Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (33 page)

In April 1988, Miscavige formally canceled Hubbard’s final directive,
Flag Order 3879, that had named the Broekers Loyal Officers. Miscavige declared that Pat Broeker had fabricated the order, although he produced no evidence to substantiate his charge. Broeker’s last claim to the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard was destroyed. He fled the country, followed by two private detectives,
Paul Marrick and
Greg Arnold, who claim that they tailed Broeker for the next twenty-four years, even to foreign countries. They say they were supervised personally by David Miscavige
and paid from church funds. “He lived a very quiet, normal life
, and everybody around him loves him,” Marrick later said of Broeker. “So that’s his whole story from our perspective.”

The same day that Miscavige canceled Hubbard’s order, Annie showed up in a remote re-education camp, in the
Soboba Indian Reservation in Southern California, that Scientologists called
Happy Valley
. It had once belonged to an order of nuns
, who left a sign on the gate that said
VALLEY OF THE SINGING HEART
. An armed guard
stood watch. Dogs were trained
to track down anyone who tried to leave.

Miscavige was now in complete control.

I
n 1986, the same year that L. Ron Hubbard died,
Paul Haggis appeared on the cover of the church’s
Celebrity
magazine, marking his entry into the pantheon of the Scientology elite. The photo shows Haggis sitting in a director’s chair, holding a coffee cup. He’s clean-shaven, with glasses, wearing a herringbone jacket with a pocket square in the breast pocket and pleated linen slacks, looking like a nerdy Hollywood executive with a lot of money to spend on clothes. The article took note of his rising influence in Hollywood. He had broken free of the cartoon ghetto after selling a script to
The Love Boat
, then ascended through the ranks of network television, writing movies of the week and children’s shows before settling into sitcoms. He worked on
Diff’rent Strokes
,
Who’s the Boss?
and
One Day at a Time
. He was now the executive producer of
The Facts of Life
, a top-rated Saturday night staple.
Celebrity
noted, “He is one of the few
writers in Hollywood who has major credits in all genres: comedy, suspense, human drama, animation.”

In the article, Haggis said of Scientology, “What excited me
about the technology was that you could actually handle life, and your problems, and not have them handle you.” He added, “I also liked the motto, ‘Scientology makes the able more able.’ ” He credited the church for improving his relationship with his wife, Diane. “Instead of fighting (we did a lot of that before Scientology philosophy) we now talk things out, listen to each other and apply Scientology technology to our problems.”

Haggis told the magazine that he had recently gone through the
Purification Rundown
, a program intended to eliminate body toxins that form a “biochemical barrier to spiritual well-being.” For an average of three weeks, participants undergo a lengthy daily regimen, spending up to eight hours a day in a sauna, interspersed with exercise, and taking massive doses of vitamins, especially
niacin. In large amounts, niacin can cause liver damage, but it will also stimulate the skin to flush and create a tingling sensation. The church says that this is evidence of
drugs and other toxins being purged from the body. Although many in the medical profession have been hostile to the Purification Rundown, citing it as a fraud and a scam, Hubbard thought he deserved a Nobel Prize
for it.

In the
Celebrity
interview, Haggis admitted that he had been skeptical of the procedure before going through it—“My idea of doing good for my body was smoking low-tar cigarettes”—but the Purification Rundown, he said, “was WONDERFUL. I really did feel more alert and more aware and more at ease—I wasn’t running in six directions to get something done, or bouncing off the walls when something went wrong.” He mentioned the drugs that he had taken when he was young. “Getting rid of all those residual toxins and medicines and drugs really had an effect,” he said. “After completing the rundown I drank a diet cola and suddenly could really taste it: every single chemical!” He had recommended the Rundown to others, including his mother, when she was seriously ill, and had persuaded a young writer on his staff to take the course in order to wean herself from various medications. “She could tell Scientology worked by the example I set,” Haggis told the magazine. “That made me feel very good.”

The Purification Rundown is a fundamental feature of Scientology’s drug rehabilitation program,
Narconon, which operates nearly two hundred residential centers around the world. Celebrity Scientologists conspicuously promote Narconon, citing the church’s claims that Narconon is “the most effective rehabilitation
program there is.”
Kirstie Alley, who served as the national spokesperson for Narconon for a number of years, describes herself as “the heart and soul
of the project,” because it had helped break her dependency on cocaine. A year after 9/11,
Tom Cruise set up a program for over a thousand rescue workers in New York to go through a similar procedure, which was paid for in part by using city money. Many participants reported positive results, saying that they had sweated a kind of black paste
through their pores while in the sauna. The Borough of Manhattan gratefully declared March 13 (
Hubbard’s birthday), 2004, as “
Hubbard Detoxification Day
.”

