Inside Scientology (38 page)

Two months later, in June 2001, Greg Bashaw committed suicide.

When Nancy Many heard the news, she was devastated. She herself had left Scientology in 1996 after suffering a psychotic break; for twenty-five years she had served the church with dedication. Like Bashaw, Many had felt her "mind break" during an intensive period of security checking in Los Angeles; later, on a Burbank street, she experienced a full-blown mental breakdown for which she was briefly hospitalized and then sent home to undergo a modified "baby watch" under the care of her husband, Chris. During that period, the church had offered no practical assistance other than a recommendation that Many take vitamins and chloral hydrate, a medication that Lisa McPherson had also been given.

Many recalled the day that Bashaw phoned her after being given her name by a mutual friend. He was looking for support. "It was tremendously cathartic, I think, for both of us to talk about this," Many told me. "We spoke a lot about the similarities in what had happened to us, and how it felt to be dumped by Scientology after all these years. We had both given our lives to Scientology: we'd volunteered for them, had never given them any trouble, and then, the one time we both needed help, they were nowhere, just nowhere."

Many recalled that a month or so after her breakdown, which church officials referred to as her "period of stress," an OSA representative visited her at home to present her with some documents to sign, absolving Scientology of responsibility in her condition and affirming that Scientology "worked" and made people better. Laura Bashaw, Greg's widow, received a similar visit, and similar papers, after her husband died, Many said. "What they learned from Lisa McPherson, if anything, was to cover their asses."

Today, at Flag, Scientologists hoping to receive auditing are asked to sign several new waivers. One gives the church full legal control over the subject's auditing and other personal files, regardless of whether the person is alive or dead. Another form confirms the adherent's desire that in the "unlikely" instance that he or she is judged by others to be in need of psychiatric treatment, they be "helped exclusively through religious, spiritual means and not through any form of psychiatric treatment ... regardless of what any psychiatrist, medical person, designated member of the state, or family member may assert supposedly on my behalf."

One particularly notable passage in this latter form, often referred to by church critics as the "Lisa Clause," states this spiritual assistance might include the Introspection Rundown, "an intensive, rigorous Religious Service that includes being isolated from all sources of potential spiritual upset, including but not limited to family members, friends or others with whom I might normally interact." In addition the adherent agrees to "accept and assume all known and unknown risks ... and specifically absolve all persons and entities from all liabilities of any kind, without limitation, associated with my participation or their participation in my Introspection Rundown."

With that, the church protects itself from legal liability. But the church has never backed away from promoting Scientology as a cure for mental illness—indeed, even after Bashaw's suicide in 2001, as the McPherson family continued to press on with their civil lawsuit, a Scientology promotion bragged that "a Flag Ship Class XII [auditor] could turn a severe mental case from raving lunacy to not only sane but bright and normal in about 8 or 9 hours."

Many has since opened her home to Scientologists needing a place to recover from psychotic breaks, and in 2009, she self-published a memoir,
My Billion Year Contract,
in which she detailed her own collapse. In the previous year or two, she said, she has received hundreds of e-mails from former members detailing their emotional breakdowns. One was from a woman who'd spent thirty-six years in Scientology and millions of dollars in donations, and had reached OT 8, the highest place on the Bridge. She arrived at the Manys' door last year, suicidal.

"I could brush off my cognitive dissonance with the other Type Threes I had known of in the past, as they were all very low in Scientology. But here was someone at the top, the end of the Bridge, on my doorstep, wanting to kill herself," said Many.

As a young Sea Org member in Boston, Many helped spread the church's anti-psychiatry agenda by putting up fliers that encouraged people to report malpractice by local psychiatrists and mental hospitals. "I thought I was doing something to help mankind. I never asked myself what Scientology had to put in its place—nothing," she says.

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years since the death of Lisa McPherson and over seventeen since Scientology won tax exemption, the church's embattled legal history seems, at least on the surface, a thing of the past. Most people today do not think of scandal when they think of Scientology; they think of celebrities, and this is the fruit of a carefully plotted marketing and PR strategy. Compared with all the other tactics the church has tried (many of them eventually abandoned), this one has reaped lasting, even unparalleled success.

