Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (17 page)

Slender and stately, Hana was one of the first thirty-five Sea Org recruits. The mission of the Sea Org, according to the contract she signed, is “to get
ETHICS IN
on this
PLANET AND THE UNIVERSE
.” She agreed to “subscribe to the discipline, mores and conditions of this
group.…
THEREFORE, I CONTRACT MYSELF TO THE SEA ORGANIZATION FOR THE NEXT BILLION YEARS
.”
⁴

Hana married another Sea Org member, an American named
Guy Eltringham, but they were separated when
Hubbard ordered her to Las Palmas, where he was refitting an exhausted fishing trawler called the
Avon River
. The decks and the hold were coated with decades of fish oil that had to be scraped away. During the two months the
Avon River
was in dry dock, Hubbard would often linger for dinner with his Sea Org crew, and afterward he would sit on the deck and regale them with stories. Hubbard’s depression had lifted and he seemed completely in control—relaxed and confident, even jovial. The crew were mainly
drinking Spanish wines, but Hubbard favored rum and Coke—an eighth of a glass of Coke and seven-eighths rum—one after another through the evening. The heavens seemed very close in the dark harbor. Hubbard would point to the sky and say, “That is where the Fifth Invaders
came from. They’re the bad guys, they’re the ones who put us here.” He said he could actually spot their spaceships crossing in front of the stars, and he would salute them as they passed overhead, just to let them know that they had been seen.

During a session with her auditor, Hana revealed the story of Madame Blavatsky’s prophecy of the red-haired man. Soon afterward, Hubbard came up on deck and gave her an intense look. From that point on, she became his favorite. He appointed her the first female Sea Org lieutenant. That day, she had a photograph made of herself in her Sea Org uniform—white shirt, dark tie and jacket, with a lanyard over one shoulder. She is young and elegant, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. After that, she rose through the Sea Org ranks with astonishing speed, often wondering if the revelation about the red-haired man was responsible for her rapid promotions.

Hubbard would drive over from his villa in Las Palmas to inspect the work on the
Avon River
. The lower holds of the ship were converted into offices and berthing spaces; new equipment—including radar and a gyrocompass—were installed, the screw replaced, and the hydraulic
system completely overhauled. The inexperienced Sea Org members did most of the work, although Spanish laborers did the welding and sandblasting. Whenever Hubbard spotted something wrong, he would be instantly transformed from the jovial and avuncular figure the crew adored into a raging, implacable tyrant. Hana, who was serving as master-at-arms, would dread seeing the “Commodore”—as Hubbard titled himself—arrive, since she felt responsible if anything went wrong. One day, when the Spanish workmen were painting a rust coat on the hull of the ship, she spotted Hubbard walking across the beach with his chief officer and his first mate, smoking and chatting happily. Then he suddenly stopped. His eyes went into slits and he began bellowing, “The rollers! The rollers!
” Puzzled, Hana leaned over the side of the ship, then saw what had caught Hubbard’s attention: tiny threads poking through the paint, which had been left by the cheap rollers that the workmen were using. “As those threads decomposed, they would leave little apertures for seawater to leak behind the rust coating,” she realized. “It destroyed the integrity of the entire rust coating, and that’s what Hubbard was screaming about as he lumbered toward the ship. And what amazed me was that he saw it at forty to sixty feet away from the ship. Later on, I walked that distance from the ship to see if I could see those little hairs coming out of the rust coat. There was no way I could see them. That added to my feeling of wonder and mystique about Hubbard.”

IN TRUTH
, Hubbard had very
poor eyesight. Before the war, both the
Naval Academy and the
Naval Reserve had rejected him because of his vision, and all during the war he wore glasses. In 1951, when he was being evaluated for a medical disability, his vision tested at 20/200 for each eye, correctable to 20/20 with glasses, much the same as it had been before the war. The examiner noted, “Eyes tire easily
, has worn all types of glasses but claims he sees just as well without as with glasses.” Was that even possible? Eyesight does change over the years, but Hubbard’s eyes were astigmatic—meaning they were more football-shaped than round—and not likely to have improved, certainly not dramatically. And yet many of Hubbard’s associates testify to his keen eyesight. Without glasses, Hubbard would have been legally blind; perhaps that’s what he was referring to when he said he had cured himself of
blindness after the war. But, clearly his eye examination showed different results.

Hubbard had written
in
Dianetics
that the eyesight of a Clear gradually improves to optimum perception. And yet, he admitted elsewhere that his vision was so bad in the postwar years that he could scarcely see his typewriter to write. He wore glasses and early versions of contact lenses. Through the use of Dianetic processing, he says, his eyes began to change. Many noticed that Hubbard had a habit of squinting
, which has the effect of pressing astigmatic eyeballs into a rounder shape, which might momentarily improve his vision. He theorized that “astigmatism, a distortion
of image, is only an anxiety to alter the image.” One day, for instance, he was reading an American Medical Association report and couldn’t make it out at all. He thought he might have to resort to using a magnifying glass. Then he realized that the reason he couldn’t read it was that he wasn’t willing to confront what it said. “I threw it aside, picked up a novel and the print was perfect.”

Hubbard would sometimes chastise members of his crew about their dependence on eyeglasses, which he said were an admission of “
overts”—transgressions against the group. One night as the fleet was sailing in the Caribbean, he looked at the young woman serving him dinner,
Tracy Ekstrand, whose glasses were sliding down her nose in the tropical heat. “You’re doing yourself
an aesthetic disservice,” he pronounced. She was mortified and stopped wearing glasses that night. Although she was still able to move from room to room and serve meals, her vision remained quite blurred. Some weeks later, as Hubbard was retiring for the night, he looked at her again. He held up his pack of cigarettes a foot in front of her face and asked if she could read the bold capital letters: “KOOL.” Flustered by the personal attention from the Commodore, Ekstrand mumbled the name of the cigarettes. “There’s been a shift!” he declared triumphantly, then went to bed. Ekstrand was shaken. “I remained outside his door for some minutes, dumbfounded and unsure how to react,” she recalled. “This time there was no question. He was wrong. He was imagining improvement and success with Scientology where there had been none.”

