Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (58 page)

The attacks often came out of the blue, “like the snap of a finger,” as John Peeler described it. Bruce Hines, who was a senior auditor in 1994, told me that before he was struck, “I heard his voice in the hallway, deep and distinctive, ‘Where is that motherfucker?’ He looked in
my office. ‘There he is!’ Without another word he came up and hit me with an open hand. I didn’t fall down. It was at that point I was put in RPF. I was incarcerated six years.”

Davis admitted that the musical chairs episode occurred, even though the church denies the existence of the Hole, where it took place. He explained that Miscavige had been away from
Gold Base for some time, and when he returned, he found that many jobs had been reassigned without his permission. The game was intended to demonstrate how disruptive such wholesale changes could be on an organization. “All the rest of it is a bunch of embellishment and noise and hoo-haw,” Davis told me. “Chairs being ripped apart, and people being threatened that they’re going to be sent to far-flung places in the world, plane tickets being purchased, and they’re going to force their spouses—and on and on and on. I mean, it’s just nuts!”

The Scientology delegation objected to the negative tenor of
The
New Yorker
queries about the church’s leader, including such small details as whether or not he had a tanning bed. “I mean, this is
The New Yorker.
It sounds like the
National Enquirer
,” Davis complained. He wouldn’t say what Miscavige’s salary was (the church is not required to publicly disclose that information), but he derided the idea that the church leader enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. Miscavige, he contended, doesn’t live on the ostentatious scale of many other religious leaders. “There’s no big rings. There’s no fancy silk robes,” he said. “There’s no mansion. There’s no none of that. None, none, none. Zero, zilcho, not.” As for the extravagant birthday presents given to the church leader, Davis said that it was tradition for Sea Org members to give each other gifts for their birthdays. It was “just obnoxious” for me to single out Miscavige.

“It’s not true that he’s gotten for his birthday a motorcycle, fine suits, and leather jackets?” I asked.

“I gave him a leather jacket once,” Davis conceded.

“So it is true?” I asked. “A motorcycle, fine suits?”

“I never heard that,” he responded. “And as far as fine suits, I’ve got some fine suits. The church bought those.” In fact, he was wearing a beautiful custom-made suit, with actual buttonholes on the cuffs. He explained that for IRS purposes it was considered a uniform. When Sea Org members mix with the public, he explained, they dress appropriately. “It’s called Uniform K.”

Davis declined to let me speak to Miscavige; nor would he or the
other members of the group agree to talk about their own experiences with the church leader.

I asked about the leader’s missing wife, Shelly Miscavige.
John Brousseau and
Claire Headley believe that she was taken to Running Springs, near Big Bear, California, one of several sites where
Hubbard’s works are stored in underground vaults. “She’ll be out of sight
, out of mind until the day she dies,” Brousseau had predicted, “like
Mary Sue Hubbard.”

In the meeting, Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he wouldn’t disclose the location.

Davis brought up Jack
Parsons’s black magic society, which he asserted Hubbard had infiltrated. “He was sent in there by
Robert Heinlein, who was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time.” Davis said that the church had been looking for additional documentation to support its claim. “A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that we’d never been able to before, because of something his biographer had found.”

The book Davis was referring to is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by
William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention there of Heinlein sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring. I wrote Patterson, asking if his research supported the church’s assertion. He responded that Scientologists had been the source of the claim in the first place, and that they provided him with a set of documents that supposedly backed it up. Patterson said that the material did not support the factual assertions the church was making. “I was unable to make
any direct connection of the facts of Heinlein’s life at the time to that narrative or any of its supporting documents,” Patterson wrote. (The book reveals that
Heinlein’s second wife,
Leslyn, had an affair with Hubbard. Interestingly, given Hubbard’s condemnation of homosexuality, the wife charged that Heinlein had as well.)

“Even those allegations from
Sara Northrup,” Davis continued, mentioning the woman who had been Parsons’s girlfriend before running off with Hubbard. “He was never married to Sara Northrup. She filed for divorce in an effort to try and create a false record that she had been married to him.” He said that she had been under a cloud of suspicion, even when she lived with Parsons. “It always had been considered that she had been sent in there by the Russians,” he said. “I can never pronounce her name. Her actual true name is a Russian
name.” Davis was referencing a charge that Hubbard once made when he was portraying his wife as a Communist spy named Sara Komkovadamanov
. “That was one of the reasons L. Ron Hubbard never had a relationship with her,” Davis continued. “He never had a child with her. He wasn’t married to her. But he did save her life and pull her out of that whole black magic ring.” Davis described Sara as “a couple beers short of a six-pack, to use a phrase.” He included in the binders a letter from her, dated June 11, 1951, a few days before their divorce proceedings:

She went on to say, “In the future I wish to lead a quiet and orderly existence with my little girl far away from the enturbulating influences which have ruined my marriage.” (Sara did live a quiet and orderly existence until her death, of breast cancer, in 1997. She explained why she made the tapes, in her last months of life. “I’m not interested in revenge
,” she said. “I’m interested in the truth.”)

