At first sight, Tom was not Mimi’s usual type. The men in her life—after her divorce she dated TV detectives Tom Selleck and Ed Marinaro as well as Bobby Shriver, scion of the Kennedy clan—were all older and taller than she was. By contrast, Tom Cruise was two inches shorter and six years younger. Like the others, though, he was well-connected—and busy. “He seemed so young and vulnerable, and she was a very powerful personality who knew how to work her power,” recalled a onetime girlfriend who watched her in action. “Quite simply, she rocked his world.”
Mimi’s romance with Tom followed a similar pattern to her days with Tom Selleck. It was all about mutual ambition and business. Show business. They saw each other in between Tom shooting The Color of Money and publicizing Top Gun, and Mimi embarking on her first major starring role in the crime thriller Someone to Watch Over Me. As Selleck’s biographer Jason Bonderoff noted, “Mimi’s a go-getter, a real powerhouse, which is one of the things Tom [Selleck] found so attractive about her. The trouble is that they were so busy with their careers they hardly had time to fall in love.”
Mimi paid rather more attention to the new Tom in her life, introducing her latest partner to the life and works of L. Ron Hubbard. She was simply performing the Gospel according to Ron. Indeed, when her friend Kirstie Alley married acting heartthrob Parker Stevenson in 1993, he, too, became a Scientologist. Somewhat ahead of his time, Hubbard placed great store on enticing celebrities into his cult, recognizing that their involvement would give the movement credibility and encourage others to join. As early as 1955, he issued a policy known as “Project Celebrity,” where he implored his followers to recruit film, theater, and sports stars. He gave celebrities free courses and wooed them further by building or buying buildings he turned into Celebrity Centres, notably a neo-Gothic mansion at the foot of the Hollywood hills in Los Angeles, where artists, actors, and others could take Scientology courses in pleasant, friendly surroundings, away from prying eyes.
His recruitment advice was to go after the “old and faded” or “up and coming,” believing that those at the top of their artistic game had no need of Scientology nostrums. For example, John Travolta joined the movement in 1974, when his acting career was in a slump. “Scientology put me into the big time,” he later claimed. Others who joined during this period were the musicians Chick Corea and Isaac Hayes, while the influential acting coach Milton Katselas sent and still sends a steady stream of aspiring hopefuls to the Celebrity Centre to try Scientology on for size. Word of mouth and personal endorsements within the Hollywood community were key elements of celebrity recruiting. So when Chick Corea went to a Paul McCartney concert in Hollywood, he had more than music on his mind. Backstage, Corea tried to corral Paul and his wife Linda into the cult. They said no, as did John and Yoko Lennon when the highly regarded session pianist Nicky Hopkins, another cult member, tried to entice them in. Hopkins was more successful with music legend Van Morrison, who joined for a time.
There was little left to chance in the “casual encounters” between a cult follower like Mimi Rogers and a potential celebrity recruit. What the celebrities never realized was that their introduction to Scientology was the result of weeks, sometimes months, of meticulous planning. The first stage was to identify a celebrity target, and then work out a “battle plan” to lure them into the cult. To help them, dedicated Scientologists made clay models of the individual, Michael Jackson for example, outlining incremental scenarios that would help their planning. By turning the idea into clay, the concept was somehow made “real.”
On the office wall inside the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood was a three-foot-by-six-foot white magnetic “org board” with the names of targeted celebrities cross-referenced to titles like “Contact,” “Handle,” “Intro Session,” and “Org,” which indicated how involved an individual had become. It was a deadly serious business. The staff of the Celebrity Centre was under intense pressure to show results. Former Scientologist Karen Pressley was “commanding officer” of Celebrity Centre International for three years during the mid-1980s and was considered a celebrity herself, as she and her husband, Peter, had written the 1982 smash hit “On the Wings of Love.”
