Skip Press - The Morton Report

Loving Hating Breitbart

2012-10-23T23:45:00Z

Those of us who knew Andrew Breitbart fairly well are still in a state of shock that he's gone. I first learned about his passing the way I've learned of many things over the years, by logging onto The Drudge Report early one morning. At first it was just a shocking headline saying "Dead at 43" but then came the flurry of reports that explained his untimely death, my favorite being by someone who knew him, Paul Bond of The Hollywood Reporter.

At the end of Bond's article he listed the survivors, which worried me the most: "Along with his parents and sister, he is survived by his wife Susannah Bean Breitbart and their four children; sons 4, 6 and 12 and a daughter, 10." I worried about their financial future, but fairly quickly a fund was set up and from what I could tell, donations were pouring in. As time passed, I saw that the "reboot" of Breitbart's media mini-empire was in able hands, and that maybe things would be as okay as they could be, given the circumstances.

At a party at the Breitbart house once, what pleased me most was Andrew's obvious joy about his home, wife, and children. His oldest son, Samson, impressed me with his intelligence and friendliness, and it was obvious how much Andrew loved being a dad.

The first time I heard Samson's name I was sitting with Andrew in a Starbucks on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. I laughed at the boldness of naming a son Samson and applauded him for it. From that point forward, Andrew Breitbart was a great man in my book.

That day, as we discussed a project he had in mind, Andrew was constantly on his laptop, updating The Drudge Report. He'd met Matt while waiting tables in Venice, he said, and one thing led to another. By the time Andrew and I met, he was making a nice six-figure living with the site, even if it seemed to occupy his every other moment. He told me the story of the night in mid-January, 1998 when he and Drudge placed a phone call to Jonathan Alter of Newsweek at home and verified the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair. The magazine, which has now deteriorated into web-only, had turned down the obvious cover story. I still wonder what would have happened if the "little blue dress" with Clinton's DNA on it had not been revealed to the nation via Drudge.

I first met Andrew when I attended a signing of Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon - The Case Against Celebrity, the book he co-wrote with Mark Ebner. I knew Ebner from our mutual interest in exposing the evils of Scientology. The book had a chapter about the so-called religion, and I was buoyed by Ebner and Breitbart's lack of fear of the notorious attack dog tactics of Scientology.

The longer I knew Andrew, the more I admired his media expertise, and the wildness of his experience. I wasn't surprised when he told me of being propositioned by Arianna Huffington as he built The Huffington Post site for her in the attic of her house. I'd run into Huffington and her then husband Michael at a party given by the Louisville Courier-Journal prior to a Kentucky Derby. I'd recoiled at what I thought was a completely evil vibe coming from her. When I heard about her hitting on Andrew, a young father of several kids, my instinct about her was validated. How sadly typical of too many in the Westside L.A. crowd, I thought.

When Andrew was starting "Big Hollywood" and other derivative sites of Breitbart.com, I was at a party at his house. He introduced me to John Nolte, the editor. In short order, I wrote two dozen articles for the site, which seemed popular with readers, given the extensive commentary. It seemed like a big happy family. When I learned Nolte's wife was a huge fan of Patti Page, I got her a copy of Patti's memoir, which I'd ghost-written. Mrs. Nolte received the only copy on earth autographed by both Patti and myself.

Andrew also invited me to become a member of the secret Hollywood Republican group "Friends of Abe" (FOA) started by Gary Sinise, shortly after he learned about it. I began going to FOA events, and getting others involved.

Then Andrew and I had a falling out over intellectual property. I wrote a non-political article about what I thought was missing in America — some Christian principles that had guided it in the beginning — and John Nolte rejected the piece. I was surprised; he'd always published the others with little comment, if any. I ran it by Andrew and he thought it was okay to publish, but in the interim I happened to read a "click-on" agreement I had encountered when first signing up on the site. It stated that the site owned in perpetuity everything I wrote for it — even though I was writing for free! I asked Andrew about that via email, and got no reply. Same with Nolte. When I realized I was getting nowhere, I finally emailed them both to say, sorry, you don't own what I created for you to use for free, take my articles down.

And they did. After that, I would see Andrew at FOA events but there was a noticeable emotional distance between us. I didn't bring up my exit from his site, and neither did he. The last time I saw him was when he did a signing of his last book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, at the Barney's Beanery in Westwood where the group met every month. The time before that was at an FOA lunch in the San Fernando Valley, which he was moderating. When it came time for discussion, I announced I was writing a book for Broadside Books, the conservative imprint of HarperCollins that publishes authors like Dinesh D'Souza and that I wanted to talk to anyone interested in being interviewed for the book. Andrew's mouth literally dropped open in surprise — I guess because it was a somewhat major project with regard to Hollywood conservatives, and he didn't already know about it.

Probably because Gary Sinise stopped talking to me when I told him about the book, every Hollywood conservative who eagerly wanted to contribute suddenly got cold feet, except for one. (Word tends to get around in small groups.) I wrote the book anyway, but ended up in disagreement with editor Adam Bellow, just as David Mamet had over another book, and the project was canned. And through all this I learned a big lesson — don't expect anyone on any side of the political aisle to be trustworthy until they prove they are. As Ronald Reagan said: Trust, but verify.

All these experiences and more ran through my mind as I watched the thoroughly entertaining new documentary, Hating Breitbart. The audience in Burbank was mostly people who knew Andrew, and even though we were all still sad from his passing, we laughed continuously during the movie, as he took on ACORN with James O'Keefe, busting criminal practices that defrauded government resources, then through the whole "N word" accusation that never was in March of 2010 in Washington, D.C.

I was glad to see the full story of the Shirley Sherrod resignation in the movie, and glad that the Anthony Weiner resignation following his sexting scandal that Andrew exposed was tagged onto the end of the movie, almost as a footnote.

In the lobby afterward, I ran into Andrew's business partner, lawyer Larry Solov, who was also his longest best friend. Funny, I thought, Larry was probably the one who wrote the rights agreement for Breitbart.com. But I didn't say anything about that; who cared any more? Larry said it was good to see me, and I said the same about him. We both were kind of amazed at how short a time it had been since Andrew passed. The main thing was the memory of Andrew Breitbart, and how he was a "bare-knuckled brawler" in journalism (Larry's words). Andrew didn't like bullies, and he considered the institutional media a bunch of bullies who had rarely been challenged until people like him came along.

I felt the same way, only Andrew did something about it. In the words of John Lennon, another fallen hero (though perhaps not to many conservatives), all Andrew wanted was for the truth to reach the public. "All I want is the truth," Lennon said. "Just give me some truth."

Whatever your feelings about or impressions of Andrew Breitbart, you should see Hating Breitbart. You'll get the truth about him, whether you agree with him or not.

Maybe one day, the media will be a bit more balanced. Andrew was here to even the scales a little, and I love people like that. Like him, I hate bullies and liars, and I'll never stop fighting them, whatever their creed, political stance, or lack of same.

In Act V, scene 5 of Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote (a bit cynically): "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Andrew Breitbart's life was relatively brief, but he was not a poor player. He was full of sound and fury, but he signified quite a lot — he was filled with the indomitable American spirit, and the significance of his life and work will carry on far beyond this movie. Larry Solov told me that the traffic on the Breitbart sites had doubled from this time last year. That made me feel much better about the family Andrew left behind.

Perhaps there will be a definitive Breitbart biography someday, and a movie or miniseries that shows how this latter-day Puck (the character from A Misdummer Night's Dream) made the greatest use of the new Internet media to not just show "what fools these mortals be" but how much better we could all become.

That kind of truth is the kind that lasts. See the movie.

Johnny Lewis and Scientology's Criminal Behavior

2012-10-04T00:45:00Z

As I write this article, actor Johnny Lewis is ranked #1 on the STARmeter on the Internet Movie Database Pro version. At #2 is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, currently appearing in the #1 movie Looper with Bruce Willis (who is ranked #19 on the STARmeter).

Unfortunately, the ranking won't help his career, because Johnny Lewis is dead, at age 28.

Lewis died on September 26, 2012 in Los Feliz, California, after terrorizing neighbors, apparently murdering his landlady, 81-year-old Catherine Davis, and mutilating her cat. For days, the news was about Lewis's descent from working actor who dated music superstar Katy Perry to criminal with a continuing drug problem. Then actor Taylor Negron wrote an article describing Davis and how she was beloved in the Hollywood community and suddenly it became clear that Lewis's victim was a beloved Hollywood legend.

Shortly thereafter, ABC News did a report that stated Los Angeles police suspected the street drug 2C-I—known as "smiles"—was to blame. I knew better. I knew it was all Scientology.

Tom Cruise, the most prominent Hollywood Scientologist, whose divorce from his third wife has been a personal public relations nightmare for months, must have cringed when he found out about the Lewis debacle. After all, Cruise's next movie is entitled All You Need Is Kill.

The Hollywood community can be astonishingly interconnected. I met Taylor Negron in the 1980s, when he appeared every Monday night with The Comedy Store Players at the laugh palace on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The Players included Robin Williams, Marty Short, Jim Stahl, Lucy Webb, and others, and improv comedy groups were the rage in town at the time. The improv movement at the Comedy Store began via Tap City, another group headed by actor Larry Anderson, who was a Scientologist for 33 years and starred in Orientation: A Scientology Information Film, which was the first thing screened for prospective Scientologists. The so-called church still owes Anderson $100,000 for services he paid for but did not receive; so far they've refused to pay him, but that's rather normal for Scientology. Larry got into Scientology through myself and Spanky Taylor in 1976 when we met him at a huge party thrown by Paul and Linda McCartney after the "Wings Over America" tour.

It was Taylor who later introduced me to Negron at the Comedy Store, where I also met with Robin Williams to discuss a script of mine. It had been given to him by a mutual friend, Scientologist Jennifer Charm, who was sleeping with Williams though he was married. (Scientology "ethics," I kept discovering over the years, was always a relative term.)

After Lewis's death, Scientology began disavowing any association with him by scrubbing his picture and information off their websites. Obscuring troubled associations has been a practice of Scientology for decades, as I discussed in a previous article about the suicide of Scientologist actress Laura Hippe who, like Lewis, was a failed "product" of Scientology's drug rehabilitation arm, Narconon. Supposedly, his mother Divona used Narconon principles to keep her middle child off drugs. So much for Scientology and Narconon "technology."

I knew Johnny's mother as well as his father Michael, who is an "OT8" (Scientology's top level of supposed spiritual awareness) and runs a Scientology center in the San Fernando Valley whose motto is "We help you get there." Michael is also a screenwriter, as several reporters have noted, but what has been missed is another point of Scientology Hollywood interconnectedness. (And no, I'm not talking about more Narconon-related deaths and lawsuits.)

Days before the Lewis news broke, my friend Alex Ben Block at the Hollywood Reporter wrote about the State of California suing two movie producers over an alleged film Ponzi scheme that defrauded elderly investors, among other things. I immediately recognized the name Dror Soref, CEO of Skyline Pictures and the director of the 2009 movie Not Forgotten. (But then, I never forget anything I consider important.) The last time I saw Soref, in the '80s around the same time I was regularly visiting the Comedy Store, he was talking to me about producing a script of mine entitled "Street Song." When he said, "The money for the production is drug money, is that okay?" I walked away. Yes, Soref was a Scientologist at the time; I'd met him at the Celebrity Centre when it was on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. The other person named in the lawsuit was Michelle Kenen Seward, a buddy of Scientologist actress Kirstie Alley, whom I also wrote about previously for The Morton Report.

After awhile, it can all make your head spin, but here's another connection. A previous movie made by Dror Soref was written by Michael Lewis. That was 1993's The Seventh Coin, whose budget was reported as $900,000 by IMDb, with a box office take of $3.2 million. Hmm.... one wonders what Soref forgot to do right when he made Not Forgotten?

All of which brings me to a simple conclusion, based on my decades-long experience in Scientology, which I usually spell this way — $cientology. It's all about the money, period. It always has been. When someone helps Scientology make money via their celebrity, they're lauded and loved. When they get in trouble, Scientology disappears from their life, running away (as they say back in Texas) like a turpentined dog (the turpentine goes on the offending dog's butt, you can imagine the reaction). When Scientology has a lot of money, they viciously attack anyone who says anything negative about them, and try to destroy them in court if possible. Lately, however, Scientology has had such a string of disasters former Village Voice editor Tony Ortega wrote the round-up article "Scientology's Meltdown" listing all the astonishing negatives.

