Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography (15 page)

After their wedding they opened a small Scientology “field auditing” practice in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, which catered to actors, artists, and other celebrities. As many celebrities wanted to keep their association with Scientology private, it was often difficult to encourage them to visit the main Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. The Sherman Oaks venue was a discreet, anonymous setting for a celebrity to explore Hubbard’s world vision. As a former Scientologist observed, “Field auditing is about getting people into the cult in a casual, come-round-to-my-house-and-talk-to-me kind of way.”

It is also about money, Scientology field auditors earning a decent living from commissions for bringing in raw meat. And celebrities were prime steak. Jim and Mimi had a pleasant three-bedroom home in the valley with a volleyball court and a swimming pool, money earned from the hundred dollars an hour or so they charged for an hour’s auditing. She recruited the singer and later politician Sonny Bono into the cult, while her great friend, comedy actress Kirstie Alley, who credited Scientology with getting her off drugs, was a regular visitor.

While Scientology was a vehicle for Mimi to fund her lifestyle, it was also a route to achieve her ultimate ambition: to become a Hollywood star. Beneath her surface charm and good looks was a focused and determined young woman who networked constantly to gain a foot on the ladder of fame. “She knew what she wanted—to be a superstar. If you had nothing to offer her, she wasn’t interested,” recalls a former girlfriend. Mimi and Kirstie even attempted scriptwriting, one effort featuring a girl who was enjoying a last fling before she reached thirty. Indeed, it took screenwriter and onetime Scientologist Skip Press some time to realize that he was being invited to her home for cookouts because of his contacts and for the chance to have first look at his latest scripts rather than because of his scintillating wit and good
looks. “When she and her husband set up an auditing practice, I learned that rather than ‘clearing the planet,’ she was fiercely focused on Hollywood success. She is one of the most coldly calculating people I ever met and would cast you aside if you could not fuel her ambition.”

In 1980, Mimi divorced her first husband, Jim, concentrating full-time on her acting career. The following year she was cast in the hit TV series
Hill Street Blues
and started dating Ed Marinaro, one of the show’s stars. Over the next few years she got a number of small roles in TV soaps such as
The Rousters
and
Paper Dolls
. Her ceaseless networking did not impress everyone, a friend of her ex-husband commenting sourly, “Mimi is the only actress I know who could fuck her way to the middle.”

While seeking acting work, she continued to recruit new members to the cult. The lifetime commissions she earned helped pay the bills. Dinner parties and other social gatherings were perfect opportunities to quietly introduce Scientology into the conversation, and it was at one such dinner party in 1985 that Mimi first met Tom Cruise. At the time she was dating “an associate” of the young actor, but she later recalled there was a chemistry between them comprised of stolen glances and brief exchanges. “I guess we both thought we were kinda cute,” said Mimi later.

For Tom, the fact that she was an actress was a plus. Apart from briefly dating singer Patti Scialfa, whom he met backstage after a concert in New Jersey during Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” tour, he had eyes only for those in his own profession. It meant that when he launched into one of his passionate lectures about his craft, his date would understand what he was talking about. As he later explained, “It’s like trying to explain how driving a racecar feels. You can’t do it. They’ve got to get into the car themselves.” Certainly Mimi recognized that quality. “He’s always been a very intense guy who is openly passionate about some things.”

At first sight, Tom was not Mimi’s usual type. The men in her life—after her divorce she dated TV detectives Tom Selleck and Ed Marinaro as well as Bobby Shriver, scion of
the Kennedy clan—were all older and taller than she was. By contrast, Tom Cruise was two inches shorter and six years younger. Like the others, though, he was well-connected—and busy. “He seemed so young and vulnerable, and she was a very powerful personality who knew how to work her power,” recalled a onetime girlfriend who watched her in action. “Quite simply, she rocked his world.”

Mimi’s romance with Tom followed a similar pattern to her days with Tom Selleck. It was all about mutual ambition and business. Show business. They saw each other in between Tom shooting
The Color of Money
and publicizing
Top Gun,
and Mimi embarking on her first major starring role in the crime thriller
Someone to Watch Over Me
. As Selleck’s biographer Jason Bonderoff noted, “Mimi’s a go-getter, a real powerhouse, which is one of the things Tom [Selleck] found so attractive about her. The trouble is that they were so busy with their careers they hardly had time to fall in love.”

