Australian booksellers are cagey about stocking Andrew Morton’s tell-all Tom Cruise biog. Crikey is not.

While the book might not make it to our shores, US journalists have done the speed reading for us. Reviewers are saying there’s nothing new here. Entertainment Weekly dismisses it as fluffy nonsense.

[It’s] the interrogation-repelling superstar meets the unstoppable dirt-digger: It’s the celeb-bio edition of Alien vs. Predator.

Alien wins. Tom Cruise begins, ”If truth be told, Tom Cruise Mapother IV has always been something of a ladies’ man” (should any biographer open with ”if truth be told”?) and ends with this thunderclap: ”Perhaps the most complex character he has ever played is Tom Cruise himself.” Between those sentences resides a 323-page air sandwich.

Cruise’s lawyer Bert Fields has denounced it as “lies” but at least they’re fun ones. The Church of Scientology issued a 15 page statement of various denials to the US TODAY show in advance of an appearance by author Andrew Morton. Read the full thing here.

Meanwhile, put the egg timer on, here’s Crikey’s 2-minute version, with thanks to Juliet Lapidos’s condensed Tom Cruise at Slate.

The inanest of details:

Entertainment Weekly: ‘[Morton’s] lack of fresh material is manifest in desperate stretching (Cruise went to high school in Glen Ridge, N.J., and a decade later, there was a rape case involving…Glen Ridge high schoolers!), family arcana (Cruise’s grandfather’s cousin’s academic works fill 8.3 cubic feet in a library — noted!), and the uncategorizably bizarre (after reading that Church leader David Miscavige is ”two years older if two inches shorter” than Cruise, I felt two seconds older if two IQ points dumber).’

The rampant heteros-xuality:

Slate: ‘Page 34: Nancy Armel, another high-school flame, also remembers fooling around in a parked car. She told Morton: “I was black and blue from the gearshift.”‘

Entertainmentwise: Morton documents Tom’s womanising ways in great detail. He also alleges that Cruise tried to woo Jennifer Garner for his spouse before turning his attentions to now-wife Katie Holmes. Tom’s chat-up technique apparently involved leaving voicemails on the Alias actress’s phone asking “if she knew what freedom was.”

The homophobia:

Slate: ‘Page 65: Tom tried to impress Nancy by taking her to the Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles, but he “was unaware of the story line—about two gay men living together in St. Tropez.” According to Nancy, “he couldn’t handle it. We had to leave before the intermission. It really bothered him. He was definitely homophobic.”‘

The control freak:

Slate: ‘Page 290-291: Morton repeats the sketchy tabloid rumors that Tom “bought a fetus learning system that was strapped to Katie’s stomach” and that he “fitted Katie’s cell phone with a tracking device so that he would know where she was day and night.”‘

Suri & the second coming:

Slate: ‘Page 289: Without naming his sources, Morton spins the following yarn: “Some [Scientology] sect members sincerely believed that Katie Holmes was carrying the baby who would be the vessel for L. Ron Hubbard’s spirit when he returned from his trip around the galaxy…Some Sea Org fanatics even wondered if the actress had been impregnated with Hubbard’s frozen sperm.”‘

Scientology VP:

Morton says Cruise is Scientology’s de facto “second in command”

The excess:

Slate: ‘Page 153-154: Tom and Nicole shared a “fantasy of running through a meadow of wildflowers together.” Eager to please his recruit, [Scientology head honcho David] Miscavige “decided to make his dream come true. A team of twenty Sea Org disciples was set to work digging, hoeing, and planting wheat grass and wildflower seed near the Cruises’ bungalow. Former Scientologist Maureen Bolstad recalled working until early in the morning in the mud and pouring rain.”

The possibility of finally seeing sense about Scientology:

Slate: ‘Page 171-172: By 1993, Morton says Tom “progressed to what Scientologists call ‘the Wall of Fire,’ or Operating Thetan III, where the secrets of the universe according to Hubbard [are] revealed.” Allegedly, “Tom found the knowledge he had just received disturbing and alarming, as he struggled to reconcile the creationist myth with the more practical teachings contained in the lower levels of Scientology…Tom [complained] that he had studied all these years and the whole faith was about space aliens.”‘

Or not:

Slate: ‘Page 250: Tom’s disenchantment didn’t last long. Morton writes that by 2004, Tom “reached the exalted level of Operating Thetan VII, where Hubbard promised that man would become his own god.”‘