Sadly, one of those dark stories was the death of Alexander Jentzsch, the 27-year-old son of Scientology’s president, Heber Jentzsch, who was found dead in his in-laws’ Los Angeles home, due to methadone taken while suffering from pneumonia. For those in the know about Scientology, death and youth often seem synonymous, particularly among those at "the top" in the church. I'm reminded of the demise of L. Ron Hubbard's 22-year-old son, Quentin.

To say I'm glad I got out of Scientology (in the 1990s) is the understatement of the last two centuries. If the items cited here give you any indication, you probably won't be surprised to know that I want EVERYONE out of this so-called church which leaves death and destruction in its wake every single day. In Scientology terms, I want the planet "cleared" of Scientology.

If that sounds harsh, ask yourself this. What, exactly, is the value of a philosophy whose highest-ranking members have sons who die in their 20s from criminal behavior and/or drugs, whose most well-known celebrity has a string of failed marriages and bizarre public utterances, and whose founder had a career filled with larceny, black magic, government investigations and convictions, and worldwide condemnation?

In the news now are stories speculating that Tom Cruise might be contemplating leaving Scientology. I hope he does; otherwise he'll go down in flames on that burning, sinking ship. As the New York Post noted, "Hey Tom, your crack is showing!" That "crack" is writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's already much-lauded new film The Master. I'll be seeing that movie soon, laughing as I recognize the ways Anderson depicted the crazy realities gleaned from Scientology. I'm sure I'll also think about a written miniseries that could tell the real, horrifying tale so much more fully.

But I'll also probably cry a little, thinking of dead sons with great promise who probably would still be with us today, if not for a supposed religion known as Scientology.

Scientology's Narconon: A Legacy of Failure and Death

2012-08-24T17:00:00Z

Recently, the organization Narconon, whose stated mission is "to eradicate the problems of drug and alcohol abuse through effective drug prevention, drug education and drug rehabilitation services," has been in the news for a series of deaths at its flagship facility, Narconon Arrowhead.

A number of articles appeared in the Village Voice, perhaps the most telling being an interview with veteran Oklahoma newsman Bob Lobsinger, whose headline quote about Narconon was, "They Lied Every Step of the Way."

In the first of the Village Voice articles, Tony Ortega, the Voice editor and perhaps Scientology's worst enemy in the media these days, noted that Narconon "is also mired in litigation in Michigan and Georgia, it was chased out of Quebec, and has also apparently given up on the UK."

In the second article, Senor Ortega cited eyewitness accounts that Rena Weinberg, the head of a non-profit umbrella organization called the Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE), had been a prisoner in the concentration camp-like prison for Scientology executives called "The Hole" from at least 2007 to 2012. He also noted that although Narconon was started by Arizona prison inmate Bill Benitez in 1966, when Narconon was incorporated in 1970, "two other people involved in that incorporation were Henning Heldt and Arthur 'Arte' Maren, senior members of Scientology's 'Guardian's Office'."

It's such a small world in Scientology. Before I left in 1996, I knew Arte Maren fairly well, and for a short time in the 1980s, I shared a house with Henning Heldt, his wife Mary, their daughter Letty, and a couple of other people, one of whom was a strange character named Robert Wiseman.

As I read about the recent Narconon deaths (three within a year), and the history of attacks Lobsinger had suffered at the hands of Scientology, I thought about another Narconon-connected death in 1986, of a talented actress who had once been my girlfriend.

As I watched the "Rock Center" segment about Narconon on NBC the night after the Lobsinger article appeared, and learned more about the deaths of Gabriel Graves, Hillary Holten, and Stacy Murphy, the anguish of the stunned parents of the deceased reminded me how I'd felt when Laura Hippe died.

I'd dated Laura for a couple of months in 1985 and she had been pressuring me to move in with her. Preoccupied with plans to take a week vacation with her to talk about it, I went through a Hollywood intersection late one night and my Honda Accord was blindsided by a massive old Chevrolet. I ended up with a totaled car, a broken hand, and learned that my insurance would only pay off the bank loan on the car. Laura graciously took me in and an orthopedic surgeon her mother worked for repaired my hand on credit.

At the time, I made a living as a temp typist in law firms, and with a broken hand I was out of work. So I worked on my writing with one hand as my other hand healed, and I was around Laura all the time, because she taught acting out of her home, which was only half a block from the Celebrity Centre in the Hollywood Hills. She did pretty well, with clients like the then aspiring Damon Wayans. I thought that maybe living with Laura and having a deeper relationship might work, but about the time the cast came off my hand, I learned a well-kept secret. Laura was an alcoholic with a long-term problem.

The revelation came one day when an auditor (Scientology counselor) came to her house with an E-meter to do a check on her, to see if she was drinking. "Watch this!" Laura whispered to me excitedly, then sat in front of the auditor, who asked her a few questions, then said, "Your needle is floating." This meant that (supposedly) Laura was free of her problems. She confided to me when the auditor left that she'd "had" a problem but it was gone. Suddenly, I understand the odd smell of her skin at times, and strange behavior I hadn't understood. She had been fooling me just like she fooled that auditor and the E-meter.

Laura was a talented actress who had been going places, starring in the first movie she went out for, The Swinging Barmaids, directed by Goldie Hawn's ex-husband, Gus Trikonis. (On the poster, that's Laura on the left.) She'd also been in Stay Hungry and Logan's Run, and been the guest star in TV shows like Baretta. She'd been going places, and then she got into Scientology. Once in Scientology she quit taking weight loss pills to stay thin, and her weight ballooned. She admitted to me that she began drinking heavily to kill deep physical pain. She never took this up with a doctor; she tried to handle everything with Scientology.

Laura trained and certified as a "Class IV" auditor at Celebrity Centre, and on the auditing side, advanced through the infamous "Wall of Fire" level, Operating Thetan 3. Given Scientology's promises about these steps on "The Bridge to Total Freedom," Laura should not have had a care in the world. Yet she was an alcoholic.

I tried to help Laura stop drinking, but the disease apparently had too strong a grip on her. Finally, I told her I was going to move out because she wouldn't "handle it" (a Scientology term that dedicated Scientologists, as I was then, use too often when they're frustrated).

It wasn't a very smart thing to say on my part. I knew very little about alcoholism, and even less about Laura's history. Late one night, I came home from work and found Laura out cold on the bathroom floor. I could see an open can of cleaner nearby — I intuited she'd tried to kill herself; her hands were turning blue. I frantically revived her, she threw up some, and the paramedics arrived not long after I called. Driving Laura's car, I followed the ambulance to Queen of Angels hospital and met Laura's mother and sister in the waiting room.

"She's done this before, you know," said her mother, Flora.

I was stunned. I had no idea. Flora informed me that every time a major boyfriend of Laura's left her over the drinking, Laura would try to kill herself. Apparently, she'd been through three or four episodes like this one. I stayed up with Laura 36 hours straight to make sure she made it. She didn't have money or medical insurance and was behind in her income taxes, all of which had to do with $cientology's influence, so she couldn't afford a better hospital. Finally, a psychologist told her a 72-hour mandatory observation period was required.

Laura gasped; if you had psychiatric or psychological counseling, you were ineligible for Scientology. She talked her way out of the mandatory stay, saying it was all just a misunderstanding and she'd been inebriated and thought she was drinking medicine.

Brainwashed over Scientology rules, I went along with it. Once I got her home, it was my turn to nurse Laura back to health, which I thought I accomplished. But then the odd smells and goofy behavior came back. Finally, I told her I was moving out and she went wild, breaking a locked door while screaming at me. I moved out the next day.

I checked in with her after she calmed down, and this time, thankfully, she took steps to deal with things she needed to fix. She lost weight, started looking into paying her taxes, and quit having a friend cancel her classes because she was drunk. (He told students she was sick.) Only then she wanted to date me again. I didn't want that, but I didn't want her to do anything emotionally drastic.

I had moved into the house with the Hennings in Los Feliz and met housemate Robert Wiseman, a plumber who was at the time making a living as a "field ethics officer," helping people with Scientology ethics "technology." Wiseman was volunteering part-time for the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA), where people became "OT," so I thought maybe he could help Laura.

His solution was to get her into the Narconon facility, and she "completed" the program in record time, gushing about how great she felt. Then I discovered she was drinking heavily again. I drove to her house to return a book she'd loaned me and was shocked to see the L.A. County Coroner's brown van on the lawn of Laura's duplex. I walked inside and Wiseman came down the stairs.

"Laura's dead, Skip," he said matter of factly, and I kind of fell apart.

I never found out if Wiseman was dating her (taboo for Scientologists counseling others, but people did it all the time). He left town within a couple of days, and I learned he'd swindled a woman out of her life savings — she came by the house looking for him. An investigation was held by AOLA, and at Celebrity Centre, the framed cover of Celebrity magazine featuring Laura Hippe was taken down from display in the celebrity hallway the next day. They went about trying to erase all evidence she had ever been affiliated with Scientology.

Years later, some anonymous jerk posted on a Web page that after Laura's suicide I had immediately called Heber Jentzsch and he and I and the Guardian's Office (Scientology's hit team, once headed by Henning Heldt) had covered the whole thing up. It was a pack of lies, but what could I do? The Hollywood police department detective confirmed what Mrs. Hippe had told me about her daughter and was very interested about the Narconon connection that had failed.

But as usual, nothing came of it. Scientology never got investigated. What happened with Laura Hippe at that L.A. Narconon facility? I'll never know, just like we'll probably never know the truth about the three recent deaths at Narconon Arrowhead.

As I read about the Narconon Arrowhead deaths on an NBC site, I thought how ironic it was that Laura Hippe had been born in Oklahoma.

I read other articles on Narconon, including one about its past involvement with the Stanley Cup champion L.A. Kings. The article said: "Clark Carr, President of Narconon International, said that in 2005 in California Narconon drug educators gave live, in-person presentations to 142,000 children, lecturing over 500,000 worldwide, as well as holding training sessions with police and other organizations."

I was pretty sure those figures were highly inflated. I'd interviewed Tennessee Williams for a theater magazine Carr had published in the late 1970s. The magazine folded before Carr could publish the interview. I shook my head when I read that Carr was the head of Narconon. As far as I knew, he had no medical training whatsoever, other than what he might have learned in Scientology.

As recent history shows, Scientology "knowledge" about drug handling can be horrifically dangerous. What people need to understand, however, is that the "con" has been a large part of Narconon for a very long time, and it's repeatedly been deadly. Narconon, like Scientology, simply needs to go away.

Sex, Scientology, and Celebrity Centre

2012-07-16T11:30:00Z

Dumped on the streets of Los Angeles in December of 1973 with nowhere to go by the Scientology Celebrity Centre, after being forced to stay up for three days doing "amends" to the great and powerful Sea Organization because of a kangaroo court known as a Committee of Evidence, I realized I knew no one but Scientologists. And they wouldn't talk to me because I'd been cast out and was in a "lower condition of Doubt." (Like the crap I'd been through wouldn't put anyone in doubt about a so-called spiritual organization.)

With nowhere else to turn, I called my mother long distance in Alabama, reversing the charges. She and my stepfather had put me on the highway with nowhere to go prior to my joining Scientology, but maybe she'd help me now. She wired me $50 via Western Union, I bought a ticket back to Austin, Texas where I'd come from the year before, and landed there with only $5 in my pocket, knowing only one friend to see. Luckily, he let me sleep on his couch for a few days until his live-in girlfriend protested.

I visited the University of Texas student bulletin board and, God on my side once again, found a couple of girls looking for someone to take over their large room in a boarding house on Whitis Street. I moved in, meaning I had two weeks free rent and two meals a day until I had to come up with the next month's rent. Walter Cronkite had lived in the house while attending UT, perhaps the very same top front room of the two-story house. I considered this an omen, given my aspirations of a media career.

In a couple of days I found a job working for Superior Dairies as a door-to-door delivery man. I was 23 years old and hadn't had a girlfriend for three years. The best offer I'd had at my ten-month stint at Celebrity Centre was a sneaky homosexual proposition from a Celebrity Centre student akin to the one proffered Mark Wahlberg by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights. Like Dirk Diggler, I turned it down. (It was eerily similar, having taken place in the Mount Olympus neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills.)

When I started delivering milk, I had sexual visions of horny housewives needing a special delivery. I'd seen too many Hollywood '60s movies, I suppose. Nothing ever happened.

