Tom seemed like a child who had never been told no. People say that celebrities stop developing emotionally at the age of their success—which for Tom had been with Risky Business at twenty-one.

“Get in the fucking present time, is what you need to do,” he then screamed at his assistant. As he lit into her, I thought about the time a friend had mentioned to me that she witnessed him taking his assistant to task for giving him a chipped coffee mug.

“You served me tea in a chipped mug? Do you know who gets served with a mug that’s chipped? Fucking DBs,” he said, using the initials for “Degraded Being,” a term in Scientology that means degraded spiritual being.

Still not noticing the log of pre-made dough on the counter, Tom raised his hand above his head. “LRH is here,” he said, then lowered his hand to his chin and said, “And Dave and I are here.” Then, with his hand down at his waist, he said, “And you are here.”

An uncomfortable heat rose in my body, just like it used to when I was a little kid being yelled at by my dad. It was horrible to watch someone I admired come undone and even worse to witness the fear in the assistant’s eyes. Tom comes across with an almost presidential charm to the public, but seeing him treat people this way was utterly shocking. I’ve seen celebrities (myself included) treat people or staff poorly, but this was on another level. The whole scene was so painful to watch that I had to step in. “Oh, wait,” I said, as if I had just discovered something. “Tom, is this it?”