Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(132)

The attacks often came out of the blue, “like the snap of a finger,” as John Peeler described it. Bruce Hines, who was a senior auditor in 1994, told me that before he was struck, “I heard his voice in the hallway, deep and distinctive, ‘Where is that motherf*cker?’ He looked in my office. ‘There he is!’ Without another word he came up and hit me with an open hand. I didn’t fall down. It was at that point I was put in RPF. I was incarcerated six years.”

Davis admitted that the musical chairs episode occurred, even though the church denies the existence of the Hole, where it took place. He explained that Miscavige had been away from Gold Base for some time, and when he returned, he found that many jobs had been reassigned without his permission. The game was intended to demonstrate how disruptive such wholesale changes could be on an organization. “All the rest of it is a bunch of embellishment and noise and hoo-haw,” Davis told me. “Chairs being ripped apart, and people being threatened that they’re going to be sent to far-flung places in the world, plane tickets being purchased, and they’re going to force their spouses—and on and on and on. I mean, it’s just nuts!”

The Scientology delegation objected to the negative tenor of The New Yorker queries about the church’s leader, including such small details as whether or not he had a tanning bed. “I mean, this is The New Yorker. It sounds like the National Enquirer,” Davis complained. He wouldn’t say what Miscavige’s salary was (the church is not required to publicly disclose that information), but he derided the idea that the church leader enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. Miscavige, he contended, doesn’t live on the ostentatious scale of many other religious leaders. “There’s no big rings. There’s no fancy silk robes,” he said. “There’s no mansion. There’s no none of that. None, none, none. Zero, zilcho, not.” As for the extravagant birthday presents given to the church leader, Davis said that it was tradition for Sea Org members to give each other gifts for their birthdays. It was “just obnoxious” for me to single out Miscavige.

“It’s not true that he’s gotten for his birthday a motorcycle, fine suits, and leather jackets?” I asked.

“I gave him a leather jacket once,” Davis conceded.

“So it is true?” I asked. “A motorcycle, fine suits?”

“I never heard that,” he responded. “And as far as fine suits, I’ve got some fine suits. The church bought those.” In fact, he was wearing a beautiful custom-made suit, with actual buttonholes on the cuffs. He explained that for IRS purposes it was considered a uniform. When Sea Org members mix with the public, he explained, they dress appropriately. “It’s called Uniform K.”

Davis declined to let me speak to Miscavige; nor would he or the other members of the group agree to talk about their own experiences with the church leader.

I asked about the leader’s missing wife, Shelly Miscavige. John Brousseau and Claire Headley believe that she was taken to Running Springs, near Big Bear, California, one of several sites where Hubbard’s works are stored in underground vaults. “She’ll be out of sight, out of mind until the day she dies,” Brousseau had predicted, “like Mary Sue Hubbard.”

In the meeting, Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he wouldn’t disclose the location.

Davis brought up Jack Parsons’s black magic society, which he asserted Hubbard had infiltrated. “He was sent in there by Robert Heinlein, who was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time.” Davis said that the church had been looking for additional documentation to support its claim. “A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that we’d never been able to before, because of something his biographer had found.”

The book Davis was referring to is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention there of Heinlein sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring. I wrote Patterson, asking if his research supported the church’s assertion. He responded that Scientologists had been the source of the claim in the first place, and that they provided him with a set of documents that supposedly backed it up. Patterson said that the material did not support the factual assertions the church was making. “I was unable to make any direct connection of the facts of Heinlein’s life at the time to that narrative or any of its supporting documents,” Patterson wrote. (The book reveals that Heinlein’s second wife, Leslyn, had an affair with Hubbard. Interestingly, given Hubbard’s condemnation of homosexuality, the wife charged that Heinlein had as well.)

“Even those allegations from Sara Northrup,” Davis continued, mentioning the woman who had been Parsons’s girlfriend before running off with Hubbard. “He was never married to Sara Northrup. She filed for divorce in an effort to try and create a false record that she had been married to him.” He said that she had been under a cloud of suspicion, even when she lived with Parsons. “It always had been considered that she had been sent in there by the Russians,” he said. “I can never pronounce her name. Her actual true name is a Russian name.” Davis was referencing a charge that Hubbard once made when he was portraying his wife as a Communist spy named Sara Komkovadamanov. “That was one of the reasons L. Ron Hubbard never had a relationship with her,” Davis continued. “He never had a child with her. He wasn’t married to her. But he did save her life and pull her out of that whole black magic ring.” Davis described Sara as “a couple beers short of a six-pack, to use a phrase.” He included in the binders a letter from her, dated June 11, 1951, a few days before their divorce proceedings: