Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(128)
Katselas had a transformative effect. Like so many others, Archer was magnetized by this ebullient Greek, with his magnificent beard and his badgering, teasing, encouraging, and infuriating personality. He was one of the most inspiring people Archer had ever met. Where had he acquired such wisdom? Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she decided to try it out. She began going two or three times a week to the Celebrity Centre to take the Life Repair Program. “I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car, and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. I said to myself, ‘My God, this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve finally found something that works!’ ” She added, “Life didn’t seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”
When Tommy was old enough, Archer would bring him to the Playhouse while she was taking lessons. He would wander around the theater, venturing into the light booth and watching his mother learning her craft. Jastrow recalled being struck by Tommy’s poise even as a five-year-old child. “I am a really good dad, and he taught me how,” Jastrow said. He gave the example of a visit from his own parents, who had flown out from Midland, Texas, to meet Terry’s new family. After Jastrow had driven them back to the airport, Tommy said, “I notice that your dad was pretty strict with you.” Jastrow agreed that his father had been very stern when he was growing up. Then Tommy continued, “I was noticing that you’re pretty strict with me.” Jastrow pointed to that as a defining moment in their relationship. “I realized I wanted to be his friend first,” he said. “He was the senior being in that relationship.”
Anne and Terry soon found their way into Scientology, but Tommy was initially raised in his mother’s original faith, Christian Science. His father, William Davis, is a wealthy financier and real-estate developer who was once reported to be among the largest owners of agricultural property in California. He was also a well-known fund-raiser for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and personally contributed an estimated $350,000 a year to Republican causes. Although Tommy grew up in an environment of money and celebrity, he impressed people with his modesty. He longed to do something to help humanity. Scientology seemed to offer a direction.
Paul Haggis met Tommy at the Celebrity Centre in 1989, when he was seventeen years old—“a sweet and bright boy.” Their meeting came at a critical moment in Tommy’s life. He had just broken up with his girlfriend. Archer had taken him to the Celebrity Centre for counseling, where he took a course called Personal Values and Integrity.
Tommy’s presence immediately caused a stir inside the church. The president of the Celebrity Centre, Karen Hollander, fixed on the idea that Tommy should be her personal assistant. He was young, very rich, and handsome enough to be a movie star himself. He had grown up mixing with famous people. It would be a perfect fit. Whenever celebrities came in, there would be Anne Archer’s son. But that required coaxing Tommy to join the Sea Org. Hollander called in the younger members of her staff to woo him. “You can either go to college and get a wog education, or you can join Sea Org and be doing the best service you could ever do for mankind—and for yourself,” John Peeler, Hollander’s secretary at the time, would tell him.
Although Anne and Terry say they wanted Tommy to get a college education, they knew of the efforts to recruit him and didn’t stand in the way. That fall, Tommy entered Columbia University, but lasted only a single semester. Over Christmas break, he went back into Hollander’s office, and when he came out, he excitedly told Peeler he had just signed the billion-year contract.
His job for Hollander was to attend to the celebrities who lounged around the president’s office. Lisa Marie Presley was often there, as were Kirstie Alley, and writer-director Floyd Mutrux. John Travolta would drop by occasionally. Also in this crowd was a clique of young actors who had grown up in the church, including Giovanni Ribisi and his sister Marissa, Jenna Elfman, and Juliette Lewis. Davis would arrange for them all to go to movies together. He was charming, attractive, he had a great sense of humor, and eventually, David Miscavige began to notice. “Miscavige liked the fact that he was young and looked trendy and wore Brioni or Armani suits,” Mike Rinder observed. “He had a cute BMW. It was an image that Miscavige liked.”
[page]Davis moved into Sea Org berthing in a dodgy neighborhood on Wilcox Street in West Hollywood. It was quite a step down from the luxurious life he had enjoyed until then. He was quickly introduced to some of the inner secrets of the organization. In about 1994, he was involved in an embarrassing cover-up when a well-known spokesperson for the church was captured in a video having sex with several other men. Amy Scobee says that church executives were frantic that their spokesperson would be exposed as being gay. Scobee and Karen Hollander set a briefcase with the spokesperson’s auditing files in the backseat of the car that Hollander was borrowing at the time—actually, Tommy Davis’s BMW—intending to take the files to Gold Base the next day for senior managers to review. Because the car was in a highly secure parking lot, they thought nothing of it. Davis returned late that night, however. He found his car and decided to take it back to the Sea Org dormitory. When he parked the car on Wilcox Street, he happened to notice the briefcase, so he locked it in the trunk and went to bed.
The next day, Scobee got a call from a sheepish Davis. He said that someone had broken into his car and stolen the briefcase out of the trunk. “When we told Tommy what was in the briefcase, he freaked,” Scobee recalled. “He went around for a week, searching through Dumpsters.” Finally, someone approached Davis about the reward he had offered and led him to the thief, a homeless man who was trying to sell the briefcase; the contents, which were still in it, meant nothing to him. Davis gave the man twenty dollars.2 Davis was disappointed because the search forced him to miss the ceremony where John Travolta was awarded a Scientology medal.