Part 11 (1/2)
To the Sea Org, it seemed obvious that Miscavige hoped to make Cruise an ”ideal” Scientologist-not a ”floundering” Scientologist, as he'd often perceived Travolta to be, with his years of disaffection in the 1980s. One step in this direction was to teach Cruise to audit. Many Scientologists, including celebrities, never bother to pursue this route on the Bridge to Total Freedom. But a ”true” Scientologist, in both L. Ron Hubbard's and David Miscavige's estimation,* was a person who had received and given counseling: indeed, Hubbard had maintained that 50 percent of the gains one got through Scientology were achieved through training as an auditor.
To ensure that Cruise's training went off without a hitch, Bruce Hines set up a special course room in the base's music studio. Then Hines and other officials combed through the personnel files of the base's nine-hundred-person staff to find an appropriate candidate to serve as Cruise's ”preclear.” After reviewing the paperwork on numerous candidates, Hines settled on Marc Headley, then a teenager newly arrived at the base. The child of Scientologists, Headley had grown up in Hollywood and was recruited into the Sea Organization when he was just fifteen. A year later, he was selected to come to Int, where he labored in the tape and CD manufacturing plant on the base, as a quality control officer. He was a hard worker, with a clean ethics record, and he was also a blank slate: he had received almost no auditing before.
Though not as a rule star-struck, Headley admitted that it took him a while to get over what he called the ”wow factor” of being audited by the hero of Top Gun. He'd been sworn to secrecy by Marty Rathbun himself: a cardinal of the Church of Scientology in Headley's eyes, Rathbun had warned the sixteen-year-old that severe punishment lay in store for him were he to speak of this top-secret auditing to anyone.
The following day, Headley reported to the music studio, where Cruise was waiting outside the course room. ”h.e.l.lo,” Cruise said, grasping the teenager's arm in a double handshake. ”I'm Tom.”
After leading him into the room, Cruise sat Headley down in front of the E-meter for what is known as a ”metabolism test.” In this procedure, the subject grasps the metal cans, or probes, of the meter while taking a deep breath, which ostensibly indicates whether the subject is rested and has had enough to eat. Headley's test showed his metabolism to be ”off.” Cruise looked concerned. Did he eat enough at dinner? Headley nodded. ”Did you take your vitamins?”
Headley never took vitamins. ”No?” Cruise looked surprised and then got up and ushered Headley into a kitchen area off the auditing room to see if he could find some vitamin packets. A cornucopia of edibles was spread on the table. ”There was more food in that kitchen than I had seen all year,” Headley recalled. ”Sandwiches, snacks, drinks, three types of entrees, rice, vegetables, fruit.” And this was just snack food. ”Who knows what they were feeding him for dinner?”
Headley, like the other staff on the base, lived in a cramped apartment in Hemet. He ate the food served at the base's dining hall, which usually consisted of bland, high-carbohydrate selections, and when punishment was meted out, rice and beans alone. He slept five hours per night, often less, depending on his production schedule. Cruise, on the other hand, was given carte blanche service at the base, including his own bungalow in a private area near the golf course, a personal valet, and meals prepared by the executive chef, Sinar Parman.
For the next several years, as long as he served as Cruise's preclear, Headley was ordered to get at least eight hours of sleep per night and to eat well-rounded meals, with vitamin supplements. ”I even got meals brought to me to make sure I was eating properly,” he said. ”All so that Tom Cruise could learn how to be an auditor and nothing would go wrong.”
For Miscavige, having Cruise at the base offered the leader exclusive access to, and ultimately control over, the man whom he hoped to mold into the ur-Scientologist. But it also seemed to provide Miscavige with something more. ”I think DM lived vicariously through Tom Cruise,” said Karen Pressley, who was working at Int by the time Cruise started coming to the base. ”I remember David's father, Ron Sr., telling me that hanging out with Tom was a dream come true for David, and I thought that seemed very true. He'd lived a very isolated life with no social interactions except with other Scientologists.”
