If the RPF really is a spiritual retreat, where Sea Org members are meant to ‘restore one’s condition to an optimal spiritual state’,41 the Church of Scientology seemed keen to shelter James from its members as they scrubbed the car park for his benefit. According to Kleitsch, on one occasion Packer arrived early, causing a massive problem for the Scientologists as they tried to hide around 30 RPF crew:
We were all bundled into a closet and I had to go to the toilet, and it was either piss my pants or go to the toilet. So I thought I would go to the toilet but then the bosun [person in charge of the RPF] pulled me back and nearly tore my shirt off and screamed at me. I was given a bottle to piss in. We were in that closet for hours – it could have been four or five hours – we had to wait until Packer was finished upstairs and had left before we were let out.42
If Annette Sharp had been able to get to Eric Kleitsch she could have confirmed the rumours she had picked up from her contacts inside Sydney’s stockbroking belt, that James Packer had become a Scientologist.
Instead the Sun-Herald gossip columnist had to start from scratch. ‘I had spent a bit of time doing my own stakeout work because I didn’t know where Packer was being audited,’ Sharp recalls. ‘I spent a week at their grounds in Dundas speaking primarily to Australian Asian students of Scientology who were coming and going.’43
Sharp didn’t spot James Packer, but she soon worked out that auditing was done at the Advanced Org in Glebe. In November 2002, she convinced her bosses at Fairfax to employ freelance photographer Peter Barnes to hover outside the building to try and capture a shot of Packer entering or leaving the building.
Annette Sharp was sure that if anyone could get the shot, it was Peter Barnes. ‘Barnsey and I had worked together on stakeouts before, and had discovered we shared a real passion for hard-to-get subjects,’ says Sharp. ‘At the time, there was none harder than James at the bosom of Scientology. The church were protecting him by letting him use undercover car parks and they were never going to confirm his attendance.’44
Peter Barnes spent weeks on the job, moving between the multistorey shopping centre car park opposite the Advanced Org and a street corner down the road. Eventually he got the shots he needed – photographs of James driving in and out of the much polished basement car park, and pictures of him smoking outside the building.
Annette Sharp is still surprised that the Scientologists gave them the opening they were looking for. ‘It seems no-one at Scientology HQ had thought to locate for James an internal courtyard in which to smoke,’ she says. ‘It gave Barnsey his window. I can still remember his delight when he rang to tell me he had our picture.’45
Annette Sharp had her story and was well placed to cover it. She had an understanding of the intricacies of both the Packer family and the Church of Scientology. Sharp had worked for the Packers for seven years as a publicist at Channel Nine. As a 19-year-old cub reporter working on the Illawarra Mercury she had had an unusual introduction to Scientology. Sharp was assigned to interview singer Kate Ceberano. Kate was a third-generation Scientologist, and her mother, Cherie, came along to the interview. ‘Cherie tried to recruit me,’ says Sharp. ‘She sent me a copy of Dianetics and rang me on a couple of occasions and asked, have I read it, what was I getting from it?’46
Sharp’s own brief brush with Scientology, and her subsequent coverage of the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman marriage and divorce, meant she had an understanding of the difficulties of covering any story relating to the organisation. When she broke the story, neither the Church of Scientology nor the Packer family would confirm James was now a committed Scientologist.
