Cruz and Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith; ordering takeout food from local restaurants; and forgoing the intrusion that any photo session would surely have brought. “She was born,” Katie recounts, “as M.I.3 [Mission: Impossible III] was coming out, and once Tom was finished promoting the film, all we wanted to do was spend time with Suri and our family and friends. We were always going to release a photo. We just didn’t want to get into the whole production of setting up a photo shoot at that time. I really just wanted to enjoy this precious time with my daughter. I knew I’d never get that time back.”
“We were just living our lives, being a family,” Tom contends. “Actually, we were taking our own photos and always planned to release those at the right time.”
“Then all the craziness began,” Katie recalls. “This ‘Where is Suri?’ controversy. Tom and I looked at each other and said, ‘What’s going on?’ We weren’t trying to hide anything.”
Tom and Katie wanted no part of the feeding frenzy. While all this bizarre speculation was going on, I repeatedly asked for the first photo session with the baby, receiving polite refusals. During the same period, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie released images of their new daughter, Shiloh, donating the proceeds to charity. (Tom and Katie chose not to link Suri’s first photo session to anything financial—even though they praise their fellow stars’ decision. Tom contributes extensively to charitable causes but declines to draw attention to such donations.) Finally, in late July, I got a call. The pair had decided to have Suri Cruise make her debut in Vanity Fair. Could Annie Leibovitz and I come to Telluride the following week?
Annie and I flew out, spending our days and nights at the compound to limit any suspicions among the paparazzi around town. And for five days Tom and Katie willingly posed for family pictures without complaint. At one point, Tom actually compared the mood to what he’s been told about photographer-reporter teams covering celebrities in the 40s, 50s, and 60s for the weekly Life magazine: hanging with a star for a week, no holds barred.
The family piles into the S.U.V., James Blunt blaring on the iPod hooked up to its speakers. Tom and Katie belt out the lyrics: “My life is brilliant / My love is pure. / I saw an angel. / Of that I’m sure.… / You’re beautiful, it’s true.”
Up into the mountains they go, to the fire pit, where the photo crew is assembled.
Annie gathers Tom, Katie, and Suri on the hillside, ready to shoot a portrait of just the three of them. (The image will become the cover photograph.)
The other family members observe the scene from behind Annie as she focuses her cameras. Soon, a breathtaking sunset descends on the southwest ridges of Wilson Peak, Gladstone Peak, Sunshine Peak, and volcano-coned Lizard Head, which the Cruises have climbed together.
Tom’s mother, an upbeat, outgoing woman from Louisville, Kentucky, moves in closer. She watches her son and daughter-in-law-to-be kiss. She sees her granddaughter Suri smile for the camera. The sun reddens the peaks in the distance. Tom’s mom begins to cry. Others on the hillside start to well up, too.
Tom seems to be forcing back the tears himself. Later, as we talk about the poignancy of that moment, I mention how the sunset photo session seemed to belie a line from his film Jerry Maguire. “We live in a cynical world,” Tom’s character says, “a cynical world.” Tom nods in agreement, although he thinks that in some ways that statement is even more true today. “I am very fortunate to have the life that I have, and I know that,” he says. “Life does deal out its percentage of—its amount of sorrow. But those moments help you appreciate the joy of life and to recognize that. We’ll never forget the bad times, you know, but you have to celebrate the joy. And that’s what Suri is: the joy.
“Having children is a new beginning,” Tom continues, “and there’s not a parent who doesn’t know that moment and think back to their children and their grandchildren and reflect on the cycle of life.”
Katie says she wants to talk with me privately.
We discuss how she’s begun to read filmscripts again. (She has appeared on TV’s Dawson’s Creek and in 13 feature films, including The Ice Storm, Pieces of April, Thank You for Smoking, and Batman Begins.) We discuss her jewelry, and I suggest that whatever she has on in the photos, and at her upcoming wedding, could inspire a fashion craze. She wears a trinity ring made of three types of gold, set with diamonds, that Tom gave her for Mother’s Day, a pair of light-pink diamond-drop earrings, a gift when Suri was born, and a diamond engagement ring surrounded by smaller pink diamonds.
She opens up about the hurtful articles and TV coverage, which she admits she follows.
“I do know what is being said in the press,” she says, explaining that she keeps up on the gossip because “this is my future. This is my family, and I care so much about them. The stories are not O.K. It eats away at me because it’s just not O.K. To see how someone as caring and good as Tom is—to see how things can just get so twisted and turned around. I mean, where does it come from? It’s been heartbreaking to see that.
“I know he’s more used to it than I am. I was overjoyed in being pregnant and then had to withstand ridicule about my pregnancy when it was the most normal, non-controversial thing imaginable. All those things were invented,” she asserts. About the rumor that they had purchased ultrasound equipment to personally monitor the child from their own home, she says, “All that garbage about the sonogram [machine]—we were followed by paparazzi and so my doctor had to make house calls. The sonogram was for his use!
“Some of the crap that’s out there—the stuff that’s said about my parents and my siblings [tabloid accounts implied that Katie’s family did not hit it off with Tom]—it’s really frustrating the amount of shit that’s out there. And the stuff they said about Suri?! You shouldn’t say that about us, and you can’t say that about my child. As a mother, you hear it and it’s just not O.K.”
One night around the dining-room table, during a Chinese-and-Thai dinner, there are stories upon stories exchanged about Tom and Katie as children. Soon, talk turns to Tom’s adventures with Connor and Bella and all the things they want to do with Suri when she gets older.
Katie observes, “It’s really special to see them [Bella and Connor] holding their little sister. To hear them talk about all of the fun things they are going to do together.” Tom adds, “It’s very moving to me too. I look at those moments of watching Bella and Connor grow up and you get a sense of what kind of people they are going to be as adults.”
At one point Tom discusses plans for taking Connor and Bella on a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. And a batch of fortune cookies is passed around. We all read ours aloud.
Tom unfurls his fortune and smiles.
“Soon,” it says, “you will be on top of the world.”
We laugh. From the looks of things, he’s already there.
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