Now Miscavige began traveling to Los Angeles to visit Cruise at his Pacific Palisades mansion. In January 1990, when Cruise was in Florida filming Days of Thunder, he invited Miscavige to join him at the Daytona 500. Afterward, Cruise took the leader skydiving. ”DM was so proud of that trip,” Mark Fisher recalled, noting that when Miscavige returned from the Daytona 500, sporting a ”Days of Thunder” leather jacket, he gathered his senior executives together and showed them a video of his jump from the plane with his instructor.
Though Cruise was still married to Mimi Rogers when he made Days of Thunder, he had fallen in love with his Australian costar, Nicole Kidman. Miscavige approved the match-he had never been a fan of the first Mrs. Cruise. Rogers was disaffected with Scientology's new management, which had purged her father in the early 1980s. Such estrangement threatened the foundation David Miscavige was building with Cruise. ”David couldn't wait to get rid of her,” said Mark Fisher.
Divorce is not forbidden in Scientology, but it is heavily frowned upon.* In theory, explains Fisher, ”the only reason you'd want to leave your marriage is if you had overts or things you were withholding from your partner.” To remedy this, couples go through what is called a ”marriage co-audit,” a form of marriage counseling done with the a.s.sistance of the E-meter, in which each party is encouraged to confess any transgressions against the other.
With Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers, it didn't work this way, said Fisher, who was there when the couple showed up for their counseling. Twenty-four hours after the session, they'd decided to split up. The church reportedly handled the arrangements free of charge, a.s.signing the senior financial counselor, Lyman Spurlock, to negotiate a settlement with Rogers, who was reportedly paid $10 million and signed a confidentiality agreement. By February 1990, the couple had divorced.
Now Cruise was able to openly pursue Kidman. To help in the blossoming romance, Miscavige and Greg Wilhere arranged for Cruise's VIP condo, located on a remote corner of the five-hundred-acre property, to be thoroughly renovated. To make Kidman happy, Sea Org members filled the place with balloons. When the couple wanted to take up tennis, the Sea Org built tennis courts for them on the property, at the Church of Scientology's expense.
”Millions of church dollars were spent so that Tom Cruise could regularly visit the Scientology base and be friends with Miscavige,” said the former Int security chief Andre Tabayoyon. The tennis court alone cost more than $200,000, he said. And the people who built that tennis court-and landscaped the property, built and renovated Cruise's apartment, and performed all other menial and labor-intensive tasks for the actor's benefit-were Scientology staffers, and many of them, Tabayoyon added, were doing time on the RPF, which meant they worked without even the paltry wage Sea Org staffers usually made.
Amy Scobee, a onetime head of Celebrity Centre and a former church ”watchdog,” or overseer of international management, recalled the day in 1991 when she was abruptly taken off her post at Int and sent to Los Angeles to a.s.sist the Cruises in hiring household help. Her a.s.signment, given to her personally by Miscavige's wife, Sh.e.l.ly, was to find and do video interviews of ”upscale Scientologists in the L.A. area” who might agree to work as Cruise's housekeeper, cook, and nanny.
It was understood, at least by the person employed to work for a celebrity, that his or her first loyalty was to the church. ”Everyone who was on celebrity lines would have to write a daily report about their activities that would go into the celebrity's PC file,” said Karen Pressley. ”Any conversations you'd have with the star, anything you did with him, what the star read, watched, who he talked to, what he was hearing ... all of that would be reported, and the reports were sent up to Int,” where Miscavige often read them personally.
In Cruise's household, Andrea and Michael Doven, the actor's personal a.s.sistants, wrote these reports. Andrea, the daughter of the actor Robert Morse, had been introduced to Scientology by Cruise; her husband, a professional photographer, had joined Cruise's staff later and was known within Scientology-and increasingly in Hollywood-as Cruise's ”communicator,” the person who spoke and ran interference for the star. Scientology had by now taken over every aspect of Cruise's life, and also his wife's: Kidman, though a lifelong Catholic, had tentatively begun studying Scientology at Int.
”Nicole was willing to try Scientology, but my opinion was always that she was doing it because Tom was involved,” said Bruce Hines, who was Kidman's auditor. ”But because of the treatment she received at Int, she had a very good experience.” In fact, said Hines, thanks to the personal attention she received, Kidman reached OT 2 in just a year, an extraordinarily fast rise even by the standards of celebrities, who tend to ascend the Bridge more quickly, Hines noted, because of their ability to pay.
