Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

CHAPTER 5
Even by Hollywood standards she was an exotic creature, her statuesque beauty
matched only by her colorful background. Born in 1956 in Coral Gables,
Florida, Miriam Spickler’s parents soon realized that they had a child prodigy on
their hands. Clever, quick, and blessed with a near-photographic memory, young
Miriam, or Mimi, as everyone called her, effortlessly rose to the top of her class,
especially in science, even though her father Phil’s job as a civil engineer meant
that they often moved from state to state, school to school. When she was just
seven, her parents parted, she and her younger brother Paul opting to stay with
their father.
It was a decision that would change her life. Her evident academic ability
enabled her to skip several grades so that she graduated from high school by the
age of fourteen. Instead of going on to college, she joined her father on his
regular forays to the casino resort of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. He had folded his
career as a civil engineer and opted to try his hand as a professional gambler.
With her good looks and better memory, the voluptuous teenager became an
accomplished poker and blackjack player—even though she was under the legal
age limit. Years later she competed in professional tournaments.
It wasn’t long before her father swapped the vagaries of the gaming table for a
surefire bet—selling a man-made religion. He had long since discarded his
Jewish faith to become an adherent of Scientology, a cult founded by science
fiction writer Lafayette Ron Hubbard in 1954, four years after the publication of
Hubbard’s best-selling book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It
was one of the first of the now-familiar genre of self-help books and became a
founding text for Scientology. Soon his eager customers were parishioners and
his business repackaged as a religion. Hubbard was making good on a boast he
had made to a conference of science fiction writers in 1947: “If you really want
to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion.”
Hubbard described Dianetics as a revolutionary and scientifically developed
alternative to conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy, arguing that it could
alleviate all manner of illnesses, including asthma, arthritis, alcoholism, ulcers,
migraines, conjunctivitis, morning sickness, the common cold, and heart disease.
In addition, he claimed it could hugely increase intelligence and eliminate
burdensome emotions as well as cure conditions like atheism and
homosexuality. The basic premise was that the brain remembers everything, and

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that by recalling and cleansing negative experiences, or “engrams,” a person can
free himself from repressed feelings and so arrive at a “clear” mental state.
Hubbard maintained that the widespread use of Dianetics would lead to a “world
without insanity, without criminals and without war.” It was an audacious
application of the notion of mind over matter.
Hubbard founded his own Church of Scientology not only to exploit the
financial success of his book, but also to bypass constant criticism by
psychiatrists and other scientists that his theories were little more than untested
and unproven pseudoscience, intellectual snake oil for the gullible. Nobel Prize–
winning physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi declared in Scientific American: “This
volume probably contains more promises and less evidence per page than has
any publication since the invention of printing.”
The scorn of the scientific community did not stop Hubbard from
incorporating his first church in California, in 1954. He faced stiff competition in
a crowded field. In Los Angeles alone there were one hundred or so cults, one of
his fiercest rivals being Krishna Venta, who told his disciples that he had arrived
on a spaceship 240,000 years ago. Hubbard’s philosophy was much more subtle,
promising the spiritual equivalent of the alchemist’s dream, turning pewter into
gold. In this case it was an impregnable synthesis of faith and reason, science
and belief.
While scientists saw man as a body, Hubbard argued that man was an
endlessly reincarnated spirit. He did not worship God, but was his own god. By
following Hubbard’s applied religious philosophy, an individual could fully
realize his immortal nature, freeing himself from his body. At its heart, the
appeal of Scientology was not to a man’s soul, but to his ego. He could become
his own god . . . for a price.
On their journey, new members—whom Hubbard called “raw meat”—would
undergo auditing. The process bore similarities to the Catholic confessional,
except Scientology’s parishioners would pay handsomely for the privilege. To
give the process an air of scientific inquiry, an auditor would use a device called
an electropsychometer, or E meter, akin to a crude lie detector, which measures
small changes in the body’s electrical current. The theory was that the meter
registers thoughts of the reactive mind and can root out unconscious lies. This
process of discovery would eventually free the mind.
Gradually—and many thousands of dollars later—Scientologists would go up
what Hubbard called “the bridge” to reach a stage of enlightenment. The elite,
who had reached upper levels, were seen as superhuman beings who, Hubbard
claimed, could communicate telepathically, leave their bodies at will, move
inanimate objects with their minds, and be totally free from the physical

