Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (5 page)

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Hubbard’s father decided to re-enlist in the Navy. Ledora got a job with the State of Montana, and she and six-year-old Ron moved in with her parents, who had relocated to Helena. When the war ended, Hub decided to make a career in the Navy, and the Hubbard family was launched into the itinerant military life.

Hubbard’s family was Methodist
. He once remarked, “Many members of my
family that I was raised with were devout Christians, and my grandfather was a devout atheist.” Ron took his own eccentric path. Throughout his youth, he was fascinated by shamans and magicians. As a boy in Montana, he says, he was made a blood brother to the
Blackfoot Indians by an elderly medicine man named
Old Tom Madfeathers. Hubbard claims that Old Tom would put on displays of magic by leaping fifteen feet high from a seated position and perching on the top of his teepee. Hubbard observes, “I learned long ago
that man has his standards for credulity, and when reality clashes with these, he feels challenged.”

A signal moment in Hubbard’s narrative is the seven-thousand-mile voyage he took in 1923 from
Seattle through the Panama Canal to Washington, DC, where his father was being posted. One of his fellow passengers was Commander
Joseph C. “Snake” Thompson
of the US Navy Medical Corps. A neurosurgeon, a naturalist, and a former spy, Thompson made a vivid impression on the boy. “He was a very careless man
,” Hubbard later recalled. “He used to go to sleep reading a book and when he woke up, why, he got up and never bothered to press
and change his uniform, you know. And he was usually in very bad odor with the Navy Department.… But he was a personal friend of Sigmund Freud’s.… When he saw me—a defenseless character—and there was nothing to do on a big transport on a very long cruise, he started to work me over.”

No doubt Thompson entertained the young Hubbard with tales of his adventures as a spy in the Far East. Raised in Japan by his father, a missionary, Thompson spoke fluent Japanese. He had spent much of his early military career roaming through Asia posing as a herpetologist looking for rare snakes while covertly gathering intelligence and charting possible routes of invasion.

“What impressed me,” Hubbard later remarked, “he had a cat by the name of Psycho. This cat had a crooked tail, which is enough to impress any young man. And the cat would do tricks. And the first thing he did was teach me how to train cats. But it takes so long, and it requires such tremendous patience, that to this day I have never trained a cat. You have to wait, evidently, for the cat to do something, then you applaud it. But waiting for a cat to do something whose name is Psycho …”

One of Thompson’s maxims was “If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.” He told young Hubbard that the statement had come from Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha. It made an impression on Hubbard. “If there’s anybody in the world that’s calculated to believe what he wants to believe and to reject what he doesn’t want to believe, it is I.”

Thompson had just returned from Vienna, where he had been sent by the Navy to study under Freud. “I was just a kid
and Commander Thompson didn’t have any boy of his own and he and I just got along fine,” Hubbard recalls in one of his lectures. “Why he took it into his head to start beating Freud into my head, I don’t know, but he did. And I wanted very much to follow out this work—wanted very much to. I didn’t get a chance. My father … said, ‘Son, you’re going to be an engineer.’ ”

THOMPSON WAS ABOUT
to publish a review of psychoanalytic literature in the
United States Naval Medical Bulletin
; indeed, he may have been working on it as he traveled to Washington, and no doubt he drew upon the thinking reflected in his article when he tutored
Hubbard in the basics of Freudian theory. “Man has two fundamental
instincts—one for self-preservation and the other for race propagation,” Thompson writes in his review. “The most important emotion of the self-preservation urge is hunger. The sole emotion of the race-propagation urge is libido.”
Psychoanalysis, Thompson explains, is the “technic” of discovering unconscious motivations that harm the health or happiness of the individual. Once the patient understands the motives behind his neurotic behavior, his symptoms automatically disappear. “This uncovering of the hidden motive does not consist in the mere explaining to the patient the mechanism of his plight. The understanding alone comes from the analytic technic of free association and subsequent rational synthesis.” Many of these thoughts are deeply embedded in the principles of
Dianetics, the foundation of Hubbard’s
philosophy of human nature, which predated the establishment of Scientology.

