Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  I was ready to post the letter, when John, with his director’s hat on, possibly thinking it might provoke a reaction and certainly mindful that it was more visual than me popping it in a letterbox, had the idea of hand-delivering a copy to someone at Scientology’s secret base. We were now a couple of months into filming and while I had been reluctant to be seen to be goading the church or trolling them – I kept thinking about where the line was between reasonable journalism and gratuitous provocation – John and Simon had a more pragmatic and ultimately more sensible view of the need to proactively put ourselves in the Church’s crosshairs. We made the two-hour drive through the desert and arrived at a collection of buildings just visible behind trees that straddled a rural highway, with low walls at the edge of the road and, around the perimeter, higher fences with razor wire and floodlights. It all seemed normal enough, as alleged mind-bending secret cult headquarters go; no groans or clanking chains were audible. There were lawns and a golf course and all in all it could have been a very large high-end rehab clinic and country club. Except maybe for the razor wire. And the floodlights.

  At the front there was a small gatehouse with a sentry and I went up to it, peering in and mouthing, ‘I’ve got a letter!’ I couldn’t hear much back so I tugged on the door and then the sentry tugged back – he seemed discombobulated, or ‘enturbulated’ to use the Scientology word – so I backed off, a little confused, and we drove down the highway to a small side road to ponder our next move. It was here, a short while later, that a fierce-looking middle-aged woman in dark glasses and a uniform of white shirt and slacks drove up with a tall cameraman in tow. ‘This is not a public road,’ she said, with some heat. ‘This is not a county road. This is our road . . . You now need to leave.’

  I protested that I was only trying to deliver a letter, to which the lady said that I’d trespassed ‘several times’. I resented this – I don’t regard going up to a gatehouse to deliver something as trespassing – and despite various resolutions I’d made to remain respectful whatever transpired, a little part of me now started to go a tiny bit John Sweeney. Not that I shouted, but I was aware of no longer being calm and at one point, knowing it might irritate her, I slipped into Scientologese. ‘I have not trespassed several times,’ I said. ‘Clear the word “several”!’ (‘Clear’ being a Scientology word for ‘Look up in the dictionary.’)

  There was some more back-and-forth, and the police arrived soon after, having been called by the Scientologists. They were friendly enough – we debated whether or not the road was public or which parts of it were – and a little after that we left and drove back up to LA.

  As the months passed, the need to plan a climactic scene of re-enactment became more pressing and eventually late in the year we settled on a concept: the most troubling allegations made by Marty and others were that Miscavige had been physically abusive to his staff and, specifically, that he’d shut them up, for months and possibly years, in a virtual prison known colloquially as the Hole. It seemed natural that we should, with Marty’s help, depict the Marty version of what the Hole might have been like.

  It was towards the end of the year by this time. I’d moved back to London. Meanwhile letters had been continuing to arrive from Scientology’s lawyers – cc’ed to various senior people at the BBC – to the effect that I was an unserious journalist, a tabloid provocateur and that the contributors I’d lined up were disgruntled apostates, fantasists, who were kicked out of Scientology for incompetence.

  There had been a couple of further engagements with agents deployed by Scientology. A glamorous European woman and a cameraman had appeared outside the studio where we were filming one day. They were filming us setting up from across the road but refused to identify themselves. ‘We’re just making a documentary about beeble,’ she said, meaning ‘people’. I’d started filming her with a Flip video camera and she’d run away. We had spent one whole day being tailed by a car with smoked-out windows – almost certainly a PI hired by Scientology lawyers. It was memorable, not just for the weirdness of being followed in a creepy fashion by people in the employ of a self-described religion supposedly dedicated to spreading peace, understanding, and happiness (would Justin Welby do that?) but also because we took elaborate measures to try to corner the driver where he or she had momentarily parked so I could get out and interrogate whoever it was, and when the moment came I messed up, stopped our car just a little too far back, giving our tail enough space to slip away.