She recalls, “I remember David Miscavige [now the Scientology leader] pounding his fists and screaming threats about getting to more celebrities. It was psychotic.” With sickening regularity, she and her colleagues were warned that if they didn’t get a celebrity into Scientology within forty-eight hours they would face internal discipline, namely a so-called Ethics Commission, or assignment to the Rehabilitation Project Force, the Scientology version of prison, whose punishments included running around a pole for days. This hysterical behavior, though typical, was even more extreme during the mid-1980s. In 1986, when Mimi and Tom started dating seriously, the cult was plunged into crisis following the death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
By then Scientology had become one of the most notorious and feared cults in the world, the movement treated with suspicion in numerous democratic countries, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, and Australia. On the surface the cult was friendly and inclusive, adherents living by the phrase: “If it ain’t fun, it ain’t Scientology.” The Celebrity Centre in Hollywood, under the warm gaze of Yvonne Jentzsch, was widely regarded as a “friendly and relaxed” venue, a great place to make show business contacts, meet good-looking girls, and, if you were lucky, get laid.
Beneath the seductive smiles, Scientology was a paranoid movement reflecting the schizophrenic personality of the founder, a dogmatic cult dedicated to world domination, dismissive of other religions like Christianity and Buddhism, and accusing psychiatrists and other health workers of being responsible for all the ills on the planet since the dawn of time. As for the gay community, Hubbard wrote in his book The Science of Survival that if the Scientology road to salvation was unsuccessful, the solution was to “dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.” For a man who wrote policies on everything from cleaning windows with newspapers to how to cheat on taxes and how to use a body vibrator, he was less forthcoming about the methodology to be employed to “dispose of” the world’s gay community.
The dark heart of Scientology was a bizarre, closed world, hidden from public view or examination, that reflected the megalomania of the cult’s founder. Even Hubbard’s second wife, Sara Northrup, described the cult leader as someone who was “hopelessly insane” and should be committed.
During the 1960s and ’70s, Hubbard built up the biggest private intelligence agency in the world, hiding behind the shield of the First Amendment to attack, harass, and defame. Church intelligence agents were taught how to make anonymous death threats, smear perceived critics, forge documents, and plan and execute burglaries. They used all means necessary to “shudder into silence”—Hubbard’s charmless phrase—any opposition.
As all critics were by definition criminals, their crimes cried out to be publicly exposed. “Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime, actual evidence on the attackers to the press,” Hubbard wrote in 1966, this attitude codified in a policy known misleadingly as “Fair Game,” where a critic “may be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” Not surprisingly, an exhaustive investigation into Scientology by the Australian government in 1965 concluded: “Scientology is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice is a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and often mentally ill.”
The cult practiced what it preached—to chilling effect. Church members were deliberately infiltrated into government agencies as well as newspapers, anti-cult groups, psychiatric and medical associations, and other organizations deemed antithetical to Scientology. The church’s most audacious espionage conspiracy—at least so far publicly known—took place during the 1970s. Code-named “Operation Snow White,” it involved the systematic wiretapping, theft, and burglary of eleven government and nongovernment buildings, including the IRS and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. Scient
ology spies had even amassed a dossier on then President Nixon, himself no stranger to dubious behavior. In 1977 these criminal activities led the FBI to launch one of the biggest raids in its history, with dozens of armed police simultaneously breaking into Scientology “centres” in Washington and Los Angeles. As a result, eleven senior Scientologists, including the founder’s third wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, went to jail. Hubbard himself and Kendrick Moxon, currently the lead Scientology counsel, were named as unindicted conspirators, along with a further nineteen Scientologists, some of whom remain active in the church today.
While Operation Snow White was breathtaking in its audacity, another conspiracy at this time was bloodcurdling in its calculated cruelty. In 1972 author Paulette Cooper wrote a book called The Scandal of Scientology, which by today’s standards was a modest and even-handed analysis of the cult. For her pains she was served with a total of nineteen lawsuits by the church. That was only the beginning of her seven-year ordeal. The same attention to planning and detail that was involved in luring celebrities into Scientology was now employed in attempting to destroy those the cult considered enemies.
