Inside Scientology Part 11

To the Sea Org, it seemed obvious that Miscavige hoped to make Cruise an "ideal" Scientologist-not a "floundering" Scientologist, as he'd often perceived Travolta to be, with his years of disaffection in the 1980s. One step in this direction was to teach Cruise to audit. Many Scientologists, including celebrities, never bother to pursue this route on the Bridge to Total Freedom. But a "true" Scientologist, in both L. Ron Hubbard's and David Miscavige's estimation,* was a person who had received and given counseling: indeed, Hubbard had maintained that 50 percent of the gains one got through Scientology were achieved through training as an auditor.

To ensure that Cruise's training went off without a hitch, Bruce Hines set up a special course room in the base's music studio. Then Hines and other officials combed through the personnel files of the base's nine-hundred-person staff to find an appropriate candidate to serve as Cruise's "preclear." After reviewing the paperwork on numerous candidates, Hines settled on Marc Headley, then a teenager newly arrived at the base. The child of Scientologists, Headley had grown up in Hollywood and was recruited into the Sea Organization when he was just fifteen. A year later, he was selected to come to Int, where he labored in the tape and CD manufacturing plant on the base, as a quality control officer. He was a hard worker, with a clean ethics record, and he was also a blank slate: he had received almost no auditing before.

Though not as a rule star-struck, Headley admitted that it took him a while to get over what he called the "wow factor" of being audited by the hero of Top Gun. He'd been sworn to secrecy by Marty Rathbun himself: a cardinal of the Church of Scientology in Headley's eyes, Rathbun had warned the sixteen-year-old that severe punishment lay in store for him were he to speak of this top-secret auditing to anyone.

The following day, Headley reported to the music studio, where Cruise was waiting outside the course room. "h.e.l.lo," 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 entrees, 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 a.s.sistance 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, a.s.signing 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 a.s.sist the Cruises in hiring household help. Her a.s.signment, given to her personally by Miscavige's wife, Sh.e.l.ly, 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 a.s.sistants, 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 f.u.c.k is this science fiction s.h.i.t?" 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 ent.i.ties 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 disa.s.sociate 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 s.e.xually 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 risque 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sumed 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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.

"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 a.n.a.lyzing Scientology's secrets. Some sites were dedicated to "scholarship" related to the OT doc.u.ments; 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 a.n.a.lysis-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 a.r.s.enal, 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 cybers.p.a.ce. 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 naivete, 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 a.s.signed 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. amba.s.sadors 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 pa.s.sion. 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 theWashington 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 endors.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.h.i.t, man," Cruise told Rolling Stone's Neil Strauss in the summer of 2004. "Some people, well, if they don't like Scientology, well, then, f.u.c.k you." "Really," he added. "f.u.c.k 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 a.s.sembled 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 s.h.i.t 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 YorkDaily 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 a.s.sociation 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.

Zealously embracing the role of Scientology's chief proselytizer, by the spring of 2005 the actor was presenting himself as a "helper" who'd a.s.sisted "hundreds of people" to get off drugs. "In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world," he told a reporter from Germany's Der Spiegel, who replied by calling Hubbard's techniques "pseudoscience." Cruise also maintained he could help criminals reform their lawless ways. "You have no idea how many people want to know what Scientology is," he told the German newspaper.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Cruise spent so much time proselytizing about Scientology during his spring 2005 promotional tour for The War of the Worlds that the director, Steven Spielberg, became concerned that Cruise was drawing attention away from the movie. But the actor was by now sealed so tightly within Scientology's protective sh.e.l.l that he barely took notice.

The next step was a new wife. Sandra Mercer, the onetime Scientologist of Clearwater, Florida, watched Cruise declare his love for Katie Holmes on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the spring of 2005 and chuckled when she saw him jumping enthusiastically on Winfrey's couch. ("Enthusiasm is very high on Scientology's tone scale," she said.) It was not unheard of for single members at Cruise's level to be "ordered" to get married in order to continue to progress in the church, she explained. Hubbard stressed that a truly successful Scientologist would be successful on all the dynamics of existence, including the "2nd Dynamic," which is marriage and family. "I can't say that happened with Tom, but I've heard it said to others; I've said it to people myself. And in Tom's case, he would have been told: 'If you find someone who can help us reach more young people, wow, what a win that would be!' That is what's promoted. Everything you do, every action you take should be done from the standpoint of gaining worldwide acceptance of Scientology."

