GOLDEN BULLSHIT
In the late 1960s, one of my best friends from prep school and college turned out to be living near me and my then-wife Louise, on New York’s Upper West Side. He had been an extremely talented painter with an interest in Biblical subjects, which he treated in a crypto-Cubist style entirely of his own invention. As an Andover student, he’d had his work exhibited at the Addison Gallery of American Art, which put him in the company of such worthies as Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and Alexander Calder. He continued to make extraordinary works of art at Yale, and the university’s art gallery showed a couple of them, an honor hardly ever accorded to students. Though his work was highly stylized, it wasn’t purely abstract, but based upon keen observation of real objects, figures, and landscapes.
I stood in awe of his gift and once, at Yale, when he was working on a painting of Christ on the Cross, I agreed to be crucified. Not with nails, to be sure, but he roped me by the arms, naked to the waist, to a heavy timber in his attic studio, and kept me dangling until I howled for mercy. He let me down, finally, and apologized for the pain he’d caused me. He wanted to get the strain on my arms down exactly on his drawing pad, and he’d simply forgotten that his fierce concentration might be causing his model some discomfort.
But when he phoned me in New York, it wasn’t to talk about art, or even to go over old times. He said he had something vitally important to tell me, so I invited him to supper. I’d told Louise about him, and she was eager to meet the person I’d raved about so often. Her enthusiasm waned after supper (he refused the jug wine – all we could afford – and stuck to tap water), when he told me why he’d contacted me, his own enthusiasm waxing as he spoke.
His life had changed. He’d discovered a book by a genius who had developed a theory of human behavior and motivation called Scientology, that exposed Freudian psychology as empty theorizing, dismissed dream analysis as a waste of the patient’s time that only made quack head-doctors rich, and lined out a method to rid the mind of all debilitating hang-ups. Anyone who followed his precepts, said my friend, would succeed in all of his or her endeavors.
I was skeptical – though not as downright incredulous as Louise was – and I told him it sounded intriguing, but I didn’t think I had any debilitating hang-ups to speak of. My friend pointed out that I was drinking wine and smoking a cigarette, habits that were not only bad for me, but indicated a lack of will power which would hinder my ambition to succeed as an actor.
Ouch. It was true that I was having some trouble summoning up the gumption to go on making the daily rounds of open casting calls, and enduring the many rejections I got when I finally managed to secure auditions. At the time, I was in an Off-Off Broadway “showcase” production of a good play, but it didn’t pay anything. And meanwhile, my wife had a juicy running part on a TV soap opera, something my friend knew because I told him. So I agreed to read the book he had brought with him. He told me I’d be glad I did, and we parted cordially.
The book was Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard. His name rang a faint bell. I was an avid science fiction reader back then, and I finally remembered a couple of SF novels Hubbard had written. They were entertaining, but not of the same literary caliber as those of other authors in the genre, such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delaney, and Philip K. Dick.
Dianetics, however, wasn’t science fiction, or at least there were no alien beings, space ships, or other futuristic elements in it. Instead, it seemed to be a self-help manual, a little like Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People, which I’d dipped into once because my stepfather had a copy. However, Dianetics was more about how to manipulate friends and dominate people, by honing your will to a keen edge. It was a strangely seductive little book. We all dream of bending others to our will through the sheer force of our personalities, and Hubbard’s style was glib and persuasive. Well, he’d cut his writing teeth churning out SF for pulp magazines that paid something like ten cents a word, so he knew how to slap sentences together. Rumor had it, I learned later, that he’d gotten sick and tired of being paid chump change, and had told one of his fellow SF writers that the way to make some real money was to invent a religion. What he came up with wasn’t recognized as a religion back then, but today it’s officially known as the Church of Scientology, which gives it tax-exempt status, among other benefits.
My friend had told me that the first consultation – in Scientology jargon it was called an audit, like what an IRS examiner does to your tax return – was free. To satisfy my curiosity, I went to a center that had opened on the Upper West Side, and met a couple of well-scrubbed, polite young men. I explained why I was there, and one of them took me into a room furnished with a table and two chairs. On the table was a monitoring device with a semicircular dial. Two tin cans that might once have held pork and beans were wired to it. He told me to hold the cans in my hands, and flipped a switch. The pointer on the dial jumped a quarter of the way along the dial and dropped back a bit.
