Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (55 page)
Read Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief Online
Authors: Lawrence Wright
Tags: #Social Science, #Scientology, #Christianity, #Religion, #Sociology of Religion, #History
“Do you have any idea that this might damage a lot of wonderful Scientologists?” Jastrow asked. “It’s such a betrayal of our group.”
Haggis responded that he didn’t mean to be critical of Scientology. “I love Scientology,” he said. Everyone knew about Haggis’s financial support of the church and the occasions when he had spoken out in its defense. He reminded his friends that he had been with them at the
Portland Crusade, when he had been drafted to write speeches.
Archer had a particular reason to feel aggrieved: Haggis’s letter had called her son a liar. She could understand the pain and anger Haggis felt over the treatment of his own gay daughters, but she didn’t think that was relevant. In her opinion,
homosexuality is not the church’s issue. She had personally introduced gay friends to Scientology.
Isham was especially frustrated. He felt that they weren’t breaking through to Haggis. Of all the friends present, Isham was the closest to Haggis. They had a common artistic sensibility that made it easy to work together. Isham had won an Emmy for the theme music he composed for Haggis’s 1996 television series,
EZ Streets
. He had scored
Crash
and Haggis’s last movie,
The Valley of Elah
. Soon he was supposed to start work on
The Next Three Days
. Now both their friendship and their professional relationship were at risk.
Isham had been analyzing the discussion from a Scientological perspective. In his view, Haggis’s emotional state on the
Tone Scale at that moment was a 1.1, Covertly Hostile. By adopting a tone just above it—Anger—he hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged. Isham made what he calls an intellectual decision to be angry.
“Paul, I’m pissed off,” he told Haggis. “There are better ways to do this. If you have a complaint, there’s a complaint line.” Anyone who genuinely wanted to change Scientology should stay within the organization, Isham argued, not quit. All of his friends believed that if he wanted to change Scientology, he should do it from within. They wanted him to recant and return to the fold or else withdraw his letter and walk away without making a fuss.
Haggis listened patiently. A fundamental tenet of Scientology is that differing points of view must be fully heard and acknowledged. But when his friends finished, they were still red-faced and angry. Haggis suggested that as good Scientologists, they should at least examine the evidence. He referred them to the
St. Petersburg Times
articles that had so shaken him, and to certain websites written by former members. He explained that his quarrel was with the management and the culture of the church, not with Scientology itself. By copying them on his resignation letter, he had hoped that they would be as horrified as he by the practices that were going on in the name of Scientology. Instead, he realized, they were mainly appalled by his actions in calling the management of the church to account.
Haggis’s friends came away from the meeting with mixed feelings—“no clearer than when
we went in,” Archer felt. What wasn’t said in this meeting was that this would be the last time any of them would ever speak to Haggis. Isham did consider Haggis’s plea to look at the websites or the articles in the
St. Petersburg Times
, but he decided “it was like reading
Mein Kampf
if you wanted to know something about the Jewish religion.”
After that first meeting with friends on his back porch, Haggis had several lengthy encounters with
Tommy Davis and other representatives of the church. They showed up at his office
in Santa Monica—a low-slung brick building on Broadway, covered in graffiti, like a gang headquarters. The officials brought thick files to discredit people they heard or assumed he had been talking to. This was August 2009; shooting for
The Next Three Days
in Pittsburgh was going to start within days, and the office desperately needed Haggis’s attention. His producing partner,
Michael Nozik, who is not a Scientologist, was frustrated. Haggis was spending hours, day after day, dealing with Scientology delegations. He resorted to getting members of his staff to walk him out to his car because he knew that Scientology executives would be waiting for him, and he wanted to give the impression he was too busy
to speak—which he was. But then he would give up and let them into the office for another lengthy confrontation.
During one of these meetings, Davis showed Haggis a policy letter that Hubbard had written, listing the acts for which one could be declared a
Suppressive Person. Haggis had stepped over the line on four of them.
“Tommy, you are absolutely right
, I did all those things,” Haggis responded. “If you want to call me that, that’s what I am.”
“We can still put this genie back in the bottle,” Tommy assured him, but it would mean that Haggis would withdraw the letter and then resign quietly.
Although Haggis listened, he didn’t change his mind. It seemed to him that the Scientology officials became more “livid and irrational” the longer they talked. For instance, Davis and the other church officials insisted that
Miscavige had not beaten his employees; his accusers, they said, had committed the violence. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Haggis responded, “okay, let’s say that’s true, Miscavige never touched anyone. I’m sorry, but if someone in my organization were going around beating people, I’d know about it! You think I’d put up with it? And I’m not that good a person.” Haggis noted that if the rumors about Miscavige’s violent temper were true, it just proved that even the greatest leaders are fallible. “Look at
Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he said, referring to one of his heroes. “If you look at his personal life, it’s been said he has a few problems in that area.”
“How dare you compare Dave Miscavige with Martin Luther King!” one of the officials shouted.
Haggis was aghast. “They thought that comparing Miscavige to Martin Luther King was debasing his character,” he said. “If they were trying to convince me that Scientology was not a cult, they did a very poor job of it.”
12
Copies of Haggis’s e-mail resignation letter were forwarded to various members of the church, although few outside of church circles knew about it. By October, the letter had found its way to
Marty Rathbun. He had become an informal spokesperson for Scientology defectors who, like him, believed that the church had broken away from Hubbard’s original teachings. He called Haggis, who was shooting in Pittsburgh, and asked if he could publish the letter on his blog. “You’re
a journalist
, you don’t need my permission,” Haggis said, although he did ask him to excise the portion of the letter that dealt with his dinner with
John Travolta and
Kelly Preston and the part about his daughter
Katy’s homosexuality.
