Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [135]
Most artists dabbled only briefly in Scientology: Rock Hudson reportedly had a single unsuccessful auditing session. Others spent a significant amount of money on courses and auditing before opting out. Don Simpson, for example, said in a 1993 interview that he'd invested $25,000 in Scientology in the 1970s before he realized that, though nearly Clear, he'd seen very little improvement in his life. "At that point, I realized it was a con," he said.
Yet there were others who embraced Scientology. The jazz musician Chick Corea, who joined the Church of Scientology in the late 1960s, referred to L. Ron Hubbard as an "inspiration" and claimed that Scientology was a major influence on his music. Karen Black, an Academy Award–nominated actress who starred in such films as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, maintained that Scientology helped her portray characters more authentically.
But Scientology's biggest catch of the 1970s was John Travolta, who was just twenty-one when he joined the church in 1974. Newly arrived in Los Angeles, he was in many ways the ideal quarry: sensitive, naive (a mediocre student, Travolta left high school after tenth grade), and prone to frequent bouts of depression. He'd been given a copy of Dianetics while shooting his first movie, The Devil's Rain. Soon after, he paid a visit to Celebrity Centre.
There, like many initiates before him, Travolta found a ready-made community. He also found guidance, in the form of officials like Chris Many, who counseled the actor during the early stages of his career. "We'd talk about film and TV and what he wanted to do next, and how Scientology could help him achieve his goals," Many recalled. Travolta would later credit Hubbard's techniques with helping him overcome his crippling fear of rejection. "My career immediately took off," the actor wrote in a personal "success story" published in the book What Is Scientology?
But Travolta was cautious when it came to promoting Scientology in the broad way that L. Ron Hubbard had envisioned. "I talk about it when it's appropriate," the actor told the writer Cameron Crowe in a 1977 interview, adding that he realized that many people got "upset" by the idea of Scientology. "Only if [people] ask me, do I talk about it."
And it wasn't just Travolta who was reticent. "There was a lot of skittishness among the celebrities to talk about Scientology," said Many, who became the captain, or executive director, of Celebrity Centre in the mid-1970s. "That was really the great irony in all of this. Hubbard's whole idea was to help artists become more successful and influential so they'd disseminate Scientology on a wide scale. But since Scientology was looked at as a cult at this time, there was a lot of concern, particularly among actors, that being vocal about Scientology might have a negative impact on their careers."
Celebrities did prove willing to promote Scientology's social agenda, however, which could often be done without ever mentioning the church. The use of social reform groups to spread L. Ron Hubbard's ideas had long been an integral part of Scientology, and was in fact one of the original objectives of the Guardian's Office. Since the late 1960s, the church has disseminated its philosophy through a number of organizations with hidden ties to Scientology, notably Narconon, a program that treats drug addiction and promotes Hubbard's holistic detoxification regimen, the Purification Rundown.
Created in 1966 by William C. Benitez, a former inmate at Arizona State Prison, Narconon was intended to help people break addictions without the use of alternative drugs like methadone. Benitez had reached out to Hubbard after reading his book The Fundamentals of Thought, and in 1970 the founder of Scientology helped incorporate Narconon as an organization that would use his purification program in the secular world. Over time, it would also assimilate core elements of Scientology teaching, including study technology, the TRs (Training Routines), and Hubbardian "ethics."
By the