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Hubbard would hire as his personal assistant Richard de Mille, son of the legendary
producer and director Cecil B. DeMille, who had started Paramount Pictures and was in
some ways responsible for the creation of Hollywood itself.
In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an editorial in Ability, a publication
aliated with the church, urged Scientologists to recruit celebrities. A long list of
desirable prospects followed, including Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Jackie Gleason,
John Ford, Bob Hope, and Howard Hughes. “If you want one of these celebrities as your
game, write us at once so the notable will be yours to hunt without interference,” the
editorial promised. “If you bring one of them home you will get a small plaque as your
reward.” Author William Burroughs and actor Stephen Boyd were drawn into the church
in its early days. Scientology was a religion rather perfectly calibrated for its time and
place, since American culture, and soon the rest of the world, was bending increasingly
toward the worship of celebrity, with Hollywood as its chief shrine. At the end of the
sixties, the church established its rst Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now
satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas,
and Nashville.) The object was to “make celebrities even better known and to help their
careers with Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. “By accomplishing this Major Target I know
that Celebrity Centres can take over the whole acting-artists world.”
Hubbard was particularly interested in stars whose careers had crested but still had
enough luster that they could be rehabilitated and made into icons of Scientology. The
prototype was Gloria Swanson, one of the greatest stars of the silent movie era, who
personied the lavish glamour of that era. Although she never regained the
international fame she had known before the talkies, she continued acting on television
and in occasional movies—most memorably, as Norma Desmond in the 1950 classic
Sunset Boulevard. Hubbard’s top auditor, Peggy Conway, a South African entertainer,
ardently cultivated Swanson, calling her “My Adorable Glory,” in her many letters to the
star, although she saves her highest praise for Hubbard, who was also her auditor: “The
Master did his Sunday best on me,” she wrote Swanson in 1956. “He never went to bed
—we talked the clock around—day after day—night after night—I was six thousand
light years above Arcturus—what a genius is our Great Red Father!”
A constant stream of aspiring young actors, writers, and directors came to Hollywood
with common dreams, trying to leverage whatever ability or looks they might have in a
market already overwhelmed by beautiful and talented and chronically unemployed
young people. Many of them were rather poorly educated—they had left school to
gamble on stardom—but they were smart, talented, and desperately ambitious.
Scientology promised these neophytes an entry into the gated community of celebrity.
The church claimed to have a method for getting ahead; just as enticing was the
whispered assertion that a network of Scientologists existed at the upper levels of the
entertainment industry eager to advance like-minded believers—a claim that never had
much to support it, but was not entirely untrue. Scientology was a small but growing
subculture in the Hollywood studios.
Kirstie Alley was an aspiring actress from Wichita who left the University of Kansas in
her sophomore year, then struggled with an addiction to cocaine. She says that a single