Stars in their eyes
23 June 2007
Tessa Mayes is the first reporter to have gone undercover in the London Celebrity Centre of the Church of Scientology. It is, she finds, like a pious version of Pop Idol. The adherents want to be celebrities at least as much as Scientologists
To download a podcast about Tessa Mayes's experiences with the celebrity Scientologists, click here.
‘A culture is only as great as its dreams and its dreams are dreamed by artists,’ wrote L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre in 1969, 15 years after he formed the church itself. So, in a sense, the Scientologists have only been true to their founder’s intentions in the ever greater emphasis they now put on the famous.
If you’ve seen the ordinary-looking Scientology shopfront on the Tottenham Court Road, the London Celebrity Centre comes as a pleasant contrast: it is an impressive, six-storey, cream Victorian building in Bayswater, adorned with balustrades. There is a small street sign advertising a ‘Free Stress Test’ with a background image of an exploding volcano and the words ‘Church of Scientology â” Celebrity Centre’ in gold lettering and a gold cross-like symbol on the ground-floor window.
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