Then he asked me to remember a time when I was very unhappy, and describe it to him. I picked the moment when my agent told me I’d lost a great part in a Broadway play to another actor. The pointer swung almost to the end of the dial.
“Describe it again, with more detail,” he said. I did. He made me repeat the description three more times. Each time, the pointer moved less, and at the end of the third, it barely twitched.
“Congratulations,” he said, as if I’d won a quiz show prize. “You have gone Clear on that engram.”
“I’ve what?”
He launched into an explanation a little like the fine print on the back of a box of laxatives. Certain unpleasant memory traces, or engrams, can become blocked and clog the intellectual faculties, just as an impacted turd can impede the process of elimination (of course he didn’t use the fecal analogy). Scientology’s audits flushed them out. I decided his own intellectual faculties were clogged by insanity, and turned down a second audit. He protested that my refusal proved I still needed help. I told him that might be true, but I didn’t think subjecting myself to a crude lie-detector test was the kind of help I needed. He lost his cool and began to rant at me. I told him he was nuts.
But he didn’t give up. In the era before home answering machines, Louise and I subscribed to an answering service, and he left message after message for me, first asking, then imploring, and finally ordering me to call him, or dire consequences would result. Louise was furious, because the answering service was strictly reserved for important calls related to our profession. The glut of messages caused her to miss one from the director of her soap changing the time of a taping, and she’d shown up late. And I was just as angry, because I missed a call asking me to come in to audition a second time for a role in a movie.
We finally changed our phone number, at considerable inconvenience, and we thought the Scientology siege was over. But a few days later, I got a registered letter from my old school friend. He wrote that I had been placed on Scientology’s “Enemies List,” for accusing an auditor of being crazy. He went on to say that certain Scientologists who had gone beyond Clear (all capital letters are his) were known as Operating Thetans, or OTs. OTs had the power to project their minds and influence events in the material world. Because of my lack of belief, a group of OTs were going to punish me by blocking my ambitions as an actor. He ended by saying that if I returned to the center, apologized, and resumed my auditing, the embargo would be lifted, and the OTs would help me become a star.
This swooped beyond delusion into megalomania. I threw the letter away and went on with my life. Like everyone else’s, it had its ups and downs. I didn’t rise to stardom, but I began working steadily in the theater, playing a number of good parts in regional theaters. Louise and I divorced amicably, and eventually I married Patsy. But in time, my theatrical ambition waned, because I never quite managed to make the leap from supporting roles to leads, and Broadway, to say nothing of Hollywood, remained out of my grasp.
It did occur to me occasionally that perhaps the Scientology curse had been effective. But as the history of witchcraft demonstrates, curses only work if the people accursed believe in them. And I certainly didn’t believe in Scientology. My lack of success was, I knew, due to a variety of factors which had nothing to do with the supernatural, and everything to do with my own bad judgment. For example, I was taken on by a pair of powerful agents in New York, but they dropped me because I kept accepting work out of town without consulting them. I simply preferred to play interesting roles on stage, for Equity minimum, rather than doing the commercials and soap opera gigs the agency sent me on, although those jobs paid far better.
Later in my career, I finally landed a genuine star turn, thanks to a director friend. The play was a musical adaptation of the Book of Matthew, in southern vernacular, and I was onstage throughout it, playing everyone from the gospel writer through Pontius Pilate and Herod, to Jesus Himself. But I got fired, despite glowing reviews, because I wouldn’t accept Christ as my Best Friend Forever, nor would I testify to that effect at the end of each performance, and urge the sinners in the audience to repent and come to Jesus. Losing that juicy role because I refused to buckle under to pressure from a Christian fundamentalist cult left me feeling hollowed out. I did land a few more jobs, but the fire in my belly was gone, and eventually I gave up acting altogether.
