Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (51 page)

Brousseau and a Sea Org executive,
Steve Marlowe, also oversaw the renovations on a Blue Bird bus, like Hubbard’s, that Cruise had purchased. Later, Cruise bought another bus, which he called
The Silver Screen
. Brousseau spent three months commuting to the Marathon Coach factory in Coburg, Oregon, to oversee the retrofitting of the forty-foot vehicle into an elaborate motor home. Brousseau estimates that the redesign cost about $1.5 million, but that doesn’t include his labor or that of Sea Org members in the Golden Era prop department, who manufactured the furniture, countertops, and cabinetry. In 2006, Brousseau also customized a limousine for the star, using the body of a Ford Excursion that he says Cruise acquired using the Scientology fleet discount. Katie was pregnant and wanted a new vehicle with a baby seat.
Miscavige had wanted to impress the couple by renovating the Excursion at a local custom shop, but the job was poorly done. Miscavige purchased another Excursion for Cruise to replace the one that had been botched. Meanwhile, Brousseau spent the next six months personally rebuilding the original Excursion. He ripped the vehicle down to its frame and installed handmade reclining seats and wood paneling fashioned from a burl of a eucalyptus tree that had been toppled in a storm. He spent about two thousand hours on the project. The materials were paid for by Cruise’s production company, but according to Brousseau, his labor, and that of about ten other Sea Org members, was not compensated. “It was a half-million-dollar beauty
all done by me, with other folks from Scientology,” Brousseau said.

Brousseau had even carved a matching Montblanc pen out of the burl, its own hidden storage case in the vehicle. When Cruise showed it to Katie, she was dazzled. She turned to Brousseau and asked, “Oh, J.B.
, did you make that?”

“Don’t thank me,” Brousseau quickly responded. “I’m just the hammer. This—,” he said, pointing to Miscavige, “is the hand that wields me.”

Cruise, who became a pilot while filming
Top Gun
, keeps a hangar
at an airport in Burbank for his airplane collection. Sea Org members completely renovated the hangar, installing a luxurious office that had been fabricated at
Golden Era Productions. Brousseau says that the furniture—a dry bar, table and chairs, desks, et cetera—was milled at an RPF base in Los Angeles. Brousseau took dozens of photographs documenting his handiwork on the star’s behalf.

No member of the Sea Org has spent more time in Cruise’s service than
Tommy Davis, who was viewed within the church as the star’s special handler and personal assistant. Although Davis maintains that he provided similar services for other celebrities, his assignment to Cruise was his primary duty between 2000 and 2004. However, he asserted, “None of the Church staff
involved were coerced in any way to assist Mr. Cruise. Church staff, and indeed Church members, hold Mr. Cruise in very high regard and are honored to assist him.”

IN JUNE 2006
, Shelly Miscavige disappeared.

She had spent her whole life conveying orders and gathering intelligence for a powerful, erratic, domineering church leader, first for Hubbard and then for her husband. She and Miscavige were always respectful toward each other in public, if not openly affectionate. As he gained power within the church, she began to see the two of them as reincarnations of
Simón Bolívar and
Manuela Sáenz
, and the lesson she drew from that previous existence was that she needed to be fiercely protective of her mate, and to keep him from making the kinds of mistakes that his character was destined to commit. In the eyes of some Sea Org members, Shelly was brittle and imperious, but
Rathbun noted that she sometimes objected when Miscavige’s physical assaults threatened to get out of hand. No one else did.

That spring, Shelly returned from a
Freewinds
voyage before her husband did, and in his absence she decided to arrange the Org Board herself. There were no settled posts, executives were still churning in the Hole, and the management structure was a mess. Taking matters into her own hands, Shelly made a number of appointments.

Soon after her husband came back, Shelly’s mood visibly changed. Her brother-in-law, John Brousseau, observed that she looked cowed: “The bulldog was gone
.” Shortly before she disappeared, she asked
Mike Rinder if Dave still had his wedding ring on. Then she vanished. Although a missing-person report has been filed, the Los Angeles Police
Department will not comment on her whereabouts. She was escorted to her father’s funeral in August 2007. That’s the last time she was seen in public. Former Sea Org members say
she is being guarded at a church facility in Running Springs, California, near Lake Arrowhead, one of the several repositories for Hubbard’s writings. It gets cold there in the winter. Miscavige sent Shelly
a sweater and a pair of gloves for Christmas.

In November 2007, Tom Cruise and
Katie Holmes married in a fifteenth-century castle outside of Rome. Among the celebrities attending
were
Jennifer Lopez and
Marc Anthony, Will and
Jada Pinkett
Smith,
Jenna Elfman, and even
Brooke Shields. Once again, David Miscavige served as the best man.

P
roposition 8
, the California initiative to ban marriage between same-sex couples, appeared on the ballot in 2008.
Paul Haggis was deeply involved in fighting the initiative, marching in demonstrations and contributing financially. His advocacy placed a strain on his relationship with Scientology. For several years, he had been concerned about the bigotry he found inside the church, especially when it was directed at his two gay daughters.
Katy, in particular, had expressed her discomfort with the way she was treated at the
Celebrity Centre, where she had been taking some courses. She had decided to go to another Scientology mission where she wouldn’t feel so judged.

One evening, Paul and
Deborah went to a small fund-raising dinner at
John Travolta and
Kelly Preston’s house. Deborah and Kelly were on the parents’ committee to raise funds for a new Delphi school in Santa Monica. Several other couples were there, all of them Operating Thetans. One of the guests referred to the waiter as a faggot.

It is difficult to imagine such open bigotry in Hollywood, a liberal stronghold, but especially in the home of John Travolta, who has dodged rumors of his sexual orientation since he first became a star. Despite the onslaught of publicity and sexual harassment suits that have been lodged against the star over the years, many Scientologists, including Haggis, believed that Travolta was not gay. Haggis had been impressed by his apparently loving relationship with his wife and children; but it is also common to assume that
homosexuality is handled at the OT
III level, where the
body thetans that cause such problems can be audited away. The other diners may have been so convinced of Travolta’s sexual orientation that they felt free to display their prejudice. In any case, Travolta reprimanded his guest, saying that such remarks were n
ot tolerated in their home.

Haggis was flooded with admiration for the firm but graceful way that the star had handled the situation. After the other guests had departed, Haggis and Travolta had a conversation in his small study. They talked about the bigotry they had observed in the church. Haggis confided that Katy had been made to feel unwanted at the Celebrity Centre. Travolta said that
Hubbard’s writings had been misinterpreted, and he later provided some references that Katy could use to defend herself.

When Hubbard wrote
Dianetics
, in 1950, he reflected the prevailing social prejudices, including the psychiatric community, which considered homosexuality a mental illness. (It was not removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
until 1973.) “The sexual pervert”
—by which Hubbard meant the homosexual—“is actually quite ill physically,” he writes. The following year, he published the
Tone Scale in
Science of Survival
. Near the bottom, at 1.1 on the scale, is the
Covertly Hostile personality. People in this state engage in casual sex, sadism—and homosexual activity. Hubbard describes this as “the most dangerous and wicked level
.… Here is the person who smiles when he inserts a knife blade between your vertebrae.” “This is the level
of the pervert, the hypocrite, the turncoat. This is the level of the subversive.… A 1.1 is the most dangerously insane person in society and is likely to cause the most damage.… Such people should be taken from the society as rapidly as possible and uniformly institutionalized.” Another way of dealing with them, he writes, is “to dispose of them quietly
and without sorrow.” He went on: “The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.”