The Packers were not happy with Sharp’s reporting and what they saw as an intrusion into their personal affairs. In Killing Fairfax, journalist Pamela Williams revealed that Kerry sent the publishers of the Sun-Herald a pointed message: ‘Kerry Packer had obtained a copy of the United Nations Human Rights Charter,’ Williams wrote, ‘and angrily sent it to the company’s chief executive, Fred Hilmer, with a warning that he was violating the charter.’47
If Fairfax Media were violating James’s rights, others soon joined in including the newspapers owned by his friends the Murdochs. The recruitment of James Packer to Scientology had become big news. News Limited’s Sydney tabloid the Daily Telegraph reported that neighbours had heard him playing The Pretenders’ hit ‘Brass in Pocket’ and Tina Arena’s pop ballad ‘Heaven Help My Heart’ at full volume three times over before jumping into his Mercedes CL600 and heading for the Church of Scientology in Glebe.48
More and more details were being published by the Sydney newspapers. Richard Guilliatt of the Sydney Morning Herald reported that on Boxing Day of 2002, James Packer flew to Los Angeles to visit Tom Cruise and attend a Scientology end of year event:
For much of the flight, Packer focused intently on a fat paperback copy of Dianetics, Hubbard’s rambling philosophical manifesto. Occasionally he would peruse other pamphlets from the church, or put on a set of headphones to listen to a Scientology CD on a portable player. As the hours passed on that long transpacific flight, Packer’s attention rarely shifted from his Scientology studies – although he did order a succession of Paddle Pops, which he sucked on ruminatively. For a man who stands to inherit several billion dollars, he cut a rather forlorn figure.49
James had come to rely more and more on Tom Cruise and Scientology to help him through his tough times. He later described Cruise as ‘a very special person’.50 The actor cast him as an extra in his film The Last Samurai.51 In 2004, Packer was in the front row seated next to singer Isaac Hayes when David Miscavige presented Tom Cruise with the one-off diamond-studded Freedom Medal of Valor for being ‘the most dedicated Scientologist’.52
While Marty Rathbun believes Cruise used James Packer to try and recruit Lachlan Murdoch, he does acknowledge that Cruise also wanted to help him. ‘It was both,’ says Rathbun, ‘and I’m not going to start assigning evil motives at every turn. It was both and so he did want to help and I do truly believe we did help him.’53
Like Cruise, Packer started employing Scientologists at close quarters, with an Australian member of the church tasked with running his Bondi apartment. He also helped recruit new members, with his former schoolmate Chris Hancock and his actor wife, Dee Smart, soon signing up. James’s new girlfriend, Erica Baxter, was also doing Scientology courses.
Getting his father on board was a very different proposition. While Pamela Williams reported in Killing Fairfax that Kerry had agreed to let Tom Cruise look after his son,54 he remained sceptical about Scientology. Kerry organised a meeting with Mark O’Brien, one of Australia’s leading media and litigation lawyers. O’Brien had defended Packer’s TV station Channel Nine when the Church of Scientology sued the 60 Minutes program over a critical story it did in 1992. The Scientologists eventually dropped the case when Packer’s legal team dug in for a long fight and started requesting Scientology policy documents as part of the discovery phase of the trial.
Mark O’Brien was a fierce legal advocate who had received a crash course in Scientology courtesy of the defamation trial. He and 60 Minutes producer Anthony McClellan had travelled to London, New York and Los Angeles to gather information, find potential witnesses and get legal advice in preparation for the trial.55 ‘They were playing hardball with us,’ recalls McClellan, ‘so we decided to play hardball back.’56 (Ironically McClellan had relied on evidence gathered by Scientologists for his 60 Minutes program exposing deaths at Chelmsford Hospital in 1980.)
O’Brien and McClellan spoke to a number of experts including one of the key American lawyers involved in defending the libel case for TIME magazine. After returning from the trip O’Brien gained firsthand experience of the kind of random surprises reserved for those who take on Scientology. He got a call from his accountant to tell him the Tax Office was investigating him. ‘There had been an anonymous tip-off that I was not declaring my proper income,’57 says O’Brien. The accusations were baseless and the tax departmen
t soon called off its investigation once the likely source of the complaint was revealed.
