------------------------------------------------------------------- F.A.C.T.Net, Inc. (Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network, Incorporated) a non-profit computer bulletin board and electronic library 601 16th St. #C-217 Golden, Colorado 80401 USA BBS 303 530-1942 FAX 303 530-2950 Office 303 473-0111 This document is part of an electronic lending library and preservational electronic archive. F.A.C.T.Net does not sell documents, it only lends them according to the terms of your library cardholder agreement with F.A.C.T.Net, Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Also by Russell Miller BUNNY~ THE REAL STORY OF PLAYBOY THE HOUSE OF GETTY Bare-Faced Messiah THE TRUE STORY OF L. RON HUBBARD Russell Miller This book is dedicated to all those Scientologists who had the courage to face the truth and speak out Contents List of illustrations vii Author's note ix Introduction 1 Preface 2 1 A Dubious Prodigy 7 2 Whither did he ~A"ander? 26 3 Explorer Manqud 40 4 Blood and Thunder 59 5 Science Fictions 76 6 The Hero Who Never Was 95 7 Black 1Magic and Betty 112 8 The Mystery of the Missing Research 131 9 The Strange Ddbut of Dianctics 147 10 Commies, Kidnaps and Chaos 163 11 Bankrolling and Bankruptcy 186 12 Phoenix Rising 202 13 Apostle of the Nlain Chance 220 14 Lord of the B. lanor 233 15 Visits to t leaven 247 16 Launching the Sea Org 263 17 In Search of Past Lives 279 18 Messengers of God 297 19 Atlantic Crossing 313 20 Running Aground 333 21 Nlaking Nlovies 348 22 Missing, Presumed Dead 365 Notes 376 Bibl'iography 382 Index 384 List of llhtstratio~ts 1 Abram Waterbury, L. Ron Hubbard's great-grandfather. 2 Ron's grandparents with their first child at Tilden, Nebraska, in the late 1880s. 3 Ron's mother, her brother and sisters, and an unknown relative. 4 Ron's long-suffering mother. 5 Ron's father, Harry Ross Hubbard, in the dress uniform of an officer of the US Navy. 6 The hospital in Tilden, Nebraska, where L. Ron Itubbard was born in 1911. 7 Little Ron in a sailor hat. 8 L. Ron Hubbard photographed during a visit to his parents un the island of Guam in 1928. 9 L. Ron Hubbard at George ~A,'ashington University. 10 The science fiction magazine in which Dianctics made its inauspicious ddbut. 11 Itubbard's public relations assistant, Barbara Kaye. 12 Richard de Mille and Barbara Kave. 13 L. Ron Itubbard with his son, Nibs, and friends in London in the 1950s. 14 I tubbard as 'revolutionary horticultural scientist' (Rex Features LId). 15 t tubbard as 'nuclear scientist' (Photo Source LId). 16 ttubbard with his wife and family (Photo Sourre LId). 17 Hubbard and Ray Kemp in Ireland. 18 ttubbard posing as Cecil Rhodes. 19 The Royal Scotman (Granada Tele~'ision Ltd). 20 Arthur Hubbard and Doreen Smith. 21 Hubbard directs a 'photo-shoot' in Curat;ao in 1974. 22 An officer of the Sea Org at Gilman }lot Springs in 1981. Copyright owners are indicated in brackets; all photographs not credited are from private sources. Author's Note I would like to be able to thank the officials of the Church of Scientology for their help in compiling this biography, but I am unable to do so because the price of their co-operation was effective control of the manuscript and it was a price I was unwilling to pay. Thereafter the Church did its best to dissuade people who knew Hubbard from speaking to me and constantly threatened litigation. Scientology lawyers in New York and Los Angeles made it clear in frequent letters that they expected me to libel and defame L. Ron Hubbard. When I protcstcd that in thirty years as a journalist and writer I had never been accused of libel, I was apparently investigated and a letter was written to my publishers in New York alleging that my claim was 'simply not accurate'. It was, and is. This book could not have been written without the assistance of the many former Scientologists who were prepared to give freely of their time to talk about their experiences, notwithstanding considerable risks. Some of them are named in the narrative, but there were many others who provided background information and to them all I pay tribute. I was deeply impressed by their integrity, intelligence and courage. This book could also not have been written without the existence of the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, which may give pause for thought to those who care about the truth yet are opposing the introduction of similar legislation in Britain. A special word of thanks is due to Jon Atack, a former Scientologist resident in East Grinstead, who has assembled one of the most comprehensive archives about Scientology and its founder and generously made his files available to me. I would also like to thank George Hay and John Symonds in London; Lydia and Jimmy tticks in Washington DC; David and :'x, lilo x,%'eaver in San Francisco; Connit and Phil Winberry in Seattle; Skip Davis in Newport, Rhode Island; Diane Lewis in Wichita; Arthur Jean Cox, Lawrence Kristiansen and Boris de Sidis in Los Angeles; Ron Newman in Woodside, California; Ron Howard of George Washington University; Sue Lindsay of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver; Dave Waiters of the Montana Historical Society; and the ever helpful staff of the Library of Congress. Too many people to name patiently replied to queries by mail and searched their records for the answers to innumerable obscure questions. Their contribution to the whole picture was invaluable. My editor, Jennie Davies, polished the manuscript with her usual skill and diligence, despite the demands of her newly-born txvins. My wife, Renate, read every chapter as it was written and always offered constructive advice. She had to put up with my long absences abroad while I was tracking down the truth about L. Ron Hubbard and then endure the misery of living with an obsessive author through the long months of writing. I could never thank her enough for her patience, love and support. Russell Miller Buckinghamshire England Introduction For more than thirty years, the Church of Scientology has vigorously promoted an image of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, as a romantic adventurer and philosopher whose early life fortuitously prepared him, in the manner of Jesus Christ, for his declared mission to save the world. The glorification of 'Ron', superman and saviour, required a cavalier disregard for facts: thus it is that every biography of Hubbard published by the church is interwoven with lies, half-truths and ludicrous embellishments. The wondrous irony of this deception is that the true story of L. Ron Hubbard is much more bizarre, mucb more improbable, than any of the lies. Preface The Revelation of Ron It was a scene that could have been ripped from the yellowing pages of the pulp science fiction that L. Ron Hubbard wrote in the Thirties . . . A strangely alien group of young people who believe they are immortal set up a secret base in an abandoned health spa in the desert in southern California. Fearful of outsiders, they suspect they have been discovered by the FBI. In a panic, they begin to destroy any documents that might incriminate their leader. It is essential they protect him, for they believe he alone can save the world. Searching through the top floor of a derelict hotel, one of their number discovers a stack of battered cardboard boxes and begins pulling out faded photographs, dog-cared manuscripts, diaries written in a childish scrawl and school reports. There are twenty-{mc boxes in all, each stuff eft with mcmorabilia, even baby clothes. The young man rummaging through the boxes is ecstatic. He is certain he has made a discovery of profound significance, for all the material documents the earl)' life of h~s leader. At last, hc thinks, it will be possible to refute all the lies spread by their enemies. At last it will be possible to prove to the world, beyond doubt, that his leader really is a genius and mirade worker . . . Thus was the stage set for the inexorable unmasking of L. Ron Hubbard, the saviour who never was. Ilt !~ ~ ~ al, Gerry Armstrong, the man kneeling in the dust on the top floor of the old Del Sol Hotel at Gilman Hot Springs that afternoon in January 1980, had been a dedicated member of the Church of Scientology for more than a decade. He was logging in Canada when a friend introduced him to Scientology in 1969 and he was immediately swept awav by its heady promise of superhuman powers and imm~irtality. During his years as a Scientologist, he had twice been sentenced to long periods in the Rehabilitation Project Force, the cult's own Orwellian prison; he had been constantly humiliated and his marriage had been destroyed, yet he remained totally convinced that L. Ron Hubbard was the greatest man who ever lived. Preface 3 The dauntless loyalty Hubbard inspired among his followers was tantamount to a form of mind control. Scientology flourished in the post-war era of protest and uncertainty when young people were. searching for a sense of belonging or meaning to their lives. Hubbard offered both, promised answers and nurtured an inner-group feeling of exclusiveness which separated Scientologists from the real world. Comforted by a sense of esoteric knowledge, of exaltation and self-absorption, they were ready to follow Ron through the very gates of Hell if need be. At the time Armstrong discovered the treasure trove of memorabilia at Gilman Hot Springs, Hubbard had been in hiding for years. His location was known only as 'X', but Armstrong knew that it was possible to get a message to him and he petitioned for permission to begin researching an official biography, forcefully arguing that it would prepare the ground for 'universal acceptance' of Scient01ogy. He saw it as the forerunner of a major motion picture based on Hubbard's life and the eventual establishment of an archive in an L. Ron Ilubbard Museum. By then Hubbard was nearly seventy years old and bad lived so long in a world of phantasmagoria that he was unable to distinguish between fact and his own fantastic fiction. Itc believed he was the teenage explorer, swashbuckling hero, sage and philosopher his biograpbies said be was. It was perhaps too late for him to comprehend that his life, in reality, far outstripped the fabricated version. tte made the leap from penniless science-fiction writer to millionaire guru and prophet in a single, effortless bound; he led a private navy across the oceans of the world for nearly a decade; he came close to taking over control of several countries; he was worshipped by thousands of his followers around the world and was detested and feared by most governments. He was a story-spinning maverick whose singular life eclipsed even his own far-fetched stories. Yet he clung tenaciously to the fiction and when Armstrong's petition to research his biography arrived at his hide-out that January in 1980, he unhesitatingly gave his approval. Armstrong had no experience as an archivist or researcher, but he was intelligent, industrious, honest and enthusiastic. He moved all the relevant documentation from Gilman Hot Springs to the Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles, where it filled six filing cabinets, and began cataloguing and indexing the material, making copies of everything and reverently preserving the originals in plastic envelopes, acutely aware of their historical importance. Not long after he had started work, posters appeared in Scientology offices announcing the private screening of a 1940 Warher Brothers movie, The Dive Bomber, for which Hubbard had written the screenplay. Every Scientologist knew that Ron had been a successful 4 Bare-Faced Messiah Hollywood screenwriter before the war and the screening was to raise funds for the defence of the eleven Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, who had been indicted in x, Vashington on conspiracy charges. Armstrong decided to help by finding out a little more about Ron's contribution to the film, but at the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles he was puzzled to discover that two other writers had been credited with the screenplay of The Dive Bomber. Armstrong remonstrated with the librarian, then sent a memo to Ron to tell him about the mistake in the Academy records. Hubbard replied with a cheery note explaining that x. Varner Brothers had been in such a hurry to distribute the movie that it was already in the can before it was realized that his name had been left off the credits. He was busy at that time, closing up his posh apartment on Riverside Drive in New York and getting read3, to go to war, so he just told the studio to mail the cheque to him at tile Explorers Club. After the war, he used the money to take a holiday in the Caribbean. It was an explanation with which Armstrong was perfectly satisfied except for one niggling worry: like all Scientologists, he had been told that Ron was blind and crippled at the end of the war and that he had only been able to make a recovery because of tile power of his mind. Clearly, Armstrong mused, he would not have taken the holiday until after his recovery. In an attempt to tit together the chronology of events, Armstrong made an application under the Freedom of Information Act for I lubbard's US Navy records. Scicntologists were enormously proud of the fact that the founder of their church was a much-decorated war hero who had served in all five theaters and was wounded several times; indeed he was the first US casualty of the war in the Pacific. It was then, with a sense of mounting disbelief and dismay, that Armstrong leafed through Hubbard's records after they had arrived from x, Vashington. He went from one document to another, searching in vain for an explanation, still refusing to believe the evidence of his own eves: the record seemed to indicate that Hubbard, far from being a hero, was an incompetent, malingering coward who had done his best to avoid seeing action. Armstrong would not believe it. He set the documents aside and resolved to start his research at the beginning, in Nlontana, where Hubbard had grown up on his grandfather's huge cattle ranch. But he could find no trace of any property owned bv the family, except a little house in the middle of Helena. Neither could he discover any documentation covering Hubbard's teenage watlderings through China. In Washington DC, where Hubbard was supposed to have graduated in mathematics and engineering from George Washington University, the record showed he dropped out after two >'ears because Preface 5 of poor grades. And of Hubbard's labled expeditions as an explorer there was similarly no sign. iI was finding contradiction after contradiction,' Armstrong said. 'I kept trying to justify them, kept thinking that I would find another document that would explain everything. But I didn't. I slowly came to realize that the guy had consistently lied about himself.' By the summer of 1981, Armstrong had assembled more than 250,000 pages of documentation about the founder of the Church of Scientology, but despite the gaping holes appearing in Hubbard's credibility, he remained intensely loyal. 'My approach was, OK, nov.' we know he's human and tells lies. What we;ve got to do is clear up the lies so that all the good he has done for the world will be accepted. I thought the only way we could exist as an organisation was to let the truth stand. After all, the truth was equally as fascinating as the lies.' Armstrong's pleas to clear up the lies fell on deaf ears. Since Hubbard had gone into seclusion, the Church of Scientology had been taken over by young militants known as 'messengers'. When Hubbard was the commodore of his own navy, the messengers were little nympbets in hot pants and halter tops who ran errands for him and competed with each otber to find ways of pleasing him. Eventually they helped him dress and undress, performed little domestic tasks like washing his hair and smearing rejuvenating cream on his ficstly features, and even followed him around with an ashtray to catch tile falling ash from his cigarettes. As tile commodure became more and more paranoid, beset by imagined traitors and enemies, the messengers became more and more powerful. In November 1981 Armstrong presented a written report to the messengers, listing the false claims made about ||ubbard and putting forward a powerful argument as to why they should be corrected. 'If we present inaccuracies, hyperbole or downright lies as fact or truth,' he wrote, 'it doesn't matter what slant we give them; if disproved, the man will look, to outsiders at least, like a charlatan . . .' The messengers' response was to order Armstrong to be 'security checked'- interrogated as a potential traitor. Armstrong refused. In the spring of 1982, Gerald Armstrong was accused of eighteen different 'crimes' and 'high crimes' against the Church of Scientolog>', including theft, false pretences and promulgating false information about the church and its founder. He was declared to be a 'suppressive person' and 'fair game', which meant he could be 'tricked, cheated, lied to, sued or destroyed' by his former friends in Scientolog>_'. 'By then the whole thing for me had crumbled,' he said. 'I realized I had been drawn into Scientolog>.' by a web of lies, by Machiavellian mental control techniques and by fear. The betrayal of trust began with Hubbard's lies about himself. His life was a continuing pattern of 6 Bare-Faced Messiah fraudulent business practices, tax evasion, flight from creditors and hiding from the law. 'He was a mixture of Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Baron tx, Ifinchhausen. In short, he was a con man.' Chapter 1 A Dubious Prodigy According to the colourful yarn spun for the benefit of his followers, L. Ron Hubbard was descended on his mother's side from a French nobleman, one Count de Loupe, who took part in the Norman invasion of England in 1066; on his father's side, the Hubbards were English settlers who had arrived in America in the nineteenth century. It was altogether a distinguished naval family: both his maternal great-grandfather, 'Captain' I. C. Dex, Volfe, and his grandfather, 'Captain' Lafayette x,%'aterbury, 'helped make American naval history'~, while his father was 'Commander' Harry Ross Hubbard, US Navy. As his father was away at sea for lengthy periods, the story goes, little Ron grew up on his wealthy grandfather's enormous cattle ranch in Montana, said to cover a quarter of the state [approximately 35,000 square miles!]. His picturesque friends were frontiersmen, cowboys and an Indian medicine man. 'L. Ron Hubbard found the life of a young rancher very enjoyable. Long da~'s were spent riding, breaking broncos, hunting coyote and taking his l~rst steps as an explorer. For it was in Montana that he had his first encounter with another culture the Blackfoot [Pikuni] Indians. He became a blood brother of the Pikuni and was later to write about them in his first published no~el, Buckskin Brigades. When he was ten years old, in 1921, he rejoined his family. His father, alarmed at his apparent lack of formal learning, immediately put him under intense instruction to make up for the time he had "lost" in the wilds of Montana. So it was that by the time he was twelve years old, L. Ron Hubbard had already read a goodly number of the world's greatest classics - and his interest in religion and philosophy was born. ,z ~ ~ /I ~ ~1 Virtually none of this is true. The real story of L. Ron Hubbard's early life is considerably more prosaic and begins not on a cattle ranch but in a succession of rented apartments necessarily modest since his father was a struggling white-collar clerk drifting from job to job. His grandfather was neither z distinguished sea captain nor a wealthy 8 Bare-Faced Messiah rancher but a small-time veterinarian who supplemented his income renting out horses and buggies from a livery barn. It is true, however, that his name was Lafayette O. Waterbury. As far as anyone knexv, the Waterburys came from the Catskills, the dark-forested mountain range in New York State celebrated in the early nineteenth century as the setting for Washington Irving's popular short story about Rip Van Winkle - a character only marginally more fantastic than the Waterburys' most famous scion. Shortly before the turmoil of the Civil War divided the nation, Abram \Vaterbury and his young wife, Margaret, left the Catskills to join the thousands of hopeful settlers trekking west in covered wagons to seek a better future. By 1863 he had set up in business as a veterinarian in Grand Rapids, Michigan and on 25 July 1864, Margaret gave birth to a son whom they named Lafayette, perhaps after the town in Indiana at which they had stopped on their journey before turning north to Grand Rapids. Lafayette, undoubtedly thankful to be known to his friends as Lafc, learned the veterinary trade from his father and married before he was twenty. tlis bride was twenty-one-year-old Ida Corinne Dc\Volfc, fr~m l lampshirc, Illinois. Diminutive in stature, Ida was a gentle, intelligent, str~mg-willcd yotmg woman whose mother had died in childbirth, with her eighth child, when Ida was sixteen. John Dc\Volfc, hcr fatl~cr, was a wealthy banker who clung to a fanciful family lcgcnd about the origins of the Dc\Volfcs in Europe. Details and dates were vague, but the essence of the story was that a cc~urticr accompa~3'ing a prince on a hunting expedition in France had somehow saved his master from an attack by a wolf; in gratitude the prince had ennobled the faithful courtier, ~estowing upon him tbc title of Count dc Loupe, a name that was eventually anglicized to DcXVolfe. [No records exist to support this story, either in Britain or France; x."ice-:\dmiral t-tarry De \Volf, twelfth-generation descendant of Balthazar De \Volf, the first De \Volf in America, says he has never heard of Count de Loupe.s] DeXVolfc offered the young couple the use of a farm he owned in Nebraska on condition that Lafe would maintain and improve the property. It was at Burnett, a settlement on the Elkhorn river, one hundred miles west of Omaha, which had recently been opened up by the arrival of the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad. Burnett was an unremarkable cluster of log cabins, dug-outs and ramshackle pine huts huddled in a lazy curve of the river and surrounded by gently rolling prairie. It might never have appeared on any map had not the homesteaders persuaded the railroad to make a halt nearby. The first train arrived in 1879 and thereafter the town developed around the railroad depot rather than the river; within a A Dubious Prodigy 9 few years a general store, saloon and livery stable were in business. The Davis House Hotel, opened in 1884, was considered the finest on the whole Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad. By the time Lafe and Ida Waterbury arrived in Burnett, soon after the opening of the hotel, Ida was heavy with child; a daughter, Ledora May, was born in 1885. During the next twenty years Ida would produce seven more children and selflessly devote herself to the upbringing of a happy, close and high-spirited familx'. For a couple of years Lafe worked his father-in-law's farm, but a bitter family row developed when DeWolfe indicated his intention to exclude his other children and leave the property solely to Ida and Lafe. Rather than be the cause of strife in the family, Lafe moved out, opened a livery stable in town on Second Street and established himself as a veterinarian. His business was a success because he was well-liked and respected in the area, particularly after playing a starring role in a local domestic drama which briefly held the toxvn gossips in thrall. Ida's sister, who had also moved to I~urnett, woke up one morning to discover that her husband had left her and taken thcir infant son with him to New York. Lafe immediately packed his bags, set off for New York bv train, tracked down the crring husband and returned to Burnett in triumph, his nephew in his arms. When Ida gave birth to another daughter in 1886, it was a typically warm-hcartcd gesture that prompted them to name the baby Toilic. A young man who used to hang around the livery stable had been engaged to a girl called Toilic before he became mentally deranged; whenever he felt 'strange' he would always, for some reason, seek out Lafe and find reassurance from his company. ~,Vhen he learned that Ida and Lafe had had another daughter, he shyly asked if they would call her Toilie, after the sweetheart he knew he would never be able to marry. Years later the irreverent Toilie would say 'I'm nuts because I was named by a crazy man' and shriek with laughter. Toilie was still a baby when hard times hit Burnett. In JanuarS.' 1887 a catastrophic blizzard swept across the plains west of the Mississippi, killing thousands of head of cattle; most of the local ranchers were mined overnight. The farmers fared no better, for that terrible winter was followed by a succession of blistering summers accompanied by plagues of grasshoppers which devastated the already sparse crops. But at a point when many of the despairing townsfolk were talking about giving up the struggle against the unforgiving elements, the climate suddenly improved and the detested grasshoppers disappeared; unlike many small towns in the Nebraska prairie, Burnett , survived the crisis. By 1899 the local newspaper, the Burnett Citizen, was able to report, as evidence of increasing prosperity, that Lafe \Vaterbur)., ,.,,'as 10 Bare-Faced Messiah among those who had built new dwelling houses in the town that year. ! It was a fine, two-storey, wood-frame house on Elm Street, sheltered at the front by two huge elm trees. At the rear, beyond a stand of willows, it overlooked prairie stretching away into hazy infinity; deer and antelope often ventured within sight of the back yard and at night the howls of coyotes made the children shiver in their beds. The Waterburys certainly needed the space offered by their new home, for by now lx, lav and Toilie had been joined by Ida Irene (called Ix. Iidgie by the family because she was so small), a brother Ray, and two more sisters, Louise and Hope. Another two girls, Margaret and June, would follow in 1903 and 1905. Lafe and Ida doted on their children, thoroughly enjoyed their company and liked nothing more than when the house was full of noise and laughter. Ida was determined that her children would have a happier upbringing than her own - she never forgot being constantly beaten at school for writing with her left hand - and as a consequence the xXaterburvs were unusually relaxed parents for their time, encouraging their offspring to attend church on Sundays, for example, but caring little which church they attended. Surprisingly, there was considerable choice. For a small town with a population of less than a thuusand people, Burnctt was an excessively Gud-fcaring community anti supported four thriving churct~cs - Baptist, l. uthcran, ~Icthodist and Cathulic. Lafc and Ida always claimed the.,,' were too busy to g~ to church themselves, although Lafc openly declared, to his children, his ambivalcnce to~'ards religion: 'Some of the finest men I have ever known were preachers,' he liked to say, 'and some of the biggest hypocrites I have ever known were preact~ers.' He was a large, bluff man with an irrepressible sense of humour, a talent for mimicry and a hint of the showman about him: he often used to announce his intention to put all his children on the stage. In the evenings, ~vhen he had had a drink or two, he would sit on the porch and play his fiddle, which had a negro's head carved at the end of the shaft. Tutored by Lafe, who was considered to be one of the best horsemen in .Xladison County, all the children learned to ride almost as soon as the,,' could walk and each of them was allocated a pony from the x,%'aterburv livery stable. Also quartered with the horses was the family cow, Star, who obligingly provided them every day with as much milk as they could drink. In 1902, because of confusion with a similarly-named town nearby, the good folk of Burnett decided to change the name of their town to Tilden, thereby commemorating an unsuccessful presidential candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, who had contested the 1876 election won by Rutherford B. Haves. ),lay was the first of the xXaterburv children to graduate, in 1904, from Tilden High School. Tall, outspoken and A Dubious Prodt~ 11 independent, she was an unashamed feminist - she was outraged when she read in the newspaper that a policeman in New York had arrested a woman for smoking in the street and thrilled to learn that deaf and blind Helen Keller had graduated from Radcliffe College the same year she graduated from Tilden. It surprised no one in the family when May announced that she wanted a career, declaring her belief that there must be more to life than caring for a husband and bearing children. Accordingly, and with the blessing of her parents, she set off for Omaha to train as a teacher. But by the time she had qualified as a high school and institute teacher, certificate of Nebraska, she was writing letters home about a young sailor she had met called 'Hub'. Harry Ross Hubbard was not a descendent of a long line of Hubbards but an orphan. Born Henry August Wilson on 31 August 1886 at Fayette, Iowa, his mother had died when he was a baby and he had been adopted by a Mr and Mrs James Hubbard, farmers in Frederiksburg, Iowa, who changed his name to Harry Ross Hubbard. At school, Harry was not a high flier. He briefly attended a business college at Norma Springs, Iowa, but dropped out when he realized he had little chance of a degree. On 1 September 1904, the day after bis eighteenth birthday, he joined the United States Navy as an enlisted man. While serving as a yeoman on the {.'SS t'ennsylvania, he began writing 'romantic tales' of Navy life for newspapers back home, earning useful extra income. He was posted to the US Navy recruiting office in Omaha in 1906 when he met lx,'Iay Waterbur`,' and it was not long before her plans for an independent career were more or less forgotten. They married on 25 April 1909, and by the summer of 1910 lxday was pregnant; her husband, now discharged from the Navy, had found work as a commercial teller in the advertising department of the Omaha 1a'brld Herald newspaper. The Waterburys, meanwhile, had left Tilden and moved to Durant in south-east Oklahoma, close to the border with Texas. Lafe had seen the first Model T. Ford trundle cautiously through the main street of Tilden and realized that his livery stable faced an uncertain future; when a close friend in Durant suggested to him that the warmer climate in the south would be better for all the family, he talked it over with Ida and they decided to go, making the eight hundred-mile trip by railroad. Ray, then sixteen, travelled with Star and the horses and fed and watered the animals during the journey. Only Toilie stayed behind in Tilden. She was twenty-three and working as a nurse and secretary for Dr Stuart Campbell, who had opened a small hospital in a wood-frame house on Oak Street, just a block away from t~he Waterbury family home. Toilie was reluctant to give up her job and her parents readily accepted her decision not to go with them to Oklahoma. 12 Bare-Faced Messiah Campbell, who had set up a practice in Tilden in 1900, had delivered Ida Waterbury's two youngest children, but it was the fact that Toilie was working for him that persuaded May to return to Tilden to give birth to her first child. With only a little more than a year between them, Nlav and Toilie had always been close, walking to and from school arm in arm, sharing a bedroom and incessantly giggling together over childhood secrets. Toilie was waiting at the railroad depot in Tilden at the end of February 1911 when Nlay, helped by a solicitous Hub, heaved herself down from the train. Although Tilden was still no more than four dirt streets running north to south, intersected by four more running east-west, Ix. lay noticed plenty of changes in the short time she had been away - four grain elevators had been built, three saloons and two pool halls had opened, Nlrs Nlayes was competing with the Botsford sisters in the millinery trade and there was even a new 'opera house'true, it had yet to stage its first opera, but tile road shows were always popular, particularly since Alexander's Ragtime Band had set the nation's feet tapping. Ixday did not have long to wait for the 'blessed event'. She went into labour during the afternoon of Sunday 10 Ix, larch, and Toilie arranged for her to be admitted immediately to Dr Campbcll's hospital. At one minute past two o'clock the following morning, she was delivered of a son. She and t luh had already decided that if it was a boy, he would be nanled Lafayette Ronald l lubbard. Ida and Lafc x, Vatcrburv did not see their first grandchild until Christmas 1911, when ttub, Nlav and the baby arrived to spend the holiday with them in Durant. Lafe, who had been out treating a neighbour's horse, burst into the house, threw his hat on tile floor and leaned over the crib to shake his grandson's hand. Baby Ron smiled obligingly and Lafe whooped with pleasure, trumpeting at his wife: 'l.ook, tile little son of a bitch knows me already.' The biggest surprise for the family was that Ron had a startling thatch of fiuffv orange hair. Hub was dark-haired and tile Waterburys had no more than a hint of auburn in their colouring - nothing like the impish little carrot-top who gurgled happily as he was passed from one lap to another. Seven-year-old Margaret, known in the familv as Nlarnie, spoke for evervone when she proclaimed her new nephew to be 'cute as a bug's ear'. During that Christmas May told her parents that Hub had got a new job on a newspaper in Kalispell, Montana, and that they would be moving there from Omaha in the New Year. She was hopeful that it would prove to be a step up for them. In tile spring of 1912, May began writing long ana enthusiastic A Dubious Prodig3.' 13 letters from Kalispell. Perhaps missing the family, she often hinted that they might consider joining her and Hub in Montana. Kalispell was a fine, modern city, she wrote, with paved streets, electric lighting and many fine houses. The surrounding Flathead Valley was famous for its fruit and at blossom time the orchards of apples, peaches, pears, cherries and plums had to be seen to be believed. One Kalispell farmer, Fred Whiteside, was so confident about the quality of his fruit that he boasted he would give $1000 to anyone finding a worm in one of his apples. May's letters gave her parents much to think about, for they both recognized that the move to Oklahoma had not been a success. x, Vhen they first arrived in Durant, Lafe bought a livery barn on the outskirts of toxvn and for several months the whole family lived in the hayloft above the animals. They built a cookhouse on the property so they had somewhere to eat their meals and then started on a house. None of the children minded the privations in the least - indeed, they rather enjoyed thinking of themselves as true pioneers - but Lafc found the humid summers very debilitating. It made May's description of the blossom in lx, lontana all the more enticing. Ida had been deeply disturbed by an incident that occurred soon after they moved into their new house. A negro raped a white woman in tile town and while a posse was out looking for him, a rumour took hold that there was going to be a negro uprising, causing somctl~ing approaching panic, particularly in remote outlying areas. At nightfall. Lafe and Ray took guns and went out on horses to protect the approaches to their property, while the girls waited behind barred windows, watching flares bounce through the night and listening to the rattle of cartwheels as farmers shepherded their families into the safety of the town. Although there was no uprising, both Ida and Lafe were concerned that there might be a 'next time' and the}' did not want to feel that their safety depended on their willingness to protect themselves with guns. In the fall of 1912, the Waterburys once again sold their house, packed up their belongings and loaded their livestock on to railcars, this time bound for Kalispell, lxdontana, 1500 miles to the north-west. Long delays at railheads, while waiting with their freight cars to be picked up by north-bound trains, added days to the journey and it was a week before they were hooked on to a Great Northern Railway train labouring across the Rocky Mountains through the spectacular passes that led to Kalispell. The family reunion was the happiest of occasions and no one received more attention than Ron, who had learned to take his first faltering steps. 'He was very much the love child of the whole family,' said Nlarnie. 'He was adored by even'one. I can still see that mop of red hair running around.' 14 Bare-Faced Messiah Lafe found a small house in Orchard Park, a short walk from May and Hub's home and only a block from the fairground, where he hoped to find work as a veterinarian. With only two bedrooms, it was not nearly big enough for the Waterbury tribe, but it had a barn that would accommodate all the horses and still leave enough room for the long-suffering and widely-travelled Star. Marnie and June, the two youngest children, were given one of the bedrooms and Lafe built a big wood-frame tent in the yard for the other four: inside, it was divided by a canvas screen - Ray slept on a bunk on one side and Midgie, Louise and Hope were on the other. They had a stove to keep them warm in the winter and were perfectly content. On summer evenings, Marnie and June often heard their older sisters whispering and tittering in the tent and sometimes they crept outside to join them and-share the cherries they stole almost every night from a neighbouring garden. The Waterburys were happy in Kalispell: Ida and Lafe made no secret of the pleasure they took in being able to see their grandson every day; Midgie met her future husband, Bob, in the town; and Ray developed an impressive talent for training horses. Under his careful tuition, the family ponies learned tricks like counting by pawing the ground with a hoof and stealing handkerchiefs from his pocket. TIm Waterbury 'show horses', ridden bv the Waterbury children, became a popular feattire in the town parades and they always competed in the races at the fairground. Baby Ron remained the centre of the family's attention and the star of the Waterbury photograph albums - Ron perched in an apple tree, Ron with Liberty Bill, their English bull terrier, on the porch of the Kalispell house, Ron tD'ing to measure the back yard with a tape. Having clearly inherited something of his grandfather's showmanship, Ron thoroughly enjoyed being in the family spotlight. Lafe was walking down KalispelI's main street one day with Marnie and Ron when he bumped into Samuel Stewart, the governor of Montana, whom he had met several time3. 'Hey Sam,' he said, 'I'd like you to meet my little grandson, Ron.' Stewart stooped, solemnly shook hands with the boy and stood chatting to Lafe for a few minutes. After he had gone, Marnie, who had been neither introduced nor acknowledged, turned furiously on her father and snapped, 'Why didn't you introduce me? Don't I matter?' Lafe had the grace to apologize, but lxdarnie could see by his broad grin that he was not in the least repentant. As well as being favoured so shamelessly, Ron could always count on the support of his many aunts in any family dispute. While he was learning to talk, he would frequently drive his mother to distraction by running round the house repeating the same, usually meaningless, A Dubious Prodigy 15 word over and over again. One afternoon at the Waterbury home, the word was 'eskobiddle'. lXlay, at the end of her patience, finally shouted at him: 'If you say that once more I'm going to go and wash your mouth out with soap.' Ron looked coolly at her and smiled slowly. 'Eskobiddle!' he yelled at the top of his voice. tx, Iay immediately dragged him off and carried out her threat. A few minutes later, Ida heard shrieks coming from the back yard and discovered Midgie and Louise holding .'May down and washing her mouth with soap to avenge their precious nephew. Less than twelve months after the Waterburys arrived in Kalispell, IX, lay broke the news that she and Hub were going to move on; Hub was having problems with his job on the newspaper and had been offered a position as resident manager of the Family Theater in the state capital, Helena. Ida and Lafe were naturally upset but, as May said, Helena was only two hundred miles away and it was also on the Great Northern Railroad, so they would be able to visit each other frequently. Nevertheless, it would not be the same, both doting grandparents gloomily concluded, as having little Ronald in and out of the house almost every day. Helena in 1913 was a pleasant city of Victorian brick and stone buildings encircled bv the Rocky Mountains, whose snow-dusted peaks stippled with pines provided a scenic backdrop in every direction. The Capital Building, with its massive copper dome and fluted doric columns, eloquently proclaimed its status as the first city of Montana, as did the construction of the neo-Gothic St Helena Cathedral, which was nearing completion on Warren Street. Electric streetcars clanked along the brick-paved main street, once a twisting mountain defile known as Last Chance Gulch in commemoration of the four prospectors who had unexpectedly struck gold there in 1864 and subsequently rounded the city. The Familv Theater, at 21 Last Chance Gulch, occupied part of a handsome red-brick terrace with an ornate stone coping, but it suffered somewhat from its position, since it was in the heart of the city's red-light district and could not have been more inappropriately named. Respectable families arriving for the evening performance were required to avert their eyes from the colourful ladies leaning out of the windows of the brothels on each side of the theater, although it was not unknown for the occasional father to slip out after the show had started and return before the final curtain, curiously flushed. Harry Hubbard's duties were to sell tickets during the day, collect them at the door as~atrons arrived, maintain order if necessan,' during the show and lock up at the end of the evening. Although his title was 16 Bare-Faced Messiah resident manager, he chose not to live at the theater and rented a rickety little wooden house, not much better than a shack, on Henry Street, on the far side of the railroad track. May hated it and soon found a snlall apartment on the top floor of a house at 15 Rodncy Street, closer to the theater and in a better part of town. Travelling road shows, sometimes comprising not much more than a singer, pianist and a comedian, were the staple fare of the Family Theater. Ron was often allowed to see the show and he would sit with his mott~er in the darkened auditorium completely enthralled, no matter what the act. Years later he would recall sitting in a box at the age of two wearing his father's hat and applauding with such enthusiasm that the aodience began cheering him rather than the cast. He claimed the players took twelve curtain calls before they realized what was happening.4 \Vhen the Waterburrs paid a visit to Helena, }tub arranged for them to see the show, made sure they had the best seats in the house and solemnly stood at the door of the theater to collect their tickets as they filed in. Not long after their return to Kalispell, May heard that her father had slipped on a banana skin, fallen and broken his arm. She did not worry overmuch at first, even when her mother wrote to sav that the arm had not been set properly and had had to be re-broken. Indeed, her w<~rrics were rather closer to home, for l larry had been told by the owner of the Family Tt~cater that unless the audiences improved the theater might have to close. The news from abroad was also giving cause for concern, despite x, Voodrow Wilso~l's promise to keep America out of the war threatening to engulf Europe. On Sunday 2 August 1914, headlines in the Ilelcna Independent announced that Germauy had declared war on Russia and a despatch from London confirmed: 'The die is cast . . . Europe is to be plunged into a general war.' Closer to home, rival unions in the copper mines at Butte, only sixty miles from Helena, were also at war. \Vhen the ix, liners' Union Hall was dynamited, Governor Stewart declared martial law and sent in the National Guard to keep order. It was in this turbulent climate that the Family Theater finally closed its doors, for the audiences did not pick up. Harry ttubbard was once again obliged to look for work, but once again he was lucky he was taken on as a book-keeper for the Ives-Smith Coal Company, 'dealers in Original Bear Creek, Roundup, Acme and Belt Coal', at 41 \Vest Sixth Avenue..Xlay, meanwhile, found a cheaper apartment for the family on the first floor of a shingled wood-frame house at 1109 Fifth Avenue. Back in Kalispell, Lafe \Vaterburv was still having trouble with his arm. [te was not the kind of man to complain about bad luck, but no A Dubious Prodigy 17 one could have blamed him had he done so. His arm had to be set a third time and just when it seemed it was beginning to heal he was thrown to the ground by a horse he was examining. He was never to regain full strength in that arm and although he was only fifty years old he knew he would not be able to continue working as a vet, with all the pulling and pushing it involved. Only the four youngest Waterbury girls were still at home, but Lafe did not think he could afford to retire, even if that had been his ambition. (His taxable assets were listed in the Kalispell City Directory at $1550, which made him comfortably off, but not by any means rich.) No prospects presented themselves immediately in Kalispell and Lafe and Ida began considering another move. It somehow seen~ed natural, since they had followed 1May to Kalispell, that they should now think about moving to Helena. In the summer of 1915, Toilie, back home on a visit from the East, drove her father to Ilclena in the family's Ixdodel T. Ford so that he could take a look around. They stayed, of course, with May and tlub in their cramped apartment on Fifth Avenue and Lafe was delighted to have the company of his four-year-old grandson every time he went for a walk in town. Hub presumably talked to Iris father-in-law about his job and the two men almost certainly discussed tim ever-increasing denland for coal and tile business opportunities available in ttclena. As a bookkeeper, tlub knew tile figures, knew the profit lves-Smith was making and knew the strength of the market - it was information that undoubtedly influenced Lafe's decision to move his family to tlelcna and set up a coal company of his own. The Waterburys arrived in 1916 and bought a house at 736 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Raleigh Street, just two blocks from May and Hub's apartment. Lafe considered himself very lucky to get the property, for it was a sturdy two-storey house, built around the turn of the century, with light and airy rooms, fine stained glass windows, a wide covered porch and an unusual conical roof over a curved bay at one corner. It would quickly become known bv everyone in the family, with the greatest affection, as 'the old brick'. The Waterbury girls had wept bitterly on leaving Kalispell, largely because their father had insisted that Bird, the Indian pony on which the)' had all learned to ride, was too old to make the journey and would have to be left behind. But their spirits soon lifted as they ran excitedly from room to room in their new home and imagined themselves as fashionable young ladies of substance. Fifth Avenue was not yet a paved road, but it was lined with struggling saplings which offered the promise of respectability and, more importantly/, it was stl-addled to the east by the Capital Building, 18 Bate-Faced Messiah a monumental edifice of such grandeur that the girls were all cteeply awed by its proximity. To the west, Fifth Avenue appeared to plunge directly into the lorested green flanks of Mount Helena and just two blocks south of 'the old brick', Raleigh Street ended in grassy hummocks which led up to the mountains and promised limitless opportunities for play. Nlarnie, then thirteen years old, could hardly imagine a better place to be. Lafe rented a yard with a stable adjoining the Northern Pacific railroad track where it crossed Nlontana Avenue and put up a sign announcing that the Capital City Coal Company had opened for business. It was very much a family affair, as listed in the tielena City Directory for 1917: Lafayette O. Waterbury was president, Ray was vice-president and Toilie (recalled from the East by her father- 'It's time to come home,' he told her, 'I need you.') was secretarytreasurer. Harry Ross Hubbard had also joined the fledgling enterprise, but the only vacancy was in the lowly capacity of teamster. On 2 January 1917 Ron was enrolled at the kindergarten at Central School on Warren Street, just across from the new cathedral which, with its twin spires and grey stone fa~2ade, towered reprovingly over the city. Most days he was xvalkcd to school by his aunts, Nlarmc and June, who xvcrc at 1Iclcna I ligh, opposite Central School. P, on, who xvas known to the ncighbourhood kids as 'brick' bccausc of his hair, would later clai~n that while still at kindergarten hc used the 'lumberjack lighting' hc had learned from bis grandfather to deal with a gang of bullies who were tcrrorizing children on their way to and from the school. But one of Ron's closest childhood friends, Andrew Richardson, has no recollection of him protecting local children from bullies. 'lie never protected nobody,' said Richardson. 'It was all bullshit. Old Ilubbard was the greatest con artist who ever lived. ,s Although the war in Europe, with its unbelievable casualty toil, was filling plenty of columns in the Independent, local news, as always, received quite as much prominence as despatches from foreign correspondents. Suffragettes figured prominently in many of tile headlines and after the women's suffrage amendment was narrowly approved in tbe Montana legislature, the victorious women celebrated by electing one of their leaders, Jeanette Rankin, to a seat in the US Congress. V','omen voters also helped push through a bill to ban the sale of alcohol as the Prohibition lobby gained ground across the nation. Even the news, m February 1917, that Germany had declared its intention to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare did not fully hit home until the following month when it was learned that German A l)ubious t'rodib' 19 submarines had attacked and sunk three US merchant ships in the Atlantic. On 6 April, the United States declared war on Germany; Congresswotnan Rankin was one of only a handful of dissenters voting against the war resolution. Mobilization began at once in Helena at Fort t Iarrison, headquarters of the 2nd Regiment, but the wave of patriotic fervour that swept the state brought in its wake a sinister backlash in the form of witchd~u~ts for 'traitors' and 'subversives'. In August, self-styled vigilantes in Butte dragged labour leader Frank Little from his rooming house and hanged him from a railroad trestle on the edge of town. His 'crime' was that he was leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical group viewed as seditious. Although selcctive draft mustered more than seven thousand troops in Montana by the beginning of August, }larry tlubbard felt, as an ex-serviceman, that he should not wait to be drafted. I Ic had served for four years in the US Navy and his country needed trained seamen. Yes, hc had family responsibilities, but he was also an American. He knew his duty and May knew she could not, and should not, stop him. On 10 October, Hub kissed her goodbye, hugged his six-year-old son and left lielena for the Navy Recruiting Station at Salt Lake City, Utah, to re-enlist for a four-year term in tile US Navy. Two weeks later, little Ron and Iris mother joined the crowds lining Last Chance Gulch to watch Montana's 163rd Infantry march out of town on their way to join the figbting in Europe. Ron thought they were just 'swell'. After 1tub had gone, May and Ron moved into :the old brick' with the rest of tile family and May found a job as a clerk with the State Bureau of Child and Animal Protection in the Capital Building. If little Ron experienced any sense of loss from the absence of his father, it was certainly alleviated by the intense warmth and sociability of the Waterbury family. lie had grandparents who considered he could do no wrong, a loving mother and an assorted array of adoring aunts who liked nothing more than to spend time playing with him. It was inevitable that he would be spoiled with all the attention, but he was also a rewarding child, exceptionally imaginative and adventurous, always filling his time with original ideas and games. 'He was very quick, always coming up with ideas no one else had thought of,' said Marnie. 'He'd grab a couple of beer bottles and use them as binoculars or he would write little plays and draw the scenery and everything. Whatever he started he finished: when he made up his mind he was going to do something, you could be sure he would see it through.' Hub wrote home frequently and made it clear that he was enjoying being back in the service, the war notwithstanding. He had been selected for training as an Assistant Paymaster and if he made the 20 Bare-Faced Messiah grade, he proudly explained in a letter to May, it would mean that he would become an officer. On 13 October 1918 Itarry Ross Hubbard was honorably discharged from enlisted service in the US Navy Reserve Force and the following day he was appointed Assistant Paymaster with the rank of Ensign. He was thirty-two years old, positively geriatric for an Ensign - but it was one of tile proudest moments of his life. Eleven days later, the front pages of the ttelena Independent was dominated by a single word in letters three inches high: V~AC~. Underneath, the sub-heading declared, 'Cowardly Kaiser and Son Flee to t{olland.' The terms of surrender were to be so severe, tile newspaper innocently reported, that Germany would forever 'be absolutely deprived from further military power of action on land and sea and in the air'. Unlike most wives whose husbands had gone to war, May knew that the Armistice did not mean that Hub would be coming home; hc }lad already told her that he intended to make a career in the Navy. It was a decision she could not sensibly oppose, for she was obliged to admit that he had been incapable of making progress in his varied civilian jobs and hc was clearly happier in tile Navy. Furthermore, his position with the Capital City Coal Company was far from secure, for she knew that her father was worricd almut tim business - tile>' were having ttiflicultv finding sofficicnt supplies of coal from Roundup and a third c~al company had opened up in town, increasing competition. The \Vatcrbury girls were helping with the company's cash flow problems by knocking on doors round and about Fifth Avenue to collect payn~ent for overdue bills. Lafc \Vaterburv never alloxved his business worries to cast a shadow over his family life and for the children, Ron included, weeks and months passed with not much to fret about other than whether or not the taffy [toffee] would set. 'Taffy-pulls' were a regular ritual in the \~,'aterbury household: a coat hanger was kept permanently on the back of the door in the basement to loop the sugar and water mix and stretch it repeatedly, filling tile taffy with air bubbles so that it would snap satisfactorily when it was set. Liberty Bill would always sit and watch the proceedings with saliva dripping from his jaws. Once he grabbed a mouthful when the taffy looped too close to the floor and disappeared under a bush ill tile garden for hours while he tried to suck it out of his teeth. One day Nlarnie and June were in the basement pulling taffy with Ron when they heard their father laughing out loud in tile front room. They ran upstairs to see what was going on and found him standing at the window, both hands clutched to his quivering midriff, tears streaming down his cheeks. Outside, a young lad3, in a tight hobble A Dubious P~odig3' 21 skirt - the very latest fashion in Helena - was attempting to step down from the wooden sidewalk to cross the road. To her acute embarrassment, she was discovering that while it was feasible to totter along a level surface, it was almost impossible to negotiate a step of more than a few inches without hoisting her skirt to a level well beyond the bounds of decorum, or jumping with both feet together. Eventually, shuffling to tim edge of the sidewalk, she managed to slide first one foot down, then, with a precarious swivel, the other. Bv this time Lafe was forced to sit down, for he could no longer stand, and the entire fanlily had gathered at the window. Laughter was an omnipresent feature of life in 'tile old brick'. \Vhen Toilie brought home a bottle of wine and gave her mother a glass, the unaccustomed alcohol thickened her tongue and tile more she struggled with ever more recalcitrant syllables, tile more her daughters howled. Then there was the time when Lafe leaned back in his swivel chair, overbalanced, fell under a shelf piled with magazines and hit his head as he tried to get up - no one would ever forget that. On the other hand almost tim worst incident any of the children could remember was tile day when their mother's pet canary escaped through an open window into tile snow and never returned. Ida had loved that canary when she was lying in bed she would whistle and it would fly over, perch on the covers and pick her teeth. In tile summer, the children speut every waking hour after school outdoors. 1Xlay, who had changed her job and now worked as a clerk in tile State Department of Agriculture and Publicity, bought a snlall plot of land iu tile footllills of the mountains, about two hours' walk from the family home and paid a local carpenter to put up a raw pine shack. It had just two rooms inside, with a long covered porch at tile front. They called it 'The Old ttomestead' and used it at weekends and holidays, taking enough food and drink with them to last tile duration, and drawing water from a well on a nearby property. l\1ost times Lafe would drive them out in tile Nlodel T. and drop them on the Butte road at the closest point to the house, from where they walked across tile fields. The children loved TIle Old Homestead for the simple pleasure of being in the mountains, playing endless games under a perfect blue sky, optimistically panning for gold in tumbling streams of crystal clear water, picking great bunches of wild flowers, cooking on a campfire and huddling round an oil lamp at night, telling spooky stories. When they were not planning a trip to The Old Homestead, Ron pestered his aunts to take him on a hike up to the top of .'\Iount Helena, wilere they would sit with a picnic, munching sandwiches and silently staring out over the sprawl of tile city below and the ring of mountains beyond. One of the trails up the mountain passed a smuky 22 Bare-Faced Messiah cave said to be haunted by the men who tlad used it as a hideout while being stalked by Indians in tile mid-nineteenth century. iMarnic used to take Ron, squirming with thrilled terror, into tlie cave to look for ghosts. 1Xlarnie and Ron, with only eight years between tbem, were as close as brother and sister. When she was in a school play at Helena Higb, taking the part of ~larie Antoinette, he sat wide-eyed throughout the performance tlien ran all the way home to tell his grandma how beautiful ~larnie was. While the children remained blithely unaware of events outside tile comforting confines of 'the old brick' and The Old Homestead, few adults in ix, lontana were able to enjoy such a blinkered existence. After years of abundant crops and high wheat prices, postwar depression brought about a collapse in the market - bushel prices halved in the space of three months - and the summer of 1919 saw the first of a cycle of disastrous droughts. Every day brought further omin{~us tidings of mortgage foreclosures, banks closing, abandoned farms turned into dustbowls and thousands of settlers leaving tile state to seek a livelihood elsewhere. In this gloomy economic climate, Lafc Waterbury was forced to close down thc Capital City Coal Company. For a while he tinkered ~ith a smllll business selling atltomobilc spares and vulcanizing tyros, but the depression meant that motorists were laying up their cars rather than repairing tbcm and Lafc decided to retire, thankful tbat hc still had sufficient capital left to support his family. 1Xlay helped with the houschuld expenses, although she realized she and Ron would not be able to stay there forever. llub had been promoted to Lieutenant (Junior Grade) in November 19t9, and whenever lie cotlid had been coming bome on leave to see his wife and son. tie was still intent on a career in the Navy, although he had already suffered some setbacks. He had been obliged to appear before a court of inquiry in May, 1920, while serving as Supply Officer on tile USS At'oostock, to explain a deficiency in his accounts of $942.28. tte also had an unfortunate tendency to overlook personal debts. No less than fourteen creditors in Kalispell claimed he left behind unpaid bills totalling $125; Fred Fisch, high-grade clothier of Vallejo, California, was pursuing him for $10 still owed on a uniform overcoat; and a Dr McPherson of San Diego was owed $30. All of them complained to the Navy Department, casting a shadow over Hubbard's record.~ He had a long spell of inactive duty at the beginning of 1921 while he was waiting for a new posting and he and 1May spent a great deal of time discussing their future. Hub expected Nlay to conform, like other Navy wives, and trail around the country with him from posting to posting; when he was at sea, he wanted her to be close to his ship's A Dubious P,odi,O.' 23 home port. 1May obviously wanted to be with ttub, but she was reluctant to move Ron from school to school and loath to leave her family. She had perhaps secretly hoped that ttub would tire of the Navy and return to civilian life in t lclcna, but the depression wiped out whatever miserable opportunities tie might have had of finding work and she realized it would never happen. In September 1921, Hub was posted to the battleship/_~,%','~' Oklahoma as an Assistant Supply Officer. tte anticipated serving on board for at least two years, much of that time at sea, and the opportunities for visits home to tlclena xvould be severely curtailcd. As a loyal wife, May felt she could no longer justify staying in Helena. She and Ron packed their bags, bade the fanilly a tearful farewell and caught a train for San Diego, the I_"SS Oklahoma's home port. Although Ron must have missed the convivial domesticity of 'thc old brick', tie did not appear to mind, in the least, being a 'Navy brat' - the curiously affectionate labcl applied to all children of servicemen, manv of whom needed more than the fingers of both hands to cuunt their schools. t lc was a gregarious boy, quick to make friends, and starting a new school held no terrors for him. After ahout a year in San Diego, the llubbards moved north to Seattle, in Washington State, xvbcn thc Oklahoma was transferred to Pugct Sound Navy Shipyard. In Seattle Ron j~fi,lcd the bov scouts, an event that would tigurc prominct~tly in a hand-written journal which tie scrawled un the pages of an old accounts book, interspersed with sh{~rt stories, a few years later: 'The 3'ear Nineteen 1tundred and Twenty-Three rallied rountt and found me contentedly resting on my laurels, a tirst class badge. For 1 was a boy scout then and deaf was mv friend that hadn't heard all about it. I considered Seattle the best town on the map as far as scouting was concerned.' In October 1923, Lieutenant Hubbard completed sea duty on the I_'SS Oklahoma and, after brief spells of temporary duty in San Francisco and New York, was assigned for further training to the Bureau of Supply and Accounts School of Application in x3/asbington DC. The US Navy, which clearIv despised any form of land transport, saved itself the cost of two long-distance train fares by giving May and Ron berths on the I_'SS ~'.S. Giant, a German warship acquired by the US Navy after the First World War, which was due to sail from Seattle to Hampton Roads, Virginia, via the Panama Canal. It was thus December, and the snow was thick on tbc ground, before the Hubbards were re-united in x, Vasbington after a voyage of some seven thousand miles, three-quarters of the way round the coast of tile United States. It was on this trip, it seems, that Ron met the enigmatic Commander 'Snake' Tbonlpson of the US Navv ix, lcdical Corps, a psychoanalyst hc 24 t3are-Faced Messiah would later claim was responsible for awakening his youthful interest in Freud, although he only made the bridest mention of the journey in his journal. His style of writing was fluent, breezy, schoolboyishly cocksure and addressed directly to the reader. 'If obviously pusbed upon,' he wrote, 'I supposed I could write a couple of thousands [sic] words on that trip . . . But I spare you .' He usually referred to hin~self in a gently ironic tone, perhaps to avoid giving an impression of thinking rather too highly of himself. x, Vhcn he arrived in x. Vashington, two troops of local scouts were battling for a prized scouting trophy, the Washingto~ Post Cup. Troop 100, he noted, belonged to the Y~ICA 'and would therefore probably lose', so he joined the other outfit, Troop 10, 'which must have sighed loudly when it perceived me crossing the threshhold'. The journal also contained flashes of humour, delivered deadpan: '\;isualize me in a natty scout suit, my red hair tumbling out from under my hat, doing my good turn daily. Once I saved a man's life. I could have pushed him under a streetcar but [ didn't.' Intent on pushing Troop 10 to victor}', Ron began acquiring merit badges with extraordinary speed and dedication. In his first two weeks, he xvas awarded badges for Fircma~lship and Personal |fealth, quickly folloxvcd by Photography, Life-Saving, Physical Development and Bird Study. lie determinedly thrust his way into the front rank of the x. Vashington scouts (it was absolutely not Ins nature to languish shyly among the pack) anti he was chosen to represent them on a delegation to tile x, Vhitc l louse to ask President Calvin Coolidge tu accept tile honorary chairmanship of National Boys' '~Veck. 1 le noted the invitation in his journal with characteristic cheek: 'One fine day the Scout executive telephoned my house and told me I was to meet the president that afternoon. I told'him 1 thought it pretty swell of tile president to come way out to my house . . .' Brushed and scrubbed ('even the backs of my hands were thoroughly washed') hc waited with fort}' other boys outside the Oval Office until a secretary emerged and said the president was ready to receive them. 'x, Vith fear and trembling, we entered and repeated our names a few times as we pumped Cal's listless hand . . . I think I have the distinction of being the only boy scout in America who has made the President wince.' The great man spoke in such lugubrious tones that Ron compared the occasion to being invited to his own hanging. In the boy scout diary he kept intermittently around this time, Ron was a lot less forthcoming than in the journal, which was clearly written with an intcntion to entertain. The most frequent entry in his diary was a laconic 'x. Vas bored.' ~.'et he would claim in later }'ears that the four months he spent in Vfashington was a crucial period uf his life during which hc received 'an extensive education in tile field of the A Dubious Prodig3' 25 human mind' under the tutelage of his friend Commander Thompson.~ He also noted - in his journal - that he became a close friend of President Coolidge's son, Calvin Junior, whose early death accelerated his 'precocious interest in the mind and spirit of man'.s 'Snake' Thompson was apparently a friend of Ron's father and a personal student of Sigmund Freud, under whom he had studied in Vienna. His inauspicious nickname was derived from his love of slithery creatures, but it was in his capacity as a student of the founder of psychoanalysis that he took it upon hindself to give the twelve-yearold boy a grounding in Freudfan theory as well as 'shoving his nose' into books at the Library of Congress. [Ron would often refer to Thompson in later life, yet the Commander remains an enigma. He cannot Be idcntilied from US Navy records, nor can his relationship with Freud be established. Doctor Kurt Eisslcr, one of the world's leading authorities on Freud, says he has no knowledge of any correspondence or contact of any kind bet\vcen Freud and Thompson-9] Presumably the hours that Ron and Thompson spent closeted together in tl~c Library of Congress were somehow dovetailed into the time he devoted to scouting, for on 28 March 1924, a few days after his thirteenth birthday, Ron was made an eagle scout. 'T~venty-one merit badges in ninety days,' hc recorded triumphantly in his journal. 'I was quite a boy then. x, Vritten up in the papers and all that. Take a look at me. You didn't know the wreck in front of you was once the youngest Eagle Scout in the country, did you?' Neither did Ron. At that time the Boy Scouts of America only kept an alphabetical record of eagle scouts, with no reference to their 10 ages. Chapter2 Whither did he l/Vander? Fundamental to the image of L. Ron Hubbard as prophet are the tales of his teenage travels. At the age of fourteen, it seems, the inquisitive lad could bc found wandering the Orient alone, investigating primitive cultures and learning the secrets of life at the feet of wise men and Lama priests. 'lie was up and down the China coast several times in his teens from Ching Wong Tow to [long Kong and inland to Peking and Manchuria.'~ In China hc met an old magician whose ancestors had served in the court of Kublai Khan and a llindu whu could hypnotize cats. In the high t~ills of Tibet he lived with bandits whu accepted him because of his 'honest interest in them and their way of life'.z In the remote reaches uf western Nlanchuria he made fricZnds with the ruling warlords by demonstrating his horsemanship. On an unnamed island in the South Pacitic, the fearless boy calmed the natives by exploring a cave that was supposed to bc 'haunted and shuwing them that the rumbling sound from within was nothing more sinister than an underground river. '[)cep in the jungles' of Polvnesia he discovered an ancient burial ground 'steeped in the tradition of heroic warri~rs and kings . . . Though his native friends were fearful for him, he explored the sacred area - his initiative based on doing all he could to know more'.3 Tilere appeared to be no limit to the young man's abilities: '1 remember one time learning lgoroti, an Eastern primitive language, in a single night. I sat up by kerosene lantern and took a list of words that had been made bv an old missionary in the hills of Luzon [Philippines]. The Igorot had a very simpld language. This missionary phoneticized their language and made a list of their main words and their usage and grammar. And I remember sitting up under a mosquito net with the mosquitoes hungrily choreping their beaks just outside the net, and learning this language - three hundred words just memorizing these words and what they meant. And the next day I started to get them in line and align them with people, and was speaking Igoroti in a very shurt time.'4 Throughout this period, Ron was said to have been supported by his wealthy, not to say indulgent, grandfather and it was during Iris ltt~ither did he l{'antter? 27 travels in the East that he became interested in the 'spiritual destiny' of mankind. 'L. Ron Hubbard learned that there was more to life than science bad dreamed of, that Nlan did not know everything there was to know about life, and that ncitl~er East nor West, the spiritual and the material, had any full answer. To L. Ron Hubbard there was a whole field here that was begging for research.'s It would, to be sure, have been an impressive start to any young man's career, if only it had been true. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ At the end of March 1924, the Itubbards left Washington DC and moved, once again, from one side of the continent to the other. tlaving finished his training at the Bureau of Supply and Accounts Schoul, tlarrv Itubbard was promoted to full Lieutenant and posted back to the Pugct Sound Navy Sbipyard at Brcmcrton, in Washington State, as Disbursing Officer. Brcmcrton was a nice little town mushroomed around the great naval shipyard, the northern base of the Pacitic Fleet, which sprawled along the shore of Pugct Suund. Seagulls wheeled and cawcd over the quiet high street and the fishing fleet in the barbour and a tangy aroma of salt, tar and oil scented the brcezc off the Sound, where bustling ~hitc-paintcd lorries providctt tbc town's main link tu Seattic on the opp~sitc sh~re. The 11ubbards found a house tw~ blocks fnm~ tl~c shipyard and their son enrolled in the eighth grade at Union l ligt~ Schuol, on the curnor of Fifth and 1 ligh Avcnt~cs. Run liked Brcmcrtnn on sight, as would any thirtccn-vcar-old with a taste for outdoor activities. After school in ti~c sumn~er hc invariably joined a group of boys to swim and fish and canoe in the S~und anti at weekends he cadged a ride out to Camp Parsons, the boy scout camp on the north-west shore of l luod Canal. Parso~s was a permanent campsite in the heart of the Olympic National Park and was considered by thousands of boys to be paradise. There were oysters, clams, shrimp and crabs to be fished from the canal and cooked over campfires; eagles soared in the thermals high overhead and the dense forest all around the camp was alive with deer, beavers, bobcats and black bears. Like countless fellow scouts, Ron's favouritc trek from Camp Parsons was the 'Three Rivers tlike', which started with the 'poop-out drag'- a long climb up a sun-baked southern slope - and ended in the late afternoon at Camp Nlvsterv at the top of the pass, where there were meadows full of wild fluwets and thrilling views over the Olympic mountain wilderness. It was a boyhood idyll that was to last for only two happy years; in the summer of 1926 his parents decided to move across the Sound back to Seattle. It was no trouble for t{arrv to commute to work at 28 Bare-Faced Messiah the shipyard by ferry and they felt that Ron ought to complete his high school education in a bigger and more sophisticated school than Union High. So it was that Ron began his sophomore year at Queen Anne High, a majestic seminary built m sparkling white bricks on a hilltop overlooking Seattle. He was barely into his second semester when his father received his first foreign posting. Lieutenant Hubbard was to take over as Officer in Charge of the Commissary Store at the US Naval Station on Guam, a remote, mountainous tropical island in the Pacific, three thousand miles west of Hawaii. Largest and southernmost of the lXlariana Islands, Guam had been ceded to the United States as a prize in the Spanish-American x. Var in 1898 and, as far as the Hubbard family was concerned, was so far away it might as well bave been on anotllcr planet. May and Hub talked long into many nights about how the3' should accommodate their lives to this new upheaval. Guam was a minimum two-year posting and May naturally wanted to accompany her husband, particularly as there as no chance of him returning home on leave. ~,Vhat most worried them was what to do with Ron, who had immediately assumed tie would be going too. Then just sixteen years old, hc was thrilled at the prospect of exchanging the dreary routine of Qticcn :\nnc 11igh for life on a tropical islantt. But officers rcturnin~ from Guam wcrc full of lurid stories about the islantt and its inhabitants. ~lanv of them concerned tile chartns of Guam's 'dusk)' maidens' and the uninhil~ited enthusiasm with which they pursued young Americans as p~tcntial husbands. There x~'as also much gossip about the horrendous strains of venereal disease which were endemic. Time and time again Itub was told by ex-Guam veterans that they would never let a son of theirs set foot in the place. In the end the)' made the painful decision to leave Ron bellind. lxday arranged for him to move back into 'the old brick' with her parents and to finish high school in tielena. Ron made no secret of Iris disgust x~'hen his parexits broke the news, although he was slightly mollified by his father's promise to try and arrange for him to travel with his mother out to Guam for a short holiday before returning to Itdcna. Lieutenant Hubbard sailed to Guam on 5 April 1927; his wife and son followed several weeks later on the passenger steamship, President Madison, bound for Itonolulu, Yokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Manila, out of San Francisco. Ron took with him his ukulele and saxophone, two instruments he had been struggling to learn, and a headful of yarns, spun by his father's friends, about how anyone with red hair was instantly proclaimed king on arrival in Guam. To his great chagrin, his return passage was already booked for July, to get Whither did he ~nde~ ? 29 him back in time for the start of the junior term at Hdcna tligh School. May took sufficient books to tutor her son in history and English during the trip, to niake up for him not finishing the semester at Queen Anne High School. Considering he was still only sixteen, Ron's log of his trip to Guam was acutely observed and literate, even if the prose was occasionally artless and self-conscious ('Westward tugged the ship's twelve ttlousand horses'). It was also packed with information, reflecting the unashan~ed curiosity of an inquisitive and extrovert young man travellixIg abroad for the first time. Watching San Francisco's Golden Gate disappear from view, Ron admitted to a lump in his throat, although he was soon involved in the timeless and titnc-wasting pursuits that comprised life on board shuffle board and deck golf, a dance one evex~ing, a movie the next, and obsessire disctlssion about who was seasick and who x~'as not. Some of ttie crew tried to turn Ron's stomacli by describing revolting n~cals of salt pork and slippery oysters, but tic was pleased to record that ncitllcr he nor his niotllcr succumbed. First stop, six da~'s out, was !{onolulu, where tlIc Presieh'nt .lh~dison was greeted ~n the barbour by flotillas of snIall hoats rowed by little, brown-skinned urchi~s who dived for quarters flipped o~,crboard from ttlc deck of the steamsbip. Thc~' used to dive for pennies, Ron noted laconically, 'tht~s has tile l lawaiian developed Ins conimercc'. Friends showed the l lubl~ards arountt the island while the ship was docked and Ron xnanagcd to get a swinl and a ride on a surf-board at XVaikiki beach. The waves were muctI longer than tllosc in California, he wrote, and sometimes attained speeds of sixty miles an hour. -~ Outward bound fronl ttawaii, Ron made friends with the second engineer who took him on a conducted tour of tlie ship, including the galley, 'spotless with shixIing equipxncnt and Chinese cooks who grinned axid displayed blank teetiC. Fifty xnilcs off the coast of Japan, they caught their first glimpse of the 'celestial beauty' of Mount Fuji rising through the clouds and cloaked in a 'pink robe of snow' suggesting, Ron thought, a 'garment for royalty'. They staved three days in Japan, first at Yokohama and then at Kobe. Ron ~ade mcticulot~s notes about eveD'tt~ing he saw, including detailed descriptions of tiow the people dressed. Much of the devastation caused by the earthquake four years earlier was still evident - including the ruin of a 'bideousl)' scrambled' fort guarding the harbour entrance in which 1700 men had died when the walls collapsed. Ron was generall)' unimpressed by Japan and clearly unprepared, as a young American innocent of foreign ways, for the sights and smells of the Orient - the disease and the dirt, the stinking 30 Ba,~'-l"aced Messrob slums and the beggars sleeping in the street. 'It doesn't look the happy land so pictured in stories,' he concluded. 'Only at cherry blossom time or in the romat~tic novel do I believe there is beauty in Japan.' I lc was rather more cheered by Shanghai, the Preshtent Madison's next port of call, partly because the first flag to greet them as they entered the Yangtze river was the Stars and Stripes, flying from th~ stern of a US Navy destroyer. The bustling river traffic -'millions of fishing boats and jtmks' - astonished him, as did the fact that the 'ragged and decrepit' coolies who unloaded the ship only earned fifteen cents a day and 'fifteen cents iMex at that!' They lived, he added somewhat unnecessarily, 'worse than anyone in the world'. He and his mott~er accompanied the ship's chief officer, who was also from Seattle, on a drive through the town. 'Opening down the main avenue over which our car travelled were hundreds of narrow intriguing streets, teeming with life. Great fish floated here and there and paper banners hung overhead. The stores were stocked with every sort of junk. Dried fish rattled on strings in the wind. Queer looking foods and drygoods were side by side. Sikh policemen werc everywhere. They are big dark bearded fellows and in their turba~s and short trouscrs of khaki luok picturcsquc. They carry grcat rattan sticks and a ritlc acn~ss the back. Tommy Atki~s was very much in evittcncc a~tl the :\~11cricilll 111arillcs, as well as Jitpallcsc anti British marines. ()n the outside of the British conccssiun I saw a British tomn~y take a Chinaman by the coat and knock him across the street. On Bubbliug x, Vcll Roatl is a beautiful hotel nnce tile home of a Chinese gentleman. 'l'hc grounds are laid out with pergolas and fountains and the h~ncl has tapestries and mosaic tile ttoors.' It was clear that bv tile time he reached Shanghai, Ron had adopted some of the more obvious colonial mannerisms, for he casually reported joining the *ladison crowd for 'tiffin' at the Palace |lotel later that day and would also soon be referring to the natives as 'gooks'. From Shanghai they sailed for 1tong Kong, a citv that was 'very British on the surface and verv native underneath( May and goa took a tram up to the top of the mountain overlooking the harbour, but the3, found the heat and humidit), very exhausting, not to mention the throngs of coolies 'not caring where the)' spit', and they were glad to leave on the last leg of their voyage on the President Madison to .x, Ianila in the Philippines. In .'x, lanila they were to transfer, with fifteen other Navy families, to a US Navy cargo auxiliary, the USS Gold Star, which was anchored across the bay at Cavite, waiting to take them to Guam. There ,.vas considerable confusion unloading the baggage from the t~'hithcr did ht' l~'a,tde, ? 3 1 President Madison, which Ron blamed on the 'lazy, ignorant natives', and it was some time before their trunks were safeIv on their way and ix. lay and Ron could relax with a glass of lemon squeeze at the Nlanila Hotel. Next day Ron went sight-seeing with a Lieutenant ~IcCain from tile Cavite Navv Yard, an acquaintance of his father. To a boy who loved blood-and-thunder adventure stories, the old Spanish forts in Cavitc exercized a compelling fascination. 'All the old guns have been dismantled, but the emplace~lents remain. Such an awful place in which to fight. The places were traps as it takes four men to even open a door. There are tunnels connecting all of them to an ancient cathedral which is un-uscd and filled with snakes, bats and trash. Very mysterious. I looked it over well when Mr NlcCain told me that millions in Spanish gold were buried in those tunnels. Some day 1 am going back there and dredge [sit'] the wbolc place. Maybe.' That evening hc was taken to 'I)reamland', one of the murc respectable bars in Nlanila ,.vhcrc girls were available for hire, for dancing, at five centunls a dance. 'Of course we didn't dance,' Ron was at pains to record, 'because by doing so one loses cast. TIm Charleston has just hit them, but it's too hot (I mean the weather).' Two days later, tile/._ 'SS Gold Star weighed anchur and set course for Guam, a seven-day voyage across tim Philippine Sea which could not have offered a greater contrast to tile comparative luxury of a passenger ship like the Presitlent Madison. TIm accommodation ,.,.'as spartan, tim food was poor and the officers remained haughtily aluof from tl~cir luckless passengers, even eating at a separate table in the dining-room. To make matters worse, the weather was terrible and tile ship pitched and rolled and walloxvcd in a grey, relentlessly heaving sea with tbc constant threat of a typhoon gathering on the horizon. It was, said Ron, a 'gosh-awful trip'. When a smudge of land appeared in the far distance and word went round that it was Guam, the relief was palpable. The C'S~",' G~ld Star hove to off Guam on Nlonday 6 June, thirty-six days after the Hubbards had left San Francisco. Hub ,.,.'as on the second tender that came out to the ship and Ron spoke for both himself and his mother ,.,.'hen he noted: '\Ve were sure glad to see him.' Ron's first impression of Guam, with its thickl,.' lorested green hills and little red-roofed houses, was favourable. Even tile sickly sweet aroma of copra which filled tile air was distinctly preferable to the stench of open drains that had predominated at all their previous ports of call. The poverty, filth and disease which had been so prevalent else,.,.'here were kept in abeyance in Guam by the overwheln~ing presence of the United States Navy, which pushed, prodded and paid the local Chamorro natives to keep the streets clean and to observe basic hygiene. 32 Bare4"a~'ed Messiah Hub had been allocated a large bungalow surrounded by banana trees in the town of Agana, about five miles from tile harbour. It was still not fully furnistled when ~lav and Ron arrived, but Ron liked tile cool sparse rooms with ttleir highiy polished floors of black hardwood, reflecting the figtit filtering througll the bamboo screens. Ttle family had two houseboys and a cook and lived in a style ttlat none of ttlcm llact ever previously experienced. May, for example, llact never tlad servants in her life and very much enjoyed tile novelty. Ron's father had arranged for him to spend part of the six weeks lie was due to stav on the island teaching English to Chamorro children in the local grade school, which was run by tile Navy. Ron did not object to undertaking this chore, but found it a more or less impossible task because of his red hair. Although he had not been instantly proclaimed king on arrival, he quickly discovered tbat his hair caused much excitement and interest, both on the street and in tile classroom. The Chamorros, dark-skinned people of Indonesian stock, seemed unable to believe that a human head could sprout such a fiery crinc and Ron's students spent their entire lesson staring uncompr~hcndingly at tile top of his head. His parents laughed wllcn he told them what was happening arid his nlothcr, drawing on her own teaching experience, softly advised him just to d›~ his best. When hc was n~t trying to be a teacher, Ron spent a great ttcal of his time satisfying Iris natural curiosity by researching the island's history and culture. S~mc of his n~tcs about Guam and its people bear a strange siniilaritv to stories that would later be incorporated into the I,. Rozl l lubhard znythol~gy. The Chamorro dialect, for example, which had originally contained some two thousand words and idion~s, had been reduced over tile years to ar~und three hundred idioms wittl an almost non-existent granlmatical structure - curiously akin tn lgnroti, the primitive language Ron was said to tlave learned in a single night by ttle light of a kerosene lanlp. And one of the Hubbards' house box's toid Ron about a devil ghost called 'Tadamona' whicti was believed to haunt ~lissionarv Point, where a fast-flowing underground river nladc eerie moaning noises at night... In Guam, as clsexvt~ere, Ron was partictdarly intrigued by the forts, which held a special romance and nlvsterv he toiled to convey in his journal :'An especially interesting one is the fort of San Juan de 'Apra [sic] in Apra hatbout. Its doors have bccn sealed for years and, as if to hide the structure, vines wind ttlemselves about it. TIle walls were built with remarkable skill, especially the corners. Most of the prison and ttlrret tlave been eroded and have failed [sic] into decay, but tile powder huusc and firing steps renlain. The walks ttlat once heard the rhvtbnl of ttie sentrv's boat, and the crash of the evening gun are now ~'hither did he l~'antler? 33 the running place of lizards. One cannot imagine the solitude and depression that surrounds it. All that beauty and grandeur which surrounded it yesterday has faded as the rose which dies and leaves its thorn .' Ron was due to leave Guam on Saturda,' 16 July 1927, on board an ammtmition ship,/~'SS Nitto, bound for Bremerton. His parexits drove him down to the harbour in the early morning and accompanied him out to the ship to help him with his bags, now cramriled with souvenirs and presents for the family back home in Helena. The three of them had a quiet breakfast together on board and at eight o'clock Nlay and Hub said goodbye and returned ashore on a tender, hardly daring to look back at the lonely figure of their son standing at the rail. The USS .Vitro sailed within the hour. If Ron was sad to be leaving, he made no mention of it in his journal. tic 'felt rather Ionely' on the first day out, but the two boys with whom hc was sharing a cabin, Jerry Curtis and Dick I)crickson, x~'crc so homesick that both were close to tears. Ron did his best to cheer them up. 1 [c particularly liked Dick, who was from Seattle and whom lie had met at Camp Parsons. 'Dick and I have bccn rcatting up on atheism,' he noted. 'Such a terrible tiring to make an issue of. Something is at the bottom of it. I'll find out in tbc States.' Eour days out, the/~Lb'S ,X'it~o hove to off x, Vake Island so that the crew could'go tishing and swimming. Ron went ashore in a whale boat and discovered that the island was inhabited by matly strange and beautiful birds, apparently quite tinafraid of the sailors walking round their nests. In tile lagoon, lie wrote, the multi-cnlourcd tropical fish looked like 'a forth of July parade' and the water was so clear he could see through thirty fathonls to the rocks on the bottom. Deprived of the recreations offered on board the President Matlison, Ron found the return voyage, courtesy of tile US Navv, to bc unremittingly dreary. tie liked to watch the stars at night Cnever in mv life have I seen such beauties') and during the day he enjoyed visiting the engine-room, but much of the time he was bored. Ironically, Ron had seriously discussed with his father the possibility of a career in the Navy, although he certainly did nnt seem much enthused by his experience on the USS .\'itro. 'If this ship is the cream of tile naval duty,' he wrote, 'I'll sure stick to milk. The officers work about an hour and then sit around and look bored. The enlisted personnel bear the brunt of the work.' Nevertheless, he could not have been completely deterred, for he noted that he and Dick would bc going to Annapolis (home of the Naval Academy) at the same time. Off Hawaii, one of the officers told Ron he could go up to the lookout in the crow's nest. 'A moment later found me staring up the forward mast which looked ungodly high. I overcame a nervous 34 Bare-Fat'ed Messiah tremor and climbed a rope up to the steel ladder . . . Nice prospect a fall was. Then I tackled the first fifty feet of ladder. It surely looked and felt insobsta~tial. About tlalf way up I thougilt I'll never been so ncrvotls before. After that ladder catrio an even smaller steel ladder. [lp I went all confidence by this time. In a moment I reached the nest and sure enougll tilere was tile Iookotlt reading a 'Western Story'. lie invited me to climb in. TIle last io itself is worse than the rest of it put together. One Ilas to dangle with nothing under him and work half way rollrid to tile other edge. Over tile side of the box I swtlng and then in. ~Iy God what a reliefS' On 6 August, in thick fog, the USS Nit~o nosed into Bremcrton and moored to Pier 4A at the Navv Yard. Ron disembarked without a moment's regret, thankful to be back on dry land and away from ttle cranlpcd and stultifying atnlospl~ere of ttle ship. Next day !it caugtlt a train for 1tclcna, wllcrc he was welcomed by the Waterburys like tile prodigal son. In 'the old brick', savotlring the head} fragrance of Ills grandmotl~cr's baking, which he rcnlcmbcrcd so well, he regaled everyone witll tile tales of his adventures and if !it cnlbroidcrcd tile account just a little, who could Ilave blanlcd him? Even a local newspaper apparently felt his exploits worth reporting in a d~ublc-column story under tile tlcatllinc 'Ronaltl l ltlbbartl Tells of ills 'l'rip to ()ricnt aml N!anv lixpcricnccs'. 'l'hc interview ch~scly f~lloxvctl the n~tcs Ron had made in Ilis j~urnal except for tile snrprising clainl, sonlctloxv neglected in. his tliary, tllat hc Ilatl witnessell an cxcctltion while he was in China. 'Ronald l lubbard Ilas tile distincti~m', the story concluded, 'of being the only boy in tile cormtry to sectire an eagle scout badge at tile age of twelve years.' file hall, ill fact, been tllirtcen. But tills snlall slip-tip and tile ctlriot~s omission of tile 'execution' [ronx his journal were not nearly as puzzling as tile fact tllat it has never been possible to trace the newspaper from which the cutting xvas taken? It appears to exist only as a photostat in tile archives of the Church of Scientology labelled 'Clipping from t lclcna, Nlontana, newspaper circa 1929'.] On 6 Sqncnlbcr 1927, Ron enrolled in the junior year at Itdena Itigtl School, a forbidding Victorian building of rough-hewn grey stone with castellated gables and turrets, just five minutes' walk from the Waterbtlrv home. A cousin, Gorham Roberrs, who was in the same year, introduced Ron to many of tlis new scllool-n~ates, but no one found it easy to settle down to work, for ttle whole scllool was distracted bv the frustrating knowledge that Charles A. Lindbergh was visiting 1 lclcna. I Ic was on a triumphant tour of the country, after flying the Atlantic alone in his tiny monoplane Spirit of St l~uis and returning as a national hero, and there was not a boy or girl in the school wllo did not fcrvetltly wistl to catcll a glimpse of him. Whither dM he tlhnder? 35 At first Ron seemed perfectly happy at Itdena High, perfectly happy to be back with his grandparents. In October he joined the l~lontana National Guard, enlisting at the State Armory on North lXlain Street and claiming he was eighteen to avoid having to wait months for his parents to send consent papers from Guam. As a private in tleadquarters Company of 163rd Infantry he felt hc cut quite a dash as he strode through tile town in his uniform broad-brimmed hat, khaki shirt and breeches, gloves tucked into the belt - to report for training at the Armory, where twin flagpoles rose from perfectly manicured patches of green grass. At school, he managed to get himself appointed to the editorial staff of TIle Nugget, !tclcna Iligh's bi-monthly newspaper. tie would naturally have preferred to have been editor-in-chief, but as a newcomer he had to be satisfied with jokes editor, a position he held jointly with Ellen Galusha. !te was photograpl~ed with the rest of the editorial staff for tim year book, standing in tile middle of the group on the steps of tile school wearing a suit and a bow tie, cschcwing the faintly raffish literary style affected by his colleagues. 'The Nu,~,get is a really good paper . . .' the caption explained. 'The name originates {r~m the large expensive gold nuggets which the prospectors nilned in prcyious years on tile main street of 11clcna .' Altl~ugh Ellen Galusha rather upstaged her follow jokes editor by winning first place in the district finals of the Extcmporaneous Speaking Contest, Run felt he kept his end up by having one of his essays selected to represent !Iclcna l ligh in the State Essay Contest. 1 lc had also written a short play which was performed by the junior branch of the Shriners and very well received. After school on 2 December, Ron and a group of his friends rushed round to the showrooms of Capital Ford hoping to see the sleek new Model A. Fords which were said to have arrived in town that day. They found a crowd of around four thousand people jamming the street outside the Ford agency, all with the same idea. Replacement for the beloved Model T., the Model A. was not only a completely new design but was also available in a number of different colemrs, a development which caused Ron and his friends to gasp with amazenlent. Later, over sodas at the Weiss Caf~5 on North Main Street, the boys hotly debated which of the models - roadster, sports coupd or sedan - was preferable and which colour each of them would be purcllasing as soon as they had some monev. That winter was tile worst in living mcmorv for the people of llelena. On 8 December, Ron woke to find the overnight temperature had dropped fifty-eight degrees to thirty-five below zero, one of the coldest on record. Outside, a biting blizzard sxvept down from the mountains, obliterating the town and tim surrounding country. 36 Bare-Faced Messiah Morning editions of the Helena Independent were full of terrible stories of families marooned and frozen to death, school buses lost in the storm and entire herds of cattle wiped out. The snow had still not melted when Ron began preparing for the annual Vigilante Day Parade, the high spot of the school year, held on the first Friday in ~lay. Although the theme of the parade always harked back to the pioneer days, Ron plumped for a more unconventional role and decided he would go as a pirate. He somehow persuaded five doubting friends, two boys and three girls, to join him, camally brushing aside any objections based on the rather obvious absence of pirate involvement in Montana's early history. Aunt Marnie helped with the costumes by taking down her drapes and removing the brass rings to provide the pirates with suitable earrings, as worn on the Spanish Main. Thus it was that as the Vigilante Day Parade, led by the Helena Itigh School Band, progressed along Main Street on the afternoon of Friday 4 May 1928, the settlers, cowboys, cowgirls, miners, trappers, prospectors, Indians and sheriffs were inexplicably joined by a small band of ferocious pirates with eyepatches and painted beards, waving wooden cutlasses. At the dance after the parade, 'Pirates by R. Hubbard' won one of three prizes in the 'Most Original' category. The report on tim parade in the 11ch'na ltteh'pcn~h,nt next day positively glowed with pride: 'The parade was larger, more ingenious, spectacular, striking, imaginative and suggestive of the past this year than ever before. The high school students once more covered themselves with glory - besides having a jolly' good time and conm~unicating a lot of fun to the bystanders . . . As a success the Vigilante parade was complete, and once more advcrtized to the world that the Helena tligh School and Last Chance Gulch puts on a show once a year unmatched elsewhere oil the globe.' A week later, Ron disappeared. When he did not show up for school on lx, londav 14 ~Iay, there were excited rumours in the junior year that he had been expelled. 'Certainly we believed he had left in a hurry, under something of a cloud,' said Gotham Roberts. 'The story was that he had got mad at a teacher and put his butt into a waste-paper basket. Old A. J. Roberts, the principal, was a German from Heidelberg and a strict disciplinarian. Ron knew that he would never put up with such behaviour, so he didn't trouble to come back. ,7 Aunt lx, larnie explained it differently: 'He just got itchy feet. tie wanted to see something new. lle was an adventurer at heart. The wanderlust was in him and he couldn't see himself staying in a little town like Helena when there was adventure ahead. He went off to Seattle to stay with my sister lXlidgie and her husband Bob. They l~ither did he Wander? 37 tried to talk him into staying with them, but he went south, hopped a ship and worked his way back to Guam.'~ Whatever the truth, Ron never returned to Helena High. Two years later, he wrote two colourful accounts of the events leading up to his departure from Helena. Although they were only separated by a few pages in his journal, many of the details do not match; indeed some passages read suspiciously like the adventure stories he was constantly scribbling in his spare time. It seenled he was driving his friends home after the Vigilante Day Parade in his 'mighty Ford' (presumably his grandfather's Model T.) when someone threw a baseball at them and hit him on the head. He stopped the car, chastized the offenders and dealt with them so severely that he broke four 'marcarpals' in his right hand. 'That was the beginning and the end. I couldn't wait and school faded from the picture. My hand was reset four times and life lost its joy. I sold the Ford and went West, taking Horace Greelcy's [sic] advice.' He announced to his grandfather that he had decided on a 'change of scenery' and caught a train for Seattle, where he stayed with his aunt and uncle for a couple of days. On 7 June, trading on his 'scout prestige', tie moved to Camp Parsons for about a week, until it became too crowded and he decided to move on. 'I set out at noon, hiking a swift pace under a heavy pack through the lofty, virgin Olympics. At nine o'clock that night I made camp about two miles down the trail from "Shelter Rock". Twelve hours later I was limp on top of a boulder pile, saved from a broken spine by my pack. I gazed at the blood pumping from my wrist and decided it was high time ! went to visit herr Doetour.' No explanation is offered for this incident or for how tie managed, in such a parlous state, to find his way back to Bremerton. It was there, while being treated by a Navy doctor, he was told that a US Navy transport, USSHenderson, was due to leave for Guam from San Francisco in a week's time (in the first account), or two weeks (in the second account). That night (first account), eight days later (second account), he was on a Shasta Limited overnight train heading south for California, apparently intent on rejoining his parents in Guam. By the time he got to the Transport Dock in San Francisco the Hentterson had already sailed. With only twenty dollars left in his pocket, Ron invested a nickel in a newspaper and read on the shipping page that the liner President Pierce, bound for China, was moored at Dock 28. An hour later he was standing m line at the dock, waiting to sign on as an ordinary seaman. While in the queue, smoking to calm his nerves, he sudde;~ly decided it would be worth a call to Twelfth Naval District to find out where the Ilenderson was. Perhaps, he 38 Bare-Faced Messiah thought, she had not yet sailed for Guam, but had just moved down the coast to another port. His hunch was correct - an officer at Twelfth District told him the tfc~zderson was in San Diego. Within half an hour - he appeared remarkably lucky with connections - he was on a bus bound for San Diego, five hundred miles further south. When he finally caught up with the 1Ie~tderso~t in San Diego, 'faint from lack of sleep and food', he was told that Washington would need to approve his request for a passage to Guam. Nothing if not bold, Ron called on the Aide to the Commandant, who turned out to be extraordinarily obliging and agreed to telegraph Washington immediately. Satisfied there was nothing more he could do for the moment, Ron rented a cheap room near the naval headquarters and slept for eighteen hours. When he woke, he learned that a signal had been received from Washington saying that his fathcr's permission would be needed before he could join the ship. 'With fear and trembling, I had a radio sent out to Guam . . . ! walked the streets of San Diego all that day with Old Man Worry gnawing at my brow. Would Dad reply "No~" or would he say "Yes"? You see, I had reason to bc worried. Tliis would be the first intimathn~ he would have of my portending return . . .' Out in Gttam, l.icutcnant l luhl~ard n~ d~n~ht wundcrcd what the hell was going on when he received a message fnnn Washington infi3rmin~ him that his son was in San I)icgu requesting passa~c on a ship to Guam. It was t~ his credit that hc immediately cabled Iris !~crmission, which arrived in San Dicg~, according t~3 l(un, only an huur before the Ht'ttdcrson was duc to sail. This does not quiet accord with the deck log of the lb,~Mcrsott, which records that 'L.R. t lubbard, son of Lieutenant l i. R. l lubi~ard USN, reported on board for transportation to Guam' at 16Z(} I~ours on Satorday 30 June. 'Fhc ship did not sail until 1330 the folloxving day. Neither do the dates match Lieutenant l lttbbard's navv record, ~vhich indicates that Ron wrote to the Navy Department asking about transports to Guam as early as 10 ~lay; hc submitted a formal application for a passage in the lh'~tderson on 28 ~Ia)' .'~ However, Ron never considered that strict regard for the truth should be allowed to spoil a good story and so he described how he was standing with his suitcase in his hand at the bottom of the gangway to the ship when the cable came through. He had lost Iris trunk, somewhere between San Francisco and San Diego, but he was unconcerned. 'The lIe~tderson sailed with me aboard,' hc noted triumphanti)'. 'My possessions were: two handkerchiefs, two suits underwear, one pair shoes, one worn suit, one thin topcoat, one tooth brush, two pair socks and two pennies. No wardrobe, no money . . .' Hc ended this part of his journal with a jaunty little postscript ~17titlter did t~e Wander? 39 addressed to the reader: 'I will tell you the secret of this strange life I had. Sssh! I was born on Friday the thirteenth.' It was, unfortttnately, not qttitc true. 13 lXlarch 1911 ~.vas a Monday. Chapter3 Explorer Manqu~ 'The following years, from 1925 to 1929, saw the young Mr ttubbard, between the ages of 14 and 18, as a budding and enthusiastic world traveller and adventurer. His father was sent to the Far East and having the financial support of his wealthy grandfather, L. Ron Hubbard, spent these years journeying through Asia . . . 'With the deatll of his grandfather, the Hubbard family returned to the United States and IRon] enrolled at the George Wasllington University in the fall of 1930. At George Washington L. Ron Hubbard became associate editor of the University newspaper, "The Hatchet", and was a member of many of the Utliversity's clubs and societies . . . l lore, also, he was enrolled in one of the first nuclear physics courses ever taught in an American university. 'As a stutlcnt, barely 20 years oltl, he supp/~rtctl Ilinlself by writing and within a very few years bc had establisl~ed tlinlsclf as an essavist i~ the literary world... lie made the time during these same busy college years to act as a director wit}l the Caribbean ~1otion Picture Expedition of 193 !. The underwater films made oil that j~urncy provided the tlydrographic Office and the University of ~lichigan with invaluable data for the furtllerance of their reSearCh. 'Then in 1932, the true mark of an exceptional explorer was denlonstrated. In that year L. Ron Hubbard, aged 21, achieved an ambitious "first". Conducting the %Vest Indies ~linerals Survey, he made the first conlplete minerah~gical survey of Puerto Rico. Thi~ was pioneer exploration in the great tradition, opening up a predictable, accurate bodv of data for the benefit of others...' (Mission Into Time, published by the Church of Scicntology, 1973) I t t I t Ttle ~'SS lh'nth'rson arrived off Guam on 25 July 1928 in heavy squalls and lay to on the lee side of the island for five days, waiting fdr an opportunity to enter the barbour. The weatt~er did not seem to bother R{n~. 'That trip was the best I ever took,' he wrote in his journal, 'and the best I ever hope to take. The Navy gave me a Explorer Manqud 4 l kangaroo court martial, there were nine young grass widows aboard, we danced every other night, the movies were good.' Ron omitted from his journal any mention of how his parents reacted to Iris return. After more than a year apart, l larry and May were no doubt happy to see their seventeen-year-old son again, but they could not have been too pleased by his impetuous decision to drop out of High School. Since there was no possibility of getting him back to the United States in time for the start of the senior year - even if he would agree to go - it was decided that he should stay on Guam and be tutored by his mother in preparation for the entrance examination to the Naval Academy. In spite of the limitations of her teaching experience, May seemed undaunted by the task of bringing her wayward son up to a sufficiently high educational standard to get him through the reputedly tough and highly competitive exam. And with servants padding softly about the house, attending unbidden to every household chore, she had plenty of time to devote to her son's studies. For his part, Ron could not have been happier to substitute the authoritarian regime of old A.J. Roberts at Helena High for what he considered to be the exotic tropical allure of Guam and tile gentle coaching of his mot!~er. In Octnber, tile I lubbards had an opportunity to take a recreational trip to China on tile/~'SS Gold Star, tile ship that had brought May and Ron to Guam in tile summer of 1927. Neither of them bad much liked the ship, but tile prospect of ten days' sight-seeing in Peking outweighed any reservations they might have had about another voyage. Hub warned his son that he would only be allowed to accompany them on condition that he continued his studies while the ship was at sea. Ron readily agreed. On 6 October, thirty families reported on board the USS Gohl Star for transportation to the China ports and return. Like the other officers on the excursion, Lieutenant Hubbard signed on for 'temporary duty'- he was Assistant to tile Supply Officer. As previously, Ron kept a log of the trip, using one of the accounts books that his father could always pr6vide. 'It is a delightful sensation', he scrawled in an early entry, 'to once more experience the pounding of engines below me and to hear the swish of a dark-blue sea outside our port.' At tile bottom of the page was a world-weary, elegiac postcript: 'Another boat caught. Is ever thus?' After a stop in Manila, which he reported as being like 'Guam plus XXX and a few trimmings', they sailed north towards the China coast. Ron was reluctantly confined to a desk in Cabin 9, claiming good progress with his studies. The GoM Star re-fuelled with coal at Tsingtao, a busy port on tbc 42 Bate-Faced Messiah Shantung Peninsula only recently returned to Chiua after being occupied for some years, first by the Germans, then the Japanese. Ron took the trouble to research Tsingtao's history and concluded that the Chinese, with all their corruption, were unworthy heirs to their own territory inasmuch as they had failed to profit from the efforts of Germany and Japan to clean up their country. 'A Chinaman can not live up to a thing,' he wrote, 'he always drags it down.' On 30 October he noted thankfully: 'l, Ve have left Tsingtao forever, I hope.' On the following day the Gold Star anchored off T'ang-ku, from where its passengers took a train to Peking.~ Like American tourists the world over, they made sure they got at least a glimpse of all the sights, which Ron described as 'rubberneck stations'. l|e was decidedly unimpresscd by Peking's historical and religious architectural heritage. The Temple of Heaven, probably the supreme achievement of traditional Chinese architecture, he considered 'very gaudy and more or less crudely done'. The summer palace was 'very cheap as to workman-ship' and the winter palace was 'not much of a palace in my cstimatinn'. The Lama temple, closed a few days after their visit by the newly-formed National Government, was 'miserably cold and very shabby . . . '!'he people worshippi,~g have voices like hull-frogs anti heat a drt,m and play a brass horn to accompany their singing (?).' As for the Imperial palaces in the Forbiddcu City, one was 'very trashy-lo~king' and most of the ott~ers were 'not worth mentioning'. Oulv the Great V~'all of China seemed to fire Iris imagination and that mostly because it was 'the only work of man's hand visible from lx. lars'. If China turned it intu a 'rollv coaster', he added, 'it could make millions of dollars even' year.' , , Neither did the Chinese people endear themselves to the opinionatcd young American. He found them shallow, simple-minded, dishonest, lazy and brutal. 'When it comes to the Yellow Races overrunning the world, you may laugh,' he noted. '... [The Chinese] have neither the foresight or endurance to overrun any white country in any way except bv intermarriage. One American marine could stand off a great many yellowmen without much effort.' Even the climate failed to please. Winter lasted from October to May, he said, the cold was intense, and it was so dry that dust formed ankle-deep in the roads and caused 'Peking sore throat', a formidable complaint that endured all xvinter. 'l believe that the most startling thing one can see in northern China', he wrote, 'is the number of camels. These are of a very mean breed but they resist cold and carry burdens xvhich is all the Chinaman requires of them. Every day in Peking one can see many caravans in Explorer .~,lanqud 43 the streets. They have a very stately shamble. They carry their head high; their mean mouths wagging and their humps lolling from side to side. All my life I have associated camels with Arabs and it strikes a discordant note with me to see the beasts shepherded by Chinainch.' The Gold ,Star stopped at Shanghai and Hong Kong before headh~g back to Guam, but Ron tired of further descriptive writing, apart from taking a final swipe at the luckless Chinese race. 'They small', he concluded, 'of all the baths they didn't take. The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.' On the final leg of the voyage, Ron's devotion to his studies rather appeared to falter, for he began filling his journal with one-paragraph synopses of short stories that he had either written, or perhaps intended to write, for magazines like 3~le (~nft, ssmn and Adventure. It was clear from these entries that he was already thinking of a career as a writer, the Naval Academy notwithstanding. Indeed, he gave the impression that he had been grinding away at a typewriter for }'ears, ending one synopsis, titled 'Armies for Rent', with a nonchalant addendum that it would include the 'usual plot complications'. Predictably, the Orient was his favourite setting and the hero was invaria!~ly a wt~ite adventurer, as in 'Secret Service': 'Adventure. All iu a day's work. Casual laddie in ![ankuw. Saves town. J~i~s Brit SS to carry out such orders as "Giuvinni in M~kdcn exciting Communists. Use your own judgen~ent. CI3".' None of hi~ effurts, it must be said, were startlingly original: 'L~vc story. Goes to France. Meets swell broad in Nlarseillcs. She takes him to her sink, bedroom and bath where he lives until notable citovens object. l le stands them off and takes the next boat for America having received a long expected will donation .' On page 119 of the accounts hook, Ron settled down to write a complete, though untitled, story which began: 'A lazy sun peeped over the horizon to throw glittering streamers of light across the breakers on the surf. The iaggoon [sic] lay blue and cool. Tropical birds winged about their daily business and two figures lay stretched , on the white coral sand. Two ragged figures, several feet apart . . . Ron's grasp of English grammar was as uncertain as his spdling. It transpired that these two figures, a boy and a girl, were the sole survivors of a shipwreck. The girl roused the bov in traditional fashion ('Bob! Bob! Speak to me~'), whereup~m Bob spoke tht~s: "'Their [sic] gone, all gone, thev're dead and the ship is at the bottom."' Alone on a desert island paradise, nature takes it course and they swear undying, though entirely chaste, love. But after being rescued and returning to the United States they drift apart. The story - 44 Ba~e-Faced lllessiah interrupted on page 123 by the scribbled working of some hated algebra equations - ends with a poignant reunion in a San Francisco hotel lobby during which the couple laugh at their earlier foolislmess. Although Ron's narrative writing was still immature, he demonstrated an obvious talent in the craft of short-story writing, structuring the narrative skilfully and compensating for what he lacked in literary skill by sheer productix'ity. The Gold Star arrived back at Guam on 18 Decetnber and in the weeks and months that followed Ron turned out dozens of stories and essays, filling one accounts book after another. His mother took a photograph of him as a budding young writer, sitting at a desk in the bungalow with his fingers poised on the keys of a big upright typewriter, although he actually preferred to write by hand in a large, untidy script, frequently crossing out words or sentences, sometimes even whole pages, as he progressed. Like all writers, there were some days when it just would not come right: 'The sun was hot, tile day was still, the palm trees gaudy green, lined the beach of that tropical isle . . . 'TIm sun was h~t, the day was still and Hospital Corpsman James Thurpc surveyed his tiny domain . . . 'The sun was h~t, the day was still . . . 'The sun xvas h~t and except for tile nlonotonotls drone of the sea beating the cruel rccf tile day was still . . .' At the age of eighteen, Ron was a pink-faced, lanky youth with a cowlick of red hair and a spotty complcxi~m, but hc was writing as if he was a well-travcllcd man of the world, a carefree, two-fisted, knockab~ut adventurer with a zest for life. It was an image he was able to create by using the slender experience of his brief travels in the East to provide a gloss of verisimilitude on the overheated combustion of his imagination. In this way, he felt able to philosophize about 'the untrust,'vorthy, lying, cruel, changeable, satirical Lady Luck', as if he had suffered more than once from her capriciousness: 'This humorist of humorists, this demon of demons has dragged men from their places in the sun into the slime of oblivion; has made beggars kings; has, with a whisper, made and crushed thousands; has laughed at the beings who supposed the,. ruled our destinies; and has killed enough men to patch hell's highway its blistcring length.' Only when dealing, gingerly, with the opposite sex did the pubescent man of the world lose his assurance. The sto~' that began so tortuousIv with 'The sun is hot . . .' was about a male nurse in the Navy who fell for his native assistant. 'She took the chair with a sly glance at the boy and folded her slitn brown hands in her lap. The Explorer Manqu~ 45 Corpsman was suddenly aware that she was beautiful. He swam for a moment in the depths of her clear brown eyes and then seated himself quickly upon the grass. He was somewhat startled by his discovery and told himself fiercely that she was native, native, native.' When, inevitably, they fell into each other's arms ('Dimly he saw Ixlarie on the porch and in a moment he felt her in his arms . . .') Ron seemed unsure how to proceed with the story. I le scored through the next four lines so heavily as to make them illegible, then abandoned it. As his attention was so diverted by his fantastic excursions into his imagination, it was perhaps no surprise that Ron failed the entrance examination to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Mathematics, which he detested, let bim down.2 ttis father was disappointed but still convinced that Ron could get through the examination. Lieutenant Itubbard's tour of duty in Guam was soon coming to an end and he knew that his next posting would be to Washington DC, where he was to be Disbursing Officer at the Naval 1Iospital. He discovered that Swayely Preparatory School in Ixlanassas, Virginia - which was within the Washington DC metropolitan area - ran a special course for Annapolis candidates and after a lengthy exchange of tclegran~s between Guam and Manassas, he managed to enrol Ron for the 1929-30 school year. The 11ubbards returned to the United States at the end of August 1929 and went straight to ticlena, Montana, for a happy family reunion. (Their return was not prompted by the death of Ro~'s 'wealthy grandfather', as suggested in 'official' biographies, since Lafayette 1,Vaterbury was still very much alive. tic died, agctl sixty-seven, on 18 August 1931.) Ill'lay, who had sometimes found the tropical climate in Guam exhausting, was particularly pleased to be home, filling her lungs with the sweet mountain air of Montana, and she decided to stay on for a while when the time came for 1 lub to take Ron to Washington. On 30 September Ron started back at school in the leafy environs of Illlanassas. In Helena, Ixlay sat down to write her son a loving, but gently chiding, letter on the family's rickety typewriter: Dearest Ronald, Am thinking a lot about this, your first day at school. Do hope .you like it and that you study every lesson thoroughly. Remember you are paying for the information and so do not hesitate to ask a teacher again and again about anything that is not clear. I want you to hold to just this one job - getting through school and passing examinations at the top. Don't write anything outside your school stuff. Don't read anything outside of school requiren~ents. x, Vhen you are through with lessons, get outdoors for your health. If you stick to this rule you will win through. 46 Bare-Faced Messiah I am feeling worlds better in this mountain air. It is a wonderful change from the tropics. It is too bad that dad could not also have had it instead of going s~ early on the job. He did it for yon so when you feel like slacking, I want you to rcmemt~er dad g~ve up his hard earned leave t~ put you where you are. There is only one way you can pa3' dad and tllat is by maki ng good. Your success is our biggest goal in life . . . ~lay went on to tell her son about the weather, a two-day fishing trip and the trout she had catlght, and Toilie being mad because he had not written her any letters. He was to let bee know if he wanted his hiking boots. 'I am on mv tocs to hear all about your school...' she concluded. 'Witb love and best wishes. Mother.' Lieutenant I lubbard's heartfelt hope that his son would follow him into the US Navy through tbc Naval Academy was soon to be dashed. During his first semester at Swayely, Ron went to a doctor complaining of eye-strain and was sent to the Naval ! 1ospital for tests. These revealed him to bc so short-sigl~ted that he stood no chance of passing tim medical requirements for entry to Annapolis. May, meanwhile, had arrived from I Iclcna and moved into a small house in Oakcrest, Virginia, which llub hatl rented for them. Many evenings she would sit with her husband fretting about Ron: I luh's gloom about what tbc [tilure held for Iris son was greatly cxaccrhatcd by the Wall Street Crash, which sccmctl as if it woultl cn~nlf tl~c cotlntry in catastnq~hc. R~n Ilimsclf cxllihitcd little regret that a career iu the Navy was no longer an option. At Swayely he was made an associate ctlitor of the school's monthly ncxvspapcr, tht' Swa~'elv Setttinel, and he was also busy rehearsing for his part as Anatnl in Episode, a one-act comctly ~vhich was to launch the Swavclv Pla)'crs' season on 13 l)cccmbcr. In trnth, being an editor or an actor xvas a sight more alluring to him than being in the Navy, although he would never have admitted it to his father. %Vfiile Run was happily itnmersed in school life at Swavely, his father was in frequent contact with the Registrar at George ~Vashington University to try and find a way of getting his son accepted as an undergraduate. Lieutenant 11ubbard was advised that if Ron cotlid earn sufficient credits at a recognized school - Woodward School for Boys, a YMCA 'crammer' in %Vashington DC, was mentioned - he would not be required to sit the College Entrance Examination for the university. Accordingly, Ron was enrolled at Woodward in February 1930. At the beginning of May he took time off from Iris studies to enlist as a Private. in the US Marine Cort~s Reserve, adding two years to Iris age and giving his occtlpation, for some reason, as 'photographer'. It seems he was tmconccrncd by such pifttmg mendacity, even on official Explorer Manqul 47 doct~ments, for his bold signature appears at the bottom of his Service Record, confirming both the errors and his physical description height 5'101/z'', weight 1651b, eyes grey, hair red, complexion ruddy. Six weeks later he was inexplical~ly promoted to First Sergeant, a leap in rank that was astonishing even by his own standards of self-regard.3 Ron's lack of concern for literal truth was exemplified by the persistence with which he claimed lie had once been the youngest eagle scout. Even when he won the Woodward school finals in tbe National Oratorical Contest, with a speech on 'The Constitution; a Guarantee of the Liberty of the Individual', the school newspaper did not fail to mention tbat he was 'at one time the yotmgest eagle scout in America', although it was not immediately apparent what tiffs had to do with oratory? To the intense pleasure of his parents, Ron graduated in June. In a letter to another university (Lieutenant l{ubbard was clearly determined to keep his son's options open), his father wrote proudly: 'Ronald worked day and night to prepare for the several examinations and was successful in passing all of them. In my own opinion he has covered considerably more ground than is usual in any high school course and the fact that with all the handicaps he has encountered he has succeeded, he is therefore tbc best possible subicct for university and college work. ,s On Z4 September 1930, Ron was admitted as a frcslm~an to tbc School of Engineering at George Washington University, with a major in civil engineering - a discipline suggested by his fatbee. lie was photugraphed for The Ctten3' Tree, the university year book, stantling in the back row of the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers in a smart suit and spotted tie, staring solemnly at the camera, hair sinarmed back and instantly identifiable by his curiously protuberant lips, which often gave him an unfortunately sullen demeanour. "- The Gx, V Campus, in the heart of Washington DC, was a lively place to be at the start of the 'thirties, despite Prohibition and the worst depression in American history. Even though the newspapers were full of stories about children scavenging for food in garbage cans and pictures of gaunt faces waiting in bread lines, civil engineering students seemed to face a bright future, for people were already beginning to talk about the new erca of technocracy, tbc absol~lte domination of technology, and the 'Great Engineer' - Herbert Hoover - occupied the White |1ousc, just a few blocks from tbe campus. In New York, the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world, was nearing completion, testimony to the vision, brilliance and the bright prospects of American civil engineers. 