The Devil May Dance by Jake Tapper (books to read fiction txt) 📗

“Scientology achieves things for people where nothing has worked before. It cures us of illnesses once considered hopeless. It increases our intelligence and competence, improves our behavior, brings us to a better understanding of life.”

Lecture concluded, he flashed them an enormous smile.

“But it didn’t help Chris,” said Sheryl Ann with a tight smile.

“It sounds to me,” snapped Margaret, “like you took advantage of a vulnerable man with a gambling problem.”

“Beatrice,” scolded Sheryl Ann, catching on. She put a warning hand on Margaret’s arm.

“Oh, Sophie!” Margaret said, suddenly near tears. She pulled out a tissue and dabbed her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She found herself actually weeping for this actor she’d never met. Maybe it was the strangeness of this church or these weird people, or perhaps she’d missed her calling—she should’ve been an actress. She blew her nose. “We need to know what he went through here, what these…doctors…subjected him to.” Margaret glared at Hubbard and Julius. “Because it obviously didn’t help!”

“Beatrice, it wasn’t their fault,” Sheryl Ann said. “Chris struggled so!”

Hubbard put a hand on Sheryl Ann’s knee. “Now, now, this is all a very normal human reaction to grief,” he said. “Chris was indeed a member of our church, and we worked closely with him in hopes he’d become clear, but he was not committed. In fact, though I’m sorry to bring up something uncomfortable, he still owes us quite a bit of money. Some eight hundred forty-three dollars and change. Let’s call it eight hundred forty.”

“Sadly, that’s true,” said Julius with regret in his voice. “We really tried with him.” He rose from his chair. “Will you excuse me? I’ll just be a minute.”

As the door closed behind him, Margaret turned to Hubbard. “What does becoming clear mean?”

Hubbard looked at her for a few seconds as if he were deciding whether to let her in on a great secret. Then a smile—a wide, gleaming grin—erupted on his face. “I will show you, Beatrice.”

Hubbard stood, ambled to a file cabinet in the corner, and withdrew from its top drawer a device that looked like a small television wired to two soup cans.

“Being clear is what we call the state achieved through auditing, which is done with this meter.” Hubbard took his seat again and began fiddling with the knobs on the device. “It’s difficult to pick up these concepts in just one meeting—we have classes that I highly recommend—but just to help you understand how hard we tried with Chris…” He leaned forward and placed the tin cans in front of Margaret.

“What is this thing?” asked Margaret.

“A Hubbard E-Meter,” he said proudly. “Most people have reactive minds. That’s the source of all of the ill behavior we see—insecurities, irrationality, unreasonable fear. The E-Meter helps us detect those problem spots. Once we get rid of the reactive mind—that’s what we call going ‘clear’—only then can we become our true selves. This E-Meter allows us to audit you, to figure out where you need help. It’s what we used to try to help your brother.” He sighed deeply and arranged his face into an expression of sympathetic sorrow. “But Chris didn’t give himself over.”

Margaret pointed at the metal objects in front of her. “Other than these soup cans, how is this any different from, say, Norman Vincent Peale’s ideas?”

“Can Dr. Peale cure seventy percent of man’s illnesses?” Hubbard demanded. “We can raise your IQ one point for every hour of auditing,” he continued as if he were on a stage. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy’s IQ from eighty-three to two hundred and twelve!”

Margaret picked up the cans gingerly and felt a slight electric current, a not unpleasant tingle. She put the cans back on the table. “Didn’t Dale Carnegie make that same claim?” she asked.

Hubbard smiled. “No, no. There’s no comparison.”

His words alone were utterly unconvincing, but Hubbard’s avuncular charm and matter-of-fact presentation carried them into the neighborhood of believability. It wasn’t hard to see how someone vulnerable or eager to change or just plain hungry for human contact might be taken in.

Julius returned, looking irritated, perhaps even alarmed. He leaned toward Hubbard and whispered briefly in his ear. Hubbard rose from his seat. “Will you ladies excuse me for a moment?” The two men hurried out of the room, Julius speaking in low, urgent tones to a newly serious Hubbard. They left the door open behind them.

Margaret tilted her head toward the tin cans in front of her. “This is so weird. Can you adjust the current on the whatchamacallit there?”

“E-Meter,” Sheryl Ann said.

“Yes, yes,” said Margaret. “That.”

As Sheryl Ann fiddled with the contraption, Margaret leaned back in her seat to peer out the open door, where she saw Hubbard and Julius in a heated conversation near the front desk. “Quick,” she said, “gimme the file.”

Sheryl Ann slid the folder across the table. “I’ll keep an eye on the door,” she whispered.

Margaret opened the folder to see a head shot of Chris Powell gazing up at her. Beneath that was a list of his credits, which tracked his career trajectory like a chart tracking population growth: bigger roles in smaller films, smaller roles in bigger films. The next page listed everyone in Powell’s life who was more famous than him, from the stars of Kid Galahad to his romantic attachments, including Lola Bridgewater, to others more peripherally in his orbit, such as Sinatra, Martin, and Davis.

“This is strange,” said Margaret. She turned the page to a memo titled “Project Celebrity.”

If we are to heal society at large, we must do something about its communication lines. A key part of this plan is Project Celebrity. There are many to whom America and the world listens. It is vital to put such persons into wonderful condition. It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefiting from it would mention it now and then.

The memo contained a list of potential enlistees, including Sinatra, Edward R. Murrow, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Danny Kaye, Liberace, Walt Kelly, Sid Caesar,