Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  The girls went to Delphi Academy, a private school that uses Hubbard “study tech.” It is largely self-guided. According to Scientology pedagogy, there are three barriers that retard a student’s progress. The first is “Lack of Mass.” This principle was derived from Alfred Korzybski’s observation that the word and the object that it names are not the same thing. If the student is studying tractors, for instance, it is best to have a real tractor in front of him. The absence of the actual object is disorienting to the student. “It makes him feel physiologically condensed,” Hubbard writes. “Actually makes him feel squashed. Makes him feel bent, sort of spinny, sort of dead, bored, exasperated.” Photographs of the object can help, or motion pictures, as they are “a sort of promise of hope of the mass,” but they are not an adequate substitute for the tractor under study. The result for the student is that he becomes dizzy, he’ll have headaches, his stomach gets upset, his eyes will hurt, and “he’s going to wind up with a face that feels squashed.” Illness and even suicide may be the expected result. Hubbard’s study tech remedies the problem by using clay or Play-Doh for the student to make replicas of the object.

  The second principle is “Too Steep a Gradient,” which Hubbard describes as the difficulty a student encounters when he makes a leap he’s not prepared for. “It is a sort of a confusion or a reelingness that goes with this one,” Hubbard writes. His solution is to go back to the point where the student fully understands the subject, then break the material into bite-size pieces.

  The “Undefined Word”—the third and most important principle—occurs when the student tries to absorb material while bypassing the definition of the words employed. “THE ONLY REASON A PERSON GIVES UP A STUDY OR BECOMES CONFUSED OR UNABLE TO LEARN IS BECAUSE HE HAS GONE PAST A WORD THAT WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD,” Hubbard emphasizes in one of his chiding technical bulletins. “WORDS SOMETIMES HAVE DIFFERENT OR MORE THAN ONE MEANING.” A misunderstood word “gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed out feeling,” Hubbard writes. “A not-there feeling and a sort of an hysteria will follow in the back of that.” The solution is to have a large dictionary at hand, preferably one with lots of pictures in it. All Scientology texts contain glossaries for specialized Scientology terms. The need to understand the meaning of words, Hubbard writes, “is a sweepingly fantastic discovery in the field of education and don’t neglect it.”

  These last two principles are fundamental to the induction of Scientology itself. Because the church asserts that everything Hubbard wrote or spoke is inarguably true, whatever you don’t understand or accept is your fault. The solution is to go back and study the words and approach the material in a more deliberate fashion. Eventually, you’ll get it. Then you can move on.

  Lauren loved her teacher at Delphi, but the Hubbard method placed the responsibility of learning almost entirely on the student. For Lauren, her parents’ tumultuous divorce was a crushing distraction. It seemed to her that no one was paying attention to her, either at home or at school. She was illiterate until she was eleven. She couldn’t read or write her own name.

  Second-generation Scientologists are typically far more at home with the language and culture of the church than their parents are. And yet they may find themselves a little lost when trying to deal with an uncomprehending society. The first time Alissa noticed that she was doing something different from most people was when she performed a Contact Assist. Scientology preaches that if you repeatedly touch a fresh wound to the object that caused the injury and silently concentrate, the pain lessens and the sense of trauma fades. If a Scientologist sees a person close his hand in a door, for instance, a church manual instructs the Scientologist to “have him go back and, with his injured hand, touch the exact spot on the same door, duplicating the same motions that occurred at the time of the injury.” There are other kinds of assists that will awaken an unconscious person, eliminate boils, reduce earaches and back pain, and make a drunk sober. Instead of crying when she hurt herself, Alissa would quietly redo the action over and over, until she had drained it of its sting. She noticed that non-Scientologists had no idea what she was doing. She was also surprised when she went to a friend’s house for dinner and the family said grace before the meal. It took her a second to realize what they were doing. In her opinion, God plays a negligible role in Scientology. “I mean, there’s a spot for it, but it’s sort of a blank spot.” So whenever her friends began to pray, “I would bow my head and let them have their ceremony.”

  Paul was also scarred by the divorce—although, as would often be the case for him, he would mine the experience for his work. He created a television series, Family Law, that was based to some extent on his divorce from Diane. He always found more solace and meaning in his work than he did in his family. Each year he grew more successful, but the gap between him and his daughters grew wider. They knew him better as a writer than as a father, and they would puzzle over the fact that he was so cool to them, when his scripts were often full of emotion. Paul felt guilty about not spending time with the girls, so he would arrange to bring them to the set and assign them some small task. Alissa got to do nearly every job in the industry, from wardrobe to production assistant; she received a Directors Guild card in Canada by the time she was fifteen.

  In 1991, Haggis went to a Fourth of July party at the home of some Scientologist friends. He met a striking actress there named Deborah Rennard. She had grown up in Scientology. In her early twenties she had studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and had fallen under the influence of Milton Katselas, the legendary acting teacher and Hubbard’s former collaborator. They became lovers. Milton was spellbinding, but he was twenty-seven years older than Deborah, and their relationship was an exhausting roller-coaster ride. They stayed together for six years. When Paul met her, Deborah and Milton had recently broken up. She was a successful actress with a recurring role in the long-running television series Dallas—as J. R. Ewing’s loyal but always unattainable secretary.

