The girls were stunned. They had watched the hostilities through Diane’s eyes. No one had prepared them for the possibility that they might be taken from her—until then, it had been the three girls and their mother against the world. The girls thought the decision was unbalanced and unfairly influenced by the fact that their father had more money. Alissa vowed she would never speak to him again.
Haggis was also caught short by the court’s decision. In addition to the year-old son, James, he had with Deborah, he suddenly had two teenage daughters on his hands as well. (Alissa was twenty-one at the time, and lived on her own.) The girls felt uprooted and they missed the emotional support of their mother. They didn’t resent Deborah; actually, they appreciated her advocacy and the way she balanced out Paul. Still, it was a difficult adjustment for everyone.
Paul put the girls in a private school, but that lasted only six months. They weren’t entirely comfortable talking to people who weren’t Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. They demanded to be sent to a boarding institution on an isolated hilltop near Sheridan, Oregon, called the Delphian School—or the “mother school,” as it was known to Scientologists.
Alissa had gone there when she was fourteen years old. It had been a mixed experience for her. She had brought a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and books of eighteenth-century poetry, a CD of great speeches by Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and a pack of tarot cards. Although she loved the school, she never felt she fit in with the other kids. They wanted to talk about boys and pop culture, and she was more interested in philosophy and religion. But Delphian was just what Lauren needed. She got intensive tutoring to help her overcome her educational deficits; however, she also began to come up against some of the constraints of her church.
While she was at Delphian, Lauren decided to write a paper about religious intolerance. In particular, she felt that Scientology was under attack and she couldn’t understand why. When she went online to see what the opposition was saying, a fellow student turned her in to Ethics. Lauren was told that Scientologists shouldn’t look at negative stories about their religion. She was supposed to be saving the planet, so why was she wasting her time reading lies? Because of her isolation, and the censorship imposed on her education, when Lauren finally graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, she had never heard anyone speak ill of Scientology, nor did she question the ban on research about her religion. She thought, “I guess I’m not supposed to do these things. I will stay away.” Like her father, she learned it was easier not to look.
Alissa had a different issue. She didn’t really date in high school, and by the time she got to junior college it began to dawn on her that she was gay. She actually wasn’t sure what that meant. She had two uncles who were gay, but for the longest time she didn’t know what a lesbian was. Then her sister Katy, who is five years younger, and had grown up in the Internet-savvy culture, came out to her parents. Paul told Katy that there was no way that he would ever love her less. That made it easier for Alissa to talk about what she was discovering about herself. The vow never to speak to her father again began to lose its hold on her.
All the girls had grown up hearing prejudiced remarks from people in the church who saw homosexuality as an “aberration” that undermined the survival of the species; gays themselves were seen as sinister perverts. These attitudes were informed by Hubbard’s writings on the subject. But it wasn’t just Scientology, Alissa realized; the entire society was biased against homosexuals. In her early twenties, Alissa finally found the courage to come out to her father. “Oh, yeah, I already knew that,” he told her. He said he wondered why she had ever dated boys in the first place.
“You knew?” she said. “I didn’t know! How did you know? Why didn’t you tell me? You could have clued me in. It would have made it easier for me.”
That was so typical of her father. He was maddening in that way, completely accepting but disengaged, as if it really didn’t matter one way or the other.
To signify her newfound identity, Alissa got a tattoo of her favorite Latin poem, the opening line of Carmen 5 by Catullus: “Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus” (Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love). It snaked all the way down her left arm.
EVER SINCE the Time exposé, the church had been frantically trying to recover Tom Cruise. Both Cruise and Nicole Kidman were attaining ever greater success; Cruise became the first actor to star in five consecutive films to gross more than $100 million in the United States, including Jerry Maguire and the first Mission: Impossible; Kidman was also gaining international renown with her roles in Batman Forever and To Die For. They gave the impression that they were putting Scientology behind them.
In 1996, Marty Rathbun had gone to Los Angeles to audit Cruise, but that one session went nowhere. According to Rathbun, Miscavige blamed Nicole Kidman, and viewed her as a gold digger who was faking Scientology. He says that Miscavige was hopeful that if they portrayed Nicole Kidman as a Suppressive Person, Cruise could be peeled away from her.
It was two years before Cruise agreed to go through another bout of auditing. This time, strict secrecy was imposed. Worried about scaring off the tentative star, Rathbun arranged the sessions so that even top officials in the church were unaware that Cruise was receiving services. For five days in October 1998, Cruise drove into a private parking lot in the back of the historic Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard, with the yellow Scientology sign atop it that looms over the fabled district. Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino used to have their offices here. Now the lobby is a shrine to the life and works of L. Ron Hubbard. A giant bust of the founder greets the occasional visitor. Embedded in the sidewalk in front of the building are the stars of bygone celebrities on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—Otto Kruger, Tony Martin, Ann Rutherford, Richard Carlson, Jetta Goudal, Paul Winchell—who had their own moments of great renown and are now largely forgotten.
