Top Guns and Top Secrets

By James Poniewozik

Tuesday, Sept. 5, she made her much anticipated debut on the CBS Evening News. America had been buzzing about her since the spring, and much rode on her premiere, in particular the career of a celebrity with whom America has had an intense love-hate relationship.

I'm writing, of course, about Suri Cruise. (I'm told the newscast was also the debut of some lady from the Today show.) Since Suri's birth in April, she had not been seen, spurring a flood of rumors. Was she a hoax? Sick? An alien? Then the House of Cronkite broke its big scoop by flashing the exclusive Vanity Fair photos, with the adorable, ebony-maned head of what even die-hard Internet rumormongers had to concede was Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' actual, intact, human baby.

Katie Couric introduced the segment with archival footage of CBS News airing baby snaps of Prince Charles. That self-serving comparison had a kernel of truth: celebrity offspring are like royal heirs. The parents hoist their issue before the throngs to prove, if not their virility, like kings of old, then their humanity.

Or in this case, their credibility. In what was already the year of the celebrity baby--Britney Spears playing hot potato with Sean Preston, Angelina Jolie posing like Madonna and child with Shiloh Nouvel--Suri inherited her dad's aura of mystery and its baggage. Cruise is one of those figures about whom there was always an official story and an unofficial story: the stuff you were allowed to say about him in respectable media and the stuff people actually cared about. The Scientology business, for instance. Cruise was a notoriously litigious member of a notoriously litigious institution. The press owns only so many 10-foot poles, and it's loath to deploy them in such situations. Journalists obeyed the keep-off-the-grass signs he laid down, as long as he drew ratings and sold magazines. And Hollywood humored him, as long as his movies minted money.

Then came Oprah's couch. Then came Brooke Shields and South Park. Most damaging, then came underperforming movies and Paramount's decision to break off its relationship with him. And Suri became a metaphor for everything the public suddenly found suspicious about him. Keeping her unseen, Cruise was pretending that he was still Untouchable Tom.

How far has he fallen? Look at Vanity Fair's Annie Leibovitz cover photo. Cruise holds Suri, nestled inside his bomber jacket; Katie Holmes peers at--but doesn't touch--her baby. It is a brilliant, sly metacomment on the whispers about Cruise: Is he too controlling? What creepy power does he have over his wife? What is he hiding? It is the sort of thing that, one suspects, a more powerful Cruise would have vetoed and that the media would have been scared to death to pull on him.

But secrets are for people who can afford them, and Cruise is not the only figure who has had to learn that. Wednesday evening on CBS, President George W. Bush talked with Couric and the world about his secret baby, the CIA's clandestine prisons. (Suri, naturally, got higher ratings.) Compelled by the Supreme Court to find a legal way of trying detainees and by dismal polls and midterms to argue for his antiterrorism strategy, the President whose Administration once defied the press to claim the prisons existed now gamely said they had--and here are the baby pictures, Katie!

What do Bush and Cruise have in common, other than a history of playacting in flight gear? They work in towns where secrecy is an expression of power. Sure, secrets can be the means to important ends, but as publicists and White House aides know, keeping secrets is an end in itself. Even when it's brazen--especially when it's brazen--secrecy affirms and bolsters your alpha status: I know you want to know this thing. But you do not have the leverage to make me talk about this thing. Therefore I own you.

But that fortress of secrecy can crumble, fast, when you combine a hit to your popularity (Iraq, Matt Lauer) with a blow to your power (from the Judicial Branch, from Sumner Redstone). Suddenly the public that supported you over the nosy press wants answers. Suddenly you need access to the media more than the media needs access to you. And suddenly, why, your life is an open book!

It was a lucky week for Katie Couric to open shop. It was an edifying week for the rest of us. But don't get used to this Washington-Hollywood glasnost. Openness, after all, can be as strategic as secrecy. Measured. Calculated. Dedicated toward the day when you're strong enough again to roll down the shades, put up the walls and pack the baby pictures safely away.