Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (56 page)

Archer said that the controversy that continually surrounds the church hadn’t touched her. “It’s not that I’m not aware of it.” She added that Scientology is growing despite the public criticism. “It’s in a hundred and sixty-five countries.”

“Translated into fifty languages!” Jastrow interjected. “It’s the fastest-growing religion.” In his opinion, “Scientologists do more good things for more people in more places around the world than any other organization ever.” He added, “When you study historical perspective of new faiths, they’ve all been—”

“Attacked,” said Archer. “Look at what happened to the—”

“The Christians!” Jastrow said simultaneously. “Think of the Mormons and the Christian Scientists.”

They talked about the church’s focus on celebrities. “Hubbard recognized that if you really want to inspire a culture to have peace and greatness and harmony among men, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish,” Archer said. “And if he’s particularly well known he needs a place where he can be comfortable. So,
Celebrity Centres provide that.” She blamed the press for concentrating too much on Scientology celebrities. Journalists, she said, “don’t write about the hundreds of thousands of other Scientologists.”

“Millions!”

“
Millions
of other Scientologists. They only write about four friggin’ people!”

Jastrow suggested that Scientology’s critics often had a vested interest. He pointed to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, drug makers, pharmacies—“all those people who make a living and profit and pay their mortgages and pay their college educations and buy their cars, et cetera, et cetera, based on people not being well.”

“Who advertise in the newspapers and on television, more than any other advertisers,” Archer added.

“But this is a collateral issue, darling, in terms of what I’m talking
about,” Jastrow continued. “For the first time in America’s experience with war, there are more mental illnesses from Iraq and Afghanistan than physical illnesses,” he said, citing a recent article in
USA Today
. “So mental illnesses become a big business.” Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas “Scientology will solve the source of the problem.” The medical and pharmaceutical industries are “prime funders and sponsors of the media,” he said, and therefore might exert “influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive.” He said that only Scientology could help mankind right itself. “What else is there that we can hang our hopes on?”

“That’s improving civilization,” Archer added.

“Is there some other religion on the horizon that’s going to help mankind?” Jastrow asked. “Just tell me where. If not Scientology, where?”

ANNE ARCHER BEGAN STUDYING
with
Katselas in 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born. She was the exceptionally beautiful daughter of two successful actors. Her father,
John Archer, was best known during the 1930s and 1940s as the voice introducing the radio drama
The Shadow
. (“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows,” he said at the beginning of the program.) He went on to appear in more than fifty films. Her mother,
Marjorie Lord, played Danny Thomas’s wife on the popular television show
Make Room for Daddy
. With such a bloodline, it might be expected that Archer would be aiming toward stardom, but when she entered the Beverly Hills Playhouse she was coming off a television series (
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
) that she didn’t respect and that had been canceled after a single season. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage and an actor with diminishing career prospects.

Katselas had a transformative effect. Like so many others, Archer was magnetized by this ebullient Greek, with his magnificent beard and his badgering, teasing, encouraging, and infuriating personality. He was one of the most inspiring people Archer had ever met. Where had he acquired such wisdom? Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she decided to try it out. She began going two or three times a week to the Celebrity Centre to take the
Life Repair Program. “I remember walking
out of the building and walking
down the street toward my car, and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. I said to myself, ‘My God, this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve finally found something that works!’ ” She added, “Life didn’t seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”

When Tommy was old enough, Archer would bring him to the Playhouse while she was taking lessons. He would wander around
the theater, venturing into the light booth and watching his mother learning her craft. Jastrow recalled being struck by Tommy’s poise even as a five-year-old child. “I am a really good dad
, and he taught me how,” Jastrow said. He gave the example of a visit from his own parents, who had flown out from Midland, Texas, to meet Terry’s new family. After Jastrow had driven them back to the airport, Tommy said, “I notice that your dad was pretty strict with you.” Jastrow agreed that his father had been very stern when he was growing up. Then Tommy continued, “I was noticing that you’re pretty strict with me.” Jastrow pointed to that as a defining moment in their relationship. “I realized I wanted to be his friend first,” he said. “He was the senior being in that relationship.”

Anne and Terry soon found their way into Scientology, but Tommy was initially raised in his mother’s original faith, Christian Science. His father,
William Davis
, is a wealthy financier and real-estate developer who was once reported to be among the largest owners of agricultural property in California. He was also a well-known fund-raiser for
Ronald Reagan and
George H. W. Bush, and personally contributed an estimated $350,000 a year to Republican causes. Although Tommy grew up in an environment of money and celebrity, he impressed people with his modesty. He longed to do something to help humanity. Scientology seemed to offer a direction.

Paul Haggis met Tommy at the Celebrity Centre in 1989, when he was seventeen years old—“a sweet and bright boy
.” Their meeting came at a critical moment in Tommy’s life. He had just broken up with his girlfriend. Archer had taken him
to the Celebrity Centre for counseling, where he took a course called Personal Values and Integrity.

Tommy’s presence immediately caused a stir inside the church. The president of the Celebrity Centre,
Karen Hollander, fixed on the idea that Tommy should be her personal assistant. He was young, very rich, and handsome enough to be a movie star himself. He had grown up mixing with famous people. It would be a perfect fit. Whenever celebrities came in, there would be Anne Archer’s son. But that required
coaxing Tommy to join the Sea Org. Hollander called in the younger members of her staff to woo him. “You can either go to college
and get a wog education, or you can join Sea Org and be doing the best service you could ever do for mankind—and for yourself,”
John Peeler, Hollander’s secretary at the time, would tell him.

Although Anne and Terry say they wanted Tommy to get a college education, they knew of the efforts to recruit him and didn’t stand in the way. That fall, Tommy entered Columbia University, but lasted only a single semester. Over Christmas break, he went back into Hollander’s office, and when he came out, he excitedly told Peeler he had just signed the billion-year contract.

