Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (9 page)

One striking parallel between
Hubbard and Crowley is the latter’s assertion that “spiritual progress did not depend
on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science.” Crowley argued that by advancing through a graded series of rituals and spiritual teachings, the adept could hope to make it across “The Abyss
,” which he defined as “the gulf existing between individual and cosmic consciousness.” It is an image that Hubbard would evoke in his
Bridge to Total Freedom.

Although Hubbard mentions Crowley only glancingly in a
lecture—calling him “my very good friend
”—they never actually met. Crowley died in 1947 at the age of seventy-two. “That’s when Dad decided
that he would take over the mantle of the Beast and that is the seed and the beginning of Dianetics and Scientology,” Nibs later said. “It was his goal to be the most powerful being in the universe.”

JACK PARSONS EXPERIMENTED
with Crowley’s rituals, taking them in his own eccentric direction. His personal brand of witchcraft centered on the adoration of female carnality, an interest Hubbard evidently shared. Parsons recorded in his journal that Hubbard had a vision of “a savage and beautiful woman
riding naked on a great cat-like beast.” That became the inspiration for Parsons’s most audacious mystical experiment. He appointed Hubbard to be his “scribe” in a ceremony called the “
Babalon Working.” It was based on Crowley’s notion that the supreme goal of the magician’s art was to create a
“moonchild”—a creature foretold in one of Crowley’s books who becomes the Antichrist. Night after night, Parsons and Hubbard invoked the spirit world in a quest to summon up a “
Scarlet Woman,” the female companion who would play the role of Parsons’s consort. The ceremony, likely aided by narcotics and hallucinogens, required Hubbard to channel the female deity of Babalon as Parsons performed the “invocation of wand
with material basis on talisman”—in other words, masturbating on a piece of parchment. He typically invoked twice a night.

Parsons records that during one of these evenings a candle was forcibly knocked out of Hubbard’s hand: “We observed a brownish
yellow light about seven feet high in the kitchen. I brandished a magical sword and it disappeared. His right arm was paralyzed for the rest of the night.” On another occasion, he writes, Hubbard saw the astral projection of one of Parsons’s enemies manifest himself in a black robe. “Ron promptly launched an attack and pinned the phantom figure to the door with four throwing knives.”

Evidently, the spirits relented. One day, an attractive young woman named
Marjorie Cameron showed up at the Parsonage. Parsons later claimed that a bolt of lightning had struck outside, followed by a knock at the door. A beautiful woman was standing there. She had been in a traffic accident. “I don’t know where I am
or where I’ve come from,” she told him. (Cameron’s version is that
she had been interested in the stories of the naked women jumping over fires in the garden, and she persuaded a friend who was boarding at the Parsonage to take her for a visit.) “I have my elemental!
” Parsons exclaimed in a note to
Crowley a few days later. “She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified.… She is an artist, strong minded and determined, with strong masculine characteristics and a fanatical independence.”

The temple was lit with candles, the room suffused with incense, and Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead” was playing in the background. Dressed in a hooded white robe, and carrying a lamp, Hubbard intoned, “Display thyself
to Our Lady; dedicate thy organs to Her, dedicate thy heart to Her, dedicate thy mind to Her, dedicate thy soul to Her, for She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates.” Whereupon Parsons and Cameron responded, “Glory unto the Scarlet Woman, Babalon, the Mother of Abominations, that rideth upon the Beast.” Then, as Hubbard continued the incantation, Parsons and Cameron consummated the ceremony upon the altar. This same ritual went on for three nights in a row. Afterward, Parsons wrote to Crowley, “Instructions were received
direct through Ron, the seer.… I am to act as instructor guardian guide for nine months; then it will be loosed on the world.”

Crowley was unimpressed. “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard
or somebody is producing a Moonchild,” he complained to another follower. “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” Cameron did become pregnant, but got an abortion, with Parsons’s consent, so it’s unclear exactly what this ceremony was designed
to produce. (Parsons and Cameron later married and aborted another pregnancy
.) Nonetheless, Parsons asserted that the ritual had been a success. “Babalon is incarnate upon
the earth today, awaiting the proper hour for her manifestation,” he wrote after the ceremony. “And in that day my work will be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the Breath of the father.”

