Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (36 page)

Headley had no idea what he meant.

“Never had bee pollen?” Cruise said excitedly. “Oh, that will do the trick for sure.”

He led Headley to his Yamaha motorcycle and rode the two of them to the base canteen. It was dinnertime, and the canteen was filled with Headley’s gawking co-workers. Headley was surprised to learn that there was bee pollen for sale, although he says Cruise didn’t pay for it; he just grabbed it and they went back to the conference room. This time, Headley passed the metabolism test, although he privately credited the Danish over the bee pollen.

According to Headley, Cruise helped him through the
Upper Indoctrination Training Routines. “Look at the wall
,” Cruise would have said, according to Hubbard’s specifications. “Thank you. Walk over to the wall. Thank you. Touch the wall. Thank you.” The purpose of this exercise, according to Hubbard, is to “assert control over the preclear and increase the preclear’s havingness.” Cruise went on to ask Headley to make an object, such as a desk, hold still, or become more solid. Another exercise involved telling an ashtray to stand up, at which point the preclear stands and lifts the ashtray, thanks the ashtray, and then commands the ashtray to sit down. With each repetition, the preclear’s commands get louder, so soon he is yelling at the ashtray at the top of
his voice. The purpose of this drill is to come to the realization that your intention is separate from your words and the sound waves that carry them. These procedures went on for hours, as Headley robotically responded to Cruise’s commands. “You learn that if you don’t do what they say, they’ll just ask the same questions five million times,” Headley recalled. At one point, he fell asleep, but he kept responding automatically. This training went on for hours every day for several weeks, until Tom and Nicole returned to Hollywood.

When Nicole moved into Tom’s mansion in Pacific Palisades, they were under constant watch.
Miscavige’s wife,
Shelly, interviewed
Scientology candidates for Tom and Nicole’s household staff. According to former executives, the Scientologists who worked for Cruise and Kidman reported to the church about whatever they observed. Miscavige offered the couple
significant gifts of service from Sea Org members. They installed a sophisticated audiovisual system.
Sinar Parman, the chef, says he helped design the kitchen
. There was a comfortable, symbiotic relationship between the star and the church. The use of unpaid church clergy to help him renovate his house, hire his staff, and install sophisticated technology was simply a part of the deal.
⁵

PAUL HAGGIS WAS ALWAYS
a workaholic, and as his career took off, he spent even less time with his family. He wouldn’t get home till late at night or early in the morning. His three daughters scarcely knew who he was.

In general, Haggis was far more interested in causes than people. He drove an environmentally friendly car—a little yellow Mini Cooper with a
WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER
bumper sticker. The Haggis house became a regular stop for the social-justice sector of the Hollywood left. Once when Haggis threw a fund-raiser for Tibet, the
Dalai Lama came. The backyard was strewn with celebrities and chanting monks. The girls thought it was hysterical.
Barbra Streisand introduced herself to the Dalai Lama, and he asked what she did. “A little singing
, a little dancing,” she told him.

For years, Paul and Diane’s marriage had been in turmoil, and in 1983 they began an epic and bitter divorce. The proceedings lasted for
nine years. The girls lived with Diane, visiting Paul every other weekend. During this period of estrangement from his wife, Haggis flew to New York with a casting director, who was also a Scientologist. They shared a kiss. He later confessed the incident during an auditing session and was sent to the
Ethics Office, where he was assigned some minor punishment. He had been to Ethics before, usually for missing coursework, but he was beginning to feel that the more famous he became, the less likely he was to be rebuked for behavior that was considered “out ethics” for other members.

Anytime Haggis boggled at an illogical or fanciful piece of data, he was invariably reminded that it was his failure entirely. He had come into Scientology as an adult, so his experience outside the church still informed his judgments. When he stumbled on something in Scientology that he thought was ridiculous, he would make a mental detour around it, not wanting to spend the time and money to do the “repairs” that his supervisors would prescribe. Although he never lost his skepticism, his daughters were born into the religion. They were schooled in it from the beginning. Nearly everyone they knew
was a Scientologist.

