Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(80)

Minutes later, Marty Rathbun lit out for the airport at a hundred miles an hour. He didn’t even have time to change clothes. He was wearing a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. His secretary booked a direct flight that would arrive at Boston only twenty minutes after Annie’s, and just twenty minutes before her connecting flight to Bangor.

It was winter and snowing in Boston when he landed, at ten at night, when most of the air traffic had ended. He ran through the nearly empty corridors of Logan Airport to the gate for the Bangor flight. There was a stairwell that led downstairs, and a door that opened to the tarmac. Rathbun rushed outside into the frigid air. The passengers were still on the ramp; Annie was only six feet away from him. “Annie!” he cried. She turned around. As soon as she saw who it was, her shoulders slumped, and she walked toward him.

Rathbun talked to Miscavige and said that he would get a couple of hotel rooms in Boston and bring Annie back in the morning, but Miscavige was unwilling to risk it. He told Rathbun that he had already arranged for John Travolta’s jet to pick them up a few hours later.

Annie and Jim Logan were finally divorced on August 26, 1993. He never saw her again. (She died in 2011 of lung cancer, at the age of fifty-five.)


BY HIS ACTIONS, Miscavige showed his instinctive understanding of how to cater to the sense of entitlement that comes with great stardom. It was not just a matter of disposing of awkward personal problems, such as clinging spouses; there were also the endless demands for nourishment of an ego that is always aware of the fragility of success; the longing for privacy that is constantly at war with the demand for recognition; the need to be fortified against ordinariness and feelings of mortality; and the sense that the quality of the material world that surrounds you reflects upon your own value, and therefore everything must be made perfect. These were qualities Miscavige demanded for himself as well. He surrounded Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman with an approving and completely deferential environment, as spotless and odorless as a fairy tale. A special bungalow was prepared for their stay at Gold Base, along with a private rose garden. When the couple longed to play tennis, a court was rehabilitated, at significant expense. Miscavige heard about the couple’s fantasy of running through a field of wildflowers together, so he had Sea Org members plant a section of the desert; when that failed to meet his expectations, the meadow was plowed up and sodded with grass. Miscavige assigned them a personal chef, Sinar Parman, who had cooked for Hubbard, and had a high-end gym constructed that was mainly for the use of Cruise and himself. When a flood triggered a mudslide that despoiled the couple’s romantic bungalow, Miscavige held the entire base responsible, and ordered everyone to work sixteen-hour days until everything was restored to its previous pristine condition.

In July 1990, Cruise’s involvement with the church became public in an article in the tabloid Star. (Cruise himself didn’t admit his affiliation until two years later, in an interview with Barbara Walters.) The fact that the information was leaked, probably from a source within the church, was at once a great embarrassment for Miscavige and a relief, because Cruise’s name was now finally linked irrevocably in the public mind with Scientology. He offered an unparalleled conduit to Hollywood celebrity culture, and Miscavige went to great lengths to court him. At Thanksgiving, 1990, he ordered Parman to cook dinner for Cruise’s whole family. Miscavige even arranged for Cruise to place some investments with the Feshbach brothers—Kurt, Joseph, and Matthew—three Palo Alto, California, stockbrokers. They were devoted Scientologists who had made a fortune by selling short on the stock market. According to Rathbun, when Cruise’s investments actually lost money, the Feshbachs obligingly replenished the star’s account with their personal funds.

Early on, Cruise and Miscavige shared a powerful sense of identity with each other. They were both short but powerfully built, “East Coast personalities,” as Parman diagnosed them. They shared a love of motorcycles, cars, and adventurous sports. Miscavige was bedazzled by the glamour surrounding the star, who introduced him to a social set outside of Scientology, a world Miscavige knew little about. He had spent most of his life cloistered in the Sea Org. He was thrilled when he visited Cruise on the set of Days of Thunder, and the actor took him skydiving for the first time. Cruise, for his part, fell under the spell of Miscavige’s commanding personality. He modeled his determined naval-officer hero in A Few Good Men on Miscavige, a fact that the church leader liked to brag about.

Just before Christmas, 1990, Sinar Parman was told that Tom and Nicole were going to get married, and that he and a Sea Org pastry chef, along with their wives, would be cooking for the wedding party. Parman was assured that they would get paid for their trouble; in the meantime, they should buy some civilian clothes suitable for a cold climate. Parman went shopping and put everything on his credit card, along with a Christmas present for Cruise. Then Cruise’s private jet flew them to Telluride, Colorado, where the wedding took place. They spent three days preparing meals for guests. Cruise’s auditor, Ray Mithoff, performed the ceremony, and David Miscavige served as best man. Afterward, Parman was informed that Miscavige had changed his mind about paying for his services and the expenses incurred. Parman was left with hundreds of dollars charged to his credit card, which he struggled to pay off on his Sea Org salary—fifty dollars a week at the time.

At first, Tom and Nicole seemed like the ideal Scientology power match. They were intelligent, articulate, extraordinarily attractive people. At Gold Base, Tom reached OT III. He would have spent a considerable amount of time after that self-auditing in order to exorcise his body thetans. Although Nicole didn’t share Tom’s obvious enthusiasm for Scientology—she was a cooler personality in any case—she was drawn along by his intensity. She went Clear in no time. Within a year, she had reached OT II, but then, mysteriously, stopped. A candidate who has begun the OT levels is not supposed to pause until OT III has been achieved. Miscavige suspected the influence of a Suppressive Person—specifically, Kidman’s father, Antony Kidman, a clinical psychologist who had written several popular self-help books in Australia. From the beginning Kidman was privately considered a Potential Trouble Source.