Haggis didn’t think about the consequences of his decision. He thought it would show up on a couple of websites. He was a writer, not a movie star. But Rathbun got fifty-five thousand hits on his blog that afternoon.
The next morning, the story was in newspapers around the world. Haggis got a call from Tommy Davis. “Paul, what the hell!
”
1
Four years before, the church had actively campaigned against
Proposition 63, the
Mental Health Services Act, which raised taxes to provide for increased care for the mentally ill; the proposition passed.
2
Mary Benjamin says they were never parties to the suit.
3
Now called the
Tampa Bay Times
.
4
Cruise’s attorney,
Bertram Fields, denies this took place: “Mr. Cruise has never asked Mr. Haggis or anyone else to denounce media attacks on Mr. Cruise on the
Larry King
show or anywhere else or to do anything like that.”
5
The church characterizes this as an attempt at extortion.
6
The church forwarded a letter to me from Katy Haggis’s friend in which she denies losing a job because of their friendship and asserting that the church is welcoming to everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation. The friend, whose parents are both employed by the church, did not respond to a request to talk further.
7
Tommy Davis gave me an affidavit, signed by Scobee, in which she admits to having liaisons. Scobee told me there were only two incidents, both of which involved a kiss and nothing more. She says she did not write the affidavit; she says she only signed it in the hope of leaving the church on good terms so that she could stay in touch with relatives. The church maintains that it does not use confidential information derived from auditing sessions.
8
The church denies that blow drills exist.
9
According to
Tommy Davis, “Mr. Miscavige has never physically assaulted Marc Headley or anyone else.”
10
Davis later said that he had never followed a Sea Org member who had blown and had only gone to see Brousseau because he was “a very good friend of mine” (Deposition of Thomas Davis,
Marc Headley vs. Church of Scientology International
, and
Claire Headley vs. Church of Scientology International
, US District Court, Central District of California, July 2, 2010).
11
Valerie Venegas told one of her sources that higher-up officials had spiked it; later, she blamed me, because I had uncovered the probe and had called to verify it with the agents (Tony Ortega, “FBI Investigation of Scientology: Already Over before We Even Heard of It,”
Village Voice Blogs
, Mar. 19, 2012).
12
Tommy Davis says that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s name never came up.
W
hen I first contacted Davis in April 2010, asking for his cooperation on a profile I was writing about Haggis for
The New Yorker
, he expressed a reluctance to talk, saying that he had already spent a month responding to similar queries. “It made little difference
,” he said. “The last thing I’m interested in is dredging all this up again.” He kept putting me off, saying that he was too busy to get together, although he promised that we would meet when he was more available. “I want our time
to be undistracted,” he explained in an e-mail. “We should plan on spending at least a full day together as there is a lot I would want to show you.” We finally arranged to meet on Memorial Day weekend.
I flew to Los Angeles and spent much of that weekend waiting for him to call. On Sunday at three o’clock, Davis appeared at my hotel, with
Jessica Feshbach. We sat at a table on the patio. Davis has his mother’s sleepy eyes. His thick black hair was combed forward, with a lock falling boyishly onto his forehead. He wore a wheat-colored suit with a blue shirt that opened onto a chest that seemed, among the sun-worshippers at the pool, strikingly pallid. Feshbach, a slender, attractive woman, anxiously twirled her hair.
Davis now told me that he was “not willing to participate in, or contribute to, an article about Scientology through the lens of Paul Haggis.” I had come to Los Angeles specifically to talk to him, at a time he
had chosen. I wondered aloud if he had been told not to talk to me. He said no.
“Maybe Paul shouldn’t have
posted the letter on the Internet,” Feshbach interjected. “There are all sorts of shoulda woulda coulda.” She said that she had just spoken to
Mark Isham, the composer, whom I had interviewed. “He talked to you about what are supposed to be our confidential scriptures.” That I would ask about the church’s secret doctrines was offensive, she said. “It’s a two-way street happening,” she concluded.
1
“Everything I have to say about Paul, I’ve already said,” Davis declared. He agreed to respond to fact-checking queries, however.
THE GARDEN BEHIND
Anne Archer and
Terry Jastrow’s home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles is a peaceful retreat, filled with olive trees and hummingbirds. A fountain gurgles beside the swimming pool. Jastrow was recounting his first meeting with Archer, in
Milton Katselas’s class. His friend
David Ladd, son of the Hollywood legend
Alan Ladd, had invited him to visit. “I saw this girl
sitting next to Milton,” Jastrow recalled. “I said, ‘Who’s that?’ ”
Archer smiled. There was a cool wind blowing in from the Pacific, and she drew a shawl around her. “We were friends
for about a year and a half before we had our first date,” she said. They were married in 1978.
“Our relationship really works,” Jastrow said. “We attribute that essentially a hundred percent to applying Scientology.”
The two spoke of the techniques that had helped them, such as never being critical of the other and never interrupting.
Scientology “isn’t a ‘creed,’ ” Archer said. “These are basic natural laws of life.” She described L. Ron Hubbard as “an engineer, not a faith healer,” who had codified human emotional states, in order to guide
the adept to higher levels of existence—“to help a guy rise up the Tone Scale and feel a zest and a love for life.”
Jastrow had been an acolyte in an Episcopal church when he was studying at the University of Houston, but doubts overwhelmed him. “I walked out in the middle of communion,” he said. “I was an atheist for ten years. That was the condition I was in when I started at the
Beverly Hills Playhouse.” He had never heard of Scientology at the time.