  Deborah Rennard and Milton Katselas in Silverlake, California, 1985

  Paul was still going through his epic divorce. Early in his relationship with Deborah, Paul admitted that he was having a spiritual crisis. He said he’d raced up to the top of the Bridge on faith, but he hadn’t gotten what he expected. “I don’t believe I’m a spiritual being. I actually am what you see,” Paul told her. Deborah advised him to get more auditing. Personally, she was having breakthroughs that led her to discover past lives. Images floated through her mind, and she realized, “That’s not here. I’m not in my body, I’m in another place.” She might be confronting what the church calls a “contra-survival action”—“like the time I clobbered Paul or threw something at him.” She would look for an “earlier similar” in her life. Suddenly she would see herself in England in the nineteenth century. “It was a fleeting glimpse at what I was doing then. Clobbering husbands.” When she examined these kindred moments in her current existence and past ones, the emotional charge would dissipate. Paul would say, “Don’t you think you’re making this up?” At first, she thought he might be right. But then she wondered if that really mattered. She felt she was getting better, so who cared whether they were memories or fantasies? As an actor she went through an analogous process when working on a scene; she would grab hold of a feeling from who knows where. It felt real. It helped her get into the role. As long as the process worked, why quibble?

  Deborah made sure Paul showed up at the annual gala and became involved in Scientology charitable organizations. Over the years, Haggis spent about $100,000 on courses and auditing and an equal amount on various Scientology initiatives. This figure doesn’t include the money that Diane gave to the church while she was married to Paul. Haggis also gave $250,000 to the International Association of Scientologists, a fund set up to protect and promote the church. Deborah spent about $150,000 on coursework of her own. Paul and Deborah held a fund-raiser in their home that raised $200,000 for a new Scientology building in Nashville, and they contributed
an additional $10,000 from their own pocket. The demands for money—“regging,” it’s called in Scientology, because the calls come from the Registrar’s Office—never stopped. Paul gave them money just to keep them from calling.

  * * *

  1 A lawyer for Preston and Travolta claims that the couple “never put their son through a ‘Purification Rundown’ treatment and would never have engaged in any type of conduct that would have endangered their son’s health, welfare, or well-being in any way.” He maintains that Preston was referring to herself when she responded to Williams’s question.

  2 According to the church, “The Sea Org policy on children changed in 1986. The Executive Director International, Mr. Guillaume Lesevre, issued the change in policy which provided that Sea Org members could no longer have children and remain in the Sea Org.”

  3 The church denies that there is such a thing as the blow drill. The church produced an affidavit by Morehead, executed Mar. 31, 1997, in which he says: “I have seen people leave and they were free to do so. I am now doing so myself.… I am aware of stories of individuals claiming to have been held against their will, but I know for myself and from my security position that the stories are completely false.” Morehead repudiates the statement, saying, “In March of 1997 at that specific moment I would have signed anything.”

  4 Cruise, through his attorney, says he has no recollection of meeting Marc Headley. Bruce Hines, who was there to make sure the process was done correctly, witnessed the sessions and clearly remembers Cruise auditing Headley.

  5 Cruise’s attorney remarks, “So far as I know, Mr. Cruise has always paid for any services he received.”

  7

  The Future Is Ours

  Now that he was firmly in control of the church, Miscavige sought to restore the image of Scientology. The 1980s had been a devastating period for the church’s reputation, with Hubbard’s disappearance and eventual death, the high-profile lawsuits, and the avalanche of embarrassing publicity. Miscavige hired Hill & Knowlton, the oldest and largest public relations firm in the world, to oversee a national campaign. The legendarily slick worldwide chairman of Hill & Knowlton, Robert Keith Gray, specialized in rehabilitating disgraced dictators, arms dealers, and governments with appalling human-rights records. As representatives of the government of Kuwait, Hill & Knowlton had been partly responsible for selling the Persian Gulf War to the American people. One of the company’s tactics was to provide the testimony of a fifteen-year-old girl, “Nayirah,” to a human-rights committee in the US House of Representatives in October 1990. Nayirah described herself as an ordinary Kuwaiti who had volunteered in a hospital. She tearfully told the House members of watching Iraqi soldiers storm into the prenatal unit. “They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die,” she said. The incident could never be confirmed, and the girl turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and had never volunteered at the hospital. The propaganda operation was, at the time, the most expensive and sophisticated public relations campaign ever run in the United States by a foreign government.

  Gray had also worked closely with the Reagan campaign. He regaled the Scientologists with his ability to take a “mindless actor” and turn him into the “Teflon President.” Hill & Knowlton went to work for the church, putting out phony news stories, often in the form of video news releases made to look like actual reports rather than advertisements. The church began supporting high-profile causes, such as Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games, thereby associating itself with other well-known corporate sponsors, such as Sony and Pepsi. There were full-page ads in newsmagazines touting the church’s philosophy, and cable television ads promoting Scientology books and Dianetics seminars.

