Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (44 page)

Such stories became a part of the Katselas legend. He was an OT V and a very public Scientologist, but he had stopped moving up the Bridge, in part because he refused to travel to Flag, where the upper-level courses were offered. Moreover, he had gotten into Ethics trouble because of his behavior with some of his female students.
Jenna Elfman was a leader of the revolt against Katselas. She had been one of his prize students, winning a Golden Globe Award in 1999 for her free-spirited performance in the sitcom
Dharma & Greg
. Allen Barton,
who had become a teacher at the Playhouse, wrote Elfman a letter in June 2004, begging her to relent. He called the movement against Katselas “Scientological McCarthyism
,” harking back to the blacklisting of Hollywood celebrities in the 1950s because of their supposed Communist sympathies. “As Scientologists, are we now a group that blacklists, that casts aside friendships and alliances on the basis of how fast someone is moving up the Bridge?” he wrote. “If we as a group are going to take on the billions of wogs out in the world, how can we disconnect from each other?” Elfman never responded.

After Cruise rallied the
Scientology celebrities, a group of students demanded that Katselas make the Playhouse a “WISE” business. The acronym stands for
World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. Katselas refused
, even though he lost a hundred students in a mass Scientology walkout. Many of them went to another school, the
Acting Center, which was founded in 2006, based in part on Scientology techniques. Katselas died of heart failure in 2008, and the Beverly Hills Playhouse is no longer connected with the church. The long line of protégés that Katselas left behind cemented the association between the church and the Hollywood acting community, but in the end he was ostracized by the very people whose careers he had nurtured.

Tom Cruise was now considered the unofficial Ethics Officer of Hollywood. He was the embodiment of Hubbard’s vision of a church with temples dedicated to celebrity rather than God. Cruise’s intensity and commitment, along with his spectacular ambition, matched
Miscavige’s own. It was as if Miscavige had rubbed a magic lantern and Cruise had appeared, a genie who could open any door. He was one of the few people that Miscavige saw as a peer. Miscavige even wondered
if there was some way to appoint Cruise the church’s Inspector General for Ethics—
Rathbun’s job. “He’d say that Tom Cruise
was the only person in Scientology, other than himself, that he would trust to run the church,” one former Sea Org member recalled. Rathbun observed: “Miscavige convinced Cruise
that he and Tom were two of only a handful of truly ‘big beings’ on the planet. He instructed Cruise that LRH was relying upon them to unite with the few others of their ilk on earth to make it onto ‘
Target Two’—some unspecified galactic locale where they would meet up with Hubbard in the afterlife.”

HAGGIS HAD ALSO BEEN
folded into the celebrity recruitment apparatus. He had put his money and his reputation in the hands of the church. He, too, was serving Scientology. But he rarely spoke about his affiliation to his employees or associates. Even his close friends were surprised to learn that he was in the church. “He didn’t have
that sort of straight-on, unambiguous, unambivalent view that so many Scientologists project into the world,”
Marshall Herskovitz observed.

For years, Herskovitz and several of Haggis’s closest non-Scientology friends participated in an irregular Friday get-together called Boys’ Night. They met at an Italian restaurant on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. The actor
Josh Brolin usually attended, along with director
Oliver Stone, producer
Stephen Nathan, and a peace activist and former priest named
Blase Bonpane, among others. One night an attractive
New York Times
reporter came to write about the event, and the men decided that she made them all a lot more appealing than they were on other occasions. After that, they voted to invite one woman to join them whenever they met. Usually, it’s a beautiful actress.
Julie Delpy and
Charlize Theron have both been accorded this honor. Madeleine Stowe recalled it as the funniest evening she had ever had, although she had the sense to bring her husband along. She remembered Haggis sitting back, wisecracking, smoking a cigarette, watching it all happen.

Although Brolin, Nathan, and Stone are three of Haggis’s closest male friends, they never talked to him about Scientology. And yet each of the three had an experience in the church, which the others weren’t aware of. Steve Nathan had been hooked up to an E-Meter in the late 1960s by some British Scientologists who were looking for recruits, but he hadn’t been impressed. Oliver Stone didn’t even know Haggis was in Scientology. But for that matter, few knew that Stone had also spent a month in the church. He was a young man just back from Vietnam, full of trouble and questions. He signed up at the church’s New York center in the old Hotel Martinique. “It was like going to college and reading Dale Carnegie, something you do to find yourself.” The difference was that in Scientology there were nice parties and beautiful girls. Scientology didn’t answer his questions; but on the other hand, he noted, “I got laid.”

Brolin had known Haggis for many years. They had worked together in television, and Brolin had helped with Haggis’s charities.
Brolin and his wife, actress
Diane Lane, shared a house in Italy during the summers with Paul and
Deborah. One evening, lubricated with grappa, Brolin began recounting a story of a friend who had “infiltrated” Scientology. He wondered why Paul and Deborah were listening stony-faced. When he finished the tale, Deborah finally said, “You know, we’re Scientologists.”

“What?” Brolin exclaimed. “When the fuck did that happen?”

“A long time ago,” Deborah said.

“I am so sorry, I had no idea!” Brolin said.

After that, Brolin went with Deborah to a couple of gatherings to hear about Scientology’s opposition to psychotropic drugs. Although Brolin had never talked about it, he had gone to the Celebrity Centre himself, “in a moment of real desperation,” and received spiritual counseling. He quickly decided Scientology wasn’t for him. But he still wondered what the religion did for celebrities like
Tom Cruise and
John Travolta: “Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology?”

