8 Bohemian Rhapsody aul Haggis and Deborah Rennard married in 1997, soon after Paul’s divorce from Diane became nal. Paul was still seeking joint custody of his three daughters. Without Pconsulting him, Diane had taken Lauren and Katy out of the Delphi Academy, apparently intending to enroll them in public school. Paul and Diane were ordered by the court to undergo psychiatric evaluation, a procedure that Scientology abhors. In December 1998, the court surprised everyone by awarding Paul full custody of his daughters. According to court records, the ruling followed the discovery that the girls were not enrolled in school at all. The girls were stunned. They had watched the hostilities through Diane’s eyes. No one had prepared them for the possibility that they might be taken from her—until then, it had been the three girls and their mother against the world. The girls thought the decision was unbalanced and unfairly inuenced by the fact that their father had more money. Alissa vowed she would never speak to him again. Haggis was also caught short by the court’s decision. In addition to the year-old son, James, he had with Deborah, he suddenly had two teenage daughters on his hands as well. (Alissa was twenty-one at the time, and lived on her own.) The girls felt uprooted and they missed the emotional support of their mother. They didn’t resent Deborah; actually, they appreciated her advocacy and the way she balanced out Paul. Still, it was a difficult adjustment for everyone. Paul put the girls in a private school, but that lasted only six months. They weren’t entirely comfortable talking to people who weren’t Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. They demanded to be sent to a boarding institution on an isolated hilltop near Sheridan, Oregon, called the Delphian School—or the “mother school,” as it was known to Scientologists. Alissa had gone there when she was fourteen years old. It had been a mixed experience for her. She had brought a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and books of eighteenth-century poetry, a CD of great speeches by Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and a pack of tarot cards. Although she loved the school, she never felt she t in with the other kids. They wanted to talk about boys and pop culture, and she was more interested in philosophy and religion. But Delphian was just what Lauren needed. She got intensive tutoring to help her overcome her educational decits; however, she also began to come up against some of the constraints of her church. While she was at Delphian, Lauren decided to write a paper about religious intolerance. In particular, she felt that Scientology was under attack and she couldn’t understand why. When she went online to see what the opposition was saying, a fellow student turned her in to Ethics. Lauren was told that Scientologists shouldn’t look at negative stories about their religion. She was supposed to be saving the planet, so why was she wasting her time reading lies? Because of her isolation, and the censorship imposed on her education, when Lauren nally graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, she had never heard anyone speak ill of Scientology, nor did she question the ban on research about her religion. She thought, “I guess I’m not supposed to do these things. I will stay away.” Like her father, she learned it was easier not to look. Alissa had a dierent issue. She didn’t really date in high school, and by the time she got to junior college it began to dawn on her that she was gay. She actually wasn’t sure what that meant. She had two uncles who were gay, but for the longest time she didn’t know what a lesbian was. Then her sister Katy, who is ve years younger, and had grown up in the Internet-savvy culture, came out to her parents. Paul told Katy that there was no way that he would ever love her less. That made it easier for Alissa to talk about what she was discovering about herself. The vow never to speak to her father again began to lose its hold on her. All the girls had grown up hearing prejudiced remarks from people in the church who saw homosexuality as an “aberration” that undermined the survival of the species; gays themselves were seen as sinister perverts. These attitudes were informed by Hubbard’s writings on the subject. But it wasn’t just Scientology, Alissa realized; the entire society was biased against homosexuals. In her early twenties, Alissa nally found the courage to come out to her father. “Oh, yeah, I already knew that,” he told her. He said he wondered why she had ever dated boys in the first place. “You knew?” she said. “I didn’t know! How did you know? Why didn’t you tell me? You could have clued me in. It would have made it easier for me.” That was so typical of her father. He was maddening in that way, completely accepting but disengaged, as if it really didn’t matter one way or the other. To signify her newfound identity, Alissa got a tattoo of her favorite Latin poem, the opening line of Carmen 5 by Catullus: “Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus” (Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love). It snaked all the way down her left arm. EVER SINCE the Time exposé, the church had been frantically trying to recover Tom Cruise. Both Cruise and Nicole Kidman were attaining ever greater success; Cruise became the rst actor to star in ve consecutive lms to gross more than $100 million in the United States, including Jerry Maguire and the rst Mission: Impossible; Kidman was also gaining international renown with her roles in Batman Forever and To Die For. They gave the impression that they were putting Scientology behind them. In 1996, Marty Rathbun had gone to Los Angeles to audit Cruise, but that one session went nowhere. According to Rathbun, Miscavige blamed Nicole Kidman, and viewed her as a gold digger who was faking Scientology. He says that Miscavige was hopeful that if they portrayed Nicole Kidman as a Suppressive Person, Cruise could be peeled away from her. It was two years before Cruise agreed to go through another bout of auditing. This time, strict secrecy was imposed. Worried about scaring o the tentative star, Rathbun arranged the sessions so that even top ocials in the church were unaware that Cruise was receiving services. For ve days in October 1998, Cruise drove into a private parking lot in the back of the historic Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard, with the yellow Scientology sign atop it that looms over the fabled district. Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino used to have their oces here. Now the lobby is a shrine to the life and works of L. Ron Hubbard. A giant bust of the founder greets the occasional visitor. Embedded in the sidewalk in front of the building are the stars of bygone celebrities on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—Otto Kruger, Tony Martin, Ann Rutherford, Richard Carlson, Jetta Goudal, Paul Winchell—who had their own moments of great renown and are now largely forgotten. Cruise went in a back door that led to a basement hallway. There was an elevator at the end of the hallway that went directly to the “secret” eleventh oor, where both Miscavige and Rathbun maintained oces. The World Series was under way—New York versus San Diego—and Cruise wore his Yankees hat. “He was not in good shape, spiritually or mentally,” Rathbun observed. “He was personally very enturbulated.” After that episode of auditing, Cruise went quiet again. He and Kidman were in England lming Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick. In any case, Rathbun and Miscavige had their hands full, fending o the lawsuits and reporters swirling around the McPherson case. Rathbun said that, in January 2001, he got a call from Cruise asking for help. Cruise said that he and Kidman were finished. Cruise never oered a public explanation for the divorce, and Kidman herself was clearly surprised by his decision. She later revealed that she had suered a miscarriage two months after Cruise moved out, and she had asked the doctors to preserve samples of the fetus’s DNA to prove that Cruise was the father. She pleaded with him to undergo marriage counseling at the church. Cruise refused, publicly declaring, “Nic knows exactly why we are getting a divorce.” This was a decisive moment in Cruise’s relationship with Scientology. Rathbun provided the star with more than two hundred hours of auditing over the next couple of years. From July through Thanksgiving, 2001, Rathbun was with Cruise at the Celebrity Centre frequently, doing auditing rundowns and the PTS/SP (Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons) course. He paired Cruise with another actor, Jason Beghe, to do training drills; for instance, Beghe would think of a hypothetical date, which Cruise had to gure out, using the E-Meter, an exercise Cruise found really frustrating. A young man named Tommy Davis began acting as Rathbun’s assistant. He brought sandwiches and helped out with Cruise’s children, making sure they were receiving church services. Despite his youth, Davis was already a unique gure in the church: He was a second-generation Scientologist, a Sea Org member, and the scion of the Hollywood elite. His mother was Anne Archer, a talented and popular actress who had starred in a number of movies, including Patriot Games and Fatal Attraction, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.