Tom Cruise must be upset about the negative reports of his marriage to Katie Holmes, because it looks like he’s whipped out his celebrity friend phonebook and asked his chums to validate his marriage to the media. A lot of the people defending Tom are fellow Scientology members like Leah Remini and Jenna Elfman, but a few are people that Tom has worked with like director J.J. Abrams and Yahoo! mogul Terry Semel.

You know what would make me believe this defensive — if Katie’s parents, friends, or even Katie herself say the stories about her marriage floundering are a bunch of crap. Isn’t it strange that all the naysaying is coming from Cruise’s camp?

Here the excerpt from the article on MSN Enterntainment:

Friends and fellow Scientology members are rallying to the defense of Suri’s rumor-plagued parents in the latest issue of People, which describes their oft-mocked relationship as “shockingly normal.”

According to the mag, members of TomKat’s inner circle are utterly “mystified” by recent headlines questioning not only their commitment to one another but Holmes’ ability to roam freely (see Us Weekly’s cover story, “Her Painful Choice: No Way Out — in love with Tom, but confined by Scientology, a conflicted Katie struggles to find happiness,” and Star’s more succinct, “Divorce!”).

“We’re shocked when we read that stuff,” says Yahoo! mogul Terry Semel. “Kate is bright and has opinions.”

“When you come over, the first thing [Katie] does is say, ‘Are you hungry? Let me make you something,” minutely details Internet mogul and L. Ron Hubbard adherent Sky Dayton. “Tom and Katie will get in the kitchen and make this amazing popcorn with chocolate. Suri is there playing. Kate feeds her a bottle and then Tom feeds her.”

Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible III” director J. J. Abrams doesn’t paint the same scene of domestic bliss and “amazing” snack foods, but he, too, expresses befuddlement over the under-Tom’s-thumb tales, saying of Holmes, “She’s hardly a shrinking violet.”

Meanwhile, longtime Cruise pal Jada Pinkett Smith proclaims that the once bright-eyed starlet, who is often photographed clinging to Cruise’s back like a baby possum, is actually a force to be reckoned with.

“I think everybody has this image: Poor little Kate, she doesn’t have the strength to take care of herself,” rails Jada, who, like Semel and Dayton, uses the Cruise-shortened moniker for his missus (in other words, he took the “I” out of “Katie”). “People don’t know that behind all that grace is a tiger … People think Tom and the Church of Scientology got something on Kate? They don’t. Kate is running her own show.”

Continues Will’s more pint-sized half, “Let me tell you: Kate ain’t no little wimpy kitty cat. It’s not that ball game. For real.”

She goes on to characterize “Kate” as having both “a quiet thunder” and a “quiet power” and gushes that she’s “smart” and “a great mother,” before adding for good measure, “Tom don’t run nothin’ in that house! It is Katie’s house. It’s her world!”

Jada, who declares the TomKat clan “extremely happy,” fumes over how “people want to focus on ‘She’s tied up in the basement and he throws steaks to her at night and she gets to see Suri only on Sundays.’ It’s ridiculous.”

And because no positive Cruise and Holmes spin would be complete without a word from church member Leah Remini, she throws in her two cents on the duo’s domestic bliss (another go-to proselytizing pal, Jenna Elfman, did her part last week, telling People, “They have a great life and they love each other. For some reason, the media cannot experience that.”)

“I really don’t get it,” the “King of Queens” actress tells the magazine. “They’re married, they love each other and have a beautiful baby. They do ‘weird’ things like take care of their kid and go to baseball games.”

But Katie isn’t the only one making compromises, says Jada, who crows about Cruise’s “devotion” to his wife, “and the places he’ll go to make her happy — spiritually, where he will go as a man for his woman.”

Does anyone want to know what places Cruise would go to make his woman happy? I shudder at the thought of that.

Did anyone other than me notice that no one from Dawson’s Creek, Batman Begins, or Mad Money came to Katie’s defense? Joshua Jackson didn’t come out and say that Katie Holmes is a force to be reckon with and that she has Tom whipped, and Christian Bale didn’t read out a statement saying that he believes Katie is deliriously happy being married to Tom (although that being said, Christian Bale can read the back of a Wheaties box and I’d still be happy).

Tom Cruise needs to learn that if he is going to launch a PR defensive like he obviously has now, it would be useful to have your wife’s friends give their two cents about the state of the union for consistency. But maybe that’s the problem — he might not be happy with what they have to say about how they feel about Katie being married to him.