Cruise, in the meantime, had reached OT 3, the vaunted Wall of Fire. For seven years, he'd waited to discover the hidden truths that he'd been promised would change his life. When he did, he had what many former Scientologists say is not an atypical reaction-”He freaked out and was like, What the f.u.c.k is this science fiction s.h.i.+t?” as Marc Headley put it-and he took a step back.
”From my recollection, Tom went kind of crazy when he reached that level,” said Karen Pressley. ”You have to remember that this was before the Internet became popular, and everything about Scientology was still veiled in secrecy. So as a dedicated Scientologist, following the rules, he would have never heard of Xenu, body thetans-any of that stuff. Finding out that this was what Scientology was about I'm sure came as quite a shock.”
Scientology maintains that OT 3 is not what Scientology is about, that it is simply one process, one tiny particle, in a great oeuvre of material, most of which has nothing to do with Xenu or body thetans: indeed, despite the fact that Hubbard's handwritten notes for OT 3 have been posted on the Internet and authenticated in court, the Church of Scientology refuses to acknowledge the OT 3 myth as true. But those who have done OT 3 and are critical of it say that it is a process that can, and does, destabilize many people, as it requires that a member suspend disbelief in order to audit invisible ent.i.ties stuck to various parts of the body.
”The way to look at the OT levels is as a form of exorcism,” explained Glenn Samuels, a former Scientologist who now counsels other ex-members, including many, he said, who've been severely traumatized by OT 3 and the subsequent advanced levels. ”Some people disa.s.sociate and suddenly hear voices not their own chattering away at them, saying things like 'You're going to die' or 'I'm giving you cancer, I'm your worst nightmare.' Just imagine the startling reality of having to think your body is loaded full of other people with voices, desires, emotion, and feelings separate from and different than your own.”
Those members who are more philosophical about OT 3 explain it as a ”handling” for the unknown factors inside every human being that are hampering their ability to progress. Cruise, though, did not see it this way, and he and Kidman stopped coming to the International Base.
For the next several years, other celebrities would front the church's agenda while Cruise pursued his career, making films that many Scientologists recognized as out of step with Scientology's ethics: notably his 1994 performance as the s.e.xually ambiguous Lestat in Interview with a Vampire and his role as Dr. Bill Harford, a man flirting with infidelity, in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, in which Cruise and Kidman played a married couple.
Cruise and Kidman spent two years working on the film in London, during which time the Dovens filed regular reports on their activities to the Int Base. ”Every once in a while, Michael Doven would get pulled to the base to get sec checked [about the Cruises],” recalled Marc Headley's wife, Claire, who worked for the RTC. Miscavige, she said, was looking for any way to recover the star, but the couple was on a new path: Tom took on the role of the predatory self-help guru Frank T. J. Mackey in Magnolia, and Nicole starred in a risque play by David Hare, The Blue Room.
The couple's edgier new course symbolized an act of defiance for Scientologists taught to look upon marital infidelity, not to mention any form of s.e.xual deviance or exhibitionism, as sinful. Miscavige began to take a hard line toward Cruise, denigrating him as ”off-purpose” and ”out-ethics” in communications with Scientology staff. ”I saw the social interaction between Dave and Tom grow less and less personal until it was down to the formalities of sending Christmas and birthday gifts only,” said Tanja Castle, then an RTC staffer who would soon become Miscavige's secretary. ”There was no live communication at all.”
But Miscavige was even more upset with Kidman, whom he blamed for Cruise's growing detachment from Scientology. Miscavige had initially put aside the fact that Kidman's father, Dr. Antony Kidman, was a psychologist-a hated SP-but he'd become dismayed that Kidman, who'd refused to move on to OT 3 after finis.h.i.+ng OT 2, remained extremely close to her father. Now Kidman and Cruise had purchased a house in her hometown of Sydney, where they began to spend an increasing amount of time.
