Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  DESPITE HIS EXUBERANT TESTIMONIAL, Haggis was increasingly troubled by the contradictions in the church. Scientology had begun to seem like two different things: a systematic approach to self-knowledge, which he found useful and insightful; and a religion that he simply couldn’t grasp. He liked and admired his auditor, and the confessions were helpful, and he continued to advance on the Bridge, even after his unsettling encounter with OT III. He saw so many intelligent people on the path, and he always expected that his concerns would be addressed at the next level. They never were. After OT III, it was all “intergalactic spirituality,” in his opinion. On the other hand, he had already paid for the complete package, so why not continue and see what happened? “Maybe there is something, and I’m missing it,” he told himself.

  When Haggis reached OT VII, which was the peak at the time, he still felt confused and unsatisfied. At the top of the OT pyramid, the thetan was promised the ability to control “thought, life, form, matter, energy, space and time, subjective and objective.” The final exercise (according to documents obtained by WikiLeaks—Haggis refused to talk about it) was “Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body.” But even if you could do that, how would you know if you succeeded? If you were transmitting the intention “Scratch your head” and a person did so, was he responding to your psychic order or was it simply coincidental? It was difficult to evaluate.

  Haggis thought that Hubbard was such a brilliant intellect that the failure to grasp these concepts and abilities must be his alone. He finally confided to a counselor at the Celebrity Centre that he didn’t think he was a very good Scientologist because he couldn’t bring himself to believe. He said he felt like a fraud and thought he might have to leave the church. She told him, “There are all sorts of Scientologists,” just as there are many varieties of Jews and Christians with varying levels of belief. The implication was that Haggis could believe whatever he wanted, to “pick and choose,” as he says.

  Haggis’s career was going so well that in 1987 he was approached by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz to write for a new television series called thirtysomething. They were looking for distinctive voices. “I love the fact that you guys are doing a show that’s about emotions,” Haggis told them. “I hate writing about emotions. And I don’t like to talk about my own.” But he seemed to be looking for a chance to push himself creatively. With his first script, Zwick and Herskovitz told him, “This is really good, but where does it come from?” Haggis didn’t know what they meant. “Where does it come from—within you?” they explained. The thought that his own experience mattered was a revelation.

  Zwick and Herskovitz sensed that Haggis wasn’t happy on the show; in any case, he got a lucrative offer to create his own series and left after the first season. But he had won two Emmys, for writing and producing, and the experience transformed him as a writer. From working with Zwick and Herskovitz, Haggis became interested in directing. He finally got the chance to do a brief ad for the church about Dianetics. He decided against the usual portrayal of Scientology as a triumphal march toward enlightenment, choosing instead to shoot a group of people talking about practical ways they had used Dianetics in their lives. It was casual and naturalistic. Church authorities hated it. They told him it looked like a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Then, out of the blue, Haggis got a huge break. He did a favor for a friend who wanted to create a new series that would star Chuck Norris, whose career as an action-movie hero had gone into decline. Haggis wrote the pilot for Walker, Texas Ranger, which ran for eight seasons and was broadcast in a hundred countries. Haggis was credited as a co-creator. “It was the most successful thing I ever did,” he said. “Two weeks of work. And they never even used my script.”

  With his growing accomplishments and wealth, Haggis became a bigger prize for the church. He agreed to teach a workshop on television writing while he was still the executive producer of Facts of Life, and that brought a number of aspiring scriptwriters into the Celebrity Centre. Then, in 1988, Scientology sponsored a Dianetics car in the Indianapolis 500, and Paul and Diane were invited to attend. Executives from the major book chains were attracted to the Scientology reception by the presence of stars, including Kirstie Alley and John Travolta, and also by the fact that Hubbard’s books have traditionally sold extraordinarily well. B. Dalton ordered 65,000 copies of Dianetics and Waldenbooks asked for 100,000. Dianetics went back on the New York Times paperback best-seller list for advice books, thirty-eight years after it was originally published.

