Hubbard was becoming increasingly cranky and confused. He slept with guards outside his door, hiding in the tamarind trees that flanked his cottage. One morning he accused the Messenger outside his door of abandoning his post. “Someone came in and exchanged my left boot for a boot half a size smaller,” he said. “They even scuffed it up to make it look the same. Someone is trying to make me think I’m crazy.”
IN AN EFFORT to lighten the mood, several of the crew made up a comic skit and gave a video of it to Hubbard. He was offended; he was sure they were mocking him. “He was shouting at the TV,” one of his executives recalled. “He sent the Messengers to find the names of everyone involved.”
One of the perpetrators of the skit was a cocky young camera operator named David Miscavige. Only seventeen years old, Miscavige had already been marked as a rocket within the church. He spent his early years in Willingboro, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia; it was one of the mass-produced Levittowns built in America after World War II. He and his older brother, Ronnie, played football in a children’s league for a team called the Pennypacker Park Patriots. Despite his athleticism, David was handicapped by his diminutive size and severe bouts of asthma, which caused numerous trips to the emergency room.
His father, Ron Miscavige, a salesman at various times of cookware, china, insurance, and cosmetics, was the first in the family to be drawn to the work of Hubbard. Frustrated with the ineffective treatment his son was getting for his asthma, Ron took David to a Dianetics counselor. “I experienced a miracle,” David later declared, “and as a result I decided to devote my life to the religion.” But in fact asthma continued to afflict him, and his disease was at the center of the Miscavige family drama.
Soon Ron and his wife, Loretta, and their four children were getting auditing at the Scientology mission in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Ronnie Junior was the oldest of the children, followed by the twins, David and Denise, and the youngest, Laurie. In 1972, the family moved to England in order to take advanced courses at the church’s worldwide headquarters at Saint Hill. At the age of twelve, David became one of the youngest auditors in the history of the church—“the Wonder Kid,” he was called.
The following year, in June, Ron and Loretta had to return to the United States for a couple of weeks. They needed someone to take care of David while they and the other children were gone. There was another American studying at Saint Hill, Ervin Scott, whose wife was also afflicted with asthma. His memory is that he agreed to let the boy stay with him. He recalls that in the first encounter David’s parents, along with his twin sister, met with him before they left. Scott immediately liked the family. The father was “wonderful and bright,” the mother was “very beautiful, with high affinity,” and the daughter was “the cutest thing.” David, however, sat at the end of the couch, unsmiling, with his arms crossed. The family wanted to make sure that Scott knew what to do in case of an intense asthma attack. “They said, ‘We have to warn you about Dave,’ ” Scott recalled. “ ‘David has episodes, very unusual episodes.’ ” The parents explained that Dave became extremely angry when he was suffering an asthma seizure. “Then they said, starting with the husband, ‘When these episodes occur, do not touch him!’ The mother reiterated, ‘Yes, please don’t touch him!’ I said, ‘What happens?’ They said, ‘David gets very, very violent, and he beats the hell out of you if you touch him.’ And the sister says, ‘Oh my God, he does beat you, really hard!’ ” Again and again, the family members emphasized that David had beaten them during an attack.
Scott glanced at David, who, he recalls, nodded in agreement. He seemed almost smug, Scott remembers thinking, “like he was arrogantly proud of kicking their ass.”
Scott was puzzled. He had never heard of asthma making a person violent. In his experience, a person in the grip of such an attack was frozen with fear. He said he would heed the warning, however.
The next morning, David moved in. Scott took him shopping and then to a pub, where he bought him a Coke. Scott also got a nonalcoholic drink. They chatted with some other Scientology auditors and David began to warm up. He seemed pleased to be around auditors, but Scott felt that there was “a certain falseness” in his behavior.
They went back to Scott’s quarters and watched television, then turned in around ten. Scott placed David in the bed by the window, which was cracked to give him some fresh air. David went right to sleep. Scott was used to the rattle of asthmatic breathing, so he soon fell asleep as well.