Recruiting the famous has long been a central strategy of the Church of Scientology, dating back more than half a century to a program known as Project Celebrity, which Hubbard launched in 1955 with the specific aim of converting luminaries in the arts, sports, management, and government—people he dubbed "Opinion Leaders"—in hopes that they'd become disseminators of church doctrine. As he stated in Scientology's
Ability
magazine, "There are many to whom America and the world listens. It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefiting from it were to mention it now and then."

Hubbard drew up a list of high-profile targets, urging Scientologists to choose one of them as their "quarry." They included Ernest Hemingway, Edward R. Murrow, Marlene Dietrich, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Greta Garbo, Jackie Gleason, Cecil B. De Mille, and the publisher of
Time
magazine, Henry Luce, among others. Hubbard issued precise instructions: "Having been awarded one of these celebrities, it will be up to you to learn what you can about your quarry and then put yourself at every hand across his or her path." And he implied that it wouldn't be easy, since the celebrities were "well guarded, well barricaded, over-worked, aloof quarry." But if Scientologists succeeded in bringing one in for an auditing session, Hubbard promised, they would be rewarded with a small plaque.

No one on Hubbard's original list ever became a Scientologist. But his hopes of drawing in high-profile members never waned. By the late 1960s, with Scientology controversial in both the United States and abroad, Hubbard began to refine Scientology's appeal to the elite by opening special churches, known as Celebrity Centres, to cater to artists and other prominent individuals, as well as their friends, family, and any other members of their entourage. In 1969, Yvonne Gilham, one of Hubbard's top Sea Org lieutenants, came to Los Angeles to open the first Celebrity Centre in a former appliance store on West Eighth Street, near MacArthur Park. The small organization hosted cocktail parties, open mike nights, and poetry readings, and though it was located in a seedy part of town, it soon became a fashionable hangout for artsy Scientologists and their friends. "It was as close to a bohemian Scientology center as you could imagine," said Nancy Many's husband, Chris, a former Scientology executive who began working at Celebrity Centre in 1970. "None of the staff wore uniforms; everyone had long hair. It had that hippie vibe that people responded to at the time."

It helped that Hubbard made a direct appeal to artists, whom he described as "a cut above" ordinary people; an artist was "a higher being who builds new worlds," as he wrote in his book
The Science of Survival.
They were "rebels against the status quo" who could, with the right enhancement, accomplish "peaceful revolution." Before long, said Chris Many, Celebrity Centre became the most successful org in Los Angeles,
with hundreds of staff and several thousand people enrolled in courses and auditing.

Gilham, an Australian with irrepressible charm, had a unique talent for hooking new members by way of a method some former Scientologists called "admiration bombing": she showered church initiates with such overwhelming praise and attention that they couldn't help but come back for more. This fawning worked particularly well with the two celebrity groups that L. Ron Hubbard wished to target: first, up-and-coming young actors and other artists who were battling insecurity as they attempted to make a career in Hollywood, and second, established, if somewhat faded, stars who were hoping to rejuvenate their reputation. Both groups could in turn reach out to their friends in the entertainment business, helping to brand Scientology not only as the "Now Religion," the image the church cultivated in the late 1960s, but also as a ticket into the rarefied world of Hollywood.

One struggling young actor drawn into Scientology in the late 1960s was Bobby Lipton, the brother of Peggy Lipton, an actor who was then starring in the hit TV series
The Mod Squad
. Though he was not a celebrity, Lipton, as he later told
Premiere
magazine, basked in a certain "reflected glory"
at Celebrity Centre because he had a famous sibling. Meanwhile, he struggled to afford the price of Scientology's services. To help defray the cost, Lipton agreed to proselytize among other actors, including his sister, whom he ultimately brought into the fold.

