Inside Scientology (44 page)

Zealously embracing the role of Scientology's chief proselytizer, by the spring of 2005 the actor was presenting himself as a "helper" who'd assisted "hundreds of people" to get off drugs. "In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world,"
he told a reporter from Germany's
Der Spiegel,
who replied by calling Hubbard's techniques "pseudoscience." Cruise also maintained he could help criminals reform their lawless ways. "You have no idea how many people want to know what Scientology is,"
he told the German newspaper.

According to the
Los Angeles Times,
Cruise spent so much time proselytizing about Scientology during his spring 2005 promotional tour for
The War of the Worlds
that the director, Steven Spielberg, became concerned that Cruise was drawing attention away from the movie.
But the actor was by now sealed so tightly within Scientology's protective shell that he barely took notice.

The next step was a new wife.
Sandra Mercer, the onetime Scientologist of Clearwater, Florida, watched Cruise declare his love for Katie Holmes on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
in the spring of 2005 and chuckled when she saw him jumping enthusiastically on Winfrey's couch. ("Enthusiasm is very high on Scientology's tone scale," she said.) It was not unheard of for single members at Cruise's level to be "ordered" to get married in order to continue to progress in the church, she explained. Hubbard stressed that a truly successful Scientologist would be successful on all the dynamics of existence, including the "2nd Dynamic," which is marriage and family. "I can't say that happened with Tom, but I've heard it said to others; I've said it to people myself. And in Tom's case, he would have been told: 'If you find someone who can help us reach more young people, wow, what a win that would be!' That is what's promoted. Everything you do, every action you take should be done from the standpoint of gaining worldwide acceptance of Scientology."

Eventually, however, Cruise's increasingly strident advocacy began to backfire, notably after he lambasted the actress Brooke Shields, a onetime friend, for using the antidepressant Paxil to treat postpartum depression. Then, a few days after his
Oprah
appearance, Cruise sat for an interview on the
Today
Show,
where he lectured Matt Lauer on the dangers of antidepressants. "Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know what Ritalin is? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you
understand
that?" Cruise asked Lauer. "You see, here's the problem. You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."

It was, as many television critics noted, spectacular TV. It was also proof to many observers, including many former Scientologists, of just how dangerously out of control Cruise's zealotry had gotten. Though Miscavige by all accounts viewed Cruise's advocacy as a win, former Scientologists and even some current ones were shocked by his tone-deaf approach. The Church of Scientology, which for decades had deftly morphed in response to society's latest interests, now seemed wholly oblivious to the effect Cruise's performance was having not only on the actor, whose career took an irreparable hit, but on his church.

By the end of 2005, Scientology had been lampooned on virtually every late-night talk show and, most memorably, on
South Park.
By 2006, a spate of magazine articles
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had examined Scientology's teachings and scrutinized its more controversial practices. As the church spokesman Mike Rinder went on television to deny Scientology's policy of making its members disconnect from family and friends who had fallen away from the church, Tom Cruise receded into the background, although by all accounts, his friendship with Miscavige, who served as best man at his wedding to Holmes and even accompanied the couple on their honeymoon, remained strong. "Dave probably told Tom to cool it a little bit and not be so aggressive in fighting people like Matt Lauer, but he wouldn't go, 'Oh my God, this really backfired,'" said one former Scientology executive who worked with Miscavige. To the contrary, he said, Miscavige would simply think that those outside of Scientology were wrong "and Tom Cruise had been 'black PR'ed.'"

For a short while, John Travolta stepped back into the promotional spotlight, albeit unsuccessfully. In February 2007, Travolta told the media that Scientology's Narconon program might have helped save the former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith,
who died of a drug overdose. "Google Narconon for a minute," MSNBC's Willie Geist suggested to the talk-show host Tucker Carlson, in response to this statement. "If I wasn't so completely terrified of Scientology, I would," Carlson quipped.

