Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (6 page)

Shortly thereafter we began packing. Sherry, who had been asked by an Ethics Officer to write up a report on anything she knew about my physical relationship with Danny, was sad to see me go, and I was sad to say goodbye to her. But she wasn’t surprised. “You have a strong personality and they don’t want that in the Sea Org. You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” she said. “I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did.”

W
E WERE ON THE 405,
the very last bit of the drive that had taken several days from Clearwater to Los Angeles, when after heading up a mountain, we suddenly saw a sea of lights spread out below us. My first real vision of L.A.

With my sister and me facing the prospect of being thrown into the RPF, Mom knew we had to leave Clearwater. Despite everything that had happened, my mom still very much believed in Scientology and our family’s place in it, and so did I. In moving to L.A. and joining up with other Scientologists we looked forward to the security of this larger group, a real community. Even though Nicole and I didn’t make it in the Sea Org, that didn’t mean we didn’t have a place in clearing the planet. And like all Scientologists, we didn’t want our eternity threatened. We learned pretty early on that we come back again and again, over the course of millions and millions of years, as the body is just the vessel for the thetan-spirit.

We didn’t have much money, but thankfully a friend of my mother’s from Brooklyn who now lived in Los Angeles offered to take us in. A Scientologist herself, she said the church was really strong out there; L.A. has the greatest concentration of Scientologists in the world.

California was nothing like what Nic and I thought it was going to be. We had pictured L.A. as a beach town filled with blond people in bikinis. But Hollywood, where we were staying, felt like just another big city. “Where’s the damn water?” Nicole asked. I was just as disappointed as Nic that L.A. wasn’t straight out of a scene from
Baywatch,
but I was still excited to be there. I could hardly wait to start fulfilling my dreams of being an actress.

My mom’s friend and her husband let us sleep on the floor of their apartment. “We” now included baby Shannon, Mom’s new boyfriend, George, whom she had met in Clearwater, and his two teenage sons.

The tiny apartment was a block from the Blue Buildings, a gigantic complex of ten buildings that made up the Church of Scientology’s West Coast headquarters. The imposing concrete Art Deco building was the former Cedars of Sinai hospital, erected on Fountain Avenue in the 1920s. It is known as “Big Blue” because of the color it was painted after being acquired by the church in 1977.

By the time we arrived in California, I should have technically been in the ninth grade, but because I missed an entire year of school while in Florida I was enrolled at King Junior High School. Not very inspired to return to school, Nicole and I persuaded our mother to let us quit. She felt, as do most Scientologists, that studying Scientology is more important than getting a traditional education. So as long as we were on course, my mom was okay with it. (Plus, I would say things like, “Ma, I’m going to be an actress. I will hire an accountant who went to school, I promise.”)

Now that we were no longer enrolled in school, we immediately set out to get jobs. Everyone in our family was hustling to find work, since we all needed to chip in to eat, pay the electricity bill, make car payments—and stay on course. Our religion didn’t come free. The courses Nic and I were taking were still introductory, so they weren’t expensive compared to what it cost to do more advanced courses. Still, the range of $45 to $300 per course was a fortune for us.

Plus, I was starting with a deficit. After I left the Sea Org, I was
saddled with what’s called “a freeloader’s debt.” Sea Org members take courses for free in exchange for being on post, but if you leave of your own volition, or are thrown out or found unfit, you owe the church money for those “free” courses you took while in the Sea Org. I owed thousands for the courses I took in Clearwater. I wasn’t allowed to be on course again until I paid my debt, so I went on a payment plan.

Practicing Scientology imposed a lot of financial pressure on everybody, but it also opened opportunities to make money. In businesses run by Scientologists, lack of experience, age, or education didn’t seem to matter. The kind of training provided by being on course was good enough. So after my mom found a job at a solar-heating company, American Sun, which was run by Scientologists, I begged her to find me work there as well, and unbelievably, she did.

It was a telemarketing position, where the barrier of entry was pretty low, but still, since I was just a teenager, the job was nothing short of a miracle.

My job was to call people who were listed in a huge binder, and to stick to a script that went something like this:

M
E
: Hello, [sir/ma’am]. I am calling to congratulate you on winning an all-expense-paid trip to Laughlin, Nevada! All you have to do is have a representative from American Sun come out for you to retrieve your certificate.

C
USTOMER
: What’s the catch?

M
E
: There is no catch, [sir/ma’am]. You simply need to set an appointment for someone to come out and enlighten you on how solar heating could drastically cut your cooling and heating bills down. After you listen to a ninety-minute presentation on solar heating for your home, you will receive this trip at no cost to you. We have a rep in your area tomorrow afternoon on another appointment. Does that work for you?

Even I thought this was a racket. But my boss assured me it was the real thing. The free trip was from Tuesday to Thursday, and it was to Laughlin, which apparently was the fucked-up part of Nevada where they have $2.99 buffets and penny slots. But it was real, and it was free.

So I took my seat in the large room of rows and rows of telemarketers and looked up at a big board on the wall. On it was every telemarketer’s name—including mine—with little suns that represented how many confirmed appointments each caller had made. Well, I was going to get suns all the way across the board! Yeah, I was definitely going to rock this. I dialed my first number with total confidence that came to me both from my inherent personality and from what I had learned in Scientology. There simply is no “no” in Scientology.