  John and I, and our DP Will Pugh, went back and forth about where we should shoot our Hole re-enactment, though we tended to agree that there was a purity and logic about doing it in the desert close to the real Scientology base. John suggested a recce of possible locations, and bringing Marty with us, and maybe our ‘David Miscavige’, a talented young actor named Andrew Perez. Since being cast, Andrew had gone method in his approach, devouring books on the subject and he’d expressed an interest in making a visit to the base, to get a feel for the place. We could kill two birds with one stone: scout the desert and take Andrew on a Scientology field trip.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to do all this we should shoot it.’

  And so Marty flew out from Texas again and we drove out to the desert one last time – him and me and Andrew – with the crew filming as we went.

  Marty was in a state of more or less on-going semi-grumpiness towards me by this stage – possibly I’d asked him the same question four or five times too many which is an occupational hazard of interviewing the same person over the course of a year. He kept mentioning that everyone else’s questions – the production assistants, the runners, the extras – were better than mine: more spiritually informed and more acute. This was fine by me – drama is conflict – though I did sometimes feel a little like his ill-treated and long-suffering spouse, undermined and belittled, and told constantly how much better he could do than me.

  When we arrived at a spot not too far from the Base, an expanse of sand and creosote bushes with bare brown mountains in the distance, Marty pointed out, reasonably, that it looked nothing like the grounds of the Scientology secret HQ, which had neat landscaped lawns and spreading trees. Besides, he said, regarding the Hole, ‘It was all inside. So you could literally recreate it anywhere . . . It’s going to be a logistics nightmare out here.’

  We chatted a little more about the feel that we were looking for. ‘You’ve got to create that claustrophobia,’ Marty said. ‘It’s a nondescript cheap-ass sort of office set-up.’ Andrew and Marty ran some lines that Miscavige had allegedly said, and then, with the light starting to go, Andrew and I drove a few miles down the road to the Base, the same spot where we’d had the police called on us before. It was dark when we got there. In the months since I’d last been there a gate had been erected, but we’d done some research and double-checked with the local authorities that the road was open to the public, which it was. We even had a filming permit. We climbed over, and we were by the fence when security lights started going on and off. The action of the lights was slightly spooky: they didn’t seem to be motion-activated and I wondered if we were being filmed by hidden cameras. Still, they had the side benefit of allowing us to see more clearly.

  Then a loud commanding male voice rang out from the main road, ‘You guys are trespassing. You need to leave or I’m calling the cops.’

  We headed back up to our vehicle and that’s when I saw the same woman, once again accompanied by a tall man holding a small camera.

  ‘The road’s closed. You’re trespassing. You need to leave,’ she said.

  ‘Apparently it’s a public road,’ I replied and waved a copy of the filming permit.

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘And we have a—’

  ‘No, you don’t. See that thing that says “Road Closed”? What’s your name? Lewis? Loo-ee? Are you so stupid that you can’t see the sign that says “Road Closed”? Do you know what a road means? It’s closed.’

  By now I knew the woman�
�s name – Catherine Fraser – and I began using it liberally, hoping it might irritate her.

  ‘Catherine, Catherine. What is the issue here? We don’t want to cause you any upset, Catherine.’

  ‘I don’t want him filming me,’ she said. ‘Tell him to stop.’

  ‘But you’re filming me,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Tell him to stop,’ she repeated.

  ‘You tell him to stop and I’ll tell him to stop,’ I said. This was a bluff. If she’d agreed, I would have been in trouble, given filming was the express purpose of my being there.

  ‘Catherine, my deep desire is to speak to someone from the Sea Org,’ I said. ‘This is good. Let’s just keep the conversation going.’

  She retreated to her car but her cameraman stayed outside, filming me. I got out my trusty Flip digital recorder. It was too dark to see anything in the viewfinder but I figured it might intimidate him. Then I intoned: ‘Are you making a documentary too? And if so, who is your one for?’ But no answer came back and so we just filmed wordlessly, in the dark and lit only by the crew car’s headlights and the sweeping beams of the cars passing us on the road.

