Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (28 page)

If he had known that his friend had been declared a Suppressive, Haggis would have had a difficult choice to make. It was one he would face soon in any case. In 1983, Haggis’s writing partner on the TV series
Diff’rent Strokes
,
Howard Meyers, who was also a Scientologist, decided to follow a splinter group led by
David Mayo, who had been one of the highest officials in the church. Haggis told Meyers that he couldn’t work with him anymore. Because Meyers was the senior writer on the show, Haggis resigned and went looking for other work.

H
ubbard never lost his interest in being a movie director. He wrote innumerable scripts
for Scientology training films, but he still thought he could take over Hollywood. He had particularly high hopes for one script, “
Revolt in the Stars
,” that was based on one of his novels. Inspired by the thunderous success of
Star Wars
, Hubbard worked on the script in 1979 with the legendary acting teacher
Milton Katselas
with the aim of having it made into a feature film.

A journeyman theater and film director before taking over the
Beverly Hills Playhouse, Katselas had directed the 1972 film
Butterflies Are Free
, starring
Goldie Hawn and
Edward Albert (
Eileen Heckart won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role). He was a vital link to the Hollywood celebrity machine that Scientology depended upon. The list of his protégés included Al Pacino, Goldie Hawn, George C. Scott, Alec Baldwin, Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Gene Hackman, George Clooney, and many other now-familiar names. His invitation-only Saturday master class was seen by many young actors as a portal to stardom. He attained OT V status and was one of the most profitable sources of recruits for the church, receiving in return a ten percent commission on the money contributed by his students. At one point, Katselas asked if he could join the
Sea Org, but Hubbard told him it was more important to continue doing what he was doing.

When Katselas and Hubbard finished the script of “Revolt in the
Stars,” Hubbard dispatched one of his top Messengers, Elizabeth Gablehouse, to Hollywood to make a deal. After the Moroccan adventure, Hubbard had appointed her his Personal Public Relations Officer. Gablehouse came from a moneyed background, and she knew how to talk about finances. She shopped the script
around and found a buyer willing to offer $10 million—which, at the time, would have been the highest price ever paid for a script, she was told. The
Guardian’s Office became suspicious and investigated the buyers, who they learned were
Mormons. Hubbard figured that the only reason Mormons would buy it was to put it on the shelf. Gablehouse wound up being sent to the
RPF, and when she balked at that, she was demoted even further—to the RPF’s RPF, alone, in the furnace room under the parking garage of the Clearwater base. The script never did get made into a film.

Hubbard’s location was a deep secret. Scientologists who asked were told he was “over the rainbow
.” Meantime, a full-fledged movie studio, the
Cine Org, was set up in a barn at Hubbard’s
La Quinta hideaway. With his usual brio, Hubbard assumed that he was fully capable of writing, producing, and directing his own material, but his novice staff often frustrated him. He would do scenes over and over again, exhausting everyone, but he was rarely satisfied with the outcome. He walked around the set bellowing orders
through a bullhorn, sometimes right in the face of a humiliated staff member.

Hubbard was becoming increasingly cranky and confused. He slept with guards outside his door, hiding in the tamarind trees that flanked his cottage. One morning he accused the Messenger outside his door of abandoning his post. “Someone came in
and exchanged my left boot for a boot half a size smaller,” he said. “They even scuffed it up to make it look the same. Someone is trying to make me think I’m crazy.”

IN AN EFFORT
to lighten the mood, several of the crew made up a comic skit and gave a video of it to Hubbard. He was offended; he was sure they were mocking him. “He was shouting
at the TV,” one of his executives recalled. “He sent the Messengers to find the names of everyone involved.”

One of the perpetrators
of the skit was a cocky young camera operator named
David Miscavige. Only seventeen years old, Miscavige had already been marked as a rocket within the church. He spent his early years in Willingboro, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia; it was one
of the mass-produced Levittowns built in America after World War II. He and his older brother,
Ronnie, played football in a children’s league for a team called the Pennypacker Park Patriots. Despite his athleticism, David was handicapped by his diminutive size and severe bouts of asthma
, which caused numerous trips to the emergency room.

His father,
Ron Miscavige, a salesman at various times of cookware, china, insurance, and cosmetics, was the first in the family to be drawn to the work of Hubbard. Frustrated with the ineffective treatment his son was getting for his asthma, Ron took David to a
Dianetics counselor. “I experienced a miracle
,” David later declared, “and as a result I decided to devote my life to the religion.” But in fact asthma continued to afflict him, and his disease was at the center of the Miscavige family drama.

Soon Ron and his wife,
Loretta, and their four children were getting
auditing at the Scientology mission in
Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Ronnie Junior was the oldest of the children, followed by the twins, David and
Denise, and the youngest,
Laurie. In 1972, the family moved to England in order to take advanced courses at the church’s worldwide headquarters at
Saint Hill. At the age of twelve, David became one of the youngest auditors in the history of the church—“the Wonder Kid
,” he was called.

The following year, in June, Ron and Loretta had to return to the United States for a couple of weeks. They needed someone to take care of David while they and the other children were gone. There was another American studying at Saint Hill,
Ervin Scott, whose wife was also afflicted with asthma. His memory is that he agreed to let the boy stay with him. He recalls that in the first encounter David’s parents, along with his twin sister, met with him before they left. Scott immediately liked the family. The father was “wonderful and bright
,” the mother was “very beautiful, with high affinity,” and the daughter was “the cutest thing.” David, however, sat at the end of the couch, unsmiling, with his arms crossed. The family wanted to make sure that Scott knew what to do in case of an intense asthma attack. “They said, ‘We have to warn you about Dave,’ ” Scott recalled. “ ‘David has episodes, very unusual episodes.’ ” The parents explained that Dave became extremely angry when he was suffering an asthma seizure. “Then they said, starting with the husband, ‘When these episodes occur,
do not touch him!
’ The mother reiterated, ‘Yes, please don’t touch him!’ I said, ‘What happens?’ They said, ‘David gets very, very violent, and
he beats the hell out of you if you touch him.’ And the sister says, ‘Oh my God, he does beat you, really hard!’ ” Again and again, the family members emphasized that David had beaten them during an attack.

