Vanity Fair Exclusive: Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise Talk About Baby Suri; 22-Page Family Portfolio by Annie Leibovitz

NEW YORK, N.Y.—In a private conversation with Vanity Fair features editor Jane Sarkin, Katie Holmes tells her that “it’s been heartbreaking” to see what’s being said in the press about her family and her baby. “Some of the crap that’s out there—the stuff that’s said about my parents and my siblings [tabloid accounts implied that Katie’s family did not hit it off with Tom]—it’s really frustrating the amount of shit that’s out there. And the stuff they say about Suri?! You shouldn’t say that about us, and you can’t say that about my child.”

Holmes explains that the gossip “eats away at me because it’s just not O.K.,” but that she keeps up on it because “this is my future. This is my family, and I care so much about them. To see how someone as caring and good as Tom is—to see how things can just get so twisted and turned around. I mean, where does it come from?”

Sarkin spent five days with the Cruise-Holmes extended family at Cruise’s Telluride, Colorado, compound, sharing meals, taking hikes, and hanging out. Bella and Connor, whom Cruise and Nicole Kidman adopted during their marriage, were there, as well as Holmes’s mother and father, Cruise’s mother and sister, and other family members.

Sarkin reports that Cruise and Holmes coo over the baby like any new parents. “She has Kate’s lips and eyes,” Tom says of the baby. “I think she looks like Kate.” Holmes counters, “I think she has Tom’s eyes. I think she looks like Tom.”

“I was overjoyed in being pregnant,” Holmes tells Sarkin, “and then had to withstand ridicule about my pregnancy when it was the most normal, non-controversial thing imaginable.” Of speculation in the press, Holmes says, “All those things were invented.”

Holmes explains their purchase of an in-house sonogram machine to Sarkin, saying that they were followed by paparazzi and as a result her doctor had to make house calls. “The sonogram was for his use!” she says.

Leading up to the frenzy over the pictures, “we were just living our lives, being a family,” Cruise says. “Actually, we were taking our own photos and always planned to release those at the right time.” But “then all the craziness began,” Holmes says. “This ‘Where is Suri?’ controversy. Tom and I looked at each other and said, ‘What’s going on?’ We weren’t trying to hide anything.”

“It seemed only natural to have Annie take the first public photographs of Suri,” says Cruise of their decision to allow Leibovitz to photograph the baby. “Annie is the only professional photographer who ever shot Bella and Connor as children.”

“The moment the doctor handed me Suri,” Holmes tells Sarkin, “I was just ready. The feeling is indescribable. All I can say is the moment I looked in her eyes I felt like … Mom.” Holmes continues: “She’s a glorious girl. She’s the miracle of our life.”

The October issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on September 6, and nationally by September 12. (Vanity Fair)

Katie Couric also showed some of the pics of Suri made by Annie Leibovitz during her first night as anchor of CBS Evening News:

There are 22 pages of photos inside Vanity Fair, so go check it out!