Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

by Leah Remini

  You now leave, feeling that you’ve accomplished something. Didn’t know that was there, but now I’m clear of it. But the mind fuck lies in the fact that they assigned you the problem and not the other way around. And afterward, if you realize that you still have a problem with communicating with your mother, you are taught that that person is a wog, or “down tone.” (Being down tone means existing at the lower level of the Scientology Tone Scale, which is a listing of the various emotional states you can be in. The higher you are on the Tone Scale, the happier and healthier you are. So, if you’re down tone, it means you’re unhappy and unhealthy—and potentially dragging higher tone people down with you.)

  The process could produce a great sense of cathartic relief. Here was a problem I wasn’t even aware of, that I may have created for myself, and after much back-and-forth, I was able to overcome that problem.

  So while in session I would feel the euphoria of self-discovery and growth, back in the real world I was still angry, depressed, and judgmental. Looking at my diaries from that period (journaling was frowned upon by the church, but I did it anyway), I would note that I still wanted more for my life and my family’s life. My Scientology realizations were great in the church building, but I would start cursing when I couldn’t find my car in a parking lot or when I had no money left in my bank account. It just wasn’t there for me in real-life situations, this sense of accomplishment of having solved problems. It really existed only when I was in the presence of other Scientologists, who completely bought into it.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that all the understanding I gained through auditing only related back to my life in the church and helped me be a Scientologist. My “gains” in Scientology were not relating to the real world. I was so entrenched in the church that it had become my everything. I couldn’t question that.

  Chapter Eight

  WHEN IT CAME TO MEN, I never really dated Scientologists, even though it was encouraged. I was embarrassed by a lot of people in the church who didn’t pay attention to practical things like how they looked and who talked in a language that was strange to the outside world. Just like I wanted a normal mom as a kid, now I wanted a normal boyfriend.

  Dating outside the church also probably meant there was a part of me that was subconsciously trying to keep something for myself that wasn’t connected to Scientology. Most of my family was in the church, as were most of my friends, and I spent much of my free time on course or being audited. My romantic life gave me that tiny bit of freedom away from the weight of saving the planet. My fantasy was that I’d meet a regular, cool, normal guy who wasn’t a Scientologist but was open to it. Hopefully fucked-up enough to desperately need it.

  Looking back now, I am sure that the way my father acted and the way I perceived him ultimately informed the way I looked at men both when I was growing up and as an adult. I interpreted his yelling and his dominance as strength, and I ultimately adopted the same behavior and took it on as part of my own persona. I believed that this was the way a man was supposed to be and this was how a woman felt, being charmed by him. He yells, she cowers. To me this all made sense—except that in my relationships, I was usually the one doing the yelling.

  I treated men badly and didn’t have much respect for them. I had a list of very specific things that could get a man written off my list pretty fast (including, for example, men who wear sandals—shallow, I know). Always a keen observer since childhood, I also kept a mental list of what I thought a man was:

  Men say horrific and hurtful things to their wives and daughters (and are forgiven).

  Men are strong, women weaker (or men appear strong, but they are weak).

  Men are charming.

  Men wear cologne.

  Men get manicures.

  Men have clean cars.

  Men cheat.

  Men don’t care about their families.

  Men go and start new families.

  Men hurt women.

  Men do not value anything.

  Men break their word and women forgive them.

  Men appear to be the dominant species.

  Men win.

  —

  FROM THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN through twenty-five, I went through a very promiscuous period, going out with all kinds of guys, from gorgeous soap actors to athletic beach bums. But I was never really attached to anyone in particular. It was mainly sex without any emotional connection.

  Now, look, I don’t want to give you the idea that I would sleep with anyone. I wasn’t picking up random men and bringing them home. I just wasn’t faithful. And sex was a substitute for really being there in a relationship.

  I would do things that men would normally do to women to “get back at them.” But I was only hurting myself. If I had sex with a guy, afterward I would say things like “Listen, ummmm, I have a very early morning, so you have to go. You can’t sleep here,” or “I have to go now. I haven’t been home all day and my dog has to be let out” (I didn’t have a dog). I would do this to a guy before he could do it to me. If I spent the night or committed to them, I would be made vulnerable. I was convinced that they would eventually either cheat or leave me anyway. Why open myself up to another man breaking my heart?

  My mom always wanted me to be with someone in the church, because she thought it would help me with my problems with men and intimacy in general.

  “I don’t know, Ma. I just don’t respect men,” I confessed to her. “I have bad intentions toward them. Obviously it comes from Dad and Dennis. I want to break their hearts, like my heart’s been broken,” having been let down by many of the men in my life.

  “I never want them to get the upper hand. Even if I feel something for them, I tell them to get the hell out.”

  But like any good Scientologist, my mom offered answers that led directly back to the church.

  “You’ll handle that in session,” she said, and that was it.