As an early morning diversion, driving along empty streets, I practiced trying to mentally change stoplights to green, the way I'd been told Yvonne Jentzsch, the Commanding Officer of Celebrity Centre, could do at will. Finally, I realized they were on a timer and were changing only because I was driving at the posted speed limit.

I bought a bicycle to get around, which came in handy when home delivery was cancelled and I was switched to a big truck, delivering to restaurants and stores in the Austin area. I got a second job running the midnight shift of a 7-Eleven store on Congress Avenue south of the Texas state capitol building. I needed extra money to buy a car, but also to pay off my $1900 "freeloader debt" from Celebrity Centre. You see, despite making only $5 a week for almost a year, working 12 hours a day, though put on the street as a penniless scapegoat, I now had to pay for all the auditing (counseling) and training I'd done while there, because I hadn't completed my billion-year contract.

Sound insane? Of course it was, but at the time I had been brainwashed as all Scientologists are into thinking Hubbard truly had found Heaven's highway, and I'd simply fallen into a ditch.

Speaking of the Sea Organization, I figured something out in Austin. One day at the capitol building I noticed a giant state seal of Texas on one wall. It was almost identical to the Scientology Sea Organization symbol, the one that bore the logo "We Come Back" (suckering in past life believers like me). Given that Mary Sue Hubbard, Ron's wife, was from nearby Round Rock, Texas (I'd delivered milk there), I wondered if "the Commodore" had seen the Texas state seal and been "inspired." But I didn't write him and ask, because I was, after all, Scientology persona non grata, being a debtor and all.

With no car, my self-esteem was shot. I made payments on my debt, worked on my writing, and never asked a single woman out on a date. Then one day I got a letter from Jan Stone at the Celebrity Centre, who asked me to call. When I did, she said, " Yvonne wants you back. She thinks you're a valuable staff member and you got a raw deal."

I told Ms. Stone I'd think about it. This would mean no debt, another shot at the "big time" in L.A., and being surrounded by the highly interesting people who came through the doors of Scientology's entertainment business experiment. Plus, I knew that the sexual mores of Scientologists were pretty loose. For a young, horny 20-something, that was a powerful lure.

The bait got heavier one hot August night on the 7-Eleven night shift. I was reading the magazines with no one else in the store when in walked Dolph Briscoe, the governor of the State of Texas, all by his lonesome. I recognized him when I looked up after exclaiming, "Holy shit, that's Kathy Moore!" He said, "Who's she?"

Bread and milk, that's all he wanted. I took his money while explaining that the cover and the hot "Classic Form" layout in the August issue of Penthouse magazine, with its lovely full frontal nudity, featured a course supervisor I'd known back in Los Angeles.

The governor glanced over the pictures approvingly. "Well," he said as he pocketed his change. "In that case, what are you doing here?"

Amen, Governor! I called Jan Stone back and, like a damned fool, was soon back on the bus for L.A. with a new Martin guitar, my old reliable Olivetti portable typewriter, and a suitcase full of clothes (better than the backpack I'd had the last time).

After getting situated in the attic of a Celebrity Centre house on Beacon Street, I went to the facility to find out what I'd be doing. I was immediately corraled by Christine Macdonald, a lovely married brunette I'd much admired in my previous stay on staff. She put me to sweeping up an empty room. Apparently, Yvonne hadn't figured out the perfect staff position for me in advance. I noticed Chris staring at me intently — was it sexual? I asked what was on her mind.

She asked if it was true what she'd heard about my being a certain famous author in a past life. Obviously, confidentiality of auditing folders wasn't what it was purported to be; I'd never said anything about my assumed past life outside of "session." But to make a good impression on Chris, I said yeah, I was pretty sure that was the case.

"Perfect!" she exclaimed gleefully, then barked at me to keep sweeping up. She hurried off.

I mused that once again I'd probably been snookered by Scientology but like last time, had little money and nowhere else to go. I thought it might be karma. Maybe I'd known Yvonne in my former life and owed her something. I was fairly certain she'd been a close friend of Cecil Rhodes, whom L. Ron Hubbard continually crowed about having been. Until, that is, someone pointed out to him that Rhodes had been a flaming gay; then he shut up about it.

That evening, however, I learned that even being a celebrity in another life had its own cachet at CC. The head of the communications office, a tall, auburn-haired, voluptuous woman named Samantha, came up to me and declared that she wanted to "have a 2D" (second dynamic relationship) with me. That was Scientologese for "I want you in my bed, now!" And that night, my drought was over.

Unfortunately, Sam wanted me for the long-term, the big haul, marriage and forever, after that one night. It freaked me out, and I turned her down. After all, I thought, what if Kathy Moore was available? I thought my male reluctance might mean I'd be put on the street again but no, I was simply berthed back in the attic and — to my great delight — given a job as a "letter registrar" writing letters of procurement to people in CC's Central Files, to get them to come in and take another course or continue moving up "The Bridge to Total Freedom."

Wonder of wonders, I would be making a living as a writer!

The next day, I ran into Kathy Moore, who always walked around with a ballerina's posture and a clipboard clasped under her ample bosom while supervising her course.

"Hey, Kathy!" I said cheerily, walking up with a smile. "Skip Press. I'm back on staff. I saw your layout in Penthouse — that was really special!"

She turned red, frowned, glared at me, turned her back, and stormed away. Apparently, she didn't like the fact of her getting buck naked for all the world to see openly discussed in a space where she was supposedly a supervisor of aspirants moving toward advanced spiritual enlightenment.

And so it began again. In the year to come, I would learn that sex (and easy sex at that) was as much an interest at Celebrity Centre as anything else. I had Catherine Bach, long before she starred as "Daisy Mae Duke" on the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, come in after I complimented her on her beautiful cursive handwriting. She asked me to give her a tour of CC, all the while draping her arm around my waist like I was her long-time lover. I didn't pursue her — she was "public" and I was "staff" and that was taboo. (I soon learned few other staff followed such rules.) I witnessed Rock Hudson come in to try out auditing at the recommendation of his Scientologist manager, Flo Allen, only to bolt from the session when asked a question about any secret he might be "withholding" (like homosexuality). The auditor, Carmine Terra, had recently been in trouble for sleeping with a married woman he'd been auditing. He'd had to work his way out of a "lower condition." In any event, pretty soon a whole lot of CC staff knew about Hudson's gayness long before his AIDS made it known to everyone.

When a few months went by, I moved in with a pretty lady named Cheryl Curran, thus getting out of a berthing situation of sharing a small room with two other guys. Celebrity Centre was becoming more popular, as evidenced by John Travolta being brought in by actress Joan Prather after they appeared together in the movie The Devil's Rain. I'd admired Joan back in Dallas on an afternoon dance show, and thought maybe, just maybe, I'd have a chance when she dumped Travolta after getting him into Scientology, but it wasn't to be. I had talent, looks, and a funny personality, you see, but I didn't have money.

And money, I quickly learned, was what Scientology and the Celebrity Centre were really all about. Pity that it would take me far too many years to fully learn that lesson...

(To be continued with the David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars and other wild notes...)

In Scientology's Salvation Navy, What's One Year Out of a Billion?

2012-07-05T20:30:00Z

In October of 1972, I completed the Communications Course at the Austin Scientology "org" (short for organization, never called churches in those days). I was immediately "routed" to sign up for the $100 Hubbard Qualified Scientologist Course, which I was eager to do. That’s because on the earlier Comm Course I’d had a major cognition (Scientologese for realization) that Lafayette Ronald Hubbard had come here from another planet to save good old Earth.

Had such a thing been suggested to me by staff at Austin? Probably, but I was relieved, because I didn't have to save the world if L. Ron already had it in progress. Earlier that year, you see, in the process of trying to get my head together in a six-month sojourn in Clayhatchee, Alabama I'd realized there must be something missing in all mankind's religions. After all, if someone had one with all the answers, everyone would be in it.

I was a 23-year-old baby boomer ex-hippie; such thoughts were normal then.

On the HQS Course I got into the auditing (counseling) I'd heard so much about. At first I thought L. Ron himself was supervising my progress when a tall redhead with a receding hairline stepped into the course room one night. He turned out to be the man who ran the org, Whit Whittle, a dead ringer for Hubbard. Whit was an Operating Thetan (OT) 7 and a Class 8 auditor — the top status on both sides (auditing and training, respectively) of Scientology's "Bridge to Total Freedom" grade chart. He had studied with Hubbard at the world headquarters in England called Saint Hill. What an appropriate name, I thought, given what Scientology promised. The staff thought Whit was damn near a god.

I didn’t care about godhood. Everything about Scientology I wanted had to do with being a writer. A couple of years earlier, high on mescaline and listening to a Moody Blues song called "Floating" I'd found myself at a party looking at my body from the ceiling. Scientology promised me I could do that all the time, at will, without drugs. “Exteriorize” they called it. Obviously, that meant as a writer I could sit in my room and research anything, by simply leaving my body and going there spiritually with “total perception.”

I was also into the idea of being "super-literate" which was a course that came after HQS. Then there was the original Dianetics idea of being "clear" — totally in control of your mind with no subconscious (the "reactive mind" in Dianetics terms) to mess you up.

Boy, that L. Ron had everything covered! I figured with all those things under my belt, I'd be super-charged to become the successful writer I imagined I'd be!

And then I got subverted. A stack of newspapers entitled The New Civilization appeared in the course room one night. They came from the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, run by Yvonne Jentzsch, a smiling, fairy godmother-looking woman that Whit Whittle had trained with at Saint Hill. I found an ad from Axioms Productions. They were looking for artists, actors, writers, and others to join their advertising agency in Los Angeles—NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY—room and board paid!

Holy Saint Hill, the skies had opened! I asked Doug and Paula Hoisington, a married couple who had signed me up for the Comm Course, if they knew anything about the Celebrity Centre. They said sure, lots of celebrities were into $cientology, that’s why they needed a Centre.

“Like who?” I asked, ever the fly in L. Ron’s ointment.

“Like the Moody Blues!” Doug declared proudly.

This was 1972, the year of the Nights in White Satin album. I loved that lush epic, and for “Floating” reasons was astounded the Moodies were into Scientology. “Can I talk to them?” I asked.

At my insistence — they were trying to sign me up for another course, you see — we called Saint Hill in England and spoke to someone in Division 6, the Public Division of Scientology orgs. No, the Moody Blues weren’t Scientologists, I was told. But the Incredible String Band was, the St. Hill staffer quickly added.

“I don’t like them,” I said. “Saw them at a pop festival near Dallas.”

Undaunted, I used the org phone to call the number listed for Axioms Productions. Although I told Sue McDaniel I'd never actually sold any of my writing, being an HQS graduate who had actually verified a past life as a writer in my auditing I figured I was qualified. She didn't seem to care about that, but she was concerned that I was a Sea Org member. I thought about that a second.

"You mean that pledge thing I signed?"

"Was it a billion-year contract?" Sue asked.

I chuckled. "Yeah, is that it?"

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "We're all Sea Org members at Axioms. Sounds like you should come out here and join us!"

I'd thought the billion-year thing was just some kind of pledge to keep helping Scientology out until everyone on Earth was clear and sane. The way Whit Whittle talked, that would only take a couple of decades. I was more than a little naive. "Well, heck!" I told Sue. "When would you have a job available?"

"Right now!" she exclaimed. "When can you come?"

I felt like I was about to, right there, in my pants. A job in Los Angeles with an advertising company, room and board paid for, writing?! No wonder I'd seen a double rainbow in the sky the first night I arrived to take the Comm Course.

It felt like perfect timing. The carpenter job I’d had was finished and I wasn’t sure where my next job would come from. A trip to Dallas with a couple of Austin registrars (salespeople) had been disastrous when I’d asked an uncle for the money to do the full Scientology “Bridge” and been aghast when they lied to him and told him I was on drugs and Scientology was my only hope.

A week later, I was on a bus to Los Angeles. I arrived late one night and walked several miles, from downtown L.A. to the Scientology Celebrity Centre on 8th Street. I had about $100 to my name, a small suitcase, a guitar, and my portable Olivetti typewriter.

When I got to the Centre, the young QM (a Navy term for Quartermaster, basically the appointed security person) told me it was closed. No, I couldn’t come inside. Since I was new to the Sea Org, I had to report to the Flag Operations Liaison Office (FOLO), which was on nearby Beacon Street. I picked up my stuff and walked over, and before going up the steps I lit up the celebratory cigar I’d purchased at the bus station.