48 Bare-Faced Messiah Unhappily, it was a future Ron viewed with some jaundice, for his heart was not in engineering and he had no time for worthy folk like civil engineers. While lecturers droned on about tile theory of structure and stress analysis, Ron's imagination roamed the world of the adventure comic strips which were just then beginning to make an impact on American mass culture. His lusty fantasies were still peopled by spies and commissars, pirates and warlords, English soldiers of fortune with impeccable credentials and the stiffest of upper lips pitted against Chinamen of barely credible inscrutability. }tis mother's advice -'don't write anything outside your school stuff'- was quickly forgotten as he covered page after page of his notebooks with swashbuckling yarns, usually set in the Orient and always scribbled in obvious haste as if he could never wait to arrive at the ddnoucmcnt. tlis literary interests naturally attracted him to the staff of the univcrsity's weekly newspaper, the Hatchet, but while Ron considered himself well enough qualified to be an editor, all he was offered was tire joh of reporter, which lowly position he only managed to endure for a few months in the spring of 1931. |h/wevcr, he had become much enamoured of late with tire infant sport of gliding and the idea of learning to fly and he was able to use his influence at tile newspaper to stimulate interest in the formation of a university gliding club. On I April 1931, the Ilatchct reported that an initial meeting of the George \Vashington University Gliding Club was to bc held soon. The club had secured the use of a Betliner prinlary traiucr and plans wcrc being made to buy a power glider to train students for power flight. Anyone interested, the report concluded, should contact L. Ron Hubbard at the Ilatchet office. Thereafter, Ron made sure that the activities of the gliding club were extensively covered. On 15 April it was reported that 'several GVv.' men who are well versed in the science of aviation and motorless flight' were expected to attend an initial meeting tile following day. 22 April: 'Glider Club Begins Training at Congressional Airport.' 13 l\lav: 'l\Iembers of Glider Club Try Out Theories In Air.' Ron adored gliding and spent a great deal of time hanging around at Congressional Airport in Rockville, Maryland, hoping to cadgc an extra flight and a tow in the Old Ford that pulled the gliders into the air. He never hesitated to cut classes if it meant 'going up' and he relied on his fellow students to brief him on the content of the classes he missed. It was not an ideal wax' to qualify as a civil engineer. Although Ron was elected president of the gliding club, it rather appeared from the reports in the ftatchet that he was in danger of being overshadowed by his vice-president, one Ray A. Helmburger. The 13 May story noted, for example, that Helmburger was the first member to release his tow-line in the air, at the height of forty feet, Explorer Manqud 49 while Ron was still 'trying his hand at the art of making turns in the air'. Einstein's theories were a 'pipe', Ron was quoted as saying, 'compared to the navigation of a motorless ship'. A few weeks later, ttcimburger won second place in a spot landing contest at the Curtis Wright Air Show in Baltimore; another GW student took third place, but Ron did not merit a mention. If there was any jealousy between the president and his deputy, it was forgotten on 13 July when they both passed their tests at Congressional Airport. Ron was rated 85 - average - bv the examiner and was awarded Commercial Glider Pilot Licenee No 385.6 By then he had completed 116 flights - evidence of the amount of time he had devoted to the sport in the two months since the gliding club began training. It was hardly surprising that Ron's success as a glider pilot was not matched by academic achievement and his grades at the end of the second semester were disappointing. Hc got an A for physical education, B for English, C for mechanical engineering, D for general chemistry and Fs for German and calculus. His overall grade for the year was D average, a result which gave no pleasure at all to his parents. They were convinced that he could do better. After a stern warning from his father that he would be expected to show a big improvement in his second year, Ron left Washington to spend tile summer vacation at Port l luron, Michigan, where he had arranged to help a friend, Philip Browning, run a gliding school. x, Vhilc hc was there, Browning taught him to fly a small stunt plane, although Ron never held a licence for powered flight.7 Ron was still in Port Huron when he learned in August that his beloved grandfather had died. The entire family gathered in Helena for the funeral - all six Waterbury 'girls' (Hope had died in childbirth in 1928) were there with their husbands and children and Rav came from Canada with his wife. Lafe was buried at Forestvale Cemetery, a quiet patch of prairie mid-way between the town and the mountains. Immediately after the funeral, Ron retui'ned to Washington to report for two weeks' annual training with the 20th Marine Corps Reserve and was rated 'excellent' for military efficiency, obedience and sobriety .s On the morning of Sunday 13 September 1931, the good people of Gratis, Ohio, a small farming community in Preble County. were surprised to see a small biplane swoop out of the skv and !and on a field to the east of the town. The pilots, according to an awed report in the Preble County News, were Philip Browning and 'L. Ron "Flash" Hubbard, dare-devil speed pilot and parachute artist'. The newspaper reported that the two flyers were forced down after running short of fuel. George Swisher, on whose farm they landed, 50 Bare-Faced Messiah must have been a phlegmatic sort of chap, because it was averred that his first words were: 'Anything I can do for you boys?' After the 'dare-devil speed pilot and parachute artist' had explained the problem, an obliging Incal by the name of Raymond Boomershine volunteered to run into town to get them some gas. 'Meanwhile,' Ron would recall, 'a lot of people were arriving. They wanted to know if we needed any help. And we said the plane had to be turned around and although t!~ey were all in their Sunday best they grabbed the tail and turned her around. Then Raymond Boomershine came back xvith the gas and helped us fill the tank. We tried to pay him and he said "Nope" and my pal said, "We don't know how to thank you." And Raymond said, "Well, if you put it that way, I always wanted to ride in one of them things. flow about a short hop?" That started it. Everyone and his kids got a ride. ,9 According to tile Preble County Nezvs, a total of thirty-six 'daring souls' were given a joy-ride that Sunday, by which time it was too dark for the fliers to leave. They stayed the night with Mr and Mrs Luther Kiracofc and next day 'roared on to St Louis, headed for more adventures'. On the same day Ron was roaring to St Louis, he was also placed on 'scholastic probation' at George XVashington University because of his p~r grades. x, Vhcn he eventually returned to Washington hc appeared unahashcd by this stricture, for he conlimped to devote much of Iris energy to the gliding club in the hope of raising sufticicnt funds to purchase a soaring plane. A few years later Ron would provide, in his usual jaunty prose, a picturesque descriptitm of how he had become disillusioned with civil engineering: 'l have some very poor gra›lc sheets which show that I studied to be a civil engineer in college. Civil engineering seemed very handsome at the time. I met the lads in their Stetsons from Crabtown to Timbuctu and they seemed to lead a very colorftd existence squinting into their transits. However, too late, I was sent up to ~laine by the Geological Society to find tile lost Canadian Border. Nluch b:ttten by seven kinds of insects, gummed bv the muck of swamps, fed on johnny cake and tarheel, I saw instantly that a civil engineer had to stav far too long in far too few places and so I rapidly forgot my calculus and slip stick . . . ,~0 At the end eft the next semester, Ron's grades showed no improvement and be remained on probation. He was nevertheless elected a member of Phi Thcta XI, the Professicmal Engineering Fraternity, and was photographed for the year book in formal evening dress, black tie and starched wing collar, as if grimly intent, like his fraternity fellows, on pursuing a career building bridges. On the evening of 8 January 1932, Ron could be found among the 14:xplorer Manqut; 5 1 eight hundred revellcrs at the first Engineering Ball, held in the west ballroom at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Music for dancing was provided by Red Anderson and his orchestra -'Mood Indigo', 'Goodnight Sweetheart', 'Nlinnie the Nloocher' and 'x, Vhen tile Ix, loon comes over the Mountain' were the popular songs of the day - and tile cabaret featured The Troubadours, under the directions of one Trimble Sawrelic. The Ilatchet listed Ron as one of the members of the organizing committee and declared the event to be a 'pronounced , success. A more important event for Ron that month was the publication of his first article in a magazine. 'Tailwind ~Viilies', in the Sportsman Pilot, described his adventures flying across country in the Midwest with his friend Philip 'Flip' Browning. 'We had three weeks' excess time before we had to get back to the college grind,' he wrote. 'Our resources were one Arrow Sport biplane, two toothbrushes and four itchy feet... We carefully wrapped our "baggage", threw the fire extinguisher out to save half a horsepower, patched a hole in tile upper wing and started off to skim over four or five states with tile wind as our only compass . . .' The forced landing at Gratis was not apparently considered wortily of mention, perhates because there appeared to be no shortage of spectacular, not to say unlikely, incidents. At Newport, Indiana, for example, they stopped to take on gas but got stuck in a muddy field. 'l crawled out to let Flip take a whirl at it aleme. By using up half tile field he managed to wish the muddy .'qpa~uw into her element, and after building some altitude, wheeled over to the place where I st~od and called down that there was another field a short distance away. After pacifying a sheriff, who was about to lock me up for trespassing, by shoving him into a mud puddle, ! hopped onto tile running board of a Purdue Boy's car and burned road over to Flip's new landing place - if you could call it that. The second field was little better than tile first and three attempts were necessary before we willed the Sparn~w up just in time to see a nine-foot telephone wire at the height of our prop. Flip threw the nose down and the wires were a scant foot above my head . . .' Any hope of Ron knuckling down to his studies disappeared early in 1932 when the Hatchet announced its intention to publish a monthly Literary Review. Nothing could have suited him better, 'for it provided him with a further excuse to neglect his tedious engineering books while he wrote more short stories, and sifted through the hundreds he had already written, to find something suitable for publication. It was unthinkable, out of the question as far as Ron was concerned, for the Literary Reveiw to appear without a contribution from L. Ron 52 Bare-Faced Messiah Hubbard and the first issue, published on 9 February 1932, carried a short story eponymously titled 'Tah', about a twelve-year-old boy soldier in China on a route march to a gory death at the point of a bayonet. It was clearly a successful debut, for the third issue included 'Grounded', another bloodthirsty Hubbard story, this one a description of a naval engagement on the Yangtze river, swirling with headless corpses, in which the Commanding Officer of tlMS Spitfire meets a sticky end. In May, Ron won the Literary Review's drama contest with a one-act play, The God Smiles. Set in a cafd in Tsingtao in Communist China, the plot hovered uncertainly between Chekhov and farce and involved a White Russian officer and his lover hiding behind a curtain to escape arrest by a tyrannical warlord. Ron was pleased to have his work acknowledged, but he was by then immersed in a new and consuming project tbat would temporarily take precedence over all his other interests - even gliding. He was making plans to lead an 'expedition' to the Caribbean. Other, less bombastic, students might have been inclined to describe the venture as a 'summer cruise', but that was not Ron's way. No, it was to be nothing short of a fully-fledged expedition and lie was to bc its leader. lie had already decided on a suitably grandiusc title -tbe Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Its dubiutis scientific aim was to explore and film the pirate 'strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish lxdain' and to 'collect whatever one collects for exhibits in ,11 mUSeUmS . The background to the 'expedition' was that R~n and his friend Ray Heimburgcr had discovered a big old four-mastcd schooner, tile Dons Hamlin, berthod in Baltimore and available for charter through the summer. Two hundred feet long and 1061 gross tons, she had never been fitted with engines and was thus not exactly overwhelmed with business. Ron had a long talk with the skipper, Captain Fred Garfield, and reckoned that if he could get together about fiftv other students they could afford to charter the Doris ttamlin for tile whole of the summer vacation. After all, he reasoned, with unemployment in the Unites States topping thirteen million, no one could entertain much hope of finding a vacation job. It did not take him long to find enough volunteers to join him - a tribute to his enthusiasm, organizational ability and salesmanship. The first report of the forthcoming expedition in the ttatchet, on 24 May 1932, was not bv4ined but bore all the hallmarks of L. Ron Hubbard's florid literary style. 'Contrary to popular belief,' it began, 'windjammer days are not over and romance refuses to die tile death - at least for fifty young gentleman rovers who will set sail on the Explorer Manqu~ 53 schooner Doris Ham/in from Baltimore on 20 June for the pirate haunts of the Spanish Main . . . 'According to L. Ron Hubbard, the strongholds and bivouacs of tbe Spanish Main have lain neglected and forgotten for centuries and there has never been a concerted attempt to tear apart the jungles to find the castles of Teach, Morgan, Bonnet, Bluebeard, Kidd, Sbarp . . . Down tilere where tbe sun is whipping tip heat waves from the palms, this crew of gentleman rovers will re-enact the scenes which struck terror to the hearts of the world only a few hundred years ago - with the difference that this time it will be for the benefit of the fun and the flickering ribbon of celluloid. In tbeir spare time, if they have any, they will scale the heigbts of belching volcanoes, hunt in the thick jungles, shoot flying fish on the wing . . .' Apart from exploring and 're-enacting' pirate scenes (a perhaps questionable contribution to science), the 'gentlemen rovers' also planned to collect valuable botanical specimens, write articles for travel magazines and make a number of short movies. 'Scenarios will be written on the spot in accordance with the legends of the particular island and after a thorough research through the ship's library, whicb is to include many authoritative books on pirates.' Tbe itinerary was similarly crowded - during the one hundred-day cruise it was planned to stop at sixteen ports on tile islands of IXlartinique, Dominica, Guadcloupc, Ncvis, Montscrrat, St Croix, Vicqucs, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Gonavc, Tortue and tile Bahamas. More experienced expedition leaders might have paused tu ponder the feasibility of attempting to sail five thousand miles in one hundred days in an old four-master with no auxiliary power, but Ron was able to draw on all the overweening confidence of his twenty-one years and would not consider anything remotely less ambitious. The expedition certainly appeared to have 'impressive backing. There were reports that the University of Michigan was providing technical support, the Carnegie Institute and the Metropolitan Museum were somehow involved, a sea-plane had been sbipped on board to take aerial pictures, Fox Movietone and PathiS Nex~'s were competing for film rights and The New }brk Times had contracted to buy still photographs. Members of the expedition, it was said, would be sharing the profits from these various lucrative deals. It seemed that young Ron Hubbard had pulled off quite a coup and it was in the spirit of the greatest possible optimism that the Doris ttamlin set sail from Baltimore on 23 June, only a fexv days behind schedule. As the schooner slipped her moorings, spread her four great sails and leaned into Chesapeake Bay, every man on board believed be was on the threshold of a great adventure. Ron, standing in the bows with the wind ruffling his red hair, was grinning as broadly as the rest, 54 Bare-Faced Messiah even though ten of the 'gentleman rovers' had entertained last-minute second thoughts and pulled out, leaving the expedition in what he would later ominously describe as a 'delicate financial situation'. In Washington, nothing was heard of the expedition until 5 August, when ttle tlatchet reported that the schooner had arrived, 'with everything ship-sllape', at Bermuda on 6 July. The story quoted a letter, presunlably from Ron, explaining some of tile expedititln's early difficulties: 'We had one ti--- of a time getting out of the Chesapeake Bay with the wind blowing in like the very devil. After that we had a couple of days of cairn. Tllen a stiff breeze came along and we keeled over and ran before it nicely. But next it blew into a storm and for two days we were tossed and rolled about enough to make nearly everyone sick. After that we got a break and the last three days our bowsprit Ilas been cutting tllrougll the brine at eight or nine knots.' What was not explained was why, two weeks after leaving Baltimore, the I)oHs Ilamlin was in Bermuda, six hundred nliles out in the Atlantic and almost as far from ~Iartinique, her planned first port of call, as Baltimore. It was a question tllat could not be answered until early in September when the l)oHs Ilamlin sailed back into Chesapeake Bay three weeks before her expected return. In Baltimore, Captaiu Garficld, a man of few wortls but with thirty years' sailing experience, sourly declared the voyage 'the worst trip I ever made'. Even R~m, who tlid Iris best to put a hrave face on it, could baroily conceal the fact that tile Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition !lad been a disaster. From the start, nothing had gone right: after leaving tile east coast of the t'nitcd States, stomps hatl tlriven the scllooncr far off course and Captain Garfield had told Ron they would have to put into Bermuda to replenish the fresh water tanks, which had sprung a leak. Ron, w!lo knew there was barely enough monev in the kitty to cover expenses, ordered the Captain to stand off the i~land to try and avoid barbour ctlarges. Garfield refused. A heated argument followed but the veteran skipper was not of a mind to take orders from a twenty-one-year-old and sailed his ship into Bermuda harbour. At this first landfail, eleven members of the expedition promptly annouriced they had Ilad enough adventure and intended to go honle. They had been disgusted, Ron explained, by the 'somewhat turbulent seas'. It transpired that the ship's cook also suffered from seasickness and so Ron fired him and hired two Bermudans to take his place. By the time he had paid off the cook and settled the t~ills for fresh water supplies, mooring and pilotage, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition was in datlgcr of running out of money before it even arrived in the Caribhean. Twt~ days out from Bermuda, bound for Martinique, Ron discovered that all the fresh water wtlich had been taken on board tlad Explo,er ,~lanqud 5 5 leaked away and his relationship with the Captain became even more acrimonious. It took the Doris 1tamlin seventeen days to reach Martinique, where she arrived a month to the day after leaving Baltimore. As soon as the anchor splashed into the blue water of the bay at Fort de France, once notorious for yellow fever, several more 'gentleman rovers' abandoned ship and made their own way home, disinterested in further roving with Ron. After they had gone ashore, Ron decided on a showdown with the increasingly surly Captain Garfield. As a result of tile fresh water ddbficle, he said, he would not be handing over any more money to the Captain. Garfield stomped off, muttering dark threats. News of this development instantly reached the ears of the six-man crew, whom Ron had earlier affectionately described as 'old sea dogs'. Faced with a threat to their wages, they instantly turned rabid and demanded Ron pay them in full, in advance. The leader of the rapidly disintegrating expedition tried to placate them and promised to cable home for more money. Meanwhile, Captain Garfield was sending his own cable home - to the owners of the Dotqs tlamlin, warning them that the charter fees were at. risk. Their response was immediate and unequivocal. Garfield was ordered to sail the ship straight back to Baltimore. Run pleaded for more tithe, swore tilere was no shortage of money, threatened dire retribution in tbc courts, appealed to tile Captain's better nature - all to no avail. In d, cspcration, he went ashore to seek advice from the US Consul in Fort de France, but was told there was m~thing that could be done. The I)oHs !!amlin weighed anchor and set a course for home with not a single pirate baunt explored. The 'gentlemen rovers' could do no more than stare moodily from the schooner's rails as the islands they hoped to visit passed by on the horizon and dropped astern. 'When we left Martinique, the whole aspect of the trip had changed,' Ron confessed. 'Morale was down to zero.' Captain Garfield was obliged to stop at Ponce in Puerto Rico to take on supplies of food and water and Ron went ashore once more to make a final attempt to salvage the expedition. At the Ponce Harbor Board he was told he could take legal action against the owners of the Dolls ttamlin but that it might take months to resolve. Sadly, he accepted defeat and the remaining 'gentleman rovers' were carried unwillingly back to Baltimore. After Iris return to Washington, he wrote an account of the expedition's troubles for the B~shington Daily News, contriving to cast Captain Garfield in the worst possible light. To head off assumptions that the whole trip had been a flop, he concluded in 56 Bare-Faced Messiah typically rhapsodic vein: 'Despite these difficulties, we had a wonderful summer. The lot of us are tanned and healthy and we know what few men know these speedy days - the thrill of plowing thru blue seas in a wooden ship with nothing but white wings to drive us over the horizon.' By the time Ron and Ray Helmburger got round to preparing a report for the tlatchet on 17 September 1932, the Caribbean IXølotion Picture Expedition had been miraculously transformed into something of a triumph. Slow sailing, unforeseen expenses and lack of experience were blamed for the cutback in the itinerary, but 'although the expedition was a financial failure, nevertheless the adventures and scientific ends accomplished well compensated for the financial deficit.' Among the scientific accomplishments claimed was the collection of a great many specimens of flora and fauna for the University of Michigan, some of them 'very rare', the provision of underwater film to the Hydrographic Office, and 'much research work in the field of natural life while at the various islands'. The New lbrk Times, it was reported, had bought some of the photographs taken on the expedition. Life on board the Dolls' Ilamlin was presented in the rosiest of lights and there was even a hint of roma~tic adventures ashore: 'By way of amusement on board the ship, the boys entertained themselves with chess, bridge, volley-ball tournaments, ctcctera, and on land, when they weren't out catclUng sharks or harpooning or visiting some colourful spot, they were capably entertained by the dark-eye sefioritas at the variot~s ports.' All in all, the report concluded that the expedition was nothing short of a 'glorious adventure'. Curiously, no trace may be found of tile many contributions to science which Ron claimed on behalf of the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. The l lydrographic Office has no record of receiving the expedition's underwater films,~z the University of -Michigan can find none of the specimens brought back by the 'gentleman rovers'~3 and the archives at The New ~brk Times hold no photographs from the expedition, no evidence that it was ever intended to buy such photographs, nor indeed any indication that the newspaper was even aware of the expedition's existence. ~4 Mystery similarly surrounds the West Indies Minerals Survey, that 'pioneer exploration in the great tradition' during which Ron is said to have completed the first mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico. This would certainly have been an impressive achievement for a twentyone-year-old civil engineering student, but the US Geological Survey knows nothing about it~s, neither does the Puerto Rican Department Explorer Manqud 57 of Natural Resources16 nor Doctor Howard Meyerboll, visiting professor in geology at the University of Puerto Rico, 1931-2. ~7 When Ron returned home from the Caribbean, he discovered that his grades for his second year at George Washington University were disastrous: a B for English, but D in calculus and electrical and magnetic physics, and an F for molecular and atomic physics. tie was perhaps not surprised and as his expectation of graduating was fast receding he could see no point in wasting a third year studying a subject in which he had no interest. When he adjudged the moment to be appropriate, he announced to his parents that he had had enougtl of civil engineering and did not intend to return to university. May and Harry Hubbard were mortified. As they saw it, their son was squandering a fine opportunity to enter a respectable profession and enjoy a successful career; it seemed such a waste. But Ron adamantly refused to listen to their entreaties that he should face up to his responsibilities, return to university, study hard and graduate. Lieutenant Hubbard, accepting at last that Ron could not be persuaded to change his mind, cast about for something worthwhile to keep his son occupied until he was ready to think again about a proper career; he was determined not to allow Ron to fritter away his time scribbling more stories. At the Naval Hospital where he was still working as Disbursing Officer, he heard that the Red Cross was looking for volunteers to work in Puerto Rico. On 13 October, he wrote to the Navy Department requesting a passage to San Juan for his son, supporting his request with a note: 'The purpose of sending my son to Puerto Rico is to place his services at the disposal of the American Red Cross in their relief work on that island.' Two days later, the request was approved. On 23 October 1932, Ron reported on board the US Navy transport, f~'SS Kitter3.', at Norfolk, Virginia,~for transportation to Puerto Rico. Among his fellow passengers were a number of nurses and the wife of tile director of the American Red Cross. While he was still at sea, readers of the November issue of the Sportsman Pilot were entertained by a second L. Ron Hubbard article, this time about his escapades as a glider pilot. He described 'the nlost terrible nightmare l have ever gone through'- how his glider had folded a wing at four hundred feet, how he had battled to prevent it going into a spin and how, as he crashed, 'so manv wires wrapped themselves about my neck that I was unable to wear a collar for weeks.' A few weeks later, he modestly added, he set up an unofficial world record by flying a glider at a speed of eighty miles an hour at a level altitude for a duration of twelve minutes. The USS Kitter3., arrived at Port au Prince, Puerto Rico, on 4 58 Ba~e-Faced Messiah November. The log book records that L. R. Hubbard left the ship along with his fellow passengers, but by then he had plans other than volunteer relief work. Somewhere between Norfolk, Virginia, and Port au Prince it seems that Ron decided to abandon the Red Cross and strike out into the hills in search of the gold he was convinced must have been left behind on the island by the Cnnquistadores. He would later claim that he spent at least six months prospecting in Puerto Rico: 'Harboring tile thought that the Conquistadores might have left some gold behind, I determined to find it . . . After a half year or more of intensive search, after wearing nly palms thin wielding a sample pack, after assaying a few hundred sacks of ore, I came back, a failure.'~$ It is possible that his real motive was not so much a genuine expectation of striking gold as a desire to escape the dreary clutches of the Red Cross. As he noted in an article written on his return to the United States: 'Gold prospecting in the wake of the Conquistadores, on the hunting grounds of the pirates in the islands which still reek of Columbus is romantic, and I do not begrudge the sweat which splashed in muddy rivers, and the bits of khaki which have probably blown away from the thorn bushes long ago.' Quite how long he spent splashing through mudtty rivers was not documented. Certainly at one point during his short sojourn on the island, hc appears to have been employed as a field representative for a prospecting company called West Indies Minerals and a photograph exists of him standing disconsolately in a pith helmet, hands in his pockets, watching a party of three or four labourcrs digging on a hillside. But if he was supervising tile first mineralogical survey of Pucrto Rico, it was a survey destined never to materialize in any archive. Indeed, it rather seems as if the 'West Indies Minerals Survey' derived from a trip undertaken, at tile insistence of Ron's angry and disappointed father, more as a penance than an expedition. Chapter4 Blood and Thztnder 'His first action on leaving college was to blow off steam by leading an expedition into Central America. In the next few years he headed three, all of them undertaken to study savage peoples and cultures to provide fodder for his articles and stories. Between 1933 and 1941 he visited many barbaric cultures and yet found time to write seven million words of published fact and fiction.' (.4 B~fi'fBio~,raph3' of L. Ron 11ttbbard, 1959) Precious little care went into compiling the matly biographies of L. Ron I ltd~bard. |lad anyone bothered to research I lubbard's published output, it would immediately have been obvious that hc had nut written anything like seven million words during tiffs period. Between 1933 and 1941, he published ahuut 160 articles and stories, almost all of them in ptdp magazines. The nature of tile medium proscrihcd lengthy literary cffurts, thus pulp fiction tended to be short, with few stories running to more than 10,000 words. If he had written seven milli~m published words, tile average length of each of his contributions would have been an impossible 44,000 words. A little intelligent inquiry would also have established that Hubbard never left North America during the years in question: the 'f6~der' for his stories derived not from expeditions to faraway places, but from past experiences embellished bv his fecund imagination. Neither did he visit 'barbaric cultures', except, perhaps, those to be found in New York and Los Angeles . . . ú 1~1~ ~ I~ Ron arrived back in ~,Vashington DC in February 1933, not too disappointed at his failure as a gold prospector and hotly anxious to renew his acquaintanceship with a young lady he had met on a gliding field shortIv before his father sent him packing to Puerto Rico. The object of his ardour was a twenty-six-year-old farmer's daughter from Elkton, Maryland. Her name was Margaret Louise Grubb, but everyone called her Pollv. She was a bright, pretty girl with bobbed blond hair and an independent streak in keeping with the age of Amelia Earhart who, nine months earlier, had become the first 60 Bare-l:hced Messiah woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Earhart inspired thousands of American women to take an interest in aviation and at weekends Polly used to like to walk out to an airfield near her home to watch the gliders wobble uncertainly into the air behind a tow from an aged and rusting Ford. An only child whose nlother had died years earlier, she both looked after her father and supported herself financially (she had got her first job, working in a shoe shop, at the age of sixteen). But despite her responsibilities, she was soon determined to learn to fly and was well on the way to getting her own licenceI when a young man with startling red hair showed up at the airfield one weekend. Poily could hardly fail to register Ron's arrival since he was immediately the focus of attention among the little group of leatherhelmeted pilots waiting for a tow. They seemed to gather naturally around him, laughing frequently xvhilc he talked non-stop, slicing the air with his hands to illustrate his various aerial exploits. For his part, it was not long before Ron noticed the attractive young woman in flying gear and strolled over to talk to her. Although she was nearly four years older than Ron, tile difference in their ages did not bother Polly in the least. Other, less openminded, w~mcn might never have considered tile possibility of a romance with a man yotmgcr than themselves, but Polly forrod i~on to be an irresistible compani{m - kil~d, considerate, entertaining and always able to make her laugh. ! lc talked a great deal about his travels in tile East, but she xvas never bored; indeed, she was constantly amazed at all tile things he had seen and done. |It xvas so much more mature, so much more worldly, than tile young men she knew around Elkton, a rural community of less than six thousand people close to the north-east corner of Chesapeake Bay. Most of them had never been further than ~,Vilmington, Delaware, ten miles up the road. Polly's father was, understandably, faintly alarmed to learn that his daughter was 'walking out' with Ron Hubbard. It was not that he did not like the young man; he, too, thougilt Ron was charming. Nor was he concerned that Ron was younger than Pollv. What worried him was the fact that Ron had neither money nor career prospects and apparently had no intention looking for a job, since he planned to support hindself by writing. In Mr Grubb's eyes, being a writer was not a job, and nothing Ron could do or say would convince him otherwise, particularly since he could only produce two articles from the Sportsman l'ilot as evidence of his earning potential. However, both Mr Grubb and Ron's parents recognized the futility of trying to oppose the match. Polly was quite as headstrong as Ron and if she had made up her mind to marry him, there was nothing anyone in the world could do to stop her. And Ron, still the adored 7 Blood and Thunder 61 only child, always got his own way with his parents. Blessings were reluctantly bestowed and tile marriage took place in Elkton on Thursday 13 April. Matly of the guests correctly speculated about the whirlwind nature of the courtship and the speed xvith which the ceremony was arranged. Polly and Ron moved into a little rented house in Laytonsville, Maryland, where slle had a spontaneous abortion. In October, she discovered she was pregnant again. In May Ron received an assignment from the Spo~7sman l'ilot to cover an amateur flying competition at College Park Airport, near Washington. His report was competent enough and written in Ilis usual breezy prose: 'Since I was, perforce and per poverty, among the spectators, I can speak only from tile ground view and venture the point that those six [pylon] races suffered on only one score. They inherited tile disadvantage of all conventional pylon races - we on the ground had nothing to watch save an empty sky as the ships disappeared for t!leir swing around the course. TIle fitlishes, tllough, made up for tllat temporarily empty sky. Tile home stretch brought the sllips down a brisk wind, through some bunlps for which tile field's trce-trimnlcd boundaries must be blatncd, and down across the finistl line in a power dive to fifty feet. Tilat satisfied ttlc spectators; it looked meteoric and Ileroic. And you know spectators.' Ttic article was published in the May/June issue of the nlagazitlc, with photographs also provided by Ron. It was his first published piece as a professional writer and tic was very proud of it, but it could hardly be described as a promising start to Ilis career. Months would pass before his by-line appeared again. For a short while it seenled it did not mucll matter that Ron was finding it difficult to make a living as a writer, for on l~iday 18 August, a headline in the 11~shington Dai~x, Nears proclainlcd: 'Youthful DC Adventurer Finds Gold in Nearby Maryland After Trek Fails.' The three-column story reported that L. Ron Hubbard, while on furlough from his job as general manager of West Indies Minerals lnc, had discovered gold on his wife's farm in Maryland. Much was made of the irony of a prospector striking gold in his own back yard: 'Hubbard, still in his twenties, left here last year for Antilies, West Indies, in search of gold so that he might return and marry the girl he met shortly before his departure. He returned a short time ago empty handed and considerably weakened from fever... "Imagine me going 1300 miles in search of gold when it lay right at tile back door of mv bride-to-be," t tubbard said dejectedly.' Ron told the newspaper ttlat mining would soon be uodcr way 'on a large scale' and he had also encountered several specimens of a curious white metal he believed was either platinum or iridium. Two p!lotographs accompanied the story, one of Polly, fctc!lingly attired in b~ots 62 Bare-Faced Messiah ' and jodhpurs, panning for gold, and another of the young couple lf~ examining a large chunk of rock with an explanatory caption: 'L. Ron Hubbard, the prospector, says the boulder in the above photo is tile largest specimen of gold quartz he has ever seen.' Paradoxically, despite having struck gold, Ron's financial situation remained precarious. In September, his glider pilot liccnce expired and he was unable to renew it as tie had not completed the necessary ten tlours' solo flying in tim previous six montl~s. The problenl was simply that he had no money, but in a plaintive letter to the Bureau of Aeronautics he side-stepped confessing he was broke by claiming the difficulty was that there was 'no glider within txvo hundred miles in which I would care to risk my neck'. The Washington Glider Club had offered him tile use of their Franklin but it was in such a sorry condition lie had to 'beg off' and he did not want to use a primary glider because 'I cracked one up once in Port Huron, Michigan, for the simple reason that most primaries won't fly.' Ron was, as always, optimistic about the future. 'Hero's the point,' he wrote. 'l am going to get me a glider next spring. A big Franklin. It took me two months of waiting on good flying days and inspectors the last time I took the commercial exam. I don't want to have to go througll all tllat next springs [sic], for springs at best are fleeting. I've fluwn a great deal nlorc Illall lnost glitlcr pilots. Maybe you've seen true of nly glider articles in aviation magazitlcs. My one ambition is to get a glider of nly own. 'And hcre's my pica. Isn't there some way you can extend this thing in view of tim circunlstances . . . Isn't there sometiling you can do about it?'z It xvas a naive hnpe: m~ bureaucracy is structured to indulge tim roseate ambitions of young men and the Bureau of Aeronautics was no exception. Its dour reply was brief: 'It is regretted tllat your glider pilot's licence... cannot be extended as requested. Also it is the policy of ttlis Departnlcnt not to extend licences.'$ Officially it was the end of Ron's gliding career, for he never again held a licerice altllougll he would apply, a couple more times, for a student pilot's licence. In October, Ron contributed another feature to the Spot~sman Pilot, this time a profile of Chet Warrington, a well-known Wast~ington pilot, and in Novenlber he wrote an article about the infant science of radio navigation. tlis lack of a licence notwithstanding, he always adopted a chatty, aviator-to-aviator style: 'Personally, I abhor navigation. It takes too much algebra and I don't speak good algebra . . . lt's my ambition to step into a ship some day and take off in rain and fog with the other coast in mind as a destination. But I don't like circular rules and too many gadgets. I'm lazy, I want someone to tic a piece of string to the hub of the prop and lead me right where I want "x Blood and Thunder 63 to go. That's my ambition, and I'll bet my last turnbuckle in a power dive that it's yours too.' In addition to his three pieces for the Sportsman Pilot, Ron also sold an article titled 'Navy Pets' to the l~tshington Star in 1933. But that was the sum of his published output for the year. The going rate for freelance writers around that time was a cent a word. Polly, whose thickening waistline added greatly to her worries, calculated at the end of 1933 that her husband had managed to earn, during the course of that year, rather less than $100. Tbere were better times ahead, however, for Ron soon discovered his natural habitat as a writer - the blood and thunder world of 'the pulps'. Pulp magazines had an honorable literary genesis in the United States and an eclectic following: John Buchan wrote TIle Tllirty-Nilte Steps in 191S for Advettture magazine, which at one time counted among its subscribers such unlikely fellow travellets as Ilarrv Truman and AI Capone. \Vriters like C.S. Forester, Erie Stanley Gardner and Juseph Conrad were introduced to huge new audiences through tile pulps, as were unforgettable characters like Buffalo Bill, box' detective Nick Cartot and the ever-inscrutable Dr Fu l\lanchu. The most successful of all pulp heroes, Edgar Rice Burrough's 'Tarzan of the Apes', made his first appearance in the pages of AlI-Sto~y magazine and went on to spawn the longest-running adventure contic strip and 11ollywood's biggest money-making film series. By the early '30s, pulp fiction was a major source of inexpensive entertainment for millions of Americans and a convenient means of escape from the anxieties and realities of the Depression. For as little as a dime, readers could enter into an action-packed adventure in which the heroes slugged their way out of tight spots in various exotic corners of an improbable world. Good invariably triumphed over evil and sex was never allowed to complicate the plot, for no hero ever proceeded beyond a chaste kiss and no heroine would dream of expecting anything more. In 1934, more than 150 pulp magazines were published in New York alone. Black Mask was considered the best of the bunch by writers, largely because it paid its top contributors as much as a nickel a word, but Argosy, Adventure, Dmle Detective and Dmte Ill, stern were all said to offer more than the basic rate of a cent a word to the best writers. As the average 128-page pulp magazine contained around 65,000 words and as many of them were published weekly, the market for freelance writers was both enormous and potentially lucrative. Of all this L. Ron Hubbard knew virtually nothing until he began to cast around for new outlets as a matter of urgency after his first 64 Bare-Faced Messiah disastrous year as a writer. 'He told me', said his Aunt Marnie, 'that he went into a bookstall and picked up all the pulp books from the rack. He took a big pile home to see what it was that people wanted to read. He thought a lot of it was junk and he knew lie could do better. That's how he started writing mystery stories.' 4 More importantly, perhaps, it dawned on Ron that he had been writing in tile pulp genre for most of his life. The swashbuckling short stories he had scribbled across page after page of old accounts books when he was in his teens were, he belatedly realized, precisely the sort of material that was to be found between the lurid covers of the most popular 'pulps'. Polly was fast expanding and every week they were deeper in debt. Ron knew he had to earn money somehow and the 'pulps' seemed to offer the best hope. He began writing one story after another, winding page after page into his typewriter without a break, often hammering away all night. Typing at phenomenal speed, never needing to pause for thought, never bothering to read through what he had written, he roamed the entire range of adventure fiction with red-blooded hcrucs who were gunslingers, detectives, pirates, foreign Icgionnaires, spies, flying aces, soldiers of fortune and grizzled old sea captains. For a period of six weeks he wrote a complete story of between 4,51)0 and 20,000 words every day, gathered up the pages when he had finished and mailed it to one or another of the pullIs in New York without a second look. It did not take long to pity off. One morning Ron went out to collect tile mail and found there were two cheques waiting for him, totalling $300 - more monev than tie had ever earned in his life. The first was from TItdlli~tg Ad~'entttres for a story called '~'hc Green God', the second from The Phantom Detecth,e for 'Calling Squad Cars'. lx, lore acceptances soon followed - 'Sea Fangs' was bought by Five Novels Monthly, 'Dead Men Kill' bv Th~illi~tg Detecth.e, 'The Carnival of Death' by Popular Detecth'e . . . By the end of April Ron had earned enough money to take Polly on a short holiday to California. They took a cheap hotel room at Encinitas, a resort a few miles north of San Diego, but Polly, now seven months into her pregnancy, found the unaccustomed heat somewhat debilitating. On 7 Mav 1934, she decided to take a dip in the ocean to cool off and got caught in a rip tide. She was a strong swimmer but only just managed to get back to the beach and the exertion brought on labour. Later that day she gave birth to a son. The baby weighed only 21b 2oz and clung to life by the most gossamer of threads. Praying he would survive, they named him Lafayette Ronald Hubbard Junior. Ron constructed a crude incubator, first out of a shoe box, then by lining a cupboard drawer with Blood and Thunder 65 blankets and keeping it warm with an electric light bulb; Polly wrapped the mewling mite in cotton wool and fed him with an eye-dropper. For two months they maintained a day and night vigil, taking it in turns to watch over the infant and maryelling at its will to live. While Polly was pregnant, Ron's father always used to ask 'her how 'his Nibs' was doing and by the time the danger period had passed L. Ron Hul>bard Junior was known to the entire family as 'Nibs', a name that would stick for the rest of his life. Fatherhood in no way moderated Ron's desire to be seen as a devil-may-care adventurer and fearless aviator and he assiduously promoted this image at every opportunity. In July, for example, he was the subject of a glowing tribute in the 'Who's Who' column of the Pilot, 'The Magazine for Aviation's Personnel', which described him as 'one of the outstanding glider pilots in the country.'. The author, 1t. Latanc Lewis I I, made no secret of his admiration. 'Whenever two or three pilots are gathered together around the Nation's Capital,' he wrote, 'whether it be a Congressional hearing or just in the back of some hangar, you'll probably hear the name of Ron Hubbard mentioned, accompanied by such adjectives as "crazy", "wild" and "dizzy". For the flaming-halted pilot hit the city like a tornadu a few years ago and made women scream and strong men weep by his aerial antics. 1 lc just dared the ground to come up and hit him . . . Ron could do more stunts in a sailplane than most pilots can in a pursuit job. tle would come out of spins at an altitude of thirty inches and thumb his nose at the undertakers who used to come out to the field and titter.' it was not too surprising that Ron was considered to be eminently suitable for inclusion in the 'Who's Who' column, for it was patently obvious that he had been at pains to project himself as the most colourful of characters: 'Before he fell from grace and became an aviator, he was, at various times, top Sergeant in the Marines, radio crooner, newspaper reporter, gold miner in tbe V','est Indies and movie director-explorer...' Among his other achievements, it seems he taught himself to fly powered aircraft ('He climbed into a fast ship and, without itny dual time at all, gave the engine the soup and hopped off . . .'), then became a barnstormer and 'flew under ever).' telephone wire in the Middle ~,Vest', before settling down to become director of the flying club at George Washington University. H. Latane Lewis I I concluded that Ron was 'one of aviation's most distinguished hellraisers'. It was a sobriquet with which the subject heartily concurred. When Nibs was bawling and burping like other contented babies, the twenty-three-year-old 'distinguished hell-raiser' decided it was time to make the acquaintance of his fellow pulp writers. Leaviog Polly and the baby at home, he caught a train for New York and 66 Bare-Faced Messiah checked into a $1 .50-a-night room at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel, which he had been assured was where many visiting writers stayed. In 1934, with the country still in the stranglehold of the Depression, there were few tourists in New York, but even before the Wall Street Crash the Forty-fourth Street Hotel had rarely attracted much tourist trade. It was a seedy establishment on Times Square largely patronized by out-of-work actors, third-rate vaudeville performers, wrestlers, touts and bookies. Frank Gruber, the only pulp writer resident when Ron arrived, accurately characterized his fellow quests as 'all-round no-goods and deadbeats'. Grubcr was an aspiring writer from Mount Morris, Illinois, who had come to New York to make his fortune on the strength of selling one story to Secret Agent X magazine and a couple more to Untlerworld. That he was not succeeding soon became evident when he explained to Ron how to get a free bowl of tomato soup at an Automat. All you had t~ do, he said, was pick up a bowl, fill it with hot water, skip the nickel slot which dispensed soup powder and grab a couple of bags of crackers. You took your bowl of hot water to a table, crumbled the crackers into it, then tipped in half a bottle of tomato ketchup. 'Presto!' said G ruhcr triumphantly. 'Tnmato soup.' Not entirely motivated by charity, Ron offered to buy Grubcr a meal. Sitting in Thomps~n's Restaurant on Sixth Avenue, just around the corner from the hotel, Ron pumped the other man for information about which editors were easiest to see, who was buying what kind of material and which magazines paid most. 11c made a list nf the commissioning editors at the most important publist~ers - Street and Smith, the l?rank A. Munscy Company, Popular Publications and Dell Niagazincs. A few days later, Grubcr took Ron along to Rosoff's restaurant on 43rd Street, where members of the American Fiction Guild met for lunch every Friday. Nlost of the successful ptdp writers in New York were members of the Guild and most of them gathered at Rosoff's at lunchtime on Fridavs. They were names familiar to millions of pulp readers: Lcster Dent, creator of Doc Savage; George Bruce, acknowledged ace of battle-in-the-air yarns; Norveil Page, who was said to earn $500 a month for his stories in the Spider; and Theodore TinsIcy, a regular contributor to Black Mask. President of the Guild was Arthur J. Burks, who had been dubbed 'King of the Pulps' in a New ~brker profile and quoted as saying that any pulp writer who did not make at least $400 a month was not worth his salt. It was a remark that was to cause him considerable embarrassment, for it was common knowledge in the Guild that Burks never earned that much, despite turning out around two hundred thousand words every month. Ron was not the kind of young man to be overawed by such Blood and Thunder 67 illustrious company and he walked into the Guild lunch at Rosoff's as if he was quite a~xfamous and successful as any man present. He was also a good deal younger than most of the members, but acted as if he had seen and done more than any of them. By the end of the lunch, he was confidently presiding over one end of the table, holding the attention of everyone within earshot with an enthralling blow-by-blow account of his expedition to explore pirate strongholds of the Spanish Main. It was accepted, at the American Fiction Guild lunches, that members might bc inclined to blur the distinction between fact and fiction. What mattered more than strict adherence to literal truth was that the stories should be entertaining, and on that score young Hubbard could not be faulted. He was a natural story-teller, able to set the scene quickly and evocatively, describe the action in rich detail, recount credible dialogue and interject humour with an acute sense of timing. Arthur Burks was happy to welcome him as a new member of the Guild, after he had paid his $10 membership fee, of course. Ron did well in New York. He made the rounds of the pulp publishers, talked his way into the offices of the important editors, sold a few stories and generally made himself known. In the evenings he used to sit in Frank Grubcr's room at the Forty-fourth Street !totel, kicking ideas around with other young writers and h{flding forth, alth~ugh his host eventually tired of Ron's apparently endless adventures. One evening Grubcr sat through a long account of Ron's experiences in the Marine Corps, his exploration of the upper Amazon and his yeatLs as a white hunter in Africa. At the end of it he asked with obvious sarcasm: 'Ron, you're eighty-four years old aren't you ?' 'What the hell are you talking about?' Ron snapped. Grubcr waved a notebook in which he had been jotting figures. 'Well,' he said, 'you were in the B, larines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six years, you spent [our years in Brazil, three in Africa, you barnstormed with your own flying circus for six years... I've just added up all the years you did this and that and it comes to eighty-four.' Ron was furious that his escapades should be openly doubted. qlc blew his tack,' said Gruber.s He would react in the same way at the Guild lunches if someone raised an eyebrow when he was in full flow. Most of the other members expected their yarns to be taken with a pinch of salt, but not Ron. It was almost as if he believed his own stories. Back home with Polly and the baby, Ron continued writing for 'the pulps' at a ferocious rate, turning out endless variations on a hairy-chested theme. His protagonists thrashed through jungle 68 Bare-Faced Messiah thickets pursued by slavering head-hunters, soared across smokesmudged skies in aerial dog-fights, wrestled giant octopi twenty fathoms beneath storm-tossed seas, duelled with cutlasses on bloodsoaked decks strewn with splintered timbers and tleld dervish hordes at bay by dispensing steel-jacketed death from tile barrel of a machine-gun. Women rarely made an appearance except to be rescued from tile occasional man-eating lion or grizzly bear. The titles he gave to his stories vividly attested to their genus - 'The Phantom Patrol', 'Destiny's Drum', 'Man-Killers of the Air', 'Hostagc to Death' and 'Hcll's Legionnaire'. Interspersed between these gripping sagas, Run still wrote occasional features for the Spotlsman Pilot in his capacity as aerial hell-raiser. 'q'tlere are few men in the United States - nay, the world - as well qualified as I to write upon the subject of cross-country flying,' he began a piece in the September 1934 issue. 'It so happens I hold the world's record in dead reckoning. I just have to marvel about it. Probal~ly no othcr pilut in tile world could do it. Probably no other pilot in the world actually has done it so well.' The braggadocio was a tease, as he soon made clear. On a fifty-mile flight from New London to Mansfield, Ohio, navigating by the sun, he claimed to have missed Iris dcstinatiou by a record margin. 'The ship bumped to a beautiful lantling. But, and hut again, iMansticld was nowhere in sight. Wc grahl~ed a farmcr's suspentler anti snapped it fur attention. Wc asked, disdainfully, where we might be. x, Vcll, thoro's no use dragging this out. x, Vc were 37 miles off . . . That, I maintain, is a world record.' In December he was offering readers tips about flying to the West Indies: 'x, Vith tile lung, long shores of Cuba behind you, you lilt Port au Prince. Right now we start assuming definitely that your plane has floats on it, timugh we've been assuming it vaguely all along. Otherwise, you'll get your wheels wet. Port au Prince isn't favoured unless you can wangle the Gcndarmcrie du Haiti into letting you use their fields. You'd have to be a better wangler than we are . . .' Two months after this feature was published, on 25 February 1935 Run again applied for a student pilot's licence. 1te never got round to taking the test to become a qualified pilot and never actually applied for another !icence~', but he blithely continued writing for tile Sponsman Pilot, offering advice to fellow aviators and filling many pages of the magazine with dashing accounts of his aerial expluits. Ron's published work in 1935 included ten pulp novels, three 'novelettes', twelve short stories and three non-fiction articles. In October, Adventure magazine invited him to introduce himself to readers in their 'Camp Fire' feature, 'where readers, writers and adventurers meet'. Run began in jocular fashion -'~,Vhen I was a year Blood and Thuntter 69 old, they say I showed some signs of settling down, but I think this is merely rumour~ . .'- and touched on all the familiar highspots of his dazzling career, his 'Asiatic wanderings', his expeditions, his 'barn- storming trip through the Mid-West', and so on. Perhaps because the same issue of Adventure also published one of his 'leatherneck yarns', Run chose to elaborate on his experiences as a 'top-kicker' in the Marines. 'I've known the Corps from Quantico to Peiping, from the South Pacific to the West Indies,' he wrote. 'To mc the l~farine Corps is a more go-to-hell outfit than the much laudcd French Foreign Legion ever could be . . .' Expressing the hope that his thumbnail sketch would be a passport to the readers' interest, he ended with the promise: 'When I get back from Central America, where l'm going soon, I '11 have another yarn to tell. ,7 Run did not go to Central America but to Hollywood, where one of his stories, 'The Secret of Treasure Island', had been bought by Columbia to be filmed as a fifteen-part serial for showing at Saturday morning matjuries. An advertisement in the Motion Picture lieraid boasted that L. Run Hubbard, 'famous action writer, stunt pilot and world adventurer' had written an 'excitement-jammed yarn with one of the best box office titles in years'. Run, of course, was pleased to add the title of 'llullywood scriptwriter' to his ever increasing roll-call of notable accomplish- mcnts and he would soon bc claiming screenwriting credit for a number of successful movies, among them Juhn Ford's classic, Sta~,ccoach,8 and The Plainsman, starring Gary Coilper. Most biographies of L. Run Ilubbard describe his tl'ollywood career, incvitablx', as a triumph: 'In 1935, L. Run Hubbard went to Hollywo;3d and worked under motion picture contracts as a script- writer of numerous films making an outstanding reputation there with many highly successful films. His work in Hollywood is still remem- bered.'" He was also said to have salvaged the careers of both Bela Lugosi and Buffs Karloff by writing them into scripts when they were s --, I1} out of work. In short, Run became another 'Hollywood tegenu. Sadly, it appears he was an unsung legend for his name cannot be found on any 'highly successful films', with the exception of The Secret of Treasure Island. But this lack of recognition never prevented Run from reminiscing about his golden days in Hollywood: 'I used to sit in my penthouse on Sunset Boulevard and write stories for New York anlt then go to my office in the studio and have my secretary tell everybody I was in conference while I caught up on my sleep because they couldn't believe anybody could write 136 scenes a day. The Screen Writers' Guild would have killed me. Their quota was eight.' ~ Run did not stay long in Hollywood knocking out 136 scenes a day 70 Bare4:aced Messiah and by the end of the year he was back in New York. Polly was pregnant again and mindful of what had happened witll Nibs, they decided she should have the baby in a New York hospital. On Wednesday 15 January 1936, she produced a daughter, Catherine May. Unlike Nibs, Catherine was a lusty, full-term baby, perfect in every way except for a birthmark on one side of her face. Not long after she was born, the Hubbards travelled by train to visit Ron's parents in Bremerton, Washington. Harry Ross Hubbard had been promoted to LieutenantCommander, at the age of forty-eight, in December 1934 and the following July hc was posted, for the third time, to Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, as an Assistant Supply Officer. For Ron's mother it was a particularly welcome move: her muchdoved sister, Toilie, was by then also living in Bremerton and their younger sister, Midgie, lived across the bay in Seattle. lxlay and ltarry had already decided they xvould retire to Brcmerton after he left the Navy and so they bought a small huusc at 1212 Gregory Way, just two blocks from the Navy Yard. Ron's seventy4wo-year-old grandmother, Ida x. Vatcrbury, was still at 'the old brick' in 11clcna, but iu October 1935 Ilclcna was hit by an earthquake. The first tremor was felt during one of President Rooscvclt's Friday night 'fireside chats' on tile radio. Throughout tile folluwing week, tifty-six further sln~cks were rccnrdcd, none of thorn scrions, but at ten o'clock on the eve,ring of 18 October a series of violent trcmurs shook the town, rctlucing ma~ly of the public builttings to rubble and generating widespread panic. 'The old brick' survived the earthquake, but in a dangerous condition. Next day, old Mrs x. Vatcrbury caugtlt a train for Bremcrton to stay with May and I lub at Gregory Way. It was in these circumstances that Polly, Ron and their two small children were welcomed into the bosom of the Waterbury fanlily when they arrived in Bremerton in the spring of 1936. All the Waterburys liked Polly. 'Slle was a lot of fun,' said Ixlarnic, 'a good sport.' Polly reciprocated their warmth, was comfortable with the family and happy to have grandparents and great-aunts around to help take care of tile boisterous Nibs while she looked after the baby. Such was tile conviviality of the milieu that Polly and Ron soon began looking for a home of their own in the Bremerton area. Property was cheap in rural Kitsap County and they found a little wooden house at South Colby, a small community with a post office and general store facing Yukon barbour to the south of Bremerton. The house was set among cedar trees on a steep hillside overlooking orchards and meadows sloping down to Puget Sound; from tile front porch at nights you could see tile lights of Seattle on the other side of the water. Polly fell in love with the place and named it 'The tlilltop'. Blood and Thunder 71 Although the house had three rooms upstairs, Ron decided he needed more privacy for writing and employed a local carpenter to build a rough pine cabin in the trees at the back of tile property which he could use as a 'studio'. He put in a desk and typewriter and went back to work, churning out such stirring epics as 'The Baron nf Coyote River' for .~htl ~,sten~, 'Loot of the Shantung' for Smashing ,'~ovels and 'the Blow Torch Murder' for Detective Fictmn. The responsibilities of fatherhood weighed lightly on Ron's shoulders and he ignored any suggestion that he should adapt his working habits to accommodate family life. He liked to work all night and sleep all morning, sometimes not making an appearance until two or three o'clock in the afternoon, at which time Polly would be expected to produce 'breakfast'. Although he was selling stories almost every week, they never seemed to have enough money and the owner of the general store in South Colby was frequently threatening to cut off their credit. Ron was completely unconcerned by the mounting bills. One day hc took the ferry into Seattle and came back with an expensive phonograph that hc had bought on credit at the Bon Marche department store. When Polly despairingly asked him how he was going to meet the payments hc replied, with a grin, that he had no intention of making any. t Ic figured it would be at least six months before Bon Marche got round to repossessing their property, meanwhile the>' could enjoy it. Financial worries apart, Polly was perfectly content at The 1Iillt~p. She enjoyed being a mott~er and was a keen gardener, spending much of her spare time clearing the ground around the house and planting shrubs and flowers. Ron was less easily satisfied by the quiet charm of South Colby and made frequent trips to New York 'on business'. As his absences became longer and longer, Polly suspected, correctly, that he might be seeing other women - she was also acutely aware that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. It was not philandering that took Ron away from home so much as the reality that being stuck out in the backwater of South Colby was uncomfortably at odds with his perception of himself. He had spent much of his adult life vigorously and successfully promoting himself as a 'dare-devil adventurer'. It was a description that would be used about him time and time again and he never tired of it. But it was also an image that needed to be sustained, bolstered here and there, and he could hardly do that sitting in a cabin in Kitsap Country. Nu, he needed to be in New York holding his fellnw writers in thrall with epic tales and making sure everyone knew that Ron 'Flash' Itubbard (he sometimes admitted to 'Flash' as a nickname) was 'quite a character'. Who dared doubt it? Absolutely not the editor of Ttlnlling 72 Bare-Faced Messiah Adventure, who was pleased to share his conviction with his readers: 'I guess L. Ron Hubbard needs no introduction. From the letters you send in, his yarns are among the most popular we have published. Several of you have wondered too how he gets the splendid color which always characterizes his stories of far-away places. 'The answer is, he's been there, brothers. Hc's been and seen and done. And plenty of all three of them !' In July 1936, New York literary agent and columnist Ed Bodin added a further feather to Ron's crowded cap by reporting in one of his columns that Ron had hit a staggering one million words in print. It was a claim as pointless as it was absurd, yet it would be remorselessly escalated over the years until by 1941 Ron was being variously credited with an output of between seven and fifteen million words. If ~,Vhatever the real figure, Ron was certainly proud of his productivity, the sheer number of words he was able to hammer out of his typewriter, and there is no question that he xvas a truly prolific writer. Bv 1937 he was using a roster of marvellously improbable pen names '~Vinchcster Remington Colt, Kurt yon Rachen, Rend Lafayette, Joe Blitz and Legionnaire 148 among tbcm. llis legendary writing speed led to rumours that he typed on to a continu~us roll of paper that fed automatically into an electric typewriter with a keyboard of his ~wn design featuring single keys fur commonly used wurds like 'and' and 'the'. It was also said that editors in New York scut messengers to Run's hotel room with a cover illustration and note asking him if he would be kind enough to write a story to fit the picture. The punchline was that tile messengers would be told to wait while Ron dashed off the story, such was tile prodigious fertility of his imagination. Toxvards the end of 1937, Ron sold his first hardback novel. Buckskin Bdgaetes, published bv Macaulay, was said to have been inspired by his experiences as a small boy in the wilds of lXlontana when he became a blood brother of the Blackfoot Indians. The theme of the book revolved around the mistreatment of the Indians bv the Hudson Bay Company, although the message did not perbaps gct across too forcibly because the Hudson Bay Company sent Ron a case of whisky after publication. Polly was very pleased that Ron had been able to cross the divide between pulp fiction and 'respectable' publishing, although she was even more pleased that .Xlacaulav had offered an advance of $2500 for Buckskin Brigaries. It was money they badly needed to clear their debts. They both waited - Ron was back from Nexv York - with considerable impatience for the cheque to arrive. On the morning the local post office telephoned to say there was a money order for collection, Ron rushed out of thc house and xvas gone Blood and Thunder 73 for hours. He returned in the late afternoon in a state of high excitement and announced to Po!ly that he had bought a boat, a wonderful boat, a thirty-foot ketch called the Magician. It was a double-ended Libby hull, the kind they used to catch salmon up in Alaska. It had a small cabin and he was going to put a new engine in it and change the rigging and . . . Polly could hardly believe her ears. She bad a drawer full of unpaid bills and her husband had just blown all their money on a boat! Ron's best friend in Bremerton was a thrusting young insurance salesman by the name of Robert MacDonald Ford. 'Almost the first thing Ron did when he got tile boat', Ford recalled, 'was to get some I . letter-heads printed. Ron was always having letter-heads printed, always on the best bond paper. The heading was "Yukon Harbor ~larine Ways". There was no such company, but that didn't bother Ron - hc only wanted the letter-head so he could buy things for the boat at wholesale prices.' Ford met Ron because he was always on the look-out for new business. x. Vhcn one of his policy holders ran into a car owned by a Lieutenant-Commander H.R. Hubbard and caused $15 worth of damage, hc delivered the settlement draft personally at 1212 Gregory x. Vav in the hope of selling some more insurance. Ron's mother was home when Ford called. 'She was a funny little woman,' he said, 'sort of wrinkled and dried up. When I asked her if she knew anyone who needed insurance she said her son, who lived out at South Colby, didn't have any. She telephoned him right then, offered to pay half the cost and we wrote the business over the 'phone. I figured if she was going to pay I'd have a good chance of collecting the premiums.' A couple of weeks later, Ford decided to pay his new policy holder a visit, accompanied by his wife, Nancy. It took them a little while to find The tlilltop at South Colby and when they finally arrived at the house Polly answered the door and said her husband was still asleep as he had been working all night. She apologized and invited them to return for dinner that evening. The Fords and the Hubbards liked each other on sight and quickly discovered they had much in common. They had children of similar ages, both wives were avid gardeners and excellent cooks, and Ron and Mac were the same age, keen on sailing and loved to talk. That first evening spent together at The Hilltop ended with much hilarity when the two men skulked off to the County gravel pile in the dead of night to fill ballast bags Polly had been sewing for the boat. Thereafter, Ford was a frequent visitor. He used to sit in the cabin with Ron drinking China tea and playing chess by candlelight, using the exquisitely carved chess set he said he had brought back from the 74 Bare-Faced Messiah East - even the pawns were fearsome little warriors carrying swords. Sometimes they would shoot at a target pinned to the cabin wall with Ron's air pistol; sometimes they would just talk for hours on end, well into the night. They often discussed wbat was happening in Europe, what Hitler was up to and whether or not there would be a war. 'Ite was a sharp guy,' said Ford, 'very stimulating and fascinating to be around. He was interested in a lot of things and was pretty well informed. x, Vhen he talked about the things he'd done, sometimes I would think he was feeding me a line, but then you'd find out that it had actually happened. He told me once that when he was gliding a guy wire had snapped and smoothed off the ends of his fingers, leaving them very sensitive. I'm pretty sure that happened. x, Vhen we went to see Stagecoach - the original one with John Wayne - he told me he'd worked on the script. I looked for his name on the credits, but didn't see it, although I didn't necessarily disbelieve him. It's possible hc exaggerated his exploits a little, but he was a writer and did have a very fertile imagination. Certainly he got into a lot of things. 'He and Polly were on pretty good terms. She was an independent sort of gal, wouldn't take.a lot of crap from anybody. They had their arguments, yes, but by and large it wasn't that bad. She'd take a drink, btit never much. We didn't drink too much in those days. They wcrc in fairly dire straits for mnncy; the grocer xvas always pressing them to pay his bill. It would take Ro,I txvo or three nights to finish a m~vclcttc. Vt,:hcncvcr hc got some mi~ncy in, he'd sec the grocer was satisfied and then he'd play for a while on Iris boat, tim Ma.~,A, ie.'~$ The Fords and the I lubbards joined Brcmcrton Yacht Club at the same timc and whenever there was a dance they could bc found at the same table, usually laughing and always enjoying themselves. In some combination the two families wcrc involved in any number of madcap projects and outings - Polly and Nancy once took a ferry across to Victoria in Canada to visit a horticultural show and returned with dozens of stolen cuttings stuffed into their bras. On another mcnlorable occasion, Ron and Mac decided they would build an experimental sail-boat with inflatable rubber wheels on the theory that it would be subject to less friction than a conventional hull. They constructed a crude timber frame with three axles and six wheels made out of inner tubes on wooden drums and borrowed a mast and sail from a small boat in the harbour. It was agreed that Ron, the more experienced sailor of the two, would conduct the first trials. He kitted himself out for the occasion in sea boots, cap and yachting rig, and they towed the strange craft out into the Sound with a row-boat. Ron confidently stepped on board and as he did so there was an ominous crack. One of the crucial joints of the frame snapped under his weight and the entire contraption rapidly disintegrated. Blood and Thunder 75 The sight of Ron in his natty sailor suit clinging grimly to the wreckage and bellowing to be taken off was too much for Ford. f le collapsed in the bottom of the row-boat and the more he laughed the angrier Ron became. In the end, Ford rowed ashore and let someone else pick up his friend. 'He had a real temper and I sure as hell wasn't going to let him catch me when he had his temper up like that,' he explained. '}le would have killed me if he'd got his hands on me at the time. I stayed out of sight for a couple of hours but he soon cooled down. We had dinner together that night.' Undaunted by the failure of the rubber-wheeled boat, the two friends could soon be found testing a model boat with an unusual V-shaped keel of their own design in Polly's washing machine, trying to figure out an accurate method of measuring the drag. Then they spent several days on the Maggie with a complicated arrangement of zips and canvas sleeves with which they hoped to improve the efficiency of the sails. While the men were playing, it was inevitable that Polly and Nancy would spend a great deal of time together with their children. Thus Nancy knew that Polly suspected Ron of having affairs witb other women during his frequent absences back East. Nancy told NIne, who said hc was sure Poily was wrong. A few weeks later, the I lubbards arrived separately at the regular Saturday night dance at Brcmerton Yacht Club. Polly drove alone from The Hilltop and Ron sailed across in The Ma.,4~,ie, making no attempt to conceal his surly demeanour. 'They were not speaking to each other,' said Ford, 'and it took us a while to find out what |lad happened. It seems Ron had written letters to a couple of girls in New York and left them in the mail box to be picked up. Polly found them and got so mad that she opened the envelopes, switched the letters and put them back in the box. She didn't tell him what she had done until they had been picked up. Pollv was a great girl, a lot of fun.' Next morning, Ron packed his bag and caught a train for New York, still in a vile temper. Chapter5 Science Fictions 'By 1938, Hubbard was already established and recognized as one of the top-selling authors . . . [and] was urged to try his hand at science fiction. He protested that he did not write about "machines and machinery" but that he wrote about people. "That's just what we want," he was told. The result was a barrage of stories from Hubbard that expanded the scope and changed the face of the literary genre . . .' Clbout L. Ron tlubbard, Writers of the Future, Volume II, Bridge Publications lnc, 1986) ú ~ ~ ~ ~ To science-fiction fans, 1938 marked the daxvn of a new era they were pleased to call the 'Golden Age'. Before then, science-fiction' pull~s with gosh-wow titles like Amazin.~,, B~mth,r, l'lan~'t Stories and Stamlin.~, had usually been ridiculed if not ignored. Crowttcd into tile darkest corner, or on to the lowest shelf of the news-stand, they were only sustained by the devotion of a small group of passionately loyal enthusiasts who, dreaming of time machines and space travel in tile grimly haunted days of the Depression, were widely cnnsidcred to be dottv. The sad truth was that the nineteenth century heritage of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and H.G. x, Vells had largely degenerated, by the early 'thirties, into trash - uninspiring tales of slavering robots and talking animals writtep in penny-dreadful prose, mediocre fiction without the science. Bug-eyed monsters figured prominently, either invading earth with the intention of enslaving the human race or carrying away our 'fairest maidens' for use as 1ove-to3,s on some alien planet. Readers needed considerable faith to relish repeated workings of the same tedious themes, but then science-fiction fans were acknowledged to be particularly fanatical, if not particular. It was possible to date, precisely, the metamorphosis that ushered in the Golden Age because it began with the appointment of John W. Campbell Junior as editor of Astounding magazine, at the age of twenty-seven, in early 1938. Campbell was the man who dragged science fiction out of the pulp mire and elevated it to an art form. Science Fictions 77 Opinionated, overbearing and garrulous, he was a chain-smoking intellectual dynamo bursting with ideas which he would expound at length, driving home every point by stabbing the air with his long black cigarette holder. His first science-fiction story, 'When The Atoms Faileel', was published in Amazing in 1930 and he quickly made a name for himself as an original, imaginative and sophisticated writer. One of his best stories was transformed, through no fault of his, into one of t Iollywood's worst movies, The Thing From Outer Space. As an editor, Campbell used his magazine to speculate on the implications - emotional, philosophical and sociological - of future scientific discoveries. He expected style, skill, ingenuity and technical proficiency from his contributors. Few of the existing pulp writers could meet his exacting standards and so he set out to nurture new talent. Almost all the biggest names of the Golden Age - Isaac Asimov, Robert Hcinlcin, A.E. van Vogt and many others - were first published in ..lstou~uling. Campbell never compromised. Faulty plots were ruthlessly rejected with pages of closely typed criticism Theodore Sturgeon once got a story back with a seven-page explanation as to why a particular fission of light metals was not feasible. Yet Campbcll's critiques to writers were always accompanied by a flood of new ideas and suggestions for other stories. 'No editor was ever more helpful,' said Jack Williamson, one of his contributors. '! lc read every story submitted. Those he rejected came back with uscftd comments, and matly a letter accepting one story also included ideas for another.'~ The mechanical ants in Williamson's novel, The.Moon Children, were Campbcll's idea. Isaac Asimov always remembered his first meeting witb Campbell in the Seventh Avenue offices of Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding. 'I was eighteen and had arrived with my first story submission, my very first. He had never met me before, but he took me in, talked to me for two hours, read the story that night and mailed the rejection the following day along with a kind, two-page letter telling me where I had gone wrong.'z Campbell was both a visionary and a realist. He believed in supernatural power and space travel and rockets and a multiplicity of worlds, but he also fervently believed that science fiction should live up to its name. His writing was studded with extraordinary technical detail explaining how complex machines worked, yet his scientists were always real people with human emotions and foibles. One of what he called his 'pet ideas' was that less than a quarter of the functioning capacity of the brain was used. 'Could the full equipment be hooked into a functioning unit,' he wrote in Thn'lling l~bnder Stories in 1937, 'the resulting intelligence should be able to conquer the world without much difficulty.' Working on this doubtful i 78 Bare4?aced Messiah premise, Campbell made unremitting attempts to encompass telepa~ thy, ESP and other odd psychic phenomena into a science he called 'psionics'. As tile reputation of Campbcll's Astounding grew, new magazines appeared on tile streets thick and fast -Marz'el Science Stories was out first, closely followed by Startli~g Stories, Dyna,~tic Science Stories and Fantastic Ad~'entttres. To distance his own magazine from the more garish pulps, Campbell changed tile title to Astounding Science Fieiron, which he thought sounded more dignified and more accurately reflected the content. Campbell first met L. Ron Hubbard at about the time he took over as editor. RoB provided a typically bombastic account of the circumstances: 'I go~ into science fiction and fantasy because F. Orlin Tremainc, at the orders of the managing director of Street and Stnith, brought me nver and ordered John W. Campbell Jr... to buy whatever I wrote, to freshen up the mag, up its circulation, and to put in real people and real plots instead of ant men. John, although we became dear friends later, didn't like this a bit.'3 Trcmaioc was an editorial director of Street and Smith and might well have effcctcd tile introduction - hc would certainly have known R~m, since Rou had contributed ma~ly stories tu Street and Smith's stahlc of atlvcnturc pult~s. But it was incnnccivablc that Campbell woultl have been o~'efi'~'ed to buy everything Ron wrote. Campbell was an cdit~r of tntal dcdicati~m and a n~toriut~s perfcctionist - he woultl never have relinquished his right to edit or to ask contributurs for a rewrite if he thonght it was necessary. 'Those ~'ho could not meet his requirements,' said Isaac Asimov, 'cotdd not sell to him.' XVhatcver the circtm~stanccs of their meeting, it was clear that the young editor and the yotmg writer tilt it off, for in April, 1938 Campbell wrote Ron a long, funny letter, full of friendly gobbledcgook, to chide RoB for not making contact when he was recently in New York. 'ilUBBARD SNUBBARD: !IUBBARD SNUBBARD: HUBBARD SN~'BB/~RD,' Campbell began. '~Vhen I was a little boy, on me fodder's knee, he says to me, says he to me (yes, I was a little boy, and I did have a fodder, and he did have a knee, and he did say to me): "Never take offense, where offense isn't meant." So thata is data . . .' He continued in similar vein for several pages, invited Ron to contribute some anecdotes about himself for a feature he was writing on the pulp magazine industry and ended: 'My best to your wife and kiddies. I am noxv about to sign off. By the way, forgive the bad copy; I only learned to type a couple of weeks ago, and can't control the engine sometimes. Addio, John.'4 Ron's first story for Astounding, and his first venture into science Science Fictions 79 fiction, was 'The Dangerous Dimension', published in the July 1938 issue. It was a diverting little tale about a mild-mannered university professor, Henry Mudge, who works out a philosophic equation enabling him to transport himself to any part of the universe by thought alone. Teleportation causes him endless difficulties since every time he thinks about a place he finds himself whisked there wifi~ no more than a 'whup!' By and large, he is remarkably unperturbed, as when he thinks himself to Mars ("Oh dear," thought Mudge. "Now I've done it!"). 'The Dangerous Dimension' was followed later in the year by a three-part novelette, 'The Tramp', which also dealt with fantastic powers of the mind. The tramp, one 'Doughface Jack', falls from a train and suffers severe head injuries. After an operation to save his life during which a silver plate is inserted into his head, he discovers he has the power to heal, or to kill, with a single glance. The surgeon is so envious of his paticnt's remarkable new powers that he decides to have the operation, too, with less happy results. When, by and by, it became important to promote an image of Ron as one of the world's great thinkers and philosophers, these two stories would be presented as clear evidence that L. RoB Hubbard had begun his research into the workings of tile mind. Science tictiara, it was explained, was 'merely the method Ron used to develop his philusophy'.s It was a philosophy which was supposedly fully expoundcd in !';xcalibur, an unpublished book Ron was first said to have written in 1938. l~h/d~/stly described as 'a sensational volume which was a summation of life based on his analysis of the state of l~lankind',6 much would bc heard of tiffs great work in later years; indeed, it would become a cornerstone of the mythology built around his life. It was claimed that the book derived from Ron's 'discovery' that the primary law of life was to survive, although, naturally, the part played by 'his explorations, journeys and experiences in the four corners of the earth, amongst all kinds of men, was crucial'.7 The first six people to read the manuscript were said to have been so overwhelmed by the contents that they went out of their minds. Curiously, however, few of Ron's fellow writers were aware of the existence of the book, with the exception of Art Burks: 'Ron called me one day and said, "I want to see you right away, I have written the book." I never saw anybody so worked up. Apparently he had written it without sleeping, eating, or anything else and had literally worked himself into a frazzle. 'He was so sure he had something "away out and beyond" anything else that he said he had sent telegrams to several book publishers telling them that he had written the book and that they were to meet 80 Bare-Faced Messiah him at Penn Station and he would discuss it with them and go with whoever gave him the best offer. Whether he did this or not, I don't know, but it is right in line with somcthing he would do. 'tte told me it was going to revolutionize everything: the world, people's attitudes to one another. He thought it would have a greater impact upon people than the Bible.'8 Burks's recollection of the manuscript was that it was about seventy thousand words long and began with a fable about a king who gathered all his wise men together and commanded them to bring him all the wisdom of the world in five hundred books. He then told them to go away and condense the information into one hundred books. ~,Vhen they had done that, he wanted the wisdom reduced into one book and finally into one word. That word was 'survive'. Ron developed an argument that the survival instinct could explain all human behaviour and that to understand survival was to understand life. Burks particularly remembered a passage in which Ron explained how emotions could be whipped up to the point where a lynch mob was formed. 'It made the shivers move up your back from your heels to the top of your head,' he said. Burks was sufficiently impressed by Excalibur to agree to write a brief biographical sketch of Ron for use as a preface. It was the usual 'red-headed fire-cater' material, with only one surprising new claim that 1934 was the year Ron 'rounded off his application of analytical geometry to aerial navigation'. The preface also mentioned a facet of Ron's character which few members of the American Fiction Guild had noticed - his unwillingness to talk about himself. 'Long ago he discovered that his most concrete adventures raised sceptic eyebrows and so, without diminishing his activities, he has fallen back on silence. We hear of him building a road in the Ladtone Islands or surveying the Canadian border and bellowing squads east and west with the perfection of a trained military man and delve though we may, that is as far as we can get.' Burks concluded with a tactful reference to the difficulty of reconciling the adventurer with the author of a philosophic treatise: 'One envisions the philosopher as a quiet gray-beard, timid in all things but thought. It is, withal, rather upsetting to the general concept to think of L. Ron ttubbard as the author of Excalibur.' Although Excalibur was never published - Burks was convinced that Ron was deeply disappointed he could not find a publisher - Ron assiduously stoked rumours about its existence and its content. 'He told me once that he had a manuscript in his trunk that was going to revolutionize the world,' said his friend Mac Ford. 'He said it was called Excalibur, but thaUs all I know about it. I never saw it.'9 Science Fictions 81 Unquestionably, Ron himself believed in Excalibur, for in October 1938 he wrote a long and emotional letter to Polly in which he expressed his hope that the manuscript would merit him a place in history. Polly had recently had a riding accident wbich resulted in her losing the tip of one finger. Ron tried to cheer her up with a funny catalogue of his own imagined ailments and promised her a jewelled Chinese fingernail holder which she could be 'snooty' about. He wrote of his frustration about his work, the constant shortage of money ('I still wonder how much money we owe in incidental bills. It's grave, I know . . .) and the need to spend so much time in New York, away from her and the children. Then he turned to the subiect which was clearly in the forefront of his mind: 'Sooner or later Excalibur will be published and I may have a chance to get some name recognition out of it so as to pave the way to articles and comments which are my ideas of writing heaven. 'Living is a pretty grim joke, but a joke just the same. The entire function of man is to survive. The outermost limit of cndcavour is creative work. Anything less is too close to simple survival until death happens along. So I am engaged in striving to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to astound the gods. I turned the thing up so it's up to mc to survive in a big way... Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary f6rm even if all books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned . . . 'When I wrote it [Excalibur] I gave myself an education which outranks that of anyone else. I don't know but it might seem that it takes terrific brain work to get the thing assembled and usable in the head. I do know that I could form a political platform, for instance, which would encompass the support of the unemployed, the industrialist and the clerk and day laborer all at one and the same time. And enthusiastic support it would be. Things are due for a bust in the next half dozen years. Wait and see.' Ron was clearly worried that he would be hampered bv his reputation as a pulp writer: 'Writing action pulp doesn't have much agreement with what I want to do because it retards my progress by demanding incessant attention and, further, actually weakens my name. So yo:~ see I've got to do something about it and at the same time strengthen the old financial position-' Towards the end of the letter he wrote about strange forces he felt stirring within him which made him feel aloof and invincible and the struggle he had faced trying to answer the question 'XVho am I ?' before returning to the theme'of immortality: 'God was feeling sardonic the Bare-l?aced Messiah day He created the Universe. So it's rather up to at least one man every few centuries to pop up and come just as close to making [lim swallow his laughter as possible.' Ron's nickname for Polly was 'Skipper' and !~ers for him was 'Red'. The letter finistied with a single encouraging line: 'I love you, Skipper, and all will be well. The Redhead.' While Ron's philosophical work languished for want of a publisher, his literary endearours in other fields continued to find wide fayour. Apart from marking his ddbut in science fiction, 1938 was the year Ron rode tile range of Western adventure. Ills name appeared in ll~'stent Stot)' magazine almost every month with a series of txvo-gun titles designed to set the pulse racing - 'Six Gun Caballero', 'I lot Lead Payoff', 'Ride 'Era Cowboy', 'The Boss of the Lazy B', 'The Ghost Tuwn Gun-Ghost', 'Death Waits at Sundown', etcetera. Campbell thought Ron was wasting his time with ~,Vesterns and told him so in a letter dated 23 January 1939: 'I don't, personally, like ~3,'csterns particularly, and, in consequence, haven't read your Western stuff. But I'm convinced that you do like fantasy, enjoy it, and have a greater gift for fantasy than for almost any other type. The fact that editor after editor has urged you to do that type seenIs to me indication titat y~u always have had that ability, and that, in avoiding it heretofore, yuu'vc suppressed a natural, and not cornmere, talent. Tilere are a lot of boys that run out readable Westerns, but ›mlv ab~~ut three or fuur men in a gcucration tbat do top-notch fantasy .'~ Campbell wanted Run to contribute to ~'nknown, a new magazine he was in tile process of launching which was to specialize in bizarre fantasy, and promised to reserve space for him with a proviso that otlly 'gentfinely first-rate fantasy' would be considered. In respemse Ron produced a stetrv called 'The Ultimate Adventtire', xvhich was used as the lead novel in tile April 1939 issue and marked the beginning of a tenure during which his name was virtually a permanent fixture in the magazine. The protagonist in 'The Ultimate Adventure' was a favourite Hubbard stereotype - a wimp transported by magic to another, vaguely Oriental, world and miraculously mutated into a roistering adventurer. The wimp in tiffs case was a destitute orphan. Beguiled bv a mad professor, tie finds himself in a scene from The Arabran Nigt~ts, is condemned to death as a suspected ghoul, shoots his way out, falls in with a band of genuine ghouls who eat human heads, rescues a fair princess from the clich~ castle and finally turns the tables on tile mad professor. It was rip-roaring stuff. A second L. Ron Hubbard story, 'Slaves of Sleep', appeared in the July issue of C)tknown. This time the hero was not a penniless orphan Science Fictions 83 but an heir to a shipping fortune, although quite as ineffectual. Another wicked professor (Ron did not have much time for academics) causes the young man to be cursed with eternal sleeplessness, banishing him to a world wbere he is a seventeenth-century sailor on the Barbary coast embroiled in hair-raising adventures. Fortunately, he has a magic ring {or use in really tricky situations - as when he single-handedly defeats an enemy fleet by obdurately ordering the ships to fall apart. Compared to previous years, Ron's output in 1939 was positively dilatory - just seven novels and two short stories. But then be had other things on his mind. A year earlier, his friend H. Latane Lewis If, who was by then working for the National Aeronautic Association, had recommended him to the War Department in Washington as the right man for an advisory post in the Air Corps. In a letter to Brigadier General Walter G. Kilner, Assistant Chief of the Air Corps, H. Latane Lewis II unexpectedly promoted Ron to the rank of 'Captain', perhaps to enhance his case: 'When you asked me last week to procure advice on tile problem of bringing a more agreeable and adventurous type of young man into the Air Corps, I did not know I would be fortunate enough to receive a call today from Captain L. Ron llubbard, the bearer. 'Captain Hubbard, whom you know as a writer and lecturer, is probably the best man to consult on this subject due to his many connections. He has offered to deliver his views in person. 'As a member of the Explorers Club he has occasion to address thousands of young men in various institutions concerning his sea adventures and his various expeditions. Ttlough he only pursued soaring and power flight long enough to eraass [sic] story information, he is still much respected in soaring societies for tile skill and daring which brought him two records. He often speaks at Harvard . . .,tl Nothing came of Ron's offer to deliver his views in person, possibly because the Brigadier General discovered L. Ron Hubbard was not a Captain, not a member of the Explorers Club, not a lecturer, held nil flying records and had never addressed Harvard. Ron, as ever, was unabashed but as the situation in Europe deteriorated - the newspapers were full of alarming reports that a German invasion of Poland was imminent - he became increasingly enamoured with the idea that his panoply of talents should be available to Washington. On I September, the day England and France declared war on Germany, he wrote to the Secretary of the War Department: 'Because of the possibility that our nation may, in the near future, find itself at war and because I v,,ell know the difficulty of finding trained men at the height of such a crisis, I wish to offer my services to my \ 84 Bare-Faced Messiah government in whatever capacity they might be of the greatest use . . .' He continued with a resum~ of his career which was, for Roe, a model of restraint and veracity. It was just possible that he inadvertently implied he had only left university in order to lead an expedition to the Caribbean, and his military experience was perhaps just a little over-emphasized, but by and large he stuck to the facts. He even had the grace to point out that though he had spent five years studying psychology and human behaviour it was purely for his own benefit. His 'pioneerleg' notes on emotional reactions, he added, would be published in the coming year. Unfortunately for Roe, two days later, President Roosevelt declared the neutrality of the United States, temporarily thwarting his ambition to play a role in the defeat of Ititler. Following the move to South Colby, Roe became accustomed to spending sumn~ers at The Hilltop, burning the midnight oil in his little cabin in the woods and sailing the ruffled reaches of Puget Sound in the Maggie at weekends, and winters in New York, where he could enjoy the amiable and cosmopolitan company of his fellow writers. lie usu~llly stayed in the cheapest hotel room he could find, but in the fall of 1939 hc scraped together enough money to rent a small apartment in Nlanhattan, on the Upper West S~dc at 95th and Riverside. To make a place where hc could work without distraction, hc rigged up a currained enclosure about the size of a telephone booth, lit with a blue electric bulb to cut down the reflected glare from his typing paper. Most of the top science fiction writers of the day tended to gather in John W. Campbcll's cluttered office in tbc Street and Smith building on Seventh Avenue and it was there that other contributors to Mtounding and Unknown madc the acquaintance of L. Roe Hubbard. L. Sprague de Camp thought that he looked like a 'reincarnated Pan who had been doing himself a bit too well on the ambrosia'~z and Isaac Asimov, who greatly admired Ron's work, became quite flustered at meeting him for the first time. 'He was a large-jawed, red-haired, big and expansive fellow who surprised me,' Asimov recalled. 'His heroes tended to be frightcried little men who rose to meet emergencies, and somehow I had expected Hubbard to be the same. "You don't look at all like your stories," I said. "Why? How are my stories?" he asked. "Oh they'regreat," I said enthusiastically and all present laughed while I blu;hed and tried to explain that if the stories were great and he was not like his stories, I didn't mean he was not great. ,~3 While he was in New York, Roe lobbied assiduously and moved inexorably towards the fulfilment of a long-standing ambition - to be Science Fictions 85 accepted as a member of the Explorers Club. He had often hinted, over the years, that he was a member, but in reality it was an accolade that had proved singularly elusive. The club occupied a handsome red brick and stone building of suitable neo-Gotbic dignity on East 70tb Street, but its worth as a prime piece of l~'lanhattan real estate was as nothing compared to the privilege of being allowed to walk througb the wrought iron gates as a member. lX{embership of the snooty Explorers Club of New York, rounded in 1904, conferred prestige, social standing and influence. Roe longed to join this exalted fraternity, not least because it would, at a stroke, forever legitimize his doubtful career as an explorer and adventurer. He could be the most charming and sociable of men when he so desired and he worked hard to make the right connections. On 12 December 1939, he was formally proposed for membership of the Explorers Club on the basis of what appeared to be an impressive application, citing the valuable data he had obtained for the tlydrographic Office and the University of Michigan during his expedition to the Caribbean, his pioncering mineralogical survey of Pucrto Rico and his survey flights in the United States, undertaken to 'aid adjustment of field and facility data'. The club's membership committee did not, it seems, require any of these claims to bc checked and on 19 February 1940, L. Roe i lubl~ard was duly elected, to his enormous and undisguised pleasure. Thereafter, he would rarely forgo the satisfaction of giving his address as 'Explorers Club, New York.' It not being in his nature to blush quietly on the sidelines, Roe was soon making his presence felt. Within a matter of months the cltlb magazine was reporting rumours that 'our red-headed Captain Roe Hubbard' liked to wrestle fully-grown brown bears. Roe wrote a good-natured denial, slyly contriving to portray himself as both sport and saint: 'I do not make a practice of going around picking on poor, innocent Kodiak bears. The day I arrived in New York City, this thing began: I picked up my phone to hear a cooing voice say, "Cap'n, do you like to wrassle with bears?" And since that day I have had no peace. How the story arrived ahead of me I do not know, 1 mean the whole thing is a damned lie ! 'A man can spend endless months of hardship and heroic privation in checking coast pilots; he can squeeze his head to half its width between earphones calculating radio errors; he can brave storm and sudden death in all its most horrible forms in an attempt to increase man's knowledge, and what happens? Is he a hero? Do people look upon his salt-encrusted and exhausted self with awe? Do universities give him degrees and governments commissions? ,\'o! They all look at him with a giggle and ask him if he likes to wrassle bears. lt's an 86 Bare-Faced Messiah outrage! It's enough to make a man take up paper-doll cutting! Gratitude, bah! Attention and notoriety have centred upon one singular accident - an exaggerated untruth - and the gigantic benefits to the human race are all forgutten!' In tile early months of 1940, Ron was forced to abandon the pursuit of further gigantic benefits for the human race in favour of earning a living. Working under the blue light in the curtained cubicle in his apartment on the Upper West Side, he produced three stories tbat would come to be regarded as classics- 'Fear', 'Typewriter in tile Sky' and 'Final Blackout'. 'No one who read "Fear" in ~)tknown during their impressionable years xvould ever forget it,' clain~ed Brian Aldiss, science fiction writer and historian. 14 The stream-of-consciousness narrative, akin to literary psychoanalysis, charts the disintegration of an academic who writes an article debunking the existence of spirits and demons and is punished by being dragged into a nightmare of black magic and hallucinations. In contrast, 'Typewriter In The Sky' was a typical Ilubbard swashbuckler about a character called 1XIikc de Wolfe wl~o finds bimsclf trapped in tile past as the unwilling victim of a science fictiun writer named ttorace I lackett. Transpurted to the Spanish l\lain, de x. Volfc is sadttlcd with tile iraplausible name of lx. tigucl Saint Rat~ul Maria Gunzalcs Sebastian dc l\Icnd~za y Toledo Francisco Juan Tumaso Gucrrcro de Brazo y Leon dc Lobo and is required to ducl with English sea dog Tom Bristul for tile hand of the fair Lady 1Xlariun, 'tlarnc-hcadcd, imperious and as lovely as any statue from Greece'. It was an ingenious little tale, but hi(rdly gr~at literature, particularly since the protagonists were given to uttering lines like 'God's breath, milord, you jest!' and 'By gad, hc's got spunk!' or even 'Peel your peepors!' Final Blackout was a novel which many science-fiction fans considered tlubbard's finest work and led to ilopeful comparisons with Jules Verne and tt.G. x, Vells. (\Vhen it was published in hardback later, Ron contrived, unsuccessfully, to appear self-effacing in a jacket note: 'I cannot bring myself to believe that Final Blackout, as so many polls and such insist, is one of the ten greatest stories ever published.') Serialized in the April, May and June issues of Astountlittg, Final Blackout precipitated furious controversv in fan magazines and bitter accusations that it was Communist or F~scist propaganda. The story was set in a Europe laid waste by generations of war and populated onlv bv marauding bands of renegade soldiers. Leading a brigade of 'unkillables', the hero, identified only as the 'Lieutenant', fights his wax- to England, where he establishes a benign military dictatorship until he is overthrown bv his forn~er commanding officers, with the backing of the United States. Science Fictions 87 ! It was a peculiarly grim and apposite story to be published in the spring of 1940. Viewed from tbe United States, the war in Europe seemed like a prelude to Armageddon, the potential destruction of civilized life under the heel of the jackboot. While American liberals were campaigning for positive action from the government to aid the Allies in tbe fight against Fascism, the anti-war neutralist lobby was equally vociferous. Partisans of both left and right read political significance into The Final Blackout: it was pro-war, anti-war, Communist or anti-Communi'st, depending on the reader's political inclinations. Even Ron's friends could not agree about his intentions. Ron was a member of a war-game circle which had been started by Fletcher Pratt, a naval historian who also enjoyed writing science fiction. Using scale models of real warships made from balsa wood, they re-enacted naval battles on the floor of the living-room in Pratt's New York apartment until the group became too large and it was necessary to transfer the battleground to a hired hall on East 59th Street. While the balsa battles were being fought, they often discussed the war and its attendant politics. '1 lubbard gave a varied impression of himself,' recalled L. Sprague de Camp, who was also a member of the war-game circle. 'Some thought him a Fascist because of tile authoritarian tone of certain stories. But one science-fiction writer, then an idealistic left-liberal, was convinced that t lubbard had profound liberal convictions. To others, I lubbard expressed withering disdain for politics and politicians, saying about the imminence of war: "Me, fight for ap~ditical system ? "' ~s There was certainly no doubt that Ron was anti-German, for on 16 lXlav he wrote a letter to tile FBI in x, Vashington on his exotic personalized stationery featuring his initials and a charging cavalryman: 'Gentlemen; May I bring to your attention an individual whose Nazi activities, in time of national emergency if not at present, might constitute him a menace to the state?' This luckless individual was a German steward at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York whose sister, according to Ron, was a member of the Gestapo. Ron accused him of being anti-American, an illegal immigrant and 'definitely fifth column'. 'Mv interest in this is impersonal,' he added, 'tbough possibly shaded by the feeling of dislike which he always inspires in me.' J. Edgar Hoover replied promptly, thanked Ron for the information and promised an investigation. But when an FB I agent called at Ron's apartment on Riverside Drive, he discovered that Ron had moved out on 1 June. The agent reported that Ron had told neighbouts he was moving to Washington DC, but as he left no forwarding address, the case was closed. ~6 88 Ba re - Fa cett Messiah Ron had not gone to Washington DC but to Washington State, back to The Hilltop and to Polly and the children. There was perhaps little time for a lengthy family reunion, however, for he was deeply involved in the planning of his next great adventure - the Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition. He was, of course, the leader and would be carrying with him, for the first time, the flag of the Explorers Club. The signal honour of carrying the club flag was jealously guarded and only granted to members taking part in expeditions with proven serious scientific objectives. Every application was obviously subjected to rigorous scrutiny by the Flag and Honors Committee, lest the significance of its award be dcvalued. Thus Captain Hubbard proposed eminently laudable aims for his Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition, notably to rewrite an important navigation guide - the US Coast Pilot, Alaska, Part 1 - and to investigate methods of radio position4it~ding with experimental equipment and a new system of mathematical computation. In a comnlittce room at the Explorers Club, these creditable aspirations clearly met with unhcsitant approval. In and arou~ld Brcmcrton, members of the Waterbury family' had a rather nlore prosaic perspective on tile Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition, referring to it simply as 'P, on and Pollv's trip'. As far as the family was conccrncd, Ron was going to take P~llv on a cruise up to :\laska. Aunt Marnic viewed the venture as a wanglc entircly typical of her nephew. 'R~n dreamed up tile trip as a way of outfitting the Maggie,' she said. 'ltis brain was always working and when he was trying to figure out how he could afford to outfit the boat he wrote letters to all these different manufacturers of instrun~ents and equipment offering to test them out.' TIle letters were written on crisply designed notepaper headed 'ALASKAN RADIO-EXPERIMENTAL EXPEDITION', with a sub-heading 'Checking data for tile US Coast and Geodetic Survey and the US Navy Hydrographic Office'. The expedition's base was given as Yukon Harbor, Colby, and its address, inevitably, ~vas the Explorers Club of New York. \Vith such impressive credentials it was no surprise that manufacturers responded positively to letters from 'Captain L. Ron Hubbard, Director AREE '40' asking for equipment to be submitted for scientific testing. Aunt Marnie knew all about 'Ron and Polly's trip' because they had asked her to look after Nibs and Katie at The Hilltop while they were away. She and her husband, Kemp, were living in Spokane, but Kemp had been unemployed throughout the Depression and they were happy to move into The Hilltop as Kemp thought he might find work at the Navy Yard in Bremerton. 'It was a beautiful spot,' said Science Fictions 89 Marnie. 'Polly had fixed up the house and the garden real nice. She was very clever with flowers, very good at gardening. From the garden you could see the ferry boats coming over from Seattle .' A few days before thex' were due to leave, Ron offered to take IX/larnie and Toilie for a trii~ round the bay in the Maggie. It was not an outing that augured well for the Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition- 'We were quite a ways out', Marnie recalled, 'when the engine suddenly went phut-phut L out of gas. Polly was furious and shouted at Ron, "1 thought you were going to re-fuel it." He had forgotten to do it. We prayed for a wind to blow so we could get in under sail. In the end we had to drain the little oil lamps. That gave us enough fuel to give the engine a shot to get us moving, then we would drift for a bit and give it another shot and finally we got back. That was my last trip on the Maggie.'~7 The 'expedition' departed its Yukon Harbor 'base' in July, with lx,{av, l\larnic, Toilie and I\lidge and their various children waving fardwell from the quayside. Marnie and Kemp settled into The 1 lilltop with Nibs and Katie, their own two children and Marylou, the daughter of Marnie's sister, Hope. For the next several months their only' contact with Ron and Pollv was througb letters posted from var:~ous ports in British Columl~ia as the Maggie sailed erratically northwards along tbc Pacific coast of Canada. From tile start, the Maggie's new engine, fitted only a few weeks before they left Puget Sound, gave trouble. On their second day out, nosing through thick fog in the Juan de Futa Strait, between Vancouver Island and the US coast and barely eighty miles from Bremerton, the engine spluttered and died. They vet)' nearly ran aground before Ron could get it going again. The same thing happened in Chatham Sound, off Prince Rupert, also, coincidentally, in a pea-souper. On Friday 30 August, the Maggie limped into the harbour at Ketchikan, Alaska, with the engine crankshaft banging ominouslyKetchikan was a small fishing and logging community surrounded by spruce forests on the southern tip of the Alaskan panhandle, some seven hundred miles from Bremerton. The Maggie's arrival merited a story in the Ketchikan :tlaska Chronicle, although no mention was made of tile expedition: 'Captain L. Ron Hubbard, author and world traveler, arrived in Ketchikan yesterday in company with his wife aboard the vest pocket yacht, Magit'ian. His purpose in coming to Alaska was two-fold, one to win a bet and another to gather material for a novel of Alaskan salmon fishing.' It seems Ron told the newspaper that friends had wagered it was impossible to sail a vessel as small as the Maggie to Alaska and he was 90 Bare-Faced Messiah determined to prove them wrong. 'Captain Hubbard covered their bets and, now that he has arrived, will have the satisfaction of collecting.' Ron no doubt wished the story was true, for he had hopelessly underestimated the cost of the trip and they were already so short of money that they could not afford to get the engine repaired. More in hope than anticipation, he sent an angry cable to the engine supplier in Bremerton demanding a replacement crankshaft, free of charge. Meanwhile, the>, were effectively marooned in Ketchikan. While Ron and Polly were carefully saving wherex, er they could, a letter arrived from ~Iarnie saying that Nibs had been up crying all night with a toothache and she had taken him to the dentist. Ron was angry that Marhie should involve them in further expense and dashed off an irritable reply telling her it was none of her business and she should have waited until they got back. ~larnic responded furiously: 'x. Vhat kind of heel are you?' Despite these trials, Ron did his best to invest the trip with scientific purpose. In mid-September, he despatched a package of sailing directions and eleven rolls of film to the flvdrographic Oftice in ~,Vashington DC with a note expressing the h/~pe that they would prove of value. lie was also ahlc to rcport favourablv to the CEape Cod Instrument Company in I lyannis on the accuracy'of its 'Cape Cod Navigator', which he |lad tested with 721 bcariog~ on radio beacons. 'It has at all times performed its dt~tics like a true sbipmatc,' Run ~vrote. A solution to their predicament presented itself later that month in the shape of Jimmy Britton, the owner and president of the local radio station. KGBU Radio was a home-spun operation which proclaimed itself to be 'The Voice of Alaska' since it was virtually the only radio station in the area. Jimmy Britton made all the annotincemenG, read the news, conducted interviews, played records and filled in time as best he could. KGBU was usually so short of material that anyone in Ketchikan was welcome on the air to talk about almost anvil;lug. It was hardly surprising, then, that the arrival in town of Captain Hubbard, leader of a scientific expedition carrying the flag of The Explorers Club of New York, was nothing short of a godsend to Britton, particularly as Hubbard was not only willing to broadcast, he seemed positively eager to do so. lie was soon regaling listeners with a gripping accouni of his expedition and his adventures navigating tbrough fog-bound, tidebedevilled and uncharted waters. Britton recognized that Ron was a natural broadcaster and storyteller, with a seemingly limitless reservoir of material, and his talks on KGB U became a regular and popular feature for several weeks. In one .>, fence Fictions 91 of them he revealed how, after only a week in Alaskan waters he had discovered, with the help of his advanced radio navigational instruments, a source of interference which had baffled the local coastguard and signal station. In another he described his role in tracking down a German saboteur who had been sent to Alaska with orders to cut off communications with the United States in the event of war. And his dramatic and sometilnes hilarious account of how, on a fishing expedition with a friend, he lassooed a swimming brown bear which then climbed on to their boat, had listeners everywhere glued to their sets. Off the air, at Jimmy Britton's request, Ron re-organized the station and wrote new programming schedules with all the confidence of a man who had spent a lifetime in broadcasting. x, Vith little interference from other radio stations, KGBU's signal, on 900 watts and 1000 kilocycles, carried for hundreds of miles and could often be heard as far south as Seattle and Bremerton. It was for tiffs reason that Ron always contrived to mention that he and his wife were stranded in Kctchikan because the Regal Company of Bremerton had refused to meet its obligations and replace their defective crankshaft. xA'hen a new crankshaft arrived in earl>' December, Ron was convinced it was his constant needling on tile air that was responsihlc. As snon as the new crankshaft was fitted, Ron and Polly set sail for home. No one was more sorry to see them go than Jimmy Britton: hc felt that KGBU had hardly begun to tap Ron's ftmd of stories. The Maggie sailed back into Puget Sound on 27 December 1940. Ron bought 1Marhie a yellow canary to thank her for looking after the children and not a word was said about the dentist. Beset once more by debts, Ron went straight back to work to earn some money. For man>' weeks a light could be seen burning all night in the window of the little cabin at tile back of The Itilltop as the stories rolled relentlessly out of his typewriter. In one of them, 'The Case of the Friendly Corpse', published in Unknown, Run cheekily disposed of Harold Shea, the hero of a story by L. Sprague de Camp that had appeared in the magazine two months previously. Ron had his own hero meet ttarold Shea and demonstrate a magic wand which turned into a serpent and proceeded to swallow up poor Harold. L. Sprague de Camp fans were outraged that Hubbard should so brusquely dispatch someone else's hero. When he was not working, Ron spent a lot of time, as before, with his friend Mac Ford, who had recently been elected to the state legislature. During the hours they spent playing chess they talked at length about the war in Europe and the likelihood of the United States becoming involved. Ron seemed somewhat subdued after his return from Alaska; he was convinced that the Japanese were planning to 92 Ba,e-Faced Messiah attack the West coast mainland and gloomily prophesied that US forces would be driven back to the Rockies before they could stem tile I$' tide of the invasion. Unbeknoxvn to Ford, Ron had made up his mind to join the Navy and was making painstaking preparations to ensure he was offered a commission, tenaciously cultivating useful contacts and soliciting letters of recommetldation wherever he could. Jimmy Britton of KGBU Radio was naturally happy to oblige and despatched a two-page eulogy to the Secretary of tile Navy on 15 lx, Iarch 1941, listing Ron's abundance of accomplishments. Among them he mentioned that Ron was a 'good professional photographer' whose work he had seen in .Vational Geographk' Magazine. No one else had, for National Geographic had never published any of Ron's pictures.~ 'I do not hesitate', Britton enthused, 'to recommend him without reserve as a man of intelligence, courage and good breeding as well as one of the most versatile personalities I have ever known.' Ten days later, Commander W. E. McCain of US Naval Powder Factory at Indian Itcad, Maryland, added his support: 'This is to certify that I have personally known Mr L. Ron 1Iubbard for the past twenty years. I have been associated with him as a boy growing up and observed him closely. I have found him to bc of excellent character, honest, ambitiot~s and always very anxiot~s to improve bimsclf to better enable him to become a more useful citizen... I do not hesitate to recommend him to anyone needlog the services of a man of his qualitlcations.' (McCain was the Lieutenant who had shoxvn Ron and ins mother around Manila in 1927 and whom Ron mcntio~ed in his journal.) ~leanwhile, Ron was in touch with his Congressman, Warren G. lx, lagnuson, who was a member of tile Committee on Naval Affairs. Ron had suggested to ~Xlagnuson that the US Navy should set up its own Bureau of Information, both to improve the Navy's public relations and to counter the 'defeatist propaganda' about naval affairs which Ron claimed was 'flooding the press'. At Magnuson's request, he produced a nine-page report which the Congressman submitted with an introduction which cannot have displeased the author: 'TIlls plan of organization has been prepared by Captain L. Ron Hubbard, a writer who is well-known under each of five different pen names. |tis leadership in the Authors' League and the American Fiction Guild, his political and professional connections and the respect in which he is held by writers and newsmen make his aid in this organization valuable. His participation in this organization will give to it an instantaneous standing in the writing profession, and bring to it a standard of high ideals . . .' As if this was not enough, the Congressman also took it upon Science Fictions 93 himself to write to no less a person than President Roosevelt to extol the virtues of 'Captain' |{ubbard. The letter, dated 8 April, added yet another laurel to Ron's crown with the improbable claim that he held more marine licences than anyone else in the country. It also introduced an aspect o~ his personality that was certainly not obvious to other people who knew Ron I{ubbard - his 'distaste for personal publicity'. 'Dear Mr President,' Magnuson xvrote. 'May I recommend to you a gentleman of reputation? L. Ron t{ubbard is a well-known writer under five different names. t{e is a respected explorer as Captain Bryan, Navy Hydrographer, will confirm. [Bryan acknowledged the sailing directions and films that Ron sent to the Hydrographic Office from his Alaskan trip.] 'Nlr Hubbard was born into the Navy. He has marine masters papers for more types of vessels than any other man in the United States. 't{c has written for Hollywood, radio and newspapers and has published many millions of words of fact and fiction in novels and national magazines. In writing organizations he is a key figure, making him politically potent nationally. 'An interesting trait is his distaste for personal publicity. He is both discreet and resourceful as his record should indicate. 'Anything you can do for Mr liubbard will be appreciated ú . .' On 18 April, l~.on reported to the Naval Reserve Headquarters in x, Vashington DC for a physical examination. Next day, he persuaded the Dean of the School of Civil Engineering at George Washington Nav,, Yard recommending him for a University to xvrite a letter to the, : commission. professor Arthur Johnson complimented Ron's lead- ership, ingenuity, resourcefulness and personality and strove to explain why such a paragon had failed to gradaute:'His average grades in engineering were due to the obvious fact that he had started in the wrong career. They do not reflect his great ability .' Unquestionably the most lyrical of all the letters of recom- mendation was that signed by Senator Robert M. Ford on the notepaper o[ the House of Representatives for the State of Washing- ton. Ford was not the kind of man to be too bothered by protocol or paperwork. 'I don't know why Ron wanted a letter,' he said- 'I just gave him a letter-head and said, "Hell, you're the writer, you write it!,,,~9 , Ron was unstinting in praise of himself. 'To whom it may concern, he began. 'This will introduce one of the most brilliant men I have ever known: Captain L. Ron Hubbard. 'He writes under six names in a diversity of fields from political economy to action fiction and if he would make at least one of his pen 94 Bare-bhced Messiah names public he would have little difficult entering anywhere. He has published many milho~s of words and some fourteen movies. 'In exploration he has honourably carried the flag of the Explorers Club and has extended geographical and mineralogical knowledge. tie is well known in many parts of the world and has considerable influence in the Caribhean and Alaska. 'As a key figure in writing organizations he has considerable political worth and in the Nortbwest he is a powerful influence. 'I have known him for man3, years and have found him discreet, loyal, honest and without peer in the art of getting things done swiftly. 'If Captain flubbard requests help, be assured that it will benefit others more than himself. 