Mimi paid rather more attention to the new Tom in her life, introducing her latest partner to the life and works of L. Ron Hubbard. She was simply performing the Gospel according to Ron. Indeed, when her friend Kirstie Alley married acting heartthrob Parker Stevenson in 1993, he, too, became a Scientologist. Somewhat ahead of his time, Hubbard placed great store on enticing celebrities into his cult, recognizing that their involvement would give the movement credibility and encourage others to join. As early as 1955, he issued a policy known as “Project Celebrity,” where he implored his followers to recruit film, theater, and sports stars. He gave celebrities free courses and wooed them further by building or buying buildings he turned into Celebrity Centres, notably a neo-Gothic mansion at the foot of the Hollywood hills in Los Angeles, where artists, actors, and others could take Scientology courses in pleasant, friendly surroundings, away from prying eyes.

His recruitment advice was to go after the “old and faded” or “up and coming,” believing that those at the top of their artistic game had no need of Scientology nostrums. For example, John Travolta joined the movement in 1974, when his
acting career was in a slump. “Scientology put me into the big time,” he later claimed. Others who joined during this period were the musicians Chick Corea and Isaac Hayes, while the influential acting coach Milton Katselas sent and still sends a steady stream of aspiring hopefuls to the Celebrity Centre to try Scientology on for size. Word of mouth and personal endorsements within the Hollywood community were key elements of celebrity recruiting. So when Chick Corea went to a Paul McCartney concert in Hollywood, he had more than music on his mind. Backstage, Corea tried to corral Paul and his wife Linda into the cult. They said no, as did John and Yoko Lennon when the highly regarded session pianist Nicky Hopkins, another cult member, tried to entice them in. Hopkins was more successful with music legend Van Morrison, who joined for a time.

There was little left to chance in the “casual encounters” between a cult follower like Mimi Rogers and a potential celebrity recruit. What the celebrities never realized was that their introduction to Scientology was the result of weeks, sometimes months, of meticulous planning. The first stage was to identify a celebrity target, and then work out a “battle plan” to lure them into the cult. To help them, dedicated Scientologists made clay models of the individual, Michael Jackson for example, outlining incremental scenarios that would help their planning. By turning the idea into clay, the concept was somehow made “real.”

On the office wall inside the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood was a three-foot-by-six-foot white magnetic “org board” with the names of targeted celebrities cross-referenced to titles like “Contact,” “Handle,” “Intro Session,” and “Org,” which indicated how involved an individual had become. It was a deadly serious business. The staff of the Celebrity Centre was under intense pressure to show results. Former Scientologist Karen Pressley was “commanding officer” of Celebrity Centre International for three years during the mid-1980s and was considered a celebrity herself, as she and her husband, Peter, had written the 1982 smash hit “On the Wings of Love.”

She recalls, “I remember David Miscavige [now the Scientology leader] pounding his fists and screaming threats about getting to more celebrities. It was psychotic.” With sickening regularity, she and her colleagues were warned that if they didn’t get a celebrity into Scientology within forty-eight hours they would face internal discipline, namely a so-called Ethics Commission, or assignment to the Rehabilitation Project Force, the Scientology version of prison, whose punishments included running around a pole for days. This hysterical behavior, though typical, was even more extreme during the mid-1980s. In 1986, when Mimi and Tom started dating seriously, the cult was plunged into crisis following the death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

By then Scientology had become one of the most notorious and feared cults in the world, the movement treated with suspicion in numerous democratic countries, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, and Australia. On the surface the cult was friendly and inclusive, adherents living by the phrase: “If it ain’t fun, it ain’t Scientology.” The Celebrity Centre in Hollywood, under the warm gaze of Yvonne Jentzsch, was widely regarded as a “friendly and relaxed” venue, a great place to make show business contacts, meet good-looking girls, and, if you were lucky, get laid.

