Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (19 page)

Despite the fact that he was only fourteen, Quentin—LRH’s heir apparent—was among the first to be initiated into the OT III mysteries. Everyone on the ship knew what was happening, and people would hover near the cabin where the materials were held to see the expression on the faces of those who had been exposed to it. When Quentin emerged, he was pale, and he threw up violently
. After that, he was never as sunny as he used to be.

TO MAKE SURE
his orders were carried out, Hubbard created the
Commodore’s Messengers Organization. In the beginning, the Messengers
were four young teenage girls, including
Yvonne Gillham’s two daughters,
Terri and
Janis, who were thirteen and eleven years old;
Annie Tidman, twelve; and, briefly, Hubbard’s youngest daughter,
Suzette, who was thirteen at the time. Soon, several more teenage girls joined them, and Suzette went to work on the decks. Two of the girls were always posted outside Hubbard’s office, waiting to take his handwritten directives to the mimeograph machine or deliver his orders in person. He instructed them to parrot his exact words and tone of voice when they were delivering one of his directives—to inform the captain what time to set sail, for instance, or to tell a member of the crew he was “a fucking asshole
” if he had displeased him. Hubbard allowed them to create their own uniforms, so in warmer climates they attired themselves in white hot pants, halter tops, and platform shoes. When the Commodore moved around the ship, one or more Messengers trailed behind him, carrying his hat and an ashtray, lighting his cigarettes, and quickly moving a chair into place if he started to sit down. People lived in fear of Hubbard’s teenage minions. They had to call the Messenger “sir” even if she was a twelve-year-old girl. (That practice has continued in the Sea Org. All senior officials are referred to as “sir,” regardless of gender.) “They held the power
of God in their little hands, their little lips,” Eltringham recalled.

The relationship between Hubbard and these girls was intimate but not overtly sexual
. They prepared his bath when he retired and would sit outside his room until he awakened and called out, “Messenger!” They would help him out of bed, light his cigarette, run his shower, prepare his toiletries, and help him dress. Some of the children had parents on the ship, others were there alone, but in either case Hubbard was their primary caretaker—and vice versa. When the girls became
old enough to start wearing makeup, Hubbard was the one who showed them how to apply it. He also helped them do their hair.

While he was on the ship, Hubbard was working out a
code of
Scientology ethics. He began with the idea that man is basically good. Even a criminal leaves clues to his crime, because he wishes for someone to stop his unethical behavior, Hubbard theorized. Similarly, a person who has accidentally hurt himself or gotten ill is “putting ethics in
on himself” in order to lessen the damage he does to others or to his environment. These were testaments to the basic longing of all people to live decent, worthy lives.

Good and evil actions
can be judged only by understanding what
Hubbard termed the
Eight Dynamics. The First Dynamic is the Self and its urge toward existence. The Second Dynamic is Sex, which includes the sexual act as well as the family unit. The Third Dynamic is the Group—any school, or class, organization, city, or nation. The Fourth Dynamic is Mankind. The Fifth Dynamic is the urge toward existence of all living creatures, including vegetables and grass—“anything directly and intimately motivated by life.” The Sixth Dynamic is the matter, energy, space, and time that compose the reality we live in. The Seventh Dynamic is the Spiritual, which must be obtained before expanding into the Eighth Dynamic, which is called Infinity or God. The Scientology mantra for judging ethical behavior is “the greatest good
for the greatest number of dynamics”—a formula that can excuse quite a number of crimes.

Every individual or group moves through stages, which Hubbard calls
Ethics Conditions, that incline toward either survival or collapse. They range from the highest state, Power, to the lowest, Confusion. The way to determine what condition one is in at any given moment is through statistics, compiled each Thursday at two p.m. For a Scientology church, the relevant statistic might be how much money it is bringing in. The “org” that brings in less money week after week is in a condition of Non-Existence, which, plotted on a graph, is represented as a steeply plummeting line. A level or slightly declining line indicates a condition of Emergency. Slightly up is Normal; sharply up is Affluence. Every Scientology organization, and every member of its staff, henceforth would be judged by the implacable weekly statistics. Hubbard warned his charges, “You have to establish
an ethics presence hard. Otherwise, you’re just gonna be wrapped around a telegraph pole.”

