Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (8 page)

In October, he got another assignment, this time as the navigation officer on the cargo ship the
USS
Algol
. The
US Navy and Marines had begun their final island-hopping campaign before the expected invasion of Japan itself—
Operation Downfall. Millions of Allied casualties were forecast. For a man who wanted to be a hero, there would be a genuine opportunity. Instead, Hubbard requested a transfer to the
School of Military Government at Princeton. “Once conversant with the
following languages, but require review: Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, Tagalog, Peking Pidgin and Shanghai Pidgin,” Hubbard wrote in his application, adding, “Experienced in handling natives, all classes, in various parts of world.” Through all the carnage, the end of the war was lurching into view, and the likely occupation of Japan was on the horizon. A polyglot such as Hubbard claimed to be would certainly find a place in the future administration.

When he arrived in Princeton, in September 1944, Hubbard fell in with a group of science-fiction writers who had been organized into an informal military think tank by his friend Robert
Heinlein. The Navy was looking for ways to counter the
kamikaze suicide attacks on Allied ships, which had begun that fall as desperation took hold of the Japanese military planners. Hubbard would spend weekends in Philadelphia at the Heinleins’ apartment, along with some other of his former colleagues, including his former editor,
John Campbell, gaming different scenarios for the Navy. (Some of their suggestions were actually tested in combat, but none proved useful
.) Heinlein was extremely solicitous of his old friend, remarking, “Ron had had a busy war
—sunk four times and wounded again and again.” The fact that
Hubbard had an
affair with Heinlein’s wife
didn’t seem to affect his deep regard. “He almost forced me
to sleep with his wife,” Hubbard later marveled.

There was another lissome young woman hanging around with the science-fiction crowd:
Vida Jameson, whose father,
Malcolm, was a part of the Campbell group of
Astounding
writers. “Quiet, shy little greymouse,”
one of the crowd described Vida, “with great soulful black eyes and a habit of listening.” She was twenty-eight, and already selling stories to the
Saturday Evening Post
, a more respectable literary endeavor than the pulps. Hubbard proposed to her. She knew he was married and refused his offer; still, she was captivated by him and continued her relationship with him until after the war.

Hubbard graduated from the School of Military Government in January 1945, and was ordered to proceed to
Monterey, California, to join a civil affairs team, which would soon follow the invading forces. The Battle of Okinawa, in southern Japan, got under way that spring, creating the highest number of casualties in the Pacific Theater. Kamikaze attacks were at their peak. American troops suffered more than 60,000 casualties in less than three months. Japanese forces were fighting to the death. The savagery and scale of the combat has rarely been equaled.

Once again, Hubbard stood on the treacherous precipice, where the prospect of heroic action awaited him—or else indignity, or a death that would be obscured by the deaths of tens of thousands of others. One month after the invasion of Okinawa, Hubbard was admitted to the
Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, complaining of stomach pains.

This is a key moment in the narrative of
Dianetics and
Scientology. “Blinded with injured optic
nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future,” Hubbard writes of himself during this period. “I was abandoned by my family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.” Hubbard says he healed himself of his traumatic injuries, using techniques that would become the foundation of Dianetics and Scientology. “I had no one
to help me; what I had to know I had to find out,” he recalled. “And it’s quite a trick studying when you cannot see.”

Doctors at Oak Knoll
were never sure exactly what was wrong with him, except for a recurrence of his
ulcer. In records of Hubbard’s many physical examinations and X-rays, the doctors make no note of scars
or evidence of wounds, nor do his military records
show that he was ever injured during the war.

In the hospital,
Hubbard says, he was also given a psychiatric examination. To his alarm, the doctor wrote two pages of notes. “And I was watching this
, you know, saying, ‘Well, have I gone nuts, after all?’ ” He conspired to take a look at the records to see what the doctor had written. “I got to the end and it said, ‘In short, this officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever.’ ” (There is no psychiatric evaluation contained in Hubbard’s medical records.)

