Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [178]
Suddenly, he asked, "Who knows what 'musical chairs' means?"
Several people raised their hand and stammered out Scientology's particular definition: "A constant transfer of workers from one job to another."
"No, fuck you," Miscavige said. "What else?"
"It's a game," someone finally said.
Miscavige, it turned out, had called them all to this meeting to play musical chairs, albeit with a twist. He explained that when the music stopped, whoever didn't get a chair would be offloaded from the base.
The officials went silent.
"You guys have fucked with me for the last time," Miscavige said.
The leader ordered that a large boom box be brought into the conference room, and when it arrived, he popped in a CD of Queen'sGreatest Hits. Freddie Mercury's operatic tenor led off with "Bohemian Rhapsody": "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?" Slowly, people began walking around the circle of chairs. Marc Headley, now an executive, couldn't believe he was doing this. He took a quick survey of the players: among the nearly seventy officials were Miscavige's onetime deputy Greg Wilhere, and another top lieutenant, Mark Ingber; there was the OSA chief, Mike Rinder, and also Marty Rathbun and the CMO executive Tom De Vocht. The music stopped. An old-time member of the Sea Org who probably hadn't left the base in twenty years lost his chair. Then the game continued and a second person was gone.
What did Miscavige really mean by "offload"? Headley, who was eliminated after a few rounds, decided it could mean a number of things: Some people, the lucky ones, might be moved to another organization; those whom Miscavige considered more serious offenders might be sentenced to a remote Rehabilitation Project Force in, say, New Zealand. Others might be handed a few hundred dollars, put on a bus, and kicked out altogether. Most of the people on the base had no family outside Scientology. Where would they go? What would they do? Few had credit cards or bank accounts; even fewer owned vehicles. The base was all they knew.
Headley watched as friends who'd worked together for years battled it out for a chair. By the time the number had dwindled to twenty, people were throwing one another against the walls, ripping seats from one another's hands, wrestling one another to the floor.
Finally, just four players remained. Miscavige changed the music to Mozart's Requiem Mass. Greg Wilhere grabbed Mark Ingber and threw him aside—one down. Lisa Schroer, one of Marc Headley's colleagues, bested Wilhere in racing for a seat—now he was gone too. It was between Schroer and Wilhere's wife, Sue. The women walked around a single chair for what struck Headley as an eternity. The music stopped. Schroer won. The game was over.
"Do any of you animals have anything to say?" Miscavige asked. No one did. It was 3 A.M. The leader confined all seventy people to the conference room and ordered them to sleep under the tables. Food was delivered from time to time. A few days later, they were told that Miscavige had decided not to offload anyone after all.
***
For Marty Rathbun, who'd spent the game of musical chairs quietly looking out the window "trying to distract myself," as he said, Miscavige's threats were nothing new. After twenty years as the leader's deputy, Rathbun, like Tom De Vocht and several other senior officials of the Church of Scientology, had grown almost used to DM's bizarre behavior. Virtually every meeting with Miscavige involved an element of fear: the initial summons required that those called to it drop whatever they were doing and sprint to the assignation place; there they would wait until the leader, who'd often be playing Nintendo in his private lounge, decided to show up.
He would arrive flanked by his wife and Lou Stuckenbrock, a retinue of aides, and, often, his beagles. He had five dogs, two of which, Jelly and Safi, wore