Peggy Lipton tried to interest her boyfriend, Elvis Presley, in Scientology, according to one of Presley's associates, Lamar Fike. "One day, in L.A., we got into the limousine and went down to the Scientology center on Sunset, and Elvis went in and talked to them," Fike later recalled.
"Apparently they started doing all these charts and crap for him. Elvis came out and said, 'Fuck those people! There's no way I'll ever get involved with that son-of-a-bitchin' group. All they want is my money.'" Though Lipton stayed in the group for a number of years, Presley, said Fike, "stayed away from Scientology like it was a cobra."

But many others in Hollywood were curious. Scientology, a fundamentally narcissistic philosophy that demonizes doubt and insecurity as products of the "reactive mind," is a belief system tailor-made for actors. The Training Routines that are part of early Scientology indoctrination have been compared to acting exercises: students are taught to "duplicate," or mirror, a partner's actions; project their "intention," or thoughts, onto inanimate objects; experiment with vocal tones, the most dominant being a commanding bark known as "tone 40"; and deepen their ability to "be in their bodies" without reacting to outside stimuli. In auditing, Scientologists re-create scenes from past lives. Some processes focus directly on members "mocking up," or visualizing themselves, in different scenarios.

Scores of famous, once-famous, and soon-to-be famous people drifted through Scientology in the late 1960s and 1970s, among them Candice Bergen, Rock Hudson, Leonard Cohen, writer William'S. Burroughs, the screenwriter Ernest Lehman, Van Morrison, and Carly Simon, as well as the future
Top Gun
producer Don Simpson and the still-undiscovered Oliver Stone. "That's the sign," the church noted in an issue of
The Auditor
magazine. "Remember twenty years ago when artists were taking up psychoanalysis? It's always the beginning of the big win when celebrities—song-writers, actors, artists, writers, begin to take something up."

Most artists dabbled only briefly in Scientology: Rock Hudson reportedly had a single unsuccessful auditing session. Others spent a significant amount of money on courses and auditing before opting out. Don Simpson, for example, said in a 1993 interview that he'd invested $25,000 in Scientology in the 1970s before he realized that, though nearly Clear, he'd seen very little improvement in his life. "At that point, I realized it was a con,"
he said.

Yet there were others who embraced Scientology. The jazz musician Chick Corea, who joined the Church of Scientology in the late 1960s, referred to L. Ron Hubbard as an "inspiration" and claimed that Scientology was a major influence on his music.
Karen Black, an Academy Award–nominated actress who starred in such films as
Easy Rider
and
Five Easy Pieces,
maintained that Scientology helped her portray characters more authentically.

But Scientology's biggest catch of the 1970s was John Travolta, who was just twenty-one when he joined the church in 1974. Newly arrived in Los Angeles, he was in many ways the ideal quarry: sensitive, naive (a mediocre student, Travolta left high school after tenth grade), and prone to frequent bouts of depression. He'd been given a copy of
Dianetics
while shooting his first movie,
The Devil's Rain.
Soon after, he paid a visit to Celebrity Centre.

There, like many initiates before him, Travolta found a ready-made community. He also found guidance, in the form of officials like Chris Many, who counseled the actor during the early stages of his career. "We'd talk about film and TV and what he wanted to do next, and how Scientology could help him achieve his goals," Many recalled. Travolta would later credit Hubbard's techniques with helping him overcome his crippling fear of rejection. "My career immediately took off,"
the actor wrote in a personal "success story" published in the book
What Is Scientology?

But Travolta was cautious when it came to promoting Scientology in the broad way that L. Ron Hubbard had envisioned. "I talk about it when it's appropriate,"
the actor told the writer Cameron Crowe in a 1977 interview, adding that he realized that many people got "upset" by the idea of Scientology. "Only if [people] ask me, do I talk about it."

And it wasn't just Travolta who was reticent. "There was a lot of skittishness among the celebrities to talk about Scientology," said Many, who became the captain, or executive director, of Celebrity Centre in the mid-1970s. "That was really the great irony in all of this. Hubbard's whole idea was to help artists become more successful and influential so they'd disseminate Scientology on a wide scale. But since Scientology was looked at as a cult at this time, there was a lot of concern, particularly among actors, that being vocal about Scientology might have a negative impact on their careers."