Inside Scientology (43 page)

"This was his pattern," said Hall. "He'd have these events, where they'd show these ads that would get everyone excited and everyone eager to give money to help spread Scientology around the world." After the event, Hall said, Miscavige would generally run the ads for a few months but never did a serious ad buy. "Then he'd cut the funding: he found fault either with the person doing the ads or with the ads themselves, but he'd shut it all down and so the whole thing would quietly die." By then, Miscavige would have moved on to a new event and fundraising campaign, which often was coordinated with the release of a new product: audiotapes or CDs of Hubbard's lectures, for example, or a handsomely packaged set of Hubbard's policy letters or other books, which the public would be encouraged to buy on the spot.

But nothing, said former executives, grew the church. At the orgs, members continued to slip away. Others languished on the Bridge. For Miscavige, who'd been raised to believe in Hubbard's management technology, the fact that it didn't seem to be working was unthinkable—indeed, it was a point of doctrine that the tech "works every time."
The idea that
he
was not doing things right was even more unthinkable, noted Jeff Hawkins. "The only conclusion he was left with was that someone was working against him, some SP."

In fact, Miscavige was right. A broad network of individuals were working against Scientology, united by a new and even more daunting enemy, the Internet. The online world was a powerful weapon in the hands of critics of the Church of Scientology, including many free-speech advocates who built websites dedicated to exposing and analyzing Scientology's secrets. Some sites were dedicated to "scholarship" related to the OT documents; others were devoted to shining a light on L. Ron Hubbard's war record, scientific claims, correspondence with the FBI, and the various lies he told about his youth. Much of Scientology's legal archive—dozens of highly contentious cases, with accompanying court transcripts and affidavits, as well as analysis—were now easily viewable online. Even Lisa McPherson's grotesque autopsy photographs were scanned and posted on several different websites, with accompanying captions that accused the Church of Scientology of murder.

For Miscavige, who'd spent most of the past twenty years deftly shifting the spotlight away from the scandals that dogged the church, the sheer glut of negative information about Scientology now available through a simple Google search was disastrous. Nothing the leader had previously dreamed up, certainly no weapon in his legal arsenal, could counter the deluge of data—scanned copies of L. Ron Hubbard's handwritten OT 3 materials, for example—that was spreading across the Internet.

At gatherings of the flock, Miscavige beseeched his followers to beware of the "lies" posted in cyberspace. At the orgs, officials urged the membership to create personalized Scientology webpages to flood the Internet with positive promotion. To help them do this, the church issued a compact disk with both a web design program and a special Internet filter program, which censored particular search terms, sites deemed to be using the trademarks or writings of Scientology or Dianetics in an unauthorized fashion, and sites that, according to the CD's licensing agreement, were seen as "improper or discreditable to the Scientology religion."

But the filter was effective only in households with a single computer and soon proved obsolete. And even if members did avoid reading such criticism, nothing prevented other people—the potential recruits that the church so badly needed—from discovering these unsavory reports when they researched Scientology. Negative stories posted on the Internet dealt a particularly devastating blow to the church because they reached young people under the age of thirty—the population whose idealism, and naiveté, had built the church in the first place. Facing perhaps the biggest crisis in its history, Scientology needed a new kind of symbol: someone whose star power could deflect, even transcend criticism.

And so, in early 1999, Marty Rathbun, who'd been spending most of his time in Florida handling the Lisa McPherson case, was called back to Los Angeles by Miscavige and assigned a new task: "recover" Tom Cruise, in earnest. Neither Rathbun nor Cruise has ever spoken about the details of this "recovery," but over the next two years, Rathbun steered Cruise back to the OT levels. By 2002, he'd reached OT 4. That year, during Cruise's publicity tour for his film
Vanilla Sky,
he and his new girlfriend, the actress Penelope Cruz, lobbied the U.S. ambassadors in France, Greece, and Germany, countries where Scientology was under investigation, to support the church in its cause of "religious freedom." This lobbying was not unlike Travolta's efforts, begun in the late 1990s, but Cruise took up the cause with even more passion. In June 2003, for instance, he secured a meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to further press his concerns about the Church of Scientology's treatment in Germany. The next day, Cruise met with Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, to discuss the same topic.

