Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (49 page)

Finally, Naz and Wilhere flew to New York, first class. She guessed that the mission would finally be revealed to her. They stopped at the New York Org, ostensibly on routine business, but there they happened to run into
Tom Cruise.
Tommy Davis was with him. Although it all seemed like a happy coincidence, Naz was a little flustered. Not only was Cruise the biggest star in the world, he had also just been accorded the highest honor in Scientology. She said to him, “Very well done, sir.” (Later she was corrected for saying that, because you don’t commend your senior.)

Cruise was charming. He said that he and Davis were headed over to the Empire State Building and then to Nobu for some sushi—why didn’t they join them? Afterward, they all went skating at Rockefeller Center, which was closed to the public while they were on the rink. It was beginning to seem a little too perfect. She spent that first night
with Cruise in the Trump Tower, where he had taken an entire floor for his entourage.

Cruise invited Naz to hang out on the set of
War of the Worlds
, which was shooting in Athens, New York, the next morning. At the end of the day, Davis accompanied her back to the city. In the limo, he handed Naz a non-disclosure agreement. There was no lawyer present, and she wasn’t given a copy of what she signed. He informed her that the “mission” was now off the table. This—the relationship with Cruise—was far more important. Davis warned that if she did anything to upset Cruise he would personally destroy her.

Naz wasn’t resistant. She wanted to help the world, and she had faith that Scientology could do that. Cruise was dazzling. Scientology was deeply important to both of them. It was obviously meant to be, so why question it?

According to several knowledgeable sources, within a few weeks Naz moved into Cruise’s house. Davis and
Jessica Feshbach were constantly tutoring her in how to behave toward the star. One evening, she and Cruise had dinner with several Scientologists, including Tommy Davis and Cruise’s niece,
Lauren Haigney, who was in the Sea Org and was posted to Gold Base. She had been
Katy
Haggis’s best friend all through their childhood. They were at the
Delphian School together. At the dinner, Lauren talked about her friendship with Katy, and how she had decided to break off their relationship when Katy said she was a lesbian. Naz was shocked, not just by the comment but by the fact that everyone agreed with her decision.
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In December, Cruise took Naz to his vacation house in Telluride, where they were joined by David and Shelly
Miscavige. While they were at Cruise’s retreat, David and Shelly watched a screener of
Million Dollar Baby
. Afterward, Miscavige said it had been difficult to sit through. He complained about what a poor example of a Scientologist Haggis was, and said that he needed to get back on the Bridge and stop making such awful, low-tone films. Cruise agreed. “He needs to get his ethics
in,” he remarked.

Naz was having an awful menstrual period, and she wanted to beg off the festive dinner they had planned, but she knew she was obliged to play the hostess. Still, she felt miserable and her mind was foggy. A couple of times, Miscavige addressed comments to her, and she couldn’t quite understand what he said. Miscavige speaks in a rapid-fire Philly brogue, and Naz had to ask him to repeat himself more than once. The next day, both Davis and Cruise dressed her down for disrespecting the church leader—specifically, for “insulting his TR 1.” In Scientology lingo, that refers to the basic Training Routine about communicating with another person. Naz had embarrassed Miscavige
because he wasn’t able to get his message across. Davis said that her conduct was inexcusable. If she was in pain, she should have taken a Tylenol.

With his characteristic intensity, Cruise himself later explained the seriousness of the situation: “You don’t get it
. It goes like this.” He raised his hand over his head. “First, there’s LRH.” He moved his hand down a few inches. “Then, there is COB.” Bringing his hand down to his own eye level, he said, “Then there’s me.”

Two weeks later, Jessica Feshbach told Naz to pack her things. Cruise was too busy to say good-bye. Naz’s last glimpse was
of him working out in his home gym.

Davis later explained to her that Cruise had simply changed his mind about the relationship, deciding that he needed someone with more power. But the star was willing to make amends by paying for a package that would allow her to attain OT VII. Continuing up the Bridge would help her deal with her grief and loss, Davis assured her.