'For courage and ability I cannot too strongly recommend him.' On 19 July 1941, L. Ron Hubbard was commissioned as a Lieutenant (Junior Grade) in the US Naval Reserve. Chapter 6 The Hero Never 1?t 'Commissioned before the war in 1941, by the US Navy, he [l'tubbard] was ordered to the Philippines at the outbreak of war in the US and was flown home in the late spring of 1942 in the Secretary of the Navy's private plane as the first US returned casualty from the Far East.' CI B,icf Biograph3' of L. Ro,~ Hubbard) 'tie served in the South Pacitic, and in 1942 was relieved by fifteen officers of rank and was rushed home to take part in the 1942 battle against German submarines as Commanding Officer of a corvcttc serving in the North Atlantic. In 1943 he was made Commodore of Corvettc Squadrons, arid in 1944 he worked with amphibious forces. After serving in all five theaters of x, Vorld War II and receiving 21 medals and palms, in 1944 he was severely wounded and was taken crippled and blinded to Oak Knull Naval 1Iospital.' (l"acts :!bout L. Ron Ilubbard) It ~ tl ti ~ Bv July 1941, the United States was effectively, although unofficially, at war. US marines had taken over the British garrison in Iceland and US warships were already escorting convoys of lend-lease supplies across tile North Atlantic. The isolationist lobby bitterly accused President Roosevelt of needlessly leading the nation into the conflict, but the momentum was irreversible. When Germam' invaded Russia, Roosevelt immediately promised US aid, declaring the defence of Russia to be 'vital to the defence of the United States'. In August, as the apparently invincible Nazi Panzer divisions pushed the Red Army back towards the outskirts of Leningrad, Roosevelt met the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, off the coast of Newfoundland and signed the Atlantic Charter, confirming US-Anglo co-operation and calling for 'the right of all peoples to choose the form of Govern~nent under which they will live'. A few days later, a German U-Boat unsuccessfully attacked an American destroyer, the I;SS G,eer, south of Iceland and Roosevelt issued orders to 'shoot on sight'. In October, the US Navy suffered its first 96 Bate-Faced Messiah casualty when anothcr destroyer, the USS Keanzey, was sunk by a submarine in the Nortb Atlantic. After the loss of the Kea~Ttey, the United States embarked on an undeclared naval war against Germany. Lieutenant L.R. Hubbard, US Naval Reserve, did not exactly play a central role in these events. In mon~ents of fantasy he could no doubt picture himself on the bridge of the Kea~tO,, beroically choosing to go down with his ship, a wry smile playing on his lips as the last of his crew was rescued; in reality, he was being shunted from one desk job to another in public relations. In tbe ligbt of his success as a writer, it was not surprising that the US Navy assigned Lieutenant Hubbard to a job in publicity, even though thc fledgling officer's literary talent was largely confined to the abstruse field of science fiction, far divorced from the sober requirements of military public relations. But Ron naturally considered himstir supremely well qualified and tie had barely been in uniform five minutes before he was offering the benefit of his advice to bis senior officers. On 21 July, with two full days' service complcted, tie wrote to Congressman Magnuson thanking him for his help in obtaitling a cornmission and mentioning that he had already submittcd tbrec ideas to accelerate recruiting, all of which were 'going into effect'.' lx. Iagnuson replicd;'Glad to bear your commission xvcnt tbrougb. Know you will be right at home in your work with Navy Press Relations.' A week later, Run had otbcr plans. In a second letter to lx. lagnuson, dated 29 July and written from The Explorers Club in New York, he said that 'as Press Relations was getting along wall enougb' he had offered to write two articles every week for national magazines, with tile aim of ~elling the 'American bluejacket' to the public. tie had, he said, been given a 'free helm' and 'because tiffs program will net about three tinles as much as Navy pay I think it no more than rigbt that I return anything above pay and expenses to Navy Relief. So all goes along swimmingly.' %Veil, not quite swimmingly: it transpired that Ron was a little over-confident about his ability to sell US Navy stories to national magazines. He rnight have written two articles every week, but none was published. ~,Vhen it became clear to tile Navy that Lieutenant Hubbard was wasting bis time, it was decided to send him to the Hydrographic Office in xXashington to annotate the photographs he had t~;ken during his trip to Alaska with Polly. tie arrived on 22 September and stayed two weeks. In a memo to the Assistant Hydrograpber, it was noted that several dozen of his photographs were 'fairly clear' and of 'some navigational interest'. Ron had also suggested changes and amplifications to the Sailing Directions for British Columbia. Some were The th'~o U. 7~o Never l~'as 97 unimportant, the memo continued, 'but in the aggregate the)' represent a very definite contribution'.z It was a contribution that marked the end of Ron's career in public relations. On 24 November, after six weeks' leave, he was posted to Headquarters, Third Naval District, in New York, for training as an Intelligence Officer. Throughout this period, his father was stationed at the Navy Yard on Mare Island in San Pablo Bay, California, as officer in charge of the commissary. Now fifty-five and still a Lieutenant-Commander, Harry |tubbard's relationship with his son had deteriorated over the years and they saw little of each other. Any pleasure Hub might have experienced when he learned Ron was following him into the Navy could not outweigh his overall disapproval of, and disappointment with, his son. Harry Hubbard was a deeply conservative, utterly conventional plodder, a man ruled by routine and conformity. He could never come to terms with what he viewed as his son's eccentricities -bis refusal to get a job, his habit of staying up all night and sleeping all day, his prolonged absences from home, his lack of regard for his family. Hub was extremely fond of Pollv and adored his two grandchildren - Nibs, then seven years old, and Katie, who was five. Sometimes be felt tie was closer to them than their own fatbcr and hc was saddcncd that this should bc the case. As far as Ron was concerned, he had nothing in common with bis father who had spent virtualIv his entire life pushing paper in tbc Navy with nothing in prospect but a pension. To Ron it was a grey and unappealing existence compared to his own world, at least as it existed in his thoughts. Ron still saw himself as an adventurer cast in the mould of his fictional heroes and never missed an opportunity to promote himself as a fearless, devil-may-care, globetrotter. It was no wonder father and son inexorably drifted apart - their characters were simply too different to be compatible. Ron was still at HQ Third Naval District in New York when, a few minutes after three o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday 7 December, an announcer broke into a New York Philharmonic concert being broadcast on CBS: 'We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.' At that very moment, bombs were still falling on the ships in Pearl Harbor and before the Japanese pilots headed for home, five US battleships had been sunk or beached, three others damaged, ten smaller warships disabled and some 2400 men killed. Next day, the President signed a declaration of war. If Ron was chafing to get into action he was to be disappointed. On 18 December, he was posted to the Philippines, but got no further than Brisbane, Australia, where while waiting for a ship to Manila, he 98 Bare-Faced 31es3tt~h so antagonised his senior officers that in February 1942 he was on his way home again on board the USS Chaumont. 'This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment,' the US Naval Attachd in Melbourne reported on 14 February. 'He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance. I te also secn~s to think he has unusual ability in most lines. These characteristics indicate that he will require close supervision for satisfactory performance of any intelligence duty.' It was clain~ed that Ron assumed authority without bothering to obtain official sanction and attempted to perform duties for which he had no qualifications, thus becoming 'the source of much trouble'.3 At Headquarters Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco, it was decided that Ron's talents might be more profitably employed in censoring cables. In a despatch dated 22 April, the Chief Cable Censor in x. Vashington recommended that no disciplinary action be taken folloxving the report from 5.1clbournc 'as it is thought that the Subjcct's qualifications may find a useful outlet in the Office of the Cable Censor, New York'. Ron did not enjoy his desk job at tbe Office of the Cable Censor and in June he put in a request for sea duty on a patrol boat, preferably in tile Caribbean area, 'the peoples, language and custon~s of which I know and of which I possess piloting knowledge.' Ills request w~ts approvcd - hc was taken off cable censorship work and ofttoted to report to a shipbuilding yard in Ncponset, xXlassachusctts, to supervise the conversion of a heavy beam trawler, the Mist, into a US Navy grinboat to be classified as t'SS 17'-422. ~,Vhen she was ready to put to sea he was to take over as Commanding Ofticcr. tiere at last was his opportunity to prove he was the hero hc devoutly believed himself to be. (t{ad he not fought and won countless battles in the pages of his fiction?) Fighting men of calibrc were certainly desperately needed, for the months fol19wing Pearl Harbor saw some of tile darkest days of the war for the United States. Although jukeboxcs around the country were tinnilv cranking out patriotic jingles like 'Goodbye, l~lama, I'm Off To '~'okohama' and 'You're a Sap, Nlister Jap', the initial euphoria that had greeted the war soon began to fade as the Allies were routed in the Pacific: Guam fell, then l~lanila, then Singapore, Batnan and Corrcgidor. It was, then, with a certain sense of fulfilling his destiny that Lieutenant Hubbard travelled to Neponsct, his orders contained in a signal in his pocket: 'LTJG LAFAYETTE R HUBBARD DVS USNR HEREBY DETACtlED PROCEED IMMEDIATELY NEPONSET MASS . . . DUTY CONNEC- TION CONVERSION YP422 AT GEORGE LAWLEY AND SONS AND AS CO OF THAT VESSEL WItEN PLACED IN FULL COMMISSION. The cunvcrsion work was carried out swiftly and on 9 September The Hero lifo Never I{~ts 99 1942, Ron despatched a message to the Commandant of Boston Navy Yard reporting that USS Yt'-422 was in excellent condition, crew training was 'approaching efficiency' and morale was high. 'As soon as a few deficiencies are remedied,' he added 'this vessel will be in all respects ready for sea and is very eager to be on her way to her assigned station or task force.' Like his father, Ron tended to be somexvhat absent-minded about personal debts. While he was supervising the conversion of the ~'P-422 he was being pursued by tailors in Brisbane and Washington DC for unpaid uniform bills an~ he still owed $265 to the Bank of Ketchikan. When tbe Alaskan bank reported Lieutenant Hubbard's debt to the Bureau of Navigation in Wasbington, Ron wrote an indignant letter to the cashier: 'You are again informed that the reason for non-payment of this note is fi~e sharp decrease in pay which I was willing to take to help my countD'. Until this war is ended I can only make small and irregular payments.' The implication was that Lieutenant t lubbard was far too busy fighting a war to be bothered by trifling debts, but sadly, when the USS ~7'-422 set out on her shakedown cruise, Lieutenant Hubbard was nowhere to be seen on board. On l October, Ron was summarily relieved of his command and ordered to report to the Commandant, Twelfth Naval District 'for such duty as he may assign you'. No explanation was contained in his orders, although earlier he had been involved in an unwise altercation with a senior officer at the shipyard. Considerable tension bad developed between tbe officers h~ charge of the conversion work and those officers assigned to crew the ten YPs being converted at the Ncponset shipyard, culminating in an extraordinary order prohibiting YP officers from approaching the conversion office or even speaking to any of the shipyard workers. Ron had taken it upon himself to fire off a memorandum to the Vice-Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, naming the officer responsible and pointing out that the YP commanding officers were all 'staaled' by the order? He might have been better advised to keep quiet: on 25 September the Commandant o[ Boston Navy Yard sent a signal to Washington stating his view that Hubbard was 'not temperamentally fitted for independent command.' With his dreams of glory temporarily crushed, Ron waited for his next assignment without much optimism, anticipating he would probably be put back in command of a desk. However, he perked up considerably when his orders came through - he was to be sent to the Submarine 'Chaser Training Center in Miami, Florida. This immediately opened up a vista of wonderful new images -'Ron the Fox', ace sub hunter, fearless scourge of the Japanese submarine fleet, etcetera. Wearing dark glasses, Lieutenant Hubbard arrived at the Training I O0 Bare-Faced Messiah Center on 2 November and quickly made friends with another officer on the course - a young Lieutenant from Georgetown, Maine, by the '~ name of Thomas Moulton. Ron ligtlt-heartedly explained that he was ~! I ú obliged to wear dark glasses as he had received a severe flash burn ' when he was serving as Gunnery Officer on the destroyer Edsel. He ~! had been standing close to the muzzle of a five-inch gun which fired !' prematurely and while his injuries did not impair his vision, he found any kind of bright light painful without dark glasses. Moulton, understandably, was impressed. By judiciously lacing his conversation with jargon and anecdotes, Ron possessed an uncanny ability to be totally convincing. It was soon 'common knowledge' at the Center that he had served on destroyers; indeed, said ~Ioulton, he was 'used as something of an autbority in tile classroom'.s x, Vhi]e they were training together in Ix, liami, mastering the intricacies of tracking and attacking enemy submarines, Moulton was treated to further details of his new friend's astonishing exploits in the early months of the war. Ilis strong recollection was that Ron was a reticent sort of hero, reluctant to talk about hinlself, but over the weeks his story came out bit by bit. On the day the Japanese attacked Pearl 1 larbor, it seemed that Ron was landed from the Fdsel on the north coast of Java in the Dutch East Indies, not far from the port of Surabaya, to carry out a secret , mission. The Edsel was sunk a couple of days later [not quite accurate - she was sunk in 1XIarch 1942] and went down with all hands. x, Vhcn the Japanese occupied the island, Ron took off for the hills and lived rough in the jungle. Once he was almost caught by a Japanese patrol and was hit in the back by machine-gun fire bcfurc he was able to make his escape. Those wounds still troubled him, he confessed. 11c often suffered severe pain in his right side and the bullets had damaged his urinary system, making it difficult for him to urinate. He was in bad shape for quite a while after being shot, but eventually he teamed up with anotl~er officer and they constructed a raft on which they sailed across the shark-infested Tim/~r Sea to xvithin one hundred miles of the Australian coast, wt~ere they were picked up by a British or Australian destroyer. It was, Mothton tbought, a remarkable piece of navigation. In January 1943, Ron was sent on a ten-day anti-submarine warfare course at the Fleet Sound School in Key ~Vest, Florida, prior to being posted to Portland, Oregon, as prospective Commanding Officer of USS PC-815, a 280-1on submarine-chaser under construction at the Albina Engine and ix, lachine Works. Ron asked Moulton if he would be his Executive Officer. Moulton was really hoping for a ship of his own, but he so admired Ron that tie agreed. The Ite~v I~1~o Never li~,~s 101 While tile PC-815 was being built, the two officers found time to enjoy life a little in the pleasant city of Portland. 1X'loulton's wife came over from tile East Coast and Pollv was able to visit from Bremerton, which was only 150 miles to the north. As a foursome they enjoyed each othcr's company and frequently had dinner together, despite rationing, in one of the restaurants overlooking tbc green valley of the Willamette river and the distant snow-capped peak of ~Iount Hood. On one well-remenlbered occasion, the pruspcctive Commanding Officer of PC-SI5 and his Executive Officer drove up to Seattle for a dance at tile tennis club. Ron was wearing his mysterious dark glasses, as usual, and was being gently teased by one of the women in their group. When he explained why they were necessary, tile woman raised her eyebrows as if she did not believe him. Moulton was quite shocked. |lowever, to prove what he was saying, Ron took off his glasses and within five or ten minutes his eyes began watering and were clearly sore. [tis friend was deeply gratified. At ten o'clock on 'Fucsday 20 April 1943, the (_'SS PC-815 was commissioned. Ron noted tile event in a pencilled entry on the first page of the ship's log book, signing his name with a proud flourish. Two days later, the Ore.k, onJ~u,~tal published a photograph of Ron and 1Xloulton in unifortn with an article about the commissioning of the new ship. Ron xvurc his dark glasses and an intrepid expression, his cuat collar was turned up and hc gripped a pipe in his right band: hc looked just like a man ready to go to war. In the story, Ron xvas described as a 'veteran sub-hunter of the battles of the Pacific and Atlantic . . . an old band at knocking tails off enemy subs'. To add a little local interest, it seems be told the reporter that hc had grown up in Portland and came from a long line of naval men. ltc said his grandfather, 'Captain' Lafayette x, Vatcrbury, and his great-grandfather, 'Captain' I.C. DcWolf, had both helped make American naval history, although naturally he did not elaborate on their contribution. [1tis grcat-grandfather's name was Abram; 'I.C.' were his grandmotber's initials. ] His membership of the Explorers Club received a prominent mention, of course, along with tile fact that he had commanded three 'internatio~ally important' expeditions. He was also persuaded to reveal that during the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition he had become the first man ever to use a bathysphere for underwater filming. When the reporter asked Ron for a comment about his new ship, he obliged with a picturesque quote that began by sounding like Humphrey Bogart and ended like the President: 'Ti~ose little sweethearts are tough. They could lick tile pants off anything Nelson or Farragut ever sailed. They put up a sizzling fight and are the only answer to the submarine menace. I state emphatically that the future of America rests with just such escort vessels.' 102 Bare4;'ticed ;lIessiah On the evening of 18 1May, the USS PC-815 sailed from Astoria, Oregon, on her shakedown cruise. Her destination was San Diego, but she had only been at sea for five hours when, at 0230 hours off Cape Lookout on the coast of Oregon, she encountered at least one, perhaps txvo, enemy submarines in the middle of a busy shipping lane! Ron provided a graphic account of the engagement that followed in a secret Battle Report to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet :6 'Proceeding southxvard just inside the steamer track an echoranging contact was made by the soundman then on duty . . .The Commanding Officer had the corm and immediately slowed all engines to ahead one third to better echo-ranging conditions, and placed the contact dead ahead, 500 yards away. 'The first contact was very good. The target was moving left and axvav. The bearing was clear. The night xvas moonlit and the sea was fiat calm...The I.'SS P(7-815 closed in to 361) 3~ards, meanwhile sounding general quarters . . . Contact was regained at 800 yards and was held on the starboard beatn vd~ilc further investigation was made. Screws were prcsent and distinct as before. The bearing was still clear. Smoke signal identification was watched for closely and whcn ncmc appeared it was concludcd the target must not bca friendly submarine. All engines were brought up to speed 15 knots and the target was brought dead ahead . . .' On its first attack run, the I~'SS P('-815 dr~ppcd a barrage of three depth charges. When it had re-establist~ed c›mtact, a second attack was made at 0350 hours, this time laying down a pattern of four depth charges. Ron lapsed into rather unmilitary lyricism to describe the ensuing events: 'The ship, sleepy and sceptical, had come to their gtms swiftly and wit|~out error. No one, including the Com~nanding Officer, could readily credit the existence of an enemy submarine here on the steamer track and all soundmen, now on the bridge, were attempting to argue the echo-ranging equipment and chemical recorder out of such a fantastic idea . . . 'At 0450, with dawn breaking over a glass}' sea, a lookout sighted a dark object about 700 yards from the ship on the starboard beam. x, Vhen inspected the object seemed to be moving . . . Although very probably this object was a floating log no chances were taken and the target was used to test the guns which had not been heretofore fired structurally. The gunners, most of whom were men of experience, displayed an astonishing accuracy, bursts and shells converging on the target. 'The target disappeared for several minutes and then, to test the guns not brought to bear on the first burst, the ship was turned in The Hero XVho Never Was 103 case the object reappeared. The object appeared again closer to the ship. Once more fire was opened and the target vanished - ú .' Ron stressed that he considered it likely tiffs target was no more than driftwood, but he thought it was good for the morale of the gunners to ensure the newly-installed guns worked. The USS PC-815 mounted four further attacks on the elusive submarine in the hope of forcing it to the surface, without success. At the end of the sixth attack the ship's supply of depth charges was exhausted. Urgent signals requesting more ammunition at first met with no response. At nine o'clock in the morning, two US Navy blimps, K-39 and K-33, appeared on the scene to help with the search. By noon, Ron believed that the submarine was disabled in some way, or at least unable to launch its torpedoes, since the PC-815, lying to in a smooth sea, presented an easy target and had not been attacked- In the early afternoon a second, smaller, sub-ctxaser, the USS SC-536 arrived, but was unable to make contact with the target. , On the bridge of I'C-815, Ron offered to lead the other ship on an attack run, blowing a whistle to signal when to drop its depth charges. 'x, Vitb the bullnose of the SC nearly against our flagstaff,' Ron wrote, 'we came to attack course . . .' Five depth charges were dropped on the lirst rim and two on the second. "l'hc observation blimt~s began to sight oil and air bubbles in the vicinity of the last attack and finally a periscope. Tt~is ship also sigbtcd air bubbles . ú ú At 1606 oil was reported again and tbis ship saw oil. Great air boils were seen and the sound of blowing tanks was reported by the sounttman ú ú ú All guns were now manned with great attention as it was supposed that the sub was trying to surface. Everyone was very calm, gunners joking about who would get in the first shot.' But the submarine did not surface. Far from being discouraged, it seemed that Ron was by then convinced that there was not just one but two submarines lurking somewhere beneath them. His sonar operator had reported making a second, separate, contact a few hours earlier. Shortly before five o'clock, a Coast Guard patrol boat brought in further supplies of ammuntion. Manoeuvring alongside, twenty-seven depth charges were transferred on to the USS PC-815 and made ready for firing. Not long afterwards, a second Coast Guard patrol boat, the Bontzam arrived, followed by another sub-chaser, the USS SC-537. There was now a total of five ships and two observations blimps involved in the search for the enemy submarines off the coast of Oregon. All through the next day, sweep and search operations continued, although not all the Commanding Officers were as keen or convinced as Ron. 'Neither the SC-537 nor the Bonham', he noted 'showed any 104 Bare4:'aced ,'1Iessiah understanding whatever and refused by their actions to cooperate.' The SC-537, he added with barely concealed disgust, failed to drop a single depth charge. As if in compensation, the ~TSS PC-815 made one attack rtm after an~ther, forging back ancl forth at higb speed, dropping barrage after barrage. ~ Still no wreckage, no bodies, floated to the surface. Ron was not in i the least deterred. 'Because we had three times found two sub targets I on the previous day, we considered from her failure to surface that one sub was gone down in 90 fathoms. The other still had batteries well up for it made good speed in subsequent attacks . . . 'All during the following night, the USSPC-815 kept the area swept as well as it could. The moonlight showed up an oil slick which we investigated, though the slick was tno thin for samples . . . A report that the sub had surfaced off Sand Lake caused all vessels except the Bonhatn to go flying north to that position. But before flank speed was attained the reported "sub" was reported as a fishing vessel . . . 'At 0700, 1May 21, 1943, being near the area of the attacks the night before this ship stopped to search . .. Suddenly a boil of orange colored oil, very thick, came to the surface immediately on our port bow . . . The Commanding Officer came forward on tile double and saw a second bull of orange oil rising ou tile other side of tile first. The soundman was loudly reporting that he heard tanks being blown on tile purt bnw. 'Every man on the bridge and flying bridge then saw the periscope, moving from right to left, rising up through the first oil bull to a height of about two feet. The barrel and lens of the instrument were unmistakeable . . . On tile appearance of the periscope, both gunners fired straight into the periscope, range about 50 yards. The periscope vanist~ed in an explosion of 20ram bullets.' The I..'SS PC-815 made one further attack run and dropped its last two depth charges. At midnight, after being in action for some sixty-eight hours, Ron received orders to return to Astoria. He noted in his report, rather sourly, that they were greeted with 'considerable scepticism' on their return. Nevertheless, his conclusion was unequivocal: 'It is specificallv claimed that one submarine, presumably Japanese, possibly a ~ine-layer, was damaged beyond ability to leave the scene and that one submarine, presumably Japanese, possibly a mine-layer, was damaged beyond ability to return to its base. 'This vessel wishes no credit for itself. It was built to hunt submarines. Its people were trained to hunt submarines. Although exceeding its orders originall}, by attacking the first contact, this vessel feels only that it has done the job for which it was intended and stands ready to do that lob again.' The tlero V~7~o Never l, lhs 105 Despite the scepticism, the US Navy mounted an immediate investigation of the incident. Ever since Pearl Harbor, Americans had been jittery about the possibility of an attack on the mainland by Japanese submarines. In February 1942, a lone enenly submarine had surfaced about a mile offshore north of Santa Barbara, California, and lobbed twenty-five shells at an oil refinery. If it happened once, it could presumably happen again and the Navy certainly needed to know if the l..rSS PC-815 had indeed stumbled across enemy submarines close to the coast of Oregon. The Commanding Officer and Executive Officer of PC-815 were ordered to report immediately to Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, Commander Northwest Sea Frontier, in Seattle. Fletcher studied Ron's eighteen-page Battle Report and interviewed the Commanding Officers of the four other ships and two blimps involved. The tape from the PC-815's attack recorder, which recorded the strength and characteristics of the sonar signals, was evaluated bv experts. When all the reports were in, Fletcher swiftly came to the co~nclusion that the hundred depth charges dropped during the 'battle' had probably killed a few fish but no Japanese. In a secret memorandum to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, dated 8 June 1943, Fletcher stated: 'An analysis of all reports con~'inces me that there was no submarine in tile area. Lieutenant Commander Sullivan [Commat~der of tile blimps] states that he was unable to obtain any evidence of a submarine except one bubble of air which is unexplained except bv turbulence of water due to a depth charge explosion. The Commanding Officers of all ships except the P('-815 state they had no evidence of a submarine and do not think a submarine was in the area. ,7 Fletcher added that there was a 'known magnetic deposit' in the area in which the depth charges were dropped. The implication was clear: Lieutenant Hubbard, Commanding Officer of I_'SS PC-815, had fought a two-day battle with a magnetic deposit. Neither Ron nor Moulton would accept this verdict. They believed that denying the existence of the submarines was a political decision taken to avoid spreading alarm among the civilian population. Muulton pointed out that the Retader's Digest had recently published a story about the attack on the oil refinery near Santa Barbara and it had caused something approaching panic among people living along the coast of California. It was hardly surprising, they concluded, that the top brass wanted to hush up the fact that US Navv ships had been fighting enemy submarines only about ten miles off the coast of Oregon. The disconsolate crew of the USS PC-815, who had no doubt expected to return home as conquering heroes, had to be satisfied with 106 Ba;e4?aced Messiah this explanation and forego public recognition of their battle. It was a bitter pill for them to swallow. The only reward their Commanding Officer could arrange was a rare treat recorded in the ship's log on the day they returned to Astoria: 'Ice cream brought on board.' As Commatiding Officer, Lieuteuant Hubbard's record was unquestionably blighted by the AdmiraVs damning report, although there was no suggestion that he should be relieved of his command. There was plenty of good-natured joshing in the service about the man who had attacked a magnetic field, but it would probably have been forgotten !~ eventually and need not have affected Ron's career, except that the luckless I_'SSPC-815 was soon in even worse trouble. Towards the end of May, the PC-815 was detailed to escort a new aircraft carrier from Portland to San Diego. Thankfully this voyage was completed without incident. On arrival in San Diego Ron said goodbye to his friend Tom Moulton, who had been transferred to HQ Thirteenth Naval District in Seattle for further assignment. San Diego is the most southerly coastal town in California, only ten miles from tile Mexican border at Tijuana. Just offshore from Tijuana there is a small group of islands known as Los Coronados, used by local fishermen to dry their nets. Ou the afternorm of 28 June, the I'('-815 steamed unknowingly into 1Mexican territorial waters and fired four shots with its 3-inch gun in the direction of the Coronados islands. She then anchored off the island and tired small arn~s - pistols and rifles - into the water. The ix. lcxican governn~ent may not have considered that the United States was launching a surprise attack, but tile incident was deemed sufficiently serious for an official complaint to be lodged. Lieutenant ttubbard, fresh from his notorious battle with a magnetic deposit, was not exactly well placed to be forgiven for this new blunder. On 30 June, a Board of Investigation was convened on board the PC-815 in San Diego Harbor. Lieutenant Hubbard was first to give evidence and stoutly denied that he had done wrong. He had ordered the gunnery practice because he was anxious to train his crew and he believed he had authority to be in the area. x,~.~hen asked why he had anchored for the night he admitted that he had not wanted to spend the entire night on the bridge. 'On three separate occasions,' he added, 'when leaving my officers in charge of the bridge the>' have become lost.'s The next witness was the Gunnery Officer, who cheerfully confessed that he thought the Coronados Islands belonged to the United States. After listening to more than thirteen hours of evidence, the three-man Board of Investigation concluded that Lieutenant Hubbard had disregarded orders, both by conducting gunnery practice and by anchoring in IMexican territorial waters without proper authority. Ttle Hero I~o Never B~ls 107 It was recommended, in the light of the short time he had been in command, that he should be admonished in lieu of the more drastic disciplinary action that the offences would normall> have deserved.9 But it was also decided that he should be transferred to other duties. On 7 July, after just eighty days as Commanding Officer of his own ship, Ron signed his last page of the PC-815's deck log: '1345, Signed on I)etachment, L. R. tlubbard.' In a fitness report covering his brief career as a Commanding Officer, Rear-Admiral E.A. Braisted, Commander, Fleet Operational Training Command, Pacific, rated Lieutenant L.R. Itubbard as 'below average' and noted: 'Consider this officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgemcnt, leadership and cooperation. He acts without forethought as to probable results. He is believed to have been sincere in his efforts to make his stlip efficient and read>'. Not considered qualified for command or promotion at this time. Rccom- I ' d ,1o mend duty on a large vessel where he can be property supervise ú Ron was posted to temporary duty in the Issuing Office at Headquarters, Eleventh Naval District in San Diego, where he almost immediately reported sick with a variety of aihx~ents ranging from malaria to a duodcnal ulcer to pains in his back. Hc was admitted to the local naval hospital for observation and remained there as an in-patient for nearly three months. 11c wrote home to inform the fanlily that he was in hospital because he had been iniurcd when hc pickc~ up an uncxplodcd shell from the deck of his ship; it had ~ ~ I1 exploded in mid-air as he ttlrcw it over the slat. In later years Ron would tell a story of how he had helped the staff at San Diego Naval ttospital during ttlis period.Iz It seemed a rcgin~cnt of marines had been shipped home wittl a disease called filoriasis about which the doctors knew nothing. Ron, because of his experience in 'the South Pacific', advised them that although there was a serum available to treat the condition, his understanding was that a spell in a cold clin~ate would work equally well. Accordingly, the regiment was despatched to Alaska where, Ron said, 'I am sure they all recovered.' TIffs good deed done, in October 1943 Ron was sent on a six-week course at the Naval Small Craft Training Center on Ternfinal Island, San Pedro, California. In December he learned he was to be given another opportunity to go to sea - as the Navigating Officer of the USS Algol, an amphibious attack cargo ship under construction at Portland, Oregon. To judge from an enID' in his private journal, he was not particularly thrilled about going back to sea, nor indeed, about being in the Navy at all. 'My salvation is to let this roll over me,' he noted gloomily o~ 6 January'1944, 'to write, write and write some more. To 108 Bare-Faced Messiah hammer keys until I am finger worn to the second joint and then to hammer keys some more. To pile up copy, stack up stories, roll the wordage and generally conduct my life along the one line of success I have ever had. '~ 3 'The only thing that ever affected me as a writer,' he recalled years later in a newspaper interview, ~4 'was the US Navy when their security regulations prohibited writing. I was quiet for about two years before I couldn't take it any more and went and took it out on a typewriter and, wearing a stetson hat in the middle of a battle theater, wrote a costume historical novel of 60,000 words which has never seen the light of day.' For the first six months of 1944, Ron remained in Portland during the fitting out of the Algol. News of the war in the Pacific was of bitter fighting and heavy casualties. US Marines were working their way from island to island towards Japan, but at shocking cost. In the attack on Tarawa Atoll, more than a thousand Americans were killed and two thousand wounded: news pictures of the beaches littered with dead Marines shocked the nation and brought home the terrible reality of war. On 15 June, two divisions of US Marines began an assault on Saipan in the southern lXlarianas, and in the battle that followed 16,500 Americans were killed or wounded. The USS .4l,~,ol was commissioned m July and immediately put to sea for trials. Through August and most of September she was excrcizing at sea; as Navigating Oftleer, P, on signed the ship's deck log every day, but there was little to report except 'under way, as before'. I le seemed to have bad second thoughts about wariting to see action, for on 9 September he applied for an appointment to the School of ~lilitary Government, citing among his qualifications his education as a civil engineer, membership of the Explorers Club, wide travel in the Far East and experience of handling natives. The Algol's Commanding Officer approved Ron's application, noting on his fitness report that while Lieutenant ttubbard was a capable and energetic officer, he was 'very temperamental and often has his feelings hurt'. On 22 September, the Algol was at last ordered to Oakland, California, to start taking on supplies in preparation for sailing to war. The excited rumour among the crew was that the ship was to take part in a major new offensive in the Pacific aimed at the final defeat of the Japanese. At 1630 on the afternoon of 27 September- the day before Ron was due to leave for Princeton - the ship's deck log recorded an unusual incident: 'The Navigating Officer reported to the OOD that an attempt at sabatage [sit'] had been made sometime between 1530--1600. A coke bottle filled with gasoline with a cloth wick inserted had been concealed among cargo which was to be hoisted aboard and stored in No 1 hold. It was discovered before being taken The He,o lI'tto Never II~s 109 on board. ONI, FBI and NSD authorities reported on the scene and investigations were started-'~s No further mention was made of the incident. There was no explanation of why Lieutenant Hubbard, the Navigating Officer, was poking around in cargo being loaded on to the ship or of how he had managed to find the 'petrol bomb'. Neither was the result of the investigations recorded. Shortly after ten o'clock that evening a brief signal was received 'Lt Lafayette Ron Hubbard, D-v (S), USNR 113392, is this date detached from duty.' On 4 October, the I_'SS Algol sailed for Eniwetok Atoll in the lXlarshail Islands, from where she would take part in the invasion of Luzon in the Philippines and the landings on Okinawa, earning two battle stars. Her erstwhile Navigating Officer, meanwhile, was on a four-month course in 'Military Government' at the Naval Training School, Princeton, prompting him to claim ever after that he finished his education at the venerable Ivy League university of the same name. x, Vhile he was at Princeton, Ran was invited to join a group of science-fiction writers who met every weekend at Robert ttcinlcin's apartment in Philadelphia to discuss possible ways of countering the Kamikazc menace in the Pacific. They were semi-official, brainstorming sessions that tteinlcin had been asked to organize b~' the Navy, in the faint hope of coming up with a defence against .young Japanese pilots on suicide missions. 'I had been ordered to round up science ticlion writers for this crash project,' ttcinlein recalled, 'the wildest brains I could find.'16 Heinlein's apartment was only three hundred yards from Broad Street Station in downtown Phil~ldelphia and the group gathered on Saturday afternoons, arriving on Pennsylvania Railroad trains which ran every half hour into Broad Street. 'On Saturday nights there would be two or three in my bed,' said }teinlein, 'a couple on the couch and the rest on the living-room floor. If there was still overflow, I sent them a block down the street to a friend with more floor space if not beds.' Heinlein tried to avoid asking Ron to walk down the street as Ron had said that both his feet had been broken when his last ship was bombed. 'Ron had had a busy war - sunk four times and wounded again and again,' Heinlein explained sympathetically. Sunday morning was set aside for the working session, after ~hich everyone sat around swapping stories and jokes. Ron often got out his guitar and entertained them in a rich baritone voice with songs like 'Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest' and 'I Learned about Women from Her'. He could also reduce the assembled company to helpless laughter with his repertoire of fast-moving burlesque skits in which he played all the roles. l 10 Bare-Faced Messiah ~ On Saturday 2 December, Jack Williamson, then a Sergeant in the ~ US Army, hosted a dinner in Philadelphia for fellow science-fiction !!~ writers and their wives. t{c was to be sent overseas in a couple of days and this was his farewell party. Among those present were the Heinlcins, the de Camps, the Asimovs and L. Ron Hubbard. 'Tim star of the evening', Isaac Asimov recalled, 'was Ron Hubl~ard. Heinlcin, de Camp and I were each prima donna-ish and each liked to hog the conversation - ordinarily. On this occasion, however, we all sat as quietly as pussycats and listened to Hubbard. tle told tales with perfect aplomb and in complete paragraphs.'~7 The host was less impressed. 'Hubbard was just back from the Aleutians then,' said Williamson, 'hinting of desperate action aboard a Navy destroyer, adventures he couldn't say much about because of military security. 'I recall his eyes, the wary, light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old ~%;est, watching mc sharply as he talked as if tn see how much I believed. Not much.'~s t{cinlcin's group never came up with any ideas about how to prevent US Navy losses from Kamikazc pilots, but it did not matter much because the war was drawing to a close and Japan was running out of aircraft and pilots to tiy them. 'H~c last big Kamikazc strike was launched in January 1945 against the US/toot (including Ron's old ship, the ~_'SS AI,~,ol) taking part in tbc invasion of Luzon. That same m~mth Ron was transferred to the Naval Civil Affairs Staging Area in lXlontcrcy, California, for further training, having timshed about mid-way among the 300 students on his course at the school of lx, Iilitary Government. In April he again reported sick and a possible ulcer was diagnoscd. On 2 September 1945, after the horror of tliroshima and Nagasaki, tim Japanese signed the surrender instrument on the quarterdeck of the ~'SS Missouri', anchored in Tokyo Bav. Three days later, Ron was re-admitted to Oak Knoll Naval Ilospital, Oakland, not as a result of heroic war wounds, but to be treated for 'epigastric distress'. It was in this rather inglorious situation, suffering from a suspected duodcnal ulcer, that the war ended for Lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard, US Navy Reserve. l'te, of course, saw it somewhat differently: 'Blinded with injured optic nerves, and lame with injuries to hip and back, at the end of VUorld War Two I faced an almost non-existent future... I was abandoned bv family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple and a probable burden upon them for the rest of my days . . . 1 became used to being told it was all impossible, that there was no way, no hope. Yet I came to see and walk again . . .'~'~ If his own account of his war experiences is to be believed, he The tle~o IA'ho ,Never ~I hs 11 I certainly deserved the twenty-one medals and palms he was said to have received. Unfortunately, his US Navy record indicates he was awarded just four routine medals - the American Defense Service Medal, awarded to everyone serving at the time of Pearl Harbor, the American Campaign 1Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign lx, ledal and the World XVar Two Victory 1Medal, this last received by everyone serving on V-J Day. Chapter 7 Black Magic and Betty 'Hubbard broke up black magic in America . . . because he was well known as a writer and philosopher and had friends among the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation [of black magic being practised in a house in Pasadena occupied by nuclear physicists]. He went to live at the house an.d investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad ... Hubbard's mission was successful far beyond anyonc's expectations. The house was torn down. itubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and never recovered.' (Statement by tbe Church of Scicntology, December 1969) ~ ~ ~1, ~ ~ l lubbard was a patient at Oak Knoll Naval l lospital for three months after the war, although the doctors were undecided as to precisely what was wr~n~g with him. He was certainly neither blind nor crippled, but scorned to be suffering from endless minor aches and pains. l lis medical record shows that he was examined exhaustively, almost every x~'eck, complaining of headaches, rheumatism, conjunctivitis, pains in his side, stomach aches, pains in his shoulder, arthritis, haemorrhoids... there seemed to be no end to his suffering. Sometimes the doctors could find symptoms, sometimes they could not. In September, for example, he was declared 'unfit for service' because of an ulcer, but in November his ailments were described as 'minimal'. It may be, of course, that Ron was simply preparing the ground to claim a vetcran's disability pension, for he certainly wasted no time putting in his application. Lieutenant lIubbard was 'mustered out' of the US Navy on 5 December 1945, and on the following day he applied for a pension on the basis of a sprained left knee, conjunctivitis, a chronic duodenal ulcer, arthritis in his right hip and shoulder, recurrent malaria and sporadic undiagnosed pain in his left side and back. ~ On the claim form, Ron said his wife and children were living with his parents at 1212 Gregor3, Way, Bremerton, until he was able to get Black Magic and Betty 113 a house of his own. He described himself as a freelance writer with a monthly income of $0.00; before he joined the Navy he claimed his average earnings had been $650 a month. Satisfied he had presented a convincing case for a pension, Ron drove out of the Officer Separation Center in San Francisco at the wheel of an old Packard with a small trailer in tow, both of which he had recently acquired. Home and the family were to the north, up in Washington State. But Ron headed soutb, towards Los Angeles, to a rendezvous with a magician in a bizarre Victorian mansion in Pasadena. John Whiteside Parsons, known to his friend as Jack, was an urbane, darkly handsome man, not unlike Errol Flynn in looks, and the scion of a well-connected Los Angeles family. Then thirty-one years old, he was a brilliant scientist and chemist and one of America's foremost explosives experts. tie had spent much of the war at the California Institute of Technology working with a team developing jet engines and experimental rocket fuels and was, perhaps, the last man anyone would have suspected of worshipping the Devil. For Jack Parsons led an extraordinary double life: respected scientist by day, dedicated occultist by night. tie believed, passionately, in the power of black magic, the existence of Satan, demons and evil spirits, and the efficacy of spells to deal with his enemies.z x, Vhilc still a student at the University of Southern California, he had become interested in the writings of Aleister Croxvley, the English sorcerer and Satanist known as 'The Beast 666', whose dabblings in black magic had also earned him the title 'The Wickedest Man In The World'. Crowley's The Book of the Law expounded a doctrine enshrined in a single sentence -'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'- and Parsons was intrigued by the heady concept of a creed that encouraged indulgence in forbidden pleasures. In 1939, Parsons and his young wife, Helen, joined the OTO, Ordo Templi Orientis, an international organization rounded by Crowley to practise sexual magic.3 A lodge had been set up in Los Angeles and met in a suitably sequestered attic. Meetings were conducted by a priestess swathed in diaphanous gauze, who climbed out of a coffin to perform mystic, and painstakingly blasphemous, rites? Parsons quickly rose to prominence in the OTO and by the earlv '40s he had begun a regular correspondence with Crowley, always addressing him as 'Most Beloved Father' and signing his letters 'Thy son, John'. When Parson's father died, his son inherited a rambling mansion and adjoining coach-house on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. South Orange Grove was where the best people lived in Pasadena in the '20s and '30s, and although its discreet gentility was 114 Bare4~'~ced Messiah fading by tile end of thc war, most of the large houses in the area were still in single occupancy, tim paintwork had yet to peel and the lawns were regularly watered and manicured. The residents of South Orange Grove Avenue did not welcome the arrival of young Jack Parsons, for the elegant three-storey fanlily mansion, shaded by huge palms and flowering magnolias and set in its own grounds, was rapidly transformed, under his ownership, into a rooming-house of dubious repute - the only way he could afford to keep the house was by renting rooms. This might not have caused too much upset in the ndghbourhood, except that when he advcrtized for tenants in the local newspaper, he specified that only atbcists and those of a Bohemian disposition need apply. Thus were tile myriad rooms at 1003 Soutb Orange Grove Avenue occupied by an exotic, argumentative and peripatetic assortment of itinerants and ne'er-dowells - out-of-work actors and writers, anarcl~ists and artists, musicians and dancers, all kinds of questionable characters and their equally questionable friends of both sexes. Noisy parties continued for days on end, guests slept on the floor when they could not find a bed and sometimes they simply forgot to leave. Understandably the neighbouts wcrc outraged, although they would uIldoubtcdly have bccll evell lilt)re alarnlcd had they knt}wn tbat the Ilousc was also destilled to I)ecolnc the hcatlttuartcrs of a black magic group wbich practiscd dcviant sexual rites. Pars{ms converted two large rooms into a private apartment for hindself and a temple for the OTO lodge. In Iris bedroom, tile biggest rooln in the house, tilere was an altar flanked by pyramidal pillars and hung with occult symbols. The oilier room was a wood-pancllcd library lined with books devoted to tile occult and dominated by a huge signed portrait of CrowIcy hanging over the fireplace. No one was allowed illtO these two roon~s unless specificall)' invited by Parsons; when members of tire OTO turned up for a meeting, tile doors remailled firmly closed. Other residents sometimes glimpsed Parsoil or one of his followers moving about the house in black robes, but no one really knew what went on in the 'temple'.s On one occasion, two smirking policemen arrived at the front door to investigate a complaint that the house was bring used for black magic orgies. They had been told, they said, something about a ceremony requiring a naked pregnant woman to leap nine times through a sacred fire, but tbev made it so obvious that they considered tile whole thing to be a joke that Parsons had no difficulty convincing them he was a bona fide and respectable scientist, and persuaded them to leave without conducting a search. Among his other interests, Parsons was also a science-fiction fan and occasionally turned up at meetings of the Los Angeles Fantasy and Black Magic and Betty 115 Science Fiction Society, where devoted fans gathered every week to meet tile top science fiction writers. Jack Williamson, a regular contributor to Science II~ttder Stot~'es, encountered Parsons at a meeting in 1941 and was surprised to learn he was a scientist. 'tie had read my nnvel Darker Than }btt Think, which deals with the supernatural,' Williamson recalled. 'I was astonished to discover he had a far less sceptical interest in such things than I did.'~ To Parsons there was an attractive affinity between magic and science fiction and on Sunday afternoons in the summer his sciencefiction friends tended to congregate in his kitcben for endless discussions about the relative merits of sci-fi writers, their ideas and stories. One of the fans who regularly took the streetcar to South Orange Grove Avenue on Sunday afternoons was a young man called Alva Rogers, who would eventually become a 'semi-pcrn~anent resident'an arrangement that was not in the least unusual. On all early visit be met and fell in love with a young art student who was renting a room in tile mansion and thereafter he would spend the night with her whenever he could. Rogcrs was fascinated by tim house, its owner and the occupants. 'lXlundane souls were unceremoniously rejected as tenants,' he said. 'There was a professional fortune teller and seer who always wore appropriate dresses and decorated her apartment witb syml~ols and arttracts of arcant lore. Tberc was a lady, well past iniddlc age but still strikingly beautiful, who clailned to have been at various times the mistress of half the famous men of France. There was a man who had been a renowned organist in tbe great movie palaces of the silent era. They were characters all.' According to Rogers, Parsons never made any secret of his interest in black magic or his involvement with Aleistcr CrowIcy. 'tte had a voluminous correspondence with CrowIcy in the library, some of which he showed me. I remember in particular one letter from Crowley which praised and encouraged him for the fine work he was doing in America, and also casually thanked him for his latest donation and intimated that more would shortly be needed. Jack admitted that he was one of Crowley's main sources of money in America. 'I always found Jack's insistence that he believed in, and practised, magic hard to reconcile with his educational and cultural background. At first I thought it was all fun and games, a kick he was on for its shock value to his respectable friends. But after seeing his correspondence with CrowIcy, and tile evidence of his frequent remittances to Crowley, I had to give him the benefit of tile doubt.'7 In the summer of 1944, Hdcn Parsons left her husband and ran off with another member of the lodge, by whom she was pregnant. 116 Bare-Faced Messiah Parsons consoled hinlself by transferring his affections to Helen's younger sister, Sara Northrup, who was then eighteen, a beautiful and vivacious student at the University of Southern California. Within a few months, Sara dropped out of her course and moved in with Parsons, to the great distress of her parents. At South Orange Grove Avenue she became known as Betty (her middle name was Elizabeth). Completely under the spell of her lover, she was soon inculcated onto the OTO and assisting in its ceremonies. In accordance with the teachings of 'the Beast', Parsons encouraged Betty to enjoy sex with other members of the lodge, or indeed any man who took her fancy. It would not affect their relationship, he loftily explained to anyone who cared to listen, since jealousy was a base emotion unworthy of the enligbte~ed and fit only for peasants. 'Betty was a very attractive blonde, full of joie de vivre,' said Rogcrs. 'The rapport between Jack and Betty, the strong affection, if not love, they had for each other, despite their frequent separate sextracurricular activities, seemed pretty permanent and shatterproof. ,s It was soun to prove an illusion. One afternoon in August 1945, Lou Goldstone, a wcll-km/wn science-fiction illustrator and a frequent visitor to South Orange Grove Avenue, turned up with L. Ron !luhhard, who was then on leave from the Navy. Jack Parsons liked Ron immediately, perhaps recognized in him a kindred spirit, and invited him to move in for tbc duration of his leave. Ron, ebullicnt as always, was not in anv way intimidated by the egregious company and surroundings; on the contrary, hc felt instantly at home. l~lost evenings he could be found dominating the conversation at the big table in the kitchen, where the roomers tended to gather, telling outrageous stories about his adventures. One night he unbuttoned his shirt to display the scars left by arrows hurled at him when he encountered a band of hostile aborigines in tile South American jungle. Like almost everyone in the house, Alva Rogers thougilt Hubbard was an enormously engaging and entertaining personality. Rogcrs also had red hair and Ron confided to him his belief, confirmed by extensive research he had undertaken at the 'Royal Museum' in London, that all redheads were related, being descended from tile same line of Neanderthal man. 'Needless to say,' Rogers recalled, 'I was fascinated.' For a while, Ron shared a room with Nieson Himmel, a young reporter who had also met Parsons through a shared interest in science fiction. Perhaps because of the inbred scepticism of newspapermen, Himmel was less impressed than most by his new room-mate: 'I can't stand pboncys and to me he was so obviously a phoney, a real con Black Magic and Betty 117 man. But he was certainly not a dummy. He was very sharp and quick, a fascinating story-teller, and he could charm the shit out of anybody. tte talked interminably about his war experiences and seemed to have been everywhere. Once he said he was on Admiral Halsey's staff. I called a friend who worked with Halsey and my friend said "Shit, 1 've never beard of him." 'I was not one of his favourite people because I liked to try and trip him up. One time he told a story about how he was walking down a corridor in the British ~Iuseum when he was suddenly grabbed by three scientists who dragged him into an office and began measuring his skull because it was such a perfect shape. I said, "Gee, Ron, that's a great story - didn't I read it in George Bernard Shaw?" Another time he said he was in the Aleutians in command of a destroyer and a polar bear jtm~ped from an ice floe onto his ship and chased everyone around. I recognized it as an old, old folklore story that goes way back. '}te was always broke and trying to borrow money. That was another reason he didn't like me - I would never lend him a cent. Whenever bc was talking about being hard up he often used to say that he tbought the easiest way to make money would be to start a rcligion. ''~ Parsons shared none of Himmel's mistrust. tlc considered that Ron bad great magical potential and took tbc risk of breaking bis solemn oath of secrecy to acquaint Ron with some of the OTO rituals.~ Betty, too, was much enamoured with tile voluble naval officer, so much so that she soon began sleeping with him. True to his creed, Parsons tried to pretend he was not concerned by this development, but others in the house thought they detected tension between the two men. Himreel, who was himself in love with Betty, was furious that she had been seduced by Hubbard. 'Betty was beautiful, the most gorgeous, intelligent, sweet, wonderful girl. I was so much in love with her and I knew she was a woman I could never have. Then Hubbard comes along and starts having affairs with one girl after another in the house and finally fastens on to Betty. I couldn't believe it was happening. There he was, living off Parsons' largesse and making out with his girlfriend right in front of him. Sometimes when the two of them were sitting at the table together, the hostility was almost tangible. '~ Alva Rogers, too, sensed that Parsons was suffering. 'Jack had never boggled at any of Betty's previous amorous adventurings, but this time it seemed somehow different... although the three of them continued to maintain a surface show of unchanged amicability, it was obvious that Jack was feeling the pangs of a hitherto unfelt passion, jealousy. As events progressed, Jack found it increasingly difficult to keep his mind on anything but the torrid affair going on between Ron 118 Bare-Faced Messiah and Betty and the atmosphere around the house became supercharged with tension.' Nevertheless, Parsons clearly remained convinced that Ron possessed exceptional powers. After Ron had left to report back to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, Parsons wrote to his 'Most Beloved Father' to acquaint him with events: 'About three months ago I met Captain L. Ron Hubbard, a writer and explorer of whom I had known for some time . . . He is a gentleman; he has red hair, green eyes, is honest and intelligent, and we have become great friends. He moved in with me about two months ago, and although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affection to Ron. 'Although he has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduced that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. tle describes his Angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guidcd him through his life and saved him many times. lie is thc most Thclcmic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles . . . I think I have made a great gain and as Bcttv and I are the best of friends, there is little loss. I cared for her rather dccply but I have no desire to control her emotiuns, and I can, I hope, control my own. I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in mind . . .,~z In early December 1945, Ron sho~ved up again at South ()range Grove Avenue, still in uniform, having driven directly from tile Officer Separation Ccntre in San Francisco. lie parked his Packard and his trailer at the rear of the house and walked back into the complicated, enign~atic lives of Jack Parsons and Betty Northrup. To Parsons's secret distress, Betty and Ron immediately resumed their affair. Alva Rogers and his girlfriend were perhaps the only two people in the house who really knew how much their friend was suffering. 'Our room was just across the hall from Jack's apartment,' Rogers recalled, 'and in the still, early hours of a bleak morning in December we were brought out of a sound sleep by some weird and dibturbing noises as though someone was dying or at the very least was deathly ill. 'We went out into the hall to investigate the source of the noises and found that they came from Jack's partially open door. Perhaps we should have turned around and gone back to bed at this point, but we didn't. The noise, which by this time we could tell was a sort of chant, drew us inexorably to the door, which we pushed open a little further in order to better see what was going on. 'What we saw I'll never forget, although I find it hard to describe in any detail. The room, in which I had been before, was decorated in a Black Magic and Betty 119 manner typical of an occultist's lair, with all the symbols and appurtenances essential to the proper practice of black magic. It was dimly lit and smoky from a pungent incense; Jack was draped in a black robe and stood with his back to us, his arms outstretched, in the centre of a pentagram before some sort of altar affair on which several indistinguishable items stood. 'tlis voice, which was actually not very loud, rose and fell in a rhythmic chant of gibberish which was delivered with such passionate intensity that its meaning was frighteningly obvious. After this brief and uninvited glimpse into the blackest and most secret center of a tortured man's soul, we quietly withdrew and returned to our room, where we spent the balance of the night discussing in whispers xvhat we had just witnessed-'~$ Rogers was convinced that Parsons was trying to invoke a demon in order to dcspatch his rival, or harm him in some way. It clearly did not work, however, for Ron remained in the best of spirits. Despite what Alva Rogers and his girlfriend had seen on that unforgettable December night, the fragile three-cornered relationship continued. Parsons seemed determined to try and overcome what he considered to be an unworthy emotion. 'I have bccn suffcrcd to pass through an ordeal of human love and jealousy,' he noted in his 'Magical Record', adding~ 'I have found a starinch companion and comrade in Ron . . ú P, on and I are to continue with our plans for tile Order.'~4 Their plans were unprecedented. Parsons wanted to attempt an experiment in black magic that would push back the frontiers of the occult world. x, Vith the assistance of his new friend, he intended to try and create a 'moonchild'- the magical child 'mightier than all the kings of the earth', wbose birth had been prophesied in The Book of the Law more than fort)' years earlier. Aleister Crowlcy professed 'the great idea of magicians of all times' was to bring into being an Anti-Christ, a 'living being in form resembling man, and possessing those qualities of ma:~ which distinguish him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten in the manner ~f human generation, nor inhabited by a human soul'-~s To find a mott~er for this new Messiah, Parsons envisaged invoking an elemental spirit of the 'whore of Babylon', the scarlet woman of St John's Revelation: 'I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name x~'ritten, M)'stery, Babylon the Great, the .Mother of Harlots . . .' O'n 4 January 1946, Jack Parsons began a series of elaborate mystic 120 Bare-Fat'ed illessiah rituals, known as the 'Babalon Working', which he hoped would lead to the invocation of a scarlet woman whose destiny was to be mother to the moonchild. For the benefit of future magicians, he kept a detailed, day-by-day account in a manuscript be called the 'Book of Babalon'. lx. Iagical rites began in the temple at South Orange Grove at nine o'clock that evening, with Prokoficv's Violin Concerto playing in the background. First Parsons prepared and consecrated various magical weapons, tablets and talismans, then he carried out eleven separate rituals, beginning with 'Invoking Pcntagram of Air' and 'Invocation of Bornless One' and ending with 'License to Depart, Purification and Banishing'. The nightly ritual of incantation and talisman-wa~'ing continued for eleven days, at first without much effect. Parsons noted that a strong windstorm blew up on the second and third days, but he had obviously been hoping for rather more startling results. 'Nothing seems to have happencd,' hc wrote in a letter to Crowlcy. 'The wind storm is very interesting, but that is not what I asked for.'~' On the seventb day, Parsons was wokcn at midnight by seven loud knocks and he disc{~vcrcd that a table lamp in the corner of his bedroom had bcctl thrown violently to the tloor axed smasbcd. 'I have had little experience with phenomena of this sort,' he rccordcd. 'Nlagically speaking, it usually rcprcscnts "breaks" m the opcratiu~, indicating imperfect technique. Actually, in any magical operation there should bc no phenomena but tbc willed rcsult.' Not until 14 Ja~uary was tile frustrated magician able to report an encouragingly mysterious occurrence. 'The light system of tile house failed at ahout 9 pro. Another magician [}lubbard] wbo had been staying at the house and studying with nle, was carrying a candle across the kitchen when he was struck strongly on the right shoulder, and tile candle knocked out of his hand. He called me, and we observed a brownistl yellow light about seven feet high in the kitchen. I brandished a magical sword and it disappeared. His right arm was paralyzed for tile rest of the night.' Next morning, tile magicians had more prosaic business to attend to. For some time, Ron, Betty and Jack had been discussing the prospect of going into business together, buying yachts on the East Coast and sailing them to California to sell at a profit. On 15 January the three of them signed their names to an agreement setting up a business partnership with the hopeful title of 'Allied Enterprises'. It was not exactly an equitable financial arrangement, since Parsons put up more than $20,000, Ron only managed to vouchsafe $1200 and Betty contributed nothing. Under the articles of co-partnership, it was vaguely stated that Allied Enterprises would indulge in activities of a Black Magic and Betty 12 l 'varied and elastic nature', presumably with an eye to subsequent expansion into other fields.~7 That evening, the new business partners resumed their magical activities and there was a further strange incident involving Ron who was by then occupying the role of 'scribe'. Parsons noted that the scribe had 'some sort of astral vision' and saw one of his old enemies standing behind him clad in a black robe with an 'evil, pasty face'; Ron promptly launched an attack and pinned the phantom figure to the door with four throwing knives. 'Later, in my room,' Parsons wrote, 'I heard the raps again and a buzzing, metallic voice crying, "Let me go free." I felt a great pressure and tension in the house that night.' The tension continued for four days, until the evening of 18 January. The magician and his scribe had ventured out into the Mojave Desert on some unexplained mystical mission and, at sutlset, the stress that Parsons had recently been experiencing drained away. He was suffused instead with a sense of well-being and turned to Ron and said simply: 'It is done.' \Vhcn the two men returned to South Orange Grove Avenue, tbey found the 'scarlet woman' waiting for them. Her name was Marjorie Cameron and in trutb she was not very much different from many of tbe unc{mventional and free-spirited young women who had gravitated to the Bohcmian lodging-house in Pasadena. But Parsons was convinced that sbc was Iris libidinous elemental spirit, not least because it transpired she was not only willing, but impatient, to participate in the magical and sexual escapades he had in mind. 'She is describable', he wrote in the 'Book of Babalon', 'as an air of fire type, with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinar2,' personality, talent and intelligence.' A few days later he wrote exultantly to Crowley: 'I have my elemental! ~he turned up one night after tile conclusion of the Operation and has been with me since . . ú She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified... She is an artist, strong minded and determined, with strong masculine characteristics and a fanatical independence-' Crowley replied: 'I am particularly interested in what you have written to me about the elemental, because for some little time past I have been endeavouring to intervene personally in this matter on your behalf . ú .' Towards the end of February, Ron went on a trip to the East Coast, perhaps to investigate the ya4ht market on behalf of Allied Enterprises. On 28 February Parsons drove alone into the lonely reaches of the Nlojave Desert to i3erform an invocation of the goddess Babalon. During this invocation, he said, the presence of the goddess came 122 Bare-Faced Messiah upon him and commanded him to write a mystical communication, couched in picturesque biblical terminology and beginning: 'Yea, it is I, Babalon. And this is my book . . .' The seventy-seven clauses Parsons excitedly scribbled in his notebook became the centrepicce of the 'Book of B7abalon'' He believed he was taking instructions for the impregnation of his scarlet woman, although it would not have been immediately obvious to nonbelievers: 'Now is the hour of birth at hand. Now shall my adept be crucified in the Basilisk abode. Thy tears, ttly sweat, thy blood, thy semen, tby love, thy faith shall provide . . .' Some of the message was also suspiciously contemporary: 'Thou fool, be thou also free of sentimentality. Am I thy village queen and thou a sophomore, that thou should have thy nose in mv buttocks?' Parsons returned to Pasadena in a state of considgrable agitation which was greatly increased when his magical partner arrived back the next day and am~ounccd he had had a vision of a 'savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast' and had an urgent message to deliver. That night, in the temple at South Orange Grove, the two magicians made prcparatiuns to receive tile message. Candles were lit, incense burned and a magical altar was laid with flox~'ers and wine. l lubbard, tile scribe, wore a wbitc-hoodcd robe and carried a lamp; Parsons, the high priest, wore a black robe and carried a cup and dagger. An automatic tape recorder was set up and at Itubbard's suggestion Rachmaninoff's 'Isle of the Dead' was played as background music. At eight o'clock, ttubbard began to intone his message from the astral world: 'Ttlesc are tile preparations. Green gold cloth, food for the Beast, upon a }lidden platter, back of the altar. Disclose onlv when , the doors are bolted. Transgression is death. Back of the main altar. Prepare instantly. Light the first flame at 10 pro, March 2, 1946. The year of Babalon is 4063 . . .' After a few minutes, Parsons noticed that his scribe was pale and sweating profusely. Hubbard rested for a few moments, then continued: 'Make a box of blackness at ten o'clock. Smear the vessel which contains flame with thine own blood. Destroy at the altar a thing of value. Remain in perfect silence and hee~t the voice of our Lady. Speak not of this ritual or of her coming to any person . . . 'Display thyself to Our Lady; dedicate thy organs to Her, dedicate thy heart to Her, dedicate thy mind to Her, dedicate thy soul to Her, for She shall absorb thee, and thou shall become living flame before She incarnates . . .' ~,Vhen Hubbard finished dictating, the scarlet woman, naked under Black Magic and Betty 123 a crimson robe, was brought into the temple. 'Oh circle of stars,' the high priest informed, 'whereof our Fatber is but the younger brother, marvel beyond m~agination, soul of infinite space . . .' Marjorie Cameron had been well rehearsed in the necessary response. 'But to love me is better than all things . . .' she chanted. 'Put on the wings and arouse the coiled splendour within you. Come unto me, to me! Sing the rapturous love songs unto me! Burn to me the perfume! Drink to me for I love you! I am the blue4idded daughter of sunset, I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night sky . . .' x, Vitb passions mounting, the three black magicians intoned a chorus: 'Glory unto the Scarlet Woman, Babalon, the Mott~er of Abominations, that ridcth upon the Beast, for She hath split their blood in every corner of the earth and 1o! she hath mingled it in the cup of her whoredom . . .' The scribe remained at the altar declaiming and describing what was supposed to be happening on an astral plane while the high priest excitedly inserted his 'wand' into the scarlet woman and tbey began copulating furiously. At midnight the unholy troika retired to bed, exhausted. Next morning {me of tttc lodgers in the house disturbed Parsons while he was mcditating in the temple - he flew out in a rage and put a curse on the man, who, he said, was very soon taken ill. After this incident, Parsons confessed that hc succumbed t{~ a black mood. tlis temper cannot have improved when he discovered that tbc roof of the guest-house had caught fire and been partially destroyed the previous night while he was otherwise occupied. tte darkly deduced that the fire had started at the very moment, during the nigbt's black festivities, when he had smashed an image of Pan. 'That evening,' Parsons wrote, 'the scribe and I resumed our work.' This time a white sheet smeared with menstrual blood was laid out on the floor of the temple and a red star, cut from the high priest's robe, was symbolically burned on the altar. As Parsons performed the 'Invocation of the Wand' on the naked body of the scarlet woman, the scribe droned: 'Embrace her, cover her with kisses. Think upon the lewd lascivious things thou couldst do. All is good to Babalon. All... The lust is hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping.' On the third and final day, the rituals began four hours before dawn and ended xvith a long poem titled 'The Birth of Babalon' extolling 'holy whoredore': Her mouth is red and her breasts are fair and her loins are full of fire, And her lust is strong as a man is strong in the heat of her desire, 124 Bare-Faced Messiah And her whoredore is holy as virtue is foul beneath the holy sky, And her kisses will wanton the world away in passi~n~ that shall not die. Ye shall laugh and love and follow her dance when the wrath of God is gone, And dream no more of hell and hate in the birth of Babalon. ~8 In the 'Book of Babalon', Parsons was completely convinced that the magic had worked and that his scarlet woman would be delivered of a moonchild in nine months 'Babalon' ' ú , ne wrote confidently, 'is incarnate upon the earth today awaiting the proper hour of her manifestations. '~ 9 But in his 'Magical Record' he was less assured: 'For the last three days I have performed an operation of birth, using the air tablet, the cup and a female figure, properly invoked by the wand, then sealed up in tbe altar. Last night I performed an operation of symbolic delivery. Now I can do no more than ra and wai ,z~ birth and P Y' t. On 6 March, Parsons sat doxvn to compose a letter to his Satanic lx. laster in England, apprising him of the momentous events that had recently taken place. 'I can hardly tell you or decide how much to write,' he began. 'I am under command of extreme secrecy. I have had the most imp~rtant, devastating experience of my life... I believe it was the result of the IXth degree working [the class of sexual magic designed to produce a higher being] with the girl who answered my elemental summons. I have been in direct touch with One who is most |Ioly and Beautiful as mentioned in The Book ~fttie Law. I carmot write the name at present. First instructions were received direct through Ron, the seer. I have followed tbcm to the letter. TIxere was a desire for incarnation. I do not yet know the vehicle, but it will come to me bringing a secret sign. I am to act as instructor guardian for nine months; then it will be loosed on the world. That is all I can say now . . ,ZI CrowIcy, who was bv then in his seventies, chronically addicted to heroin and facing deatl~, was irritated by his disciple's secrecy. On 19 April he despatched a terse reply: 'You have got me completely puzzled by your remarks about the elemental . . . I thought I had a most morbid imagination, as good as any man's, but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea of what you can possibly mean.' On the same day he wrote to Karl Germer, head of the OTO in the United States: 'Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I i~et fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.' x'~,'fiile Parsons fretted over Crowley's letter, his faithful scribe was facing more earthly, and much more familiar, problems. Having contributed his meagre savings to Allied Enterprises, Hubbard was badly in need of money. He had written virtually nothing since leaving Black Mag& and Betty 125 the Navy and his wife was rapidly losing patience with his repeated excuses as to why he was unable to send any money home to support her and the children. Polly recognized by this time that there was little chance of saving her marriage. T~wards the end of the war, she and Ron had briefly discussed moving to California when he was discharged from the Navy, but Pollv refused to uproot the cbildren. She had a nightmare vision of trying to raise a family while trailing forlornIv after her husband, backxvards and forwards from one coast to the ot~er.z2 Nibs and Katie were happily settled in Bremerton, enjoyed school, and had friends and family all around. Polly had left The l~[illtop and moved in with Ron's parents to be closer to the facilities of Bremerton; it was an arrangement she found perfectly satisfactory. Both Harrx' Hubbard, who had retired from the Navy and found a job as manager of Kitsap County Fair, and his wife enjoyed having their grandchildren around. But while Polly was content to live with her in-laws, she still needed money to feed and clothe herself and the children and, not unreasonably, she expected her husband to provide it. Ron's problem in this regard was not just that he was broke (nothing unusual), but tbat he had reached the limit of his credit with the residents of 1003 South Orange Grieve Avenue, having borrowed from everyone who was prepared to lend. In February, the Veterans Administration had awarded him a pension of $11.50 a month for a ten per cent disability caused by his ulcer. Ron did not consider this miserable am{>unt to be nearly sufficient and on 18 March, two weeks after completing his duties as a black magic scribe, he lodged an appeal, producing a dramatic new disability which he had somehow neglected to mention on his original claim form. 'I have lost between sixty and eighty per cent of my vision,' he claimed in a letter typed on his distinctive initialled notepaper, 'and as my profession is that of writer, my present inability to read or use my eyes seriously affects mv income. I cannot work either long hours or under the slightest adverse conditionsú My income at the present time, due entirely to service connected injuries, is zero. Would you please advise me as to the steps I should take to gain further pension ?,z3 After his years in the Navy, Ron was well aware of the speed with which the wheels of bureaucracy moved and his need for money was urgent. His solution was to persuade Parsons that the time had come to activate Allied Enterprises. Towards the end of April, Ron and Sara [she was only called Betty at South Orange Grove] left for Florida with $10,000 drawn from the Allied Enterprises account at the Pasadena First Trust and Savings Bank. Parsons approved the withdrawal so that the partnership could purchase its first yacht in the 126 Bate-f:aced Messiah east; it was agreed that Ron and Sara would then either sail it back to California for re-sale, or transport it overland, whichever proved to be cheaper. It seemed a perfectly simple and sensible business arrangement, although Parsons presumably did not know that on I April Ron had written to the Chief of Naval Personnel requesting permission to leave tile United States to visit South America and China.24 flowever, not many weeks passed before Parsons began to worry, for he heard not a word from either Ron or Sara. tie realized, with mounting frustration, that they had gone off with $10,000 of his money and he had little idea of where they might be. He confessed his concern to Louis Culling, another member of the OTO lodge, and swore he was going to get his money back and dissolve the partnership. The next day Ron telephoned from Florida, reversing the charges. Culling was at South Orange Grove when the call came through and he was amazcd to find that Parsons was completely dominated by ttubbard. After what had been said the previous day, Culling expected Parsons to be cool towards his wayward partner at the very least. But Parsons made no mention of his disquiet, did not complain about being kept in the dark and said nothing about dissolving the partnership. Itc was soon laughing happily into tile telephone as if he had not a care in the world and tile conversation ended with Parsons saying, 'I hope we shall always be partners, Ron.' Greatly disturbed, Culling took it upon hitnself to make some inquiries and on 12 May he wrote to Karl Gcrmcr: 'As you may know by this time, Brother John signed a partnership agreement with this Ron and Betty whereby all money earned by the three for life is equally divided betxveen the three. 'As far as I can ascertain, Brott~er John has put in all of his money . . ./~Icanxvhilc, Ron and Betty have bought a boat for themselves in Miami for about $10,000 aad are living the life of Riley, xvhilc Brother John is living at rock bottom, and I mean n~ck bottom. It appears that originally tbey never secretly intended to bring this boat around to the California coast to sell at a profit, as they told Jack, but rather to have a good time on it on the east coast . . % ,2s Germer naturally inforn~ed Croxvley, who replied by cable on 22 /May: 'Suspect Ron playing confidence trick. Jack evidc~;tlv weak fool. Obvious victim prowling sxvindlers.' Ina letter seven'days later, CrowIcy wrote, 'It seems to mc on the information of our brethren in California that Parsons has got an illumination in which he has lost all his personal independence. From our brother's account he has given away both his girl and his money. Apparent/}, it is the ordinary confidence trick.'z6 x, Vhilc Croxvlev and felloxv members of the ()TO were already in Black Magic and Betty 127 agreement that Brother Parsons had been conned, Brother Parsons was painfully arriving at a similar conclusion and at the beginning of June he packed a case and caught a train East, determined to track down the errant lovers and get his money back. In Miami, Parsons discovered to his astonishn~ent tbat Allied Enterprises had already purchased three boats - two auxiliary schooners, tile Harpoon and the Blue ~ter II, and a yacht, the Diane. It seemed that Ron had raised mortgages totalling more than $12,000 to buy the schooners. Parsons traced the Harpoon to Howard Bond's Yacht Harbor on the County Causexvay, but there was no sign of eitbcr Ron or Sara. The Blue Water was found at the American Sbip Building Company docks on the Ix,'liami river; again, there was no one on board. One evening a few days later, Parsons received a telephone call from the harbour. The liarpooh, he was told, had set sail at five o'clock that afternoon, with Ron and Sara on board apparently intent on making an escape. In his Nliami hotel room, Parsnns dotreed his magic robes and traced a circle on tbe floor with his magic wand. At eight o'clock, he stepped into the ring and performed the 'Banishing Ritual of the Pcntagram', tbe prclimit~ary to all magic, followed by a full invocation of Bartzabcl, the spirit of Mars, whose help he sought to restrain his fleeing partners. In a letter to CrowIcy describing his actions, hc was able to report a highly satisfactory restdt: 'At tile same time, so far as I can check, his ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast, ~hich ripped off his sails and forced him back to port, where I took tim boat in custody.'z7 On 1 July, the magician sought redress through mnrc cnnvcntional means: hc filed suit in the Circuit Court for Dade County, accusing Ron and Sara of breaking the terms of their partnership, dissipating the assets and attempting to abscond.zs A receiver was appointed to wind up the affairs of Allied Enterprises and a restraining order was placed on the defendants, preventing them from leaving/Xliami or disposing of any of the partnership's assets. 'Here I am in Miami pursuing the children of mv folly,' Parsons wrote gloomily to Crowley on 5 July. 'I have them well tied up. They cannot move without going to jail. However, most of the money has already been dissipated. I will be lucky to salvage $3000 to $5000.' On 11 July, the three partners signed an agreement, drawn up by Parsons' lawyer, dissolving tbe partnership. Ron and Sara handed over the Blue ~ter and the Diane and agreed to pay half Parsons' legal costs. For his part, Parsons allowed Ron and Sara to keep the tta~poon in return for a $2900 pronlisson.' note which covered his financial interest in the schooner. Jack Parsons returned to Pasadena satisfied that he had made the best deal he could under the circumstances and 128 Bare-bhced Messiah not too distressed at the loss of his former lover and his former best friend. He never saw either of them again. In Miami, Ron and Sara were returned to their accustotned state of penury after their brief fling at the expense of Allied Enterprises. Their most immediate and pressing problem was how to maintain payments on the $4600 mortgage still outstanding on the Ha~poott. Ron, who had never allowed money matters to worry him over-much, clung to the belief that he would eventually be able to wheedle a larger pension from the Veterans Administration. On 4 July, Independence Day, he had spent part of the holiday composing yet another stirring appeal against his pension award and introducing a further hitherto unmentioned disability, this time a 'chronic and incapacitating bone infection'. On the claim form, he painted a harroxving picture of a veteran gainely struggling against disabilities which he rated at one hundred per cent. t tis original duodcnal ulcer had mysteriously multiplied; his 'ulcers', hc pointed out, had caused him to abandon h~s old profession of 'ship-master and explorer' and severehi hampered his work as a writer. 'I can do nothing involving hervotes strain without becoming dangerously ill.' As for his failing eyesight, he now found it difficult to read for more than three or four minutes without suffering from headaches, making it virtually impossiblc for him to do any research. !iis problcn~s had begun, he noted, after 'prolonged exposure to tn~pical stmlight in the Pacific'. Furthermore, he xvas lame as the result of a bone infection in his right hip, contracted at Princeton University because of 'the sudden transiti~n~ froth the tropics to the slush and icy cold of Princeton'. tie was unable to walk wittyout suffering severely. '.~.ly earning power, due to injuries, all service connected,' he concluded, 'has dropped to nothing. I earned one thousand dollars a month prior to the war as a writer. I cannot now earn money as a writer and attempts to find other employment have failed because of my physical condition.' To support his case, tlubbard persuaded Sara to write to the Veterans Administration as an old friend to provide independent corroboration of his rapidly deteriorating health. She put her parents address in Pasadena on the top of the letter. 'I have know Lafayette Ronald Hubbard for many years,' she began, inauspiciously and untruthfully, 'and wish to testify as to the condition of his health as I have observed it since his separation from the Navy. 'Before the war, he was an extremely energetic person in excellent health and spirits . . . Since his return in December last year he is entirely changed. He cannot read because of his eyes, which give him Black Ahzgic and Betty 129 much pain. He is rather lame and cannot take his accustomed hikes . . . t le has tried to work at three different jobs and each he has had to leave because of an increase in his stomach condition. He seems to need an enormous amount of rest... 'I do not know what he is going to do for income when his own meagre savings are exhausted, because I see no chance of his condition improving to a point where he can regain his old standards. He is becoming steadily worse, his health impaired again by economic worries . . . ,29 In fact, a short-term solution to his economic worries was immediately and obviously at hand: the Harpoon. Faced with the impossibility of repaying the mortgage, Ron decided to sell the boat in the hope of clearing his most pressing debts. Solvent again, temporarily at least, he asked Sara to marry him. She accepted unhesitatingly. At the beginning of August the lovers left Florida and caught a train for Washington DC. On 10 August 1946, twenty-onc-5'ear-old Sara Northrup and L. Ron ttubbard were married in a simple ceremony at Chestertown, ~laryland. By a curious coincidence, Chestertown was only thirty miles from Elkton, where L. Ron Hubbard had married Polly Grubb in 1933. Sara knew nothing of Pollv and had no idea that her new husband had bccn previously married. Still less did she know he had never been divorced. Similarly, Polly, in Brcmerton, had yet to learn her husband was a bigamist. Back at South Orange Grove in Pasadena, Parsons sold the old mansion for development and moved into the coach-house with his scarlet woman, Marjorie Cameron, whom he subsequently married. It was to be a tragicall)' brief alliance. On the afternoon of Friday 20 June 1952, Parsons was working alone in the garage of the coachhouse, which he had converted into a laboratory. At eight minutes past five there was an enormous explosion. The beavv stable doors were blasted from their hinges, the walls blew out and a huge hole was torn in tbe floor timbers. When the dust had cleared, a partially dismembered body could be seen still bleeding in the rubble. Further horror was to follow. Police traced Parsons's mother, lx. lrs Ruth Virginia Parsons, to the home of a crippled woman friend in x. Vest Glenarm Street. Informed of the accident and her son's death, Mrs Parsons returned to the room where her friend was sitting in an armchair. She sat down in another chair out of reach, unscrewed a bottle of sleeping tablets and, watci~ed by her helpless and appalled friend, rapidly swallowed the entire contents. Unable to move from her chair, the terrified cripple watched her friend slowly die.3ø 130 Bate-Faced Messiah The inquest fortrid that the explosion had been caused by Parsons accidentally dropping a phial of nitro-g[ycerine. But because of his known interest in the occult, there were inevitably rumours of suicide or even murder; none of his friends could believe that a man so experienced in handling explosives would have dropped nitroglyceri~e accidentally. ~,Vhatever the truth, no black magician could have wished for a blacker departure from the world. Chapter 8 The Mystery of the Missing Research 'In 1948, Mr Hubbard's first writings on the nature of life and the human mind began to circulate privately. Passed from hand to hand, word quickly spread that he had made a revolutionary breakthrough . . .' (L. Ron ttubbartt, The Man and flis ~rk, 1986) tl~ ,1 ~ I, t~ After their wedding in Maryland, Hubbard and his young bride returned to California and found an apartment at Laguna Beach, a resort much favourcd bx' artists and writers, half-way between Los Angeles and San Diego. John Steinbeck lived there xvhcn he was writing his first major novel, 7~n-tilla 1,7at, a factor R~n~ n~ doubt took into considerarisen when hc was looking for a place to settle down and resume his career as a writer. The pr~blcm was that hc could neither settle d~x~n nor write. Indeed, to judge from his bulging file at the Veterans Admi~fistrati~n, in 1946 Ron largely directed his literary talents to the diligent pursuit of a bigger pension. On 19 September, he limped into the VA medical centre in Los Angeles with a miserable litany of bx' now familiar complaints: 'Eves are sensitive to bright sunlight and I can't read very much and I have severe headaches . . . My stomach trouble keeps mc on a very rigid diet - can only eat milk, eggs, ground meat and strained vegetables . . . I tire quickly and become nauseated when l work hard . . . My left shoulder, hip - in fact the entire left side is bothered with arthritic pains - can't sit any length of time at typewriter or desk . . .' Once again, the doctors did not seem to be able to find anything markedly wrong with the veteran, other than calcified bursitis, a touch of arthritis in his ankles apparently causing him to walk v.'ith a 'hobble-like gait' and 'minimal duodenal deformity'. On the examination report it was noted that there were no scars or indications of gunshot wounds or other injuries. It was perhaps just as well for Ron that the Veterans Administration did not have access to his private journals, for a very different picture was presented therein. Several scrawled pages ~'ere filled with 132 Bare-Faced Messiah 'Affirmations', many of which concerned his health. Had he been a little more circumspect, the 'Affirmations' could have been viewed as a brave attempt to make light of his ailments, or to cure himself through sheer strength of will, for in some of them he seemed to be trying to convince himself that he was fit: 'Your ulcers are all well and never bother you. You can eat anything. 'You have a sound hip. It never hurts. 'Your shoulder never hurts. 'Your sinus trouble is nothing.' Unfortunately for his place in posterity, he frequently chose to elaborate. Thus he confessed that his stomach trouble was a device he had used to get out of punishment in the Navy, his bad hip was a pose and his foot injury was an alibi: 'The injurv is no longer needed. It is well. You have perfect and lovely feet.' A f~w of the Affirmations were also stamped with the faintly sinister mark of Alcister CrowIcy, as in 'l\Icn are your slaves' and 'You can be merciless whenever your will is crossed and you have the right to be merciless.' VA doctors would undoubtedly have found them fascinating reading, not least for the insight they provided into tlubbard's psyche and his attitude towards tim \rA: 'x, Vhcn you tell people you are ill, it has no effect upon your health. And in Veterans Administration examinations you'll teli them how sick you are; you'll look sick when you take it; you'll return to health one hour after the examination and laugh at them. 'No matter what lies you may tell ott~ers, they have no physical effect on you of any kind. You never injured your ticalth by saying it is bad. You cannot lie to yourself.'z By October, ttubbard was once again down to his last few dollars and when a friend offered him a temporary job taking care of a boat at the yacht club on Santa Catalina Island he jumped at the opportunity. After less than six weeks at Laguna Beach, Sara uncomplainingly packed their bags and prepared to move on. It was a situation with which she would become all too familiar in the months ahead. While staying at the Catalina Island Yacht Club, Ron managed to stir himself to write an article about fishing for the local newspaper, the Catalina Islander, but this was his only published work in 1946. On 14 November, he wrote to the Veterans Administration from the Yacht Club to complain that his last two pension cheques had not been forwarded. 'I need this money, little as it is, very badly,' he wrote 'and would appreciate any expedition which the matter can be given.' A week later, he wrote again to explain why he had failed to show up for another medical examination which tile VA had requested in October. 'I was unable to report for further examination because I was The Mystery of the Missing Research 133 both ill and broke. ú ú I certainly hope you can scare me up something by way of a pension for I am not eating very well these days and this job I have will vanish shortlY-'3 Vanish it did and by the beginning of December Ron and Sara were in New York, staying at the Hotel Belvedere, West 48th Street. On 8 December he wrote on hotel notepaper to acknowledge receiving orders to report for another examination, explaining his expensive address by saying that a friend had financed Iris trip back East in return for his advice on an expedition then being planned. While he was in New York, Ron naturally looked up his old science fiction friends and one of them introduced him to Sam Metwin, who was then editing the 'Thrilling' group of magazines. 'I found him a very amusing guy,' Metwin recalled, 'and bought several stories from him. tie was really quite a character. I always knew he was exceedingly anxious to hit big money - he used to say he thought the best way to do it would be to start a cult. ,4 Ron also called on his old friend and mentor, John \V. Campbell, in his familiar office in the Street and Smith building. Campbell was delighted to welcome Ron back from the war; he had written to him a year earliers pleading for contributions ('Astounding is in a moll of a hess. I nccd- and but bad - stories. Any length.') and now he urged P, on to get back to work. Itc was constantly getting letters from readers, hc said, asking when the magazine was going to publish more stories by L. Ron 1 tubbard. Before he left the building, Ron accepted an assignment to write a five thousand-word feature about the consequences of man landing on the moon for Air Trails anti Science F~vntiers, a new non-fiction magazine which Campbell had recently launched. Despite his terrible eye-strain and rheumatism and ulcers and everything else, Hubbard managed to put together an imaginative and informative piece. He prophesied that the first moon landing ~'ould take place within five or ten years and argued that a lunar military base would have enormous strategic value. 'It is entirely within reason', he wrote, 'that the nation which demonstrates the courage, intelligence and industrial proficiency necessary to establish a base on the moon will rule the world.' 'Fortress in the Sky', under the bydine of Captain B.A. Northorp, was the cover story in the May 1947 issue of Air Trails. The reason Hubbard did not use his own name could be found buried deep in the text. Although he packed the feature with authoritative and impressive detail about the composition and environ~nent of the moon, he simply could not resist the opportunity for further self-aggrandisment. In a section discussing the technical problems of reaching the moon by rocket, he wrote: 'Here and there throughout the world 134 Ba re - b~ced Messiah many men have been thinking about rockets for some time. I recall that in 1930, L. Ron ||ubbard, a writer and engineer, developed and tested - but without fanfare - a rocket motor considerably superior to the V-2 instrument of propulsion and rather less complicated.' Campbell was still a meticulous editor and a stickler for accuracy. If he believed that his friend was developing rocket m~tors in 1930 at the age of nineteen, he was also extraordinarily na~'ve. It is more likely that he turned a blind eye to keep Ron happy in the hope that he would soon return to the pages of Astounding. Ron and Sara only stayed a matter of weeks in New 'York. In the New Year they were on the move again, this time to the unprepossessing environs of Strnudsburg, Pennsylvania, just south of the Pocono Mountains. There Ron fullillcd Campbdl's hopes by writing a novel, The End Is .\~t }k't, about a young nuclear physicist's attempts to prevent the world being taken over by constructing a new philosophical system. It was serializcd in three parts in Astounding later in tile year, although it was not as well received as some of Ron's earlier work. On 14 April 1947, tbe long-suffering Pollv filed for a divorce in Port , Orchard, ~Vashington, on the grounds of desertion and non-support. She was still unaware that her husband had 're-married'; she did not even know hc was living with another woman. That situation was soon to change. Three weeks after Polly set divorce proceedings iu m~tion, P, on scandalized his flunilv bv moviug iuto The I lilltop with Sara. 'It was an awful slap in the face for his mother,' said his Aunt lx, larnic. 'tlub and ,x, lay deeply disappru~'ed. It was very difficult for them as they had Polly and tbc children living with them. The family clamriled up about it and never mentioned it. ~,Vhen Ron took Sara up to The Hilltop I said to my sister, "Well, we loved him as a child, Midgic, but he's a perfect stranger to us m~w. "'~' The familv would have been even more shocked had the), known that Ron had married Sara; only Ron's friend, lx, Iac Ford, knew the truth and he kept quiet. 'I ran 'into Ron one evening wben he was taking the children to the theatre in Bremerton,' Ford said. 'We hadn't seen each other since before the war and when we were talking in the lobby he mentioned something about marrying again. I thought it was strange because I knew that he was not divorced from PoIly, but I did not say anything because I didn't want to get involved. ,7 }tubbard filed an agreement to the divorce on 1 June and an interlocutory decree was awarded on 23 June. Poll3. was given custody of the children, costs and $25 a month maintenance for each child. Knowing Ron, she did not cherish much hope of tile maintenance payments arriving regularly, if at all. ~]w Myste,y of the Missing Resean'h 135 Ron and Sara left The }tilltop in July and returned to California, to a rented trailer on a lot in tile seediest section of North Hollywood, wilere he began writing tile first of the popular 'Olc [)oc Nlethuselah' stories - rousing yarns about a Soldier of Light and his devoted four-armed slave, Hippocrates, who travel around tile universe in a golden spaceship saving entire civilizations from death and disease and overthrowing despotic inter-planetary dictators as a sideline. In August, the month The End Is Not }i,t began serialization in Astounding, Ron acquired a literal' agent. Forrest Ackerman was not a big-time ltolly~,ood agent with a fat cigar, but a young man with thick horn-rimmed spectacles who had been addicted to science fiction ever since he first picked up a copy of Amazing Stories at the age of nine. 'Forrie' Ackerman would one day be tile proud owner of the world's biggest collection of science-fiction magazines and would drive around Los Angeles in a red Cadillac with SCI-FI on the ticence plate, but in 1947 he was still struggling to capitalize on his devotion to the genre by persuading science-fiction writers that hc could represent them. Then thirty years old, he had actually met Itubbard ten years earlicr in Shep's Shop, a second-hand bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard which specialized in science fiction. 'I was browsing in Shcp's Shop one night in 1937 when I got into conversation with this young red-halted man who told mc hc held a world record in gliding. Hc said his name was I,. Ron tlubbard and that tie had had a lot of adventure stories published in pulp magazines. I asked him if tie had ever tried his hand at science fiction and hc said, no, oddly enough, he hadn't. But right tilere, on the spot, he began to outline the plot for a science fiction story set in California 25,000 )'ears in tile future, during a second Ice Age. I never saw that story in print, but it seemed to plant a seed in his mind . . .' Ackerman liked to believe that their brief encounter in Shep's Shop was the spur that started Ron Hubbard writing science fiction. Ills first act on his new client's behalf was to take him to meet G. Gordon Dewey and Peter Grainget, two Los Angeles businessmen who wanted to diversify into publishing. The meeting was not a marked success: there was some desultory discussion about buying rights to some of Hubbard's novels, but nothing was concluded. Afterwards, Ron offered to drive Forrie back to his apartment in New Hampshire. It was a journey Ackerman would never forget, for on the way Ron began to tell him the incredible story of how he had died on an operating table during the war. 'I remember he had an old rattletrap of a car and he was chewing tobacco. As he drove he would open the door with one hand and squirt tobacco juice out onto the road. ~,Vhen we got to my apartn~ent we sat outside in the car while tie continued with tile story. It was after five 136 Bare-Faced Messiah o'clock in the morning, and the sun was coming up, before he had finished. 'Basically what he told me was that after he died he rose in spirit form and looked back on the body he had formerly inhabited. Over yonder he saw a fantastic great gate, elaborately carved like something you'd see in Bagdad or ancient China. As he wafted towards it, the gate opened and just beyond he could see a kind of intellectual smo~gasbord on which was outlined everything that had ever puzzled the mind of man. All the questions that had concerned philosophers through the ages- When did the world begin? Was there a God? Whither goest we? - were there answered. All this information came flooding into him and while he was absorbing it, there was a sort of flustering in the air and he felt something like a long umbilical cord pulling him back. He was saying "No, no, not yet!", but he was pulled back anyway. After the gates had closed he realized he had re-entered his body. 'He opened his eyes and found a nurse standing over him looking very concerned. Just as a surgeon walked into the room, Ron said, "I was dead, wasn't I ?" The surgeon shot a venomotts look at the nurse as if to say, "What have you been telling this guy?" But Ron said "No, no, I know I was dead." 'TIm next part of tile story I would find very difficult to direct realistically if 1 was a movie director. According to Ron, hc jumped off the operating table, ran to his Quonset hut, got two rean~s of paper and a gallon of scalding black coffee and for the next 48 hours, at a blinding rate, he wrote a work called Excalibur, or The Dark Sword. 'x,~,'ell, he kept the manuscript with him and when he left tile Navy he shopped it around publishers in New York, but was constantly turned down. He was told it was too radical, too much of a quantum leap. If it had been a variation of Freud or Jung or Adler, a bit of an improvement here and there, it would have been acceptable, but it was just too far ahead of everytt~ing else. t lc also said that as he shopped tim manuscript around, the people who read it either went insane or committed suicide. The last time he showed it to a publisher, he was sitting in an office waiting for a reader to give his opinion. The reader walked into the office, tossed the manuscript on the desk and then threw himself out of tile window. 'Ron would not tell me much about Excalibur except that if you read it you would find all fear would be totalIv drained from you. 1 could never see what was wrong with that or why that would cause anyone to commit suicide. ,s Ackerman was frankIv incredulous, but was impressed by the sincerity and conviction with which Ron told the story. He also ri:cognized, as an aspiring litcrarv agent, that Excalibur could be just the kind of thing to get a new publishing venture off the ground. The Mystery of the Missing Research 137 Later that morning he telephoned Gordon Dewey and Peter Grainger, repeated tile story Ron had told him and asked them if they would take a look at the manuscript. His sly hint of the potential risk only served to whet their appetities. 'They were mad keen to see it,' Ackerman said. 'I remen~ber Dewey saying, "No combination of words, ideas or philosophy will have that effect on me !"' Ackerman reported tile good news to his client, but Hubbard, suddenly and uncharacteristically bashful, refused to produce the manuscript. 'tie said it was in a bank vault and it was going to stay there. I think he was quite sincere. He seemed like a man who had seen too many people go crazy or commit suicide, who had enough on his conscience already. I never did get to see the manuscript or show it to any publisher. In fact, I never encountered anyone who said they had seen it.' Despite Forrie's best efforts, Ron did not make anything like a living wage as a writer in 1947. After The E~td Is Not ll, t, he sold two Ole Doc Methuselah stories to Astounding, a short story, 'Killcr's Law', to a\'eze Detective and a novel, Ttte Clu,e-Chalker, to Five A~vels MonthIx'. The income generated from these five stories was barely sufficie;~t to support hinlself, let alone his present wife, his former wife and his two teenage children. In October, Ron discovered he could qualify for $90 a month subsistence from the VA if hc enrolled at college. tic promptly signed on as a student at the Gcllcr Ticcater ~Vorkshop on the corner of Fairfax and x, Vilshire, but hc was still determined to pursue a better disability pension. Two weeks later he composed a letter to the VA in Los Angeles unquestionably designed to tug at bureaucratic heartstrings by painting a pathetic picture of a confused and helpless veteran on the brink of a total breakdown: Gentlemen; This is a request for treatment ú ú ú After trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil li[g, I am utterly unable to approach anything like my o~n competence. My last pttysician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psychoanalyst. Toward the end of my service I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose ~vas seriously affected. I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations, and have newly come to realize that I must first triumph above this before I can hope to rehabilitate myself at all. 138 Bare4:aced Messiah I cannot leave school or what little work I am doing for hospitaliza- tion due to many obligations, but I feel I might be treated outside, possibly with success. I cannot, myself, afford such treatment. V~'ould you please help me? Sincerely, L. Ron Hubbard9 To its credit, the VA responded to this dramatic cry for help with commendable speed and arrangen~ents were made (or Hubbard to attend Birmingham VA Hospital in Van Nuvs for another examination. By this time, his medical records were hi3pelesslv confused as he had given so many different versions of his service ca~-eer, his injuries and ailments. I lc took the opportunity of this consultation to add another injury to the record, claiming that he had fallen from a ladder on a ship called tile t 'SS Pen~tant in 1942, injuring his back, hip, left knee and right heel. x, Vhile he was waiting for the results to come through, Ron was greatly discomf~rtcd to receive a demand from the VA for $51 which he had been overpaid in subsistence - he had dropped out of college on 14 November, claiming be was too ill to continue studying, but had collected subsistence until the end of the month. 'I cannot imagine ht,w to replty this $51', he xvhincd in a letter to the VA datctl 27 Janttary 1948, 'as Iatn nearly penniless and have but $28.50 tu k, st mc for nearly a month to come. Since leaving school in mitt-Nuvcmbcr I have made $115 from various sources -ab~n~t $40 from tbc sale of two bits to magazines in late November and the repayment of a batl debt for $75. These comprise my income to date except for the sale of a typewriter tonight for the at;ove $28.50. My expenditures consist of S27 a month trailer rent and $8{) a month loud for my wife and self, which includes gas, cigarettes and all incidentals. I am vet)' much in debt and have not been able to get a job but am trying to resume my pre-xvar profession of professional writing. My health has been bad and I feel that if I could just get caught up financially I could write a novel which has been requested of me and so remedy mv finances. It ,.vould take me three months and even then I would not be able to guarantee solvency. Is there any provision in the Veteran's Administration for grants or loans or financing so that I could get back on my feet?' Nothing came of this hopeful inquiry. A few da,,,s later the results of Ron's medical examination arrived, but offered tittle encouragement that he would bc a',,,'artlcd a higher pension. As before, nothing too serious was diagnoscd, other than arthritis and mvositis, an inflammation of the muscle tissue. T}~ere was not even', any longer, any evidence of a duodenal ulcer and no evidence at all of tile injuries he said he |lad sustained when he fell from a ladder. The Mystery of the Missing Reseatch 139 flowever, bureaucracy works in strange and unfathomable ways. Despite the findings of his most recent medical, Ron's bewildering portfolio of infirmities and his dogged determigration to be disabled finally paid off. On 27 February he received a letter from the VA regional office with the good news that his combi~ed disability rating had been re-assessed at forty per cent and his pension increased to $55.20 a month.~ø With that, Lieutenant tlubbard USNR had to be satisfied. Forrest Ackerman, who had noticeably not been getting rich from his ten per cent of Ron's earnings, neverthcrless remained on good terms with his client. When Ron came bounding up the stairs to his apartment one afternoon, sweat trickling from under the band of his white straw hat, and said he needed money to get out of town because his ex-wife was after him for alimony, Fortie good-naturedly handed over everything he }lad in his wallet - $30. 'It was a small fortune to me then,' he recalled. For some time, Forrie had been trying to persuade Ron to make an appearance at one of the meetings of tile Los Angeles Fantasy and Science Fiction Society, of which he was naturally a rounding member. The meetings were held every Thursday evening in the basement H~om of a small hotel on South Bixcl Street in d~wntown Los Angeles and were often attendcd by writers with an eye to future Sa]CS. Ron first turned up at a 'Lasfas' meeting on 15 April and, as a distinguished guest, was invited to address the n~cn~|>ers. lie gave an impromptu, entertaining little talk about hiniself and his work, mentioning his 'shame' that he was only able to ~'rite abot~t five thousand words a day and touching briefly on his philosoptiical opus, Excalibur, which he had locked in a bank vault ~hen he 'finally realized bow dangerous it was'. 'The real surprise of the evening', the club magazine reported, 'came when t{ubbard was talking about his friend, Arthur J. Burks. Someone mentioned Burks's story, "Survival", which had been judged one of the best of 1938 when it appeared that year in Me~'t'el Tales. "Survival ?" questioned Hubbard. "I don't remember reading that one. What was it about?" It concerned an invasion of America by the "yellow men of the East", he was told. "What?" said Hubbard. "And how did the',' escape the peril?" By burrowing under the ground, he was told. ~,lr Hubbard was surprised at this. In fact, he said, "Goud God! That dog! Wait till I get hold of Burks . . ." He explained tile outburst: "Back in '38 I wrote a movie treatnlent of a story called "Survival". It concerned an invasion of America by the yellow men of the East. They escaped by burrowing under the ground! I gave that 140 Bare-Faced Messiah story and four others to an agent to sell. He lost them. And now I find that B urks has written and sold a story just like it!" '~ Among the fans present that evening was a young tcletype operator by the name of Arthur Jean Cox. He admitted to mixed feelings about meeting the farootis Ron Hubbard for the first time: 'lie was an amusing, lively, animated, dynamic man who dominated the conversation, although I had the feeling that he told more lies in the club room in the first half hour than had been told there in tile preyiotas month. tie talked a lot about his past - I heard the story about the polar bear jumping on his boat dozens of times - but I thought it was all fantasy. 'At that time he was one of the most famous science fiction writers in America, certainly in the top ten. i\lost of the members of the club were very young and in awe of him, but I didn't like him. His face was pock-marked, as if he'd had smallpox as a child, and I thought he looked like a wolf; he was a very predatory sort of man. ,~2 . Hubbard returned to tile Los Angeles science fiction society two weeks later to give a talk about immortalitv and the future of medical science. [It had become interested in medi~'al matters, he explained to a mainly spellbound audience, after hc bad 'died' for eight minutes as a result of wounds received in the war. l|c was brought back to life 'by the use of several emergency measures'. ~,Vhilc convalescing he had plenty of time to satisfy his natural curiosit>, and he had become convinced that bio-chcrnists were capable of lengthening life to tile point of 'limited immortality'. Joseph Stalin was only being kept alive, he claimed sornewhat obscurely, because of a particuiar serum that had been developed by the Russians. Afterwards, Ron demonstrated a surprising talent as a hypnotist with a repertoire of parlour tricks. lie bypnotized almust everyone in the dubroom: one young man looked at his hand with utter astonishment, convinced he was holding a pair of miniature kangaroos in his palm; another rapidly removed his shoes when he felt the floor getting hot and a third spent a hystericalIv funny ten minutes on an imaginaD, telephone tD'ing to fend off a perSistent'and non-existent car salesman. It was probable that Hubbard had learned hypnosis from Jack Parsons and he appeared to have no difficulty inducing byp~otic trances - all he.needed to do, with some people, was count to three and snap his fingers. But he sometimes forgot to bring a subject out of hypnosis. He told Cox's younger brotber, Bill, that he would fall asleep every time he (Hubbard) scratched his nose. Under hypnosis, Bill dutifully obeyed. But later in the evening Hubbard absent-mindedlv scratched his nose while he was standing in the centre of a group of fan~ and Bill Cox instantly collapsed, fortunately falling into the arms of Forrest Ackerman, who was standing behind him. The M3'steO, of the Mi~'si,t~, Research 141 Hubbard also played a cruel, post-hypnotic trick on Bill Cox. tie took him to one side at the meeting and told bim that the following afternoon, at two o'clock, he would drop whatever he xvas doing and meet Hubbard at a building site on the corner of Wilshire and Lucas. Hubbard was waiting there next day when, at precisely two o'clock, Cox showed up. Under Itubbard's instructions, Cox first found he could not take his hands of bis pockets. Then he was ordered to take hold of a nearby railing and discovered he could not let go. As he struggled to release his grip, Hubbard told him the rail would get hotter and hotter until it was red hot. Considerably distressed, Cox writhed in agony until at last Hubbard laughed, parted him on tile shoulder, told him he could go home and that he would not remember anything that had bappened. Tbis incident only later came to light because a fellow science fiction writer, A.E. van Vogt, shared Hubbard's interest in hypnotism. Onc night at a Lasfas meeting, someone described a particularly vivid dream and |lubbard immediately claimed responsibility for it, saying it was a hallucination he bad caused while he was 'out strolling in Astral form'. Van Vogt did not necessarily disbelieve I lubbard but thought it was more likely that tie had induced tile dream by post-hypn~tic suggestion. \Vith the help of a professional hypn~tist friend, hc decided to check if any members of the club had been hypnotized by tlubbard with~ut being able tu remember it. They started with Bill Cox, put him in a deep trance and quickly learned of the ordeal that tlubbard had put him through. Although van Vogt gravely disapproved, he continued, curiously, to hold l lubbard in the highest esteem. In tile world of science fiction, A.E. van Vogt was considered to be in tile very top rank of ~fiters and it was tlubbard ~ho requested that they should meet at the end of the war. Van was invited to dinner with Hubbard at Jack Parsons's house in Pasadena and was instantly dazzled by the force of his personality; like everyone else around Hubbard, he rapidly found himself in a vaguely supplicant position, Verv soon he would be running around at Hubbard's beck and call. 'When we were first introduced, a hand of steel grabbed mine and squeezed it so hard that I braced myself. He was physically very strong and in fine physical condition. f fe had been in command of a gunboat in the Pacific. Once he sailed right into the harbour of a Japanese occupied island in the Dutch East Indies. His attitude was that if you took your flag down the Japanese would not know one boat from another, so he tied up at the dock, ~vent ashore and wandered around by himself for three days. Everyone else ~'as scared except Hubbard; he was a brave man, no question about it. 'I knew his work as a writer, of course, and enjoyed it. tie wrote 142 Bare-Faced Messiah about a million words a ),car, straight on to the typewriter at incredihle speed. 1Xly guess was that he typed at about seventy words a minute. It just poured out - 1 have seen typists working at that speed, but never a writer. I was in his apartment a couple of times when he said he had to finish a story and he would sit typing steadily for twenty minutes without a break and without looking up. That would have been totally impossible for me. 'x, Vhen he was out in the evenings, he would begin to think of a plot for a story and throw ideas around, asking people around the table what they thought of this or that. By the end of the evening he would have it worked out in his mind and when he got home he would spend the night writing, tearing the pages out of the typewriter and throwing them all over the floor. Sara told me it was her job when she got up in the mottling to collect the pages and put them in order. He left a note to tell her where to send it and he never looked at it again. 'I tc never told mc where he learned hypnotism, but he was certianly a great hypnotist. There were certain people he could hypnotize instantly. 11e would talk to them for a few moments, take their mind in a certain direction, then just say "Sleep!"'~3 I lubhard's efforts to use his facility in a more constructive fashion at the science fiction society were somewhat less successful. |fc once hypnotized a mornher who was taking a college examination tile following ttav and ordered hi/n to get straight A's, wiltlout that happy result. Another attempt to help someone whu felt he had a 'block' about spelling similarly failed. lly the time a fan approactled Ron to ask if hypnosis could help with his emotional problems, Ron could only lamely suggest he tried reading Dale Carnegie's tlow to ll~'n Fn'ends and lnJtt~cnct, l'~'oplc. That sutnmcr, 1948, Hubbard ran into a spot of bother with the law. A trilling misunderstanding over a cheque led to the embarrassment of his being arrested by the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff, fingerprinted and charged with petty theft. He was released on bail of $500 while the Sheriff's Forger), Detail investigated the circumstances of the offence. On 19 August 1948 he was arraigned at San Gabriel Township Justice Court where he entered a plea of not guilty and waived trial by jury. However, by the time the trial date came around on 31 August, Hubbard changed his plea to guilty and was fined $25. Remarkably, he did not need time to pay. ~4 Ron never mentioned the incident to his friends and the court files were destroved in 1955, so it will never be known precisely what he had done wrong. He was also fortunate that none of the local newspaper reporters was a science-fiction fan and so no one realized that the L.R. ttubbard charged with petty theft at San Luis Obispo was a famous sci-fi writer. The 31ysteO, of the Missi~A, Research 143 Shortly afterwards, Ron and Sara left California for Savannah, Georgia, where, Ron would claim later, he embarked upon another important stage of his pioneering research into the unexplored recesses of the human mind. ~Vithin a couple of years it would become imperative for L. Ron Hubbard to play down his career as a pulp writer and establish for himself a rather more sober reputation as a scientist, philosopher and guru. Lesser men might have hesitated to undertake such a radical metamorphosis, but not Ron }tubbard, who effortlesslv contrived to make it appear as if his whole life had been dedicated to unravelling the mysteries of the psyche. The story of his childhood in the 'wilds of Montana' and his adoption as a blood brother of an Indian tribe presented a picture of a boy unusually in tune with nature and primitive cultures. tlis tutelage by a 'personal student' of Freud, his 'wanderings' in the mystic East and his expeditions as an explorer all suggested an upbringing and career of extraordinary dimensions, constantly directed towards a quest for deeper understanding of life's mysteries. \Vriting science fiction was downgraded to no more than a convenient device designed to finance his 'research'. During the 'year' he had spent in Oak Knoll Naval ttospital, Ron would claim bc had bad the run of the medical librarx' and access to the medical records of former prisoners of war. I Ic began experimental psycho-analysis on cx PoX~,'s, 'using a park bench as a consulting room', and his research continued ever more intensiveIx' through the post-war years. In Savannah, he said, he worked as a voltinteer lay practitioner in a psychiatric clinic, helping charity patients no one else would treat. There was, perhaps, no reason why anyone should question the veracitv of ttubbard's research, but his friends must have been puzzled that they knew nothing of it. lx, lac Ford, for example, who had spent so much time with Ron in the late '30s, sailing on Puget Sound and often talking through the night over a bottle of whisky, had never realized that his friend was engaged in research of any kind. In the heated and wide-ranging discussions that took place in the kitchen of Jack Parsons's house in Pasadena, an ideal forum for Hubbard to talk about his theories, he had said not a word about them. Alva Rogers had frequently heard him tapping away at a typewriter in his room, but there was nottUng to indicate he was writing anything but fiction. Not even tile amiable Forrest Ackerman had any idea that Ron was about to abandon.science fiction in fayour of philosophy, although in January 1949 he received an amusing letter from his client hinting at the possibility. 144 Bare-Faced Messiah Addressing Ackerman, as always, as '4E', Ron wrote from Savannah to say that he had set up an office in the apartment building where he was living on Drayton Street. It was a very nice place, he said, and could easily become a den of vice, 'so I only allow women over 16 in there'. He had acquired a dictaphone machine which Sara was 'beating out her wits on' transcribing not only fiction but his book on the 'cause and cure of nervous tension', which he was going to call either The Dark Sword or Excalibur or Science of the Mt'ntt. He was writing so much fiction, Sara was having to work on the manuscript in fits. 