Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(59)

Desperate to get Gillham the auditing she still thought she needed, Taylor went to the financial banking officer and begged her for the funds to send her friend to Flag. “If she wants to go to Flag, she can take the f*cking Greyhound,” the officer responded.

“You’re Yvonne’s assassin!” Taylor shouted.

For her impertinence, Taylor was sentenced to RPF. Her new baby daughter, Vanessa, was taken away and placed in the Child Care Org, the Scientology nursery. There were thirty infants crammed into a small apartment with wall-to-wall cribs, with one nanny for every twelve children. It was dark and dank and the children were rarely, if ever, taken outside.

When she got the news, Taylor cried, “You can’t do that now!” She was thinking of Travolta. He had just called her the day before, saying that he was arriving on an Air France flight after his appearance at a film festival in Deauville, where he was promoting Saturday Night Fever. Despite his triumph, Travolta appeared depressed and withdrawn. During the filming of Saturday Night Fever his girlfriend, Diana Hyland, had died in his arms. She was two decades older than he—she played his mother in a made-for-TV movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble—and had already had a double mastectomy when they met. Their romance was doomed when her cancer recurred. Taylor had helped Travolta through that period of grief, but now his mother, the most important figure in his life, had also developed cancer. Travolta asked Taylor if she would pick him up at the airport. She promised him, “Wild horses wouldn’t keep me from being there!”

The church officials now told Taylor that someone else would meet Travolta. Taylor knew the star would feel surprised and betrayed. He had come to rely on her, both as an unpaid assistant and for emotional support. He would immediately suspect that something terrible had happened and worry about her. Taylor was mortified to think that she would be the cause of his discomfort.

The RPF had moved out of the basement up to the top floor of the old V-shaped building that formerly housed the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Nearly two hundred people were crammed by the dozen into old patient rooms in bunks stacked three high. Because of the overcrowding, Taylor was given a soggy mattress on the roof. It was cold. She could hear the traffic on Sunset Boulevard only a block away. She had a view of the Hollywood Hills and the endless lights of the wakeful city, which was throbbing all around her. So many young people like her had been pulled into the matrix of Hollywood glamour and fame, even if they would never enjoy it themselves. And now, here she was, in the heart of it—isolated, trapped, humiliated, an unnoticed speck on a rooftop. Who could believe that a person could be so lost in the middle of so much life?

Moreover, she was pregnant again. It happened a few weeks after she entered RPF, during a brief marital visit from her husband. There was no maternal care or any easing of the intensely physical work she was made to do with the other “RPF’ers,” as they called themselves. For one two-week stretch, they were putting in thirty hours at a stretch with only three hours off. Like everyone else, Taylor ate slop from a bucket—table scraps or rice and beans. After six months on this diet she still wasn’t showing her pregnancy; indeed, she was losing weight. She worried that she was going to lose the baby.

A pair of missionaires came to see Taylor one day with a strange request. They were thinking about how to reward the RPF’ers for having done the renovations to the Advanced Org building, which were now almost complete. “We would like you to arrange a private screening of Saturday Night Fever,” they told her.

Of course, no one in the RPF had been able to see the movie, despite the fact that it was an international sensation. Getting to Travolta wasn’t easy, however. He was now the top box-office star in the world. Playboy called him “America’s newest sex symbol.” The church hierarchy was worried that he was also drifting away from Scientology. A screening of his movie would underscore his commitment to the religion at a moment when that seemed in doubt.

As the church’s liaison to Travolta, Taylor was the obvious person to make the arrangements.

“First of all, I can’t use the phone,” Taylor told the missionaires. “Secondly, I can’t leave the building. Maybe you’d like a Beatles reunion while you’re asking for that.”

“We just think you could take care of this,” they replied.

Taylor had to figure out a way to get a print of the film from Travolta without having to explain why she had failed to pick him up at the airport and then disappeared from his life for months, without a word. A couple of days later, the missionaires arranged for her to use a pay phone on one of the lower floors of the building. Taylor called Kate Edwards, Travolta’s creative director at the time.

“Spanky! Where are you?” Edwards cried. Travolta and his production company had been looking for her frantically.

“Honey, I can’t really talk,” Taylor said. She told Edwards that she was in the Los Angeles complex. “I’ve been specially selected to do a program that will help me,” she explained vaguely. She said she had an urgent favor to ask—a print of the film.

That was a problem. The movie was being shown around the world and all the prints were out. The only one available was Travolta’s personal copy, but Edwards said she would make the request. “Johnny said if you ever called and needed something, just do it,” Edwards assured her.

“You can’t tell John about this call!” Taylor said.