Inside Scientology (42 page)

The following day, Headley reported to the music studio, where Cruise was waiting outside the course room. "Hello," Cruise said, grasping the teenager's arm in a double handshake. "I'm Tom."

After leading him into the room, Cruise sat Headley down in front of the E-meter for what is known as a "metabolism test." In this procedure, the subject grasps the metal cans, or probes, of the meter while taking a deep breath, which ostensibly indicates whether the subject is rested and has had enough to eat. Headley's test showed his metabolism to be "off." Cruise looked concerned. Did he eat enough at dinner? Headley nodded. "Did you take your vitamins?"

Headley never took vitamins. "No?" Cruise looked surprised and then got up and ushered Headley into a kitchen area off the auditing room to see if he could find some vitamin packets. A cornucopia of edibles was spread on the table. "There was more food in that kitchen than I had seen all year," Headley recalled. "Sandwiches, snacks, drinks, three types of entrées, rice, vegetables, fruit." And this was just snack food. "Who knows what they were feeding him for dinner?"

Headley, like the other staff on the base, lived in a cramped apartment in Hemet. He ate the food served at the base's dining hall, which usually consisted of bland, high-carbohydrate selections, and when punishment was meted out, rice and beans alone. He slept five hours per night, often less, depending on his production schedule. Cruise, on the other hand, was given carte blanche service at the base, including his own bungalow in a private area near the golf course, a personal valet, and meals prepared by the executive chef, Sinar Parman.

For the next several years, as long as he served as Cruise's preclear, Headley was ordered to get at least eight hours of sleep per night and to eat well-rounded meals, with vitamin supplements. "I even got meals brought to me to make sure I was eating properly," he said. "All so that Tom Cruise could learn how to be an auditor and nothing would go wrong."

For Miscavige, having Cruise at the base offered the leader exclusive access to, and ultimately control over, the man whom he hoped to mold into the ur-Scientologist. But it also seemed to provide Miscavige with something more. "I think DM lived vicariously through Tom Cruise," said Karen Pressley, who was working at Int by the time Cruise started coming to the base. "I remember David's father, Ron Sr., telling me that hanging out with Tom was a dream come true for David, and I thought that seemed very true. He'd lived a very isolated life with no social interactions except with other Scientologists."

Now Miscavige began traveling to Los Angeles to visit Cruise at his Pacific Palisades mansion. In January 1990, when Cruise was in Florida filming
Days of Thunder,
he invited Miscavige to join him at the Daytona 500. Afterward, Cruise took the leader skydiving. "DM was so proud of that trip," Mark Fisher recalled, noting that when Miscavige returned from the Daytona 500, sporting a "Days of Thunder" leather jacket, he gathered his senior executives together and showed them a video of his jump from the plane with his instructor.

Though Cruise was still married to Mimi Rogers when he made
Days of Thunder,
he had fallen in love with his Australian costar, Nicole Kidman. Miscavige approved the match—he had never been a fan of the first Mrs. Cruise. Rogers was disaffected with Scientology's new management, which had purged her father in the early 1980s. Such estrangement threatened the foundation David Miscavige was building with Cruise. "David couldn't wait to get rid of her," said Mark Fisher.

Divorce is not forbidden in Scientology, but it is heavily frowned upon.
^*
In theory, explains Fisher, "the only reason you'd want to leave your marriage is if you had overts or things you were withholding from your partner." To remedy this, couples go through what is called a "marriage co-audit," a form of marriage counseling done with the assistance of the E-meter, in which each party is encouraged to confess any transgressions against the other.

With Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers, it didn't work this way, said Fisher, who was there when the couple showed up for their counseling. Twenty-four hours after the session, they'd decided to split up. The church reportedly handled the arrangements free of charge, assigning the senior financial counselor, Lyman Spurlock, to negotiate a settlement with Rogers, who was reportedly paid $10 million and signed a confidentiality agreement. By February 1990, the couple had divorced.

Now Cruise was able to openly pursue Kidman. To help in the blossoming romance, Miscavige and Greg Wilhere arranged for Cruise's VIP condo, located on a remote corner of the five-hundred-acre property, to be thoroughly renovated. To make Kidman happy, Sea Org members filled the place with balloons. When the couple wanted to take up tennis, the Sea Org built tennis courts for them on the property, at the Church of Scientology's expense.