Eventually, however, Cruise's increasingly strident advocacy began to backfire, notably after he lambasted the actress Brooke Shields, a onetime friend, for using the antidepressant Paxil to treat postpartum depression. Then, a few days after his Oprah appearance, Cruise sat for an interview on the Today Show, where he lectured Matt Lauer on the dangers of antidepressants. "Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know what Ritalin is? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?" Cruise asked Lauer. "You see, here's the problem. You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."

It was, as many television critics noted, spectacular TV. It was also proof to many observers, including many former Scientologists, of just how dangerously out of control Cruise's zealotry had gotten. Though Miscavige by all accounts viewed Cruise's advocacy as a win, former Scientologists and even some current ones were shocked by his tone-deaf approach. The Church of Scientology, which for decades had deftly morphed in response to society's latest interests, now seemed wholly oblivious to the effect Cruise's performance was having not only on the actor, whose career took an irreparable hit, but on his church.

By the end of 2005, Scientology had been lampooned on virtually every late-night talk show and, most memorably, on South Park. By 2006, a spate of magazine articles* had examined Scientology's teachings and scrutinized its more controversial practices. As the church spokesman Mike Rinder went on television to deny Scientology's policy of making its members disconnect from family and friends who had fallen away from the church, Tom Cruise receded into the background, although by all accounts, his friendship with Miscavige, who served as best man at his wedding to Holmes and even accompanied the couple on their honeymoon, remained strong. "Dave probably told Tom to cool it a little bit and not be so aggressive in fighting people like Matt Lauer, but he wouldn't go, 'Oh my G.o.d, this really backfired,'" said one former Scientology executive who worked with Miscavige. To the contrary, he said, Miscavige would simply think that those outside of Scientology were wrong "and Tom Cruise had been 'black PR'ed.'"

For a short while, John Travolta stepped back into the promotional spotlight, albeit unsuccessfully. In February 2007, Travolta told the media that Scientology's Narconon program might have helped save the former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith, who died of a drug overdose. "Google Narconon for a minute," MSNBC's Willie Geist suggested to the talk-show host Tucker Carlson, in response to this statement. "If I wasn't so completely terrified of Scientology, I would," Carlson quipped.

By the end of 2007, Scientology's public image was worse than at any other time in Miscavige's tenure. It was a "joke" how bad it was, a onetime senior church official told me when I interviewed him in the spring of 2008. "Between Cruise and Miscavige, they absolutely destroyed Scientology's PR," he said. "I've never seen it like this."

And yet Miscavige seemed almost oblivious to this problem, a quality that set him notably apart from L. Ron Hubbard, who'd reacted to negative press with hurt feelings, blaming the "wog world" for his problems and isolating himself and his followers. According to many observers, Miscavige was unfazed ("Dave doesn't care if people like him," an official noted) and blamed his staff when things went wrong.

It was a tendency Miscavige had shown since taking over the church: an example, said many of his former executives, of the leader's poor management. But Miscavige's imperviousness was also wholly understandable. He had lived immersed in Scientology since the age of eight. He'd become the leader of the church at the tender age of twenty-five. He'd had no experience living in the non-Scientology world, much less in running a Scientology org or mission, or even counseling people in any significant way. Indeed, Miscavige's dealings with the flock had always been limited-according to Marty Rathbun, the leader frequently sent emissaries like Rathbun to interface with prominent members while he remained at a distance. In his twenty-odd years at the helm, Miscavige did one television and one print interview. After 1998, he did no interviews at all.

Scientology too had become more insular. And this, noted Steve Hall, made it even harder to promote Scientology to mainstream Americans. "That has got to be the hardest a.s.signment in the world," he said. "By this point, Scientology is a culture. Inside the church you can go on completely unaware, really ignorant of how to connect to people, because you live and breath Scientology twenty-four hours a day. But outside of the church, people know all about the lawsuits, they've heard it called a 'mafia' or a cult, they've gone on the Internet to read the OT materials ... so how do you sell Scientology to new people? You don't."

Chapter 15.

The Bubble.

