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The now-peaceful world of onetime international megastar Tom Cruise, who had recently settled in to a quiet life of running a studio that could produce the kind of personal, little-seen vehicles that would help reduce his public profile enough to free him up to attend Redskins games and personally accompany daughter Suri to her ball-crawl romps at the Celebrity Centre's in-house Gymboree, has been temporarily rocked by accusations made in the new Andrew Morton tell-all Tom Cruise: An Unauthorised Biography, explosive excerpts from which were published in The Daily Mail this weekend. Scary Hollywood Lawyer and Designated Protector of the Cruise Brand Bert Fields was already hurling himself upon the grenades Morton had lobbed in the direction of his prized client (whom the author says has ascended to the position of the vice-pope of Scientology), especially a headline-grabbing, "sick and bizarre" section that claims some Scientologists believe that Suri is L. Ron Hubbard's baster-baby, according to the Mail:

[Fields] criticised a passage in which Morton claims some "fanatical" Scientologists believed Suri Cruise was actually the result of a sperm donation by Scientology's dead founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

Morton writes that Ms Holmes may feel she was in "the horror movie Rosemary's Baby, in which an unsuspecting young woman is impregnated with the Devil's child".

Mr Fields said: "It's not being published in England. The American publishers criticised the libel laws in Britain because they require an author to tell the truth. Well, thank God for the British libel laws." [...]

Of the bizarre beliefs Morton ascribes to some Scientologists about Cruise's third wife, Katie Holmes, whom the actor married in a whirlwind romance, the author says, incredibly: "Some Sea Org fanatics even wondered if the actress had been impregnated with Hubbard's frozen sperm.

"In her more reflective moments, Katie might have felt as if she were in the middle of a real-life version of the horror movie Rosemary's Baby, in which an unsuspecting young woman is impregnated with the Devil's child."

Mr Fields described the passage as "sick and bizarre".

"It's a pack of lies," he said. "The book suggests Scientologists somehow run his career. I've represented him for over 20 years and I've never discussed his business with David Miscavige. It's poorly researched and badly written, and it's not really even about Tom Cruise - it's an attack on Scientology."

Mercifully, Fields was content to dismiss the Suri story without issuing a detailed description of the lovemaking session between Cruise and Katie Holmes that led to their daughter's conception, trusting that the public neither wants nor needs a procreational play-by-play to accept the disturbing and surreal falsity of the Rosemary's Baby scenario. Additionally, the suggestion that the actor's career is steered by the Church seems ridiculous on its face, as even the least experienced Level VII Development Executive would have passed on both of Cruise's initial United Artists projects, Lions for Lambs and Valkyrie, preferring that the star crank out another far more lucrative, tithe-generating crowd-pleaser from the Mission: Impossible franchise instead of some talky political tract or historical drama about failed Nazi-hunters.