Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(122)
HAGGIS WAS CASTING The Next Three Days in the summer of 2009, and he asked Jason Beghe to read for the part of a detective. Beghe’s best-known film role was as the love interest for Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. In the late nineties, when Haggis had worked with the gravel-voiced actor on a CBS series, Family Law, Beghe had been an occasional front man for Scientology. He had come to the church, like so many others, through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. In old promotional materials for the church, Beghe is quoted as saying that Scientology is “a rocket ride to spiritual freedom.” He says that Miscavige once called him “the poster boy for Scientology.”
Paul Haggis on the set of The Next Three Days, in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, train yard
“I just want you to know I’m no longer in Scientology,” Beghe told Haggis when he called. “Actually, I’m one of its most outspoken critics. The church would be very unhappy if you hire me.”
“Nobody tells me who I cast,” Haggis responded, but he decided to look at the lengthy video Beghe had posted on the Internet, in which he denounces the church as “destructive and a rip-off.” Haggis thought the actor had gone over the edge, but he asked if they could talk.
The two men met at Patrick’s Roadhouse, a pleasantly shabby coffee shop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Beghe was calmer than he had been in the video, which he now called “a snapshot of me having been out only three months.” He could see that Haggis was troubled. Even though Beghe had renounced the church, he continued to use Scientology when dealing with former members. In his several meetings with Haggis, he employed techniques based on Hubbard’s Ethics Conditions. These range from Confusion at the bottom and ascend through Treason, Enemy, Doubt, Liability, Emergency, and so on, up to Power. Each of the conditions has a specific set of steps to follow in order to advance to a higher state. Assuming that Haggis was in the condition of Doubt, Beghe knew that the proper formula required him to provide information.
He told Haggis that in the late nineties he began having emotional problems. The church prescribed more auditing and coursework. In retrospect, Beghe felt that it had done no good. “I was paying money for them to f*ck me up,” he said, estimating that he had spent as much as $600,000 in the process, and nearly $1 million in his thirteen-year Scientology career. When he finally decided to leave the church, he told Tommy Davis that the church was in a condition of Liability to him. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution. But now the situation was reversed, Beghe maintained. He proposed that the church buy some property and lease it to him at a negligible rate. “You guys don’t have any policies to make up the damage, so I’m doing this for your own good—and for mine,” he explained to Davis and others. “Because I don’t have a policy of taking it in the ass.”5
While talking to Haggis, Beghe was reluctant to use the word “brainwashing”—“whatever the f*ck that is”—but he did say that somehow his mind had been taken over. “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are L. Ron Hubbard’s,” he explained. “You think you’re becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist.”
Haggis was disturbed by Beghe’s account of what had happened after he left the church. He claimed that none of his Scientology friends would talk to him, his son had been kicked out of school, he was being followed by private investigators and threatened with lawsuits. Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true believer as some members, he didn’t nurse the same sense of betrayal. “I didn’t feel that some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would find L. Ron Hubbard and his thought,” he said. But he did feel that he had been cautioned.
“TOMMY,” HAGGIS’S LETTER of August 19, 2009, abruptly begins. “As you know, for ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.”
The tone of the letter is both aggrieved and outraged, mixing Haggis’s personal experiences with the results of his one-man investigation into the church. He mentions how Katy Haggis’s friends had turned against her when she came out to them as a lesbian. Katy had told him that another friend of hers had applied to be the assistant for Jenna and Bodhi Elfman, the Scientology acting couple. Lauren Haigney, Tom Cruise’s niece in the Sea Org, had been assigned to vet the applicants. Katy says that Lauren wrote up a report saying that Katy’s friend was known to hang out with lesbians. The friend did not get the job, Katy said.6
Haggis also recounted the scene at John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s house, when another Scientologist made the slur about the gay waiter. “I admire John and Kelly for many reasons; one of them is the way they handled that,” Haggis stated. “You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and then quote LRH in their defense.” He said that the church’s decision not to denounce the bigots who supported Proposition 8 was cowardly. “Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.”