“Honey, I can’t really talk,” Taylor said. She told Edwards that she was in the Los Angeles complex. “I’ve been specially selected to do a program that will help me,” she explained vaguely. She said she had an urgent favor to ask—a print of the film.
That was a problem. The movie was being shown around the world and all the prints were out. The only one available was Travolta’s personal copy, but Edwards said she would make the request. “Johnny said if you ever called and needed something, just do it,” Edwards assured her.
“You can’t tell John about this call!” Taylor said.
“I’m going to have to tell him,” Edwards replied. “I’m going to have to ask him to borrow it.”
The next time Taylor was allowed to call, Edwards told her that Travolta had agreed to loan Taylor the print, under one condition: that he could see her. The missionaires conferred with their superiors. They decided that as long as Taylor got the print, she could meet Travolta for dinner on the Sunday night after the screening.1
Travolta followed up by sending flowers, which were delivered to Taylor in RPF.
The screening took place on Saturday night in Scientology’s Lebanon Hall. It was a high point for everyone, all the more so because it was followed by a disco dance. Across the country similar dances were taking place, inspired by Travolta’s passionate performance.
Taylor wouldn’t be a part of it, however. As soon as the movie was over and the credits were rolling, several Scientology executives, including Yvonne’s former husband, Heber Jentzsch, escorted Taylor to an office and told her to call Travolta and cancel their date for dinner the following night.
“I can’t do that!” Taylor said.
“There have been all sorts of efforts to recover him, and we can’t let you get in the way of that,” Jentzsch told her. “Call him right now.”
“It’s after midnight!”
Travolta was furious when he heard what she had to say. “We had a deal!” he said.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“How could you do this?” he demanded. “How could you leave your baby?” For the first time in their relationship, he raised his voice. “My mother died, and you weren’t there!”
Taylor began to bawl so hard she couldn’t speak. She recalled that Travolta was asking questions she couldn’t answer, questions she had been afraid to pose herself. He seemed to know what she was going through. “Unless you killed somebody, which I don’t think you did, there’s no reason for you to be where you are,” Travolta told her. He had never said an unkind word to her in their entire relationship, and his frankness was devastating.
“I’m doing this so I can be better!” Taylor sobbed. “So I can help you more.”
Meanwhile, Jentzsch was jabbing his finger at her and mouthing the order to hang up the phone. She quickly said good-bye and set the phone in the cradle. Then she was escorted back to RPF.
All that night she cried and cried, but when the sun came up, she was flooded with clarity. “I am so fucking out of here!” she decided. “I don’t know how, but I’m getting out.”
It wasn’t obvious how she could escape. She had been placed in RPF in March; now it was September. There hadn’t been time to plan because she was working constantly. She didn’t know where to turn. It didn’t occur to her to call her parents because she was so apprehensive that she might bring shame on Scientology if anybody knew what had happened to her. In any case, she was forbidden to speak to anyone outside the RPF, even to other Sea Org members. And even if she did escape, she realized, she actually knew very little about what was going on in the world. Since she had joined Scientology at the age of fourteen, she had never read a book that hadn’t been written by L. Ron Hubbard.
Taylor managed to slip away to visit her ten-month-old daughter in the Child Care Org across the street. To her horror, she discovered that Vanessa had contracted whooping cough, which is highly contagious and occasionally fatal. The baby’s eyes were welded shut with mucus, and her diaper was wet—in fact, her whole crib was soaking. She was covered with fruit flies. Taylor recoiled. The prospect of losing both her unborn baby and her daughter seemed very likely.
She finally conceived a plan. Explaining to her guards that she had to telephone the doctor, she managed a brief call to Travolta’s office and asked Kate Edwards to meet her the next day at a certain time, giving the address of the Child Care Org. She hung up without even hearing Edwards’s response.
The next day she was allowed a brief visit to the nursery. Taylor put an extra diaper in her purse. She had four dimes, all the money she had in the world, and a toothbrush. Fortunately, Edwards arrived, right on time.