By the end of 2007, Scientology's public image was worse than at any other time in Miscavige's tenure. It was a "joke" how bad it was, a onetime senior church official told me when I interviewed him in the spring of 2008. "Between Cruise and Miscavige, they absolutely destroyed Scientology's PR," he said. "I've never seen it like this."

And yet Miscavige seemed almost oblivious to this problem, a quality that set him notably apart from L. Ron Hubbard, who'd reacted to negative press with hurt feelings, blaming the "wog world" for his problems and isolating himself and his followers. According to many observers, Miscavige was unfazed ("Dave doesn't care if people like him," an official noted) and blamed his staff when things went wrong.

It was a tendency Miscavige had shown since taking over the church: an example, said many of his former executives, of the leader's poor management. But Miscavige's imperviousness was also wholly understandable. He had lived immersed in Scientology since the age of eight. He'd become the leader of the church at the tender age of twenty-five. He'd had no experience living in the non-Scientology world, much less in running a Scientology org or mission, or even counseling people in any significant way. Indeed, Miscavige's dealings with the flock had always been limited—according to Marty Rathbun, the leader frequently sent emissaries like Rathbun to interface with prominent members while he remained at a distance. In his twenty-odd years at the helm, Miscavige did one television and one print interview. After 1998, he did no interviews at all.

Scientology too had become more insular. And this, noted Steve Hall, made it even harder to promote Scientology to mainstream Americans. "That has got to be the hardest assignment in the world," he said. "By this point, Scientology is a culture. Inside the church you can go on completely unaware, really ignorant of how to connect to people, because you live and breath Scientology twenty-four hours a day. But outside of the church, people know all about the lawsuits, they've heard it called a 'mafia' or a cult, they've gone on the Internet to read the OT materials ... so how do you sell Scientology to new people? You don't."

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, a growing majority of today's Scientologists are, like David Miscavige, people who were born or raised in the movement. This makes the marketing of Scientology far easier. Children who grow up in Scientology have a limited worldview: they are integrated into mainstream society, yet in many ways are totally isolated from its standards and norms. The degree of this isolation may differ, but the general rigor of a Scientology upbringing holds true whether members live in a sleepy community like Clearwater or in Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the United States. Many church-raised kids refer to their childhood as a "bubble." Some children thrive in this environment; others, chafing against its dogma, rebel; still others are consumed by it entirely.

Natalie Walet falls into the first category. She is part of Scientology's third generation: both of her parents, a few aunts and uncles, and her paternal grandmother are Scientologists, and Scientology is the only religion she's ever known. When I met her for the first time, in August 2005, she was seventeen, just out of high school and living with her parents in Dunedin, outside Clearwater. We met at the Starbucks on Cleveland Street, around the corner from the Fort Harrison.

This, she realized, was a daring move. Scientologists are discouraged from speaking to journalists; those who do—indeed most of those I met—do so with the church's permission and are often chaperoned by church officials. Natalie hadn't asked anyone's permission. A pretty girl with shiny dark hair, she was tremendously self-assured, which was something I'd find true for many Scientologist kids. She had agreed to talk to me "without a filter," as she later said, "because quite frankly I wanted to stand up for the rest of us Scientologists that get globbed in with the crazy people."

We watched from the wide front patio of the Starbucks as a blue and white bus, adorned with the word
F
L
A
G
in elaborate script, discharged what looked like a small army of Sea Org members. Each was dressed in a preppy uniform of khaki, black, or navy blue trousers and a crisp white, blue, or yellow dress shirt.
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"Most people think that all Scientologists look like that," Natalie said. She was dressed in a low-cut black T-shirt and jeans. "I meet people all the time who say, 'Oh my God, you're a Scientologist?'" She rolled her eyes in teenage exasperation. "I mean, dude, you see them every day. Your clerk at the 7-11 could be a Scientologist. Your neighbor may be a Scientologist. You just don't know. And that's because we're not that different from you! We're all just people," she said.