The meeting with the Scientology delegation lasted all day. Sandwiches were brought in. Davis and I discussed an assertion that
Marty Rathbun had made to me about the
OT III creation story. While Hubbard was in exile, Rathbun said, he wrote a memo suggesting an experiment in which ascending Scientologists might skip the OT III level—a memo Rathbun says that Miscavige had ordered destroyed. “Of every allegation that’s in here,” Davis said, waving the binder containing fact-checking queries, “this one would perhaps be, hands down, the absolutely, without question, most libelous.” He explained that the cornerstone of the faith was the writings of the founder. “Mr. Hubbard’s material must be and is applied precisely as written,” Davis said. “It’s never altered. It’s never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology.”

But hadn’t certain derogatory references to
homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbard’s books been changed after his death?

Davis agreed that was so, but he maintained that “the current
editions are one-hundred-percent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote.” Davis said they were checked against Hubbard’s original dictation.

“The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation?” I asked.

“No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot,” Davis replied. “The point is, it wasn’t Mr. Hubbard.”

“Somebody put the material in those—”

“I can only imagine,” Davis said, cutting me off.

“Who would have done it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t think it really matters,” Davis said. “The point is that neither Mr. Hubbard nor the church has any opinion on the subject of anyone’s sexual orientation.…”

“Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and that’s been corrected now?” I asked, trying to be clear.

“Yeah, I can only assume that’s what happened,” Davis said. “And by the way,” he added, referring to
Quentin Hubbard, “his son’s not gay.”

During his presentation, Davis showed an impressively produced video that portrayed Scientology’s worldwide efforts for literary programs and drug education, the translation of Hubbard’s work into dozens of languages, and the deluxe production facilities at
Gold Base. “The real question is who would produce the kind of material we produce and do the kinds of things we do, set up the kind of organizational structure that we set up?” Davis asked. “Or what kind of man, like L. Ron Hubbard, would spend an entire lifetime researching, putting together the kind of material, suffer all the trials and tribulations and go through all the things he went through in his life … or even with the things that we, as individuals, have to go through, as part of the new religion? Work seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, fourteen-, fifteen-, eighteen-hour days sometimes, out of sheer total complete dedication to our faith. And do it all, for what? As some sort of sham? Just to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?” He concluded, “It’s ridiculous. Nobody works that hard to cheat people. Nobody gets that little sleep to screw over their fellow man.”

We came to the section in the queries dealing with Hubbard’s war
record. His voice filling with emotion, Davis said that if it was true that Hubbard had not been injured, then “the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie.” He concluded: “The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero.”

I believe everyone on
The New Yorker
side of the table was taken aback by this daring equation, one that seemed not only fair but testable. As proof of his claim that Hubbard had been injured, Davis provided a letter from the US Naval Hospital in Oakland, dated December 1, 1945. It states that Hubbard had been hospitalized that year for a duodenal ulcer, but was pronounced “fit for duty.” Davis had highlighted a passage in the letter: “Eyesight very poor, beginning with conjunctivitis actinic in 1942. Lame in right hip from service connected injury. Infection in bone. Not misconduct, all service connected.” Davis added later that according to
Robert Heinlein, Hubbard’s ankles had suffered a “drumhead-type injury”; this can result, Davis explained, “when a ship is torpedoed or bombed.”

Despite subsequent requests to produce additional records, this was the only document Davis provided to prove that the founder of Scientology was not lying about his
war injuries. And yet, Hubbard’s medical records show that only five days after receiving the doctor’s note, Hubbard applied for a pension
based on his conjunctivitis, an ulcer, a sprained knee, malaria, and arthritis in his right hip and shoulder. His vision was little changed from what it had been before the war. This was the same period during which Hubbard claimed to have been blinded and made a hopeless cripple.

Davis acknowledged that some of Hubbard’s medical records did not corroborate the founder’s version of events. The church itself, Davis confided, had been troubled by the contradiction between Hubbard’s story and the official medical records. But he said there were other records that
did
confirm Hubbard’s version of events, based on various documents the church had assembled. I asked where the documents had come from. “From St. Louis,” Davis explained, “from the archives of navy and military service. And also, the church got it from various avenues of research. Just meeting people, getting records from people.”

The man who examined the records and reconciled the dilemma, he said, was “Mr. X.” Davis explained, “Anyone who saw
JFK
remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin Costner’s character goes and meets a
man named Mr. X, who’s played by Donald Sutherland.” In the film, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel
Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the Office of Special Operations at the Pentagon. (
Oliver Stone, who directed
JFK
, says that Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the 1980s, Prouty worked as a consultant for Scientology and was a frequent contributor to
Freedom
magazine. “We finally got so frustrated with this point of conflicting medical records that we took all of Mr. Hubbard’s records to Fletcher Prouty,” Davis continued. Prouty told the church representatives that because Hubbard had an “intelligence background,” his records were subjected to a process known as “sheep-dipping.” Davis explained that this was military parlance for “what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence officer. And, essentially, they create two sets.” (Prouty died in 2001.)

The sun was setting and the Dunkin’ Donuts sign glowed brighter. As the meeting was finally coming to an end, Davis made a plea for understanding. “We’re an organization that’s new and tough and different and has been through a hell of a lot, and has had its ups and downs,” he said. “And the fact of the matter is nobody will take the time and do the story right.”

Davis had staked much of his argument on the veracity of Hubbard’s military records. The fact-checkers had already filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all such material with the National Archives in St. Louis, where military records are kept. Such requests can drag on well past deadline, and we were running short on time. An editorial assistant,
Yvette Siegert, flew to St. Louis to speed things along.