Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(127)
THE GARDEN BEHIND Anne Archer and Terry Jastrow’s home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles is a peaceful retreat, filled with olive trees and hummingbirds. A fountain gurgles beside the swimming pool. Jastrow was recounting his first meeting with Archer, in Milton Katselas’s class. His friend David Ladd, son of the Hollywood legend Alan Ladd, had invited him to visit. “I saw this girl sitting next to Milton,” Jastrow recalled. “I said, ‘Who’s that?’ ”
Archer smiled. There was a cool wind blowing in from the Pacific, and she drew a shawl around her. “We were friends for about a year and a half before we had our first date,” she said. They were married in 1978.
“Our relationship really works,” Jastrow said. “We attribute that essentially a hundred percent to applying Scientology.”
The two spoke of the techniques that had helped them, such as never being critical of the other and never interrupting.
Scientology “isn’t a ‘creed,’ ” Archer said. “These are basic natural laws of life.” She described L. Ron Hubbard as “an engineer, not a faith healer,” who had codified human emotional states, in order to guide the adept to higher levels of existence—“to help a guy rise up the Tone Scale and feel a zest and a love for life.”
Jastrow had been an acolyte in an Episcopal church when he was studying at the University of Houston, but doubts overwhelmed him. “I walked out in the middle of communion,” he said. “I was an atheist for ten years. That was the condition I was in when I started at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.” He had never heard of Scientology at the time.
Archer said that the controversy that continually surrounds the church hadn’t touched her. “It’s not that I’m not aware of it.” She added that Scientology is growing despite the public criticism. “It’s in a hundred and sixty-five countries.”
“Translated into fifty languages!” Jastrow interjected. “It’s the fastest-growing religion.” In his opinion, “Scientologists do more good things for more people in more places around the world than any other organization ever.” He added, “When you study historical perspective of new faiths, they’ve all been—”
“Attacked,” said Archer. “Look at what happened to the—”
“The Christians!” Jastrow said simultaneously. “Think of the Mormons and the Christian Scientists.”
They talked about the church’s focus on celebrities. “Hubbard recognized that if you really want to inspire a culture to have peace and greatness and harmony among men, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish,” Archer said. “And if he’s particularly well known he needs a place where he can be comfortable. So, Celebrity Centres provide that.” She blamed the press for concentrating too much on Scientology celebrities. Journalists, she said, “don’t write about the hundreds of thousands of other Scientologists.”
“Millions!”
“Millions of other Scientologists. They only write about four friggin’ people!”
Jastrow suggested that Scientology’s critics often had a vested interest. He pointed to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, drug makers, pharmacies—“all those people who make a living and profit and pay their mortgages and pay their college educations and buy their cars, et cetera, et cetera, based on people not being well.”
“Who advertise in the newspapers and on television, more than any other advertisers,” Archer added.
“But this is a collateral issue, darling, in terms of what I’m talking about,” Jastrow continued. “For the first time in America’s experience with war, there are more mental illnesses from Iraq and Afghanistan than physical illnesses,” he said, citing a recent article in USA Today. “So mental illnesses become a big business.” Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas “Scientology will solve the source of the problem.” The medical and pharmaceutical industries are “prime funders and sponsors of the media,” he said, and therefore might exert “influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive.” He said that only Scientology could help mankind right itself. “What else is there that we can hang our hopes on?”
“That’s improving civilization,” Archer added.
“Is there some other religion on the horizon that’s going to help mankind?” Jastrow asked. “Just tell me where. If not Scientology, where?”
ANNE ARCHER BEGAN STUDYING with Katselas in 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born. She was the exceptionally beautiful daughter of two successful actors. Her father, John Archer, was best known during the 1930s and 1940s as the voice introducing the radio drama The Shadow. (“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows,” he said at the beginning of the program.) He went on to appear in more than fifty films. Her mother, Marjorie Lord, played Danny Thomas’s wife on the popular television show Make Room for Daddy. With such a bloodline, it might be expected that Archer would be aiming toward stardom, but when she entered the Beverly Hills Playhouse she was coming off a television series (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) that she didn’t respect and that had been canceled after a single season. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage and an actor with diminishing career prospects.