Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  Although it’s not included in the exhibit, Hubbard’s chronology of psychiatry actually begins “five billion years ago” with the development of a particular technique that was developed “in the Maw Confederation of the Sixty-third Galaxy”:

  Take a sheet of glass and put it in front of the preclear—clear, very clear glass—which is supercooled, preferably about a −100 centigrade. You got that? Supercooled, you know? And then put the preclear right in front of this supercooled sheet of glass and suddenly shove his face into the glass.…

  Takes about twenty seconds, then, to accomplish a total brainwash of a case.

  Now, if you wish to play God, as the whole-track psychiatrist did at that time, all you have to say at this time is, of course, “Go to Earth and be president,” or something like that, you know? And a thetan, being properly brainwashed now, will take off, and that’s that.

  Hubbard also blamed psychiatrists, allied with the tyrant Xenu, for carrying out genocide in the Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago. There are obvious parallels in this legend with the Nazi regime, which used doctors, including psychiatrists, to carry out the extermination of the mentally ill, along with homosexuals, Gypsies, and Jews; and also by the Soviet government, which employed psychiatrists to diagnose political dissidents and lock them away. Hubbard lived through these shameful events, and they no doubt colored his imagination.

  After Hubbard’s death, Miscavige continued the campaign. In 1995, he told the International Association of Scientologists that the church’s goals for the new millennium were to “place Scientology at the absolute center of society” and to “eliminate psychiatry in all its forms.” The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum, maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist. In this view, psychiatrists have been responsible for the Holocaust, apartheid, and even 9/11. The commission is not above bending the truth to make its point. The president of CCHR, Dave Figueroa, asserts that Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a psychiatrist who took control of bin Laden’s “thought patterns.” “Whatever type of drugs that Zawahiri used to make that change in bin Laden, we don’t know,” Figueroa explained. “We know there was a real change in that guy’s attitude.” This view is reiterated in the terrorism portion of the museum. (In fact, Zawahiri is a general surgeon, not a psychiatrist.)10

  CCHR’s main effort has been an international campaign against the use of psychiatric drugs, especially for children. The surgeon general of the United States issued a report in 2001 claiming that more than twenty percent of children ages nine to seventeen had a diagnosable mental or addictive disorder, and that four million American children suffered from major mental illness. There is obviously an immense market for medications to treat such disorders. About ten percent of Americans over the age of six are on antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs are the top-selling category of drugs in the country. They have become a plague on the schoolgrounds of America, with indiscriminate prescriptions creating a new culture of drug dependency—one that the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession bear some responsibility for.

  Haggis has been a substantial supporter of the CCHR. As a boy, he says, he spent most of his days staring out the window, daydreaming—a candidate for an attention deficit disorder diagnosis. “I identified with the oddballs and the misfits,” he said. “Those who conform have very little chance of making a difference in life.” He was sure that if his parents had medicated him, he might never have become a writer. He hosted fund-raisers for CCHR in his home. “I simply believe that psychiatric drugs are over-prescribed, especially to children,” he said. “I think that is a crime.”

  Scientologists have been seeking ways of criminalizing psychiatric remedies. In the same period that Cruise was chastising Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, Kirstie Alley and Kelly Preston were testifying before state lawmakers in Florida, who passed a bill, written in part by Scientologists, that would hold schoolteachers criminally liable for suggesting to parents that their children might be suffering from a mental health condition, such as attention deficit disorder. Governor Jeb Bush vetoed the bill. Governor Jon Huntsman did the same in Utah. Similar bills have been pushed by the CCHR in other states. In her Florida testimony, Kirstie Alley held up photographs of children who had committed suicide after taking psychotropic drugs. “None of these children were psychotic before they took these drugs,” she asserted, sobbing so hard she could barely speak. “None of these children were suicidal before they took these drugs.”

  Some drug makers have covered up studies that indicate an increased danger of suicidal or violent thoughts caused by psychotropic medicines. Eli Lilly, for instance, suppressed data showing that patients who were taking the popular drug Prozac—the only antidepressant certified as safe for children—were twelve times more likely to attempt suicide than patients taking similar medications. Antidepressants have been implicated in a number of schoolyard shootings, such as the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, where two students killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher. One of the killers was taking Luvox at the time. Adderall—one of the drugs cited by Cruise—is an amphetamine often prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; it sometimes causes increased aggression in children and adolescents. Ritalin, the most common drug prescribed for ADHD, is similar to cocaine in its potential for addiction. According to The Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, a person using Ritalin, Adderall, or other cocaine-like drugs “can experience nervousness, restlessness, agitation, suspiciousness, paranoia, hallucinations and delusions, impaired cognitive functions, delirium, violence, suicide, and homicide.”

  But people who are taking antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood-stabilizing drugs are already at a higher risk for suicide or violent behavior. One of the dangers of prescribing an antidepressant is that it may give the patient the stimulus he or she needs to act on suicidal impulses that are already present. Sudden withdrawal from antidepressants can prompt suicidal thoughts as well. Several studies have found that the risk of suicide was just as great for those who don’t receive antidepressants as for those who do; over time, however, patients taking antidepressants are less likely to kill themselves. Such medications now come with warnings about increased suicidal behavior. And yet, one study noted the steady decline of overall suicide rates in the United States since fluoxetine (Prozac) was introduced in the American market. The authors estimated that the drug was responsible for saving 33,600 lives between 1988 and 2002.