“Hello, ma’am,” I began.

When it came time for the woman to say, “What’s the catch?” she actually said it! Even though my supervisor had told me they always said it, I couldn’t believe it actually worked. But when I got to the part about setting up an appointment, the lady on the other end of the line didn’t go for it. No problem—there were more names where hers came from.

By the end of the day, however, I realized that booking appointments wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it would be. In fact, I hadn’t booked a single appointment all day. When the next day didn’t go any better, I decided to take matters into my own hands and go off script. Mostly, the people I called cut the conversation short by hanging up on me. So when one man did just that, I called him back to give him the real talk.

“Hey, it’s me again,” I said. “Listen, you do have to sit through this boring thing on solar heating, but you don’t need to buy it. Just, like, do the presentation and you literally get a trip. It’s Tuesday through Thursday, okay? But it seems like you aren’t that busy.”

He hung up on me again. And I called him again. This time I didn’t care about making a friggin’ appointment; I wanted to give him a piece of my mind.

“What is this? What are you, some kind of animal?” I shouted (sounding like my dad). “You don’t hang up on people!”

The man hung up again and then called the company to file a complaint about me. Not only did I never get a single sun by my name—I soon got fired.

I wasn’t so upset when American Sun let me go, because by that point I realized there was a whole network of Scientology businesses in the vicinity of the Blue Buildings (which was important, since I didn’t have a car). My sister got a job down the street at a place called George’s General Store, which sold accessories needed for Scientology sessions and recommended vitamins.

Canvassing the area around Fountain Avenue, I went into the restaurant right across from the Blue Buildings, New York George’s (no connection to the general store). My strategy was to use the fact that I was from New York to get my foot in the door. The owner, Randy, a Scientologist, interviewed me and agreed to try me out as a cashier, because I wasn’t trusted to be a waitress with the attitude I had on me, as he could attest to from my days as a customer there. “Just sit here on this stool, take the money, make change, and try not to lose us any business with your mouth,” Randy said.

“Can I at least—”

“No,” Randy said. “Take the money, make change, and that is it.”

To pass the time, rather than just sit there I took it upon myself to clean the doors every five minutes with Windex, clean the cash register with a Q-tip, and put all the bills facing in one direction. You could say I had an obsession with things looking neat and clean—and I still do. Eventually Randy promoted me to waitress, a job that I know most people complain about, but I absolutely loved it.

I mimicked my grandmother, who used to clean the whole table after we finished dinner and before coffee and cake. “You don’t want to sit in macaroni,” she’d say. “Let me make it nice.” So before I served the coffee (with the napkin in between the saucer and the
cup, naturally), I’d say, “Let me make it nice,” and then I’d clean the table, which customers found charming.

I even loved being a waitress when customers were busting my balls, an occupational hazard. One of my regular customers was a guy named John Futris, who owned a Scientology graphic design company called JFI a few doors down. They printed all of the church’s literature. John was always smiling, but he was a pain in the ass with his muffin ordering. “I would like a blueberry muffin, with the top cut off, but not in half, the top should be smaller, and then I want two pats of butter, one on the top and one on the second half. But make sure the butter is not frozen, so warm it a little in your hand first, and then a coffee with half-and-half and one sugar.” Every day.

This went on for a couple of months until one day when John asked me what I really wanted to do, I told him eventually I wanted to be an actress but my immediate goal was to make more money. “I believe you’ll be a great actress one day,” he said, before asking me if I typed and wanted a job that’d pay more.

“Yes and yes,” I said.

I quit New York George’s that day. I was moving up in the world, going corporate. I only prayed my eyes would go bad so I could wear glasses, which would go perfectly with the pencil skirts I planned to wear.

John called me into his office on my first morning and said, “I need you to take this down in shorthand because I need you to type up a letter.”

“Yup.”

I wrote down what he said (sort of) and went back to my desk to type it up. I sat and stared down at the typewriter. I didn’t know how to type; I didn’t really even know how to load in the paper. I could have sworn I took a class in school once. Or was that in a movie I saw? Whatever. How hard could this be?

An hour later, John called me on the intercom and said, “Is that letter ready to be signed?”

Looking at the catastrophe that was the letter (I had used about half a bottle of Wite-Out), I knew I couldn’t show it to him. So, as I walked into his office and looked at him sitting behind his big wooden desk, I said, “John, I lied to you. I can’t type,” and I started to tear up.

“Honey, you lied about typing? Why?”

“Because you are from Chicago and I just really wanted to work for you and I…”

“Leah, you are too cute.”

John fired me.

As his secretary.

He did offer me another job as his personal assistant. My first task was to go up to his house on Mulholland Drive and bring his shirts to the cleaners. Easy enough. But I was bewitched by his Greek wife, Valerie, with her blond hair and her long, pretty nails. Valerie was also from New York, and she laughed at everything I said. She was always pinching my cheeks and saying, “You are so cute.” Who wouldn’t be smitten? It was hard to believe hours had gone by.

John fired me.

As his assistant.

And hired me as his accounts receivable person, where I was given a crash course in getting people to pay their bills. While I may have failed him as a secretary and an assistant, I quickly learned the art of manipulating people into paying their bills on time, all the while using church tactics to find their weaknesses and prey on them.