Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (48 page)

Occasionally, the
Freewinds
is used to confine those Sea Org members that the church considers most at risk for flight. Among the crew on the ship during Cruise’s birthday party was
Valeska Paris
, a twenty-six-year-old Swiss woman. Paris had grown up in Scientology and joined the Sea Org when she was fourteen. Three years later, her stepfather, a self-made millionaire, committed suicide, leaving a diary in which he blamed the church for fleecing his fortune. When Valeska’s mother denounced the church on French television, Valeska was isolated at the Clearwater base in order to keep her away from her mother. The next year, at the age of eighteen, she was sent to the
Freewinds
. She was told she would be on the ship for two weeks. She was held there against her will for twelve years. Shortly before Cruise arrived
, Paris developed a cold sore, which caused Miscavige to consign her to a condition of Treason, so she wasn’t allowed to go to the birthday party, but she later did wind up serving Cruise and his girlfriend at the time, the Spanish actress
Penélope Cruz.

In October, Miscavige acknowledged Cruise’s place in Scientology by awarding him the
Freedom Medal of Valor. Miscavige called Cruise “the most dedicated
Scientologist I know” before an audience
of Sea Org members who had spent much of their lives working for the church for a little more than seven dollars a day. Then he hung the diamond-encrusted platinum medallion around the star’s neck.

“I think you know that I am there for you,” Cruise said to the thrilled audience. “And I do care, so very, very, very much.” He turned to an imposing portrait of Hubbard, standing beside a globe. “To LRH!” he said, with a crisp salute.

Lana Mitchell, the cook
who had been accused of feeding Cruise the poisoned shrimp a few months before, had gotten out of Happy Valley, but she watched the ceremony while in
RPF, along with some two hundred of her detained colleagues. About fifty of them were Sea Org executives who had been purged by Miscavige. They were being held in the Los Angeles complex on L. Ron Hubbard Way, in the massive blue former hospital where Spanky
Taylor and so many others had been confined. Some had been in the organization for more than twenty years and had worked directly for Hubbard. They were completely cut off from the outside world—no television, radio, or even any music. As many as forty people were crammed into each of the former hospital rooms, with only one bathroom to share. Often there was not enough food to go around. Some of those confined had severe medical conditions, including Uwe Stuckenbrock, the former international security chief, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and had deteriorated to the point of being unable to speak. One of the jobs Mitchell was assigned on RPF was welding, but she had never done it before, and she burned her eyes because she wasn’t wearing the protective glasses correctly. She got no medical attention at all.

Every effort was made to keep RPF’ers out of view. Windows were curtained so no one could see in or out. They traveled through tunnels and over rooftops when they needed to move about within the complex. There were no days off, although they were allowed to call their families on Christmas. Their sole diversion was watching the big Scientology galas on television. After all, the elaborate sets for these events were constructed by the RPF’ers in Los Angeles or at Flag Base in Clearwater. To view the big Cruise event, they were all taken to the mess hall.

One of the penitents was
Mark McKinstry, who had been National Sales Manager at
Bridge Publications when the movie version of
Battlefield Earth
, starring
John Travolta, came out in 2000. Hubbard’s tale is about an alien race of “Psychlos,” who have turned people into
slaves—until a hero arises to liberate humanity. Travolta had worked for years to get the movie made, and wound up paying a significant portion
out of his own pocket. It was at the peak of his career. “I told my manager
, ‘If we can’t do the things now that we want to do, what good is the power?’ ” he remarked at the time. Miscavige had been deeply involved in the filming from the beginning. He would watch dailies of the film in Clearwater while he was overseeing the handling of the
Lisa McPherson case. His critiques would then be
typed up and sent to the Scientology representative who was always at Travolta’s side. When the movie was completed, Miscavige called Travolta to congratulate him, saying that LRH would be proud. He predicted it was
going to be a blockbuster.