'So far, however,' he wisecracked, 'she has recovered easily from each fit.' If Ackerman did not take the letter too seriously be'could hardly be blamed, for its tone was largely facetious throughout. Ron promised that among the 'bandy household hints' contained in the book was information on how, to 'rape women without their knowing it, communicate suicide messages to your enemies as thcv sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco parkway to the mayor for cash, and evolve ti~c best way of protecting or destroying conm~unism'. l lc had not decided, he added casually, whether to destroy tile Catholic Churcb or 'merely start a new one'. Airbough he cootinucd in similar vein, suggesting promotion gimmicks like requiring readers to sign a release absolving the author of any responsihility if they went crazy, it was clear that he expected the book to hc a s~cccss:'Thought of some interesting publicity angles on it. I tnight post a ten th~usand dollar bond to bc paid to anyone who can attain equal results with any known field of knowledge. A reprint of the preface, however, is about all one needs to bring in orders like a snow storm. Tt~is has more selling and publicity angles than an5, book of which I have ever heard . . .' (Publicity angles notwithstanding, he could not have been too confident of the book's success, because shortly after writing to Forrio he wrote to the Bureau of Naval Personnel asking for a transcript of his sea service in order to apply for a licence in tile mercllant marine. He asked for the request to be dealt with quickly as he had a 'waiting berth'.~s) The first sci-fi fans knew of L. Ron ttubbard's intention to v~'rite a philosophic treatise was an interview with him that appeared in the January 1949 issue of a magazine cal led ~ 'n'ters 'Mt~rkt, ts and Me'thods, during which he mentioned that he was working on a 'book of psvcholoD.". But he added that he was also working on a rewrite of a Bro/~dway play, no less than ten novels and a serial for Street and Smith. This was the conundrum. In 1949, the year ill which Hubbard's 'research' was presumably approaching fruition, he once again began writing fiction at a prolific rate: 'Gun Boss of Tumbleweed' and 'Blood on his Spurs' for Thrilling ~'sten~, 'Gunman' and 'Johnny the Town Tamer' for Fantous ~stemt, 'Plague' and 'The Automagic Horse' for The Mystery of the Missing Research 145 Astounding, 'Beyond the Black Nebula' and 'the Emperor of the Universe' for Statlling Stories, and many more. Not a month passed in 1949 without the name of L. Ron Hubbard appearing on the cover of one of the pulp magazines. Nevertheless, rumours began to circulate among science-fiction farIs in the sumnler of 1949 that Ron Hubbard was also writing a book about philosophy and was intending to unveil an entire new 'science of the mind'. x, Vhat was most surprising to the fans was that Hubbard had found the time to produce such a science, for it had long been expected by sciencefiction devotees that one of their number would eventually come up with some world-shaking discovery. Many of the technological developments of the previous twenty years, including the atom bomb, had been predicted with uncanny accuracy by science-fiction writers and to the fans it was entirely logical that science fiction should give birth to an important new science. The run, ours were fuelled by tile fact that nt> one had seen I tubbard for montt~s - he had not attcndcd any of the recent gatherings of the Los Angeles science fiction society, neither had he made an appearance in any of the magazine offices in New York. It was said he was holed up somewhere in New Jersey and that John x,V. Campbell was somehow involved in his plans. But no one knew exactly ~hcrc 1tubbard was or precisely what hc was doing or what tbc new 'science' might entail, althougb everyone was agreed that I lubbard was on to 'something big', whatever it was. The first tantalizing details were revealed in an editorial in the December issue of Astouttdittg Sciettce Fit'tiott. With an implicit sense of history in the making, Campbell announced that an article was in preparation about a new science called Dianetics. 'Its power is almost unbelievable; it proves the mind not only can but does rule the body completely; following the sharply defined basic laws set forth, physical ills such as ulcers, asthma and arthritis can be cured, as can all other psychosomatic ills...' On the facing page, by a curious coincidence, there was a story titled 'A Can of Vacuum' by L. Ron Hubbard, about a practical joke which results in remarkable scientific discoveries. By January 1950, the runlours had reached the ears of t, Valter Winchell, the syndicated columnist on tile New York Daily Mirror. 'There is something new coming up in April called Dianetics,' he wrote in his column on 31 January. 'A new science which works with the invariability of physical science in the field of the human mind. From all indications it will prove to be as revolutionary for humanity as the first caveman's discovery and utilization of fire.' in the April issue of Astounding, Campbell announced that the long-awaited article was at last ready for publication: 'Next month's 146 Bare-Faced Messiah issue will, I believe, cause one full-scale explosion across the country. x, Ve are carrying a 16,000 word article entitled "Dianetics - An Introductiun to a New Science', by L. Ron Hubbard. It will, I believe, be the first publication of the material. It is, I assure you in full and absolute sincerity, one of the must important articles ever publisbcd. In this article, reporting on Hubbard's own research into the engineering question of huw the human mind operates, immensely important basic discoveries are related. Among them: 'A technique of psychotherapy has been developed which will cure any insanity not due to organic destruction of the brain. 'A technique that gives any man a perfect, indelible, total memory, and perfect, errorless ability to compute his problems. 'A basic answer, and a technique for curing - not alleviating ulcers, arthritis, asthma, and many other nongerm diseases. 'A totally new conception of the truly incredible ability and power of the human mind. 'Evidcuce that insanity is contagious, and is not hcretlitaty. 'This is no wild theory. It is not mysticism. It is a coldly precise engineering description of how the human mind operates, and how to go about restoring correct operation tested and used on some 250 cases. And it makes only one overall claim: tbc mcth~ds logically dcvchq~cd from that description ~cork. TI~c mcmorv stimulation tcchnitluc is s~ p~wcrful that, within 30 mint~tcs of entering therapy, must pc{~plc will recall in full detail their own birth. I have observed it in actiun, and used the techniques mysctf. . . 'It is n~t only a fact article of the highest imp{~rtancc; it is the story of the ultimate adventure - an exploration in the strangest of all tcn-a i~tcog~titet; tim human mintl. N~ stranger adventure appeared in The zlrabiatt .X'if4hts than l lubbard's experience, using his new techniques, in plowing through the strange jtmgle of dist~rtcd thoughts within a human mind. 'l'o find, beyond that zone of madness, a computing mechanism of ultin~atc and incredible efficiency and pcrfcction i' RareIv can any editor have penned such a fulsumc and glowing testimonial. The world, or at least the wnrld of science fiction, waited with bated breath. Chapter 9 The Stra~~ge D[but of Dia~zetics 'l~lv vanity hopes that you will secure credit to me for eleven years of unbaid research, but mv humanity hopes above that that this science will be used as intelligently and extensively as possible, for it is a science and it does produce exact results uniformly and can, I think, be of benefit.' (Letter from L.R. ttubbard to Dr Joseph x, Vinter, August 1949) 1. /I Ig t~ ~ In the spring of 1949, Ron and Sara had moved to the Ncw Jersey shore, to a beach cottage at Bay tlcad, a discreetly genteel yachting resort on the northern tip of Biirncgat Bay. Rich New Yorkers whu could not quite afford the 1 lampto~s kept large summer houses at Bay l lead where they sailed the ruffled blue waters of the bay, played tennis and artended each othcr's cocktail parties. The 11ubbards' rented cutrage was one of the smallest properties, but Sara, who suspected she was pregnant, was delighted with it. She was weary of their peripatetic lifestyle; she calculated that in only three years of marriage they had set Gp home in seven different States and had never staved in on~ place for more than a few months. Bay ttead, with its cotlntry club aura, did much to lift her spirits. John Campbell had persuaded them to move from Georgia and had found them the cottage which was less than a hour's drive on the Garden State Parkway from Plainfield, where he and his wife lived. He wanted Ron close'by because he wanted, passionately wanted, to be involved in what he considered to be the historic genesis of Dianetics. It was predictable, in the course of their working relationship as science-fiction editor and science-fiction writer, that Campbell and Hubbard would spend time together discussing ideas and that Ron would test his theories on a man as responsive as the editor of Astounding. Campbell was an intellectual maverick: he had studied physics and chemistry at college, had a mechanistic approach to psychology and was fascinated by gimmicks and technolog).', but he also flirted with psychic phenomena like dowsing, telekinesis, 148 Bare-Faced Messiah telepathy and clairvoyance. Ron could not have had a more attentive audience when he first began to propound his theory that the brain worked like a computer which could bc made markedly more efficient by clearing its clogged memory bank. Always a persuasive talker, Hubbard possessed a natural ability to marshal a smattering of knowledge into a cogent and authoritative thesis, interwoven with scientific and medical jargon. His 'scientific' approach to unravelling the mysteries of the human psyche precisely accorded with Campbell's own view that humanity could be investigated with the techniques and impersonal methodology of the exact sciences, ~ and although Ron's ideas stemn~ed more from his exuberant imagination than from any research, to Campbell what llubbard had to say was tantamount to a revelation on the road to Damascus. He compared individual memorv to a 'time-track' on which every experience was recorded. Using a form of hypnosis, he believed painful experiences could bc recalled and 'erased' with consequent beneficial effects to buth physical and mental health. Ron offered to demonstrate on a convenient couch at Campbcll's home in Plainfield. lie drew the blinds, told Campbell to relax, close his eyes on a count to seven and try to recall his earliest chiltthood experience. Gently prompted by R~m to produce more anti more details, Campbell was surprised to find hc c~uld resurrect long-f~rgottcn incidents with such clarity that it was as if he had physically returned to the time and place. After a couple of sessions, he seemed to be able to go back far em~ugh to actually re-live the astonishing experience of his birth and at the same time he discovered that the chronic sinusitis that had plagued him all his life was much improved. Thereafter, Campbell was the first cornmilled disciple of Dianetics, utterly convinced that L. Ron Itubbard had made profound discoveries about the workings of the mind and that the fundamental nature of human life was about to be changed for the better. [Hubbard himself was perhaps as concerned to make monev as he was to help humanity and he had some interesting ideas al~out how to do it. Around this time he was invited to address a science-fiction group in Newark hosted by the writer, Sam Moskowitz. '\Vriting for a penny a word is ridiculous,' he told the meeting. 'If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion. ,2] Determined to help Ron propagate his new 'science', in July 1949 Campbell wrote to Dr Joseph ~,Vinter, a general practitioner from St Joseph, Michigan, who had contributed occasional articles on medical subjects to .4stoundhtg: 'L. Ron Hubbard, who happens to be an author, has been doing some psychological research . . . He's gotten important results. His approach is, actually, based on some very early The Strange D~;but of Dianeth's 149 work of Freud's, some work of other men, and a !or of original research. tle's not a professional psychoanalyst or psychiatrist, he's basically an engineer. He approached the problem of psychiatry from the heuristic viewpoint - to get results.' Campbell described the case of an amputee veteran suffering from severe depression who had bccn helped by Hubbard after conventional psychiatry had failed t{, alleviate his condition. Psychiatrists had injected sodium Pentothal to enable the veteran to re4ive his war experience, taking him through the moment he was hit by a mortar shell to the moment he recovered consciousness in the aid station, but he continued to be depressed and insist he would be better off dead. Using Dianetics, Hubbard had also taken the veteran back through the shell burst but discovered that while he was ttnconsciot~s medics had said, 'This guy's hopeless, he's better off dead anyway' and chosen to move other casualties first. This incident, it transpired, was the cause of his problems. \Vintcr was intrigued: he had never considered before that an unconscious patient could in any way be aware of what was going on around him. Ite wrote to Campbell asking for more information and back came another long letter elaborating on the theory and concluding: '\Vith cooperation from some institutions, some psychiatrists, hc [llubbard] has worked on all types of cases. lnstitutionalizcd schizopbrcnics, apathies, manics, dcpressives, perverts, stuttering, neuroses - in all, nearly 1000 cases. But just a brief sampling of each t.vpe; he doesn't have proper statistics in the usual sense. But he has one statistic. ttc has cured e~'e~3' patient he worked with. tte has cured ulcers, arthritis, asthma.' ~,Vhile \Vinter was avowedly incredulous at the idea that a man with no medical training of any kind was able to cure one hundred per cent of his patients, he did not share the tendencv of his medical colleagues to dismiss all lay practitioners as dangerous cranks. He had always been fascinated by the enigmas of human behaviour and believed in a holistic approach to medicine which was amenable to unconventional hypotheses. He contacted Hubbard, suggested that he present his findings to the medical profession, and offered to help. Hubbard quickly replied, promising to forward an 'operator's manual' for Wintcr's use and thanking him for his interest. When his manual arrived, Winter made several ccpies and gave them to psychiatrist friends in Chicago, but was disappointed bv their negative reactions. The}' were interested in the ingenuity of tiubbard's ideas, but strongly sceptical of their efficacy. However, VVinter still felt the subject was worth pursuing and made arrangements to visit Bay Head to observe Dianetics 'in action'. Ron, who was acutely aware 150 Bare 4;'aced Messiah of the potential value of recruiting a doctor to the Dianetic cause, inx'ited Winter to stay with him and Sara at the cottage on the beach. He arrived in Bay Head on 1 October 1949, and Sara, now several months into her pregnancy, did lter best to make the young doctor welcome, despite somewhat cramped conditions. \Vi~ter discovered titat }tubbard was spending much of his time testing his theories by 'running' science-fiction fans brought in by Campbell. The purpose of 'running' a patient, Hubbard explained, was to send them 'down the time-track' to uncover their 'impediments'. x. Vinter sat in on several sessions, then agreed to Ron's suggestion that he should be 'run' himself. 'The experience was intriguing,' hc said. 'I felt, in general, that I was obtaining some benefits from Hubbard's methods of therapy. I was also aware of the possible inaccuracies of a subjective evaluation of mv own progress: I therefore endeavourcd to make up for this by ob~'crving the other patients closely. It was possible during this short period of observation to note onlv the differences in their bchaviour before and after each therapy session. The changes were obvious: before a session I would see agitation, depression and irritability; after a session the patient would be cheerful and relaxed. ,3 Although he had some reservations, particularly ahout I lubbard's absolutism and inclinati~m to make sweeping gcncZralizatitms, he was unquestionably impressed. l le noted tim cmntional discharge titat resulted when patients recalled painful experiences; he himself re-lived the terror he had felt as a child on learning of his grandmothcr's death and fountt it dissolving in a tit of sobhing and weeping, after which he felt a great sense of relief. \Vi~ter did not return to Nlichigan until 'l'hanksgiving, xvhen an incident occurred which finally convinced hin, of the validity of Dianetics. ttc arrived home to aiscover that his six-vear-old son'was having problems: the boy had developed a paralyzin~ fear of the dark and of ghosts, which he believed were waiting upstairs to strangle him. B'inter recalled that his wife had experienced considerable difficulties during the bov's birth and decided to apply Dianetic techniques to see if there was any connection. He was flabberi~asted by the result. The doctor persuaded his son to lie down, close his eves and try to recall the first time he had ever seen a ghost. To \Vinte~;'s amazement the boy described in detail the wl~ite apron, cap and mask of the obstetrician who had delivered him and how he felt he was being strangled. Winter and his wife discussed what had happened and concluded with certainty that the only time their son had seen that doctor in his surgical gown was at th~ moment of his birth. It was evident to them that the bov's fear was connected with his struggle to be born and his phobia soon disappeared. The St~a~tge D~but of Dia~tetit's 15 1 Believing himself to be at the possible dawn of a 'Golden Age of greater sanity', Winter returned to Bay Head after the holiday enormously optimistic about the prospects for Dianetics. 'I immediately became immersed in a life of Dianetics and very little else,' hc recorded. ttubbard and Campbell were deeply invol~'ed in the projected article for zB'tottttdittg and \Vir~ter began work on the preparation of a paper explaining the principles and methodology of Dianctic therapy, intended for presentation to the medical profession. Ron, who made no secret of his contempt for the medical establishment (often to the considerable embarrassment of Dr Wittier), was not in the least surprised by the reception it received: the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry both rejected the paper for publication on the grounds of insufficient clinical evidence of the technique's effectiveness. Undcterred, the three men continued developing and refining Dianctic theory, slowly bringing into their orbit other converts, notably a young electrical engineer by the name of Don Rogcrs and Art Ccppos, head of tlcrmitagc ltousc, a small medical and psycttiattic texthonk publisher who had contracted, at Campbcll's instigation, to publish a book about Dianctics. The 'Bay Ilcad Circle', as it came to be known, devoted many hours to discussiam of terminology. Ron was still using the word 'impcdiment' to describe painful past experiences, alth~tuglt they all agreed that a new wortl x~as nccdcd to avoid confusion. For a while, impcdintcnt was replaced bv 'norn', the name of tttc Norsc godttcsscs said to contrul ~lan's destiny, but in the end they plumped for 'cngram', which was defined in Dorland's Medical DictionaD, as a 'lasting mark or trace'. ~Icanxvhilc, Ron fnund time to dash off a feature about Dianetics for tttc Explorers Club journal, in which he explained that he had developed the therapy as a tool for expedition commanders to maintain the health and morale of their men. 'That it apparently conquers and cures all psychoson~atic ills', he added with barely reigned modesty, 'and is of interest to institutions where it has a salutary effect upon the insane, is beyond the province of its original intention.' Untroubled, as always, by facts, Ron nonchalantly informed his fellow members that details of the science could be found, 'where it belonged', in textbooks and professional publications on the mind and bodv.4 [Credit for the inspiration for Dianctics would be variousIv and fancifulIv attributed over the >'ears; at one point ttubbard claintcd his interest in the mind had been stimulated while at universitv bv comparing the rhythmic vibrations of poctr>' in English and Japanese, in which language he was, of course, fluent.s] Shortly before Christntas 1949, tlubbartl finished the article for 152 Bare-Fat'ed Messiah Astounding, but Campbell agreed to delay publication so that it would come out sbortly before the book was available and help promote sales. Despite his lingering misgivings about the extravagance of Ron's claims, Winter agreed to write a foreword to the article, an endorsement which would greatly add to the credibility of Dianetics. 'I sincerely feel', he wrote, 'that Ron tlubbard has discovered the key which for the first time permits a true evaluation of the human mind and its function in healtb and in illness - the greatest advance in mental therapy since man began to probe into his mental make-up.' In tile midst of all this accelerating activity, of writing and revising, proof-reading, 'running patients' and answering the inquiries that were beginning to arrive as a result of the advance editorials in Astounding, Hubbard became a father for the tbird time. On 8 1March, 1950, Sara gave birth to a daughter, Alexis Valerie, in the local hospital. x, Vi~ter, conveniently on hand, supervised the delivery. When she cradled the baby in her arnls for tile first time, Sara registered with considerable pleasure that her daughter had flaming red hair. By the beginning of April, Campbcll's editorials had stimulated so much interest that it was decided to establish a I lubbard Dianctic Research Foundation to disseminate km~wlcdgc of the new therapy and stimulate further research. The Foundation was incorporated in the unlovely cnviro~s of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a grimy industrial town on the shores of Newark Bay, opposite Staten Island. The board of directors was made up of Ron and Sara 1Iubbard, Campbell, x, Vintcr, Don Rogcrs, Art Ccppos and a lawyer by the name of Parker C. ,XIorglm. Dr \Virlter, who had by then sold his practice in 1Xlichigan to devote himself full-time to Dianctics, accepted the post of medical director 'without qualms'. The Foundatiun rented the top floor of an old office building on Morris Avenue and furnished it with second-hand sheet-metal desks, Nat'>' surplus lectured~all chairs and Army surplus cots. Ron and Sara rented a small frame house at 42 Aberdeen Road, Elizabeth and moved in with the baby. Sara very much regretted leaving Bay ttead and viewed Elizabeth with unconcealed distaste, but Ron persuaded her that it was vital for him to be on hand to direct the affairs of the Foundation. Campbell's wife, Dona, was similarly suffering from her husband's obsession with Dianetics, so much so that she walked out of their marriage, declaring Dianetics to be the 'last straw'. Regular contributors to Astounttmg also began to express concern that tile editor no longer seemed interested in anytiling but Ron Hubbard's wonderful next' science and many of them failed to share his enthusiasm. Isaac Asimov read an advance copy of tbe Dianctics article and thought it The Strange Ddbut of Dianetks 153 xvas 'gibberish'6 while Jack Williamson said he thougbt it was like a 'lunatic revision of Freudjan psychology'. But Campbcll's ardour could not be cooled. In a letter to Williamson be said he had witnessed Ron restoring sanity to a 'raving psychotic' in thirty mixlutes and curing a Navy veteran of ulcers and arthritis. 'I know dianetics is one of, if not the greatest, discovery of all Man's written and unwritten history,' he added. 'It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries.'7 The May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction appeared on tim streets in the third week of April. A hairy, ape-like alien with yellow cat's eyes glowered menacingly from the cover. Readers would discover that he was the evil Duke of Kraakahaym, special envoy from the Empire of Skontar to tile Commonwealth of Sol, but everyone knew there was something much more diverting in the magazine that month -tbe long-awaited introduction to Dianetics, the first science ever to be launched in a pocketbook pulp magazine. So startling were the tidings that Campbell felt obliged to emphasize that tile author was entirely serious. 'I want to assure every reader, most positively and unequivocally,' hc wrote, 'that this article is not a hoax, joke, or anything but a direct, clear statentent of a totally ncw scientific tilesis.' 1 lubl>ard might have wished for a more venerable medium in which to launch his new science, but he could hardly have found a more receptive forum. Many science-fiction fans at that time had an engineering and science background and as far as tbev were concerned llubbard's dissertation, filling more tban forty pages and seemingly resulting from years of diligent research and stud>', was logical, enticing and thoroughly persuasive. . It was certainly very different from his previous writing. The customary narcissistic swaggering was notably absent and his usual racy pro~e was replaced by a sober, textbook style sometimes too wol-dv to be immediately comprehensible: 'When exterior determinism ~as entered into a human being so as to overbalance his self determinism the correctness of his solutions fell off rapidly.' Hubbard's approach was that of an engineer seeking practical, scientific solutions to the mysteries of the human mind, constantly testing his postulates against a single, simple criterion: does it work? He began bv drawing an analogy between the brain and a computer with an indnite memory bank and perfect function. Even' human brain, he argued, had the potential to operate as this optimum computer, with untold benefits to the individual and to mankind, not least restoring sanity to the insane, curing all manner of illnesses and ending wars. 154 Bare-Faced Messiah Constraints were presently imposed on the brain by 'aberrations', usually caused by pbysical or emotional pain. Since pain was a threat to survival, tile basic principle of existence, tbe sane, analytical mind sought to avoid it. Evolution had provided the necessary mcchanisrn by means of what he called the 'reactlye mind'. In momet~ts of stress, the 'analytical mind' shut down and the 'reactlye mind' took over, storing information in cellular recordings, or 'engran~s'. He provided an example of how an engram was stored. If a child xvas bitten by a dog at the age of two, she might not remember the incident in later life but the engram could be stimulated by any number of sights or sounds, causing her inexplicable distress. It might be a similar noise to that of the car driving past wbcn tile dog attacked, the smell of a dog's fur, or the scrape of skin on concrete when she was knocked to the ground. The purpose of Dianetic therapy, he explained, was to gain access to the engran~s in the reactlye memory banks and 're-file' them in the analytical mind, wilere their influence would be eradicated. To 'unlock' the reactlye memory bank it was necessary to locate the earliest cngrams, which he claimed were often pro-natal, sometimes occurring within twenty-four hours of conception ! A foetus might not understand words spoken while it was in the womb, he asserted, but it would be able to recall them in later life. I laving cleared the reactlye mind, the analytical mind would then function, like tile uptimum computer, at full eflicicncv - tbc individual's IQ would rise dramaticallv, he would be frccd o( all psychological and psychoso~atic illnesses and his memory would improve to the point of total recall. Dianetics was easy to apply, he asserted, once tile axitnns and mcchanisn~s had been learned, and he envisaged the science being practised by 'people of intelligence and good drive' on their friends and families. 'To date, over two hundred patients have been treated,' he claimed; 'of those two hundred, two hundred cures have been obtained.' It was certainly an alluring prospect - a simple science available to ordinary people that invariably succeeded and claimed amazing results. But Hubbard knew better than to reveal, in a twenty-five-cent magazine, how to practise his wonderful new science; readers were specifically warned that the article would not contain sufficient information for them to become Dianetic operators. All the techniques would be explained, they were told, in a forthcoming book soon to be published by Hermitage House, price $4.00. On 9 May 1950, Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard appeared without fanfare in bookstores across the Ttle Strange D~but of Dianetics 155 nation. Hermitage House was not optimistic that it would be a big seller and set the initial print run at a modest six thousand copies. The book, dedicated to Will Durant, esteemed author of Ttle Slot)' of PIlilosoptly, displayed none of the restraint evident in the ~,kstounding article. Indeed, Hubbard introduced his t~ew science with breatbtaking magniloquence. 'The creation of Dianetics', he declared in tile opening sentences of the book, 'is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arcb... q:he hidden source of all psychosomatic ills and human aberration has been discovered and skills have been developed for their invariable cure.' Significant among the maladies |tubbard claimed he could cure were the complaints that had figured so prominently in his Veterans Administration file: arthritis, eye trouble, bursiris and ulcers. He also added to the list the most intractable ailment kn~wn to medical science - the common cold. Optimism and confidence in tile ability of Dianctics to deal with almost all human problcnls were the abiding themes of the book. Hubbard's seductive message was simple - a dramatic brcakthrougb had occurred in psychothcrapy- The tcchniqt~cs were easy to learn, xvcrc available to cvcryonc and, most important of all, tllwa3's ~corketI! Thc first challenge of Dianctics was to get througtx the book, for the text was abstrttsc, rambling, rcpctitivc, stutltlcd with confusing ncologisms and littered with interminable ft~otnotcs, wbich t lubbard sccmcd to think added acadcmic vcrisimilitudc. l:cllox~' science-fiction writcr L. Spraguc de Camp frankly attmittcd he found thc book incomprehensible and quoted x,V.S. Gilbert to explain wbv a fiction xvritcr who was fluent, litcrate and readable should produce such impenetrable non-fiction: 'If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, Why, x~,-hat a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!'$ Hubbard's anxiety to invest his work with intellectual authority should have deterred him from laying bare his own fierce prejudices, but he could not be restrained. The book exposed a deep-rooted hatred of women, exemplified by a prurient pre-occupation with 'attempted abortions', xvhich he claimed were the most common cause of pre-natal engrams. 'A large proportion of allcgedly feeble-minded children', he wrote, 'are actually attempted abortion cases . ú ú |towever many billions America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for the crinxinals are spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom 156 Bare-Faced Messiah children are a curse, not a blessing of God . . . All these things are scientific facts, tested and rechecked and tested again.' When the women in Hubbard's 'case histories' were not thrusting knitting needles into themselves, they were usually being unfaithful to their husbands, or the)' were being beaten up, raped or otherwise abused. Almost without exception, they allowed the wretched embryos in their wombs to be grievously mistreated. 'Fathers, for instance, suspicious of paternity, sometimes claim while trouncing or upsetting mothers that they will kill the child if it isn't like Father. This is a very bad engram... it may compel an aberee into a profession he does not admire and all out of the engramic command that he must be like the parent. Tbe same engram, he added mysteriously, could also cause premature baldhess or lengthen the child's nose. Hubbard gave many illustrations of tbe problems caused by pre-natal engrams, some of which might bave strained the credulity of even his most gullible readers. If a husband beat his pregnant wife, for example, yelling, 'Take that! Take it, I tell you. You've got to take it!', it was possible the child would interpret these words literally in later life and become a thief. Or a pregnant woman suffering from constipation might sit straining for a bowel movement muttering to herself, 'Oh, this is hell. I am all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy I can't tbink. TIlls is too tcrriblc to be borne.' In this case, he explained, the child might easily develop an inferiuritv complex from a engram which suggested to him he was too terrible tG be 'born'. Some of the worst pro-natal engrams were caused by naming the child after the fatber. If tile expectant motl~er was committing adultery, as so many of llubbard's pregnant women were wont to do, she was likdv to make derogatory remarks about her husband while engaged in sexual intercourse with her lover. The foetus, obviously, would be 'listening' and if he was given the busband's name he would assume in later life that all tile horrible things his mother had said about his father were actually about him. After women, Hubbard's secondary target was the medical profession, towards which he directed almost rabid hostility, accusing neurosurgeons of reducing their 'victims' to 'zombvisni' either by burning away the brain with electric shocks or tearingOt to pieces with a 'nice ice-pick into each eyeball'. 'In terms of brutality in treatment of the insane,' he wrote, 'the methods of the shaman ~r Bedlam have been exceeded by the "civilized" tecbniques of destroying nerve tissue with the violence of shock or surgery... destro)Ying most of his personality and ambition and leaving him nothing more than a manageable animal.' Indisputably the most portentous section of the book was that The Strange Dibut of Dianetics 157 ~vhich explained to the reader how to put Dianetics into practice. Artfully employing the jargon of modern technolog).-, Hubbard called the process 'auditing'. The practitioner was the 'auditor' and his patient was a 'pre-clear'. To become 'clear' of all engrams was the goal devoutly to be pursued for 'clears' were free from all neuroses and psycboses, had full control of their imaginations, greatly raised IQs and well-nigh perfect memories. Auditing began in a darkened room by inducing in the pre-clear a condition Hubbard described as 'Dianetic reverie', which could apparently be recognized by a fluttering of the closed eyelids. It was not so much a hypnotic trance, he was careful to point out, as a state of relaxation conducive to travelling back along the time-track. Once the reverie had been induced, the auditor placed the pre-clear back in various periods of his life, moving inexorably towards birth or conception. Most pre-clcars, Hubt~ard advised, would eventually experience a 'sperm dream' during which, as an egg, they would swim up a channel to meet tile sperm. Once the earliest engram had been erased, later engrams would erase more easily. An average auditing session should last about two hours and tlubbard estimated that a minimum of twenty hours' auditing would be neetied before tbe pre-clear began to reap the rewards. To a nation increasingly inclined to unload its problems on an expensive psychiatrist's couch, the promise of Dianetics was wondrous. It all seemed so eminently logical, pragmatic and alluring, as if human life was about to take on a new sparkle. \Vith the book in one hand, what problems could not be solved? Here at last was a do-it-yourself therapy for the people that friends could offer to friends, husbands to wives, fathers to children. Any doubts were swept aside by the book's overweening absolutism: who would dare make such sweeping claims if they were not true? Even the immoderate tenor of the author's attack on the medical profession struct many cbords. Electric shock therapy and pre-frontal Iobotomv were frightening and mysterious techniques disturbingly reminiscent of the experiments that had taken place in Nazi concentration camps, horrors only recently uncovered and still fresh in the mind. It was understandable that people wanted to believe in Dianetics, if for no other reason than to relegate such seemingly medieval practices to history. For the first few days after publication of Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental tbalth, it appeared as if the publisber's caution about the book's prospects had been entirely justified. Early indications were that it had aroused little interest; certainly it was ignored by most reviewers. But suddenly, towards the end of .xiav, the line on the 158 Bare-bhced Messiah sales graph at the New York offices of ttcrmitage House took a steep upturn. The first purchasers of Dh~etics were mostly science-fiction fans and readers of Astounding. Primarily the)' wanted to see if Hubbard's new science really did worL Typical among them was Jack Homer, a psychology graduate at a college in Los Angeles: 'I had been a science-fiction fan since 1934 and I was fascinated by Campbell's editorials in Astounding. I ordered the book as soon as I heard about it. I got it on Monday, read it by Tuesday and was auditing on x. Vednesdav. I sat doxvn and audited five people and boy, it worked just like Hubbard said it would. I said to myself, "Gee, he may not have it all, but he's sure got a good piece of it."'" A. E. van Vogt knew the book was coming out because Hubbard had been telephoning him every day from Elizabeth to try and get him interested in Dianctics. Van insisted he was a writer, not a therapist, and had no intention of reading Ron's book. But when an advance copy arrived in the mail he could not resist taking a look and tie was piqued to discover how well Dianctic theory dovetailed with his own fiction. }lis most popular novel, Slan, had been about supermen evolving fantastic new powers of the mind vcr)' much in the way cnvisagcd by Dianctics. Van Vogt read Dianetics twice, then decided to experiment on his wife's sister, who was visiting them at the time. I lc began auditing her, folluwing the instructlulls in the book, and to his utter astonishmcnt found she was soon re4iving the moment of her birth. She had been a breech baby and Van and his wife, Edna Nlaync, watched in awe as she went through the motions of being born, screaming arid yelling as she 'felt' the forceps pulling her out. Next day, Van invited Forrio Ackcrman and his wife over. 'Van was the first in tuwn to get Ron's book' said Ackcrman. 'tie told me that his 'phone was ringing off the hook all day. Everyone wanted to know if Dianctics was phoncy or if there was really something in it. 'I was his second guinea pig. He asked me to lie on a couch and explained about the time-track. tte said I could think of it as if I was in an elevator going down arid stopping at floors equating to different years, or I could imagine I was on a train and watching signs with different dates flash by the window. 1 got the idea and lay there waiting for something to happen. Suddenly, on a sort of velvety background I saw two disembodied eyes, hard-boiled eyes like those of the actor, Peter Lurrc. I said, "I see these popping eyes . . ." 'Van said to concentrate on that and keep repeating "popping eyes". I kept saying it and it gradually got abbreviated to "Popeyes", then "poppies". ~,Vhcn I was in High School we memorized a poem about The Strange D[but of l)mnetics 159 World War One: "In Flanders fields the poppies grow, by the crosses row on row . . ." I suddenly thought of the poppies growing row on row and in my mind I went riglit to the grave of my dear brother, Lorraine Ackerman, who didn't quite make it to twenty-one. When I learned he had been killed, I remember I just went round with an empty feeling. All those years later, the sorrow that I had been holding at bay came gushing out and I got it all out of my system. It was quite astonisl~ing to me at the time and gave me tim feeling there was certainly something to it.r All over the country the same thing was happening: science-fiction fans were buying the book and auditing their friends, who then rushed out to buy the book so they could audit their friends. In this first flush of enthusiasm, Hubbard's insistence that Dianetics worked seemed indisputable: everyone could uncover an engram somewhere duwn their time-track and only tim most churlish pre-clears would not admit to feeling uplifted after an auditing session. If auditing worked, it was perhaps not unreasonable to give credence to the whole science of Dianetics. At the offices of Astounding Scie~tce Fiction in New York, more than two thousand letters had arrived in the fortnight folluwing publication of the Dianctics article and mail continued to puur in by the sackload. Campbell, who liked statistics, calculated that only 0.2 per cent of the letters were unfavourablc. At Itcrmitagc 11ousc, Art Ccppos was frantically trying to arrange for more copies of the book to be printed and distributed; bookstore owners evervwhcre were complaining that they were running out of supplies. In Los Angeles, the demand was so great that Dianetit's was only available on an under-the-counter basis. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was inundated with inquiries when it was announced in June that L. Ron ttubbard would be teaching the first full-time training course for Dianetic auditors. ttopeful trainees travelled thousands of miles to New Jersey in tbe hope of getting a place on the course. Jack Hornet was one of them. '1 got hold of Hubbard's telephone number and called him and said I wanted to take the course. He said, "lt's awful crowded out here, but you're as welcome as the flowers in May ." I had a friend with a Cadillac who was also interested and we drove non-stop across the country to get there in time. 'The course cost $500, which was an immense amount of money in those days, but it was worth every cent. There were about thirty-five to forty i3eople on the course, all sorts, men and women- They were a welbeducated, literate bunch and if there was a common factor among them it was probably an interest in science fiction. 'Ron lectured every day. He was very impressive, dedicated and 160 Ba~e-b~ced Messiah amusing. The man had tremendous charisma; you just wanted to hear every word he had to say and listen for any pearl of wisdom. We never discussed wl~ere he had got all his knowledge. To me, the source of his data was irrelevant. I'd been in college studying recent discoveries in psychology and they were not worth a damn compared to what he had come up with and what it would do. 'I guess it would be true to say that the early 'riffles was tile right moment to launch Dianctics. The atomic bomb had been dropped, there was a sense of hopelessness around and there was a great deal of fear about a nuclear war - people were building cabins out in the wilderness. McCarthy|sin was rife and our troops were fighting a war in Korea which seemed complctely unreal to most of us. Then along comes 1Iubbard with tile idea that if we cotdd increase the overall sanity of man just a little bit, it would be a partial solution to the threat of nuclear war. It was no wonder that pc~plc wanted to listen to bim.' %Vhilc Hut~bard was lecturing in Elizabeth, Dianctics became, virtually overnight, a national 'craze' somewhat akin to the canasta maratho~s and pyramid clubs that had brictlv flourished in the hysteria of post-war America. Dianctic groups sp~'ang up everywhere, in every sn~all town and every college; on the l, Vest Coast 'Dianctic parties' became the rage; in I lollywood, whcrc neuroses and dultars lay thick on the grotmd, the movie col~mv jovfullv embraced the idea o( a therapy that did not invulvc all the 'tedious i~ours demanded by psychoanal.vsts. livcrvonc wanted to audit everyone else and rigtl't across the nation Alncricans were excitedly reZliving their births, courtesy of the new guru, L. Ron 1 lubl~ard. The media had so far largely chosen to ignore L. Ron I lubbard and his new science, but it was clear from the rising level of public interest that he could not be ignored forever. On 2 Jtdy, Dianetics, The Mottet~t Sea'tree of,lh'ntal llt'alth - now known to converts simply as 'The Book' - reached the top of the bestseller list in the los Angeles Tz)nes, where it would remain for many months. On the same dav tile book received its first major review, in 7'/ze A~w }~rk Times. It &as a predictable savaging by Rollo May, a noted psychologist and writer. May could find no merit in Dianetics. It was, he said, an oversimplified form of regular psychotherapy mixed with hypnosis. He wondered if the author was not writing with his tongue in his cheek and searched in vain for scientific evidence to support the book's bizarre theuries. 'Books like this do harm', .May concluded, 'by their grandiose promises to troubled persons and bv tgcir oversimplification of human psychological problems.' In Scientific America,z, a professor of physics at Columbia University declared the book containted less eviZience per page than any publication since tile invention of printing. 'The huge sale of the book The Strange Ddbut of Dianetit's 161 to date is distressing evidence', wrote the professor, 'of the frustrated ambitions, hopes, ideals, anxieties and worries of the many persons who through it have sought succor.'~ New Republic weighed in by describing tile book as a 'bold and immodest mixture of complete nonsense and perfectly reasonable corernon sense, taken from long acknowledged findings and disguised and distorted by a crazy, newly invented terminology'. iz Following close on the heels of the media pundits came the outraged ranks of the medical profession. The American Psychological Association, pointing out that t lubbard's 'sweeping generalizations' were not supported by empirical evidence, called for Dianetics to be limited to scientific investigation 'in the public interest'. 'If it were not for sympathy for the mental suffering of disturbed people,' Dr Frederick Hackcr, a Los Angeles psychiatrist declared, 'the so-called science of Dianctics could be dismissed for what it is - a clever scheme to dip into tile pockets of tile gullible with impul~ity. Tbe Dianctic auditor is but another name for the witch doctor, exph~iting a real need with phoncy methods.'~3 Many medical experts sourly pointed out that there was nothing new in Dianetics and that |tubl~ard was simply applying new words to common phenomena lung kmlwn and accepted in psychoanalysis. The 'engram' theory, they explaincd, was no more than a form of 'abrcaction', tile psychiatric term for releasing emotions associated with tile suppressed memory of SOlIIC past event. In the face of such criticism, Dianeticists rose ell masse to defend their founder and his ideas, bombarding the offending publications with indignant letters. Leading tile protest was Frederick L. Schumall, a distinguished professor of political science from ~,%'illiamstown, lXlassachusetts, who had visited Hubbard in New Jersey and been instantly converted. 'l Iistory has become a race between Dianetics and catastrophe,' he wrote to The .'Vezc l~rk Times. 'Dianetics will win if enough people are challenged, in time, to understand it.'~4 The constant publicity spread the word as effectively as a nationwide advert|zing campaign and the more the medical profession railed against Dianetics, the more people became convinced there must be something to it. Only two months after the publication of the book, .'~'ewsweek reported that more than fifty-five thousand copies had been sold and five hundred Dianetics groups had been set up across tile United States.Is If the cause of all the fuss was in any way bewildered by his sudttaen change of circumstances, he was certainly not going to show it. in truth, Itubbard had certainIv not anticipated that the book would ever be a bestseller, but he acted as if it was pre-ordained and slipped effortlesslv into the role of luminary. tie was, naturally, much in 162 Bare-b ~2ced Messiah demand for interviews and he proved to be a natural interviewee providing reporters with a multitude of picturesque quotes about his colourful life and exhausting years of research 'in the laboratories of the world '. He was unfailingly polite, amusing, ready to answer any question and always wiIling to pose for a photograph. lie also contrived to provide every reporter with a tit-bit of new information. t'arade magazine was able to reveal exclusively, for example, that 'the man behind the new mental health craze' was also 'the father of the world's first Dianetics baby'. Alexis Valetie tlubbard, Ron explained, had been carefully shielded in her pre-natal life frnm noise, bumps and parental conversations in order to protect her from engrams. The result, Ron happily announced, was that the baby was talking at three months, crawling at four months and was free froru all phobias. ~6 'Since the overnight success of his book Diant, tics,' the Los Angeles Dat'ly ~ws reported, 'I lubbard has become, in a few swift months, a personality, a national celebrity and tbe proprietor of the fastest growing "movement" in the United Statcs.'~7 Chr~pter I 0 Cornroles, ~'dnaps and Chaos 'The United States Government at this time [1950] attempted to monopolize all his researches and force him to work on a project "to make man more suggestible" and when he was unwilling, tried to blackmail him by ordering him back to active dutv to perform this function. Having made many friends he was able to instantly resign from the Navy and escape this trap. The Governn~ent never forgave him for this and soon began vicious, covert international attacks up{~n his work, all of which were proven false and baseless.' (11~ttat is Scietttolol,.,3' ? 1978 ) 11 I, 11 t1 11, Calif~rnia, ever enchanted by fads anti facile philosophies, was the natural habitat of [)ianctics and it ~'as to California that llubl~ard returned in triumph at the beginning of August 1950, to be feted by joyful Diancticists waiting to meet him at Los Angeles airport. Tx~: )'ears earlier, hc had lcft as a pemfilcss pulp fiction author; now hc wa.back as a celebrity with a book firnlly lodged at tile top of every bestseller list and a growing legion of folloxvers x~ho truly believed hitn to bca genius. 11c had a busy schedule ahead: apart from personal appearances and interviews, he was to lecture at the nex~ly-formed t{ubbard Dianctic Research Foundation of California, all the big bookstores wanted him for signing sessions and, most important of all, hc was to attend a rail, on Thursday 10 August at tile Shrine Auditorium. It promised to b, Dianetics' finest hour, for on that evening the identity of the xvorld's firs 'clear' was to be announced. The Shrine was a vast, mosque-like building with white stucc~ castellated walls and a dome in each corner, unforgettably characterizct by the music critic of the Lt Times as being of the 'nco-penal Bagdad school of architecturc. Built in 1925 by the Al ~lalaikatl Temple, it wa: the largest auditorium in Los Angeles and could scat nearly 6500 pcopl under a swooping ceiling designed to resemble the roof of a tent. ~,~,'hcl the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation booked it for the meetin: on 10 August, few people expected more than half the seats to be filled. 164 Bare-Faced Messiah Arthur Jean Cox, the young teletype operator who had met Hubbard at tile Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, left early for the meeting by streetcar and was surprised how crowded it was. 'More and more people got on at ever), stop,' he said. 'I couldn't believe that ez'etyone was going to the meeting but when we arrived at the Shrine on Royal Street, everyone got off. I was absolutely amazed. By the time I got inside there were only a few seats left. '~ The audience was predominantly young, noisy and goodhumoured. Many people carried well-thun~bed copies of 'The Book', j in the hope of getting them signed by Hubbard, and tilere was much 1 speculation about 'the world's first clear' and what he or she would be able to do. Dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Life, had sent reporters and photograpllers to cover the event and those cynics xvho had predicted a sea of empty seats looked on in astonishment as even the aisles began to fill. When L. Ron Hubbard walked on to the stage, followed by A. E. van Vogt, whom he had recently recruited, and other dircctor~ of the Foundation, tilere was a sponta~;cous roar from the audience, followed by applause and cheering that continued for several minutes. Hubbard, totally assured and relaxed, smiled broadly as he Iookcd around the packed auditorium and finally held up his ha/Ids for silence. The meeting opened with l|6hbard demonstrating Dianctic techniques. With the help of a pretty blonde, he showed how to induce Dianetic reverie and then he 'r/ul a grief incident' on a girl called l%larcia. While the audience obligingly responded when Ilubbard spread his arms for applause at the end of each demonstration, it all seenled a little too well rehearsed and there was ~nurmur of approval when someone stood up in tile audience and called out: 'Ladies and gentlemen, somehow I can't help but feel that all this has been pre-arranged.' Immediately people began shouting for Hubbard to demonstrate on someone from the audience and when a young mall jumped on to the piano in the orchestra pit, a chant went up: 'Take hbn! Take hhn !' Hubbard, not in the least flustered by this turn of events, invited him up on to tbe stage. The young man introduced himself as an actor whose father had studied with Freud, which fortuitously gave Hubbard the opportunity of mentioning Iris own connection with the great analyst, through his old friend 'Snake' Thon~pson. Sitting on facing chairs at the front of the stage, Hubbard made a determined attempt to audit the man, but he proved an unrcsponsive subject, answering almost ever>' question in the negative. The audiú ence soon became bored and restless and began calling, 'Throw him out, throw him out!' Hubbard, perhaps somewhat relieved, shook the man's hand and he stepped down. Cornroles, Kidnctps and ('haos 165 The atmosphere throughout had remained perfectly cordial, even if the shouted comments from the audieucc were increasingly irreverent. x,~,.'hen [iubbard was explaining the multitude of mental and physical benefits arising from successful auditing, someone yelled, 'Are your cavities filling up?' and caused a good deal of laughter. As the highlight of the evening approacbed, there was a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation in the packed hall. A hush descended on the audience when at last Hubbard stepped up to the microphone to introduce the 'xvorld's first clear'. She ,~vas, he said, a young woman by tile name of Sonya Bianca, a physics major and pianist from Boston. Among her many newly acquired attributes, hc claimed she had 'full and perfect recall of every moment of her life', which she would be happy to demonstrate. I le turned slowly to the wings on one side of the stage and said: 'Will you come out now please, Sonya?' The audience erupted once more in applause as a thin, obviously nervous, girl stepped out of the wings and into a spotlight which followed her to centre stage, where she was embraced by |lubbard. In a trcmulous voice she told the meeting that Dianctics had cleared up her sint~s trouble and cured her 'strange and embarrassing' allorgy to pain~. 'For days after I came in contact with paint I had a painful itching in nly eyebrows,' she stammcrcd. 'Now both conditions have cleared up and I feel like a million dollars.' She ansxvcred a few routine qucstio~ls from Hubbard, who then made tile mistake of inviting questions from tile audience: they had clearly been expecting rather more spectacular revelations. 'What did you have for breakfast on October 3 19427' somebody yelled. Miss Bianca understandably looked somewhat startled, blinked in the lights and silook her head. 'What's on page 122 of Dronetics. The Modent Scie~tce of Metttal llealth?' someone else asked. [%liss Bianca opened her mouth but no words came out. Similar questions came thick and fast, amid much derisive laughter. Many in the audience took pity on the wretct~ed girl and tried to put easier questions, but she was so terrified that she could not even remember simple formulae in physics, her own subject. As people began getting up and walking out of the auditorium, one man noticed that Hubbard had momentarily turned his back on tile girl and shouted, 'OK, what colour necktie is Mr Hubbard wearing?' The world's first 'clear' screwed up her face in a frantic effort to remember, stared into the hostile blackness of the auditorium, then hung her head in misery. It was an awful moment. Hubbard, sweat glistening in beads on his forehead, stepped forward and brought the demonstration swiftly to an end. Quickwitted as always, he proffered an explanation for Miss Bianca's 166 Bare-Faced Messiah impressive lapses of memory. The problem, Dianetically speaking, was that when he called her forward, asking her to come out 'now', the 'now' had frozen her in 'present time' and blocked her total recall. It was not particularly convincing, but it was the best he could do in the ci rcu msta noes. Fortie Ackerman, ~'hu was at the Shrine that night to see his client perform, summed up the fedings of man3- people who were there: 'I was somewhat disappointed not to see a vibrant woman in command of herself and situation. Sbe certainly was not my idea of a "clear". ,2 It would be some time before Hubbard produced anot|ler 'Clear' although his followers, in their enthusiasm, would frequentl3. declarj that their own protdgds had reached that blissful state. One of these was a fifteen-year-old girl of such remarkable pox~'ers that she was said to have made her bad teeth fall out and grown ncxv teeth in their place.3 But no one suggested presenting her at a public meeting. The ddbficlc at the Shrine was no more than a hiccup in the rising fortunes of L. Ron llubbard. \Vhen, after the meeting, Ackerman called on bis clicnt in his suite at the Frostona llotcl in Los Angeles, tiubl~ard clapped Ilim on the shoulttcr and boo~ned happily: 'Well, l:orric, I'm dragging down Clark Gablc's salary.' It was true: money was literall3, pouring in. !:or tile tirst few weeks after van Vogt agreed tu take over as head of the Lus Angeles Foutidation, hc recalled d~ing little hut tear open envelopes and pull out $50(} chcq/~es from people who wanted to take an autlitor's course.4 Only a few days after tile Shrine meeting, tile Foundation moved its headquarters into tile former official mansion of the go~'ernor of California, a sprawling building shaded by palm trees on the corner of South I I~juver and Adams, known as the 'Casa' because of its Spanish appearance. Although it cost $4.5 million, enough money had already come in for a duwn payment. Other branches of the Foundation h~d opened in New York, \Vashington DC, Chicago and Honolulu. But while money was pouring in, it was also pouring out and tilere was no accounting, no organization, no financial strategy or control. 'One day the bank manager called me,' said van Vogt. 'tie told me Mr Hubbard was in the front office and wanted to draxv a cashicr's cheque for S56,000 and was it all right to give it to him. I said, "He's the boss. "' Trying to hold all the reins, refusing to delegate, tlubbard became ever more authoritarian and suspicious of the people around him. 'He was having a lot of political and organizational prublen~s with people grabbing for power,' said Barbara Kave [not her real name], a public relations assistant at the l.os Angele~ Foundation. 'He didn't trust anyone and was highly paranoid. He thought the CI.~ had hit men Comnties, Kidnaps and (~httos 167 after him. We'd be walking along the street and I would ask, "Why are you walking so fast?" lle would look over his shoulder and say, "You don't know what it's like to be a target." No one was after him: it was all delusion.' Barbara Kave knew a lot about Ron's problems because she was having an affair with bim. Sbe was just twenty years old, an exceptionally pretty blonde and a psychology major. 'I wanted to get into public relations and an employment agency sent me along to the Foundation. They were looking for someone to answer the scurrilous attacks t}lat the Press was making on Dianetics. Ron interviewed me for the job and hired me straig}lt away. 'My first impression was of a husky, red-ha|red man with a full, flabby face - not by any means what one would call handsome. If i'd seen him on the street I wouldn't have given hinl a second look, but I soon learned he was a very creative, intelligent and articulate individual. He had a marvellous personality and was very dynamic. There was a lot going on in the office at that time and somcti~ncs when I worked late he took hie }lomc. One nigllt tic kissed me and, well, one tiling led to another, That's how it all started. I knew he was married, but I was very yotnlg at tile time and not as concerned witll otbcr nlen's wives as pcrbaps I should Ilavc been.' It was an affair squeezed into a tlectic timetable. 1Iubl~ard was lecturing at ttlc Fotmdatiun every day, seven days a xvcek. A. E. van Vogt, who had temporarily abandoned scictlcc-fiction writing, got up at 5.3{) each morning to drive down to the Casa to open tile office. !tubbard arrived an hour later and cbaircd a daily meeting of the staff instructors, most of wtlom had received their initial training in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At eight o'clock the first students arrived. Hubbard lectured from eight to nine and demonstrated from nine to ten. 'We had an auditorium that could seat 500 people,' said van Vogt, 'but the lectures were always crowded. You see tbere was nothing available for ordinary people at tbat time ill the wav of therapy. Analysts were a lost cause because they were already charging too much and we offered a complete course for $500. What sticks in my mind was how fluently Ron talked off the top of his head. Every morving it was something different. It anlazed me. Where had it all come from? That was the question in my mind. The only thoughts I ever got from Ron were that he had observed tbings they were doing in China and thought they were pretty good. I think he motlifietl Chinese ideas.' When hc was not lecturing in the evenings, Hubbard spent his time with Barbara, wllo soon found herself hopelessly in love. Stle was thrilled wtlen lie rented a 'love nest' apartment for them at tbc Chateau 168 Bare-Faced 31essiah Marmont Hotel, a fake castle on a hill overlooking Sunset Strip which was a favourite haunt of movie stars. The first night they spent tilere togetber, Ron seemed to want to reassure her of the permanence of their relationship. [te put his arm round her shoulders and took her through the apartment. 'This is your closet,' he said, 'this is your dressing-table, this is your toothbrush... 'Barbara was deeply touched. Two days later, Sara and the baby arrived in town from the East Coast and moved into the love nest. When Barbara turned up for work at the Foundation next morning, she found her to{}thbrush on her desk, along with the few personal possessions she had left at the apartment. ~,Vhile she stood staring at the pathetic little bundle with tears welling in her eyes, Hubbard came over and hissed his apologies, whispered that his wife was a 'bitch' and that there was nothing hc could do. 'I miss you,' he croaked. Then, to Barbara's amazement, be asked her if she would like to have dinner with }tim and Sara tbat evening. Speechless, she could do no more than sbake her head. Despite the hurt, Barbara could not bring [mrself to break off the affair. 'I was completely infatuated. I remember I said to my room-mate - wc had a small apartment in Beverly Hills -"If I ever tell you I am marrying this guy I want you to tie me up and not let me out of the door because hc's a lunatic." But I didn't trust m~'self not to do it because I was so encbanted by him. Being with him was like watcbing a fascinating character playing a role on a stage. I was never bt}rcd with him. lie was a magical, delightful man, a great raconteur, very bright and amusing and a very gentle, patient and sweet lover. 'At the same time I recognized early on that he was also deeply disturbed. Some of the things he told me were realIv bizarre, but I never knew what to believe. He said his mother was a lesbian and that he had found her in bed with anotber woman and that he had been born as the result of an attempted abortion. [to talked a lot about his grandfatller who could really hold his liquor and played a fiddle with the head of a negro carved on tile end, but he never talked about his father and never once mentioned he had children. I did not know he had a son until I read it in the newspapers years later.' Towards the end of September, Barbara accompanied Hubbard on a lecture tour in the San Francisco area in her capacity as public relations officer of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. To her acute embarrassment, Sara came to see them off at Union Station and ostentatiously kissed her husband goodbye, at the same time sweeping her eyes up and down Barbara's figure. Hubbard, too, was discomforted and drank a great deal in the club car of the train as it rattled north. Commies, tG'dnaps and Chaos 169 His spirits improved greatly when they arrived in San Francisco and he discovered that a welcon~ing barbecue party had been arranged at tile home of a local Dianeticist. Barbara, however, had an unhappy time - during the course of the evening she wandered into the kitchen and found ttubbard kissing his host's wife. Later that evening when she refused to sleep with him he lost his temper and ballowed, 'They're all against me!' That night, Barbara wrote in her diary: 'I see him now as vain, arrogant, self-centred and unable to tolerate any frustration .' They soon made it up, as a subsequent passage in her diary recorded: 'Things were better in Oakland. He took a penthouse apartment, I was with him constantly and he fell in love with me a little again and I felt closer to him than ever. He drank excessively and talked in proportion to his intake. Grotesque tales about his family mostly and his hatred of his mother, who he said was a lesbian and a wborc . . . tle is a deeply unhappy man. Ite said the only thing to show him affection for tile last few years, before he met me, was Calico, his cat.'s In October, Hubbard returned to the East Coast for a few days and was greeted at Elizabeth with the news that tbe Foundation was approaching a financial crisis - its monthly income could no longer even cover tile payroll - and Joseph Winter, tile man who had done so mucb to validate Dianetics, was about to resign. Winter was deeply disillusioncd with tile Itubbard Dianctic Research Foundation. tie no longer believed that Dianctics was free from risk - two pre-clears had developed acute psych{~ses during auditing - and he was extremely worried by the Foundation's continuing willingness to accept anyone for traioing as an auditor. 'People had breakdowns quite often,' said Perry Chapdelaine, a Sears Roebuck clerk from Mason City, Iowa, who was a student at Elizabeth. 'It was always bushed up before anyone found out about it. It happened to a guy on my course, a chemical engineer. They wanted to get him out of the school and I voltmteered to stay with him in an adjoining building. He never slept or ate and was in a terrible state, no one could do anything with him and in the end they took him off to an asvlunl.'6 'Apart from what he considered to be inherent dangers in alluwing anyone to audit anyone, Winter had also begun to doubt whether the state of 'clear' was realistically obtainable. Finally, he was frustrated by the fact that the Research Foundation was making absolutely no attempt to conduct any serious scientific research, which was one of its avowed aims. He had ;,oiced his growing concern on several occasions, only to be airily dismissed by }tubbard. It became clear to ~,Vinter that he had no alternative but to resign] 170 Bare-Faced 31essiah Art Ceppos was largely in sympattly with Winter and also submitted his resignation. Hubbard's reaction was typically immoderate. Angry and bitter at what he considered to be a betrayal by two of his earliest supporters, he spread the word that x, Vinter and Ceppos had been plotting to seize control of the Foundation and had consequently been 'forced' to resign.s It was not Hubbard's style to be satisfied with simply blackening the reputation of his enemies - he wanted revenge. An opportunity presented itself in tile unlovely form of Senator Joe McCarthy, the self-seeking demagogue who, in February 1950, had accused the State Departn~ent of being riddied with Communists and Communist sympathizers. The atmosphere of fear and suspicion generated during the witch-hunts that followed cast a shadow across America; almost nothing was worse, during the era of McCarth3'ism, than to be a 'Commit', or be thou,,4ht to be a 'Conmile'. On 3 November 1950, the general counsel of the l{ubbard Dianctic Research Foundation in Elizabeth contacted the FBI and said that Art Ccppos, president of tlcrmitage ttousc, was a Communist sytnpathizer who had recently tried to get hold of the Foundation's mailing list of sixteen thousand names which would bc 'valuable to anyone interested in circulating Commu~ist party literature'.'~ I lubbard stayed less than a week in Elizabeth and made little attempt t~ resolve tile financial crisis facing the Foundation. I lc had absolutely no interest in balance sheets and oldcrated on tile optimistic, if unrcalistic, belief that somehow everything would come out all right in the end. Further problems, of a more personal nature, arose when he rcturued to Los Angeles: he began to suspect his wife was having an affair. One evening he had insisted on an outlandish double date with his wife and his lover. Barbara, who hated the idea, reluctantly showed up to meet Ron and Sara at a Los Angeles restaurant in the company of Miles llollistcr, one of the instructors from the LA Foundation. 'I think Sara must have known what was going on,' said Barbara. 'She was very hostile. At one point in the evening we were talking about guns and she said I looked like the type to carry a Saturday night special.' The dinner party back-fired on Hubbard - his lover's date became his wife's lover. Nliles Hollister was twenty-two years old, tall, dark-haired and strikingly handsome, a graduate of Bard College in New York State, where he had been president of the student body, and a sportsman of some repute - he was the first man to land a swordtish off the coast of Florida using light tackle. In short, he was everytt~ing that Hubbard was not: young, attractive, sporting and well-connected. It was hardly surprising that Hubbard conceived a passionate loathing for the young man and predictable that he would Comttlies, Kietnaps attd C]1tlos 17 1 retaliate. His first move was curiously elliptical - he sunlmarily fired two of t Iollister's closest friends at the Foundation, claiming they were Commt~nist$. Jack Hornet, who was by then working at the Los Angeles Foundation, attempted to intervene on their behalf. 'They were both nice guys and highly trained instructors and I tried to get them off the hook. I went and confronted I lubbard in Iris office and said, "You can't fire those guys, you don't have any evidence." He ranted and raved, pacing up and down, and said, "You don't understand. I'm fighting a battle here. I might lose some people on the way, but l'nl going to win." 'tlubbard was willing to do anything, for him it was any means to an end. A couple of weeks later he got nlad at a fellow named Charlie Crail, who had helped set up the LA organization. They had some disagreement about how the place shotdd bc run. He called me and another guy into his office and told us to go and steal Charlic's Dianctics certificates. We told him we wouldn't do it and that he shouldn't count on us for that kind of operation. He coultln't understand it. As far as he was concerned, because he had signed the certificates ttley belonged to him. There were lots of incidents like that, but I was usually prepared to go along with tllcm because I felt his gcnit~s far outstlonc his craziness. r With his suspicions fostering, llubbard's relationship wittl Sara deteriorated rapidly. One night they tlad a violent row and Sara shouted at him, 'Why don't you just go off and spend the weekend with some pretty girl]' i~ubbard stormed out of the house, picked up Barbara Kave and drove to a motel in Malibu, where he spent much of ttlc weekend moodily swigging whisky. 'I Ic was very down in the dumps about his wife,' said Barbara. 'tlc told me how he tlad met Sara. }to said he went to a party and got drunk and when he woke up in the morning he found Sara was in bed with him. lie xvas having a lot of problems with her. I remember he said to me I was the only person he knew who would set up a white silk tent for him. I was rather surprised when we were driving back to LA on Sunday evening, he stopped at a florist to buy some flowers for his wife.' Barbara kept a meticulous diary in which she constantly analyzed and re-analyzed her affair with Hubbard, speculated on his nlental condition a~d recorded day-to-day drama. On Mondav 27 November, she noted that Hubbard burst into her office that morning 'tremendously etnotionally disturbed'. Sara had tried to conlmit suicide over the weekend by taking sleeping pills, he said, after Barbara had spoken to her on the telephone. tlc assumed Barbara had told her about their affair. 172 Ba re-t: aced ,~fi'ssmh It was not true. Barbara had telephoned to speak to Itubbard about Foundation business and had only exchanged a few words with Sara after learning Ron was not at home. l'tubbard would not believe it: he had audited Sara and 'recovered an engram' indicating that her suicide attempt was triggered by Barbara's telephone call. An argument inevitably followed and Barbara recontructcd the extraordinary 'highlights' in her journal, very mucb as if she was writing a pulp romance: '~: You make a habit of instilh'ng engrams, too, don't you? That's fine. That's good bd~aviour for the founder of Dianetics. nt: Isn't it exciting for you being a pawn on such a grand chess board? You are playing for the world. Can you think of anything more exciting? ~: I don't give a good God damn about the world. I want a single, gratifying, human relationship. n~: You couldn't have one. You're an ambitious woman. You crave power. You're a ~Iarie Antoinette, a Clcopatra, a Lucretia Borgia . . . you must have a Caesar or an Alexander. M~: No, I don't need a Caesar, though Caesar may need me. I know ynu now, Ron, and at this moment am closer to you than anvnnc has ever been. ~l~: (l lead htmg lnw) And knt~wing me ynu d~m't care for the any IBore. ~: I care for you in a different, new and exciting way. (tic put his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him.) n~: I shouldn't do this. (fie kissed me.) ~: You still care for me. HI: flow do you know? ~xe: You can't find your hat. You're distracted. nt: That makes you feel powerful, doesn't it? mE: It makes me aware of something interesting. You still want me. hE: Why? ~g: Because you need me. You need me more than I need you. ~ig: In 1939 I was very much in love with a girl. She felt that way too. When I knew she had a boyfriend coming up, I waited on th~ stairway with a gun, just for a moment. Then I said they are flies. I realized who and what I was and left. I told her I wouid leave her free to marry a sharpie with a cigar in his mouth from Xluncie, Indiana. Would you like to be left free? Mg: The alternative is a sharpic with a Kool cigarette from Elizabeth, New Jersey. HE: That was unwise, very unwise, of you to say that.' Barbara discovered just how unwise it was when, two days later, she received a terse message via Western Union: 'Would ad~'ise you to (~mml'es, Kidnaps and ( 'haos 173 forget all about me and the Foundation - Ron."l was in shock,' she recalled. 'Here was the man I was supposed to be having a great love affair with telling me I was fired.' A. E. van Vogt, meanwhile, was striving to keep the Los Angeles Foundation in business. He calculated that the six Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundations had spent around one million dollars and were more than $200,00(} in debt. At the beginning of November, while Hubbard was away on the East Coast, van Vogt cut the staff of sixty by half in an attempt to stay solvent. ttubbard was furious and began hiring indiscriminately the moment he returned: within a week, the payroll was back up to sixty-seven people. Van Vogt remonstrated, but tlubbard insisted that the extra staff was needed for research. 'Financial disaster was inevitable,' said van Vogt. ~ One of the research projects about which I lubl~ard was very excited was the aptly named 'GUK' programme. 'GUK' was a haphazard cocktail of benzedrine, vitamins and glutamic acid which Ilubbartl believed facilitatcd auditing. 'I recall Ron telling a meeting about this great breakthrough in Dianetics,' said Forrest Ackerman. 'Ite said hc had discovered a chemical way to audit yourself called GUK. It comprised huge qua~titics of vitamins which you took every two h~urs for at least txvcnty-four hottrs. If you took enough, hc said, it would release the cngrams within yotl without the ncctt for a partner. 'The Foundation rented a huge cnmplcx on Rossmore near Beverly and loatts of Diancticists were holed up there going through the GUK programme but it didn't last too long- 1 think it was a dead end.' In December, gok magazine published a scathing article under the headline 'Dianetics - Science or Hoax?' The text left the reader in little doubt as to wt2ich the magazine thought it was. 'Italf a million laymen have swallowed this poor man's psychiatry...' it began. 'Hubbard has demonstrated once again that Barnurn underestimated the sucker birth rate.' The tens of thousands of people who had swallowed }tubbard's doctrine were characterized as 'the usual lunatic fringe types, frustrated maiden ladies who have worked their way through all the available cults, young men whose homosexual engrams are all too obvious . . .' The article referred to the 'awe, fear and deep disgust' with which the medical profession viewed Dianctics and quoted a doctor at the famous Nlcnninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, who conceded that sufferers from mental malaise might find temporary relief from 'Dianetic hocus pocus' just as they sometimes do from hypnotism or voodoo. 'But,' he added, 'the greatest harm to a person would come not because of the vicious nature of Dianctic therapy but because it will lead them away from treatment x~hich they may badly need.' 174 Ba,e-Faced Messmh Hubbard's primary attraction, Look concluded, was that his ersatz psychiatry was available to all. 'It's cheap. It's accessible. It's a public festival to bc played at clubs and parties. In a country with only 6000 professional psychiatrists, whose usual consultation fees start at $15 an hour, l lubbard has introdoccd mass-production methods. Whctl~er such methods can actually IMp you if you're sick is a moot point.' As alwavs in the face of an attack, particularly from the direction of the despised media, committed Dianeticists closed ranks and there was no lack of cheer at the LA Foundation's Christmas party, artended by staff and students alike. Barbara Kaye turned up and was asked to dance by Hubbard. 'I need some coonselling, doctor, 'she whispered in his ear. 'What do you do with a pre-clcar who keeps dreaming she is in bed with you?' t lc grinned broadly and replied, 'I have been thinking of beginning a series of empirical tests on the result of substituting the reality for the dream.' x, Vithin a few days, their affair resomed: on New Ycar's I!vc, tlubbard missed tbc party hc was supposed to attend with Sara and spent the night with Barbara at her apartment on Dale Drive in Beverly I Iills. In January 1951, the Ncxv Jersey Board of Nlcdical Examiners instituted proceedings against the I lubl~ard Dianctic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, acct,sing it of teaching medicine xvith›~ut a licerice. The Fountlati~m hirctl an attorney who wits conlidcnt hc coultt defend the suit, bttt there was a strong feeling am~ng the directors that they shooltl 'skip'; inttt~irics were institutctl to lind a state whcrc they would bc m~rc welcome.t' 11ubl~ard, who clearly thou~zht the prospects in New Jersey h~okcd bleak, asked two reliable students at I!lizabcth John Sireborn and Grog I lcmingway, the youngest son of the writer to load all his personal possessions into his black Lincoln limousine and drive it to Los Angeles. In the interim, perhaps still hoping to save his marriage, he persuaded Sara and the baby to accompany him to Palm Springs, where he had rcntcd a single-storey adobe house with a small garden of flowering shrubs on Mcl Avenue. Ite wanted to get awav from the distractions of Los Angeles, lie explained, to start writing a sequel to DUzneth's. It was to be called Science of Surz'ival and would introduce faster, simplified auditing techniques. Hubl~ard, Sara and Alexis were joined in I'alm Springs bv Richard de l~Iille, son of the film director Cecil B.dc Nillie, who had recently been appointed tlubbard's personal assistant. '.Mthough it never occnrred to me at the time, 1 think mv name had something to do with it,' dc Nlillc acknoxvlcdgcd. '1 lc liked to collect celebrities. I had got into Dianctics as early as possible after reading the article in. lstounding and I was working at the I~A Foundation making poblications out of [ lubbard's lectures xvhcn hc asked the to g~ with him to Palm Springs. Com~nies, Kidnaps and Cha~s 175 'There was a lot of turmoil and dissension in the Foundation at the time; he kept accusing Commt,nists of trying to take control and he was having difficulties with Sara. It was clear their marriage was breaking up - she was very critical of him and he told me she was fooling around with t tollister and he didn't trust her.'13 Predictably, Sara did not stay long in Palm Springs - the tension was more than she could stand. Hubbard did not try to detain her and as soon as she and Alexis had departed for Los Angeles, tie sent a telegram to Barbara Kaye telling her he loved her and needed her. She caught a bus for Palm Springs on 3 February and was met by llubbard at the bus station. 'As he walked towards me,' she said, 'I could see that he was ill.' Kaye, who would later become a psychologist, said she made a clinical diagnosis of tlubbard during the weeks they spent together in Palm Springs. 'There was no doubt in my mind he was a manic depressive with paranoid tendencies. Many manics are delightful, productive people with tremendous energy and self-confidence. I lc was like that in his manic stage - enormously creative, carried away by feelings of omnipotence and talking all the time of grandiose schemes. 'But when I arrived he was in a deep depression. Hc had been totally unable to work on his book, which had been originally scheduled for publication that month. That's why bc had called me hc was hoping I could help him get througb his writers' block. tic was very sad and lethargic, lying around feeling sorry for himself and drinking a great deal. Sometimes he would go to the piano and fiddle around, improvising weird melodies of his own composition. lie thought that Sara had hypnotised him in his sleep and commanded him not to write. He told me that the people in Elizabeth had tried to "slip him a Mickev" in his glass of milk and another time they attempted to insert a fatal hypo into his eye and heart to try and stop him from ever writing again. Those were the engrams he was running. 'I tried to help him by using a technique I had learned at college, breaking down the problem into small parts and presenting it a step at a time. I got a block of butcher's paper and said to him, "Look, you don't have to write. Just sit down at this table and look at the paper and when vou don't want to look at it any more, get up and leave." He sat there fi~r ten minutes on the first day and this went on for several days until one day he picked up a pencil and began to write. Next day he was back at work, very excited and enthused about what he was doing. tie was singing and horsing around, talking, laughing and discussing ideas in the kitchen until three o'clock in the morning.' One of Hubbard's favourite topics of conversation was psychiatrists. One night over dinner at Mel Avenue, he told Barbara about an occasion when he had demonstrated auditing techniques to a group 176 Bare-b~ced Messiah of psychiatrists and one of them had said to him, 'If you claim to cure people by doing that, if you're not careful we'll lock you up.' He laughed excessively, took a bite out of a chicken leg and spluttered, 'They called me a paranoid, can you imagine it?' That night Barbara wrote in her diary: 'lMy blood ran cold as he was saying that. It was all I could do to keep froin weeping.' Barbara had been in Palm Springs for nearly three weeks when Ron began fretting that 'something was brewing' in Los Angeles. He decided that they should return immediately, even though the book was not yet finished. 'I didn't see him for a week after we got back,' Barbara said, 'then he turned up at my place at about five o'clock one afternoon, very distraught and pale, with his hair all over the place. He paced up and down in my room and told me he had discovered lx, liles and Sara in bed together. He was afraid that they were plotting with a psychiatrist in San Francisco to get him committed to a mental institution. Sara had telephoned Jack Maloncy, the general manager in Elizabeth, and said a doctur had recommended he should be treated for paranoid schizophrcnia. I lc said he had found letters proving that Miles was conspiring with Coppus and ~,Vintcr to get control of tile Foundation. "Plcasc don't ask mc anytiling," he said. "I'm in a very bad way. I'm going to the desert for a few days alone. Things are very bad."' I lubl~ard did not go off into the desert alone. lie had other plans: he was guing to get Sara committed before she committed him. But first hc had to kidnap :\lexis. On the evening of Saturday, 24 February 1951, John Sanborn was babysitting for eleven-month-old Alexis tiubbard at the Casa on Hoover and Adanls in Los Angeles. Several of the staff, Sanborn included, lived in one wing of the building. Sanborn and Greg Hemingxvay used to hang around with Hank and .Xlarge Hunter, who worked in the research department; they'd usually eat together in a little joint down the road called 'TIle Bread Line'. ~large, who was a friend of Sara's, had a baby daughter the same age as Alexis and Sara occasionally left Alexis with Marge when she wanted to go out. This particularly Saturday evening, Sanborn was tired and when there was a suggestion that they should all go to the movies, he offered to stay behind and look after the kids. He bad done it lots of tinms before, knew all about changing nappies and giving them bottles. Marge was grateful and went off with the ottlers, happy to have a night out, leaving Sanborn in charge of her daughter, Tam, and 'Lexie'. At about eleven o'clock there was an urgent rapping at the door. Sanborn opened it and found Frank Dessler, one of Hubbard's aides, standing on the doorstep wearing a long topcoat and wide-brimmed Cornroles, Kidnaps and Chaos 177 felt hat. His hands were thrust into his coat pockets in such a way that Sanborn .~'as positive he was carrying a gun. 'iMr Hubbard's coming,' Dessler rasped. 'Hc's here to get Alexis.' Sanborn thought it was a hell of a time of night to do it, but said nothing. A few minutes later, Hubbard came in, also wearing a topcoat and felt hat. 'x,~,'e're just taking Alexis,' he said. Sanborn led the way to the room where both children were sleeping. ttubbard leaned over and picked up a toy from Alexis's crib. 'This hers?' he asked. Sanborn shook his head and Hubbard threw it on fi~e floor. \Vhile they were getting the baby's things together, Sanborn started to say, 'Listen, if she wakes up in the night there's a certain routine - . .' but Hubbard cut him short. 'I don't care about that,' he snapped. 'We've got a nurse for her and we're taking her to Palm Springs.' He picked Alexis out of her crib, still asleep, and hurried away into the night. Sanborn wondered idly what was going on, but he went to bed soon afterwards. At one o'clock in the morning he was woken by someone shaking him violently and hc sat up with a start to find Nlilcs ttollister standing over his bed. If he had not been so sleepy, he would have laugbcd: ttollister, too, was wearing a long topcoat and felt hat and also appeared to be carrying a gun. 'Where did Ron take Lcxic?' he dcmantted. Sanborn rubbed his eyes and mumbled, 'Palm Springs''B'hcn did they lcave?' l lollistcr asked. It sccmcd that Sanborn did nut respond quickly enough, for I lullister sh~utcd 'l~'hcn did they leave?' Sanborn toid him and he hurried out of tbc room. A few minutes later, Sailborn heard t{ollistcr rowing his car outside. t lollistcr headed out of town at high speed in the direction of Palm Springs, which was exactly what ttubbard had intended him to do. By then, Alexis had been handed over to the twcnty-fourdlour xXestwood Nurses Registry in Los Angeles. tlubbard, posing as a businessman bv the name of James Olscn, had asked the agency to arrange for his cfqild, Anne-Marie, to be put in the care of a competent nurse for about a month because his wife had suddenly been taken seriously ill and business commitments required him to leave immediately for the East Coast. l~lelba 1McGonigel, the owner of the agency, was deeply suspicious but agreed to take the baby after 'Mr Olsen' had signed a 'To whom it may concern' statement releasing the agency of any responsibility. Shortly after one o'clock on the morning of 25 February, a black Lincoln ~trew up outside the Hubbards' apartment at 1251 Westmoreland Avenue in \Vest Los Angeles. Richard de t'x, lille was at the wheel, Hubbard and Frank Dessler were in the back. Inside the house, Sara sat in her nightgown by the telephonne, weeping into a handkerchief as she waited for news of Alexis. She jumped up in alarm when she heard a key scraping at the door, but her fear turned to anger when her 178 Bare-Faced Messiah husband and Dessler appeared in tbe doorway. 'Where's Lexie?' she screan~ed. Neither man said a word. They grabbed her by each arm, one of ttlcm clamped a hand over her mouth and they bustled her out of the house, across the sidewalk and into the back of the car, which drove off at speed. Sara fought like a cat in the back of the car, screaming and shouting at ttubbard, who in turn was shouting at her. At one point, when the car stopped at traffic lights, she tried to leap out and thereafter 11ubbard gripped her round the neck in a stranglehold while the argument continued. 'She was enraged at being hauled off and was fulminating insults in all directions,' said de ix, Iille. 'She was very bitter about thcir marriage and his conduct and Ron was fulminating against ~liles I lollister and her conduct.' At Los Angelcs city limit, Desslcr was dropped off and the Lincoln spcd on towards San Bernardino, where Ron hoped to get Sara medically examined and declared insane. 'She was eager to get the same opinion about him,' de Millc declared, 'but Ron held all the cards at that point.' There followed a ludicrous farce as they toured the dark streets of San Bcrnardino trying to find a doctor while Sara alternately scrcamcd at, and plcadcd with, her husband to tell her where he had taken .-\lcxis. Eventually, 1tubbard went into tile county hospital xvhilc dc Millc guarded Sara in tile car. 1tc returned after some few tninutes, apparently surprised and disgusted that tilere was no doctor available in the earl}' hours of tile morning willing to declare his wife insane. At dawn, the Lincoln could be seen trailing a cloud of dust as it headed east across the desert towards tile Arizona border; 1tubbard had ordered de Millc to drive to tile airport at Yuma. TIle angry squabbling in the back of the car had not let up for a moment. Sara swore again and again that she would have Ron arrested for kidnapping the moment she was free and he swore that if she did she would never see Alexis again. The mutual threats and recriminations continued whilc Hubbard was thinking hard how he could extricate himself from the situation. Parked in the watery early morning sunshine in a quiet corner of Yuma airport, the warring couple at last agreed on a temporary truce. Hubbard promised to release Sara and tell her where Alexis was if she signed a piece of paper saying that she had gone with him voluntarily. Sara tearfully signed and Hubbard scribbled a note to Dessler: 'Feb. 25. To Frank - This will authorize Sara to take Alexis to live with her when she has a house. L. Ron Hubbard.' He jotted down the name of the agency he said was caring for Alexis -'Baby Sitters Inc, Hollywood phone book' - and added, 'Give Sara the baby's address now so Sara can see her.' Commies, Kid~aps and ('ht~os 179 tlubbard and de l\lille got out of the car and Sara, still in her nightgown, drove back to Los Angeles clutching the piece of paper she believed would enable her to be re-united with her baby. But Hubbard had no intention of permitting such a reunion. 'tte believed tbat as long as he had the child he could control tile situation,' de lx, lille explained. x, Vhile Sara was on her way back to Los Angeles, Hubbard was standing in a telephone bootb at Yuma airport giving urgent instructions to Frank Dessler. 1tc was to arrange for Alexis to be collected from her nurse before Sara got there. No matter what it cost, he was then to hire a reliable couple to drive the baby to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Itubbard would meet her. It did not take long for Sara to discover that Ron had ntisled her but by tile time she had persuaded Desslot to reveal the baby's whereabouts it was too late. She arrived at tile Vv'estxvood nursery just two t~ours after Alexis had been taken away. Sara filcd a kidnapping complaint with Los Angeles police department, but ttubbard was luck}'- the police dismisscd the incidcnt as a domestic dispute which was nothing to do with them. tlubbard did not go directly to Elizabeth bccausc he wanted to , block any further attempts Sara might make to have him committed. Accompanied by the loyal dc Nillie, hc caught a commuter plane to Phoenix and frotn there they flew to Chicago, where tlubbard presented himself for cxamini;tion by a psychiatrist and a psychologist, both equally bemused. 'ttc wanted a testimonial from a professional who would say he was OK and that he was not a paranoid schizophrenc,' said de Nillie. 'tlc and I went first to a psycbiatrist who didn't like tbc smell of it. tie obviously thought he was being manipulated, so we just paid him $10 and Icft.'Then we went to a prominent diagnostic psychologist of that era who did some projective testing on 1tubbard and produced an upbeat, harmless report, saying that he was a creative individual upset by family problems and dissension and it was depressing his work and . so forth. It xvas very bland but Hubbard was delighted with it. The main value of it to him was that it didn't say he was crazy, so he could claim he had been given a clean bill of'health by the psychiatric profession.' Before leaving Chicago, Ilubbard called at the offices of the FB1 to alert them of his suspicions that one of his employees was a Communist. The man's name, he was far from reluctant to reveal, was Miles ttollister.~4 Hubbard and de Mille then flew to New York and caught a taxi to Elizabeth, where the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was still in operation, although besieged by creditors. They checked into a hotel and waited for Alexis to arrive. 180 Bare-Faced Messiah While they were there, a furttler complication entered Hubbard's already entangled private life: Polly Hubbard filed suit in Port Orchard, x, Vastlington, for maintenance, alleging that her former husband had 'promoted a cult called Dianetics', had authored a bestseller, owned valuable property and was well able to afford payn~ent of maintenance for his two children, Nibs, then sixteen, and Katie, fifteen. t lubbard responded by claiming that his first wife was not a fit and proper person to have control of the children because she 'drinks to excess and is a dipsomaniac'. On 3 March 1951, Hubbard, in his role as patriotic citizen, wrote to the FBI in Washington to provide the names and descriptions of fifteen 'known or suspected Communists' within his organization. Iteading the list were his wife and her lover: 'SARA NORTHRUP (HUBBARD): formerly of 1003 S. Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, CaliL 25 yrs. of age, 5'10", 1401bs. Currently missing somewhere in California. Suspected only. Had been friendly with many Commu~lists. Currently intimate with them but evidently under coercion. Drug addiction set in fall 1950. Nothing of this known to me until a few weeks ago. Separation papers being filed and divorce applied for. 'NII I~F.S I IOLI~ISTER: Sumcwherc in tile vicinity of Los Angeles. Evidently a prime mover but very young. Almut 22 yrs, 6', 1801bs. Black hair. Sharp chin, broad forehead, rather Slavic. Confcssedly a member of tile Young Cotnmut~ists. Center of most turbulence in our organization. Dissn~isscd [sic] in February when aftiliatious discovereft. Active and dangerotis. Commonl)' armed. Outspokcnly disloyal to tile U.S.' FBI director John Ettgar l loover replied promptly: 'l wish to thank you for tile information you have made available to this Bureau.'~s Four davs later, Hubbard kept an appointment, arranged at his request, with an FBI agent from the Internal Security Section. His intention was to press home his accusations against Hollister, as was evident from the agent's report: 't{ubbard advised that he felt that Communists within his organization were undermining its structure. He advised that he had turned over the names of several suspected Communists to the FBI office in Los Angeles. Hubbard could only recall the name of one of these individuals. He stated Miles Hollister was one of the individuals he suspected of being Communistically inclined. Concerning ttollister, Hubbard stated that he was instrumental in driving Hubbard's wife, Sara Elizabeth Northrup, to the point of insanity. tlubbard expressed considerable concern in connection with Hollister's influence on his wife. lie stated that his wife, as well as his Army .45 automatic, had been missing for several davs. . .' Cornroles, Kidnttps and ('haos 181 Later in the interview, }lubbard disclosed that Russia was interested in his work. 'Hubbard stated that he strongly feels that Dianetics can be used to combat Commtmism. Howc~'er, he declined to elaborate on how this might be done. 1 tc stated that the Soviets apparently realized the value of Dianetics because as early as 1938 a,~ official of Amtorg, while at The Explorers Club in New York, contacted him to suggest that he go to Russia and develop Dianetics there. 'In an apparent attempt to give credence to his statements, f[ubbard advised that he was recently psychoanalyzed in Chicago and was found to be quite normal...,it, The FBI agent conducting the interview could not agree: he concluded that llubbard was a 'mental , 17 case. During iris short stay in Elizabeth, l lubbard managed to alienate his old friend and mentor, John x,V. Campbell, who resigned from tile Foundation and thus joined Hubbard's lengthening list of encnlies. In Campbcll's view, I lubbard had become impossible to work with and was responsible for the ruinous finances and complete disorganization throughout the Dianctics moven~ent. (Desslcr wrote to |tubbard on 9 March to say that none of tbc staff at the LA Foundation had been paid for murL' than two weeks, but l lubbard seemed unconcerned.) Soon after .~Mexis arrived, 1 lubl~ard announced to dc .Xlillc that tbcy were g~fing to go south, where it was warmer, so that he coultt continue v,'ith Iris book. It had been snowing for weeks ill Elizahcth and dc Nlille was not in least the sorry to leave, even though 1 lubbartl had made it clear that it would be his responsibility to care for the baby. q;hcy were unlikely fellow travellers: a large, forty-ycar-oltt illan with a florid complexion, flaming red hair and a Kool cigarette constantly between his lips; his diminutive companion, twenty-nine years old, rather shy and very much in awe of tile older man; and a gurgling twelve-month-old baby in nappies just learning to walk. The three of them arrived in Tampa, Florida, in the middle of .'Xlarch. They took two rooms in a small hotel: Hubbard had a room to , himself, de .Xlille and the baby shared. 'It never crossed my mind that the baby should go in with him,' said de lx, lille. 'He was the leader and I was t14e follower. He gave the orders; I was privileged to serve.' Hubbard pretended to look for property in Tampa, but de Mille noticed that he seemed nervous and ill at ease much of the time. 'One evening I knocked on his door and he opened it carrying a loaded .45 service automatic. I must have looked a bit surprised because he said, "You shouldn't creep up on me like that, Dick." I didn't even know he had a gun until that moment.' A couple of days later l{ubbard said to de Nlille: 'I don't like tile 182 Bare-Faced Messiah way things feel aronnd here. I want to go to a place where I can breathe free. V,/'e're going to t iavana.' Havana in the early 'fifties, before Castro, was the fun capital of the '~Vestern hemisphere - a corrupt, colourful, hcdo~istic, wide-open city where tourists with money were guaranteed a good time. Americans did not even need a passport to enter Cuba and no one raised an eyebrow at tile two men who arrived from Florida in the company of an apparently motherless baby. They took a taxi downtown and checked into a hotel on the Paseo Marti, Havana's bustling main street. 'Hubbard managed to rent a very old Spanish typewriter', de Mille recalled, 'and was madly banging away' on it all night, while I was taking care of the baby and trying to sleep with the water pipes rattling in the wall. After we had stayed there a couple of nights, we went to a real estate agent and rented a ground-tloor apartment in the Vedado district, the Beverly tlills of llavana. Once we had moved in, we hired two Jamaican women to look after Alexis, which was a great relief to Hie. ' Comfortably installed in the apartment, tlubbard began working intensively nn his book, dictating into a recording machine. :\s was his usual habit, hc worked all night with little to sustain him but a bottle of rum, which was usually empty by daxvn. In the aftcrnouns, lie would often sit and talk with dc lXlillc. 'lie talked about himself a lot, but as is often truc with that kind of person tie ttidn't really give me any confidences: he was telling me his story as tie thought I ought to know it. 11c told nic about Jack Parsons and AIcistcr CrowIcy and all that. ttc didn't take any responsibility for the black magic rituals and blamcd them nn Parsons, but hc admitted hc was there. 'x, Vhat I didn't understand about him at the time was his lack of persocial attachment. I lc thought people were there to be used, to serve the user and didn't have any importance in their own right. I don't think he abducted Alexis, for example, with any intention of keeping her; tie was just using her to keep control of the situation. '~Vhen I first saw him at the theering at The Shrine auditorium I was very impressed. I thougilt hc was a great man who had made a great discovery and whatever his shortcomings they must be discounted because lie had the answer. tle promised heaven. He said I have the key which can open the door, do vou want to go there? It did not matter that his qualifications were suspect; he held the key. Actually, he was very widely read, a sort of self-made intellectual. I' don't think he did any research in the academic sense, but he knew a lot about Freud, hypnosis, the occult, magic, etcetera, and Dianetics grew out of that knowlctlgc. Commies, Kidnaps and Chaos 183 'I don't think Dianetics were necessarily successful because the time was riglit. The time is never wrong for a cultist movement. People present new ideas which they say are going to change the world and there are always a certain number of people who believe them. Lenin was the Itubbard of 1917. Hubbard was the Madame Blavatsky of 1950.' Hubbard's ability to concentrate on his work was subjected to a severe setback when the American newspapers of Thursday 12 April arrived in Cuba. Sara had at last blown the whistle and filed a writ at Los Angeles Superior Court demanding ttie return of her child. The headlines told the story: 'Cult Founder Accused of Tot Kidnap', "'Dianctic" Hubbard Accused of Plot to Kidnap Wife', 'Iliding of Baby Charged to Dianetics Author'. Most newspapers carried a picture of the distraught mother, smiling broadly. After digesting ttiis less than welcome news, Ilubbard sat down and wrote a lctter to Sara. It was dated 15 April and contained all the pulp writer's flair for fantasy: 'Dear Sara, I liave been in the Cuhan military hospital and I am being transferred to the United States next wcck as a classified scientist immune from interference of all kinds. Timugh I will be hospitalizcd probal~ly a long time, Alexis is getting excellent care. I see her every day. She is all i have to live for. My wits never gave way under all you did and let them do but my body didn't stand up. My right side is paralyzed and getting more so. I tiope niy ticart lasts. I may live a long time and again I may not. But Dianetics will last 10,00b years - for ttie Army and Navy have it BOW. My Will is all changed. Alexis will get a fortune unless she goes to you as she would tlicn get nothing. Hope to see you once niorc. Goodbye- I love you. ROB.~ The next day, Hubbard marched into the US Embassy in Havana, insisted on seeing the military attachd and asked for protection froni Communists who, he said, were trying to steal his research material. He appealed, as one officer to another, for help. The attach6, clearly sceptical, murmured something about 'seeing what he could do' and cabled the FBI in Washington for 'any pertinent information' about his wild-eyed visitor. Back came the reply that Hubbard had been interviewed on 7 March last and that 'agent conducting interview considered Hubbard to be mental case'. De Mille had not noticed the paralysis ttubbard mentioned in Iris 184 Bate-Faced Messt'ah moving letter to Sara, nor indeed was he aware that ttubbard was interned in a military hospital, but he certainly registered a drooping in Iris spirits. 'tte began to get very nervot~s again and complained that be wasn't feeling well. |te said he had to move downtown, so we broke our lease and mo~,ed into the Packard I lotel, which faced the park and overlooked the entrance to the barbour and the prison. There he proceeded to get sick. It was probably an ulcer, but he said it was the result of pain-drug hypnosis which Sara and x,~'inter had done way back.' The ne`.vs from Los Angeles was not calculated to make him feel any better. On 23 April, Sara filed for divorce, citing 'extreme cruelty, great mental anguish and physical suffering'. Her allegations were sensational. Apart froth charging ttubbard with bigamy and kidnapping, Sara claimed hc had subjected her to 'systematic torture, including loss of sleep, beatings, and strangulations and scientific experiments'. Because of his 'crazy misconduct' she was in 'hourly fear of both the life of herself and of her infant daughter, who she has not sccll f›)r two nlont}ls'. All the salaciot~s details were included in the divorce complaint. \Vhilc they were living at the Chatcat: lXlarmont, Sara said Ron had told her hc no longer '.,,'anted to be married to her but did not `.rant a divorce as it might damage his reputation. [lis suggcsti~m `.vas that she 'shoultl kill herself if she really loved him'. Subsequently he prevented her from sleeping for a period of four days and then i~ave . her sleeping t~ills 'resulting in a nearness to the shadoxv of dcatb'. Sara accused her husband of frequently trying to strangle her; on one occasion, shortly before Christmas 1950, bc had been so violent he ruptured the Eustachian tube in her left car. The follo`.ving month, at Palm Springs, he had started his car in gear while she was getting out and knocked her to the ground. As a result of tlubbard's bchaviour, the divorce complaint continued, tbe 'plaintiff and her medical advisers... concluded that said Hubbard was hopelessly insane, and, crazy, and that there was no hope for said Hubbard, or an,,, reason for her to endure further; that competent medical advisers recommended that said tlubbard be committed to a private sanitarian for pshychiatric observation and treatment of a mental ailment known as paranoid schizophrenia . . .,1:~ Caryl Warher, Sara's flamboyant |loIIvwood attornev, did his best to ensure the case received maximum publicity. The reporters covering the Divorce Court for the L.I Timt, s and the Exa//tt'ner were both women and early feminists. 'Before the case I made stare they knew what a bastard this guy Hubbard was,' said Warncr. 'I told tt~em be was a sattist, that he'd kept his wife awake f~r d:l,.'q an,] h~, ...... I } .... Commies, Kidnaps and ('haos 185 with cigarettes and that he was crazy, crazy like a fox. They could hardly wait for me to file the complaint. 'I liked Sara and Miles a lot. They eventually married and got a house in l\Ialibu and ~ve became friends; I remember they introduced me to pot. I believed Sara absolutely; there was no question about the truth in my opinion. When she first came to me with this wild story about hnw her husband had taken her baby I was determined to help her all I could. I telephoned Hubbard's lawyer in Elizabeth and warned him: "Listen, asshole, if you don't get that baby back I'm -,19 going to burn you. The first singe was inflicted by the damaging headlines in newspapers across the country the day after the kidnapping complaint was filed on 11 April. (The only unforeseen setback to \Varner's carefully laid plans was that President 11arry S. Truman inconveniently chose the same day to sack General Douglas MacArtbur for insubordination in Korea and thus rather hogged the front page.) The divnrcc itself received more extensive coverage and was better handled: the pictures of Sara smiling broadly were replaced by pictures of her weeping pitifully and being comforted bv her attorney. Iu Cuba, Ilubl>ard's condition regressed. '! think what really caught up with him,' said dc Millc, 'was that hc felt hc was losing control of the organization. That's what it amounted to.' There was no question that 1Iubbard's fortu,~cs had undergone a radical revision in the twelve montt~s since his emergence as the adored founder of Dianctics. Ills personal life was in disarray, t}~c Hubl~ard Dianctic Research Foundations in Elizabeth and I,os Angeles `.`.'ere disintegrating, most of tbe money bad somcho`.v been frittcrcd away, he was montl~s behind with his second book and hc was stuck in Cuba with Alexis and he had no idea what to do with her. What he needed was a saviour, preferably a saylout with plenty of ready cash. And there was one obvious candidate - Don Purcell, a businessman in x, Vichita, Kansas. Mr Purcell was not only an enthusiastic Dianeticist, he also happened to be a millionaire. T›~wards the end of April, Hubbard sent a telegram to Purcell from tlavana saying he needed help. De 3.1ille followed up with a longdistance telephone call urging Purcell to 'do something' because Ron was dying. Purcell acted without delay. He sent a private plane to Cuba with a registered nurse on board to collect Ron and Alexis and bring them back to Kansas. (De Mille had been instructed to stay behind and finisb transcribing Ron's plastic recording discs. ) As a follower of Dianetics, Purcell was delighted and honoured to be able to play host to L. Ron Hubbard in Wichita. It was a pleasure that would be shortdived. Chapter 11 Bankrollhtg and Bank~~tptcy 'The money and glory inherent in Dianetics was entirely too much for those with whom I had the bad misfortune to associate myself... including a woman who had represented herself as my wife and who had been cured of severe psychosis by Dianetics, but ~vho, because of structural brain damage would evidently never be entirely sane . . ú Two of the early associates, John W. ~Campbcll and J.A. Winter, bocathe bitter and violent because I refused to let them write on the subject of Dianetics, for I considered their knowledge too slight and their own aberrations too broad to permit such a liberty with the science... Fur coats, Lincoln cars and a young man without any concept of honor so far turned the head of the woman who had been associated with me that on discovery of her affairs, she and these otl~ers, hungry for money and power, sought to take over and control all of Dianctics.' (L. Ron l tubl~ard, Dittnett'cs...'kx-ibt~ts, October 1951) /1 ~ /1 ~, I, D~n~ Purcell was a shy, unassuming man who was once a short-order chef in a little fourteen-stool care opposite the Orpheum Tt~eater in downtown ~Vichita before he made his fortune in oil antt real estate during the post-war boom. Very tall and thin - he was usually described as all 'skin and bones' - fie turned to Dianetics in the hope of finding a cure for his chronic constipation. ~ He attended an auditor's course at Elizabeth with his wife in the autumn of 1950 and returned to V~"ichita brimming with enthusiasm for the new science. Although he never menti~ncd if it had eased his constipation, he did frequently claim that DianetiCs had given him the ability to work a twenty~two-hour day, which was useful to a real estate developer in x, Vichita in 1951. The farming town in the heart of the winter wheat belt had been transformed by the arrival of the oil and aircraft industries and it was expanding at a phenomenal rate. Roads, houses, schools, churches, office blocks and factories were being built everywl~ere. Between 1950 and 1951, the population of ~,Vichita rose by more than 30,000, pushing the figure above 200,000 for the first time. Bankrolling antt Bankn~ptcy 187 PurcelPs real estate company, Golden Bond Homes, was building 150 houses in the south-west of the city, an ambitious development which put him in the burgeoning ranks of Wichita's post-war millionaires. Yet despite his success and wealth, he never aspired to social prominence in the town; imbued with the quintessential hardworking, godfearing values of the mid-West, he preferred to remain quietly in the background, perfectly content with his reputation as a businessman of integrity and a good Christian. Like most early Dianeticists, Purcell was a true believer, both in the efficacy of the science and the genius of its founder. When he heard tile Elizabeth Foundation was in difficulties, he immediately offered to 'lend a hand', with both short-term finance and practical business advice. He also provided the funds to set up a branch of the Foundation in Wichita, in a two-storey building sandwiched between Hope's I lamburger Hut and an auto repair firm at 211 West Douglas Avenue, Wichita's main street3 It was, then, entirely to be expected that Purcell would respond unhcsitatingly to I tubbard's dramatic plea for help. Ron told him over the telephone from Ilavana of Iris plans to set up the headquarters of the I)ianctics movement in Wichita and, as far as Purcell was concerned, if tile great L. Ron Ilubbard chose to make his home in Wichita, it could do the town nothing but g{~od. Ilubbard stepped from PurcelPs chartered aeroplane at Wichita airport wearing a lightweight tropical suit and a cream silk Ascot, an item of apparel not often seen in Sedgwick County. Purcell was waiting to greet him, along with a reporter from the l~'iHzita Eagle, to whom Ron delivered a carefully prepared statement designed to appeal to the good folk of %Vichita. After Los Angeles and tlavana, Wichita might have appeared somewhat lacking in glamour, but tlubbard had the good sense not to make invidious comparisons. 'Dianctics is a pioneer mental science,' he announced, 'therefore it is only natural that we should prefer to centralize where the American pioneering spirit and cultural interests are still high. It is impossible to take Dianetics to every interested person, so we have established our headquarters here where those interested can come to Dianetics.'$ He also took the opportunity to point out that seventy per cent of insane people throughout the world could be returned to norreality with Dianetics. 'Hope for Insane is Claimed for Dianetics by Founder' was the headline in the evening edition. Itubbard checked into the Broadview Hotel, where Purcell had reserved and paid for a suite for him. Alexis, who was becoming accustomed to a succession of surrogate mothers, remained in the care of the nurse who had looked after her on the plane from Havana. The two men were soon discussing plans for the consolidation of Dianetics 188 Ba~ 'e- Fa c e d Me s s ia h in Wichita, plans that would be speedily brought to the attention of the FBI. On 4 May, 1951, the FBI agent in Wichita received an anonymous letter: 'Investigate No 211 x,%'est Douglas, under the "Ilubbard Dianetics Research Fot~ndation", they are conducting a vicious sexual racket. There are four women and a larger numt~er of men. If they have moved go after them. They are bad, I know because I am one of the victims...' Tt~is execrable piece of rumour-mongering was added to Hubbard's FBI file, along with a memo from the special agent in charge in ~Vichita noting: 'General gossip at ~"ichita has it that the Los Angeles brauch of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundatiun went broke and the cost of operation in New Jersey necessitated establishing hcadctuartcrs of the organization in the central United States . . ."~ Hul~bard did not know he had bccn accused of running a 'vicious sexual racket', which was probably just as well because he already had so much to worry about that hc was finding it exceedingly difficult to give his full attcnti›~n to the affairs of the Fotmdation. The main problem, entirely of his own making, was that his private life remained in ct~mplcte turmoil. \Vhilc his first wife was pursuing him for maintenancc and hc was still involved in a messy divorce from Sara, ttubbard invited his lover in Los Angeles to be his third wife. Almost as soon as he arrived in \Vitchita he had telephoned Barbara and asked her to join him, folloxving up with a cable: 'Do r~oT TI|INK I SIIOULD OFFER YOU ANITIIING LESS IIONOIL-~BLE TIIAN MARRIAGE. SIIOULD YOU CONSIDER IT I MUST DOL'BLY CLARIFY EXISTING STATL'S TO BE SURE. WITII ALL MY lIEART AND MUCII LOVE. RON.' Barbara realized that Ron remained as paranoid as ever, as a second cable arrived at her Bcverlv Hills apartment tWO hours later: 'BETTER KEEP OL'R PI.ANS A CLOSE SECRET AS I DO NOT KNO%V WII,~.T TItEY WOULD TRY TO DO TO YOU IF TliEY KNEW. BE VERY CAREFUL. ALl, l~lY LOVE. RON .' Barbara had no idea who 'they' were and was understandably concerned about marrying a man accused of bigamy, kidnapping and torture. 'Darling, yo she is in a mess o' trouble,' she replied by letter. . 'Do you dare give me any idea of the sort of future awaiting us? God knows I don't want what could be a wonderful and productive partnership between us to wind up with vou in jail or continually on the lain from the law . . .,s ' ~,Vhile Barbara was pondering Ron's proposal, Sara filed a further complaint in Los Angeles, claiming she had been unable to serve divorce papers on her husband because he had fled to Cuba. To support her petition, she included the letter Hubbard had written to her from Havana and a letter tlate, cl ? ~,I ..... ~..~ t_ _~ .... :_ _ ~ r , ú Bankrolling and Bankn~p t cy 189 first wife in Bremcrton. Polly had read about the divorce in the newspapers and felt moved to offer her sympathy. 'Sara, if I can help in any way, I'd like to,' she wrote. 'You must get Alexis in your custody. Ron is not normal. I had hoped you could straighten him out. Your charges probably sound fantastic to the average person, but I've been through it - the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits which you charge - 12 years of it.' The newspapers were happy to report this further development in the domestic troubles of the 'mental-moven~ent mogul', as Hubbard was described with laboured alliteration in the L4 Times. In x, Vichita, State r~'Iarshal Arthur W. Wermuth was surprised to read that Hubbard had 'fled to Cuba' because he had just read of his arrival in Wichita in the Evenhtg Eagle. Wermuth, who happened to be a well-known local war here, sent a message to Los Angeles acquaintlug the authurities with Hubbard's whereabouts. Next day the newspapers reported that the 'missing mental-movement mogul' had been 'discovered' in Wichita by the 'legendary one-man armv of Bataan'. Prompted by the news from Wichita, on 14 lXlav Sara's attorney filed another petition asking for Hubbard's assets in Los Angeles to be placed in receivership. The petition noted that Hubbard had been found 'hiding' in Wichita 'but that he would probably leave town upon being detected'. Coincidentally, on the same day l tubbard despatched a seven-page letter to the Department of Justice in Washington, clearly seeking revenge against Sara. Even for Itubbard, the rambling, venomous missive x~'as a breathtaking concoction of lies, vituperation and wild aBcgations rendered all the more dangerous by the rise of McCarthvism. Describing himself as 'basically a scientist in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena', he accused Communists of destroying his half-million dollar business, ruining his health and withholding material of interest to the US Government. The architect of his misfortune was none other than 'a woman known as Sara Elizabeth Northrup . .. whom I believed to be my wife, having married her and then, after some mix-up about a divorce, believed to be my wife in COHIHIoB ]aw'. Sara, he stressed, was responsible for breaking up the 'American Institute of Advanced Therapy', an organization he had established in 1949, and the follo~ving year she was the primary cause of all the trouble at the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, along with Art Ceppos, who was "'formerly" a member of the Communist Party' and Joseph ~,Vinter, who 'seemed to have Communist connections' and was a 'psyche-neurotic' who had been discharged from the US Army l\ledical Cores. 190 Bart'-Fa~'ed Messrob Playing the role of fearfully browbeaten husband, he said his 'alleged wife' had caused }lint to make out a will leaving her shares in the copyrights and Foundations. Later, when he was asleep at his home in New Jersey he was 'slugged'. Ite had unwisely done nothing about it at tile time as he had no witnesses, but his h~alth had been poor thereafter. Arriving in Los Angeles, his wife left their baby unattended in a car and be was arrested for it -'I could never understand why.' Much worse was to come. 'On Decernber 5, while asleep in my apartment on North Rossmore in Los Angeles, I was again attacked and knocked out. When I woke I debated considerably about going to the police but was again afraid of publicit3, for again I did not know who might have done this. It never occurred to me to suspect that my wife had an3, part in this. 'I had become so ill by January 1st and was so long overdue in writing my second book that I went to Palm Springs. I returned from Palm Springs in late February to find my wife apparently ill, in bad mental condition, and mv baby more or I~ss forgotten in a back room of the Los Angeles Foundation. I instantly to~lk steps, what steps I could, to give tny wife help. She seemed to rectal'or. 'I was in n~y apartntent on February 23rd, about two or three o'clock in the murning when the apartment was entered, I was knocked out, had a needle thrust into my beart to give it a jet of air to produce "coronary thrombosis" and was given an electric shock with a 110 volt current. This is all very blurred to me. I had no xvitncsscs. But only one person had another key to that apartment and that was Sara.' ttubbard went on to describe how hc had found love letters to his wife from/Miles 1 tollister, a 'member of the Young Communists', and an ominous telegratn containing the pbrase 'Lombardo should live so long'. Lombardo, he explained, was a name Sara sometimes called him. Then he described how they had plotted to have hint cotnmitted and how he had tried to get hi's wife axvay by taking her to Palm Springs. She consented to go with him, he said, and he had }ter signed statement to prove it. Sara's real motive in filing for divorce,he claimed, was to get control of the Foundation. All the attacks she had mounted against him had held up research he was intending to offer to the Government. 'In August 1950 I found out a method the Russians use on such people as Vogeler, 1Mindszenty and others to obtain confessions. I could undo that method. My second book was to have shown how the Communists used narcosynthesis and physical torture and why it worked as it did. Further, I was working on a technology of psychological warfare to present it to the Defense Department. All that work was interrupted. Each time I tried to write_ a nv,,~ ~ttqob ...... I ...... t ~ , Bankrolling anti Bankn~ptt), 19 1 ttubbard declared his concern to prevent Dianetics falling into the hands of Communists and appealed for a 'round-up' of the 'vermin Communists or ex-Communists' who were trying to take over the potent forces of the Foundati{m. He suggested the 'round-up' should start witIt Sara: 'I believe this woman to bc under heavy duress. SIte was born into a criminal atmosphere, her father having a criminal record. Iter half*sister was an inmate of an insane asylum. She was part of a free love culony in Pasadena. She had attached herself to a Jack Parsons, the rocket expert, during the war and when she left him he was a wreck. Further, through Parsons, she was strangely intimate with many scientists of Los Alanto Gotdos [Alamogordo in New Mexico was where the first atomic bomb was tested]. I did not know or realize these tbings until I myself investigated the matter. She may have a record . . . Perhaps in your criminal files or on the police blotter of Pasadena you will find Sara Elizabeth Northrap, age about 26, born April 8, 1925, about 5'9", blond-brown hair, slender . . . I have no revenge motive nor am I trying to angle this broader than it is. I believe she is under duress, that they have somctl~ing on her and I believe that under a grilling she would talk and turn state's evidence.' I lubl~ard made it clear he felt his life was in danger and concluded: 'Frankly, from what bas happened, I am not certain I will live through this. If I do not, know that I have only tbesc enemies in the entire world. '›' If llubbard's letter bad been a little more moderate and his FBI tile not already voluminous, his letter might easily have resulted in Sara's arrest. The 'Red Scare' was at its height and the American people bad succumbed to an irrational fear of subversion and disloyalty encouraged by McCarthy, the cold war, Korea, a series of sensational spy trials and the Truman administration's loyalty programmc. 