Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (9 page)

I believed that I would be the one to move us up and out. My family was now going to live a better life and I was going to be the one to lead the way. I convinced my mom that we needed to move out of Hollywood and into Burbank. She obsessed about the money it would cost and so did my stepfather, George. Like most Scientologists, he cared more about working toward his eternity. Everything else was just materialistic and a waste of time. But I got to Mom one day when I said, “LRH had very nice things, Mom. We need to live better.” I knew this would appeal to her.

So we moved into Parc Pointe, an apartment complex. Mario Lopez and Jennifer Love Hewitt were a couple of our neighbors. Standing on our balcony, overlooking the pool downstairs in the center of the courtyard, I thought,
We made it, people! We’re living in Burbank, California!

Shortly before our move, Nicole had decided to move out on her own, and she got an apartment nearby. Ever since we’d left Clearwater, my sister’s interest in Scientology had waned. As the years passed, she left the church and moved toward Christianity. I didn’t have a problem with it, but my mother did. She attributed anything that was wrong in my sister’s life—everyday problems like money issues or boyfriend trouble—to the fact that Nicole was no longer a Scientologist. Looking back, I should have pointed out,
Wait, we have the exact same problems and we are still
in
Scientology.
At the time however, I was under the impression that our achievements in the church outweighed anything else that might be going wrong in our real lives or any other non-Scientologists’ lives, for that matter. Still, I never gave Nicole a hard time about no longer being in the church.

In September of 1989, when the first episode of
Living Dolls
aired, it seemed like everything was going my way. Life was exciting, from the telex I received from then-ABC president Bob Iger telling me to “have a good show” to coming to the attention of the New Kids on the Block. Well, I wasn’t exactly the one who got noticed by the hottest boy band at the time. It was Halle Berry. Thanks to her we were invited by the guys to their show and backstage afterward.

Even my dad, who I hadn’t heard from in a while, called to say he had seen me on TV and that he was very proud of his little girl. It was a surprise, because my dad didn’t reach out often. If we spoke on the phone, it was because I called. And if I saw him and his family in New York, it was because I was the one who visited him. He asked what Tony Danza was like and could I get pictures. Then he said, “Why don’t you make a movie with Marty Scorsese? He’s from the old neighborhood.”

“I’d love to, Dad,” I said. “But I don’t have his phone number.”

He said, “Well, get it somehow. Don’t you have an agent?”

I said, “Hey, Dad, you know it’s not easy to get on a series, right?”

M
Y MOTHER WA
S GENUINELY PROUD
of me. She always thought I was funny—she used to say, “Oh, my God, Leah, you make me
laugh
” all the time—but now I was on television making other people laugh. I was on top of the world, my family was proud, my church was proud. I was on my way.

In television, however, there is a thing called ratings. And we didn’t do well in them. And we were told that we were being canceled. We were all completely devastated. None of us was ready to move on. We had just gotten started.

After shooting the twelfth episode of
Living Dolls
in December 1989, we had a wrap party, which was the worst thing I could imagine.

On top of the sadness I felt to be leaving this group of people I had become so close to so quickly, I had no idea what I was moving on to. I worried about making the payments on my brand-new car and paying the rent on the apartment filled with all the new matching furniture that I had convinced my family I could afford. To my mom and George I pretended that everything was going to be all right, but on the inside I was dying from the pressure. I didn’t understand why I was being punished. What had I done?

Y
OU’RE NOT GOING TO
DO
this show,” my agent said.

Not going to do this show? It’s
Saved by the Bell
.

I was now with a big power agency, ICM, which I had been encouraged to move to after I got
Living Dolls
. Still, I didn’t care how big and powerful these guys were; I was grateful that a popular sitcom was offering me six episodes, and I was going to take it.

My agent’s rationale for turning down the role of Stacey Carosi—who has a romance with Zack (played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar)—was that since I was coming off of a series, it was beneath me to take a recurring role on a show. I thought,
Not having money to pay my rent is beneath me.

The series that I had just come off of in the fall of 1991,
The Man in the Family,
lasted for only seven episodes. It left me back where I was before
Dolls,
auditioning for guest appearances on popular sitcoms. I just wanted to belong somewhere again, on a show I could call my own. I was exhausted already. I did a pilot, it didn’t go any further; I got another series, it got canceled before it aired. Each time I swore I was going to give up, but then I’d just get back up and keep going. (All told, I’ve been on more than twenty-five
eventually canceled television shows in my career, and have appeared in even more pilots that never made it to air. While I would never complain, I certainly did feel anxiety. This is not an easy business to be in.)