Taylor explained to her Scientology escort that Edwards was her sister-in-law who had come to take Vanessa to the doctor.
“Is this approved?” he asked.
“Oh, absolutely!” Taylor opened Edwards’s door and handed her the baby. Edwards stared in bewilderment as Taylor loudly told her to call as soon as she found out what the doctor said. Then, under her breath, she added, “Kate, when I shut this door, please drive away as quickly as you can.” Edwards nodded, then Taylor jumped in. Edwards hit the gas.
“Spanky, no!” the escort cried.
Taylor hadn’t planned any further than this.
She was still dressed in a man’s black boiler suit, with the sleeves and legs rolled up. Edwards fetched some clothes from her mother that would fit Taylor’s emaciated frame and picked up some diapers for Vanessa, then checked them in to the Tropicana Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard. Taylor finally called her husband in the Guardian’s Office. Another executive picked up the line. “Spanky! They’re looking for you everywhere! Where are you?” he demanded.
“I want to talk to Norm,” she said.
“You need to come back!”
Taylor said she would call back at eleven that night. This time, her husband answered.
“Are they there?” Taylor asked him.
“Yes.”
She hung up. After an hour or two, she called again. He said he was alone. She told him she was out of the church and not going back. The baby was safe, she said. Norm wanted to meet, and Spanky finally told him where she was. She realized their marriage was probably over, but she felt she owed him that. Norm came over to the Tropicana and they spoke for several hours.
The next morning at nine there was a knock on the door of Taylor’s hotel room. Three Sea Org executives were there to haul her back to RPF.
Taylor still believed in the revelations of her religion. She worried that her salvation was at stake. But she was also gripped with fear that her baby and her unborn child were in mortal danger.
At first, she was firm in telling the men that she wasn’t coming back. “If you lay a hand on me or my child, I’m filing charges!” she cried. They assured her they just wanted to talk. They told her that they hated to see her be declared a Suppressive Person. She would be cut off from any other Scientologist—nearly everyone she knew. There was a proper way to “route out,” they reminded her. Eventually, Taylor agreed to return to the office to file the paperwork that would allow her to leave the Sea Org on good terms and still be a Scientologist.
As part of the routing process, Taylor was given a confession to sign detailing all the “crimes” she had committed. She glanced at the document. Some of the actions cited were drawn from her preclear folders, things she had confessed to her auditors that were supposed to remain confidential. She knew how it worked; she says she had once been assigned to go through members’ folders and circle any “evil intentions” toward Scientology. Sexual indiscretions or illegal acts were always highlighted. These would be forwarded to the Guardian’s Office to be used against anyone who threatened to subvert the church. If the crimes weren’t sufficiently damning, Taylor came to learn, scandalous material would simply be manufactured. She signed her confession without really reading it. Later, she was given her bill.
The theory of the “freeloader’s tab” is th
at people who join the Sea Org don’t have to pay for the cost of auditing and the coursework to move up the Bridge. The truth is that there is never much time to take advantage of such instruction. Taylor had been in the Sea Org for seven years, however, and the bill for the services she might have taken amounted to more than $100,000.
Just before she left the office, the executive handling her case was called away for a moment. Taylor took her confession off his desk and stuffed it in her purse. When she finally left the building, she tore it to pieces.
WHEN HUBBARD FOUND OUT Yvonne Gillham was dying, he sent her a telex asking if she wanted to keep her body or move on to the next cycle. She decided it would be quicker just to let go, but she still wanted the auditing. Hubbard agreed to let her travel to Clearwater, to do an “end of cycle on her hats”—meaning that she would brief her successor at the Celebrity Centre before she died.
Hana Eltringham was stationed at Flag, and she was shocked at the sight of her dear friend. Yvonne was dizzy and frequently lost her balance, and her thoughts trailed away. She refused to take pain medication because it would interfere with her auditing. She tearfully blamed herself for the terrible “overt” of dying and deserting Hubbard. She was desperate to see her children, to say good-bye, but they were kept away.
