Inside Scientology (40 page)

Pressley, who'd written the pop song "On the Wings of Love" with her husband, the composer Peter Schless, was considered a "celebrity Scientologist" when she joined the Sea Organization in 1986. Her mission was to bring more celebrities into the church, and the pressure to do so, she said, became increasingly intense after Miscavige assumed leadership of the RTC in 1988. A special org board was set up in Celebrity Centre with the names of individual targets and where they stood in the recruitment process. As church officials were compiling these lists, David Miscavige was refining a much larger strategy: to establish the Church of Scientology as the alternative religion of the stars. Central to this plan was Celebrity Centre itself, which had long ago moved from its low-rent quarters in downtown L.A. to a far more elegant address at 5930 Franklin Avenue, in the shadow of the Hollywood Hills.

Celebrity Centre's new home was an ornate, cream-colored Norman revival castle with fanciful turrets and balustrades; built in 1929, it was known as the Chateau Elysee. Its original owner, Eleanor Ince, the widow of the silent film producer Thomas Ince, had built the place as a luxury residence for her friends, many of them retired movie stars. By the 1970s, however, the Chateau had fallen on hard times and was scheduled for demolition when the Church of Scientology bought it, and the surrounding three-acre property, in 1973, for $1 million in cash. Over the next twenty years, the church poured millions from its own reserves into renovating the Chateau, newly landscaping the formal gardens, and transforming the entire property into a kitschy Versailles.

Inside the manor, crystal chandeliers sparkled against a rococo tableau heavy on the gold leaf, trompe l'oeil paintings, and ceiling frescoes. In the lobby, decorated in Louis XIV style, a bronze bust of L. Ron Hubbard stood opposite a white piano that would have made Liberace feel at home. In addition to these ornate finishes, Celebrity Centre boasted thirty-nine hotel rooms, several theaters and performance spaces, a screening room, an upscale French restaurant, a casual bistro and coffee bar, tennis courts, and an exercise room and spa done in elegant black and white tiles. On the roof of the Chateau, an enormous neon sign, visible from the Hollywood Freeway, proclaimed
S
C
I
E
N
T
O
L
O
G
Y
in large gold lettering.

Into this gaudy palace, a structure was put in place to lure, acquire, service, and ultimately profit off not only the A-list stars, whose faces and endorsements graced the posters in the lobby, but also the many young hopefuls aspiring to stardom. To attract the up-and-coming, ads were placed in
Variety,
Backstage,
and the
Hollywood Reporter,
promoting Scientology as a form of professional development. "Want to Make It in the Industry?"
one asked. "Learn Human Communications Secrets in the Success Through Communications Course." Another ad pitched a seminar package whose topics included how to get an agent, how to write a screenplay, and how to break into soap operas. All seminars, the ad was careful to say, included booklets by L. Ron Hubbard on "Targets and Goals, Public Relations and more," and would feature talks by "special guest celebrity speakers."

Students who showed up to take the seminar found it to be a variation on a self-improvement course. Getting an agent was only a peripheral topic. "The guy who teaches the course on getting an agent never even had an agent," said Art Cohan, an actor and acting coach who studied at Celebrity Centre for several years. "It was a good promise, though—everyone comes to Hollywood hoping to get an agent. Celebrity Centre would get you in there with these ads, they'd sit you in a seminar and give you a few basic truths, and the students would walk away thinking, Wow, maybe they have the key!"

Cohan, who left Scientology in 1998, now runs the Beverly Hills Playhouse, one of the premiere acting schools in Los Angeles. Founded by the late acting coach Milton Katselas, a longtime Scientologist, the Playhouse had provided a home in the 1970s and 1980s for the young George Clooney, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Alec Baldwin, among many others. It was also an unofficial feeder to Celebrity Centre, particularly during the 1990s and early 2000s, when roughly one-fifth of the school's approximately five hundred students were studying Scientology. Among them were the actress Anne Archer and her husband, the producer Terry Jastrow; Priscilla Presley; Nancy Cartwright, the voice of
The Simpsons'
Bart Simpson; Kelly Preston, who later married John Travolta; and Jenna Elfman and her husband, Bodhi, who, like Giovanni Ribisi, another student of Katselas's, had grown up in the church.

