Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(77)
The Dianetics car crashed in the first lap. Paul and Diane flew home in Travolta’s plane, with Travolta himself at the controls.
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SUZETTE HUBBARD BLEW in February 1988.
Five years earlier she had met Guy White, a Sea Org marketing executive, on the RPF running program, which at the time was in Griffith Park in Los Angeles—about fifty people running all day long, even after dinner, stuffing themselves on bread and honey to keep themselves going. Suzette was warned by an auditor that Guy was gay. In fact, Guy didn’t know if he was gay or not. When he joined the staff, he had to respond to a questionnaire that asked, “Have you ever been involved in prostitution, homosexuality, illegal sex or perversion? Give who, when, where, what in each instance.” He had never actually had a homosexual relationship and had been celibate for a decade; moreover, it was generally assumed that homosexuality was a false identity, a “valence,” in Hubbard’s language, and that such longings would disappear when he got to OT III.
Suzette and Guy married in March 1986, three months after her father died. Their son, Tyson, was born nine months and a day later. It was strange having a child on Gold Base. Suzette had been pregnant when the order was issued banning Sea Org members from having children,2 and the only other child around was Roanne, Diana Hubbard’s daughter. Other Sea Org members looked upon the children longingly. “People could see what they could never have,” Guy White said. The fact that Tyson had been born so soon after Hubbard’s death, and that he had shockingly red hair, stirred speculation that he might be a reincarnation of the founder. “Is he? Is he?” they asked themselves.
Every church or mission maintains an office for the day Hubbard returns. A pen and a yellow legal pad await him at each of his desks. His personal bathrooms have toothbrushes and identical sets of Thom McAn sandals beside the shower. On Gold Base, his modest original house was razed and replaced with a $10 million mansion. A full-time staff attends the empty residence, regularly laundering the founder’s clothes and keeping the house ready for his white-glove inspection. His vehicles are still in the garage, gassed up, with the keys in the ignition. On his nightstand is a Louis L’Amour novel, with a bookmark placed midway through. The dining table is set for one.
The search for Hubbard’s reincarnated being resembles the quest for the new Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, although there are few clues about his identity. He had prophesied that he would be out of action “for the next 20–25 years.” In some versions of the story, Hubbard will be recognized by his red hair, which is why Tyson’s birth aroused such expectations.
Suzette was terrified that Tyson would be taken away from her. She had little time with him as it was. There was a Sea Org policy, written by her father, which mandated an hour a day of “family time,” but that had been canceled. Now Suzette was pregnant again. Over a period of days she smuggled toys and clothes via a laundry basket into her little Mazda; then one night she left a farewell note for Guy, grabbed Tyson, and drove to San Diego. A few days later, she moved in with Mary Sue. Mary Sue was living in a house in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles that the church provided when she got out of prison. Amid all the anxiety, Suzette had a miscarriage.
After Suzette blew, Guy recalls being sent to Happy Valley and being told he would have to divorce his wife. Jonathan Horwich, Roanne’s father, was also in Happy Valley, along with Arthur Hubbard, Ron and Mary Sue’s youngest child. One night, while Horwich was supposed to be standing guard, Arthur blew and was never recovered.
In October 1988, Guy also decided to escape. Each evening, he went for a stroll along the fence line, a little farther each time, carrying a snack for the German shepherd guard dogs. One night, he jumped the fence, but the dogs betrayed him and began barking. He had to dive off the road when he saw the lights of the blow team coming after him. For hours, he stumbled through the brush, bleeding, his clothes torn, until he made it to Hemet, where he pounded on the door of a bowling alley. In broken Spanish, he told the person who peeked out that he had been in a car wreck.
Guy finally rejoined Suzette. (They had two other children before he came out to her as gay. They divorced in 1998.)
LIKE PAUL HAGGIS, Tom Cruise had been raised Catholic, although he was more religiously inclined than Paul. His family moved frequently, and he spent part of his childhood in Canada, where he had the reputation of being a headstrong, troublesome, charismatic, and charming boy. His schoolwork suffered because of dyslexia, and he later said that when he graduated from high school he was “a functional illiterate.” However, he excelled in sports and drama. His family, like the Haggis family, threw themselves into theater, founding an amateur troupe of players in Ottawa. His antisocial, bullying father was a disruptive force in the family, and early one morning, when Cruise was twelve, his mother packed up her three daughters and her precocious son and fled back to America. “We felt like fugitives,” Cruise later recalled.
Spiritual questing and a tendency toward piety were already features of Cruise’s personality. He spent a year in seminary in Cincinnati, with a view toward joining the priesthood. But there was another, intensely ambitious side that was focused entirely on stardom. He went to Hollywood when he was eighteen, and managed to get a role in Endless Love, a movie starring Brooke Shields. He was a natural actor, but also persistent and choosy, quickly finding his way into memorable roles. The longing to express his spiritual side had never gone away, but it was difficult, in Hollywood, to know exactly how to fit that in.