Unbeknownst to her, high-ranking church officials were discussing whether to employ the Mafia to kill her or frame her for a crime she did not commit. They chose the latter, a conspiracy that involved dozens of church workers in a campaign of harassment designed to send her to jail or a mental institution, or drive her to suicide. For months after the book’s publication, Paulette, a pretty, petite blonde, was followed and subjected to obscene phone calls and attempted break-ins to her Manhattan apartment, as well as a vicious letter-writing campaign that accused her of molesting a two-year-old child. (In keeping with Hubbard’s teachings, sexually lurid and often ludicrous allegations against opponents are hallmarks of Scientology smear campaigns.)
Paulette’s second cousin, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the writer, survived a bungled murder attempt. A few months later, in May 1973, the FBI arrested Paulette for allegedly making two bomb threats against the church of Scientology. It took two years and a “truth test,” which Paulette passed, for the FBI to drop its case. In a plan called “Operation Freakout,” Scientologists continued their harassment. At one point a Scientology agent, Jerry Levin, deliberately befriended her, feigning sympathy for her torment while sending details of her every thought and movement to his Scientology bosses. In one of his many reports he noted exultantly: “She can’t sleep again, she’s talking suicide . . . wouldn’t this be great for Scientology?” It was only after the FBI raid on Scientology churches in 1977, which uncovered at least twenty-three thousand documents relating to Operation Freakout, that the full extent of the vicious conspiracy was exposed and Paulette’s undoubted innocence proven.
Paulette’s explanation about her reasons for investigating the cult is as simple as it is courageous. Born in Auschwitz concentration camp, where her parents were murdered, she says, “My parents were killed by Hitler. Scientology is a Fascist group. If people had spoken out in the 1930s perhaps he wouldn’t have come to power. Once I decided the church was evil I had no choice.”
After the jailing of high-ranking Scientologists, the cult liked to claim that its nefarious past was over. During the 1980s, two senior judges on different continents begged to disagree. In 1984, in London’s High Court, Judge Latey, ruling in a child custody battle, concluded: “Scientology is both immoral and socially obnoxious . . . it is corrupt, sinister and dangerous. It is corrupt because it is based upon lies and deceit and has as its real objective money and power for Mr. Hubbard, his wife and those close to him at the top. It is sinister because it indulges in infamous practices both to its adherents who do not toe the line unquestioningly and to those who criticize or oppose it. It is dangerous because it is out to capture young people, and indoctrinate and brainwash them so that they become the unquestioning captives and tools of the cult, withdrawn from ordinary thought, living and relationships with others.”
That same year a judge in California focused on the bizarre mind-set of the cult’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. At the conclusion of a four-week case involving senior church officials and their harassment of former senior Scientologist Gerry Armstrong, who was at one time Hubbard’s personal researcher, Judge Breckenridge launched a forthright condemnation of the cult and its founder: “The organization clearly is schizophrenic and paranoid and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder LRH. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile.”
By then the cult seemed to be on the point of internal collapse, riven by disputes, splits, and lawsuits. In 1982, Scientology missions were summarily disbanded for seemingly taking too big a slice of the cult’s business pie. Many mission holders were harassed, humiliated, and strong-armed into acquiescence. Disgruntled cult members left by the thousands, some even staging a noisy protest outside the cult’s British headquarters. Even Scientology celebrities had their doubts about the direction in which the organization was headed. At that time John Travolta was struggling with his commitment. In an August 1983 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he voiced his doubts about the way the cult was being run. “I wish I could defend Scientology better but I don’t think it even deserves to be defended in a sense.” Alarmed, the cult hierarchy assigned two Scientology auditors, Chris and Stephanie Silcock, a married South African couple, to go everywhere with him, from the movie set to his home, to bolster his allegiance. Other celebrities, like musician Edgar Winter, were given free auditing to keep them happy.