  She didn’t judge me (and for that, she is always the person I go to, then and now)—she subscribed to the idea that anything bad I was doing wasn’t really the doing of her daughter; instead it was my reactive mind, which I was on the road to dealing with and getting rid of. The main thing was that I stay on course and move up the Bridge. If I did that, everything would sort itself out.

  All of my non-Scientology boyfriends would tell me I was fucked-up and that clearly Scientology was not working for me because I kept cheating or leaving. This made me go in search of someone even more fucked-up than I was. Someone I could fix, to avoid fixing myself.

  In 1996 the universe provided me with Angelo Pagán. A man with a history of cheating, and three kids. Perfect. Now, I’ll preface this by saying this is not a love story. I mean, it’s a story about love—just not the kind that you hope to tell your kids one day.

  It all began with a WB sitcom I was on—First Time Out—which, naturally, was soon canceled. The show’s star, Jackie Guerra, who became a good friend, invited me out to a Cuban nightclub to “celebrate” getting canceled. I wasn’t exactly feeling celebratory about being on the unemployment line yet again, but when I heard that Scott Baio, who had directed the last episode of our show, was going to be there, I quickly said yes.

  Maybe I’d marry Scott. He might make this better. There was no doubt about it; I wanted “Charles in Charge” of me, and “Chachi loves Leah” sounded kinda nice. Now that he was no longer my director in a professional relationship, maybe there was something there.

  As soon as I walked into the Cuban club El Floridita, I fell in love with the place. It was the tiniest nightclub I’d ever been to in my life. A small parquet dance floor surrounded by tables, a drop ceiling, red walls, and strung-up Christmas lights were the sum total of El Floridita’s décor.

  After Jackie, Scott, and I had dinner, the band started playing salsa music, and soon after that this guy walks in. He’s got thick black hair, carame
l skin, and huge dimples. He went right up to the microphone and just started singing without doing any kind of warm-up.

  I was intrigued by this Cuban Frank Sinatra, but by now the club had become really crowded and the dance floor was packed with people dancing salsa, so we decided to leave as I’m not good with inhaling other people’s sweat (that’s why I don’t do things like yoga). My fascination with Scott Baio had waned in the hours we were there because he was wearing high-top Reeboks. I told you, I’m very judgmental.

  The next day I was still thinking about the singer. I called the club and found out that he performed every Wednesday night, then told Jackie that we were going back to El Floridita. The following Wednesday we got a table on the floor, right by the band, and had just sat down when Jackie spotted someone at the bar: “Isn’t that Carlos? He was on our show. He had a few lines.”

  “I don’t want him over here, Jackie.” I didn’t want to be sitting with some asshole guy when Cuban Frank Sinatra walks in.

  “Why are you such a bitch?”

  “What kind of guy comes to a club by himself?”

  Jackie just rolled her eyes and got up to talk to Carlos. Meanwhile, Cuban Frank Sinatra walked in and started to sing. So I put my purse in the empty chair next to me, because I didn’t want “Carlos, Mr. Few Lines” sitting with us. Jackie had brought him over anyway. I turned my back to him completely, as if I were totally absorbed by the band. That is, until I heard him tell Jackie, “My friend Angelo’s the lead singer here. I came to meet him.” And with that, I turned around and said, “Jesus, Carlos! How rude of me to turn my back to you! Eat something with us!” as I removed my purse from the empty seat.

  “Jackie, how rude are you? Carlos! Have some platanos.”

  Sure enough, when the band took a break, Angelo came right over to say hello to Carlos, who introduced him to Jackie and me.

  “Do you dance?” he asked me.

  “With you? Yes. But I don’t know how to dance salsa,” I said.

  “I’ll teach you.”

  On the dance floor, as Angelo’s going one-two-three, I’m doing the check:

  Smells good, check.

  Dimples, check.

  Good teeth, check (although the bottom row are a little fucked-up, but I found that sexy as hell).

  Strong arms, check.

  Then the last item on the checklist: shoes and socks. I was petrified as I looked down, because if you have white socks on, you’re dead to me. Dead to me. There’s no fixing you. You’re beyond help. As a person, there are certain things you should know, and one of them is black pants, black socks, black shoes.

  Please, God, please.

  And he had black socks and good black shoes. Check!

  With Angelo it was instant magic. Like what movies are made of, songs are written about. But to be sure this magic was real, I needed to test it out.

  With my checklist complete, I decided to break the number one rule of dating, and I asked him, “So, when are we getting married?”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” he laughed.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” I mimicked him. “It’s going to happen, Angelo. I know you’re uncomfortable in this moment, because you probably just think you’re going to get laid. And that is going to happen. Right away. But here’s what I’m saying to you: We’re going to get married at some point.”

  “That’s funny. I mean, I’m already kind of married.”

  Suddenly, the rom-com movie I was in came to a complete halt.

  “What do you mean, you’re ‘kind of married’?” I asked.

  What it meant, according to Angelo and which I believed, was that he and his wife were legally married but separated.

  I said, “Why are you married already?”

  He said, “Well, where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Magic. I am a sucker for cologne and a good line. “What time do you get off?” I asked.