Beneath the seductive smiles, Scientology was a paranoid movement reflecting the schizophrenic personality of the founder, a dogmatic cult dedicated to world domination, dismissive of other religions like Christianity and Buddhism, and accusing psychiatrists and other health workers of being responsible for all the ills on the planet since the dawn of time. As for the gay community, Hubbard wrote in his book
The Science of Survival
that if the Scientology road to salvation was unsuccessful, the solution was to “dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.” For a man who wrote policies on everything from cleaning windows with newspapers to how to cheat on taxes and how to use a body vibrator, he was less forthcoming about the methodology to be employed to “dispose of” the world’s gay community.

The dark heart of Scientology was a bizarre, closed world, hidden from public view or examination, that reflected the megalomania of the cult’s founder. Even Hubbard’s second wife, Sara Northrup, described the cult leader as someone who was “hopelessly insane” and should be committed.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Hubbard built up the biggest private intelligence agency in the world, hiding behind the shield of the First Amendment to attack, harass, and defame. Church intelligence agents were taught how to make anonymous death threats, smear perceived critics, forge documents, and plan and execute burglaries. They used all means necessary to “shudder into silence”—Hubbard’s charmless phrase—any opposition.

As all critics were by definition criminals, their crimes cried out to be publicly exposed. “Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime, actual evidence on the attackers to the press,” Hubbard wrote in 1966, this attitude codified in a policy known misleadingly as “Fair Game,” where a critic “may be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” Not surprisingly, an exhaustive investigation into Scientology by the Australian government in 1965 concluded: “Scientology is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice is a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and often mentally ill.”

The cult practiced what it preached—to chilling effect. Church members were deliberately infiltrated into government agencies as well as newspapers, anti-cult groups, psychiatric and medical associations, and other organizations deemed antithetical to Scientology. The church’s most audacious espionage conspiracy—at least so far publicly known—took place during the 1970s. Code-named “Operation Snow White,” it involved the systematic wiretapping, theft, and burglary of eleven government and nongovernment buildings, including the IRS and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. Scientology spies had even amassed a dossier on then President Nixon, himself no stranger to dubious behavior. In 1977 these criminal activities led the FBI to launch one of the biggest raids in its history, with dozens of
armed police simultaneously breaking into Scientology “centres” in Washington and Los Angeles. As a result, eleven senior Scientologists, including the founder’s third wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, went to jail. Hubbard himself and Kendrick Moxon, currently the lead Scientology counsel, were named as unindicted conspirators, along with a further nineteen Scientologists, some of whom remain active in the church today.

While Operation Snow White was breathtaking in its audacity, another conspiracy at this time was bloodcurdling in its calculated cruelty. In 1972 author Paulette Cooper wrote a book called
The Scandal of Scientology,
which by today’s standards was a modest and even-handed analysis of the cult. For her pains she was served with a total of nineteen lawsuits by the church. That was only the beginning of her seven-year ordeal. The same attention to planning and detail that was involved in luring celebrities into Scientology was now employed in attempting to destroy those the cult considered enemies.

Unbeknownst to her, high-ranking church officials were discussing whether to employ the Mafia to kill her or frame her for a crime she did not commit. They chose the latter, a conspiracy that involved dozens of church workers in a campaign of harassment designed to send her to jail or a mental institution, or drive her to suicide. For months after the book’s publication, Paulette, a pretty, petite blonde, was followed and subjected to obscene phone calls and attempted break-ins to her Manhattan apartment, as well as a vicious letter-writing campaign that accused her of molesting a two-year-old child. (In keeping with Hubbard’s teachings, sexually lurid and often ludicrous allegations against opponents are hallmarks of Scientology smear campaigns.)

Paulette’s second cousin, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the writer, survived a bungled murder attempt. A few months later, in May 1973, the FBI arrested Paulette for allegedly making two bomb threats against the church of Scientology. It took two years and a “truth test,” which Paulette passed, for the FBI to drop its case. In a plan called
“Operation Freakout,” Scientologists continued their harassment. At one point a Scientology agent, Jerry Levin, deliberately befriended her, feigning sympathy for her torment while sending details of her every thought and movement to his Scientology bosses. In one of his many reports he noted exultantly: “She can’t sleep again, she’s talking suicide . . . wouldn’t this be great for Scientology?” It was only after the FBI raid on Scientology churches in 1977, which uncovered at least twenty-three thousand documents relating to Operation Freakout, that the full extent of the vicious conspiracy was exposed and Paulette’s undoubted innocence proven.