Cruise also took on the cause of education, hoping to win government funding for Scientology's Applied Scholastics supplemental education program. Over lunch with Secretary of Education Ron Paige and his chief of staff, John Danielson, Cruise, according to a report in the
Washington Post,
asked numerous questions about the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bush administration's mandate that schools found to "need improvement" must set aside 20 percent of the annual budget to provide students with supplemental education.
By the summer of 2003, Applied Scholastics, now headed by Bennetta Slaughter, had been approved in the state of Missouri as one such provider and soon met with similar endorsement in Florida, California, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C.

During this phase of Cruise's activism he began to float a story that became a key part of the rewritten script of his life: that his dyslexia had rendered him a "functional illiterate"
until he was "cured" by Hubbard's study technology. By the summer of 2003, Cruise was openly promoting Scientology as a cure for learning disabilities, often plugging a Scientology-backed tutoring program, the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project (H.E.L.P.), that he'd helped found.

By the fall of that year, Cruise garnered even more publicity for his sponsorship of the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, a Scientology-endorsed clinic in lower Manhattan that used Hubbard's controversial Purification Rundown to treat first responders at the World Trade Center on 9/11, who now, two years later, suffered from health problems related to the disaster. In an interview with Larry King on November 28, 2003, Cruise, who donated more than $1 million to the effort, defended the clinic, whose techniques some physicians had criticized. "Doctors do not know how to diagnose chemical exposures, because it can actually have mental ramifications," he said.
"You go to a doctor and now he's going to put you on more and more drugs, steroids, things that are ineffective." But Scientologists, he suggested, had far more potent solutions. "I've actually helped people that have been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD," Cruise said, giving a plug for Hubbard's study technology.

"I watched Tom promoting those causes and I just felt a shiver," said Karen Pressley, who'd left Scientology in 1998, disillusioned with David Miscavige's leadership. "He had that same passion I'd once had when I was convinced that I had found the only thing that worked. It's a phase you go through in your development as a zealot."

But Cruise was a special kind of zealot: he was the biggest movie star in the world. His intense personality lent fervor to his new role as a one-man Scientology promotion machine. "At Int," recalled Marc Headley, then the head of production at Golden Era, Scientology's in-house film studio, "they put together a media reel each week of everything being said about Scientology that everyone on the base had to watch, so people who saw it thought Scientology was
the
biggest thing that was happening right now in the world." Cruise's effectiveness as a spokesman was the most exciting thing to happen to the church since it was granted a tax exemption in 1993. "They thought it was awesome," said Headley.

As Cruise was getting ready to embark on an overseas tour to publicize his film
The Last Samurai,
Warner Bros. reportedly became concerned about how his advocacy of Scientology would play. According to numerous reports, the actor's longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley, often credited with carefully constructing Cruise's "Teflon" persona, advised her client that, for this trip, he should leave the Scientology talk at home. Instead, it was Kingsley who stayed behind: when Cruise began his European tour, his publicist was noticeably absent.

Two months later, Cruise ended his fourteen-year affiliation with Kingsley and her company, PMK, and hired his older sister and fellow Scientologist, Lee Anne DeVette, as his new publicist; Marty Rathbun later said that David Miscavige encouraged Cruise to make this move. Now, free of Kingsley's moderating influence, Cruise and DeVette embarked on a plan to educate journalists about Scientology. Whereas Kingsley had often scolded certain reporters for asking about Cruise's religious beliefs, and even banned some from doing so, the actor now insisted that journalists tour the Celebrity Centre before he'd sit down for an interview. Scientology was "the shit, man," Cruise told
Rolling Stone
's Neil Strauss in the summer of 2004. "Some people, well, if they don't like Scientology, well, then, fuck you." "Really," he added. "Fuck you. Period."