  Then, in May 1991, came one of the greatest public relations catastrophes in the church’s history. Time magazine published a scathing cover story titled “Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” by investigative reporter Richard Behar. The exposé revealed that just one of the religion’s many entities, the Church of Spiritual Technology, had taken in half a billion dollars in 1987 alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the parent organization were buried in secret accounts in Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and Cyprus. Many of the personalities linked with the church were savaged in the article. Hubbard himself was described as “part storyteller, part flimflam man.” The Feshbach brothers were the “terrors of the stock exchanges,” who spread false information about companies in order to drive down their valuations. Behar quoted a former church executive as saying that John Travolta stayed in the church only because he was worried that details of his sex life would be made public if he left. The article asserted that Miscavige made frequent jokes about Travolta’s “allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior.” When Behar queried Travolta’s attorney for the star’s comment, he was told that such questions were “bizarre.” “Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist,” Behar wrote.

  “Those who criticize the church—journalists, doctors, lawyers, and even judges—often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up, or threatened by death,” Behar noted. He accused the Justice Department of failing to back the IRS and the FBI in bringing a racketeering suit against the church because it was unwilling to spend the money required to take the organization on. He quoted Cynthia Kisser, head of the Cult Awareness Network in Chicago: “Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen.”

  After the Time article appeared, Miscavige was invited to appear on ABC’s Nightline, a highly prestigious news show, to defend the image of the church. He had never been interviewed in his life. He rehearsed for months, as much as four hours per day, with Rathbun and Rinder. He would prod them to ask him questions, then complain that they didn’t sound like Ted Koppel, the show’s courtly but incisive host. Miscavige would ask himself the questions in what he thought was Koppel’s voice, then respond with a hypothetical answer. He sorted through what seemed to his aides an endless number of wardrobe choices before settling on a blue suit with a purple tie and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. Finally, on Valentine’s Day, 1992, he went to New York, where the show would be broadcast live.

  The interview was preceded by a fifteen-minute report by Forrest Sawyer about Scientology’s claims and controversies. “The church says it now has centers in over seventy countries, with more on the way,” Sawyer said. Heber Jentzsch, the president of the Church of Scientology International, was featured, claiming a membership of eight million people. Sawyer also interviewed defectors, who talked about their families being ripped apart, or being bilked of tens of thousands of dollars. Richard Behar, the Time reporter, recounted how Scientology’s private investigators had obtained his phone records. Vicki Aznaran, a former high official in the church, who was then suing the church, told Sawyer that Miscavige ordered attacks on those he considered troublemakers—“have them, their homes, broken into, have them beaten, have things stolen from them, slash their tires, break their car windows, whatever.”

  Koppel allowed Miscavige to respond to the Sawyer report. “Every single detractor on there is a part of a religious hate group called Cult Awareness Network and their sister group called American Family Foundation,” Miscavige said. “It’s the same as the KKK would be with blacks.” He seemed completely at ease.

  “You realize there’s a little bit of a problem getting people to talk critically about Scientology because, quite frankly, they’re scared,” Koppel observed.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no.”

  “I’m telling you, people are scared,” Koppel insisted.

  “Let’s not give the American public the wrong impression,” said Miscavige. “The person getting harassed is myself and the church.”

  Koppel then lobbed what seemed like an e
asy question for a man who had spent so much time preparing for this encounter. “See if you can explain to me why I would want to be a Scientologist.”

  “Because you care about yourself and life itself,” Miscavige said eagerly. He gave the example of communication skills. “This is something that major breakthroughs exist in Scientology, being able to communicate in the world around you,” he said. “There’s an actual formula for communication which can be understood. You can drill on this formula.”

  “So far in life, I haven’t had a whole lot of trouble communicating,” Koppel drolly noted.

  “What in your life do you feel is not right, that you would like to help?” Miscavige asked. It was a classic Scientology technique, to find a subject’s “ruin,” the thing that was blocking his access to happiness.

  “I feel perfectly comfortable with my life,” Koppel replied.

  Miscavige switched tactics. “Let’s look at it this way, then, what Scientology does. If you look out across the world today, you could say that if you take a person who’s healthy, doing well, like yourself, you’d say that person is normal, not a crazy, not somebody who is psychotic, you look at a wall and they call it an elephant,” he said, extemporizing. “And you can see people below that—crazy people, criminals—that I think society in general will look at and say, ‘That breed of person hasn’t something quite right because they’re not up to this level of personality.’…What we are trying to do in Scientology is take somebody from this higher level and move them up to greater ability.”

  “What about the folks ‘down there’?”

  “We don’t ignore them. My point is this: Scientology is there to make the able more able.”

  “Another way of saying that is: you’re interested in folks who’ve got money.”