All of Hubbard’s senses
were
painfully acute. Each day, every room he inhabited had to be dusted to the point that it would pass a white-glove test. He was fanatically clean but also hypersensitive to soap, so that his clothes had to be rinsed up to fifteen times, and even
then he would complain that he could smell the detergent. His chef had to switch from cooking on stainless steel to Corningware because Hubbard complained of the taste of metal in his food. These stories were traded among his disciples as more evidence of his superhuman powers of discernment.

ACCORDING TO SEVERAL
Sea Org members, while he was in Las Palmas, Hubbard fell in love with another woman—
Yvonne Gillham
, the ship’s public relations officer. (She would later go on to start the
Celebrity Centre in Hollywood.) She had a wide smile, large hazel eyes, and a short pixie haircut, bearing a resemblance to Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music
. Gillham combined a down-to-earth personality with a touch of class that came from growing up in the high society of Queensland, Australia. Inevitably, Hubbard demanded that she accompany him on the high seas. Gillham had three young children at Saint Hill, and she had only joined the Sea Org on Hubbard’s pledge that they could stay with her, but Hubbard’s desire for her had become a prison, one that she was too loyal to escape.

Yvonne Gillham in a head shot she used during her modeling career, circa 1952

Hubbard was fifty-six years old in the fall of 1967, when he set sail with his youthful crew. There was no destination or purpose other than to wander. Hubbard was by now portly, ruddy-faced, and jowly; his swept-back, once-red hair had turned strawberry blond. His eyes, which have been described as blue or green by various observers, were actually gray, like seawater, casting an odd flatness over his aspect. Two strong lines transected his face: a deep furrow between his eyebrows, matching the notch below his nose and the cleft in his chin, and his duckbill lips, which were his most prominent feature. Once aboard, he dressed in various naval uniforms befitting his self-appointed station as Commodore of the fleet, with lots of braid and crossed anchors on his cap.

There were three ships
in Hubbard’s navy. In addition to the
Avon River
, there was a schooner called the
Enchanter
, and the 3,200-ton flagship, a flat-bottom cattle ferry originally called the
Royal Scotsman
, which was renamed the
Royal Scotman
because of a clerical error in the registration. The smokestack
was emblazoned with the initials “LRH.”

Hubbard spent most of his time
in the air-conditioned captain’s cabin on the promenade deck of the
Royal Scotman
, surrounded by windows to take in the ocean vistas. He rarely drank on the ship, except perhaps to take the chill off on a cold night on the bridge. Drugs were nowhere in evidence. His days were largely solitary, passed in auditing himself and writing policy papers. His office on the top deck was called the Research Room. It was behind a pair of highly polished wooden doors with brass handles. The floor was a bright red linoleum covered with Oriental rugs; there was a massive mahogany desk and a huge mirror above a fireplace. Crew members passing by on the upper deck could see him writing with his usual rapidity on foolscap, using a green pen for policy bulletins and a red one for the “tech”—that is, his vast corpus of coursework and procedures that comprised Scientology’s spiritual technology. His restless leg
would be jiggling as his hand raced across the page, faultlessly, in handsome, legible script. For other writing, he turned back to his typewriter. “I think he was doing
automatic writing,” said
Jim Dincalci, one of his medical officers. “The pages would be flying. When he came out of it, he would blink his eyes, as if coming awake, and he did this thing with his lips, smacking.”

Hubbard and Mary Sue would dine
in his office between eight and ten p.m. Sometime after three in the morning, Dincalci would give
Hubbard a massage and he would go to sleep. After that, everyone on the ship had to be quiet until Hubbard awakened, sometime before noon, and remain absolutely mute while he was
auditing himself on the
E-Meter.

In Hubbard’s opinion, the device operated just below the level of conscious awareness; it somehow knew what you were thinking before you did. It was eerily compelling. Anything that registered on the meter was seen as being significant. The trick was divining what the needle was saying. Sometimes the reaction was so violent that the needle would pound back and forth like a berserk windshield wiper—you could hear it snapping against the pins at either end. Hubbard called this a “
rock slam.” Anyone who registered
such a reaction was deemed psychotic and certain to have committed crimes against Scientology; if that person was in the
Sea Org, he would be punished automatically, the crime to be sorted out later.

After initially resisting the concept of
past lives, Hubbard became passionately interested in the subject. “We Come Back
” was the motto of the Sea Org. Hubbard began recalling many of his own previous existences, which the E-Meter validated. He claimed to have been a contemporary of
Machiavelli’s, and he was still upset that the author of
The Prince
stole his line “The end justifies the means
.” He said he had been a marshal to
Joan of Arc
and Tamburlaine’s wife
. He told stories about driving a race car
in the alien
Marcab civilization millions of years before. He came to believe that in some of his past lives on this planet, he had buried
treasure in various locations, so he launched an expedition to unearth his ancient hoards. He called it the
Mission into Time. He selected a small crew to go on the
Avon River
. Because he wanted to keep the mission secret, he had two long rafts fashioned, which could be rowed ashore under cover of darkness and pulled up on the beach near where he imagined his ancient treasure was buried. When
Hana Eltringham saw she wasn’t on the list, she wrote Hubbard, pleading to be included, saying she would be willing to perform any duty. To her surprise, Hubbard appointed her chief officer.