Hubbard designated Elizabeth Gablehouse, one of Yvonne’s closest friends, to talk to her about the celebrities in her care—who was a reliable speaker, who was good at recruiting other celebrities. Yvonne talked about various people—some television actors, a Mexican pop singer, the producer Don Simpson, Karen Black, Chick Corea, and Paul Haggis, among others—but she was particularly worried about Travolta. “Please help him. He’s especially sensitive,” she said. She advised Gablehouse to deal with the celebrities the same way she treated Hubbard—very delicately, and with an open mind. Gillham died in January 1978.
Spanky Taylor’s son, Travis, was born that March, weighing less than three pounds, although he was carried to full term. (Both of Taylor’s children are alive and healthy today.)
Many former Sea Org members found their departure from the church to be tangled in confusion, panic, grief, and conflicting loyalties. Many still cling to a relationship with the church, sometimes for years, like Taylor, or for the rest of their lives. The coda to Taylor’s story is that a year after leaving the Sea Org, she traveled to Houston to meet with Travolta. He was filming Urban Cowboy at the time. On her own initiative, she came to “recover” him for the church. She had heard that he was having problems in his life, and she worried that her own troubles had prevented him from turning to the church for help. It was also possible that if she brought Travolta back into the fold, her standing in the church would be improved.
Like most celebrities, Travolta had been shielded from the church’s inner workings. The scandals that periodically erupted in the press about Hubbard’s biography, or his disappearance, or the church’s use of private investigators and the courts to harass critics—these things rarely touched the awareness of Scientology luminaries. Many simply didn’t want to hear about the problems inside their organization. It was easy enough to chalk such revelations up to religious persecution or yellow journalism. “There are two sides to the story, but I don’t know both sides,” Travolta blithely said when he was asked about Operation Snow White. “I’m not involved with that.” In any case, for someone like Travolta, who was so publicly associated with the church, it would be hard to just walk away. He had been asked to declare himself publicly, and he had done so, again and again.
The star was staying in a private house in Houston. He and Taylor met in the evening, after dinner, over a plate of chocolate-chip cookies that she had brought. She explained that she had left the Sea Org and was with her children now, then quickly changed the subject and asked about him. He described the problems he was having.
Former Scientologists have given conflicting accounts of Travolta’s stressful relationship with the church at that time. The church hierarchy was desperately concerned that their most valuable member would be revealed as gay; at the same time, the hierarchy was prepared to use that against him. Bill Franks, the church’s former executive director, told Time magazine that Travolta was worried that if he defected, the church would expose his sexual identity. Jesse Prince has stated that Travolta was threatening to marry a man, although that wasn’t a legal option at the time. In Franks’s opinion, the church had Travolta trapped. At one point, the star sought assurance from Franks that his private confessions wouldn’t be used against him. “My sessions are protected, right?” he asked Franks. In truth, intelligence officers inside the church had already been directed to gather material—called a Dead Agent pack—that would be used against Travolta if he turned.
In Houston, however, Travolta told Taylor that he didn’t really feel that he needed to be recovered—he was just taking a break. However, Taylor did persuade him to buy a costly package of auditing so that he could get back on the Bridge. He had stopped his coursework after completing OT III.
After that, Taylor received a letter from Hubbard saying, “Well done.” The founder asked if there was anything she needed. She asked nothing for herself, but begged Hubbard to do a “Folder Error Summary” on Travolta, in which the founder would personally review all the star’s auditing over the years to spot any mistakes—a tremendous honor for any Scientologist. A Messenger assured her that it would be done.
Not long afterward, however, Travolta stopped talking to Taylor. She got a call from Priscilla Presley, who asked what was going on. Presley had run into Travolta and he said that they should get together. “I’ll call Spanky,” Presley had told him.
“No, don’t go through Spanky,” Travolta said.
When Spanky heard this, she realized she had been declared a Suppressive Person. Nobody had bothered to tell her, but from now on, no Scientologist would be allowed to talk to her.
