Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [70]
"It was the reactive mind," David Miscavige later explained during an interview with the St. Petersburg Times. "From that moment I knew, this is it," he said. "That is the point in my life where I said ... 'I have the answer.'"
Ronald Sr. was also convinced that Scientology offered answers, and before long he'd enrolled his entire family in Scientology courses at the local mission in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. In 1971, he took his children out of school and moved the family to England, where they began advanced training at Scientology's world headquarters at Saint Hill. For the sheltered boy from the Philadelphia suburbs, moving to Sussex was a drastic change and would mark the end of his childhood.
There were many kids at Saint Hill in the early 1970s, many of them the children of Scientologists. Hubbard, who encouraged parents to look at their children as men and women whose bodies simply hadn't attained full growth—"big thetans in little bodies," as some parents said—had never established rules about when a child could or couldn't be audited, go to work, or audit others. A precocious overachiever, David Miscavige learned to audit when he was twelve. By thirteen, he was counseling people two or three times his age and, some recalled, giving security checks to senior Scientology executives. There was nothing for kids to do at Saint Hill other than work or study, but even so, David seemed unusually driven, recalled Neville Chamberlin, the onetime crewman on Hubbard's Apollo. Chamberlin, who left Scientology in 1982 and later became an outspoken critic, had returned to England in 1979, and he met the Miscaviges soon after they arrived at Saint Hill.
They struck him as a dysfunctional family, particularly Ronald Sr., a notorious flirt who was reputed to have a violent streak. But David, still severely asthmatic, "was completely motivated to make something of himself," said Chamberlin. "I remember seeing him outside the auditing rooms one day, leaning, back against the wall, just desperately trying to catch his breath. He was on the way to give someone a session, and he was just standing there, holding his client's folder, trying to get it together before he went into the room. He was thirteen or fourteen."
By the time he was fifteen, David Miscavige had returned to the United States with his family. Now a sophomore in high school, he was, like many children raised in Scientology, enamored with the idea of helping L. Ron Hubbard clear the planet. It was a goal that didn't necessarily jibe with his new life as a tenth-grader, and Miscavige would later tell friends in Scientology that he hated school and couldn't wait to leave. He was shocked by the level of drug use among his peers and was quite sure of what he wanted to do with his life. Anything he still needed to learn, he reasoned, he could discover by working for the Church of Scientology as a member of the Sea Organization.
On his sixteenth birthday, April 30, 1976, Miscavige dropped out of high school, and with his parents' blessing signed a billion-year Sea Org contract. Shortly afterward, he was dispatched to Scientology's new land base in Clearwater, Florida, where he was trained as a Commodore's Messenger. Ten months later, he went to join Hubbard and his group in La Quinta.
Miscavige was