The story told within the private world of the Sea Organization is that David Miscavige, aided by Marty Rathbun and several other deputies, engineered the dissolution of Tom Cruise's marriage to Nicole Kidman and Cruise's subsequent emergence as the Most Famous Scientologist in the World. No one still a member of the Church of Scientology has ever admitted to this, and Kidman has never discussed the reasons why her marriage abruptly ended in January 2001, shortly after the couple's tenth wedding anniversary. But those who have left Scientology since the early 2000s recall that it was widely understood in the combative, rigorously single-minded world of David Miscavige's Church of Scientology that Nicole Kidman was an SP.
SPs were much on the church leader's mind by the late 1990s, as Scientology, still enmeshed in the Lisa McPherson case, became even more embroiled in the ongoing battle with its critics, whose number now included a legion of former members who'd become disillusioned by Scientology's high prices and authoritarianism. This ”quiet mutiny,” in the words of Sandra Mercer, who would ultimately leave herself, was not always reflected in Scientology's income, which continued to receive a boost from frequent fundraising events. However, according to Jeff Hawkins, who as the church's marketing chief kept careful track of such data, virtually every other indicator showed a church on the decline. This devastating piece of information was widely known but never discussed outside the executive suites at Int, where Miscavige scrambled to reverse the trend, to no avail. At Flag, which as Scientology's chief financial engine was a good indicator of the church's overall health, members had completed 11,603 courses and auditing services in 1989, the year Miscavige a.s.sumed full control of the church. That number had decreased to 5,895 in 1997, the year that the Church of Scientology was first implicated in the death of Lisa McPherson.*
That year, hoping to drum up new members and counteract the bad press, the church launched what it called the ”largest and most comprehensive” public relations campaign in its history, producing a series of thirty-eight television advertis.e.m.e.nts, some of which promoted Hubbard's books while others emphasized aspects of his philosophy. Miscavige unveiled the campaign during the June 1997 ”Maiden Voyage” event on the Freewinds, a gala celebration attended by church dignitaries and high-rollers, such as Bennetta and David Slaughter. And yet, as recalled by Steve Hall, the copywriter who created most of these ads, within months of this event, Miscavige had pulled the funding from the campaign.
”This was his pattern,” said Hall. ”He'd have these events, where they'd show these ads that would get everyone excited and everyone eager to give money to help spread Scientology around the world.” After the event, Hall said, Miscavige would generally run the ads for a few months but never did a serious ad buy. ”Then he'd cut the funding: he found fault either with the person doing the ads or with the ads themselves, but he'd shut it all down and so the whole thing would quietly die.” By then, Miscavige would have moved on to a new event and fundraising campaign, which often was coordinated with the release of a new product: audiotapes or CDs of Hubbard's lectures, for example, or a handsomely packaged set of Hubbard's policy letters or other books, which the public would be encouraged to buy on the spot.
But nothing, said former executives, grew the church. At the orgs, members continued to slip away. Others languished on the Bridge. For Miscavige, who'd been raised to believe in Hubbard's management technology, the fact that it didn't seem to be working was unthinkable-indeed, it was a point of doctrine that the tech ”works every time.” The idea that he was not doing things right was even more unthinkable, noted Jeff Hawkins. ”The only conclusion he was left with was that someone was working against him, some SP.”
In fact, Miscavige was right. A broad network of individuals were working against Scientology, united by a new and even more daunting enemy, the Internet. The online world was a powerful weapon in the hands of critics of the Church of Scientology, including many free-speech advocates who built websites dedicated to exposing and a.n.a.lyzing Scientology's secrets. Some sites were dedicated to ”scholars.h.i.+p” related to the OT doc.u.ments; others were devoted to s.h.i.+ning a light on L. Ron Hubbard's war record, scientific claims, correspondence with the FBI, and the various lies he told about his youth. Much of Scientology's legal archive-dozens of highly contentious cases, with accompanying court transcripts and affidavits, as well as a.n.a.lysis-were now easily viewable online. Even Lisa McPherson's grotesque autopsy photographs were scanned and posted on several different websites, with accompanying captions that accused the Church of Scientology of murder.
For Miscavige, who'd spent most of the past twenty years deftly s.h.i.+fting the spotlight away from the scandals that dogged the church, the sheer glut of negative information about Scientology now available through a simple Google search was disastrous. Nothing the leader had previously dreamed up, certainly no weapon in his legal a.r.s.enal, could counter the deluge of data-scanned copies of L. Ron Hubbard's handwritten OT 3 materials, for example-that was spreading across the Internet.
