By Courtney Enlow | Celebrity | April 19, 2016 |
By Courtney Enlow | Celebrity | April 19, 2016 |
First and foremost, happy birthday, Suri. Second and secondmost, hail Xenu.
Suri Cruise has undergone a tragic amount of attention and speculation in her young life. This is of course partially due to the boundaryless culture of paparazzi and tabloids, but also because, honestly, her parents were just super fucking weird. Ten years is a long time, so let’s run down some of the things we’d experienced up to that point:
- The couch heard ‘round the world
- Tom insisting everyone call her “Kate”
- The single scariest and most fucked up celebrity interview I’ve ever read, please read the whole thing if you haven’t done so before.
a security guard lumbers into the dressing room and presents Holmes with a giant silver box tied in a thick purple ribbon. A small crowd gathers to watch her gleefully tear open the package and pluck out a Chanel diamond necklace—a gift, naturally, from Cruise. “He’s my man! He’s my man!” she screams, then jumps up on her chair to do an impression of her fiancé’s now-famous sofa shtick from Oprah.People begin to cheer. “This is your moment!” cries the manicurist.
“I can do splits too,” Holmes says, jumping down and splaying herself across the floor. On that note, I suggest, we should probably get the photo shoot started.
“On that note,” she replies, “I love him.”
- A lot of awkward kisses
- This photo
That about brings us up to speed. Suri was born just a year—exactly—after Tom and Katie’s first date. With how quickly the pair procreated, the fact that Suri wasn’t seen publicly until she was nearly six months old, and even her birth certificate was weird. With her dad being peak Cruise-azy at the time and her mom being a scarily brainwashed nightmare creature who’d been sent off to Scientology bootcamp for reprogramming (allegedly and also probably), Suri didn’t really have a chance at a private childhood.
One of the most prevailing theories is that Cruise isn’t her dad at all. Some theorists point to Chris Klein, Holmes’s longtime boyfriend until very shortly before marrying Cruise. The theory goes Suri was born a few months before the date they announced her birth to give the impression the baby was Cruise’s and not Klein’s. Other theorists point to Cruise’s cousin William Mapother, who played Ethan Rom on Lost, or Tommy Davis, the former Scientology spokesman.
Of course, that assumes Suri exists at all. Which we now know she does, but in those months between birth (or “birth”) and Vanity Fair cover story, many were convinced she did not exist.
Another theory posits that Suri is the product of L. Ron Hubbard’s frozen sperm and that she was born as his reincarnation. So. That’s pretty cool, I guess.
And then came two distinct camps of Suri-related judgment: the Scientology stuff, and the general “you’re parenting wrong” stuff.
For the latter, Suri wore tiny high heels and lip gloss. Whatever. People were also deeply concerned that she never wore a coat and drank from a bottle till she was 5. Whatever. She also had no bedtime and they treated her like an adult, despite her acting like “a brat” and throwing tantrums. Whatever. I don’t care.
So happy birthday, Suri. Sorry your early years were such a weird public shitshow, but kudos to your mom on keeping you fairly free of that since the escape divorce.