5lany reputations and careers were destroyed by accusations a great deal milder than those levelled by Hubbard against his wife. But by 1951, Hubbard was well known to the FBI. The opinion of tbe agent who had interviewed him in Newark that he was a 'mental case' figured prominently in his file, as did Sara's divorce allegations that he was 'hopelessly insane'. It was a diagnosis with which the FBI was inclined to concur and Hubbard's letter was tucked into his file and ignured, no doubt after the filing clerks had had a good laugh. At the end of 1Xlay, Barbara Kaye arrived in x, Vichita, having decided that she would marry Ron. 'If love can break men's hearts it can restore them too,' she had written to him. 'Yours shall be regenerated with my love and it will grow stronger.' She found a hand-written note from Ron waiting for her at the 192 Bate-Faced Messiah Its cheery tone encouraged her greatly and she was thus doubly shocked by Hubbard's appearance when he showed up at the hotel soon after she had checked in. 'He had visibly deteriorated both physically and mentally. He was extremely unkempt, like a street person. His fingernails were uncut and his hair was long and stringy; he looked like Hoxvard ttughes in his last days. He talked in a monotone all the time and seenled on the verge of tears; he was obviously clinically depressed. He told me he had borrowed $50 from Purcell to pay for my room but no one was to know I was in Wichita because Purcell had opposed me coming.' Hubbard took her out to a jewellery store to buy her an engagement ring, but she was already having second thoughts. 'I felt extremely distanced from him because he was so strange, he was like a different person. I began to think I could never marry this man; I was frightened of him.' Next morning, Barbara hurriedly returned to Los Angeles, leaving I lubbard a note saying she didn't want to come between him and his patron. As tile prospective third Mrs t Iubbard swept out of town, Sara arrived to parley for tile return of Alexis. 'She got the baby back', said Richard de ~lille, who had by then joined Hubbard in x, Vichita, 'by agreeing to let him divorce her and bv not saying anything bad about him. ,7 On 9 June 1951, Sara signed a handwritten statement scraxvled on the notepaper of The t lubbard Dianctic Foundation lnc of x, Vichita agreeing to cancel her receivership action and divorce suit in California in return for a divorce 'guaranteed bv L. Ron tltd~bard' in mid-June. Two days later she signed a typed statement categorically retracting the allegations she had made against her husband: I, Sara Northrup }lubbard, do hereby state that the things I have said about L. Ron Hubbard in courts and the public prints have been grossly exaggerated or entirely false. I have not at any time believed otherwise than that L. Ron Hubbard is a fine and brilliant man. I make this statement of my own free will for I have begun to realize that what I have done may have injured the science of Dianetics, which in my studied opinion may be tbe only hope of sanity in future generations. I was under em~rmous stress and my advisers insisted it was necessary for me to carry through an action as I have done. There is no other reason for this statement than my own wish to make atonement for the dan~age I may have done. In the future I wish to lead a quiet and orderly existence v~'ith my little girl far away from the enturbulating influences which have ruined my marriage. Sara Northrup I lubbard. Bankrolling anti Bankn~ptcy 193 TIm statement bore all tile hallmarks of having been written by ttubbard, even down to the use of one of his owtl invented words, 'enturbulating'. The English language was insufficiently rich and diverse for 11ubt~ard and he often made up new words to compensate for its inadequacies - to 'enturbulate' was a neologism meaning to 'bring into a confused state'. On 12 June, ttubbard was awarded a divorce in Sedgwick County Court on ttle basis of Sara's 'gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty'. TIle court agreed to an emergency hearing after }tubbard testified that the breakdown of the marriage had brought about severe damage to his health and peace of mind and tie feared that any delay would cause tlim to 'suffer further nervous breakdown and impairment to health'.$ Sara did not give evidence in court. All she cared about was that she was awarded custody of Alexis. Clutching her baby, she caught tile first Greyhound bus out of Wicbita and out of ttlc life of L. Ron 1 lubbard. It did not take Don Purcell long to discover the role Hubbard expected hinl to play as president of ttlc Ilubbard Dianctic Foundation of Wichita -- to provide nloncy, uncomplainingly. 11ubbard, tile vice-president and ellairman, was spending Purccll's nloncv at a prodigious rate. tic had nloved into a large, comfortably furnistled franle house on North Yale opposite ttle snooty Wictlita Country Club and in the heart of a select residential area called Sleepy t lollow. Following Barbara's abrupt departure he llired a conlcly !lousekeeper, a lady in her early forties, wtlo very soon succumbed to his advances and as a consequetlce was sumnloned to his bed most nights. 'Ron enjoyed women,' explained Richard de Nillie. 'tte didn't see any point in having an attractive woman around without making use of her.' At the Foundation on West Douglas, staff were hired and fired arbitrarily as Hubbard's attention and enthusiasm flitted from project to project, from one grandiose scheme to anott~er. tte had a fiction writer's gift for dreaming up impressive titles for every venture, even if it only existed as an idea. Thus, courtesy of Itubbard, Withira was briefly ttle home of an organization called 'The International Library of Arts and Sciences', which no doubt caused sonle head-scratctling among the local farmers and factory workers. Five-hundred dollar training courses for Dianetic auditors were run on a continuous basis and although there was still a reasonable number of applicants nlaking tllcir wav to Wichita, the excitenlent of tbc previous summer had faded away. To thousands of people across America, Dianetics was no mute than a passing whim. 194 Bare-Faced Messiah A major conference of Dianeticists organized in Wichita at the end of June 1951 only attracted 112 delegates, but |tubbard continued to behave as if the movernent was going from strength to strength. Heedless of demand, tile Foundation publisl~ed a never-ending stream of booklets, bulletins and pamphlets on arcane elenlents of the science -'Child Dianetics', 'Handbook for Pre-clears', 'Lectures on Effort Processing', etcetera - which piled up at 211 \Vest Dooglas despite the best efforts of the staff to press them on to eveD, visitor. Hubbard's second book, Science of SuH'ival, was published by the \Vichita Foundation in August. Dedicated to 'Alexis Valetie Hubbard, For \Vhose Tomorrow May Be Hoped a World That Is Fit To Be Free,' it delved into metaphysics and reincarnation and elaborated on what HUbbard called tile 'tone scale', a device for measuring an individual's emotional state and a key to tile interpretation of personality. tlubbard provided a veneer of authority for the book by acknowledging tile influence of a long list of philosoptlers from Aristotle and Socrates, through Voltaire and Descartes, to Freud and Korzvbski. But despite their contribution, S~'ient'e of Survival significantly failcd to follow Dianetics on to the ,Yew }~rk Times's bestseller list. For students taking courses at the Foundation, the highlight of tile wcck was the lecture l lubbard delivered every Friday evening. t{elen O'Bricn, a yotmg woman from Philadelphia who had negotiated a bank loan in order to train as a professional auditor, described tile scene: '1tc would appear at the back of tile crowded hall and walk down the centre aisle to the platform, amid applause. It was well staged. He spoke against a background of rich drapes, bathed in spotlights that set off his red hair and weird, enthusiastic face . . . 'Hubbard was a marvellous lecturer, and he spoke quite frankly then, introducing the soberest and wildest ideas without apology, seeming to share the uproarious delight of some of the members of bis audience at his flights of intellectual audacity. [iis rhetoric had a tempo that usually carried everyone along in at least pseudo acceptance of everything he said, although some of it was far afield of the "science of mental health" which had brought us all together. ,9 Helen O'Brien soon became a member of Hubbard's 'honour guard', a small group of awed, intensdy loyal, admirers who considered it the highest privilege to be in Ron's presence. 'It was not like being with a human being,' she said. 'tie was shaking with cnerg).' and there was a sort of light around him, a cloak of power. 'Sometimes at his house be would play the organ and sing songs he had composed in college. Ron told me quite a bit about his life. tie said his father was some sort of conman, a very shadow), kind of character, who he suspected was trying to take over Dianeticg R~n Banktolling and Bank,uptcy 195 said he'd destroy the whole thing if that happened. tie talked a lot about Sara. When she ran off with another man Ron followed them and they locked him ill a hotel room and pushed drugs up his nose, but he managed to escape and went to Cuba. q{e was not promiscuous, but he was available sexually. I had sex with him one night. Several of us were working late with him, taking notes and we all went out to a coffee shop. Ron and I left the ott~ers there and went up to bed. It was real matter of fact.r Among the motley collection of well-meaning people who trekked to Wichita in the summer of 1951 was a slim, pretty girl from Houston, Texas, by the name of Mary Sue Wbipp. Born in Rockdale, lx,,lary Sue was a nineteen-year-old coed at the University of Texas intent on making a career in petroleum research. She arrived in \Vichita with a friend, Norman James, who had read about Dianetics in Astounding and had pershaded her to join him on the course. Blue-eyed and auburn-halted, lX'lary Sue aroused predictably mixed fcglings at the Hubbard Dianctic Foundation. Most of the men liked her; most of the women did not. 'Sbe was a nothing,' said |lclcn O'Bricn sourly. 'Her favourite reading was Tn~e Con. li,ssion .' It did not take long for tlubbard to register the arrival of this attractive pre-clcar from Texas and he took a partictdar interest in her progress. l\lary Sue was flattered by the great man's attention and within a matter of a few weeks she had moved in with him at 910 Nortb Yale, to tbe furv of the housekeeper, who found herself relegated to more conventional duties. Mary Sue rapidly qualified for her Hubbard Dianetic Auditor's Certificate and joined the staff of tile Foundation as an auditor, all thoughts of a career in the petroleum industry abandoned. Auditing was the major activity at the Foundation, for staff and students alike. Everyone was auditing everyone else and someone, naturally, had to audit Hubbard. This dubious honour was variously bestowed and on one occasion it passed to Perry Chapdelaine, who was working as a research assistant at the Wichita Foundation. 'I assumed I would have to stick rigidly to the techniques we had been taught at the Foundation,' said Chapdelaine, 'but it was very different from what I expected. He just lay down on the bed in his bedroom, closed his eves and started to talk. I sat on a chair by the bed and snapped my tqngers a time or two, like we had been taught, directing him to go back to the earliest moment he could recall but he opened his eves, glared at me, closed his eyes again and continued talking. ||e v~'as relating, very vividly, what was happening to him as a clam or a jellyfish, in terms of effort and counter-effort- It was fascinating, but I didn't know what to make of it. I learned then, 196 Bwe-Faced 31essiah pretty well, what he meant by research - it was him talking and the auditor listening. 'The problem for many people involved in Dianetics was that they accepted every word Hubbard said as literal truth, rather than a framework around which you could do things. I remen~ber at a lecture one night tie told people if they did this or that they would no longer need to wear glasses and that they would be able to throw them away forever. tte pointed to a big bowl at the bottom of the steps leading up to the rostrum and at the end of the lecture people were throwing their glasses into this bowl. Don Purcell was one of them. 'ltubbard thought it was a great joke. tte told me about it afterwards, making a snide remark about Purcell and describing how he took off his glasses, threw them into the bowl and groped his way out of the lecture hall. Itubbard was laughing that people would do something like that just because of what he said. Of course, it didn't work. Like every one else, Purcell had a nexv pair of glasses in a couple of days. 'There was no question I lubbard had an extraordinary ability to transmit to other people. I~le audited me once in his front room in x. Vichita and it was the one and only time in my life I had a perfect perception of being in embryo. i'll never furget it, it was the most amazing experience of my whole life.'~l In August, |{ubbard had to submit to the indignity of anuthcr medical examination to avoid losing his pension from the Veterans Administration. 'This veteran gives a long history of three years of sea duty,' the examirling physician noted in his report. 'It was gathered from what tie says that the duty was rather strenuous, his first assignment in 1942 being with a merchant ship which was assigned to transporting troops. Later, he states, tie served with escorts in the North Atlantic. One one occasion, in 1942, he fell down a ladder and struck his rigtit hip, but there were no facilities aboard ship and it was necessary for him to go on wittyout anv aid... tie is a writer by profession and states he has some income from previous writing that helps take care of him.' Hubbard presented his usual laundry list of injuries and ailments, but the doctors could find symptoms for none of them. 'This is a well nourished and muscled white adult', the examination report concluded, 'who does not appear chronically ill.'~z Understandably, the VA saw no cause to increase the veteran's pension, but on tins occasion the veteran was perImps not too concerned since Don Purcell was still providing ample funds for his activities, even though tlieir relationship was fraying. It had been agreed between them that Purcell would be responsible for the management and business affairs of the Foundation while Hubbard Bankrolling and Bankruptcy 197 looked after training, processing and research, but a simple division of responsibility proved to be unworkable. 'Things went along fine for a while, then Ron began to encroach on my territory,' Purcell recorded. 'The more he did this the ornerier I g~jt. Ron established an overhead structure that far exceeded the gross income. I began to hold out for an organizational structure that could exist within its income with the idea of expanding the structure as our income increased. This idea did not satisfy Ron. He kept telling me that I had agreed to pay off all the old debts and underwrite a new start for the Foundation and why didn't I go ahead and do it?'~3 Purcell's Wichita lawyer, Jean Oliver Moore, was present on many occasions when money was discussed. 'The bills were reaching astronomical proportions,' he said. 'Ron believed one thing should be done and Don another and there was a divergence of opinion. But in the end it had to be a matter of prudent business judgement - the Foundation was losing money hand over fist at a rate faster than Purcell could replace it.'~4 Money was not the only problem. Purcell and Hubbard were in fundamental disagreement over the issue of 'past lives'. From the earliest days of auditing, pro-clears invited to travel back along the time-track had occasionally progressed beyond birth or conception to previous, often romantic, existences, recalling their adventures as medieval knights or centurions in ancient Rome. It happened to ttelcn O'Brien, who re4ived the experience of being a young peasant woman in Ireland in the early nineteenth century who was killed by a British soldier when she tried to prevent him raping her. Hubbard was at first ambivalent about the validity of 'past lives', but by the time tie got to Wichita he had embraced the concept so enthusiastically that he showed up for one of his regular Friday night lectures with a dreadful limp; he explained to the audience that he had returned on his genetic time-track to a moment when he was shot in the leg during the Civil War and had not had time to complete 'running' the incident. Purcell, who was still hoping that Dianetics would achieve academic and professional recognition, considered the notion of 'past lives' to be unscientific and wanted it dropped. Hubbard resented his interference in his 'research' and was anyway disinclined to heed the views of a pragmatic real estate developer~ 'Ron's motive was always to limit Dianetics to the authority of his teachings,' Purcell noted. 'Anyone who had the effronterv to suggest that ott~ers beside Ron could contribute creatively to ihe work must be inhibited.' Friction between the two men increased markedly. Meanwhile, the FB1, ever vigilant, continued to fret about what Hubbard was up to, at the same time displaying a remarkable talent 198 Bare-Faced Messiah bt ul for obfuscation. On 1 October 1951, for example, the FB1 office in ,la! Kansas City, wbich apparently did not read newspapers, asked ~.itl Washington for any information about a school or clinic of '[)yanetics' ha, operated by an L. Ron t lubbard in xA7ichita. The reply indicated that ran' the FBI was quite as paranoid about ttubbard as Hubbard was about the FB1. Prominent mention xvas made of allegations tbat tile activities of the Foundation were of 'particular interest to sexual perverts and hypochondriacs' and that Sara had accused her husband of being 'mentally incompetent'. The file failed to note that she had retracted her accusations. ~5 In November and December, Hubbard played a starring role in FBI communications when he became enthused, temporarily, by an extraordinary enterprise straight from the pages of his own science fiction and smacking faintly of world domination. ttis idea was to establish an alliance of leading international scientists and to store all the latest scientific rcscarcb on microfilm in an atom-bomb-proof archive sotncwbcre in Arizona. In this way, he argued somewhat obscurely, individual nation,s would bc denied the technical capacity to wage a nuclear war. ttubbard called the project 'Allied Scientists of the x. Vorld' [the name of an organisation that had featured in his novel 5--~ -,~ 'The End Is Not Yct'] and chose Perry Chapdclainc to supervise its ~: inauguration. 'Ron telephoned me at three o'clock in the morning and said he needed me real bad,' Chapdelaine recalled. 'l got dressed and went over to his house and we sat in the front room where he told me all about his plan for Allied Scientists of tbe ~Vorld. Ills stated goal was to stop war in the world. l{c thought with Allied Scientists he could control war and in that way control the world. 'I'llat was xvhat he wanted, no question.' Cbapdelaine was despatched in great secrecy-'Hubbard told me to ,.~ make sure no one knew he was bebind it, I've no idea whv'- to Denver, Colorado, where the headquarters of Allied Scientists of the . x. Vorld was to be established. His orders xvere to organize a mass ~ mailing of scientists and technicia~s who xvould be informed that they ~ had been awarded fellowships in Allied Scientists of the x, Vorld in recognition of their scientific achievemerits and invited to send in annual dues of $25. The timing could not have been worse. 'Thousands of leaflets went out,' said Chapdelaine, 'but only one or two came back.' Instead, the FBI was deluged with requests from recipients of the mail-shot to investigate the organization as a possible Communist front organi- ! zation - such was tbe power of McCarthyism. The FBI soon ~ established that L. Ron Hubbard was behind Allied Scientists: inter-Bureau memoranda now contained the information that 'several ~ \Vaterbury, I~. F, on (nt-:~ ,~x~) l~.tln's grandfather xx.~, ard's grcat-granclfatht'r, supposed to have ox~ ned a ~g tilt' flitdie carreel quarter of the state of I ncgr<~'s head Nl~mtana. Here he is )ec~llnc part ~ff seen as he teaIll ~ Icgt'nd. xxas, a struggli~g veterinarian, pictured x~ith I~is xx ire kll]d their firsl child (R~t~'s m~tl~t' at Tildcn, Ncbra~k ar()tllltt tile liltc ~88os. , , ,'T. 'L, ' ' .., , ~ .~' '. :, ~.- ..,, ~,..' '.. ~ , ~: ú ~... , ~- ~ ....~.,~ ~ , ~ -~ ,~ :-. _~, ~ ~-~'~ ~d~:'. ~ -~ .~ ~-: - .~ ,, ;- ;~. ~. 'N L~d~ra .~lav \Vaterbt|ry, I~n's m~hcr (left). ~ith an unkn~n relative, her sisters 'l'~,ilic' anti ~lid~it. a~d hn~rhcr Ray ph~t~raphcd in their h~n~e r~x~n t~f ] Ic]t. na, ~]~nrana. '~ ~ ~ ../.': ~ \ / ,.'~,-' !' ,,. ~;:~: ,, ,~ , \."~ f---~.._..-!~.:~.-::.;~-::. z.:~:~-~_ .: ~ f~ ~ ~'~Z ' ~ "- " t~~ '~-~ :'~ _. '~_;:~ ~ ~-~:~ . _ ,'~-- .~: ~ ~,~ ~ - .~=~..-~ / ~':'~ . '--' :~ ~ ' ~ ; "" ' z~ i. ~; ~,. ~ s .... 2' ~ ~ ~' ..... =.~'~ ~"". .... -.~ . ,~.S~'T ~Z ~ i'~'-iLT3 .,-,.2. ~, 2 Z~ ........ : ~ '~:~ ~ ~ ~ . ~ ~ ~ '- ~ ~ ~' I' ~1~1~1.' I.I'FI~ 'l'l~t' I~,,,p~x.~l sn I'ildt. n. X~.hra~ka. ~ht'r~' I.. R,,n tul~bard x~a~ h,,r,~ it~ I,~. Ills t,~ 'l',,ili~'. xxl~ xx,~rkcd ~ il~t' ~ i~llal. in sct'~i~t[ l'r~n~ it~L' ri~l~. ~lltJX I' I~/(;ll'l ) l,ilTlc J~,l~ If] ~1 a~,~r ha~. ()~' day h~. ~,,uld bc he' sc. lf-app~int~'cl c~mm~d~re ~>f liS (}~%11 pFl%'ill(' 11~1%'}', NIl;If'f) 'l'hc I~txdttlr~ -ClCI/CC- ticti~m ~rilcr p{~st'~ ill }llS ~ xt~t'~rilcr duri~ a xi~lt It> his ,,~rcnts ~n the island ,~l (;uatn~ i~ 1~}2S. (~vm.') Ilubhard learned to fix a tzlidcr ~hilc at George ~a~hi,~;n Lnivcrsitv. He ,~ttlt~irt't] the u~i,lucly appro}~r~alt' Ilick~lillllc ~f'l"lash' and I~kt. tl I~, l~c tlcst'ribcd as a 'tl,~rt. dcx il spt't'd pil~t and l~,lr;it'lltllt. artist'. ~11'1} [)i.~nct~cs Illlikes its in.~t~-t~ti~us dt'[~t~l, in the pages ,,I ~ ptalp scmc~cc fiction IIl,l~ilZillu. e..,~,:~ ~ ' Bctx%ccn his scco:~tt ,lntt tl~irtl matrmagcs, I{i,,~ ' dallied ~ith his pttblic rc]ali,~t~s assistant. . lustiotas Barbara Ka~e. SI~c ~>uld s~on c~n- cludt' that he was parat~c>ic]. ~ (nlct.~x~) Richard de Nlille and Barbara Kaxc ,- the house in Palm Springs ~hcre }ttmbbartt 7:e3 z'. .,~,7~ ~ (~? plotted to kidnap his daugt,ter Alexis. ~ ~ , ~, ~ ~ ,,~ ~'-__~ 'I"E~ ~,?:L~'7=_: '~:l " - .... "n~n ;:~..:~ . . :~',., ~ ~ "~ ~ i ~~ ú ~{;~'i) 'l'he p~rtly Nibs (st'c~md . ~': undcr iff Rh~dcsia. Fortunately. hc did not U a~t5 ~ Rh~dcs xxas h~m~oscxual. ~ ~'X/' .-' X~ l./ (f.I.:FT) [ ltibl~ard x~ith his friend I{;ty Ipt'tl t,, ~,,Ix ~2 'Irish pn~blcm'. .. ~ .- ú , I ~ .. "1 ' ' :~tirr,. ú . "~ "' ~ - i ' '~ ~ ""~' I ú ú ú 4 J hut IIt~hb~lrd ~nd I)~reen .";mith, ~ne ~ff the I lubb~rd directs a 'photo-shower' in Cura~'ao, ~924. ~st'n~t, rs, pl;lyj~ ~jth t~rc. in the C'~llif~Hli;tn I,~ltc. r, he ~'~uld pr›~ress to m~kin~ movies in ~'rt. I,ikt' h~s f;Itht. r. Artl~t~r ~'~]lt'ctt. d ~uzls. C'~lljf~r~i~. Bankrolling anti Bankn~ptCv 199 individuals' alleged he was 'mentally incompetent' and a report from the Kansas City office noted that he had 'delusions of grandeur'. ~6 When Post Office inspectors began an investigation of Allied Scientists for possible violation of mail fraud statutes, I'~Iubbard beat a rapid retreat and abandoned the venture. But he was, as alxvays, untroubled by trouble. At the Foundation's New Year party, which was held in a Wichita hotel and featured a live orchestra and a floor show, he was the life and soul of the festivities. 'He danced a great deal,' said Helen O'Brien, 'with a light and exact rhythm that was completely without grace. There was something attention-arresting in the way he handled himself. Many almost worshipped him in those days, but there were other individuals who looked at him askance, with something close to fear.' For Don Purcell, the Allied Scientists fiasco was almost, but not quite, the last straw. According to Chapdelaine, Purcell was.'frantic, almost hysterical' over the ill-starred enterprise. 'lie was scared to death that it would reflect on him,' said Chapdelainc. 'He was afraid of what I lubbard might do next.' \Vith the relationship between the two men at its lowest ebb, it full to lawyers to deliver tbe final blow. Ever since |lubbard's arrival in x, Vicbita, Purcell had been fending off creditors who had been left in the lurch as, one after am~tt~er, the original l lubbard Dianctic Research Foundations closed their doors. At one point be had had to lodge an $11,000 bond with the district court to prevent the \Vichita Foundation being placed in State receivership. 'During this time,' he noted, 'I was neg~tiating with attorneys trying to effect a settlement of the State receivership. I purcbascd all of the accounts involved in the deal and heaved a sigh of relief. The mess was cleaned up.'~7 His relief was premature. Early in 1952, a court ruled that the tlubbard Dianctic Foundation in Wichita was liable for the very considerable debts of the defunct Hubbard Dianctic Research Fotmdation in Elizabetb, New Jersey. It was a disaster. Purcell, now deeply suspicious that his partner had all along deliberately suppressed the truth about the financial situation in Elizabeth, believed the only option was to file for voluntary bankruptcy. Hubbard would not countenance such a move, but was outvoted at an emergency meeting of the board of directors held on 12 February. He resigned immediately and announced his intention to establish a 'Hubbard College' on the other side of town. After some discussion, he shook hands on a 'gentlcmen's agreement' to continue co-operating with Don Purcell and the Wichita Foundation. The 'gentlemen's agreement' was worthless, for Purcell had crossed [|ubbard and had thus become an enemy to be attacked and harrasscd 200 Bare-Faced Messiah at every opporttu~ity. The millionaire got a taste of what lay in store ten days later when, on the day the Foundation filed for bankruptcy, he received a telegram from Hubbard: 'You ARE ADVISED THAT A $50,OOO BREACH OF FAITIt AND CONTR.~CT SUIT IS BEING FILED AGAINST YOU PURSUANT TO FAILURE TO DISCHARGE CREDITOR OBLIG.-XTIONS AND T!tAT ANOTHER SUIT FOR BAD MANAGEMENT FOR A SLMILAR AMOUNT IS BEING FILED. I AM SORRY TO BE PRESSED TO THIS EXTREMITY. SORROWFULLY, L. RON ItUBBARD.' The final accounts for the Hubt~ard Dianetic Foundation of \Vichita revealed an income of $142,000 and expenditure of $205,000. Hubbard had received fees amounting to nearly $22,000 while salaries for all the remaining staff only accounted for $54,000. The assets of the Foundation largely comprised copyright of all the tapes, books, techniques, processes and paraphernalia of Dianetics, including the nanle. Both Purcell and I lubbard clain~ed ownership and during the bitter feud that inevitably followed, |tubbard mounted a campaign of vilification against bis former partner and took to referring to him as 'that little flatulcnce'. }lc accused Purcell of plotting to steal Dianetics and of accepting a $50{),000 bribe from the American Nledical Association to destroy the movement. Purcell ,,vas out of bis depth: one day bc arrived at the Foundation oftices on \Vest Douglas and found that all the address plates for the mailing list were missing. Later James Elliott, a !lubl~ard aide, admitted 'inadvertently' removing them. Cl'bey were kept in three boxes, each t~vo feet long and three feet high and weighing more than twentv-five pounds.) Subsequently a number of taped lectures went missing and when a court ordered tbe tapes to be returned Purcell discovered ever}, third or fourth word had been erased. ~8 In Nlarcb, Itubbard took a break from hostilities to marry Marx Sue \Vhipp, who was by then two months pregnant. To avoid the three-day waiting period required by the state of Kansas, they drove across the state line iuto Oklaboma where it was possible to be married instantly by a Justice of the Peace. Mary Sue would later provide friends with two versions of the circumstances: one had Hubbard knocking on her door in the middle of night shouting, 'Susie, you're the girl I'm going to marry. Get your things, we're leaving.' In the other, they eloped with her parents in bot pursuit and got a JP out of bed to perform the ceremony, still in his pyjamas. ~9 Back in Withira, the new Mrs Hubbard assumed partial responsibility for running the Hubbard College, which occupied the second floor of a modern office building on North Broadway. It only staved in business for just six weeks, but it was long enough for the founder to gather together, by telegram, as many loyal followers as he could find Banksriling and Bankn~ptcy 201 to attend a convention at which he promised to present 'important new material'. About eighty people turned up for the event, which was held in the banqueting hall of a \Vicbita hotel. Hubbard first introduced an ingenious little gadget called an E-meter, which he claimed was capable of measuring emotions accurately enough to 'give an auditor a deep and marvellous insight into the mind of his pre-clear'. It was a black metal box with a lighted dial, adjustment knobs and wires connected to two tin cans. He demonstrated how' it worked by inviting a member of the audience to hold the tin cans and then pinching him the needle of the dial flickered in response. Then he asked him simply to imagine the pinch and the needle fluctuated again] The excitement generated by the E-meter was as nothing compared to Hubbard's next revelation. }te had, he said, discovered an entirely new science which transcended the limitations of Dianetics. It was a science of cenaint}' and he already had a name for it - he was going to call it Scientology. Chapter 12 Phoenix Rt~htg '/Many awards and honors were offered and conferred on L. Ron Hubbard. He did accept an honorary Doctor of Philosophy given in recognition of his outstanding work on Dianctics and, as an inspiration to the many people . . . who had been inspired bv him to take up advanccd studies in this field.' (Mt'ssion Imo Time, 19~35 .i~ ~ 1'~ al ~ At the begirming of April 1952, Hubl~ard packed his belongings into the back of his yellow Pontiac convertible and headed out of x, Vichita on the liansas 'l'urnpikc with his teenage bride of four weeks beside him on the front scat. Their destination, one thousand miles It) the ~'cst, xvas Phoenix, :\riz~)lla, where loyal aides had already put up a shingle {mtsitlc a small oflicc at 1405 North Central Street, am~ouncing it as the hcadqui~rters of the 1Iubbard -'\ssociation of Scicntologists. Phoenix was so named because it was built on the ruins of an ancient Indian settlement on tile Salt River, which had risen like tile legcnttar.v phoenix. Ilubbard, who had had more than enough of ~Vichita, could not think of a more appropriate location for the rise of his astounding new science from the still-smoking ruins of Dianetics. The word Scientology was derived from the Latin scio (knoxring in the fullest sense) and the Greek lo,~,os (stud)'). Hubbard erroneously believed it to be his own invention: but curiously and coincidentalIS.' almost t'.vent.v years earlier in 1934, a German scholar bv tile name of Dr A Nordcnholz had written an obscure ~,,'ork of 'philosophical speculation titled Scientologie, lI'issettschaft yon dee BeschaJji, nheit unit der Tau.~lichkeit ties It)'ssens (Scicntology, the Science of the Structure and Validity of Knoxvledgc). It was unlikeIv, huxvever, that , Hubbard was plagiarizing Dr Nordenholz - the book had not been translated into English and Hubbard's knowledge of German was rudimentary. Hubl~ard' would introduce Scientology as a logical extension of Dianetics, but it was a dcvelop/nent of undcr~iable expedicnce, since it ensured hc would be able to stay in business even if tile courts l'tlocn& Rising 203 eventually awarded control of Dianetics and its valuable copyrights to 'that little flatulence', the hated Don Purcell. The difference between Dianetics and Scientology was that Dianetics addressed the body, whereas Scientology addressed the soul. With his accustomed bombast, }lubbard claimed that he had 'come across incontrovertible, scientifically-validated evidence of the existence of the human SOUl'. 1 To underpin his new science, Hubbard created an entire cosmology, the essence of which was that_the true self of an individual was an immortal, omniscient and omnipotent entity called a 'thetan'. In existence before the beginning of time, thetans picked up and discarded millions of bodies over trillions of years. They concocted the universe for their own amusement but in the process became so enmcsl~ed in it that they came to believe they were nothing more tban the bodies they inhabited. The aim of Scientoh~gy was to restore tile thctan's original capacities to the level, once again, of an 'operating thetan' or an 'OT'. It was an exalted state not yet known on earth, Itubbard wrote. 'Neither Lord Buddha nor Jesus Christ were OTs according to the evidence. Thcv were just a shade above Clear.': Throughout the early streamer montt~s of 1952, ttubbard promulgated the theory of Scicntology at a series of lectures delivered at the Hul~l~ard Association of Scicntologists in Phoenix. Itc was addressing, for tim most part, committed Diancticists, people who truly believed him to bca genius, and so the audiences tended to be somewhat uncritical. But if validation of the cosmology was needeli, it was c{mstantly provided by the 'past lives' wbich were by now a prominent and fascinating feature of auditing. Thetans were obviously not restricted to this universe and auditing sessions revealed innumerable accounts of space travel and adventures on other planets very similar to those found in the pages of Astounding Science Fit'lion, to which the founder of Scientology had so recently been contributing. One report described how a pre-clear had arrived on a planet 74,000 years ago and battled 'black magic operators' who were using electronics for evil purposes. 'He nov; goes to anott~er planet by spaceship. A deception is accomplished bv hypnosis and pleasure implants (rather like opium in their effects) whereby he is deceived into a love affair with a robot decked otlt as a beautiful red-baited girl . . .,3 'Past lives' were further confirmed by the flickering needle of the E-meter, which was enthusiastically adopted as propitious technological support. Invented by a Dianeticist called Volnex' Mathison, the E-meter was basically a device which measured galvanic skin response - the changes in e/ectrical conductivity of the skin that occur at moments of even quite slight excitement or emotional stress. It proved 204 Bare-Faced Messiah to be such a useful auditing tool that it would eventually beconle invested with an almost nlystical power to reveal an individual's innermost thoughts. It also provided a useful source of income, for every self-respecting Scientologist wanted to have his own E-meter and the only place to buy them was from the Hubbard Association of Scientologists. In July, the Scientific Press of Phoenix (another Hubbard enterprise) published a book originally titled l~7~at To Audit and later re-named The History of Man. Introduced as a 'cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years', Hubbard intended the book to establish the foundations of Scientology and he had no desire to be unduly modest about its potential. ~,Vith the knowledge gained by Scientology, he wrote in the third paragraph, 'the blind again see, the lame walk., the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner. ' Even juttgcd by the standards of his science fiction, The Ht'sto~y of Man was one of I luhbard's most bizarre works and possibly the most ahsurd book ever written, although it was treated with great reverence by his followers. An amalgam of mysticism, psychothcrapy and pure science fiction, the cotetent invited tbc derision which was inevitably forthcoming. "1'o say it is an astonisl~ing document does not adequately convey the pcculiar qualities or contents of TIre llt'stoB, of ~11an . . .' one g~vcrnmcnt report4 m~tcd. 'For coml~ressed nonsense and fantasy it must surpass anything tbcrctoforc written.' In a narrative style tbat wobbled tincertainly between schoolboy fiction and a pscudo-scicntific medical paper, Itubbard sought to explain that the human body was occupied bv both a thctan and a 'genetic entity', or GE, a sort of low-grade soul 'located more or less in the centre of the body. ('The genetic entity apparently enters the protoplasm line some two days or a week prior to conception. There is some evidence that the GE'is actually double, one entering on the sperm side . . .') The GE carried on 'through the evolutionary line, 'usually on the same planet', whereas the thetan only came to earth about 35,000 years ago to supervise the developn~ent i~f caveman into homo sapions. Thus the GE was once 'an anthropoid in the deep forests of forgotten continents or a mollusc seeking to survive on the shore of some lost sea'. The discovery of the GE (Hubbard hailed every fanciful new idea as a 'discovery') 'makes it possible at last to vindicate the theory of evolution proposed bv Darwin'. ~luch of the book was devoted to a re-working of evolution, starting with 'an atom, complete with electronic rings' after which came cosmic impact producing a 'photon converter', the first single-cell creature, then seaweed, jellyfish and tbe clam. This knowledge was important to Scicntologists since it enabled them to identify the kind Phoenix Rising 205 of engrams a GE might have picked up when occupying a prehistoric life form. Many engrams, for example, could be traced back to clams. The clam's big problem was that there was a conflict between the hinge that wanted to open and the hinge that wanted to close. It was easy to restimulate the engram caused by the defeat of the weaker hinge, Hubbard pronounced, by asking a pre-clear to imagine a clam on a beach opening and closing its shell very rapidly and at the same time making an opening and closing motion with thumb and forefinger. 'I'llis gesture, he said, would upset large numbers of people. 'By the way,' he warned, 'your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the "clam" to some one [sic], you mav restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. One such victim, after hearing about a clam deatb, could not use his jaws for three days.' After the clam came the 'Weeper' or the 'Boohoo', a mollusc that rolled in the surf for half a million years, pumping sea water out of its shell as it breathed, hence its name. Weepets had 'trillions of misadventures', prominent among them the anxiety caused by trying to gulp air before being swamped by the next wave. 'The inability of a pre-clear to cry,' }!ubbard explained, 'is partly a hang-up in the Weeper. Ilc is about to be hit by a wave, has his eyes full of sand or is frightcued about opening Iris shell because be may be hit.' Fear of f.~lling also had its origins in the luckless Weepors, which were freqcntly dropped by predatory birds. Progressing ahmg the genetic time-track, evolution arrived at tile sloth, which 'bad bad times falling out of trees', the ape and the famous Piltdown Man, which was the cause of a multitude of engrams, ranging from obsessions about biting to family problems. These could be traced back to the fact that 'the Piltdown teeth were enormous and he was quite careless as to whom and what he bit.' Indeed, so careless was the Piltdown Man, Hubbard recorded, that he was sometimes guilty of 'eating one's wife and other somewhat illogical activities'. (Unfortunately for Hubbard, just twelve months after The ttistoty of Man was published, the supposed fossil remains of primitive man found in gravel on Piltdown Common in the south of England were exposed as a hoax. The Piltdown Man had never existed. Hubbard was describing engratns caused by GEs occupying a fictitious early life form dreamed up in 1912 by Charles Dawson, the English amateur archaeologist responsible for the Piltdown fraud. ) The ttistoty of Man drifted into pure science fiction when Hubbard came to the point of explaining how thetans moved from body to body. Thetans abandoned bodies earlier than GEs, it appeared. While 206 Bare4'~ced Messitth the GE stayed around to see the body through to death, thetans xvcre obliged to report to a between-lives 'implant station' where they were implanted with a variety of control phases while waiting to p~ck up another body, sometimes in competition witb other disembodied thetans. Hubbard revealed that most implant stations were on Mars, although women occasionally had to report elscwt~ere in the solar s~'stem and there was a 'Martian implant station somewhere in the Pyrenees'. After publication of the epoch-making The Histot3, of.Hctn, Hubbard was not of a mind to rest on his dubious laurels. The Hubbard Association of Scientologists and the Scientific Press of Phoenix produced a veritable avalanche of publications during 1952, including another book, ScientoloA~,.. 8-80, which appeared only a few montl~s after The tlisto~yof Man. Continuing Iris traditional of audacious introductions, the author wrote: 'With this book, the ability to make one's botty old or young at will, the ability t~ heal thc ill without physical contact, the ability to cure the insane and the incapacitated, is set'forth for the physician, the layman, the mathematician and the physicist.' Both books were rcttuircd reading for new Scicntol~gists and were studied as if they were setiotas scientific textbooks, indicati~g tbc cxtra~rdinary hold i lubbartt xvas beginning to exert over Iris follows'ors. Non-Scicntol~gists co~/d never understand hoxv hc achieved a position of such on~nip~tence, but the power he wic/tlcd was far froth, unprcccdcntctl. Scicntology already exhibited the classic characteristics of a religious sect, offering salvation through secret kn›~wlcdgc and totally dominated by a leader claiming a monopoly ›n~ the source of the knowledge. Nlany such 'manipulationist sects' ttourishcd at different periods of Christian history.s There were also striking parallels between Scientology and the quirkier pseudo-sciences like phrenology, Cuunt Alfred Korzvbski's general semantics and 'iridiagnosis', which taught that all p/~ysical ailments could be diagnoscd through the iris of the eve. Many sucb - , pseudo-sciences were built on a structure of the wildest assumptions, yet attracted a devoted following. They were invariably the creation of a single, highly charismatic, individual ~iewed by his foliowets as a genius of divine inspiration. Absolute poxver was vested in the leader, critics were derided, successes londly trumpeted and failures ignored. Opponents were darkly accused of ulterior motives in xvanting to prevent the advanccr~ent of the human race - Hubbard's frequent plaint. ~Vhile tlubbard was writing and lecturing in Pboenix in the summer of 1952, a somewhat unexpected event occurred - his son, L. Ron Hubbard Junior, turned up in town apparently intent on becoming a I'hoenix Rising 207 Scientologist. Nibs was thex~ eighteen years old, a plump young man with a shining, cherubic countenance topped by wispy curls of pale orange hair. tie had been living with his grandparents in Bremcrton for the prcviotts two years, but had been unable to settle down in high scho~l and had decided to join his father in Pboenix. Mary Suc, preoccupictt with her thickening waistline, raised no objection when her busband suggested that Nibs should move in with them, in the modern house they had rented near Camel Back Mountain, on the outskirts of toxvn. And since she was only about a year older than Nibs, she felt under no obligation to be a dutiful stepmother. Nibs enrolled at a correspondence school in an attempt to complete his high school education and his father gave him a job at the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, at tbe same time arranging for him to bc audited intensively. As the son and namesake of the founder, Nibs was treated with some deference by othcr Scicntologists and made rapid progrcss in the organization - he was soon designated as 'professor' of the 'Advanccd Clinical Course', one of a number of courses ~>n offer t~ ambitious Scicntologists in Phoenix. 11c also acquired a number of initials after Iris name to support his professorial status. In Scptcmbcr 1952, Hubbard and Mary Sue left Phoenix for tbcir first visit to Europe. Tbc trip was explained to follow Scicntolt~gists somewhat illogically: 'Amid tbc c~nstant violence of tbc turncnat Don J. Purcell of Withira and Iris stilts which attcmptcd to seize Scicntology, Nlarv Suc became ill and to save her life, Ron took her to Englantl.' It was never spelled out why taking Nlarv Suc to Englantt would save her life; indeed, since she was eight months pregnant it would have been much safer not tc~ travel. Bt/t l lubbard wanted to go to London to establish his control over the small Dianctics group which had formed there spontaneously and Mary Sue insisted on accompanying him. The tlubbard's first impressions of London were gloomy. As they drove into the city from the airport, thcv were shocked by the extent of the bomb damage which tbev could see from the back of their taxi. The people on the streets seemed drab and dispirited, the shop windows were empty- rationing was still in force - and Hubbard thought there was an air of 'quiet desperation' about the place. He was also quietly desperate himself, having discovered that American cigarettes were unavailable. However, their spirits lifted somewhat when the taxi drexv up outside 30 Nlarlborough Place, Nlaida Vale, tbc h~use that had been rented for them bv local Dianeticists. It was a handsome, doublc-fronted late Edxvardian villa with light, air~' ro~ms, not far from Rcgent's Park and the West Entt. Two nights later, Ron and Nlary Sue were guests of honour at a welcoming dinner party arranged by a member of the Dianetics group who had an apartment only ten minutes' walk from Marlborough 208 Bare-bhced ~h'ssiah Place. Among the guests was a woman called Carmen D'Alessio wh{~, like most of those present, admitted to being 'totally fascinated' by Dianetics. She was, of course, greatly looking forx~:ard to meeting Hubbard, not least because she was hoping that he might be able to cure her of the unexplained attacks of panic she had suffered since she was a child. '~ly first impression was of a big, tall nian with a highly coloured face and brilliant red hair combed back from a high forehead. He was a very magnetic, powerful man, not really very attractive, but you couldn't ignore him. I-Ie dominated the evening, talking about energy, electronics, tractor beanis, etcetcra. I heard him sa3, he'd been in the Navy and had some trouble with his leg and got the impression he was talking about a war injury. 'After dinner, whcn xve were all sitting around, I told him about my problem and hc immediately began to audit me. I was sitting on a sofa against a wall and hc told me to do something that would prompt most pcoplc to think he was mad, although I thought I knew what he was talking about. What lie said to me was, "Be three feet back of your head"- those were his exact words. I thought I would have to go'into the wall, or tile room behind, but I attempted to do it in my imagination. 1 lc gilve me quite a Io~g session, with everyone sitting around cumplctcly silent, but it dirt nothing.' Not lung aftcrwartls, Carmen D'Alcssio artended |lubbard's introductury lecture at his house in Marlborough Place. 'About 30 or 40 people were foregathered in the sitting-room and when tlubbard walked in it was obviot~s to me he had a bloody axvful cold,' she . recalled. 'He had a ~'cr)' high colour, much more so than normal, he was sweating profusely, his eyes were streaming and he kept blowing his nose. tle even talked like man with a cold, but he told us that he was suffering from the effect of leaving his body and visiting another planet. ~Vhile he was advancing across the floor of this other planet, he said, something like a bomb blew up in his face. Everyone was taking it very seriously, but I didn't believe it. I thoughi, "the man's a thumping liar." I was right. A nurse was living in the house at the time because Hubbard's wife was extremely pregnant. She was a friend of mine and she told me afterwards that he had flu. She'd even given him an injection for it.' The nurse was soon obliged to direct her ministrations elsewhere: on 24 September, less than three weeks after arriving in London, Mary Sue gave birth to a daughter, Diana 1Xlcredith de x, Volfe Hubbard. Ron cabled the good news back to Phoenix, adding a terse plea for cigarettes: 'SEND MORE KOOLS.' Miss D',~\lcssio, meanwhile, was continuing to be audited by Itubbard, at his instigation, despite an unnerving experience during a Phoen& Rising 209 second sessioo at Marlborough Place. 'While I was sitting there trying to do what he told me, I suddenly opened my eyes and saw that he was sitting opposite me laughing silently. I didn't like that at all.' She was disappointed to register no improvement in her condition. 'It seemed quite useless, it wasn't helping at all. Two or three days afterwards I was feeling very disorganized, ragged and out of sorts. Friends kept telling me to ring Ron, but I didn't want to bother him. Eventually someone rang him and he said, "Put her on the line." He gave me a long session over the telephone lasting at least two hours, possibly three. 'At that time he was very interested in energy. He said, "I want you to mock up a small amount of energy, like a little ball and tell me when you have done it." Then he said, "Now blow it up, make it explode." This was going on subjectively in my imagination; I had no difficulty doing it. Then he said, "Now you have exploded it, gather it all together again and reduce it all down to the small ball of energy, make it solid again." I did that and he said, "Now explode it again." That is all the session consisted of. 'After I had been doing this for a while, possibly half an hour, my physical body began to react in an extraordinary wax'. It began of its own accord to jerk about unintentionally, first quite gently. I told him what was happening and he told me not to worry but continue doing what he told me. The jerking became stronger, almost out of my control. I felt quite frightened, but he remained very calm and gentle. Finally it seemed my body was being flung out of the chair and I had to hold the chair and the telephone with might and main. I could not possibly have made my body do what it was doing, I would have had to have been an acrobat or trained contortionist. I thought my heart was going to burst. Mv friends sitting in the room watching me were aghast, terrified. 'The explosions, which had become more and more violent, became less violent by degrees and in the end instead of violent explosions of vast energy it was more like a stone thrown into pond sending out ripples. The ripples became very pleasant and as they did so my body calmed down and became quite tranquil, as if I was lying in the sun on a hot day. All around me were beautiful colours like the Aurora Boreal|s, colours out of this world, very soothing and harmonious and completely restorative. This went on until I felt quite all right and then he said it was the end of the session.' Hubbard was clearly pleased by the results he had obtained with Carmen D'Alessio and at his next public lecture, in a small hall near Holland Park, he invited her to tell the audience about her experience. Unfortunately, Miss D'Alessio began her account bv describing how her heart had nearly stopped and Hubbard hast|Iv interrupted. 'tie 210 Ba re~Faced ,'~'lessiah didn't want me to say any more,' she recalled. 'tie never allowed anyone to say anything negative about him. ,6 In October, a British edition of Scientolo~t~y: 8-80 was published, with a note about the author from an unnamed editor: 'Some think of his work as the only significant enlargement of the mind since Freud's papers in the late 19th century; otllers think of it as the x, Vestern x, Vorld's first workable organization of Eastern philosophy. It has been called by txvo of the leading writers in America: "The most significant ' advance of mankind in the 20th century"... Probably no pbilos- i opher of modern times has had the popularity and appeal of }tubbard or such startling successes within his own lifetime.' At the end of Novenlber, Hubbard returned to the United States, with Mary Sue and the baby, to dcliver a series of lectures in Philadelphia, xvhcrc the Scicntology franchise was being run by ttelcn O'Brien and her husband, who paid ten per cent of their gross earnings to tlubbard for the privilege. The O'Bricns agreed to pay Hubbard a $1000 fee for the lectures; in addition they arranged a car for his use a~d rentcd an ultra-modern terraced apartment at 2601 Parkway, high above River l)rive. l lubbard was pleased with it, declared it t~ bca 'science-fiction writcr's dream' and at the same time tried t~ man~cuvrc 1Iclcn O'Brien into signing the rental agreement. She knew him t~n~ well to be caught out like that. 'l told him, "lt's your apartment, you sign tile lease,"' she saitl. 'l le was tricky like that. ,7 l'tubbard lectured for a total of seventy hot~rs in Philadelphia to an audience of'thirty~eight dcv~tces, spca~jng without preparation or notes on three evenings and six afternoons each week between I and 19 December. Ever)' word was recorded on high-fidelity tapes and later lucratively marketed as the 'Philadelphia Doctorate Course', along with a spiral-bound book of the fiftv-four crayon drawings with which he illustrated his talks. Many of thc~seventv hours were devoted to elaborating the cosmology of S~ientology, but' tie also talked about ways of 'exteriorizing' from the body and demonstrated a new auditing technique called 'creative processing', similar to the 'mock-up' routine he had tried out on Carmen D'Alessio. 'x, Vhat made it interesting,' said Fred Startsfield, one of the students on the course, 'was the feeling that you were involved in the birth of a new, developing science. It looked like sometiling you could do something with, not just some theory that was utterly useless.'s The only small hiccup in the sm'ooth running o~ the Philadelphia Doctorate Course occurred on the afternoon of 16 December, when US marshals thundered up tile stairs of the liubbard Dianetic Foundation at 237 North 16th Street, Philaddphia, waving a warrant Phoenix Rising 21 l for the arrest of L. Ron |lubbard. Nibs, who was present and who had inherited something of his father's talent for story-telling, would later talk about an 'incredible Western-style' fight ensuing, wittl two hundred Scicntologists battling on the stairs against FBI agents, US marstlals and Philadelphia police? [lclcn O'Bricn can recall no such m616e. 'I was on the door so I know what happened. There was no fight. Two detectives in plain clothes and a policeman in uniform came in. I asked them what they wanted and they said, "We are here to arrest Ronald Hubbard". We were always apprehensive about plots to arrest Ron and I ran upstairs and told him what was Ilappening. He went up to the third floor, but there was no escape. One of ttlc students who had only one arm waved his hook at the cops and they backed down a bit, but they said, "We've got a warrant for Hubbard and we are going to take him". My husband and I got in the paddy-waggon with Ron. Tlley fingerprinted him and put him a cell - it was the only time he was ever behind bars. I called nly brother, who was a lawyer, and he got Ron out on $1000 bail later tl/at aftcrnoon.' The cause of this spot of bother was Don Purcell, who was still doggedly pursuing I !ubbard tllroUgtl the courts in an attempt to get s{nnc of Iris money back and keep tile Wichita Foundation in business. When he heard l lubl~ard was m Philadelphia, Purcell filed an affidavit in Pcnns~'lvania District Court accusing him of wrongfully withdrawing ~9286 from ttlc bankrupt Wicllita Foundation. 'Throughout his l)ianctic career,' the affidavit noted, 'I luhbard has displayed a fine talent f~r profiting personally althougll his firms and institutions generally fail.r tlubbard was examined before the bankruptcy court on 17 and 19 December, agreed to make restitution and was discharged. Ve~ soon afterwards he flew back to London, where the Hubbard Association of Scicntologists International, or HAS|, had opened for business in a couple of draughty rooms above a shop in Holland Park Avenue in West London. They were unprepossessing premises for a science offering immortality, but tlubbard was not finding it easy to establish a base for ScientoloD' in Britain. Helen O'Brien received a despairing letter from a friend describing the HASI offices in London: 'There was an atmosphere of extreme poverty and undertones of a grim conspiracy over all. At 163 Holland Park Avenue was an ill-lit lecture room and a bare-boarded and poky office some eight by ten feet, mainly infested by long-halted men and shorbhaired, tatty women.' In February 1953, Hubbard decided it was necessa~ to bolster his status wth the phlegmatic British by acquiring some academic qualifications. He knew precisely where they were available - from Sequoia University in Los Angeles. The 'university' of Sequoia was owned by 2 12 Ba re-Faced Messiah Dr Joseph Hough, a chiropracteur and naturopath who ran a successful practice from a large house in downtown Los Angeles and conferred 'degrees' on whoever he thought roeriled them. Richard de 1Mille was awarded a Ph.D. from Sequoia, somewhat to his surprise, for a slim volume he had written under the title .4n Introductiott to Scientology. On 27 Feburary, de lMillc, who was then living in Los Angeles, received an urgent telegram from Hubbard in London: 'PLEASE INFORM DR HOUGII PHD VERY ACCEPTABLE. PRIVATELy TO YOU. FOR GOSH SAKES EXPEDITE. t, VORK lIERE UTTERLY DEPENDANT ON IT. CABLE REPLy. RON.' De l~li]le found Itough thoroughly agreeable and replied the following day: 'PtlD GRANTED. I-IOUGtt'S AIRMAIL LET']'ER OF CONFIRIVATION FOLLOWS. GOOD LUCK.' It was in this way that Hubbard acquired the distinction of appencling letters to his name - a mysterious 'Doctorarc of Divinity' would follow shortly, along with a 'D. Scn'. ' - It was clear from correspondence around this time that I|ubbard was beginning to ponder the future of Scicntology. Few of the franchises in the Unitcd States were generating much income and the organization had grown haphazardly into a cumbersome conglomeration of corp~ratit~s spread around tile country and increasingly difficult to control. lie was also facing tile relentless, if covert, opposition of J. I'-'dgar I loovcr and ttlc FBI. I loovcr's agents rarely failed tu mention, in answer to inquiries abuut tlubbard, that his former wife claimed hc was 'hopelessly insane'. z l At the beginning of March, Itubbl;rd wrote to flclcn O'Brien from l.ondon and asked her to go to Phoenix, close down the publishing operation and move it to Philadelphia. On the day she arrived, she learned that burglars had broken into ttubhard's house on East Tatera Boulevard, near Camel Back Mountain. She drove out there and found the house had been ransacked. Although she had no way of knowing what had been stolen, she asslm~ed the thieves had Geen looking for the labled manuscript of Excalibur. Two guns were certainly missing and she reported their serial numbers to the FBI. ~,Vith her usual efficiency, O'Brien packed up the 'commutlications center', shipped ever3, thing to Philadelphia and assumed editorship of the bi-monthlv magazine, ttle .7ottntal of Sct'entolt,,~y, which was tile primary channel of communication between Hubt~ard and his followers. In truth, editing tile magazine was not too oneruus a task, since almost everytiling was written b~' Hut>bard. (~,Vhenex'er he wished to discuss his oxen wondrous worl/in glowing terms, he signed the articles 'Tom Esterbrook '. ) On 10 April, ffubl>ard wrote another long letter to Helen O'Brien discussing the possibility of setting up a chain of HASI clinics, or Phoenix Rising 213 'Spiritual Guidance Centers'. They could make 'real money', he noted, if each clinic could count on ten or fifteen pre-clears a week, each paying $500 for twentydour hours of auditing. He had clearly previously discussed the prospect of converting Scientology into a religion. '1 await your reaction on the religion angle,' he wrote. 'In my opiniun, we couldn't get worse public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we've got to sell. A religious charter would be necessary in Pennsylvania or NJ to make it stick. But I sure could make it stick.' Perhaps inspired by such considerations, Hubbard's next published work bore a distinctly Old Testament flayour. The bhctors was a summation of his '30-year examination' of tim human spirit and the material universe: 'Factor No. 1: Before tile beginning was a Cause and the entire purpose of the Cause was the creation of effect.' At tile end of tile thirty factors was a valediction reading, 'ttumbly tendered as a gift to 1Man by L. Ron Hubbard.' Three weeks later, the humble tcndcrcr of gifts to mankind was writing to Helen O'Bricn in a rather less pious fashion about a particular member of tile species who continued to be a thorn in his side - Don Purcell. "FIle obvious intcntiun of Purcell is to attack and wipe out by public odium anything and everything he can in Dianctics, thus leaving him, he thinks, with a monopoly on tim subject. Sooner or later it is quite obvious that this man . . . who is probal~ly tile most hated man in the city of Wichita because of his business dealings, will run up against somebody insane enough to put a bullet through him... Patently the man is insane. ttc has actively refused processing ma~ly times. 11e's about as safe to have around as a mad dog . . . The only surprising part of all this is that tile American public by their attention to Purcell and what he says, demonstrates their complete incompetence and their desire to be swindled.' At the end of 1May, Hubbard announced his intention to stir up some interest in Scientology on the continent and he left London for Spain by car, with ~Iary Sue, who had recently discovered she was pregnant again, and baby Diana, then eight months old. 'Fhev stayed first in Sitges, a small resort on the Mediterranean coast, then drove further south to Seville. It seems they did little other than enjoy an extended holiday, although Helen O'Brien, who was virtually running Scientology in the United States, continued to receive long, rambling letters in Hubbard's untidy scrawl. On 19 July, he wrote nine pages asking her to get one of her 'electronic eager beaver' friends to construct an extraordinary machine with which he believed he would be able to cure insanity. The device was to be disguised as an ordinary briefcase with the trigger incorporated in the lock and it was to be capable of delivering a concentrated 214 Bare-Faced Messiah supersonic beam alternating approximately between breathing and heart rates, thus inducing hypnosis. lqe wanted to be able, he said, to walk into a sanitorium with his secret machine, confront an insane patient and make him sane in a few seconds. 'Ttlis would mean', he wrote, 'the immediate end of psychiatric resistance to Scientology.' O'Brien was to get the machine made up as a matter of urgency and air-freight it to him in Spain with a spurious explanation of its function for the benefit of the Customs officals. On 15 August he wrote again, pleading with her to make sure the machine was finistied by the time he arrived back in the United States in mid-September. He added that he had been working with children very successfully: 'I can make kids walk in a few minutes who were crippled . . . I can solve any case and teach people to solve any case without failure. I know the mind like a surveyor knoxvs a map. That sets me free, like the gcnic of the uncorked bottle.' The 'genie' returned to Philadclpbia at the end of September in time to address the three-day International Congress of Diancticists and Scicntologists at the Broadwood I lotcl. With more than three hundred dclcgatcs attending, the event was a great success, but by this time the organizcrs,t lclcn O'Bricn and bcr husband, were cxbaustcd a~ltt disillusioncd. Tbcv had bccn at l lubbard's beck and call for most of the year, receiving little in return. ':\s s~on as we became rcspunsiblc for I lubb~lrtl's interests,' I lclcn O'Bricn recorded, 'a projection of h~stility began, and he doubted and doublc-crt~sscd us, and sniped at us without pause.' They had no desire to take it an>, more and resigned. t lclcn O'Bricn would forever recall her parting, regretful words to Hubbard: 'You're like a cow x~ho gives a good bucket of milk, then kicks it over.' In October and November, ttubbard lectured to the Ilubbard Assocatic~n in Camden, New Jersey, just actress tile Delaware River from Philadelphia. 1X:larv Sue would normally have been present at everx' lecture, but she x~'as forced by her pregnaxxcy and tile endless demands of an active toddler, to spent most of the time at home - vet another rented house, this time at Medford Lakes, about twent\' miles from Camden. Nibs, who had recently married his long-time girlfriend, Henrietta, in Los Angeles, came to visit and was given a job in the Camden 'org', a Scicntoh~gy abbreviation for organizati~ln. The Hubbards returned to Phoenix for Christmas, to the house near Camel Back Mountain, and on 6 January 1954, .Xlary Sue gave birth to her sccoud child, a son, Geoffrey Quentin McCaully Hubbard. Deprived of the services of ttelen O'Brien, |tubbard tried to entice Richard de Mille back into the fold, only to discover that he, too, had become disillusioned. 'I wanted t~ find the true answer to everything,' phoe~,ix Rising 215 de Mille explained, 'but I didn't like all the contradictions and I was becoming more and more sceptical of the whole thing. There was a constant pyramidi~g of claims, but th~ performance xvas always deficient. The answer to the deficiency was that we didn't have a particular step quite right, but now we had another step and tiffs time it's going to be right. 'x, Vhen llubbard called mc and said, "I miss you. Why don't you come back?" I was somewhat critical and expressed my scepticism. His reaction was typical. "\Vh{l's gotten to you, Dick?" be asked- To him, there was no such thing as simply being unconvinced.' Despite the defections, Scientology prospercd in phoenix, so much so that in April 1954, the tlASI moved into sumptuous new premises on a corner site at 1017 North Third Street. Forn~erly an apartment building, the new headquarters had wide Spanish-style colonnadcd porches offering shade from the fierce Arizona sun on both first and second floors. Outside there was a large parking lot lined with palm trees and inside an auditorium with the latest recording facilities, more than twenty auditing rooms, comfortable oftices for the executives and a swimming p{~ol. h~ a brochure printcd to celebrate the nlovc, a picture of a beaming L. R~n llubbard, C.E., D. Scn., D.I). could bc forrod on thc inside front cover aud a similarly beaming L. l~,on 1Iubhard Jr., II.G.:\., l).Scn., on the inside back cover. 'Ten thousand >.cars of thinking men have made this science possible,' tbc introduction pr~claimctl. 'L. Ron l lubl~ard has spent more than 30 years pcrfccting Dianctics anti Scicntol~gy to tile point of practical application .' The house at Camel Back, x~.hcrc the 11ubl~ards xvcrc cni~Ying an unaccustomed period of residential stability, became a gathering place for xvhichcvcr courtiers happened to be in fad'our at the time. One of them was an Englishman by the name of Ray Kemp, who had no doubt that llubbard possessed supernatural pt~'crs. '1tc could certainly move clouds around in the sky,' said l':.emp. 'I sax~- him do that. If there were a lot of little pu[[y clouds in the sky tic could n~ove one hi one direction and one in another and then get them to join up. It was nott~ing particularly special for him; it was just a fuix thing to do .' Kemp liked to say he had found Scientology in a wastepaper basket. lie was serving as a Rox'al Navy radar technician in Malta and was luoking for something ~o read at a dull party when tie spotted a discarded copy of Astou~tding Science l"'iclion. It was the Dianetics issue. tic read it avidly, then bought the book and enrolled for an auditing course at Holland Park Avenue when he v,'as next in London on leave. By 1954 he had made his way to phoenix, wl~ere he was working for'the org as an auditor. 'I spent quite a bit of time x~'ith Ron and Nlary Sue out at Camel 216 Bare-Faced Messiah Back. We used to swap war stories and try to cap each other's yarns. tte was a wonderful story-teller and he'd make a story fit whatever point he was trying to make. I don't think he ever expected me to take his war stories seriously, although I knexv he had been wounded because one nigllt he kept complaining of a pain in his side and when he stood up a little bit of sbrapnell fell out from under his shirt. He said it was sometiling that often happened - fragments of shrapnel still in his body were slowly working their way out. 'One of the ttlings he liked to do was ride his motorcycle - he had an Indian, a real monster - out into tile desert. tfc played a game he called point to point. t{e'd pick a spot on the horizon and go for it, straight as he could, without deviating, regardless of what was in the way, cactus or whatever. Nibs and Dick Steves, from the org, used to chase him on their motorcycles, but Ron's favourite trick was to put up dust devils bchi~ld him. That's another thing he could do manipt~latc dust devils. l lc could whip them up and move them around at will. I often saw him du that.'~z Rav 1,2emp exemplified a propensity in I tubbard's disciples to build mvttls around him. There was also a marked tendency to treat everything tie said as gospcl, which led to frcqucnt misunderstandings as i lubl~ard liked to make jokes. Once, during a lecture in Phoenix, he tnade a crack about a Colt .45 being an 'enormously effective' method of extcri~rization. As this ludicrous piece of wisdom was disseminated, a st›~ry grew that I lubl~ard had drawn a gun during tile lecture and fired a round into the floor. Nibs swore later that lie had seen the hole in the floorboards. Jack l forner joined tile circle close to 11ubt}ard that summer of '54. Like so many of the earl)' Dianeticists tie had fallen out with I lubbard, in his case after I lubbard had accused him of fiddling the accounts, but typically he found he could not stay away. He pretended he was in Phoenix to see some friends who were working for the org and naturally ran into Hubbard. 'He asked me what I was doing and I said "teaching school" and he said, "we'll soon fix that" and he began to run a process on me right there and then. He told me to go and touch certain tl~ings in tile room and then sit down at a desk. Then he said, "Now you go touch them" and I knew exactly what he meant. ~Vhile I was sitting there I suddenly found myself looking at the underside of the desk. I had a definite, certain reality of mvself out of mv body. I said "Oh mv God, I'm out of my bodv!" At that point I' knew what he meant by exteriorization. 'Later, when I was working for him doing research in Phoenix, I was out at his home late one afternoon with Jim Pinkham, who did all the recording at tile org, and someone knocked at the door. Ron went Pttoenix Rising 217 and talked to a guy outside for about five minutes and came back with a big grin on his face. He said the guy at the door wanted to give him a cheque for $5000 for acopy oft','xcalibur. Then he laughed out loud and said, "One of these days I '11 have to get round to writing it." We cracked up. It was the only tithe Ron ever admitted there was no such book. 'It didn't matter too much to us. From our standpoint at that time Scientology was the only game in town and it was Ron's game. It was like exploring the moon, like being in the space programme, except that we were exploring the mind instead of space. Religion didn't cut it, psychology didn't cut it. If Ron wanted to tell tall stories about himself to make hindself look good, so wtlat? We didn't worry a whole lot about it. t t is genius outflowered his craziness. ,~3 Ma~ly of Ron's most fervent admirers, Homer included, found it difficult to include Mary Sue in their devotion. 'l hated her,' said Homer. 'She was a real tight4ipped Baptist. One night I got into a fight with her because she called my girlfriend a whore. I really tore into her verbally and 1 lubbard threw me out of the house.' Hubbard would never allow anyone to criticize Nlary Sue and although he rarely showed much affection for her in public, it seemed, after two failed marriages and innumcrablc affairs, that he had at last formed a stable relationship, improbable as it had first appeared. They were i~dccd an unlikely couple - a tlamboyant, fast-talking extrovert entrepreneur in his fortics and a quiet, intense young x,,'oman twenty years his junior from a small town in Texas. But anyone who utldcrcstimatcd Mary Suc made a big mistake. Although she was not yet twenty-four vcars old, she excrcized considerable power within the Scicn~ology ~ovcment and people around t lubbard quickly learned to bc wary of her. Fiercely loyal to her husband, brusque and autocratic, she could be a dangerous enemy. She also had a remarkable capacity for motherhood; only four months after Quentin was born, she was pregnant again. In June, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International produced an imaginative re-working of I Iubbard's biography in a letter to the Better Business Bureau in Phoenix, clearly designed to improve ILx, Sl's standing in tile town. Much new information was included, not all of it entirely comprehensible. The myste~Tious Commander Tompson [sic], for example, was said in tile letter to have 'instituted psychoanalysis in the US Navy for use in flight surgery'. A Dr William Alan White, superintendent of St Elizabeth's, a government asylum in Washington, made his debut as someone under whom Hubbard ha'd trained and mention was made of a hitherto unmentioned book:'ln 1947 t ! ubbard published a book for the Gerontological Society and the American Medical Association called Scientology. A New Science.' 2 18 Babe-Faced Messiah This non-existent publication, it seemed, was 'politely received', but thereafter events had conspired against the scientist-author. Like 'almost any nuclear physicist' bc had often written science fiction 'for amusement' and unscrupulous puhlisl~ers took advantage of tiffs fact. While poor Ron wanted nothing for hindself but to be left in peace to continue his study and research, he was pressurized to produce a popular book for Hermitage |louse, who then 'unwisely' published an article in a pulp magazine. The sorry tale continued with Hubbard constantly being taken advantage of by all and sundry, with everyone but Ron trying to make money out of his discoveries and his wicked estranged wife threatening to stir up a 'great deal of scandal'. However, the biography had a happy ending in Phoenix in the Hubbard Association of Scientologists - the first organization in the field to be under Hubbard's sole control and therefore untainted by all the previous manoeux, rings. It had established a two-year record of good repute and responsibility, paid its bills promptly 'as any Phoenix business firm with which it deals can attest' and xvas following a policy of quiet, orderly business. It was soon intending to make Scientology available to the disabled 'as a public service'. The letter was signoct by Jolm Galusha, the secretary of the HASI board of directors. It was, no doubt, written in good faith, for Galusha was a thoroughly decent, deeply committed Scicntol~>gist. ! lc had been working ~m the railroad in Colorado when he tirst heard about Dianetics and had thrown himself intu it wholeheartedIv. 'I thought it was a prix liege to work for Ron,' he said. 'Nlavbc he was a charlatan and a liar I didn't care. The point was that the tcch was good. It worked.'~4 The 'tech' was the commonIv used contraction for what |Iubbard, the engineer, liked to describe as 'the tcchnol{~gy' of Scientology. Galusha did not get to know ttubbard particularly well, but then very few people did. Jack Homer recalled a strange remark Hubbard once made: 'We were out the back of his house and he xvas draining the radiator of his car because it was going to be unexpectedly cold that night. I said to him, "You know Ron, it would be nice if we could be closer friends." There was a silence for a moment, then he replied, "Yeah, it would be nice, but I can't have any friends."' For Hubbard, the best news of 1954 came towards the end of the year when he heard from x, Vichita that Don Purcell was giving up tile fight for control of Dianetics. Purcell had tired of tile seemingly endless litigation and the constant attacks from Scientologists. He had also became interested in an offshoot of Dianetics called Synergetics and when he decided to devote his future resources to Synergetics he banded the Wichita Foundation's copyrights and mailing lists back to Hubbard, thankful to disentangle himself from the man he had once considered a saviour. Phoenix Rising 2 19 PurceWs retreat could not have come at a more apposite momentWith Dianetics and Scientology at last firmly under his control, Hubbard was ready to follow his own often-voiced advice: 'If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start a religion.' Chapter 13 Apostle of the Main Chance 'A historic milestone in the personal life of L. Ron Hubbard and in the history of Dianctics and Scientology was passed in February 1954, with the fotmding of the first Church of Scientology. This was in keeping with the rc~igious nature of the tenets dating from the earliest davs of research. It was obvious that hc had been exploring religious territory right along.' (Mission lnto 7~'me, 1973) I, ii, 11, It, II, Hubbard had been qttictly planning the conx'ersion of Scientology into a rcligi~n for more than twelve months, ever since his returu from Europe in the autumn of 1953. It made sense financially, for there were substantial tax c~mccsshms available to churches, and it made sense pragmatically, for he was convinced that as a religi~m Scientology would bc less vulnerable to attack bv the enemies he was convisited were constantly trying to encircle h;m. Furthermore, religion was booming iu post-war America. All the churches were increasing their membership, there was a new interest in revivalism, epitomized by Billy Graham's spectacular crusades, and even theologians were fostering ihe concept of the church as integral to contemporary culture, reflected in the popularity of songs like 'I Believe' and epic films like 77re Ten (~tntna~td~nents'. Politicians, too, spoke of 'piety on the Potomac' and President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower declared in late 1952: 'Our government makes no sense unless it is rounded on a deeply felt religious faith - and I don't care what it is!' In 1954 Congress boosted the new piety bv adding the phrase 'under God' to the pledge of allegiance. Hubbard was quick to recognize there was a religious bandwagon rolling and equally quick to leap nimbly aboard. In December 1953, he incorporated three new churches - the Church of American Science, the Church of Scientology and the Church of Spiritual Engineering - in Camden, New Jersey. On 18 February 1954, the Church of Scientology of California was incorporated. its objects, inter alia, were to 'accept and adopt tile aims, purposes, principles and creed of the Church of American Science, as rounded bv L. Ron Apostle of the Main Chance 221 tlubbard'. Another Church of Scientology was incorporated in Washington I)C and throughout 1954 tlubbard urged franchise holders around the United States to convert their operations into independent churches. Executives of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International henceforth described themselves as 'ministers', and some of the more flamboyant even took to wearing clerical collars and pre-fixing their nanms with 'Reverend'. At the beginning of 1955, Hubbard moved his headquarters from Phoenix to x. Vashington DC, declaring his belief that the church's constitutional rights were safer under the jurisdiction of Federal, rather than State, courts. Travelling with him to Washington was a veritable family entourage, including his heavily pregnant wife and their two small children, his son Nibs and his wife, Henrietta, also pregnant. On Sunday, 13 February, Mary Sue gave birth to a daugl~ter, 1Xlarv Suzette Rochelle tfubbard, her third child in rather less than three years of marriage. The Ilubbards mo~,ed into a two-storey house in the leafy Maryland suburb of Silver Spring, just outside tile Washington DC metropolitan area, and it was from there that Ron resun~ed his correspondence with the Conm~u~ist Activities Division of the FB I. On 11 July 1955, he wrote a maundcring three-page letter, about Communists and wicked accountants conspiring with renegade IRS agents to destroy him, so inane that the recipient at the FBI scribbled on it a notation 'appears mental'.~ Thereafter, the FBI no longer acknowledged commt~ications from ttubbard 'because of their rambling, meaningless nature and lack of any pertinence to Bureau interests'.z No doubt somewhat to the Bureau's chagrin, Hubbard was not in the least deterred from writing. Two weeks later, on smart new printed notepaper headed 'L. Ron Hubbard D.D., Ph.D.', he wrote again to say he had received an invitation to go to Russia. It had come from an 'unimpeachable source' who suggested that as he was about to be ruined by the IRS he might as well accept the offer. 'It seems I can go to Russia as an adviser or a consultant and have my own laboratories and receive very high fees. And it is all so easy because it has already been ascertained that I could get my passport extended for Russia and all I had to do was go to Paris and there a Russian plane would pick me up and that would be that.' He did not wish to reveal the name of his contact, he added, 'because he is a little too highly placed on the [Capitol] Hill'. It seemed Hubbard was able to resist blandishments from beyond the Iron Curtain, for through the sweltering summer months in Washington DC he could be found lecturing at the 'Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences', in a ten-roomed house at 1845 R Street, in the north-west section of the city. He was still maintaining a 222 Ba~'4;'aced Messiah one-way communication with the FBI and on 7 September, he wrote to complain about the persecution of Scientologists, some of whom he alleged were being mysteriously driven insane, possibly by the use of LSD, 'the insanity producing drug so favoorcd by the APA [American Psychological Association]'. An~ther poor wretch, a 'half-blind deaf oltt man' had been arrested for practising medicine without a licenee in Phoenix by a County attorney promising to 'get to the bottom of this thing about [lubbard and Scientology'. On a personal basis, Hubl~ard pointed out that it was not uncommon 'to have judges and attorneys mad-dogged about what a terrible person I am and how foul is Scientology . . . All man~er of defamatory rumours have been scattered around me, questioning even my sanity . . .' It certainly was a quest/on in the forefront of the FBI file, although llubbard was not to know that. [to continued: 'I am trying to turn out some monograpl~s on matters in m~' fidd of nuclear physics and psychology for the government on tt;e subject of alleviating some of the distress of radiatior~ burns, a project I came east to complete.' He also promised to forward information about the latest brain-washing techniques in Russia. 'l'hc h~rror of 'brain-washing' hacl been an cmntivc talking pnint in the United States ever since the end of the Iiorcan war and the revelallure that Llnited Nations prisoners had been brain-washed for pn~pagantla purposes. Timely as always, I lubt}ard entered the debate bv distributing a pamphlet entitled 'Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russilm 'l'cxtbook on Psychopolitics', which he claimed was a transcript of a lecture delivered in the Soviet Unison by the dreaded Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, architect of Stalin's purges. It was this pamphlet he forwarded in duc course to the [:BI with a note explaining that it was the Church of Scientology's printing of 'what appeared to be ~ Comn~u~ist manual'. The Bureau's Central Research Sect/on examined it and concluded that its authenticity was . doubtful, since it lacked documentation of source material, did not use normal Commu~ist words and phrases and contained n<~ quotations from well-known Communist works, as would be expected. llad the Central Research Section been familiar with the xvorks of L. Ron tlubbard, they rnigbt have noted certain similarities in the narrative style. The FBI did not acknowledge receipt of the pamphlet, but this did not dissuade tbc tlubbard Dianetic Research Foundation of Silver Spring, Nlaryland, from mailing the pamphlet to influential individuals and organizatio~s around the country with a covering letter claiming that 'authorization' had been received to release the material after the FBI had hccn supplied with a copy. Ap~stle of the :~lain ('hatwe 2Z3 While Hubbard was skirmishing with the FBI, he was also tightening his grip on the Scientology movement and urging his followers to take action against anyone attempting to practise Scientology outside tbe control of the 'church'. He derided apostates as 'squirrels' and recommended merciless litigation to drive them out of business. 'Tbc law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease,' he wrote in one of his interminable bulletins, casually adding, 'If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.' In the same bulletin he offered the benefit of his advice to any Scientologists unlucky enough to be arrested. They were instantly to file a $100,000 civil damages suit for molestation of 'a Man of God going about his business', then go on the offensive 'forcefully, artfully and arduousIv' and cause 'blue flames to dance on the courthouse rnof until everybody has apologized proh~sely'. The onlv way to ddend anything, ttubbard wrote, was to attack. 'If you ever forget that, you will lose every battle you are ever engaged in.'3 It was a pbilosophy to which he would adhere ardently all his life. At tbc end of September, the ttubbards packed their bags once again, closed the house at Silver Spring antt departed the United States with their three young children for anott~er extended visit to London. l lubbard bad taken a lease on a large apartment in Brunswick I touse, a mansion block in Palace Gardens Terrace, a few minutes walk froth Kensington Gardens. It bocathe, tctnporarily, the address of the Ilubbard Communicati{~s Office, which maintained links with embryonic Scientology grout~s in other countries (satellite churches had already been established in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). tlubhard immediately took over the dav-to-dav running of the Itubbard Association of Scientologists International, which was still operating from its dreary premises at 163 tlolland Park Avenue, although it had grown considerably in size. There was now a full-time staff of twenty auditors, most of them young, like C~'ril Vosper, who had been a nineteen-year-old biology student when he first read about Dianetics and was a qualified professional auditor by the time he was twenty. '1 had no doubt that Hubbard's arrival in town was a historic event,' he recalled. 'I believed in him totally, balieyed he was a genius and was convinced he knew a lot more about the human species and the human condition than anyone else. Tbe only reason I had any slight difficulty in accepting that he was the world's greatest human being was that, to English eyes, he didn't look like a Messiah. Ite used t{~ wear very brash American clothes - loud check jackets and buotlace 224 Bare-Faced Messiah ties and brothel-creepers. It wasn't quite the image we expected. But he gave a number of public lectures around town and was interviewed by the media and was pretty well received. The newspapers at that time were quite complin~entary, they viewed him as an oddball who might just have come up with something good. 'Ron presided over the staff meeting at the HASI at five o'clock every afternoon. It was all Christian names at the HASI, everyone called him Ron, but there was no doubt he xvas absolutely in charge. He wouldn't brook any other input: all the books were written by him, all the policy letters xvere written by him. No one would ever question anything he said or wrote. I had read The Histo~.'x, of Man and I knew, as a biology student, that it was a load of bleeding nonsense but I explained it to myself as an allegorical work. In any case, I could never have said to him, "Now listen, Ron, that's just not true." No one would ever have done that. 'One of the things that begall to worr.V me about Ron was that he was unprcdictablc. 11c could bc very thoughtful and kind one minute and quite hideous the next. We were auditing about 50 hours a week and I remember one afternoon a girl auditor burst into tears when she was tclling Rou about a particularly dirt|cult case she had. 1Ic put his arm rountt her and said, "Jcn~ly, anything xve can do for this pre-clcar is better than doing nothing. She needs help and a bit of attention and that is what you arc giving her. Just keep on doing the same thing you're doing and you will resolve it in due course. You can't expect nliraclcs overnight." That struck me as a very htlmane and comforting thing to say to her. There was no question lie had sometiling to contribute in the psychological area. I mean, just to sit down with someone and listen to them for a couple of hours did them good. 'But then I have also seen him behave in a grotcsqt,e fashion. One afternoon during a lecture a woman in the audience was coughing rather badly and hc walked to the front of the stage, red-faced and visibly angry, and shouted, "Get that woman out of this lecture hall !" She was one of his most fervent supporters and she was also desperately ill - she died three weeks later of lung cancer.'4 Aside from occasional temper tantrunks, Itubbard considered things were going very well in London. 'I am busy at a headlong rate of speed,' he wrote to Marilyn Routsong, an aide left behind in V','ashington to keep an eve on his interests, 'realIv got things rolling off over here. Hope to have some films that will help us before long, and am now dickering around on an international radio'. He ended the letter with a titbit of information that must have made Ixdiss Routsong's nerves tingle: 'Jhst between ourselves, I actually do have a method of as-|sing the atom bomb. Anyway I'm not quite as far away as you think. Love, Ron.' Apostle of the Main Chance 225 In tile peculiar argot of Scientology, 'as-isness' was a process of making sometiling disappear. What Hubbard was apparently saying was that he was well on the way towards removing nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. However, something must have gone wrong since he would soon be applying his awesome imagination to the problem of dealing with radiation. The ttubbards' closest friends in London were Ray Kemp, now back home from Phoenix, and his pretty girlfriend, Pain, both of whom worked at the HASI. Itubbard, as a minister of the Church of American Science, perromped the ceremony when they married in February 1956, in the lecture room at the HASI, and Mary Sue was Pam's maid of honour. 'Ron and Mary Sue had dinner with us the night before the wedding,' Pain said, 'and Ron told us he had writtcn tile ceremony specially for us. He was a very good friend tie even fixed our honeymoon, made arrangements for us to use an apartment in Tangier owned by a friend of his and paid for our air tickets. 'x, Vhcn we got back, we used to see a great deal of them, two or three times a week. Ron would telephone and say, "I'm coming over to dinner and I'm bringing a chicken." Then we would sit up for hours playing Cluedo and the men would start telling stories and tilere would bc lots of laughtcr. It was a lot of fun - I'd usually end up falling asleep and Mary Sue would go to bed. Their relationship sccmcd O1':-, but there never seemed to be a lot of love between them. She was not thc affectionate type, she xvas more efficient than affectionate. They used to have fierce husband and wife domestic argun/cnts. 'x. Ve had a big old apartment in Palace Court, Kensington, with a huge living-room with a full-size concert grand in the corner and we used to have parties every night. Ron was always the life and soul, great fun. Hc loved to dance, play the guitar or ukulele; he was a real actor. He would drag me up to sing with him and then we'd make up rude songs about him and auditing and he would top each verse and roar with laughter and think it was terribly funny. I thought he was always very aware as an individual. He would make a comment about sometbing and he'd invariably be right and I'd look at him and think "How did you know that?"'s At the end of March 1956, Ray Kemp accompanied Hubbard on a , trip to Dublin. 'He wanted to see if there was something he could do for Ireland,' Kemp explained. 'tie felt that Ireland's troubles were based on the fact that it was a bit like a Third World nation and had never been able to apply the skills of its people. V'.'e were tilere for two or three days and he spent the whole time talking to people. ~,Ve'd be 226 Bare4'hced Messiah ~ walking down the street and all of a sudden he wasn't there. I'd look back and sce him deep in conversation with sonleone, asking them if they had a job, what their skills were, tl~ings like that. Believe it or not, he'd actually run a little process on them there and then and tbey'd feel better and he'd walk away. Ills idea was to open a Personal Efficiency Foundation in Dublin to teach people how to apply whatever skills they had got, but I don't think anything ever came of it.' Back in London, Hubbard applied hindself to proselytizing for his fledgling church. Never short of ideas, he told Kemp to try putting an advertisement in the London evening nexvspapcrs with a telephone number and the offer, 'I will talk to anyone about anything.' It instantly tapfled tile deep well of loneliness which exists in every big city and generated an extraordinary response. 'We were inundated with calls,' said Kemp. 'Everyone from potential suicides to a girl who couldn't decide which of three men to marry.' So successful was this campaign that 1 labbard then tried targeting specific, and potentially vulnerable, groups, starting with the victin~s of one of the most (cared diseases of tile 'firtics. The classified columns of the evening newspapers soon began carrying the following, apparently innocuous, advertisement: 'Polio vie(ires. A research foundation in~'cstigating polio desires volttotters suffering from tile effects nf that illness to call for examination...' The 'research fotmdation' followctt up with similar advertisements aimed at asthmatics and arthritics. 'Casualty Contact' was anotller thoroughly distasteful recruiting metholt advocated bv Ilubl~ard. lie rccornrnentlcd that ambiti{~us auditors looking for new pro-clears should cut out stories in the newspapers about 'people who have been victimized one way or the other by life. It does not much matter whether that victimizing is in the manner of mental or physical injury . . .' Then they should make a call on the bereaved or injured person as speedilY' as possible, , representing themselves as 'a minister whose compassion was compelled by tile nexvspapcr story'. Bv the sumn~er of 1956'Scientology was prospering mightily and so, at last, was its founder. ttubbard's gross receipts for tim fi~'cal year ending June 1956 amounted to $102,604 -a handsome income by any standards.61tis salary from tile Church of Scientology xvas only $125 a xveek, but he earntd commission from the sale of training pi'ocesses and E-meters, in addition to substantial royalties from his innumerable books. ~Iore than sixty books on Scicnt~logy by L. Ron Itubbard were in print bv this time and a new one was appearing approximately every two months, usually containing new processes and procedures superseding those currently in use. Apostle t~f the Main Chance 227 The church could easily afford tile expense of allowing its founder to become an early transatlantic commuter and Hubbard made frequent visits back to Washington during tile year, collecting lecture fees on each trip. In November, the Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences (also known as the Academy of Scientology) moved to 1810-1812 19th Street, adjoining grey-brick townl~ouses with two flights of stone steps leading up to the front door in a tree-lined street of eminent respectability. T}le ttubbards took a lease on a handsome four-storey brownstone on the other side of the street for their use when they were in Washington. In March 1957, the Church of Scientology adopted a compensation scheme known as a 'proportional pay plan' under which Hubbard would henceforth receive, in lieu of salary, a percentage of the church's gross income. The effect was dramatic: before the end of the 'riftits the founder of the Church of Scientology would be coining around $250,000 a year, a great deal more than the President of the United States. By April it seemed that ttubbard had given up his heroic, singlcd~andcd attempt to rid the world of nuclear weapons by 'as-ising' the atomic bomb, for in that month he hired the Royal Empire Society I lall in' London in order to preside over the 'London Congress on Nuclear Radiation and ttealth'. The various lectures delivered at this extraordinary event were later condensed into an even more extraordinary book titled All About Radiation and written by 'a nuclear physicist' and 'a n~edical doctor'. The doctor was anonymous, but the 'nuclear physicist' was none other than L. Ron }lubbard offering the benefit of his advice with customary scant recourse to the laws of science. He asserted, for example, that a sixteen-foot wall could not stop a gamma ray whereas a human body could, an assertion later described bv an eminent radiologist as 'showing complete and utter ignorance of physics, nuclear science and medicine'.7 In line with his philosophy ~hat most illnesses were caused by the mind, Hubbard avowed, 'The danger in the world today in my opinion is not the atomic radiation which may or may not be floating through the atmosphere but the hysteria occasioned by that question.' Radiation, he added, was 'more of a mental tban a physical problem'. Fortunately, however, no one needed to worry about radiation, since Hubbard had devised a vitamin compound called 'Dianazene' (after his first child by Man' Sue?) which provided protection: 'Dianazene runs out radiation - or what appears to be radiation. It also proofs a person against radiation to some degree. It also turns on and runs out incipient cancer. I have seen it run out skin cancer. A man who didn't have much liability to skin cancer (only had a few moles) 228 Bare-Faced 31essiah took Dianazene. His whole jaw turned into a raw mass of cancer. tie kept on taking Dianazene and it disappeared after a while. I was looking at a case of cancer that might have happened.' TIle doctor, writing under the pseudonym lx, Iedicus, confirmed in his section of the book that 'some very recent work bv L. Ron Hubbard and the Hubbard Scientology Organization has indicated that a simple combination of vitamins in unusual doses can be of value. Alleviation of the remote effects and increased tolerance of radiation have been the apparent results . . .' The Food and Drugs Administration in the United States was inclined, after studying a copy of All About Radi~tion, to disagree. FDA agents swooped on the Distribution Center Inc, a Scientology company in Washington, seized 21,000 Dianazene tablets and destroyed them, alleging that they were falsely labelled as a preventative treatn~ent for 'radiation sickness'. In July' 1957, Hubbard addressed the 'Freedom Congress' at the Shorebarn Hotel in x, Vashi~gton; during the lecture he carried out a christening ccrem~lnv for the first time. Its function, he explained, was simply to help get thc thetan oriented in its new body and informality was the keynutc, as was made evident in a booklet titled 'Ceremonies of tile Founding Church of Scientolugy'. After introducing the child to its parcnts and godparents, the ceremony proceeded: '||ere we go. (To tbc child): t|ow arc you? All right. Now your name is ---. You got that? Good. There you are. Did that upset you? Now, do you realize that you're a men~ber of the !IASI? Pretty g~od, huh?' Thereafter the parents and godparents were introduced to the child and the ceremony concluded: 'Noxv you're suitably christcried. Don't ~'orry about it, it could be worse. OK. Thank you very much. They'll treat you all rigbt.' His image as a family man was a pose, since he evinced little interest in his own children. ixiibs rarely managed to please his father and his sister, Catherine, then twenty-one, had started working for the organization in Washington but saw little of Hubbard. She married a Scientologist in 1956 which would have pleased her father except he did not like the man; the marriage could not survixe his disapproval and she divorced in 1957. Hubbard made no attempts to see Alexis. The same month as the Freedom Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency opened a file, No. 156409, on L. Run Hubbard and his organization. CIA agents trawled through police, revenue, credit and property records to try and unravel Hubbard's tangled corporate affairs. It was a task of herculean difficulty, for the Church of Scientology was a cryptic maze of ad hoc corporations. The printed notepaper of the Academy of Scientology gave only a hint of its labyrinthine structure -on the left-hand side of the page was a list of no Apostle of the Main Ctlance 229 less than seventeen associated organizations, ranging from the American Society for Disaster Relief to the Society of Consulting Ministers. Agents traced a considerable amuunt of property owned either by Hubbard, his wife, son, or one of the daunting number of 'churches' with which they were associated, but the report quickly became bogged doxvn in a tangle of names and addresses: 'The Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences is currently engaged as a school for ministers of religion which at the present time possesses approximately thirty to forty students. The entire course consists of $1500 to $1800 worth of actual classroom studies . ú ú The public office is located at 1810-12 19th Street N .x,V. The corporations rent the entire building ú ú ú 'The Hubbard Guidance Center, located at 2315 15th Street, N.XV., occupies the entire building which consists of three floors and which was purchased by the SUBJECT Organization. The center also rents farm property located somexvhere along Colcsville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, on a short-term lease. Tbe center formerly operated a branch office at 8609 Flower Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland. In addition to the Silver Spring operation, the center has a working agreement with the Founding Church of Scientology of New York, which holds classes at Studio 847, Carnegie Hall, 154 x,Vest 57th Street, New York City. Churches of this denomination number in excess of one hundred in the United States ú ú .' One agent was assigned the thankless task of reading through all tlubbard's published work at the Library of Congress in order to gain an 'insight' into Scientology. 'Hubbard's works', he noted glumly, 'contain many words, the meaning of which are not made clear for lay comprehensian and perhaps purposely so.' The District of Columbia Income Tax Division reported that the 'church' had applied for a licence to operate as a religion in x, Vashington DC probably in an attempt to claim tax-free status, and the Personal Property Division reported that it was having difficulty persuading the church to produce its records so that a personal property tax could be levied. Repeated telephone calls had produced nothing but excuses as to why the records could not be produced. In the end, the CIA file could do no more than chronicle a multitude of vague suspicions; it certainly uncovered no hard evidence of wrong-doing and it revealed curiously little about the remarkable career of the founder of the Founding Church of Scientolog).'- 'Dr Hubbard', it noted simply, 'received a Doctor of Divinity degree in 1954 and throughout his adult career has been a minister.' The increasingly obvious success of Scientology from 1957 onwards unquestionably prompted federal agencies to keep a closer eye on Hubbard. The Washington Field Office of the FBI, for example, maintained an extensive file which included film and sound recordings 230 Bate-Faced Messiah as well as photographs and doggedly noted ever), example of Hubbard's exuberant irreverence to authoritv. ~,~,'hcn the Academ3I of Scientology delivered txvelve thousand feet of film to a Washington laborator), for processing, outraged technicians forwarded it to the FBI for investigation, alleging that the speaker on , the film was ant~-Amencan. The film covered six one-hour lectures by Hubbard, during which he made a crack about the Governn~ent developing the hydrogen bomb in order to 'kill more people faster'. I{c also talked about his experience, when 'he was a policeman', in deallug xvith the criminal mind. 'q'he FBI thinks there's such a thing as the criminal mind - always a big joke,' he said. 'There's a criminal mind and a non-criminal mind. Tbe FBI have never shown me a non-criminal mind. Of course, these are terrible tt~ings to say - simply comments on J. Edgar who is an awfully good guy, stupid, but awfully good.' The Washington Field Office, which perhaps lacked Hubbard's sense of hun~our, solemnly took note of this analysis of their director and diligently forwarded to him the advice that L. Ron llubbard thougin hc was 'stupid'.s Largel3' unaxvarc of the extent of fcdcral interest in his activities, t lubbard had remained in Washington after the Freedom Congress to lecture on a more pcrmancnt basis at the .-Xcatlcmy of Scicntology. ~larv Suc and the children j~fincd him fr~m London and they all moved into the brownstone house on 19th Street. :Xlthough she was sonn prcgna~t once more, Nlary Suc was app~intcd 'Acadcmv Supervisor' antt remained a powerful figure m the organization. O;~ 6 June 1958. she gave birth to her f›~urth child - a son, Arthur Ronald C~n:wa). l lubbard. Like his olt/cr brothers and sisters, Arthur emerged im~ the world xvith a wispy topping of bright red hair. Through most of 1958 lIubbard lectured in XVashmgton at the Academy. In one famous lecture, taped for posterity and marketed for profit, he recounted tbc colourful 'story of Dianctic~ and Scicntology', interlacing the resum6 with anecdotes and jokes, all delivered with a fine sense of tin~ing and generating roars of laughter from an appreciative audience. It was essentially the story of his own life as it . had come to be compiled in his mind, with extraordinary adventures tagged on to a slender frarnework of facts. ' 'The story starts when [ was 12 years old', he began, 'and I met one of the great men of Freudian adalysis, Commander Thon~pson, a great man and explorer. He was a commander in the US Navv. His enemies called him Crazy Thompson and his friends called him ~nake Thompson. He was a personal friend of Freud and had no kids of his own. On a big transport on a long cruise he started to work me over. lie had a cat b3' the name of Psycho with a crooked tail. The cat would do tricks and the first thing he did was teach me to train cats . . .' Aposth~ of the Mabt Chance 23 1 tle continued the story in similar vein. Finding himself in Asia while still a teenager, he discovered he was able to 'operate in the field of Asian mysticism'; in college he was 'never in class' but got through by persuading other students to take his matbe~natics examinations while he did their psychology papers. [t was easy, he said. fie simply read the textbooks the night before and sat the exam next morning. During the Prohibition years he knocked around with newspaper reporters and drank bathtub gin acquired from the 'very best gangsters'. In 1938, having 'associated rather thoroughly with twelve different native cultures, not including the people in the Bronx', he identified the urge to survive as the common denominator of all forms of life. In hospital at the end of tbc war, 'recuperating from an accumulation of too much wartime Scotch and overdoses of lead', he continued his research. 'I found out that by taking off one collar ornament I became an MD. Tbcy don't let anybody in a medical library except doctors but by stopping off with one collar ornament and for a couple of bucks having a marine on crutches come by and say, "Good morning, doctor", I was able to get in a year's study at the medical library.' After leaving hospital he bought a yacht, took a cruise to the West Indies, then used his wartime back pay to finance further research -'l went down to the middle of l lol[ywood, rented an office, wrapped a towel round mv hcad and became a swanft.' Pcrhat}s tl~c most revealing thiug llubbard said about himself during the lecture was a comment on one of Commander Thompson's favouritc little aphorisms. It appeared that the Commander used to tell Ron, 'lf it's not true for you, it's not true.' It aligned with his own personal philosophy, Hubbard explained, 'because if there is anyone in the world calculated to believe what he wants to believe it is I'. Never did L. Ron liubbard speak a truer word. In October, Iiubbard flew back to London to preside over a six-week 'Advanced Clinical Course' at HASI's smart new West End offices in Fitzrov Street. Cyril Vosper was one of the students on the course hoping for a Bachelor or Doctorate of Scientology and he noticed a marked change in t{ubbard's appearance: 'The flashy American clothes were gone. Now he was wearing grey tweed suits and silk shirts. He looked like a well-dressed professional gentleman and there was a feel of money and class about the whole thing. ,9 Nluch of the course, Vospcr recollected, was devoted to students investigating each other's past lives. As Hubbard made frequent mention in his lectures of past lives on other planets, with zapp guns, flying saucers, mother ships, galactic federations, repellet beams and suchlike, Vosper reported that many of the past lives excitedly revealed during the course sounded like 'Flash Gordon' adventures. 232 Bare-Faced lllessiah Nibs, who was one of the instructors, proved to be enormously resourceful in the past lives area. 'x, Vhen a student was having difficulty in making bis past life gel,' said Vosper, 'Nibs would helpfully fill in bits. Students knew that unless they could bring forth a past life with full recall, pain, emotion, full perception, the lot, they would be regarded as something less than real Scientologists. There was a good deal of rivalry as to who could dig up the most notable or extraordinary past life. Jesus of Nazareth was very popular. At least three London Scientologists claimed to have uncovered incidents in which they were crucified and rose from the dead to save the world. Queen Elizabeth I, \Valter Raleigh and the venerable Bedc were also popular. Funnily enough, I never met anyone who dain~ed to know anything about Attila the tIun, Genghis Khan or Pontius Pilate.' ttubbard returned to Washington for Christmas, but in the New Year he began making plans to move back to London with his family. Pain and Ray Kemp wrote to say that they were moving and that their house in North London, on the Finchlcy Road in Golders Green, would be availahlc if Ron was looking for somewhere to live. The Hubbards - Ron, Mary Sue, Diana, aged six, Quentin, five, Suzette, four and Arthur, eight months - arrived i~ London at the end of February and agreed to rent the Kemps~ house in Goldors Green. 'lXly daughter Suzannc was born m~ Ron's birthday,' said Pain Kcmp. 'Ron came over with a beautiful, bright orange, angora shawl for me. lie said everyone brings presents for the baby but everyone forgets it is the mott~er that has been doing all the work so hc was bringing a present for the motl~er. That was tyt~ical of him. 'It was also typical of him that he stifled us for the rent and he stifled the greengrocer. Before they moved in, the greengrocer on the other side of the road asked us if he could trust the new tenants and we said "Of course." Ron proceeded to run up a huge bill which he never paid. And he never paid us any rent. ~,Ve asked him dozens of times for the money. I*te told us to ask Mary Sue and she alxvavs said they didn't have any money. 'Then one day Ron came over on his motorcycle, very excited and pleased with himself. He said, "Guess what I've done?"' The Kemps were dumbrounded by their friend's news. He announced that he had bought the lxdaharajah of Jaipur's estate in SUSsex. Chapter 14 Lord of the Manor 'My own life is rather dull these days. I sort of won the lX, laharajah of ]aipur's luxury Sussex estate in a poker game..-' (Note in the Explorers Log from Dr L. Ron Hubbard, Explorers Jountal, February 1960) t1~ I~ Ie 11 I~ Saint Itill Manor was a Georgian mansion on a landscaped estate two miles from the little market town of East Grinstead in Sussex. The countryside thereabouts was much favoured by the landed gentry in the eighteenth century for the beauty of its verdant, gently rolling hills and its proximity to the court in London, only a few !~ours away by horse and carriage, and Saint llill was one of a number of large country houses in the area. Built for a wealthy landox~'ncr in 1733, the manor could not be described as one of fi~e glories of Georgian architecture (indeed, its sandstone facade had a faintly brooding aspect), but it was sufficiently imposing to merit a ballroom ~'ith marble columns and grotmds of fifty acres ~vith a lake, surrounded by a dense boundary hedge of rh{idodendrons. By the time it passed into the owt~ership of the Maharajah of Jaipur, the house boasted eleven bedrooms, eight bathrooms and an outdoor swimming-pool. While the Maharaiah spent a considerable sum on interior improvements, including commissioning the artist John Spencer Churchill to paint a mural in one of the first-floor rooms, he only lived in the house intermittently. When the fortunes of the Indian princes wavered after Independence in 1947, he decided to put his English estate on the market and was happy to find a buyer in the unlikely shape of L. Ron Hubbard. The arrival of an American family at Saint Hill Manor in the spring of 1959 occasioned almost as much excitement in East Grinstead as that of the exotic !Xlaharajah had done some years earlier. Alan Larcombe, a young reporter on the East Grinstead Courier was despatched to interview the new owner and found him to be extremely co-operative, happy to pose for a photograph ~,ith his wife and children and more than willing to talk about himself. 234 Bare-Faced ~l:lessiah 'An American and his delightful fanilly find a haven at Saint Hill', the Coun'er reported in its issue of 29 May 1959. Describing 'Dr Hubbard' as a 'tall, heavily built man whose work for htmlanity is known throughout the world', Larcomhc made no attempt to explain the nature of Dr llubbard's work, but contented himself with a recap of his subject's career, starting, naturally, with breaking broncos and hunting coyotes on his grandfathcr's cattle rauch. 'x, Vhen he inherited his grandfathcr's cattle estates in 5,1ontana and all its debts, hc wrote it into solvency, turning his hand to anything: essays, fiction and film scripts.' The inberiting of his grandfather's insolvent cattle estates was a titbit of information 1tubbard had not previously disclosed, as was his revelation that hc was deeply involved in the study of plant life. 'The production of plant mutations is one of his most iri~portant projects at the mo~ent. By battering seeds with X-rays, Dr [tubbard can either reduce a plant through its stages of cvolutioi~ or advance it.' It was, perhaps, inevitable that Hubbard would become an expert gardener the instant he moved into the Iinglish countryside and the fact that Saint t lill ~lan{)r had well-stocked greenhouses'undoubtedly helped fire his interest. But his horticultural expcrinlents also helped divert attcntiun from the real reason he had bought tile estate: his intcnti~m was that it should bccon~c tbc world-wide headquarters of Scicntology. |lubbard surmised, m~ th~t,bt correctly, that the people of East Grinstead were not qt, ite ready for this piece of information. In :\ugust, the (bttt7'er reported th/~t the experiments being conducted at Saint Ifill by the 'nuclear scientist, Dr llubbard' promised to rcvolt, tio~ize gardening. By treating seeds with 'radioactive rays' he xvas growing tomato plants 16 feet high, with an a~'cragc of 15 t;'usses and 45 tomatoes on each truss. He had also discovered that an 'infra-red rav lamp' provided complete protection against mildew, a discovery that was likely to save market gardeners 'thousands of pounds'. ' The reporter, again, was Alan I-arcombe:'ttc showed us some yet), big tomatoes and I remember thinking at the time that anyone could have grown them that size with fertilizers, but he was very keen we should take a photograph of them, so we did.'7 The picture the newspaper used was of little Qucntin, five years old, standing on duckboards in his father's greenhouse, staring solemnly at the camera through a forest of tomato and maize plants. ' Dr Hubbard's experiments soon came to the attention of Garden a'X~'ws, to which publication he revealed, gardener to gardener, his conviction that plants felt pain. He demonstrated bv connecting an E-meter to a geranium with crocodile clips, tearing c;ff its leaves and showing how the needle of the E-meter oscillated as he did so. The Lo,d of the ,Uanor 235 Garden News correspondent was enormously excited and wrote a story under the sensational headline 'PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN, describing Hubbard as a 'revolutionary horticultural scientist'. It was not long before television and Fleet Street reporters were beating a path to Saint Hill 1Matlot demanding to interview ttubbard about his novel theories. Always pleased to help the gentlemen of the press, he was memorably photographed looking tompassionately at a tomato jabbed by probes attached to an E-meter - a picture that eventually found its way into Newszceek magazine, causing a good deal of harmless merriment at his expense. Alan Whicker, a wellknown British television interviewer, did his best to make Hubbard look like a crank, but ttubbard contrived to come across as a rather likeable and confident personality. Wben Whicker moved in for the kill, sarcastically inquiring if rose pruning should be stopped lest it caused pain and anxiety, tlubbard neatly side-stopped the question and drew a parallel with an essential life-preserving medical operation on a hutnan being. He nilght have wbacky ideas, Whickcr discovered, but he was certainly no fool. Scientol~gists around the world could have been forgiven for wondering what their beloved leader was up to, but an explanation was soon forthcoming. The purpose of Ron's experiments, tbcv ~'erc told, was to 'reform the wnrld's food supply'. I lc had already prodt~ced 'ever-bearing tomato plauts anti sweetcorn plants sufticiently impressive to startle British newspalters i~to front-page stories about tills new wizardry'.3 Soun after Itubbard mo~led into Saint 11ill, tile Church of Scientology commissioned a bust of its founder from the sculptor, Edwartl I larris. I larris liked his sitters to talk while be was working anti asked his friend, Joan Vidal, to attend the sittings and cbat with Ilubbard. 'I~Iv first impression of him', she said, 'was tbat with his very pink skin and light red hair he looked like a fat, pink, scrubbed pig. I remember one of the first tllings he told me was that you could hear a tomato scream if you cut it and that's why he never ate tomatoes. He talked a lot about whether vegetables could feel pain and about all his past lives. It was very entertaining; it was obvious hc had a good mind and was widely read. 'After the bust was finished we were invited to dinner with him and his wife at Saint Itill. x, Vhen we arrived we were met by Nlary Sue. She was a rather drab, mousy, m~thing sort of person quite a bit younger than him. She showed us into a book-lined stud>' and hc waited a few minutes, rather theatrically, before making an entrance. I don't think they had finished work on the house because we had dinner in the kitchen. It x~as all wtlite tiled, very antiseptic, and the meal was served by a woman wearing a white overall, white shoes and stockings. Tt~ere 236 Bare-Faced Messiah was nothing to drink but Coca-Cola or water and tbe food was awful - we had frozen plaice fillets, a few vegetables and icecream, but he had an enormous steak overhanging his plate. It was obvious that everything revolved around him. tie was almost like Oswald iXIosley, he had the same sort of power. Both of them talked a lot about past lives; they told me that their daughter had previously been a telephone operator who had died in a fire. We didn't stay late and when we got back to ~'ictoria Station Eddie and I were both so hungry that we went in the buffet and had delicious roast lamb sandwiches.'4 In October, Dr Hubbard unveiled yet another of his interests. Learning tbat East Grinstead had been unable to fill a vacancy for a Road Safety Organizer, he volunteered for the job. As he explained to a meeting of the East Grinstead Road Safety Committee, he was anxious to make a contribution to the commu~ity and he felt that tire experience he had gained serving on 'numerous' road safety committees in the United States could bc put to good use in East Grinstoad. Hc gave an interesting talk on road safety campaig~s in the United States, put forward many ideas on boxv to reduce accidents locally, confidently ans~vered questions and was unani,nously elcctcd as the toxvn's new Road Safety Organizer by a grateful committee. | lc was not able to give road safety considcratio~s Iris attention for too long, however, for he had arranged to visit :\ustralia in November to lecture tl~ Scicntol{~gists in Melbourne. | Ic left London on 3 10ctubcr, fl.x ing tirst-class on BOAC via Calcutta and Singapore. At the 1 lubbard Communications Office in Spring Street, 3,1clbourne, he wasgreeted by an ecstatic crowd of Scientologists who cheered noisily when he announced his belief that Australia would be the first 'clear contir~ent'. Between lectures, he spent t~ours with local l IASi executives discussing ways of persuading the Australian Labour Party and trades union movement to adopt Scientology tectmiques. |tubbard was convinced that Scientology could help Labour win the next election in Australia, thus creating a favourable climate for the developn~ent of the church and neutralizing tbe unabated hnstility of the Australian media. XVhile he was still in lx, lelbourne, tlubbard received an urgent telephone call from x, Vashington with bad news. Nibs, he was told, had 'blown'. To Scientologists, 'blowing the org' (leaving the church) was one of the worst crimes in the book: it was almost unbelievable that the highly-placed son and namesake of the founder would take such a step. Nibs had simultaneously held five posts in Scientolog)."s increasingly cumbersome bureaucratic structure: he was Organizational Secretary of the Founding Church of Scientology, ~,Vashington DC; |tubbard Communications Office4n-Charge, x,%,"asbington DC; Chief Advanced Clinical Course Instructor; Hubbard Communications Office x, Vorld ~,'ide Techr~ical Director; and a 3, Icmber of the International Cormoil. L~rd of the Manor' 237 Despite his portentous titles, Nibs was frustrated by not being able to make any money out of Scientology and he left a letter to his father explaining that this was the only reason for his resignation: 'Over the past few years, I have found it increasingly difficult to maintain basic fina'ncial survival for n~vseff and my family. This I must remedv. I fully realize that I have'not handled my financial affairs in the most optimum manner. But for six years I have managed to provide, at least the basic necessities, in some manr~er. In doing so I have depleted all my reserves and have become deeply in debt . . .' Hubbard, who was not exacdy a pillar of rectitude in fiscal matters, was nevertheless furious with his son. Nibs had been in and out of debt ever since he had first turned up on Hubbard's doorstep in Phoenix. The problem was that he had his father's casual attitude towards money, but none of his talent for making it and none of his luck. In his resignation letter, Nibs said he was going to look for a full-time job, but hoped to be able to continue practising Scientology in his spare time. He failed to take into account the fact that his father would automatically view his defection as an act of treachery. Hubbard would never have allowed Nibs to continue trying to make money out of Scicntol~gy. He quickly scribbled an airmail letter to Marilvn Routsong on 25 November: 'Nibs ,.,sas trying to get more money by loans from us. Tt~is may make a field upset but we'll survive. If be goes into practice anywhere or starts up a squirrel activity have ttCO cancel all certificates and awards of Iris. ttc won't ever be bircd back.' A few days later Itubbard received more, equally utxwelcome, family news when his Aunt Toilie telephoned from Bremerton to say that/fis seventy-four-year-old mother had had a stroke, was very ill and not expected to live. }Iubbard had had little contact with his parents, or the Watcrbu~' family, since the end of the war. Toilie was the only one who tried to keep in touch, writing to him once or twice a year, and it fell to her to find Ron when May was taken to hospital. 1tubbard told her, over a crackling inter-continental telephone line that he could not get away, he was too busy. Toilie was quite as forceful a personalit)' as a grey-halted old lady as she had been as a young woman. 'You're coming home,' she told him. 'I want you to catch the next flight out. That is orders, Ron. You owe that much to your mother and I pray to God you get here before she's dead .' Bv the time Hubbard arrived in Bremerton, his mother was in a com'a. He went in to see her, held her hand and talked to her; he told the family afterwards he was sure she knew he was there. She died the following day. 'Ron didn't stay for the funeral,' said his Aunt Marnie. 'He organized the burial, ordered the stone, paid all the expenses and 238 Bare-Faced Messiah made arrangements for a man from the Church of Scientology to come up and accompany the body with Hub and Toilie to the funeral in Helena. Then he flew back to England from Bremerton. I thought he should have stayed for the funeral. I don't know what could have been so pressing tbat he had to get back to England. ,s In March 1960, the gentle burghers of East Grinstead learned a little more abot, t their Road Safety Organizer when he published a book titled ttave ~bu Lived Befi.-~ This Life? in which were described a number of startling 'past lives' revealed during auditing. One case history concerned a previous existence as a walrus, another as a fish, a third bad witnessed the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 and a fourth had been a 'very happy being who strayed to the planet Nostra 23,064,000,000 years ago'. The ('o~t~7~.