Tom and Nicole owned penthouse apartments in Sydney and New York. There was a mansion in the Pacific Palisades, a ranch in Colorado, and a condo in Florida. There were French chefs, Italian professors, personal trainers, bodyguards and nannies on the permanent payroll. The entourage commuted from one palace to another in a private jet. Any trailer parked on a sound stage had to have marble floors and be as big as a castle. Either because at that juncture they didn’t quite know where babies came from, or perhaps not wanting to leave procreation to blind chance, ready-made children were adopted — Isabella Jane Kidman Cruise in 1992 and Connor Anthony Kidman Cruise in 1995. Connor was black. ‘He’s from the human race,’ his saviour of a father explained. ‘He’s from mankind.’

I wonder if that megalomaniacal old phoney Stanley Kubrick intended putting a fatal strain on the relationship during Eyes Wide Shut? The production dragged on for years, with hundreds of unnecessary takes, reshoots, replacement casts and perpetual, draining rehearsals. Kubrick was unwarrantably secretive and possessive, creepily spending too much time with his stars, dominating and manipulating them. In this, the propitiation of Kubrick is eerily like the Church of Scientology, to which Cruise is deeply devoted — and which is banned in Germany as ‘an exploitative cult with totalitarian tendencies’. Notwithstanding such a demurral, however, Paramount and Universal allowed Cruise to have Scientol- ogy ministers frequenting the film sets, laying out their stalls.

The interminable Eyes Wide Shut is ostensibly about sexual obsession and jealousy; the result on the screen is inert and pretentious nonsense, devoid of all life and panache. But the director’s own behaviour mirrored his movie’s themes, and once it had wrapped he dropped dead. Tom and Nicole got divorced. ‘Well, I can wear high heels now,’ said Nicole, and one does feel she’d been set free.

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