POLLY AND THE TWO CHILDREN
had spent the war waiting for Ron on their plot in
Port Orchard, but there was no joyous homecoming. “My wife left me
while I was in a hospital with ulcers,” Hubbard noted. “It was a terrible blow when she left me for I was ill and without prospects.”

Soon after leaving the hospital, Hubbard towed a house trailer
behind an old Packard to
Southern California, where so many ambitious and rootless members of his generation were seeking their destiny. There was a proliferation of exotic new religions in America and many other countries, caused by the tumult of war and disruptions of progress that older denominations weren’t prepared to solve. Southern California was filled with migrants who weren’t tied to old creeds and were ready to experiment with new ways of thinking. The region was swarming with Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Zoroastrians, and Vedantists. Swamis, mystics, and gurus of many different faiths pulled acolytes into their orbits.

The most brilliant member of this galaxy of occultists was
John Whiteside Parsons, known as Jack, a rocket scientist working at what would later become the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Technical Institute. (Parsons, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, developed solid rocket fuel.) Darkly handsome and brawny, later called by some scholars the “James Dean of the occult
,” Parsons was a science-fiction fan and an outspoken advocate of free love. He acquired a three-story
Craftsman-style mansion, with a twelve-car garage
, at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—a sedate, palm-lined street known as Millionaires Row. The house had once belonged
to
Arthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had hosted former president
Theodore Roosevelt,
John Muir, and
Albert Einstein in its oval dining room. The street had also been home to
William Wrigley, of the chewing-gum fortune, and the beer baron
Adolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door.

She must have been appalled to watch as Parsons divided the historic home and the coach house behind it into nineteen apartments, then advertised for renters. He sought artists, anarchists, and musicians—the more Bohemian the better. “Must not believe in God
,” the ad stated. Among those passing
through the “Parsonage” were an aging actress from the silent movie era, an opera singer, several astrologers, an ex-convict, and the chief engineer for the development of the atomic bomb. A number of children from various alliances constantly raced through the house. Parsons threw parties that featured “women in diaphanous gowns
,” as one visitor observed, who “would dance around a pot of fire, surrounded by coffins topped with candles.” Parsons turned the mansion into the headquarters of the
Agapé Lodge, a branch of the
Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret fraternal organization dedicated to witchcraft and sexual “magick,” based on the writings of the notorious British writer and provocateur
Aleister Crowley, whose glowering countenance was captured in a portrait
hanging in the stairwell.

Despite the bizarre atmosphere that he cultivated, Parsons took his involvement in the OTO seriously, making brazen ethical claims for his movement—claims that would sound familiar when
Scientology arose only a few years later. “The breakup of the home
and family, the confusion in problems of morals and behavior, the frustration of the individual need for love, self-expression and freedom, and the immanence of the total destruction of western civilization all indicate the need for a basic reexamination and alteration of individual and social values,” Parsons writes in a brief manifesto. “Mature investigation on the part of philosophers and social scientists have [
sic
] indicated the existence of only one force of sufficient power to solve these problems and effect the necessary changes, and that is the force of a new religion.”

TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD SARA ELIZABETH
“
BETTY
”
NORTHRUP
, Parsons’s feisty mistress, was the younger sister of his wife, who had run off with another man. Sara was tall, blond, buxom, and wild, often claiming to have lost her virginity
at the age of ten. “Her chief interest
in life is amusement,” one of the boarders observed. But she was also
quick and intelligent and full of joy, delighting everyone around her. She had become involved with Parsons, who was ten years older, when she was fifteen
. Her parents tolerated the relationship; in fact, her indulgent father helped bankroll the
Parsonage, which Sara purchased jointly with Parsons while she was still a teenager. One evening Robert
Heinlein appeared at the house, bringing along his friend L. Ron Hubbard, who was wearing dark glasses and carrying a silver-handled cane. “He was not only a writer
but he was a captain of a ship that had been downed in the Pacific and he was weeks on a raft and had been blinded by the sun and his back had been broken,” Sara later recalled. “I believed everything he said.”