The convulsions gripping the cult proved the last straw for Mimi’s father, mission holder Phil Spickler, who watched the movement he had so enthusiastically embraced become perverted from its original purpose. He recalls: “There is a great deal to be found in both Dianetics and Scientology that is truly and absolutely wonderful and that can be used outside the profit motive or the enslavement motive.”
As the movement went into meltdown, Hubbard was in hiding, on the run from the law for fraud and tax evasion. Those who glimpsed this shadowy character, then living under an assumed name in a remote ranch in Crestor, California, recall that he cut an incoherent, unkempt figure reminiscent of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. His teeth were black, his lank, shoulder-length hair dirty and matted, his nails long, gnarled, and curling—hardly an endorsement for the lifestyle he had spent years promoting. The ultimate irony of his bizarre life is that when he died in January 1986, shortly after suffering a stroke, his body was full of Vistaril, a psychiatric drug used to calm frantic or overanxious patients. Yet this was the same man who had devoted his life to fighting psychiatrists, blaming them for all the world’s ills.
With his death, the Scientology leadership became embroiled in a vicious power struggle. Youngsters in the fanatical Sea Org—an elite group that signed billion-year pledges to Scientology—staged a coup against Hubbard’s inner circle, ousting his anointed successor, Bill Franks, and Hubbard’s closest aides. In several countries Sea Org officers, some barely teenagers, snatched control of the entire country’s organization. “It’s like The Lord of the Flies,” a former franchise holder told The New York Times. “The children have taken over.” When the dust settled, a diminutive but ruthlessly ambitious high-school dropout named David Miscavige had taken overall command of the rickety operation. With members leaving in droves, the omens were that Scientology would go the way of so many cults and expire shortly after the death of its founder. Not this time. A Hollywood heartthrob was waiting in the wings to give it the kiss of life. In years to come he would be called the savior of Scientology.
When Tom Cruise was given picture books on Scientology and Dianetics in 1986, he knew little, if anything, about the cult, except that some of those in his circle had jo
ined or, like Top Gun producer Don Simpson, were interested. It is doubtful that he would have had a chance to read the article in Forbes magazine that year that described the church as “complete with financial dictators, gang bang security checks, lie detectors, committees of evidence and detention camps.”
As for Mimi, she was doing what she and her Scientology friends like Kirstie Alley had done for years, enticing friends into her faith. At that time Tom was the most talked-about star in Hollywood, Top Gun being that year’s blockbuster. To reel in such a big fish would raise her standing inside Scientology and give her film career and earnings a massive boost. Scriptwriter and onetime Scientologist Skip Press, who watched Mimi in action, recalls: “As a former Scientologist who saw all its dark corners, it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if she made a play for Tom with the primary intention of bringing him into the cult and leapfrogging over him to an acting career. In the mid-1980s, Scientology was still reeling from the raid by the FBI. They desperately needed new celebrity blood to stay alive.”
Ironically, while Tom was becoming quietly intrigued by the philosophy of L. Ron Hubbard, senior Scientologists had other celebrities in their sights. During Tom’s romance with Mimi in 1986, prime Scientology targets were his buddy Emilio Estevez, son of actor Martin Sheen, and his fiancée, actress Demi Moore. Indeed, the entire Sheen family was in the crosshairs. With Mimi now on the scene, it was perhaps no coincidence that Scientologists assigned to recruit Demi and Emilio started getting high-grade information about their whereabouts. As Karen Pressley recalls, “A senior Scientology executive would be on the phone telling us that Emilio Estevez was staying in Malibu and that we had forty-eight hours to speak to him and get him in for an auditing session. There was so much heat and pressure on this, it was outrageous.” The thinking was that if they could entice Emilio into the fold, Demi would surely follow. Their covert tactics paid off, as both did join for a time, Estevez always refusing to talk about his involvement with the cult for fear that he might “have his phones tapped.”
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