McKinstry had been working for a year promoting the movie edition of the book. He traveled across the country with Travolta to push the book in bookstores, malls, and Walmarts. About 750,000 copies were sold. Like many others who have spent time with Travolta, McKinstry came to like him immensely. The actor was devoting a substantial amount of his own time and energy to making the book a success. But when the movie came out, it was a critical and box-office catastrophe. Even at the premiere, Sea
Org members had to be bused in to Mann’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to fill the empty seats for as many as three shows a day. For some of them, it was the first movie they had seen in years. “ ‘Battlefield Earth’ may well
turn out to be the worst movie of this century,” the
New York Times
critic observed, in what proved to be a typical review. There were false accusations
that the film contained subliminal messages promoting Scientology. Travolta’s career went into a lengthy dark period. Cruise later complained to Miscavige, saying that the movie was terrible for the church’s public image.
⁵
Miscavige responded that it
would never have been made if he’d had anything to do with it.

McKinstry was dismayed when he went to a screening of the movie and watched people walking out or booing. His wife could see that he was upset and asked what was wrong. “Why didn’t anyone watch
this movie before it was released?” he said. She reported to the church what he had said, and he was ordered to RPF.

SHORTLY BEFORE HE RECEIVED
Scientology’s top award, Cruise ended his three-year relationship with
Penélope Cruz.
Shelly Miscavige had been
supervising her auditing and helping her through the Purification Rundown. But, like Nicole, Penélope was suspect
in the eyes of the church’s leader. She was an independent-minded person and continued to meditate and identify herself as a Buddhist.

Cruise traveled with a Scientology delegation to open a magnificent new church in Madrid, where he read his speech to the crowd in halting Spanish. Before the opening, however, he was sitting with his sister
Lee Anne, who had become his publicist.
Mike Rinder, who was in the room, remembers that Cruise heatedly complained to his sister that no one had been able to find him a new girlfriend. Miscavige walked in, Rinder says, and Cruise made the same complaint to him.
⁶

Miscavige took the hint. “I want you to look
for the prettiest women in the church,”
Tom De Vocht remembers Miscavige saying. “Get their names and phone numbers.” Miscavige then assigned Greg
Wilhere and
Tommy Davis to audition all the young actresses who were in Scientology—about a hundred, according to
Marc Headley, who observed some of the videos. Shelly Miscavige, the leader’s
wife, oversaw the project personally. Wilhere and Davis immediately went to work. The women weren’t told why they were being interviewed, but they were asked about their opinions of Cruise and where they were on the Bridge. Wilhere, who was actually in the Hole
at the time, was taken out of confinement, given a BlackBerry and five thousand dollars to buy civilian clothes at a Saks Fifth Avenue outlet, then sent to New York and Los Angeles to videotape the interviews. Rinder noticed that when Cruise arrived at the Freedom Medal of Valor ceremony a month later, he was accompanied by a raven-haired young actress and model,
Yolanda Pecoraro. She was born into Scientology and had completed a number of courses at the Celebrity Centre and on the
Freewinds
, but she was only nineteen years old. Cruise was forty-two at the time.

The Scientology search team came up with another aspiring actress,
Nazanin Boniadi
, twenty-five years old, who had been born in Iran
and raised in London. Naz was well educated and beautiful in the way that Cruise was inclined to respond to—dark and slender, with large eyes and a flashing smile. She had studied pre-med at the University of California at Irvine before deciding to try her luck as an actress. More important for the purposes of the match, however, was the fact that Boniadi was an OT V. Her mother was also a Scientologist.

In early November 2004, Naz was informed that she had been selected for a special program that was critical to the future of the church, but it was so secret she wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, even her mother. Naz was moved immediately into the
Celebrity Centre, where she spent a month going through security checks and special auditing programs. She hoped the project had something to do with human rights, which was her special interest, but all she was told was that her participation would end bigotry against Scientology.