Scott glanced at David, who, he recalls, nodded in agreement. He seemed almost smug, Scott remembers thinking, “like he was arrogantly proud of kicking their ass.”

Scott was puzzled. He had never heard of asthma making a person violent. In his experience, a person in the grip of such an attack was frozen with fear. He said he would heed the warning, however.

The next morning, David moved in. Scott took him shopping and then to a pub, where he bought him a Coke. Scott also got a nonalcoholic drink. They chatted with some other Scientology auditors and David began to warm up. He seemed pleased to be around auditors, but Scott felt that there was “a certain falseness” in his behavior.

They went back to Scott’s quarters and watched television, then turned in around ten. Scott placed David in the bed by the window, which was cracked to give him some fresh air. David went right to sleep. Scott was used to the rattle of asthmatic breathing, so he soon fell asleep as well.

Scott remembers hearing a scream around one o’clock. He jumped up and turned on the light. David was leaning on the bed with one arm. His face was blue and his eyes were rolled back. Scott had never seen anything like it. He started to touch him, but drew back and performed a Scientology “assist.” He said, “That’s it, David, come up to present time,” repeating the command twice. David blinked and then jolted awake. He was still disoriented, so Scott performed another Scientology exercise, called a locational: “Look at that wall. Look at that bed.” Slowly, David began to focus. Finally he asked Scott, “Did I hit you?”

“No.”

“Whew!”

David was still groggy and quickly went back to sleep, but Scott was unsettled. He watched the boy for another hour before drifting off again himself.

In the morning, David remembered nothing of what had happened during the night. He got ready to take a shower. When he took off his pajama top, Scott did a double take. He had never seen a thirteen-year-old boy with such muscles. “This kid is built like Arnold
Schwarzenegger!” he thought. “A young, very small Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

While David was in the shower, Scott took a look at the medication on his nightstand. He remembers seeing two bottles and two inhalers. One of the inhalers was a typical over-the-counter medication, but all the others contained steroids. Scott had grown up on a farm, and he had used steroids to treat some diseases in animals, but also to build up the muscle mass in cattle. Could that have had the same effect on Miscavige? (Actually, asthma medications often use corticosteroids, which do not have the same effect as the anabolic steroids that weightlifters and athletes employ. Corticosteroids can stunt growth, however, and if Miscavige took them might have contributed to his short stature.) Scott decided to write a Knowledge Report about what he had seen, which would go to the Ethics Officer. “Here is a Scientologist, and he’s taking drugs, and he’s having these very bad episodes of asthmatic attacks, that can and should be handled by
auditing.” He also asked for David’s preclear folder, which should have a record of his previous auditing. He was told that David didn’t have a PC folder. Scott had never heard of a Scientologist without one.

Scott worked with David on some of his coursework and training drills. At times, the teenager struck him as highly intelligent, but robotic, and there were some concepts he couldn’t seem to grasp. For instance, with the most basic
E-Meter drill, which was simply to touch the meter and then let go, Scott recalls that David’s hand was shaking. “David, relax! This is just a drill,” Scott said. David settled down, and they continued the drill, but Scott was troubled. The boy was supposed to be a qualified auditor but he didn’t seem to be trained at all. According to Scott, David admitted that he had never audited anyone and that, in fact, he had never even been audited himself. “Auditing is for weaklings,” he said. In any case, he said, he was Clear from a past life. Scott wrote up another Knowledge Report.

The course supervisor was strangely impatient with Scott for taking extra time to get Dave through the drills. There was something else that was peculiar, too. A photographer kept following David around. Later, Scott learned that a Scientology magazine was preparing an article about the youngest auditor to complete an internship in the Sea Org. Scott was complicating matters by holding up David’s progress.

Scott remembers that on Monday, David audited a preclear. When
he came back to the room, he seemed agitated, and Scott asked him what was going on. “Those fucking women!
” Scott remembers David exclaiming. “There should be no women in the
Sea Org.” Scott learned that there were three women who were overseeing David’s internship at
Saint Hill. David’s attitude toward women was deeply troubling, as Scott noted in yet another Knowledge Report. So far, no one in the
Ethics Office had responded.

That changed a few days later. Scott was called into the Ethics Office and told that David had complained that Scott was enturbulating, or upsetting, him and causing problems because of the abundant reports he was writing. “This kid is an SP,” Scott warned, “and you better handle him.” Then he opened the door to leave. David was standing just outside. His reaction told Scott that he had overheard him calling him a Suppressive Person. “He went into total fear,” Scott said. That very day, David was moved into another room, and his parents soon returned from the United States. But David avoided Scott whenever they passed each other.

In August, Scott was sitting out in the yard across from the castle and the auditing rooms on the Saint Hill grounds. He was talking to a friend of his, a Norwegian nurse. Suddenly they heard a young woman wailing. Scott remembers looking up and seeing David, his face red and the veins visible in his forehead. He had a preclear folder under his arm. Behind him was the crying girl, who was holding her side in apparent pain. According to Scott the nurse exclaimed, “He beat up his PC!”