With baby Suri, seeing is believing

There it is, after months of chatter and speculation, on the cover of the new Vanity Fair: a photograph of the world’s biggest movie star, that girl who used to be on “Dawson’s Creek” (no, not the surprisingly good actress with the Oscar nomination, the other one) and an actual human baby.

Inside the magazine there are 22 more pages devoted to the trio, and while some space is handed over to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes discussing their surprise and frustration with the gossip surrounding little Suri Cruise, it’s Annie Liebovitz’s photos of the infant and her famous parents that are the real draw.

With enough hair to join a Beatles tribute band, Suri bites her father’s nose (while Cruise seemingly poses for the “Jerry Maguire” poster one last time), gets kissed by her mother and stares out from under the leather jacket holding her close to daddy’s heart. It looks for all the world like a happy, newly expanded family.

It’s an image that at least two of them desperately need to project right now. Holmes has been accused not only of being a weak-willed puppet who Cruise effectively auditioned for the role of his wife but of being his second choice (following, so the rumor goes, a failed attempt to woo Scarlett Johansson). Cruise, meanwhile, has recently capped off a year and a half of abominable publicity — couch-jumping, on-air spats with Matt Lauer, a curiously underperforming “Mission: Impossible III” — by having his production company very publicly abandoned by Paramount in a move that some speculate is a message that the studios are trying to crack down on out-of-control stars.

The photos would appear to be damage control (though not from the Paramount fallout, since they were taken in July, a month beforehand), finally capitulating to the constant and deafening requests to see the baby, already.

Slideshow   Top gun A look at Tom Cruise's career and relationships.

So now that we’ve finally seen actual photographic evidence of Suri (those thinking “ ... or a reasonable facsimile” can go sit in the corner now), now that we’ve finally gotten the answer to the question, “When are we going to see pictures of the baby?,” maybe it’s time to answer another question that was sitting right next to it, being drowned out, the entire time: Why is any of this our business?

Because from every important angle, it’s not. Perhaps Cruise opened the door when he conducted an extremely public courtship of Holmes, but he had every right to slam it shut again when it became clear that those he’d let in were determined to make themselves obnoxious houseguests. When someone calls you a zealot and your wife a docile pet before peeing on the furniture, the last thing you do is break out the baby book for them.

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