Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [60]
These girls, the children of Scientologists, as it turned out, were called the Commodore's Messengers. Many of them had grown up on the Apollo, having been sent by their parents to serve in the Sea Organization. As the youngest people on the ship, they'd been deployed at first as go-fers, running messages to and from L. Ron Hubbard and other members of the crew, but over time, Hubbard began to rely on the Messengers as his personal caretakers, and as his eyes and ears.
DeDe Reisdorf, one of Hubbard's favorite Messengers, was thirteen years old when she arrived on the Apollo in 1971, with her sixteen-year-old sister, Gale, and her parents, Charles and Pauline Reisdorf, longtime Scientologists who'd joined the church in the 1950s. Most of the girls on the ship were also in their early or middle teens—the oldest, DeDe recalled, was perhaps seventeen. Many were there without their parents (Charles and Pauline Reisdorf departed the Apollo in 1973, leaving their children behind). "I hated it at first," recalled Gale, who served as a lookout on the ship and also as a steward to Mary Sue Hubbard and her daughter Diana. "I cried almost every night for two or three months. But then I just accepted it, and it became my life."
Messengers washed and ironed Hubbard's clothes, laid out his pajamas, prepared his bath, helped him dress, attended him while he ate, and took careful notes on every minute of his day. When Hubbard slept, two Messengers waited outside his door in case he happened to need anything (at which point he'd bellow, "Messenger!"). Messengers lit his cigarettes, and when he walked around on deck, two would accompany him at all times: one person carrying his ever-present pack of Kools, the other holding an ashtray to catch the droppings.
Messengers also parroted Hubbard's words, mimicked his tone of voice, and spoke for him. The job, as Gale explained, was to "pass on what he said, exactly, and then report back how the person responded—exactly." Jeff Hawkins recalled several occasions when, asleep in his bunk, he was awakened in the middle of the night by the small hand of a Messenger laid gently on his chest and the words "The Commodore wants to know ..." He would then be expected to spring to attention and answer the question, after which, he said, "they'd say 'Thank you' and fade away into the night."
As "emissaries of the Commodore," Messengers were addressed as "sir." Eventually they would be given their own org, the Commodore's Messenger Organization, with their own hierarchy, and ultimately they held almost as much authority as the Commodore himself. Among the privileges allowed the Messengers were the right to enter any room (except Hubbard's) without permission, the right to view anyone's private case folders or personal auditing files (except Hubbard's), and the right to be disciplined or given orders only by a higher-ranking member of the Commodore's Messenger Organization or L. Ron Hubbard himself.
The Messengers, as Hubbard's envoys, were dispatched on assignments that ranged from finding out why a certain engine had failed aboard ship to discovering why a Scientology organization's statistics happened to be down. It was extremely demanding: even at thirteen or fourteen years of age, they were not allowed to return until they had solved the problem. While many referred to their service to the Commodore as fantastic training for jobs they'd hold later in life, they also admitted that they'd ceased being children the moment they entered his employ. The Messengers worked long hours, got time off only occasionally, and received hardly any education. "We had three hours a day of reading, writing, and arithmetic—nothing else," said Karen Gregory, a Messenger who came on board the Apollo when she was twelve. Their teachers were other Sea Org members—"no one in particular"—and often a person who lacked training as an educator. The students showed up if they wanted to; rarely would a Messenger be punished for not doing her homework, Gregory said. At the age of sixteen, they were allowed