  David Miscavige was at the race. It was one of the few times he and Haggis ever met. The organizer of the event, Bill Dendiu, recalled that Miscavige was not pleased that Haggis had been invited. Dendiu defended his decision because Haggis was now a bona fide celebrity. “He has had a string of hit TV shows and by my estimation is a very devoted member of the church,” he told Miscavige. Paul and Diane met Miscavige and other top-level members of the church for dinner. “Paul takes no shit from anybody,” Dendiu recalled. “The fact that he did not suck up to Miscavige—and in fact, had a couple of little zingers or one-liners for him while we were at the dinner—that got me some additional browbeating.” He added: “You have to understand that no one challenges David Miscavige.”

  The Dianetics car crashed in the first lap. Paul and Diane flew home in Travolta’s plane, with Travolta himself at the controls.

  SUZETTE HUBBARD BLEW in February 1988.

  Five years earlier she had met Guy White, a Sea Org marketing executive, on the RPF running program, which at the time was in Griffith Park in Los Angeles—about fifty people running all day long, even after dinner, stuffing themselves on bread and honey to keep themselves going. Suzette was warned by an auditor that Guy was gay. In fact, Guy didn’t know if he was gay or not. When he joined the staff, he had to respond to a questionnaire that asked, “Have you ever been involved in prostitution, homosexuality, illegal sex or perversion? Give who, when, where, what in each instance.” He had never actually had a homosexual relationship and had been celibate for a decade; moreover, it was generally assumed that homosexuality was a false identity, a “valence,” in Hubbard’s language, and that such longings would disappear when he got to OT III.

  Suzette and Guy married in March 1986, three months after her father died. Their son, Tyson, was born nine months and a day later. It was strange having a child on Gold Base. Suzette had been pregnant when the order was issued banning Sea Org members from having children,2 and the only other child around was Roanne, Diana Hubbard’s daughter. Other Sea Org members looked upon the children longingly. “People could see what they could never have,” Guy White said. The fact that Tyson had been born so soon after Hubbard’s death, and that he had shockingly red hair, stirred speculation that he might be a reincarnation of the founder. “Is he? Is he?” they asked themselves.

  Every church or mission maintains an office for the day Hubbard returns. A pen and a yellow legal pad await him at each of his desks. His personal bathrooms have toothbrushes and identical sets of Thom McAn sandals beside the shower. On Gold Base, his modest original house was razed and replaced with a $10 million mansion. A full-time staff attends the empty residence, regularly laundering the founder’s clothes and keeping the house ready for his white-glove inspection. His vehicles are still in the garage, gassed up, with the keys in the ignition. On his nightstand is a Louis L’Amour novel, with a bookmark placed midway through. The dining table is set for one.

  The search for Hubbard’s reincarnated being resembles the quest for the new Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, although there are few clues about his identity. He had prophesied that he would be out of action “for the next 20–25 years.” In some versions of the story, Hubbard will be recognized by his red hair, which is why Tyson’s birth aroused such expectations.

  Suzette was terrified that Tyson would be tak
en away from her. She had little time with him as it was. There was a Sea Org policy, written by her father, which mandated an hour a day of “family time,” but that had been canceled. Now Suzette was pregnant again. Over a period of days she smuggled toys and clothes via a laundry basket into her little Mazda; then one night she left a farewell note for Guy, grabbed Tyson, and drove to San Diego. A few days later, she moved in with Mary Sue. Mary Sue was living in a house in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles that the church provided when she got out of prison. Amid all the anxiety, Suzette had a miscarriage.

  After Suzette blew, Guy recalls being sent to Happy Valley and being told he would have to divorce his wife. Jonathan Horwich, Roanne’s father, was also in Happy Valley, along with Arthur Hubbard, Ron and Mary Sue’s youngest child. One night, while Horwich was supposed to be standing guard, Arthur blew and was never recovered.

