Going Clear by Lawrence Wright
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of those social scientists who believe that brainwashing is a myth or a fraud that has been used to denigrate new religious movements, including Scientology, Jesse Prince must already have been a convert, or close to one, before he went into the RPF. Although he says he was attracted to the church largely because of the girls, he was aware of the rigors of the Sea Org before he joined it. Perhaps, like the three victims of Chinese Communist thought reform that Lifton termed “apparent converts,” Prince was predisposed to be a part of a totalitarian movement because of his own psychological need to conform, or to be a part of a polarized system that separates all humanity into the saved and the damned. Such persons, the theory goes, are reared in either chaotic or extremely authoritarian homes. They have conflicted images of themselves as being at once extremely good and extremely bad. This is particularly true in adolescence, when identities are still volatile. Prince didn’t need to be brainwashed, the theory goes; he was actively looking for a totalistic organization that accommodated his polarized personality.
Some incidents in Prince’s background support this hypothesis. Although his upbringing was “tumultuous”—his mother died when he was ten—Prince maintained close and loving relationships with his father and his three younger siblings. After his mother died, however, he began experiencing bouts of total body paralysis accompanied by a sense of falling—“like jumping off the Grand Canyon.” The feeling was of helpless, abject terror. Then, suddenly, he would be outside his body, as if a parachute had opened, and he could observe himself sleeping in his bed. The intensity of these experiences made them absolutely real to him, but he decided not to talk about them because “if you bring that up, you go to the crazy house.” Prince now sees those episodes of body paralysis as severe anxiety attacks, but they prepared him to accept the truthfulness of the paranormal powers that Scientology claimed to provide.
Brainwashing theory, on the other hand, proposes that strenuous influence techniques can overwhelm and actually convert an individual to a wholly different perspective, regardless of his background or pre-existing character traits, almost like an addiction to a powerful drug can create an overpowering dependency that can transform an otherwise stable personality. Stripping away a person’s prior convictions leaves him hungry for new ones. Through endless rounds of confession and the constant, disarmingly unpredictable fluctuations between leniency and assault, love and castigation, the individual is broken loose from his previous identity and made into a valued and trusted member of the group. To keep alienated members in the fold, “exit costs”—such as financial penalties, physical threats, and the loss of community—make the prospect of leaving more painful than staying.
Whether Prince was brainwashed, as he believes, or spiritually enlightened, as the church would have it, his thinking did change over the year and a half he spent in the RPF. In order to move out of the RPF, a member has to have a “cognition” that he is a Suppressive Person; only then can he begin to deal with the “crimes” that he committed that caused him to be confined in the RPF in the first place. During his many hours of auditing, Prince later related, “You just kinda get sprinkles of little things that seem interesting, sprinkles of something that’s insightful. And then you’re constantly audited and in a highly suggestible state … like being pulled along very slightly to the point where now I might as well just be here and see what this is about now. Maybe it’s not so bad, you know?”
ONE OF JESSE PRINCE’S COMPANIONS in RPF was Spanky Taylor, an old friend of Paul Haggis’s from his early days in Scientology. She had become close to Paul and Diane soon after they arrived in Los Angeles. She called him “Paulie,” and had helped him market some of his early scripts when he was still trying to break out of cartoons. From the beginning, she had seen his talent; her own talent was helping others realize theirs.
“Spanky” was a schoolyard nickname for Sylvia, but it had such a teasing twist that she could never escape it. She was the child of Mexican American laborers in San Jose. When she was fourteen, she became a fan of a local cover band called People!, which included several Scientologists. She began helping the group with concert promotion, and soon she was working with some of the other great bands coming out of the Bay Area, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Scientology was just another expression of the political and cultural upheaval of the times. Even members of the Grateful Dead were drawn into Scientology, which promised mystical experiences without hallucinogens. Albert Ribisi, the keyboard player for People!, introduced Spanky to the church. She joined the staff at the Santa Clara mission when she was fifteen.
She was a cheerful young woman with warm brown eyes who called everyone “honey.” Because of her experience with promotion, she was posted to the Celebrity Centre. The place was constantly buzzing with activity—tie-dyeing, fencing, poetry readings—and she loved it. Famous people were always passing through, which added to the sense that something fun and important was happening here.
Spanky inevitably came to the notice of Yvonne Gillham, who had created the Celebrity Centre in 1969, after gaining Hubbard’s permission to go to LA and escape the tension of his romantic pursuit of her. Gillham came to look upon Spanky almost as an extension of herself, with the same easy, natural flair for dealing with people. Even though Spanky was still a teenager, Gillham arranged for her to take care of some of the most important figures associated with the church.
One celebrity quickly took precedence. John Travolta was in Mexico making his first film, The Devil’s Rain, a cheap horror movie starring Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner. He got to be friends with Joan Prather, a promising young actress and dancer, who was one of the few cast members his age. “He glommed onto me from day one,” she said. “He was extremely unhappy and not doing well.” Prather began talking about how much Scientology had helped her. Actors are often asked to get in touch with feelings that can be quite devastating. “Dianetics offered a tool to get to one’s raw emotions without going completely bonkers,” she observed.
