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Doctor knows best, but not if you're a believer

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Sunday Jan 11 2009

W hen I i

W hen I interviewed John Travolta a couple of years ago he had recently turned 50 and was playfully pondering his own mortality. He didn't care if he died young, he told me, adding that that had happened to a lot of famous people and he'd had a great life. And anyway, he still had plenty of time to leave a beautiful corpse.

The Saturday Night Fever star could have scarcely have imagined that just a couple of sunny Hollywood winters later, newspapers would be giving sorrowful accounts of his career milestones. Not because he had died -- in fact he looks even younger now than when I met him -- but because when the kin of a famous person passes on, it is usually their famous and still living relative that gets the obituary (Also see: Hudson, Jennifer).

The problem was that we knew very little about Jett Travolta's short life. The son of the Pulp Fiction star had made headlines not only for his ill health -- he suffered from frequent seizures -- but also because he was said to have autism, a condition his father, as a Scientologist, does not believe in. Several autism charities (including the Autism Society of America) had issued pleas for Travolta and his wife, former model Kelly Preston, to have the boy treated properly and one author, Mark Ebner, had written a book about it. The star had even clashed with his younger brother Joey, who had made a documentary on autism, over the issue.

John Travolta and Kelly Preston had always insisted that their son instead suffered from Kawasaksi disease, a rare condition that causes inflammation of the arteries. Experts were sceptical, saying the disease rarely affected children over the age of 8 and was rarely fatal.

Travolta and Preston had linked Jett's condition to the use of cleaning agents in their home and had had the boy 'detoxed' in a programme designed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

According to the Travolta family, Jett had died in the bath at their home in the Bahamas after having a seizure and hitting his head, but the director of the funeral home, Glen Campbell, said that their was no sign of trauma to the head. He added that the death certificate, based on the post mortem examination, gave the cause of death as seizure alone. It was perhaps the last in a long line of discrepancies between the Travolta view of Jett's death and that of the experts. Whether Jett had autism or not is a subject of debate, but seeing a problem of the brain in physical rather than psychological or behavioural terms is something consistent with Scientology beliefs. Tom Cruise attacked Brooke Shields for taking medication for post-partum depression because he does not believe that she had a condition.

Scientology's defenders last week -- Lisa Marie Presley included -- have pointed out that the religion/cult (depending on your point of view) does allow conventional medical treatment for some demonstrably physical conditions and its spokesman has said that Scientologists should "go with what the medical community" says in regard to autism. However this is not what Scientologists have said up until now. According to Church of Scientology teachings, people with autism are classified as "degraded beings" and can work to improve their condition themselves. Rick Ross, a vocal American critic of Scientology has said: "the Travoltas, as very prominent Scientologists, would never have consulted a doctor to deal with the treatment of autism".

Ironically, John Travolta had no doubts about the life-saving properties of Scientology. In fact when I spoke to him he credited his faith with preventing him from dying young. "I have fame on the level of a Marilyn Monroe or an Elvis Presley," he told me. "But part of the reason I didn't go the way they did was because of my beliefs. People make judgments about it [Scientology] but often don't know what they're talking about . . . We [the Church of Scientology] are only getting bigger and we help people all over the world, from disaster zones to drug rehabilitation."

It's worth pointing out that Scientology is not the only religion that has clashed recently with medical science -- the Catholic Church is against condoms, Evangelical protestants are against stem cell research, while the issue of a Jehovah's Witness receiving a blood transfusion against her will is one that has come before the Irish courts last year.

But viewing a child with autism as a 'degraded being' seems a special branch of madness.