Cruise went in a back door that led to a basement hallway. There was an elevator at the end of the hallway that went directly to the “secret” eleventh floor, where both Miscavige and Rathbun maintained offices. The World Series was under way—New York versus San Diego—and Cruise wore his Yankees hat. “He was not in good shape, spiritually or mentally,” Rathbun observed. “He was personally very enturbulated.”
After that episode of auditing, Cruise went quiet again. He and Kidman were in England filming Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick. In any case, Rathbun and Miscavige had their hands full, fending off the lawsuits and reporters swirling around the McPherson case. Rathbun said that, in January 2001, he got a call from Cruise asking for help. Cruise said that he and Kidman were finished.
Cruise never offered a public explanation for the divorce, and Kidman herself was clearly surprised by his decision. She later revealed that she had suffered a miscarriage two months after Cruise moved out, and she had asked the doctors to preserve samples of the fetus’s DNA to prove that Cruise was the father. She pleaded with him to undergo marriage counseling at the church. Cruise refused, publicly declaring, “Nic knows exactly why we are getting a divorce.”
This was a decisive moment in Cruise’s relationship with Scientology. Rathbun provided the star with more than two hundred hours of auditing over the next couple of years. From July through Thanksgiving, 2001, Rathbun was with Cruise at the Celebrity Centre frequently, doing auditing rundowns and the PTS/SP (Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons) course. He paired Cruise with another actor, Jason Beghe, to do training drills; for instance, Beghe would think of a hypothetical date, which Cruise had to figure out, using the E-Meter, an exercise Cruise found really frustrating.
A young man named Tommy Davis began acting as Rathbun’s assistant. He brought sandwiches and helped out with Cruise’s children, making sure they were receiving church services. Despite his youth, Davis was already a unique figure in the church: He was a second-generation Scientologist, a Sea Org member, and the scion of the Hollywood elite. His m
other was Anne Archer, a talented and popular actress who had starred in a number of movies, including Patriot Games and Fatal Attraction, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She had been a deeply committed Scientologist since she began studying with Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in her twenties. She had always been proud to associate herself with Scientology in public, speaking at innumerable events on behalf of the church. Her son Tommy embodied the aspiration of the church to establish itself in the Hollywood community; indeed, he was living proof that it had done so. He had known Cruise since he was eighteen years old, so it was natural that he soon became the church’s liaison with the star, reporting directly to Shelly Miscavige. He had a relationship with Cruise similar to the one that Spanky Taylor once enjoyed with John Travolta. Rathbun assigned Davis to sit with Cruise in the parking lot of Home Depot in Hollywood while the star was doing his Tone Scale drills—guessing the emotional state of random people coming out of the store.
Cruise then took a break to promote his movie Vanilla Sky. The following February through April 2002, Cruise and Rathbun were once again working together full-time, mostly at Gold Base. Cruise was preparing for his role in The Last Samurai, directed by Ed Zwick, and between sessions with Rathbun he would go into the courtyard to practice his swordplay.
Cruise had begun dating the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, and in the fall of 2001 Rathbun began auditing her as well. At the same time, he was still acting as Nicole Kidman’s Ethics Officer in the church, even though she and Cruise were engaged in a bitter divorce proceeding. One of the issues was whether the children would be educated in schools using the Hubbard method, which Kidman opposed. That was another battle she lost. Although Tom and Nicole split custody of their children, both Isabella and Connor soon chose to live exclusively with their father. Rathbun says this was because the Scientology staff, especially Tommy Davis, quietly worked to turn the children against Kidman. “Tommy told them over and over again their mother was a sociopath and after a while they believed him,” he recalled. “They had daily sessions with Tommy. I was there. I saw it.”
According to several former Sea Org members, Rathbun’s auditing sessions with Cruise were videotaped. Tom De Vocht, a former church official, said Miscavige would watch them and then regale his inner circle, over his nightly whiskey, with stories of Cruise’s confessions, dwelling especially on his sex life.1
Rathbun was opposed to the endless courtship of Cruise. In his opinion, there was no need for it once Cruise was securely back on the Bridge. Rathbun told Miscavige, “I think I’m done with this guy.” Miscavige responded, “He’ll be done when he calls me.” The leader was galled by the fact that Cruise had never contacted him when he came back for counseling. Rathbun continually urged Cruise to call “COB,” as Miscavige is known in the church—Chairman of the Board. At one point Cruise asked for Miscavige’s number, but then failed to call. His tentativeness was worrisome.
Whatever restraint Cruise felt about Miscavige eventually fell away, however, and Miscavige was once again folded into the star’s inner circle. There were movie nights in Cruise’s mansion. Miscavige flew with Cruise in the Warner Brothers jet to a test screening of The Last Samurai in Arizona. The two men became closer than ever. Cruise later said of Miscavige, “I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from LRH. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders. I’ve met them all.”