Taylor never tried to speak to Paul Haggis again, worried that she might compromise his relationship to the church. For his part, Haggis had no idea what had happened to Spanky. He wondered why she had just disappeared. But Scientologists were always drifting in and out of his life. Sea Org members, even friends like Spanky, might be suddenly posted somewhere else without explanation, or assigned to Clearwater for advanced training, or sent to a secret Sea Org base where they were rarely in contact with the outside world. That might explain her absence. He didn’t inquire. He readily identified with the church’s narrative that Scientology was being victimized by an intolerant and uncomprehending press, self-serving politicians, careerist bureaucrats, and reactionary police agencies looking for headlines. By publicly defending Scientology, he took on the great burden of scorn and ridicule routinely directed at the church; and in that way, he also allied himself with persecuted minorities everywhere: he was one of them.
If he had known that his friend had been declared a Suppressive, Haggis would have had a difficult choice to make. It was one he would face soon in any case. In 1983, Haggis’s writing partner on the TV series Diff’rent Strokes, Howard Meyers, who was also a Scientologist, decided to follow a splinter group led by David Mayo, who had been one of the highest officials in the church. Haggis told Meyers that he couldn’t work with him anymore. Because Meyers was the senior writer on the show, Haggis resigned and went looking for other work.
* * *
1 Travolta’s attorney denies there was an agreement to visit Spanky in exchange for his personal copy of Saturday Night Fever.
5
Dropping the Body
Hubbard never lost his interest in being a movie director. He wrote innumerable scripts for Scientology training films, but he still thought he could take over Hollywood. He had particularly high hopes for one script, “Revolt in the Stars,” that was based on one of his novels. Inspired by the thunderous success of Star Wars, Hubbard worked on the script in 1979 with the legendary acting teacher Milton Katselas with the aim of having it made into a feature film.
A jo
urneyman theater and film director before taking over the Beverly Hills Playhouse, Katselas had directed the 1972 film Butterflies Are Free, starring Goldie Hawn and Edward Albert (Eileen Heckart won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role). He was a vital link to the Hollywood celebrity machine that Scientology depended upon. The list of his protégés included Al Pacino, Goldie Hawn, George C. Scott, Alec Baldwin, Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Gene Hackman, George Clooney, and many other now-familiar names. His invitation-only Saturday master class was seen by many young actors as a portal to stardom. He attained OT V status and was one of the most profitable sources of recruits for the church, receiving in return a ten percent commission on the money contributed by his students. At one point, Katselas asked if he could join the Sea Org, but Hubbard told him it was more important to continue doing what he was doing.
When Katselas and Hubbard finished the script of “Revolt in the Stars,” Hubbard dispatched one of his top Messengers, Elizabeth Gablehouse, to Hollywood to make a deal. After the Moroccan adventure, Hubbard had appointed her his Personal Public Relations Officer. Gablehouse came from a moneyed background, and she knew how to talk about finances. She shopped the script around and found a buyer willing to offer $10 million—which, at the time, would have been the highest price ever paid for a script, she was told. The Guardian’s Office became suspicious and investigated the buyers, who they learned were Mormons. Hubbard figured that the only reason Mormons would buy it was to put it on the shelf. Gablehouse wound up being sent to the RPF, and when she balked at that, she was demoted even further—to the RPF’s RPF, alone, in the furnace room under the parking garage of the Clearwater base. The script never did get made into a film.
Hubbard’s location was a deep secret. Scientologists who asked were told he was “over the rainbow.” Meantime, a full-fledged movie studio, the Cine Org, was set up in a barn at Hubbard’s La Quinta hideaway. With his usual brio, Hubbard assumed that he was fully capable of writing, producing, and directing his own material, but his novice staff often frustrated him. He would do scenes over and over again, exhausting everyone, but he was rarely satisfied with the outcome. He walked around the set bellowing orders through a bullhorn, sometimes right in the face of a humiliated staff member.