Kelly Preston has promoted Narconon in her native Hawaii. “Starting in the schools
, we’ve delivered to over ten thousand different kids,” she said. Preston and
Travolta’s sixteen-year-old son, Jett, who was autistic, died of a seizure in January 2009. His parents had taken him off of
Depakote, an anti-seizure medication, saying it was ineffective. (The church claims that
it does not oppose the use of such drugs when prescribed by a doctor; however, Hubbard himself denounced
the use of anti-seizure medications.) Previously, Preston asserted on the
Montel Williams Show
that Jett suffered from
Kawasaki syndrome, a rare disorder that she thought was brought on by his exposure to pesticides and household chemicals.

“With Jett, you started him
on a program that I think is talked about in this book by L. Ron Hubbard,” Williams said, holding up
Clear Body, Clear Mind
, which outlines the principles of the Purification Rundown.

“Exactly,” Preston replied.
¹
She then talked about her own profound experience on the program. Novocaine from previous dental work began to surface. “I had my entire mouth get numb again for an hour and a half,” she said. Other drugs were purged as well, along with radiation exposure from the sun. “I had a bathing suit when I was seven years old—this is completely true. I had a bathing suit that I thought was so cool with holes in the side and a hole in the center,” she said. “And I got a sunburn in it. And twenty years later, I had this same sunburn come out in my skin, the entire sunburn.” Preston brought copies of Hubbard’s book for the entire studio audience.

DESPITE HIS EXUBERANT TESTIMONIAL
, Haggis was increasingly troubled by the
contradictions in the church. Scientology had begun to seem like two different things: a systematic approach to self-knowledge,
which he found useful and insightful; and a religion that he simply couldn’t grasp. He liked and admired his auditor, and the confessions were helpful, and he continued to advance on the
Bridge, even after his unsettling encounter with
OT III. He saw so many intelligent people on the path, and he always expected that his concerns would be addressed at the next level. They never were. After OT III, it was all “intergalactic spirituality,” in his opinion. On the other hand, he had already paid for the complete package, so why not continue and see what happened? “Maybe there is something, and I’m missing it,” he told himself.

When Haggis reached
OT VII, which was the peak at the time, he still felt confused and unsatisfied. At the top of the OT pyramid, the
thetan was promised the ability to control “thought, life, form, matter
, energy, space and time, subjective and objective.” The final exercise (according to documents obtained by WikiLeaks—Haggis refused to talk about it) was “Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body.” But even if you could do that, how would you know if you succeeded? If you were transmitting the intention “Scratch your head” and a person did so, was he responding to your psychic order or was it simply coincidental? It was difficult to evaluate.

Haggis thought that Hubbard was such a brilliant intellect that the failure to grasp these concepts and abilities must be his alone. He finally confided to a counselor at the Celebrity Centre that he didn’t think he was a very good Scientologist because he couldn’t bring himself to believe. He said he felt like a fraud and thought he might have to leave the church. She told him, “There are all sorts of Scientologists,” just as there are many varieties of Jews and Christians with varying levels of belief. The implication was that Haggis could believe whatever he wanted, to “pick and choose,” as he says.

Haggis’s career was going so well that in 1987 he was approached by
Ed Zwick and
Marshall Herskovitz to write for a new television series called
thirtysomething
. They were looking for distinctive voices. “I love the fact that you guys
are doing a show that’s about emotions,” Haggis told them. “I
hate
writing about emotions. And I don’t like to talk about my own.” But he seemed to be looking for a chance to push himself creatively. With his first script, Zwick and Herskovitz
told him, “This is really good, but where does it come from?” Haggis didn’t know what they meant. “Where does it come from—within
you
?” they explained. The thought that his own experience mattered was a revelation.

Zwick and Herskovitz sensed that Haggis wasn’t happy on the show; in any case, he got a lucrative offer to create his own series and left after the first season. But he had won two Emmys, for writing and producing, and the experience transformed him as a writer. From working with Zwick and Herskovitz, Haggis became interested in directing. He finally got the chance to do a brief ad for the church about
Dianetics. He decided against the usual portrayal of Scientology as a triumphal march toward enlightenment, choosing instead to shoot a group of people talking about practical ways they had used Dianetics in their lives. It was casual and naturalistic. Church authorities hated it. They told him it looked like a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.