At gatherings of the flock, Miscavige beseeched his followers to beware of the ”lies” posted in cybers.p.a.ce. At the orgs, officials urged the members.h.i.+p to create personalized Scientology webpages to flood the Internet with positive promotion. To help them do this, the church issued a compact disk with both a web design program and a special Internet filter program, which censored particular search terms, sites deemed to be using the trademarks or writings of Scientology or Dianetics in an unauthorized fas.h.i.+on, and sites that, according to the CD's licensing agreement, were seen as ”improper or discreditable to the Scientology religion.”
But the filter was effective only in households with a single computer and soon proved obsolete. And even if members did avoid reading such criticism, nothing prevented other people-the potential recruits that the church so badly needed-from discovering these unsavory reports when they researched Scientology. Negative stories posted on the Internet dealt a particularly devastating blow to the church because they reached young people under the age of thirty-the population whose idealism, and naivete, had built the church in the first place. Facing perhaps the biggest crisis in its history, Scientology needed a new kind of symbol: someone whose star power could deflect, even transcend criticism.
And so, in early 1999, Marty Rathbun, who'd been spending most of his time in Florida handling the Lisa McPherson case, was called back to Los Angeles by Miscavige and a.s.signed a new task: ”recover” Tom Cruise, in earnest. Neither Rathbun nor Cruise has ever spoken about the details of this ”recovery,” but over the next two years, Rathbun steered Cruise back to the OT levels. By 2002, he'd reached OT 4. That year, during Cruise's publicity tour for his film Vanilla Sky, he and his new girlfriend, the actress Penelope Cruz, lobbied the U.S. amba.s.sadors in France, Greece, and Germany, countries where Scientology was under investigation, to support the church in its cause of ”religious freedom.” This lobbying was not unlike Travolta's efforts, begun in the late 1990s, but Cruise took up the cause with even more pa.s.sion. In June 2003, for instance, he secured a meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to further press his concerns about the Church of Scientology's treatment in Germany. The next day, Cruise met with Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, to discuss the same topic.
Cruise also took on the cause of education, hoping to win government funding for Scientology's Applied Scholastics supplemental education program. Over lunch with Secretary of Education Ron Paige and his chief of staff, John Danielson, Cruise, according to a report in theWas.h.i.+ngton Post, asked numerous questions about the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bush administration's mandate that schools found to ”need improvement” must set aside 20 percent of the annual budget to provide students with supplemental education. By the summer of 2003, Applied Scholastics, now headed by Bennetta Slaughter, had been approved in the state of Missouri as one such provider and soon met with similar endors.e.m.e.nt in Florida, California, Louisiana, and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.
During this phase of Cruise's activism he began to float a story that became a key part of the rewritten script of his life: that his dyslexia had rendered him a ”functional illiterate” until he was ”cured” by Hubbard's study technology. By the summer of 2003, Cruise was openly promoting Scientology as a cure for learning disabilities, often plugging a Scientology-backed tutoring program, the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project (H.E.L.P.), that he'd helped found.
By the fall of that year, Cruise garnered even more publicity for his sponsors.h.i.+p of the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, a Scientology-endorsed clinic in lower Manhattan that used Hubbard's controversial Purification Rundown to treat first responders at the World Trade Center on 9/11, who now, two years later, suffered from health problems related to the disaster. In an interview with Larry King on November 28, 2003, Cruise, who donated more than $1 million to the effort, defended the clinic, whose techniques some physicians had criticized. ”Doctors do not know how to diagnose chemical exposures, because it can actually have mental ramifications,” he said. ”You go to a doctor and now he's going to put you on more and more drugs, steroids, things that are ineffective.” But Scientologists, he suggested, had far more potent solutions. ”I've actually helped people that have been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD,” Cruise said, giving a plug for Hubbard's study technology.
