Inside Scientology (3 page)

Scientology is a faith that is both mainstream and marginal. Known for its Hollywood members, it is run by a uniformed set of believers who rarely, if ever, appear in the public eye. It is an insular society—one that exists, to a large degree, as something of a parallel universe to the secular world, with its own nomenclature, ethical code, and, most daunting to those who break its rules, its own rigorously enforced justice system. As an American subculture, it has been described to me, many times, as a subculture within a subculture within a subculture, whose outer layers appear harmless and even appealing, but which hides an inner stratum that reeks of authoritarian control.

For the past five years, I have sought to understand Scientology: not to judge, but simply to absorb. What I have found defies expectations, and even definition.

Adventure is the vitamizing element in histories, both individual and social ... Its adepts are rarely chaste, or merciful, or even lawabiding at all, and any moral peptonizing, or sugaring, takes out the interest, with the truth, of their lives. And so it is with all great characters.

—
WILLIAM BOLITHO
,
TWELVE AGAINST THE GODS

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be said about Lafayette Ron Hubbard, he undoubtedly had a strange and unique genius. One of the most effective hucksters of his generation, he understood the common American yearning for self-transformation and exploited it by connecting this impulse to two of the great American passions of the twentieth century: science and religion. He would remove all that was fuzzy and imprecise about religion. He would discard all that was cold and inhuman about science. And he'd sell the results like soap. Some people think he was the greatest con man of his time. Others believe he was a savior.

As a young man, Hubbard was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an amateur explorer, magician, and hypnotist. At the age of forty, he came up with an alternative to psychotherapy that he called Dianetics, wrote a best-selling book about it, and became famous. Within a year he lost everything. In 1952, he started over, reimagining Dianetics as a spiritual science he called Scientology. Over the course of the next thirty-five years, he would be a salesman, guru, sea commodore, spymaster, poet, recluse, tyrant, and, last but not least, a very rich man.

When Hubbard died in 1985, the world took note, but he remained a mystery. Hubbard's official biography, which has been rigorously promoted by the Church of Scientology, presents him as a modern-day Ulysses: a restless explorer and spiritual seeker whose youthful adventures led him to the far corners of the Orient, where he visited Buddhist lamaseries, befriended Manchurian warlords, and even lived for a time with bandits in the hills of Tibet. Significantly less glowing assessments of Hubbard can be found in a number of court transcripts, affidavits, and even some of Hubbard's own early writings, which present the founder of Scientology as a fabulist whose claims contained certain embellishments, together with, in many cases, outright fabrications.

Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, on March 13, 1911. His father, Harry Ross "Hub" Hubbard, served in the navy; when he was promoted to lieutenant in 1921, the Hubbards embarked on a life of perpetual motion, relocating almost yearly to posts in Guam, San Diego, Seattle and Bremerton in the state of Washington, and Washington, D.C. For Ron, an only child, it was an exciting but alienating way to spend his childhood, and loneliness would remain an issue throughout his life. "When I was very young, I was pathetically eager for a home,"
Hubbard wrote in the early 1940s.

The itinerant nature of Hubbard's childhood stimulated a lifelong love for adventure and also fueled what by any estimation was a particularly rich and detailed inner life. He grew up thrilling to the stories told by the men in his father's naval circles, and had particularly romantic notions of the sea, "a lovely, vicious lonely thing,"
as he conceived of it. A restless boy with an isolationist streak, he harbored dreams of commanding his own ship—though he had no intention of winding up like his father, a naval supply officer who spent most of his career behind a desk. Harry Hubbard, as the journalist Russell Miller noted in his critical yet comprehensive biography of Hubbard,
Barefaced Messiah,
was "a deeply conservative plodder, a man ruled by routine and conformity."
Ron Hubbard, by contrast, was a dreamer who saw himself as the hero of his own adventure story. Though his real-life exploits were limited—routine Boy Scout hikes
^*
and swimming expeditions were interspersed with a few exotic trips with one or both of his parents through the Panama Canal and eventually parts of Asia and the South Pacific—Hubbard viewed himself as a young Jack London; he penned swashbuckling accounts of his (greatly embellished) heroics in his journal, and later projected his fantasies onto fictional (and often, like him, redheaded) heroes: sailors, spies, pilots, soldiers of fortune. He had a sponge-like ability to absorb facts and details about the places he'd visited, no matter how briefly, and he wrote breezily, "as if he was a well-traveled man of the world," Miller noted,
and "a carefree, two-fisted, knockabout adventurer," not the gawky, freckled teenager he actually was.

