Davis now told me that he was “not willing to participate in, or contribute to, an article about Scientology through the lens of Paul Haggis.” I had come to Los Angeles specifically to talk to him, at a time he had chosen. I wondered aloud if he had been told not to talk to me. He said no.
“Maybe Paul shouldn’t have posted the letter on the Internet,” Feshbach interjected. “There are all sorts of shoulda woulda coulda.” She said that she had just spoken to Mark Isham, the composer, whom I had interviewed. “He talked to you about what are supposed to be our confidential scriptures.” That I would ask about the church’s secret doctrines was offensive, she said. “It’s a two-way street happening,” she concluded.1
“Everything I have to say about Paul, I’ve already said,” Davis declared. He agreed to respond to fact-checking queries, however.
THE GARDEN BEHIND Anne Archer and Terry Jastrow’s home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles is a peaceful retreat, filled with olive trees and hummingbirds. A fountain gurgles beside the swimming pool. Jastrow was recounting his first meeting with Archer, in Milton Katselas’s class. His friend David Ladd, son of the Hollywood legend Alan Ladd, had invited him to visit. “I saw this girl sitting next to Milton,” Jastrow recalled. “I said, ‘Who’s that?’ ”
Archer smiled. There was a cool wind blowing in from the Pacific, and she drew a shawl around her. “We were friends for about a year and a half before we had our first date,” she said. They were married in 1978.
“Our relationship really works,” Jastrow said. “We attribute that essentially a hundred percent to applying Scientology.”
The two spoke of the techniques that had helped them, such as never being critical of the other and never interrupting.
Scientology “isn’t a ‘creed,’ ” Archer said. “These are basic natural laws of life.” She described L. Ron Hubbard as “an engineer, not a faith healer,” who had codified human emotional states, in order to guide the adept to higher levels of existence—“to help a guy rise up the Tone Scale and feel a zest and a love for life.”
Jastrow had been an acolyte in an Episcopal church when he was studying at the University of Houston, but doubts overwhelmed him. “I walked out in the middle of communion,” he said. “I was an atheist for ten years. That was the condition I was in when I started at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.” He had never heard of Scientology at the time.
Archer said that the controversy that continually surrounds the church hadn’t touched her. “It’s not that I’m not aware of it.” She added that Scientology is growing despite the public criticism. “It’s in a hundred and sixty-five countries.”
“Translated into fifty languages!” Jastrow interjected. “It’s the fastest-growing religion.” In his opinion, “Scientologists do more good things for more people in more places around the world than any other organization ever.” He added, “When you study historical perspective of new faiths, they’ve all been—”
“Attacked,” said Archer. “Look at what happened to the—”
“The Christians!” Jastrow said simultaneously. “Think of the Mormons and the Christian Scientists.”
They talked about the church’s focus on celebrities. “Hubbard recognized that if you really want to inspire a culture to have peace and greatness and harmony among men, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish,” Archer said. “And if he’s particularly well known he needs a place where he can be comfortable. So, Celebrity Centres provide that.” She blamed the press for concentrating too much on Scientology celebrities. Journalists, she said, “don’t write about the hundreds of thousands of other Scientologists.”
“Millions!”
“Millions of other Scientologists. They only write about four friggin’ people!”
Jastrow suggested that Scientology’s critics often had a vested interest. He pointed to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, drug makers, pharmacies—“all those people who make a living and profit and pay their mortgages and pay their college educations and buy their cars, et cetera, et cetera, based on people not being well.”
“Who advertise in the newspapers and on television, more than any other advertisers,” Archer added.
“But this is a collateral issue, darling, in terms of what I’m talking about,” Jastrow continued. “For the first time in America’s experience with war, there are more mental illnesses from Iraq and Afghanistan than physical illnesses,” he said, citing a recent article in USA Today. “So mental illnesses become a big business.” Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas “Scientology will solve the source of the problem.” The medical and pharmaceutical industries are “prime funders and sponsors of the media,” he said, and therefore might exert “influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive.” He said that only Scientology could help mankind right itself. “What else is there that we can hang our hopes on?”