The years at sea were critical ones for the future of Scientology. Even as Hubbard was inventing the doctrine, each of his decisions and actions would become enshrined in Scientology lore as something to be emulated—his
cigarette smoking
, for instance, which is still a feature of the church’s culture at the upper levels, as are his 1950s habits of speech, his casual misogyny, his aversion to perfume and scented deodorants, and his love of cars and motorcycles and Rolex watches. More significant is the legacy of his belittling behavior toward subordinates and his
paranoia about the government. Such traits stamped the religion as an extremely secretive and sometimes hostile organization that saw enemies on every corner.

Because
Hubbard viewed the world that way, he awakened suspicion that there must be something very dangerous about Scientology. One by one, ports began turning away the fleet. It had begun with
Gibraltar
in 1967, when the ship was refused assistance during a heavy storm in the strait.
England banned foreign Scientologists
from entering the country for study in July 1968 and declared Hubbard an undesirable alien. Hubbard took out his frustration on his crew. He assigned
Yvonne Gillham a condition of Non-Existence and reduced her to a “
swamper,” which he defined as “one who cleans up.” Her hands became raw and gnarled. “She was like Cinderella
,” a friend recalled, “always scrubbing.”

While the ships were docked in
Valencia, a storm arose. Hubbard happened to be aboard the
Avon River
when he noticed that the
Royal Scotman
had torn free from one of its mooring lines. He screamed that someone should hoist the anchor and start the engines, but before the crew reacted, the big ship crashed against the dock, damaging its prop. Although the ship was not badly damaged, Hubbard assigned the crew and the
Royal Scotman
itself to a condition of Liability, which is below Non-Existence on his ethics scale. Hubbard stayed aboard the
Avon River
and steamed off to Marseilles until the
Royal Scotman
was returned to favor. Mary Sue was made the captain and ordered to retrain the crew and spruce up the ship to an acceptable state. No one could bathe or change clothes for months. The crew wore dirty gray rags on their left arms, which signaled their degraded status. Even Mary Sue’s snappish Corgi, Vixie, had a rag around its collar, and the ship itself wore a bracelet of gray tarpaulins around its funnel. An Ethics Officer walked the decks actually swinging a mace.

Despite the squalid conditions, Mary Sue ran the ship with a minimum of hysteria, earning her the respect and loyalty of many aboard. Without Hubbard, the mood lightened. Mary Sue used to have parties
in her cabin with Candy Swanson, the children’s tutor, and two men they were sweet on. They danced to Jimi Hendrix records. But when Hubbard returned, the party was over.

A YOUNG MAN
with a gift for languages named
Belkacem Ferradj joined the Sea Org when the ship docked briefly in Algiers in 1968. Hubbard, surrounded by his Messengers, had made an immediate impression on Ferradj. He was dressed like an admiral, and he spoke
with a broad American accent. A golden glow seemed to emanate from his large head. Mary Sue struck Ferradj as “gorgeous
,” with long, curly hair and piercing eyes, but he thought she was “the most secretive person in the world.” When the ship sailed in July, Ferradj was aboard, having signed his billion-year contract with the Sea Org.

Ferradj became close to Hubbard’s sixteen-year-old daughter,
Diana. She had developed into a glamorous young woman, with flowing red hair and pale skin showered with freckles. She played the grand piano in the family dining room on the ship. Some saw her as imperious, a princess, but Ferradj, who was four years older than Diana, was smitten. When Hubbard found out about the relationship, he summoned Ferradj to the poop deck. Ferradj said Hubbard greeted him with a blow to the jaw. “I hit the bulkhead
of the ship and slumped to the deck,” he recalled. “I don’t know if it was because I was an Arab or what. I left in disgrace.”