A young man with red hair, making me wonder if he was a Hubbard, sat behind the desk, listening to my tale of arrival. “Why are you smoking that cigar?” he asked.

“Celebrating getting here,” I proudly told him. “Why?”

“Aberrated!” he exclaimed (the Dianetics word for crazy).

He let me sleep on a bench in the lobby. The next morning I was ushered into the office of Peeter Alvet, the head of the FOLO, who told me that I would go to work wherever the Sea Org needed me, not Celebrity Centre or its offshoot, Axioms. I argued I was a writer. Didn’t he see my typewriter? I threatened to go back to Austin. Finally, to my great relief, he said I could be on staff at Axioms after all.

I went back to CC and was told I had to go to “the ship” to train. “Huh? What ship?”

“The Excalibur down in San Pedro. It’s like basic training. You’ll love it."

My heart sank. My stomach churned. I’d never been on a ship. This sounded military. He gave me a short pitch how the Sea Org was like the Salvation Navy, doing what needed to be done to make a real civilization out of the chaos of Earth and helping mankind.

Damn. This billion years sounded more serious than I’d thought.

I met Sue McDaniel and the people of Axioms Productions, who lived in a house on Berendo Street not far from the famous MacArthur Park that Richard Harris had sang about. I left my belongings at the house on Berendo Street and was taken to the port of San Pedro. The next morning I was pounding on rust pits on the deck in the hot sun. They had to be hammered out, sanded down, and repainted constantly. The Excalibur was captained by a fellow named Scott Mayer who seemed to spend more time running around in his dockside convertible than he did with recruits like me.

It was like a weird summer camp where we took Sea Org Basics courses and learned how special we were, there helping L. Ron (now identified as “The Commodore”) fix up these messed-up Earth people. When I was jammed in an upper berth of a triple-decker bunk bed that night, my face a few inches from the ceiling in an old tub swaying in the ocean waves, I didn’t particularly feel special, but I went along to get along.

A couple of weeks later, after completing my courses and helping fix most of the deck, it came time for me to get a “security check.” This was an interrogation by an auditor behind a Scientology E-meter, designed to prove that I wasn’t a government plant with “evil intentions” toward Scientology.

Or something like that. It was tres strange but I wasn’t exactly in a position to call home for help, since I had no home. The fellow auditing me, a skeptical looking chap in a turtleneck named Bill Yaude, whizzed through the questions, telling me I had a “floating needle.” Then he asked: “Have you ever operated under an assumed name?” I thought about it. “Got a read on that,” he said. “Well?”

“Umm. Not recently,” I said.

“What do you mean, not recently?”

“I was thinking of, uh, another lifetime. I had a pen name.”

He looked at the E-meter. “Got a read there. Tell me about it.”

So I did. I sweated, wondering if I’d failed. Maybe I’d get kicked out, put on the streets.

“Needle’s floating,” he told me. And then he checked some more questions, and I apparently passed the audition.

The next day I was driven back to Los Angeles and immediately put to work at the Celebrity Centre. At first, they tried me on the switchboard, the old-fashioned kind that you saw in old movies, where you get incoming calls, pull out a plug, and jam it into the appropriate hole for the person being called. It took me about ten minutes to completely screw that up — I had about five minutes training — so I was replaced by a gay black fellow named Joe Crane, who knew what he was doing. Again, I thought this would be the end of me, but they found me another job, running the snack bar operated by Axioms Productions within the Celebrity Centre.

It didn’t take long to figure out that the income from the snack bar was completely supporting Axioms Productions. So much for the advertising agency I thought I was joining. They didn’t need me as a writer just yet; they were doing already written radio commercials for a new citywide campaign called “Dianetics 73.”

Thankfully, I was a whiz at running the snack bar and soon replaced the regular guy there, a mustachioed local named David Green. I got to know the students and pre-clears and one day was stunned when actress Anne Francis stood in front of me ordering a milkshake. I complimented her on her work in the movie Forbidden Planet and her TV show Honey West and she smiled at me.

Ah, Hollywood! Since the snack bar was in the same space as Division 6 of Celebrity Centre, I was privy to all the news of celebrities being recruited into Scientology. The office of Yvonne Jentzsch, the Commanding Officer of the Centre, was upstairs above the snack bar. So what if I was being paid $5 a week? People got to know me and seemed to like me and, oddly enough, two other guys who people breathlessly informed me had been the same famous author I thought I’d been in another life stopped coming around the Centre. Then one day I quit seeing Anne Francis and asked Bob Mithoff in Div. 6 what happened to her.

“She blew,” he said. That meant she’d quit Scientology. I asked why.

“She read something Diana Hubbard wrote about the purpose of Div. 6,” Bob told me.

“What did it say?”

“That the purpose of Div. 6 is 'to capture and control the public',” he said matter of factly.

“What does that mean?”

“We gotta clear this planet!” he informed me with a gleam in his eye. "That a problem?”

“Guess not. Hope you… uh, we get her back. I like her.”

They never did. It should have been a warning to me, but there was so much I didn’t know. Pretty soon, I was getting more auditing — apparently, it was free for staff. After I got the Drug Rundown Yvonne Jentzsch selected me to be the Treasury Secretary for Axioms Productions. After six months training on the Guardian’s Finance Course I would be in charge of paying the bills and be an executive. I’d be writing checks.

That move would be a route to getting put on the street in Los Angeles, with nowhere to go and no one giving a damn whether I lived or died. There was a great deal to learn about Scientology and, like most, I would have to learn the hard way. In the words of L. Ron Hubbard, I would have to “make it go right.” If I didn’t? Well, he also said, “We’d rather have you dead than incapable.”

I was a member of Scientology’s Salvation Navy until October of 1973. I learned that Axioms Productions was a sinking ship, and I’d signed on when torpedoes had already hit it. I was blamed for their financial troubles, given a Committee of Evidence and assigned an ethics condition of Treason, and forced by “Ethics Officer” Chris Many to stay awake for three days while doing filing in Central Files. That apparently didn’t satisfy them, so I was put on the street with nowhere to go. I called my mother in Alabama, desperate, and she wired me $50 by Western Union. By the time I got back to Austin I had $5 left and only one friend to call.

You’d think I’d have been done with Scientology at that point, but oh no. After another ten months, I’d get suckered in again by a call from Yvonne Jentzsch, and would put in another four years on my pledged billion before being screwed by Scientology all over again.

To be continued...

My Past Life in Scientology

2012-06-27T12:00:00Z

It was a perilous but wonderful time for me in the autumn of 1972. I was a homeless yet blissful nobody, like the line McCartney sang in "You Never Give Me Your Money": “Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go.” I’d arrived in the middle of the night at Austin, Texas, hitchhiking down from Dallas with a backpack, a guitar, a portable Olivetti typewriter, and $249. This was everything I owned in the world, and I had nowhere else to go.

I’d been dropped off on the freeway in Dallas by my mother and stepfather, who wanted nothing to do with me. We’d driven out from Alabama; it was the last time I would see them for half a decade. I should have been scared to death but I’d been in worse situations, mostly due to them, partly due to having been a hippie. I’d been forcefully divorced from my family (which included three younger brothers I loved deeply) twice before, put on the highway with $20 by my mother, and dropped off on the highway near Dallas by my maternal grandfather and my mother's sister. And then there was the hitchhiking across the South. Once, I woke up on the side of a freeway somewhere in Louisiana. I’d slept in the grass the night before and somehow lost my wallet. I had 34 cents in my pocket. How I’d survived, who knows?

Back to Austin. I spent the hours before sunrise in an all-night coffee shop just off Interstate 35, a couple of blocks from the University of Texas campus, dawdling over a breakfast and asking questions of anyone who would listen about places to live. There wasn’t much you could do with $249, but the next morning I found a co-op house a block off Guadalupe Street, the main drag by UT, and I managed to get room and board paid for a month, leaving me with just over $100. I had a carpenter’s hammer, a measuring tape, and a tool belt in my backpack, along with a few clothes. Luckily enough, in a couple of days I found work as a carpenter and started making a living. My plan was to build up some money and start my career as a writer and musician. I’d never made a dime from either activity, but I knew I could if I tried hard enough. I was 23 years old, and utterly naive about how to make it in the world. Then something intervened, in the form of an introductory lecture on Dianetics and Scientology.

When I cashed my first paycheck, I had enough money to buy sheets and a bedspread for the mattress I’d been sleeping on. There was a mall nearby and I hitchhiked toward it to buy the bedclothes. I was feeling pretty good. I was stoned.

Being marijuaned was something different for me. In the previous six months, disillusioned with my hippie friends and a life that had spun almost into oblivion, I had made peace with my mother and stepfather long enough to stay with them in Alabama and work construction and save money. I hadn’t touched marijuana or much of anything — one beer, and a couple of aspirin another time was the extent of my substance abuse. I slept on the couch in the front room of their new FHA-financed house, and when I wasn’t working, I read books about Edgar Cayce and religions. I practiced yoga while listening to ragas by Ravi Shankar on the stereo — but only when everyone else was out of the house.

On to Austin. On that particular Saturday, Jerry, the rich fat kid across the hall who tripped and toked all day while reading science fiction and giving foot massages to the ladies of the co-op house, got me high. I figured why not, it had been a long time; what could it hurt?

Ha! That’s when kickass karma arrived in the form of Mike, an intense strawberry blonde young man in a bad blue suit and horrible yellow tie, behind the wheel of a Volkswagen bug. He asked where I was going and I told him.

“Hey, I’m going to a Scientology lecture,” he said, looking like a dock worker who'd been hit by a two by four. “Ever heard of it?”

I think I shocked him, given the resultant look on his face. “I read that it’s the fastest-growing religion on the west coast," I said. "I read a book called The New Religions.”

“Well, you should go to the lecture with me,” he replied. “It’s free.”

Free was my favorite word, but I envisioned a dozen businessmen in blue suits in a classroom setting, briefcases lined up perfectly by their desks. I was wearing a yellow wife beater tank top (no doubt to match Mike's tie), cutoff blue jean shorts, and sandals. “I don’t think I’d fit in,” I told him.

“Scientology can help you with that,” he said. “You’ll do fine.”

Within minutes, I was at the Scientology “org” (their term for organization) and Mike had disappeared. I was the only person in a back room listening to a lecture about "Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health." Dressed in a tan corduroy suit with a yellow shirt (they loved that color) and dark green knit tie (ditto), bearded lecturer Bill Johonnessen explained to me the structure of the “reactive mind.” It sounded a lot like the subconscious, but who was I to quibble, I was stoned. I listened intently and made mental notes, only once wondering why Bill hadn’t asked whether or not I was stoned. I felt like it was obvious.

Finally he said, “So that’s how it works. Any questions?”

“Well, it kind of makes sense. But what I’m most concerned with is reincarnation. Do you folks believe in that?”

Mr. Corduroy Suit seemed taken aback, as though I was not your average, captured-off-the-street lecture attendee. “Sure,” he said, “but we call it something different. We call it ‘past lives’.”

“How’s that different?”

“It’s not, really. It’s just what we call it."

“Oh. So do you remember any past life you’ve lived? I think I do, and that kind of bothers me.”

“Sure,” he said without hesitation. “I was Chateaubriand.”

“I have no idea who that is,” I replied. “Or should I say, was.”

His face flushed red. I’d apparently committed a past life faux pas. “You know, famous man at the French court. Invented the steak named after him? Chateaubriand?”

“Never had one. I usually eat chicken-fried steak. But that’s interesting, I guess.”

“So what is it about this past life of yours that bothers you? Do you remember a specific identity or something?”

I hesitated. After all, I was still stoned and I'd been reading some of Jerry's fucked-up science fiction before I left the co-op house. Maybe I was tripping on all this? But Corduroy Suit seemed sincere. I’d never mentioned this to anyone but family before, and they’d gone silent when I told them. I shared now with Bill who I thought I'd been, a fairly famous author.

Dianetics Man’s mouth dropped open, the way my three brothers and aunt and uncle had reacted when I’d told them I explained I was going to be a writer because I'd done it before, in another life. That had taken place in a living room in Clayhatchee, Alabama, which was a very strange place to do yoga and talk about past lives.

“Well,” Bill said. “Scientology can help you with that. You should take our Communications Course.”

“How will that help me figure out if I really lived before? I’ve had these flashes of things out of nowhere, and it bugs the hell out of me. Makes me feel like I might be going crazy.”