In 1927, Hubbard’s father was posted to
Guam, and
Ledora went along, abandoning Ron to the care of her parents. For a man as garrulous as L. Ron Hubbard turned out to be, reflections on his parents are rare, almost to the point of writing them out of his biography. His story of himself reads like that of an orphan who has invented his own way in the world. One of his lovers later said that he told her that his mother was a whore and a lesbian, and that he had found her in bed with another woman. His mistress also admitted, “I never knew what to believe
.”

Hubbard made two voyages to visit his parents in Guam. One trip included a detour to
China, where he supposedly began his study of Eastern religions after encountering magicians and holy men. According to the church’s narrative, “He braved typhoons
aboard a working schooner to finally land on the China coast.… He then made his way inland to finally venture deep into forbidden Buddhist lamaseries.” He watched monks meditating “for weeks on end
.” Everywhere he went, the narrative goes, the teenage Hubbard was preoccupied with a central question: “ ‘Why?’ Why so much
human suffering and misery? Why was man, with all his ancient wisdom and knowledge accumulated in learned texts and temples, unable to solve such basic problems as war, insanity and unhappiness?”

In fact, Hubbard’s contemporary journals don’t really engage such philosophical points. His trip to China, which was organized by the YMCA,
lasted only ten days. His parents accompanied him, although they are not mentioned in his journals. He did encounter monks, whom he described as croaking like bullfrogs. The journals reflect the mind of a budding young imperialist, who summons an unearned authority over an exotic and unfamiliar culture. “The very nature of the Chinaman
holds him back,” Hubbard observes on the ship back to Guam. “The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.”

The journals provide a portrait of an adolescent writer trying on his future craft by cataloguing plot ideas, such as, “A young American in India with an organized army for rent to the various rajahs. Usual plot complications.” Another idea: “Love story. Goes to France. Meets swell broad in Marseilles.” He is trying uncertainly to find his voice:

Hubbard entered the School of Engineering at
George Washington University in the fall of 1930. He was a poor student—failing German and calculus—but he excelled in extracurricular activities. He began writing for the school newspaper. A new literary magazine
at GWU provided a venue for his first published works of fiction. He became director of the gliding club, a thrilling new pastime that was just catching on (Hubbard’s gliding license was #385
). The actual study of engineering was a secondary pursuit, as his failing grades reflected.

In September 1931, Hubbard and his friend
Philip “Flip” Browning took a few weeks off to
barnstorm through the Midwest in an Arrow Sport biplane. “We carefully wrapped
our ‘baggage,’ threw the fire extinguisher out to save half a horsepower, patched a hole in the upper wing, and started off to skim over four or five states with the wind as our only compass,” Hubbard writes. By now, he had taken to calling himself “Flash.”

Hubbard’s account of this adventure, “
Tailwind Willies,” was his first commercially published story, appearing in
The Sportsman Pilot
in January 1932. It was the launch of an unprecedented career. (He would go on to publish more books than any other author, according to the 2006
Guinness World Records
, with 1,084 titles.)

In the spring of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Hubbard
undertook a venture that displayed many of the hallmarks of his future exploits. He posted a notice on several university campuses: “Restless young men
with wanderlust wanted for the
Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Cost to applicant $250 payable at the dock in Baltimore before sailing. Must be healthy, dependable, resourceful, imaginative, and adventurous. No tea-hounds or tourist material need apply.” The goals of the expedition were grand and various—primarily, to make newsreels for
Fox Movietone and Pathé News, while exploring the pirate haunts of the Caribbean and voodoo rites in Haiti. There were also vague plans to “collect whatever one collects
for exhibits in museums.”

“It’s difficult at any age to recognize a messiah in the making,” wrote one of the young men, James S. Free, a journalist who signed on to the expedition. He was twenty-three years old, two years older than Hubbard. They were going to be partners in the adventure, along with Hubbard’s old flying buddy, Phil Browning. “I cannot claim prescient awareness that my soon-to-be business partner possessed the ego and talents that would later develop his own private religion,” Free wrote in a notebook he titled “Preview of a Messiah.”