”I watched Tom promoting those causes and I just felt a s.h.i.+ver,” said Karen Pressley, who'd left Scientology in 1998, disillusioned with David Miscavige's leaders.h.i.+p. ”He had that same pa.s.sion I'd once had when I was convinced that I had found the only thing that worked. It's a phase you go through in your development as a zealot.”
But Cruise was a special kind of zealot: he was the biggest movie star in the world. His intense personality lent fervor to his new role as a one-man Scientology promotion machine. ”At Int,” recalled Marc Headley, then the head of production at Golden Era, Scientology's in-house film studio, ”they put together a media reel each week of everything being said about Scientology that everyone on the base had to watch, so people who saw it thought Scientology was the biggest thing that was happening right now in the world.” Cruise's effectiveness as a spokesman was the most exciting thing to happen to the church since it was granted a tax exemption in 1993. ”They thought it was awesome,” said Headley.
As Cruise was getting ready to embark on an overseas tour to publicize his film The Last Samurai, Warner Bros. reportedly became concerned about how his advocacy of Scientology would play. According to numerous reports, the actor's longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley, often credited with carefully constructing Cruise's ”Teflon” persona, advised her client that, for this trip, he should leave the Scientology talk at home. Instead, it was Kingsley who stayed behind: when Cruise began his European tour, his publicist was noticeably absent.
Two months later, Cruise ended his fourteen-year affiliation with Kingsley and her company, PMK, and hired his older sister and fellow Scientologist, Lee Anne DeVette, as his new publicist; Marty Rathbun later said that David Miscavige encouraged Cruise to make this move. Now, free of Kingsley's moderating influence, Cruise and DeVette embarked on a plan to educate journalists about Scientology. Whereas Kingsley had often scolded certain reporters for asking about Cruise's religious beliefs, and even banned some from doing so, the actor now insisted that journalists tour the Celebrity Centre before he'd sit down for an interview. Scientology was ”the s.h.i.+t, man,” Cruise told Rolling Stone's Neil Strauss in the summer of 2004. ”Some people, well, if they don't like Scientology, well, then, f.u.c.k you.” ”Really,” he added. ”f.u.c.k you. Period.”
David Miscavige, by all accounts, was thrilled by the emergence of Tom Cruise, Proselytizer. It fully realized his strategy. To Scientologists who knew the men, it seemed as if a complete transference had taken place. ”Tom talked and acted as if he were a clone of David Miscavige,” said Mark Headley. And in fact Miscavige, the chairman of the board, or COB, of the church, often told his staff that Cruise was the ”COB of celebrities.”
During one meeting on the base, Headley recalled, Miscavige told the a.s.sembled Scientologists a revealing story. In late 2003 or early 2004, Cruise invited a group of Scientologist celebrities to a meeting in Hollywood. About twenty or thirty reportedly showed up to hear Cruise offer a powerful rallying call to activism; Cruise read the actors the riot act about what it meant to be a ”real” Scientologist. Headley said, ”Now this is a guy who didn't say s.h.i.+t about Scientology for ten years-but now he is telling them they were 'out-ethics' for not being vocal enough about Scientology.”
Miscavige, said Headley, used this story to ill.u.s.trate Cruise's dedication. ”He'd done it totally unsolicited, and called Dave afterward and told him what he did. Dave loved it. And I'll tell you one thing,” he added. ”Right after that meeting supposedly happened, Jenna Elfman showed up at the opening of a Scientology mission in San Francisco, and then another one in Buffalo.”
Elfman wasn't the only one spurred to advocacy. The second-generation Scientologist Ericka Christensen, a young actress who'd starred in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, told the New YorkDaily News that she counted Scientology as one of her ”secret weapons,” as the newspaper put it, and considered Cruise a mentor. The actor Jason Lee, who'd costarred with Cruise in Vanilla Sky but had kept mum about his involvement in Scientology, now showed up for the opening of a Scientology mission in Los Feliz. Perhaps the most surprising new spokesperson was the pop singer Beck. His father, the composer David Campbell, is a Scientologist, and Beck, as he once said, ”grew up in and around” Scientology; but like Lee, the singer had never spoken openly about the group. Now in an interview he reported that the faith had ”strengthen[ed]” his outlook on life and inserted a small anti-prescription-drug message in the video for his single ”Girl.”