The silence of cruise's 'sinister' Cult

By Chris Ayres
Saturday January 26 2008

Friday night, Hollywood. I'm at dinner with my wife and two friends. The restaurant seems ordinary but the wine list features bottles costing more than $1,000. There's a glass building to our right. Within it, we can make out a blue glow and several rows of straight-backed chairs facing a screen -- upon which is projected the giant, sombre image of L Ron Hubbard.

It's surprisingly easy to get a reservation here at the Renaissance restaurant, which is in the conservatory of one of LA's grandest buildings, the Château Elysée -- on Franklin Avenue, built in the 1920s and bought in the 1970s by the Church of Scientology, which renamed it the Celebrity Centre. The building includes a detox facility and a 39-room hotel -- endorsed by John Travolta.

I become acutely aware that we are the only people in a restaurant that could probably accommodate 100 people or more. There are supposed to be 10 million members of the Church of Scientology worldwide -- and if you believe the organisation's critics, it practically runs Tinseltown. So where the devil is everyone? Or is it all just Hollywood hype?

The alternative religion is in the spotlight after a video of Tom Cruise from the Church's archives was leaked onto the internet website YouTube -- and subsequently broadcast by TV news bulletins around the globe. You've probably seen it by now, and heard Cruise tell his audience: "We are the authorities on the mind!"

Cruise was roundly ridiculed -- a German historian compared his hyper-intense oratory style to that of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist who conspired in the extermination of several million Jews. From a PR perspective, of course, Scientology has always had a number of unique problems. For a start, it was founded by L Ron Hubbard -- a science-fiction writer. It began with his book Dianetics, which became a sensation in the future-obsessed 1950s, promising a technology to cure allergies and colds, among other things.

Over the years, Hubbard turned his ideas into a Church, although it took several court rulings for anyone to recognise it as such. Along the way, Hubbard fell out spectacularly with the psychiatric profession (to this day, Scientologists call for psychiatry's global obliteration) and the tax authorities.

"They don't trust anyone, except each other," says one former member of Hubbard's Sea Organisation -- the elite and naval-uniformed operation based in Clearwater, Florida. "Banks, the government, the medical system, even schools. The organisation attracts a lot of people who are disgruntled with the world."

Scientologists dispute this -- they argue that they work with governments and other businesses all the time, and indeed even Cruise's closest business partners, such as film producer Paula Wagner, are not Scientologists.

And yet the Church has undoubtedly had some dark days, particularly in the late 1970s when a series of FBI raids revealed that Scientologists had infiltrated and wire-tapped the Internal Revenue Service and other US government agencies. Several Church members, including Hubbard's wife, Mary, were sent to jail. At the same time, Scientology's critics found themselves the targets of vicious silencing campaigns -- they were "fair game" according to Hubbard -- with the journalist Paulette Cooper facing arrest for a fake bomb-plot carried out using her identity. Hubbard, meanwhile, had taken to spending a lot of his time at sea, outside of US jurisdiction, hence the founding of the Sea Organisation. The Church also has a "secret" 500-acre compound in the desert.

When Hubbard died in 1986, the Church's leadership was handed over to his 26-year-old former assistant, David Miscavige, a supremely self-confident speaker who brought the likes of Cruise and Travolta into the organisation. Describing the beliefs of a Scientologist is difficult, because many of the Church's most important teachings are confidential and copyrighted. Broadly, however, Scientologists believe that they carry with them spirits, or thetans, and that through the process of paid-for auditing, it is possible to overcome trauma and misery and become "clear", a status known as being an Operating Thetan. Meanwhile, Hubbard's texts -- especially those available only to Operating Thetans -- remain the subject of rumour, and were infamously satirised in a 2006 episode of South Park. That was when Cruise allegedly put pressure on Sumner Redstone, the head of Viacom -- which owns both South Park's home of Comedy Central and Paramount -- to pull repeats of the episode.

Soul singer Isaac Hayes, a fellow Scientologist who played Chef in the series, resigned over the same issue. In the end, the episode was pulled and then nominated for an Emmy, with a full-page advertisement appearing in Variety with the South Park characters pictured against a backdrop of the Celebrity Centre. "C'mon Jews, show them who really runs Hollywood!" was the caption. Weeks later, Redstone, who happens to be Jewish, dumped Cruise. Any fears of a Jewish/Scientology fallout were soon put to rest when Cruise went into business with MGM's Harry Sloan, also Jewish.

As one movie executive told me (on condition of not being identified): "It's all a bit of light comic relief, to be honest. Some of us think the Scientologists are nuts, but it doesn't really affect how business is done. That said, they won't act in anything that promotes psychiatry, and there's a special process they go through before making a decision."

Incidentally, the text satirised by South Park concerns Xenu, a dictator of the Galactic Confederacy, who is said to have paralysed billions of his subjects 75 million years ago, brought them to Earth, scattered them around volcanoes and then killed them with hydrogen bombs, their disembodied souls becoming thetans. When the Dutch writer Karin Spaink put this on her website, she was sued over copyright in a case lasting eight years.

None of this appears to have damaged Scientology's power in LA, where rumours persist that David and Victoria Beckham will soon be attending Scientologist-only functions with the likes of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Indeed, you can literally feel its presence on the streets: the Scientologists now operate five buildings on Hollywood Boulevard alone. "I think the FBI raids would have put them out of business, but the celebrities, like Priscilla Presley, and then Travolta, and now Cruise, has made people say, 'Hey, maybe there's something there'," says Paulette Cooper, the journalist once targeted as "fair game".

There have been claims that the Church is a rip-off and a cult that excommunicates awkward members only to take them back as cheap labour, and I wonder about all the clearly intelligent people who consider themselves Scientologists: the Crash screenwriter Paul Haggis, for example.

And then I think about those that claim the organisation's membership has been estimated at 1 per cent of the official 10 million and I begin to wonder if the Cruise association might have run its course.

After dinner in the Renaissance, we ask for the tour of the building, but after several phone calls, our man can't find a guide. "They've gone to the movies," he says. So we leave: unaudited, unbullied, and unchastised.

Sinister, right?

- Chris Ayres