At one point during the intensive auditing and security checks, Wilhere informed her that she would have to break up with her longtime boyfriend in order for the project to proceed. She refused. She couldn’t understand why her boyfriend posed any kind of problem; indeed, she had personally introduced him to Scientology. Wilhere persisted, asking what it would take for her to break off the romance. Flustered, she responded that she would break up if she knew he had been cheating on her. According to Naz’s friends, the very next day, Wilhere brought in her boyfriend’s confidential auditing files and showed her several instances of his infidelities, which had been circled in red. Naz felt betrayed, but also guilty, because Wilhere blamed her for failing to know and report her boyfriend’s ethical lapses herself; after all, she had audited him on several occasions. Obviously, she had missed his “withhold.” She confronted her boyfriend and he confessed. That was the end of their relationship.
⁷

Another time, Naz was asked what her “ideal scene for 2-D”—in other words, her dream date—would be. It was eating sushi and going ice-skating. But she wondered why that was important.

One of her assignments was to study a bulletin of Hubbard’s titled “
The Responsibilities of Leaders.” It is Hubbard’s deconstruction
of the lives of the nineteenth-century South American military leader
Simón Bolívar and his ferociously protective mistress, a socialite named
Manuela Sáenz. Bolívar, Hubbard writes, “was a military commander
without peer in history. Why he would fail and die an exile to be later deified is thus of great interest. What mistakes did he make?” Sáenz, his consort, “was a brilliant, beautiful and able woman. She was loyal, devoted, quite comparable to Bolivar, far above the cut of average humanoids. Why then did she live a vilified outcast, receive such violent social rejection and die of poverty and remain unknown to history? What mistakes did she make?”

Hubbard’s analysis was that Bolívar knew how to do only one thing brilliantly—to lead men in battle—and therefore he tended to resort to military solutions when diplomacy or politics would better serve. “He was too good at this one thing,” Hubbard observes. “So he never looked to any other skill and he never even dreamed there was any other way.” Bolívar failed to use his immense authority to reward his friends and punish his enemies; thus his friends deserted him and his enemies grew stronger. Craving glory and the love of his people, Bolívar disdained the bloody intrigues that might have kept him in power. “He never began to recognize a suppressive and never considered anyone needed killing except on a battlefield,” Hubbard coldly sums up. “His addiction to the most unstable drug in history—fame—killed Bolivar.”

Manuela Sáenz might have saved him. She had qualities that he lacked, but she, too, made mistakes. For all her cleverness, she never contrived to make Bolívar marry her, which would have given her the standing that she badly needed. “She was utterly devoted, completely brilliant and utterly incapable of bringing off an action of any final kind,” Hubbard notes. “She violated the power formula in not realizing that she had power.” She should have taken on the portfolio of Bolívar’s secret police chief (as Mary Sue did for Hubbard). “She was not ruthless enough to make up for his lack of ruthlessness and not provident enough to make up for his lack of providence,” Hubbard writes. “She was an actress for the theater alone.”

In Hubbard’s view, the moral of Bolívar and Sáenz’s tragedy is that those with power must use it. Someone close to power, like Manuela, has to dedicate herself to enlarging the strength of her partner. “Real powers are developed by tight conspiracies of this kind,” Hubbard writes. If Manuela had been willing to support Bolívar completely,
Hubbard concludes, she would have been a truly historic figure, rather than being “unknown even in the archives of her country as the heroine she was.”

Nazanin Boniadi was obviously being groomed for leadership. Why else would she be reading about Bolívar and Sáenz? But what lesson was she supposed to draw? She was puzzled by the demands the church was placing on her, which had little to do with human rights. Along with the security checks and the coursework, Naz was told to have her braces taken off and was given very expensive beauty treatments.
Wilhere informed her that the “director” of the special project had decided that her hair had too much red in it, so a stylist to the stars came to the Celebrity Centre to darken and highlight her hair. Then came the shopping spree
. Wilhere took Naz to Rodeo Drive and spent twenty thousand dollars for her new wardrobe.