LUCKILY FOR THE CHURCH, a growing majority of today's Scientologists are, like David Miscavige, people who were born or raised in the movement. This makes the marketing of Scientology far easier. Children who grow up in Scientology have a limited worldview: they are integrated into mainstream society, yet in many ways are totally isolated from its standards and norms. The degree of this isolation may differ, but the general rigor of a Scientology upbringing holds true whether members live in a sleepy community like Clearwater or in Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the United States. Many church-raised kids refer to their childhood as a "bubble." Some children thrive in this environment; others, chafing against its dogma, rebel; still others are consumed by it entirely.

Natalie Walet falls into the first category. She is part of Scientology's third generation: both of her parents, a few aunts and uncles, and her paternal grandmother are Scientologists, and Scientology is the only religion she's ever known. When I met her for the first time, in August 2005, she was seventeen, just out of high school and living with her parents in Dunedin, outside Clearwater. We met at the Starbucks on Cleveland Street, around the corner from the Fort Harrison.

This, she realized, was a daring move. Scientologists are discouraged from speaking to journalists; those who do-indeed most of those I met-do so with the church's permission and are often chaperoned by church officials. Natalie hadn't asked anyone's permission. A pretty girl with shiny dark hair, she was tremendously self-a.s.sured, which was something I'd find true for many Scientologist kids. She had agreed to talk to me "without a filter," as she later said, "because quite frankly I wanted to stand up for the rest of us Scientologists that get globbed in with the crazy people."

We watched from the wide front patio of the Starbucks as a blue and white bus, adorned with the word FLAG in elaborate script, discharged what looked like a small army of Sea Org members. Each was dressed in a preppy uniform of khaki, black, or navy blue trousers and a crisp white, blue, or yellow dress shirt.* "Most people think that all Scientologists look like that," Natalie said. She was dressed in a low-cut black T-shirt and jeans. "I meet people all the time who say, 'Oh my G.o.d, you're a Scientologist?'" She rolled her eyes in teenage exasperation. "I mean, dude, you see them every day. Your clerk at the 7-11 could be a Scientologist. Your neighbor may be a Scientologist. You just don't know. And that's because we're not that different from you! We're all just people," she said.

Of course there were some differences, she acknowledged. Like all Scientologists, Natalie saw herself as a thetan, and her physical, or "meat," body one of many she'd had on life's continuum. In the end, her body was unimportant. She lit a cigarette. She'd started smoking when she was eleven, she said, which she realized was "kind of bad," but then again, L. Ron Hubbard chain-smoked Kools for most of his life. "LRH never said we were supposed to be perfect."

Natalie idolized Hubbard. I noticed that she often prefaced her sentences with the phrase "LRH says," and she could quote him, chapter and verse. But unlike many older Scientologists, who describe the Founder in almost G.o.dlike terms, Natalie saw Hubbard as simply "a brilliant person who came up with a fascinating technology, a lot of which is common sense." She spent a lot of her free time studying Hubbard's ideas, which, she explained, were primarily about learning how to take better control of one's life and handle problems in a rational way. "For me, Scientology is about finding out the 'why' for whatever it is you want to apply it to. But you have to find that out for yourself," she said, and quoted Hubbard: "What's true for you is what you observe to be true."

Natalie was born in Arlington, Virginia, and spent her early life in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where her father, John Walet, ran the church's large organization on Dupont Circle. Natalie's mother, Emily, also worked at the D.C. Org, and as an only child, Natalie virtually grew up there. Despite her father's official-sounding t.i.tle-he was the executive director-her parents were part of the church's rank and file, not Sea Org members, but paid staff who worked long hours. Loyal Scientologists, they were also independent. "My mother is very outspoken; she'll tell you exactly what she thinks," Natalie said, recalling one instance when Emily Walet staunchly defended a church member whom officials had wanted to declare suppressive-and prevailing. "That guy is still a Scientologist, in D.C., and doing really well," Natalie said. "There's a lot of pressure when you work in the org. I know my parents got in arguments with higher-ups from time to time. But if they saw something they felt was wrong, they said something."

Scientology is an extremely doctrinaire faith, yet it does not necessarily produce robots. Natalie, an extremely poised and articulate teenager, was an example of just how independent some Scientologist kids can be. She explained it was due to the unique way Scientologist children are raised, which is in accordance with Hubbard's dictum that all people, regardless of age, be granted their own "beingness," or self-determinism. The Walets took this directive seriously and rarely yelled at or talked down to their daughter, unlike the parents of non-Scientologist kids she'd later meet. "I was never treated like a little kid, even when I was a little kid," she said, and thought about that for a minute. "I guess I never really felt like a little kid either," she added.