  I was head over heels for Angelo with the dimples in a way that I had never felt. I wanted to be with him as much as possible, but it seemed that he could never sleep over. There was always a reason. An early work shift or he needed to take his young son to school. If I had used an ounce of the life smarts I prided myself on, I would have known why Angelo could never stay the night and why we rarely met until late at night. When I look back on it, it’s clear I didn’t want to know.

  After I had given Angelo a lecture about going after his dreams, (he was selling electronics during the day and singing at night, which left no time for him to pursue his dreams of being an actor), he came to me and confessed the truth.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said to me one night. “I’m really starting to like you, and I’m starting to feel bad about the person that I’m being. I’m not separated. I’m a cheater—and not just with you. I have been a cheater my whole life.”

  This guy is so fucked-up, he’s perfect for me!

  I admired Angelo’s honesty and candor, and I think it made me fall even more in love with him. I didn’t want to give him up. So, even though Scientology hadn’t helped me with my infidelities, I decided the church was going to fix his: “I need you to go to this place and make a change in your life.”

  Angelo did a small intro course called Personal Values and Integrity, which was about exactly what the title said. It discussed morality in a very simple way, stressing the importance of the participants’ confessing to any and all transgressions with exercises such as writing an essay on the topic “When have you been dishonest?”

  God bless him, Angelo threw himself into the course and began to tell me about every woman he had been with in the recent past—and there were a lot. Girls in the club, a dancer he knew from back in San Francisco, an entire bridal party! The more truths he told me, the more he wanted to tell. While most people might hear about these transgressions and be devastated, I had learned from Scientology that this behavior was not representative of the real person Angelo was. He just hadn’t been “cleared” yet. All of this was still his reactive mind. A person could admit to the most heinous things and feel no remorse. But learning to admit to feeling guilt and to take responsibility was a whole other thing, which Angelo was now doing. We’re taught to respect the person who has the balls to do that and admire him for it. Admitting you’ve done something wrong is the first step toward salvation, as defined by Scientology. According to LRH, each of us has something like 800 million overts—meaning transgressions—and you are never going to get them all out in one lifetime, but it’s being aware that you have them and need to work on them that makes all the difference.

  Angelo’s history with women was what the church calls an ethical blind spot. Every man he knew growing up, including his father, cheated. It was accepted. What wasn’t okay was to leave your wife for your girlfriend. So for Angelo to finally admit to himself that he was in fact a cheater was a huge first step for him. And the fact that he was willing to do something about it was even more impressive to me as a Scientologist. This was someone who could confront things and make real change. Angelo felt like that perfect mix I was waiting for, a “normal guy”—not a Scientologist—but someone who could quickly get with the program and get with Scientology.

  My mom had a completely different take on the situation. “This guy isn’t actually divorced,” she said. “He isn’t even separated.” Maybe it was the echo of her own situation with my dad and Dennis, who had both left her for other women, or that she wanted more for her daughter than being the other woman, but she showed a hardness with me that I had never seen before. For the first time, my mother, who had supported me through many things other mothers wouldn’t have, expressed utter disgust toward me. “I don’t even know you,” she said. “I did not raise this person.”

  My mother’s reaction brought me back to my senses. Angelo was married with three kids. I was so focused on his ethical blind spot that I had complete
ly ignored my own. Suddenly I asked myself, “What are you doing?” And the answer was horrible: I was destroying a marriage. Which opened up a new blind spot. I had no real respect for marriage. What did it mean? Clearly, it meant nothing when it came to my dad or my stepdad Dennis.

  And just as clearly, I had no respect for the family unit either.

  I went to the only place I had to work out my crisis of conscience—the church. I eventually and begrudgingly told them that I was having an affair with a married man, who had a son with his current wife. I was told I needed to make up the damage. It was determined that the way for me to do that was to pay for Angelo and his wife to go to marriage counseling offered by the church.

  Scientology couples counseling is vastly different from typical relationship counseling. The church teaches that a marriage can’t survive if one partner has any unknown transgressions against the other person. You need to reveal in excruciatingly specific detail what it is you’ve done wrong. Scientology doesn’t factor in how much this kind of truth can break a husband’s or wife’s heart. Unlike other religions, where one can relieve guilt by talking to a member of the clergy, Scientology forces its parishioners to confront their partners face-to-face and admit their transgressions, no matter the consequences.

  So I did it. I told Angelo that he needed to give his marriage a chance, and the only way he was going to do it was through counseling, which I would pay for because of what I had done by sleeping with him. Although he was as sad about leaving me as I was about leaving him, he had realized the impact the values course had on him and knew that for the good of his family he should give counseling a try.

  I felt no relief for making up the damage. Instead, I got to watch Angelo and his wife walk by me at the Celebrity Centre, where they were going to counseling, holding hands like newlyweds. My church was telling me, “Do not contact Angelo.” And again I was back in auditing and ethics to deal with my hidden evil intentions toward men, which clearly had not changed.