Inside Scientology (8 page)

At other points, Hubbard became extremely depressed, drinking heavily and sedating himself with drugs like phenobarbital. He had come to believe, as he told Klowden, that Sara had caused his most recent bout of writer's block, having hypnotized him in his sleep and "commanded" him not to write. And Sara wasn't the only one who was against him, he said. Officers of the Elizabeth Foundation had tried to "slip him a mickey" in a glass of milk; he claimed they had also attempted to "insert a fatal hypo[dermic needle] into his eye and heart to try and stop him from ever writing again."

During one of these episodes, Klowden was visiting Hubbard in Palm Springs when he suddenly announced that "something was brewing" in Los Angeles, and he needed to return home. A week later, he knocked on the door of her apartment, disheveled and pale, and announced that he'd discovered Sara and Miles Hollister in bed together. He was afraid they were plotting to have him committed.
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"Please don't ask me anything," Hubbard told her. "I'm in a very bad way."

The next evening, February 24, 1951, Hubbard took his one-year-old daughter, Alexis, from her crib at the Los Angeles Foundation and deposited her at a local nursing agency. A short while later, Richard De Mille, who was now working as Hubbard's personal assistant, arrived at Hubbard's apartment and took Sara by force into Hubbard's waiting Lincoln Continental.

Striking first, Hubbard had decided to declare his wife insane. De Mille sped the Lincoln out of Los Angeles toward San Bernardino as the couple argued venomously about their marriage. For an hour or so, Hubbard searched in vain for a psychiatrist who'd agree to commit his wife in the middle of the night; then he ordered De Mille to drive into the desert.

In Yuma, Arizona, Hubbard agreed to release Sara but had an aide take his infant daughter to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where her father joined her several days later. Then, together with De Mille and baby Alexis, Hubbard flew to Havana, Cuba, at that time a rum-soaked, anything-goes city where Americans were free to enter without a passport. There, he rented an apartment in a wealthy section of town and, putting Alexis into the care of a nanny, sat down to finish his next book,
Science of Survival.

Sara meanwhile filed divorce proceedings against Hubbard, accusing him of kidnapping both her and their daughter and alleging physical and mental abuse. After a protracted battle, she finally regained custody of Alexis in June 1951—though not before agreeing to drop her divorce suit, in which she'd asked for a portion of the $1 million she said the Dianetic Research Foundations had earned. Instead, Sara agreed to let Hubbard divorce
her
and then signed a statement retracting all of her prior attacks on her husband, which she said had been "grossly exaggerated or entirely false."
Contrary to what she may have said before, she now asserted that "L. Ron Hubbard was a fine and brilliant man." She added that Dianetics "may be the only hope of sanity in future generations." With that, mother and daughter disappeared from his life.
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Hubbard by now had many other problems to worry about. Because the existing foundations were in shambles, he had accepted the offer of a wealthy supporter named Don Purcell to leave Havana and start a new Dianetic Research Foundation in Wichita, Kansas, which he did. But Purcell was not prepared to assume the debts of the other foundations, particularly not the Elizabeth Foundation, which closed its doors for good at the end of 1951, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In 1952, a court ruled that the Wichita Foundation was liable for the Elizabeth Foundation's debts. Purcell implored Hubbard to file for voluntary bankruptcy, which he refused to do. Left with no choice, Purcell held an emergency meeting of the Wichita Foundation's board of directors in February 1952, which voted to go ahead with the bankruptcy proceedings.

Furious, Hubbard resigned from the board and sued Purcell for mismanagement, breach of faith, and breach of contract. To no avail: the court auctioned off the foundation's assets, which Purcell bought for just over $6,000. Hubbard launched a bitter campaign to discredit Purcell, accusing him of accepting a $500,000 bribe from the American Medical Association to destroy Dianetics.

It was no use. Purcell owned Dianetics; Hubbard was left without rights to any part of his creation, including its name. His great scientific adventure, it appeared, was at an end. Hubbard needed to reinvent himself, once again.

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1952, L. Ron Hubbard sent personal telegrams to about eighty loyal Dianeticists, his remaining followers. He had "important new material"
to present, he said.