Natalie began school, upon her own insistence, she said, when she was four, skipping kindergarten. She attended a private school, the Chesapeake Ability Academy in northern Virginia, which was run by Scientologists. There are nearly fifty such schools in the United States, and for those who can't afford them, scores of private tutoring programs to help Scientologist kids in public schools supplement their education with Hubbard's techniques. All are sponsored by Applied Scholastics, which licenses Hubbard's study technology to independent schools and tutors in the same manner that WISE licenses his management technology to independent businesses.

Though they are not considered "parochial" (though they are tax-exempt), Scientology schools, according to the church's own literature, are meant to educate children into L. Ron Hubbard's philosophy, with larger goals in mind. "By educating a child into one's own beliefs, one gradually takes over a whole new generation of a country and can thus influence, in the long term, the development and growth of that country," stated a 1986 issue of Impact, the magazine published by the International a.s.sociation of Scientologists. The Jesuits, for example, "were very successful at this strategy."

Natalie never saw Chesapeake as "religious" in any way. "They just used study tech," she explained. The kids learned at their own pace; used physical examples-clay models, marbles, or diagrams-to help them work out complex concepts; and focused intensely on vocabulary, never skipping a word they didn't understand; instead, they looked it up in the dictionary. Natalie described this education as "awesome" because she was never allowed to just ignore things she did not fully comprehend. "If I got a ninety-eight on a test, they would go to that two percent I did wrong and help me figure it out." An intelligent and highly motivated girl, she stayed at Chesapeake through fifth grade and then transferred to a public middle school, where she was an accelerated student. At thirteen, she started high school.

The next year, her parents moved to Dunedin, in part to be closer to Flag, but also, Natalie said, because Washington had become too expensive. For Natalie, it would prove to be both a social and spiritual awakening.

The Walets arrived in the Clearwater area just two years after the Lisa McPherson criminal case had been thrown out, an event that had angered many people in the community. For the next several years, the case was kept alive as the McPherson family's civil lawsuit against the church continued,* and the public's resentment of Scientologists, or "Scienos," as many derisively called them, was palpable. Some twelve thousand Scientologists were living in or around Clearwater by the early 2000s, according to church estimates*-the greatest number in any city except Los Angeles. The Church of Scientology was one of the largest owners of property in Clearwater; half of their holdings were located in or around downtown Clearwater, where, in response to years of protests fomented by church critics, an extensive security system was installed. Some 150 surveillance cameras are posted on or around all buildings a.s.sociated with Scientology, some disguised as streetlights or hidden inside lampposts, but most perched quite openly on rooftops and window ledges. Some cameras face in, toward the buildings themselves; others are aimed at the street.

Natalie thought this was normal-"It's the twenty-first century; who doesn't have a security camera?"-but many other people found the cameras disconcerting. Scientologists, many locals complained, had "taken over" downtown; indeed, just a year before I met Natalie, the St. Petersburg Times had dubbed Clearwater, a city of more than 100,000 people, "Scientology's Town."

Natalie's religion had never caused problems for her in Virginia-it had almost never come up among her friends and teachers in middle school, in fact. But at the public high school she began attending in Dunedin, some of her teachers advised her that certain faculty members might lower her grade if they knew she was a Scientologist. The parents of several of her cla.s.smates, upon learning of Natalie's faith, refused to allow her in their homes. Several even sent letters to one of her teachers, saying they didn't want her to have contact with their children at school.

Kids asked Natalie if she was an alien. She didn't know what they were talking about. Like all Scientologists, Natalie had been instructed not to read about Scientology in any source except a Scientology-sponsored website or publication, and she believed that much of what was posted on the Internet or written in the newspapers about her religion was "entheta." Though the church might have insisted that the OT levels remain secret until its members had earned, and paid for, the right to have those mysteries revealed, the kids at school had no such restrictions and garnered more from a simple web search than Natalie would learn for years.

Natalie was miserable. "I started hanging out with the wrong kids," she said, with a flick of her cigarette. "You know, the typical story." Yearning to fit in, she made friends with the drug crowd-"basically the only people who were nice to me"-and began smoking pot. Before long, she'd entered what she called a "pretty heavy drug phase" that would last for two years. "Looking back, I see it was an interesting experience," she said. "I'd taken a lot of things for granted because I'd lived in that bubble of Scientology-I didn't know anything else. But when I went to high school I started hanging out with these kids and seeing the way they lived and how different their lives and families were from mine ... it blew me away."