Johonnesson explained that Dianetics “auditing” (their form of counseling) involved going back in your mind to earlier times, to find out where a problem started. He said I’d get some of that auditing on the second course, the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist course, and then I could find out for sure, guaranteed. But first I had to take the Communications Course, to prepare me for the auditing.

The course cost $35. That was a lot of money for me at the time, but I signed up. Two weeks later, I ended up pawning my guitar and typewriter to afford the course. Two of the registrars from Scientology took me to the pawnshop and collected the money as soon as it was handed to me. They were very insistent, and looked a little hungry.

So on September 26 I was supposed to start the Communications Course. Once again, I hitchhiked out to the Scientology org. I had trepidations, though. I finally decided I wanted a sign from God to assure me this was something I was supposed to do. We were a block from the Scientology place when the guys who gave me a ride began chattering about something in the sky — they’d never seen anything like it. Sitting in the back, I couldn’t see what they were talking about, but when I got out of the car I saw it. In the northeastern portion of the sky, there was a perfect double rainbow, one arched over the other. And along the western horizon at sunset, there were golden flashing lights everywhere. Some kind of storm was brewing.

I walked toward the Scientology course room, convinced I’d been given my sign. Or signs. In the next month, I would get the auditing Bill Johonnssen had told me about, and sure enough, I would find out about that "past life." What I hadn’t told him, though, was that I had something else in mind, a crazy idea. I wanted to find the person said author had married, a woman I was sure was reincarnated anew like me. Out of the billions of people on the Earth, I was determined to come across her and then—I calculated—my life would be magically transformed and the pain of my early years would seem like only minor inconvenience.

Funny thing was, I would achieve that goal, but it would require 16 years in Scientology and a great many more perilous adventures to get there. I didn’t know that on September 26, 1973. I simply knew that I’d received my sign and I had a Communications Course to do. I had no idea about the darkness of Scientology that I would have to experience, like Orpheus going through hell to find Eurydice, but even if I’d known on that rainbow evening, I probably would have remained undaunted, because love will cut through anything, and bring about miracles, and my adventure had begun.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is all too typical of why people of my generation got into Scientology back then. It was a very different time, and no one has ever told that aspect of the lure of Scientology. So here I am to share it with you. It covers a couple of decades, and a number of incarnations.

Is Scientology Trying to Take Over Self-Publishing?

2011-10-21T15:15:00Z

Recently, I was pleased to learn that producer Paula Wagner - a former long-time production partner of Tom Cruise - had optioned a self-published novel to turn into a major motion picture. The book was Internet Dates From Hell by Trisha Ventker.

As I read about the book, I knew that once again Wagner had shown excellent judgment in material, as she had when partnered with Cruise, whose post-Wagner creative selections have not been so sharp. Ventker's story has everything a Hollywood hit needs: a young beautiful woman in New York City who is a kindergarten teacher, hilarious crazy online dating stories, and a happy ending resulting in marriage and relocation to a beautiful former mining town in Colorado. But what caught my eye was the following paragraph:

"The book was published through iUniverse, a self-publishing imprint of Author Solutions, and the deal came out of the author taking part in Author Solutions’ first Book-to-Screen PitchFest. After Ventker got good reaction, the book was brought to Wagner by Author Solutions director of new media Marcus Chait."

I have a best-selling book (for 20 years) about making it in writing and I keep up with new developments. In the latest edition I provide a good deal of information on self-publishing. In addition, I helped start the Hollywood Film Festival and have been a person "fielding pitches" at many a pitchfest. So there were numerous reasons the article caught my eye, but what made me wonder was the name Author Solutions and the name Chait.

As a former Scientologist who helped the church-run Author Services when it started in the 1980s, I wondered if Author Solutions was connected. Author Services started out as a group that would represent Scientologist writers, then when that didn't seem profitable, it turned into an organization promoting the science-fiction novels that L. Ron Hubbard came up with like the infamous Battlefield Earth which was transformed into a bomb of a movie by none other than John Travolta.

If you'll note on the Author Solutions link provided, at the top of the page it states:

Author Services

Every author wants to be published, but everyone has unique needs based on previous publishing experience, reason for writing, personal goals, and available resources. We're here to help.

I wondered if Marcus Chait was related to prominent Scientology financial contributor Izzy Chait, who owns the Chait Gallery in Beverly Hills. Not being able to determine a yes or no on that, I looked at the LinkedIn profile of Marcus Chait (don't blame me if it's gone when you read this) and discovered something very interesting. From May 2008 to August 2008, he was a "Creative Consultant to CEO" of United Artists in Los Angeles. That CEO was Tom Cruise, who split from Paula Wagner that August.

The profile also states that Chait studied psychology at the University of Santa Barbara from 1991 to 1993, so that made me doubt he could be a Scientologist, as Hubbard claimed that all the problems of Mankind stem from psychiatrists and psychologists. So hmm, I thought, was there some kind of oddity going on here, or not? Then I remembered a video I'd seen about a huge new "Dissemination and Distribution Center" for Scientology in Los Angeles - all 185,000 square feet of it.

As I looked at the photoshopped photo of the building it was supposedly housed in and studied the massive facilities depicted in the video (maybe $50 million of equipment), I knew that there was no way Scientology had a need for that much printing of Scientology materials, because the demand just wasn't there. The church already had a publications and audiovisual production facility on Olympic Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Why did they need this one? The building on Badini Boulevard in Commerce, California was where the church had supposedly moved its uniforms facility from Vernon some time back, but looking it up on Google Earth I could see it was indeed huge.

How huge? Well, big enough to have their own U.S. Post Office person working on-site, with the facility "hard-wired" into the government entity, if you believe the video.

I did a bit more investigation and found out there are special padded floors inside, so workers can stay on their feet all day long without getting so exhausted. Since I knew the church was under attack in many countries - Australia, France, Germany, etc. - and that the church facilities in Los Angeles looked relatively abandoned compared to my time in Scientology, what in the world could they be doing to keep those presses going?

Then I took another look at the Author Solutions site and the list of self-publishing houses they'd bought up: AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford, and XLibris among others. Hmmm. I remembered something Tony Ortega of The Village Voice said about tell-all books published by former Scientologists, when writing about Jefferson Hawkins' Counterfeit Dreams:

"Regular publishers won't touch these books -- even though some of them are actually very well written -- so the authors have had to go the self-published route."

True, indeed. Unlike Janet Reitman's attempt at being fair and objective about Scientology (something the church has never done in my experience), dissenters' books like Nancy Many's My Billion-Year Contract, Amy Scobee's Abuse at the Top, and Marc Headley's Blown For Good tell hair-raising, horrible tales about the abuses of many years in Hubbard's pseudo-navy "Sea Organization" supposedly set on saving the world by "Clearing the Planet."

And those current hard-working Scientology staff members, like Owen Varrall (pictured from the video), they'd never defect, would they? After all, Owen completed the False Purpose Rundown a few years ago, Scientology counseling designed to strip away any "evil intentions" a person might have toward Scientology. Heck, with super-clean facilities and comfortable floors, surely those staff will stick around.

I wondered, would he be working on publications other than for Scientology in that huge facility?

Okay, so Author Solutions' funding seems to come by way of Bertram Capital, but who invests in Bertram? Does Tom Cruise or other Scientology celebrity millionaires? How about the massive fortunes amassed by Scientology itself, all tax-free? Where is all that money invested, other than in media real estate they've been buying up lately?

Not being funded by Rolling Stone magazine like Reitman, or The New Yorker like Lawrence Wright, I didn't continue investigating. It just seemed highly curious to me, and a fascinating possible scenario.

- Book company gets a major Hollywood hit movie out of a book they publish, resulting in lots of publicity.

- As a result of the hoopla, aspiring writers all over the world default to said book company for self-publishing.

- Former Scientologists who want to tell their tales find their options highly limited if said book company is prejudiced toward Scientology due to its personnel and/or connections.

- And just maybe, a multi-million dollar investment by a church having tax-exempt status gets earned out when they lease their equipment and/or personnel (working long hours on comfortable floors) to print all those self-published books.

Why, gee, that couldn't happen, could it? Sounds like something out of science-fiction.

I'll be waiting for - as the late great Paul Harvey would say - the rest of the story.

Trembling in Orbit: The Astronaut's Secret

2011-10-15T11:30:00Z

I'm a long-time fan of Kickstarter, "the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world," where millions of dollars get pledged every week. I've donated to projects there and contemplated one of my own. (If you want to know what, email me.)

My latest favorite is The Astronaut's Secret, a documentary put together by Zach Jankovic, a Houston filmmaker whose neurologist father, Dr. Joseph Jankovic, diagnosed astronaut Rich Clifford in 1994 and found early signs of Parkinson's disease.

The film will be a 30-minute documentary about the life of Astronaut Clifford and will examine how he kept his Parkinson’s Disease a secret from the public for 17 years, which included a six-hour spacewalk from the Mir space station, during the 76th Space Shuttle mission, the 16th mission for the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Astronaut Clifford, who is now retired, speaks all across the USA about early detection of Parkinson’s disease. Before his third and final Shuttle flight, only his commander, Kevin Chilton, knew his secret. After the STS-76 mission, Clifford decided to quit flying, not knowing how fast the Parkinson's disease would progress along.

Don't get the wrong idea. According to Zach Jankovic, "The Army was fully informed from day one. His flight physicals were delivered to Army medical each year. The Army conducted a separate evaluation of his condition and flying skills and made no changes in his status."

Clifford was in unknown territory about how it might affect his work as an astronaut. Once, while in space suiting up for his spacewalk, he noticed a tremor in his right hand, a very early sign of the disease. He told Zach that he would try to keep his hand hidden during the remainder of the flight.

During the process of diagnosis NASA kept in close communication with Clifford. Since Parkinson's is a clinical diagnosis, it was a six-month process of elimination to confirm the diagnosis. Anyone concerned about Clifford's condition was in contact with Dr. Jankovic.

The idea of an astronaut with Parkinson's would offer wild possibilities in a Hollywood movie. One can imagine a shaking hand losing some tool that drifts into space, locking the astronaut outside. Fortunately, nothing even close to that happened.

This fascinating documentary covers Clifford visiting NASA to watch the last shuttle launch in 2011 and his reflections on the program. The Kickstarter page had raised $13,305 at this writing, with 34 days to go. If it doesn't reach its intended goal of at least $48,000 in pledges by Friday, Nov 18, 1:45pm EST, the project will not be funded.

If you want to help fight Parkinson's and see this film made, have a visit. Rewards for pledges start as low as $1, going all the way up to $10,000 or more (which includes a three-minute film made about you or your company by the director). Hey, that might put your name in orbit!

Uh Oh, the Nazis are Coming Back -- And They Have Flying Saucers!

2011-10-10T13:35:00Z

For some time now, I've been fascinated by the efforts of a bunch of European filmmakers who have been creating a movie with a grand premise - Nazi scientists who build UFOs at a secret base in Antarctica escaped as World War II was ending and went to the dark side of the moon.

Oh, one more thing... the Nazis are coming back with superior technology and they're going to wipe out the "subhumans." Take a look at their latest trailer, entitled "We Come In Peace."

Heh heh. Sure they will.

The movie's called Iron Sky and it premieres April 4, 2012. (You'd think they would've picked Hitler's birthday, April 20th, but that might have been a little... well, over the top...)

Their CGI is excellent and they've kept subscribers to the website continuously apprised. The latest little teaser is not a YouTube video, however, but a comic book entitled "Bad Moon Rising." Oh brother, is it ever!

Did the Nazis really have UFOs? Well, there's a whole site about it, you decide. Here's a quote from that site:

"The German saucers' are often known also as the 'V-7 legend': this comes from a reportedly circular aircraft named 'V-7' and claimed to have flown in Prague on February 14, 1945.

"These crafts were believed the same 'flying saucers' (later named UFOs) sighted by many people all around the world since 1947. According to the many would-be 'inventors' and enthusiasts of this theory, UFOs would not be of extraterrestrial origin but man-made. They were the ultimate result of the evil Nazi technology."

Here's a frame from the comic. Janos Honkonen does an excellent job of promoting this bootstrap production and in making the YouTube videos.

I don't know about the UFOs, but I do know that the goosesteppers were excellent with the technology - which is why the USA had such an excellent space program initially, thanks to the genius of Wernher von Braun and some of his friends, imported to work for their former enemies.