Each of the girls was a near clone of one of the parents.
Alissa and
Katy were Paul, pale and blond, but more sharp-featured, with dimpled noses and sculpted cheekbones.
Lauren, the middle daughter, was Diane, inheriting her half-Greek mother’s olive skin and dark, Mediterranean eyes. The girls were bright, inquisitive, and cheerful by nature, but their parents’ divorce was an endless, churning, distracting, heartbreaking trauma, and it took a toll.

The girls went to
Delphi Academy, a private school that uses Hubbard “study tech
.” It is largely self-guided. According to Scientology
pedagogy, there are three barriers that retard a student’s progress. The first is “
Lack of Mass.” This principle was derived from
Alfred Korzybski’s observation that the word and the object that it names are not the same thing. If the student is studying tractors, for instance, it is best to have a real tractor in front of him. The absence of the actual object is disorienting to the student. “It makes him feel physiologically condensed,” Hubbard writes. “Actually makes him feel squashed. Makes him feel bent, sort of spinny, sort of dead, bored, exasperated.” Photographs of the object can help, or motion pictures, as they are “a sort of promise of hope of the mass,” but they are not an adequate substitute for the tractor under study. The result for the student is that
he becomes dizzy, he’ll have headaches, his stomach gets upset, his eyes will hurt, and “he’s going to wind up with a face that feels squashed.” Illness and even suicide may be the expected result. Hubbard’s study tech remedies the problem by using clay or Play-Doh for the student to make replicas of the object.

The second principle is “
Too Steep a Gradient
,” which Hubbard describes as the difficulty a student encounters when he makes a leap he’s not prepared for. “It is a sort of a confusion or a reelingness that goes with this one,” Hubbard writes. His solution is to go back to the point where the student fully understands the subject, then break the material into bite-size pieces.

The “
Undefined Word
”—the third and most important principle—occurs when the student tries to absorb material while bypassing the definition of the words employed. “THE ONLY REASON A PERSON GIVES UP A STUDY OR BECOMES CONFUSED OR UNABLE TO LEARN IS BECAUSE HE HAS GONE PAST A WORD THAT WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD,” Hubbard emphasizes in one of his chiding technical bulletins. “WORDS SOMETIMES HAVE DIFFERENT OR MORE THAN ONE MEANING.” A misunderstood word “gives one a distinctly blank feeling
or a washed out feeling,” Hubbard writes. “A not-there feeling and a sort of an hysteria will follow in the back of that.” The solution is to have a large dictionary at hand, preferably one with lots of pictures in it. All Scientology texts contain glossaries for specialized Scientology terms. The need to understand the meaning of words, Hubbard writes, “is a sweepingly fantastic discovery in the field of education and don’t neglect it.”

These last two principles are fundamental to the induction of Scientology itself. Because the church asserts that everything Hubbard wrote or spoke is inarguably true, whatever you don’t understand or accept is your fault. The solution is to go back and study the words and approach the material in a more deliberate fashion. Eventually, you’ll get it. Then you can move on.

Lauren loved her teacher at Delphi, but the Hubbard method placed the responsibility of learning almost entirely on the student. For Lauren, her parents’ tumultuous divorce was a crushing distraction. It seemed to her that no one was paying attention to her, either at home or at school. She was illiterate until she was eleven. She couldn’t read or write her own name.