While the Scientologists eventually dropped the defamation case, Kerry Packer did not emerge unscathed. Mounting a legal defence would have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. When his son became involved with the same organisation that tried to sue him he called in Mark O’Brien for a briefing. In his usual formidable way, Packer wanted answers. ‘I want to know what this organisation is about,’ he said to O’Brien. His legal counsel responded, ‘I will send you tapes of the two 60 Minutes stories which show how they operate.’58
Reports later emerged that Kerry might have been concerned the Scientologists were after a slice of the Packer fortune.59 ‘I never heard Kerry say he was worried they would take all his money,’ O’Brien told me.60
Kerry was not just suspicious of Scientology. He took a cynical view of any organisation promising eternal life. In 1990, the billionaire had a massive heart attack during a polo game. His heart stopped beating for seven minutes. Afterwards he told his friend Phillip Adams, ‘I’ve been to the other side, and let me tell you, son, there’s fucking nothing there.’61 It is likely Kerry would have been even more sceptical of a religion that pumped its parishioners so vigorously for donations. One former Packer executive doubts the Scientologists were ever in danger of getting much out of Kerry or James. ‘You find a religion that can take away the Packers’ money,’ Brian Powers said to Paul Barry, ‘and I’m going to convert.’62
In the end Kerry acknowledged that Scientology was good for his son. ‘Kerry ultimately had the view it helped James,’ says Mark O’Brien. ‘Something helped him, he was a lot better after being involved with them.’63 Marty Rathbun agrees. ‘I saw it,’ he says. ‘I knew what was going on in his life. I saw him improve as a person, be more in the present, more analytical, more happy.’64
As James pulled himself back into shape, his father’s health continued to decline. Kerry was now too sick to play polo, or even golf, or follow any of the thrill-seeking pursuits he’d once enjoyed.65 The drugs he was taking to help his body accept his new kidney also made him vulnerable to infection. He was spending more time in hospital and taking on the appearance of a frail old man. His body was rejecting the kidney that had been so generously donated to him by his helicopter pilot Nick Ross.
On Boxing Day 2005, Kerry Packer died at his home in Bellevue Hill. A state-funded memorial service was held at the Sydney Opera House seven weeks later. Tom Cruise and his new wife, Katie Holmes, flew to Australia on their private jet to attend the service. If Kerry had any concerns about the Scientologists getting at his money, it was not reflected in the will. The family empire was now in James’s hands.66
In November 2006, 11 months after his father had died, James spoke publicly for the first time about Scientology. As part of an expansive profile for the Australian Financial Review, journalist Pamela Williams asked him if he would spend an hour or so on Scientology every couple of days? ‘Sometimes,’ he responded. ‘I could well spend that amount of time on it and I think it has been very good for me. It has been helpful. I have some friends in Scientology that have been very supportive. But I think it’s just helped me have a better outlook on life.’67
Around the same time James Packer was talking about how beneficial Scientology had been for him, his absence from Scientology courses was causing a major meltdown inside the organisation’s management offices on Hollywood Boulevard. According to one former insider, James was no longer an active Scientologist by the middle of 2006.
Lucy James served in many roles in her 30 years as a Scientology staffer. In 2006, she was working in Los Angeles as the ‘management head’ of all Advanced Organizations across the world. The Sydney office, where Packer had been receiving services, was under her jurisdiction. According to Lucy, Anne McCarthy, the Scientology ‘management head’ of Celebrity Centre International, gave her access to a top-secret file on the Australian billionaire.
The file showed that James Packer has been serviced by AOSH ANZO (Advanced Org in Sydney) but was no longer taking such services, no longer cooperating and Anne wanted me to handle AOSH ANZO to get James back in and taking Scientology services. Dave Petit, Executive Director of Celebrity Centre International, had come to the management building to meet with Anne and complain about the huge Scientology flap that was James Packer. In fact, Packer was considered so important to Scientology, Petit wanted the three top executives of AOSH ANZO in Sydney hauled before the Sea Org – equivalent of a court martial.68
According to Lucy James, the file contained information about why James Packer had withdrawn from Scientology. ‘It was simply that Packer was done with Scientology,’ she says. ‘He had gotten out of it what he wanted and was busy getting on with his life.’69 James Packer had entered Scientology depressed and in a bad way and left it in much better shape. But this was not good enough for the Church of Scientology. The organisation wanted the billionaire on their books permanently.