“It sounded really interesting, so I brought up certain things about my case and asked if that could be handled,” Travolta later recalled. “And she said it could. I said, ‘Come on … could THAT be handled? You know, I couldn’t believe it.” Prather gave him a copy of Dianetics. It helped with his bouts of depression and insomnia. “Sometimes people say the most incredible things in the world to me that last year would make me suicidal,” he observed. On another occasion he remarked, “Before Dianetics, if people said negative things to me or about me, I would cave in easily. Being a man, that wasn’t a very appealing quality. Some people would say, ‘The boy is too sensitive.’ But many times I had suppressive people around me who would cave me in on purpose. I was sort of like a minefield.”
Prather also counseled him using some of the basic processes of Scientology. “I went outside my body,” Travolta later said. “It was like the body was sort of on its own and I was outside walking round it. I got real frightened, and she said, ‘Oh my goodness, you’ve gone exterior.’ ”
When he returned to Los Angeles, Travolta began taking the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist Course at the Celebrity Centre with about 150 other students. He confided to the teacher, Sandy Kent, that he was about to audition for a television show, Welcome Back, Kotter. After roll call, Kent instructed everyone to point in the direction of ABC Studios and telepathically communicate the instruction: “We want John Travolta for the part.” At the next meeting, Travolta revealed he had gotten the role of Vinnie Barbarino—the part that would soon make him famous. “My career immediately took off,” Travolta boasted in a church publication. “I would say Scientology put me in the big time.”
Gillham adored Travolta and constantly told him he was going to be a star. To prove it, she gave him Spanky.
Although Travolta craved fame, he was taken aback by the clamor that came along with it. Spanky managed his relationship with his fans. She went to the taping
Travolta generously credited the church for advancing his career and giving him the poise to handle his burgeoning celebrity. “You always have the fear, ‘Success is terrific now, but will it last forever?’ ” he observed in one interview. “When you hit it quickly, you don’t know where it will go.… Scientology makes it all a lot saner.” He introduced a number of fellow actors to Scientology, including Forest Whitaker, Tom Berenger, and Patrick Swayze, as well as the great Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. (Travolta’s friend Priscilla Presley was the only one who actually stuck with the church.) Spanky Taylor was a visible reminder of Travolta’s increasing devotion to Scientology, as well as the church’s investment in his fame, which could be jeopardized by the indiscreet behavior of a talented but entitled movie star.
When the FBI raid on the Church of Scientology took place on July 8, 1977, Taylor was six months pregnant and living with her husband, Norman, in the squalid Wilcox Hotel. Norm was an executive in the legal bureau. Early on the morning of the raid, he frantically called Spanky and told her to get over to Yvonne’s office right away to get the loaded gun she had been given by a friend, which she kept in her desk. By the time Taylor arrived, there were FBI agents everywhere—more than 150 of them at two Scientology buildings, the Advanced Org and Château Élysée. It was the largest FBI raid in history, and it went on all day and night. They brought battering rams and sledgehammers to break the locks and knock down walls. In addition to the 200,000 documents they were carting off—many of them purloined by Guardian’s Office operatives from government workplaces—they found burglar tools and eavesdropping equipment. Taylor dutifully made her way through the chaos to Yvonne’s office and slipped the gun into her purse. She didn’t allow herself to think how crazy it was to be carrying a weapon past all these lawmen.
Outside the gates, reporters were clamoring to get in. Just then, a school bus pulled up, full of kids from a religion class at the Pacific Palisades high school. Taylor recalled with alarm that they were coming to take a tour that she had previously arranged. The wide-eyed teens watched as Taylor explained to the teacher that this wasn’t the best time for the tour. (They never rescheduled.)
Within the church, the explanation for the raid was that some Scientologists were being charged with stealing the Xerox paper they used when they had copied the reports on the church in government files—in other words, it was just another example of jackbooted government goons twisting the Constitution in order to crack down on religious freedom. But when the indictments came out the following year, the scale of Operation Snow White was plainly exposed. Eleven Scientology executives, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were indicted in Operation Snow White. Her husband was named as an unindicted co-conspirator, although it had arisen from his original plan.
Saturday Night Fever premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in December. Travolta had spent five months training for the film, running two miles a day and dancing three hours a night. He recognized the opportunity that the film provided, and he supplied a singular, electrifying performance. But when he walked down the red carpet past the fusillade of camera flashes, he looked dazed. “When I got out of the limo in front of Grauman’s, I was dumbfounded, I didn’t know how to take it,” he said in a televised interview at the after-party. “It was like a fantasy, it was like a dream tonight.” He was twenty-three years old, now an international star. He was also the most conspicuous Scientologist in the world, after only L. Ron Hubbard himself. And who is to say that Scientology didn’t help make his dreams come true?
