Tom Cruise follows me on Twitter. Until now, I have been relatively proud of this fact, even though he follows tens of thousands of people, and only tweets three times a year, and his account is probably run by his staff, and he wouldn’t actually be able to tell you what Twitter was if you held a gun to his head. Regardless, I was proud.
But now I feel like a failure, because Tom Cruise has never sent me a cake. And it turns out that all Tom Cruise does is send cakes to people. According to Yahoo, every year he orders more than 100 white chocolate coconut bundt cakes from Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, California, and sends them to his famous friends. Rosie O’Donnell gets one. Kirsten Dunst gets one. Jimmy Fallon gets one. James Corden gets one. Graham Norton gets one, and his staff eat it without telling him. Henry Cavill called it “the most decadent, the most amazing cake”. Barbara Walters once ate hers live on television, in a power move as yet unmatched by any mortal human.
And of course it is a good cake. Tom Cruise doesn’t operate by half measures. He thrives on intensity. He once explained how to make spaghetti carbonara to Oprah Winfrey with such ferocious conviction that I immediately started making it his way, no questions asked, in case he found out and ran to my house and kicked me in the throat. As I said, of course it’s a good cake.
The Yahoo story is full of nice details. Cruise chose Doan’s as his bakery of choice because Diane Keaton bought one of its cakes to prove that it was tastier than Katie Holmes’ favourite cake. Cruise’s team takes each cake to a secondary location to be gift-wrapped before they send it out to recipients. Dunst calls it the “Cruise cake”. Despite all this, the most important thing here is the knowledge that Cruise has now officially become more legend than man.
In truth, he was already well on the way. This summer, a conversation he had with culture secretary Oliver Dowden led to a Covid travel exemption so that Mission: Impossible 7 could resume production. Not long afterwards, when the rest of the world was sheltering in place, he was filming in Norway, driving a motorbike off the side of a mountain before gliding back to Earth on a parachute. Cruise has always been aggressively keen on reaching the upper levels of his capability, but this year it seems as if he’s forcing things to happen through nothing but sheer power of will.
The cake thing leaves no doubt. Sending hundreds of cakes to people during a festive season so miserable that many of us have barely been able to get it together enough to write anyone a card is nothing short of miraculous. It’s as if Tom Cruise has decided that Christmas will happen and now, purely because of that, it’s happening.
Yes, it’s true that he isn’t saving the world. But isn’t he sending a message to us all? If we can all go the extra mile and remember other people, and use our near-infinite wealth to direct a team of underlings to purchase, wrap and send a cake to the woman from Interview With a Vampire, then the world would undoubtedly be a better place.
Was this entire piece a ploy to get Tom Cruise to send me a cake? Yes it was. Am I ashamed of that? Yes.