Lucy James says there was immense pressure on her to find someone to punish for James Packer’s retreat from Scientology. ‘It was considered scandalous that I did not discipline AOSH ANZO (Sydney based) executives,’ says the former Sea Org member, ‘such was the pressure on the Celebrity Centre network staff to keep Packer in the fold.’70 With Tom Cruise’s involvement in the initial recruitment of James, coupled with Miscavige’s demands that it be a top priority, the hunt was on to find a scapegoat.
The secret files revealed much more than a sense of panic over Packer’s withdrawal from Scientology. According to Lucy James, the dossier included evidence that the Australian billionaire was being spied on by three of his staff members who were Scientologists. She says the intelligence gathered by these staffers was sent to senior US executives at the Celebrity Centre and the Religious Technology Center. If true, it is a move straight from Scientology’s Tom Cruise playbook, where his personal assistant, the Scientologist Michael Doven, was in the words of Marty Rathbun, a ‘card carrying, deep cover mole into the life and family of Tom Cruise’.71
As Lucy James told me, the operation was highly organised:
The file contained a number of reports from James Packer’s own staff. These three staff were handpicked Scientologists, all recruited and screened by Celebrity Centre International (CCInt) to work for James. Essentially they were spies, reporting on Packer’s movements and actions. One report covered the fact that James was sleeping in until 11.00 am every morning, which for some reason was considered a really big deal by Scientology executives. All three of James Packer’s staff were being disciplined by special CCInt staff sent all the way to Australia to handle them, but of the three it was decided the girl (who seemed to carry out or coordinate household duties) should be removed and replaced as she had gone ‘off the rails’ and was ‘compromised’ because she was defending James Packer saying he was ‘just living life’.72
James Packer would not talk to me for this book. He has never commented publicly on why he severed ties with Scientology. His defection did not become public knowledge until two years after Lucy James saw the secret files that suggested he was no longer receiving Scientology services. In May 2008, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Andrew Hornery reported that he ‘was no longer undertaking Scientology courses and had slowly moved away from the religion, telling his closest friends he no longer “needs it”.’73
By this time Marty Rathbun was not around to retrieve James in the way he had got Tom Cruise back in. In January 2004, Rathbun was hauled into David Miscavige’s office. ‘He lambasted me,’ Rathbun wrote in Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior, ‘for having failed to beat a long-time, close associate of mine named Mike Rinder for his failure to confess to thought crimes to Miscavige’s liking.’74
Marty Rathbun says Miscavige then smashed his head against a steel wall and sentenced him to time in ‘The Hole’, an office prison at International Base where Scientology executives were held, sometimes for years. (Miscavige denies all allegations
of abuse made against him.) Rathbun, second in command to Miscavige, escaped the Church of Scientology the following month.
Because he had left Scientology by 2006, Rathbun is unsure why James Packer left Scientology. Years later he tried to reach out to him:
I sent an email to him and I don’t know whether it arrived. It was several years ago, after I began to speak out and it was being speculated that he was done with Scientology. I really liked James Packer. I just think he is one of the sweetest people I have ever met in my life. Cruise became like Miscavige and wanted to be Miscavige and in many ways had parallel personalities. Jamie was not part of that. He did not fit that mould at all he is just a wonderful person and I have nothing but good things to say about him.75
James Packer may have been used by the Church of Scientology to get to Lachlan Murdoch, but many of those close to him believe he benefited from the experience. Yet in Scientology terms the mission was a failure. Scientology may have helped James Packer, but it did not hang on to him. The mission to recruit Lachlan Murdoch came to nothing. ‘Essentially we got nowhere with him while I was there,’ says Rathbun.76
Lachlan Murdoch would not talk to me for this book. In 2012, after Rupert Murdoch tweeted that Scientology was a ‘very weird cult’, The Daily Beast reported that Cruise had tried to recruit Lachlan, and that Rupert had staged an intervention to make sure he had nothing to do with them.77
Both Rupert and Lachlan denied the story of any intervention. In a statement to The Daily Beast, Lachlan Murdoch said:
I can confirm, on the record, that I have never considered becoming a Scientologist in any way or at any time. The premise of the story is entirely wrong. I probably come close to sharing my father’s views about the religion, but I resist tweeting them.78
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