Indeed, the intensely private couple, who have members of their staff sign strict confidentiality agreements, have always fought for control of their image. In 1998 Cruise and Kidman won a libel suit against the British tabloid Express, which had suggested that they were gay and their marriage was a ruse. (They donated the $330,000 judgment to charity.) In 1999 they sued the U.S. tabloid the Star for claiming sex experts had to coach them in the art of lovemaking for scenes in the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, leading to a retraction and another donation to charity. Cruise addressed speculation about his marriage in an impassioned interview with Talk magazine last April. "Basically, people are saying, 'That's a lie, it's a sham,' " said the actor. "At a certain point, I said, 'Fine. Go ahead and prove it.' . . . Now I want an apology, because my kids are going to school. Prove we're liars."

The couple's Los Angeles attorney Bert Fields dismisses all such allegations as "just nuts. These are people who for 10 years were very much in love." If you had spotted them in public, you would have had to agree. In Sydney, where Cruise was shooting Mission: Impossible 2 in 1999, he and Kidman partied at the local nightclub Soho and struck club owner Andrew Lazarus as "either very much in love or terrific actors." The pair were similarly cozy on the red carpets at premieres for M:I-2 in Los Angeles and Sydney last May. Two months later they moved with the children to a luxury villa in a posh neighborhood in Madrid, where Kidman spent four months filming the supernatural thriller The Others, which Cruise coproduced. True to their commitment never to be apart for more than three weeks (though both claimed they'd never gone more than two), Cruise "left on a couple of occasions for business," says Spanish film executive Eduardo Chopero, "but always came back to the family. When they were together, there was nothing amiss between them."

Certainly the pair didn't appear estranged at a November bash at the Manhattan nightclub Float, celebrating the impending wedding of Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola and the singer Thalia. "They were all over each other," Float publicist Lori Brown, who was there, says of Cruise and Kidman. "They were dancing together and grinding up against each other. It was very much like Eyes Wide Shut. It was very sexy." Nothing unusual about that, says Australian director John Duigan (Sirens), who cast Kidman in her Down Under TV breakthrough, Vietnam, in 1985 and has remained a close friend ever since. "They were genuinely a very close couple," he says. "For the duration of their relationship they were enormously supportive of each other and remarkably happy. People will probably read into (the split) that somehow the relationship was flawed from the beginning. But people would be wrong in thinking that their parting was somehow inevitable."