Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (24 page)

One of the most famous preachers in American history,
Aimee Semple McPherson, built the
Angelus Temple near Echo Park in 1923,
where she married Pentecostalism with
Hollywood theatricality. She created sets for her sermons on a stage designed for her by
Charlie Chaplin
, who may have been one of her secret Hollywood paramours (
Milton Berle
claimed to be another). Anticipating the garb of Hubbard and the Sea Org, McPherson liked to dress in an admiral’s uniform, while her disciples wore nautical outfits
. As a teenager,
Anthony Quinn played the saxophone in the church and translated for Sister Aimee when she preached in Mexican neighborhoods. After he became a movie star, Quinn would compare her to the great actresses he worked with, including
Ingrid Bergman and
Katharine Hepburn. “They all fell short
of that first electric shock Aimee Semple McPherson produced in me.”

And so when the Church of Scientology was officially founded in Los Angeles, in February 1954, by several of Hubbard’s devoted followers, there was already a history of religious celebrities and
celebrity religions. The cultivation of famous people—or people who aspired to be famous—was a feature of Hubbard’s grand design. He foresaw that the best way of promoting Scientology as a ladder to enlightenment was to court celebrities, whom he defined as “any person important enough
in his field or an opinion leader or his entourage, business associates, family or friends with particular attention to the arts, sports and management and government.” It was not surprising that Hubbard would hire as his personal assistant
Richard de Mille, son of the legendary producer and director
Cecil B. DeMille, who had started
Paramount Pictures and was in some ways responsible for the creation of Hollywood itself.

In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an editorial in
Ability
, a publication affiliated with the church, urged Scientologists to recruit celebrities. A long list of desirable prospects followed, including Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Jackie Gleason, John Ford, Bob Hope, and Howard Hughes. “If you want one
of these celebrities as your game, write us at once so the notable will be yours to hunt without interference,” the editorial promised. “If you bring one of them home you will get a small plaque as your reward.” Author
William Burroughs and actor
Stephen Boyd were drawn into the church in its early days. Scientology was a religion rather perfectly calibrated for its time and place, since American culture, and soon the rest of the world, was bending increasingly toward the worship of celebrity, with Hollywood as its chief shrine. At the end of the sixties, the church established
its first
Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) The object was to “make celebrities even better known
and to help their careers with Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. “By accomplishing this Major Target I know that Celebrity Centres can take over the whole acting-artists world.”

Hubbard was particularly interested in stars whose careers had crested but still had enough luster that they could be rehabilitated and made into icons of Scientology. The prototype was Gloria Swanson, one of the greatest stars of the silent movie era, who personified the lavish glamour of that era. Although she never regained the international fame she had known before the talkies, she continued acting on television and in occasional movies—most memorably, as Norma Desmond in the 1950 classic
Sunset Boulevard
. Hubbard’s top auditor,
Peggy Conway, a South African entertainer, ardently cultivated Swanson, calling her “My Adorable Glory,” in her many letters to the star, although she saves her highest praise for Hubbard, who was also her auditor: “The Master did his Sunday best
on me,” she wrote Swanson in 1956. “He never went to bed—we talked the clock around—day after day—night after night—I was six thousand light years above Arcturus—what a genius is our Great Red Father!”

A constant stream of aspiring young actors, writers, and directors came to Hollywood with common dreams, trying to leverage whatever ability or looks they might have in a market already overwhelmed by beautiful and talented and chronically unemployed young people. Many of them were rather poorly educated—they had left school to gamble on stardom—but they were smart, talented, and desperately ambitious. Scientology promised these neophytes an entry into the gated community of celebrity. The church claimed to have a method for getting ahead; just as enticing was the whispered assertion that a network of Scientologists existed at the upper levels of the entertainment industry eager to advance like-minded believers—a claim that never had much to support it, but was not entirely untrue. Scientology was a small but growing subculture in the Hollywood studios.

Kirstie Alley was an aspiring actress from Wichita who left the University of Kansas in her sophomore year, then struggled with an addiction to cocaine. She says that a single auditing session cured her habit. “Without Scientology, I would
be dead,” she declared. The testimonials of such celebrities would lead many curious seekers to follow
their example. Posters with the faces of television and movie stars were placed outside Scientology churches and missions, saying, “I AM A SCIENTOLOGIST
…COME IN AND FIND OUT WHY.” In the Hollywood trade magazine
Variety
, Scientology offered courses promising to help neophyte actors “increase your self-confidence
” and “make it in the industry
.” Scientologists stood outside
Central Casting, where actors sign up for roles as extras, passing out flyers for workshops on how to find an agent or get into the
Screen Actors Guild. Courses at the Celebrity Centre focused on communication and self-presentation skills, which were especially prized in the entertainment industry. The drills and training routines would have felt somewhat familiar to anyone who had done scene work in an acting class. Many actors, at once insecure but competitive by nature, were looking for an advantage, which Scientology promised to give them. The fact that anyone was interested in them at all must have come as a welcome surprise.

Others who passed through Scientology at the same time as
Paul Haggis were actors
Tom Berenger, Christopher Reeve, and
Anne Francis; and musicians
Lou Rawls,
Leonard Cohen,
Sonny Bono, and
Gordon Lightfoot. None stayed long.
Jerry Seinfeld
took a communication course, which he still credits with helping him as a comedian. Elvis Presley
bought some books as well as some services he never actually availed himself of.
Rock Hudson
visited the Celebrity Centre but stormed out when his auditor had the nerve to tell him he couldn’t leave until he finished with his session, although the matinee idol had run out of time on his parking meter. The exemplary figure that Hubbard sought eluded capture.