Second-generation Scientologists are typically far more at home with the language and culture of the church than their parents are. And yet they may find themselves a little lost when trying to deal with an uncomprehending society. The first time
Alissa noticed that she was doing something different from most people was when she performed a
Contact Assist. Scientology preaches that if you repeatedly touch a fresh wound to the object that caused the injury and silently concentrate, the pain lessens and the sense of trauma fades. If a Scientologist sees a person close his hand in a door, for instance, a church manual instructs the Scientologist to “have him go back
and, with his injured hand, touch the
exact spot
on the
same
door, duplicating the same motions that occurred at the time of the injury.” There are other kinds of assists that will awaken an unconscious person, eliminate boils, reduce earaches and back pain, and make a drunk sober. Instead of crying when she hurt herself, Alissa would quietly redo the action over and over, until she had drained it of its sting. She noticed that non-Scientologists had no idea what she was doing. She was also surprised when she went to a friend’s house for dinner and the family said grace before the meal. It took her a second to realize what they were doing. In her opinion, God plays a negligible role in Scientology. “I mean, there’s a spot for it, but it’s sort of a blank spot.” So whenever her friends began to pray, “I would bow my head and let them have their ceremony.”

Paul was also scarred by the divorce—although, as would often be the case for him, he would mine the experience for his work. He created a television series,
Family Law
, that was based to some extent on his divorce from Diane. He always found more solace and meaning in his work than he did in his family. Each year he grew more successful, but the gap between him and his daughters grew wider. They knew him better as a writer than as a father, and they would puzzle over the fact that he was so cool to them, when his scripts were often full of emotion. Paul felt guilty about not spending time with the girls, so he would arrange to bring them to the set and assign them some small task. Alissa got to do nearly every job in the industry, from wardrobe to production assistant; she received a Directors Guild card in Canada by the time she was fifteen.

In 1991, Haggis went to a Fourth of July party at the home of some Scientologist friends. He met a striking actress there named
Deborah Rennard. She had grown up in Scientology. In her early twenties she had studied acting at the
Beverly Hills Playhouse and had fallen under the influence of Milton Katselas, the legendary acting teacher and Hubbard’s former collaborator. They became lovers. Milton was spellbinding, but he was twenty-seven years older than Deborah, and their relationship was an exhausting roller-coaster ride. They stayed together for six years. When Paul met her, Deborah and Milton had recently broken up. She was a successful actress with a recurring role in the long-running television series
Dallas
—as J. R. Ewing’s loyal but always unattainable secretary.

Deborah Rennard and
Milton Katselas in Silverlake, California, 1985

Paul was still going through his epic divorce. Early in his relationship with Deborah, Paul admitted that he was having a spiritual crisis. He said he’d raced up to the top of the Bridge on faith, but he hadn’t gotten what he expected. “I don’t believe I’m a spiritual being. I actually am what you see,” Paul told her. Deborah advised him to get more auditing. Personally, she was having breakthroughs that led her to discover
past lives. Images floated through her mind, and she realized, “That’s not here. I’m not in my body, I’m in another place.” She might be confronting what the church calls a
“contra-survival action”—“like
the time I clobbered Paul or threw something at him.” She would look for an “earlier similar” in her life. Suddenly she would see herself in England in the nineteenth century. “It was a fleeting glimpse at what I was doing then. Clobbering husbands.” When she examined these kindred moments in her current existence and past ones, the emotional charge would dissipate. Paul would say, “Don’t you think you’re making this up?” At first, she thought he might be right. But then she wondered if that really mattered. She felt she was getting better, so who cared whether they were memories or fantasies? As an actor she went through an analogous process when working on a scene; she would grab hold of a feeling from who knows where. It felt real. It helped her get into the role. As long as the process worked, why quibble?

Deborah made sure Paul showed up at the annual gala and became involved in Scientology charitable organizations. Over the years,
Haggis spent about $100,000 on courses and auditing and an equal amount on various Scientology initiatives. This figure doesn’t include the money that Diane gave to the church while she was married to Paul. Haggis also gave $250,000 to the
International Association of Scientologists, a fund set up to protect and promote the church. Deborah spent about $150,000 on coursework of her own. Paul and Deborah held a fund-raiser in their home that raised $200,000 for a new Scientology building in Nashville, and they contributed an additional $10,000 from their own pocket. The demands for money—“
regging,” it’s called in Scientology, because the calls come from the Registrar’s Office—never stopped. Paul gave them money just to keep them from calling.