Yes, the same fellow who engineered the deadly V-2 rockets that bedeviled England helped us get the Apollo astronauts to the moon, ladies and subhumans.

Gee, wonder why they didn't have us check out the dark side of the moon? Hmm...

In the 1980s, I helped with the production of a documentary on Nazi jets and met their top three aces from World War II: Adolf Galland, Gunther Rall, and Johannes Steinhoff (who, oddly enough, served as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1971-1974 and created a controversy by shaking Ronald Reagan's hand during the President's visit to Kolmeshöhe Cemetery near Bitburg, in 1985 during a celebration of the 40th anniversary of V-E Day).

I still laugh thinking about how thrilled "Mackie" Steinhoff was, having scored a big bottle of American whiskey as he left the hotel in Long Beach. "You can't get this in Germany!" he chortled to me. Those hilarious Nazis... oh boy.

I'll let you find the Nazi UFOs videos on YouTube yourself because most of them are posted by "WhitePowerTV8" - eek. The "Iron Sky" videos, I must add, are absolutely not connected with the WhitePower whoevers.

Iron Sky seems like a fascinating movie, and they're financing it with donations and contributions and it looks amazing.

I just hope it's not a documentary!

Spreading a Little Joy with Steve Jobs and George Harrison

2011-10-09T17:10:00Z

You may not have heard of 19-year-old Hong Kong resident Jonathan Mak Long, but you've probably seen one of his designs in the past few days. It's a take on the Apple logo.

I put it on my Facebook profile the day after the Apple co-founder died. When the design is reduced in size to a Facebook thumbnail, it's hard to see the Jobs profile - it simply looks like the famous Apple "bite" Mac aficionados like myself have grown to love.

According to Jonathan, 180,000 people contacted him expressing praise for his design. The number could have been 100 times that if enough people knew who was responsible for the artwork. Even then, he thought the response was simply crazy.

It was nice to see, a "just one more thing" that we didn't get because Jobs wasn't there to introduce the Apple iPhone 4s and new Apple CEO Tim Cook had to do it. I also found it reassuring that, despite the doomsayers about Apple's certain demise now that its resident creative genius has passed on, the new phone is nevertheless a huge success.

Steve Jobs was so forward thinking, he left behind four years of advance planning for the company he loved. That's vision, and thinking of others.

I've observed that the loss we feel when someone passes is directly proportional to the joy they brought us when they were alive. And joy creators cut across social divisions. Steve Jobs was, apparently, an ardent Democrat, with Al Gore on his board at Apple, but the voice of the American right, Rush Limbaugh, made a special point of praising Jobs for everything he'd done. Citing how his fans had criticized him for being an evangelist for Apple products, Limbaugh said:

I talk about Apple and Jobs because I love greatness. I just love greatness. I am fascinated by it. I am intrigued by how it happens. I'm intrigued about every aspect of greatness and excellence, because it's so genuinely rare. It is genuinely rare and exciting, and I am mesmerized by it. I'm inspired by it.

Me, too. Last night I watched Martin Scorsese's great new documentary about George Harrison, Living in the Material World. I subscribed to HBO to see it. It's as poignant and as inspiring as the accounts of Steve Jobs that began rolling out as soon as he passed. And again, the loss I felt when it was over was directly proportional to the joy Harrison gave me.

At the end of the trailer, Harrison says, "People always say to me, I'm the Beatle that changed the most, but really, that's what I see life is about. You have to change."

Isn't that the truth?

After Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer, they got into legal hassles with The Beatles' Apple Corps over trademark infringement. The battles continued, off and on, from 1978 to 2006. On November 10, 2010 Beatles albums were finally available on the iTunes store. It was a happy day for all concerned.

If Steve Jobs and George Harrison were around to leave us with some final words, it might simply be, "Spread joy."

The way Jonathan Mak Long did. It's a lesson we all could learn more often.

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Hollywood Karma Has Long Teeth

2011-09-29T12:45:00Z

I've taught writing formally for 20 years, screenwriting for 15 years, and still offer an online course that was at one point available in 1500 schools. My students have won awards like the Sundance Film Festival Online Viewers Award. I've written a lot of highly successful books like the Complete Idiot's Guide to Screenwriting, and edited others like The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design, which became the bible of video game creation for writers and designers. Now that I've bored you with all that, here's my cautionary Hollywood tale.

In 2009 I was approached by Fred Andrews, a production designer just off a few seasons of Without A Trace. He loved my writing and wanted help with a script he called "Lockjaw." I read it, saw some potential, and spent many hours giving him notes and going over copious amounts of photos and other material. He began calling me his "best friend."

Mistake #1 — I didn't do a contract between us.

I had a producer friend, Paul Mason, who had always wanted a new monster character to build a movie franchise around. I called him and told him I'd found it and he and Fred got together. But I noticed another name on the script - Tracy Morse - and asked Fred to assure me he had the rights. "Oh sure," he said. "Tracy doesn't care, he just wants 10%." It said "based on a screenplay" by Morse on Fred's script.

Mistake #2 — I ignored a big red flag.

Paul takes the script to his buddy Sid Sheinberg at The Bubble Factory. Fred gets invited in. He brings along a clay statue rendition of the new monster. I tell Fred that will sell them on the idea, and it does. The movie gets financed for $2 million, with $500K in production deals from the state of Louisiana where it is to be shot. Fred promises me a job on the set, a part in the movie (maybe), and a part for my young handsome son Haley.

Don't you know it, there's just no room in the budget for all that. No room in the budget for me to receive anything. No moolah, nada. Fred apparently doesn't think it's appropriate to pay me even a finder's fee. Ain't that peculiar, chilluns?

I complain to Paul, who thinks I'm asking him for money, though I'm asking him to talk sense with Fred. Wrangling ensues. Finally, I get an offer to be associate producer, highest ranking of two, as long as I won't go after Fred for money. I decline and let it slide.

Mistake #3 (maybe) — I figure my "friends" will come to their senses. Ha ha ha.

So the movie goes into production. It seems Fred has ignored most of my notes. I'm busy making a living. Then I read some articles about the production. I try email. Nothing. Finally, I decide on small claims court. Almost two years have gone by. I lose - no written contract. The lawyer sitting in as judge doesn't care about my emails, calls, or hours.

Then the movie comes out. "Lockjaw" has become Creature. Tracy Morse has equal credit on the screenplay and gives an interview explaining how it all [cough] worked. Apparently, he didn't think "just 10%" was equitable.

Then karma happens, as it always manages to do. The Hollywood Reporter says the movie has set a new record, for lowest number of paying customers per screen, ever. About six people per theater. It's like the tag line on the original poster for Lockjaw: "Some things are better left alone."

I noticed that my old "pal" Fred hasn't been too happy with the comments that have been made about his first-time director movie. "Bottom feeders"? Oh, really? Thirteen percent on Rotten Tomatoes? Oh, my. And Den of Geek! calls it "arguably the biggest box office bomb of the year." Oh, lawdy, lawdy.

And there you have it, kids. A monstrous little story, ain't it? But that's Hollywood, where people think they can get away with doing the nastiest little things until they discover that - just like in the real world - it always comes back to bite them in the butt.

In the words of Tony Joe "Poke Salad Annie" White...

Chomp. Chomp, chomp.

Kirstie Alley: Scientology Celebrities' Conditions of Confusion

2011-09-28T17:00:00Z

Recently, prior to attending a reading by Janet Reitman of her book Inside Scientology, my date and I strolled down Vermont Avenue in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz, looking at the packed cafes and coffee shops. In contrast, I noticed one large, well-lit storefront was also vacant, save a couple of employees.

"What's this?" I said, reading a sign. "Kirstie Alley's Organic Liasion? It's as empty as a Scientology place these days." It was the Scientology celebrity's new weight loss program.

A passerby stopped and smiled. "It's always empty," she said. "I've never seen a customer in there. They filled it up at the opening, but that's it. And they ticked a lot of people off, too, shutting off the street like they did."

I told my date how I'd met Kirstie in the 80s. That was at a backyard party given by Mimi Rogers, when Mimi was still Mrs. Jim Rogers and a Scientology "field auditor," meaning a counselor operating outside of Scientology missions or churches.

I wasn't sure why I'd been invited other than that the Rogers were getting involved with the Scientology celebrity community. Mimi ushered me to the backyard where a volleyball game was taking place, and there was a tall, gorgeous, barefooted young woman. It was Kirstie, newly arrived from Kansas. I was wowed, but who wasn't that day?

Later, Mimi wanted to see something I'd written. Right then, right now. Odd, but I went to my car and brought back a screenplay "treatment" that had been optioned by a couple of neophyte producers. Mimi and Kirstie stood together, reading it intently. I asked Mimi if she planned to try some acting. (After all, I'd briefly met her when she was 18 at the original Scientology Celebrity Centre, and she was drop-dead gorgeous.)

"Something like that," Mimi said. "That's good," she said, handing me back my work. She and Kirstie walked away.

I next saw Kirstie at the wedding party of Scientologist Cathy Cade. She told me she was studying acting. I had a feeling. "You're going to be big star," I told her. She grinned and said, "Wow, I hope you're right!" The guy she was with glared at me. More time passed, and a mutual friend took me to a taping of Cheers at Paramount. I reminded Kirstie of what I'd told her. She didn't remember.

I next saw her at the screening of the movie Allie & Me, made by my friend Michael Rymer. Her boyfriend James Wilder was one of the stars. I was married then, and my wife and I sat directly behind Kirstie and James. I asked if she remembered me: Skip Press, the writer?

"Oh, the photographer," she said.

"No, I've always been a writer," I replied.

She shook her head. "Oh, I'm sure you were a photographer," she said.

I let it go. She was probably thinking of Scientologist and celebrity photographer Dick Zimmerman, whom I resemble, but why bother? The movie was about to start.

And back to now. The next day after the Reitman talk, my date and I looked up Organic Liasion on the Web. I had to laugh at one of the links to Phitter - "Giving Phitness a Phacelift" - a discussion site put up as a "gift from Kirstie Alley and Organic Liasion." It was typical of Scientology; invent words to make a subject seem special.

I'd been explaining a lot of things about Scientology to my date, including "ethics conditions formulas" which supposedly allow Scientologists to improve any kind of condition (including body image) at any time. They are (in ascending order): Non-Existence, Danger, Emergency, Normal, Affluence, and Power. Below Non-Existence were "negative" conditions often used as punishment (in descending order): Liability, Doubt, Enemy, Treason, Confusion. I said that Kirstie's business was almost in Non-Existence in Scientology parlance, and if she didn't improve business, it would become a Liability, she'd go into Doubt about it, etc. I suggested Kirstie had probably applied a lot of those conditions in her weight loss battles.

We found a video about the opening of the store on Mark Bunker's XenuTV on YouTube. At about two and a half minutes in, Scientologist actor Ethan Suplee of the TV show My Name Is Earl explains to Bunker that no matter what he hears about Scientology he won't look it up, even if someone sends him a direct link. Then Juliette Lewis arrives, chides Bunker a bit, making little sense, and stalks off. Another woman says she's confused about Bunker.

"You were wrong about that condition," my date said, laughing. "Kirstie's in Confusion. Don't you think they all are?"

I couldn't disagree, because when I found out what Scientology was really about - making money no matter who got hurt - I left. And I quit hanging around with actors who work overtime at letting Scientology keep them confused. When people complain about actors not being very bright, I just shake my head, and I often think of those I knew while in Scientology, many of whom still remain... confused.

Exclusive: Scientology's Big Gay Problem, Part 3: Was Founder L. Ron Hubbard Bi-Sexual?

2011-09-23T21:05:00Z

Here and there after leaving Scientology, I would be told or read things that allowed me to continue to connect the dots about L. Ron Hubbard, such as the "Babalon Working" 1946 sex magic ritual that Hubbard participated in with Jack Parsons, rocket scientist and fellow follower of Aleister Crowley. As described by Richard Metzger in Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult:

Parsons used his "magical wand" to whip up a vortex of energy so the elemental would be summoned. Translated into plain English, Parsons jerked off in the name of spiritual advancement whilst Hubbard (referred to as "The Scribe" in the diary of the event) scanned the astral plane for signs and visions.

Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard

The ritual is, by every description I could find, homosexual in nature. Aha, I thought. Finally I had an explanation to Hubbard’s apparently lifelong crusade against homosexuality.