His job for Hollander was to attend to the celebrities who lounged around the president’s office.
Lisa Marie Presley was often there, as were
Kirstie Alley, and writer-director
Floyd Mutrux.
John Travolta would drop by occasionally. Also in this crowd was a clique of young actors who had grown up in the church, including
Giovanni Ribisi and his sister Marissa,
Jenna Elfman, and
Juliette Lewis. Davis would arrange for
them all to go to movies together. He was charming, attractive, he had a great sense of humor, and eventually,
David Miscavige began to notice. “Miscavige liked the fact
that he was young and looked trendy and wore Brioni or Armani suits,”
Mike Rinder observed. “He had a cute BMW. It was an image that Miscavige liked.”

Davis moved into Sea Org berthing in a dodgy neighborhood on Wilcox Street in West Hollywood. It was quite a step down from the luxurious life he had enjoyed until then. He was quickly introduced to some of the inner secrets of the organization. In about 1994, he was involved in an embarrassing cover-up when a well-known spokesperson for the church was captured in a video having sex with several other men.
Amy Scobee says that church executives were frantic that their spokesperson would be exposed as being gay. Scobee and Karen Hollander set a briefcase with the spokesperson’s auditing files in the backseat of the car that Hollander was borrowing at the time—actually, Tommy Davis’s BMW—intending to take the files to Gold Base the next day for senior managers to review. Because the car was in a highly secure parking lot, they thought nothing of it. Davis returned late that night, however. He found his car and decided to take it back to the Sea Org dormitory. When he parked the car on Wilcox Street, he happened to notice the briefcase, so he locked it in the trunk and went to bed.

The next day, Scobee got a call from a sheepish Davis. He said that someone had broken into his car and stolen the briefcase out of the trunk. “When we told Tommy
what was in the briefcase, he freaked,” Scobee recalled. “He went around for a week, searching through Dumpsters.” Finally, someone approached Davis about the reward he had offered and led him to the thief, a homeless man who was trying to sell the briefcase; the contents, which were still in it, meant nothing to him. Davis gave the man twenty dollars.
²
Davis was disappointed
because the search forced him to miss the ceremony where John Travolta was awarded a Scientology medal.

Davis went through a period of doubt and actually considered dropping out of the Sea Org, according to Scobee, but then he recommitted and became so enthusiastic that he had the Sea Org logo—a laurel wreath with twenty-six leaves representing the stars in the Galactic Confederacy—tattooed on his arm. When Miscavige found out
, he berated Davis, saying that he had violated the church’s copyright.

Davis began working with
Marty Rathbun during his intensive auditing of Cruise. When Rathbun was thrown in the Hole, Davis became something more than a gofer for the star. He provided a line to Cruise at a time when the actor’s relationship with the church was not yet solidified, and his constant presence beside the superstar boosted the image of Scientology as a hip, insider network. Although Cruise is ten years older, the two men physically resemble each other, with long faces and strong jaws, a likeness that is enhanced by similar spiky haircuts. Their relationship evolved into a friendship, but one that reflected the immense power imbalance between them, as well as Davis’s position as a deputy of the church in the service of its most precious asset. Until his association with Cruise, Davis had been called Tom
, but he became Tommy to distinguish him from the star. In other ways, he became more like him—his clothes, his hair, his intensity.

At the age of nineteen, Davis married a dreamy Belgian woman, Nadine van Hootegem, who was also in the Sea Org. “I made the decision
to forward the aims of Scientology,” she told the ABC News program
20
/
20
in 1998. “I actually compare it a little bit like Mother Teresa.” She added, “It’s a fun activity to set men free.” According to Mike Rinder,
Nadine Davis became intensely involved in
Tom Cruise’s
entourage. “Somehow dealing with
Katie
Holmes, she did something wrong,” Rinder says. “She became a non-person.” He says that Tommy was forced to divorce her.
³

Soon after Cruise’s troubles in 2005, Tommy Davis was sent to Clearwater to participate in the
Estates Project Force. Normally, the EPF functions as a kind of boot camp for new
Sea Org members.
Donna Shannon was a veterinarian who had risen to OT VII before signing her billion-year contract. She was surprised to find that about half the people undergoing training were veteran Sea Org members who were being disciplined, including Davis. He seemed like a nice guy, so she was puzzled that he was subjected to the worst hazing. “He complained about
being out scrubbing the Dumpster with a toothbrush till late at night,” she recalled, “then he’d be up at six to do our laundry.” Sometimes Davis would be paraded in front of the other Sea Org members as his Ethics Officer shouted, “This guy is not a big shot! He’s lying to you!” Only later did Shannon learn that Davis was
Anne Archer’s son. (As it happens, Archer was also at the Clearwater base
, taking advanced courses. A teenage Sea Org member—
Daniel Montalvo, the same one who guarded Cruise during his auditing sessions—was assigned to keep her in the dark and make sure that she never encountered her son.)

Shannon and Davis worked together, maintaining the grounds. “I was supposedly supervising him,” Shannon said. “I was told to make him work really hard.” That didn’t seem to be a problem for Davis. At one point, Shannon said, he borrowed about a hundred dollars from her because he didn’t have money for food.

One day, Shannon and Davis were taking the bus to a work project. Shannon asked why he was in the EPF.

“I got busted,” Davis told her. “I fucked up on Tom Cruise’s lines”—meaning that he had botched a project Cruise was involved in.

“So what are your plans now?” she asked.

“I just want to do my stuff and get back on post,” Davis replied.

Shannon said that suddenly “it was like a veil went over his eyes, and he goes, ‘I already said too much.’ ”

Several months later, Davis paid her back the money.
⁴