~' reported that the book caused a 'storm of controversy' in the town, as migbt have been anticipated, and ttubbard was prompted to issue a statement seeking to explain something of Scicntoh~gy: 'Scicntilic research work on Dianctics and Scicntology has been carried out by Dr L. Ron llubbard, and skilled persons empl~ycd by hini, over the past 30 years. Only since 1950 has the knowledge glcancd from tbis exacting and penetrating work into the fi,nctions of the mind bccn released to tbe general public in the form of special and skilled trcatnicnt . . . In connection xvith Dr I lubbard's b~ok 11az'e ~u l.i~'ed 11efi.'e 7Ytis l. ifi.? the cuntcrlts are merely rcpurtcd from an observer's point of view . . .' ' In an internal memo tu his press officer, tiubllard stressed tile nccd to emphasize constantIv tbat he was working in the field of 'nuclear physics on life sources and life energy' in order to avoitt being tagged as a psycbiatrist or spiritualist. 'This will take some doing, perhaps,' he added, in a rare moment of candour.t' Hubbard need not have worried overmuch as far as East Grinstead was concerned, since the weatber and tile Royal Familv were topics of much greater perennial interest than whatever was gc;ing on at Saint Hill ~lanor. The cast list of the upcoming, absorbing and long- running British royal soap opera was just being drawn up in spring 1960 - the Queen's third child, Prince Andrew, was born in February and Princess Margaret was due to marry in .Xlay. To add a little spice to the conversation in East Grinstead pubs, there was also the forthcoming obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence's niasterpiece, Latt~, ( ~hatterle3' 's Lover. - This last event was being folloxvcd closely by ~Iary Sue as her husband bad recently uncovered a previous liie coincidentalIv revealing her to have been none other than D. H. Lawrence! In a'letter to her friend, Marilyn Routsong, Mary Sue explained the considerable Lord of the Manor 239 problems she had experienced as D. H. Lawrence. It seemed the great writer had difficulty constructing plots, thought poetry was a joke and believed little of what he wrote. On the strength of this previous incarnation, Mary Sue confessed tbat she, too, was going to write a book and outlined the plot with a somewhat unpromising grasp of grammar and spelling. She wrote tbat it would be completely anti-Christ. The first sentence begins "In tbe small town of Balei, a bastard child was born." She then intended to sbow how tie was really a mongrel and tile son of three fathers (a joke on the Trinity of God) because the mother had, the night in question, slept with three of the town's most virile men and not knowing whose sperm had reached her womb, had thereupon decided to call him All, Son of .... , Son of .... , and Son of .... which impressed the local inhabitants and created a stir throughout the country. She concluded that she wouldn't have it in her name, for obvious reasons. In the same letter, Mary Sue mentioned the rumpus that had been caused when Ron ordered all the staff at Saint Hill to be checked out on an E-meter. She noted that three office staff refused and five domestic staff refused. She was surprised and wrote that the5' were all scared to death of the E-meter and pretending that it was something that would onl3, happen in America, adding that they evidcntlv have something to bide bccaosc of their fear to go on the E-meter.7 tlubbard's insistence that everyone who worked for him be interrogated on tile E-meter was part of the routine 'security checking' lie dcenicd necessary to identify potential trouble-makers, dissidents and spies. No one in Scient›~logy now duubtcd tile capability of the E-meter to expose visceral emotions and ever more elaborate 'seechecks' would become a common feature of life in the Scientology movement - evidence of Hubbard's persistent paranoia about his enemies, both those that existed in reality and those that thronged tiis imagination. Despite the not unreasonable reluctance of some of the servants at Saint Hill Manor to be interviewed about their private lives while grasping tin cans attached to a mysterious electric machine, the Hubbards had settled in comfortably by the spring of 1960. The painters and decorators had finished their work and the family was enjoying the Elysian delights of gracious living in an English country house. On their 'personal staff' there were a secretan.', housekeeper, cook, butler, valet, nanny and tutor for the children. The former billiards rootn, leading directly from the grand entrance hall, had been re-modellcd into l-iubbard's private office, with a bench seat upholstcred in red leather down one side of the room and a personal telcprinter installed alongside his desk. Also accessible from the hall was the family dining-room, which included a bar stocked 240 Bare-Faced Messkdt with Coca-Cola (Hubbard's preferred drink), a large lounge and a television room. Upstairs, tlubbard had his own suite comprising a sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom, adjoining Mary Sue's office, bedroom and bathroom. The children had bedrooms at the other end of the house and the '~Ionkey Room', named after the murals painted by John Spencer Churcllill, was converted into a school-room and equipped with trampoline. Apart from the kitchen, most of the remaining rooms m the manor were used as offices. It was the first time that the Hubbards as a family had remained in one place for any length of time and the children were particularly enchanted by Saint Hill Manor, with its maze of rooms and sweeping grounds. At weekends the four of them could usually be found, muddy-kneed, exploring the estate or paddling in rubber boots on the fringes of the lake; twice a week Diana and Suzette attended dancing lessons at the local Bush Davies school. tluhbard, too, liked to stroll the grounds at weekeods, taking photographs with one or the other of his new cameras. Photography was a recently acquired hobby and his framed pictures could be found in many of tile rooms at Saint Hill. ~lainly landscapes and portraits, thcv were of course universally praised, even those that were slightly out of f~cus. :\ll in all, visitors to Saint Ilill at this time would have observed little amiss with thc uicc American family who had taken up residence. Certainly no one woultt have guessed that I lubbard possessed the dubious distinction of being probably the only owner of an English country house under tile continuous surveillance of the l?Bl. tlis file, Number 244-210-B, was much tht, mbcd and even included an interview with his first wife, Polly, by then re-married, who was able to say very little except that her first husband was a 'genius with a misdirected mind'. To some extent, the FBI's interest in Hubbard was a situation of his own making, for the frequently intemperate bulletins and policy letters which flowed from Saint Itill in an endless stream for distribution to Scientologists around the world were bound to generate the attention of J. Edgar Hoover's staff. On 24 April 1960, for example, Hubbard issued a bulletin to US franchise holders asking them to do everything in their power to deny the presidency to 'a person named Richard .M . Nixon'. He claimed that after an innocent reference to Nixon in a Scientolog).' magazine, two armed secret service agents, acting on Nixon's orders, had threatened staff on duty at the rounding church in Washington :'Hulking over desks, shouting violently, they stated that they daily had to make such calls on "lots of people" to prevent Nixon's name from being used in ways Nixon disliked . . . They said Nixon ~ Lord of the Manor 241 t believed in nothing the Founding Church of Scientology stood for . . ú 'We want clean bands in public office in the United States. Let's begin by doggedly denying Nixon the presidency no matter what his Secret Service tries to do to us now . . ú He hates us and has used what police force was available to him to say so. So please get busy on it...' Nixon was indeed denied the presidency, although it was possible that the famous televised debates with John F. Kennedy had more to do with it than the HCO Bulletin. But it was becoming evident that the owner of Saint Hill Manor considered he had an important role to play in political and international affairs and it ,,vas a responsibility he had no intention of shirking. An HCO Bullctin in June promulgated the 'Special Zone Plau The Scientologists Role in Life', in which Itubbard explained how Scientologists could exert influence in politics. 'Don't bother to get elected,' he wrote. 'Get a job on the secretarial staff or the bodyguard.' In this way positioncd close to the scat of power, he argued, Scicntology would be advantageously situated to transform an organization. 'If we were revolutionaries,' he added, 'this HCO Bulletin would be a ~-'er3' dangerous document.' In August, the 'Special Zone Plan' was absorbed into a new 'Department of Government Affairs' made necessary, l{ubbard gravely explained, because of the amount of time senior Scientology executives were having to devote to governmental affairs, as governments around the world disintegrated under the threat of atomic war and Communism. 'The goal of the Department', he wrote 'is to bring government and hostile philosophies or societies into a state of complete compliance with the goals of Scientology- This is done by high-level ability to control and in its absence by a low-level ability to overwhelm. Introvert such agencies. Control such agencies.' Returning to a familiar theme, Hubbard urged his followers to defend Scientology by attacking its opponents: 'If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace..- Don't ever defend, always attack. Don't ever do nothing. Unexpected attacks in the rear of the enemy's front ranks work best .' The Department of Government Affairs never existed other than as a 'policy letter',8 but then much of Hubbard's private world only existed on paper. In HCO Bulletins and Policy Letters replete with the trappings of bureaucratic red tape ~ colour-coded distribution lists, elaborate references, innumerable abbreviations, etc - Scientology flourished as an international organization of enormous influence 242 Bare-Faced Messiah waiting in the wings to save the universe from the combined perils of Communism, nuclear weapons and its o~vn folly. Sitting at an electric typewriter in his study at Saint [till Manor, often clicking away all night just as in the days `.vhen he was writing science fiction, |fullbard demonstrated Ins extraordinary range as a writer by effortlessl3, producing sheaves of documents that appeared to have been drafted by conmfittees of bureaucrats and la`.vvers. Laid out and printed like official government papers, they conferred dry authority on content xvhich, frequently, `.vould not llave withstood too close scrutiny. But of course no Scientologist would question the literal truth of anything Ilubbard wrote, no matter how improbable if Ron said it `.vas so, it was so. Hubbard's blossonling omnipotence was bolstered by the statdy fashion in `.vhich hc no`.v travellcd, al~vavs first-class, usually accompanied by a faithful courtier and greete~l at every destination by an awed `.velcoming party of admirers. In October and November 1960 he visited South AfriCa to lecture Scicntologists in Cape Town and Johannesburg; in December he flew to V~"ashington DC, spent Christmas and tbe Nc`.v Year there, rcturncd to Johannesburg to deliver more Iccturcs in mid-January, and arrived back at Saint Ilill ~lanor tnwards the end uf February 1961. In Nlarch, llubl~ard announced tbc launch of the 'Saint l/ill Special Brieling Course' for thusc auditors who wisl~ed to train personally under his auspices. The cost of the 'Sl ISBC' was/:250 per persnn and the first student to enrol was Rcg Sharpc, a retired businessman who had become so cnamourcd with Scicntolog55' that he bought a house in tile little `.'illage of Saint |lill, adjoining the estate, in order to be close to Ron. For the first couple of weeks there '.'.'ere only t`.vo students on the course, but more soon began to arrive from around the world, lured by the pron~ise that 'Ron, personally, `.vould discover and assess `.vith the aid of an E-meter' each student's'goal 'for this lifetime'. Nlary Sue, who was the course supervisor, also held out the prospect of material re~`.'ards: 'I `.rant you to make moncy. If an`.. one of you cannot conceive of an auditor driving around in a gold-it;lated Cadillac or Rolls you had better reorientate yourselves. I like the idea. ,9 As the numbers on the Briefing Course increased, accommodation became a problem. The greenhouses where Ron had conducted his pioneering horticultural experin~ents were demolished to make `.ray for a 'chapel' which in reality ~vas used as a lecture hall. ()the;' . buildings went up around the manor without a moment's thought for obtaining planning permission - Hubbard's strongly held opinion was that what he did on his own land was his o`.vn business. It was a view la~,d of the Manor 243 the local authority was disinclined to share when someone pointed out what was going on at Saint }/ill and Hubbard was eventually prevailed upon to employ an architect and apply for planning approval like everyone else. The Briefing Course would eventually comprise more than three hundred taped lectures by L. Ron Hubbard, its longevity sustained by 'tectlnical breakthroughs' that followed closely one upon the other, each new technique replacing the last and requiring dedicated Scicntologists to trek back to Saint Hill time and time again in order to keep up to date. When I tubbard was not lecturing he was writing directives covering everytiling from how to save the world to how to clean his office. No detail was too insignificant to merit his attention: one HCO Policy Letter covering two pages was posted protnincntly in the garage at Saint tlill explaining how cars should be wastled and another was addressed to the t louschold Section headed 'Flowers, Care Of'. lie also dashed off a new potted biography of himself adding further gloss to his already well-burnished career. It was included in a handout headed 'What Is Scicntology ?': 'For hnndrcds of years physical scientists !lave been seeking to apply the exact knowledge tbcx' had gainctl of the pbysical unix'ersc to Nlan and his problcnls. Newton, Sir James Jeans, Einstein, have all sotxgbt to find the exact laws of buman bchaviour in orttcr to bclp Nlankintt. 'l)cvclopcd by L. Ron Ilubbard, C.E., Ph.I)., a nuclear physicist, Scicntology tlas demonstrably achieved this Iong-suught goal. Doctor I lubl~ard, educated in advanced physics and higher mathct~atics and also a student of Sigmund Freud and others, began tlis present rescarclles thirty years ago at George Washitlgton University. The dranlatic result Ilas been Scicntology . . .' The laudable aim of 'helping nlankind' sat rather uncomfortably with the requircn~ent for security checks, which were stepped up during 1961. An even more intrusive questionnaire was introduced which appeared to have been designed with perverts and criminals rather than potential trouble-makers in nlind. Many of the questions reflected Hubbard's nlorbid preoccupation with sexual deviation ('tfave you ever had intercourse with a member of your family' and 'ltave you ever tlad anything to do wittl a babv farnl?') and a wide range of crimes were also probed ('Have you ever murdered anyone?' and 'tlave you ever done any illicit diamond buying?'). In addition Hubbard specifically wanted to know if the individual being checked had ever 'had any unkind thoughts' about himself or Nlarv Sue. Every check sheet was forwarded to Saint Hill on t{ubbard's orders. When conlbincd with the individual folders in which details of auditing 244 Bare-Faced Messiah sessions were recorded, they made up a comprehensive dossier in which the innermost thoughts of every member of the Church of Scientology were filed. Three davs after Christmas 1961, Hubbard flew to x. Vashington DC to attend a congress and publicize the benefits to be obtained by enrolling on the Saint ttill Briefing Course. He asked Reg Sharpe to accompany him on the trip and Sharpe was very soon made axvare of his leader's little foibles. V','hen their aeroplane stopped for re-fuelling at Boston, Hubbard scurried across the passenger terminal and stood with his back pressed against a wall for the duration of the stop, explaining to his bemused companion that there were people 'out to get bins'. In x, Vashington, Sharpe was astonisl~ed by the adulation with which |tubbard was received. ttc lectured for about four hours on each day of the congress to a spellbound audicnce and had refined his speaking technique to a fine art, shamelessly bnrrowing the tricks of show business and political conventions. tie liked to appear at the back of the hall to the accompaniment of a drum roll and stride through the audience, waving his arms in greeting and shaking hands on the way to the rostrum. 11is timing, the essence of a good speaker, was faultless and he cot~ld hold an entire auditorium in thrall for hours. Like a cabaret artiste doing two spots a night, he g{~t into the habit of changing Isis cloth~ during a break, appearing for the second half of his lecture in a silk suit of a different colour, or sometinses a gold lam~ jacket. It held the interest of the atldience, he explained, and also solved Isis perspiration problends. Hubbard's vigorous promotion of Saint I lill as the Mecca of Scientology resulted in hundreds of yuung Americans making their way to East Grinstead, son~ewhat to the surprise of the townspeoplc, who still had very little idea of what was going ors. 'Dr Hubbard' had recently adopted a rather lower profile locally: he resigned from his position as the town's Road Safety Organizer, pleading pressure of business, was very rarely seen outside the grounds of Saint Hill -Manor and no longer courted publicity from the local newspapers. By and large, the influx of American visitors to the town was welcomed: they were quiet, polite and spent freely. If the)' were less than forthcoming about what they were doing in ihe area, that was all right with the locals, who instinctively respected the rights of folk who wanted to 'keep themselves to themselves'. Memt~ers of East Grinstead Urban Council expressed some faint concern inasmuch as Saint Hill Manor was restricted, by planning regulations, to private residential use, but such was Dr Hubbard's reputation that the). resolved to do no more than urge him, in confidence, to apply for planning permission regularizina the ,,›,~ ,,~ l~n'd of the Manor 245 the manor for office and research purposes. He responded by slapping in a planning application to build a seventy-five-room administration centre in the grounds of the manor and circularizing a 'Report to the Community' appealing for support. In the report, Hubbard revealed to the people of East Grinstead that as a result of Iris experiments on plants and 'living energies' he was able to reduce the physiological age of an individual by as much as twenty years and increase the average life span by as much as twenty-five per cent. 'x, Ve have not announced anything of this to the press,' he confided, 'as we are already overworked in centres of the world for discoveries such as these. But we wanted you as a friend to be aware of this, and consider you have the right to know what is happening here.' In August, Hubbard turned his attention to the broader arena of international affairs by offering to help President Kennedy narrow the gap in the space race. The young president had committed the United States to landing a 1nan on the moon before the decade was out and, as a loyal American, Hubbard obviously wanted to do what he could to help. On 13 August 1962, he wrote a long letter to the White House to advise Kennedy that Scicntology techniques were peculiarly applicable to space flight and that the perception of an astronaut could be increased far beyond human range and stamina to levels hitherto unattaincd in human beings. To establish his bona tides, tlubbard claimed to have coached tbc 'British Olympic team', producing unheard-of results. lie added that he had been fending off approaches from the Russians for )'ears, evcr since he was offered Pavlov's laboratories in 1938. The first manuscript of his work had been stolen in Miami in 1942, the second in Los Angeles in 1950 and 'only last week' Communist interests had stolen forty hours of tape containing the latest research work from the Scientology headquarters in South Africa. Although he was convinced that there was a growing library on Scientology in Russia, fortunately the Russians did not yet have the advanced knowledge that would be applicable to the space programme. All the US Government need do, he said, was turn over anyone needing conditioning for space flight and Scientolog2,.' would do the rest. Each man would need processing for about 250 hours and the cost would only be $25 an hour, with the possibility of a discount for large numbers. 'Man will not successfully get into space without us . . .' he warned. 'We do not wish the United States to lose either the space race or the next war. The deciding factor in that race or that war may very well be lying in your hands at this moment. and may depend on what is done with this letter... Courteously, L. Ron Hubbard.' 246 Bt~e4'hced Messiah It seemed that Hubbard seriously expected his offer to receive proper consideration in the Oval Office, for two weeks later he was in ~,l,"ashington discussing with the staff at the Hubbard Communications Office how to handle the expected inflow of astronauts. It was agreed that any dealings with the US Government would be on a cash basis only, that they would reserve the rigbt to reject anyone they considereal to be uusuitable and that if Government officials wanted to investigate Scientology techniques they xvould be told, pleasantly, to 'go up the spout'. If there was a flood of astronauts arriving for processing, Ron would come over from Saint Hill and set up a special operation to handle them. ~o On the voyage back to England, travelling first-class on the Queen lz7izabeqh witb Reg Sbarpc, the two men passed their time auditing each other. Ilubbard told his friend that in a past life on anot|~er planet he had been in charge of a factory making steel humanoids which hc sold to thctans, offering bite purcl~ase terms if they could not afford the cash price. - Back at Saint ttill, Hubbard was baffled to discover that the President had not replied to his letter, but everything was made clear to him a fexv months later when agents of the Food and Drugs Administration staged a raid oo the Scientology headquarters in Washingrain. It was olH't~tts to Hubl~ard that the President had asked the FI).,\ t~ h~k into Scicntology as a result of his letter and the FDA, wishing to pron~ntc its own programrots, had attempted to turn the tables on Scientology. Chapter 15 Visits to Heaven '\Vell, I have been to heaven . . . It was complete with gates, angels and plaster saints - and electronic iraplantation equipment.' (L. Ron }lubbard, ttCO Bulletin 11 May 1963) I~ I~ ~ t1~ ~ The FDA raid on the Church of Scientology on 4 January 1963, was a farce better suited to the Keystone Cops than a federal agency. Two unmarked vans, escorted by motor-cycle police, screeched to a halt outside 1810-12 19th Street, ~Vashington NW, i~ the middle of tbc Mtcrnoon and as police blockaded both ends of the quiet residential street, FDA agents and US marshals in plain clothes jumped out of tbe va~s and ran into the building. Passers-by migbt well have assumed tbcv were after tcrrurists of tbe most dangcr{~us order. It would then, have been somcthiog of a surprise wbcn the brave officers began staggering out shortly afterwards with n~tbing more menacing than piles of books and papers and stacks of boxed E-n~cters. Such was the haul that two more trucks bad to bc called in bcf{~re the aftcrnoon's work was complete, bv wbich time the FI)A was able to announce, with an evident sense o[' triumph, that it had seized more than three tons of literature and equipn~ent. The feeble justification for these heavyd~andcd tactics was unveiled when the FDA filed charges accusing the Church of Scientolugy of having 'false and misleading' labels on its E-meters. As it would have been perfectly feasible to file a similar charge by purchasing a single E-meter from any Scientology office, the raid exposed the Food and Drug Administration to considerable derision and provided the church with a wonderful opportunity to capitalize on its newly marryred status. FDA agents were portrayed as armed thugs bursting into 'confessional and pastoral counselling sessions' and desecrating the sanctity of a church. Scientology press releases described the raid as a 'shocking example of government bureaucracy gone mad' and a 'direct and frightening attack upon the Constitutional rights of freedom of religion'. ~ On 5 January, L. Ron Hubbard issued a statement from Saint ttill 248 Bare-Faced Messiah 1Manor: 'All I can make of this is that the United States Government . . . has launched an attack upon religion and is seizing and burnh~g books of philosopby... Where will this end? Complete censorship? A complete ignoring of the First Amendment? Are churches to be attached and books burned as a normal course of action?' There had been no suggestion that the material carted away by the FDA xvould be burned, but that did not prevent Hubbard returning to the theme in a second statement the follo`.ving day, as well as making the connection between the FDA raid and his letter to President Kennedy. He claimed that 'twice in recent years' the White House had asked for a presentation of Scientology and he had thought it only courteous to make the same offer to Kennedy, not realizing that lesser officials were 'imbued with ideas of religious persecution'. He was still boping for a conference with the president, he said, slyly alluding to recent events by adding that he would expect to be given some guarantee for his 'personal safety'. Hubbard ended on an almost joctdar note: 'As all of my books have been seized for burning, it looks as though I will have to get busy and write anotl~er book.' In fact, 1963 was one of the few years in which Hubbard did not produce a single book. Instead, hc chose to remain at Saint Ilill issuing increasingly bizarre proclamations. On 13 ~Iarch - his tiftysccontt birthday - hc bcst~wcd a general amnesty on his folloxvcrs, in the fashion of some middle-eastern putcntate: 'Any arid all offcnccs of any kiud bcfurc this date, discovered or undisco`.'ered, are fully and completely forgiven. Directed at Saint Itill, on March the thirteenth, 1963, in the 131h year of Dianctics and Scientology. L. Ron tlubbard.' The amnesty was followed in :'x, Iay by the foudroyant revelation that ttubbard had t,.,.'ice visited heaven, 43 trillion and 42 trillion years earlier. In a four-page HCO Bulletin - dated 11 ~lav AD 13 (mea~ing 'After Dianetics') - he claimed the first visit had taken place 43,891,832,611,177 years, 344 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes and 40 seconds from 10.02pro Daylight Greenwich Mean Time 9 May 1963. Nit-pickets might have pointed out that 'Daylight Grccnwic~ Mean Time' was a term unkno`.vn in horology and that, in any case, at 10.02pm on a May evening in Britain it would be dark, but this was a trifling matter compared with what `.vas to come. The first surprise was that heaven `.vas not a floating island in the sky as everyone imagined, but simply a high place in the mountains of an unnan~ed planet. Visitors first arrived in a 'toxvn' comprising a trolley bus, some building fronts, sidewalks, train tracks, a boarding house, a bistro in a basement and a bank building. Although there seemed to be people around - in tbc boarding house, for example, ~,~'sits to tfeaven 249 there was a guest and a landlady in a kimono, reading a newspaper Hubbard quickly discovered they were only effigies and probably radioactive, since 'contact with them hurts'. However, he was able to report he saw 'no devils or satans' [perhaps because he was supposed to be in heaven]. The bank was the key point of interest in the town. It was an old~fashioned corner building of granite4ike material with a revolving door. Inside, to the left of the door, was a counter and directly opposite was a flight of marble stairs leading to the Pearly Gates !'The gates . . . are well done, well built,' Hubbard wrote. 'An avenue of statues of saints leads up to them. The gate pillars are surmounted by marble angels. The entering grounds are very well kept, laid out like Bush Gardens in Pasadena, so often seen in the movies.' On his second visit to heaven, a trillion years later, Hubbard noticed marked changes: 'The place is shabby. The vegetation is gone. The pillars are scruffy. The saints have vanished. So have tbe angels. A sign on one side (the left as you "enter") says "this is Heaven". The right has a sign "Hell" with an arrow and inside the grounds one can see the exca`.'ations like archcological diggings with ra`.v terraces, that lead to "Hell". Plain wire fencing encloses the place. There is a sentry box beside and outside the rigbt pillar . . .' Hubbard's visits to heaven would bccome something of an embarrassment to Scicntologists in future years and tbc',' would strive to explain that he had intended his description to be allegory, but Itubbard himself attached a note to the bulletin seeming to deny its contents ,.,,,ere allegorical. 'This }ICO Bulletin', he stressed, 'is based on over a thousand hours of research auditing . ú ú It is scientific research and is not in any wav based upon the mere opinion of the researcher.'z In August, Hubbard turned his attention to more temporal issues bv re-defining Scientology policy to`.vards the media. Typically, he did not mince words. Almost all Scientology's bad publicity, he asserted, could be blamed on the American Ix, ledical Association, which wanted to cause maximum harm to the movement in order to protect its private healing monopoly. 'The reporter who comes to you, all smiles and withholds, wanting a story,' he said, 'has an AMA instigated release in his pocket. He is there to trick ,,'ou into supporting his preconceived story. The story he xvill write has already been outlined by a sub-editor from old clippings and AMA releases ú ú ú ' Hubbard's sensitivity towards newspapers was understandable, since Scientology was an easy target and wherever it flourished it was attacked by a universally ~nsympathetic press, In Australia, the church had suffered a great deal of unfa`.'ourable publicity, in 250 Bare-Faced Messiah particular from a Melbourne newspaper, Tn~th, which published a series of hostile features about Scientologists being 'brainwashed' and alienated from their families. The media attacks led to questions in tbe Parliament of Victoria, allegations of blackmail and extortion, and accusations that Scientology was affecting ttle 'mental well-being' of undergraduates at lxdelbourne University. In November 1963, the Victoria government appointed a Board of Inquiry into Scientology. At Saint Hill Manor, tlubbard at first professed himself to be pleased about the Australian inquiry and even hinted that it bad been set up at his instigation. But it soon became evident that the inquiry was basically antagonistic to Scientolog).' and when an invitation arrived from l~lelbourne from him to appear, he contrived to find compelling reasons to refuse. In March 1964, the Satu,da3, Evening Post publisbed what would be one of the last full-scale media interviews with L. Ron }lubbard, even though hc would be pursued by reporters for the rest of his life. It was an unusually objective feature, although little new was revealed except for ttubbard's claim that he had recently been approached by Fidcl Castro to train a corps of Cuban Scicntologists. The founder of the Church of Scicntology appcarcd willing to discuss any subject except money. l Ic was, lie said, indcpcndcntly wealthy and drew only a token salary of $70 a week, Scicntology being a 'labour of love'. Certainly the Stttttrdtt3, Evening l'ost reporter was deeply impressed by 1 luhbard's lifcstvlc- tile Georgian mansion, the butler who served his afternoon Coca-Cola on a silver tray, the chauffeur polishing the new Pontiac and the Jaguar in the garage, and tile broad acres of tbe estate.3 But while it might have seemed to a visiting journalist that Hubbard had acquired many of the traditional tastes of an English country gentleman, the reality was very different, as Ken Urquhart, a dedicated young Scientologist who xvorkcd as the butler at Saint l lill, explained :'Neither Ron nor lx. larv Sue lived the way one might have expected in a house like that. They spent most of their time working; there was very little socializing. They xvould go to bed very late, usually in the small hours of the morning, and get up in th~ early afternoon. 'Ron used to audit himself with an E-meter as soon as he got out of bed. When he called down to the kitchen I would take him up a cup of hot chocolate and stay xvith him while he drank it. ttc used to sit at a table at the end of his four-poster bed chatting about the news or the weather or the latest goings-on at Saint ttill. I remember lie used to talk a lot about his childhood. He seemed to want to give the impression that he was rather upper-class; he liked to use French expressions, for example, although his accent was dreadjSd. tie said his mother was a very fine woman. tie told me that when she was in Visits to tteaven 251 hospital desperately ill be got there just in time to tell her that all she had to do was leave her body and go down to the maternity ward and pick up another one. |le didn't say what her reaction was. 'When he went to have a bath I'd extricate myself and rusb downstairs to cuok breakfast for him and Mary Sue. She had a separate bedroom, but usually had breakfast with him - scrambled eggs, sausages, mushrooms and tomatoes. After breakfast he xvould go into his office and I would rarely see him again until six-thirtx' when I had to have tile table laid for dinner. At six-twenty-five I would go into his office with a jacket for him to wear to table and after dinner they would spend an hour or so watching television with the children and then he and Mary Sue would return to work in their separate offices. 'I really loved working for Ron; I would have done anything for him. To me he was superhuman, a very unusual, very great person who really wanted to help the world. I was less sure about Mary Suc; I never quite knew where I stood with her. She could be very sweet and loving, but also very cold. The first time I had any contact with her was on the first Sundav I was at Saint I {ill. Sbc came into the kitchen where I was preparing dinner and did not say a word to me. I thought that was very strange. Sl~c was fiercely protective of her cbildrcn and 1 liked them a lot. Arthur had a fcxv problems because he was the youngest and the others wouldn't play with him. l)iana was heavily into ballet lessons. They were nice.' Urquhart was a Scot who had been studying music at Tri~ity College in London when hc was introduced to Dianctics. 'It was as if someone had swept the cobxvcbs out of my mind,' lie said. tie was working part-time as a waiter when Ron asked him if he would help out at Saint Hill as a butler. 'I wouldn't have done it for anyone else. l used to cook all the meals, sweep the floors, make tbe beds, rusb around all day long, for/;12 a week plus room and board. I was perfectly happy, but things changed quite a bit early in 1965 when "ethics" came in. I was assigned a "condition of emergency" because I served him salmon for dinner that was not quite fresh. I was shocked. You had to go through a whole formula, write it up and submit it with an application to be up-graded .,4 'Conditions' were an essential part of the new 'ethics technology' devised by Hubbard in the mid-sixties, effectively as a form of social control. Ii was his first, tentative step towards tbe creation of a society within Scientology which would ultimately resemble the totalitarian state envisaged by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Anyone thought to be disloyal, or slacking, or breaking the rules of Scientology, was reported to an 'ethics officer' and assigned a 'condition' according to the gravity of the offence. Various penalties were attached to each 252 Ba~'-b~'ed Messiah condition. In a 'condition of liability' for example, the offender was required to wear a dirty grey rag tied around his or her left arm. The worst that could happen was to be declared an 'SP' (suppressive person), whicb was tantamount to excommunication from the church. SPs were defined by Hubbard as 'fair game' to be pursued, sued and harrassed at every possible opportunity. q, Vhat happened with the developn~ent of ethics,' said Cyril Vosper, who worked on the staff at Saint t[ill, 'was that zeal expanded at the expense of tolerance and sanity. My feehng was that .Mary Sue devised a lot of the really degrading aspects of ethics. i always had great warmth and admiration for Ron - he was a remarkable individual, a constant source of new information and ideas- but I thought Mary Sue was an exceedingly nasty person. She was a bitch. 't [ubbard had this incredible dynamism, a disarming, magnetic and overxvhclming personality. I rcmeml~er being at Saint Hill one Sunclay evening and running into him and as we started to talk people gathered round. People had a wonderful feeling with him of being in the presence of a great man.'s In October 1965, the Australian Buard of Inquiry into Scicntology published its rcp~rt. Conducted by Kevin A. zindcrson QC, the intluiry sat for 160 ttays, heard evidence from 151 witnesses antt then savagely condcmucd every aspect of Scientology. No one needed to progress beyond the first paragraph to guess at what was to fullow: 'There are some features of Scientol~gy which are so ludicrous that there may be a tendency to regard Scientology as silly and its practitioners as harmless cranks. To do so would be ~ravely to misunderstand the tenor of the Board's conclusions. This Report should be read, it is submitted, with these prefatory observations constantly in mind. Scientology is evil; its techniques evil; its practice a serious threat to the c<~mmunitv, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded anal often mentally ill.' In many cases, the report continued, mental dei-angement and a loss of critical facultics resulted from Scientology processing, which tended to produce subservience amounting almost to mental enslavement. Because of fear, delusion and debilitation, the individual often found it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to escape. Furthermore, the potentiality for misuse of confidence was great and the existence of files containing the most intimate secrets and confessions of thousands of individuals was a constant threat to them and a matter of grave concern. As for L. Ron Hubbard, the report suggested that his sanity was to be 'gravely doubted'. tlis writing, abounding in self-glorifica(ion and grandi~sity, replete with histrionics and hysterical. incontinent Visits to tfeaven 253 outbursts, was the product of a person of unsound mind. His teachings about thetans and past lives were nonsensical; he had a persecution complex; he had a great fear of matters associated with women and a 'prurient and compulsive urge to write in the most disgusting and derogatory way' on such subjects as abortions, intercourse, rape, sadism, perversion and abandonment. His propensity for neologisms was commonplace in the schizophrenic and his compulsion to invent increasingly bizarre theories and experiences was strongly indicative of paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur. 'Symptoms', the report added, 'common to dictators.' It continued in similar vein for 173 pages, concluding: 'If there should be detected in this report a note of unrelieved denunciation of Scientology, it is because the evidence has shown its theories to be. fantastic and impossible, its principles perverted and ill-rounded, and its techniques debased and harmful. Scicntology is a delusional belief system, based on fiction and fallacies and propagated bv falsehood and deception . . . Its forruder, with the merest smattering of knowledge in variot~s sciences, has built upon the scintilla of his learning a crazy and dangerous edifice. The [tASI claims to be "the world's largest mental health organization". ~Vhat it really is however, is the world's largest organizatit~n of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous tcclmiqucs which masquerade as mental therapy.'~ It was not difficult to 'detect' a note of unrelieved denunciation in the Anderson report; indced, in its intemperate tone, its use of emotivc rhetoric and its tendency to exaggerate and distort, it bore a marked similarity to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. In his determination to undermine Scicntolugy, Anderson completely ignored the fact that thousands of decent, honest, well-meaning people around tbe world believed themselves to be bonefiring from the movement. To condemn the church as 'evil' was to brand its followers as either evil or stupid or both - an undeserved imputation. Bloodicd but unbowed, Itubbard began fighting back against the Anderson report on the day of its publication, beginning with a rebuttal written exclusively for the East Grinstead (hurler, accusing the Australian inquiry of being an illegal 'kangaroo court' which had refused to allow him to appear in his own defence. Its findings were 'hysterical', he said, and not based on the facts. Ite compared the inquiry to the heresy trials which had led to witches being burned at the stake in the dark ages. However, Dr tlubbard - described as 'the son of a .Xlonta'na cattle baron'- still found it in his heart to be munificent: 'XVell, Australia is young. In 1942, as the senior US naval officer in Northern Australia, bv a fluke of fate, I helped save them from tbe Japanese. For the sake of Scientol~gists there, I will go on helping them . . . Socrates said, 254 Bare-14~ced Messitch ~ "Philosophy is the greatest of the arts and it ought to be practiced." I intend to keep on writing it and practicing it and helping others as I a , CaIl. For his fellow Scientologists, tlubbard had a sligtltly different message. \Vhat had gone wrong m Australia, he explained, was that he had approved co-operation with an inquiry into all mental health services. ('V~'e could have had a ball and put psychiatry on trial for murder, mercy killing, sterilization, torture and sex practices and could have wiped out psychiatry's good name.') Unfortunately, because of bungling somewhere along tile line, the inquiry had been narrowed to Scientology orlly, 'so it was a mess'. He laid out the procedure to be followed if there were further official inquiries into Scicntology. The first step was to identify the antago~lists, next inx'estigatc them 'for felonies or worse' and then start feeding 'lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers' to the press. 'l)on 't ever tamely submit to an inx'estigation of us,' he warned. '.\lake it rough, rough on attackers all the way.'7 llubl~ard soon showed hc was prepared to take tile lead. The storm caused by the Anderson report was not merely restricted to ephenleral headlines: it pruvokcd further and continuing media investigation into Scic~t~l~y and prodded governments into taking punitive measures against the church. The reaction, socioh~ist Roy \Vailis noted, was comparable to an international moral panic: 'The former conception of tile movement as a relatively harmless, if cranky, health arid self-improvement cult, was transformed into one which portrayed it as evil, dangerous, a form of hypnosis (with all the overtones of Svengali in the layman's mind), and brainwashing.'s The Australian govertlment was first to act: in December 1965, the State of Victoria passed tbe Psych{~l~gical Practices Act which effcc~ tively outlawed Scientology and empox~'ered tile :\ttorney General to seize and destroy all Scientology doctmlents and recordings. Then the country playing host to tile 'evil Dr Hubbard' could hardly be expected to ignore the Anderson report and on 7 February 1966, Lord Balniel, NIP, then chairman of the National Association for Mental tlealth, stood up in tile House of Commons and asked the Minister of ttealth to initiate an inquiry into Scientology in Britain. Two davs later, Hubbard issued an instruction from Saint Hill .Xlanor: 'Get a detective on that Lord's past to unearth the titbits. They're there.'9 On 17 February he set up a 'Public Investigation Section' to be staffed by professional private detectives. Its function xvas to 'help LRII [ttubbard became knoxvn in Scientology by his initials] investigate public matters and individuals which seem to impede human liberty' and 'furnish intelligence'. The first private investigator hired to head tile section was told to find at least one bad ~ l~'sits to Heaven 255 mark ('a murder, an assault, or a rape') oil every psychiatrist in Britain, starting with Lord Balniel. Unfortunately for Hubbard, tile gallant detective promptly scuttled off and sold his story to a Sunday newspaper, creating more tmfavourablc publicity for Scientology. ~ Scicntology's 'official' reply to the Anderson report was a fortyeight-page document, bound in black and gold, and titled 'Kangaroo Court. An investigation into the conduct of tile Board of Inquiry into Scientology.' It was hardly designed to win the hearts and minds of the average Australian. 'Only a society founded by criminals, organized by criminals and devoted to making people criminals, could come to such a conclusion [about Scientol›~gy] . . .' the introduction declared. 'The fotmdation of Victoria consists of the riff-raff of London's slums - robbers, murderers, prostitutes, fences, thieves the scourings of Newgate and Bedlam . . . tile niceties of truth and fairness, of hearing witnesses and weighing evidence, are not for men whose ancestry is lost in the promiscuity of the prison ships of transportation...' After airing the manifold grievances of the church, 'Kangaroo Court' returned to its initial theme: 'The insane attack on Scientology in tile State of Victoria, can best be undcrstuod if Victoria is seen for what'it is - a very primitive community, somcxvhat barbaric, with a rudimentary knowledge of the physical sciences.' There followed a de/|ant quote from L. Ron Hubl>ard: 'The future of Scicntology in Australia is bright and shiny. We will continue to grow and progress. No vested interests or blackhearted politicians, no matter how much power tbev seem to all)' themselves with, can stop our th›~ughts or our communications . . ú \Ve will be here teaching and listening when our opponents' names are merely ntis-spelled references in a history book of tyranny.' Despite his apparent confidence, tlubbard recognized that ScientoIogists needed a boost to their morale in the face of the concerted attacks from the media following the Anderson report. In February 1966, rumours began to circulate among Scientologists that one of their number had at last achieved the labled state of being 'clear' (Sonya Bianca's performance at The Shrine in Los Angeles having been long forgotten). To become 'clear' was still the goal of every Scientologist, but it was proving an extraordinarily elusive one. New levels of processing were continually introduced at Saint tlill, each with tile promise that it would result in 'clearing', only to be replaced by another level and yet more promises. Among the students completing the Level V I I course in February 1966 was John McMaster, a South Africa~ in his mid-thirties ~'ho worked on the staff at Saint llill as director of the Hubbard Guidance Centft. lXlcMastcr had been a medical student in Durban x~hcn hc 256 Bare-Faced Messiah first came across Scientology in 1959. He had had part of his stomach removed because of cancer and was in more or less continuous pain until his first auditing session, after which the pain disappeared. Totally converted, he arrived at Saint Hill to take the Briefing Course in 1963 and was subsequently invited by Hubbard to join the staff. After he had graduated as a Level VII auditor, McMaster was sent to Los Angeles by I tubbard to spread the news of the latest 'technology' being taught at Saint Hill. He had only been there a couple of days when he received a cable: 'Congratulations, world's first clear'. lie was ordered to return to Saint Hill immediately for a final check on an E-meter by the 'qualifications secretary'. On 8 March he passed the check without a quiver on the needle of the E-meter, proving that he had completdy erased the memory bank of his reactlye mind. He xvas clear! 'lt's with greatest joy and happiness,' the qualifications secretary advised Ilubbard, 'I have to report to you that John Mclx, laster has passed the Clear check and no doubt exists that he has erased his batik completely . . . Thank you for the honour and privilege of checking out tile first Clear.'~ The excitement this event caused within Scicntology was further hcightcnctt when the gratifying word was spread tbat lxdc:X, Iaster possessed all the attributes prophcsicd by Ron sixteen >'cars earlier in Dianetics, 77~e .llodent Science of Mental tlealth. Indeed, it was said that tile world's first clear was actuallyglowing!. The Auditor, the journal of Scientology, trumpeted the joyous event in its next issue and quoted McMaster: 'It is a great privilege to have been able to follow the stepping stones paved in the wake of Time by such a man as L. Ron Hubbard, for althougb I have worked for it, I could never have realized it without tile great gift tie has given, not only to me, but all Mankind.' To celebrate the great occasion, Hubbard proclaimed another 'general amnesty'. On the same day Mclxdaster was checked out as 'clear', a curious advertisement appeared in the personal column of The Times: 'I, L. Ron Hubbard, of Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex, having reviewed the damage being done in our society with nuclear physics and psychiatry by persons calling themselves "Doctor" do hereby resign in protest my umversity degree as a Doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.), anticipating an early public outcry against anyone called Doctor; and although not in any way connected with the bombs of "psychiatrics treatment" or treatment of the sick, and interested only and always in philosophy and the total freedom of the human spirit I wish no association of an>' kind with these persons and do so publicly declare, and request my friends and the public not to refer to me in :,l_ ~1_2, ,2,1, ' Visits to Heaven 257 Next day, the Daily Mail rather churlishly pointed out that the title Hubbard had publicly renounced was bogus anyway. Mr Hubbard was not available for comment; his personal assistant, Reg Sbarpe, told the newspaper that Ron was abroad on holiday and was not to be disturbed. Hubbard was not on holiday, he was on his way to Rhodesia, where Prime lx, linister Ian Smith had recently signed a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in defiance of tile Britisb Government. Now that he had no reason to hope that Australia would be the first 'clear' continent, t{ubbard had scaled down his ambitions and was looking for a country which would provide a 'safe environment' for Scientology. I{e chose Rhodesia firstly because he thought he could create a favourable climate bv helping to solve the UDI crisis and secondly because he believed i~e had been Cecil Rhodes in a previous life. He told Rcg Sharpe that he hoped to be able to recover gold and diamonds he was convinced Rhodes had buried somewllere in Rhodesia. On 7 April 1966, the CIA headquarters in the United States received a cable from an agetit in Rhodesia: 'Request traces of L. Ron ttubbard, US citizen recently arrived.' The reply confirmed that Headquarters files contained no derogatory information about the subject, but a memo was attached giving excerpts from press reports. It concluded: 'Individuals who have been connected with the organizations headed by l{ubbard or wbo have had contact with him and tile organizations, have indicated that Hubbard is a "crackpot" and of "doubtful mental backgrotmd".'~z The 'crackpot' meanwhile had bought a large four-bedroomcd house with a swimming-pool in the exclusive Alexander Park suburb of Salisbury and opened negotiations to acquire the Bumi Hills t{otel on Lake KTariba. His plan was tu use the hotel as a luxury base from which to spread the influence of Scientology. }{e believed the Lake Kariba site would attract we!l-heeled followers who wanted to be instructed in the highest levels of Scientology and were willing to pay around $10,000 for the privilege. Nothing of this was revealed to the people of Rhodesia, to whom he represented himself as a 'millionaire-financier' interested in pumping money into the crippled economy of the country and stimulating the tourist industry. In an interview in the Rhodesia Sumlay Mail he said he had left his stately home in Britain on doctor's orders after a third attack of pneumonil. 'I am really supposed to be on vacation,' he explained, 'but I have had so many invitations to invest in businesses here and this countn.' is so starved of finance that I have become intrigued.' Hubbard was careful to distance himself frum xvhat the newspaper 258 Bare-Faced Messiah called 'the controversial Scientology movement'. It had never really been pushed in Rhodesia, he said, and added: 'I am still an officer of the corporation that administers the movement but it is very largely autonomous BOW.~13 In early Ix, lay, Itubbard produced, uninvited, a 'tentative constitution' for Rhodesia which he felt would satisfy the demands of the blacks while at the same time maintaining white supremacy. It embodied the principle of one man one vote for a lower house, while real power was vested in an upper house elected by qualified citizens with a good standard of English, knowledge of the constitution and financial standing verified by a bank. Hubbard was apparently convinced that Rhodesia's black population would welcome his ideas, even though it was patently obvious that the qualifications required to cast a vote for tile upper house would exclude most blacks. With his i~imitablc talent for adopting the appropriate vernacular, l lubbard's pruposals were written in suitably constituti{~nal prose, beginning: 'Before God and Nlan wc pledge ourselves, the Government of Rhodesia and each of our officers and men of authority in the Government to this the Constitution of our country . . .' Copics were despatched to lan Smith aod to Saint Hill lx. lanor in Engl~md with i,~structiu~s to forward the document to tile British Prime I~linistcr, liarold Wilson, when I lubbard gave tile word. Ian SmitlUs principal private secretary rcplictt politely to I lubbard on 5 May saying that his suggestions had been passed to a Cabinet sub-comn~ittce examining proposals for amcnding tile constitution. Still as paranoid as ever, t lubbard then wrote to the Minister of Internal Affairs asking if the investigation of his activities and background had been completed and if he could have confirmation that everything was in order. ttc added a jaunt)' p{~stscript:'XVhy not come over and have a drink and dinner with me one night?' This provoked a frost)' response from the ~linister's private secretar)': 'My Minister has asked me to thank you for your letter of 5th May 1966 and to say that he has no knowledge of his :'x, linistry carrying out an investigation into your activities. }te regrets he is unable to accept your invitation to dinner. Yours faithfully . . .' Hubbard continued to try and ingratiate himself with the leading political figures in Rhodesia, but with little success. In June, he arranged for John 1Mc).laster to visit him from Johannesburg, where he was teaching a clearing course. 'fie cabled me and asked me to bring all the clearing course students to Salisbury to take part in a film he wanted to make,' said McMaster. 'I was also to be sure to bring with me two bottles of pink champagne, which was not available in Rhodesia. 'I had no idea why he wanted it but I knew it was important because Visits to Heaven 259 I was met by one of Hubbard's assistants at Salisbury airport and the first thing she said to me was, "Have you brought the champagne?" It turned out he wanted to give it to Mrs Smith as a present in order to try and get in with the Prime Bdinister. Next morning his chauffeur drove him round to Government House and he swaggered up to tile front door with a bottle trader each arm thinking he was going to take Mrs Smith by storm. But they xvouldn't let him past the front door and he came back very upset, really disgruntled. ,~4 Hubbard's high profile as the 'millionaire-financier' who boasted that he could solve the UDI crisis won him few friends among Rhodesia's deeply conservative white society. tte often spoke of his willingness to help the government, pointing out that he had been trained in economics and government at Princeton, and seemed surprised that his services were not welcon~ed. On television, in newspaper interviews and in all his public pronouncements, ttubbard professed support for Ian Smith's government, although in private he thought Smith was a 'nasty bit of work' who was incapable of leadership-~s Similarly, he publicly espoused sympathy for the plight of the black majorities in both Rhodesia and South Africa, while privately admitting contempt for them. Blacks were so stupid, he told John McNlaster, that they did not give a reading on an E-meter. i~, At the beginning of July, Hubbard was invited tu address the Rotary Club in Bulawavo. t lc delivered a rambling, hectoring speech telling the assembled businessmen how they shotdd run their country, their businesses and their lives and when it was reported in the local newspaper it appeared to be faintly anti-Rhodcsian. A couple of days later, ttuhbard received a letter from the Department of Immigration informing him that his application for an extension to his Alicn's Temporary Residence Permit had been unsuccessful: 'this means that you will be required to leave Rhodesia on or before tile 18th July, 1966.' Hubbard was stunned. Up until that mon~ent he had believed himself to be not just a prominent personality in Rhodesia, but a popular one. He asked his friends in the Rhodcsian Front party to make representations on his behalf to the Prime Minister, but to no avail. 'Smith ranted and raved at them,' he reported later, 'told them l had been deported from Australia, was wanted in every country in tile world, that my business associates had been complaining about me and that I must go.'17 The Rhodesjan Government refused to make any comnlent on the t~xpulsion order, but Hubbard had few doubts about who was behind it - it was obviously a Communist plot to get him out of the country because he was the man most likely to resolve the UDI crisis. 260 Bared:aced Messiah On 15 July, ttubbard lined up Iris household staff on the lawn in front of Iris house on J~hn Plagis Avenue and bade them an emotional farewell for the benefit of Rhodesian television, whose cameras were recording tile departure of the American millionaire-financier. At the airport there were more reporters waiting to interview him before he left and one of them warned him to expect a posse from Fleet Street to greet him in London. He was quite cheered by the prospect and began to think that his expulsion might actually increase his status as an international personality. As [tubbard's plane lifted off tile tarmac at Salisbury, frenzied preparations were being made in Britain to give him a hero's welcome on his return. The news that the revered founder of Scicntology was being kicked out of Rhodesia |lad initially been greeted with dismay and disbelief at Saint Itill Nlanor. 'x,~,"e were shocked,' said Ken Urquhart, 'no one could understand how such a thing could happen. It was an even bigger surprise for the other orgs because none of them kncxv he was in Rhodesia. It was supposed to be a big secret. I was by then working as LRI| Communicator x, Vorld-Widc and it was my job to code and de-code the tclexcs that were going backwards and forwards and between Saint 1Iill and Rhodesia. l'lc didn't want anyone to knoxv he was away because he thought everyone would start slacking.' Coaches were laid uu tn transport every available Scicntologist from East Grinstoad tu I lcathrow on the morning of Saturday, 16 July. They took with them hastily prepared 'x, Velcomc [lome' banners but neglected to obtain the necessary permission to wave them; airport police politely insisted they should remain unfurled. Some six htmdred Scicntologists, including lx, lary Suc and the children, were gathered in the terminal by the time l|ubbard's flight landed. They had to wait while he sorted out a problem about his vaccinations with immigration officers and two hours passed before he emerged from Customs, wearing a lightweight suit and sun-hat, looking tired, but smiling broadly. 'l'm glad to be back,' he shouted as police forced a path through his cheering supporters to a yellow Pontiac convertible parked in front of the ternfinal. He sat on the back, waving presidential style, as the car was slovdy driven away. No one could have asked for a more enthusiastic welcome, although Hubbard was disappointed that Fleet Street had failed to turn out. Only one reporter was at the airport and he only seemed to want to ask about the events in Australia, to which query Hubbard snapped, 'That's past history.' Pain and Rav Kemp were among the first visitors to Saint Hill after Hubbard's return from Rhodesia. 'l|c told me everytiling that had happened,' said Ray Kemp. 'It seems there was a chief of police who Visits to fteaven 261 was very bullying to the blacks and Ian Smith was very wimpish. Smith couldn't make decisions about anything and would rely on the chief of police to tell him what to do. Ron was at dinner one night with Smith and he warned him that if he continued to be wimpish and not put his foot down the probability was that he would be assassinated. About two days later there was an assassination attempt, although I don't remcn~ber whether it was on Smith or the chief of police. The bullet went through Iris mouth and out the side. Ron somehow got the blame because of what he had said. That was why he was asked to leave. ,~s Ken Urquhart got a slightly different version: 'tie inferred the problem was that he knew what to do about the blacks and be became very popular with them. That's why tile government kicked him out. I heard him tell Mary Sue that he had lost œZ00,000 in investment in Rhodesia.' Back in the familiar surroundings of Saint [{ill Nlanor, |{ubbard had plenty of time to review Scicntology's current situation and prospects. It was a far from rosy picture. Apart from the problems in Australia and Rhodesia, trouble was also brewing in the United States, where the Internal Revenue Service was challenging the Church of Scicntology's tax-exempt status. In Britain there was another rash of hysterical headlines when the police found a girl wandering the streets of East Grinstoad in a distressed condition in the early hot~rs of the murning. It trauspircd she was a schizophrenic who had been institutionalizcd before being recruited as a Scicntologist. There were further demands in Parlian~ent for an inttuiry into Scientology, to which the l~Iinistcr of Health tartly replied: 'I do not think any further inquiry is necessary to establish that the activities of this organization are potentially harmful. I have no doubt that Scientology is totaly valueless in promoting health . . .' Scicntology even seemed to be wearing out its welcome in East Grinstead, where the locals were complaining they were being overwheln~ed. As if it was not bad enough having strange Americans walking round the streets wearing badges saying 'Don't speak to me, I'm being processed', Scientologists were snapping up all available rented accommodation, crowding the pubs and straining everyonc's patience. 'There was a lot of resentment and alarm in the town,' said Alan Larcombe of tile East Grinstead Coun'er. 'People felt that Scientolog.v could not be allowed to continue expanding. There was a feeling they were trying to take over - an estate agent, dentist, hairdresser, jewellet;s, finance company and a couple of doctors were all Scicntology run. People didn't like it. They felt that if you had problends you ought to go and have a chat with your vicar.' Larcombe paid another visit to Saint l{ill Nlanor and was astonished 262 Ba~e-Faced Messiah at tile numbers of people who were there. 'It was quite an eye opener. As I pulled tap outside tbc house a bell sounded somewhere and people began pouring out, bundreds and hundreds of them, like wasps learlug a nest. It was an incredible sight. I was completely taken aback by how much the place had grown. I discovered there were so many students there tbat the sewage system could not cope.' Hubbard, musing on Scientology's multitude of problems in the autumn of 1966, arrived at a daring and original solution. He kept it a secret, because he loved secrets, although he hinted at what was on his mind in a remark to John MdXIastcr, recently returned from South Africa. 'You know, Jobn,' he said, 'we have got to do something about all this trouble we are having with governments. Thcre's a lot of high4cvel research still to be done and I want to be able to get on with it without constant interference. Do you realize that 75 per cent of the carth's stArface is completely free from the control of any government? That's where we could be free - on the high seas.'~'~ McMastcr bad no idea what hc meant and 11ubl~ard dicl not choose to elaborate. S~on senior Scicntol~gists were arriving from the United States to take part in a top-secret project under Ron's personal direction. They cotdd somctin~cs bc seen scrambling in and out of a rubber dinghy on the lake or pouring over navigatiunal charts in a classroom. Some evenings they tact behind closctl d~ors ill the garage and it was said that they spent their time practising tying knots. Bv I)cccmbcr it was known they wcrc involved in sometl~ing called the 'Sea Project'. But still no one could imagine what it was. Cttapter 16 Launching the Sea Org 'Hearing of L. Ron Flubbard's plans for further exploration and research into, among other things, past civilizations, many Scicntologists wanted to join him and help. They adopted the name "Sea Organization" . . . Free of organizational duties and aided by the first Sea Org members, L. Ron ||ubbard now bad the time and facilities to confirm in the physical universe some of the events and places he had encountered in his journeys down the track of time . . .' (.11ission Into 7'ime) ~I ~ all /I all In 1967, L. Ron tlubbard was fifty-six years old, tile father of seven children and a grandfather several times over. x. Vitb a loyal wife, a home in England and four children still at school, hc was at an age when most men put down roots and plan nothing more ambitious than a comfortable retirement. But be was not like must men. In 1%7, L. Ron Hubbard raised a private navy, appointed himself Commodore, donned a dashing uniform of his ox~'n design and set fortb on an extraordinary odyssey, leading a fleet of sbil~s across the oceans variously pursued by the CIA, the FBI, the international press and a miscallany of suspicious government and maritime agencies. He had begun making secret plans to set up the 'Sea Organization' on his return from Rhodesia in the summer of 1966, shrouding the whule operation with layer upon layer of duplicity. Ills intention was that the public should believe that he was returning to his former 'profession', that of an explorer, and accordingly, in September 1966, Hubbard announced his resignation as President of the Church of Scientology. This charade was supported by the explanation that the church was sufficientIv well established to survive without his leadership. In preparation for his anticipated resignation a special committee had been set up to investigate how much tile church owed its founder; it was decided the figure was around $13 million, but Hubbard, in his benevolence, forgave the debt. Still a member of the Explorers Club, Hubbard applied for permission to carry the club flag on his forthcoming 'Hubbard 264 Bare-Faced Messiah Geological Survey Expedition'. Its purpose, he explai;~ed, was to conduct a geological survey from Italy, through Greece and Egypt to the Gulf of Aden and down the east coast of Africa: 'Samples of rock types, formations, and soils will be taken in order to draw a picture of an area which has been the scene of the earlier and basic civilizations of the planet and from which some conclusions may possibly be made relating to geological dispositions requisite for civilized growth.' This highfalutin nonsense sufficiently impressed the Explorers Club for the expedition to be awarded the club flag. }The club could not, however, be said to exanline such applications very scrupulously - }tubbard had also been awarded the flag in 1961 for another entirely fictitious venture - the 'Ocean Archeological Expedition', allcgedly set up to explore submerged cities in the Caribbean, Mediterranean and adjacent waters. ~] On 22 November 1966, the Hubbard Explorational Company Limited was incorporated at Companies }louse in London. The directors xvere L. Ron }tubbard, described as expedition supervisor, and Mary Suc Hubbard, ttle company secretary. The aims of the company were to 'explore oceans, seas, lakes, rivers and waters, lands and buildings in any part of the world and to seek for, survey, examine and test properties of all kinds'. I lubbard had m~ m~>rc intention of conducting geological surveys than hc had of relinquishing control of the Church of Scicntology and its handsome income. I lis real objective was to shake off ttle fetters on tlis activities and ambitions imposed by tiresome land-based bureaucracies; his vision was of a domain of his own creation on the freedom of the high seas, connected by sophisticated coded conlmunications to its operations on land. Its purpose would be to propagate Scientology behind a screen of business management courses. Before the end of 1966, the 'Sea Org'- as it would inevitably become known - had secretly purchased its first ship, the P.'ncha,tter, a forty-ton sea-going schooner. To further obscure his involvement, Hubbard asked his friend Ray Kemp to be a part owner. Kemp was the man who believed that Hubbard could move clouds with the power of his mind and when he showed up at Saint Hill to sign for the Encha~tter he swore that Hubbard played a little magical trick on him: 'We'd been sitting talking for hours and it was getting dark when he said, "Well I guess we'd better get this thing signed." I said, "Do you have a pen?" and he said, "Yes, it's over there." I went to pick up the pen on his desk and it disappeared. I thought at first it was the light, but I tried three times to pick up the pen and each time it was not there and I realized he was making it disappear. In the end I said to Ron, "If you'll just leave the bloody pen still for a moment, I'll sign." [I,, ~,~,,l,t ,t,, ~,,~ thi .... lib,, ,~, k ........ : ....... ~ : ,> Ltzunching the Sea Org 265 Shortly after the purchase of the Enchanter, the Hubbard Explorational Company bought an old, rusty North Sea trawler, the 414-ton Avon River, moored at llull, a busy seaport on the north-east coast of England. Hubbard then flew to Tangier in lx, lorocco, where he planned to continue his 'research', leaving his family at Saint }till /X~lanor. Mary Sue wanted to stay behind because Diana, star pupil at the local dancing school, had been chosen to present a bouquet to Princess Margaret, who was due to open the Gen(~e Theatre in East Grinstead a few weeks later. Before being driven to the airport, Hubbard scribbled instructions for various members of the 'sea project'. One of them was Virginia Downsborough, a plump and cheerful New Yorker who had been working as an auditor at Saint Hill for nearly three years. Virginia was never entirely sure why she had been honoured with an invitatiun t~ join the project, unless it was because she came from a sailing family and kncxv a little about ships and knots. 'At that time the sea project was just a few of us who would get together in the garage and learn how to tie knots and read a pilot. I bought a little sailing boat and sailed it at weekends, but that was about it. Ron always worked way down the line - he knew what he intended to do, but he never laid it out for us. 'After he had gone I was given a scaled envelope with his initials on. Inside were my orders. I had to go to 11ull, get tile l'.'nch~nter ready for sea and sail her to Gibraltar for a refit. Ron gave me a list of things he wanted from Saint Hill, mainly personal possessions and clothes, which I was to bring with me. I left for Hull next day .' Scientologists were in the habit of following Ron'~ orders unhesitatingly, no matter how dffficuit the task, or how ill-equipped they were to carry them out. Virginia Downsborough held a masters degree in education and had run a child development department in a New York school before coming to Saint Hill; nevertheless she set out for Hull without a second thought. 'A lot of things needed to be done before the Enchanter was ready to sail,' she recalled, 'so I lived on the .4~'on River, which was moored alongside and was absolutely filthy, for a couple of weeks while the work was being carried out.' The Enchanter sailed in the New Year with a hired skipper and a novice crew of four Scientologists, including Downsborough. In the light of forthcoming Sea Org voyages, it was a comparatively uneventful trip, apart from losing most of the fuel at sea somewhere off tile coast of Portugal. After putting in briefly at Oporto, the Enchanter arrived safely in Gibraltar, only to discover there was no room in tbc ways. A message arrived from a Hubbard aide in Tangier saying that Ron was ill and they were to continue to Las Palmas, in the Canary 266 Ba,e-Faced Messiah 'We got the Enchanter on the ways in Las Palmas,' said Downsborough, 'and we had not been there very long before Ron turned up. Bill Robertson - another Scicntologist - and myself went to the post office to post some letters and discovered a telegram there from Ron saying that he was arriving in Las Palmas almost at that minute and wanted to be met. We jumped into a taxi and got to the airport just in tinle to pick him up as he was coming through Customs. We found him a hotel in Las Palmas and next day I went back to see if he was all right, because lie did not seem to be too well. 'When I went in to his room there were drugs of all kinds everywt~ere. He seemed to be taking about sixty thousand different pills. I was appalled, particularly after listening to all tlis tirades against drugs and the medical profession. There was something very wrong with him, but I didn't knoxv what it was except that he was in a state of deep depression; he told nit he didn't have any more gains and hc wanted to die. That's what he said: "l want to die."' It was important for llubbard to be discovered in this dramaticall)' debilitated condition at this time, for it would soon be aunounced to fclloxv Scicntol~gists that lie had completed 'a research accomplishmcnt of immense nlagnitudc' described, somcxvhat inscrutat~ly, as the 'Wall of Fire'. TIlls was the OT3 (()pcrating Thetan Section Thrce) material. in which were containcd 'the secrets of a disaster which resulted in the dccav of life as we know it in ttlis sector of tile galaxy'.3 I lubbard, it was said, was the 'first person in millions of )'ears' to map a precise route tllrough the 'Wall of Fire'. l laving done so, his OT power has been increased to such an extent tllat he was at grave risk of accidcntal injury to tlis body; indeed, he tlad broken his back, a knee and an arm during the course of his research. Virginia Downsborough did not observe any broken limbs, but recognized that Ron needed nursing. 'I moved into an adjoining room in the hotel to take care of him. He refused to eat the hotel food, so I got a little hotplate and cooked nleals for him in the room, simple things, tl~ings that he liked. Xlv main concern was to try and get him off all the pills he was on and persuade him that there was still plenty for hinl to do. Ite was sleeping a lot and refused to get out of bed. '! don't know what drugs he was taking - they certainly weren't making him high - but I knew I had to get him over it. I discussed it witll him and gradually took t}lem away. He didn't carry on about it. tic had brought a great pile of unopened mail with tlinl fronl Tangier, a lot of it from Nlarv Sue, and I got him to start reading her letters. After about three weeks he decided lie would get out of bed and he started taking little walks and then he got interested in what was happening on the t:'~t~'hanter and after that he was all right.' ~l:.rx ~,~,' t],.w in t,~ I .:~ P:~ln~:~ :~ ~,,r~.~ ~ ;~,~n ~v:~ hn,'k nn hi< f.~.-t Launching the Sea O~g 267 and Virginia Downsborough was instructed to find the Hubbartts a house. She rented tile Villa Estrella, a pretty white-painted hacienda with a red-tiled roof on a rocky promontory facing the sea, about forty-five minutes drive from Las Palmas. 'I cooked dinner for them at the house every evening,' she said. 'Ron used to like to sit up and talk half the night long after ix, lary Sue had gone to bed. He had this intense ability to communicate and it was fascinating to listen to him. I was intrigued by the concept he presented of himself as being a constant victim of women. 'He talked a lot about Sara Northrup and seemed to want to make sure that I knew he had never married her. I didn't know wily it was so important to him; I'd never met Sara and I couldn't have cared less, but he wanted to persuade me that the marriage had never taken place. When he talked about his first wife, the picture he put out of himself was of this poor wounded fellow coming home from tile war and being abandoned by his wife and family because hc would be a drain on them. lie said he had planned every move along the way with Mary Sue to avoid being victimized again. ,4 When tile Enchanter came off the ways in the barbour at Las Paln~as, tlubbard took her out on extended cruises round the Canary Islands to search for gold he had buried in previut~s lives. 'l'le wonld draw little maps for us,' said Virginia Doxvnsborough,' and we would be sent off to dig for buried treasure. Itc told us he was hoping to replace tile E~whanter's ballast with solid g~ld. I thought it was great fun - the best show on earth.' All these activities were supposed to remain a closely guarded secret and |lubbard insisted on the use of elaborate codes in Sea Org communications. In a despatch to Saint Itill he urged his followers not to feel '007ish and silly' about security. 'When you have had the close calls I have had in intelligence through security failures,' he said, 'you begin to believe there is something in tbe subject. I was once in 194{) ordered out on a secret mission by the US to a hostile foreign land with whom we were not yet at war. It was vital to mask mv purpose there. It would have been fatal had I been known to have been a naval officer. On a hunch I didn't leave at once and the following day the US sent a letter to me that had I left would have been forwarded to me in that land, addressing me xvith full rank and title, infornling me to wear white cap covers after April 15 in Washington. Had I departed, that letter, following me, would have sentenced me to death before a firing squad !,s While ttubbard was in Las Palmas he developed phobias about dust and smells which were the cause of frequent explosive temper tantrums. tie was always complaining that his clothes smelled of soap or he was being choked by dust that no one else could detect. Nu 268 Bare-Faced Messiah matter how frequently the Enchanter's decks were scrubbed, she was never clean enough for the Commodore. Similarly, the routine drive between the hathour and the Villa Estrella became an ordeal for everyone in the car. 'Sometimes I thought we'd never get there,' said Virginia Downsborough. 'Every few miles he would insist on stopping because there was dust in the air conditioner. He would get into such a rage that on occasions I thought he was going to tear the car apart.' In April 1967, the Avon River steamed into the harbour at Las Palmas after a voyage from Hull which the skipper, Captain John Jones, later described as the 'strangest trip of my life'. Apart from the chief engineer, Jones was the only professional seaman on board. 'My crew were sixteen men and four women Scientologists who wouldn;'t know a trawler from a tramcar,' he told a reporter from the Daily Mit, or on his return to England. Captain Jones should perhaps have foreseen the difficulties when he signed on for the voyage and was informed that he would be expected to run the ship according to the rules of The 0,~, Book, a sailing manual written by the founder of the Church of Scicntology and therefore considered by Scientologists to be infallible gospel. 'I was instructed not to use any electrical equipment, apart from lights, radio and direction finder. \Ve had radar and other advanccd equipment which I was not allowed to use. I was told it was all in The O,g Book, which was to be obeyed without question.' Following the advice in this esteemed manual, the :lvo,t River bumped the dock in Hull as she was getting under way and had barely left the Humber estuary before the Scientologist navigator, using th~ navigational system advocated by Hubbard, confessed that he was lost. 'I stuck to mv xvatch and sextant,' said Captain Jones, 'so at least I knew where we were.' As the old traxvler laboured into the wind-flecked waters of the English Channel, a disagreement arose between the senior Scientologist on board and the Captain about who was in command. By the time the Avon River put into Falmouth to re-fuel, both the Captain and the chief engineer were threatening to pack their bags and leave the ship. Frantic telephone calls to East Grinstead eventually led to the protesting Scientologist being ordered to return to Saint hill and the smoothing of Captain Jones's ruffled feathers. The rest of the trip passed off without incident, although the two seamen remained utterly mystified by their crew and in particular bv the hours they spent fiddiing with their E-meters? At Las Palmas, the :tvon River.was hauled up on the slips recently vacated bv the Encha,rter and prepared for a major re-fit. A workin~ party of bright-eyed sea project members had already arrived in the Launching the Sea Org 269 Canaries, among them Amos Jessup, a philosophy major from Connecticut. The son of a senior editor on Life magazine, Jessup had gone to Saint Hill in 1966, while he was studying in Oxford, to try and get his young brother out of Scientology and instead had become converted himself. 'I was soon convinced', he said, 'that instead of being some dangerous cult it was an important advance in philosophy. 'I was clear by the spring of '67 and when I heard that LRH was looking for personnel for a communications vessel I immediately volunteered and was sent to Las Palmas. We were all given a "shore story" so that no one would know that we were Scientologists; we were told to say that we were working for the Hubbard Explorational Company on archeological research. 'On the day we arrived, the Avon RR'er was being hauled up on the slips. She looked like what she was -an old, worn-out, oil-soaked, rust-flaked steam trawler. Our job was to give her a complete overhaul. \Ve sand-blasted her from stem to stern, painted her, put bunks in what had been the rope locker, converted the liver oil boiling room into additional accommodation, put decks in the cargo holds to make space for offices. LRH designed a number of improvements - a larger rudder and a system of lifts to hoist small boats aboard.'~ Hubbard would show up every couple of days to check on thc progress of the work, but it was never going ahead fast enough and more sea project members were constantly being flown in to Las Palmas to join the work-force. Hana Eltringham, a former nurse from South Africa, arrived in August. 'At first sight the ship looked terrible. all streaked with rust,' she said. 'You had to climb a long, shaky ladder to get up on to the deck and as I got over the side I could see everS.'thing was covered in sand from the sand-blasting and then were people sleeping on the sand, obviousIv exhausted. 'Nevertheless, it was a tremendous thrill to be there. It was a grea' honour to be invited to join the sea project; we were an elite, like th~ Marine Corps. All of us were true and tried Scientolog~sts, highl.~ motivated, and to me it was high adventure.' After working as a deck hand for a couple of weeks, Hana wa: promoted to ethics officer. 'Nly job was to run round making sure the crew weren't goofing. [ felt I was responsible for catching erron before he did because he would get vep,' upset - he would literalE scream and shout - if something was not being done right. I wa= mostly scared of him in those days. 'One afternoon I was standing on the deck with a clipboard waitinl for him to come on board and I knew something was wrong because saw his face start to contort when he was still 15 or 20 yards away walking towards the slips. As he came up to the ship he starte, 270 Bare-Faced Mt'ssiah shouting, filling his lungs and bellowing "What are they doing? Why are they ttoing that?" and pointing to the side of the ship. He came up the ladder still screaming in a kind of frenzy. I didn't know what was the matter and he told me to look over the side of the ship. I stuck my head over to see what the hell he was screaming about. The painters who were putting white paint on the hull xvcrc using old rollers and the paint had a kind of furry coat on it from the rollers. He'd seen that from ma~ly yards away. It was extraordinary. I was awed.'s Such incidents inevitably led to the offenders being assigned a 'lower condition', the penalties for which were by then routinely formalized. The least setiotas was 'emergency' followed by 'liability', in which hapless state the miscreant forfeited pay, was confined to 'org premises' and had to wear the infamous dirty grey rag on one arm. In a condition of 'treason', all uniforn~s and insignia were removed and the rag was replaced by a black mark on the left check. In 'doubt', the offender was fined, barred frum thc org and could not be communicated with. Lastly came the dreaded 'enemy'-'Ix. lay be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scicntologist without any discipline of the Scicntoh~gist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.' l'2vcn though I luhl~ard had 'resigned' as president of the Church of Scicntoh~gy, thc tlow of edicts continuctt uninterrupted and he rcmmdcd Scicntol~gists of the penaltics for lower conditio~ls in a policy letter tlictatcd at the Villa Estrclla in Los Palmas. tic also found time to record a taped lecture in which he warned of a world-xvidc conspiracy to destroy Scicntoh~gy. The resourceful ~lary Sue had apparently traced the conspiracy to tile very highest !ovals, to a cabal of international bankers and newspaper barons sufticiently powerful to control many heads of state, among them the British Prime ~linister, llarold x, Vilson. While l lubbard was fulminating against international conspiracies and bellowing at his amateur work-force as they struggled to prepare the ..lyon River for sea, good news arrived from a 'mission' in Britain (tasks undertaken on tlubbard's bd~alf were always aggrandized as 'missions'). For many months txvo senior Scicntologists, Joe van Staden and Ron Pook, had been scouring European ports for a big ship, something like a cruise liner, which could be used as the Sea Org's flagship. In September, they reported by telex that they had found, laid up in Aberdeen, just the ship that Ron was looking for. She was tile Royal S~'otsntan, a 3280-ton motor vessel huilt in 1936 and most recently in service as a cattle ferry on the Irish Channel crossing. Despite her age, she was in good condition and could probably be bought, von Stadcn and Pook thought, for not much more than œ60,000. To tlubbard, tile money was insignificant; Saint l lill alone was taking in around œ40,00{} a week in fees. ttc immediately l,~lunHIlng the Sea Otg 271 instructed von Staden and Pool to start negotiating the purchase and to make arrangements for the Royal Scotsman to join the other ships in Las Palmas, although Avon River was still high and dry on the slips. It was only natural that the Commodore, who was not tile most patient of men, would want his fleet assembled at tile earliest opportunity and he was constantly irritated by what he considered to be unnecessary delays in the Avon River's refit. By this time there were thirty-five Scientologists working on the ship from dawn to dusk, sawing, painting, chipping, scrubbing and polishing. The bridge had been completely reconstructed and fitted with nexv compasses and navigation equipment, all the cabins had been steam cleaned, the fish hold was converted into auditing space with rows of built-in desks, and there was a research office for the Commodore just forward of the bridge. When at last she was ready for service, the re-launching was rather less than an outstanding success. As the trawler, sprucely whitepainted, slid down the ways, it was realized too late that no precautions had been taken to restrain her; she drifted helplessly in the bay until a boat could be found to push her tox~'ards a mooring buoy. To compotmd this embarrassing indignity, the E~tchanter appeared over the horizon under tow, having broken down while out scorching for the treasure buried by the Commodore in previous lives. Txvo days later, both ships set sail, somewhat uncertainly, for Gibraltar. The Royal Scotsman, meanwhile, had lcft Ahcrdcen but had run foul of th'e Board of Trade, the British agency responsible for the safety of ships registered in the United Kingdom. On 7 November, a solicitor acting for the new oxvners of the Royal Scotsman, had telephoned the Board of Trade in London and asked if the ship could be re-registered as a pleasure yacht and cleared for a voyage to Gibraltar. He was told that such a re-classification would entail considerable modifications - under the Safety of Life at Sea Convention of 1960, the ship would need valid load-line, cargo ship construction, safety equipment and radio certificates. The Sea Org decided to try anottler tack: a couple of days later, the Royal Scotsman put in to Southampton on the south coast and an attempt was made to clear her with the port authorities as a ~vhaling ship. This sudden transformation not unnaturally aroused suspicions and the authorities responded by slapping a provisional detention order on the ship, preventing her from putting to sea until necessary safety provisions had been complied with. This news, nervously conveyed to L. Ron Ilubbard in Gibraltar, produced a predictable'explosi~n. Hubbard railed at the stupidity of the people who were supposed to be helping him and funded about the injustice of being prevented from doing what hc wanted with his own 272 Bare-Faced Messiah ship. When he had caln~ed down, he decided that the only solution was to fly to England with a hand-picked crew, take command of the Royal Scotsman and sail her away, protests from the Board of Trade notxvithstanding. Shortly afterwards, a curious party of sailors in blue serge suits, x~hite polo neck sweater~s and little tar hats arrived at Gatwick airport on a flight from Gibraltar. They were led by a large, red-faced man wearing a white peaked cap and carrying a letter of authority explaining that the3' xvere the delivery crew for a vessel under tile seal of the Hubbard Explorational Company. In the customs hall, an officer of HM Customs and Excise glanced briefly at the letter brandished by the red-faced man and casually inquired: 'ls tbis the same Hubt~ard who has tile place at East Grinstead?' 'OIl yes,' the red-faced man boomed, 'Mr Hubbard is an explorer himself.' Amos Jessup, who was standing directly bcbind tlubbard, marvelled at his conlposure. The improbable sailors boarded a coach waiting outside tile airport and were driven straight to Soutbampton Docks, to the berth occupictt bv the Royal St'otsman. 'Everyone climbed out and stared up at this huge ship,' Jessup recalled. 'I was startled and amazed by the size of it. It was three stories high and 357 feet long. I was assigned to hc thc bos'n. I didn't know all I should have known about bos'ning and I was rather shocked at tile magnitude of what I'd been handed. 'After wc got on board, LRI I called ev.eryonc togctller and had us sit on the staircase between A deck and B deck. I lc stood at the bottom of the stairs and said, "This may look like a big and overwhelming thing, but don't let it scare you. I've handled ships bigger than this. She handles like a dream, drives like a Cadillac with big twin screws. Therc's nothing to it." x,~,'~e were already a can-do kind of group, but everyone felt a bit better after that.' Over the next few days, there was constant activity at the Royal Scotsmtt~t's berth. Every few hours a truck would arrive from Saint Hill loaded with filing cabinets which were humped on board. Taxis disgorged eager Saint Hill volunteers, clutching their bags and the 'billion-year contract' which Hubbard had recently introduced as a condition of service in the Sea Org. hdary Sue and the children arrived and took over the upper-deck accommodation which had been reserved for the Hubbard family. Diana }tubbard was then fifteen, Quentin thirteen, Suzette a year younger and little Arthur just nine years old. They would have the company of a few other children on the ship and a notice was pinned in the saloon explaining how they were to be treated: 'A tutor will be provided for the children, who will be assigned regular hours of work and play. Anyone who deprives a child of his or her work or play will Launching the Sea O,g 273 be assigned to a condition of non-existence.' (Penalties for n{~nexistence - Must wear old clothes. May not bathe. x. Vornen must not wear make-up or have hair-do's. Men may not shave. No lunch hour . . .9 Not everyone joining the crew was a volunteer. John lx, lcMastcr, whom Hubi3ard had earlier described as the first Pope of the Church of Scientology, had recently fallen into dislayout, probably because tie was beginning to become too influential. Slight and golden-baited, McNlaster had been touring the world as an evangelist for Scientology, attracting huge audiences, considerable popularity and the dangerous enmity of L. Ron Hubbard. On a brief return visit to Saint Hill, he was abruptly assigned a lower condition, deprived of all his awards and ordered to re-train from scratch. He would recall his experiences years later with enormous bitterness, contemptuously referring to Hubbard as 'Fatty': 'All of a sudden I was ordered to appear at Saint Hill Manor at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning with all my clothes. There was a big open truck outsidL' being loaded with files and filing cabinets and I was told to get in the back. I had no idea where I was going. By the time we got to Soutbampton Docks I was frozen, I could hardly move. This was November, don't forget. They got hie on to the poop deck and this big fat body appeared. It was Fatty. "Oh, so you've deigned to come, have you?" be said. "Well I'm here, aren't I?" I said. "If you've come to join us, I'll conic down and shake >'our hand," he said. lle stepped down, grabbed my hand, realized I was frozen and started screaming and shouting to'get me into a warm cabin. I sat in the cabin for about three hours until I had thawed out. I was told that I was going to be a galley hand. By this time I was well used to Hubbard's insanity and there was no way i was going to succumb to it. I wasn't bottlered. If they wanted me to ~lean the heads and scrub the decks, that was fine by me.r To supplement his inexperienced crew, Hubbard hired a couple of professional seamen, including a chief engineer, but it did not prevent mishaps occurring even before the Royal Scotsman had put to sea. One of the recruits was on duty at the gangplank as Quartermaster and failed to notice until it was too late that the ship's rubbing strake had caught on the edge of the dock as the tide ebbed. A small crowd of stevedores watched with undisguised amusement as the crew of the Rox'al Scotsman tried to lever their enormous ship off the dock. It was hoi3eless: the rubbing strake creaked, splintered and finally broke away from the hull. liubbard took the opportunity to parade the entire crew on tile dockside to point out what had happened and remind them that as thetans all of them must have had seafaring experience in one or another of their past lives. 'The truth of the matter is that you have all 274 Bare4?aced Messiah been around a long time,' he stressed. 'Stop pretcnding you don't know what it is all about, because you do know what it is all about.' Amos Jessup said everyone felt better afterwards. \Vhilc all this was going on, Hubbard had despatched Hana Eltringham on a top secret missiun to re-register tile Royal Scotsman in Sierra Leone in order to circumvent the attention of tbe Board of Trade. liana first flew back to Las Palmas, wilere she collected a Spanish law3'er wbo had previously worked for the church, and then together they took a flight to Sierra Leone, a tiny, mosquito-ridden republic on the west coast of Africa. In Freetown, tile capital, it took thirty-six hours to complete tile paperwork, during which time Hana bought a large Sierra Leonese flag. On 28 November, less than three days after leaving Britain, she was on her way back to Gatwick carrying the ship's new documents. She took a cab from the airport direct to Southampton Docks. 'l arrived back on board at about four o'clock in tbe afternoon and took the papers straight to LRtt, who was having tea in the main dining-room with the ship's officers. lie was delighted to see me and very pleased to get the new registration, but as he was reading through the papers his eye caught something and he started to frown. I felt the familiar terror rising. "Did you notice this?" he said, pointing to the name of the ship on the papers. I looked and saw the "s" had been missed out and it was spelled "Royal Scotman". I began to stanm~er an apolugy, but he suddenly smiled, grabbed nly hand and began pumping it. "Double congratulations," he said. "Now tile ship has a new name as well."' l Ic instantly ordered painters to black out the second 's' in the name on tbe bows, stern, lifeboats and lifebelts. The folluwing day, the Royal Scotman applied for clearance to sail to Brcst in north-west France, for repairs. The port authorities in Southampton had no powers to detain a vessel registered in Sierra Leone and the ship sailed at dusk, raising the Sierra Leonose flag and banging into the fenders in tile inner harbour on her way out into Southampton x. Vater. It was to be a hair-raising maiden voyage for tile Sea Org's flagship, as Hana Eltringham recounted: '\Ve sailed out of the channel that evening into an awful storm. The engine room was in a very bad condition; the main engines were not running very well and neither were the generators and because the paint was so dirty in the engine room you couldn't follow which were the water lines and which were the fuel lines. Half-way between Southampton and Brest, one of the generators conked out. 'I was on bridge watch as officer of the deck. \Ve were between three to five miles off the north-west tip of France and I could see ahead, on the port side, the buoys marking the rocky coastline going south. But as we came around to try and get into the estuary towards Brest I Launching the Sea O~g 275 noticed the the red-flashing buoys were swinging across the bows of the ship and I realized we were caught in a rip tide and were being pushed towards the rocks. 'The ship started to wallow very badly and each time she went over she took longer to recover. Although she had stabilizers, she went from a five degree roll to almost a twenty-five degree roll and on the last roll to port she staggered. V',~e were all hanging on to the bridge and at that moment the old man [Hubbard] began screaming at Bill Robertson, the navigator, "Get us on a course out of here ! Get us on a course out of here!" He was really bellowing. The ship started to stagger around, very slowly and painfully. It was scan'. I was terrified and I think LRH was too, tile way he was screaming and holding on to the bridge and glaring at us. 'Once we had got out of it and were about ten miles off tile coast steering south, he took the entire bridge watch into the cabin just behind tile bridge and told us that due to what had happened and the ship b,.qng at risk and not truly seaworthy he had decided not to go into Brest, even though it would be defying orders. We were going to continue soutb down to the Mediterranean. The way he was telling us was like he was convincing us it was tbe right tiling to do. He went over and uvcr it, to make sure we understood. Then he entered what had happened in the log book, a two- or three-page entry explaining tbc reasons for not going into Brest, and we all signed it. 'The following day tilere was another near catastropbe. \Ve were planning to put into ~ibraltar to meet up with the ..h'on River. It was about five or five-thirty in the afternoon and getting dark as we approached the Gibraltar Strait. We were ill the northernmost lane entering the Nled and we could see there was a storm brewing. The storm came up quickly and the sea was very wild and as we were battling to control the ghip tile oil lines from tile bridge to tile engine room lost pressure and the hydraulic steering on the bridge gave way. 'The ship started to drift across the southernmost outgoing lane towards the Nloroccan coast. We put our "Not under command" lights on so other ships could see we were drifting and started to work frantically on the back of the poop deck to rig up the emergency steering. It was pouring with rain and very cold. In the middle of all this we were in radio communication with Gibraltar asking for help, for a tug to be sent out to bring us in. They refused. They said that because we had failed to comply with our sailing orders we would not be allowed into any English port. I can remember LRI t pleading with them on the radio: "x, Ve have wives and children on board, we are at risk." But they would not come to our aid. I was appalled. It was my first major shock. 'We had managed to find all the component parts to hook up the 276 Bare-Faced Messiah emergency steering on the aft docking bridge and there we were, Ron, Pook and myself, hanging on to tile manual steering wheel trying to steer the ship while someone stood holding an umbrella over us, anotller shone a torch on a little hand compass and someone else talked on a walkie-talkie to the bridge to the person watching the gyro compass. Mary Sue was running backwards and forw'ards with cups of steaming hot cocoa. 'I could still hear snatches of LRH talking to Gib on the ship-toshore radio and I remember standing there, holding on to tile steering wheel with aching arms and tears streaming down my face, thinking nobody waots us, where can we go? To be refused h~lp by a British port brought home to me the enornlity of our situation and my empathy for the old man increased a thousand fold. He was not wanted in England and he had been kicked out of various places around the world. All I could think about xvas that no one wanted this brilliant man and tile treasures he had to offer.' Denied entry into Gibraltar, the Royal Scotman continued into the Mediterranean under hcr emergency steering and set a course for the little principality of 1Monaco, where I iubt>ard hoped he woultt be more wdcomc. Food and water was running low and tile cook was reduced to serving soup made with seawater by tile time the ship hove to off lXhmtc Carlo m early December. She was too big to enter the harbour, but the port atlthoritics agreed to her being rc-fucllcd and rcprovisioncd bv lighters, and engineers were brought on board to repair the steering. Fronl Monaco, the Ro~'al Scotman sailed to Cagliari in Sardinia, xvhcre she docked for the first time since leaving Southampton. If llubbard had a reason for visiting Sardinia, he kept it to himself. x, Vhile thcv were tilere, he received a cable which brought on another paroxysm uf uncnntrolled rage and sent everyone around him diving for cover. The .,t~'on River had been caught i~ hurricane-force storms north of tile Balearic Islands: much of the deck gear had been swept overboard and tile terrified crew were very shaken up. As Hubbard read the cable his face began to twitch. }Ie strode to the chart table, stabbed at it madly with his finger and bellowed, '11'hat were they doing up there?' John O'Keefe, the unhappy Scientologist who had been given command of the Avon River, had muddled his instructions and was miles off course when he ran into the storm. He should have been far to the south of the Balearies, heading for a rendezvous with the Royal Scot~nan in Cagliari. ttubbard was still seething when the :lyon Rt:ver finally limped into the harbour at Cagliari. He refused to speak to O'Keefc and ordered a Committee of Evidence (a Com-Ev in Scientology-speak) to be convened, which inevitably found O'Keefe Launching the Sea Org 277 guilty of dereliction of duty. He was assigned a lower condition, stripped of his post and given a lowly job in the engine room. O'Keefe, who thought he had done well to save his ship, was devastated. This humbling ritual cast something of a pall over the Christmas celebrations, after which tile Commodore ordered both ships back across the 1Mediterranean to Valencia in Spain - a five hundredqnile voyage completed without incident, no doubt to the relief of both crews. Tied up alongside in Valencia barbour, O'Keefe sought out his friend I{ana Eltringham. 'l was shocked by his condition,' she said. 'He had lost about twenty pounds and looked like a skeleton with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks. It was unbelievable. He told me he was thinking of leaving and I began to think about it too. It was the first time I really questioned what was going on. I mulled it over for about a week, but in the end I couldn't go. I came back to the view that I was a solid Sea Org member and that in order to achieve freedom I had to fight for it, that it wasn't necessarily an easy road and that I would have to overcome obstacles and encounter suppression. It was a critical moment, but I managed to suppress any desire to leave and get away from the insanity.' No such doubts assailed Stanley Churchcr, one of the three professional seamen on tile Royal Scotman. |tired as the ship's carpenter in Southanlpton, hc was thorougllly sick of his ship-rallies by the time they reached Valcncia. Placed in a 'condition of doubt' fur 'defying an order, encouraging desertion, tolerating mutinous nicerings and attempting to suborn the chief engineer', ~lr Churcllcr employed a few choice words to tell the Scicntologist ofticers what hc thought of their 'mumbo-jumbo' and was promptly sacked. Back in England, Churcher told his story to the People, one of Britain's saucier Sunday newspapers, who gleefully published it under the headline 'AllOY TIlERE -- It'S the craziest cruise on earth' along with pictures of the ship and L. Ron Hubbard, described as the 'boss' of the 'mind-bending cult' of Scientology. Mr Churcher was withering in his disdain. 'There were seven officers of this Scientology lot,' he said, 'who used to swank about in blue and gold-braid uniforms, but I reckon they knew next to nothing about seamanship. Four of them were women. Hubbard called himself the Commodore and had four different types of peaked cap. tlubbard's wife, who had an officer's uniform made for her, seemed to enjoy playing sailors. 'Every day they went below for lectures, but we seamen ~vere never admitted. It was all so blooming mysterious I tried to find out more. 1 offered to give them seamanship lectures and they were so pleased at these they gave me a free beginner's course in Scientology. I was give a test on their E-meter, a sort of lie detector, and a woman officer asked me a lot of personal questions, including details of my sex life. The 278 Ba~'-Faced Messiah oldest student was a woman of seventy-five who told me she was convinced that Mr Hubbard would fix her up with a new body when she died. 'I couldn't make head nor tail of it.'~ Chapter 17 In Search of Past Lives 'USIS OFFICER STATES HUBBARD RUNS FLOATING UNIVERSITY' OF QUESTIONABI, E MORAL CHARACTER~ NOT ACCREDITED ANY US UNIVERSITIES AND POOR REPRESENTATIVE FOR US ABROAD . .. FLOATING COLI,EGE PROBABLY PART OF CIIARLATAN CULT.' (CIA cable traffic, June/July 1968) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Soon after the Royal Scotman docked in Valcncia a group of students ficw in from Saint Hill to take a 'clearing course' on board the ship. One of them was a pretty, dark-eyed New Yorkcr called ~larv Marcn: 'I had a friend in dance class in New York who was into Scicntology and he told me about it. They soundcd like an interesting group of people and I thought it would be useful to have this exact scientific technology at my disposal. I read Dianetit's and it made a lot of sense tO me. 'By 1967 I was doing the briefing course at Saint liill and I saw some people who had come back from this mysterious sea project. One of the guys was terrified, really scared; I had no idea why he was in such a state. Two weeks later more came back. They had lost a lot of weight and looked overwhelmed, as if they had seen some kind of monster in the sea. Later I discovered that they had been cleaning cattle dung out of the ship's hold for two weeks, but I didn't know it at the time. I said to my husband, Artie, I'm never going to join the Sea Org. 'I forgot all that when we all got on a plane to do the clearing course. It was called the New Year Freedom Flight. I'd never been to Spain before and it all seemed very exciting. At that time the ship looked clean, kinda nice. The stateroom I was given was very small and cramped, but everything looked kinda spilled up. The atmosphere was very congenial. 'LRH was on the ship and in a real jolly mood. He used to stay up late at night on the deck and talk to us into the wee hours about his whole track adventures, how he was a race-car driver in the Marcab civilization. The Marcab civilization existed millions of years ago on another planet; it was similar to planet earth in the 'firties, only they 280 Bare-Fenced Messiah had space travel. Marcabians turned out later not to bc good guys so it wasn't a compliment that their civilization was similar to ours. LRtt said he was a race driver called the Green Dragon who set a speed record before he was killed in an accident. }te catne back in anottter lifetime as the Red Devil and beat his own record, tben came back and did it again as the Blue Streak. Finally he realized all he was doing was breaking his own records and it was no game any more. 'People would stand around listening to these stories for hours, very over-awed. At the time it seemed a privilege and honour to share these things, to bear him talking about tbings that went on millions of years ago like it was yesterday. It was usually entertaining, but I sometimes found it very stressful to take it all in, tbis powerful, boon~ing outflow, and it was hard to get away. One night I was getting dizzy and dared to ask if I could leave early. I could hear my voice echoing in the cosm~s as I said, "If you'll excuse me, I have to go to bed, sir." He said, "Ol,[, sure.'''l Talking about bis past lives to an adoring, captive audience was one of 1Iubbard's fayour|to recreational activities. t lis stories, no matter how outrageous, wcre alxvays treated seriously, for everyone on tile ship was a dcdicatcd Scientologist committed to tbe concept of past lives and immortality. It was nnt in the least improbablc to lXlary /xdarcn, or any of the others who listened to Ilubl~ard talking on the deck of Royal Scotmerit on those warm Spanish nights, that bc had bccn a ~.larcabian racing driver. One uf tbe recurring features of I lubbard's past lives on this planet was a pcncbant for secreting Iris worldly goods underground and one of the frustrations of his present life was Iris inability to find them. lie xvas deeply disappointed titat his cruises round tile Canary Islands in tile Ettcllanter had not resulted in replacing tile schooner's ballast with gold bars, but now he had more time, more ships and more personnel at his disposal and in February 1968, he asked for volunteers to accompany him on a special mission on the ..t~'on River. Amos Jessup was among the first to step forward. 'He didn't tell us ahead of time what we were going to do, but it didn't matter to me, I'd have followed him tbrough the gates of Hell if I had to. I was glad to do anything for him because I felt that what he had done to help others was so great an accomplishment he deserved whatever help I could offer. People felt he was a mirade worker, someone who had demonstrated a far higl~er level of competence than anything x~'e could aspire to. It was as exciting and stimulating as bell to be with him. You had to be on your toes, put out your maximum effort, but it was always very refresbing and therapeutic. ,z Hubbard accepted thirty-five volunteers for the mission and for the next few weeks conducted daily training sessions on the deck of the In Search of l'ast Lives 281 Avon River, often watched by envious students hanging over the rails of the Royal Scotman moored alongside in Valencia barbour. \Vith a stop watch in one hand, the Commodore put the crew tbrougb innumerable drills to rescue men overboard, fight fires, handle lines, launch and retrieve small boats and repel boarders - he told them he was worried about piracy in the Mediterranean and wanted to be sure they would not panic if that circumstance arrived. At the beginning of Nlarch the Avon River set sail, leaving the Royal Scotman seething witb speculation about the nature of her mission. She headed east, back across the ~lediterranean once again, and anchored in a sheltered bay off Cap Carbonara, on the south-east coast of Sardinia, where Hubbard mustered the crew on the well deck for a briefing. Standing on a hatch cover so that he could be seen, he told them he was on tbe tbreshold of achieving an ambition he had cherisbcd for centuries in earlier lives. This was tbe first lifetime he had been able to build an organization with sufficient resources, money and manpower to tackle the project they were about to undertake. He had accumulated vast wealth in previous lives, he explained, and bad buried it in strategic places. Tbc purpose of their present mission was to locate this buried treasure and retrieve it, either witIt, or without, the co-operation of the authurities. Several men~bers of the crew were unable to suppress gasps of excitement at this prospect and he smiled broadIv before continuing. To the best of Iris recollection, when he was the Commander of a tlcet of war galleys two tbousand years ago, there was a temple somewllere on tbe coast close to where they were ancborcd. It was called the Temple of Tenet and the high priestess was a charming lady who, be said with a wink, had 'warmed the hearts of sailors'. ttis intention was to put several parties ashore next morning to search for the ruins of the temple and the secret entrance where he had buried a cache of gold plates and goblets. 'It was an electrifying idea,' said Jessup. 'We all thought it was higb adventure. tlere was this guy who had cracked through the age-old mystery of the human condition, had dug into, and uncovered, every aspect of human shortcoming, now broaching into a new area, going to sea with a bunch of people in the Mediterranean and digging up buried treasure. It didn't matter to me if it was true or not, what mattered was being able to play a game that LR|I had designed. If it was important to him, I would do the best 1 could.' The ruins of the Temple of Tenet at first proved difficult to trace, until |tubbard realized titat bis recollection was based on ancient sailing instructions whereas be had selected the search area using a modern chart. Once this obstacle had been overcome the ruins were soon found, an event wbich caused a predictable stir on board the 282 Bare-Faced Messiah Avon River only marginally spoiled by the discovery that the site was clearly marked as an ancient monument - it might have been more sensible to locate the temple by looking at a guide book. The fact that th~ temple was a known ruin also made it rather difficult for the Scicntologists to begin sweeping the area with their metal detectors, let alone starting to dig, without arousing the suspicion of the locals. Although one group reported encountering what appeared to be the hidden entrance and a surreptitious probe with a metal detector was positive, t[ubbard decided merely to note their findings and move on. XVhilc the search parties wrote up detailed reports of everything they had fotmd, the Avon River headed south towards tim coast of north Africa, to Tunis, where the ancient civilization of Carthage flourished before the birth of Christ. Hubt~ard said he knew a Carthaginian priest who hart hidden a trcasurc trove of jewels and gold in a tcmplc which hc thuught hc could tiutt. Moorcd in the harbour of the q'unisian port of Bizcrtc, the Commod~rc briefed his eager search parties by making a clay toodot of what he could recall of the topography arotmd the temple; they were told to scour the coastline for a 'matching' landscape. I lc was almost always waiting on the deck when the sh{~rc parties returned, impatient to knoxv what they had discovcrctl. Sure cn~ugh, they found the site of the temple just as hc had described it, but erosion had destroyed the secret tunnel which lctl to where the treasure was hidden. I lubhard went out tn the site, con/irmctl tlxat they hart fountl the right place and pointed out where the erosion had taken place. Althuugh they had not yet retrieved any treasure, there was not a man or woman un the mission who was not encouraged by what they had discovered thtts far. From Bizcrte, the .lyon River mo~'ed along the coast to La Goulctte, the outer harbour of Tunis, where an attempt xvas made to cxph}rc the ruins of an underwater cit3. Their scuba equipment proved unequal to the task and llubbard mocked up another clav model of vet another temple site, which this time was found to bc occupied bva govcrnn~ent office building. XVhilc at La Goulctte, Joe van Stadcn, the captain of tim Avon River, offended the Commodore in some way, was promptly dismissed and replaced bv tlana Eltringham. 'I was working in the between decks area,' she recalled, 'when LRt i called me over and said, "You're going to be the new Captain." I went completely numb; I was terrified. I can remember sitting at my desk with my head in my hands muttering, "Oh my God, oh my God." As I sat there I suddenly became aware of him standing in the doorway of his cabin beckoning to me. I got up and walked over to him. He had an E-meter in one hand and he thrust the cans at me and said, "Hold these." I stood there In Search of l'ast L&'es 283 in the doorway while he was fiddling with the meter and then he said, "I want you to recall the last time you were Captain." 'Through the confusion and fear I was experiencing, my first thought was that this was ridiculous. Then I started to get vague impressions of a time in some past life when I was the Captain of a ship and there was a storm at sea. He said, "Very good, very good" and asked me to go back earlier and I got a very vivid flash of space shit~s and space travel. It was very real, not an imaginary thing at all. I told him what I had seen, that I was on some space ship being called urgently to my land base. We were going back as fast as we could when we were blown up in space by some enemy. That was followed by confusion and some spinning motion as if the space ship was disintegrating. He had me go through it again and the effects of the experience subsided a lot. "Good," he said, "very good." That was it. 'I went up on the deck and felt the fear and terror in my stomach just disappear. I suddenly felt very able, very competent to tackle anything that came along. Next morning I had to take the ship from one side of La Goulette hatbout to the other for re-fuelling, then pick up a pilot to take us out. I thought he would come out and help. No way. I saw him open the curtains of his cabin for a moment, smile to himself a little bit, then close them. I thought, "The old sod isn't even going to give me a hand.-,3 A few hours out of La Goulettc, on an easterly course towards Sicily, steam began pouring from the hatches over the engine room. Cabbie Runcie, tim ship's chief engineer, who was the only 'wog' (tim Scicntologist's name for a non-Scientologist) on board, appeared on the bridge wiping his hands with an oily rag to announce that a piston ring in the high-pressure cylinder had blown and that they would have to stop for repairs. Runcie was nearly seventy years old, a bald, toothless, taciturn, pipe-smoking Scot who preferred to keep his own counsel and t{ubbard was both surprised and irritated by his temerity, particularly as he was a 'wog'. The Commodore ordered Hana to stay on course at the same speed, whereupon Runcie disappeared down the steps to the engine room muttering, 'This is madness, this is stupidity.' It was his only recorded comment on the entire voyage. Steam was still pouring from the engine hatches when the Avon River dropped anchor off the little fishing port of Castellanm~are on the north coast of Sicily. Thoroughly unconcerned by the banging and swearing from the engine room, Hubbard gathered a small group on the deck and pointed out their next objective - an old watch tower just visible on a high promontory overlooking the harbour. He decreed that the search should take place under cover of darkness and at dusk that evening the search party set out in a rubber dinghy to reconnoitre the watch tower. 284 Bare-Faced Messiah They returned several hours later in a state of high excitement, having registered strong readings on a metal detector in one corner of the watch toxver. The following night another expedition was mounted, this time armed with shovels. TIle crew of the Avon River waited with nerves on edge, but there was no brass-bound chest in the bottom of the dinghy when it bumped against the side of ttle ship - the rocky foundations of the watch tower had proved too much for shovels. Hubbard, who appeared quite as disappointed as everyone else, said he did not think it was worth wasting any more timc at the site. He promised to send the Enchanter back at a later date to find the owner of the land and negotiate its purchase in order to conduct a thorough excavation. From Sicily, the ..l~'on River sailed across the Straits of Mcssina to the 'toe' of Italy, anchoring off tile barren, rocky coastline of Calabria, which had been I lubbard's territory when he was a tax collector at the time of the Roman empire. Not an entirely honest tax collector, however, for hc said he had hidden gold in sacred stone shrines along tile coast, figuring that they were less likely to be vandalized. Two small boats were put ashore with search parties, but none of tile shrines could bc fountt. The Avon River steamed up and doxvn the coast while lonk-o/~ts swept tile shore with binoculars, but still to no avail. Ilubl~ard concluded that the coast had betel erodcd and the shrines washed into the sea, along with all his hiddcn gold. There was, nevertheless, a palpable aura of anticipation bt~ilding up on board the ..lyon River for everyone knew the climax of the mission was still to come - a visit to a secret space station on the island of C~rsica. Hubbard had shown a few favoured mcnlbers of the crew, including l lana Eltringham, several pages of handwritten and typed notes describing the existence and location of the station in mountainous terrain to the north of the island. [t occupied a huge cavern which could only be entered by pressing a specific palm print (tile crew had no doubt it was Hubbard's) against a certain rock, which would cause a rock slab blocking the cave to slide away and instantIv activate the space station. Inside, there was an enormous mother ship and a fleet of smaller craft, constructed from non-corrosive alloys as vet unknown to earthlings, and everything needed for their operation, including fuel and supplies. Sadly, the Corsican space station was to remain no more than tile subject of thrilling run, ours, for towards tile end of April an urgent radio message arrived from Mary Sue asking the Commodore to return immediately to Valencia, where there was a 'flap' (the euphemism employed to describe any clash between Scientologists and 'wogs'). Hubbard acquiesced, leaving the crew speculating wildly about what might have happened at the space station. There was In Search of Past Lives 285 strong support for the view that Ron was intending to use the 'mother ship' to escape from earth and continue his work elsewhere, perhaps in a more rewarding environment. The Sea Org, it was hopefully suggested, was perhaps nothing more than a step towards a 'Space Org'. Such considerations had to be put aside for the time being, forAvon River ran into a series of storms as she ploughed towards the lx, lediterranean coast of Spain. Hubbard's temper worsened with the weather. One dark night, in a gale force wind, Hana became concerned that the ship was being blown too close to the silore and dared to change course without asking the Commodore's permission. As the old trawler turned, she began to buck and wallow. 'She was just coming round nicely', Hana recollected, 'when there was this great bellow from LRII's cabin, which was under the bridge. I heard his feet pounding up the companionway and then the bridge door burst open. I Ic stood there like a madman, with his hair all over the place, glared around and shouted, "What's going on?" I almost leapt at him, grabbed him by both shoulders and told him as clcarlv as I could what I had done, after which he began to calm down and stopped glaring at everyone like some ferocious beast. It always struck me as odd that a man of his calibre would behave like that; I expected him to be more God-like.' tlubbard was further displeased, on arriving in Valcncia, to discover that tile 'flap' had been caused by the port Captain of the Rox'al St'otmatt, who had consistently refused requests from the Spanish port authorities to move tile ship from the dock to a mole in the harbour. The situation had deteriorated to such an extent that the Spaniards were threatening to tow the ship out to sea and deny her re-entry. Hubbard sent a mission ashore to heal the rift and transferred six officers from the Avon River to the Royal Scotman to report on how the ship was being run. A fexv days later, the Royal Scotman dragged her anchor in the outer harbour as a storm began to blow up. Hubbard heard what was happening over the radio on the Avon River. Ile grabbed the nearest available officers, jumped into the barge and hurried across to the Royal Scotman, running up on to the bridge to take command. The ship was still secured to the harbour wall by wire hawsers which were under enormous pressure; if they snapped, nothing could prevent her being swept on to the rocks. Hubbard managed to slip tile hawsers and re-anchor the ship, but not before her rudder had been damaged against tile mole. When the emergency was over, the furious Commodore demanded an 'ethics investigation' to find out who had 'goofed' and meanwhile assigned the entire ship a 'condition of liability'. Since there were s~ 286 Bate- l'~ced sl'lessiah few people he could trust, be appointed Mary Sue to be the new Captain of Royal Scotman. Her orders were to take the ship to Burr|aria, north of Valencia, for repairs and tben to cruise up and down the Spanish coast to train the crew. She was to stay at sea until both the crew was sufficiently well trained and the shil~ sufficiently spruce to qualif3ú for upgradi~g; until then, the Royal Scotman would remain in 'liability'. So it was that Spanisb fishermen working their nets off the coast of Valencia were treated to an unforgettable spectacle over the next few weeks - a large passenger ship cruising offshore with a band of dirty grey tarpaulins knotted around her funnel. Had the fisbermen been allowed on board, they would have been even more surprised to see that all the crew, including tbe diminutive lady Captain, wore grey rags tied to their left arms. It was even said, although perhaps in jest, that .Xlary Suc's pet corgi, x.