A Billion Years by Mike Rinder

Author:Mike Rinder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

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MY DAYS WERE endless, crammed with keeping track of scientology’s enemies, conducting programs to neutralize them, putting out fires on the internet, and dealing with the constant celebrity issues.

Perhaps the strangest celebrity encounter I had was with Michael Jackson. I became the go-to person in scientology for Lisa Marie Presley during her marriage to Jacko. Her mother, Priscilla, had become involved in scientology when Lisa Marie was young, and so she had been raised a scientologist. She enlisted me in her efforts to convert Michael to scientology, or at least to convince him to accept it. I gave them both a private tour of the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. Throughout the tour, Michael was extremely paranoid. He repeatedly dove to the floor, whimpering that he had seen someone taking photographs of him through the windows, though there was no line of sight to any publicly accessible location. Lisa Marie laughed it off and explained that he was always worried about the paparazzi. He was so soft-spoken I could hardly hear him, and his comments and questions were disjointed and childish. She had told me she thought Michael understood her because he had grown up in the media spotlight and never really had a childhood, similar to her own experience as the daughter of the King. But it was not to last—they divorced in 1996.

In March 1995 I flew to Wichita, Kansas, to attend the grand opening of a special scientology mission. Miscavige had been pushing hard for celebrities to become more active in promoting scientology, and Kirstie Alley was the first to take the step of putting money into opening a mission in her hometown. After the 1982 mission holder fiasco, few people had stepped up to open new missions, which had diminished the flow of new recruits into scientology. Celebrities doing so would popularize the idea again. Alley was a longtime scientologist who credited scientology with curing her drug addiction. She had become a star on Cheers and was close friends with John Travolta, who had been at the top of the scientology celebrity heap before Tom Cruise, though his career was now on a downward trajectory at the time when Cruise’s was heading to the stratosphere.

Travolta in fact piloted us all on his Gulfstream from LA to Wichita. I sat across from his wife, Kelly Preston, and played cards with Isaac Hayes and Lisa Marie Presley in the back (they would subsequently be persuaded to open a mission in Memphis). Kelly stunned me when she told me she had lived in Adelaide during her teen years, just a mile from where I lived, and had attended the sister school of the all-boys school where I had spent many years.

Tom Cruise didn’t attend, as he was shooting Mission: Impossible, but his presence in the scientology orbit loomed larger than ever before. He was the biggest star in the world, and Miscavige was using this to his advantage. Despite the IRS victory, the German government still refused

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