A few months later, Hubbard moved in. He made an immediate, vivid impression on the other boarders. “He dominated the scene
with his wit and inexhaustible fund of anecdotes,” one of the boarders,
Alva Rogers, later recalled. “Unfortunately, Ron’s reputation for spinning
tall tales (both off and on the printed page) made for a certain degree of skepticism in the minds of his audience. At any rate, he told one hell of a good story.” Like Hubbard, Rogers had red hair, and he was intrigued by Hubbard’s theory that redheads are the living remnant of the Neanderthals.

Hubbard invited one of his paramours from New York,
Vida Jameson, to join him at the Parsonage, with the ostensible task of keeping the books. It’s a testimony to his allure that she came all the way across America to be with him, although soon after she arrived, she discovered that she had been displaced.

The other boarders watched in astonishment as Hubbard worked his charms on the available women in the household, before setting his sights on “the most gorgeous
, intelligent, sweet, wonderful girl,” as another envious suitor described Sara Northrup. “There he was, living off Parsons’ largesse and making out with his girlfriend right in front of him. Sometimes when the two of them were sitting at the table together, the hostility was almost tangible.” Enlivened, no doubt, by their rivalry over Sara, Parsons and Hubbard quickly developed a highly competitive relationship. They liked to begin their mornings with a bout of fencing in the living room.

Parsons struggled with his feelings of jealousy, which were at war with his philosophy of free love. He could understand Northrup’s attraction to the new boarder, describing Hubbard in a letter to Crowley in 1946 as “a gentleman, red hair
, green eyes, honest and intelligent.…
He moved in with me about two months ago.” Then Parsons admits, “Although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron.” He went on to admire
Hubbard’s supernatural abilities. “Although he has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduced that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. He describes his Angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through his life and saved him many times.”

The extent to which Scientology was influenced by Hubbard’s involvement with the OTO has long been a matter of angry debate
. There is little trace in Hubbard’s life of organized religion or spiritual philosophy. In the Parsonage, he was drawn into an obscure and stigmatized creed, based on the writings and practice of
Crowley—the “Great Beast,” as he called himself—who gloried in being one of the most reviled men of his era. The Church of Scientology explicitly rejects any connection between Crowley’s thinking and Hubbard’s emerging philosophy; yet the two men were similar in striking ways. Like Hubbard, Crowley reveled in a life of constant physical, spiritual, and sexual exploration. He was a daring, even reckless mountaineer, and his exploits included several failed attempts to climb the world’s most formidable peaks. He, too, was a prolific writer who authored novels and plays as well as books on magic and mysticism. Boisterous and highly self-regarding, he had been kicked out of an occult society called the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn after feuding with some of its most prominent members, including
William Butler Yeats, whom Crowley accused of being envious of his talent
as a poet. He may have served
as a British spy while living in America during World War I, despite the fact that he was constantly publishing anti-British propaganda. Crowley relied on opiates and hallucinogens to enhance his spiritual pursuits. During an excursion to Cairo in 1904, he discovered his Holy Guardian Angel, a disembodied spirit named
Aiwass, who claimed to be a messenger from the Egyptian god Horus. Crowley said that over a period of three days, Aiwass dictated to him an entire cosmology titled
The Book of the Law
, the main principle of which was, “Do what thou wilt
shall be the whole of the law.”

Nibs—Hubbard’s estranged
eldest son and namesake, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (he later changed his name to Ronald DeWolf)—claimed
that his father had read the book when he was sixteen years old and developed a lifelong allegiance to
black magic. “What a lot of people
don’t realize is that Scientology is black magic just spread out over a long time period,” he contended. “Black magic is the inner core of Scientology—and it is probably the only part of Scientology that really works.”