In February 2005, Naz went to Clearwater to take the courses. At first, she was treated like a VIP, but soon one of her friends noticed dramatic changes in her—she was weeping all the time. Naz confided that she had just gone through a wrenching breakup with Tom Cruise. The shocked friend immediately reported her to Ethics. Naz was assigned a condition of Treason and ordered to do reparations for the damages she had done to the group by revealing her relationship with Cruise. She was made to dig ditches and scrub public toilets with a toothbrush. Finally, in June, she worked her way back into good standing with the church, but she was ordered to stay away from the Celebrity Centre. Davis advised her to go live in some far corner of the world and never utter another word about Tom Cruise.
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The search for a new mate
for the star now went beyond Scientologists. Cruise briefly courted the Colombian actress Sofía Vergara, whom he met at a pre-Oscar party hosted by Will and
Jada Pinkett
Smith, but that relationship dissolved when Vergara refused to become a Scientologist. The religion was a crucial factor, both for Cruise and for the church. Cruise was particularly interested in
Jennifer Garner. Other actresses were invited to the Celebrity Centre to audition for what they believed was a role in the
Mission: Impossible
series. The names included
Kate Bosworth
,
Jessica Alba,
Lindsay Lohan,
Scarlett Johansson—and
Katie Holmes.

Holmes was an ingenue
with almond-shaped brown eyes, who described herself as a twenty-six-year-old virgin. She had been a top student at an all-girls Catholic high school in Toledo, Ohio, but like Tommy Davis, she had dropped out of Columbia University after a single semester. Soon she was starring on the teenage soap opera
Dawson’s Creek
and had a modest film career in coquettish roles. Church researchers discovered an interview she had given to
Seventeen
in October 2004. “I think every young girl dreams
about [her wedding],” Holmes told the magazine. “I used to think I was going to marry Tom Cruise.” She had developed a crush on the actor when he appeared in
Risky Business
. At the time, she was four years old.

Katie and Tom met in April 2005. “I was in love from
the moment that I shook his hand for the first time,” she later told talk-show host
Jay Leno. Cruise is famous for his ardent courtship—flowers, jewelry, and imaginative dates. He took Katie on a nighttime helicopter ride
over Los Angeles, with take-out sushi. Within a little more than two weeks, she had moved into Cruise’s Beverly Hills mansion, fired her manager and agent and replaced them with his representatives, and had begun to be accompanied by Jessica Feshbach, who was explained in press interviews as being her “best friend
.”

In May, Cruise appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. The audience, nearly all women, were in a near-hysterical state of anticipation even before Cruise came out on the stage, so his behavior has to be seen against a backdrop of a highly titillated screaming mass, to which he responded like a surfer catching a massive wave. He pumped his fist in the air and knelt on the floor. “Something’s happened
to you!” Winfrey exclaimed.

“I’m in love!” he explained.

“We’ve never seen you behave like this before!”

“I know!” Cruise said, jumping backward onto her couch. Then he grabbed Winfrey’s hands and began wrestling with her. “You’re gone!” she kept saying. “You’re gone!” It was a scene of complete delirium.

Cruise’s spectacular and highly public romance was overshadowing the promotion for
War of the Worlds
, the movie he had just made with
Spielberg, which would be released the following month. A few weeks after the Winfrey show, Cruise did an interview with
Today
show
host
Matt Lauer as Holmes sat nearby. The questions were friendly, and Cruise seemed happy and relaxed until Lauer mentioned that Holmes had agreed to take up Scientology. “At this stage
in your
life, could you be with someone who doesn’t have an interest?” Lauer asked.

“You know, Scientology is something that you don’t understand,” Cruise responded. “It’s like, you could be a Christian and be a Scientologist, okay.”

“So, it doesn’t replace religion,” Lauer offered.

“It is a religion, because it’s dealing with the spirit. You as a spiritual being.”