VERY EARLY ONE MORNING
in July 1977, the
FBI, having been tipped off about
Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents
. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout
.” It concerned the treatment of
Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology,
The Scandal of Scientology,
six years earlier.

After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her
sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain.

The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the
International Herald Tribune
about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.”

One of the doors
the federal agents opened during the raid in Los Angeles led to the darkened basement of the old
Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on Fountain Avenue, newly christened as Scientology’s
Advanced Org building. There were no lights, so the heavily armed agents made their way down the stairs with flashlights. They found a warren of small cubicles, each occupied by half a dozen people dressed in black boiler suits and wearing filthy rags around their arms to indicate their degraded status. Altogether, about 120
people were huddled in the pitch-black basement, serving time in the
Rehabilitation Project Force. The ranks of the RPF had expanded along with the church’s need for cheap labor to renovate its recently purchased buildings in Hollywood. The federal agents had no idea what they were seeing. Within moments, a representative of the church’s
Guardian’s Office arrived and began shouting at the agents that they were exceeding the limits of their search warrants. Seeing that the
Sea Org members posed no threat to them, the agents shrugged and moved on.

It is instructive to realize that none of the Sea Org members consigned to the RPF dungeon took the opportunity to escape. If the FBI had bothered to interrogate them, it’s unlikely that any of them would have said that they were there against their will. Most of them believed that they were there by mistake, or that they deserved their punishment and would benefit by the work and study they were prescribed. Even those who had been physically forced into the RPF were not inclined to leave. Despite federal laws against
human trafficking and unlawful imprisonment, the FBI never opened the door on the RPF again.

Jesse Prince, one of the very few black members of the Sea Org, was among those being punished. He had been attracted to Scientology by the beautiful girls and the promise of superhuman powers. He recalls being told he would learn to levitate, travel through time, control
the thoughts of others, and have total command over the material universe. In 1976, when he signed up for the Sea Org, Scientology had just purchased the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, part of the
real-estate empire that the church was acquiring in Hollywood, along with the
Château Élysée and the old
Wilcox Hotel, which functioned as Sea Org berthing. The hospital was a mess; there were leftover medical devices and body parts in laboratory jars; there was even a corpse in the basement morgue. The Sea Org crew slaved to convert the hospital into a dormitory and offices. One night Prince was awakened after an hour of sleep and ordered to report to a superior, who chewed him out for slacking off. Prince had had enough. “Fuck you
, I’m outta here,” he said. His superior told him he wasn’t going anywhere. “He snapped his fingers and six people came and put me in a room,” Prince recalled. “I was literally incarcerated.” It was March 1977. Prince was placed in the RPF with two hundred other Sea Org members, doing heavy labor and studying Hubbard’s spiritual technology. He would be held there for eighteen months. “They told me the only way to get out is to learn this tech to a ‘T’ and then be able to apply it.”

The question posed by Prince’s experience in the RPF is whether or not he was
brainwashed. It is a charge often leveled at Scientologists, although social scientists have long been at war with each other over whether such a phenomenon is even possible. The decade of the 1950s, when Scientology was born, was a time of extreme concern—even hysteria—about mind control.
Robert Jay Lifton, a young American psychiatrist, began studying victims of what
Chinese Communists called “thought reform,” which they were carrying out in prisons and revolutionary universities during the Maoist era; it was one of the greatest efforts to manipulate human behavior ever attempted. In 1949, a number of Americans and Europeans who had been imprisoned during the Maoist revolution emerged from their cells apparently converted to Communism. Then, during the
Korean War, several
United Nations soldiers captured by Chinese troops defected to the enemy. Some American soldiers among them went on camera to denounce capitalism and imperialism with apparent sincerity. It was a stunning ideological betrayal. To explain this phenomenon, an American journalist and CIA operative,
Edward Hunter, coined the term “brainwashing.” Hunter described robotic agents with glassy eyes, like zombies or the products of demon possession. A popular novel,
The Manchurian Candidate
, published in 1959, and a film of the same
name that came out three years later, capitalized on this conception of brainwashing as being the total surrender of free will through coercive forms of persuasion.

Lifton’s early work on
thought reform has become the basis for much of the scholarship on the subject since then. Lifton defined thought reform as having two basic elements:
confession
, which is the renunciation of past “evil,” and
re-education
, which in
China meant refashioning an individual in the Communist image. “Behind ideological totalism
lies the ever-present human quest for the omnipotent guide—for the supernatural force, political party, philosophical ideas, great leader, or precise science—that will bring ultimate solidarity to all men and eliminate the terror of death and nothingness,” Lifton observes. In facing the commonplace charge that psychiatry, or the Marines, or Catholic schools all engage in forms of brainwashing, Lifton developed a set of criteria to identify a totalistic environment, and contrasted these with more-open approaches to reshaping human behavior.

The totalist paradigm begins with shutting off the individual’s access to the outside world, so that his perceptions of reality can be manipulated without interference. The goal at this stage is to provoke expectable patterns of behavior that will appear to arise spontaneously, adding to the impression of omniscience on the part of the controlling group. Those who are involved in the manipulation are guided by a sense of higher purpose that permits them—actually, compels them—to set aside ordinary feelings of human decency in order to accomplish their great mission. Those who are being manipulated may come to endorse the goals and means of the group—as Prince did—or simply abandon the will to resist. In either case, the individual is robbed of the chance for independent action or self-expression.