Until that apocalypse occurred, Hubbard and Parsons decided, they would go into business together. The plan was for Hubbard to purchase yachts in Florida, sail them through the Panama Canal to California, and resell them at a profit. Parsons and
Sara sold the Parsonage and handed over the money to Hubbard—more than twenty thousand dollars
from Parsons alone. Hubbard and Northrup promptly left for Miami.

While in Florida, Hubbard appealed to the
Veterans Administration for an increase in his medical disability. He was already receiving compensation for his
ulcers, amounting to $11.50 per month. “I cannot tolerate
a general diet—results in my having to abandon my old profession as a ship master and explorer, and seriously hampers me as a writer.” He said his eyesight had been affected by “prolonged exposure to tropical sunlight,” incurred while he was in the service, which caused a
chronic case of conjunctivitis. He also complained that he was lame from a bone infection, which he theorized must have occurred by the abrupt change in climate when he was shipped to the East Coast. “My earning power, due to injuries, all service connected, has dropped to nothing,” he summed up. Sara Northrup added a handwritten note of support. “I have know
[
sic
] Lafayette Ronald Hubbard for many years,” she claimed. “I see no chance of his condition improving to a point where he can regain his old standards. He is becoming steadily worse, his health impaired again by economic worries.”

Parsons grew to believe that Hubbard and Sara had other plans for his money, and he flew to Miami to confront them. When he learned that they had just sailed away, he performed a “Banishing Ritual
,” invoking
Bartzabel, a magical figure associated with Mars. According to Parsons, a sudden squall arose, ripping the sails off the ship that Hubbard was captaining, forcing him to limp back to port. Sara’s memory was that she and Ron were on their way to California, when they were caught in a hurricane in the Panama Canal. The ship was too damaged
to continue the voyage. Parsons gained a judgment
against the couple, but declined to press criminal charges, possibly
because his sexual relationship with Sara had begun while she was still below the age of consent, and she threatened to retaliate.
Hubbard’s friends were alarmed, both about his business dealings with Parsons and his romance with Sara. “Keep him at arm’s
length,”
Robert Heinlein warned a mutual friend. His wife,
Virginia, regarded Ron as “a very sad case
of post-war breakdown,” and Sara as Hubbard’s “latest Man-Eating Tigress.”

Sara repeatedly refused Ron’s entreaties to marry him, but he threatened to kill himself unless she relented. She still saw him as a broken war hero whom she could mend. Finally, she said, “All right, I’ll marry you
, if that’s going to save you.” They awakened a minister in Chestertown, Maryland, on August 10, 1946. The minister’s wife and housekeeper served as witnesses to the wedding. The news ricocheted among Hubbard’s science-fiction colleagues. “I suppose Polly was
tiresome about not giving him his divorce so he could marry six other gals who were all hot & moist over him,” one of Hubbard’s writer friends,
L. Sprague de Camp, wrote to the Heinleins. (In fact, Polly didn’t learn
of the marriage till the following year, when she read about it in the newspapers.) “How many girls is a man entitled to in one lifetime, anyway?” de Camp fumed. “Maybe he should be reincarnated as a rabbit.”

The Church of
Scientology admits that Hubbard was involved with Parsons and the OTO, characterizing it, however, as a secret mission for naval intelligence. The church claims that the government had been worried about top American scientists—including some from Los Alamos, where the atom bomb was developed—who made a habit of staying with Parsons when they visited California. Hubbard’s mission was to penetrate and subvert the organization.

“Mr. Hubbard accomplished
the assignment,” the church maintains. “He engineered a business investment that tied up the money Parsons used to fund the group’s activities, thus making it unavailable to Parsons for his occult pursuits.” Hubbard, the church claims, “broke up black magic in America.”

