That changed a few days later. Scott was called into the Ethics Office and told that David had complained that Scott was enturbulating, or upsetting, him and causing problems because of the abundant reports he was writing. “This kid is an SP,” Scott warned, “and you better handle him.” Then he opened the door to leave. David was standing just outside. His reaction told Scott that he had overheard him calling him a Suppressive Person. “He went into total fear,” Scott said. That very day, David was moved into another room, and his parents soon returned from the United States. But David avoided Scott whenever they passed each other.
In August, Scott was sitting out in the yard across from the castle and the auditing rooms on the Saint Hill grounds. He was talking to a friend of his, a Norwegian nurse. Suddenly they heard a young woman wailing. Scott remembers looking up and seeing David, his face red and the veins visible in his forehead. He had a preclear folder under his arm. Behind him was the crying girl, who was holding her side in apparent pain. According to Scott the nurse exclaimed, “He beat up his PC!”
Karen de la Carriere was also a young intern at Saint Hill, and she was directed to join the others in the internship room. “They told us that David Miscavige had struck his PC,” she recalled. “He had been removed from his internship, and we were not to rumor-monger or gossip about it. We were supposed to just bury it.”
David was not done with Scientology, however. At fifteen, he went Clear in his present life. On his sixteenth birthday in 1976, “sickened by the declining moral situation in schools illustrated by rampant drug use,” he dropped out of tenth grade and formally joined the Sea Org. He began his service in Clearwater; less than a year later, he was transferred to the Commodore’s Messengers in California, where once again he quickly captured the attention of the church hierarchy with his energy and commitment. He rose to the position of Chief Cinematographer at the age of seventeen. After the skit that made such a poor impression on Hubbard, David redeemed himself in the founder’s eyes by renovating one of his houses and ridding it of fiberglass, which Hubbard said he was allergic to.
David Miscavige filled a spot in Hubbard’s plans that once might have been occupied by Quentin, although Miscavige displayed a passion and focus that Quentin never really possessed. He was tough, tireless, and doctrinaire. Despite David’s youth, Hubbard promoted him to Action Chief, the person in charge of making sure that Hubbard’s directives were strictly and remorselessly carried out. He ran missions around the world to perform operations that local orgs were unable to do themselves—at least, not to Hubbard’s satisfaction.1
HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING his thousand-page opus, Battlefield Earth, in 1980. (Mitt Romney would name it as his favorite novel.) Hubbard hoped to have the book made into a major motion picture, so the Executive Director of the church, Bill Franks, approached Travolta about producing and starring in it. Travolta was excited about the prospect. Suddenly Franks got a call from Miscavige saying, “Get me John Travolta. I want to meet that guy!” Miscavige began wining and dining the star. “He just moved in and took over Travolta,” Franks recalled. But he says that privately Miscavige was telling him, “The guy is a faggot. We’re going to out him.”
Fleeing subpoenas from three grand juries, and pursued by forty-eight lawsuits, all naming the founder, Hubbard slipped away from public view on Valentine’s Day, 1980, in a white Dodge van, with velvet curtains and a daybed. It had been customized by John Brousseau, a Sea Org member who took care of all of Hubbard’s vehicles. The elaborate escape plan involved ditching the Dodge for an orange Ford. In the meantime, Brousseau purchased another Dodge van for Hubbard, identical to the first. He then cut the original one into pieces and took them to the dump. The Ford was chopped up and dumped as well.
Hubbard briefly settled in Newport Beach, California, in a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette. In the apartment next door were Pat and Annie Broeker, his two closest aides. Pat, a handsome former rock-and-roll guitar player, enthusiastically adopted the role of an undercover operative, running secret errands for Hubbard and going to any lengths to keep their location a secret. His wife, Annie, one of the original Commodore’s Messengers, was a shy blonde, totally devoted to Hubbard.