A few months ago, when we were in the thick of the War Of The Worlds-based Tom Cruise media feeding frenzy, I implored someone near Cruise -- and I didn't especially care who -- to shut him up. Since then, he more or less has shut up, for which I'm naturally grateful. But that doesn't mean I'm not still curious about the true story of how he and his fiancée Katie Holmes "met," "fell" in "love," and now "got" her pregnant; I just don't want to hear that story from him, because I find him, perhaps, something of an unreliable narrator, even of the events of his own life.

Of course, I have my own theories as to how this union came to be, what is required to keep it going, and what strategy lies behind the pace with which actual, factual information about the couple gets doled out to us -- like, for instance, a cynic might observe that the timing of the announcement of Holmes's pregnancy dovetailed nicely with the DVD release of her last movie, Batman Begins. But since I'm not interested in getting sued, I'll keep those theories to myself and look, instead, to the accounts of TomKat recently published in the legitimate press: "Baby On The Way" (People, October 24, 2005) and "How Tom Changed Katie" (Us Weekly, November 7, 2005).

Obviously, the People story -- even if the couple didn't officially sign off on it -- advances the public story we've been told, straight from the dek: "Barely six months into their romance, the ecstatic couple reveal they're expecting their first child. And Katie's bump is already showing." Hooray! What better time to bring an innocent child into the mix than when a couple has known each other long enough to have each probably had their teeth professionally cleaned at least once? People is careful to tell us that the timeline totally, totally works out: the estimate is that she was six months pregnant by the time the bump (ugh) made its first public appearance on October 1, which would mean that...when they were all schmoopy in Venice on April 29, roughly five months earlier, they...you...well, medicine's not an exact science! You don't know the history of obstetrics -- Tom Cruise does!

All the friends and associates People found to comment on both sides of the couple are delighted: "He's already an enthusiastic guy, so you can imagine how happy he was" (Cameron Crowe); "She wouldn't be having a baby if she wasn't ready" (Oliver Hudson). Even when there's an undercurrent of dismay or confusion on the Holmes's side of the aisle, they still stick to their talking points: "She found her happiness" ("A friend from Holmes's Before Cruise era, [who] wishes her well while lamenting that the actress has fallen out of contact with many of their old circle since leaving her New York City apartment for Cruise's L.A. home"); "She always seemed to have her act together, and getting married first [before getting knockd up] would be part of the plan" (Jessica Drouillard, a high-school classmate); Holmes's parents are "supportive...They have to give way to the privacy of Tom and Katie and let them proceed at their own pace" (a friend of the Holmes family). Brainwashed with an e-meter? Dragooned into acting as an incubator for Tom's swimming thetans? Heavens, no! And when the magazine included a box to publish the reaction of Holmes's ex (of only about eight months, mind you) Chris Klein -- for the record, they no longer speak -- they managed to find the grimmest photo possible, in which he's squinting at the camera in front of a chain-link fence, like a coke dealer at a schoolyard. She's well shut of him!

People even manages not to express any skepticism at the "silent birth" method Scientologist mothers are encouraged to practise, "which calls for maximum quiet at the delivery." In describing it, the magazine cites Scientologists Leah Remini and Kelly Preston, as well as Greg LaClaire, "an executive at the church." What about seeking comment from an OB/GYN -- hell, even one non-Scientologist mother -- about the advisability of having a woman in labour splitting her focus between delivering her baby and trying to keep her voice down? It's one thing for the body of the story to be unwaveringly positive about the pregnancy; after all, if it were pretty much any other couple, celebrity or no, the reader wouldn't expect the tone of a story called "Baby On The Way" to advance a con position to balance all the pro. But not to offer a dissenting opinion about an unusual and restrictive method of performing a medical procedure just goes to prove how totally normal it is -- and what a normal young couple TomKat will be, too, if they try it!

Us Weekly tells a very different story: "As Cruise and Holmes share their baby joy with the world, mysteries about their romance remain." Oooooh, scaaaaary! And just in time for Hallowe'en! Now, don't get me wrong -- I realize that any gossip magazine is generally a tissue of lies. (Not that I'm saying Us Weekly even is a gossip magazine: don't sue me!) But one thing this article does that I love, and that is so appropriate and necessary in a contemporary story about Katie Holmes, is use her own words against her. "[Y]ou can forgive the bride-to-be if she seems at a loss for words. 'I'm so happy,' she told NBC's Maria Menounos...'It's...it's...it's a dream come true." The magazine asks, "Does she sound a little too scripted in interviews?" The answer, as we all know: GOD, YES. In the aforementioned Menounos interview, "she mentioned how 'excited' she was about her pregnancy on four separate occasions." "Image expert" Michael Levine comments, "I don't mean to be unkind, but she sounds kind of robotic and zombified...Each time she says exciting, it becomes more painful. It's like a Saturday Night Live parody." Actually, though, we object to one part of Levine's testimony: "kind of"? As for Holmes's limited vocabulary, though, there is another explanation for her insisting upon how "exciting" and "amazing" everything is apart from the likelihood that someone's making her stay "on message": she might just be dumb.

Us also addresses the "how far along" question, putting Holmes's pregnancy at five months, which would mean that she was about one month gone when Cruise proposed (that accelerated relationship pace worked out great for women in the '50s!), and that she'll deliver in March 2006, about a year after breaking up with Klein (but it's not like she'd need all that much time to get over her multiple-year relationship with him -- I think I saw in People that he deals coke in schoolyards!).

Us also hints around at the question I most want answered: how do Holmes's parents feel about...all of this?

Awkward in-law alert! It seems Holmes's star turn is not sitting so well with her Toledo, Ohio-based parents, Martin and Kathy Holmes. "She is not the Katie Holmes they know and love," says a source close to the actress. "She is Kate Cruise, this other person altogether. Of course they wish her and Tom well -- they love her -- but they're confused by her new life." (Cruise's rep [his sister, let us not forget] insists such accounts are "completely untrue!") Still, they gave the union their blessing. "We're happy and excited," her father, an attorney, has said. "Tom is a humanitarian, and we feel good about that."

People and Us Weekly are offering us two versions of the same story -- the former telling us the party line the couple (or the older, maler half of it, at least) wants us to believe, the latter the account we not-so-secretly want to hear. (When the best you can say about your future son-in-law is that he's "a humanitarian," things are pretty rough; I can't wait until Martin Holmes is quoted in Star as saying something like, "It's not as though she's marrying Dr. Mengele!") But in the celebrity era we live in now, we can't even say that the truth is somewhere in between; with the kind of privilege and power that allows even D-list stars to get acquitted on murder charges, there's no way we plebes can possibly fathom the sort of bizarre practices the famous can pay to have hushed up. (Has anyone yet accounted for that missing half-month between when Holmes met Cruise and when they showed up in Venice as a surprise couple?) In this case, Us teases with the possibility that my dearest hope will come true -- that Mr. and Mrs. Holmes will eventually go on the record as saying they think their child has been altered somehow and that they blame her fiancé, and finally Cruise will have been served by someone he can't sue into submission, because how would it look if he brought the parents of his supposed beloved to court and told America they were a couple of liars?

I mean, I'm not saying that is what happened to Holmes, or what her parents think. But imagining that as their shared subtext makes both of these cover stories a lot more interesting.