David Miscavige, by all accounts, was thrilled by the emergence of Tom Cruise, Proselytizer. It fully realized his strategy. To Scientologists who knew the men, it seemed as if a complete transference had taken place. "Tom talked and acted as if he were a clone of David Miscavige," said Mark Headley. And in fact Miscavige, the chairman of the board, or COB, of the church, often told his staff that Cruise was the "COB of celebrities."

During one meeting on the base, Headley recalled, Miscavige told the assembled Scientologists a revealing story. In late 2003 or early 2004, Cruise invited a group of Scientologist celebrities to a meeting in Hollywood. About twenty or thirty reportedly showed up to hear Cruise offer a powerful rallying call to activism; Cruise read the actors the riot act about what it meant to be a "real" Scientologist. Headley said, "Now this is a guy who didn't say shit about Scientology for ten years—but now he is telling them they were 'out-ethics' for not being vocal enough about Scientology."

Miscavige, said Headley, used this story to illustrate Cruise's dedication. "He'd done it totally unsolicited, and called Dave
afterward
and told him what he did. Dave loved it. And I'll tell you one thing," he added. "Right after that meeting supposedly happened, Jenna Elfman showed up at the opening of a Scientology mission in San Francisco, and then another one in Buffalo."

Elfman wasn't the only one spurred to advocacy. The second-generation Scientologist Ericka Christensen, a young actress who'd starred in Steven Soderbergh's
Traffic,
told the New York
Daily News
that she counted Scientology as one of her "secret weapons,"
as the newspaper put it, and considered Cruise a mentor. The actor Jason Lee, who'd costarred with Cruise in
Vanilla Sky
but had kept mum about his involvement in Scientology, now showed up for the opening of a Scientology mission in Los Feliz. Perhaps the most surprising new spokesperson was the pop singer Beck. His father, the composer David Campbell, is a Scientologist, and Beck, as he once said, "grew up in and around"
Scientology; but like Lee, the singer had never spoken openly about the group. Now in an interview he reported that the faith had "strengthen[ed]"
his outlook on life and inserted a small anti-prescription-drug message in the video for his single "Girl."

Cruise, meanwhile, had recruited James Packer,
^*
the son of the richest man in Australia, Kerry Packer, to Scientology. Sea Org staffers, who'd long ago been instructed to refer to Cruise as "sir," were now ordered to salute the actor as if he were their superior officer.
^*
When Cruise visited Int, as he did with more frequency after 2003, he was no longer accommodated in his standard condo, but rather in the guesthouse of L. Ron Hubbard's $10 million mansion, Bonnie View. One reason for this treatment was that Cruise, at least according to Miscavige, was now Scientology's main cash cow. In 2004, Cruise gave close to $3 million to Scientology, with much more promised. Miscavige frequently bragged to his staff that Cruise intended to use some of that money to help build hundreds of new churches and boom Scientology beyond anything Miscavige had previously imagined. In the leader's mind, Cruise could be a one-man "war chest," the sole funder of the church's expansion.

Cruise's strategic value to the church was so crucial that nothing was too good for the actor. Miscavige even created a special award for him, the International Association of Scientologist's Freedom Medal of Valor, which he presented to Cruise at the IAS's twentieth anniversary gala in October 2004. When Cruise, in a black velvet jacket, walked onstage to receive his medal, a platinum disc encrusted with diamonds, the audience gave him a standing ovation as the actor and the Scientology leader saluted each other, hugged, and then clasped hands in a victory gesture. Miscavige called Cruise "the most dedicated Scientologist I know."

Other Scientologists cringed at that statement. "All I thought about was the dedicated Sea Org members who'd sacrificed and given their lives to Scientology," said one member who was in the audience that evening. But to Miscavige, Cruise was better than all of them. The leader had even begun to tell his staff that he wished that Cruise could be his second-in-command, recalled Jeff Hawkins. "He'd say that Tom Cruise was the only person in Scientology, other than himself, that he would trust to run the church."

All the other Scientology executives, even such esteemed officials as Ray Mithoff, Greg Wilhere, and Mike Rinder, were "degraded" in Miscavige's eyes; their repeated failures—Rinder and Marty Rathbun's inability to protect Miscavige from personal involvement in the Lisa McPherson case, for example—made them unworthy.