Cruise’s renewed dedication to Scientology permanently changed the relationship between the church and the Hollywood celebrity community. Cruise poured millions of dollars into the church—$3 million in 2004 alone. He was not simply a figurehead; he was an activist with an international following. He could take the church into places it had never been before. Whenever Cruise traveled abroad to promote his movies, he used the opportunity to lobby foreign leaders and American ambassadors to promote Scientology. Davis usually accompanied him on these diplomatic and lobbying missions. Cruise repeatedly consulted with former President Clinton, lobbying him to get Prime Minister Tony Blair’s help in getting the Church of Scientology declared a tax-deductible charitable organization in the United Kingdom. Rathbun was present for one telephone call in which Clinton advised Cruise he would be better served by contacting Blair’s wife, Cherie, rather than the prime minister, because she was a lawyer and “would understand the details.” Later, Cruise went to London, where he met with a couple of Blair’s representatives, although nothing came of those efforts. In 2003, he met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to express the church’s concerns over its treatment in Germany. Cruise had access to practically anyone in the world.
That same year, Cruise and Davis lobbied Rod Paige, the secretary of education during the first term of President George W. Bush, to endorse Hubbard’s study tech educational methods. Paige had been impressed. For months, Cruise kept in contact with Paige’s office, urging that Scientology techniques be folded into the president’s No Child Left Behind program. One day Cruise flew his little red-and-white-striped Pitts Special biplane, designed for aerobatics, to Hemet, along with his Scientologist chief of staff, Michael Doven. Miscavige and Rathbun picked them up and drove them to Gold Base. Rathbun was in the backseat and recalls Cruise boasting to COB about his talks with the secretary.
“Bush may be an idiot,” Miscavige observed, “but I wouldn’t mind his being our Constantine.”
Cruise agreed. “If fucking Arnold can be governor, I could be president.”
Miscavige responded, “Well, absolutely, Tom.”2
IN 2001, Haggis was fired from Family Law, the show he had created. His career, which for so long seemed to be a limitless staircase toward fame and fortune, now took a plunge. He began working at home.
Within a week, he started writing a movie script called Million Dollar Baby, based on a series of short stories by F. X. Toole. He spent a year working on it, drawing upon some of his own painful memories. He identified with the character of a sour old boxing coach, Frankie Dunn. Like Haggis, Frankie is estranged from his daughter. His letters to her are returned. He turns to religion, going to Mass every day and seeking a forgiveness that he doesn’t really believe in. Into the coach’s dismal life comes another young woman, Maggie Fitzgerald, an aspiring boxer from a white trash background. All of the loss and longing he feels for his daughter is apparent in his mentoring of this gritty young fighter, who has more faith in him than he has in himself. But Maggie is paralyzed when her neck is broken in a fight. In a climactic moment, she begs Frankie to pull the plug and let her die. Haggis faced a similar choice in real life with his best friend, who was brain-dead from a staph infection. “They don’t die easily,” he recalled. “Even in a coma, he kicked and moaned for twelve hours.”
Haggis dreamed of directing the movie himself. But as much as studios admired the writing, the story was so dark nobody wanted to get near it. Haggis began borrowing money to stay afloat. He turned down another TV series because he realized that his heart hadn’t been in television for years.
One of his abandoned TV projects still haunted him. The idea sprang from an unsettling incident a decade before, when he and Diane were driving home from the premiere of Silence of the Lambs. Paul was wearing a tuxedo and driving a Porsche convertible. He stopped at a Blockbuster Video store on Wilshire Boulevard to rent some obscure Dutch film. When they got back into the car, two young black men with guns suddenly rushed up to them. The robbers ordered them out of the car and told them to walk toward a dark parking lot. That seemed like a really bad idea. Haggis pretended not to hear them. He put Diane in front of him and headed down Wilshire instead.
“Stop!”
Paul and Diane froze. They heard footsteps, and one of the thieves snatched the video out of Diane’s hand. Then the Porsche roared off. That was the last Haggis ever saw of it.
Ten years later, Haggis awakened in the middle of the
night and began chewing over this frightening episode once again. He often thought about it. The entire experience had lasted less than a minute, but it had colored his stance toward life in complicated ways. Where did these kids come from? They were living in the same city as he, but a universe of race and class separated them. He could imagine who he was in their eyes, just some rich white guy with much more than his share of what life had to offer. In a way, Haggis was on their side. But it could have turned out so much worse; guns always make things dangerously unpredictable. He was shaken by that thought. The unexpected coda of snatching the rented videotape was intriguing. Haggis had managed a wisecrack to the cops at the time. “I think you’ll discover that these men have been here quite often, looking for that video, and it was never in.”
Specifically, what he thought about in the middle of the night was what those kids said to each other as they sped out of the Blockbuster parking lot onto Wilshire in his pearlescent Cabriolet. Could he find himself in them? Haggis got out of bed and began writing. By mid-morning he had a lengthy outline. It was about the manifold ways that people interact with each other—how the experience of having someone honk at you in traffic and shoot you the finger can affect your mood, so that you take it out on someone else at the first opportunity; or how, alternatively, someone lets you into a long line of traffic, and your day brightens. He saw life in America as a volatile collision of cultures—of immigrants who fail to read the codes that underlie our system, of races that resent and mistrust each other, of people coexisting in different social strata who look at each other with uncomprehending fear and hatred.
He had shopped the proposal around to different television producers, but they unanimously passed on it. Now, as he was struggling financially and artistically, Deborah suggested he consider writing the script as a movie. “You’ll win an Academy Award,” she told him.
Going Clear Page 31