  When the time came to film the scene of the Hole re-enactment, there was a part of me that was amazed we’d got to the end without Marty bailing. A few weeks earlier, I’d been trying to think up other ideas for our little team of actors to re-enact and my mind had turned to allegations of physical abuse that involved the Sea Org members running around trees for hours in the hot desert. It was part of a drill created by Hubbard – the ‘Cause Resurgence Rundown’ – that had allegedly been turned into a punishment by Miscavige.

  I had suggested this in an email to Marty.

  ‘You running around a tree with actors, I guess, tells me where you are going,’ he replied. ‘It is where I have expressed repeated concerns about – let us do our all to be as entertaining as possible by clowning. As I have explained to you on numerous occasions (I am sure providing you with miles of great footage of entertaining impatience and frustration), to John from the outset, and even to Simon two and nearly one-half years ago, I don’t really want to participate in such a project – let alone devote, what, five or six out-of-town weekends to it while raising an infant. I am rethinking whether the December trip is worth anyone’s while.’

  John had had to step in and send some long pacifying email to smooth Marty’s feathers.

  Marty had also experienced a nasty Scientology encounter at the airport one afternoon – after doing some filming with us – when three Scientology executives had showered him with weird abuse. The Church later tried to claim that the executives had been there by chance and that Marty had first abused them, though I found that a little hard to believe. Marty filmed some of the encounter on his primitive mobile phone. Smudgy digital images showed two men and a woman in executive dress: ‘You’re a loser!’ the woman said. ‘You’re nothing! Why don’t you stop committing suppressive acts and live a real life?’ It was a surreal display: the naked antagonism in the name of spirituality and ethics.

  Marty uploaded the video to his blog. It went viral. For a while the satisfaction of having a hit video seemed to quell some of Marty’s disgruntlement towards me and the project. But that soon passed and instead he came to see it as a side effect of his doing our film – which it probably was – and then by extension to resent me for, in a roundabout way, fomenting the trolling and making his life miserable in order to generate material for the film.

  We had brought back our little band of actors one final time – including Andrew our Miscavige and our Tom Cruise – and rendezvoused at a West Hollywood studio where a set had been created: a cheap-looking conference room interior, little more than chairs and a table and a window with bars, and an easel with a flipchart. Marty had written a rough script, and the day started with him presiding over a bull session in which he explained the background to the scene: the Hole, how it had worked, how he had been sent there and how he had reached his breaking point. He also described the particular day that the script depicted – when Marty had (allegedly) seen Miscavige beat up his friend Tom DeVocht, causing Marty to make the decision to flee.

  When the time came to do a take, Andrew Perez, our Miscavige actor, went full curtain-chewing loco, delivering a freewheeling rant based on Marty’s words, pushing subordinates around, hurling abuse. ‘Get down! Lick the fucking floor! You fucking mental midgets! You fucking degraded beings don’t get shit done!’ At one point he grabbed the leg of the flipchart easel and smashed it on the table, causing it to shatter into a thousand pieces – for a moment I worried he might have put out somebody’s eye. ‘How do you handle an SP. You handle him roughly, OK?’

  ‘That was a command performance,’ Marty said afterwards. ‘It was as if he was channelling that guy.’ John came down to congratulate the actors. I asked if he thought we needed another take. ‘Uh, no,’ he said, looking as though I must be mad. ‘There’s a guy in the control room who actually seemed quite disturbed.’ Maybe he was worried about Andrew smashing another leg. Either way, there was for a few minutes a feeling of relief that we’d done the main job of work we were supposed to do – that it had revealed something about the creed that Marty had espoused and advanced for so many years – and more than that, if true, the existence of the Hole was arguably an expression of something inside Scientology itself: a logical consequence of the most extreme form of its totalizing worldview and fanatical intensity.

  I was wrapped up in these thoughts when I happened to wander outside to find Marty in conversation with two older guys with white hair and beards who looked like Kenny Rogers and his session bassist.

