Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (14 page)

“You know, I’m a public figure and you’re nobody,” Ron said, “so if you have to go through the divorce, I’ll accuse you of desertion so it
won’t look so bad on my public record.” As long as she was going to get Alexis back as part of the bargain,
Sara agreed.

Sara Northrup Hubbard in April 1951, when she was suing Hubbard for the return of their baby daughter, Alexis

On the day of the divorce, Ron was convinced that the spell the Communists had cast over Sara would be broken, and she would come back to him. When they walked out of the courtroom, Sara told him that she had to get their daughter. Ron took her to the place where Alexis was being held. Sara said that the last thing she had to do was go to the airport. She already had a ticket. Then the enchantment would dissolve and she would be free.

On the day of her scheduled departure, Ron drove Sara and Alexis to the airport. “We got halfway there and he said he wasn’t going to do it,” Sara recalled.

“You’re going to get on that plane and go away, aren’t you?” Ron said.

“Well, I have to follow their dictates,” Sara replied. “I’ll just go to the airplane.”

Ron parked the car. He told her that he couldn’t stand the idea that she would be under the influence of psychiatrists, and that he might never see either of them again. “I’m not going to let you go,” he said.

“I got out of the car, it was on the edge of the airfield,” Sara remembered. “I left all Alexi’s clothes in the car, I left my suitcase, one of her shoes fell off and I had my purse. I just ran across the airfield, across the runways, to the airport and got on the plane. And it was the nineteenth of June and it was the happiest day of my life.”

IN THE SPACE
of a year, Hubbard had gone from destitution and obscurity to great wealth and international renown, followed by a crashing descent. The foundation he had
created to train auditors plummeted into debt and soon declared bankruptcy. Close supporters, such as
John Campbell and Dr.
Winter, deserted.
Dianetics proved to be a fad that had swept the country, infatuating tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, but then burned itself out more quickly than the hula hoop.

Once again, Hubbard got a house trailer, and this time he drove it to Lawrence, Kansas, where
Russell Hays now lived. Hays instructed Hubbard to park his trailer on some raw land he owned nearby. “That didn’t please him
,” Hays said. “I wouldn’t want to have to live with him, he’d get on my nerves.” Hubbard was drinking and had a number of drugs along with him, and he pressed Hays to supply him with marijuana. Hays later dried some horseweed and mailed it to Hubbard, signing the letter, “I. M. Reefer.”

Hays advised the discouraged Hubbard to make use of his extensive mailing list. There were many followers who still believed in the man and his method. Some had had meaningful emotional breakthroughs. Others had experiences—such as leaving their bodies—that conclusively proved to them the validity of Hubbard’s claims. These acolytes provided the bedrock of support that Hubbard needed to regenerate his broken organization, rebuild his
finances, and repair the stain on his reputation caused by his personal scandals.

In addition to Hubbard’s relentless self-confidence, several new factors salvaged his movement. He had a new device, the
E-Meter, developed by one of his followers, which Hubbard revealed in March 1952. The E-Meter would replace the Dianetic
reverie with what appeared to be a more scientific approach, one that didn’t look so much like a
hypnotic trance. “It sees all, knows all
,”
Hubbard declared. “It is never wrong.” And he had a new wife, Mary Sue Whipp, a petite Texan, twenty years his junior, whom he married that same month. She was already pregnant with the first of their four children.

Hubbard also had a new name for his movement. From now on, it was
Scientology.

G
iven his biography, it would be easy to dismiss
Hubbard as a fraud, but that would fail to explain his total absorption in his project. He would spend the rest of his life elaborating his theory and—even more obsessively—constructing the intricate bureaucracy
designed to spread and enshrine his visionary understanding of human behavior. His life narrowed down to his singular mission. Each passageway in his interior expedition led him deeper into his imagination. That journey became Scientology, a totalistic universe in which his every turn was mapped and described.

Hubbard’s own logic was inclining him toward conclusions that he was at first reluctant to draw. By admitting the validity of
prenatal
memories, he was bound to confront a dilemma: What if the memories didn’t stop there? When patients began having “
sperm dreams
,” Hubbard had to accept the idea that prenatal
engrams were recorded “
as early as shortly before conception
.” Then, when patients began to remember previous lives, Hubbard resisted the idea; it threatened to tear apart his organization. “The subject of past deaths
and
past lives is so full of tension that as early as last July 1950, the board of trustees of the [
Dianetics] Foundation sought to pass a resolution banning the entire subject,” he confided. Still, the implications were intriguing. What if we have lived before? Might there be memories that occasionally leak through into present time? Wouldn’t that prove that we are immortal beings, only temporarily residing in our present incarnations?

