When Spanky heard this, she realized she had been declared a Suppressive Person. Nobody had bothered to tell her, but from now on, no Scientologist would be allowed to talk to her.
Taylor never tried to speak to Paul Haggis again, worried that she might compromise his relationship to the church. For his part, Haggis had no idea what had happened to Spanky. He wondered why she had just disappeared. But Scientologists were always drifting in and out of his life. Sea Org members, even friends like Spanky, might be suddenly posted somewhere else without explanation, or assigned to Clearwater for advanced training, or sent to a secret Sea Org base where they were rarely in contact with the outside world. That might explain her absence. He didn’t inquire. He readily identified with the church’s narrative that Scientology was being victimized by an intolerant and uncomprehending press, self-serving politicians, careerist bureaucrats, and reactionary police agencies looking for headlines. By publicly defending Scientology, he took on the great burden of scorn and ridicule routinely directed at the church; and in that way, he also allied himself with persecuted minorities everywhere: he was one of them.
If he had known that his friend had been declared a Suppressive, Haggis would have had a difficult choice to make. It was one he would face soon in any case. In 1983, Haggis’s writing partner on the TV series Diff’rent Strokes, Howard Meyers, who was also a Scientologist, decided to follow a splinter group led by David Mayo, who had been one of the highest officials in the church. Haggis told Meyers that he couldn’t work with him anymore. Because Meyers was the senior writer on the show, Haggis resigned and went looking for other work.
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1 Travolta’s attorney denies there was an agreement to visit Spanky in exchange for his personal copy of Saturday Night Fever.
5
Dropping the Body
Hubbard never lost his interest in being a movie director. He wrote innumerable scripts for Scientology training films, but he still thought he could take over Hollywood. He had particularly high hopes for one script, “Revolt in the Stars,” that was based on one of his novels. Inspired by the thunderous success of Star Wars, Hubbard worked on the script in 1979 with the legendary acting teacher Milton Katselas with the aim of having it made into a feature film.
A journeyman theater and film director before taking over the Beverly Hills Playhouse, Katselas had directed the 1972 film Butterflies Are Free, starring Goldie Hawn and Edward Albert (Eileen Heckart won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role). He was a vital link to the Hollywood celebrity machine that Scientology depended upon. The list of his protégés included Al Pacino, Goldie Hawn, George C. Scott, Alec Baldwin, Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Gene Hackman, George Clooney, and many other now-familiar names. His invitation-only Saturday master class was seen by many young actors as a portal to stardom. He attained OT V status and was one of the most profitable sources of recruits for the church, receiving in return a ten percent commission on the money contributed by his students. At one point, Katselas asked if he could join the Sea Org, but Hubbard told him it was more important to continue doing what he was doing.
When Katselas and Hubbard finished the script of “Revolt in the Stars,” Hubbard dispatched one of his top Messengers, Elizabeth Gablehouse, to Hollywood to make a deal. After the Moroccan adventure, Hubbard had appointed her his Personal Public Relations Officer. Gablehouse came from a moneyed background, and she knew how to talk about finances. She shopped the script around and found a buyer willing to offer $10 million—which, at the time, would have been the highest price ever paid for a script, she was told. The Guardian’s Office became suspicious and investigated the buyers, who they learned were Mormons. Hubbard figured that the only reason Mormons would buy it was to put it on the shelf. Gablehouse wound up being sent to the RPF, and when she balked at that, she was demoted even further—to the RPF’s RPF, alone, in the furnace room under the parking garage of the Clearwater base. The script never did get made into a film.