Scott remembers hearing a scream around one o’clock. He jumped up and turned on the light. David was leaning on the bed with one arm. His face was blue and his eyes were rolled back. Scott had never seen anything like it. He started to touch him, but drew back and performed a Scientology “assist.” He said, “That’s it, David, come up to present time,” repeating the command twice. David blinked and then jolted awake. He was still disoriented, so Scott performed another Scientology exercise, called a locational: “Look at that wall. Look at that bed.” Slowly, David began to focus. Finally he asked Scott, “Did I hit you?”
“No.”
“Whew!”
David was still groggy and quickly went back to sleep, but Scott was unsettled. He watched the boy for another hour before drifting off again himself.
In the morning, David remembered nothing of what had happened during the night. He got ready to take a shower. When he took off his pajama top, Scott did a double take. He had never seen a thirteen-year-old boy with such muscles. “This kid is built like Arnold Schwarzenegger!” he thought. “A young, very small Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
While David was in the shower, Scott took a look at the medication on his nightstand. He remembers seeing two bottles and two inhalers. One of the inhalers was a typical over-the-counter medication, but all the others contained steroids. Scott had grown up on a farm, and he had used steroids to treat some diseases in animals, but also to build up the muscle mass in cattle. Could that have had the same effect on Miscavige? (Actually, asthma medications often use corticosteroids, which do not have the same effect as the anabolic steroids that weightlifters and athletes employ. Corticosteroids can stunt growth, however, and if Miscavige took them might have contributed to his short stature.) Scott decided to write a Knowledge Report about what he had seen, which would go to the Ethics Officer. “Here is a Scientologist, and he’s taking drugs, and he’s having these very bad episodes of asthmatic attacks, that can and should be handled by auditing.” He also asked for David’s preclear folder, which should have a record of his previous auditing. He was told that David didn’t have a PC folder. Scott had never heard of a Scientologist without one.
Scott worked with David on some of his coursework and training drills. At times, the teenager struck him as highly intelligent, but robotic, and there were some concepts he couldn’t seem to grasp. For instance, with the most basic E-Meter drill, which was simply to touch the meter and then let go, Scott recalls that David’s hand was shaking. “David, relax! This is just a drill,” Scott said. David settled down, and they continued the drill, but Scott was troubled. The boy was supposed to be a qualified auditor but he didn’t seem to be trained at all. According to Scott, David admitted that he had never audited anyone and that, in fact, he had never even been audited himself. “Auditing is for weaklings,” he said. In any case, he said, he was Clear from a past life. Scott wrote up another Knowledge Report.
The course supervisor was strangely impatient with Scott for taking extra time to get Dave through the drills. There was something else that was peculiar, too. A photographer kept following David around. Later, Scott learned that a Scientology magazine was preparing an article about the youngest auditor to complete an internship in the Sea Org. Scott was complicating matters by holding up David’s progress.
Scott remembers that on Monday, David audited a preclear. When he came back to the room, he seemed agitated, and Scott asked him what was going on. “Those fucking women!” Scott remembers David exclaiming. “There should
be no women in the Sea Org.” Scott learned that there were three women who were overseeing David’s internship at Saint Hill. David’s attitude toward women was deeply troubling, as Scott noted in yet another Knowledge Report. So far, no one in the Ethics Office had responded.
That changed a few days later. Scott was called into the Ethics Office and told that David had complained that Scott was enturbulating, or upsetting, him and causing problems because of the abundant reports he was writing. “This kid is an SP,” Scott warned, “and you better handle him.” Then he opened the door to leave. David was standing just outside. His reaction told Scott that he had overheard him calling him a Suppressive Person. “He went into total fear,” Scott said. That very day, David was moved into another room, and his parents soon returned from the United States. But David avoided Scott whenever they passed each other.
In August, Scott was sitting out in the yard across from the castle and the auditing rooms on the Saint Hill grounds. He was talking to a friend of his, a Norwegian nurse. Suddenly they heard a young woman wailing. Scott remembers looking up and seeing David, his face red and the veins visible in his forehead. He had a preclear folder under his arm. Behind him was the crying girl, who was holding her side in apparent pain. According to Scott the nurse exclaimed, “He beat up his PC!”
