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

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Tommy
When I rst contacted Davis in April 2010, asking for his cooperation on a
prole I was writing about Haggis for The New Yorker, he expressed a
reluctance to talk, saying that he had already spent a month responding to
similar queries. “It made little dierence,” he said. “The last thing I’m interested in is
dredging all this up again.” He kept putting me o, saying that he was too busy to get
together, although he promised that we would meet when he was more available. “I
want our time to be undistracted,” he explained in an e-mail. “We should plan on
spending at least a full day together as there is a lot I would want to show you.” We
finally arranged to meet on Memorial Day weekend.
I ew to Los Angeles and spent much of that weekend waiting for him to call. On
Sunday at three o’clock, Davis appeared at my hotel, with Jessica Feshbach. We sat at a
table on the patio. Davis has his mother’s sleepy eyes. His thick black hair was combed
forward, with a lock falling boyishly onto his forehead. He wore a wheat-colored suit
with a blue shirt that opened onto a chest that seemed, among the sun-worshippers at
the pool, strikingly pallid. Feshbach, a slender, attractive woman, anxiously twirled her
hair.
Davis now told me that he was “not willing to participate in, or contribute to, an
article about Scientology through the lens of Paul Haggis.” I had come to Los Angeles
specically to talk to him, at a time he had chosen. I wondered aloud if he had been told
not to talk to me. He said no.
“Maybe Paul shouldn’t have posted the letter on the Internet,” Feshbach interjected.
“There are all sorts of shoulda woulda coulda.” She said that she had just spoken to
Mark Isham, the composer, whom I had interviewed. “He talked to you about what are
supposed to be our condential scriptures.” That I would ask about the church’s secret
doctrines was offensive, she said. “It’s a two-way street happening,” she concluded. 1
“Everything I have to say about Paul, I’ve already said,” Davis declared. He agreed to
respond to fact-checking queries, however.
THE GARDEN BEHIND Anne Archer and Terry Jastrow’s home in the Brentwood neighborhood
of Los Angeles is a peaceful retreat, lled with olive trees and hummingbirds. A fountain
gurgles beside the swimming pool. Jastrow was recounting his rst meeting with Archer,
i n Milton Katselas’s class. His friend David Ladd, son of the Hollywood legend Alan
Ladd, had invited him to visit. “I saw this girl sitting next to Milton,” Jastrow recalled.
“I said, ‘Who’s that?’ ”
Archer smiled. There was a cool wind blowing in from the Pacic, and she drew a