YVONNE GILLHAM HAD fallen ill. She complained of headaches and was losing weight. She wanted desperately to go to Flag, where she could get the upper-level auditing she thought could cure her, but she was told there wasn’t money for that. Instead, she was sent on a mission to Mexico with her husband, Heber Jentzsch, an actor and musician who later became president of the church, a largely ceremonial post. They had married five years earlier. On her fiftieth birthday, October 20, 1977, while still in Mexico, Yvonne suffered a stroke. Jentzsch sent her back to Los Angeles, while he completed the tour. After that, her daughter Janis, one of Hubbard’s original Messengers, received a beautiful suitcase from her. Inside there was a letter, but it made no sense. Janis tried to find out what was wrong, but no one would say. Her sister, Terri, went to the Sea Org berthing and found Yvonne lying in her room unattended. Finally, she was sent to a hospital, where doctors found a tumor in her brain, which had caused the stroke in the first place. It would have been operable if she had come to them sooner, the doctors said.
Desperate to get Gillham the auditing she still thought she needed, Taylor went to the financial banking officer and begged her for the funds to send her friend to Flag. “If she wants to go to Flag, she can take the fucking Greyhound,” the officer responded.
“You’re Yvonne’s assassin!” Taylor shouted.
For her impertinence, Taylor was sentenced to RPF. Her new baby daughter, Vanessa, was taken away and placed in the Child Care Org, the Scientology nursery. There were thirty infants crammed into a small apartment with wall-to-wall cribs, with one nanny for every twelve children. It was dark and dank and the children were rarely, if ever, taken outside.
When she got the news, Taylor cried, “You can’t do that now!” She was thinking of Travolta. He had just called her the day before, saying that he was arriving on an Air France flight after his appearance at a film festival in Deauville, where he was promoting Saturday Night Fever. Despite his triumph, Travolta appeared depressed and withdrawn. During the filming of Saturday Night Fever his girlfriend, Diana Hyland, had died in his arms. She was two decades older than he—she played his mother in a made-for-TV movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble—and had already had a double mastectomy when they met. Their romance was doomed when her cancer recurred. Taylor had helped Travolta through that period of grief, but now his mother, the most important figure in his life, had also developed cancer. Travolta asked Taylor if she would pick him up at the airport. She promised him, “Wild horses wouldn’t keep me from being there!”
The church officials now told Taylor that someone else would meet Travolta. Taylor knew the star would feel surprised and betrayed. He had come to rely on her, both as an unpaid assistant and for emotional support. He would immediately suspect that something terrible had happened and worry about her. Taylor was mortified to think that she would be the cause of his discomfort.
The RPF had moved out of the basement up to the top floor of the old V-shaped building that formerly housed the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Nearly two hundred people were crammed by the dozen into old patient rooms in bunks stacked three high. Because of the overcrowding, Taylor was given a soggy mattress on the roof. It was cold. She could hear the traffic on Sunset Boulevard only a block away. She had a view of the Hollywood Hills and the endless lights of the wakeful city, which was throbbing all around her. So many young people like her had been pulled into the matrix of Hollywood glamour and fame, even if they would never enjoy it themselves. And now, here she was, in the heart of it—isolated, trapped, humiliated, an unnoticed speck on a rooftop. Who could believe that a person could be so lost in the middle of so much life?
Moreover, she was pregnant again. It happened a few weeks after she entered RPF, during a brief marital visit from her husband. There was no maternal care or any easing of the intensely physical work she was made to do with the other “RPF’ers,” as they called themselves. For one two-week stretch, they were putting in thirty hours at a stretch wi
A pair of missionaires came to see Taylor one day with a strange request. They were thinking about how to reward the RPF’ers for having done the renovations to the Advanced Org building, which were now almost complete. “We would like you to arrange a private screening of Saturday Night Fever,” they told her.
Of course, no one in the RPF had been able to see the movie, despite the fact that it was an international sensation. Getting to Travolta wasn’t easy, however. He was now the top box-office star in the world. Playboy called him “America’s newest sex symbol.” The church hierarchy was worried that he was also drifting away from Scientology. A screening of his movie would underscore his commitment to the religion at a moment when that seemed in doubt.
As the church’s liaison to Travolta, Taylor was the obvious person to make the arrangements.
“First of all, I can’t use the phone,” Taylor told the missionaires. “Secondly, I can’t leave the building. Maybe you’d like a Beatles reunion while you’re asking for that.”
“We just think you could take care of this,” they replied.
Taylor had to figure out a way to get a print of the film from Travolta without having to explain why she had failed to pick him up at the airport and then disappeared from his life for months, without a word. A couple of days later, the missionaires arranged for her to use a pay phone on one of the lower floors of the building. Taylor called Kate Edwards, Travolta’s creative director at the time.
“Spanky! Where are you?” Edwards cried. Travolta and his production company had been looking for her frantically.