Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [113]
Scientologists knew better than to ask what happened to a member who went Type Three, which was not to say that church insiders were unaware of how psychotic breaks were handled. "Without question, most seasoned Sea Org members are aware of what is done to a person when someone is declared PTS Type Three," said Nancy Many, who was based in Clearwater in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though she never took part in an Introspection Rundown, she was well aware when they were occurring, as she often saw guards posted outside various hotel rooms at the Fort Harrison. "I'd ask them why they were there and they'd tell me that a member had just gone Type Three and needed to be watched," she said. As a church official in charge of external relations, "I'd see Telexes come in from other organizations all the time, reporting that someone had gone Type Three and needed to be 'fixed.'"
What that meant, she understood, was very specific, not only for the person suffering the breakdown but also for the organization. "The worst thing that could happen would be that someone would lose it and cause a lot of work for staffers, which would cause the organization to lose money," she said. "You wanted to get these people isolated and away from the org and its income lines as fast as you could."
In October 1989, one Scientologist, thirty-one-year-old Marianne Coenan, suffered a breakdown and was confined in a ranch house in a well-do-to section of Pomona, California, by her husband and family, who were all church members. Two months later, the police received a tip and went to the house, where they found Coenan locked in a sparsely furnished room, behind a bolted door "into which a small, square opening was cut and steel bars had been inserted" as an observation grate, according to one report in the Los Angeles Times. Authorities described her as "incoherent," with "bruises and scratches on her legs, wrists, and neck." Scientology material was found in the house, including information about the Introspection Rundown. A church spokesman insisted that Coenan's treatment "was not a church matter ... nor did the church take any stand with relationship to her treatment."
With Lisa McPherson it would be different. That a newly minted Clear, someone "in control of their own mind" by Scientology's own definition, could suffer what by all appearances seemed like a total mental breakdown on a public street in Clearwater, the heart of Scientology's spiritual empire, was not only a situation that needed "fixing" but also a potential public relations nightmare for the church, and particularly for the Flag Land Base, the highest-grossing organization in Scientology. "This is not what the members pay $100,000 or more to get," said Many. "There are many, many Scientologists who have moved to Clearwater to advance on the Bridge and are regularly paying big money to Flag. You would never want them knowing that one of these high-ranking people just went crazy."
But there was also another reason McPherson's breakdown caused such a fuss: according to several former church officials, it had been Scientology's leader, David Miscavige, who'd declared Lisa McPherson Clear to begin with.
For the better part of 1995, Miscavige was in Clearwater, where he was working on his project to "remake the face of Flag," as one former official put it, through the Golden Age of Tech. To do this, he involved himself in every facet of the base's daily operations, issuing streams of orders that staff were expected to follow exactly, and right away. "In the Sea Org, if you get an order from Dave Miscavige, everything else in your entire life stops until that order is complied with and he accepts it as done," Marc Headley, a former Sea Org member, told me in an interview. Headley was based at Scientology's Golden Era Productions studio on the Int Base but was sent to Flag in 1995 to oversee the installation of new audiovisual systems. As he recalled,