It seemed like all the actresses in L.A. were going out for the same roles—after a few rounds of endless auditions at the studios, I was able to identify the girls who were my competition for these coveted spots. So when I walked into an audition for the part of Rhea Perlman’s daughter on
Cheers
and saw one of my regular contenders, I was like, “Ugh, there’s Aniston.”

Jennifer Aniston and I had become friendly from seeing each other so much at various auditions. She was normal, unlike most other actresses, who, if you tried to make small talk, like asking where they were from, would accuse you of trying to “psych them out.” One girl I tried to shoot the shit with got up and walked out. So when you find someone, like Jennifer, who isn’t douche-y, you develop a natural camaraderie.

When I saw her in the last round of callbacks for the
Cheers
audition, I said, “Fuck, I hope you don’t get this one. I need to pay my rent.”

Jennifer just smiled and said, “I hope you get it, then.”

The part of Carla’s daughter was kind of a no-brainer for me, but you never know. So when the casting agent came out and said, “Jennifer…” I was thinking,
You have got to be fucking kidding me
. But the agent finished the sentence with “Thank you so much, but we’re going with Leah this time.”

Jennifer couldn’t have been sweeter. “Congratulations, honey!” she said, and I could tell she really meant it.

My first day on the set of
Cheers
I was totally awestruck because it was such a huge show and it featured major, Emmy-winning actors. While I was watching rehearsal, Ted Danson came and sat next to me. I tried to play it cool, not wanting to bother him. So when he said, “Would you run lines with me?” I assumed he was speaking to someone else and completely ignored him.

“Is that too much?” he said.

“I’m sorry. Were you talking to… ? I actually didn’t know,” I stammered. “I heard you. I just didn’t know if you were talking to me.”

“Yes, darlin’, I’m talking to you. Would you mind? I’m so bad on my lines.”

“Of course!” I said. We went through his lines and when he did the scene for real I felt completely responsible for his success, like I was Ted Danson’s acting coach or something.

So, I had landed the role of Carla’s daughter on
Cheers,
but of course, as TV history would tell, Jennifer Aniston got hers with
Friends
. When the show was still being developed and was called
Friends Like Us,
I tried out for the part of Monica. As soon as my agent and I read the script we knew it was going to be a hit. And it was filming over at Warner Bros., right across the hall from John Levey’s office. If this wasn’t meant to be, I didn’t know what was.

The way it worked back then was you’d go to the studio first to audition, and then if you made the cut you went to the network. If you didn’t make it, you would get the “It’s not going any further” line, but if you did go on, it was a long day. It came down to me and this other girl at network. We became friendly during what seemed like an eternity of them asking us, individually, to go in and read, then sit outside, then calling one of us back in, then out, and so on. Eventually the casting director came out and said, “Thank you so much.” Here was the embarrassing part, where one of us would exit a failure. It’s hard to walk out with your head held high when you’ve been rejected.

“You can both leave,” the casting director said.

We were surprised but relieved. The girl and I assumed they were going to tell us at home who got the part, which was probably for the best. We walked out of the building and into the completely empty parking lot. It was a Saturday, so no one was at the studio. We chatted on the way to our cars, wishing each other the best, and then we saw Courteney Cox walking toward us, then past us and right into the building.
Motherfucker!
We both knew it right away:
She
had the part of Monica.

I knew
Friends
was going to be a hit. This killed me. I cried for days. I swore I would never ever audition for another show. Ever. Because this had been the one that was going to be my ticket. This one was so tough to get over.

In addition to hustling for parts, I had all my Scientology work to deal with. I was a dedicated parishioner, going through auditing and courses, but still there were always things required as a parishioner that I felt uncomfortable with, like the drills we had to do on certain courses. One was to spot different levels on the Tone Scale. You had to stop complete strangers on Hollywood Boulevard, get them to answer questions, and then assess their tone: 2.5 for Boredom, .07 for Hopeless. As part of a course on the Tone Scale, we were sent out with clipboards and required to pretend that we needed people to answer questions for a survey being conducted by the Hubbard Such-and-Such Research Center, but it was all just a ruse for us to practice assessing different tone levels. The surveys weren’t real. Most people were like, “Fuck you. I know who you are and what you’re doing.”