Karen de la Carriere was also a young intern at Saint Hill, and she was directed to join the others in the internship room. “They told us that David Miscavige had struck his PC,” she recalled. “He had been removed from his internship, and we were not to rumor-monger or gossip about it. We were supposed to just bury it.”
David was not done with Scientology, however. At fifteen, he went Clear in his present life. On his sixteenth birthday in 1976, “sickened by the declining moral situation in schools illustrated by rampant drug use,” he dropped out of tenth grade and formally joined the Sea Org. He began his service in Clearwater; less than a year later, he was transferred to the Commodore’s Messengers in California, where once again he quickly captured the attention of the church hierarchy with his energy and commitment. He rose to the position of Chief Cinematographer at the age of seventeen. After the skit that made such a poor impression on Hubbard, David redeemed himself in the founder’s eyes by renovating one of his houses and ridding it of fiberglass, which Hubbard said he was allergic to.
David Miscavige filled a spot in Hubbard’s plans that once might have been occupied by Quentin, although Miscavige displayed a passion and focus that Quentin never really possessed. He was tough, tireless, and doctrinaire. Despite David’s youth, Hubbard promoted him to Action Chief, the person in charge of making sure that Hubbard’s directives were strictly and remorselessly carried out. He ran missions around the world to perform operations that local orgs were unable to do themselves—at least, not to Hubbard’s satisfaction.1
HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING his thousand-page opus, Battlefield Earth, in 1980. (Mitt Romney would name it as his favorite novel.) Hubbard hoped to have the book made into a major motion picture, so the Executive Director of the church, Bill Franks, approached Travolta about producing and starring in it. Travolta was excited about the prospect. Suddenly Franks got a call from Miscavige saying, “Get me John Travolta. I want to meet that guy!” Miscavige began wining and dining the star. “He just moved in and took over Travolta,” Franks recalled. But he says that privately Miscavige was telling him, “The guy is a faggot. We’re going to out him.”
Fleeing subpoenas from three grand juries, and pursued by forty-eight lawsuits, all naming the founder, Hubbard slipped away from public view on Valentine’s Day, 1980, in a white Dodge van, with velvet curtains and a daybed. It had been customized by John Brousseau, a Sea Org member who took care of all of Hubbard’s vehicles. The elaborate escape plan involved ditching the Dodge for an orange Ford. In the meantime, Brousseau purchased another Dodge van for Hubbard, identical to the first. He then cut the original one into pieces and took them to the dump. The Ford was chopped up and dumped as well.
Hubbard briefly settled in Newport Beach, California, in a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette. In the apartment next door were Pat and Annie Broeker, his two closest aides. Pat, a handsome former rock-and-roll guitar player, enthusiastically adopted the role of an undercover operative, running secret errands for Hubbard and going to any lengths to keep their location a secret. His wife, Annie, one of the original Commodore’s Messengers, was a shy blonde, totally devoted to Hubbard.
Hubbard soon decided that the Newport Beach location was compromised, so the three of them hit the road. Pat drove a Chevrolet pickup with a forty-foot Country Aire trailer, which mainly contained Hubbard’s wardrobe, and Annie piloted a luxurious Blue Bird mobile home that John Brousseau had purchased for $120,000 in cash under a false name. The Blue Bird towed a Nissan pickup that Brousseau had converted into a mobile kitchen. For most of a year, this cumbersome caravan roamed the Sierras, lighting in parks along the way. At one point, Hubbard bought a small ranch with a gold mine, but he didn’t really settle down until 1983, on a horse farm in Creston, California, population 270, outside San Luis Obispo, near a spread owned by the country singer Kenny Rogers. He grew a beard and called himself “Jack Farnsworth.”
