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

said that they should get together. “I’ll call Spanky,” Presley had told him.
“No, don’t go through Spanky,” Travolta said.
When Spanky heard this, she realized she had been declared a Suppressive Person.
Nobody had bothered to tell her, but from now on, no Scientologist would be allowed to
talk to her.
Taylor never tried to speak to Paul Haggis again, worried that she might compromise
his relationship to the church. For his part, Haggis had no idea what had happened to
Spanky. He wondered why she had just disappeared. But Scientologists were always
drifting in and out of his life. Sea Org members, even friends like Spanky, might be
suddenly posted somewhere else without explanation, or assigned to Clearwater for
advanced training, or sent to a secret Sea Org base where they were rarely in contact
with the outside world. That might explain her absence. He didn’t inquire. He readily
identied with the church’s narrative that Scientology was being victimized by an
intolerant and uncomprehending press, self-serving politicians, careerist bureaucrats,
and reactionary police agencies looking for headlines. By publicly defending
Scientology, he took on the great burden of scorn and ridicule routinely directed at the
church; and in that way, he also allied himself with persecuted minorities everywhere:
he was one of them.
If he had known that his friend had been declared a Suppressive, Haggis would have
had a dicult choice to make. It was one he would face soon in any case. In 1983,
Haggis’s writing partner on the TV series Diff’rent Strokes, Howard Meyers, who was also
a Scientologist, decided to follow a splinter group led by David Mayo, who had been one
of the highest ocials in the church. Haggis told Meyers that he couldn’t work with him
anymore. Because Meyers was the senior writer on the show, Haggis resigned and went
looking for other work.
1 Travolta’s attorney denies there was an agreement to visit Spanky in exchange for his personal copy of Saturday Night
Fever.