Instead of remembering, the patient undergoing
Dianetic counseling “returns” to the past-life event. “There is a different feel to
another period in time that’s so basic it’s hard to describe,” Hubbard’s top US executive,
Helen O’Brien, recalled. “If you find yourself in a room, there may be color with unfamiliar tones because of gaslight shining on it. The air has a strange quality. Its particles of dust derive from unmodern constituents. Even human bodies seem to radiate a different kind of warmth when they are covered with the fabrics of another age. Memory, per se, filters out all that. When you return, you find the past intact.” Some of the “returnings” were shocking or painful. O’Brien’s first past-life experience in an auditing session was that of being a young Irish woman in the early nineteenth century. She could feel the coarse texture of her full-skirted dress as she walked down a narrow country lane, hearing the birds and feeling the warm country air. But when she turned a corner of her house, she saw a British soldier bayoneting her fourteen-year-old son in the yard. “I literally shuddered
with grief,” O’Brien writes. When the soldier threw her to the ground and tried to rape her, she spit in his face. He crushed her skull with a cobblestone. O’Brien’s auditor had her re-experience the scene over and over until she was able to move through the entire bloody tableau unaffected. “By the end of it, I was luxuriously comfortable in every fibre,” she writes. “When I walked downstairs … the electric lights dazzled me. The clean modern lines of the house interior, and the furniture, were elegant and strange to me beyond all description. I was freshly there from another age. For the first time in this lifetime, I knew I was beyond the laws of space and time.

“I was never the same again.”

With his new
acceptance of past-life experiences, Hubbard could now describe the individual as being divisible into three parts. First there was the spirit, or soul, which Hubbard calls the
thetan. The thetan normally lives in or near a body but can also be entirely separate from it. When a person goes exterior, for instance, it is the thetan part of him that travels outside the body or views himself from across the room. The mind, which serves mainly as a storehouse of pictures, functions as a communication and control system for the thetan, helping him operate in his environment. The body is merely the physical composition of the person, existing in space and time.

Anyone who stands in the way of a thetan’s spiritual progress is a Suppressive Person (SP). This is a key concept in Scientology. Hubbard
uses the term to describe a sociopath. The
Suppressive instinctively fights against constructive forces and is driven berserk by those who try to help others. Hubbard estimates that Suppressives constitute about twenty percent of the population
, but only about two and a half percent are truly dangerous. “A Suppressive Person will
goof up or vilify any effort to help anybody and particularly knife with violence anything calculated to make human beings more powerful or more intelligent,” Hubbard writes. “The artist in particular
is often found as a magnet for persons with anti-social personalities who see in his art something which must be destroyed.”

Naturally, anyone who is close to a Suppressive Person is in great danger of falling under his influence. Hubbard called that person a
Potential Trouble Source. If, for instance, a parent opposes a child who wants to join
Scientology, that parent is likely to be declared an SP; and as long as the child remains in contact with the parent, he is in danger of being defined as a PTS. He will be denied
auditing and training. Eventually, the child will have to make a choice, either to leave the church—which offers him a path to career success, personal improvement, and salvation—or to disconnect from his parent, who is the cause of his failure to achieve happiness and realize his dreams.

Hubbard had learned some difficult lessons from his experience with Dianetics. He was by nature an
autocrat, but his work beckoned to amateurs. The movement inspired by his book had sprung up so quickly there was no real chance to rein it in and exert the kind of authority that might have made it more durable. Although he tried to impose order by creating professional training schools for auditors, in truth he had more or less surrendered control of the movement from the moment of inception by empowering his readers to become practitioners themselves; all they had to do was to follow the formulas sketched in his book. Entrepreneurs grabbed hold of the concept and snatched it out of his hands. They spread the message, but they also diluted it. When the Dianetics movement subsided, Hubbard was unable to restore the momentum that had given it such a rocket-powered launch. Imitators and competitors came
onto the field, some even rivaling Hubbard himself. He was determined not to make the same mistakes with Scientology. From now on, he would exercise total control. His word was law. He was not just the founder, he was “Source”—the last word, whose every pronouncement was scripture.