Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (6 page)

Pulp fiction derives its name from the cheap paper stock used in printing the garish magazines—
Weird Tales, Black Mask, Argosy, Magic Carpet—
that became popular in Depression-era America. The pay for contributors was miserable—the standard rate was a penny a word. To fill the usual
128 pages, each pulp magazine required 65,000 words, so that the yearly quota to fill the 150 pulp weeklies, biweeklies, and monthlies that crowded the newsstands in 1934 amounted to about 195,000,000 words. Many well-known writers began their careers by feeding this gigantic maw, including
Dashiell Hammett,
H. P. Lovecraft,
Erle Stanley Gardner,
Raymond Chandler,
Ray Bradbury, and
Edgar Rice Burroughs. The pulps nurtured genres that were perhaps not new but until then had never been so blatantly and abundantly expressed.

Hubbard’s actual life experiences seemed wonderfully suited for such literature. His first pulp story, “
The Green God,” published in
Thrilling Adventures
in 1934, is about a naval intelligence officer (possibly based on Snake
Thompson) who is tortured and buried alive in China. “
Maybe Because—!,” published in
Cowboy Stories
, was the first of Hubbard’s forty-seven westerns, which must have drawn upon his childhood in Montana. Soon, however, there were stories about submarines and zombies, tales set in Russia or Morocco. Plot was all that really mattered, and Hubbard’s amazing capacity for invention
readily colored the canvas. Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and
Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words
of fiction a month. He was
writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper
to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher. Because the magazines didn’t want an author to appear more than once in the same issue, Hubbard adopted
pen names—Mr. Spectator, Capt. Humbert Reynolds, Rene Lafayette, Winchester Remington Colt, et cetera—accumulating about twenty aliases over the years. He said that when he was writing stories he would simply “roll the pictures” in his mind and write down what he saw as quickly as possible. It was a physical act
: he would actually perspire when he wrote. His philosophy was “First draft, last draft
, get it out the door.”

Ron and Polly’s son, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., was born prematurely on May 7, 1934, in Encinitas, California, where the couple had gone to vacation. The baby, whom they called Nibs, weighed little more than two pounds at birth. Ron fashioned an incubator
out of a cupboard drawer, using a lightbulb to keep it warm, while Polly fed Nibs with an eyedropper. Two years later, in New York City, Polly gave birth to a daughter, Katherine May Hubbard, whom they called Kay.

In 1936, the family moved to
Bremerton, Washington, near where Ron’s parents were then living, as well as his mother’s family, the
Waterburys. They warmly accepted Polly and the kids. Ron was doing well enough to buy a small farm in nearby
Port Orchard with a house, five bungalows, a thousand feet of waterfront, and a view of Mount Rainier—“the prettiest place
I ever saw in my life,” he wrote to his best friend,
Russell Hays, a fellow author of pulps who lived in Kansas. Ron spent much of his time in New York, however, cultivating his professional contacts, and leaving his wife and children for long periods of time.

Hubbard pined for
Hollywood, in what would be a long-term, unrequited romance. Despite his overtures, he received only “vague offers
” from studios for short-term contracts. “I have discarded Hollywood
,” he complained to Hays. “I haven’t got enough charm.” But in the spring
of 1937,
Columbia Pictures finally optioned one of Hubbard’s stories to be folded into a serial, titled
The Secret of Treasure Island
. Hubbard quickly moved to Hollywood, hoping to finally make it in the movie business. (He later claimed
to have worked on a number
of films during this time—including the classic films
Stagecoach
, with
John Wayne, and
The Plainsman
, with
Gary Cooper—but he never actually received any film credits other than
The Secret of Treasure Island
.) By midsummer he had fled back to the farm in Washington, blaming the long hours, tension, and “dumb Jew producers
.”

Once again, he threw himself into writing the pulps with a fury, but also with a new note of cynicism. “Never write about
a character type you cannot find in the magazine for which the story is intended,” he advised Hays. “Never write about an unusual character.” Realism was no asset in this kind of writing, he complained, remarking on “my utter inability to sell a story which has any connection with my own background.… Reality seems to be a very detested quantity.”

Then, on New Year’s Day, 1938, Hubbard had a revelation that would change his life—and eventually, the lives of many others. During a dental operation, he received a gas anesthetic. “While under the influence
of it my heart must have stopped beating,” he relates. “It was like sliding helter-skelter down into a vortex of scarlet and it was knowing that one was dying and that the process of dying was far from pleasant.” In those brief, hallucinatory moments, Hubbard believed that the secrets of existence were accidentally revealed to him.
Forrest Ackerman, who later became his literary agent, said that Hubbard told him that he had risen from the dental chair in spirit form, glanced back at his former body, and wondered, “Where do we go from here?” Hubbard’s disembodied spirit then noticed a huge ornate gate in the distance, which he floated through. On the other side, Ackerman relates, Hubbard discovered “an intellectual smorgasbord of everything that had ever puzzled the mind of man—you know, how did it all begin, where do we go from here, are there past lives—and like a sponge he was just absorbing all this esoteric information. And all of a sudden, there was a kind of swishing in the air and he heard a voice, ‘No, not yet! He’s not ready!’ And like a long umbilical cord, he felt himself being pulled back, back, back. And he lay down in his body, and he opened his eyes, and he said to the nurse, ‘I was dead, wasn’t I?’ ” The nurse looked startled
, and the doctor gave her a dirty look for letting Hubbard know what had happened.

