After Cruise rallied the Scientology celebrities, a group of students demanded that Katselas make the Playhouse a “WISE” business. The acronym stands for World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. Katselas refused, even though he lost a hundred students in a mass Scientology walkout. Many of them went to another school, the Acting Center, which was founded in 2006, based in part on Scientology techniques. Katselas died of heart failure in 2008, and the Beverly Hills Playhouse is no longer connected with the church. The long line of protégés that Katselas left behind cemented the association between the church and the Hollywood acting community, but in the end he was ostracized by the very people whose careers he had nurtured.
Tom Cruise was now considered the unofficial Ethics Officer of Hollywood. He was the embodiment of Hubbard’s vision of a church with temples dedicated to celebrity rather than God. Cruise’s intensity and commitment, along with his spectacular ambition, matched Miscavige’s own. It was as if Miscavige had rubbed a magic lantern and Cruise had appeared, a genie who could open any door. He was one of the few people that Miscavige saw as a peer. Miscavige even wondered if there was some way to appoint Cruise the church’s Inspector General for Ethics—Rathbun’s job. “He’d say that Tom Cruise was the only person in Scientology, other than himself, that he would trust to run the church,” one former Sea Org member recalled. Rathbun observed: “Miscavige convinced Cruise that he and Tom were two of only a handful of truly ‘big beings’ on the planet. He instructed Cruise that LRH was relying upon them to unite with the few others of their ilk on earth to make it onto ‘Target Two’—some unspecified galactic locale where they would meet up with Hubbard in the afterlife.”
HAGGIS HAD ALSO BEEN folded into the celebrity recruitment apparatus. He had put his money and his reputation in the hands of the church. He, too, was serving Scientology. But he rarely spoke about his affiliation to his employees or associates. Even his close friends were surprised to learn that he was in the church. “He didn’t have that sort of straight-on, unambiguous, unambivalent view that so many Scientologists project into the world,” Marshall Herskovitz observed.
For years, Herskovitz and several of Haggis’s closest non-Scientology friends participated in an irregular Friday get-together called Boys’ Night. They met at an Italian restaurant on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. The actor Josh Brolin usually attended, along with director Oliver Stone, producer Stephen Nathan, and a peace activist and former priest named Blase Bonpane, among others. One night an attractive New York Times reporter came to write about the event, and the men decided that she made them all a lot more appealing than they were on other occasions. After that, they voted to invite one woman to join them whenever they met. Usually, it’s a beautiful actress. Julie Delpy and Charlize Theron have both been accorded this honor. Madeleine Stowe recalled it as the funniest evening she had ever had, although she had the sense to bring her husband along. She remembered Haggis sitting back, wisecracking, smoking a cigarette, watching it all happen.
Although Brolin, Nathan, and Stone are three of Haggis’s closest male friends, they never talked to him about Scientology. And yet each of the three had an experience in the church, which the others weren’t aware of. Steve Nathan had been hooked up to an E-Meter in the late 1960s by some British Scientologists who were looking for recruits, but he hadn’t been impressed. Oliver Stone didn’t even know Haggis was in Scientology. But for that matter, few knew that Stone had also spent a month in the church. He was a young man just back from Vietnam, full of trouble and questions. He signed up at the church’s New York center in the old Hotel Martinique. “It was like going to college and reading Dale Carnegie, something you do to find yourself.” The difference was that in Scientology there were nice parties and beautiful girls. Scientology didn’t answer his questions; but on the other hand, he noted, “I got laid.”
Brolin had known Haggis for many years. They had worked together in television, and Brolin had helped with Haggis’s charities. Brolin and his wife, actress Diane Lane, shared a house in Italy during the summers with Paul and Deborah. One evening, lubricated with grappa, Brolin began recounting a story of a friend who had “infiltrated” Scientology. He wondered why Paul and Deborah were listening stony-faced. When he finished the tale, Deborah finally said, “You know, we’re Scientologists.”
“What?” Brolin exclaimed. “When the fuck did that happen?”
“A long time ago,” Deborah said.
“I am so sorry, I had no idea!” Brolin said.