Hubbard didn't disappoint. Standing at the lectern in a hotel banquet room in Wichita, he unveiled, with theatrical flourish, a device he called an "electropsychometer," or E-meter. It had been developed by an inventor and Dianeticist named Volney Mathison; having heard Hubbard talk about the problems he was having with identifying incidents of heavy emotional charge by simply questioning a patient, Mathison came up with an apparatus that would give an auditor "deep and marvelous insight into the mind of his preclear,"
as Hubbard put it. This simple black box with adjustable knobs and a lit dial measured galvanic skin response—the tiny electrical fluctuations under the surface of the skin that occur at moments of excitement, stress, or physical pain.

It was, essentially, a lie detector, operating on many of the same principles.
And it would be used, said Hubbard, in the practice of what he called a brand-new science: Scientology. According to Hubbard, the term derived from the Latin
scio,
meaning "study," and the Greek
logos,
meaning "knowing."
Scientology
is thereby defined as "the study of knowledge." Hubbard's followers would come to refer to it in slightly different terms: "Knowing How to Know."

If Dianetics had revealed "the exact anatomy of the human mind,"
Scientology went further, allowing its practitioners to discover the anatomy of the human soul. Hubbard called that entity the thetan (
theta,
Hubbard said, meant "life") and said it represented a person's "true," or innate, self, which was wholly separate from the body, the mind, and the physical world.

Thetans, Hubbard explained, existed long before the beginning of time and had drifted through the eons, picking up and then discarding physical bodies as if they were temporary shells. Bored, they created the universe. But after a while, they got trapped in that creation. During the lengthy course of their history, which Hubbard called the "whole track," they had been implanted, through electric shock, pain, or hypnotic suggestion, with a host of ideas, some positive, like love, and others contradictory or negative—such as the ideas of God, Satan, Jesus Christ, and political or bureaucratic government. Eventually they came to believe themselves to be no more than the bodies they inhabited—Hubbard called them "theta beings"—and their original power was lost.

The goal of Scientology, Hubbard said, was to restore that power, which was the purpose of Scientology auditing. Thanks to the E-meter,
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which for starters would enable people to recover buried memories, this form of therapy would be far more precise than Dianetics auditing.

By the time Jana Daniels arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, in the summer of 1952, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists (founded that April as a training facility, book publisher, and exclusive seller of E-meters) was enjoying moderate success. Hubbard had left Wichita several months earlier and moved west, taking with him his adoring new bride, Mary Sue Whipp, an attractive nineteen-year-old former student of the University of Texas. To the delight of many male students, though not to the women ("She was a nothing," Helen O'Brien told Russell Miller; "Her favorite reading was
True Confessions
"), Mary Sue had been studying at the Wichita Foundation since the summer of 1951. About thirty or so people soon gathered at the association in Phoenix: science fiction fans, musicians, artists, a few psychologists, and various young people—a scruffier and less professional crowd than those who'd surrounded Hubbard in Elizabeth and Los Angeles, but just as fascinated by what he had to sell.

Daniels, then twenty-two, had been a fan of Hubbard's since she'd first read
Dianetics,
in 1950. Like Helen O'Brien, she'd been a young housewife, somewhat bored, and she became curious about this new "science of the mind." Then living in Shreveport, Louisiana, she was also curious about Hubbard, whom a friend had described as "a Hollywood person who was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley and went about the streets dressed in white robes and wearing a turban."

But the L. Ron Hubbard whom Daniels met in Phoenix didn't live up to this exotic description. "My first impression of him was of a fairly tall, orange-haired, pink-skinned man who had lips that looked like raw liver and who appeared somehow moist," she said. "I considered him a singularly unattractive man. He was not a snappy dresser and often looked as if he had slept in his clothes." And yet something about Hubbard drew Daniels in. "He was immensely charismatic. He was
magnetic,
" she said. He was also, Daniels added, "a man of many faces. He was who you wanted him to be. There were countless facets to his personality. He would put them on as if they were clothing."

Hubbard had begun to promote the myth that his life had been one of sober exploration. According to this revision of his biography, he had wandered the world to gain understanding of the human mind and spirit, and had written science fiction as a way to fund that extensive "research." He now claimed to have spent a full year at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, where he had access to the whole medical library, including the records of former prisoners of war. He met these men and began to treat their psychological wounds, holding consultations on a park bench. He claimed that in 1949, while spending time in Savannah, Georgia, he had continued this research by volunteering at a psychiatric clinic.

