Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(61)

“Are they there?” Taylor asked him.

“Yes.”

She hung up. After an hour or two, she called again. He said he was alone. She told him she was out of the church and not going back. The baby was safe, she said. Norm wanted to meet, and Spanky finally told him where she was. She realized their marriage was probably over, but she felt she owed him that. Norm came over to the Tropicana and they spoke for several hours.

The next morning at nine there was a knock on the door of Taylor’s hotel room. Three Sea Org executives were there to haul her back to RPF.

Taylor still believed in the revelations of her religion. She worried that her salvation was at stake. But she was also gripped with fear that her baby and her unborn child were in mortal danger.

At first, she was firm in telling the men that she wasn’t coming back. “If you lay a hand on me or my child, I’m filing charges!” she cried. They assured her they just wanted to talk. They told her that they hated to see her be declared a Suppressive Person. She would be cut off from any other Scientologist—nearly everyone she knew. There was a proper way to “route out,” they reminded her. Eventually, Taylor agreed to return to the office to file the paperwork that would allow her to leave the Sea Org on good terms and still be a Scientologist.

As part of the routing process, Taylor was given a confession to sign detailing all the “crimes” she had committed. She glanced at the document. Some of the actions cited were drawn from her preclear folders, things she had confessed to her auditors that were supposed to remain confidential. She knew how it worked; she says she had once been assigned to go through members’ folders and circle any “evil intentions” toward Scientology. Sexual indiscretions or illegal acts were always highlighted. These would be forwarded to the Guardian’s Office to be used against anyone who threatened to subvert the church. If the crimes weren’t sufficiently damning, Taylor came to learn, scandalous material would simply be manufactured. She signed her confession without really reading it. Later, she was given her bill.

The theory of the “freeloader’s tab” is that people who join the Sea Org don’t have to pay for the cost of auditing and the coursework to move up the Bridge. The truth is that there is never much time to take advantage of such instruction. Taylor had been in the Sea Org for seven years, however, and the bill for the services she might have taken amounted to more than $100,000.

Just before she left the office, the executive handling her case was called away for a moment. Taylor took her confession off his desk and stuffed it in her purse. When she finally left the building, she tore it to pieces.


WHEN HUBBARD FOUND OUT Yvonne Gillham was dying, he sent her a telex asking if she wanted to keep her body or move on to the next cycle. She decided it would be quicker just to let go, but she still wanted the auditing. Hubbard agreed to let her travel to Clearwater, to do an “end of cycle on her hats”—meaning that she would brief her successor at the Celebrity Centre before she died.

Hana Eltringham was stationed at Flag, and she was shocked at the sight of her dear friend. Yvonne was dizzy and frequently lost her balance, and her thoughts trailed away. She refused to take pain medication because it would interfere with her auditing. She tearfully blamed herself for the terrible “overt” of dying and deserting Hubbard. She was desperate to see her children, to say good-bye, but they were kept away.

Hubbard designated Elizabeth Gablehouse, one of Yvonne’s closest friends, to talk to her about the celebrities in her care—who was a reliable speaker, who was good at recruiting other celebrities. Yvonne talked about various people—some television actors, a Mexican pop singer, the producer Don Simpson, Karen Black, Chick Corea, and Paul Haggis, among others—but she was particularly worried about Travolta. “Please help him. He’s especially sensitive,” she said. She advised Gablehouse to deal with the celebrities the same way she treated Hubbard—very delicately, and with an open mind. Gillham died in January 1978.

Spanky Taylor’s son, Travis, was born that March, weighing less than three pounds, although he was carried to full term. (Both of Taylor’s children are alive and healthy today.)

Many former Sea Org members found their departure from the church to be tangled in confusion, panic, grief, and conflicting loyalties. Many still cling to a relationship with the church, sometimes for years, like Taylor, or for the rest of their lives. The coda to Taylor’s story is that a year after leaving the Sea Org, she traveled to Houston to meet with Travolta. He was filming Urban Cowboy at the time. On her own initiative, she came to “recover” him for the church. She had heard that he was having problems in his life, and she worried that her own troubles had prevented him from turning to the church for help. It was also possible that if she brought Travolta back into the fold, her standing in the church would be improved.

Like most celebrities, Travolta had been shielded from the church’s inner workings. The scandals that periodically erupted in the press about Hubbard’s biography, or his disappearance, or the church’s use of private investigators and the courts to harass critics—these things rarely touched the awareness of Scientology luminaries. Many simply didn’t want to hear about the problems inside their organization. It was easy enough to chalk such revelations up to religious persecution or yellow journalism. “There are two sides to the story, but I don’t know both sides,” Travolta blithely said when he was asked about Operation Snow White. “I’m not involved with that.” In any case, for someone like Travolta, who was so publicly associated with the church, it would be hard to just walk away. He had been asked to declare himself publicly, and he had done so, again and again.