going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

Desperate to get Gillham the auditing she still thought she needed, Taylor went to the
nancial banking ocer and begged her for the funds to send her friend to Flag. “If she
wants to go to Flag, she can take the fucking Greyhound,” the officer responded.
“You’re Yvonne’s assassin!” Taylor shouted.
For her impertinence, Taylor was sentenced to RPF. Her new baby daughter, Vanessa,
was taken away and placed in the Child Care Org, the Scientology nursery. There were
thirty infants crammed into a small apartment with wall-to-wall cribs, with one nanny
for every twelve children. It was dark and dank and the children were rarely, if ever,
taken outside.
When she got the news, Taylor cried, “You can’t do that now!” She was thinking of
Travolta. He had just called her the day before, saying that he was arriving on an Air
France ight after his appearance at a lm festival in Deauville, where he was
promoting Saturday Night Fever. Despite his triumph, Travolta appeared depressed and
withdrawn. During the lming of Saturday Night Fever his girlfriend, Diana Hyland, had
died in his arms. She was two decades older than he—she played his mother in a madefor-TV
movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble—and had already had a double mastectomy
when they met. Their romance was doomed when her cancer recurred. Taylor had
helped Travolta through that period of grief, but now his mother, the most important
figure in his life, had also developed cancer. Travolta asked Taylor if she would pick him
up at the airport. She promised him, “Wild horses wouldn’t keep me from being there!”
The church ocials now told Taylor that someone else would meet Travolta. Taylor
knew the star would feel surprised and betrayed. He had come to rely on her, both as an
unpaid assistant and for emotional support. He would immediately suspect that
something terrible had happened and worry about her. Taylor was mortied to think
that she would be the cause of his discomfort.
The RPF had moved out of the basement up to the top oor of the old V-shaped
building that formerly housed the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Nearly two hundred
people were crammed by the dozen into old patient rooms in bunks stacked three high.
Because of the overcrowding, Taylor was given a soggy mattress on the roof. It was
cold. She could hear the trac on Sunset Boulevard only a block away. She had a view
of the Hollywood Hills and the endless lights of the wakeful city, which was throbbing
all around her. So many young people like her had been pulled into the matrix of
Hollywood glamour and fame, even if they would never enjoy it themselves. And now,
here she was, in the heart of it—isolated, trapped, humiliated, an unnoticed speck on a
rooftop. Who could believe that a person could be so lost in the middle of so much life?
Moreover, she was pregnant again. It happened a few weeks after she entered RPF,
during a brief marital visit from her husband. There was no maternal care or any easing
of the intensely physical work she was made to do with the other “RPF’ers,” as they
called themselves. For one two-week stretch, they were putting in thirty hours at a
stretch with only three hours o. Like everyone else, Taylor ate slop from a bucket—
table scraps or rice and beans. After six months on this diet she still wasn’t showing her
pregnancy; indeed, she was losing weight. She worried that she was going to lose the
baby.