EVEN IF HUBBARD WAS
a government spy, as the church claims, the available records show him at what must have been his lowest point in the years just after the war. His physical examination at the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles in September 1946 notes, “No work
since discharge
. Lives on his savings.” (The VA eventually increased his disability to forty percent.) Sara noticed that he was having nightmares. That winter, they moved into a lighthouse on a frozen lake in the Poconos near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It was an unsettling time for Sara; they were isolated, and Ron had a .45 pistol that he would fire randomly. Late one night, while she was in bed and Ron was typing, he hit her across the face with the pistol. He told her that she had been smiling in her sleep, so she must have been thinking about someone else. “I got up and left
the house in the night and walked on the ice of the lake because I was terrified,” Sara said in 1997, in an account she dictated shortly before she died. She was so shocked and humiliated she didn’t know how to respond.

Ron had begun beating her in Florida, shortly after her father died. Her grief seemed to provoke Ron—she assumed it was because she wasn’t being who he needed her to be. No one had ever struck her before. She recognized now how dangerous their relationship was; on the other hand, Ron’s need for her was so stark. He had been blocked for a long time, and Sara had been churning out plots
for him, and actually writing some of his stories. Ron worried that he would never write again. He frequently threatened
suicide. Sara didn’t believe in divorce—it was a terrible stigma at the time—and she still thought she could save Ron. “I kept thinking
that he must be suffering or he wouldn’t act that way.” And so, she went back to him.

Ron took a loan and bought a house trailer, and he and Sara drove across the country to
Port Orchard, where his parents and his undivorced first wife and children were living. Sara had no idea why people treated her so strangely, until finally
Hubbard’s son Nibs told her
that his parents were still married. Once again, Sara fled. Ron found her waiting for the ferry that was leaving for California. The engines of the ship grumbled as Ron hastily pleaded his case. He told her that he really was getting a divorce. He claimed that an attorney had assured him that he and Sara actually were legally married. Finally, the ferry left without her.

Soon after that, Ron and Sara set out for Hollywood. They got as far as Ojai, California, where Ron was arrested
for failing to make payments on the house trailer they were living in.

In October 1947, Hubbard sent the VA an alarming and revealing plea:

Nothing came of this request. There is no record that the VA conducted a psychological assessment of Hubbard. Throughout his life, however,
questions would arise about his sanity.
Russell Miller, a British biographer, tracked down an ex-lover of Hubbard’s, who described him as “a manic depressive
with paranoid tendencies.” The woman, whom Miller called “Barbara Kaye” (her real name was
Barbara Klowden), later became a psychologist. She added, “He said he always wanted
to found a religion like Moses or Jesus.” A man who later worked in the church as Hubbard’s medical officer,
Jim Dincalci, listed his traits: “Paranoid
personality
. Delusions of grandeur. Pathological lying.” Dr.
Stephen Wiseman, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, who has been a prominent critic of Scientology, speculated that a possible diagnosis of Hubbard’s personality would be “malignant narcissism
,” which he characterizes as “a highly insecure individual protecting himself with aggressive
grandiosity, disavowal of any and every need from others, antisocial orientation, and a heady and toxic mix of rage/anger/aggression/violence and
paranoia.”

And yet, if Hubbard was paranoid, it was also true that he really was often pursued, first by creditors and later by grand juries and government investigators. He may have had delusions of grandeur, as so many critics say, but he did in fact make an undeniable mark on the world, publishing many best sellers and establishing a religion that endures decades after his death. Grandiosity might well be a feature of a personality that could accomplish such feats.

A fascinating glimpse into Hubbard’s state of mind during this time is found in what I am calling his
secret memoir. The church claims that the document is a forgery. It was produced by the former archivist for the Church of Scientology,
Gerald Armstrong, in a 1984 suit
that the church brought against him. Armstrong read some portions of them into the record over the strong objections of the church attorneys; others later found their way onto the Internet. The church now maintains that Hubbard did not write this document, although when it was entered into evidence, the church’s lawyers made no such representation, saying that the papers were intensely private, “constitute a kind of self-therapy
,” and did not reflect Hubbard’s actual condition.