Hubbard had been used to receiving regular shipments of money, but after he took flight, the entire structure of the church was reorganized, making such under-the-table transfers more difficult to disguise. Miscavige ordered that $1 million a week be transferred to the founder, but now it had to be done in a nominally legal manner. One scheme was to commission screenplays based on Hubbard’s innumerable movie ideas. That way, Hubbard could be paid for the “treatment”—about $100,000 for each idea. Fifty such treatments were prepared. Paul Haggis was one of the writers asked to participate. He received a message from the old man asking him to write a script called “Influencing the Planet.” The script was supposed to demonstrate the range of Hubbard’s efforts to improve civilization. Haggis co-wrote the script with another Scientologist, Steve Johnstone. “What they wanted was really quite dreadful,” Haggis admitted. Hubbard sent him notes on the draft, but apparently the film was never made.
Meanwhile, Miscavige consolidated his position in the church as the essential conduit to the founder. Miscavige’s title was head of Special Project Ops, a mysterious post, and he reported only to Pat Broeker. Miscavige was twenty-three years old at the time and Broeker a decade older. As gatekeepers, they determined what information reached Hubbard’s ears. Under their regency, some of Hubbard’s most senior executives were booted out—people who might have been considered competitors to Miscavige and Broeker in the future management of the church—and replaced by much younger counterparts.
Miscavige and Broeker would communicate in code on their pagers. At any hour of the night, John Brousseau, who was Miscavige’s driver, would take him to one of the several designated pay telephone booths between Los Angeles and Riverside County to wait for a call revealing the rendezvous point. It was usually a parking lot somewhere. The drivers of the two men would wait while Miscavige and Broeker talked, sometimes for hours.
Gale Irwin, who had been on the Apollo when she was sixteen years old and had risen to being the head of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, began to wonder what was going on. Hubbard’s dispatches had become increasingly paranoid, and his only line of communication to the outside world was through these two ambitious young men. Nearly every one of the original Messengers who had joined Hubbard on the Apollo had been purged. David Mayo, who was Hubbard’s personal auditor, had also been shut off from contact. He, too, became suspicious of Miscavige and ordered him to be security-checked, but Miscavige refused this direct order from a superior. Gale Irwin says she confronted him, and Miscavige knocked her to the ground with a flying tackle. (The church denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse.)
Brousseau got a call from Irwin. She was agitated. She told him that Miscavige had gone psychotic. She said she had to contact Pat Broeker right away for a meeting. When Bro
usseau asked to talk to Miscavige, Irwin began shouting orders at him, saying that Miscavige was raving and had to be restrained. In no way could Brousseau talk to him! He must arrange the meeting with Broeker immediately!
Brousseau drove her to a prearranged pay phone outside a Denny’s restaurant in San Bernardino, which was used only for emergencies. As they waited for the call from Broeker’s driver, a black Dodge van came barreling into the parking lot and slammed to a halt between Brousseau’s car and the phone booth. The doors blew open and half a dozen men spilled out of the van, including David Miscavige. Irwin says that Miscavige used a tire iron to pummel the pay phone, without much effect. Finally he was able to yank the receiver off the cable. Miscavige ordered Irwin into the van, and she meekly acquiesced.
With this action, the coup was accomplished: Miscavige and Broeker were now fully and defiantly in control of Scientology. The founder was isolated, caged by his notoriety and paranoia. No one knew if the orders coming from over the rainbow were from Hubbard or his lieutenants, but now it no longer mattered. Irwin was busted. A year later, in 1984, Miscavige declared her a Suppressive Person, which would happen to nearly every one of the original Messengers, the most trusted circle of Hubbard’s advisers. David Mayo was sent to the RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert heat for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out.
There was one last obstacle that Miscavige had to remove. In 1979, as a result of the FBI raid, Mary Sue had been charged and convicted of conspiracy, along with ten other Scientology executives, and sentenced to five years in prison, despite the evidence that her health was in decline. She suffered from chronic pancreatitis, a painful condition that made it difficult to digest food. “She was frail and thin and completely oblivious to anything she had done wrong,” recalled a Scientologist who escorted her into the back door of the courthouse in Washington. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be photographed.’ That was more important to her than the fact that she was going to jail for five years.”
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