Some of Natalie's new friends came from broken or dysfunctional homes; others were underachievers and struggled in school. Natalie, who'd managed to do well in school despite partying on weekends, would look at them and think, G.o.d, this is so horrible. But what could she do? "These kids didn't know how to, you know, look up a word in a dictionary," she said. "They didn't know why they didn't understand things. They didn't know why they would fail tests." Some kids she knew had been diagnosed with ADD and took Ritalin or Adderall. "They would fail and fail, and they wouldn't pay attention in cla.s.s because they didn't understand, and so they'd be prescribed these drugs. Meanwhile, n.o.body was actually helping them." (In one desperate effort to help a friend who was failing a science cla.s.s, Natalie said she grabbed a dictionary and made her friend look up everything she didn't understand, which she said ultimately helped the girl pa.s.s that cla.s.s, and several others.) Like that of many teenagers, her rebellion lasted only a few years. Drugs, she realized by her sixteenth birthday, were not only unhealthy, they were "counter-intentioned": Scientologists not only eschew mind-altering substances but cannot be audited if they have imbibed. They are also expected to maintain a high level of ethics, which, quite obviously, ruled out taking c.o.c.ktails of pills and staying out all night. This is not who I am, she thought. Why am I doing this?

She had no idea. With great trepidation, Natalie went to her father, a dedicated Scientologist for thirty years, and told him that she had a drug problem. Her dad's reaction, as she recalls it, was not atypical for Scientologists. "He just sat there and he looked at me. He didn't freak out. He didn't even ground me. Nothing. He just said, 'We are going to fix you.'"

The next day, Natalie started the Purification Rundown. Every day for the next three weeks, she went to a local field auditing group that offered the program and spent up to five hours a day in the sauna, alternating lengthy sweat sessions with half-hour runs on the treadmill. The experience, as she recalled, was almost mystical, far more intense than any other detox program she'd ever heard of, and way beyond what friends experienced doing juice fasts or high colonics. "I used to feel like I could never see the real colors of the world because I was so dulled out," she told me. But during the Purification Rundown, she began to see things clearly, with almost psychedelic vividness. Afterward, Natalie felt renewed. "It was amazing how much better I felt. I could think faster, process things faster. I was more there."

This was step one of Natalie's fix. The second phase was the Life Repair auditing program, which she did the summer after her junior year. It began with a complete purging of her transgressions, which Natalie found tremendously therapeutic; the entire package of auditing sessions similarly impressed her. "I had some really amazing revelations in auditing," she said. "I got a much clearer idea of who I actually was."

By Christmas, she'd gotten rid of her drug-using friends, "disconnecting" from them in the way she felt L. Ron Hubbard intended: she'd realized they were bad influences and no longer wanted them in her life. She also began auditing in earnest, eager to ascend the Bridge to Total Freedom. She approached her Scientology study as a form of spiritual healing as well as self-help. "I really wanted to figure out why I had done some of the things I had done, and find answers for some of my problems, and I found them," she told me. That spring, she graduated with honors from high school.

Now Natalie was preparing to go to college, though several of her Scientologist friends, and some Scientologist adults, including her boss at her summer job, thought it was unnecessary. What could a person learn that couldn't be picked up simply by studying L. Ron Hubbard? "I said excuse me, and I left," Natalie said, and she moved to a position with more supportive supervisors. "Keeping Scientology Working never says you shouldn't be educated in other things," Natalie said. "I mean, LRH obviously knew other things." Was he as educated as he claimed to be? Natalie confessed that she had gone on the Internet and read a bit about Hubbard's biography. She doubted the truth of everything she found there, but whatever his education had been, she liked what he said about learning. "I don't think LRH would be okay with people thinking that all you have to learn is Scientology." She referred to one of the Founder's statements, a personal favorite of hers: "One doesn't learn about life sitting in an ivory tower, thinking about it. One learns about life by being part of it."

Natalie was determined to live Hubbard's words. Over the next few years, she would-at the University of Tampa she joined a sorority, majored in economics, and graduated summa c.u.m laude in May 2010. Her world had broadened with each step out of the Scientology bubble, a development that her parents supported. And she continued to remain a dedicated Scientologist, perhaps even more dedicated, she said, because of her diverse experience. "One thing I've noticed," she said recently, "is that there are kids who've grown up in Scientology and have never really seen anything else. I think that bubble can be a problem."