  There are numerous examples of Scientologists who have considered or actually committed suicide, or engaged in violence, who might have been helped if they had taken psychotropic medicines. In Buffalo, New York, on March 13, 2003 (L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday), twenty-eight-year-old Jeremy Perkins stabbed his mother seventy-seven times. He was a schizophrenic with a history of violence and hallucinations, who had rejected psychiatric treatment because he was a Scientologist. Hana Eltringham, who had been Hubbard’s chief deputy, believes that Scientology itself caused her own shattered mental state. For years after attaining OT III, Eltringham had frequent thoughts of suicide. The unremitting migraines and voices in her head made her despair. Several times, she came close to jumping off the top floor of the church’s headquarters in Clearwater, but restrained herself because she was worried that it would bring disgrace upon the church and Hubbard’s teachings. It was only when she left the church and began taking Prozac that her headaches and her suicidal thoughts went away. “It has changed my life,” she claimed. Her friend Mary Florence Barnett, Shelly Miscavige’s mother, had similar symptoms—constant headaches and suicidal thoughts. She confided to Eltringham that she wanted to kill herself in order to stop the suppressive body thetans from taking over her mind. Barnett eventually went outside the official church to receive Scientology counseling, a heretical practice known in Scientology as squirreling. (The church
denies that Barnett became involved with dissident Scientologists, but if she had, that would have placed David and Shelly Miscavige in a compromised position with the church. They would have been Potential Trouble Sources if they failed to disconnect from her.) On September 8, 1985, Barnett’s body was found. She had been shot three times in the chest and once through the temple with a rifle. Both of her wrists were slashed. She left two suicide notes. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled her death a suicide.

  In 2007, Kyle Brennan, twenty years old, who was not a Scientologist, went to stay with his father, a member of the church, in Clearwater. Brennan was taking Lexapro, an antidepressant heavily promoted by its manufacturer, Forest Laboratories. He was also under the care of a psychiatrist. According to court records, Brennan’s father, Thomas, was ordered to “handle” his son. Thomas Brennan’s auditor was Denise Miscavige Gentile, David Miscavige’s twin sister. She spoke on the phone to Kyle’s mother, who was not a Scientologist, and urged her to enroll her son in Narconon, the church’s drug-treatment program. His mother refused, pointing out that the program costs approximately $25,000; moreover, Kyle was not a drug addict. She sued, charging that church officials had ordered Thomas Brennan to lock his son’s Lexapro in the trunk of his car. Days after that, Kyle shot himself to death with a .357 Magnum that his father kept in his bedside table. (The suit was dismissed for lack of evidence.)

  The long history of humanity’s inadequate attempts to deal with depression, and the manifold ways in which insanity expresses itself, have never yielded a clear path. Tragedies such as the suicide of Kyle Brennan demonstrate the danger of dogmatic interpretations of psychiatry, such as those offered by Tom Cruise and other Scientology celebrities on the subject. The American Psychiatric Association felt so threatened by Cruise’s statements on the Today show that the president of the organization issued a statement affirming that mental illnesses are real medical conditions. “It is irresponsible for Mr. Cruise to use his movie publicity tour to promote his own ideological views and deter people with mental illness from getting the care they need,” said Steven S. Sharfstein, the president of the APA. But at the 2005 annual meeting of the International Association of Scientologists, Mike Rinder, who had been let out of the Hole for the occasion, credited Cruise with persuading the Food and Drug Administration to post suicide warnings on the labels of two psychiatric drugs within days of his interview with Lauer.

  “If someone wants to get off drugs, I can help them,” Cruise told the German magazine Der Spiegel, in April 2005. “I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs.”

  HAGGIS HAD SENT a rough cut of his movie Crash to the Toronto Film Festival, an important venue for independent films that are looking for distribution. In September 2004, the movie met its first audience at the Elgin Theatre, an elegant old vaudeville house downtown, not far from the spot where Paul sold tickets at the soft-porn theater his professor used to run.

  As he watched the movie, Haggis was appalled. Everything that was wrong was glaringly apparent on the huge screen. He sat glumly waiting for it to end, calculating what could be salvaged. So when the audience rose to its feet at the end, cheering, Haggis couldn’t believe what was happening. Lion’s Gate Films bought Crash for $3.5 million and scheduled it for release the following spring.

  Crash opened quietly in April 2005. There were no billboards or bus signs, which were already touting the arrival of War of the Worlds in June. The reviews for Crash were passionate but polarized. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, calling it “a movie of intense fascination.” A. O. Scott, who reviewed it for The New York Times, was less infatuated. It was a “frustrating movie,” he wrote, “full of heart and devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.” There was no actual premiere, just a screening at the Academy Theater on Wilshire Boulevard, and no grand party afterward. Haggis and his family went out to dinner.