In Arizona, however, Hubbard also played the role of Everyman. He and Mary Sue rented a small house near Camelback Mountain that maintained an open-door policy. "In those beginning days there was not so much a 'belief' in what Hubbard said and claimed, as there was hope that it was true," said Daniels. "We were more on a journey of discovery than following a belief system."

Having come up with the idea that thetans could move objects with their minds, Hubbard and some of his acolytes sat around the kitchen table, trying to remove the cellophane from a cigarette package by using their "intention beams." Now in her seventies, Daniels, who left Scientology in 1983, laughed to think of it. "We were not successful," she said. "At another time I was in his car with him and we went out into the desert and practiced pulling clouds from the sky. No dice. Pulling oranges from a tree. Fail." But nonetheless, Hubbard could make you feel as if anything you tried would be a success. "He could zap you with admiration, with affinity, with whatever suited him. He had a way of mesmerizing one with subtle repetitive gestures and repetition of words. I think his motivation was obvious—money," she said. "But there was a great deal of idol worship. Some thought him a god."

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, Helen O'Brien and her husband, John, had opened a branch of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists. By 1953, similar groups had formed in other cities, including London, where Hubbard began to spend an increasing amount of time. All of these organizations were bleeding money.

Perhaps it was time to try a different approach. They should create a company, independent of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, but fed by the HAS, Hubbard suggested in a letter to O'Brien, dated April 10, 1953. This new organization, a "clinic" of sorts, would see clients and pay the HAS a percentage of its proceeds, which would go to cover costs. All they'd need to make "real money," he noted, was ten or fifteen preclears a week, who might easily be convinced to pay upwards of $500 for twenty-four hours of auditing. Shrewdly, Hubbard anticipated that the more they charged, the more popular they might become. Hubbard told O'Brien that he'd seen it happen. "Charge enough and we'd be swamped."

The failure of Dianetics, as Hubbard saw it, had been its democracy: he'd written a book and sold it to the people, and they had taken the techniques and done with them what they wanted. Even Hubbard's onetime lieutenant, A. E. Van Vogt, now had his own Dianetics practice in Los Angeles.
Hubbard received none of the profits from this and other similar ventures; neither did he get any credit for coming up with the ideas. He wanted both. Now he could ensure that he got them by turning Scientology into a business. Perhaps the best way to do that was also to make it into a religion.

"Perhaps we could call it a Spiritual Guidance Center," he suggested to O'Brien.
Hubbard described installing attractive desks, outfitting the staff in uniform, and hanging diplomas on the wall. With that, they could "knock psychotherapy into history," he said. A "religious charter" would be necessary to make it stick. "But I'm sure I could make it stick." After all, they were treating the spirit of a person, he said. "And brother, that's religion, not mental science."

The more he thought about it, Hubbard told O'Brien in his April 1953 letter, the more "the religion angle," as he put it, seemed to make sense. "It's a matter of practical business."

This reframing from the "mental science" of Dianetics to the religion of Scientology was a typically canny move by Hubbard, which picked up on the national mood. In 1950, more than half of the American population were members of one or another Christian congregation; by the end of the decade, that number had reached 69 percent. "Churches were by far the most trusted institution in American life [in the 1950s]—ahead of schools, radio and newspapers, and the government itself," the historian Stephen Whitfield noted in his book on 1950s America,
The Culture of the Cold War.
It was probably not lost on L. Ron Hubbard that the most popular therapist and self-help guru in America, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, was also a minister.
In an age of increasing anxiety and paranoia, faith was seen as a route to sound mental health. Peale's best-selling book,
The Power of Positive Thinking,
was published in 1952, the same year Hubbard announced the advent of Scientology; it would remain on bestseller lists for years. Cloaking Scientology in religious garb was practical on numerous levels. Certainly it would make the organization seem more respectable—"in my opinion, we couldn't get worse public opinion than what we have had, or less customers with what we've got to sell," Hubbard noted in his letter—it would also allow auditors to sidestep the rules regarding certification for psychological counseling. As practitioners of "mental science," Dianetics and Scientology auditors had been scrutinized for lacking the appropriate medical or psychological licenses; as clergy, they could counsel whomever they wanted, under the protection of a church. They could also claim tax-exempt status,
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which Hubbard would later explain to his flock was a fundamental reason for taking the religious route. "No one ever saw it as a religion," Jana Daniels explained. "It was a most unpopular idea until it was explained by Mr. Hubbard that for tax reasons, a church would get a better shake."