  In October 1988, Guy also decided to escape. Each evening, he went for a stroll along the fence line, a little farther each time, carrying a snack for the German shepherd guard dogs. One night, he jumped the fence, but the dogs betrayed him and began barking. He had to dive off the road when he saw the lights of the blow team coming after him. For hours, he stumbled through the brush, bleeding, his clothes torn, until he made it to Hemet, where he pounded on the door of a bowling alley. In broken Spanish, he told the person who peeked out that he had been in a car wreck.

  Guy finally rejoined Suzette. (They had two other children before he came out to her as gay. They divorced in 1998.)

  LIKE PAUL HAGGIS, Tom Cruise had been raised Catholic, although he was more religiously inclined than Paul. His family moved frequently, and he spent part of his childhood in Canada, where he had the reputation of being a headstrong, troublesome, charismatic, and charming boy. His schoolwork suffered because of dyslexia, and he later said that when he graduated from high school he was “a functional illiterate.” However, he excelled in sports and drama. His family, like the Haggis family, threw themselves into theater, founding an amateur troupe of players in Ottawa. His antisocial, bullying father was a disruptive force in the family, and early one morning, when Cruise was twelve, his mother packed up her three daughters and her precocious son and fled back to America. “We felt like fugitives,” Cruise later recalled.

  Spiritual questing and a tendency toward piety were already features of Cruise’s personality. He spent a year in seminary in Cincinnati, with a view toward joining the priesthood. But there was another, intensely ambitious side that was focused entirely on stardom. He went to Hollywood when he was eighteen, and managed to get a role in Endless Love, a movie starring Brooke Shields. He was a natural actor, but also persistent and choosy, quickly finding his way into memorable roles. The longing to express his spiritual side had never gone away, but it was difficult, in Hollywood, to know exactly how to fit that in.

  There was one church that was especially designed to resolve this dilemma.

  Cruise’s first wife, the actress Mimi Rogers, introduced him to Scientology in 1986. He had just finished filming Top Gun, which had made him the world’s biggest movie star. He had little incentive to publicly declare himself a Scientologist after the widespread opprobrium directed at Scientology following the FBI raids on Operation Snow White and the exposure of the church’s esoteric beliefs. Rumors of his involvement began to mount, however. For several years he managed to keep his affiliation quiet, even from church management. Using his birth name, Thomas Mapother IV, he received auditing at a small Scientology mission called the Enhancement Center in Sherman Oaks, which Rogers had started with her former husband. Rogers’s close friend, and former roommate, Kirstie Alley, did her auditing there, along with singer—and later, congressman—Sonny Bono, who had also been brought into the church by Rogers. Cruise would later credit Scientology’s study methods for helping him overcome his dyslexia.

  The triumph of adding Cruise to the Scientology stable was fraught with problems. Mimi Rogers was at the top of that list. Her parents had been involved with Dianetics since the early days of the movement. In 1957, when Mimi was a year old, they had moved to Washington, DC, to work for Hubbard, and her father, Philip Spickler, had briefly joined the Sea Org. But Mimi’s parents had become disaffected by the end of the seventies. They were considered “squirrels,” because they continued to practice Scientology outside the guidance of the church. It would be one thing to have Tom Cruise as a trophy for Scientology, but it would be a disaster if he became a walking advertisement for the squirrels.

  When Miscavige learned of Cruise’s involvement in Scientology, he arranged to have the star brought to Gold Base, alone, at its secret desert location near Hemet, in August 1989. He assigned his top people to audit and supervise the young star during his first weekend stay. Cruise arrived wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, trying to keep a low profile, although everyone on the base knew he was there.

  Cruise was preparing to make Days of Thunder that fall. He had just seen a twenty-one-year-old Australian actress, Nicole Kidman, in the thriller Dead Calm, and he was so enchanted that he cast her in a part she was far too young to play: a brain surgeon who brings Cruise’s character back to life after he crashes his race car. They had an immediate, intense connection, one that quickly became a subject of tabloid speculation.