"Millions of church dollars were spent so that Tom Cruise could regularly visit the Scientology base and be friends with Miscavige," said the former Int security chief Andre Tabayoyon.
The tennis court alone cost more than $200,000, he said. And the people who built that tennis court—and landscaped the property, built and renovated Cruise's apartment, and performed all other menial and labor-intensive tasks for the actor's benefit—were Scientology staffers, and many of them, Tabayoyon added, were doing time on the RPF, which meant they worked without even the paltry wage Sea Org staffers usually made.

Amy Scobee, a onetime head of Celebrity Centre and a former church "watchdog," or overseer of international management, recalled the day in 1991 when she was abruptly taken off her post at Int and sent to Los Angeles to assist the Cruises in hiring household help. Her assignment, given to her personally by Miscavige's wife, Shelly, was to find and do video interviews of "upscale Scientologists in the L.A. area" who might agree to work as Cruise's housekeeper, cook, and nanny.

It was understood, at least by the person employed to work for a celebrity, that his or her first loyalty was to the church. "Everyone who was on celebrity lines would have to write a daily report about their activities that would go into the celebrity's PC file," said Karen Pressley. "Any conversations you'd have with the star, anything you did with him, what the star read, watched, who he talked to, what he was hearing ... all of that would be reported, and the reports were sent up to Int," where Miscavige often read them personally.

In Cruise's household, Andrea and Michael Doven, the actor's personal assistants, wrote these reports. Andrea, the daughter of the actor Robert Morse, had been introduced to Scientology by Cruise; her husband, a professional photographer, had joined Cruise's staff later and was known within Scientology—and increasingly in Hollywood—as Cruise's "communicator," the person who spoke and ran interference for the star. Scientology had by now taken over every aspect of Cruise's life, and also his wife's: Kidman, though a lifelong Catholic, had tentatively begun studying Scientology at Int.

"Nicole was willing to try Scientology, but my opinion was always that she was doing it because Tom was involved," said Bruce Hines, who was Kidman's auditor. "But because of the treatment she received at Int, she had a very good experience." In fact, said Hines, thanks to the personal attention she received, Kidman reached OT 2 in just a year, an extraordinarily fast rise even by the standards of celebrities, who tend to ascend the Bridge more quickly, Hines noted, because of their ability to pay.

Cruise, in the meantime, had reached OT 3, the vaunted Wall of Fire. For seven years, he'd waited to discover the hidden truths that he'd been promised would change his life. When he did, he had what many former Scientologists say is not an atypical reaction—"He freaked out and was like,
What the fuck is this science fiction shit?
" as Marc Headley put it—and he took a step back.

"From my recollection, Tom went kind of crazy when he reached that level," said Karen Pressley. "You have to remember that this was before the Internet became popular, and everything about Scientology was still veiled in secrecy. So as a dedicated Scientologist, following the rules, he would have never heard of Xenu, body thetans—any of that stuff. Finding out that this was what Scientology was about I'm sure came as quite a shock."

Scientology maintains that OT 3 is not what Scientology is about, that it is simply one process, one tiny particle, in a great oeuvre of material, most of which has nothing to do with Xenu or body thetans: indeed, despite the fact that Hubbard's handwritten notes for OT 3 have been posted on the Internet and authenticated in court, the Church of Scientology refuses to acknowledge the OT 3 myth as true. But those who have done OT 3 and are critical of it say that it is a process that can, and does, destabilize many people, as it requires that a member suspend disbelief in order to audit invisible entities stuck to various parts of the body.

"The way to look at the OT levels is as a form of exorcism," explained Glenn Samuels, a former Scientologist who now counsels other ex-members, including many, he said, who've been severely traumatized by OT 3 and the subsequent advanced levels. "Some people disassociate and suddenly hear voices not their own chattering away at them, saying things like 'You're going to die' or 'I'm giving you cancer, I'm your worst nightmare.' Just imagine the startling reality of having to think your body is loaded full of other people with voices, desires, emotion, and feelings separate from and different than your own."

