Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

One celebrity quickly took precedence. John Travolta was in Mexico making his first film, The Devil’s Rain, a cheap horror movie starring Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner. He got to be friends with Joan Prather, a promising young actress and dancer, who was one of the few cast members his age. “He glommed on to me from day one,” she said. “He was extremely unhappy and not doing well.” Prather began talking about how much Scientology had helped her. Actors are often asked to get in touch with feelings that can be quite devastating. “Dianetics offered a tool to get to one’s raw emotions without going completely bonkers,” she observed. “It sounded really interesting, so I brought up certain things about my case and asked if that could be handled,” Travolta later recalled. “And she said it could. I said, ‘Come on … could THAT be handled? You know, I couldn’t believe it.” Prather gave him a copy of Dianetics. It helped with his bouts of depression and insomnia. “Sometimes people say the most incredible things in the world to me that last year would make me suicidal,” he observed. On another occasion he remarked, “Before Dianetics, if people said negative things to me or about me, I would cave in easily. Being a man, that wasn’t a very appealing quality. Some people would say, ‘The boy is too sensitive.’ But many times I had suppressive people around me who would cave me in on purpose. I was sort of like a minefield.”