When Cohan arrived at the Playhouse, in 1992, nearly everyone on the staff was a member of the Church of Scientology, and some met regularly with Celebrity Centre staff to discuss which students might be targeted that particular week. If a student had problems or showed insecurity about an aspect of his or her career, Playhouse staff members, in exchange for credits toward free auditing or courses, would suggest the person read one of Hubbard's books, or, even better, take a course at Celebrity Centre to stay "on purpose." Cohan himself was introduced to Scientology this way and admits that he later used the same technique on others. "The indoctrination is if you pay for this auditing and get rid of this negativity, then you can
really think clearly,
" he chuckled. "Actors are really vulnerable in Los Angeles. Anything they will think will work, they will try."

One of the actors who joined Scientology through the Beverly Hills Playhouse was Jason Beghe. A handsome thirty-four-year-old who'd grown up in Manhattan and attended the elite Collegiate School, Beghe began studying with Katselas in 1993. By then, Katselas's advanced classes, of which Beghe was a part, were filled with students who were Scientologists. Some received partial scholarships for serving as class "ethics officers," taking notes on which students were late, who seemed tired, who might be having a problem. The great Katselas himself, whom students revered as a god, kept a photograph of L. Ron Hubbard on his desk.

Curious about the church, Beghe asked his friend Bodhi Elfman to give him a few books about Scientology. Elfman obliged and gave Beghe the primer
What Is Scientology?
Beghe found the book's description of the Purification Rundown intriguing. "And that Clear thing sounded good too," he said. The next day he approached Elfman. "Take me to that castle," he said, referring to Celebrity Centre.

At the Chateau Elysee, a cadre of eager Sea Org members greeted Beghe; they seemed to be waiting just for him. And in fact, this may have been the case, for unlike many newcomers, Beghe, whose visit had been arranged by Elfman, was a valuable target: a working actor with a recurring role on the nighttime soap
Melrose Place.
He spent most of that day at Celebrity Centre, touring the grounds, talking to the staff, and otherwise being "admiration bombed," which, he confessed, worked. "Even the most successful artists are extremely insecure about their career," he said. "Everybody is your best friend over there; they just love you to death."

Within a few days, Beghe had invested $50,000 in Scientology, paying up front for the Bridge all the way to Clear. "I figured I could do this in five or six months," he said. Soon Beghe was skipping auditions to take Scientology courses. Within a year or two, he had ascended farther up the Bridge than John Travolta. "I was as gung-ho as you can get," he said. "David Miscavige called me the poster boy for Scientology."

But as Beghe, who reached OT 5, became more involved in Scientology, he was also expected to promote it. Internally, that meant providing the voiceover for a Sea Org recruiting film, which was shot at Golden Era Studios, the Scientology-owned production facility on the International Base. He also made about half a dozen ads for the various "career development" workshops at Celebrity Centre and led one of those seminars himself. Though he recognized the seminars as good PR, Beghe was reluctant to say some of the things he was pressured to say, which included attributing all of his success—by 1997, Beghe had landed a role on
Chicago Hope
and costarred with Demi Moore in the film
GI Jane
—
to Scientology. "You sell a little piece of your soul when you tell that lie," said Beghe, who left Scientology in 2007. "You tell yourself it's for a good cause ... but a part of you knows you're full of shit."

Nonetheless, Beghe did as he was told, and he was not the only one speaking the party line. By the late 1990s, celebrity Scientologists had begun promoting Scientology's social agenda like never before. John Travolta, for instance, became a key booster of Applied Scholastics, an organization created in the early 1970s to help introduce Hubbard's study technology to the general public. The actor's claim: that Hubbard's study technology had allowed him to realize a lifelong dream of becoming a jet pilot.