Those members who are more philosophical about OT 3 explain it as a "handling" for the unknown factors inside every human being that are hampering their ability to progress. Cruise, though, did not see it this way, and he and Kidman stopped coming to the International Base.

For the next several years, other celebrities would front the church's agenda while Cruise pursued his career, making films that many Scientologists recognized as out of step with Scientology's ethics: notably his 1994 performance as the sexually ambiguous Lestat in
Interview with a Vampire
and his role as Dr. Bill Harford, a man flirting with infidelity, in Stanley Kubrick's
Eyes Wide Shut,
in which Cruise and Kidman played a married couple.

Cruise and Kidman spent two years working on the film in London, during which time the Dovens filed regular reports on their activities to the Int Base. "Every once in a while, Michael Doven would get pulled to the base to get sec checked [about the Cruises]," recalled Marc Headley's wife, Claire, who worked for the RTC. Miscavige, she said, was looking for any way to recover the star, but the couple was on a new path:
Tom took on the role of the predatory self-help guru Frank T. J. Mackey in
Magnolia,
and Nicole starred in a risqué play by David Hare,
The Blue Room.

The couple's edgier new course symbolized an act of defiance for Scientologists taught to look upon marital infidelity, not to mention any form of sexual deviance or exhibitionism, as sinful. Miscavige began to take a hard line toward Cruise, denigrating him as "off-purpose" and "out-ethics" in communications with Scientology staff. "I saw the social interaction between Dave and Tom grow less and less personal until it was down to the formalities of sending Christmas and birthday gifts only," said Tanja Castle, then an RTC staffer who would soon become Miscavige's secretary. "There was no live communication at all."

But Miscavige was even more upset with Kidman, whom he blamed for Cruise's growing detachment from Scientology. Miscavige had initially put aside the fact that Kidman's father, Dr. Antony Kidman, was a psychologist—a hated SP—but he'd become dismayed that Kidman, who'd refused to move on to OT 3 after finishing OT 2, remained extremely close to her father. Now Kidman and Cruise had purchased a house in her hometown of Sydney, where they began to spend an increasing amount of time.

The story told within the private world of the Sea Organization is that David Miscavige, aided by Marty Rathbun and several other deputies, engineered the dissolution of Tom Cruise's marriage to Nicole Kidman and Cruise's subsequent emergence as the Most Famous Scientologist in the World. No one still a member of the Church of Scientology has ever admitted to this, and Kidman has never discussed the reasons why her marriage abruptly ended in January 2001, shortly after the couple's tenth wedding anniversary. But those who have left Scientology since the early 2000s recall that it was widely understood in the combative, rigorously single-minded world of David Miscavige's Church of Scientology that Nicole Kidman was an SP.

SPs were much on the church leader's mind by the late 1990s, as Scientology, still enmeshed in the Lisa McPherson case, became even more embroiled in the ongoing battle with its critics, whose number now included a legion of former members who'd become disillusioned by Scientology's high prices and authoritarianism. This "quiet mutiny," in the words of Sandra Mercer, who would ultimately leave herself, was not always reflected in Scientology's income, which continued to receive a boost from frequent fundraising events. However, according to Jeff Hawkins, who as the church's marketing chief kept careful track of such data, virtually every other indicator showed a church on the decline. This devastating piece of information was widely known but never discussed outside the executive suites at Int, where Miscavige scrambled to reverse the trend, to no avail. At Flag, which as Scientology's chief financial engine was a good indicator of the church's overall health, members had completed 11,603 courses and auditing services in 1989, the year Miscavige assumed full control of the church. That number had decreased to 5,895 in 1997,
the year that the Church of Scientology was first implicated in the death of Lisa McPherson.
^*

That year, hoping to drum up new members and counteract the bad press, the church launched what it called the "largest and most comprehensive" public relations campaign in its history,
producing a series of thirty-eight television advertisements, some of which promoted Hubbard's books while others emphasized aspects of his philosophy. Miscavige unveiled the campaign during the June 1997 "Maiden Voyage" event on the
Freewinds,
a gala celebration attended by church dignitaries and high-rollers, such as Bennetta and David Slaughter. And yet, as recalled by Steve Hall, the copywriter who created most of these ads, within months of this event, Miscavige had pulled the funding from the campaign.