Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(101)
For years, Herskovitz and several of Haggis’s closest non-Scientology friends participated in an irregular Friday get-together called Boys’ Night. They met at an Italian restaurant on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. The actor Josh Brolin usually attended, along with director Oliver Stone, producer Stephen Nathan, and a peace activist and former priest named Blase Bonpane, among others. One night an attractive New York Times reporter came to write about the event, and the men decided that she made them all a lot more appealing than they were on other occasions. After that, they voted to invite one woman to join them whenever they met. Usually, it’s a beautiful actress. Julie Delpy and Charlize Theron have both been accorded this honor. Madeleine Stowe recalled it as the funniest evening she had ever had, although she had the sense to bring her husband along. She remembered Haggis sitting back, wisecracking, smoking a cigarette, watching it all happen.
Although Brolin, Nathan, and Stone are three of Haggis’s closest male friends, they never talked to him about Scientology. And yet each of the three had an experience in the church, which the others weren’t aware of. Steve Nathan had been hooked up to an E-Meter in the late 1960s by some British Scientologists who were looking for recruits, but he hadn’t been impressed. Oliver Stone didn’t even know Haggis was in Scientology. But for that matter, few knew that Stone had also spent a month in the church. He was a young man just back from Vietnam, full of trouble and questions. He signed up at the church’s New York center in the old Hotel Martinique. “It was like going to college and reading Dale Carnegie, something you do to find yourself.” The difference was that in Scientology there were nice parties and beautiful girls. Scientology didn’t answer his questions; but on the other hand, he noted, “I got laid.”
Brolin had known Haggis for many years. They had worked together in television, and Brolin had helped with Haggis’s charities. Brolin and his wife, actress Diane Lane, shared a house in Italy during the summers with Paul and Deborah. One evening, lubricated with grappa, Brolin began recounting a story of a friend who had “infiltrated” Scientology. He wondered why Paul and Deborah were listening stony-faced. When he finished the tale, Deborah finally said, “You know, we’re Scientologists.”
“What?” Brolin exclaimed. “When the f*ck did that happen?”
“A long time ago,” Deborah said.
“I am so sorry, I had no idea!” Brolin said.
After that, Brolin went with Deborah to a couple of gatherings to hear about Scientology’s opposition to psychotropic drugs. Although Brolin had never talked about it, he had gone to the Celebrity Centre himself, “in a moment of real desperation,” and received spiritual counseling. He quickly decided Scientology wasn’t for him. But he still wondered what the religion did for celebrities like Tom Cruise and John Travolta: “Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology?”
Brolin once witnessed Travolta giving a Scientology assist at a dinner party in Los Angeles. Marlon Brando arrived with a cut on his leg. He had been injured while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway pull his car out of a mudslide, and he was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology, which gave him enhanced abilities. Brando said, “Well, John, if you have powers, then absolutely.” Travolta touched Brando’s leg and they each closed their eyes. Brolin watched, thinking it was bizarre and surprisingly physical. After ten minutes, Brando opened his eyes and said, “That really helped. I actually feel different!”
[page]IN 2003, Cruise continued working with Rathbun on his upper levels. While he was at Gold Base, instead of staying in the cottage he had formerly shared with Nicole Kidman, Cruise moved into the guesthouse of L. Ron Hubbard’s residence, Bonnie View. One Sunday night, following a late-night meal in Hubbard’s baronial dining room, Cruise got food poisoning. The culprit was thought to be an appetizer of fried shrimp in an egg roll. The cook was summarily sent to Happy Valley.
Rathbun accompanied Cruise to Flag Base in Clearwater where he could perform the exercises required to attain OT VII. Because Miscavige depended on Rathbun to handle so many of the church’s most sensitive problems, he had been lulled into feeling a kind of immunity from the leader’s violent temper. In September, he returned to Gold Base and gave a report to Miscavige about Cruise’s progress.
Miscavige asked where Cruise would be doing his semiannual checkups. “At Flag,” Rathbun said. All OT VIIs do their checkups at Flag.
“Who’s going to do it?”
Rathbun named an auditor in Clearwater that he thought highly of.
Miscavige turned to his wife and said, “Can you believe this SP?” He declared that unlike any other OT VII, Cruise would get his checkups at Gold Base.
When Cruise duly arrived at Gold for his semiannual check, he was preparing for his role as a contract killer in Collateral. Miscavige took him out to the gun range and showed him how to shoot a .45-caliber pistol. Meanwhile, Rathbun administered the star’s six-month checkup.
Because of his insubordination, Rathbun had to go through a program of penitence. One of the steps was to write up a list of his offenses against the church, which Miscavige had sketched out for him. “I am writing this public announcement to inform executives and staff that I have come to my senses and I am no longer committing present time overts and have ceased all attacks and suppressions on Scientology,” Rathbun admitted in September 2003, adopting the abject tone that characterizes many Scientology confessions. Speaking in full-blown Scientologese, he wrote, “The end result is unmocked org form, overworked and enturbulated executives and staff.” This meant that he had not thought out his intentions clearly, causing the church and the people who worked for it to be in disarray. He had a particular apology to make to David Miscavige: “Each and every time on major situations, COB has had to intervene to clean up wars I had exacerbated.… The cumulative amount of COB’s time I have cost in terms of dropping balls, creating situations internally and externally, is on the order of eight years.”