~ixie, was obliged to sport a grey rag tied to her collar. tlubbard remained on the Avon Rt'vcr and sailed south to Alicante, where the students who had been on tbc Re~val Scotman were now accommodated in a 'land base', a hotel. I lis plan to pax' them a visit was thwarted hv the untimely discovery that the ..!volt ~iver was too . big to enter the harhottr. For a while he scented at a loss to knoxv what to do, but after sit,dying a chart hc decided that thcv should go to IXlarscillcs, the second largest city in France and her chief Mediterranean port. As always, no one dared ask why they were going wt~ere they were going. Sailing north, the Avon Riv,,,- came across tbe unhappy Royal Scotman apparently anchored for the night, still with her grey i-ag round the funnel. I lubbard ordered his ship to manoeuvre within hailing distance and bellowed into a bullhorn, '~,Vell, well, hero's a ship in liability that thinks it can anchor for the night, taking it easy.' Mary Sue's voice came drifting back across the water, but the crew of the trax~'ler could not hear what she was saving. 'It might be better training to keep your ship moving at night,; ttubbard boomed, 'or are you scared to keep going in the dark?' Mary Sue's reply remained unintelligible, althougb it seemed somewhat heated to HXna EItringham, who was on the bridge with Hubbard. Friends who were on the '!iabilitv cruise' told Hana later that the conditions on board were appalling.'The crew worked to the point of exhaustion, the food was meagre and no one was allowed to wash or change their clothes. Mary Sue enforced the rules rigidly but shared the privations, and was scrupulously fair and popular. In -Xlarseillcs, tlubbard mo~'ed into a rented villa on shore while the engine of the .t~'on River was overhauled. A telex was installed in the villa so that he could stay in touch with Saint Hill, from where the In Search of Past Lives 287 news was of increasingly vociferous opposition to Scientology from both press and public. 11ubbard was warned that more questions were expected in Parliament about their activities. At the beginning of June a radio message arrived from Mary Sue to say |bat the Royal Scotman was ready for reassessmcnt. tter husband graciously agreed to up-grade the ship to the next level - 'nonexistence'- and gave his permission for her to sail to ]Marseilles for his inspection, after which he would decide if she could resume operations unhindered by the stigma of a lower condition. Tbe Royal Scotman arrived in the hatbout at 1Xlarseilles looking better than she had at any time since going into service for the Sea Org -sbe had been painted white from stem to stern, her brasswork was gleanring and the entire crew bad been fitted out with smart new uniforms. Hubbard was all smiles, presided over a ceremony to remove all lower conditions and promptly moved back into his cabin on board. A few days later the Roral Scotman sailed for Melilla in Spanish Nlorocco, eight hundred miles distant. Noone knew why. The Commodore's sunny disposition was not to endure. The ..lyon Ri~'er was stranded in Nlarscillcs hatbout by a general strike in France which had paralyzed the country and brought repair work on the ship's engines to a halt. Huht~ard began sending messages from the Royal Scotman urging l-{ana Eltringham to somehow get the repair work completed as hc needed her urgently. One evening the radiu operator told 1 lana that LRI I wanted to speak to her ahmc; she was to clear the bridge and close the doors. 'I did what I as told,' she said, 'and as I picked up tbc radio I could hear him sobbing openly. lle was weeping with frustration over what was going on on the Rox'al Scotman. Ite said the new Captain was so incompetent that he had had to take over and he couldn't cope any longer. It shook me like nothing else could. tte was my everything. I loved him like a father or a brother, he was part of my family. I really loved him |bat mucb I would have done an3, thing for him and there he was weeping over the radio and pleading with me to do everything in my power to get my ship to sea to join him. "I need you to take over as Captain," he said. I was bewildered. I didn't think I was capable of doing it but I knew I would have to try. Part of his brilliance was that he motivated you to do extraordinary things.' Two days later, when the bridge blocking the harbour was opened in an emergency, the Avon River made a dash for |be open sea with her engine repairs still incomplctt-. She got as far as Barcelona before the piston rings blew again. She re-fuelled and limped down to Valencia, where more repairs were undertaken, then a radio message arrived ordering H aria to meet the Royal .ScoDnan in B izerte. The old trawler arrived at the Tunis|an port a few hours before the Rox'al Scotman. John NlcMaster, who had been awax' on a promotion 288 Bare-l~'aced Messiah tour and had re-joined the Avon River in Valencia, watched the arrival of the Sea Org's flagship in Bizerte. 'I'll never forget it,' he said. 'We had been warned over the radio that she was coming and about the time she was due a cruise ship from the Lloyd Tristina iane came in to the river. She was like a beautiful swan, gliding in, conling alongside and docking effortlessly. Perfect! 'Fhen our rust bucket chunters in making a huge noise and begins manoeuvring too far out. Someone throws a line from the deck without the faintest hope of reaching the dock and the rope splashes into the water. It was almost twilight and I could hear Fatty's voice coming across the water. He was standing on the bridge screaming: "I've been betrayed, the bastards have betrayed me again!" The Arabs waiting on the dock to take tile lines must have wondered what the hell was going on. ,4 When Rox'al Scotman was eventually moored, Itubbard's first act was to place tile Avon River in a condition of 'liability' for taking so long to catch up with him. t{c refused to speak to liana Eltringham and had no desire to hear how she had risked arrest by slipping out of the strike-bound harbour in Marseilles in order to join him, or how she had sailcd more than five htmdred miles with steam pouring out of the hatches and tile engines threatening to seize up at any moment. 'There was no more talk of me becoming Captain of the Royal Scotman,' l{ana saitl. Beset by traitors and incompetents, |{ubbard felt obliged to introttuce new punishtncnts for crring Sea Org personnel. Dcpcnding on his whim, offenders were either contined in the dark in tile chain locker and given food in a bucket, or assigned to chip paint in the bilge tanks for twenty-four or forty-eight hours without a break. A third variation presented itself when Otto Roos, a young Dutchman, dropped one of the bow-lines while tile Rox'al Scotman was being moved aloug tile dock. Purple with rage, |{ubbard ordered Roos to be throxvn overboard. No one questioned the Commodore's orders. Two crew members promptly grabbed the Dutchman and threw him over the side. There was an enormous splash when he hit the water, a moment of horror when it seemed that he had disappeared and nervous speculation that he might have hit the rubbing strake as he fell. But Roos was a good swimmer and when he climbed back up the gangplank, dripping wet, he was surprised to find the crew still craning anxiousIv over the rails on the other side of the ship. 'It was not really possible to question what was going on,' explained David Mayo, a New Zealander and a long-time member of the Sea Org, 'because you were never sure who you could really trust. To question anything Hubbard did or said was an offense and you never knew if you would be reported. lxdost of the crew were afraid that if In Sea,oh of Past Lives 289 they expressed any disagreement with what was going on they would be kicked out of Scientology. That was something absolutely untenable to most people, something you never wanted to consider. That was much more terrifying than anything that might happen to you in the Sea Org. 'We tried not to think too hard about his behaviour. It was not rational much of the time, but to even consider such a thing was a discreditable thought and you couldn't allow yourself to have a discreditable thought. One of the questions in a sec-check was, "Have you ever had any unkind thoughts about LRH ?" and you could get into very serious trouble if you had. So you tried hard not to.'s On 25 July 1968, while tlubbard was still m Bizerte, the government in Britain finally decided to take action against 'Scientology. Kenneth Robinson, the Health Minister, stood up in the House of Commons and announced a ban on Scientology students entering the UK. 'The Government is satisfied,' he said, 'having reviewed all the available evidence, that Scicntology is socially harmful. It alienates members of families from each other and attributes squalid and disgraceful motives to all who oppose it. Its authoritarian principles and practices are a potential menace to the persnnality and well-being of those so deluded as to become its followers; above all, its methods can bca serious danger to the health of those who submit to them.' A few days later, the t tome Secretary annuunced that L. Ron tlubbard was classified as an 'undesirable alien' and would consequently not be allowed back into Britain, a decision that prompted Hubbard to send a telex to Saint Hill complaining that 'England, once the light and hope of the world, has become a police state and can no longer be trusted.' These developments spurred British newspapers to renewed efforts to find and interview the elusive Mr Hubbard. The Daily alail, which had recently been pleased to publish the numbers of Hubbard's bank accounts in Switzerland, was first to track him down in Bizerte. Hubbard affected an attitude of nonchalant indifference to events in Britain and did his best to charm the Mail team. He invited the reporters on board, showed them his sixteen war medals in a framed case behind his desk and politely answered questions for more than two hours. He claimed he was no longer in control of Scientology, said he was abroad for health reasons and insisted he was still welcome in Britain. 'My name inspires confidence,' he asserted. 'I'm persona grata everywhere. If I wanted to return to Britain, I'd walk in the front gate and the Customs officer would say, "Hullo, Nlr Hubbard." That's how it's always been and always will be.' It was a public relations tour de force; almost the worst thing the 290 Bare-Faced Messiah newspaper could find to say about him was that he chain-smoked menthol cigarettes and 'fidgeted nervously'.6 He perforn~ed with similar confidence when a British television crew arrived the folloxving day, even when the interviewer asked him, 'Do you ever think you might be quite mad?' Hubt~ard grinned broadly and replied 'Oh yes! The one man in tim world who never believes hZ's mad is a madman.' lie explained that most of his wealth derived from his years as a writer rather than from Scientology :'Fifteen million published words and a great many successful movies don't make nothing.' He was in the Mediterranean, he said, studying ancient civilizations and trying to find out why they went into decline.7 After the television interview, Hubbard decided not to stay in Bizerte to entertain further media representatives. The Royal Scotman rapidly weighed anchor and headed back to sea, leaving lateconfers to disconsolately kick their hods in the dust on the Tunisian dockside and wonder what the trip was worth in expenses. The arrival of the Royal Scotman on the Greek island of Corfu two days later aroused little interest locally. Corfu was a popular port of call fur cruise liners anti a busy harbour, with shit~s plying in and out all tile time. Apart, perhaps, from her Sierra Leonest ttag, tilere was nothing special abot~t tile Royal Nt'otman; x~'ord went round that she was one of th~sc t]oating schonls that had become popular of late and vague dncksidc curiosity was satisfied. Emissaries from the ship paid a visit on the harbourmastcr, Marius Kalogeras, and explained that they were representatives of the 'Operation and Transport Corporation Limited', an international business management organization. They would shortly be joined by two other ships and intended, they said, to stav in Corfu'for some time while students artended courses on the ships. Their 1ogistic requirements, they pointed out, would result in a considerable injection of funds into tile island's economy, not to mention the contribution made by their free-spending students. The harbourmaster quickly grasped the message, allocated choice berths for the 'OTC' ships in a secluded section of the newly extended quay and promised to provide full facilities. Appraised o(this warm welcome, the Commodore began to look upon the island and the Greek people with particular favour, even to the extent of granting an interview to t:)~hinten's ton Idisseon, one of Corfu's daily newspapers, on the subject of the recent coup d'etat in Greece ldv a clique of military officers known as the 'Colonels'. The interveiwer's obsequiousness was only surpassed by Hubbard's obvious desire to ingratiate himself, as fawning ansx~7er followed fawning question: In &arch of Past Lh'es 291 'Q. Mr Hubbard, as the international personality that you are, are you following the new situation in Greece and what do you think of tile work of the present National Governn~ent? A. The government is the mirror of the people. Where I go and wherever the students go, the people continually say how safe they feel. The decision to form a company to establish its headquarter offices here shows our confidence in Greece. Q. I have been told, Mr Hubbard, that you have read the whole of the new Greek Constitution from beginning to end. If that's true, what do you think of it? A. Yes, I've read it with much interest. The rights of man have been given great care in it. I have studied many constitutions, from the times of unwritten laws which various tribes have followed, and the present constitution represents the most brilliant tradition of Greek democracy. Out of all the modern constitutiuns the new Greek Constitution is the best . . .' | lubbard's interpretation of the ruling milltar3' junta as a democracy was somewhat at odds with international opinion, but the interviewer failed to take issue with it. By the time the Avon River joined the flagship in Corfu, Itubbard was so enamoured with Greece that he decided to change the names of all Iris shit~s in honour of Iris ncxv hosts. TIm Royal Scotman became the Apollo, the ..l~'on River the Athena and thc Enchanter, which had been pottcring around the Mediterranean on various missiotas for the Commodore and frequently breaking duwn, was req~amcd the l)ia,t~,. At the end of August, the first students arrived in Corfu from Saint 1till, many of them carrying large sums of smuggled cash (the British government had recently introduced restrictions on the export of currency and it was causing some cash-flow problems for the Sea Org, which routinely paid its bills in cash). 'They gave me about/23000 in high-denomination notes to take out to tile ship,' said Ma~ iXlaren. 'I hid it in my boots.' Smuggling was entirely consistent with the Sea Org's cavalier disregard for the tedious rules of the 'wog' world. Leon Steinberg, for example, supercargo on the Avon River, was the acknowledged expert at forging docun~ents of authorization to satisfy tim voracious appetite of maritime bureaucracy, using potato-cuts to replicate the essential rubber stamp. They were almost always accepted, to the huge enjoyment of the Scientologists, who called them 'Steinidocuments'.s The course being offered in Corfu was for advanced Scientologists to train as 'operating thetans' at Level VIII, the highest that could be attained at that time. To become a Class VIII auditor ~vas the ambition of every self-respecting Scientologist, although none of them was prepared for the new autocracy that had developed within the Sea 292 Bare-Faced sllessiah Org. 'The atmosphere was very unfriendly when we arrived,' said Mar)' Maren. 'One of our group was a bit drunk and he was grabbed by one of the officers who really roughed him up, yelling at him, "This is a ship of tbe Sea Org and it's run by L. Ron Hubbard..." I knew it was not going to be like Valencia and I didn't like it.' Students were outfitted with a sparse uniform of green overalls, brown belt and brown sandals and were humiliated at every opportunity. '\Ve were told we were lower than cockroaches and didn't even have the right to audit lxdary Sue's dog,' said -'\laren. The working day began at six o'clock every morning and ended at eleven o'clock at night after a ninety-minute lecture delivered by Hubbard in the forward dining-room on B Deck. 'We were always terrified of falling asleep. LRH would be carried away dramatizing different topics and we'd be pinching each otber to stay awake. We were terrorized; it was continuous stress and duress.' The course had not been going long before Hubbard decided that too many mistakes were being made during auditing and he announced that in future those responsible for errors would be thrown overboard. Everyone latlghed at Ron's joke. Next returning, at the regular muster on the aft well deck, two names were called out. As tbe students stepped forward, Sea Org officers grabbed them by their arms and lugs and threw them over the side of the ship while the rest of the group looked on in amazement and horror. 11ubbard, Mary Sue and their sixteen-year-old daughter Diana, all in uniform, watched tbe ccremonv frodn the promenade deck. 'File two 'overboards' swam round the skip, climbed stone steps on to the quayside and squelched back up the ship's gangplank, gasping for breath. At tbe top, they were required to salute and ask for permission to return on board. 'Overboarding' was thereafter a daily ritual. The names of those who were to be thrown overboard were posted on the orders of the day and when the master-at-arms walked through the ship at six o'clock even- morning banging on cabin doors and shouting 'Muster on the well deck, muster on the well deck!' everyone knew what was going to happen. 'Anyone to be thrown overboard would be called to the front,' said Ken Urquhart,' and the chaplain would make some incantation about water washing away sins and then they would be picked up and tossed over. People accepted it because we a[l had a tremendous belief that what Ron was doing would benefit the world. tte was our leader and knew best. ,9 'I thought it was terrible, inhumane and barbaric,' said Hana Eltringham. 'Some of the people on the course were middle-aged women. Julia Salmon, the continental head of the LA org, was fifty-five years old and in poor health and she was thrown overboard. In Search of Past Lives 293 She hit the water sobbing and screaming. LRH enjoyed it, without a doubt. Sometimes I heard him making jokes about it. Those were the toomerits when I came closest to asking myself what I was d~fing there. But I always justified it by telling myself that he must know what he was doing and that it was all for the greater good.' Diana Hubbard also appeared to enjoy the ceremony and often ordered overboards. 'I remember coming out on deck one day when I was chief officer,' said Atnos Jessup, 'and finding my whole division of four or five people being thrown overboard. I didn't know anything about it and said, "What the hell's going on here?" Then I noticed Diana looking down at me from the deck above and I thought, "Jesus Christ!"' Of the four Itubbard children on the ship, only Diana had so far been appointed an officer in the Sea Org. She was a 'lieutenant commander' at the age of sixteen and wore a uniform with a mini-skirt and a peaked hat, habitually perched on the back of her head in order not to muss her long auburn hair. Quentin, who was 14, was supposed to be an auditor but could summon up little interest compared to his teenage passion for aeroplanes: he was often to be seen walking along the deck with both arms outstretched, wheeling and diving in some imagiuary dogfight, lips vibrating to simulate appropriate engine noises. Suzctte and Arthur, who were thirteen and ten respectively, scented perfectly content to make tile best of their strange lives and enjoy the influence their name bestowed. Diana was perhaps the least liked of the liubbard children, certainly as far as John Mc~laster was concerned. ~Ic,Xlaster, still working as a galley hand, was overboarded five times on the Apollo and nursed a deep resentment against Hubbard and his officious daughter. 'The last time someone called down and said, "John, you're wanted on the poop deck, the Commodore wants to give you a special axvard." 1 had some misgivings, but I went up anyway and when I stepped on to the poop deck I realized it was all a nasty little trick. The whole crew was marshalled there and up on the promenade deck there was Fatty and the roval family and all the upstart lieutenants. Hubbard was leaning over the railings with a sorrowful, I've-been-betrayed-again look on his face. 'I began to seethe. I was made to stand immediately below the "royal family" and Diana comes down and stands in front of me and reads out a list of mv crimes, things like trying to take over and undermining this and that. It was all lies. I was so mad I nearly picked her up and threw her overboard. Then she chants, "\Ve cast your sins and errors to the waves and hope you will arise a better thetan." 'I nearly said, "Go and fetch that fat bastard up there! He's the dishonest one! Throw hhn overboard." I should have done; I wish I 294 Bare-bhced Messfi~h had, it would have broken the spell they were all under. I was grabbed by these four big thugs and flung over and I started laughing and laughing. I tbougbt, "Jesus, I'm going to get off this floating insanity even if I have to swim to Yugoslavia."' ~0 He left the ship several months later. It was predictable that a 'school ship' which tossed its students overboard every morning would attract a certain amount of attention. Corfiot dock workers could hardly believe their eyes when the first people went over the side of Apollo, although the>, soon treated the whole business as a huge joke and regularly gathered to watch the fun. But interest was also stirred in other quarters. The Noraarch (mayor) of Corfu asked Major John Forte, the honorary British vice-consul on the island, what he knew about this strange ship. Forte, a retired army officer who had made his home on Corfu, knew a lot. tic had reported tile arrival of the Rox'al Scotman in Corfu to the Foreign Office in Lond~/tl, correctly deducing that it was, in his words, the 'sinister Scicntology ship'. Subsequently he had been instructed to dcliver a letter to Ilubbard to infortn him that hc had been declared pcrsona non grata in Britain. It had proved to be far from easy. 'I was met at thc gangway', the major rcpurtcd, 'by a small boy aged abuut twelve witb a very intent but far off expression on bis face who politely but firmly inquired my business. I asked where I could find tbc Captain. In all seriousness, the lad insisted, "1 am the Captain." Apparently the children take it in turns to act the role of different officers on the sbip and are indoctrinatcd into actually believing they really are the character they happen to bc portr~;ying. After an interesting conversation with the lad, I was whisked away by one of the staff to the dirty and evil-smelling bowels of the ship where I was introduced to an outsize female character known as "supercargo", who looked as if she migbt have been a wardress in a Dickensfan reformatory in a bygone age. "Supercargo" signed a receipt for the letter and promised to get it delivered to Hubbard who was alleged to be away cruising on the Az,on Ri~'er. About a month later, the letter, which had been crudely opened and resealcd, was returned to me with a note frOHi "' ú " ' supercargo saying that t[ubbard could not be traced, his whereabouts being unknown.' I~ Hubbard was on board all of this time, l.ving low and waiting for an appropriate moment to step ashore. x, Vhile the rumours built up about the 'mystery ship' in the barbour, local traders unashamedlv wel- comed tbe estimated $50,0{)0 the Sea Org was spending in Corft; every month and on 16 November, Hubbard was invited to a reception in his honour at the Achilleon Palace, a lavish casino on the island. It was In Search of f'ast Lives 295 the first time he had left the ship since its arrival in August and he was accorded a standing ovation as he entered the palace. Much gratified, Hubbard returned the hospitality by inviting local dignitaries to a re-naming ceremony on board the Apollo. All the Sea Org officers paraded on the quaysidle in their best uniforms and Diana Hubbard, her hat on straight for once, climbed a rostrum and broke a bottle of champagne against the ship's stern, proclaiming, 'I christen thee yacht "Apollo".' As the new gold name on the stern was unveiled, Hubbard joined his daughter on the rostrum and said, 'I wish to thank you very much because you are here and because you have honourcd us with your presence, O Citizens of Corfu . . .' Behind these cordial scenes, problems were fermenting. The Greek Government had instituted inquiries about Scientology through its Embassy in London. Security agents acting for the Colonels had been instructed to check out the ship, but were assured by the harbourn~aster that the Scientologists were harmless people who abided by the law and gave no trouble. 'I have seen people being tossed into the sea,' bc admitted, 'but they have told me this is part of their training course.' lxdaior Forte complained that he was besieged by people objecting to Scientologists being 'harboured' on the island and Corfu's leading daily newspaper, Telegrafi~s, published a highly critical feature about Scicntology which really raised Corfiot suspicioi~s with a passing mention of 'black magic'. By January 1969, Corfu traders were so alarmed by the prospect of action being taken against tbc Scicntologists that a delegation sent a telegram to Prime Minister Papadopoulos submitting its '~'armcst plea' for 'Professor Hubbard's Philosophy Scbool' to be allox~ed to remain in Corfu. Tbe Secretary General of tile Ministry of Nlcrchant Marine replied that tbere was 'never any objection' to the Apollo remaining in Corfu. Hubbard, meanwhile, was promising to lavish further largesse on the island. In a typically magniloquent manifesto headed 'Corfu Social and Economic Survey' he envisaged building hotels, roads, factories, schools, a new barbour, three golf courses, seven yacht marinas and various resort facilities, as well as establishing a Greek University of Philosophy funded by Operation and Transport Corporation. The headline on the front of Ephmten's ton Idisseott next day was 'CORFU WILL KNOW BETI'ER DAYS OF AFFLUENCE'. Deputy Prime Minister Patakos hastily issued a statement emphasizing that 'no permission had yet been granted to the Scientologists to become established on Greek soil'. Hubbard responded by announcing that his Scientology School in Corfu would open 'within two or three weeks'. By this time Major Furte was convinced that Hubbard's intentfun 296 Ba,~'-Faced Messiah was to take over partial control of the island and establish the world headquarters of Scientology and he was lobbying assiduously against allowing him a foothold. Hubbard, on the other hand, was convinced as usual tbat there was a conspiracy and that Forte was an agent of British intelligence working a 'black propaganda' section. He would later allege that the major had spread vicious runtours about black magic rites being held on board the Ap,ollo and Scientologists poisoning wells and casting spells on local cattle.~z In reality, decisions were being made at a level far above that of an insignificant honorary vice-consul; the Greek Minister for Foreign Affairs had lodged an official request with the UK and Australian Governntents for information regarding the status of Scientology in their countries. On 6 March, Hubbard's opponents received unexpected support from the US Sixth Fleet when a task force arrived off Corfu and a detachment of lXlarines set up sentry posts around the berths occupied bv the Sea Org ships apparently in order to prevent US Navy personnel from cotning into contact witb Scicntologists. 'Somehow it seemed', said Major Forte 'that this was a carefully planned operation designed to bring forcibly home to the authorities the grave danger of contamination by this undesirable cult.' Unlikely as titis theory was, less than two weeks later the Nomarch of Corfu ordered Ilubbard and his shit~s to leave Greece within tx~'enty-four hours. 'The old man almnst had a heart attack when he got the news,' said Kathy Cariotaki, a Sea Org member who was on the bridge with llubbard at the tiinc. 'Itc went absolutely grey with shock.' a3 At five o'clock on the afternoon of 19 March 1969, with the harbour sealed by police, the Apollo slipped her li,~cs and sailed out into the Aegean Sea. Nlajor John Forte xvatchcd her leave front the waterfront and realized he was standing next to one of the island's notorious Lotharios. I lc commiserated with him on the departure of so many pretty young girls. 'As a matter of fact I'm not sorry they're gone,' the man replied. 'They were a lot of cockteasers. x, Vhen it came to the point they all tell you they are only allowed to have sexual relations with fellow Scientologists.' Forte laughed. It was, he thought, an intriguing aspect of the philosophy of the Church of Scicntology. Ctzapter 18 Messengers of God 'It is possible that Commodore Hubbard and his wife... are philanthropists of some kind and/or eccentrics, but if one does not accept this as an explanation, there has to be some other gimmick involved in this operation. What this gimmick might be is unknown here, although people in Casablanca have speculated variously from smuggling to drug traffic to a far-out religious cult.' (Cable from US Consul General, Casablanca, to x. Vashington, 26 September 1969) :l, ~, ~ :l, ~ At the time of her ignominious departure from Corfu, the Apollo informed the port authorities that she would be making for \'enice, inforntation which was doubtless passed to the CIA and to the Foreign Office in London, since both the United States and the United Kingdom were anxious to keep track of the wily Commodore of the Sea Org. But once the ship was out of sight of the Greek mainland, Hubbard ordered a change of course. The Apollo turned west towards Sardinia, where she was rapidly re-fuelled and re-provisioned before heading for the Strait of Gibraltar and sailing out of the Mediterranean. For the next three years, the Apollo patrolled the eastern Atlantic, aimlessly sailing from port to port at the Commodore's caprice and rarely stopping anywhere for longer than six weeks. She ventured out into the Atlantic as far as the Azores and once put in to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, but most of the time she criss-crossed a diamond shaped patch of ocean bordered by Casablanca, Madeira, Lisbon and the Canaries, with no objective other than to stay on the move. 'LRH said we had to keep moving because there were so many people after him,' explained Ken Urquhart, who was by then the Commodore's personal communicator. 'If they caught up with him they would cause him so much trouble that he would be unable to continue his work, Scientology would not get into the world and there would be social and economic chaos, if not a nuclear holocaust. '~ US intelligence services were mystified by what Hubbard was up to and cables arriving in Washington began speculating on a variety of 298 Bare-Faced ,lIlessiah illicit activities ranging from white slavery to drug-running. In September 1969, while the Apollo was in Casablanca, the local US consul cabled Washington with an account of a visit to tile ship. All concerned, he noted, have been 'perplexed by the vagueness of the replies' to simple questions about the ship's activities. The consul had picked up a brochure which was no more forthcon~ing, explaining that trainees on board were learning 'the art and the culture of navigation, the theory of which, when applied, demonstrates a very useful practice at sea'. Since the ship was registered in Panama, the Panamian consul tried his luck, but with no better results. He found the ship 'in a very bad state of repair' and believed that 'the lives of the crew had been in jeopardy' while the vessel was at sea. 'The Panamanian consul has tried unsuccessfully to meet Commodore Itubbard, who has taken a suite at tile El Mansour Hotel and has instructed the hotel personnel to refuse all telephone calls.'z In frcqucnt cotntxluniqu(:s from tile ship to his faithful disciples, l|uhl~ard cxpoundcd on the enemy forces ranged against Scicntology and elaborated on the 'international conspiracy' theory of which he had always been enamourcd. Out in tbe Atlantic, cruising on his flagship, tile Commodore's prc-occupatioon with Commtmist conspiracies dcvclopcd into a fixation about somctt~ing called thc 'Tenvaka Mcm~>rial' - a namc he gave to tile mysterious agency he clain~ed was co-ordinating thc attacks on Scicntology. tlis hunt for tile Tenyaka mcm~rial was the subject of a rambling thirty-one-page monologuc, dated 2 Novemher 1969 and headed 'Covert Operatitans', in which be said that be and Mar~' Suc bad 'just discovered' that memt>ers of the x, Vorld Federation of Nlental I lealth were working for Britisb and US intelligence agencies. 'These bastards who are in charge of security in these Western countries,' he wrote, 'ought to be simply electric shocked to death. I'm not kidding. Because these same guys . . . have meetings with the Russians every year.' Later the Commodore decided that the Tcnvaka Memorial was run by a Nazi underground moven~ent intent on world d~mination.3 Both Hubbard and .Mary Sue, who rejoiced in the titles of 'Deputy Commodore', 'Commodore Staff Guardian' (CSG) and 'Controller', peppered their memoranda with military terminology and intelligence jargon. Mary Sue ran the powerful Guardian's office, which was Scientology's intelligence bureau. In a 'Guardian Order' dated 16 December 1969, she warned that the 'enemy' was infiltrating double agents into the church and urged the use of 'any and all means' to detect infiltration. One of the 'operating targets' was to assemble full data by investigation for use 'in case of attack? 'Smersh' even figured in one of Hubbard's 'flag orders', which defined Scientology's second Messengers of Gott 299 zone of action thus: 'To invade the territory of Smersh, run it better, make tons of morley in it, to purify the mental health field. ,s The need for security was made very real to those Scientologists who were flown out to join the ship at its various ports of call. They were briefed and repeatedly drilled on their 'shore stories' - that tbcy were employees of Operation and Transport Corporation, a business management company. They were warned not to use Scientologyspeak on shore, to den5' any link between OTC and Scientology and, in particular, to feign ignorance of L. Ron Itubbard. All outgoing private mail had to be left, unsealed, with the master-at-arms and every letter was read by an ethics officer to check for possible breaches of security. Approved mail was shipped in bulk to Copenhagen for posting. Lest curiosity prompted enemies ashore to sift through the ship's garbage for incriminating paperwork, all papers were bundled up and dumped at sea. And on the rare occasions when 'wogs' were allowed on board, the crew carried out a 'clean ship drill', which involved hiding any Scicntology materials from viexv and turning all the pictures of L. Ron Ilubbard to the wall. Hubbard's persistent reiteration that Scientology was beset by dark forces, seeking to destroy anything that helped mankind, fostered a siege mc~talitv among the crew of the Ap~dl~ and provided spurious justification f~;r the harsh conditio~s on board. Throughout the Sea Org, the nccd for dedication, vigilance and sacrifice was constantly stressed and it gencratcd fierce loyalty which was blind to logic or literal truth. The 'shore story', which evcr,,'~me knew was a pack of lies, was a regrettable necessity if tile w/~rld was to be saved by Scientol~gy. It was also a regrettable necessity to prevent anyone from 'blowing the org'. Although all the passports were locked in a safe, attempts to jump ship were not unknown. Whenever it happened, Sea Org personnel were rushed ashore to stake out the relevant local consulate, where the fugitive was likely to try and obtain a new passport. If they v,'ere too late, a 'dead agent caper' was activated. The runaway was accused of being a thief or a trouble-maker in order to discredit whatever story he was telling in the Consulate; in the parlance of wartime spies, he would be neutralized and considered a 'dead agent'-6 Despite the continuing restrictions on personal liberty, life on board improved somewhat after the Apollo left the Mediterranean- The 'heavy ethics' were eased - there was no more overboarding, for example - and the Commodore's demeanour was markedly sunnier. 'He'd often take a stroll along the promenade deck and stop to talk to people,' said Urquhart. 'lie normally wore a white silk shirt with a gold lanyard, a cravat and naval cap with lots of scrambled egg on the peak and you could always see him in the centre of the crowd that 300 Bare-Faced Messiah gathered round llim whenever he stopped to talk. But there was still a lot of tension on board and the very real possibility that somebody would make a mistake that would cause a flap. Someone might upset a harbourmaster, or say the wrong thing in answer to a question, or let slip something about Scientology. Some shit was going to hit the fan every day, you could count on it.' No attempt was made on board ship to maintain tile myth that Hubbard xvas no longer in charge of Scientology. Between forty and fifty feet of telex n~essages arrived every day from Scientology offices around the world and he received weekly reports detailing every org's statistics and income. Money was, without question, one of the Commodore's primary interests, although he liked to profess a lofty disregard for such matters as financial gain. Loyal members of the Sea Org, who were paid $10 a week, bdieved the Commodore drew less than they did, because that is what he told them. The reality was that llubbard was receiving $15,000 a week from church funds through tile Hubbard Explorational Company and that huge sums of money were being creamed from 'desk-drawer' corporations and salted away in secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Licchtenstein. When one of these accounts had to be closed in 1970, $1 million in cash was transferred on board the:lpollo.7 There was also a considerable disparity between the way tile 1 tubbards lived on tile ship and tile conditions endured by everyone else. Most of tile crew lived in cramped, smelly, roach-infested dormitories fitted with bunks in three tiers that left little room for personal possessions. tlubbard and Mary Sue each had their own state-rooms in addition to a suite on the promenade deck comprising an auditing-room, office, an elegant saloon and a wood-pancllcd dining-room, all offdimits to students and crew. tlubbard had a personal steward, as did Mary Sue and the lluhbard children, who all had their own cabins. Meals for the Commodore and his family were cooked in a separate galley by their personal chef, using ingredients brought by couriers from the United States. XVhen/Mike Goldstein, an anthropology major from the University of Colorado, was sent out to join the Sea Org, he was pressed into service as a courier. 'I was briefed in Los Angeles and drilled on my shore story. It was all made to seem very mysterious and cloak and dagger. It was scary. I was warned to follow my instructions to the letter and given a box to take out with me to the ship. I was to say it contained company papers of the Operation and Transport Corporation. Going through the security control in Los Angeles airport, the box set the buzzer off. I nearly died. The5' opened it up and discovered it contained ttubbard's underpants, tied in a bag with metal clips. Messengers of God 301 'When I got to New York I found I was expected to courier something else - fourteen boxes which had to be maintained at a certain temperature. No one would tell me what was in them, only that it was vital they arrived intact at the ship. In London I had to change planes. Transferring from one terminal to another with these fourteen boxes was murder. I arrived in Madrid and was taken by Sea Org menll>ers to an apartment, where the boxes were put in refrigeration. Next day I caught a plane for Casablanca, only to discover the . ship had moved on further south to Sail. By then I was completely paeanold about the boxes, terrified that the heat would get to whatever was in them. I got them wrapped up and found a bus to take me to Sail, where I finally arrived at the ship and handed over the boxes. I was wondering wbat the hell was in them, but I didn't find out until later. I was carrying fourteen boxes of frozen shrimps for the Hubbard family. ,s Like all Scientologists, it had been Goldstein's long-time ambition to meet L. Ron tlubbard and when he first got to the ship he used to contrive excuses to walk past tlubbard's research room on the promenade deck just so that he could catch a glimpse of the great man at work. llc was amazed at the amount of paperwork that Hubbard seemed to get through, although many of his prcconceptiotls about the Sea ~.)rg were soon shattered. 'l had been told that Flag [the .lpollo] was perfection and that everyone was super-efficient. But then I was appointed Flag Banking Officer and handed a real d~g's breakfast: tbc ship's finances were in a mess. Tilere were drawers full of money everywhere and more than a million dollars in thc safe, but no proper accounts. x, Ve paid for everytiling ill cash and were working ~vith three different currencies - Spanish, Portuguese and l~1oroccan - and it seemed that if anyone ~vanted money for something they just asked for it. I decided it llad to be done by the book and told everyone they would have to account for what they had already spent before they could have any more. TIle ship was a different world, you have to understand. It' was supposed to run Scicntology for the whole planet, but it was a world unto itself.' It was also a world entirely of Hubbard's creation and he added to it, at around this time, a bizarre new element - an elite unit made up of children and eventually knoxvn as the Conmlodore's Nlessengcr Organization. The CMO was staffed by the offspring of committed Scientologists and its original, apparently innocuous, function was simply to serve the Commodore by relaying his verbal orders to crew and students on board the Apollo. But the messengers, mainly pubescent girls, soon recognized and enjoyed their power as teenage dories of the Commodore. In their cute little dark blue uniforn~s and gold lan>'ards, they were trained to ddiver ttubbard's orders using bis 302 Ba,e-P~ced 21Iessiah exact words and tone of voice; if he was in a temper and bellowing abuse, the messenger would scuttle off and pipe tbe same abuse at the offender. No one dared take issue with whate~Ier a messenger said; no one dared disobey her orders. Vested xvith the authority of the Commodore they came to be widely feared little monsters. From 1970 onxvards, messengers artended tIubbard day and night, working on six-hour xvatchcs around the clock. When he was asleep, two messenger sat outside his state-room waiting for the buzzer that would signal he was axvake. Throughout his waking hours, they sat outside his office waiting for his call. When he took a stroll on the deck, they followed him, one carrying his cigarettes, the other an ashtray to catch the ash as it fell. Every minute of the Commodore's existence had to be recorded in the 'Messenger Log' which noted when he woke, ate, slept, worked and the details of every message he had required to be run. It was, of course, tim greatest possible hom~ur to be selected as a messenger and it was perhaps understandable that the girls would vie with eacl~ other to curry favour with the Commodore and dream up ways of pleasing him, by springing forward to light his cigarette, perhaps, or reverently dusting tim individual sheets of his writing paper, particularly since they were awarded extra points for little acts of thotxgl~tfulncss. l)~rccn Smith was just twelve years old, a skinny kid with long blond hair, big eyes and smeared make-up, inexpcrtly applied, when she arrived m the Azorcs m September 1970, to join the crew of tile Apollo. Born into Scicntolugy, she had wanted to be a messenger for as long as she could recall. 'l remember sitting on my luggage on the dockside and looking up at tile ship. She was the biggest ship in the port, painted all white, with these huge gold letters, Apollo, and she made a real awesome impression on me. x, Ve had to wait on the dock to be cleared bv tim medical officer. I spotted LRH, or thought I did, standing with his hand on the shoulder of a young girl in a shim' blue short-sleeved pullover with a gold lanyard. He gave her a little shove and she went running doxvn deck after deck to the gangway, skidding to a stop at the bottom to welcome us on board on behalf of the Commodore. It was the first time I'd seen a messenger.'~ Two days later, Doreen received a nasty taste of life at sea. Weather reports indicated that a hurricane was heading straight for the Azores. It was too dangerous for a ship the size of the .~tpollo to remain in the barbour and there was no time to sail out of reach. Hubbard took the ship to sea and sailed up and down in tile lee of the island, changing course as the wind changed direction. 'It was a very impressive feat of seamanship,' said Hana Eltringham. 'I was on the bridge for almost all the time and I was petrified. Day didn't look much different from Messenge~-s of God 303 night, the wind was howling continually and you could hardly see the bow of the ship because of breaking waves and spray. LRH sat at the radar for thirty-six hours without a break, except to go to the bathroom. He was very calm throughout, constantly reassuring everyone it was going to be all right. ,~0 When tile hurricane had passed, Doreen was put to work washing dishes in the galley while she trained first as an 'able seaman', then as a 'page', before she could qualify to join the CMO. She had to appear before a board of fourteen-year-old messengers, win its approval and run sample messages before she was accepted. The most exciting morncut of her life was when she was taken ashore in Ixdorocco to buy her uniform - dark blue stretch pants and a blue tunic. 'I was thrilled to death,' she said. 'It was what I had wanted from day one. LRH was my hero. We'd always had his picture hanging on the wall at home and w~ listened to his tapes all tbe time. I was his greatest fan.' ttubbard so much enjoyed the company of his pretty young messengers that it inevitably put a strain on his relationship with his wife and children. It was obvious to Mary Sue, as it was to everyone on board, that the Commodore favoured his messengers above his own children, for whom he seemed to have little time or consideration. Diana, tile eldest, had inherited her father's self-confidence and was least affected by his lack of regard. Then eighteen she was one of the Comtnodore's gtaff Aides, who formed tile senior management body directly under Hubbard. She was engaged to another Sea Org officer and had a reputation on board for being cold and authoritarian, although she was much admired by the messengers for her long auburn hair, her beauty and her status; they called her 'Princess Diana'- None of the children had had a proper education since leaving England in 1967. On the bridge, Diana could handle the ship with brisk efficiency, but she read nothing more demanding than romantic novels and i~ conversation she rivalled Mrs Malaprop. Her latest malapropisms were the source of much secret merrin~ent among her fellow officers. ller brother, Quentin, was seventeen in January 1971 and was deeply unhappy. He was working as an auditor, but all his life he had longed to be a pilot and frequently pleaded with his father to be allowed to leave the ship to take flying lessons. Quiet and introverted, Quentin was furtively described as 'swishy' because no one wanted to say out loud what everyone suspected - that he was homosexual. Hhbbard's loathing of 'homosexuals was well documented in his voluminous writings and there was not a Scientologist alive who would risk suggesting to him that his son's sexuality was in doubt. Suzette and Arthur were less troubled by the sacrifice of their childhood. Suzette was fifteen, a cheerful, uncomplicated teenagcr 304 Bare-b~ced Messiah with a great sense of furl and none of her older sister's drive or ambition. Moved from post to post around tile ship, she performed tolerably well and displayed no executive aspirations. All the children had to stand watch along with the rest of the crew and Suzette could always be relied upon to be on duty on time. Not so her txvelve-yearold brother, Arthur, who often refused to get out of bed when he was supposed to be on night watch. If the watchkeeper going off duty tried to rouse him, he would threaten to make a noise and wake his father. Am'one who woke Hubbard was in serious trouble and it was often less troublesome to do Arthur's duty than chance waking the slumbering Commodore. Arthur was commonly described as a 'holy terror' and rampaged through the ship at will, playing practical jokes, like throwing buckets of xvater into occupied toilet cubicles, witl~out fear of retribution. Yet there were moments when even tile irrepressible Arthur experienced a sense of loss. Dotten Smith and Arthur were the same age and the firmest of fricnds. 'I Ic'd often say to mc that be wished his father had more time for him,' Dotcon said. 'I suppose, at one time or another, we all wished we |lad more ordinary lives.' Arthur's special rcsponsit~ility on board ship was to look after his fathcr's motor-cycles, in particular a huge liarIcy Davidson that had been given to t lubt~ard by the Toronto org. One afternoon, the Commodore told Durecn to make sure Arthur had cleaned the tlarlcy Davidson properly by wiping a tissue over the mudguards and petrol tank and bringing it back to show him. She returned with a black smudge on the tissue. Hubbard was incensed. 'You go and assign Arthur liability,' he roared at Doreen, 'he's not doing his duty.' Doreen was relieved that Arthur didn't seem to be too worried by his father's reaction, or bv tim need to tie a grey rag round his arm, but it was not the end of the matter. l\Iary Sue, who was fiercely protective of her children, felt it was Doreen's fault that Arthur had been assigned liability. Later that afternoon, she grabbed her by the arm and starting shaking her. 'You little fiend,' she hissed, sinking her nails into the girl's arm, 'you're destroying my family.' The messengers were nothing if not Ioval to each other. \Vhile Doreen was still sobbing, one of them ran to tell the Commodore what had happened. As Doreen got back to her post outside Hubbard's office, she saw iXlary Sue going in and heard him roar, 'Close the fucking door!' Through the engraved glass, she could see t\Iarv Sue's silhouette standing to attention in front of the desk while the Commodore ranted. Doreen could not make out ever).'thing he said, but she distinctly heard him bdluw at the top of his lungs, 'Nobody manhandles mv messengers, is that clear?' .Xlary Sue mumbled her agreement. 'Yes what?' he bellowed. 'Yes sir!' she replied smartly. Messengers of God 305 Outside, the messengers were trying hard not to put their ears to the keyhole, but they heard enough to be thrilled. A few months later, Diana upset her father in some way. Hubbard reeled off a long reprimand to the messenger on duty, adding at the end of it: 'OK, go and spit in Diana's face.' The messenger was a little dark-eyed girl called Jill Goodman, thirteen years old. She ran along the deck to Diana's office, burst in, spat in her face with unerring accuracy and began sfiouting her message as Diana let out a scream of fury. Mary Sue, who was in an adjoining office, burst in as her datlghter was wiping the spittle from her face. She grabbed Jill round the throat as if she was going to strangle her and also began screeching. Jill started crying and when lx. lary Sue let her go, she immediately rushed off to tell the Commodore. Another acrimonious husband and wife row followed, which ended with Man' Sue throwing her shoes at the luckless messenger tlubbard despatci~ed to chastise her further. TIm Commodore was soon embroiled in another domestic drama of a different, and totally unexpected, nature. tlc received word from Los Angeles that his daughter Alexis was trying to make contact with him. Now twenty-one years old, Alexis lived with her mother and stepfather, l\lilcs t{ollister, on the 1Iawaiian island of Nlaui. Although her mother rarely spoke about her father - Sara was still frightcncd uf her first husband and looked back on her divorce as a lucky escape from his clutches - Alexis had read enough about L. Ron 1 lubbard to begin to think of him as a rather romantic figure and she was naturally curious to meet him. in 1970, on a visit to England, she called at Saint Hill Manor in the hope of seeing him and was disappointed to discover he was not there. A year later, while she was home from college for the summer vacation, she wrote to him care of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles. Hubbard acted swiftly when he heard about Alexis' inquiries. tle scribbled a note to her and dispatched detailed instructions to Jane Kember who was running tbe Guardian's Office at Saint Hill, about how the matter was to be handled. The messengers had got into the habit of standing beside tim Commodore when he was writing at this desk and whipping away each sheet of paper as he reached the bottom of the page. Doreen Sinith was on duty when the Commodore was writing to Alexis and she was shocked by what she was surreptitiously reading as his hand flew over the page. lle ended his instructions to Kember with a little homily, 'Decency is not a subject well understood.' When Alexis returned to college in the United States she learned that there was a man staving in the local motel who had been asking to see her. She invited hir~ to her dorm, where he introduced himself as 306 Bare-bbced Messiah L. Ron tlubbard's agent and said he had a statement to read to her. While Alexis sat stunned, ttle man read out a statement in which Hubbard categorically denied he was her father: '~_'our mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948... In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie. She turned up destitute and pregnant.' Hubbard implied that Alexis's father was Jack Parsons, but out of the kindness of his heart he had taken her motl~er in to see her through 'her trouble'. Later he said he came up from Palm Springs, California, where he was living, and found Alexis abandoned; she was just a toddler, a 'cute little thing', and so he had taken her along on bis wanderings for a couple of years. Hubbard told Alexis that her mother had been a Nazi spy during the Second x, Vorld x, Var and suggested that the divorce action was a spurious ploy on her part to win control of Scientology-'They [Sara and 2\.lilts I lollistcr] obtained considerable newspaper publicit3.' none of it true, anti employed the highest priced divorce attorney in tile US to sue me for divorce and get tile foundation in Los Angeles in settlement. T}~is proved a puzzle since where there is no legal marriage, there can't be any divorce.' \Vhcn the a~cnt had finished reading, hc asked Alexis if she hacl any questions. Sbc asked in a small voice if she could sec tile statement. 1 lc re|used. ~lustcring what composure she could, she said that what she bad heard was self-explanatory and asked him to leave. Alexis matte m~ further attcml~ts to see her father. ~ At around this time, another young woman began causing problems for tile Commodore. Susan Mcister, a twentv-threc-vear-old from Colorado, had joined the crew of the Apollo in l~ebruar,~ 1971, having been introduced to Scientology by friends while she \;,'as working in San Francisco. \Vhen she arrived on the ship she was a typically eager and optimistic convert and wrote home frequently, urging her'famib,, to 'get into' Scientology. 'I just had an auditing session,' she wrote o;~ 5 .'\lay. 'I feel great, great, great and mv life is expanding, expattdittg and it's all Scientology. Hurry up! flurry, hurry. Be a friend to yourselves - get into this stuff now. It's more precious than gold, it's the best thing that's ever ever ever ever come along. Love, Susan.' Bv the time of her next letter, on 15 June, the Commodore's conspiracy theories had clearly made an impression. 'I can't tell you exactly where we are. \Ve have enemies who . . . do not wish to se~ us succeed in restoring J~-t'etlom and self-dete~nhzatt~m to this planet's people. If these people were to find out where we were located they would attempt to destroy us . . .' Ten days later, when the .'lpollo was docked in tile Moroccan port of Messengers of God 307 Sail, Susan iMeister locked herself in a cabin, put a .22. target revolver to her forehead and pulled tbe trigger. She was found at 7.35 pm lying across a bunk, wearing the dress her mother had sent her for her birthday, with her arms crossed and the revolver on her chest. A suicide note was on the floor. Local police were called, but the death of an American citizen inevitably alerted US consular officials and exposed the Apollo to the kind of attention that Hubbard had been trying to avoid for years. Following the Commodore's oft-repeated doctrine, the Sea Org went on to the attack. Susan 1X'leister, who had seemed a rather quiet and reserved young woman to her friends, was portrayed as an unstable former drug addict who had made previous attempts at suicide; Peter \Varren, the Apollo's port Captain, hinted that compromising photographs of her had been found. These smear tactics were soon extended to embrace William Galbraitb, the US vice-consul in Casablanca, who had driven to Sail to make inquiries into the incident. On 13 July, he had lunch witb x. Varrcn and Joni Chiriasi, another member of the crew, at the Sidi Bouzid restaurant in Sail before being taken to look round the ship. Afterwards, Warren and Chiriasi both signed affidavits accusing Galbraith of threatening tile ship - 'He said that if the ship became an embarrassment to the United States, Nixon would order the CIA to sink or sabotage it.' Galbraith also allcgcdly referred to the Church of Scicntology as a 'bunch of kooks' and speculated that the ship was being used as a brothel or a casino or for drug-trafficking. Ncxt day, Norman Starkey, captain of the Apollo, forwarded copies of the affidavits to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in \Vashington, with a covering letter complaining that Galbraith had threatened 'to murder the vessel's company of 380 men, women and children, many of whom are Americans'. Letters were also sent to John Mitchell, the Attorney General, and to the Secret Service, all with copies to President Nixon, who was yet to be engulfed by \Vatergate. A few days later, Susan Meister's father arrived in Casablanca to investigate his daughter's death but found it impossible to make headway with the disinterested Moroccan authorities, ~ho were somewhat more concerned with a recent attempted coup d'~tat than a lone American making inquiries about his daughter. Meister, who refused to believe that Susan had committed suicide, could not even discover where her body was being kept and in desperation he turned to L. Ron Itubbard for ilelp. He later wrote a dispiriting account of his visit to the ship, escorted bv Peter x, Varren: 'Passing the guarded gates into the port compound, we had our first look at 1 lubbard's ship Apollo. It appeared to be old 308 Bare-Faced 3Iessiah and as we boarded it, the girls manning the deck gave us a hand salute. All were dressed in work-type clothing of civilian origin. Most appeared to be young. Upon boardiug, we were shown the stern of the sbip, which was used as a reading-room, with several people sitting in chairs reading books. The mention of Susan seemed to meet with disapproval from those on board . . . we were shown where Susan's quarters were in the stern of the ship beloxv decks where it appeared fifty or so people were sleeping on shelf-type bunks. Susan's letter had mentioned she shared a cabin all the way forward with one other person. Next we were shown the cabin next to the pilot house on the bridge where the alleged suicide had taken place . .. We were not allowed to see any more of the ship. I requested an interview with Hubbard as he was then on board. Warren said he would ask. t~e returned in about half an hour and said Hubbard had declined to see inC.' After his return to America, M&stcr discovered to his anger and astonishment that his daughter had been buried even before he arrived in ~1orocco. He arranged to have the body exhumed and returned to the United States, but before the remains of Susan Meister were put to rest, a final dirty trick was played: Mcister's local health authority in Colorado received an anonymous letter warning of a cholera epidemic in ~h~rocco that had so far caused two or three hundred deaths. 'It's been brought to my attention,' wrote the poison pen, 'that the daughter of one George Mcister died in Morocco, either by accident or cholera, probably the latter.'~2 At the beginning of 1972, Hubbard fell ill, suddenly and inexplicably, with a sickness that defied diagnosis and presented a bewildering range of sympton~s. Towards the end of January, the Commodore sent a pathetic note to Jim Dincalci, the ship's medical officer: 'Jim, I don't think I'm going to make it.' Dincalci, who had been appointed medical officer on the strength of six montf~s' experience as a nurse before joining Scientology, was unsure what to do. f|e had been deeply shocked when he first arrived on the ship in 1970 to realize that Hubbard became ill just like ordinary mortals, since he clearly remembered reading in the first Dianetics book that it was possible to cure most ailn~ents with the power of the mind. In his first week as medical officer, Hubbard began complaining of feeling unwell and Dincalci was very surprised when a doctor was called. He prescribed a course of pain-killers and antibiotics, but Dincalci naturally did not bother to collect the pills because he was convinced that Ron would not need them. 'I thought', he said, 'that as an operating thetan he would have total control of his body and of any pain. When he discovered I hadn't got Messengers of God 309 him the pain-killers, he flew off the handle and started screaming at ,13 me. Fearful of making another mistake, Dincalci sought advice about the Commodore's illness from Otto Roos, who was one of the senior 'technical' Scientologists on board. Roos ventured the view that the problem stemmed from some incident in his past which had not been properly audited. The only way to find it would be to comb through all the folders in which Ron's auditing sessions were recorded. t|ubbard gave his approval to this course of action, adding a note to Otto Roos: 'I'm delighted that somebody is finally going to take responsibility for my auditing.' Roos began calling in the folders from Saint Hill and from all the Scicntology branches in the United States where Hubbard had been audited. There were hundreds of them, dating back to 1948; Roos calculated they would make a stack eight feet high. He began working through the folders, discovering, to his disquiet, numerous 'discreditable reads' - moments when the E-meter revealed that Hubbard had something to hide. Toxvards the end of lx, larch, while Roos was still poring over the folders, a messenger arrived at his cabin saying that the Commodore wanted to see all the folders. Roos was dumbrounded: it was an inviolable rule of Scientology that no one, no matter who hc was, was allowed to see his own folder. He told the messenger it was out of the question. A few minutes later, the door burst open and two hefty members of the crew barged in, picked up the filing cabinets and staggered out with them. Two days passed before a messenger told Roos he was wanted by the Commodore. From the moment the Dutchman entered t|ubbard's office, it was apparent the Commodore had made a dramatic recovery. Hubbard leapt up from his desk with a roar and struck out at Roos with his fist, following up with a furious kick. He was shouting so wildly that Roos was unable to make out what he was saying apart from that it was sometiring to do with the 'discreditable reads'. Mary Sue was sitting in the office with a long face watching what was going on. When Hubbard had calmed down a little he turned to her and asked her, as his auditor, if he had ever had 'discreditable reads'. Mary Sue's expression did not alter. 'No sir,' she said, 'you never had such reads. ' Roos could see folders scattered across Hubbard's desk, open at the pages where he had noted the 'reads' that Mary Sue denied existed. He said nothing. Hubbard paced the room, fretting that Roos had 'undoubtedly told this all over the ship' and that everyone was talking and laughin~ about it. In fact, Roos had informed no one, although it did not prevent him from being put under 'cabin arrest'. After he had been dismissed, Mary Sue kept running down to his 3 10 Bare-l~hced Messiah cabin with different folders, trying to explain away the 'discreditable reads'. He had been using outdated technology, she said, and 'should have known about it'. Later Diana Hubbard also stopped by, pushed opened Roos's door, screamed, 'I hate you! I hate you!' and stalked off. t 4 The Apollo was docked in Tangier throughout this drama and IMarv Sue was busy supervising the decoration and furnistling of a splitdevel modern house, the Villa Laura, on a hillside in the suburbs of Tangier. The I-tubbards planned to move ashore while the ship was put into dry dock for a re-fit and Mary Sue was looking forward to it. Hubbard was still dreaming of finding a friendly little country where Scientology would be allowed to prosper (not to say take over control) and he had begun casting covetous eyes on Morocco, at whose Atlantic ports he had been calling regularly ever since leaving the ,Xlcditerrancan. The Moroccan monarchv was going through a period of crisis and tlubbard felt that King ttassan would welcome the help that Scicntology could offer in identifying potential traitors within his midst and be suitably grateful thereafter. Some mont}ls prcviuusly, the Sea Org had set up a land base in a small huddle of office buildings on the airport road outside Tangier. TIm erection of a sign on the road announcing, in Englisb, French and Arabic, the arrival of 'Operation and Transport Corporation Limited, International Business Management' immediately attracted the attention of Howard D. Jones, the local :\merican consul general. Itc became even more interested a fexv days later when, at a party in Tangier, he met a nervous American girl who admitted working for OTC but would say nothing about it. 'I am here with a Panamian corporation,' she said, 'but that is all I can tell you.' Nothing could have been more calculated to prompt the consul to make further inquiries. He soon made the connections between OTC, the 'mystery ship' :tpollo and L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, but he discovered very little more, to judge by a frustrated cable he despatched to Washington on 26 April 1972: 'Little is known of the operations of Operation and Transport Company here, and its officers are elusive about what it does. However, we presume that the Scientologists aboard the Apollo and in Tangier do whatever it is that Scientologists do elsewhere. 'There have been rumours in town that Apollo is involved in drug or white slave traffic. However, we doubt these reports... The stories about white slave traffic undoubtedly stem from the fact that included among the crew of the Apollo are a large number of strikingly beautiful young ladies. However, we are skeptical that a vessel that stands out like a sore thumb, in which considerable interest is Messengers of God 3 l 1 bound to be generated, and with a crew numbering in hundreds, would be a reasonable vehicle for smuggling or white slaving.'~s The US consul, although be had no way of knowing it, was looking in the wrong direction. Very little was happening on the ship that would have been of interest to x, Vashington, but a great deal was happening ashore. The Operation and Transport Corporation was relentlessly trying to make inroads into Moroccan bureaucracy, undeterreLt bv numerous setbacks. It acquired an inauspicious foothold with a g~3vernment contract to train post office admi~istrators on tbe assurance that Scientology techniques would accelerate their training, but the pilot project soon foundercd. 'We took half the students,' said Amos Jcssup, 'while the other half were trained in the traditional way. We spent a month trying to teach them certain study techniques but they got so anxious that the ott~ers were forging ahead learning post office techniques that they walked out.' Jessup, who spoke French, led OTC's next assault - on the Nloroccan army. He and Peter x, Varren made friends with a colonel in Rabat and demonstrated the E-meter to him. '1tc was properly amazed by it,' said Jessup, 'and arranged for us to give a presentation to a general who was said to be a friend of the Minister of Defence and the riglit hand man of the King. We were taken to this gigantic, luxurious house, where we did a few drills. The general said he was vcrv interested and would get back to us. We waited in a little apartment in Rabat the Sea Org had rented to us, but didn't hear am'thing so went back to the ship. Shortly afterwards, tbe general led an'unsuccessful coup and committed suicide. We realized then that he wouldn't have passed word about the E-meter to the King.' Another OTC mission was having more success with the 1Xloroccan secret police and started a training course for senior policemen and intelligence agents, showing them how to use the E-meter to detect political subversives. The Apollo, meanwhile, sailed for Lisbon for her re-fit and Mary Sue and Ron moved into the Villa Laura in Tangier. Hubbard seemed strangely depressed; Doreen Smith reported that he often talked about 'dropping his body', which was Scientology-speak for dying. Loyal wife that she was, Mary Sue took it upon herself to deal with one o~ the sources of her husbar;d's troubles - his estranged son, Nibs. After 'blowing the org' in 1959, fortune had not smiled on Nibs. tte had drifted from job to job, finding it ever more difficult to support his wife and six children, and as the realization dawned that he would never be allowed back into Scientology, tie became an even more prominent critic of his father and his father's 'church'. \Vhen tbe church was locked in litigatiun with the Internal Revenue Service, Nibs testified on behalf of tim IRS. 312 Bare-Faced Alessiah In September 1972, ~lary Sue orchestrated a campaign to 'handle' Nibs, instituting a search through all the Sea Org files and instructing the Guardian's office to do the same. She told an aide that Nibs' 'big button' was money and that it was time to start hunting through the old files to dig up former complaints about him. ~6 The church never revealed what it found out about the Founder's son, but on 7 November Nibs recorded a video-taped interview with a church official retracting his IRS testimony and all allegations he had previously made against father. They were made 'vengefully', he explained, at a time when he was undergoing a great deal of personal and emotional stress: 'x, Vhat I have been doing is a whole lot of lying, a whole lot of damage to a lot of people that I value highly. 'I happen to love mv father, blood is thicker than water, and basically it may sound silly to some people but it means a great deal to me that blood is thicker than water and another thing, as a matter of interest too, would bc I made some pretty awful statements about tim Sea Org and none of these are true. I've no personal knowledge of any wrong doing or illegal acts or brutality or anything else against people by the Sea Org or anv member of tile Scicntology organization.' At the Villa Laura in Tangier, Hubbard had little time to reflect on this filial declaration of love. Indeed, it was more likely he was reflecting on tile curious incvitability with which his plans were ending in tears. The OTC training course for ~Ioroccan secret policeman was breaking up in disarray under the stress of intcrnecine intrigue between pro-monarchy and anti-monarchy factions and the fear of what the E-meter would reveal. 'It was a crazy set up,' said Jessup, 'you couldn't tell who was on which side.' It was possible that tile Sea Org might have staved to try and u~ravcl this complication, had not word arrived from Paris that the Church of Scientology in France was about to be indicted for fraud. ~l'hcrc was a suggestion that French lawyers would be seeking |{ubbard's extradition from ~1orocco to face charges in Paris. The Commodore decided it was time to go. There was a ferry leaving Tangier for Lisbon in forty-eight hours: Hubbard ordered everyone to be on it, with all the OTC's movable property and every scrap of paper that could not be shredded. For the next two days, convoys of cars, trucks and motor-cycles could be observed, day and night, scurrying back and forth from OTC 'land bases' in Morocco to the port in Tangier. x, Vhen the Lisbon-bound ferry sailed from Tangier on 3 December 1972, nothing remained of the Church of Scientology in Morocco. Hubbard left behind onlv a pile of shredded paper, a flurry of wild rumours and a scattering of befuddled U S consular officials. Chapter 19 Atlantic O'ossing 'REVIEW OF AVAILABLE INFO REGARDING OVERSEAS ACTIVITIES CHURCI| OF SCIENTOLOGY REVEALS ONLY THAT ITS FOUNDER L. RON HUBBARD IS ECCENTRIC MILLIONAIRE WHO HAS BEEN EXPELLED FROM RESIDENCE IN SEVERAL COUNTRIES BECAUSE OF Ills ODD ACTIVITIES AND BEIIAVIOUR. HE IS OWNER OF SEVEtL-XL SHIPS WHOSE APPEARANCE IN PORq'S IN VARIOUS PARTS OF WORLD HAVE STIMULATED QUERIES . . . FRO.'M OTtlER GOVERNMENTS ASKING INFO RE VESSELS MISSION AND CRE~,~~. RESPONSES ~ND~CATE WE KNOW VErY LITTLE... (Outgoing signal from CIA headquarters, 16 October 1975) ~ ,1' :Is :1, /I llubbard did not join the exodus on the Lisbon-bound ferry from Tangier; he was driven from Villa Laura to thc airport, where there was a direct flight leaving for Lisbon that afternoon. Sea Org personnel were waiting to meeting him in the Portuguese capital and thcv hurried him through the airport to a waiting car which headed downtown to the Lisbon Sheraton. The Commodore then sat fretting in his hotel suite for several hours while lawyers in Paris, Lisbon and New York assessed the risk of his extradition to face fraud charges in France. Ordinarily, he would have avoided such legal imbroglio by sailing away from it in his flagship, but the Apollo was in dry dock and thus provided no sanctuary. With Hubbard in the hotel were Ken Urquhart, Jim Dincalci and Paul Preston, a former Green Beret recently appointed as the Commodore's bodyguard. Urquhart said that Hubbard was 'fairly relaxed' and gave them a little briefing on the need to maintain 'safe spaces'.~ Dincalci disagreed: 'He was very nervous and afraid of what might happen. I could see he was shredding. After two or three hours there was a telephone call from the port Captain. When he put the phone down he said, "This is really serious. I've got to get out of here ,~ ,~ ~O~' . Urquhan was sent out to book seats on the first available flight to the United States and collect some cash. It was agreed that Preston would travel with Hubbard and Dincalci would 'shadow' them so that 314 Bare-Ft~t'ed Messiah he could inform the ship immediately if there were any problems. The loyal Urquhart returned with three Lisbon-Chicago tickets on a flight leaving earl), next morning. Although he had booked them through to Chicago, the flight stopped in New York and he suggested they got off there in case there was a 'welcoming party' waiting at Chicago's O'Hare airport. tfe also had a briefcase stuffed with banknotes in different currencies - escudos, marks, francs, potrods, dollars and lx, Ioroccan dirhams, about $100,000 in total; it was the best he could do, he told Ron. The flight left next morning after only a short delay, with Dincalci sitting several rows away from Hubbard and Preston. At J.F. Kennedy airport in New York, Dincalci stood behind them in the Customs queue and looked on in horror as a Customs officer told Hubbard to open his briefcase. Having looked inside he promptly invited tlubbard to step into an interview room. 'As they took him away I thought, oh God, that's it, noxv everyone will know L. Ron l{ubbard is back in America,' said Dincalci. 'He came out about fiftcen minutes later looking like a zornbit. tlc'd had to give them a lot of infornlation about the money. x,~,.'e got into a taxi outside and I said, "Where are we going?" I [c said, "I can't think." lie was literally in shock. Wc drove into Manhattan and he pointed to a hotel, it was a Ih~ward J~hnson's or something like that, and said, "We'll stay there."' The three of them checked in using false names: tlubl~ard was Lawrence l larris, Preston was I)on Shanmn~ and l)incalci was Frank lx, Iorris. Dincalci then went across the street to a dell and bought lunch. Back in the hutel, he asked the Commodore if he should return to the ship, but Hubt~ard did not seem to understand the question. Next day, he sent Dincalci out to buy clothes for all of them and to look for a place to live; the question of Dincalci returning to the ship was never mentioned again. Dincalci soon found a suitable apartment in Queens, in a fifteenstorey building with its oxvn heated swimming-pool called 'The Executive'. It was in a safe, upper middle-class residential area close to Forest tiills and convenient for the subway. For the first few weeks, Hubbard did nothing but watch television all day long, switching from channel to channel, absorbed by everything from soap operas to rock music shows. The America to which Hubbard had returned after an absence of nearIra decade had changed beyond his recognition, particularly when viewed through a colour television screen. It was a country obsessed with the unfolding revelations of x, Vatergate, haunted by a war incomprehensibly lost in Vietnam and beset by crises, not least in confidence. The Commodore of the Sea Org knew little of tile black Atlantic 0ossing 315 crisis, the urban crisis, the drugs crisis, the energy crisis or any of the events that were branded into tile American conscience by place names such as Kent State, Attica and Chappaquiddick. While Preston stayed in the apartment to look after Hubbard, Dincalci went out every day to tile United Nations building to research international extradition laws. A few days before Christmas 1972, he returned to tile apartment and told Ron he was in the clear; hc had established beyond doubt that the United States would not extrattite its own citizens. Hubbard began making plans to travel, to visit the org in Los Angeles. He even thought about throwing a party, but within a couple of days a message arrived from the Guardian's Office in California telling him he was still not safe and to stay undercover. It was a cheerless Christmas. The Guardian's Office was the conduit for commt~nications with tile Conmlodore and the strictest security prevailed to prevent his whereabouts being discovered. Preston picked up and delivered tile mail every other day at a post office box in New Jersey. Everything was in code and no personal mail of any kind was forwarded. Telephone calls were similarly coded, using the page numbers of tile American Ile~'tage Dictionary - 345/16 was the sixteenth word from the top on page 345. Preston would go to a payphone well away from the apartment, call the Guardian's Office in Los Angeles and reel off the numbers. If there was an incon/ing message he used a small tape machine to record it and transcrihcd it when he got back to the apartment. When they were out and ahout in New York, both Dincalci and Preston went to inordinate lengths to ensure they were not being tailed, frequently back-tracking and crossing from an uptown to a duwntown train. Travelling on the subway, they would choose a stop at random, hold open the doors as they were beginning to close and leap out at the last moment. Inside the apartment, a routine was soon established. Dincalci got up early and went out to do the day's food shopping and buy the paperback booii's that tile Commodore read voraciously. 'I soon got to know what he liked,' said Dincalci. 'It was all blood and thunder escapist stuff. I'd choose them by the cover - tile more lurid the cover,the more he liked them.' l{ubbard woke at about ten or eleven o'clock; tile television was turned on immediately and stayed on for the remainder of the day, even if he was reading or writing. x, Vhile Dincalci was out running errands for the Commodore, Preston staved in the apartment to prepare breakfast and lunch. Dincalci co/~ked dinner when he got back in tile evening. Fur tile first two montl~s it was always tishsticks, breaded chicken, steaks or hamburgers, until tlubbard tired of the diet and encouraged Dmcalci to try other dishes. 3 16 Bare-Faced Messiah After dinner Itubbard had a single tot of brandy and sometimes talked into tile night. 'He'd jump arotmd from subject to subject.' said Dincalci. 'One minute he'd be talking about how an angel had given him this sector of the universe to look after and next minute he'd be talking about the camera he wanted me to buy for him next day. I used to watch him talking; sometimes his eyes would roll up into his head for a couple of minutes and he'd be kinda gone. One of the things that upset him was that he'd never gotten back the money that he had stashed away in previous lives. There was some inside the statue of a horse in Italy which he had hidden in the sixteenth century. He was a writer and had written The Pt~'nt'e. "That son-of-a-bitch Machiavelli stole it from me," tie said. He talked a lot about his childhood and all the horses he had ridden when he was little, how he would get on them before he could walk. I didn't get the impression that it was a happy childhood, not at all. Tt~ere was a lot of bitterness there about his parents. tie said, over and over, he had graduated from George Washington University. "They say I didn't," he used to complain, "but I did." He said that he was editor of the University paper for four years and that would prove it. 't{e said that when Pearl l{arbor was bombed he was on some island in tile Pacific and he was tile senior person in charge because everyone else had bccn killed. lie was cnntrolling all the traffic through the island until a bomb exploded right by him at the airport and lie was sent Ifome, the first US casualty of World x, Var Two. He had a big fatty rumour, a lymphoma, on the top of his head which he said had silvers of shrapnel in it. We had it X-raved once and had the film enlarged fifty times to find the shrapnel, but there was nothing there. x, Vhen he came back from the war his first wife didn't go to see him, even though he was wounded. He had nothing good to say about her. t{is second wife, whom he never really married, was a spy who had been sent bv the Nazis to spy on him during the war. '~1ost nights I'd give him a massage before he went to bed and he always said he felt better for it. In nly mind I never questioned anything he said except once when he was talking about out-of-thebody experiences and how beautiful it was to sit on a cloud. I was always running about New York looking at things for him and I thought if he was such hot shit, why did I have to go and look? Why couldn't he go out of his body and take a look himself?' In February, Hubbard began to get jittery about the security in the Executive building and Dincalci was asked to look for somewhere with a 'lower profile'. tie found a large apartment in a scruffier neighbouthood of Queens - a nondescript second-floor xvalk-up in the middle of a block on Codwise Place - owned by a Cuban family who lived on the first floor of the house. Dincalci paid three months' rent in advance, in Atlantic Crossing 3 17 cash, and said his brother and his uncle would be moving in immediately. Soon after the move, Hubbard decided to go out for a walk. Dincalci was concerned that the preparations the Commodore was making to pass unnoticed in the street would almost certainly mark him out for attention. 'His hair had grown very long, almost doxvn to his shoulders and he looked pretty unkempt. He insisted on wearing this big hat with the brim turned up. It made him look like Bozo the clown. If he had walked into any org they would have kicked him out.' After being cosseted by central heating for three months, |h~bbard stepped out into a freezing February day, immediately got a chill in his tooth and attracted a retinue of jeering street kids. It discouraged hitn from venturing out again by himself. His aching teeth appeared to trigger other complaints and Dincalci was driven to distraction trying to nurse an intractable and irritable elderly patient who was at first reluctant to consult either doctor or dentist. When one of Hubbard's rotten'teeth dropped out, Dincalci painstakingly ground all his food. Eventually Hubbard agreed to seek professional medical help. On visits to a chiropractor in Greenwich Village tie always wore a wig as a disguise and on one occasion Dincalci and Preston took the be-wigged Commodore to a local Chinese restaurant for his favourite dish, egg fno yong. It was their only social outing. On the recommendation of an allergist, tlubbard began a regular course of injections, administered by Dincalci, which seemed to help him. As his health improved, he started taking more interest in the affairs of the Church of Scientology, even writing bulletins with some of his old enthusiasm. 'tle wrote tremendously fast bv hand,' said Dincalci. 'It was like automatic writing you get in the occult. He'd have a glazed look, as if he was kinda gone, his eyes would roll up and the corners of his mouth would turn down and he'd start this frenzied writing. I've never seen anyone write so fast.' Now sixty-two, Hubbard was also beginning to ponder his place in posterity. The Church of Scientology had been swift to make use of the recently enacted Freedom of Information Act, which had revealed that government agencies held a daunting amount of material about Scientology and its founder in their files, much of it less than flattering. Hubbard, who had never been lettered by convention or strict observance of the law, conceived a simple, but startlingly audacious, plan to improve his own image and that of his church for the benefit of future generations of Scientologists. All that needed to be done, he decided, was to infiltrate the agencies concerned, steal the revelant files and either destroy or launder any damaging infornlation thev contained. To a man who had rounded both a church and a 318 Bare-Faced Messiah private navy this was a perfectly feasible scheme. The operation was given the code name Snow White - two words that would figure ever more prominently over the next few months in ttxe communications between the Guardian's Office in Los Angeles and the Commodore's hiding place in Queens, New York. In September 1973, tlubbard got word from the Guardian's Office that the threat of extradition had diminished and it was safe for him to return to the ship and, coincidentall3', to his wife and children. tte left next day, with Paul Preston, on a Boeing 747 bound for Lisbon, leaving Dincalci behind to pack up all their belongings and close the apartment at Codwise Place. No one on the ship knew where tlubbard had been for the previous ten months, nor that he was returning, but his arrival back on board was predictably cause for celebration. 'When he came back on board hc Iookett better than I had ever seen him look,' said liana EItringham. 'l{e was bright and bouncy, busting out all over. 1 lc had lost weight and could hardly contain his happiness at being back. ,3 If there was an emotional reunion with Nlary Sue and the children, it was not widely observed. Instead, ltuhl~ard gathcrcd the crew on A l)cck tu explain that hc had bccn away tuuring the orgs in the United States, raising quite a laugh when tie said that tie had walked into some of them xvithout being recognized. Preston, sitting at the back of the room, knew it was a lie but obviously said noticing; tie had once driven 1 lubbard past the New York org but all the Commodore had said was that he thought it needed a bigger sign. x, Vhile Hubbard had been away, his accommodation on theApollo had been extended and improved and his research room had been totally encased in lead, insulated from contact with the hull, to make it sound-proof. A working party had spent three months craxvling through the ventilation shafts and scrubbing them with toothbrushes in order that he would no longer be troubled by his well-known allergy to dust. In tile previous few weeks the ship hat( been cleaned from stem to stern and every deck subjected to a 'white glove inspection'. An3' ledge or fiat surface that produced a smudge on the fingers of a white cotton glove resulted in the entire area being cleaned again. The Commodore soon had the ship on the move and there were many light hearts on board when the Apollo weighed anchor and set sail, after almost a year in dock in Lisbon. She headed north along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula, stopping for a few days at the historic cities of Oporto and Corunna, then turning south again to Setubal and Cadiz. At the beginning of December, she returned to Tenerife in the Canarm' Islands, one of her regular ports of call before the Lisbon re-fit. Atlantic Crossing 3 1. Hubbard wanted to spend some time ashore in Tenerife taking photographs, and his cars and motor-cycles were unloaded on to the dock. He had at his disposal a big black Ford station wagon, a 1962 yellow Pontiac Bonneville convertible and a Land Rover, but as often as not he chose to make his forays ashore astride his monstrous Harley Davidson, on which no doubt he cut a particular dash. One afternoon, snaking round the switchback curves up in the volcanic mountait~s of Tonerife, Hubbard skidded on a patch of loose gravel, lost control and fell off, smashing several cameras that were on straps round .his neck. Although in considerable pain, he managed to get back on the bike and ride it down to the port. Fie let it drop on the quayside and staggered up the gangway of the .4pollo with his trousers torn and the mangled cameras still around his neck. Jim Dincalci, back on board as medical officer, was summoned immediately. Only too well aware that he was not qualified to deal with broken bones or possible internal injuries, he suggested that the Commodore should be taken to hospital for a check-up. Hubbard refused adamantly, but huffily agreed to be examined by a local doctor. tle prescribed rest and pain-killers, to be taken two at a time as required. After the doctor had left the ship, Dincalci, who still clung to the remnants of a conviction that an operating thetan had no need for anything as mundane as a pain-killer, offered the Commodore a single pill and a glass of water. 'x, Vhv only one?' tlubbard snapped, his eyes bulging with anger. Dincalci hastilv produced a second pill, but Hubbard's temper gave way. tie leapt up from his chair and began pacing tile room in a fur3', shouting unintelligible abuse at tile fools in his midst who cared nothing for the fact that he was dying. Suddenly he turned on Dincalci. 'It'syotl,' he roared. '}bil 're trying to kill me.' Dincalci was shattered by the accusation. 'I felt I had rapport x~'ith him, I felt like a son to him. It was like having my father say I was trying to kill him. No, it was worse. Here was the man who was trying to save the universe saying I was trying to kill him. I was crushed. I felt I had lost everything; what little self-esteem I had was gone in that moment.' Dincalci very quickly found himself chipping paint and the ticklish task of nursing the Commodore was handed over to Kima Douglas, a strikingly attractive artist from South Africa who had had two years' nursing experience in the labour ward of the British hospital in Bulawayo. 'I think he had broken an arm and several ribs,' she said. 'He certainly had massive black bruises everywhere. We strapped up his arm and strapped his ribs, but he couldn't lie down so he slept in a chair as best he could. He must have been in agony. He screamed and hollered and yelled. It was absolutely ungodly; six weeks of pure hell. 320 Bare-Faced Messiah 'He was revolting to be with - a sick, crotchet)', pissed-off old man, extremely antagonistic to everything and everyone. His wife was often in tears and he'd scream at her at the top of his lungs, "Get out of here!" Nothing was right. He'd throw his food across the room xvith his good arm; I'd often see plates splat against the bulkhead. V',~ben things got really bad, I'd go and make him English scrambled eggs, well salted and peppered, and toast and butter and take it up to him. I even fed him once. 'He absolutely refused to see another doctor. He said they were all fools and would only make him worse. The truth was that he was terrified of doctors and that's why everyone had to be put through such hell. ,4 She could not help but recall how be had changed in the months since she first joined the ship. 'My expectation of L. Ron Hubbard was that he would be a psychic person who could look at me and see every evil thing ! had ever done in my xvholc life. I was still searching for something, although I didn't know what, and the thought of someone being able to look into mv head both terrified and excited me. I'd been indoctrinated with all the tl~ings he could do. Tt~ere were wild stories that if an atomic b~m~b was about to go off ill Nevada, Ron could dcfuse it with the power of his mind. At that time everyone was talking about atomic warfare and i truly believed he had come to save the planet. As I walked up the gangway to the ship, he stopped ot~t of his office wearing a white uniform and his Commodorc's hat with two messengers close behind him. I was introducctl to him and be shook my hand and was very charming. tlc sccmcd to bca jovial, happy, golttcn man. I felt I had arrived.' Kima called on her unlovablc patient every two days, but tile burden of day-to-day care fell on tile messengers. 'Before the motor-cycle accidcut he was a very nice, friendly person,' said Jill Goodman, [who was thirteen years oltt when she became a messenger.] 'Afterwards, he was a complete pain in the ass. It was like having a sick, crotchety grandfather. You never knew what he was going to be like when you went in there. ,s 'He didn't get out of that red velvet chair for three months,' said Doreen Smith. 'I le'd sleep for about forty-five minutes at a time, then be axvake for hours, screaming and shouting. It was impossible to get him comf~rtablc. None of us got any sleep. I was better with a cushion, someone else was better with a footstool, someone else with cotton padding, so every time he woke up we all had to be in there, fussing around him while he ~vas screaming at us that we were all "stupid fucking shitheads" . . . he was out of control and even the toughies were in tears at times. The red chair to us became a symbol of the worst a htm~an being can be - all we wanted to do was chop it up in little pieces and throw it overboard. ,e, x, Vhile tlubbard was still fuming in his red velvet chair, still Atlantic Cn~ssing 321 ascribing sinister motives to every mishap and imagined slight, he issued an edict that would introduce another Orwellian feature to life on board the Apollo. Convinced that his orders were not being carried out with sufficient diligence, he established a new disciplinary unit called the Rehabilitation Project Force. Anyone found to have a CI (a 'counter-intention' to his orders or wishes) was to be assigned to the RPF, along with all trouble-makers and back-sliders. 'I was shocked when I heard about it,' said Hana Eltringham. 'To me it was like setting up a penal colony within our midst.' Since it was only necessary to incur the Commodore's disfavour to be assigned to the RPF, its numbers swelled rapidly. RPF inmates wore black boiler suits, were segregated from the rest of the crew and slept in an unventilated cargo hold on filtlly mattresses that were due to be thrown out before the Commodore decided they would be suitable for his new unit. Seven hours' sleep were permitted, but there was no leisure time during the day and discipline was harsh. Meal breaks were brief and the RPF was obliged to eat whatever food was left from the crew meal. 'Thi~gs took a real doxvntlill turn around that time,' said Gerry Armstrong, who was then the ship's port captain. 'He became much more paranoid and belligerent. He was convinced tilere were evil people on board with hidden evil intentions and he wanted to get them all in the RPF. The RPF was used as an incredible daily threat over everyone. If he could smell something con~ing from the vents, whocx'er was the current vents engineer would bc assigned to the RPF. If the cook burned his food - RPF. If a messenger complained about someone - RPF. 'Itis actions definitely became more bizarre after the motor-cycle accident. You could hear him throughout the ship screaming, shouting, ranting and raving day after day. tlc was always claiming that the cooks were trying to poison him and he began to smell odours everywhere. His clothes had to be washed in pure water thirteen times, using thirteen different buckets of clean water to rinse a shirt so he wouldn't smell detergent on it. 'At that time no one would have dared to think that the emperor had no clothes. He controlled our thoughts to such an extent that you couldn't think of leaving without thinking there was something wrong with you.'7 To the relief of tile entire crew, the Commodore was more or less recovered from his accident by the time of his sixty-third birthday in March 1974 and the ship resumed its aimless wandering, this time on a triangular course bettween Portugal, lx. ladeira and the Canaries. But a subtle and bizarre change had taken place in the pecking order on board: after the Commodore and his wife, the most powerful people 322 Bare-Faced Messiah on the ship were now little girls dressed in hot pants and halter tops the new uniform of tile Commodore's faittlful band of messe~gers. While Hubbard tlad been suffering so vociferously, the messengers had assumed many extra little tasks on his behalf. They washed and combed his hair, helped him dress and undress, massaged his back, mixed his special night-time vitamin drink and smeared on his fleshy features the cream he mistakenly believed kept him looking youthful. When he recovered, the messengers continued with these duties and constantly competed with each other to find further little ways of pleasing the Commodore. The ritual of his ablutions, as devised by the messengers, set the tone for tlubbard's increasingly baroque lifestyle. 'At first I was surprised at all the ttlings we had to do,' said Tanya Burden, who had joined the ship in Madeira as a trainee messenger at the age of fourteen. 'But then I thought this man has studied for fifty years to help the world and has dune so much for mankind, why should he have to do anytiling for himself? \Vhcn hc woke up he would yell 'q\lcssengcr" and two of us would go into his room straight away. He would usually be lying in his bunk in his underwear with one arm outstretched, waiting for us to pull him up to a sitting position. While one of us put a rubc round his shoulders, tile other one xvould give him a cigarette, a li~ol non-filter, light it and stand ready with an ashtray. ! would run into the bathrueml to make sure his tuothbrush, snap and razor were all laid out in a set fashiun and I prepared his bath, checked the shampoo, towel and tile tcmpcraturc of the water. '\Vhcn hc went into the bathroom we would lay out his cluthes, powder his socks and shoes and fold everything ready to get him dressed. Everything had to be right because if it wasn't i~e would yell at us and we didn't want to upset him. The last tiling we wanted to do was upset him. %'hen he came out of the shower, he would bc in his underwear. Two of us held his pants off tile floor as he stepped into them. He didn't like his trouscr legs to touch the floor, God forbid that should happen. We pulled up his pants and buckled his belt, although he zipped them. \Ve put on his shirt, buttoned it up, put his Kools in his shirt pocket, tied his cravat and coalbed his hair. All this time he'd be standing there watching us run around him. Then we'd follow him out on to the deck carrying anything he might need - cloak, hat, binoculars, ashtray, spare cigarettes, anything he could possibly think of wanting. We felt it was an honor and a privilege to do anything for him. ,s The messengers were all potential high school cheerleaders in appearance - pretty blondes with even white teeth and red lips, pert little breasts straining against knotted halter tops, bare midriffs, tight hot pants, long tanned legs, bobbysox and platformed-soled sandals. Atlantic (';ossing 323 They had devised the uniform themselves, with the Commodore's approval, and it gave them maximum opportunity to flaunt their pubescent assets to advantage. While male members of the crew competed avidly to deflower the messengers, Hubbard hindself never once exhibited any sexual interest in them. 'tie never tried anything with me,' said Tanya, 'and as far as I know hc never did with any of the other girls. tte didn't sleep with Mary Sue; we thought perhaps he was impotent. I think he got his thrills by just having us around.' 'I once asked him why he chose young girls as messengers,' said Doreen Smith. 'He said it was an idea he had picked up from Nazi Germally. He said Hitler was a madman, but nevertheless a genius in his own right and the Nazi Youth was one of the smartest ideas he ever had. \Vith young people you had a blank slate and you could write anytiling you wanted on it and it would be your writing. That was his idea, to take yotmg people and m~uld them into little Itubbards. tte said he had girls because women were more loyal than men.' The more the messengers did for the Commodore, the more he came to think of them as the only members of tile crew he could trust. At nights, when they were undressing him and going through the elaborate business of getting him ready for bed, hc liked to talk to them, sharing confidences and telling them about his adventures. They would sit on tile carpet at the end of his bed listening to his stories, wide-eyed, for hours. The special status they enjoyed did nothing for their characters. 'We became', Jill Goodman admitted, 'poisonous little wenches. \Vc had power and we were untoucllable.' It was not in the least unusual for a fourteen-year-old messenger to march up to a senior executive on the ship and scream: 'You fucking asshole, you're going to the RPF. That'll teach you to luck up.' It was unthinkable to answer back; it would have been like ansxvering back to ttubbard. 'A sort of "Ian'd of the Hies syndrome" began working with the messengers,' said Rebecca Goldstein, who had been recruited into Scientology by her brottler, Amos Jessup. 'They were so drunk with their own power that they became extremely vengeful, nasty and dishonest. They were a very exclusive, dangerous little group.' In lxday 1974, Hubbard did a very curious thing which perhaps indicated that he was losing his facility to distinguish, even in his own mind, between fact and fiction: he applied to the US Navv for the war medals he had always claimed he had been awarded but icnew he had never won. On 28 May, the ship's liaison office in New York wrote to the Navy Department enclosing an authorization from 1tubbard to obtain his medals and asking for them to bc forwarded as soon as possible. The 324 Bare-Fat'ed Messiah letter provided some helpful background data on lx. Ir Hubbard, quoted from one of his spurious 'official' biographies: 'He served in the South Pacific and in 1942 was relieved by fifteen officers of rank and was rushed home to take part in the 1942 battle against German submarines as Commanding Officer of a Corvette serving in the North Atlantic. In 1943 he was made Commodore of corvette squadrons and in 1944 he worked with amphibious forces.' There followed a list of seventeen medals awarded to Mr Hubbard, including the Purple Heart and the Navy Commendation Medal, many of them with bronze stars. On 18 June, the Navy Department replied, enclosing the four routine medals awarded to former Lieutenant Lafayette R. ttubbard, US Naval Reserve, and noting, 'The records in this Bureau fail to establish Mr Hubbard's entitlement to the other medals and aw'ards listed in your request. ''~ The Commodore apparently had no difficulty circumventing this little problem: he quickly put into circulation an eight-by-ten colour photograph of twenty-one medals and paints he had won during the war. Some were missing, he explained to the crew. }te had actually won twenty-eight medals, but the remainder were awarded to him in secret because naval command were embarrassed that he had sunk a cnuplc uf sulks in their own 'back yard'. In the summcr, the Commodore turned his attention from his own image to that of his ship. t lc was taken with an idea to improve the Aptdlo's public relations by staging free concerts and dance performances for the local residents at her regular ports of call. After hours of watcl~ing television in Queens, he considered hindself an expert on popular music and modern dance and believed he had made important 'discoveries' about tim nature of rock music and the need for a strong heavv beat. tte often demonstrated Iris theories to a mystified Jim Dincalci. On the ship, he was able to put his ideas into practice with his own band, the 'Apollo Stars', made up of volunteers from the crew chosen at auditions conducted bv the Commodore with all the confidence and aplomb of a man who had spent a lifetime in show business. Ken Urquhart, who probably knew more about music than am'one on board, resolutely refused to become involved. 'My favourite composer was NIozart, not the horrible, raucous noise they were making. They practiced on the deck most afternoons, playing music made up bv LRtt with a very primitive, animal beat. There was no way 1 was going to go near them.' Mike Goldstein, who had played drums in a semi-professional group while he was at university, volunteered to play with the Apollo Stars in order to get out of the RPF. 'LRIt had said anvone in tim RPF who was accepted for the Atlantic Crossing 325 band or the dance troupe would be let out. I volunteered because I thought anything was better than running around in a black boiler suit. I was wrong. The band was terrible, awful; it was the most embarrassing tiring I have ever done.' Hubbard's idea was that the Apollo Stars would be playing on the aft well deck each time the ship entered a harbour and that bookings for both the band and dance troupe would be arranged in advance at ever}' port of call. Since he would be making appearances himself, he had a new uniform designed with a suitably theatrical flair. It featured a powder bluc kepi with a lavishly gold-braided peak and a cloak in the same hue, lined with scarlet silk. He looked, Urquhart reported, 'most peculiar'. Quentin |h~bbard, now twenty, began rehearsing with the dance troupe and enjoyed it so much he made the mistake of telling his father he would like to be a dancer. 'Oh no you wouldn't,' Itubbard replied. 'I have otbcr plans for you.' Tl~ere was no further discussion and Qucntin was no longer allowed to perform. Not long afterwards, he made a feeble attempt at suicide while the ship was docked at Funchat in lx. ladeira. 'lle'd gone missing ashore for a while,' said his friend Doreen Smith, 'and while people were out looking for him he just walked back on boardZ I went to see him in his cabin to make sure he was OK and found him lying on his brink. tlc smiled at me and I said, "tli, how are you feeling?" 1te said, "Not so good, my stomach's real upset." Then he said, "Dotten, I've done the most awful thing. I've taken a whole lot of pills." I said, "Oh shit. Get out of the bunk and don't go to sleep." I began walking him around the cabin and said, "You know I'm going to have to tell your Dad, don't you?" tle nodded and said, "I know. He'll know what to do."' Doreen ran to the Commodore's cabin and said 'Quentin's taken some pills.' llubbard did not need it spelled out. tic told Doreen to fetch some mustard from the galley and mixed it into a drink which he made Quentin gulp down. The boy vomited repeatedly and was taken to the sick bay to recover. His father sent down a message that as soon Quentin was well enougb to leave the sick bay, he was to be assigned to the RPF. Mary Sue, who had a reputation for protecting her children against the excesses of the ship's regime, was powerless to intervene. She was supposed to be responsible for welfare on board indeed, she had won a special dispensation from the Commodore to allow married couples in the RPF to spend one night together a week but knew her husband was in a towering rage over Quentin and there was nothing she could do. Rebecca Goldstein was among the inmates of the RPF when Quentin arrived. 'It was real tough for him,' she said. 'He was very 326 Bare-Faced Messt~h delicate and refined, not at all self4mportant, very unlike his father. He had hardly any facial or body hair and it was very hard to say whether he had started shaving. There were rumours that he'd attempted suicide before. tie cringed from his father, he was completely overwhelmed by him.' TIle valiant attempts of the Apollo Stars and its associated dance troupe to win the hearts and minds of the Spanish and the Portuguese people did not meet with overwhelming success, although ttle political climate did not help. There had been a military coup in Portugal earlier in the year and the subsequent unease tended to make the Portuguese netvotes of mysterious foreign ships calling at its ports for no apparent reason. The Apollo had also managed to upset the Spaniards by mistakenly attempting to enter a major naval base at El Firol. The ship's real problem, however, was that its 'shore story' was wearing thin. Portuguese and Spanish port authorities were still being told that the Apollo was owned by a highly successful business consultancy firm, but all they could see was an did, rust-streaked ship, often fcstooncd with ragged laundry. and crewed by young people in tattered, ill-assorted uniforn~s. It was little wonder that suspicions mounted about its activities and rumard, the controller, but it was inconceivable that she was acting on her own initiative or not discussing progress with her husband. And although tile amateur agents had discovered it was ridiculously easy to infiltratc, bug and burgle US govcrnn~ent offices, the risks were considerable, both to the agents themselves and their church superiors..llubbard was not too worried about who would take the rap if Operation Sno,.v White was exposed, as long as it was not him. A few days before he moved to Dunedin, he appro~'ed a Guardian's Office proposal to infiltrate agents into the US Attornev's offices in Washington DC and Los Angeles with the specific task of providing an early wartling of any legal moves against him. In its usual clumsy prose, the Guardian's Office defined the first priority of 'Program LRt{ Security' as 'ix, laintain an alerting Early Warning System throughout the GO N/x,V [Guardian's Office network] so that any situation concerning govts or courts by reason of suits is known in adequate time to take defensive actions to suddenly raise the level on LRH personal security very high.'s Confident that the Guardian's Office would protect him, t{ubbard planned to insinuate himself into Clearwater society by posing as a photographer with an interest in taking scenic pictures for the tourist industry. 'Taking pictures of "beautiftd Cx, V" is the local button,' he Running ..~round 337 wrote in a letter to Henning Heldt, a deputy guardian. 'lx. ly portrait of the mayor will hang in city hall never fear.' The mayor of Clearwater, Gabriel Cazares, had more important things on his mind than having his portrait taken. Like many of the good citizens of Clearwater, he was concerned by the sudden influx of strangely incommunicative young people. They were busily scrubbing and cleaning the Fort Harrison Hotel and the old bank building, wore a form of uniform and appeared to be guarded. 'I am discomfited,' the perplexed mayor finally announced, 'by the increasing visibility of security personnel, armed with billy clubs and mace, employed by the United Churches of Florida. I am unable to understand why this degree of security is required by a religious organization.' For his discomfiture, the mayor was instantly placed on Scientology's 'enemies list'. l-{e would have been even more discomfited had he seen a directire issued in December outlining plans to take control of 'key points in the Clearwater area'. The aim of 'Project Power' was to 'establish the indispensibilitv of United Churches' in the community and the means of achieving ihe objective involved classic Hubbardjan strategS.': 'The overall plan is to locate opinion leaders - then, their enemies, the dirt, scandal, vested interest, crime of the enemies (with overt data as much as possible). Then turn this over to UC [United Churches] who will approach the opinion leader and get his agreement to look into a specific subject (which will lead to the enemies' crimes). UC then "discovers" the scandal, etc, and turns it over to the opinion leader for his use. Ops [operations] can be done as a follow up to remove or restrain the enemy.'6 Before United Churches' cover was blown, Itubbard made a foray into Clearw'ater to direct the taping of a radio show in which three local ministers had been invited to participate. The Commodore had abandoned his gold-embossed naval whites in favour of a beret and khaki fatigues and in this freakish outfit, topped by headphones, be bustled about, twiddling knobs, adjusting microphones and directing where everybody should stand. 'They introduced him to me as lx, lr Hubbard,' said the Reverent R. L. Wicker, of Clearw'ater's Calvary Temple of God. 'But that didn't mean anything to me. They said he was an engineer.' In January, the Guardian's Office discovered that local newspapers were moving closer to discovering the real identity of United Churches. Silver reported that a Bette Orsini of the St Petersburg Times was asking questions about the tax-exempt status of the Church of Scientology. And June Bvrne, a Scientologist who had got a job as a clerk in the news room'at the Clearwater Sun told the GO that reporter Mark Sableman seemed to be making a connection between 338 Ba~e-t'~ced Messiah United Churches and Scientology. IIe had been checking the registration plates of cars used by United Churcbes officials and had discovered one was licensed in the name of 'R. I{ubbard'. On 28 January 1976, the 'Reverend' Arthur J Maren, a striking figure with an Old Testament beard, arrived in Clearwater from Los Angeles to announce at a news conference that the Church of Scicntology were the owners of tile Fort Harrison Hotel and the Bank of Clearwater building. Its involvement had not previously been revealed only out of an altruistic desire to avoid overshadowing the work of its subsidiary organization, United Churches. On 5 February, five hundred citizens artended an open day at the Fort Harrison I [otel to view the renovation work that had already been completed. l\'laren reassured those present that tberc was nothing to fear from Scientology. 'Scicntol~gists are people who don't drink or violate laws,' he said. 'They arc friendly and want to contribute.' Ncxt day, the Church of Scicntology filcd a $1 million lawsuit against l\lavor Gabriel Cazarcs, accusing him of libel, slander and violation of the church's civil rights. Hubbard thought it was unlikely that his own security in King Arthur's Court had bccn comprnmiscd, since his location was knoxvn to so foxy people and all of them were well-trained and fanatically loyal. But there was a kind of pcrfidiot~s incvitabilitv that bc would eventually bc wrong-fooled, as had happened so often in his singular career. TIlls time it was no onc's fault but his own. lie dccidcd hc nccdcd ancw wardrobe for Ins new life on shure. 1 lis usual babit was to order what tie wanted from a tailor in Savilc Row, via his secretary at Saint tlill :'x, lanor, but on tbis occasion hc was impatient and decided to call in a local tailor from Tarport Springs, the next town up Route 19A, north of Dunodin. The tailor turned out to be a science-fiction fail and while hc was measuring his ncxv client they got talking about science fiction. I lubbard let slip Ins identity and the tailor xvas delighted to be able to shake the hand of the great L. Ron Hubbard, wbose sci-fi stories hc had for so long admired. Back in Tarpon Springs, he told Iris wife, 'You'll never guess xvho I was just measuring for a suit . . .' News travelled fast thereabouts and it was not long before a reporter began knocking on the doors of King Arthur's Court in Dunedin. Hubbard bolted. '\Ve'rc leaving riglit now,' he sbouted at Kima Douglas, then head of tile household unit. '\Vhat do you want to take with you?' Kima, wbo was accustomed to handling crises, suggested her husband, .'x. like. tlubbard agreed he could be their driver. 'tie was more agitated than I had seen him for years,' Kima recalled. '\Ve did not have time to do anything but pack a small bag.' tlubbard had five suitcases already stowed in the trunk of his gold Cadillac and they Run n ing :t~,ro u nd 339 swept out of King Arthur's Court as the sun was setting in the gulf. With lx, likc Douglas at the wheel, Kima on the front seat beside him and Hubbard cowering in the back to avoid being seen, they headed across the Florida panhandle on Route 4 in the direction of Orlando. It was a journey that Kima Douglas would never forget: 'Somewhere near Orlando we stopped at a hotel, I think it was a Great Western, and checked in under false names. LRt l was supposed to be my father. We got adjoining rooms and then LRtl sent l\like out to telephone Mary Sue from a payphone to find out what had happened. When he came back, he said he had not been able to get through because she had moved her office. TIle old man just broke down and wept; tears poured out of his eyes. \Ve didn't know wbat the hell was bappcning. He started to wail, "Don't you see? If she's moved her office it means that someone's been there. The whole thing's broken down. Don't you understand?" It looked like he was going to have a tieart attack right tilere, so .Mike went out to the payphone again to try and get some more information. \Vhcn hc got back he said everything was OK. Mary Sue had moved her office from one apartment to another because she thought she would be more comfortable.' Early next morning tlubbard apprised his travelling companions that tti'cy .were going to drive the 1200 miles to New York, but they were going to ditch tbc Cartlilac because it was too noticeable. I lc gave [)ouglas $5000 to go out and buy another car; Douglas returned an hour later with a second-band Chevrolet hatchback, big enough for their suitcases and suitably nondescript. They left immediately. '\Ve were on the road fur three or four days,' said Kima. 'It was a horrendous trip. Hc sat in the back smoking cigarettes like mad and every time he saw a police car he'd scream, "TIxere they arc, tbev'rc afro; us~" We had to keep turning off the highways antt freeways, stopping continually, to avoid police cars. We went through some real hokev places. One time he got out of the car and started beating the roof i,~'ith frustration. I said to him very quietly, "Get back in the car, sir. Everything's all right ." 'tlc kept saying we had to get to New York, we had to get to New York, but as we were driving through New Jersey I could see he was getting more and more affected by the pollution. He was hyperventilating, panting for breath. It was scary, really scary. We headed for Queens, where he had staved before, and an aeroplane went overhead throwing out all kinds of 'shit. I pointed to it and said, "Sir, I'm not going to do this to you. There's no way you're going to stay here." By then he was like a child and mumbled something about do whatever you want. I said we should turn round and go back to Washington DC. He just said, "Do whatever you have to do." ,7 l\like Douglas swung the wheel on the Chevrolet and turned back in 340 Bare-Fetced Messiah the direction from which they had just come, south along the New Jersey turnpike, across the Delaware river into Maryland as far as the outskirts of \Vashington DC. They found rooms for the night in a hotel just off the Capital Beltxvay. Next morning, Kima drove downtown to look for more permanent accommodation. She found a comfortable brownstone on Q Street in Georgetown, only nine or ten blocks from the Washington org, and signed a $1300-a-month rental agreement. \Vithin a few days of moving into the brownstone, Hubbard had recovered his composure. Telex communications were set up and the usual retinue of messengers and aides moved in, including Jim Dincalci, who drove up from Florida towing a U-Haul trailer loaded with tile Commodore's personal possessions and private papers. Daily reports began arriving from Mary Sue, many of them detailing the activities of Operation Snow White. 'It was strange to think', said Kima, 'that while we were lying low in Washington, other Scicntologists were going through the files in government buildings not far from where we were living.' In the bustling streets of Georgetown, Hubbard felt safe to go out and about, although he grew a beard and touk to wearing a curious assortment of old clothes in the fond belief that hc would merge into the cosmopolitan atmosphere. '11e bought clothes from Salvation Army stores, real gungey stuff,' said Alan Vos, one of the aides who had moved into the Q Street brownstone. 'It was strange because on the ship be had had all these phobias about dust and smells and how his clothes had to be washed, but that all vanished when we were living together in Washington. '|te used to go out walking and sit in the sidewalk caf,2s on Connecticut Avenue. The Scientology office was just a couple of blocks away and he was often handed flyers by people recruiting for Scientology; he thought it was very funny. One day he got talking to a woman in a restaurant about Scientology and he suggested she should go round to the org on S Street. I heard later that when she got there the}' asked who had sent her and she pointed to LRIt's picture on the wall and said, "That man over there." They went crazy and started an investigation on her, thinking she was some kind of government plant. 'It seemed to me that LRH was happy in \Vashington, happy to be getting out, mixing with other people, going to the movies. On tile ship he had no idea what was happening in the world. tlc thought about moving his headquarters to Washington and looked at a property - there was a hotel for sale on Dupont Circle - but Mary Sue talked him out of it. She didn't like Washington and convinced him it was too dangerous. That's the kind of thing she used to do - play on his fears and psychoses about violence and police. ,s Rttnning :lground 341 Hubbard spent quite a bit of time researching in the library of Congress, reading up on black magic and the occult, and most days he took a walk in Rock Creek Park, where he believed that FBI agents were trained. He bought a trick camera with a lens that looked sideways and amused himself by taking pictures of trainee agents for future reference. Kima Douglas thought he was mad to take the risk. Coincidentally, Rock Creek Park was also the chosen venue for a fake hit-and-run accident which the Guardian's Office set up in an attempt to end the political career of the troublesome mayor of Clearw'ater. Gabriel Cazares by then figured promirlently on tile Church of Scientology's hit-list and the Guardian's Office had been trying to dig up some dirt on him for weeks. Scientologists had gone back to his home town of Alpine, Texas, trawled through public records, nosed around the courthouse and even checked the |leadstones in the local graveyard, without success. But then it was disclosed that Cazares would be attending tile national mayors' conference in Washington from 13-17 March and the Guardian's Office made hasty plans to give him a welcome. A Scicntologist posing as a X, Vashington reporter sought an interview with Cazares and introduced him to a friend, Sharon Thomas, who offered to show the mayor the sights of Washington. Nliss Thonlas was, of course, working for the Guardian's Oftice. Driving with the mayor through scenic Rock Creek Park, she temporarily lost control of her car and ran into a pcdcstrian, whu crumpled dramatically. To the mayor's horror, Miss Thon~as accelcratcd away without stopping, leaving the injured man lying on the road. A Guardian's Office memo the following day discussed ways of using the accident to discredit Cazares and concluded: 'I sbuuld think the mayor's political days are at an end.' Curiously Cazares was also on the Commodore's mind. On the very same day, Itubbard scrawled a note to the GO: 'Cazares - is there still some possibility the Cubans in Miami might get the idea he is pro-Castro?' The 'victim' of the hit-and-run accident was a young man called Michael Mcisner, a Scientologist since 1970. Mcisner was the key figure in Operation Snow White: he was 'running' all the GO agents who had been infiltrated into governnxent agencies in Washington, had personally taken part in several burglaries at the Department of Justice and organized the copying of tens of thousands of secret government files. For almost eighteen months, GO agents had been sneaking in and out of government buildings without hindrance, but on' the evening of 11 June 1976, things started to go wrong when the FBI discovered Mcisncr and Silver in tile US Courthouse Library at the foot of Capitol Hill. They were waiting for cleaners to vacate all office from which they were going to steal files, but they told the FBI 342 Ba~e 4?aced Messiah agents they were doing legal research. They presented fake identification docun~ents and were allowed to leave. Next day, in the brownstone on Q Street, an agitated Ilubbard shoxved Kima Douglas a tclcx from Mary Sue anti asked, 'What am I going to do about this?' 