  According to Rathbun, Cruise and Miscavige now had a common interest: getting rid of Mimi. She demanded and received a church mediation of their relationship, which involves each partner being put on E-Meters and confessing their “crimes” in front of the other. But with Cruise ready to move on and Miscavige seemingly set against her, Rogers stood little chance. Marty Rathbun and a church attorney went to her home carrying divorce papers. “I told her this was the right thing to do for Tom, because he was going to do lots of good for Scientology,” Rathbun recalled. “That was the end of Mimi Rogers.”

  Rogers later said that she and Cruise were already having difficulty in their marriage. He had been seriously thinking about becoming a monk, in which case marriage wouldn’t fit into his plans. “He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument,” she told Playboy. “Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.”

  AFTER TWO YEARS, Annie Broeker had worked her way out of Happy Valley. She was assigned to Gold Base, which serves as the headquarters for the Commodore’s Messengers Org; Golden Era Productions, which makes Scientology films and manufactures the audiovisual materials for the church, as well as E-Meters; and the Religious Technology Center, which enforces the orthodoxy of Scientology practices. Through his position as chairman of the RTC, Miscavige directed the church’s operations, spending much of his time living on the base. Rathbun and other top executives were also living and working on the five-hundred-acre base, which was still so hush-hush that few Scientologists knew of its existence. Rathbun believed that Miscavige wanted Annie close by, in case Pat Broeker ever stirred back to life.

  An ex-marine named Andre Tabayoyon, who oversaw construction of the security at the Gold Base, later testified that church funds were used to purchase assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols; he also said that explosive devices were placed around the perimeter to be used in case of assault by law enforcement officials. Surrounded by a security fence with three-inch spikes, patrolled by armed guards, and monitored by cameras, motion detectors, infrared scanners, and a sniper’s nest at the top of a hill, the property houses about eight hundred Sea Org members, in conditions that the church describes as “like one would find in a convent or seminary, albeit much more comfortable.”

  Annie resumed using her maiden name, Tidman. Although she was continuously under guard, she had fallen in love with another Sea Org member—Jim Logan, the same man who had recruited Paul Haggis into Scientology on the street corner in London, Ontario. Annie had met Logan in Happy Valley when both were on the RPF. Jim and Annie married in June 1990 and moved to Sea Org berthing near Gold Base. Logan was no longer the long-haired hippie he had been in those days; he was now mid
dle-aged and balding, with a black moustache, but he still had those intense, playful eyes and a ready laugh. His outsized, boisterous personality didn’t always fit well in the highly regimented life he had signed up for. In the summer of 1992, Logan was served with a “non-enturbulation order,” which meant that he should stop stirring things up. In October, eight men came to escort him to a detention facility where troublesome staff members were confined. Logan was told that he had been declared a Suppressive Person and was going to be booted out of the Sea Org.

  Annie had previously confided that she was “finished” with the Sea Org and would leave if Jim was ready. He didn’t want to go then; he still hoped to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the church, but Annie made application to formally route out of the Sea Org. In a few months, if all went well, they would have a quiet reunion in Nova Scotia, where they could have children and forget the past. Annie promised him, “They can’t make me divorce you.” But on October 8, 1992, Logan’s last day in the Sea Org, church officials told him that Annie had been ordered to disconnect from him. He was served with divorce papers, given a freeloader tab for more than $350,000, and then dropped off at the bus station with a ticket to Bangor, Maine.

  Several times after that, Jim and Annie were able to speak secretly. She would manage to sneak a call to him late at night, or he would have his mother call her. When Annie couldn’t wait any longer to see him, Jim bought her an open ticket from Ontario, California—the nearest airport—to Bangor. It would be waiting for her to pick up whenever she wanted. A few weeks later, Jim got a call from Annie: she was on her way. It was about five in the morning in California. She was catching a flight that stopped in Denver, then went on to Boston, where she would change planes for Bangor. Jim set out from Nova Scotia for the nine-hour drive to the airport.