Brolin once witnessed Travolta giving a Scientology assist at a dinner party in Los Angeles.
Marlon Brando arrived with a cut on his leg. He had been injured while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway pull his car out of a mudslide, and he was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology, which gave him enhanced abilities. Brando said, “Well, John, if you have powers
, then absolutely.” Travolta touched Brando’s leg and they each closed their eyes. Brolin watched, thinking it was bizarre and surprisingly physical. After ten minutes, Brando opened his eyes and said, “That really helped. I actually feel different!”

IN 2003
, Cruise continued working with
Rathbun on his upper levels. While he was at
Gold Base, instead of staying in the cottage he had formerly shared with
Nicole Kidman, Cruise moved into the guesthouse of L. Ron Hubbard’s residence,
Bonnie View. One Sunday night, following a late-night meal in Hubbard’s baronial dining room, Cruise got food poisoning. The culprit was thought to be an appetizer of fried shrimp in an egg roll. The cook was summarily sent
to
Happy Valley.

Rathbun accompanied Cruise to Flag Base in Clearwater where he could perform the exercises required to attain OT VII. Because Miscavige
depended on Rathbun to handle so many of the church’s most sensitive problems, he had been lulled into feeling a kind of immunity from the leader’s violent temper. In September, he returned to Gold Base and gave a report to Miscavige about Cruise’s progress.

Miscavige asked where Cruise would be doing his semiannual checkups. “At Flag
,” Rathbun said. All OT VIIs do their checkups at Flag.

“Who’s going to do it?”

Rathbun named an auditor in Clearwater that he thought highly of.

Miscavige turned to his wife and said, “Can you believe this SP?” He declared that unlike any other OT VII, Cruise would get his checkups at Gold Base.

When Cruise duly arrived at Gold for his semiannual check, he was preparing for his role as a contract killer in
Collateral
. Miscavige took him out to the gun range and showed him how to shoot
a .45-caliber pistol. Meanwhile, Rathbun administered the star’s six-month checkup.

Because of his insubordination, Rathbun had to go through a program of penitence. One of the steps was to write up a list of his offenses against the church, which Miscavige had sketched out for him. “I am writing this public announcement
to inform executives and staff that I have come to my senses and I am no longer committing present time overts and have ceased all attacks and suppressions on Scientology,” Rathbun admitted in September 2003, adopting the abject tone that characterizes many Scientology confessions. Speaking in full-blown Scientologese, he wrote, “The end result is unmocked org form, overworked and enturbulated executives and staff.” This meant that he had not thought out his intentions clearly, causing the church and the people who worked for it to be in disarray. He had a particular apology to make to
David Miscavige: “Each and every time on major situations, COB has had to intervene to clean up wars I had exacerbated.… The cumulative amount of COB’s time I have cost in terms of dropping balls, creating situations internally and externally, is on the order of eight years.”

Rathbun was shocked, not just by being declared an SP, but also by the changes at Gold Base in the year and a half he had been posted to Flag. All communications into and out of the base had been cut off. The leader had several of his top executives confined to the
Watchdog Committee headquarters—a pair of double-wide trailers that had been married together. By the end of the year, the number who were living
there under guard had grown to about forty or fifty people
. It was now called the Hole
. Except for one long conference table, there was no furniture—no chairs or beds, just an expanse of outdoor carpet—so the executives had to eat standing up and sleep on the floor, which was swarming with ants. In the morning, they were marched outside for group showers with a hose, then back to the Hole. Their meals were brought to them—a slop of reheated leftovers. When temperatures in the desert location mounted to more than a hundred degrees, Miscavige turned off the electricity, letting the executives roast inside the locked quarters.

The leader ordered them to stay until they finally had rearranged the “
Org Board
”—the church’s organizational chart—to his satisfaction, which was never given. Photographs of Sea Org personnel were continually moved from one position to another on the chart, which meant that people were constantly being reassigned to different posts, whimsically, and no post was secure. About nine hundred positions
needed to be filled at Int and Gold Bases, and the stack of personnel and ethics files was five feet high. This anarchic process had been going on more or less intensively for four years
.

At odd, unpredictable hours, often in the middle of the night, Miscavige would show up in the Hole, accompanied by his wife,
Shelly, and his Communicator,
Laurisse Stuckenbrock, each of whom carried a tape recorder to take down whatever Miscavige had to say. The detainees could hear the drumbeat of the shoes as Miscavige’s entourage marched toward the trailers. The leader demanded that the executives engage in what were termed “
séances”—endless hours of confessions about their crimes and failures, in this and previous lives, as well as whatever dark thoughts—
“counter-intentions”—they might be harboring against him. If someone was not forthcoming with such confessions, the group would harass that person until he produced a confession. Sometimes these were sexual fantasies. That would be written up in a report, which Miscavige would then read aloud to other church officials.

The entire base became paralyzed
with anxiety about being thrown into the Hole. People were trying desperately to police their thoughts, but it was difficult to keep secrets when staff members were constantly being security-checked with E-Meters. Even confidences whispered to a spouse were regularly betrayed. After one of COB’s lengthy rants, recordings of his statement would be sent to a steno pool, then transcripts
were delivered to the executives in the Hole, who had to read them aloud to each other repeatedly.

Mike Rinder was in the Hole
for two years, even though he continued to be the church’s chief spokesperson. Bizarrely, he would sometimes be pulled out and ordered to conduct a press conference, or to put on a tuxedo and jet off to a Scientology gala; then he would be returned to confinement. He and other executives were made to race around the room on their hands and bare knees, day after day, tearing open scabs
on their knees and leaving permanent scars. Miscavige once directed
De Vocht to rough up Rinder, because “he’s just an SP
.” De Vocht took Rinder outside and gave him a going-over. But De Vocht was also frightened of Miscavige. He took to sleeping with a broken broom handle. When another executive spoke up
about the violence, he was beaten by two of Miscavige’s assistants and made to mop the bathroom floor with his tongue.