Of course there were some differences, she acknowledged. Like all Scientologists, Natalie saw herself as a thetan, and her physical, or "meat," body one of many she'd had on life's continuum. In the end, her body was unimportant. She lit a cigarette. She'd started smoking when she was eleven, she said, which she realized was "kind of bad," but then again, L. Ron Hubbard chain-smoked Kools for most of his life. "LRH never said we were supposed to be perfect."

Natalie idolized Hubbard. I noticed that she often prefaced her sentences with the phrase "LRH says," and she could quote him, chapter and verse. But unlike many older Scientologists, who describe the Founder in almost godlike terms, Natalie saw Hubbard as simply "a brilliant person who came up with a fascinating technology, a lot of which is common sense." She spent a lot of her free time studying Hubbard's ideas, which, she explained, were primarily about learning how to take better control of one's life and handle problems in a rational way. "For me, Scientology is about finding out the 'why' for whatever it is you want to apply it to. But you have to find that out for yourself," she said, and quoted Hubbard: "What's true for you is what you observe to be true."

Natalie was born in Arlington, Virginia, and spent her early life in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where her father, John Walet, ran the church's large organization on Dupont Circle. Natalie's mother, Emily, also worked at the D.C. Org, and as an only child, Natalie virtually grew up there. Despite her father's official-sounding title—he was the executive director—her parents were part of the church's rank and file, not Sea Org members, but paid staff who worked long hours. Loyal Scientologists, they were also independent. "My mother is very outspoken; she'll tell you exactly what she thinks," Natalie said, recalling one instance when Emily Walet staunchly defended a church member whom officials had wanted to declare suppressive—and prevailing. "That guy is still a Scientologist, in D.C., and doing really well," Natalie said. "There's a lot of pressure when you work in the org. I know my parents got in arguments with higher-ups from time to time. But if they saw something they felt was wrong, they said something."

Scientology is an extremely doctrinaire faith, yet it does not necessarily produce robots. Natalie, an extremely poised and articulate teenager, was an example of just how independent some Scientologist kids can be. She explained it was due to the unique way Scientologist children are raised, which is in accordance with Hubbard's dictum that all people, regardless of age, be granted their own "beingness," or self-determinism. The Walets took this directive seriously and rarely yelled at or talked down to their daughter, unlike the parents of non-Scientologist kids she'd later meet. "I was never treated like a little kid, even when I was a little kid," she said, and thought about that for a minute. "I guess I never really felt like a little kid either," she added.

Natalie began school, upon her own insistence, she said, when she was four, skipping kindergarten. She attended a private school, the Chesapeake Ability Academy in northern Virginia, which was run by Scientologists. There are nearly fifty such schools in the United States, and for those who can't afford them, scores of private tutoring programs to help Scientologist kids in public schools supplement their education with Hubbard's techniques. All are sponsored by Applied Scholastics, which licenses Hubbard's study technology to independent schools and tutors in the same manner that WISE licenses his management technology to independent businesses.

Though they are not considered "parochial" (though they are tax-exempt), Scientology schools, according to the church's own literature, are meant to educate children into L. Ron Hubbard's philosophy, with larger goals in mind. "By educating a child into one's own beliefs, one gradually takes over a whole new generation of a country and can thus influence, in the long term, the development and growth of that country," stated a 1986 issue of
Impact,
the magazine published by the International Association of Scientologists.
The Jesuits, for example, "were very successful at this strategy."

Natalie never saw Chesapeake as "religious" in any way. "They just used study tech," she explained. The kids learned at their own pace; used physical examples—clay models, marbles, or diagrams—to help them work out complex concepts; and focused intensely on vocabulary, never skipping a word they didn't understand; instead, they looked it up in the dictionary. Natalie described this education as "awesome" because she was never allowed to just ignore things she did not fully comprehend. "If I got a ninety-eight on a test, they would go to that two percent I did wrong and help me figure it out." An intelligent and highly motivated girl, she stayed at Chesapeake through fifth grade and then transferred to a public middle school, where she was an accelerated student. At thirteen, she started high school.