“He made sure that all of my stuff was taken out of our dormitory room and put into the hallway. He just moved me out lock, stock, and barrel, so I had no place to sleep.”

But Miscavige’s charisma played well with the Messenger girls who had decamped to Clearwater while Hubbard plotted his next moves. Among the girls was Shelly, who soon caught Miscavige’s eye. He was just nine months older—and she still seemed liked a typical 15-year-old, giggling and listening to the love ballads of John Travolta.

The romance between Shelly and Miscavige began around 1978, in a rustic bubble known as Int Base. There, in the scrubby ranchlands 90 miles east of Los Angeles, Team Hubbard had transformed a faded resort area into Scientology’s international headquarters. The state-of-the-art base included a film-production studio, heavy security, and Hubbard’s $10 million mansion.

While Miscavige had a hair-trigger temper that produced sudden fits of verbal and physical violence, according to several sources—at one point, he’d punched his own auditor—most of the time he was just a fun-loving wunderkind. (A representative for the Miscaviges characterized as “false” the assertions regarding David Miscavige’s alleged temper and fits of violence.)

The romance did nothing to improve Shelly’s standing with her peers. Some of the girls deemed her too young and status-hungry for their taste, and they often excluded her. “That really pushed her buttons,” recalls one former Messenger. “It was the one thing that really made her flash emotion, in a desperate sort of way. She was clearly a lonely girl who’d been abandoned all her life.”

But once Miscavige entered the picture, she focused on him. They married in 1982 in the Los Angeles area and instantly became the “It couple” of Sea Org. Emphasis on “couple.”

“Back then, Shelly was much less subservient, because she was in a position that was basically equivalent to Miscavige’s,” Mike Rinder recalls. “She was not in a junior position, and she was always a feisty sort of a person.”

And their timing was excellent. Hubbard was, by this point, a babbling Kurtzian figure. This created a power vacuum that required immediate attention. Miscavige expertly outmaneuvered his rivals and shooed them out of the picture. When Hubbard finally died, in 1986, Scientology’s future was placed in Miscavige’s hands.

Stand by Your Man

One of the first orders of business for Miscavige as chairman of the board, or “C.O.B.,” was to give Shelly a job befitting the First Lady of Scientology. He created the position of “C.O.B. Assistant,” which afforded her a large workspace connected to his extremely large one in Building 50, a $70 million facility built to Miscavige’s increasingly lofty specifications. “We were kids, and it was all exciting, and it was all the future, and it evolved and evolved,” says Mark “Marty” Rathbun, who at the time served as Miscavige’s top deputy. “The thrill lasted about three years after the old man died. After that time, it progressed to insanity.”

Basically, Shelly was in charge of the dozen-odd staffers who worked in the executive office. In real terms, though, according to Claire Headley, the job required her to be “whatever ‘the boss’ wanted her to be at any given moment.” Sometimes she was his unofficial counselor, at other times his valet. Such became the nature of their relationship that she’d hover within arm’s reach of him. There she nodded thoughtfully or flashed a huge smile, while Miscavige’s opposite elbow was manned by his second-most-important female accessory, Laurisse “Lou” Stuckenbrock. A statuesque New Zealander, she functioned as his “communicator.”

By this point, according to several ex-Scientologists, Shelly’s husband had come to seem more like her boss. When the couple went out at night, they were often accompanied by Miscavige’s bobbleheaded yes-men. When they came home, they retired to separate bedrooms, say several sources.