I lost touch with my school friend, but many years later he contacted me again. He invited Patsy and me to an exhibit of his recent paintings, held in New York at a tiny gallery. Of course we went. He was jovial and courteous, by all appearances entirely happy with his life and his works. But the works themselves were appalling. In place of the strikingly original paintings he had made when I first knew him, with their shattered perspectives and vibrant, deliberately clashing colors, the daubs on the wall were flat, and done in the soft, sentimental pastels of Valentine’s Day greeting cards. They showed his wife and children, along with other friends and relations – Scientologists all, I learned – posed in a dreamily bucolic landscape. The pictures were utterly banal, but he was quick to inform us that they were selling very well. And he used all his still-considerable charm to urge Patsy to mount an exhibition of them in the far more prestigious gallery where she worked. She explained, tactfully, that the James Goodman Gallery dealt only in modern masters: Picasso, Matisse, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and the like. He switched off his charm like a light bulb, and stalked away to talk to someone else. I haven’t seen him since.
Scientology not only survived, but prospered richly, in the years that followed. It got also got a great deal weirder. Ell Ron, as the faithful called him, spun a wild creation myth to certain adepts who had given him a hell of a lot of money and thus been promoted to elite status within the cult. The tale involves all the trappings of the pulp science fiction Hubbard used to write: a wicked intergalactic overlord, atomic destruction, faster-than-light space ships, and both telepathy and telekinesis.
Ell Ron set up a large center in Florida, and attracted many new followers. He registered his cult as a religious institution, the Church of Scientology, a ploy that made it immune to federal and state taxes. But the IRS still had a few questions about his personal income, so he took his show to sea. He bought a mothballed World War Two minesweeper, renovated it, and manned it with his most devoted disciples, under the command of a retired naval commander who was also a Scientologist. New converts were treated like recruits in Marine boot camp and given the most arduous and messy jobs aboard. Because some of the converts were minors, the Sea Org, as he called it, came under more unwelcome scrutiny from the Feds, but they couldn’t intervene as long as the ship stayed outside the three mile limit.
He set up a center in the Netherlands, where the tolerant Dutch welcomed his cult, just as they’d welcomed the English Separatists in the 17th century, when they were driven out of England by the Anglican Church. Ell Ron and his followers relished their persecution, for it put them in the company of the Pilgrim Father William Brewster, and of Brigham Young, who moved his doughty band of Mormons to Deseret, known now as Utah, where they quickly became the dominant force, both religious and political, in the territory, and wound up building a tabernacle whose size dwarfs St. Peter’s Church in Rome and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Radical religions are always met by harsh persecution from established cults, but wind up triumphing over their persecutors, either by coopting or converting them, whereupon they become the persecutors and start killing everyone who doesn’t agree with them.
Today, Scientology prospers very well, despite Ell Ron’s death in 1987, after he fled to the California desert following his indictment on serious charges involving Operation Snow White, an attempt to infiltrate the FBI, which was investigating Scientology’s shady doings. Most of the Scientologists involved, including Ell Ron’s wife (a patient woman, for Hubbard had a thing for the young, female officers in the Sea Org), were caught, but Ell Ron died – some say he was raving mad at the end – before the feds nabbed him. Of course he was supposed to be immortal, and even said so to his closest cadre. So the cult concealed his death for several years, until the first of many articles and books airing its dirty laundry was published.
But cultists are wonderfully inventive. Think of the Jesus tale: “No, really, he came back to life after he died on the cross, I saw him, trust me!” So Ell Ron simply left the physical vehicle and became the most powerful of all the Operating Thetans, existing on an invisible plane from which he monitors and controls everything that happens on Earth. In essence, he’s God.
This idea appeals to Hollywood actors, who like to think of themselves as gods, but acknowledge that movie directors and producers are bigger gods. It’s no surprise that Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and other celebrities are members of the cult, and helped to finance the glitzy Scientology Celebrity Center in Hollywood, frequented more by tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of movie royalty than by the stars themselves. Ell Ron, wherever he is, must approve. All he ever really wanted was to be celebrated.