Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(97)
Cruise’s renewed dedication to Scientology permanently changed the relationship between the church and the Hollywood celebrity community. Cruise poured millions of dollars into the church—$3 million in 2004 alone. He was not simply a figurehead; he was an activist with an international following. He could take the church into places it had never been before. Whenever Cruise traveled abroad to promote his movies, he used the opportunity to lobby foreign leaders and American ambassadors to promote Scientology. Davis usually accompanied him on these diplomatic and lobbying missions. Cruise repeatedly consulted with former President Clinton, lobbying him to get Prime Minister Tony Blair’s help in getting the Church of Scientology declared a tax-deductible charitable organization in the United Kingdom. Rathbun was present for one telephone call in which Clinton advised Cruise he would be better served by contacting Blair’s wife, Cherie, rather than the prime minister, because she was a lawyer and “would understand the details.” Later, Cruise went to London, where he met with a couple of Blair’s representatives, although nothing came of those efforts. In 2003, he met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to express the church’s concerns over its treatment in Germany. Cruise had access to practically anyone in the world.
That same year, Cruise and Davis lobbied Rod Paige, the secretary of education during the first term of President George W. Bush, to endorse Hubbard’s study tech educational methods. Paige had been impressed. For months, Cruise kept in contact with Paige’s office, urging that Scientology techniques be folded into the president’s No Child Left Behind program. One day Cruise flew his little red-and-white-striped Pitts Special biplane, designed for aerobatics, to Hemet, along with his Scientologist chief of staff, Michael Doven. Miscavige and Rathbun picked them up and drove them to Gold Base. Rathbun was in the backseat and recalls Cruise boasting to COB about his talks with the secretary.
“Bush may be an idiot,” Miscavige observed, “but I wouldn’t mind his being our Constantine.”
Cruise agreed. “If f*cking Arnold can be governor, I could be president.”
Miscavige responded, “Well, absolutely, Tom.”2
[page]IN 2001, Haggis was fired from Family Law, the show he had created. His career, which for so long seemed to be a limitless staircase toward fame and fortune, now took a plunge. He began working at home.
Within a week, he started writing a movie script called Million Dollar Baby, based on a series of short stories by F. X. Toole. He spent a year working on it, drawing upon some of his own painful memories. He identified with the character of a sour old boxing coach, Frankie Dunn. Like Haggis, Frankie is estranged from his daughter. His letters to her are returned. He turns to religion, going to Mass every day and seeking a forgiveness that he doesn’t really believe in. Into the coach’s dismal life comes another young woman, Maggie Fitzgerald, an aspiring boxer from a white trash background. All of the loss and longing he feels for his daughter is apparent in his mentoring of this gritty young fighter, who has more faith in him than he has in himself. But Maggie is paralyzed when her neck is broken in a fight. In a climactic moment, she begs Frankie to pull the plug and let her die. Haggis faced a similar choice in real life with his best friend, who was brain-dead from a staph infection. “They don’t die easily,” he recalled. “Even in a coma, he kicked and moaned for twelve hours.”
Haggis dreamed of directing the movie himself. But as much as studios admired the writing, the story was so dark nobody wanted to get near it. Haggis began borrowing money to stay afloat. He turned down another TV series because he realized that his heart hadn’t been in television for years.
One of his abandoned TV projects still haunted him. The idea sprang from an unsettling incident a decade before, when he and Diane were driving home from the premiere of Silence of the Lambs. Paul was wearing a tuxedo and driving a Porsche convertible. He stopped at a Blockbuster Video store on Wilshire Boulevard to rent some obscure Dutch film. When they got back into the car, two young black men with guns suddenly rushed up to them. The robbers ordered them out of the car and told them to walk toward a dark parking lot. That seemed like a really bad idea. Haggis pretended not to hear them. He put Diane in front of him and headed down Wilshire instead.
“Stop!”
Paul and Diane froze. They heard footsteps, and one of the thieves snatched the video out of Diane’s hand. Then the Porsche roared off. That was the last Haggis ever saw of it.
Ten years later, Haggis awakened in the middle of the night and began chewing over this frightening episode once again. He often thought about it. The entire experience had lasted less than a minute, but it had colored his stance toward life in complicated ways. Where did these kids come from? They were living in the same city as he, but a universe of race and class separated them. He could imagine who he was in their eyes, just some rich white guy with much more than his share of what life had to offer. In a way, Haggis was on their side. But it could have turned out so much worse; guns always make things dangerously unpredictable. He was shaken by that thought. The unexpected coda of snatching the rented videotape was intriguing. Haggis had managed a wisecrack to the cops at the time. “I think you’ll discover that these men have been here quite often, looking for that video, and it was never in.”
Specifically, what he thought about in the middle of the night was what those kids said to each other as they sped out of the Blockbuster parking lot onto Wilshire in his pearlescent Cabriolet. Could he find himself in them? Haggis got out of bed and began writing. By mid-morning he had a lengthy outline. It was about the manifold ways that people interact with each other—how the experience of having someone honk at you in traffic and shoot you the finger can affect your mood, so that you take it out on someone else at the first opportunity; or how, alternatively, someone lets you into a long line of traffic, and your day brightens. He saw life in America as a volatile collision of cultures—of immigrants who fail to read the codes that underlie our system, of races that resent and mistrust each other, of people coexisting in different social strata who look at each other with uncomprehending fear and hatred.