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universe, able to control what Scientologists call MEST: Matter, Energy, Space,
and Time. It is possibly the greatest story ever sold: customers spending up to
$500,000, or more in today’s terms, to progress through Hubbard’s labyrinthine
courses in the hopes of reaching spiritual fulfillment—and the ability to move
ashtrays. From mortal man to immortal superman . . . it was an enticing
prospect. All that and saving the planet, too.
Hubbard’s particular genius was his ability to create a parallel universe, a self-
contained belief system that promised “total spiritual freedom” while depicting
the planet Earth as a dangerous place full of “merchants of chaos.” In the Cold
War era, amid the threat of an instant nuclear Armageddon, his philosophy
struck a populist nerve, particularly with Roman Catholics and later Vietnam
war veterans and hippies, who were disillusioned with conventional religious
and political structures and inspired by the notion of saving the world from itself.
Mimi’s father, Phil Spickler, was an early follower. He recalled: “There was a
strong feeling that I, we, were making or would be making a difference in this
world’s future. In the 1950s, after the war, it seemed possible to break the grip
that certain institutions held in world affairs, and establish a saner planet.”
Altruism aside, it was also a way to make money. Ron’s church was
essentially a franchising operation, expanding its membership by licensing
individuals known as mission holders to set up branches in various parts of the
country. Like any pyramid selling scheme, the higher up the chain, the more an
individual earned. Typically, a Scientologist who introduced “fresh meat” into
the church would earn a lifetime commission of 10 percent, plus more on book
sales. Spickler opened his own mission in Palo Alto, California, his daughter,
Mimi, rising through the ranks so rapidly that by her late teens she was a Class 8
auditor, able to train the most advanced Scientologists, including celebrities. “It
was a religious philosophy that I was shaped and formed by, part of my
education. So in that sense it will always be there,” she says.
During the 1970s, Mimi was a familiar figure at the Scientology headquarters
in Clearwater, Florida, where she took courses. Inside the cult, she was
something of a celebrity herself, her high achievement in one so young making
her stand out. Even though fellow Scientologists remember her as icy, aloof, and
distant, she was beautiful enough to have men falling at her feet. As a teenager
she was well aware of her effect on men, dating a string of fellow Scientologists
who included fellow auditor James Fiducia, a tall, good-looking New Yorker.
When they went their separate ways, she met another high-level Scientology
auditor, Jim Rogers, who was in a similar mold to her previous boyfriend, being
tall, older, and easygoing. The couple married in 1977, when she was just
twenty-one.

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After their wedding they opened a small Scientology “field auditing” practice
in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, which catered to actors, artists,
and other celebrities. As many celebrities wanted to keep their association with
Scientology private, it was often difficult to encourage them to visit the main
Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. The Sherman Oaks venue was a discreet,
anonymous setting for a celebrity to explore Hubbard’s world vision. As a
former Scientologist observed, “Field auditing is about getting people into the
cult in a casual, come-round-to-my-house-and-talk-to-me kind of way.”
It is also about money, Scientology field auditors earning a decent living from
commissions for bringing in raw meat. And celebrities were prime steak. Jim
and Mimi had a pleasant three-bedroom home in the valley with a volleyball
court and a swimming pool, money earned from the hundred dollars an hour or
so they charged for an hour’s auditing. She recruited the singer and later
politician Sonny Bono into the cult, while her great friend, comedy actress
Kirstie Alley, who credited Scientology with getting her off drugs, was a regular
visitor.
While Scientology was a vehicle for Mimi to fund her lifestyle, it was also a
route to achieve her ultimate ambition: to become a Hollywood star. Beneath her
surface charm and good looks was a focused and determined young woman who
networked constantly to gain a foot on the ladder of fame. “She knew what she
wanted—to be a superstar. If you had nothing to offer her, she wasn’t
interested,” recalls a former girlfriend. Mimi and Kirstie even attempted
scriptwriting, one effort featuring a girl who was enjoying a last fling before she
reached thirty. Indeed, it took screenwriter and onetime Scientologist Skip Press
some time to realize that he was being invited to her home for cookouts because
of his contacts and for the chance to have first look at his latest scripts rather
than because of his scintillating wit and good looks. “When she and her husband
set up an auditing practice, I learned that rather than ‘clearing the planet,’ she
was fiercely focused on Hollywood success. She is one of the most coldly
calculating people I ever met and would cast you aside if you could not fuel her
ambition.”
In 1980, Mimi divorced her first husband, Jim, concentrating full-time on her
acting career. The following year she was cast in the hit TV series Hill Street
Blues and started dating Ed Marinaro, one of the show’s stars. Over the next few
years she got a number of small roles in TV soaps such as The Rousters and