Lauer then asked about a comment that Cruise had recently made about actress
Brooke Shields, who had written that antidepressants had helped her get through her postpartum depression. “I’ve never agreed with
psychiatry—ever!” Cruise said. He was dressed in black, his muscular arms on display; he had a stubble beard and his hair was draped in bangs across his forehead. He radiated an athletic intensity and a barely contained fury. “As far as the Brooke Shields thing, look, you’ve got to understand, I really care about Brooke Shields. I think, here’s a wonderful and talented woman. And I want to see her do well. And I know that psychiatry is a pseudo-science.”

“But, Tom, if she said that this particular thing helped her feel better, whether it was the antidepressants or going to a counselor or psychiatrist, isn’t that enough?”

“Matt, you have to understand this,” Cruise said, glowering. “Here we are today, where I talk out against drugs and psychiatric abuses of electric-shocking people—okay, against their will—of drugging children with them not knowing the effect of these drugs. Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?”

“The difference is—”

“No, no, Matt.”

“This wasn’t against her will, though.”

“Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt.”

“But this wasn’t against her will.”

“Matt, I’m asking you a question.”

“I understand there’s abuse of all these things.”

“No, you see, here’s the problem,” Cruise said. “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”

Lauer was taken aback by Cruise’s aggressiveness, but he pressed on. “Do you examine the possibility that these things do work for some people? That yes, there are abuses, and yes, maybe they’ve gone too far
in some areas. Maybe there are too many kids on Ritalin. Maybe electric shock—”

“Too many kids on Ritalin?” Cruise said, shaking his head. “Matt.”

“Aren’t there examples where it works?”

“Matt, Matt, Matt, you don’t even—you’re glib. You don’t even know what Ritalin is.” He said there were ways that Shields could solve her depression—he mentioned diet and exercise—other than drugs. “And there are ways of doing it without that, so that we don’t end up in a brave new world. The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation, okay. And she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn’t understand in the same way that you don’t understand it, Matt.”

SCIENTOLOGY
’
S HISTORY OF
psychiatry holds it responsible for many of the ills that have affected humanity—war, racism, ethnic cleansing, terrorism—all in the pursuit of social control and profit. The church has opened an exhibit,
“Psychiatry: An Industry of Death,” on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It describes the often grisly and benighted practices that have characterized the evolution of the profession, including madhouses, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and the proliferation of psychiatric drugs to treat spurious diagnoses. Scientology views this history as a long march by psychiatrists to manipulate human behavior and institute world government.

Although it’s not included in the exhibit, Hubbard’s chronology of psychiatry actually begins “five billion years ago
” with the development of a particular technique that was developed “in the Maw Confederation of the Sixty-third Galaxy”:

Hubbard also blamed psychiatrists, allied with the tyrant
Xenu, for carrying out genocide in the
Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago. There are obvious parallels in this legend with the
Nazi regime, which used doctors, including psychiatrists, to carry out the extermination of the mentally ill, along with homosexuals, Gypsies, and Jews; and also by the Soviet government, which employed psychiatrists to diagnose political dissidents and lock them away. Hubbard lived through these shameful events, and they no doubt colored his imagination.

After Hubbard’s death,
Miscavige continued the campaign. In 1995, he told the
International Association of Scientologists that the church’s goals for the new millennium were to “place Scientology at the absolute
center of society” and to “eliminate psychiatry in all its forms.” The Citizens Commission on
Human Rights, a lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum, maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist. In this view, psychiatrists have been responsible for the Holocaust, apartheid, and even 9/11. The commission is not above bending the truth to make its point. The president of CCHR,
Dave Figueroa, asserts that
Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, was a psychiatrist who took control of bin Laden’s “thought patterns.” “Whatever type of drugs that Zawahiri
used to make that change in bin Laden, we don’t know,” Figueroa explained. “We know there was a real change in that guy’s attitude.” This view is reiterated in the terrorism portion of the museum. (In fact, Zawahiri is a general surgeon, not a psychiatrist.)
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