Tom, Ed, Farrah, and Michael

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Normally when celebrities die, I take a few days to try and make connections. (Really, I do.) And they aren't often obvious or easy to see. You see, as I've argued before, Tom Cruise is crafty when he gets in one of his murderin' moods. It's rare that one of Tom's acts of aggression displays an easy connection between the person passing on and the reason for Mr. Cruise's anger.

But, today is not a day to indulge in careful evidence turning. For today, Mr. Cruise unleashed his fury on two of American celebrity royalty. I'm not--of course--suggesting that Cruise went out and dispatched these two today. He's far too practiced at this sort of thing to be that sloppy. Certainly his plans were set in motion a while back and I'm quite confident that he didn't WANT both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson to die on the same day. For doing so would naturally raise more questions that he wanted raised.

But he slipped up, and so we must search for the clues that incriminate him. We must understand why his dormant anger was unleashed upon the Grande Dame of 70s sex and the 80s King of Pop.

What do we know about Farrah? Well, I know that my next door neighbor had that poster. And we know that she was battling "cancer" for a while now. Those are obvious facts. But what you might NOT know is that Farrah made two critical mistakes. 1) She was the owner of one of Celebrity's Greatest Smiles (see that poster link again). And 2) she starred in a TV movie called Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story. Tom Cruise is also the owner of an impressive smile--all enormous teeth and vibrant commitment to the happiness. And only one such smile can survive in Celebrity Land at any one time. Additionally, when Cruise's latest movie Valkyrie (in which he plays his own brand of Nazi hunter, leading a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler) performed poorly in the domestic box office . . . well, you can connect those quite obvious dots as well as I, can't you?

It's a shame that Tom had to blame Farrah for his career downfalls. She just wanted to find away to live her own life at this point, trying in her own way to find a way out of the shadow of Charlie's Angels.

Now, what about Michael Jackson? His death came as a much greater shock. He has been battling legal issues for years and even moved his family out of the country to find some peace. But what could he have done to anger Tom? Was Tom planning a Beatles movie, featuring himself as John Lennon perhaps? Was he not aware that Jacko had lost his control over the Beatles music? Did Tom make a mistake?

Unlikely.

Rather, I think Tom felt that Micheal's many years of plastic surgery was threatening a filmic niche that Cruise had carved out for himself. Did he feel that Jacko's more publicized facial alterations were upstaging his own? Perhaps. Who can truly understand the mind of a mad man?

The forgotten man in all of this is Ed McMahon. They say that Hollywood deaths always occur in threes, so naturally we can assume that Tom Cruise operates in a similar fashion. Can we figure out why Mr. Cruise wanted to off the Ultimate Second Banana? Maybe Tom wanted to turn some of his gold into cash . . . or maybe he thinks Suri is a talented singer, but McMahon refused to revive Star Search to satisfy the unbalanced Cruise's desire to turn his daughter into a pop sensation.

All I can say is that Hollywood sleeps uneasily tonight.

Tom is back with a vengeance. And this time--as it is each and every time--it's personal. (You've just got to figure out why it's personal to him.)