Kirstie Alley, who'd struggled with a cocaine problem before joining Scientology in the late 1970s, championed Narconon. In several interviews in the 1990s, she confessed to having checked into a Narconon detox center not long after arriving in Los Angeles in 1979 and credited the program with "saving her life"
by helping her get off drugs
^*
(something Alley's auditors from the late 1970s and early 1980s strenuously deny—indeed, they say, she never enrolled in the Narconon program).

A long roster of Scientologist celebrities took up the charge against psychiatry. The screenwriter-director Paul Haggis, for example, who'd joined Scientology in 1975, was one of a number of boldface names on the membership rolls of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), which was founded in 1969 by the Guardian's Office to combat "mental health abuse." By the 1990s, it had become a powerful anti-psychiatry lobbying force, taking on such pharmaceutical giants as Eli Lilly, and, with help from its celebrity sponsors, bringing Scientology into the national conversation over the effectiveness, and possible misuse, of psychiatric drugs, particularly with regard to children diagnosed with ADD or ADHD—conditions CCHR, and Scientology, maintained were fraudulent.

Beghe also joined the CCHR board of commissioners. And he was expected to attend the annual Celebrity Centre gala each August, an invitation-only event, closed to the general Scientology membership. The highlight of the evening was Miscavige's speech, which stroked the celebrities for their importance to society and also urged them to move up the Bridge. This was not a hard-sell speech promoting a product, such as a new series of books, but rather a call to action. "Sometimes he would push the importance of being a field staff member and how vital it was for celebrities to talk about Scientology to their friends," recalled Karen Pressley. "Other times he would challenge them to engage in important personal projects."

This included spreading Scientology's message beyond Hollywood. It helped that the church's roster now included the legal analyst Greta Van Susteren and her husband, the powerful Washington lawyer John Coale, as well as the singer Sonny Bono, who had studied Scientology in the 1970s and 1980s and was elected to Congress in 1994. Having a presence in Washington had always been a priority of the church, and Bono became a vocal advocate for Scientology-related causes in the House of Representatives. He was particularly instrumental in helping the Church of Scientology fight a number of copyright-infringement cases, notably one against the Internet service provider Netcom, on which a Scientology critic had posted some of the church's secret doctrine.

Bono also joined several other members of Congress in appealing to the U.S. trade representative, Charlene Barshevsky, to put pressure on Sweden, which had allowed public access to Scientology doctrine, costing the church millions of dollars in lost income, its leaders claimed. Swedish law permitted free access to any published work, regardless of copyright. Nonetheless, Barshevsky threatened to put Sweden on a U.S. government watch list of countries that violated international trade agreements unless it complied. In October 1997, under pressure from Congress, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the State Department, and the Commerce Department, Sweden agreed to pass tougher copyright-protection laws that would stop the infringement of Scientology's secret doctrine.

But if anyone helped get the church's message across in Washington it was John Travolta. No longer the reticent star, Travolta had spent much of the 1990s promoting Scientology outright. ("I never defended Scientology,"
he told an interviewer from
Playboy,
adding that he felt more of an urge to "enlighten others about it.") By the late 1990s, Travolta had become an outspoken supporter of Scientology's ongoing campaign against the German government, which had been investigating the Scientology movement since the early 1990s. Germany was notably hard on groups it suspected of cultlike activities, and it viewed Scientology as a threat to its system of democracy. German Scientologists claimed to have been fired from jobs and prevented from joining political parties because of their affiliation with the church. Some claimed their children had been turned away from local kindergartens.

In response to these reports, Travolta's attorney, Bertram Fields, wrote an open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, which was published in January 1997 in the
International Herald Tribune
and reprinted in several U.S. papers, including Hollywood's own
Daily Variety.
It was signed by thirty-three other well-known entertainment and industry figures, including Dustin Hoffman, Goldie Hawn, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, and the chief of Warner Bros., Terry Semel, and drew an analogy between the mistreatment of Scientologists in Germany and the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Several weeks later, the U.S. State Department released its annual human rights report, which, in careful language, detailed German Scientologists' claims of "government-condoned and societal harassment."
Though the report did not directly take the German government to task for human rights abuses, it was notably in-depth, dedicating six paragraphs to describing the various measures that had reportedly been taken against German Scientologists.