When
Otto Roos, a Sea Org executive from Holland, failed to lash a steel cable to a bollard on the dock during a terrible storm in Tunisia, Hubbard ordered him thrown from the ship’s bridge into the sea, a height of about four stories.
Hana Eltringham wrote a concerned report to Hubbard that night, explaining that the storm had been so furious that Roos simply couldn’t hang on when trying to secure the ship. The report was returned to her with the comment “Never question LRH
.”
⁵

Roos survived his
punishment, only to set a dismal precedent. After that, overboardings became routine, but mostly from the lower poop deck. Nearly every morning, when the crew was mustered, there would be a list of those sentenced to go over the side, even in rough seas
. They would be fished out and hauled back onboard through the old cattle doors that led to the hold. The overboardings contributed to the decision of the Greek government to expel the Scientology crew from
Corfu in March 1969. That didn’t stop the practice. None except Hubbard family members were spared.
John McMaster
, the second “first Clear,” was tossed over the side six times, breaking his shoulder on the last occasion. He left the church
not long afterward. Eltringham had to
stand with Hubbard and his aides on the deck when the punishments were meted out. If the crewman seemed insufficiently cowed by the prospect, Hubbard would have his hands and feet bound. Whitfield remembered one American woman,
Julia Lewis Salmen, sixty years old, a longtime Scientology executive, who was bound and blindfolded before being thrown overboard. “She screamed all the way
down,” Eltringham said. “When the sound stopped, Hubbard ordered a deck hand to jump in after her. Had he not, I think Julia may have drowned.”

Hubbard chose a different punishment for another of the older members of the crew,
Charlie Reisdorf. He and two other
Sea Org crew were made to race each other around the rough, splintery decks while pushing peanuts with their noses. “They all had raw, bleeding noses
, leaving a trail of blood behind them,” a senior auditor recalled. The entire crew was ordered to watch the spectacle. “Reisdorf was in his late fifties, probably. His two daughters were Messengers; they were eleven or twelve at the time, and his wife was there also. It was hard to say which was worse to watch: this old guy with a bleeding nose or his wife and kids sobbing and crying and being forced to watch this. Hubbard was standing there, calling the shots, yelling, ‘Faster, faster!’ ”

Hubbard increasingly turned his wrath on children, who were becoming a nuisance on the ship. He thought that they were best raised away from their parents, who were “counter-intention” to their children. As a result, he became their only—stern as well as neglectful—parent. Children who committed minor
infractions, such as laughing inappropriately or failing to remember a Scientology term, would be made to climb to the crow’s nest, at the top of the mast, four stories high, and spend the night, or sent to the hold and made to chip rust. A rambunctious four-year-old boy named
Derek Greene
, an adopted black child, had taken a Rolex watch belonging to a wealthy member of the Sea Org and dropped it overboard. Hubbard ordered him confined in the chain locker, a closed container where the massive anchor chain is stored. It was dark, damp, and cold. There was a danger that the child could be mutilated if the anchor was accidentally lowered or slipped. Although he was fed, he was not given blankets or allowed to go to the bathroom. He stayed sitting on the chain for two days and nights. The crew could hear the boy crying. His mother pleaded with Hubbard to let him out, but Hubbard reminded her of the Scientology axiom that children are actually adults in small bodies, and equally responsible for their behavior. Other young children were
sentenced to
the locker for infractions—such as chewing up a telex—for as long as three weeks. Hubbard ruled that they
were
Suppressive Persons. One little girl, a deaf
mute, was placed in the locker for a week because Hubbard thought it might cure her deafness.

Hubbard explained to Hana Eltringham that the punishments were meant to raise the level of “confront” in order to deal with the evil in the universe. One member of Eltringham’s crew on the
Avon River,
Terry Dickinson, a jocular Australian electrician, made the mistake of failing to order a part for the ship-to-shore radio. Hubbard sent a handwritten note to Eltringham ordering her to keep Dickinson awake until the part arrived and the radio was properly installed. If the crewman fell asleep, he would be expelled. Eltringham guiltily carried out the order, but she knew the hapless Dickinson couldn’t make it on his own, so she stayed awake with him for five days and nights, pouring coffee down his throat, walking him up and down the beach, and consoling him as he wept and said he couldn’t take it anymore. Eltringham believed she was saving Dickinson’s soul, as well as her own, but he left shortly after that incident, “a broken man.” Later, Hubbard wrote a note explaining that Dickinson “did not have the confront
to see this through.”

“You would say to yourself
, ‘Why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you speak out?’ ” Eltringham later remarked. “You see, I was a true believer. I believed that Hubbard knew what he was doing. I, unfortunately, believed that he knew what it was going to take to help everyone in the world and that, even though I didn’t understand, it was my duty to follow and support what he was doing. None of us spoke out. None of us did anything.”