I took a shortcut to try to get out of doing the drill. “I’m an actress. I can’t be out here. Someone might recognize me from my not-so-popular and canceled series,” I protested. “John Travolta did it,” the supervisor said. “
You’re
going to do it.”

I was pretty much always on course a minimum of two and a half hours a day at the Celebrity Centre on Franklin Avenue, which was the building reserved for people in the arts or their associates to get services. After I became a working actress, I always went in through the main entrance, but there was a special one that led to the President’s Office—a private area reserved exclusively for celebrities, like John Travolta, Tom Cruise, and Kirstie Alley, and other VIPs. I didn’t get that role on
Friends,
so I wasn’t “there” yet.

In the theory room of the course room, which is just for reading, I would sit as still as a statue, because a supervisor was always walking around, looking for manifestations of study problems. If someone scratched his head, the supervisor would come over and ask, “What word don’t you understand here?” I always tried my best not
to blink or breathe. If you yawned, you were pretty much dead in the water.

“Get your course pack and come into the practical room for a checkout on your materials,” the supervisor would command.

Being checked out sent me directly back to elementary school, where teachers seemed to take sadistic pleasure in pointing out a kid’s gap in understanding in front of everyone in class. In quizzing me, the supervisor asked for definitions of words in the course packet, then examples of how to use those words in a sentence. Sometimes starting at the top of the page, which read “Sussex, England,” and if you didn’t know where that was, you would have to re-read the whole thing again (Sussex was where L. Ron Hubbard once had a home and is now the highly coveted Church of Scientology called St. Hill Manor). They went back as much as ten pages in the course to find something I had forgotten. It could be the third point in the ten points of “Keeping Scientology Working” or reciting verbatim all twelve “antisocial personality attributes.” Then I would have to go all the way back in my course to that point. It was frustrating, but the objective was to get the correct data and technology per HCOB (Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin). That meant doing it exactly right. I mean
exactly
.

Being on course was time-consuming, but when a parishioner was getting audited, there was no time limit. An auditing session could be twenty minutes or twenty hours. As determined by L. Ron Hubbard policy, you were expected to do twelve and a half hours a week of auditing or study. If you were not a good student before Scientology, you certainly would become one.

Auditing is all about rooting out hidden pain, stress, or anxiety with the use of an E-Meter and then getting rid of it. The E-Meter, short for “electropsychometer,” is an “electronic instrument that measures mental state and change of state in individuals,” according to the church. During the process, the preclear, or PC (person getting the auditing), is asked a set of questions or given directions as he holds on to two empty “cans” hooked up to the meter. It is believed that the thoughts in a person’s mind affect the flow of energy between the cans and cause the needle on the dial to move.

When you are being interviewed by the auditor, there is a “mental image picture.” This is a Scientology term for something you can “see” in your mind, most often demonstrated by asking someone to close their eyes and think of a cat and then describe what it “looks like.” These mental image pictures include emotion, pain, or stress, which changes the flow of the current and moves the needle.

The auditor’s job is to keep the session focused by using the meter and observing the reactions on the needle. There are twenty-eight “needle characteristics” that auditors have to know verbatim. A little shaky movement on the dial means you are having a bad thought about the thing you are talking about, or about something you are not telling the auditor. If the needle falls to the right, it tells the auditor to pursue what the PC is thinking about or talking about.

That is one of the hardest parts about being in session—there might be something you really want to get off your chest or to understand better (a fight with a boyfriend, problems with your mother, an issue with a colleague at work), but if the needle doesn’t move when you talk about a particular subject, you have to move on. In Scientology you further discuss only what’s reading on the meter.

Auditing can also become a form of self-editing, when it comes to criticizing others. The theory in Scientology is that if you are critical of someone, you have “similar transgressions of your own.”

For example, if you were to say, “My boyfriend beats me,” that would be seen as saying something critical to the auditor. He would then turn it around and say, “I got that, but have you done something similar to him or others?” The word “critical” in Scientology is very different.

Hubbard defined critical thought as “a symptom of an overt act having been committed” or “a withhold from an auditor.” What Hubbard meant is that critical thought is a bad thing; it indicates a criminal act. “Overt acts” and “withholds” are the equivalent of crimes against life and freedom in Scientology. The new definition thus makes it a crime for members to think critically, particularly about Scientology. Any “critical thought” by the Scientologist is immediately suspect. This redefinition makes criticizing anything
about Scientology extremely difficult for members, as it is reflected back on them as something they did wrong. Hubbard’s message is clear: Critical thought is not the sort of thing any good Scientologist should be engaged in.