'The essence of the report,' said Kima, 'was that they had caught the man who had been getting all this great infornlation for us from the tax files.' Althoug}l no arrests had yet been made, [tubbard surmised, correctly, that there was trot~ble in store. His instinct, once again, was to flee. A bolttlolc had been estabhshcd on the other side of the country in anticipation of just this eventual/ty. On the following mor~ing, Kinla Douglas checked in at National Airport with her elderly "father", for a flight to Los Angeles. Travelling under false names, tt;ey sat together in the first-class cabin and watched an adventure triovie, featuring a spectacular hang-glider rescue, which tile old man very much enjoyed. At LAX, the). were met by a limousine and driven to Overland Avenue in Culvcr City, where Gerry Armstrcmg had rented four adjoining apartments. Back at tbc brownstone on Q Street in Gcorgetoxvn, the occupants xvcre toiling in and out of tbc hnuse, loading boxes into two U-llaul trailers parked outside. They would leave that night for the long drive across tbc continent to Los Angctcs. Overkind Avcm~c was a wide tree-lined street with low-rise apartment blocks on one sitlc and tbc usual An~crican suburhan parade of shopping plazas, tilling stations and used-car lots on the other. It was nlidttlc-class lind anonymous, the kind of place where people could come and go for mnntl~s with~ut ever being noticed by their neighbouts. Arn/strong had alread), set up a tclcx link before the Comn~odote arrived. Special decoder equipment was installed to provide direct secure communicatirons with Clearwater and the Guardian's Office in Los Angeles, code-named Beta. Overland Avent~e's code natne was Alpha. Among earl)' telex messages to arrive at Alpha was the news that Gerald Wolfe, agent Silver, had been arrested at his desk at tile IRS building in Washington and a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Michael ~leisner,wbo was nlissing from his home. Hubbard was not surprised by ~leisner's disappearance - he was staying at Beta, where he xvas being provided with a new appearance and identity. ~lary Sue's platl was that he should 'lose himself' in some large city. Mary Sue soon joined her husband at Overland Avenue to discuss the situation and some pressing family problems. She persuaded him that they would be able to resume fanilly life in safety if they could find a remote rancb somcwbere in southern California, but the truth was that the family had already disintegrated under the stress of constantly being 'on the run'. Diatla's marriage was in trouble, Run n ing A&,ro u n d 343 Quentin was supposed to be working for the org in Clearwater but was constantly absent, reckless Suzette was dating 'wogs' and Arthur had dropped out of the California Institute of the Arts after gentle Jim Dincalci bad pulled strings to get him a place. 'I took his portfolio along,' said Dincalci, 'made up a story about him and gave him a false hyphenated name to disguise who he was. Hc was accepted on the strength of his portfolio and his mother and father were very happy with it, but he didn't last long.' Not unreasonably, Mary Sue longed for some kind of stability and missions were despatched to find a property for the family, although Hubbard insisted that there had to be enough space to accommodate Iris messengers and his ever-changing court of loyal aides. Tile Commodore could not countenance life witbout a bevy of nubile messengers at his beck and call. Kima Douglas went to look over a beautiful farm with its own beach not far from Santa Barbara and pleaded with him to buy it, but he said it was too expensive at $4 million. Then a mission scouring the Palm Springs area reported back on a promising property in the desert at La Qumta, on tile east side of the San Jacinto Mountains, which was on the market for $1.3 million. Itubbard drove down to look at it in his new red Cadillac Eldorado convertible, wearing a jaunty little cap pulled down over his straggling long hair, which bad at last turned grey. It was not a car that guaranteed him a low profile, but he had insisted on having it. t le swept in through tim high gates of tile Olive Tree Ranch at La Quinta, took a quick look round, professed himself satisfied and returned immediately to Los Angeles. La Quinta was about twenty minutes' drive from Palm Springs and was a quiet little community of cheap low-roofed houses that simmered on a flat patch of sun-scorched earth between the mountains. Olive Tree Ranch occupied the land behind the seedy La Quinta Country Club and perversely grew dates and citrus fruit rather than olives. The main house was a sprawling white adobe hacienda with a red-tiled roof built around a courtyard. There was a swimming-pool with an island in the middle sporting a single, surprising, palm tree and two other smaller houses, one called Rifle and the other The Palms. As soon as the purchase papers had been signed, a working party from the Los Angeles RPF moved in to begin renovations and improvements. Hubbard had decided he would live in Rifle and wanted the house painted white throughout, with white tiles on tbe floor and all white furniture. Telex machines were installed in the main house, but it was intended that the ranch would be insulated as much as possible from the Church of Scientology. Everyone living and working there was given a cover name, warned not to use Scientology words or bring Scientology books on to tbe property. 344 Bare4~hced s~4essiah The ttul~bards moved in at the beginning of October 1976 and began to enjoy a new life of tranquillity on their ranch in the desert. ']'he messengers noticed a change in the Commodore; he was much more relaxed than formerly and usually in good spirits. But on the morning of x, Vednesday, 17 November, as Doreen Smith was running across the Rifle to begin her watch, she could hear him shouting at the top of his voice: 'That stupid fucking kid! That stupid fucking kid! Look what he's done to me! Stupid fucking . . .' As she got closer, she could hear another unearthly, chilling noise. It was Mary Sue keening, barely drawing breath, but emitting a terrible endless scream. x. Vhen she entered the house, the messenger she was relieving was in tears. She sobbed out the awful news: 'Quentin's killed himself.' Quentin had been found in Las Vegas at 0832 hours on 28 October, slumped over the steering-wheel of a white Pontiac parked off Sunset Road alongside the perimeter fence of McCarran Airport at the end of the north-south runway. All the car windox~'s were rolled up and a white vacuum cleaner tube led from the passengcr's vent window to the exhaust tail pipe. Tissue papers had been stuffed into the window opening around the tube and the car's engine was still running. Officer Brux~s of the Las Vcgas Metropolitan Police Dcpartn~ent was first on the scene. Hc wrenched open both the car doors and ascertained that thc young man inside was still alive, though unconscious, probably because the tube had fallen off the tail pipe. He carried no i&ntification of any kind and there were no liccncc plates on the car. There was nothing in the car but a Grundig portable radio, a black tote bag containing miscellaneous clothing and an open, partly consumed, bottle of tequila. 'The vehicle appeared as though the subicct might have been sleeping in it,' the police report noted. 'The subject himself was very unkempt, his clothing was dirty, and would be possibly described as a vagrant type subject. A white male, appeared in his mid to late 20s. The subject was transported to Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital via Mercy Ambulance . . .,9 As no one knew who he was, Quentin was admitted to hospital as 'John Doe'. The only identifying marks that the hospital could record were his red hair and red moustache. He never regained consciousness and died at 2115 on 12 November. The police records listed him as a 'possible suicide'. On Monday, 15 November, the Las Vegas coroner's office began making attempts to establish 'John Doe's' idenitv. His car, which had been impounded, was re-checked and a Florida itighway Patrol smog sticker was found, along with a vehicle identification number. A telex to the Florida department of motor vehicles came up with the Running Aground 345 information that the vehicle was registered to a Quentin Hubbard of 210 South Fort Harrison Avenue, Clearwater. Descriptions of the car and the dead man were telexed to Clearwater police department with a request that the information be checked. At 8.40 pm that same day, a man called Dick Weigand telephoned the deputy coroner from Los Angeles airport, said he was leaving for Las Vegas in five minutes and hoped to be able to identify John Doe. They agreed to meet at ten o'clock that night at the Medical Examiner Facility on Pinto Lane. \Veigand was a senior Guardian's Office agent. He arrived at Pinto Lane five minutes late and explained that he had been contacted by a Kathy O'Gorman, who lived at the same address in Clearwater as Quentin Hubbard. However, he said he had only seen Quentin a couple of times and could not be sure of making a positive identification. x, Veigand viewed the body twice, stared into Quentin's white face, with his unmistakable red hair and moustache, then shook his head and said he was not sure. He could give no more help and he did not even knoxv the telephone number of Kathy O'Gorman in Clearwater. Weigand disappeared into the garish Las Vcgas night and immediately put a call through to the Guardian's Office to give them the bad news: it was Qucntin, all right. Mary Sue screamed for ten minutes when she heard the news. 'It was horrcndous,' said Kima Douglas. 'It kept on going. I couldn't believe she could get that much air in her lungs. The only time I had ever really seen her cry before was when Vixic, her Corgi, died and I had to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to try and revive it. The old man didn't cry or get emotional. He was furious - really angry that Quentin had done it.' That same morning, a detective from Clearwater police department telephoned Las Vegas to say that 210 South Fort Harrison Avenue was the address of the US headquarters of the Church of Scientology, but that the church's public affairs officer, one Kathy O'Gorman, had refused to give him any information about Qucntin ltubbard. The detective said that the Clearwater police had had 'many problems' with the church; as far as he knew, the founder, L. Ron |tubbard, lived on a yacht in the bay. The Guardian's Office, meanwhile, had moved swiftly to 'handle' the situation. Its local representative in Las Vegas was a pit boss at the Sands Hotel by the name of Ed Watters. 'I had been working as a covert operator for about eight years,' he said. 'I had secretly tape-recorded a psychiatrist and got him to talk about 1obotomies to try and discredit him and I had bugged the meetings of Clark County Mental Health Association, tt~ings like that. I worked on anything that org conceived to be a threat to the Hubbards. '1,Vhen they found out Quentin was here, I was told to get hold of all 346 Bare-Faced Messiah his medical files. There was apparently evidence that he had had a homosexual encounter shortly before he was found and they didn't want anything like that to get out. There was a girl Scicntologist working in the hospital in a very secure position and she got all the reports on Quentin and gave them to me and I handed them over to the Guardian's Office.r On the morning of Thursday, 18 November, Arthur Maren arrived at the coroner's office in Las Vegas and introduced himself as director of public affairs for the Church of Scientology. He said he would be able to make a positive identification of the body and at 11.25 he confirmed that John Doe was, indeed, Geoffrey Quentin McCaully Hubbard, aged twenty-two. Maren said that Quentin's parents were not in the United States, but were away on a trip round the world. March went backwards and forwards to the coroner's office over the next few days providing information designed to deter any further investigation into Qucntin's death. He even persuaded the coroner to describe the cause of death as 'undctermined' in a press release. Qucntin was said to have been on vacation and in Las Vegas to check out enrolmcnt requirements for a flying school. On lx. hn~day, 22 November, a young woman called Mary Rezzonico turned t~p with an authorization signed by L. R~n Hubbard and Mary Suc l lubbard for the release of their son's remains and his personal effects. l~,czzonico said she had personally obtained the signatures over the weekend at 'an unspccificd location in Ireland'. Qucntin was cremated next day at Palm Crematory in Las Vcgas. 'I knew he had homosexual problems,' said Ed x, Valtcrs, 'but he was a good kid. |{c was just a young, soft boy, not the ruthless, hard-nosed type. I lc had wanted to get out of Scientology for some time, but you don't just leave somett~ing like Scicntology. You quit and then instantly become an enemy. lie knew his father violently attacked anyone who betrayed him and he knew that the Guardian's Office would be after him as a traitor. tie had grown up in Scientolog>.' and would have been tremendously afraid of the world out there, full of wogs and evil people. I guess he just couldn't handle it.' 'He was just a miserable, miserable boy,' said Kima Douglas. '|{e was a little kid out of his depth who knew he could never compete with his father.' A final macabre chapter was still to be enacted. Quentin had chosen to die at the end of an airport runway, watching the aircraft he had longed to fly landing and taking off. It was thus resolved that his ashes should be scattered from a light aircraft over the Pacific. Frank Getbode, a Scientologist in Palo Alto, had his own aeroplane. 'The Guardian's Office telephoned and asked me to help with a special project,' Gerbode said. 'I was to fiv my plane out over the Run n ing Agro u n d 347 Pacific with a couple of GO people who were going to scatter Qucntin's ashes. I wasn't supposed to tell anybody, of course. It turned out to be a gruesome business. It's not easy to throw particulate matter out of a light aircraft and the ashes blew back into the plane. I was taking little bits of Quentin Hubbard out of the upholstery for months afterw'ards. '~ Chapter21 Alaking Movies 'The crime committed by these defendants is of a breadth and scope previously unheard oL No building, office, desk or file was safe from their snooping and prying. No individual or organization was free from their despicable conspiratorial minds. The tools of their trade were miniature transmitters, lock picks, secret codes, forged credentials, and any other device they found necessary to carry out their conspiratorial schenies. It is interesting to note that the founder of their organization, unindicted co-conspirator L. Ron Hubbard, wrote in his dictionary entitled ]}lottent ,llattagement Technology, Defined that, "Truth is what is true for you." Thus, with the founder's blessings, they could wantonly commit perjury as long as it was in the interests of Scientology.' (Government sentencing memorandum on lXlarv Suc I lubbard, ct al, October 1978) II, ~ /t Ig /1~ At Olive Tree Ranch, everytl~ing changed after Qucntin's death. The Commodore's all-too-brief bonhomie disappeared and he reverted to the familiar bellowing, foul-mouthed tyrant, plagued by phobias, surrounded by fools and besieged by enemies. ú x, Vhen he was in tile throes of a tantrum, he often looked deranged, with his long, unkempt hair, glaring eyes and flecks of saliva around his mouth. But no one would risk even thinking such a thing, lest it show up during auditing. There was a particularly feared phenomenon on the E-meter called a 'rock slam', when fi4e needle wavered violently, apparently indicating a discreditable thought. 'Rock slams' almost inevitably led to long periods of incarceration in an RPF, by then a feature of most of the major orgs. For those Scientologists who had only ever seen the dozen official pictures of L. Ron Hubbard, seeing him for the first time at La Quinta was something of a shock, as Anne Rosenblum discovered when she arrived to start training as a messenger: 'The first night I was there I didn't talk to LRH since he was busy, but I saw him. He had long reddish-gray hair down past his shoulders, rotting teeth and a really fat gut. He didn't look anything like his pictures. The next day I met Making Movies 349 him. He was doing exercises in his courtyard and called me over. I was nervous meeting him. I was really surprised that I didn't feel this "electric something or another" that I was told happens when you are around him.' Anne had been told that both lx. Iary Sue's pet dogs were 'clear' and that they would bark at anyone who had committed 'o~'erts' (crimes) about the Hubbards. She was dismayed when she walked into Rifle for the first time and one of the dogs came tearing out of l~.lary Sue's room, barking furiously at her. 'I started walking around wondering what deep, dark terrible overts I had committed on LRH or Mary Sue in this life or past lives.'~ Because their loyalty was unquestioned, the messengers knew more about what was going on in Scientology than anyone other than Hubbard and Mary Sue. They knew all about Operation Snow XVhite, for example, because the Hubbards often discussed its Nlachiavellian twists and turns over dinner. They were also privy to the family's intimate secrets. One afternoon, while Hubbard was away from his office, Doreen Smith came across a pile of letters Quentin had written to his father. She was surprised: she knew the Commodore had not replied to any of them because all his mail went out via the messengers. 'Out of curiosity, I pulled the letters out and read a couple,' she confessed. 'It sounded like Quentin had gone crazy. |{c was talking about people coming from outer space and what we were going to do about it and how tie knew the Marcabs were coming every five thousand years to check on our development. It seemed like tie had taken his father's space odyssey stories and plumped them in his own reality. It was real loony tune stuff.' SIte told no one about titis except, of course, all the other messengers. Doreen was close to the younger Hubbard children and was shocked by Quentin's letters. She was even more shocked by what happened when the Commodore fell out with his youngest daughter, Suzette. 'She was dating another Scientologist but for some reason tile Commodore didn't approve of him and so he sent a messenger with $5000 in cash to buy him off. The messenger was told to threaten the gu3ú that he would be declared SP if he didn't take the money and sign an agreement to stop seeing Suzette. 'But the agreenlent also made it look as if the guy was blackmailing Hubbard and threatening to take her away. That's what |iubbard told Suzette was happening. I was in his office when he called her in and showed her the agreement, shouting things like, "I told you so." Suzette might have seen through it, but she was a toughie. She started dating wogs and then, when she was being audited - auditing is like a confessional - she would describe everything she had done on the date in great detail, knowing that her father would read her folder. It was 350 Ba,e4"t~ced Messiah her way of getting back at him. The only form of communication she could have with her father was through her auditor. '|te went purple with rage when he read her folder with all that stuff in it and her saying things like, "If my father doesn't like what I'm doing, I don't give a damn." When hc had finished reading it, he threw it across the room and then threw a yellow legal pad at me and told me to take down a letter. He started dictating a letter disint~eriting Suzette and I began to cry. In the end I said, "l can't do this." I put down the pad and let him have it. "Quentin's dead," I said, "and now you're tearing your family apart. You can't do this to your family and to Mary Sue. If you want to send this letter, write it yourselL" Then I excused myself from the watch and ran out. Afterwards, I discovered he tore up the letter. He never did disinherit Suzette.' (Dorcen was a particular favourite with the Commodore and one of the few people at Olive Tree Ranch who would have dared suggest he might have made a mistake. Ilc called her 'Do', had a little engraved dog-tag made for her and in rate momet~ts of amiability he would give her an affectionate pat her on the head and say, 'That's my Do. ') Arthur, the youngest of tile t lubbard children, was in rather better favour with his father, although he made a pest of himself with everyone clsc at Olive Tree Ranch by riding his motur-cyclc around the property at breakneck speed. 'lie was a brat,' said Jim Dincalci. 'All the tinge.' Ills talent as an artist was hcing empluycd to paint a series of watcrculuurs illustrating incidents in his fathcr's early life, which were to bc used in a glossy, coffee-table tome published by tile church under the title, 11'hat Is Scientologx'? There were pictures of little Ron riding on his grandfatbcr's cattle ranch, sitting by a campfire with the Pikuni Indians, journeying 'throughout Asia' at tile age of fourteen, as a university student attending one of tile first nuclear physics courses and supporting himself as an essavist and technical writer (the caption somehow failed to mention his science fiction). Two paintings showed him crippled and blinded in a naval hospital after tile war and a third depicted him miraculously restored to health by the pow'er of mind. Arthur's pictures were unremarkablc art, but fascinating inasmuch as they illustrated most of the significant lies told by Iris father about Iris life before Scientology. In the early part of 1977, Hubbard became enthused by a project called the 'Purification Rundown' which he believed would rid the world of drug addiction. Ills debut as an authority on the subject was marked by tile issue of a hullctin in which he warned about the effects of LSD and listed its characteristics, as if after months of research, 'All the information came from one person who had taken LSD once.' said Jim Dincalci. 'That was how he did his research.'z Making Movies 35 1 At Hubbard's request, Dincalci put together the elements of the Purification Rundown, a regimen of exercise, diet and vitamins designed to rid the body of toxic substances. Dincalci never thought of it as much more than a simple plan for healthier living, but in tile grand arena of the Commodore's fantasies it was transforn~ed into a sensational discovery, the instant solution to the international drugs crisis, the salvation of the world's youth, a beacon of hope for drug addicts everywhere. Strenuotls attempts were made to provide scientific evidence to back up the vivifying claims made for the Purification Rundown and t lubbard was so carried away by his own brilliance that he soon began to dream of a suitable award for his contribution to humanity- a Nobel Prize, for example. He issued a written order to Laurel Sullivan, his personal public relations officer, allocating 'unlimited funds' to a project aimed at getting him a Nobel Prize and inquiries were immediately instituted to see if there were any Scientology connections, or strings that could be pulled, with mcn~bers of the Nobel nominating committee. Poor Mary Sue, meanwhile, was floundering in the aftermath of Operation Snow White. The real problem was what do with Michael lx. lcisner, who was growing restive as a fugitive and disenchanted with the efforts of his superiors to resolve Iris quandary. At one point ,x, lary Sue had considered trying to make him tbc scapegoat, suggesting he had organized tile burglaries in a fit of jealous pique because his wife was doing better as a Scicntnlogist than he was. Anott~er Guardian's Officer suggestion was that tim authorities should he told that ~leisncr was trying to blackmail the cburch. After eight months on the run, mnving from one secret address to another, Ixdcisner threatened to 'blow'. tlc was immediately placed under gnard. The fugitive had become a captive. On 20 June 1977, while being held at an apartment in Glendale, he gave his guards tile slip, changed buses twice to avoid pursuit and went into a bowling alley, from where he telephoned tile FB I. Ite said he wanted to give himself up. Two days later, the Guardian's Office received a letter from Nleisner, postmarked San Francisco, saying that he was lying low for a while to think things over. TIffs information was passed to Mary Suc, who responded: 'I frankly would not waste Bur 1 [Bureau One, the GO investigative division] resources looking for him, but '~voultt instead utilize resources to figure out a way to defuse him should he turn traitor.'3 It was too late. ~leisner was already in Washington describing to dumbrounded FBI agents the scope and success of Operation Snow White. At six o'clock on the morning of 8 July 1977, 134 FBI agents armed 352 Bare-Fa~'ed Messiah with search warrants and sledgehammers, simultaneously broke into the offices of the Churcb of Scientology in Washington and Los Angeles and carted away 48,149 documents. They would reveal an astcmishing espionage system which spanned the United States and penetrated some of the highest offices in the land. Hubbard's reaction to the raid was true to form: he immediately assumed the Guardian's Office had been penetrated by suppressives. It was clear to him he could now trust no one but the messengers. He also realized that the documents seized by the FBI would inevitably implicate ]x, Iary Sue in Operation Snow White and he was acutely aware of the need to put some distance between himself and his wife. On 15 July, in the middle of the night, a Dodge station wagon pulled out through the high gates of Olive Tree Ranch. To ensure it was not followed, the car showed no lights until it reached Highway 111, the main road between Indio and Palm Springs. Hubbard was slouched on the back seat of the car, grasping his midriff and complaining of stomach pains. With him were three messengers, Dianc Rcisdorf, Claire Rousseau and one of the few male messengers, Pat Brockcr. They headed north on Interstate 5, turning east at Sacramento, across the Sierra Nevada and the state line, througb Reno to Sparks, a city of low-rent houses, casinos and motels, situated on the Truckcc River. The sun was just rising when they checked into a motel under false names. Their story was that Pat and Claire were married, Diane was their cousin and l lubbard their elderly uncle. \Vhilc 11ubbard staved in his room at the motel, Pat went out to look for an apartment. lie quickly found somewt~ere suitably anonymous, paid cash and equipped it with everything they would need for an indefinite stay. The four of them moved in a few days later. For the remainder of 1977, Itubbard staved in hiding at Sparks. He cut off all direct communications with tile Guardian's Office and his family and relied on his three messengers to maintain secret links with the Church hierarchy. It was not long before they began to run out of money and elaborate arrangements were made for the transfer of cash from Clearwater. Pat Broeker met the DCO/CMO/CW (Deputy Commanding Officer, Commodore's Messenger Organization, Clearwater) at Los Angeles airport where they exchanged identical suitcases. Brocker collected a case containing one million dollars in hundred-dollar bills and returued to Sparks, frequently doubling back to ensure he was not being followed. To further launder the money, the bills were broken down into lower denomination notes in local casinos. For a man whose activities were under intense investigation by the FBI, Hubbard seenled remarkably insouciant. Most mornings he took a long walk, then spent tile rest of the day writing film scripts. 1tc had Making Movies 353 an idea for a feature film called Revolt in the Stars, a dramatization of high-level Scientology training about events which happened seventyfive million years ago when an evil ruler by the name of Xenu massacred the populations of seventy-six platlets, transported their frozen spirits back to earth and exploded them in volcanoes. He also wanted to make films that could be used for recruiting and instruction within the church and the more he thought about the idea of being a film director, the more he liked it. He was sixty-six years old and had onlv ever sbot home movies, but he did not consider his age or lack of experience to be any kind of drawback. A few days after Christmas 1977, word arrived at Sparks that the Commodore was unlikely to be indicted as a result of the FBI raid and he decided it was safe to move back to La Quinta. There was just one problem. He suspected that Marv Sue was still under FBI surveillance, so if he returned to Olive Tree Ranch, she would have to move out. Hubbard arrived back at the ranch on the morning of 2 January 1978 to tbe ritual rapturous welcotne from his followers. t-le spent a number of hours with l\lary Sue behind the closed doors of his study. No one knew what passed between them, but Mary Sue left the ranch that evening at the wheel of her BNI\V. Next day, Doreen Stnith was sent to Los Angeles to help her look for a house. \Vith the Commodore's return, security was stepped up. Guards with walkie-talkies patrolled the property day and night and were drilled on how to deal with process servers. If a visitor asked for Mr ||ubbard, thev were to deny all knowledge of him; if someone tried to press papers on them, they were to kick them away. In a real emergency, a button on every walkie-talkie would set off alarms all around the property. At the back of Rifle, a tan-coloured Dodge Dart with a souped-up engine and a full tank of petrol was kept ready for a getaway at all times. Behind the security screen, the Commodore was directing the setting up of a full-scale film unit. More property was purchased around ga Quinta - a ten-acre ranch, code-named l\Iunro, became a barracks for the film unit personnel and a studio was built in a huge barn on the Silver Sand Ranch, a 140-acre grapefruit farm. Lights, dollies, cameras and a vast range of technical equipment were all moved into the new studio. Hubbard took to wearing a cowboy hat, suspenders and a bandana, which he imagined gave him an artistic mien appropriate to a film director. The Cine Org was to cut its teeth making simple promotional films illustrating various situations in which Scientology could be used beneficially. Hubbard wrote all the scripts and knew exactly what he wanted, but found it infuriatingly difficult to transfer his vision on to 354 Bare-Faced Messiah celluloid. Surrotmtted by an army of enthusiastic amateurs running around desperate to please, nothing seen~ed to go right. If the actors remembered their lines, the lighting was botched; if the lighting was all right, the sound failed; if the sound was satisfactory, the sets fell down . . . The Commodore's temper worsened day by day. An appeal had gone out to Scientology branches around the world for volunteers with acting and film-making experience to help Ron in a special project. Among the first to arrive was a middle-aged couple from Las Vegas whose show business experience extended to four performances of their own dance and comedy act at the Sahara Showcase. Adelle and Ernie Hartwell were champion ballroom dancers who had taken a few Scientology courses and had been led to believe that joining the Cine Org xvould give them their big break. They were disillusioned from the moment of their arrival. 'I was absolutely shocked', said Ernie, 'to see every one running around in shorts, ragged clothes, dirty and unkempt. They put us in a little three-room shack on the edge of tbe ranch. We go inside and what a mess! The place was over-run with bugs and insects.' 'The main thing I disliked,' said Adelle, 'was that when we first got there we xvcre programmed on the lies xve had to tell. If we ran into one of uur friends, we had to tell a lie tn them and tell them we were just there for a vacation . . . x,~,'e were schooled on how to get away from process servers, FBI agents, any government officials or any policeman xvho wantcd anything to do with t lt,bbard.' Adellc's introduction to the Commodore was unforgettable. She x~as wnrking in the wardrobe department when she heard a barrage of abuse from behind a screen: 'You dirty goddam sons of bitches, you're so goddam stupitt. Fuck you, you cock-suckers . . .' It seemed to go on for several miuutcs. 'l had something in my hand and it fell to the floor,' she recalled. 'I said, "x, Vho in the world is that?" They said it was the Boss - we weren't allowed to use the name I lubbard for security reasons. "You mean the leader of the church speaks like that?" I asked. "Oh yes," was the reply. "he doesn't believe in keeping anything back."' Adelle Hartwell was supposed to be a make-up assistant on a movie called The 6)zfathomable 3Ian, which chronicled Hubbard's view of mankind from the beginning of time to the present day. She soon learned that ttubbard was a director who like plenty of gore, and gallons of fake blood had to be prepared m advance of everv day's shooting. 'Did he ever like those films to be bloody,' sbe said. 'It was enough to make you sick. 'x, Vc'd be shooting a scene and all of a sudden he'd yell, "Stop! .Make it more gory." We'd go running out on tbe set with all this Karo Syrup and food colouring and we'd just dump it all over the actors. Then Making Movies 355 we'd film some more and he'd stop it again and say, "It's still not gory enough," and we'd throw some more blood on them.'4 On one occasion, when filming a bnmbing raid on an FBI office - a scene I lubbard very much enjoyed - hc ordered so much blood to be poured over the unhappy actors that their clotbes became glued to their bodies and had to be cut off by wardrobe assistants. x, Vhen the Cinc Org was shooting in the studio, all the sets had to bc cleaned and scrubbed with special soap every morning before Hubbard arrived and tile messengers would go round with white gloves to ensure that it had been done properly. Hubbard bad a director's chair that no one else was allowed to sit in and as he was walking around the set a messenger would follow close behind him, ready to put the chair underneath him if he chose to sit down. One unfortunate girl got the positioning wrong by a few inches and as the Commodore sat down he missed the chair and sprawled on the floor. No one laughed: it was not wise to laugh at the Commodore- The girl was immediately despatched to the RPF. Despite tl~e somewhat desperate desire on everyonc's part that the Cinc Org sbould succeed, its films were in no danger of winning Oscars. One of the fundamental problems was that the scripts, although no one would admit it, were as amateurish as everything else. Narratives tended to begin, 'From the beginning of history, Man has searched for truth . . .' and many of the roles were wooden stereotypes or ludicrous caricatures reflecting l{ubbard's multitude of prejudices. One film, titled The Pn~blents of Life, featured a perplexed young couple searching for a meaning to their lives. They first consulted a psychiatrist, predictably portrayed as a demented sadist, then sought advice from a scientist, wbo was shown madly scribbling theorems on a blackboard as if completely insane. Finally they approached a beaming Scientologist and concluded thev were at last in the right place. Subtlety was not one of Hubbard's more obvious talents as a scriptwriter. 'The trouble was that he wanted to make movies that would take over Hollywood,' said Kima Douglas, 'but they were terrible, really terrible. The crew wotdd have to do scenes over and over again before he was satisfied. Occasionally the day would end up with a "Fine, well done everybody", but more often there were tantrums and he'd storm off the set screaming that it had better be right tomorrow .,s Gerry Armstrong was put in charge of set building. 'It was all hokev, worse than high school,' he said. 'When we were shooting films he w:as the most abusive I have ever seen him, screaming and .veiling all the time. People were running around terrified. He'd cover up his own incompetence by attacking everyone else. The guy had poor eyesight and he was running the cameras, so the shots were often out 356 Bare4:~ced Messiah of focus and he'd scream at the cameraman, "You can't frame a shot!" Or he'd hear a hum on the nlicrophone and start yelling, "Sound! Sound! You fucking idiots! Get off the set!'''6 Faithful Jim Dincalci was by this time convinced that Hubbard was unbalanced and he asked to be relieved of his post on the Commodore's staff. He was immediately ostracized. 'For two months Hubbard would not even acknowleclge my existence. He would not say hello or even nod at me. On the set in the morning he would say hello to everyone and deliberately skip me.' Dincalci was also less inclined to believe the Commodore's stories of his past life adventures: 'A friend of mine, Brian Livingstone, told me one time that Hubbard had finished [reading] a book and passed it on to him to read. He started reading it that night and next day he heard Hubbard talking about a lifetime where he had done these various things and Brian had just read about the same things itt the book !' Hubbard knew little of what was happening to Mary Sue during this period because the messengers censored her letters in order to avoid upsetting the Commodore. If Mary Sue sent bad news, the messengers cut out the offending passages with a razor blade, believing it to be their duty to keep such problems 'off his lines'. But they naturally rcad all Mary Suc's commul~ications themselves and were certainly not above gossip. On one occasion she wrote to ask, plaintivcly, why Ron spent so much time with 'his people' and so little time with her. 'I understand you're trying to save the world,' she wrote, 'but I need some time, too.' The contents of that letter were soon common knowledge all round ()live Tree Ranch. In truth, Mary Sue had much to complain about, because she had no doubt that she was going to have to take the rap for Operation Snow ~,Vhite. 'llubbard abandoned her', said Ken Urquhart, 'and made it quite clear within the org that he had abandoned her. It's the one thing I find hard to forgive - that he was prepared to allow his wife to go to jail for crimes he was equally guilt}' of. After the FBI raid I was put to work making up reports to show that he did not know what was going on. In other words, I was to cover his ass. tie was privy to almost all of it and was as guilt}' as Mary Sue. ,7 On 15 August 1978, a federal grand juD, in Washington indicted nine Scientologists on twenty-eight counts of conspiring to steam government documents, theft of government documents, burglarizing government offices, intercepting government communications, harbouring a fugitive, making false declarations before a grand ju~ and conspiring to obstruct justice. Heading the list of those indicted was Mary Sue Hubbard. She faced a maximum penalty, if convicted, of 175 years in prison and a fine of $40,000. On 29 August, all nine Making Movies 357 defendants were arraigned in the federal courthuuse at the foot of Capitol Hill and pleaded not guilty. A few days later, Hubbard collapsed while he was filming on location in the desert. 'The temperature was somewhere between 118 and 122 degrees,' said Kima Douglas. 'I had been watching the old man out there wheezing and struggling for breath, with flecks around his mouth. It was crazy; I knew he wouldn't be able to take it much longer. We always had a motor home at the location - he'd have his lunch in it and sometimes have a lie-down while the set was being prepared. Tt~is particular day he came back to the motor home and said he didn't feel well. His pulse was extremely erratic and his blood pressure was way up. I thought he was going to die and said that we ought to get him to hospital. He gripped my arm and said, "This time, no!"' I tubbard was taken back to Olive Tree Ranch, apparently slipping in and out of a coma. At one point he muttered to Kima, 'If I die, bury me in the date field.' A Scientologist doctor, Gene Denk, was summoned from Los Angeles and driven to the ranch blindfolded but he seemed unsure what xvas wrong with the Commodore. Hubbard had always said that he only got ill because his encmics were pushing bad energy on him; it was just sometiring saviours had to put up with, he would explain with a shrug. Auditing was the way to exorcize bad energy. David Mayo, the senior case supervisor in Clearwater, did not know where he was going or what he had to do. All he was told was that an urgent, top-secret teicx had arrived at tile CMO instructing him to be on the next flight to Los Angeles. tie was given twenty minutes to get to the airport and didn't even have time to say goodbye to his wife. No one was to know that he had gone. It was nightfall when he arrived at Los Angeles airport. He was met by a Scientologist he vaguely recognized and hurried out to a waiting car, which swept out of the airport complex and up on to Los Angeles' bcwildering network of freeways. Neither of the men in the car would tell NIavo where they were taking him. Somewt~ere on tile outskirts of the city they stopped at a parking lot and switched cars. Half an hour later, in another parking lot, Nlavo was bundled into a tbird car and this time he was blindfolded. He asked what was going on and the driver replied: 'We're taking .you to LRH. He's sick. Keep the blindfold on until we arrive.' NIayo was dismayed when he was at last ushered into the Commodore's room at Rifle. 'He was obviously very ill, lying on his back a[most in a coma. He could talk a little, but very slowly and quietly. There was medical equipment all round him, including an electric pulse machine to re-start his heart. Denk told me he thought LRH 358 Bare 4:t~ced Messiah was close to death. tle would have moved him into a bospital but he thought file ride in the ambulance might finish him off. I was given his PC folders and told to solve the problem. I started looking through tile folders that night and began auditing him next day. ,s |tubbard slowly recovered, proving the wondrous efficacy of auditing to everyone at Olive Tree Ranch except, perhaps, the Commodore's auditor. Mayo was deeply disturbed by what he learned during his daily auditing sessions with Hubbard: 'tie revealed things about himself and his past which absolutely contradicted what we had been told about him. tie wasn't taking an3- great risk because I was a loyal and trusted subject and had a duty to keep such things confidential. 'It wasn't just what I discovered about his past. I didn't care where he was born or what he had done in tile xvar, it didn't mean a thing to me. I wasn't a loyal Scicntologist because he had an illustrious war recordú Vfhat worried me was when I saw things he did and heard statements hc made that showed his intentiotas were different from what they appeared to be. x. Vhcn I was with him messengers often arrived with suitcases full of money, wads of htmdred-dollar bills. Yet he had always said and written tt'~at he had never received a penny from Scicntology. 1 te would ask to see it, tile messenger would open the case and he'd gloat over it for a bit before it was put away in a safe in his bedroom. I le didn't really spend much, so I guess it was getaway money. I didn't mimt the idea of him having money or being rich. I thought he had done tremendous wonttots and should bc well paid for it. But why did have to lie about it? 'I slowly began to realize that he wasn't acting in tile public good or for tile benefit of mankind. It might have started out like that, but it was no longer so. One dab' we were talking about tile price of gold, or something like that, and he said to me, very emphatically, that he was o obsessed by an insatiable lust for power and money. I'll never forget it. Those were his exact words, "an insatiable ldst for power and money" ' ú By tile middle of October, the Commodore was back on his feet, back making movies. Mayo was ordered to be an actor and was appalled by llubbard's bdlaviour on the set. 'tie walked around with an electric bullhorn yelling orders through it even if the person was only a fexv feet away. The crew xvere in a constant state of fear. tte'd say he wanted a certain set built and describe it. Everyone would work a in a frenzied state to get it done, often through the night, not stopping for meals and praying it would be right and that they would not get into trouble. Wben he arrived to begin shooting he invariably decided he didn't like it. It had been altered; he wanted it blue, not green. Some of the crew would be sent to the RPF and others would be Making Movies 359 running around trying to find some blue paint. Then he'd want to know why it was blue and not yellow. 'When I was trying to be an actor I'd have to do the same line over and over again. It was never right. It was too loud, too quiet, too intense, not intense enough. Then he'd scream, "Why aren't you doing it enthush~sticall3' ?" He'd end up stamping off, screaming that it was all impossible and that no one would do what he said. One of the main reasons why he got sick, I think, was that he had so many failures and so much frustration and upset over the moviesú Everyone was tip-toeing around waiting for explosions. 'One incident was quite dramatic and revelatory. During a period when things had got very, very bad, some of the crew tried to lighten things up by making a little video recording intentted as a joke. It was a humorotis skit on an incident that had happened a couple of days earlier. They thought it would amuse him and sent him the video tape. I was standing outside his office waiting to see him when he played it. There was a tremendous explosion. He started yelling and screaming and messengers began running in and out. He was literally shouting at the televisionú tie didn't think it was funny at all. He thought he x~'as being held up to ridicule and that tile crew were mocking bim and he was furious. Messengers were sent to find the names of everyone involved and they were all sent to the RPI:. Then he thought that tilere were people who were not directly involved but might know about it and he wanted their names and they were sent to the RPF as well.' Cine Org members assigned to the RPF were sent to work on quarter pay - $4.00 a week - at a recently acquired propert}' about forty miles from La Quinta which was to be tile Commodore's 'summer headquarters'. Gilman t lot Springs was a faded resort straddling Route 79 between Riverside and Palm Springs. Its 550 acres boasted a yellowing golf course, a decrepit motel, the Massacre Canyon Inn, and a collection of miscellaneous buildings in various states of disrepair, one of them a house satirically named 'Bonnie View'. The entire property had been purchased for $2.7 million cash and local people were told it was going to be used bv members of an organization called the 'Scottish Highland Quietude Club'. Hubbard had not seen the place but declared an ultimate intention to move into Bonnie View and the RPF was toiling to prepare the house for him, ripping out the vents, tiling the floors, painting and dec0rating and vainly attempting to create a dust-free and odourlcss habitat. It was honest labour much preferable to the stress and hysteria prevalent in the Cine Org, which by then employed around 150 people. Like almost every episode in Ilubbard's life, the Cine Org ended in 360 Bare-Faced Messiah sudden collapse and farce. The Hartwells, the stage-struck ballroom dancers who thought they were breaking into show business, had disentangled themsel~'es by the end of 1978 and returned to Las Vegas, poorer but xviser. Ernie Hartwell did not particularly want to stir up any trouble but he thought that the church was trying to entice Dell back and break up his marriage. He was a straight-talking Navy veteran xvho xvorked in a casino and was not the kind of guy to be coxred by 'kids running around in sailor suits', which was his favourite description of Scientologists. He began threatening to go to the FBI and the ncxvspapers and telling everything he knexv. Actually he did not knoxv much, other than the best-kept secret in Scientology - the whereabouts of L. Ron Hubbard. Ed Waiters, the agent who had 'handled' Quentin's suicide, was ordered to 'handle' Hartwell. '1'11 never forget sitting in the local Guardian's Office the day I brought Ernie in,' said Waiters. 'These txvo young kids who've never met tlubbard are sitting there and they obviously think that Hartxvell's a liar. Ouc of tbem says, "You don't know what you're talking about. You say you actually met Ron Hubbard . . ." Ernie says, "Yeah, I was xvith him down in the desert." "Well, if you met him," says the GO guy, "how would you describe him?" I kncxv that what he meant was how did Ilubbard look, but Ernic says, "I low would I describe hitn? I'd describe bim as fucking nuts." '~ly heart was pumping. No one talks like that about LRI I. The GO people were stunned. To them it proved that Ernic xvas a liar. I said, "Well, Emit, you don't really ttlt, atl that hc's nuts, do you?" ttc says, "Yeah~" So I asked him to give me an example, hoping to tone it down a bit. "Are you kidding~" He says. "One day we get there and hc's playing director xvith all these kids following him arounct. He starts screan~ing at the xvall. he says therc's supposed to be shelves there and why aren't there shelves there. So one of his people turns to me and says put some shelves there. So 1 sav OK, I need a hammer, nails and wood. Then this fucking kid just savs to me make it go right." 'To tell someone "~iake it go right" was typical Scientology-spcak. I knew then that he was telling the trutll.'9 Waltors liked Ernic Hartwell and tried, over the next couple of days, to dissuade him from carrying out his threats. 'Next thing that happens,' he said, 'was that the GO sent some people to tell me to stay out of it. They were going to handle ttartwcll. They were not going to allow Hubbard to be exposed by this man and they insinuated they x~'ould destroy him if they had to. Ernie xvas just a troubled old guy off the street who should never have been in Scientology in the first place. How could they think of destroying someone like that? Something just went off inside me.' Making Movies 361 Walters began telephoning his closest friends in Scientology, among them Art Maren, to tell them he was thinking of getting out. Maren rushed to Las Vegas and begged Ed to re-consider. It dawned on Walters, with a sense of deep shock, that his friend Artie was fdghtened. Next day Waiters went to the FBI. Alarm bells were already ringing at Olive Tree Ranch, where someone had been seen taking photographs of the property. Itubbard reacted as he always reacted in a crisis: he fled. Tbe chosen getaway vehicle was a white customized Dodge Ram van with darkened windows, fitted out inside with a bed, CB radio and the latest stereo system. Hubbard had had it made so that he could sleep on long journeys by road, but it served the purpose for which it was now needed - to get him out of Olive Tree Ranch unseen. Kima and Mike Douglas were again chosen to go with him. They left at nightfall, with the Commodore in his usual state of paranoid hysteria. 'As we drove up into the San Jacinto l~'Iountains,' said Kima, 'he was lying on the bed in the back, alternately urging Mike to drive faster and complaining that he was feeling sick. We were already tearing round these hairpin bends as fast as we could, but he kept repeating, "We've got to get out of here. Go faster, Go faster."' They checked into an isolated motel up in the mountains and Hubbard stayed in his room while the Douglas's went out every day looking for a place where they could set up yet another secret base for the Commodore. They eventually found several adjoining apartments for rent in new building just off the main street in liemet, a small town on the west side of the mountains. tIubbard mox'ed in at the end of 1%larch 1979, along with a slimmed-down staff of messengers and aides. In many ways, Hemet was an ideal place to hide. It was a sleepy little farming town, surrounded by orange groves and unremarkable in every wax' except perhaps for its resemblance to a Rockwell painting. Its main street signs reflected quiet respectability, small-town values and quintessential Americana: Sun-up Milk Drive-In; Dollar Saver; Smile Jesus Loves You; i{cmet Retirement Home; Happy Birthday Doug & Laura; Virgin Dv'lortuary; Hemet l~1otel Pets Welcome; Gun Shop; Church of the Open Bible . . . The Commodore's new base was behind Lee's Acupuncture Clinic, adjacent to a Pick 'n' Save supermarket and a drive-in McDonald's. In this antiable suburban setting, an extraordinary security cordon was tightened around the man whose name was not now allowed to be mentioned. Within Scientology, I{ubbard's new location was known only as 'X'. The summer headquarters at Gilman Hot Springs was only fourteen miles distant, to the north, but no one was allowed to travel directly between the two places. l~'likc Douglas, one of the few 162 Bare-Faced ,~lessiah ~eople with authority to make regular journeys between Hemet and 3ilman, clocked up 120 miles each time. Inside the apartn~ents behind the acupuncture clinic, a skilful alarm ~ystem was devised, with bnzzcrs and red lights everywhere. All the itaff were drilled regularly so they knew what to do if strangers arrived tt the door - they had to deny all knoxvledge of L. Ron Hubbard, of :ourse, but they also had to try and act normally while the Corntoolore was being hustled out through a back escape route to a getaway :at that would always be read>, in a garage opening on to a different .treet. Once all the security precautions were in place, Hubbard relaxed ~nd settled down to enjoy life in Hcmet. Although he occasionally hrew his food across the room when he believed the cook was trying o poison him, by and large he was better tempered than he had been vhen he was trying to make movies. He usually got up about midday, udited himself for an hour and then dealt with whatever corresponIcnce the messengers had decided he should see. In the afternoons he levotcd several hours to taping lectures and mixing suitable back:round music, and in the evenings he watched television and reminiced to a small, but always attentive, audience. 'I believed the stories he told were true for him,' said Kima )ouglas. 'I 1c was a good story-teller and it was nice to listen to him. te told us once how he was Tamburlainc's wife and how he had wept ~'hen Tamburlainc was routed in his last great battle. Another time he vas on a disabled spacesbip that landed here before life began and ealized the potential and brought seeds back from another planet to ertilize planet earth. I didn't see why that couldn't be true.' David IXIavo recalled sitting on the floor with a couple of messengers vhile the Commodore played hill-billy songs on his guitar and talked bout the time he had earned his living as a troubadour in the Blue ,Iountains. 'I think he made up the songs as he went along,' said ,Iavo. 'Afterwards, everyone clapped.' .ifter several weeks at tlemet, Hubbard began venturing out into he town in a variety of extraordinary disguises. He had a baseball cap ~'ith false hair sewn into it, plastic padding to change the shape of his ace and stage make-up to alter the colour of his eyebrows and ideburns. 'He always thought he looked wonderful,' said Kima, 'but ~e usually looked like a funny old man. I always thought it would have ,een safer to dress him up like a nonentity, but he would never have ".. He always wanted to wear his hat at an angle, kind of jaunty, [isplay a bit of panache. tie was fun like that. He'd walk down the nain street, always followed by a couple of messengers, little girls in ~hite shorts or tight, tight jeans and he thought he looked like one of he locals, but he never did.' l~Mking Movies 363 thjbbard knew so little about contemporary America that he considered shopping malls to be a wondrous innovation and he would spend hours wandering around them, buying plastic trinkets. Although he never spent much when he was out shopping, he was investing huge sun~s in stocks, precious stones and gold. 1Xlichael Douglas had been appointed the Commodore's 'finance officer' and was managing an enormous portfolio of stocks running into millions of dollars. There were bags of gold coins and diamonds stuffed in two sales at the Hemet apartxnents and more jewels were lodged in the vaults of a local bank. Through the summer months of 1979, Hubbard followed closely the progress of the battery of lawyers which was fighting to prevent Mary Sue and her co-defendants from being brought to trial. In the intimacy of the Hemet hideaway, he made no secret of his intention to sever all his connections with his wife. He frequently asserted that he had never known anything about what Mary Sue was doing and whined about the fact that she was getting him into trouble. Everyone knew it was a lie. David Mayo was sent to see lx. lary Sue at her bouse off ixdulholland Drive in Los Angeles, to suggest that she might consider a divorce. 'She was really offended and very upset,' said Mayo. 'I thought she was going to blow my head off. I went back several times later to make sure that she wasn't going to rat on him. That's what he was really worried about, that she would reveal during the case that she was only relaying his orders. She had covered up for him so much, and there had been so many opportunities for her to betray him, that she couldn't believe he would think that. She kept saying to me, "x. Vhat is he worried about?" I thought to myself, "My God, I can't tell her."' Hubbard, still not convinced that he could trust his wife, decided to risk meeting her himself at Gilman t{ot Springs. At summer headquarters, no one was supposed to know that the Commodore was visiting, although it was not hard to guess since a working party was assigned to spend two days scrubbing 'Bonnie View' and polishing all surfaces by hand. Mary Sue was told to go to a hotel in Riverside and ~'ait to be picked up by Kima Douglas, who drove her on a roundabout route to Gilaman, checking all the time that they were not being followed. Hubbard arrived on the bed in the back of the Dodge Ram, which drove through the gates of the resort at high speed. Waiting guards immediately put a chain across the entrance. No messengers were present during the meeting, so no one knew what was discussed and no one saw either the Commodore or his wife leave the property. Mary Sue never betrayed her husband, but then she had never intended to. The trial was scheduled for 24 September in Washington, 364 Bare-Faced Messiah but the govermnent prosecutors and defence attorneys were still bargainring at that date and a stay was granted. On 8 October, in an unusual legal manoeuvre, an agreement was reached that the nine defendants would plead guilty to one count each if the government presented a written statement of its case, thereby avoiding a lengthy trial. On 26 October, US District Judge Charles R. Richey accordingly found the nine Scientologists guilty on one count each of the indictment. Mary Sue and two others were fined the maximum of $10,000 and jailed for five years. The remaining defendants received similar fines and prison sentences of between one and four years. Sentencing Mary Sue, the judge told her: 'We have a precious system of government in the United States... For anyone to use those laws, or to seek under the guise of those laws, to destroy the very foundation of the government is totally wrong and cannot be condoned by any responsible citizen.' All the defendants indicated an intention to appeal on the grotmds that the evidence against them had been obtained illegally. Scientology lawyers were still hoping to prevent the damning documents seized in the FBI raids, currently under seal, from being released. But on 23 November, the day after Thanksgiving, the appellate court ordered the seal to be lifted and began releasing the documc~ts, much to the delight of newspapers and television stations throughout the United States. At last they were able to report the astonishing details of Operation Snow White and give the public a peek into the strange and secretive world of the Church of Scicntology. Exposed and vilificd in headlines across the nation, ttubbard became morose, suspicious and fearful once again for his safety. Kima and Mike Douglas had finally asked themselves what they were doing at Hornet and had 'blown the org'. The departure of two such long-standing and trusted aides made the Commodore nervous about the loyalty of everyone around him, except for Pat Broeker, the messenger who had accompanied him to Sparks, Nevada, and his new wife Annie, also a messenger. The Broekers were flattered and pleased to become the Commodore's closest confidantes. Hubbard's grip on reality, always tenuous, slipped further. He issued orders for plans to be prepared for a new house somewhere near Hemet. It was to be, an aide reported, in 'a non-black area, dust-free, defensible, with no surrounding higher areas and built on bedrock'. It was also to be surrounded by a high wall with 'openings for gun emplacenlents'. ~0 At the end of February 1980, a few days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Hubbard disappeared with Annie and Pat Broeker. He was never seen again. Chapter 22 Missing, Pres~tnzed Dead 'I would say that 99 per cent of what m~' father has written about his own life is false.' (Ron DeWoil, formerly L. Ron Hubbard Junior, lxday 1982) It, I, I, I, ,l, For nearly six years, no one knew where L. Ron tlubbard was hiding or whether he was dead or alive. He was hunted high and low by television and newspaper reporters, federal investigators and law officers: none of them unearthed a single clue to his whereabouts. iXlary Sue, his loyal and loving wife for more than txventy-five years, did not know where her husband was, neither did their children. The Commodore had effectively vanished. After ttubbard skipped from tlemet with tile Brockors, the apartments were closed. Once all the papers and personal effects had been packed and moved out, a working party cleaned each apartment with an alcohol solution to remove fingerprints, carefully wiping down all the walls, fixtures, door knobs, shelves, windows and mirrors. Pat Broeker, acting on Ron's orders, supervised the operation. Broeker also directed, apparently at the bellest of the absent Commodore, a massive corporate reorganization of the Church of Scientol~gy, ostensibly designed to further shield Hubbard from legal liabilities and to ensure that the income flowing to him from the church, then running at about $1 million a week, could never be traced. t He was assisted by his friend and fellow messenger David Miscavige, a ruthless and ambitious nineteen-year-old who had learned management technique at tile Commodore's knee, as a cameraman in the Cine Org. lxdiscavige was small, slight and asthmatic, but his lack of stature did not prevent him from adopting Hubbard's principle that the way to get things done was to browbeat subordinates by bellowing and threatening. His strutting figure became widely feared at Gilman Hot Springs and at the former Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, recently purchased by the church for its new headquarters. Many long-serving senior Scicntologists were purged during the 366 Ba~e-Faced Messiah re-structuring and none had redress to Hubbard, for the messengers controlled his conlmunication lines. Apart from the Broekers, Miscavige was said to be the only other Scientologist privy to the Commodore's location, although most of the staff at Gilman knew that Ron could not be far away because it only took Pat Broeker four or five hours to make the round trip from Gilman to Ron's hide-out. During this upheaval, no one could be sure if it was really Hubbard who was issuing the orders or, indeed, if it was his ultimate intention that the messengers should take over control. In letters to those who had formerly been close to him, he gave no hint that he was juggling with the massive and complex structure of Scientology. 'Dearest Do,' he wrote to Doreen Smith in June 1980, 'life is a bit dull for me . . . I'll have to get up and get my wits to work to find something advantageous to do, so this is just a hello really. I hope you and the others are well and doing well . . .,z David lx, layo also received a number of letters from Hubbard and began to worry about his state of mind. 'In the first paragraph of one letter he said something like, "You might think I've gone crazy, but I'm still OK, just believe what I say is true." I remember thinking, God, whatevcr's coming must be pretty weird. It was real demented stuff, berating psychiatrists and claiming they were the root of all evil, not just on this planet but since time immemorial. He had it figured out that back in the beginning of tile universe, psychiatrists created evil on a particular star system. When I read it I thought my God, he t's crazy! He can exhort me not to think he's crazy, but this letter belies it. ,3 In Nlay 1981, when the purge was well under way and the messengers were consolidating their power, Miscavige moved to oust lxdary Sue as Controller. Ilc first chipped away at her position by making it known among her friends that Ron wanted her out. Then, at a stormy meeting in Nlary Sue's office, lxdiscavige told the Commodore's wife that she was an embarrassment to the church, that she was certain to lose the appeal against her prison sentence and that it was important for the public image of the church that she be disciplined. Nlary Sue lost her temper, screamed and raged at the upstart messenger and at one point threw an ashtray at him. But Nliscavige stood his ground in the full knowledge that Mary Sue's position was hopeless. Without being able to count on her husband's support, she had no alternative but to step down. Afterwards she wrote bitter letters of complaint to Ron, but she suspected they were never delivered.4 Miscavige would later complete his humiliation of the Hubbard fanlily by having Arthur and Suzette ejected from Gilman Hot Springs as 'security risks' and appointing Suzette as his personal maid at the Cedars complex.s Missing, Presunted Dead 367 Mary Sue's resignation as Controller was not annotnlced until September, when the church issued a press release piously justifying the 'shake-up' as a reaction to the indictments resulting from Operation Snow White and admitting that the Guardian's Office 'wetit adrift' by engaging in a battle with the federal government. In April 1982, David Mayo received anott~er long letter from the Commodore in which he said he did not expect to live much longer - a few months at the least, a few years at the most. Until he was able to pick up a new body, grow to adulthood and resume his rightful position as the head of Scientology, tlubbard was assigning responsibility for safeguarding the 'purity' of the technology to his friend Mayo. David Mayo believes that Miscavige and his cohorts interpreted this news as a threat to their position and began making plans to remove him. Nlcanwhile, yet another enemy stepped into tile arena to do battle with the church. A commission had been set up in Clearwater to investigage Scicntology and its star witness was to be none other than L. Ron tlubbard Junior, who had recently changed his name to DeWolf in order to further disassociate himself from his father. Pink-faced and bespectacled, Nibs told tile commission that his father was a habitual liar, paranoid, schizophrenic and megalomaniac who had fabricated most of his qualifications and written Dialwrits off the top of his head without doing any research. Worse was to come. In July, Nibs gave an interview to the Santa Rosa News-llerald in which he portrayed his father as a ~'ifc-bcatcr who had experimented in black magic and fed him and his sister bubble gum spiked with phcnobarbitol. 'I Ic had one of thuse insane things, expecially during tile '30s, of trying to invoke the devil for power and practices. lx, ly mother told me about him trying out all kinds of various incantations, drugs and hypnosis . . .ttc used to beat her up quite often. He had a violent, volcano-type temper, and he smacked her around quite a bit. I remember in 1946 or 1947 when tie was beating up my mother one night, I had a .22 rifle and I sat on the stairway xvith him in my sights and I almost blew his head off.' It was not quite the pre-publication publicity St Ix, lartin's Press might have wished to launch Battle]ield Ea,~h: A Saga of the li, ar 3000, L. Ron Hubbard's first science-fiction book for more than thirty years. It was evident that the Commodore, where~'er he was, had been busy, for the eight hundred-page Battlefield Earth was trumpeted not only as the longest science-fiction book ever written but merely the prelude to Mission Earth, an epic work of more than one million words due to be published in ten separate volumes over the next four years. Battle]ieltl Earth was the story of how Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, one of the few surviving human beings still on earth, turned the tables on 368 Ba~e-Ft~ced Messiah the huge, shambling, hairy aliens wtlo had taken control of the planet. Many science-fiction buffs did not feel the work matched the pace and excitement of tlubbard's earlier fiction. Iudeed, his agent, Fortie Ackerman, wondered if it had really been written by Ron and took the trouble to have the dedication on his pcrsonal copy ('To 4E, my favourite monster and long-time friend') verified by a handxvriting expert. Hubbard's follow sci-fi writer, A.E. van Vogt, whose endorsement of the book as a 'masterpiece' appeared prominently on the cover, later confessed that he had been daunted by its size and had not actually bothered to read it.6 Hubbard alxvays sent van Vogt and his wife a Christmas card and that )'ear he included a note boasting that it had only taken him a month to write Bt~ttlefield Earth. If I-lubbard had lost his touch as a fiction writer, he xvas still perfectly capable of adding, even at this late stage in his life, further embellishmerits to his earl)' career. 'I had, myself, somewhat of a sciencc background,' he wrote in the introduction, 'had done some pioncer work m rockets and liquid gases, but I was studying the branches of man's past knowledge at that time . . . For a while, before and after x, Vorld ~Var Two, I was in rather steady association with the new era of scientists, the boys who built the bomb . . .' It was essential for I lubbard's reputation that BattleJield l'.'arth became a bestseller. The Church of Scientology guaranteed to buy 50,000 hardback copies, monntcd a massive publicity campaign tu support the book and instructed Scicntol~/gists throughout the United States to go out anti buy at least two or three copies each. Bt~ttltfit,ld Earth duly made its debut on the major bestseller lists. Those Scientologists who were beginning their prison sentences at around that time no doubt found sufficient leisure hours in their cells to enjoy their leader's latest oeuvre. lXlary Sue's second in command, Jane Kember, was driven to prison by her friend Virginia Downsborough. 'It was pathetic really,' said I5ownsborough, 'even when she was actually on her way to prison Jane still thought that Ron was going to surface and fix everything. All she had done was what he had told her to and she couldn't believe that he would betray her. It was incredible. ,7 Attorneys acting for .'\lary Sue had appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Supreme Court to have her conviction overturned and in January 1983 a US district judge in Washington rejected her request to be sent to a half-way house instead of prison. lXIary Sue, who was then fifty-one, sobbed in the courtroom and said she wanted to 'sincerely and publicly apologize', but Judge Norma tt. Johnson was unsympathetic, describing the offences as not only serious but heinous. 'Because of your leadership role,' she said, 'I find your degree of culpability was great.' Mary Sue reported next day to the Federal Missing, Presumett Dead 369 Correctional Institution in Lexington, Kentucky, to begin serving a four-year term. l\Icanwhile, lX{ary Sue's stepson had filed a petition in Riverside, California, for tile trusteeship of his fathcr's estate, claiming that Hubbard was either dead or mentally incompetent. Nibs, who was then working as the manager of an apartment block in Carson City, Nevada, and taking home :$650 a month, estimated the estate was worth $100 million, which was an indication of how little anyone knew of how much tile Commodore was making out of the ~2hurch of Scientology - during 1982 alone, Hubbard raked in at least $40 million from various Scicntology corporations.$ The petition claimed Hubbard 'has lived a life characterized bv severe mental illness . . . consistent failure . . . and tile use of false and fraudulent, oftentime criminal means, to cover up these failures and to acquire wealth, fame and power in ordcr to destroy his perceived "enemies".' Dcx, Volf further alleged that the church leaders were stcaling millions of dollars' worth of gems and cash from his fathcr's estate.9 Attorneys acting on ~lary Suc's behalf filed a counterpetition asserting that Nibs was 'simply trying to get Iris hands on his Dad's money'. Tllis intrigt~ing litigation generated a flurry of media speculation abuut the fate of the founder of Scicntolugy, but the question of wbctl~er llubbard was dead or alive was quickly settled when the church produced a signed declaration with tile Commodorc's fingerprints on every page, authenticated by independent experts. I {ubbard described his son's allegations as malicious, false and ill-rounded. 'With respect to Ronald De\Volf,' he wrote, 'I consider him neither a friend nor a family member in the true sense of the word. Although biologically he is my son, his hostility and animosity to me are apparent and have been for )'ears . . . I am not a missing person. I am in seclusion for my own choosing. My privacy is important to me, and I do not wish it or my affairs invaded in the manner permitted by this action. As Thoreau secluded himself by Walden Pond, so I have chosen to do in my own fashion.' The court accepted the documents as proof that Hubbard was still alive and dismissed DeWoWs suit, but in his determination to blacken tiubbard's name, Nibs had clearly inherited something of his fathcr's perseverance. lie surfaced again in the June 1983 issue of Penthotts~' magazine, making even more sensational allegations - that [lubbard had been involved in black magic since the age of sixteen, believed himself to be Satan, wanted to become the most powerful being in the universe, smuggled gold and drugs, was a sadist and a KGB agent. tic had bought Saint Hill Manor, Nibs claimed, with money obtained from the Russians. 'Black magic is the inner core of Scientology,' Nihs 370 Bate-Faced Mt, ssiah stressed, 'and it is probably the only part of Scientology that really works. Also, you've got to realize that my father did not worship Satan. He thought he was Satan.' It was wild stuff, perhaps a little too wild. Just like his father, Nibs lacked subtlety. Had he been more restrained, the interview might have made an impact. Instead, it simply strained the reader's credulity to such an extent that it was hard to decide who was the most deranged - L. Ron Hubbard Senior or L. Ron tlubbard Junior. In November 1983, an optimistic letter from Ron was distributed to Scientologists around the world to tell them how well everything was going. tie described himself as 'ecstatic' with the state of management and confident that their legal problems were behind them. 'Those who were harassing Scientology in the past', he wrote, 'are beginning to present a panorama of coattails.' He explained that he had been working on very advanced research for the last two years which was 'opening the sky to heights not previously, envisioned' and concluded, 'So I wanted to say' hello and to tell you the results of an overview of the game and, boy, does that future look good . . . Love, Ron.' Ron did not bother to mention how Mary Sue was making out at the Federal Correctional Institution in Kentucky, neither did he comment on the time-bomb ticking away under the church in the slight form of his disenchanted archivist and biographer Gerry Armstrong, who had taken thousands of documents with him when he left Scientology - documents that ptDved the founder of Scicntology was a charlatan and a liar. For many montt~s church attorneys had been trying to force Armstrong to return the material, having initially succeeded in having the documents placed under court seal. In May 1984, tile issue went to trial at Los Angeles Superior Court before Judge Paul G. Breckenridge. A procession of witnesses trooped into tile courtroom to tell their dismal stories about life in Scientology, at tile end of which the judge refused to order tile return of the documents and delivered a damning verdict on Scientology: 'The organization clearly' is schizophrenic and paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background and achieven~ents. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile. 'At the same time it appears that he is charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling, manipulating and inspiring his adherents. He has been referred to during the trial as a "genius", a "revered person", a man who was "viewed by his followers Missing, Presunted Dead 37 I in awe". Obviously', he is and has been a very complex person and tha~ complexity is further reflected in his alter ego, the Church ol Scientology... He has, of course, chosen to go into seclusion. but... seclusion has its light and dark side too. It adds to hi.. mystique, and yet shields him from accountability and subpoena o~ service of summons.' The judge then turned to lx, lary Sue, who had been released afte~ serving a year of her prison sentence and bad given evidence during the hearing: 'On the one hand she certainly appeared to be a pathctk individual. She was forced from her post as Controller, convicted and imprisoned as a felon, and deserted by her husband. On tile othc~ hand her credibility leaves much to be desired. She struck the familiar pose of not seeing, hearing, or knowing any evil . . .' The Church of Scicntology immediately appealed against tile decision of tile court, ensuring that the documents remained under seal and unavailable to hordes of waiting newspapermen, at least for the time being. Three weeks later, a judge in the Iligh Court in London joined in the attack by memorably branding Scicntology as 'immoral, socially obnoxious, corrupt, sinister and dangerous' and describing the bchaviour of tlubbard and his aides as 'grinfly reminiscent of tile ranting and bullying of Hitler and Ins henchmen'. Mr Justice Latev had been hearing a case involving a custodv dispute over tile children of a practising Scientologist and his wife, who had broken away from the cult. Awarding custody to the mother, tile judge gave Scientology short shrfft: 'It is corrupt because it is based on lies and deceit and had as its real objective monev and power for Nlr ttubbard, his wife and those close to him at the top. It is sinister because it indulges in infamous practices both to its adherents who do not toe the line unquestioningly and to those outside who criticize or oppose it. It is dangerous because it is out to capture people, especially children and impressionably, young people, and indoctrinate and brainwash them so that they become the unquestioning captives and tools of the cult, withdrawn from ordinan' thought, living and relationship with others.' As to the Hubbards, the judge considered the evidence clear arid conclusive: 'NIt Hubbard is a charlatan and worse, as are his wife Nlary Sue Hubbard and the clique at the top, privy to the cult's activities.' Following the teaching of L. Ron Hubbard, most Scientologists assumed that such attacks were orchestrated and engineered by their multitude of enemies. In 1985, when CBS's '60 minutes' investigated Scientology and presenter Mike Wallace quoted the 'schizophremc and paranoid' decision of Judge Breckenridge, the Reverend liebet Jentzsch, president of the Church of Scicntology, had a ready, if 372 Bare-Faced Messiah incomprehensible, reply: 'I traced back where that came from, this whole schizophrenic paranoia concept that he has. It came from Interpol. At that time, the president of [nterpol was a former SS officer, Paul Dickopf. And to find that Judge Breckenridge quoted a Nazi SS officer as the authority on Scientology, I find unconscionable . . .' On 19 January 1986, Scientologists around the world received their last message from L. Ron Hubbard. In Flag Order number 3879, headed 'The Sea Org and The Future', he announced that he was promoting himself to the rank of Admiral. Alongside the proclamation, in a Scientology magazine, was a colour photograph of the grey-haired Commodore in his Sea Org peaked cap. He was grinning broadly, with a definite twinkle in his eyes. He had never looked more like Puck. Creston, population 270, elevation 1110 feet, straddles a dusty road junction txventy miles north of the old mission town of San Luis Obispo in California. On the main streeet, which at most times of the day is deserted, there may be found the Loading Chute Steak Dining-Room, Creston Realty, a post office with a flagpole and two phone booths outside and a ramshackle wooden building with peeling red paint and a slipped sign proclaiming it to be the Long Branch general store. Rusting automobile hulks sprouting weeds, flea-bitten tethered horses and satellite dishes are a common feature in the gardens of the unassuming houses thereabouts. On O'Do~ovan P, oad, which runs south off tbc main street, there is a small library, a school, tile Creston Conm~unitv Church Bible Classroom and tile meeting hall of Creston x. Vomen's Club. Attaclled to the front of the meeting hall is a notice board offering for sale a horse, a pick-up and a '69 sedan, both these last 'needing work'. It is evident that the good people of Creston have yet to share the affluence to be seen displayed so ostentatiously elsewhere in California. But further along O'Donovan Road, the rural landscape is clearly manicured by money. Rolling hills of green velvet are stitched with white picket fences and the houses stand well back from the road behind meadows sprinkled with wild daisies and studded with twisted oak trees. Four miles out of the town there is a graded track off to the right and a metal sign indicates it is a private road leading to the Emmanuel Conference Centre. This track winds up the hillside along the edge of the Whispering x, Vinds Ranch, a 160-acre spread which, according to local gossip, was once owned bv the actor Robert Mitchum. The gates to the ranch may be found after about 400 yards and the track then forks to a small cedarwood house on tbe right, continuing on the left up the hill to the Camp Emmanuel ecumenical retreat. It is a quiet place, a perfect place to hide. Missing, Presunted Dead 373 In the summer of 1983 the ranch was bought by a young couple who called themselves Lisa and Mike Mitchell. The San Luis Obispo real estate agent involved in the sale guessed by his accent that Mitchell was from New York. He walked into the office straight off the street and said he wanted to buy a large, secluded ranch where he could breed Akitas, a rare Japanese dog. The realtor took l~litchell out to look at xXhispering Winds, which was on the market for $700,000. He examined the ranch house with great care, even climbing up into the roof, v,'here he seemed disconcerted by the insulation. 'I'll have to get that out of there,' he told the agent, explaining that his wife was allergic to fibreglass. Nevertheless, he liked the property and said he would buy it. lx, loney was no problem - he had just come into an inheritance worth several million dollars. Good as his word, Mitchell paid the full price in cash, with thirty cashier's cheques drawn on several California banks. ~0 The lx, litchells moved into the ranch shortly afterwards, along with their elderly father. They kept very much to themselves, avoiding all contact with their neighbours. Maxine Kuchl and Shirley Terry, who ran Camp Emmanuel, rarely spoke to either of them and knew nothing of the old man except that his name was Jack. Robert Whaley, a retired marketing executive from New York xvho lived in the cedar house overlooking 'vVhispering Winds, similarly saw little of them, although he was intrigued by what was going on. It seemed to Whaley that his new neighbours had more money than sense. The three-level ranch house was gutted and re-modelled not once, but several times. A lake in front of the house was widened and deepened and stocked with bass and catfish. A race-horse track, with an observation tower and viewing stands, was built to one side of the house and never used. Miles of white picket fence went up, either following the contours of the land or running absolutely straight. One section of fence was torn down three or four times, apparently because it was not straight enough. Thoroughbred horses, buffalo and llamas were soon grazing in the fenced paddocks, and swans and geese graced the lake. 'I was amazed how much they were spending on the place,' said Whaler. 'There was absolutely no regard for expense. When they were havin~ new irrigation lines installed, they put in a twelve-inch pipe, big enough for a town. None of them was very friendly, but I once asked Mitchell who was doing all the planning and he said his wife's father, Jack, was handling most of it as he used to be a civil engineer.'~ ~ While the renovations were under way, Jack lived in a $150,000 Bluebird motor home parked on the property, but he could often be seen pottering around in baggy blue pants and a yellow straw hat, 374 Bare-Faced Messiah taking photographs. | Ie was overweight, and with his white hair and white beard, reminded Whaley of Kentucky Chicken's Colonel Sanders. Once Whaley walked across to \Vhispering Winds to see if he could borrow a tool and surprised the old man in the stable. Jack was busy filing a piece of metal and was evidently not pleased to see his neighbour: he glared suspiciously at \'fhaley for a second, then scurried off into a workshop without a word, locking the door behind him. The incident did not bother Whaley overmuch; he preferred to keep to himself anyway. He used to work in the magazine business in New York and was accustomed to oddball characters. Before the war, he had been a marketing executive for science-fiction pulps and had known most of the leading writers, although there was nott~ing about the old man with a beard that struck a chord. One other thing he thought was rather odd about the folk across the way was that they rarely had visitors, except at night. He would often see headlights coming up the track late and turning through the gates of \Vhispcring ~,'~inds. Usually it was just one car, but on tile evening of 24 January 1986 there seemed to be cars coming and going all night . . . The telephone was already ringing when Irene Rcis, co-owner of the Rcis Chapel in San Luis Obispo, arrived for work on the morning of Saturday 25 January. A voice at the other end uf the line identified himself as Earlc Cooley, an atturney, and asked if they did cremations. ~Irs Rcis replied that the}' did, although the crcmatory xvas usually closed at weekends. Special arrangements could bc made if necessary. Cooley then asked if a body could bc collected from the \Vhispering \Vinds Ranch on the O'Dunovan Road in Crcston. Irene's husband, Gene, drove the hearse out to Creston, not imagining it was anything but a routine job. Cooley accompanied tile body back to San Luis Obispo. At the Reis Chapel, a tasteful white adobe building with a red pantile roof on Nipomo Street, he asked Mrs Reis if arrangements could be made for an 'immediate cremation'. He presented a death certificate signed by a Gene Denk of Los Angeles certifying the cause of death as cerebral haemorrhage and a certificate of religious belief forbidding an autopsy. It was not until l\Irs Reis looked at the documents that she realized tile body lying in her chapel was that of L. Ron Hubbard. Mrs Rcis knew enough about Hubbard to insist on informing the San Luis Obispo Country sheriff-coroner. Deputy coroner Don Hines arrived at the Reis Chapel within a few minutes. No one had had any idea that Hubbard was in the vicinity and Hines wanted to make sure that everything was done by the book - it was not every day Mt'ssing, Presunted l)ead 375 that a 'notorious recluse' turned up in San Luis Obispo. Hines said tbat no creu~ation could take place until an independent pathologist had examined the body. He also ordered the body to be photograpl~ed and fingerprinted to ensure positive identifications. (Later the fingerprints were revealed to match those on file at the FBI and the Department of Justice.) It was three-thirty in the afternoon before [lines was satisfied and agreed to release the body for cremation. On the following day, tile ashes of L. Ron ftubbard were scattered on the Pacific from a small boat. The news of the death of the founder of Scientology was broken to 1800 of his follo~vers hastily gathered in the tlollywood Palladium on the afternoon of Monday, 27 January. David 1Miscavige made the announcement that Ron had moved on to his next level of research, a level beyond the imagination and in a state exterior to tile body: 'Thus, at 2000 hours, Friday 24 January 1986, L. Ron tlubbard discarded tile body he had used in this lifetime for seventy-four years, ten months and eleven days. The body he had used to facilitate his existence in this universe had ceased to be useful and in fact had become an impediment to the work he now must do outside its confines. The being we knew as L. Ron Hubbard still exists. Although you may feel grief, understand that he did not, and does not now. He has simply moved on to his next step. LRH in fact used this lifetime and body we knew to accomplish what no man has ever accomplished - he unlocked the mysteries of life and gave us the tools so we could free ourselves and our fellow men . . .' At a press conference later that day, it was revealed that Hubbard had made a will on the day before his death leaving the bulk of his fortune, 'tens of millions of dollars', to the church. Generous provision had been made, it was said, for his wife and 'certain of his children'. Nibs, predictably, got nothing. Nor did Alexis, the daugher he denied was his. There are those who still believe that Hubbard died years earlier and that his death was covered up by the messengers while they consolidated their control over the church. There are those who still believe that Hubbard will soon be entering another body, or might even have done so already, prior to resuming his position as the head of Scientology. There are those who still believe that, for all his faults, Hubbard made a significant contribution to helping his fellow men. And there are those who now believe, sadly, that they were the unwitting victims of one of the most successful and colourfui confidence tricksters of the twentieth century. Notes Chapter One 7 lbid 8 L. R. Hubbard Service Record Book, I Oregon Jou.tal, 22 Apt 1943 US Marine Corps 2 Mission Into 7Yme, published by the 9 Preble (bunty News, 21 July 1983, Church of Scientology, 1973 (reprint of original article) 3 Letter to author, 25 May 1986 10 Adventure, I October 1935 4 1938 biography of L. R.[tubbardby 11 The Hatchet, 24May1932 Arthur J. Burks, president American 12 Letter fm Oceanographic Office, Fiction Guild Department of Navy, 22 June 197(I 5 Interview Andrew Richardson, 13 Letter to author fm University of }telena, Montana Michigan, 23 Apr 1986 6 Harry Ross Hubbard navy record 14 Letter to author fm Director of 7 Facts About L. Ron Itubbard - Archives, The New }brk Times, 14 Things }bu Should Know, Flag April 1986 Divisional Directive, 8 Mar 1974 15 Report fm Clifford Kaye, US 8 Mission Into Time Geological Survey, 22 June 1970 9 Letter to author, 4 Mar 1986/US 16 Letter fm Dept of Natural Resources, Govt Memorandum, 16 Nov 1966 San Juan, 10 Oct 1979 l0 Letter to author, 1 Feb 1986 17 Letter fm Dr Meyerhoff, 11 Feb 1980 18 Ad~,enture, 1 October 1935 Chapter Two I Facts About L. Ron ttubbard Chapter Four 2 What Is Scientology? 1978 3 lbid I Letter to author fm Mrs Catherine 4 LRft in Scientology -A New Slant Gillespie, Dec 1986 On Life 2 Certified airman's file 5 Facts About L. Ron 11ubbard 3 IbM ~ l~etter to author fm Montana 4 Interview Mrs Roberts lhstorical Society, 24 Mar 1986 5 Gruber, Frank, The Pulp Jungle, 7 Interview Gotham Roberts, 1telena, 1967 Apt 1986 6 Certified airman's file 8 Interview Mrs Margaret Roberts, 7 Ad~'enture, 10 October 1935 llelena, Apt 1986 8 Interview Robert Macdonald Ford, 9 tt. R. Hubbard navy record Olympia, Washington, 1 Sept 1986 9 Facts About L. Ron Hubbard 11) L. Ron Hubbard autobiographical ( 'hapter Three notes, 1974 11 Rocky Mountain Ne~cs, 20 February 1 [)eck log,/~ 'SS Goltt Star 1983 2 L. R. ltubbard Service Record Buok, 12 A Brief Biography ofL. Ron Hubbard, US Marine Corps 1963 3 lbid 13 Interview Ford 4 tinidentified newspaper clipping 5 I,etter fm H. R. Hubbard to Dean of S~,l,th Eastern University, 1930 ( ~hapter Five 6 Certified airman's file, Federal Aviation Administration, 12 May I Williamson, Jack, ChadofBbnder, 1986 1985 ~ ~ ~ N~Zt,~ ! ' ov. Isaac, In Memory Yet Green, ~ 11 l~etter fm L.R. |lubbard Junior, 2, ~ t January 1973 3 Ron the Wn'ter Public Affairs Dept, 12 L. Ron Hubbard autobiugraphical Author Services lnc, 1982 notes, 1972 4 The John W. (~mpbell l~tters, Vol I, 13 Ron The WHter 1985 14 Rocky Mountain News, 20 Februar 5 Ron the ~iter 1983 6 Mission Into Time 15 Deck log USSAlgol, National 7 lbid Archives 8 TheAberee, December 1961 16 Foreword to ~dbody by Theodore ~ 9 Interview Ford Sturgeon, 1986 ~' 10 The John W. Campbell l~tters 17 Asimov op.cit 11 Letter fm H. Latane Lewis I l, 14 18 Williamson op. cit February 1938 19 tlubbard, L.R., My Philosphy, 19e 12 Sprague de Camp, L., Elron qthe City q Brass (b~ntastic, August ( 7hapter Seven 1975) & Science Fiction Hand~k, 1953 I L. R. Hubbard Claim No 7017422 13 Asimov, op-cit. Veterans Administration archives 14 Aldiss, Brian, 7~'llion }'~arSpree, 2 Rogers, Alva, l)arkhouse, 1962 1986 3 Synmnds, John, The Great Beast, 15 Fantastic, August 1975 1971 16 FBI Files on L. R. Hubbard 4 Letter fm L. Sprague de Camp to 17 Interview Mrs Roberts Symonds, 5 August 1952 18 Letter to author fro National 5 Interview Nieson ltimmel, Los Geographic, 3 Mar 1986 Augeles, 14 August 1986 19 Interview Ford 6 Letter to author fm Jack Williams6 1 November 1986 7 Rogers, op. tit. Ibid ......... ~ ( 'hapter Six ~ 9 Interview Himmel t-- 1 Memorandum fm l lubbard to "I0 Grant, Kenneth, The Magical Magnuson, 21 July 1941 Revi~,al, 1972 2 Memorandum for Asst 11 Interview Himmel Hydrographer, 22 October 1941 12 Sytnonds, op.cit. 3 Despatch fm US Naval Attache, 13 Rogers, op.cit. ~ ~ Melbourne, 14 February 1942 / ~ Parsons file, O'fO archives, New 4 Memorandum fm CO USS YP-42Z York ~ ,,~ 12 September 1942 ~- -~CeowFey, Aleis~r, The B~k of the 5 Moulton testimony in Church of ~w Scientology ~'. Armstrong, 21 May 16 Grant, op.cit. 1984 17 Parsons ~'. Hubbard and Northrut 6 USSPC-815 Action Report, 24 May Case No 101634, Circuit Court, D 1943 County, Florida 7 Memorandum fm Commander NW 18 Book ofBabalon, OTO archives, Sea Frontier, 8 June 1943 New York 8 Record of proceedings, Board of 19 lbiet Investigation, {rSSPC-815, 30 June 20 Parsons, John, 'Magical Record', 1943 OTO archives, New York 9 Letter of admonition from 21 Symonds, op.cit. Commander, Fleet Operational 22 Letter to author fm Mrs Catherine Training Command, Pacific, 15 July Gillespie, November 1986 1943 23 Hubbard file, VA archives 10 Report on the Fitness of Officers, 29 24 L. R. Hubbard navy record May - 7 July 1943 25 OTO archives, New York 378 Bare-14~ced Messiah 26 Ibid 17 Los Angeles Dai6, News 6 September 27 Grant, op.cit. 1950 28 Parsons ~l. Hubbard and Northrup 29 Hubbard file, VA archives (Thapter Ten 30 l'asadena Star News, 21 June 1952 I Interview Cox and letter to Martin and 5 Jnly 1952 Gardner, 30 April 1952 2 Interview Ackerman ('hapter Eight 3 Evans, Christopher, (7nits of 1 Report of Physical Examination, VA Unreason, 1973 File, 19 September 1946 4 Interview A. E. van Vogt 2 Transcript Church of Scientology ~,. 5 Interviews Barbara Kaye, Los Angeles, 28 July ~ 5 August 1986 Armstrong 3 Itubbard file, VA archives 6 Interview Perry Chapdelaine, Nashville, 25 April 1986 4 Interview ixlerwin, Los Angeles, August 1986 7 Winter, op. cit. 8 Letter to B. Kaye fm Hubhard, 21 5 The John II'. ('antpbell l,etters, Vol I Oct 1951 6 Interview Mrs Roberts 9 US Govt memo to director FBI fm 7 Interview Ford SAC Newark, 21 March 1951 8 Interview Forrest Ackerman, 10 Interview Hornet I h~llywood, 31) July 1986 9 ttubbard file, VA archives l I Van Vogt, A.E., Dianetics and the 10 lbid I'n~fessions, 1953 11 Shan~ri-l.a, LASIrAS club organ, 12 Maloney, John W., .4 Factual Report No 6, May-June 1948 on Dianetics, February 1952 12 Interview Arthur Jean Cox, Los 13 Interview Richard de Mille, Santa Angeles, 18 August 1986 Barbara, 25 July 1986 13 Interview A. E. van Vogt, Los 14 US Govt memo to Director FBI fm Angeles, 22 July 1986 SAC Chicago, 27 April 1951 14 FBI memo, 13 April 1967 15 Letter in FBI files, 10Mar 1951 15 L. R. Huhbard navv record 16 US Govt memn 62-116151-70, 7 Mar ' 195 l 17 Airgrant to Legal Attach{~, Havana, Chapter Nine .... ~. 27 April 1951 (?t (1 Wollheim, Donald, The Universe ) 18 Divorce complaint No. I) 414498, 23 ~ ~._ Makers, I?Z_2 ..... "'~0~ April 1951, Los Angeles Superior 2 i~;'Angeles Times, 27 August 1978 Court U;"'~ Winter, Joseph A. A Doctor's Repo~l 19 Interview Caryl W'arner, t lollywood, C2~ .~, %~.~ on Dianetics, 1951 August 1986 !)'? 4 Expto,'ers Jou.tat, Winter/Spring ~hp~er Fjev'~'~"x 5 Hubbard autobiographical notes, 1972 2 l)iane Lewis research report, Wichita 6 Asimov, op. cit. 7 op. tit. January 1987 7 Willian~son, op. tit. 3 FBI memo, 15 iMay 1951 8 Fantastic, August 1975 4 Wichita Eagle-Bea. con, 26 Mar 1983 9 Interview Jack ltorner, Santa 5 Interviews Kaye 1Honica, 24Jtdy 1986 6 FBI file, 14 May 1951 10 Interview Ackerman 7 Interview de Mille 11 Scientific American, Jan 1951 8 Case No A36594, I)istrict Court of 12 ,Vew Republic, 14 August 1950 ~ Sedgwick Count~, Kansas ~ 13 LOOK, 5 I)ecember 1950 ( ~"O:Briefi; Hee~T~,Dia,~etics in Limbo,%f,~0 14 TI1eA~w ~}.'k 7Yntes, 6 August 1950 'X_~Q6 /~ 15 Newsweek, N o 36, August 1950 1{) Ti~lep ,me~ ~Ti'~th i~' ' 16 l'arade, 29 October 1950 ()'Brien, Los Angeles, August 1986 Notes 37~ I l Interview Chapdelaine 7 Anderson, op. tit. 12 tlnbbard file, VA archives 8 FBI Airtel, 7 August 1958 ~ .[.jF 13 Purcell, Don, Dianetics TodaY,,""-. 9 Interview Vosper ~,~__ a~.~J-_~7:7:&~' 1{) Interview Kemp ~ , ~ 14 Interview Moore, Wichita, 'X ~~ Noveml, er 1986 ~ ,o ~: , r"t~"~ ........ r ~T, 9~ , ~ 1 ' ( ~hapter bburteen 1ou,~ ~ovt memos, I tyct i 31 ann o Oct 195 l I Interview Alan Larcombe, East 16 FBI l)n file 100-6136 Grinstead, November 1985 17 op. cit. .~ 2 Garden News, 18 December 1959 Purcell, 18 tlubbard Dianetic Foundation Inc i 3 Atack, Hubbard th~vugh the looking Bankruptcy, No 379-B-2, [)istrict ] glass Court of Kansas " 4 Interview Joan Vidal, l~ondon, 19 Non-attributable interviews in Los January 1986 Angeles, August 1986, and Haywards 5 Interview Mrs Roberts X7 tleath, Sussex, May 1986 6 Atack, Itul~bard thr~ugh the looking glass Chapter Twelve 7 Letter fm Mary Sue ilubbard to ~1 It'hat is Scientology? Marilyn Routsong, 4 February 1960 ~ ~ ~ ~ Abilitv No. 81, 1959 8 Interview George Hay, London, March 1987 Hubbhrd L. Rdn, "tfave }bu l,ived 9 HCO News Letter, 7 May 1962 Befin'e This Life?" 1968 10 Minutes nf special staff meeting, 4 Anderson, Kevin V. Report of the Board of Inquiry Into Sct~ntology, tlCO Washington, Z9 August 1952 Australia, 1965 5 Wilson, Bryan, Religious Sects, 1970 (~hapterFifteen 6 Interview Carmen D'Alessio, ~ London Jan 1086 1 'l'he Findings on the US Food and I)rug Agency 1968 7 Interviews O'Brien 2 ItC() Bulletin, 11 May 1963 ..... 8 Interview Fred Stansfield, Burbank, 3 Saturda3' EvenhtgPost, 21 March July 1986 1~}{~4 9 Evidence of L. Ron Hubbard Jr. at 4 Interview Ken Urquhart, Maclean, Clearwater hearings, May 1982 ~( i0 Bankruptcy file 23747, vede~aT' va, Apr 1986 ~ Records Center, Philadelphia .~' 5 Interview Vosper t t L~t~ fn~ ltoover to Senator t longer 6 Anderson, op. cit 7 Wallis, Roy The Road 7b 7btal. Ferguson, 2 Mar 1953 Freedom, Lnndon 1976 12 Interview Ray Kemp, Pah~mar, Ca, Foster, Sir John, Enquiry into the ~ Aug 1986 8 . . . , . , ~ , .. ,2J 13 Interview Horner P~ at ttce& Effi cts q ~ tentolog3 , London, 1971 14 Interview Galusha, 1)enver, 9 Secretarial Executive Director, Office Cnlorado, Mar 1986 o[ LRtt, 9 Feb 1966 ('hapter Thirteen 10 The People, 20 Mar 1966 11 Saxon ttamilton Joutnal, Sumn~er 1 FBI memo, 11 October 1957 1985 2 FBI memo, 27 February 1957 12 CIA filesobtained via FOI 3 tlCO Techt~ical Bulletin, Vol II, 13 Rhodesia Sunday Mail, 22 May 1966 1955 14 Interview McMaster, London, Mar 4 Interview Cyril Vosper, London, 1986 December 1985 15 FIA memo, 22 Aug 1966 5 Inteview Pain Kemp, Palomar, Ca, 16 Interview McMaster Aug 1986 17 CIA memo 6 Founding Church of Scientnlogy v. 18 Interview Kemp US Court nf Claims No. 221-61 19 Interview McMaster 38(I Bare-Faced Messiah Chapter Sixteen 9 Interview Doreen Gillham, Malibu, August 1986 I Letter from assistant secretary, 10 Interview Eltringham Explorers Club, 8 December 1966 11 Letter fm Sara Hollister; testimony 2 Interview Kemp Armstrongv. Church of Scientology 3 Mission Into Time 12 Jon Atack archives 4 Interview Virginia Downsborough, 13 Interview Jim I)incalci, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Ca, August 1986 Ca. August 1986 5 Despatch fm LRI{, 22 Apr 1967 14 The O. J. Roos Story, 7 September 6 Evans, Christopher, ('nits of 1984 Unreason, l,ondon 1973 15 Los Angeles Times, 29 August 1978 7 Interview Amos Jessup, San Diego, 16 Letter fm Mary Sue Hubbard to Jane July 1986 ~ Kember, 2 September 1972 8 Interview Hana Eltringham, Los Angeles, Mar 1986 9 HCO Policy Letter, 26 Sept 1967 ChapterNineteen 10 Interview McMaster 11 The People, 21 February 1968 l Interview Urquhart 2Interview Dincalci 3Interview Eltringham Chapter Seventeen 4 Interview Kima Douglas, Oakland, I Interview Mary Maren, Los Angeles, California, Sept 1986 August 1986 5 Interview Jill Goodman, New York, 2 Interview Jessup Mar 1986 3 Interview Eltringham 6 Interview Gillham 4 Interview McMaster 7 Interview Gerald Armstrong, 5 Interview David Mayo, Palo Alto, Boston, Feb 1986 August 1986 8 Interview Tanva Burden, Boston, 6 Daily Mail, 6 August 1968 Feb 1986 7 Malko, George, Scientology: 7'he 9 L. R. t{ubbard navy record New Religion, New York, 1970 10 Interview Kathy Cariotaki, San 8 Interview Jessup Diego, July 1986 9 Interview Urquhart l 1 Interview Mrs Roberts 10 Interview McMaster 1Z LosAngeles Times, 29 August 1978 11 Forte, John, The (bmmodo~e and the 13 Capt. Bill Robertson Debrief (~flonels, Corfu Tourist Publications Transcript, May 1982 and Enterprises, 1981 14 Interview Kemp 12 Letter fm Mary Sue Hubbard to Sir John Foster, 6 November 1969 13 Interview Kathy Cariotakj, San ('hapter Twenty Diego, July 198~\ ...... 1 Interview Frankie Freedman, Sherman Oaks, Ca, Aug 1986 Chapter EtChteen 2 Interview Dincalci 3 Interview Mayo 1 Interview Urquhart 4 (7earwaterSun, 5 Dec 1975 Z Los Angeles Tintes, 29 August 1970 5 GO order 261175, 26 Nov 1975 3 The Guardian, 12 February 1980 6 St Petersburg Times, 9 Jan 1980 4 Guardian Order, 16 December 1969 7 Interview Douglas 5 Flag Order of 1890, 26 March 1969 8 Interview Alan Vos, Maclean, Va, 6 Affidavit of Gerald Armstrong, 19 March 1986 March 1986 9 Officer's Report, D.R. No 76-57596, 7 7 Testimony, Armstrong ~,. Church of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police ~ Scientology Department 8 Interview Michael Goldstein, 10 Interview Ed Waiters, Las Vegas, Denver, Co, March 1986 Aug 1986 ; Notes 11 Interview Dr Frank Gerbodc, Pah~ ('bapter Twettty-Tzco Alto, Aug 1986 I l'btbes, 27 October 1986 2 Ioterview Gillham Uhapter Twenty-One 3 Interview Mayo 1 Affidavit of Anne Rosenblum 4 Testimony, Church of Scientology Armstrong 2 Interview Dincalci 5 Newsletter of Center for Personal 3 l~amont, Stewart, Religion lnc, Achievement, 13 February 1984 London, 1986 6 Interview van Vogt 4 Affidavits ot Adelle & Ernest tlartwell St Petersbu~ Times, 9 Jan 7 Interview Downsborough 1980 8 Forbes, 27 October 1986 9 Case No. 47150, re the Estate of L. 5 Interview Douglas Ron tlubbard, Superior Court for l 6 Interview Armstrong County of Riverside 7 Interview Urquhart 10 San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribun 8 Interview Mayo 30 January 1986 9 Interview Waiters 11 Interview Robert Whaley, Creston, 10 John Atack archives August 1986 Index Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences (also known Boomershine, Raymond, 511 as Academy of Scientology), 221,227,228,229, brain-washing, 222 230 Braisted, Rear-Admiral F.A., 107 Ackerman, Forrest, 135-7, 139, 1411, 143,144, Jixedk~.nrid~e, Judge Paul G., 370,371,372 ,58-9, ,66, ,73,368 Ad~'ent .... 63, 68, 69 &~ i ~ ~ i i ~C , , , Air Trails and Seience F~ntiers, 133 ~ ~ 331 Alaska, 88.89, 90, 91,94, 96, 99, 107 L~XBritain, 254, 260, 261. 270, 271,277,289,290, 201, Aldiss, Brian, 86 294,296,297 AH A&~ut Radmtion, 227, 228 see also East G rinstead; I .ondon; Saint I I ill Allied Enterprises, 121~1,124, 125, 127, 128 Manor Allied Scientists of the World, 198. 199 Britton, Jimmy, 911, 91,92 AH 1t~ste~n. 71 Brueker, Annie, 364 ..~azing, 77 Brocker, Pat, 352,364, 365,366 American Fiction Guild, 66, 67, 92 Br~wning, Philip, 49, 5 I Americao Medical Ass{~ciati{m lAMA), 2~21,249 Bruns, Officer, 344 ~ America~d~5~chologj~al Association, 161 Bryan, Captain, 93 D .e.o.,,254. 255 ,,...h.rd,, ;. 72 A~fllo (formerly Royal .~cotnton). 291,293,294, Burden, Tanya, 322,323 295,296,297,298,299, 300. 301,302, 3{16, Burks, Arthur J., 66, 67, 79, 80, 139, 14{} 307, 3111, 311,313,318,319,321. 324,326, Bt~h~r koown as 'I'llden). 8-9, IOsee al›o 327,328,331,333 ~~ ~ce alx›~ R~val S~{~tn~an llyrne, June. 337 Aptdh~ Stars, 32~5,326, E8 Armstrong, Gerry, 2, .1, 4, 5,321,342. 355, 37{} Camer›o~, Marjoric, 121. 123. 129 Asimov, Isaac, 77, 78, 84, I II), 152 Campbell. Dona, 152 as-isncss, 22~5,227 Campbell, John W., 7~7, 78, 82, 84, 133,134, Astoun~Kng (later km~wn as.lstoundzngS~-u, nce 145 6, 147-9, 150, 151. 152, 153, 158, 159, 181, Plct~on), 76.77, 78, 84, 86, 133,134. 135,137, 186 145. 147,148, 151,152. 153,155,158,159. Campbell, Stoart, 1 I, 12 174, 195, 2113, 215 Camp Parsons, 27.33, 37 Athena (formerly knnwn as .l~'on Rit'et ) sec .l~'on Canary Islands. 265,267,269,280,207, 318,321 see Rn,er also l.as Palnias, Tencrife auditing, 157,158, 159, lbl, 16~5,169, 173,195-6, Capital City Coal Cotnpany, 18, B), ZZ 197,203,204, 2(}8,211), 213,224, 3119, 349-50, C~r~.~2~ ~l_~t~ Expediti m, 40.52 6, 101 358 Gioti~i,"~by2296, 32%~iT ~ Auditor, 256 Ca~ifi~a} 297, 2~8, 301,307 ~dT.G~G;irali;,~23,236,249 50, 252-5,257,260,261. Case t~The l'Stend(v~Vnpse, The 11 lubbar{I). 91 ,32 ~ Avon Ri~'er (later koown as Athena), 265,268,269, Catskills, 8 270, 271,275. 276, 280, 281. 282, 283. 284, Cavite, 30.31 285,286,287. 288,291. 294 Cazares, Gabriel. 337,338,341 Az~res. 297, 3112 Ccppos, Art, 151,152, I59, 169-7{). 176, 181~ (~'t~'t~tonh's ~f the l'~tt~nltn~, ( 'hitli b ~[ Ncientolo~,y, Bahamas. 53,328,329,331,334 228 Balnicl, l.ord, 254,255 Chapdclainc, Perry. 169. 195. 198,199 Batth:licld I:~ttth 11 lubl~ard), 367-8 Charlesl~o~, 328 Bay Ilea›l, 147, 14~J, 1511, 151,152 ('h~,c-thalket, The (11ubbard), 137 Bermuda. 54, 328 China, 4, 26.34, 37, 41.42, 43,167secal~,, Bia~ca, Sonya, 165 6. 255 ShanEhai ..~t~282. 287,288, 289,291) (7hiriasi, J{mi, 31)7 ~' bla~112-311, 182. 369--711 christenin~ cercmonS, scicnt~h~gist, 228 IJluc II'atet II. 127 Cluirchcr, StardeS, 277 11o{tin. Ed. 72 Ch~rch nf American Science, 220. 225 I~k e~lBahalon ( I'ar~, ~ns ). 121~. 12 I, 122, 124 Chnrch ›~f Scicntol›~gy see Scientology ~ ~;:k~{(x,W. 11,,. (('r›,,,lex). 113, I19. 124 (Thurch ,,f Spiritual l!ngincerin~ 220 Index 385 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 167,228,229, drug addiction, 35{~-I 257,263,279, 297,313,326,331 l)unedin, 336, 338 Cine Org, 353,354, 355,359~0, 365 see also films l)urant, 11, 12, 13 clears, 163,165~0,225--6 l)urant, Will, 155 Clearwater. 334-8,341,342, 343,345,352, 357,367 Commodore's Messenger Organization see East Grinstead, 233,234. 236,238, 244,245. 253, messengers 260, 261,265,268 Communism, 170, 171,175,180, 181. 183,189, 190, see also Saint llill Maoor 191,198,221,222, 241,242,245,259. 298,326 Edsel, lO0 conditions, 25 l-Z, 270, 277,285,286,287,288 E~a,slgL,_Dr Kurt, 25 Cooley, Earle, 374 ~ E, bzabeth~t52, 158, 159. 160, 167, 169, 170, 174. Coolidge, Calvin, President, 24, 25 C]~'7~""T~5,176, 179, 181,185,186. 187, 199, 3(}6 Corfu, 290, 291. 294-6,297,329 t Elkton, 59.60, 61,129 Corouados lslands, 106 EIliott, James, 200 Corsica. 284 EItringham, Hana, 269,274,277,282-3,284,285, ~ ',mne~ (East Grinstead), 233,234, 238,253,261 286,287,288,292,302,318,321,328, 329 Cnx. Arthur Jean. 140, 164 E-meter, 201,2034, 234,235,239,242, 247,250, Cox, Bill, 140, 141 256,259,268,277,282, 309, 311,312,348 Crail, Charlie, 171 Enchanter (later known as Dmna), 264,265,266, Creston, 372,374 267,268,271,280, 284,291 Crowley, Aleister, ll3, 114, 115,119, 120, 121,124, Endls Not }i't, The (1tubbard), 134, 135,137 126, 127, 132, 182 engrams, 151,154, 155,156, 157, 161,173,205 Cuba, 182, 183,185, 188, 195,250 Ephimem ton Hisseon, 290. 295 Culling, Louis, 126 ethics, 251-2,285 Curaqao, 328,331-2,333,334 Excal;bur, 79, 80, 81,136, 139, 144,212,217 Explorers Club, 4, 83.85, 88. 911194, 96, 1111, 1118, Daily Mail, 257,289 151,181,263,264 Daily Minor, 145,268 exteriorization, 210, 216 l)aily News (Los Angeles), 162 D 'A lessio, Carmen, 208-10 Eactors, The ( 11 u bbard ), 213 Darker Than }tbu Think (Williamson), 115 Family Theater, lielena, 15, 16 Daytona Beach, 332,333,334,335 Eamous B?ste~n, 144 I)e Camp. L. Sprague, 84, 87, 91, 110, 155 fantasy writing, 82-3 I)e Mille, Richard, 174, 177, 178, 179, 181,182, FBI, 2, 87, 170, 179, 18tl, 181,183,188. 191,197-8, 183-4, 185, 192, 193,212, 214-15 212, 221,222,223,229,230, 240,263,328, Denk, Gene, 357,374 341,351-2, 353,354, 355,356, 3611, 361,364, l)epartment ol Government Affairs, 241 375 Derickson, Dick, 33 films. 69, 3524~, 357,351~60 Dessler, Frank, 176-7,178,179, 181 FinalBlackout. The (1tubbard). 8e~7 l)etective FIction, 71 Eive Nuvels Monthly, 64, 137 Dewey, G. Gordon, 135,137 Fletcher, Admiral Frank Jack, 105 DeWoil, Ronald (formerly known as Nibs 1tubbard) flying, 48-511, 51.57.60, 62, 65 see Ilubbard, Nibs Food and Drugs Administration (FI)A), 228,246, DeWolie. Ida see Waterbury, Ida Corinne 247. 248 DeWolfe, )oho (also referred to as 'Captain' 1 .C. Ford, Nancy, 73, 74, 75 DeWolfe), 7, 8, 9, 101 Ford, Robert MacDonald (Mac), 734, 75, 8(1, 91, Diana (formerly known as Enchanter) see 93, 134, 143 l';nchantel Forte, l~lajor Juhn, 294,295~o l)ianazene, 227-8 Fr.~ 2_su,. 28~13 Diane, 127 C"Freedman, Frankie. 332. 333~32~" I)ianetics, 145 74, 181,182-3,185-8,191, [93 201, Freedom Congress, 228 2{12-3, 2117-8,211,213,218,219 see also Freedom of Inh~rmation Act, 4, 317 Ilubbard Dianetic Research Foundations; Freud, Sigmund, 24, 25,140,164,230,243 namc$.~dividuals cunnected with Dianetics Eunchal, 325,326, 327 I)incalci. Jim, 3 8,309,313,314,315,316,317, IYøc'al~'~~4,326, 333,334,340,343,350, Galbraith, William, 307 351,356 Galusha, Ellen, 35 l)ive Bonlber, The, 3-4 Galusha, John, 218 l)oris Itamlin, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 Gatden News, 234, 235 l)ouglas, Kima, 319-20,327,329, 332, 334,338, Garfield, Captain Fred, 52, 54, 55 339,340, 341,342, 343,345,346,355,357, GE (genetic entity), 204, 2(}5, 2116 361,362, 363,364 George Washington University, 4, 40, 46, 47, 48,511, Douglas, Mike. 338,339,361,363,364 57~._65.~.9._~,~_2_43.3~16. D ..... b .... gh, Virginia, 265,266, 267,268,368 ~dE, Frank, 34b.~7 I) 386 Barc-Ft~ced Messiah (;crmer, Karl, 124, 126 38, 41, 45, 47, 57, 70, 73, 97, 125. 134.2 t:~. (;ibraltar, 265,271,272, 275. 276 330-1 (;ilmao I I~t Sprin~s, 2, 3,359. 361,362.3(~3. 365. I lubbard. 1 lenrietta, 214,221 366 1 [ubbard, James, 1 I gliding see flying 11ubbard, Katie (Catherine May), 711, 88, 89, 97, ~~~, 32~5 125. 180,228 dstein, Rehecca, 21~'3~CN I luhbard, I.afayette Ronald , .~ Gnldstnne, Lou, 116 F{~r pers{~ns. places ~r subjects connected with I,. ~,~dman, J '~5, ~2(1,3~ X Ron I lubbard see natne nf person, place or ~raiT'i~.~,~- '~ 9 subject Gratis, 49, 51 11ubbard, l.afayette R{mald, Jnr see Ilubbard, Nibs ~.... 7, ~u I lubbard, Mary Sue (n6e Whipp), 195, 2~}, 21)7-8, ;7;U '", ~ d t. t ~J]y~e 11ubbartl, P›dly 214,217,221,225,230,235, 2329, 242, 2511, GrtiYil~, Xlr, 60 251,252, 264,270, 272, 284,286,287,298, Grul~er, Frank, 66.67 3~, 3113.30~5, 31)9-1{}, 311-12. 325,328, 33(), Guam, 28, 29.31,32, 33.35, 37, 38, 41), 41,43.44, 336,340,342, 344, 345,346, 349, 351,352, 45, 98 353,356,363 4, 36~7, 3629, 371 Guard/at~s ()fficc, 298,312,315,318,336, 337,341, I lubbard, May (n~e Waterbury), 9, 1{~1 I, 12-15, 342, 345,346. 351. 352, 360,367 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22-3, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, (;I~K pr,~grammc, 173 41,45%, 57, 7(}, 73,134. 237-8 I tubbard, Nibs (l~afayette Ronald, Jnr; knnwn later 11ackcr, l)r Frederick, I~1 as Ronald DeWolfe), 6~5, 70, 88, 89, 90, 97, I lalscy, Admiral, 117 125,180, 2(}~7, 211,214, 215,216, 221,231-2, I latp~u~n, 127,128, 129 23~7, 311-12, 365,367,369-70,375 Ilarris, Edward, 235 [lubbard, Polly (n~c Grubb), 59-61, 63, 6~5, 71}, 11artwell, Adelle and Ert0e, 354, 3611 71,72-3, 74, 75, 81 2, 88, 89, 90, 91,97, 101, I IASI see I lubl~ard Ass~ciati~m of Scientol›~gists / 125;~5180, 240 Ioternati{~nal ~ !lubbard, Qoent~Geoffrey Quentin McCaully), Ilat~het, The. 4{1, 48, 51 --2, 54, 56 ~ 214,-2234, 272, 293, 3{13,325%, 343, 34~7, Ilavana. 182, 183,185,187,188 349 Ilave }}~u I.i~,edBefine 71~is Lt~'? (11ubbard). 238 Itubbard, Sara Northrup see Nortbrup, Sara I ICO (I lubbard Comn~u~ications ()ffice), 223,236, 1 lubbartt, Suzette (Mary Suzette R~chclle), 221, 237,241. 242,243,246. 248,249 232,240,272, 293,303 4. 343,349-50, 366 heaven, visits to, 247.24~9 I lubbard Association of Scientologists, 202, 203, Ileimburger, Ray A., 48, 49, 52, 56 204,206,207,214,218 I Icinlein, Robert, 77, 1119, 1 I{) I lubbard Association o{ Scientologists International 11eldt, I lenning, 337 (I IASI), 211,212, 215,217. 218,221,223. 224, lielena, 4, 15, 16, 17.18, 19, 21,23, 28, 29, 33, 34, 225,231,236,253 35, 36, 37, 41, 45, 46, 49,711 Ilubbard College, 199,200 lielena Indepen&nt. 16, 18, 20, 36 I lubbard Cornn~unications Office see tlCO II .....t, 361,362,363,364,365 I lu~anetic ReSearch Foundati .... . ~c~x Ilcmingway, Greg, 174. 176 ( Eliza~th, 152, 15~i, 169, 170, 174, 179. 181, i8~[ D tJ Ilern,itage Ilousc, 151,154,155. 158, 159, 17{}, 218 ~ ..... [~ Ilinm~cl, Nitson, 11~17 LosAngeles, 163,166. 167, 17(}. 171. 173, 17~5, ff U ,,i,,e~. Don. 37~5 ,8,, '8S, 'S8 '~ t IItsto~!%7~,e (I lubl,ard), 204, 2(15,206, 224 ~3J.~dvlphi~ 21~ _~ - ~ Ilollister. Miles, i~1,175, 176, 177. 178. 179, '1 180. 185, 1911, 3(}5. 306 t 1'93. F6i:~ j9~'~ i9~7, 19~ Ilollvwood 4, 69, 77,135,161), 231 ~ J lbmg Kong, 311.43 mentinned, 176, 189 11omdul,~, 29. 166 I lubbard Explorational Crimpany l~imited, 264,265, Iloover. J. Edgar, 87, 180, 212, 23(}, 241) 269,272,300 I lorncr, Jack, 158,159, 171,216, 217,218 I lubbard Geological Survey Expedition, 2634 Ih~ugh. l)r Joseph, 212 1tubbard Guidance Center, 229, 255 Itubbard, Alexis Valerie, 152, 162, 174, 175, 17~9, Ilunter, Ilankand Marge. 176 181,182, 183,185, 187, 189, 192~3,194, 305~, I lydro~raphic ()ffice, 4(}, 56, 85, 90, 93.96 375 l lubbard, Arthur Ronald Conway, 230, 232, 251. International Congress of I)ianeticists and 272,293,303,304,343,350, 366 Scicntologists, 214 I lubl~ard, Diana Meredith de Wolfe, 21}8,213,232, lntmdu~tmn to Scientolo~'..In (do Mille), 212 2411, 251,265,272,292, 293,295,303,305, Ireland. 225~ 310, 330,333,342 Ilubbard, Ilarry Ross(ltub), 7.11.12, 13, 14, Jaipur, Maharajahof, 232,233 15-16. J7.18,19-20.22-3,27,28,31,32,33. Jamaica, 53,330 lndex 387 James, Nornun. 195 Marcn, Mary, 279, 28(}, 291,292 Japan, 29-30 Marseilles, 286, 287,288 Jentz~h, Rev. llebcr, 371-2. Martinique, 53, 54, 55 Jessup, Atnos, 269,272, 274.28(I. 281. 293~11.TM Mathison, Volney, 2(}3 %.. 312,323 ~---"~' May, Rollo, 160 Johnson, Professor Arthur, 93 Mayo, David, 288-9,334, 357. 358-9,362, 363,366, Johnson, Judge Norma It., 368 367 Jones. Iloward D., 31(I Meisner, Michael, 341,342, 351 Jones, Captain Jnhn, 268 Meister. George, 307-8 .7ountalofScientology, 212 Meistcr, Susan, 306-8 Metwin, Sam, 133 Kalispell, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.17.22 messengers, 5,301 3,304-5,320, 322 3,328. 332, Kalogeras, Marius, 29(} 349,355,366,375 Kangan~ ( butt, 255 Mexico, 106 Kaye, Barbara, 166-7,168, 169. 170, 171. 172-3. Miami, 99, I(R}, 126, 127, 128,245. 333 174, 175,176, 188, 191-2 Michigan, University nf, 411, 53, 56, 85 Kember, Jane, 305,368 Miscavige, l)avid, 365,366, .3__Q7,375 Kemp. Pain, 225,232, 260, 331 (...~itchett, Li.qa and l~like~ 373 ~ Kemp, Ray, 215-16. 225,226. 232, 260,264 K16~'aco'i;72,76 ......... ' Kennedy, John F., 241,245. 248 Montana, 4, 7, 12, 13, 14.15, 18, 19, 22, 36.45.72, Ketchikan, 89, 90, 91,99 143,234 see also I [elena Ketchikan Alaska ('hronicle, 89 Montana National Goard, 35 KGBU Radio, 90, 91, 92 Mnore. Jean Ohvier, 197 Kilner. Brigadier General Walter G.. 83 Morgan, Parker C., 152 ~Co, 265,287,303. 306, 307,308,310, 311,312 l~a Goulette, 282. 283 fl,3 '-,Møultøn, Thomas. 1{i0, 1(11,105, 1(16 ' Laguna Beach, 131,132 ................... La Quinta, 343-4,348,353 see also ()live 'Free Navy see US Navy Ranch Neponset. 98, 99 l~arcombe, Alan, 233,234,261 New Detective, 137 Las Palmas, 265,266. 267,268,269,270, 271,274 New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners, 174 [.as Vegas, 344,345,346, 354,360,361 ,Yew Republic. 161 Latey, Mr Justice, 371 News4terald (Santa Rosa). 367 Lewis, H. Latane II, 65, 83 Newsweek. 161,235 Liechtenstein, 300, 329 New York, 9, 1 I, 23, 47, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 75, Lisbon, 297,311,312, 313,314,318 78, 81, 84, 85, 87, 97, 133,134, 136, 145, 159, , mle, Frlnk, i~'~ 166, 179,229, 279, 301,314,315,316, 318, nan ' 323. 334,336, 339 d "~72,5,223, 224,225,226, ..... 53, 56, ,60, ,6,,, 94 227,230, 231,232, 251,260, 301,371Nixon, Richard, 240, 241,307 London Congress on Nuclear Radiation and I lealth, Nordenholz, Dr A., 202 227 Northrup, Sara (also known as Betty), 116, 117.118, Look magazine, 1734 !20, 125~0, 127-8, 128-9, 132, 133,134, 142, IA~sAngeles, 3,4, 113,131,135,137, 158,159, 161, 143,144, 147,150, 152, 168, 170, 171-2, 174-5. 162, 163,166. 170, 171,173,174, 175, 176, 176-9, 180, 183-5,188-93,195,198,267. 3115, 177,179, 180, 181,183,184. 185,188, 189, 306 1911. 192, 211,212, 214,245,256, 300,305. Nugget, The, 35 306. 315,318,331,338,342,343,345. 352, 353,357,363,365,370 Oak Knoll Naval Itospital, 95, 110, 112, 118, 143 Los Angeles Fantasy and Science Fiction Society, O'Brian. Ilelen 194-5,197, 199. 210, 211,212,213, 114-15,139. 140, 145,164 214 l.os :lngeles Times, 160. 163, 184.189 Ocean A rcbaeolol~ical Expedition. 264 ()'Gotman, Kathy, 345 McCain, %V.E.. 31, 92 O'Keefe, John, 276-7 McCarthy, Joe, Senator. 1711, 191 Olive Tree Ranch. 3434. 348,350, 352,353,356, McGonigel. Melba, 177 357,358,361 McNlaster, John. 255-6,258,259. 262. 273,287 8, Operation and Transport Corporation Limited 293 4 _. (OTC), 29{I, 290,300, 310, 31 I, 312 '~ Nladcira. 297,321,325,326. 327 ("Operation Snow White:-318,336,340,341,349, ) Magg,e (Magwtan). 73, 74, 75.84, 88, 89, 91 [-~._351,352,356, 364. 367 Z2~J'/ Magnuson, Warrob G., I12, 93, 96 Oregon,"~;44)3, tt-15, t07 ' /~./.~' _~6~//. __~' Maloney, Jack, 176 OregonJollrnal. 101 ' Manila, 30, 31,41 Ot;e B~?k../h'~CLLpbbard). 268 tx3-~ M ..... .~XrthurJ.. 338,346. 361 fl' C O ....... Bette, 337~ ~ .[ 388 Bare-Fat'ed ;llessiah OTC see ()perallure al~d 'l'rausport Corp{~ration Ru~s: Ottq, 288.30%&. I,imitcd ~R,~ScDb!Um. A~B~9 x. ~ ~T,,<,,rdoTemph,,ricn,is), ,,3, ,,4, :,6, ,,7,-C~;~,~.~'~g~:~iee3' ' I24. 126 Routso.g. Marily., ZZ4,237,238 nverboarding. 288,292 4,295 Royat Scotman (later known as,~11o), 270, 271, {}verland Avenue (Alpha). 342 Z7Z. Z73. Z7~5. Z76, ZT?, Z7g. Z80. 281. Z8S, 286,287,288, z~}, 29 t, 294 see atso A~tlo Palm Springs. 174. 175. 176. 177. 184. 19{L 306. 343 RPF (Rehabilitation Project Force). 2. 321. 323. Pa,ama. 298 324: 325. 329. 343,348.35S. 358.35g l'a~ade. 16Z Ru::cie. Cabhie. Z83 Parseins. I lelen. 113.115 Russia. 181. l~. ZZl. ZZ2. 245. 298. 369 Parsons. John Whiteside (Jack). 113 3{1. 140. 141 . 143. 182. 191,306 Sablema,, Mark. 337-8 l'a{s:~ns. Ruth Virgioia, IZ9 Sa~, 301,307 Pasadena. 112, 113. IZl. 127. 128. IZ9. 141. 143. Saint llill Manor. 233. 234,235. 238, Z3g. 240, 241. 191 Z4Z. 243. 244. 245,246. 247-8. 250. 251. 252. see also South Ora,gc Grove Avenue 254. 255. 256. 258, 2~. 261. Z64. 265, Z67. past lives. 197, Z3bZ. Z38. 246. Z7g 8S. 316.36Z Zfi8. 269. 270. Z7Z. 273. Z79. Z86. 289, Z91. Peking. 41.42 305, 3~. 338. 369 l'enthouse. 369 Saint llill Special Briefi,g Course (SIISBC). Z4Z. l'eople. 277 243. 244 t't:anto,: Detect:re. ?'/:e. 64 St l'ete,sbu~ ?~mes. 335. 337 Philadelphia. I09. 110. 210.21 l. Zl2,214 ~L~cent, 3~ ...-~. Philadelphia Doctorate C ....... 210 ~n, J~ ,~ -- ~ e~,~ Philippines, 26, 3~1,95, 97, 1119 ~-..~anborn, John, 174, 176, 17~/- ~ Phoenix. Z0L 203, 2(14,206, 2(17,208,212, 214,215, San' ]}iego. ~ 102, l{16, 107 216, 217,218,221,222. 237 San Francisco, 23.29, 31, 37, 98.113, 118, 168, 3~ Pzlot. 65 San l,uis Obispo, 142,372. 373,374, 375 Pinkhan{, Jim, 216 Santa Catalina Island, 132 plants, 23~5 Sartlinia, 276,281,297 ~,p~L;~7(). 271,27,5 .Satinday Everang I'ost, 250 ~.Sava~al}~ 143~1~ I'optdarl)ctectnT, 64 : Schectcr, Mark, 332, 333-: ~ p,,,,:and. ,,~,, ,:., ,06. ::,7, ,:,8 .XC sc..ma.'~7~;~:.' Portugal, 313,321,326, 327 see also I.ish,m la ~7< '---- Pratl, Fletcher, 87 ~icnce fich6~N~, g~7. 11~15,135,139, Pn'61e f '~mntl' A'e~t's. 49 5(} 140, 367-8 see also name of author l'n's~dent Madison, 28.29, 31), 31 Science of SuH.i~'d (1tubbard). 174. 194 t'rest,:n, Paul~ 313. 314,315,317,318 Scientific,~ten'can. 1~ I'nfldems of life. 7~le. 355 scientology/scient{:l~gists, 2(11-375 Ptd~lic I mcstigations Sectinn. 254 Scientolo~y:8~O. 2(}6.210 Pucrm Rico, 40.53, 55.56, 57, 58, 59, 85 ~outing, Z3.24, 25, 27.47 ~J~fic~9, 63 4, 65--8, 69, 71, 72, 76 Sea Org, 263432, 372 ('Purcell, l)on, 185, 18~7, 192, 193,196, 197, 199, Seattle, 23, 27, 28, 33.36, 37, 70, 71, 91,101,105, ~}. 2~, 207, 21 I, 213,218 106 Purificiion Rundown, 350~1 Secret of Treasure Island. The (11ubbard), 69 security checking, 23~434 ' Ra ia~i~, 227-8 , , Shaughai, 30, 43 recnfitin~mefi~:dsZZ6 Sharpe, Rc~, Z4Z, Z44, Z4fi: 257 Red Cross. 57, 58 Shrine Autlitorium, 163~, 182 Rehabilitation Project Force see RPF Sicily, 283 284 Reis, Irene, 374 Sierra I,eone, 274 Reisdur[, {)lane. 352 Silver ((]erald Wolfe). 336. 337,341, 34Z Re~'olt m the Ntats, 353 Silver Spring. 221,222, 2Z3,229 _~.ico. ~h~~ h ,~ X/an (V.. Vom. iS8 Rhodes,a 2s7 6. Z,5. Z~p~ '~e.' '~ .-' ....' Q; """ ' "' ,:,4, ,:,5. ,: :. ,2:,, 32,. 325. Riclta?d~m,~mlrew, l~ ~ I Richey, Judge Charles R., 364 ~3~;~ J~}, 353,366 mad safety. 236 k~mifl~. lafi357. 258, 259,261 R,,hcrts, A.]., 36, 41 South Airion. 223, Z42,245,259,262 Rohcrts, Gotham, 34, 36 Southampton, 27 I, Z7Z, Z73. 274 Rohcrts~m, Bill, 266,275. 331 Snuth Colby 711.71,73, 84 R~evs, Alva, 115,116. 117,118, 119. 143 Southern Land Sales and I)cveh:pment, 333. 335 l{,,~crq, I).n, ]51,152 S~mth ()range (3mvc Avenue, Pasadena. 113, 114. Index 115,116, 118, IZ0. 1Z1, I22, IZS, I26. IZqsee {'SS ILS. Grant, 23 also Pasadena I,rSS YP-422. 98, 99 space flight, 245_6 Spain, 213,214,277,279,285,286, 326see also Valcncia, 277,279,281,284,285,286. 287. 288 V alencia Vatt Staden~ ] ~c, 270,271,282 Sparks, 352, 353,364 Van Vogt, A.E., 77. 141. 158, 164, 166. 167. 173, Special Zone Plan, 241 368 Spo~sman Pilot, 51,57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 08 Veterans Administration (VA), IZ5,128, 131,132, Stagecoach, 69, 74 ( 137. 138, 139, 196 Stansfield, Fred, 210 Vidal, joan. 235 ' Starkey, Norman, 307 Vos, Alan, 34{) x .,s:_~_,,_!,_._~__,~.2sl. a.~_.. . V0Sm_._C_~!LZ_~.~:Z..~.I.Z3Z. ZSZ_.~-- C, ' Steinberg, !~eon~' "Stei,;fi,~vernor Samuel, 14, 16 Wake Island, 33 Street and Smith, 66, 77, 78.84. 133,144 Wallace, Mike, 371 Sturgeon, Theodore, 77 Wall{s, Roy. ZS4 Sullivan, Laurel, 351 Wall of Fire, 266 Still{van, Lieutenant Commander, 105 Waiters, Ed, 345-6, 360, 361 .';unday ]fail (Rhodesia). 257 Warnet, Caryl, 184. 185 Survival (Burks), 13940 Warnet Brothers. 3, 4 Nwavely Sentinel, 46 Warren, Peter, 3117, 308.311 Swisher. George, 49-50 Washiogton, 4, 23, 24.27, 3& 45, 46, 47.49, 511, 51, Switzerland, 289,300, 329 54, 55, 59, 61, 62, 87, 90, 93, 96, 98.99. 129, Synergetics, 218 166, 189,198, ZZI, 224. 227,228. 229,230, 232. 236,241. 242, 244, 247. 297. 298,307, Tampa, 181 310, 311,328. 331,333,336. 339, 340. 341, Tangier. 265,310. 311. 312,313 342,351,352,356, 363. 368 Telegrafos, 295 Washington lJaily News, 55, 61 Tenerile, 318,319 Washington Sta~; 63 Tenyaka Memorial, 298 Waterbury, Abram, 8 thetans, 203,204,205,206 Waterbury, }tope, 10, 14, 49, 89 Thing From Out~LSpace. The. 77 Waterbury, Ida Corinne (n& DeWolfe), 8, 9, 10, 1 I. < __Thomas, Sharon, 34~-. 12, 13.14, 15, 17, 21, 70 Thompson. Commander 'Snake'. 23-4, 25,164. 230. Waterbury, June. 10. 14, 18. Z0 231 Waterbury. Late (Lalayette). 7.8, 9.10. I1, IZ, 13, Thnlliml.ldventme, 64, 71 Z 14, 15.16--17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 45, 49, 101 Thrillingl)etective. 64 Waterbury, Louise, 10, 14, 15 Thn'lling Ill. sic.t. 144 Waterbory, Margaret, 8 7~mllin~ 116neterStones, 77 Waterbury, Marnie (Margaret), 10, 12, 13, 14, 18. Tilden (formerly knox~'n as Burnerr), 1{}, 11, 12see 19, 20.22, 36, 64,711, 88, 89, 90, 91. 134. 237, also Burnett 331 Times. The, 256 Waterbury, May see Itubbard, May Tremainc, F. (}rlin, 78 Waterbury, Midgie (Ida Irene), 10, 14, 15, 36, 70, Trinidad, 331 134 Tnah, 250 Waterbury, Ray, III, 11, 13, 14, 18, 49 Tsingtao, 41-2 Waterbury, Toil{e, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 21,46, 70, 7~.pewdte~ In the Sky (11ubbattt), 86 89_, 23__.~_7238 , ' ~tld. DidC7315 ~ f 'nfathontaHc .11an, The, 354 Wermuth, Arthur W., 189 United Churches of Florida. 335,337,338 Westerns, 82 f 'nknown. 82.84, 86.91 Western Story, 82 Urquhart, Ken. 25(I, 251,26(}, 2,51. 292,297,299, West Indies Minerals Survey, 40, 56-7.58 313,314,324, 325,356 /~) Westwo_od N rusty, 177. 179 LTS Navv ~obert, 3.-7-3-;-37A . llarry Ilubbard and, 7, 11, 19.20, 22, 28 ~VJtat Is Scientolo~77 350 L. Rm~ Ilubbard and, 4, 23, 30, 33, 37, 46, 57, Whicker, Alan. 235 92-111,112. 296. 323 4 ~,Vhipp, lXlary Suesee [lubbard, Mar> Sut' ~ :SS;11gol, 107, 108. 109, 110 Whispering Winds Ranch. 372. 373. 374 ['SS G{dd Sta~; 30, 31.41.42, 43, 44 White, Dr WiBiam Alan, 217 {~'SSllendersou, 37.38, 40 Wichita, 185. 186. 187, 188. 189. 192. 193,194, 195, {'SStGtte~y, 57 196, 197,198, 199. 200.2{11,202. 2117.211, ~.'SSAItm, 33, 34 213,218 ['SS Oklahoma, 23 ~Ychfla Eagle, 187 ~'SSP(Lgl5, 100, Illl, 1(12, lll3, 104, 105,106, 1(17 Wicker, Rev. R.L-, 337 390 Bare- Faced Messiah %,~,'illiamson, Jack, 77, 110, 115,153 Winter, Dr Joseph, 147, 14P~51,152, 169-711, 176, x.~.'ils. m, I lcnry (lalt. r known as I larry I lubbard) ,~,~, 184, 186, 189 I lubbard, I larr3' Ross Wolfe, Gerald (Silver), 336,337,341,342 x,~,'inchctl. ~,~'altcr. 145 !t.'titers ','{larkets anti Methods, 144 ================================================================= If this is a copyrighted work, you are acknowledging by receipt of this document from FACTNet that on the basis of reasonable investigation, you have not been to obtain a copy elsewhere at a fair price, and that you are and will abide by the following copyright warning. WARNING CONCERNING COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS: The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photo copies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified by law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. 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