When I learned that fine artist Michael Pattinson (whose work is one of the favorite pieces in my house) had left Scientology after completing the highest available “level” of OT8 (described as “Cause Over Life” at the time I got involved), I was thrilled. I knew Michael had battled with the organization over his homosexuality for years, and it pleased me to know he would now be free of that.

By then, I thought I had figured out most of the neuroses and psychoses of Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. In the fifteen years since leaving Scientology I had studied quite a bit about hypnosis, psychology, and religion. It became clear to me that Dianetics was simply altered abreaction, which Carl Jung referred to as "trauma theory.” I could see that elements of the beginning courses of Scientology such as the Training Routines where people sit across from each other at a comfortable distance and gaze at each other without flinching, were hypnotic in nature, as was “auditing.”

Black magic and the Parsons ritual explained, I concluded, Hubbard’s homosexual problem. He was embarrassed, and didn’t want that found out.

And then someone gave me a manuscript, a very well researched, very thick manuscript, that chronicled Hubbard’s life from start to finish. I’d never read anything like it, and I learned it was deeply sourced. It opens with some scenes aboard the USS U.S. Grant, a transport ship that had originally been a German ocean liner. Ron Hubbard and his mother were on that ship in the autumn of 1923 enroute to Hampton Roads, Virginia from Seattle via the Panama Canal. There was another person onboard who would become very influential to young Ron’s life, Commander Joseph Cheesman “Snake” Thompson (below left) who was a San Francisco psychoanalyst and career medial officer in the U.S. Navy. Thompson died in 1943 at the age of 68. As Wikipedia states:

According to the Church of Scientology, Thompson "took it upon himself to pass on the essentials of Freudian theory to his young friend." Hubbard himself later said that through Thompson's friendship, "I attended many lectures given at naval hospitals and generally became conversant with psychoanalysis as it had been exported from Austria by Freud." Another Scientology text says that Thompson spent "many an afternoon in the Library of Congress teaching L. Ron Hubbard what he [knew] of the human mind."

This means that when Thompson was spending a lot of time with young Hubbard, Thompson was 48 and Hubbard was about 12. That to me seemed a bit odd, as did the fact that when Thompson died, although he was married, he left $10,000 to his Siamese Pak Kwai Mau (“White Devil Cat”).

But back to the manuscript. In one scene, Thompson invites young Hubbard (right) to his stateroom, and teaches him about hypnotism. One thing about L. Ron Hubbard is certain - he was a master hypnotist. And then Thompson teaches Hubbard about something else - sex - and young Ron goes along, because there is much to learn.

As I’ve outlined, auditors talk. Hubbard received a good deal of auditing during his time in Scientology and despite the church’s claim that Scientology auditing is completely confidential, it is not. In previous years, I might have doubted writing that claimed young Ron Hubbard had sexual relations with “Snake” Thompson but Hubbard’s own words convince me otherwise. Specifically, Hubbard’s “affirmations."

I met author Omar Garrison while still on staff at the Celebrity Centre. He wrote The Hidden Story of Scientology, which was a favorable account, and had been hired to write the definitive biography of L. Ron Hubbard. The problem he encountered was that, the more he dug into the facts, the more he was convinced that Hubbard was crazy. This led to Scientology staff member Gerry Armstrong forming the same conclusion, and Armstrong escaped Scientology with some of Hubbard’s own highly incriminating documents. Consider this entry, an “affirmation” Hubbard wrote about his own sexuality:

"I have a very bad masturbatory history. I was taught when I was 11 and, despite guilt, fear of insanity, etc. etc. I persisted. At a physical examination at a Y when I was about 13, the examiner and the people with him called me out of the line because my testicles hung low and cautioned me about what would happen if I kept on masturbating. This "discovery" was a bad shock to me."

Armstrong worked with Hubbard's personal archive in 1980 and 1981 and provided the biographical above material to Garrison. In 1984, he read portions of them into the record at the in Scientology v. Armstrong trial, Los Angeles Superior Court, Case No. C 420153. One result of the trial was that Judge Paul G. Breckenridge, Jr. described Hubbard as a "pathological liar."

Was Hubbard (left, e-metering a tomato) lying when he wrote that someone “taught” him to masturbate at age 11?

Or was he telling the truth? If so, who taught him? Did Hubbard feel violated about that, and harbor a lifelong, even subconscious hatred for the person who had also taught him hypnotism and the psychological methods that would later be called Dianetics, and thus make homosexual masturbatory sex rituals with Jack Parson seem like no big deal?

Whatever the real truth may be, it remains that Scientology has a big problem with homosexuality, and it goes all the way back to its founder.

Paul Haggis was disgusted with it. How little he knew.

Exclusive: Scientology's Big Gay Problem, Part 2 - Unraveling the Homosexual Hostility

2011-09-23T01:00:00Z

The following is part two of our mini-series on Scientology's long-time stance against homosexuality, its discriminatory practices against gays within its ranks, and how founder L. Ron Hubbard's own early sexual "experiences" may have unduly affected his view on homosexuality.

Outing and Ousting

I’d been a fan of TV’s Laugh-In and one of my favorites had been Lily Tomlin. One night I was in the office of Division 6, the part of the Centre responsible for bringing new “public” into Scientology, when a woman named Eileen Zee burst in, crying. A number of us tried to calm her down and found out that her boss, Lily Tomlin, had been hitting on her and Eileen was afraid of losing her job. So Lily Tomlin was a lesbian? Well, I thought, that’s just Hollywood.

Ultimately, Eileen didn’t get Lily into Scientology, which the Division 6 staff had been coaching her on doing.

John Travolta’s sexuality has been questioned in the media for years, but while on staff, I never heard anything about it. He’d been brought into Scientology by actress Joan Prather, someone I’d had a mad crush on in high school, when she appeared daily as a go-go dancer on a TV music show out of Dallas. I figured if Travolta (right, using e-meter) was dating Prather, he was quite a lucky guy.

Later, when the Centre was on La Brea in Hollywood, I talked to Travolta once and had no inkling there was anything gay about him.

But I had worse things to worry about in 1977, when many Scientology executives like myself were told we had terrible spiritual problems and “evil intentions” against Hubbard due to items that had shown up in our auditing sessions. We were told we could either go work on the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF) to get all fixed up spiritually, or be banished. I joined the RPF long enough to figure out that this event just happened to coincide with Scientology purchasing the former Cedars of Lebanon hospital on Sunset, and that we were a slave labor force there to fix it up.

I took my exit from staff and found out that I wasn’t banished after all. I just had to pay for all the auditing and training I’d received in four years, which added up to around $15,000. To the shock of former staff members, I ended up on a game show and won almost exactly that amount in cash and prizes. I wrote a radio script and sold it, helped start a magazine, and within a year, I was an up-and-coming personality in Hollywood and a celebrity in my own right.

That’s when I met Paul Haggis and we began a writers group of Scientologists at the Celebrity Centre, one that ran for years. As I became well known as a professional writer in the Scientology community, people began to explain things to me that I had only wondered about before.

For example, while on staff at Celebrity Centre I’d found out about John McMaster (left), Clear #1, who had been an amazing ambassador of goodwill for Hubbard in the early years. (Hubbard said McMaster was “the first real clear.”) I couldn’t find much material on McMaster, so I asked questions, and one night the top auditor at Celebrity Centre explained it to me.

“He’s not around any more,” he said curtly. “He’s gay.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Homosexual,” came the explanation. “1.1 on the tone scale - Ron hates homosexuals. Didn’t you read Science of Survival?"

Once off staff, I found out people had loved McMaster, but he apparently couldn’t stand the homophobic hostility and irrational behavior displayed by Scientology’s founder. He left the organization in 1968, only to be “declared” a “Suppressive Person” by Hubbard. Yvonne Jentzsch had been tight-lipped when I’d asked her about McMaster, but she told me that he had “gone PTS” (become a Potential Trouble Source, meaning someone under the influence of a Suppressive Person, or “SP”). She did reveal though, that McMaster had invented the Power Processes of Scientology, a precursor to “going Clear” on the “Bridge to Total Freedom” Scientology chart of progress.

I learned that Hubbard had made McMaster the "Pope" of Scientology in 1966, but McMaster protested some of Hubbard’s crazy behavior and they grew apart. Maybe it was when Hubbard imprisoned a 4-year-old child in a chain locker on board the Scientology “Sea Organization” ship Apollo, after chewing up one of Hubbard's papers. Or, perhaps it was when McMaster was forcibly thrown into the ocean (which Hubbard called “overboarding”) and struggled in the water with a broken collarbone for hours.

Post-Scientology, McMaster told an interviewer: “I saw that he was in it for the money and personal power, and his actual intentions were not as stated. The basic function of auditing is a wonderful thing, but Hubbard perverted it."

Perverted? The way homosexuals supposedly operated?

Ron Rules Rhodesia

One of the more compelling audiotapes that staff members and Scientologists would refer to in those days was “Ron’s Journal ’67” in which he said:

“In 1966, knowing that the world would not go on forever without war, and knowing that it might be very advisable for us to have all of our materials in a safe repository, I went down to southern Africa in order to establish an area where this could be effected.”

Specifically, it was Rhodesia (LRH in Africa right), and what Hubbard left out of the story was that he had tried to take over the country of Rhodesia based on his personal charm and Scientology “technology.”

I’d asked Yvonne Jentzsch about that, because she’d told me she had nursed “Ron” back to health after he did the mental/spiritual research in developing the vaunted “OT3” (Operating Thetan, Level 3, thetan being the Scientology world for spiritual being coined by Hubbard from the Greek word “theta” meaning “life”). Supposedly, Hubbard had broken his back while breaking through the “Wall of Fire” psychic traps put in place by space aliens and had confided many things to Yvonne.

Okay, so it sounds nuts to the normal person, but Scientology was layered on you bit by bit, and the more encapsulated you became in the community, the more likely you could believe the next bit of balderdash. Besides, Yvonne Jentzsch, like McMaster, was highly likable and since she had three kids she wasn’t a lesbian, so why shouldn’t I believe her?

In the Scientology community, I was known as a writer after being off-staff for little more than a year. I’d been on national TV, I knew people in Hollywood, and people came to me with stories.

One such acquaintance, John Ausley, had been married to Paulette Ausley, the person in charge of the Qualifications Division of Scientology worldwide, reporting directly to L. Ron Hubbard. Paulette had been responsible for the “tech error” that had supposedly allowed all the southern California executives to be sent to the RPF, only to have it “discovered” by Hubbard about the time the renovations on “the Complex” (the former hospital) were being completed. John’s sister, Liz Gablehouse, was Hubbard’s personal Public Relations Officer. So I figured he knew what he was talking about.

Since more than one Scientologist had told me Hubbard was certain he had been Cecil Rhodes (the man who gave the country its name) in a former life, I asked John about a picture I’d seen of Hubbard (left) standing smugly, hands on hips, on the tomb of Rhodes. Had he tried to take over the country because he’d once de facto ruled it as Cecil Rhodes? Ausley laughed.

“Ha! He quit talking about that,” he said. “He got kicked out of the country because he was kissing the butt of Ian Smith, the Prime Minister, and people could see right through him.”

“So he didn’t think anyone would believe he’d been Rhodes?”

“Nah. He used to brag about that on the Apollo, then one night Kima Douglas said, ‘Sir, did you know Cecil Rhodes was a flaming homosexual?’ Never heard him mention it again.”

Kima Douglas, shades of Yvonne Jentzsch, had nursed Hubbard back to health on the Apollo after he ignored staff warnings and went riding his motorcycle dockside on a rainy night in a Mediterranean port and crashed horribly. I’d known that much about her, but hearing that she’d shut Hubbard up about Rhodes made me laugh, though I was still a somewhat loyal Scientologist. (I wasn’t laughing later when I found out that Cecil Rhodes had been instrumental in the Boer Wars in Africa, where the British established concentration camps that killed tens of thousands of people. Shades of the RPF...)

Quentin Hubbard's Suspicious Suicide

This prompted me to ask John Ausley about John McMaster, and he confirmed the good things I’d heard from others about the man. We also had discussions about the death of Hubbard’s son Quentin who was reportedly - like McMaster - a master auditor, much beloved, and gay. Ausley grew agitated discussing the situation, because he’d seen Quentin yelled at by his father, which in Ausley’s opinion had more to do with Quentin being gay than anything else.

