Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [133]
"I could brush off my cognitive dissonance with the other Type Threes I had known of in the past, as they were all very low in Scientology. But here was someone at the top, the end of the Bridge, on my doorstep, wanting to kill herself," said Many.
As a young Sea Org member in Boston, Many helped spread the church's anti-psychiatry agenda by putting up fliers that encouraged people to report malpractice by local psychiatrists and mental hospitals. "I thought I was doing something to help mankind. I never asked myself what Scientology had to put in its place—nothing," she says.
PART IV
Chapter 13
The Celebrity Strategy
MORE THAN FIFTEEN years since the death of Lisa McPherson and over seventeen since Scientology won tax exemption, the church's embattled legal history seems, at least on the surface, a thing of the past. Most people today do not think of scandal when they think of Scientology; they think of celebrities, and this is the fruit of a carefully plotted marketing and PR strategy. Compared with all the other tactics the church has tried (many of them eventually abandoned), this one has reaped lasting, even unparalleled success.
Recruiting the famous has long been a central strategy of the Church of Scientology, dating back more than half a century to a program known as Project Celebrity, which Hubbard launched in 1955 with the specific aim of converting luminaries in the arts, sports, management, and government—people he dubbed "Opinion Leaders"—in hopes that they'd become disseminators of church doctrine. As he stated in Scientology's Ability magazine, "There are many to whom America and the world listens. It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefiting from it were to mention it now and then."
Hubbard drew up a list of high-profile targets, urging Scientologists to choose one of them as their "quarry." They included Ernest Hemingway, Edward R. Murrow, Marlene Dietrich, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Greta Garbo, Jackie Gleason, Cecil B. De Mille, and the publisher of Time magazine, Henry Luce, among others. Hubbard issued precise instructions: "Having been awarded one of these celebrities, it will be up to you to learn what you can about your quarry and then put yourself at every hand across his or her path." And he implied that it wouldn't be easy, since the celebrities were "well guarded, well barricaded, over-worked, aloof quarry." But if Scientologists succeeded in bringing one in for an auditing session, Hubbard promised, they would be rewarded with a small plaque.
No one on Hubbard's original list ever became a Scientologist. But his hopes of drawing in high-profile members never waned. By the late 1960s, with Scientology controversial in both the United States and abroad, Hubbard began to refine Scientology's appeal to the elite by opening special churches, known as Celebrity Centres, to cater to artists and other prominent individuals, as well as their friends, family, and any other members of their entourage. In 1969, Yvonne Gilham, one of Hubbard's top Sea Org lieutenants, came to Los Angeles to open the first Celebrity Centre in a former appliance store on West Eighth Street, near MacArthur Park. The small organization hosted cocktail parties, open mike nights, and poetry readings, and though it was located in a seedy part of town, it soon became a fashionable hangout for artsy Scientologists and their friends. "It was as close to a bohemian Scientology center as you could imagine," said Nancy Many's husband, Chris, a former Scientology executive who began working at