In Hubbard’s own written account of the event, he remembers voices crying out as he is being restored to life, “Don’t let him know!
” When he came to, he was “still in contact with something.” The intimation that he had briefly been given access to the divine mystery lingered for
several days, but he couldn’t call it back. “And then one morning, just as I awoke, it came to me.”

In a fever, he dashed off a small book he titled
Excalibur
. “Once upon a time
, according to a writer in The Arabian Nights, there lived a very wise old man,” the book begins, in the brief portion that the church has published of the fragments it says it has in its possession. The old man, goes the story, wrote a long and learned book, but he became concerned that he had written too much. So he sat himself down for ten years more and reduced the original volume to one tenth its size. Even then, he was dissatisfied, and he constrained the work even further, to a single line, “which contained everything there was to be known.” He hid the sacred line in a niche in his wall. But still he wondered, Could all human knowledge be distilled even further?

Hubbard sent excited telegrams to publishers in New York, inviting them to meet him at Penn Station, where he would auction off a manuscript that would change the world. He wrote
Polly, “I have high hopes
of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed.”

But
Excalibur
was never published, leading some to doubt that it was ever written. The stories Hubbard later told about the book added to the sense that it was more mythical than real. He said that when the Russians learned of the book’s contents, they offered him money and laboratory facilities to complete his work. When he turned them down, they purloined a copy of his manuscript from his hotel room in Miami. Hubbard explained to his agent
that he ultimately decided to withdraw the book from publication because the first six people who read it were so shattered by the revelations that they had lost their minds. The last time he showed
Excalibur
to a publisher, he said, the reader
brought the manuscript into the room, set it on the publisher’s desk, then jumped out the window of the skyscraper.

Hubbard despondently returned to the
pulps. Five years of torrential output had left him exhausted and bitter. His work was “worthless
,” he admitted. “I have learned enough of my trade, have developed a certain technique,” he wrote to
Hays. “But curbed by editorial fear of reality and hindered by my own revolt I have never dared loose the pent flame, so far only releasing the smoke.”

That same year Hubbard received an offer to write for a magazine called
Astounding Science-Fiction
. The editor,
John W. Campbell, Jr., twenty-seven years old at the time, was to preside over what Hubbard and others would mark as the
Golden Age of
Science Fiction. One of the many brilliant young writers who would be pulled into Campbell’s orbit,
Isaac Asimov, described Campbell as “a tall, large man
with light hair, a beaky nose, a wide face with thin lips, and with a cigarette holder forever clamped between his teeth.” Campbell was an overbearing champion of extreme right-wing ideas and crackpot science—especially psychic phenomena—and he would hold forth in nonstop monologues, often adopting perverse views, such as supporting slavery, then defending such propositions to the point of exhausting everyone in the room. “A deviant figure of
marked ferocity,” as the British writer
Kingsley Amis observed. On the other hand, Campbell was also a caring and resourceful editor who groomed inexperienced writers, such as
Robert A. Heinlein—first published in
Astounding
—and turned them into cultural icons.

Campbell considered science fiction to be something far more than cheap literary diversion; for him, it amounted to prophecy. His conviction of the importance of the genre added a mystical allure that other forms of
pulp fiction never aspired to.
Fanzines and
sci-fi clubs
, composed largely of adolescent boys who were drawn to the romanticized image of science, formed in many cities around the country; some of those fans went on to become important scientists, and their work was animated by ideas that had first spilled out of the minds of writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Hubbard. “Science fiction, particularly
in its Golden Age, had a mission,” Hubbard writes. “To get man to the stars.” He saw himself as well qualified for the field: “I had, myself, somewhat
of a science background, had done some pioneer work in rockets and liquid gases.”

Hubbard discovered his greatest talents as a writer in the field of
science fiction, a more commodious genre and far more intellectually engaging than westerns or adventure yarns. Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common. Some of the most closely guarded secrets of
Scientology were originally published in other guises in
Hubbard’s science fiction.

Certainly, the same mind that roamed so freely through imaginary universes might be inclined to look at the everyday world and suspect that there was something more behind the surface reality. The broad canvas of science fiction allowed Hubbard to think in large-scale terms about the human condition. He was bold. He was fanciful. He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion.

HUBBARD NOW LIVED
two lives: one on the farm in
Port Orchard, surrounded by his parents and Polly and the kids; the other in New York, where he rented an apartment on the Upper West Side. The city rewarded him with the recognition he craved. He enjoyed frequent lunches at the Knickerbocker Hotel with his colleagues in the American Fiction Guild, where he could swap tales and schmooze with editors. He also became a member of the prestigious
Explorers Club, which added credibility to his frequently told stories of adventure.

“In his late twenties
, Hubbard was a tall, well-built man with bright red hair, a pale complexion, and a long-nosed face that gave him the look of a reincarnated Pan,” a fellow science-fiction writer,
L. Sprague de Camp, later recalled. “He arranged in his New York apartment a curtained inclosure the size of a telephone booth, lit by a blue light bulb, in which he could work fast without distraction.”

The fact that Hubbard was a continent away from his wife offered him the opportunity to court other women, which he did so openly that he became an object of wonder among his writer colleagues. Ron blamed Polly for his philandering. “Because of her coldness
physically, the falsity of her pretensions, I believed myself a near eunuch,” he wrote in a private memoir (which the church disputes) some years later.
“When I found I was attractive to other women, I had many affairs. But my failure to please Polly made me always pay so much attention to my momentary mate that I derived small pleasure myself. This was an anxiety neurosis which cut down my natural powers.”