I’d met Quentin (right) briefly but never thought about his sexuality, only found him to be quite affable and admirable in the way he (as Scientology royalty) conducted himself. On October 28, 1976 he had been found - as the story went - in Las Vegas, slumped over the steering wheel of a Pontiac parked near the McCarran Airport, a possible suicide attempt. Admitted to the hospital as a John Doe with no identification, he died two weeks later.

A few years later, a Scientologist named Cathy McCoy, who had met Quentin when he visited the Scientology organization in Sacramento, told me that Quentin was not gay, that he was bisexual if anything, and that he had been driving to California to be with her after leaving staff at Flag (the Scientology base in Clearwater, Florida).

A few years after that, I was dating Nikki Merwin, secretary and best friend to Mary Sue Hubbard, on the Apollo at the same time as the Ausleys and Liz Gablehouse, and she told me that Hubbard had considered his son an embarrassment and that Quentin’s death at the age of 22 would be bad “PR” for Scientology. (She later told me that Hubbard’s main reaction to his wife going to prison, taking the rap for him in “Operation Snow White,” was over her being strip-searched. Not exactly a font of compassion, that Hubbard.)

In recent years, one of my kids was a good friend of a son of the late Joe Lisa, one of the Scientology “Guardian’s Office” operatives dispatched to Las Vegas to “handle” Quentin. There were many oddities about how Quentin had been found, shocking to anyone who knew how Quentin usually comported himself, but the most shocking to me was hearing how someone had entered the hospital room, unplugged the IV, and put the “embarrassment” out of his misery.

It took many years for me to get to the point where I knew anything was possible with Hubbard and Scientology.

John Travolta Gay Rumors and LRH's Web of Lies

When I met John Ausley he was an aspiring writer and came to me for advice, which I readily gave him. We would talk about what various Scientologists were doing in Hollywood, and a big disappointment to both of us was John Travolta’s movie Moment by Moment with Lily Tomlin. We were both of the opinion that it came across as a gay guy trying to pretend to be in love with an older lesbian, as though both of them were straight. The movie was panned by everyone, and flopped at the box office.

Scientologists I knew would often discuss with me whether Travolta was gay, despite the girlfriends I knew he’d had. I knew that one of his managers, the late Bob Lemond, was gay. I knew Travolta’s auditor who helped him through illness and upset on the set of Urban Cowboy, who I was fairly certain was at least bisexual.

But I didn’t care! Why should I? If Rock Hudson could entertain me all those years playing straight, what did it matter?

What did matter to me was hypocrisy, and as the years went on I saw more and more of it from L. Ron Hubbard, with stories revealed to me by people who knew him very well, such as his long-time agent, the somewhat legendary (particularly in science-fiction circles) Forrest J. Ackerman.

I received a number of early Dianetics and Scientology books from a woman who had been Hubbard’s babysitter in Phoenix, who quit because of his explosive temper. I learned from more than one source that Hubbard’s stories of being crippled and blinded after World War II were an outright lie - they’d been in the hospital with him at Oak Knoll Hospital in Oakland. He wasn’t at all blinded or crippled, I was told, but he was a giant pain in the ass to staff. I met a man who told me stories of Hubbard from Hollywood parties pre-Dianetics who would give him a ride because Hubbard was too broke to own a car.

And then in 1996 I had my own split with Scientology, after being accused of having “withholds” from the organization. By then I was married with a couple of kids, flourishing as a writer, and not terribly active. My wife read the book A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack and I followed suit, then I told Scientology I was through. A couple of people in Scientology Navy suits showed up unannounced in the middle of the night and tried to “dead agent” Atack (defuse his claims), starting with the accusation that he had been a heroin addict.

“A heroin addict like Chick Corea, you mean?” I asked. (I’d been to a giant party thrown by Paul McCartney with Chick and some other people, and knew things about him.) “Or Nicky Hopkins?” (I’d been roommates with Nicky while putting on plays at the Celebrity Centre.) My knowledge of the backgrounds of these prominent Scientology celebrities and other things helped shut down my want-to-be handlers.

They left and I never heard from them or Scientology again.

Photo credit: Lermanet.com

Exclusive: Scientology's Big Gay Problem, Part 1 - LRH's War Against Homosexuality

2011-09-20T18:05:00Z

The following is part one of our mini-series on Scientology's long-time stance against homosexuality, its discriminatory practices against gays within its ranks, and how founder L. Ron Hubbard's own early sexual "experiences" may have unduly affected his view on homosexuality.

Objection and Defection

Paul Haggis' (two-time Oscar-winning writer/director) now well-publicized defection from the Church of Scientology came about for numerous reasons.

As he outlined in his letter of departure: a) Haggis has two lesbian daughters and supports gay and lesbian rights, b) an employee of the San Diego church signed Scientology's name to a petition supporting California’s Proposition 8, which denied gay and lesbian couples the right to legally wed, c) he had expressed his displeasure to church spokesman Tommy Davis and been told something would be done but Haggis felt it had not, and d) Haggis claimed that his daughter Katy was ostracized by Scientologists after she revealed she was a lesbian.

Although Tommy Davis claimed there was no such prejudice in the church, Lawrence Wright pointed out in his February 2011 New Yorker article about Haggis and Scientology that when he examined recent copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, the definition of "sexual pervert" included homosexuals and lesbians.

Haggis had other major problems with Scientology despite his 35-year membership, not the least of which was that his wife, actress Debbie Rennard, was ordered to “disconnect” (completely shun) her parents when they left Scientology.

Rennard’s own membership rivaled Haggis in time spent; prior to marrying the moviemaker, she had a long relationship with the late film director and acting coach Milton Katselas, whose acting classes at his Beverly Hills Playhouse formed a literal feeder unit for the Scientology Celebrity Centre for decades. Many well-known stars like Anne Archer, Catherine Bell, Jenna Elfman, Priscilla Presley, and Giovanni Ribisi studied there (although Ribisi was born into a Scientology family).

What most people reading Wright’s article did not know is: Dianetics and Scientology, and the gay and lesbian lifestyle have been at odds since the beginning, because of none other than Lafayette Ronald Hubbard.

Whenever the subject of gays and Scientology comes up in conversation, it is inevitable that someone in the know will point out that Scientology celebrities rumored to be gay cannot leave Scientology because their “pre-clear folders” (the notated record of counseling session, recorded by hand as it progresses) would be exposed to the public at large, thereby ruining a gay or bisexual actors’ chances of getting straight leading roles.

Would that happen? It was certainly true in years past, but who knows in this day and age.

In December 2010, openly gay actor Rupert Everett (My Best Friend’s Wedding) told the BBC he barely worked for almost a decade, only to finally move back to England. He depicted Hollywood as “an extremely conservative world” that only appeared to be liberal. Still, sexual orientation hasn’t exactly slowed down Neil Patrick Harris (whose Smurfs movie hit #1 this year) or Sir Ian McKellen. It also hasn’t prevented Gus Van Sant from making movies, kept Ellen DeGeneres from having a hit TV show, or stopped Jane Lynch from hosting the 2011 Emmy Awards.

Would Scientology try to use confidential “priest-penitent” information against a defector? Maybe.

Is there a general prejudice against gays and lesbians within the Scientology community? Yes and no. If you’re a celebrity, generally there is not, because celebrities give a lot of money to Scientology and are used in promoting the church established by L. Ron Hubbard in 1953. If a celebrity leaves Scientology, though, or even if they stray, it can be quite different.

Confessions Revealed, Loose Lips

Full disclosure - I’m completely heterosexual, and single. I’m also a former Scientologist, with a long association at the Celebrity Centre, both as a staff member who worked closely with the Centre’s founder, Yvonne Jentzsch, and as a “public person” afterward. On the other hand, I did not spend the kind of money poured into Scientology’s coffers by people like Tom Cruise or John Travolta, so even though I fit the Celebrity Centre definition of a celebrity, I was never treated like one.

The first time I encountered the breaking of confidentiality of Scientology auditing information was when Don Baaska, a jazz musician who was at the time Celebrity Centre’s Senior Case Supervisor, stunned me with a comment.

The Senior C/S in any Scientology facility is the person in charge of the application of “standard technology” (Scientology done exactly as Hubbard outlined) to every person receiving Scientology “auditing” (counseling). That includes complete confidentiality of what transpires in any “session” and all Scientologists are admonished not to discuss their own “case” (mental problems they’re using Dianetics and Scientology to conquer) outside of session. Naturally, the stipulation is even more rigorously applied to “auditors” (counselors), and C/Ses should never discuss what transpires.

Nevertheless Baaska, after I mentioned Scientology celebrity musician Jimmie Spheeris (brother of movie director Penelope Spheeris) getting a new recording contract, groused to me that Spheeris would probably blow the money on partying that included homosexual exploits. Baaska said it had been on ongoing problem. I knew Jimmie a little, knew members of his band better (they included some Celebrity Centre staff members), but I had no idea he was gay or (more likely as I learned over the years, bisexual).

It was only the beginning; in the years that followed in my Scientology adventure, I learned that confidentiality of information within counseling sessions was largely a myth.

In those days, the mid-1970s, the Celebrity Centre located on Eighth Street between downtown Los Angeles and MacArthur Park was a bohemian enclave of many out of the mainstream ideas. When I arrived, there were three people who claimed to have been Mark Twain in a previous life.

The brother of actor Stephen Boyd confided to me that Yvonne Jentzsch has been Bodhidharma in a past incarnation, and before the Centre moved to a new home at 1551 N. La Brea in Hollywood, artist and calligrapher Bruce Bishop got hold of “Hymn of Asia” - a piece Hubbard had written to try to impress a Buddhist convention - and turned it into an impressively illustrated book. (Hubbard hadn’t impressed the Buddhists, maybe because in the book he alluded to being the reincarnated Buddha.)

I’d grown up in small Texas towns where homosexuals were almost non-existent, but I was open to examining any idea. I was also naïve; when a film editor taking a class at the Centre asked me to hang out on a Saturday night, I had no idea he was gay until I got in the car with him and he propositioned me, and then I got out.

Despite Don Baaska’s comment, Scientologists seemed accepting of just about anything in those days, and I didn’t sense a “gay problem” despite what I read in Hubbard’s book Dianetics:

"The sexual pervert (and by this term Dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of deviation in dynamic two such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc., and all down the catalog of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically… he is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also far from normal and extremely dangerous to society…”

(Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health, Book Two, Chapter 5, p. 120 - “dynamic two” being the sex and family part of the eight “dynamics” or means of survival in life that Hubbard devised, reminiscent of Buddha’s “Eightfold Path.”)

Even worse, in Science of Survival, the follow-up to Dianetics, Hubbard outlined a numerical range of emotions that he dubbed “the tone scale” that ranged from -3 at the bottom (death), to +4 at the top (enthusiasm). According to that chart, "perverts" such as homosexuals, were at the level of “covert hostility” or 1.1:

“At 1.1 on the tone scale we enter the area of the most vicious reversal of the second dynamic. Here we have promiscuity, perversion, sadism, and irregular practices."

(Science of Survival, Book One, Chapter 18, page 116.)

Rock Hudson Narrowly Escapes

It was odd, because I didn’t see any examples of such perversions or irregular practices (whatever those were) in Jimmie Spheeris or other people who were openly gay around Celebrity Centre, such as classical pianist Mario Feninger and his boyfriend Ian Brooks, or Scientology auditor and “ethics counselor” Margaret George, a very butch older woman who drove a Corvette, smoked continuously, and seemed to have a penchant for young blonde lady Scientologists. I also never heard any complaints about gays and lesbians.

One day, however, the Centre was abuzz because Scientologist Flo Allen, a talent agent whose best friend was Scientologist Marion Wagner (divorced from actor Robert Wagner), had brought in her famous client Rock Hudson for an introductory auditing session. Hudson didn’t last long - I saw him leaving in a hurry and asked why he was upset. No one would tell me but later, his auditor Carmine Terra explained that Hudson had hit upon a homosexual “withhold” (undisclosed transgression against a moral code) and wouldn’t reveal it, so he bolted. This was many years before Hudson contracted AIDS and created worldwide headlines by “coming out.”

It was quite a surprise to me to learn that the man who had starred in so many movies opposite Doris Day actually liked guys, but the longer I was around Celebrity Centre, the odder life in Hollywood seemed to be. And when the organization moved its headquarters to Hollywood, there would be many more revelations to amaze.

Coming tomorrow: Part 2 of TMR's exclusive report: "Scientology's Big Gay Problem: LRH's Lies and Secrets Unravel"