  Despite the conflicting reviews and limited distribution, a groundswell was building for the movie, driven entirely by audiences who were caught up in a national conversation over race and class that the movie prompted. It would go on to earn nearly $100 million in international sales. Million Dollar Baby had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture that February. Haggis was writing a James Bond movie, Casino Royale, in addition to the Eastwood picture Flags of Our Fathers. He was flying.

  Tom Cruise’s career was headed in the opposite direction. Haggis had seen him at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Cruise and Tommy Davis arrived on Ducati motorcycles, wearing black jackets, and were let in the back door of Morton’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills. They said hello to Haggis, but nothing more. Polls showed that Cruise was still ranked as the most powerful actor in Hollywood, and even the most powerful celebrity in the world, but he was also ranked number one as the celebrity that people would least like to have as their best friend.

  When Cruise returned to Gold Base, Miscavige showed off his Harley-Davidson V-rod motorcycle, which had been custom-painted a candy-apple red over a brushed nickel surface. Miscavige’s brother-in-law, John Brousseau, known for his elegant craftsmanship, had done the work. In addition to overseeing the renovation of the Freewinds, Brousseau had installed bars on the doors of the Hole shortly after Rathbun escaped.

  According to Brousseau, “Cruise was drooling” over the motorcycle. “God, could you paint my bike like that?” he asked. Brousseau looked at Miscavige, who nodded. Cruise brought in two motorcycles to be painted, a Triumph Rocket III and a Honda Rune. Spielberg had given him the Honda after the filming of War of the Worlds; it had already been custom-painted by the set designer. Brousseau had to take each motorcycle apart completely and nickel-plate all the parts before painting them.11 Cruise drove the newly painted Rune, with Katie on the back, to the fans’ screening of his movie at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in June.

  Tom Cruise and David Miscavige at the Church of Scientology opening in central Madrid, 2004

  After that, Brousseau was regularly assigned to work on special projects for Cruise. Shelly Miscavige had drafted Brousseau and seven other Sea Org members, along with many of Cruise’s employees at Odin Productions, to work for more than two weeks rehabilitating Cruise’s leased nine-bedroom mansion on Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills—painting, fixing the roof, doing cabinet work, stretching the carpet, rewiring, pressure-washing the tennis court, weeding and planting, repairing the irrigation system, and even reorganizing the clothes in the closets. In the last week, Brousseau says, he had at least a hundred contractors under his direction in order to get the house ready for Cruise.

  Brousseau and a Sea Org executive, Steve Marlowe, also oversaw the renovations on a Blue Bird bus, like Hubbard’s, that Cruise had purchased. Later, Cruise bought another bus, which he called The Silver Screen. Brousseau spent three months commuting to the Marathon Coach factory in Coburg, Oregon, to oversee the retrofitting of the forty-foot vehicle into an elaborate motor home. Brousseau estimates that the redesign cost about $1.5 million, but that doesn’t include his labor or that of Sea Org members in the Golden Era prop department, who manufactured the furniture, countertops, and cabinetry. In 2006, Brousseau also customized a limousine for the star, using the body of a Ford Excursion that he says Cruise acquired using the Scientology fleet discount. Katie was pregnant and wanted a new vehicle with a baby seat. Miscavige had wanted to impress the couple by renovating the Excursion at a local custom shop, but the job was poorly done. Miscavige purchased another Excursion for Cruise to replace the one that had been botched. Meanwhile, Brousseau spent the next six months personally rebuilding the original Excursion. He ripped the vehicle down to its frame and installed handmade reclining seats and wood paneling fashioned from a burl of a eucalyptus tree that had been toppled in a storm. He spent about two thousand hours on the project. The materials were paid for by Cruise’s production company, but according to Brousseau, his labor, and that of about ten other Sea Org memb
ers, was not compensated. “It was a half-million-dollar beauty all done by me, with other folks from Scientology,” Brousseau said.

  Brousseau had even carved a matching Montblanc pen out of the burl, its own hidden storage case in the vehicle. When Cruise showed it to Katie, she was dazzled. She turned to Brousseau and asked, “Oh, J.B., did you make that?”

  “Don’t thank me,” Brousseau quickly responded. “I’m just the hammer. This—,” he said, pointing to Miscavige, “is the hand that wields me.”

  Cruise, who became a pilot while filming Top Gun, keeps a hangar at an airport in Burbank for his airplane collection. Sea Org members completely renovated the hangar, installing a luxurious office that had been fabricated at Golden Era Productions. Brousseau says that the furniture—a dry bar, table and chairs, desks, et cetera—was milled at an RPF base in Los Angeles. Brousseau took dozens of photographs documenting his handiwork on the star’s behalf.

  No member of the Sea Org has spent more time in Cruise’s service than Tommy Davis, who was viewed within the church as the star’s special handler and personal assistant. Although Davis maintains that he provided similar services for other celebrities, his assignment to Cruise was his primary duty between 2000 and 2004. However, he asserted, “None of the Church staff involved were coerced in any way to assist Mr. Cruise. Church staff, and indeed Church members, hold Mr. Cruise in very high regard and are honored to assist him.”