  ‘What’s an SP like you doing in a place like this?’ ‘Kenny’ said to Marty.

  ‘How much is the BBC paying you?’ said Kenny’s friend.

  ‘Between the foster care and what the BBC is paying you, is that enough for you to cover your nut?’ Kenny asked. ‘Do you get paid enough for the foster care?’

  Scientologists have a gift for pushing people’s buttons. In fact, you could argue the most compelling evidence that Hubbard may have been onto something is how effective they are at causing people anguish: John Sweeney losing his shit during filming; me by the side of the road. And now, Marty, with the mention of his son.

  They turned and left. Marty looked shaken.

  ‘This is really sick, man,’ he said. ‘None of these things just happen. David Miscavige had to direct this. He scripted it and he directed it.’

  ‘We probably shouldn’t tell the actors what happened,’ I said. ‘It might upset them.’

  ‘Welcome to my life, Louis. I have to live this life where I can’t really share what happens to me on a day-to-day basis. We can’t make friends. It’s very difficult to say, “Hey, come on over for a barbecue, but realize you might be being surveilled and it might be going into the archive of the most pernicious, dangerous cult the Western world has known for the last fifty years.” ’

  I’ve thought a lot about what I did next. I’m still not sure whether it was right or wrong. I chose this moment of Marty’s vulnerability to bring up his misdeeds in the Church. ‘You ran private investigators,’ I said. ‘Some of these techniques were things you did to other people.’

  Marty paused and looked away.

  ‘You’re so wrong,’ he said. ‘It never even crossed my mind to think about bringing a person’s child into something.’

  ‘You had PIs pretending to be people’s friends while secretly—’

  Marty was now wandering off, seemingly in disgust.

  ‘Isn’t that a fact?’ I said.

  He stopped and turned. ‘You’re a fuckin’ asshole. That’s a fact,’ he said. ‘Fuck you.’

  Almost immediately I felt bad at how startled and betrayed he looked at my questions. He paused now, clearly angry and upset.

  ‘You know, I’m sitting here having my child brought into this thing and you want to make me defend myself?’ he said. ‘Fuck yourself.’

&
nbsp; ‘OK, I consider myself fucked,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say now.’

  ‘This is really offensive. I’m really fuckin’ offended by it. I’m telling you I have no life. I can’t even make friendships. I am unemployable. And you start giving me this shit?’

  Then we stood in silence for a bit, there on the pavement outside the studio.

  We filmed one or two more scenes: our David Miscavige playing backgammon with our Tom Cruise (we figured, having cast a Tom Cruise, we needed to use him in something); a final triumphalist oration by our David Miscavige, taken from a speech he gave at a Scientology gala in 2004.

  But in that moment with Marty, after he’d been emotionally ambushed by the two Scientologists, I was confident we had an ending and, therefore, a film.

  Chapter 29

  The Fart

  When they raised the baby’s head, tiny, cross-faced and smeared like a bagel in what looked like cream cheese and jam, I glanced at Nancy and could only think, We’re not doing this again.

  He’d arrived after a harrowing C-section one October afternoon at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. Nancy looked half-dead afterwards, as pale as a vampire; the procedure had been delayed and delayed for mysterious reasons – we’d felt like passengers whose flight keeps getting pushed back, the same sense of boredom and impotence, though with an admixture of fear. Then when it was going on, there was a worrying atmosphere of hushed urgency, and muttered conferences, vital signs were dipping, and my mind naturally went to the worst-case scenario and I cursed myself for the foolhardiness we’d shown in taking Nancy through the blood-letting of another round of life creation.

  Getting to term had been a trial. Two had ended in miscarriage. There were tears on a weekend away in Yosemite. We’d been through nothing like that before. The language of grief and the social forms I was versed in didn’t seem adequate to the occasion. The sadness was completely private, between us, and even I – if I’m honest – didn’t really understand what she was going through. It still seemed abstract to me, whereas to Nancy the babies had already become real.