Kendra Wiseman grew up in Scientology's bubble in Los Angeles. A few years older than Natalie, she left the bubble-and Scientology-during her teens. Kendra is the daughter of two of the most prominent Scientologists in Los Angeles. Her father, a former president of the U.S. branch of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, is an outspoken anti-psychiatry activist, and her mother was one of Scientology's most successful FSMs during the 1990s. Kendra's uncle is another key Scientology figure: the president of Narconon International, which now operates more than 120 drug rehabilitation and education centers around the world.

The church caters to Scientologists of this elite stature and they receive treatment much like that of celebrity members. Indeed, as "opinion leaders," which Hubbard defined as "any person important in their field," they are considered "celebrities" by the Scientology rank and file. Many of them have been in Scientology for decades, contributing steadily to most of its key campaigns. Because they are Scientology's most dedicated, great care is taken to ensure they have a positive, not a punitive, experience.

In exchange for this treatment, all opinion leaders are expected to promote Scientology in the secular world, and many do by talking about the church to non-Scientologist acquaintances or business a.s.sociates. But unlike the Hollywood celebrities, who often maintain independent social networks (according to the journalist Lawrence Wright, who has written about the screenwriter-director Paul Haggis for The New Yorker, some of Haggis's friends maintain they had no idea he was a Scientologist, despite his affiliation with the church of more than thirty years), Scientology opinion leaders, and their children, tend to live in a world rigidly focused on their faith. In Kendra's case, all of her childhood friends were Scientologists, as were her parents' friends, her uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins, and half brother. The dancing school she attended was run by a Scientologist, as were the stables where she took horseback riding lessons. The school she attended, the Delphi Academy in Los Angeles, is one of the most prestigious Applied Scholasticsbacked schools in the country. During the summer, she enrolled in programs at the Celebrity Centre or another Los Angeles church, or at Flag, where her parents visited frequently. "I was in a completely isolated community," Kendra told me. "I had no contact with non-Scientologists-none. That kind of thing just didn't exist."

And yet Kendra spent her childhood in one of the most diverse metropolitan regions of the United States. Kendra lived in a s.p.a.cious home in an upper-middle-cla.s.s neighborhood of Glendale, and later in Burbank. Growing up there in the 1990s, Kendra had what she considered to be a typical suburban life. "I rode my bike, I used the computer, I watched TV, just like any other kid," she said. On weekends, she and her friends rented videos, shopped at the Glendale Galleria, ate at In-N-Out Burger, and went to the multiplex (Kendra was a diehard fan of The Lord of the Rings). No matter what day it was, they communicated via their pagers and chatted on AOL.

But her everyday reality was Scientology and the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, whose framed portrait hung in her home, much as a Christian family might display an image of Jesus Christ. Hubbard's maxims arose frequently in her family conversations and those of their friends, and his theories and policies affected every facet of their lives. When Kendra misbehaved, she was a.s.signed a condition-"danger," for example-for which she would have to do amends, like cleaning her room. When she skinned her knee or b.u.mped her head, Kendra's mother would give her a "contact a.s.sist," a holistic healing technique that involves repeatedly touching a wounded area of the body until it feels better. Like all Scientologist children, Kendra was raised to believe that, as a thetan, she had not only lived before, but had chosen her own body. "When I was little, my mom would tell me a story about how she was playing the piano one day when she was pregnant, and felt my thetan inhabit her," said Kendra. "She said there were lots of other thetans kind of hovering around, but I was strongest: I picked her." Kendra's family unfailingly followed church policy so that they would be "sessionable"; they stocked their home with vitamins, organic vegetables, and fruit and slept for at least eight hours every night, a prerequisite for auditing.

Kendra's parents spent a part of each day auditing, hooked up to their own personal E-meters, which cost around $4,000 apiece. Because they were at the top of the Bridge to Total Freedom, they could "solo audit," or audit themselves. Kendra never knew what went on in her parents' auditing sessions, just that they would sequester themselves in a room and hang a little sign on the door reading IN SESSION. During these periods, Kendra would tiptoe around the house. "You weren't supposed to make a peep," she explained; according to Hubbard, disturbing someone's auditing session was not only damaging to that person's spiritual well-being but also was a suppressive act.