Hubbard was living with his parents in Washington, DC, when Free arrived. “Ron introduced me to his mother, whose long light brown hair seemed dark beside the reddish glow of her son’s hair and face,” Free wrote, in one of the few records of the actual relationship between Hubbard and his mother. “I recall little else about her except that like her husband, Navy lieutenant Henry Ross Hubbard, she plainly adored young Ron and considered him a budding genius.”

Hubbard filled Free in on new developments. Phil Browning, the other partner, had dropped out at the last minute, but he had managed to get the loan of some laboratory equipment from the University of Michigan; meantime, Hubbard was negotiating with a professional cameraman for the anticipated films of the voodoo rites “and that sort of salable material.” Thanks to Free’s efforts to sign up more than twenty new members of the expedition, Hubbard said, “We have enough cash to go ahead.”

The trip was a calamity from the start. A number of the “buccaneers” who signed up bailed out at the last minute, but fifty-six green collegians with no idea what they were doing clambered aboard the antiquated, four-masted schooner
Doris Hamlin
. The adventure began with the
Doris Hamlin
having to be towed out of Baltimore harbor because of lack of wind. That was almost the end
of the expedition,
since the tug was pulling toward the sea while the ship was still tied to the dock. Once in the Atlantic, the ship was either becalmed in glassy seas or roiling in high chop. The mainsails blew out in a squall as the expedition steered toward St. Thomas. Seasickness was rampant. At every port, more of the disgusted crew deserted. The only film that was shot was a desultory cockfight in Martinique.

It soon became evident
that the expedition was broke. There was no meat or fruit, and the crew was soon reduced to buying their own food in port.
Hubbard didn’t have enough money to pay the only professional sailors on the ship—the captain, the first mate, and the cook—so he offered to sell shares in the venture to his crewmates and borrowed money from others. He raised seven or eight hundred dollars
that way, and was able to set sail from Bermuda, only to become mired in the Sargasso Sea for four days.

After a meager supper one night,
George Blakeslee, who had been brought along as a photographer, had had enough. “I tied a hangman’s noose
in a rope and everybody got the same idea,” he wrote in his journal. “So we made an effigy of Hubbard and strung it up in the shrouds. Put a piece of red cloth on the head and a sign on it. ‘Our red-headed _____!’ ” Hubbard stayed in his cabin after that.

The furious captain wired for money, then steered the ship back to Baltimore, pronouncing the expedition “the worst and most unpleasant
I ever made.” Hubbard was not aboard as the “jinx ship,” as it was called in the local press, crept back into its home port. He was last seen in Puerto Rico, slipping off with a suitcase in each hand.

In some respects, Hubbard discovered himself on that unlucky voyage, which he termed a “glorious adventure
.” His
infatuation with motion pictures first became evident on this trip, although no movies were actually made. Despite the defections, Hubbard demonstrated an impressive capacity to summon others to join him on what was clearly a shaky enterprise. Throughout his life he would enlist people—especially young people—in romantic, ill-conceived projects, often at sea, where he was out of reach of process servers. He was beginning to invent himself as a
charismatic leader. The grandeur of his project was not yet evident, even to him, but in the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition he clearly defined himself as an explorer, sailor, filmmaker, and leader of men, even though he failed spectacularly in each of those categories. He had an incorrigible ability to float above the evidence and to extract from his experiences lessons that
others would say were irrational and even bizarre. Habitually, and perhaps unconsciously,
Hubbard would fill this gap—between reality and his interpretation of it—with mythology. This was the source of what some call his genius, and others call his insanity.

WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-THREE
, Hubbard married Margaret Louise Grubb, an aspiring aviator four years his senior, whom he called Polly. Amelia Earhart had just become the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic, inspiring many daring young women who wanted to follow her example. Although Polly never gained a pilot’s license, it wasn’t surprising that she would respond to Ron’s swashbuckling personality and his tales of far-flung adventures. They settled in a small town in Maryland, near her family farm. Ron was trying to make it as a professional magazine writer, but by that point—at the end of 1933—he had only half a dozen articles in print. Soon, Polly was pregnant, and Ron had to find a way to make a living quickly.