In 1929, Hubbard entered Swavely, a preparatory school in Manassas, Virginia, in anticipation of what his parents hoped would be his next step: the U.S. Naval Academy. But appointment to Annapolis was not to be—terrible at math, Hubbard failed that portion of his entrance exam and was also discovered to be nearsighted, instantly disqualifying him from becoming a cadet. Faced with life as a civilian, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University in the fall of 1930 with a major in civil engineering. But while exceedingly bright, Hubbard was a diffident student and had no more interest in engineering than he'd had in mathematics.

Hubbard's destiny, he felt certain, lay in more exciting realms. Fascinated by the concept of "motorless flight," he'd earned a commercial glider pilot's license in 1931 and also learned how to fly a small stunt plane. That summer, he and a friend took off to "barnstorm" around the Midwest. It was a rather hapless adventure; the stunt plane, "which had a faculty for ground-looping at sixty miles an hour,"
Hubbard later said, by turns sank into mud, went off course, and nearly plowed into a fence. But it was a genuine adventure nonetheless. Hubbard returned to college that fall with a new self-coined nickname: L. Ron "Flash" Hubbard, "daredevil speed pilot and parachute artist."

The following summer, Hubbard chartered an aged four-mast schooner, intending to lead an expedition around the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure. He promoted the trip as a research and motion-picture voyage—he dubbed it the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Placing an ad in local college newspapers for "adventurous young men with wanderlust,"
he managed to recruit some fifty other students to go with him, at the cost of $250 per person. The trip was a bust: not only did the expedition fail to explore or film a single pirate haunt, but, plagued first by bad weather and then by financial difficulties, the men made it only as far as Martinique before the captain, who would later call the voyage "the worst trip I ever made,"
decided to turn back. Hubbard, however, maintained that the trip had been a great success, even telling his college newspaper that the
New York Times
had agreed to buy some of the group's photographs.
^*

The ability to spin a setback as a triumph was a quality that would define Hubbard throughout his life. He was an immensely charming young man whose stories, while sometimes dubious, were often, by virtue of his own salesmanship, utterly convincing. Garrulous, with self-deprecating humor and a ready wit, he attracted people like a magnet and made them believe in his dreams. What's more, he seemed to believe in them himself. A naval commander named Joseph Cheesman "Snake" Thompson had imparted to the youthful Hubbard
a crucial bit of wisdom: "If it's not true for you, it's not true." Hubbard took that as a motto. "If there is anyone in the world calculated to believe what he wants to believe," he later said, "it is I."

By 1938, L. Ron Hubbard was twenty-seven years old, a tall, strapping young man with a head of thick, fiery red hair and one of those unforgettable faces: pale, long-nosed, a bit fleshy around the lips, and frequently flushed—all of which, as one acquaintance noted, gave him "the look of a reincarnated Pan who'd been a bit too long on the ambrosia."
But he also had tremendous self-confidence, which had served him well through the hardest years of the Great Depression. "I seem to have a sort of personal awareness which only begins to come alive when I begin to believe in a destiny,"
he wrote to his wife, Polly, a flying enthusiast he'd met on a Maryland airfield in 1932 and married the following year.

Hubbard had dropped out of college in 1932, having spent two unimpressive years there. With neither a job nor a college degree, he tried his hand at freelance journalism but soon gave it up for mass-market fiction, action-packed stories that constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 1930s—a precursor, in many ways, to TV. Published in cheap, dime-store magazines known as "pulps," the narratives generally featured hearty, adventurous men who'd fly spy missions over occupied Germany, engage in battle on the high seas, or romance weak-kneed women held captive in enemy forts—a perfect format, in other words, for Hubbard to express his own lusty sensibilities.

Within a year of embarking on this career, he'd found success, largely due to his journeyman's approach. Tremendously prolific, he wrote westerns, detective stories, adventure tales, and mysteries, churning out thousands of words every day and sending his stories, one after another, to New York City publishers. This entrepreneurial spirit seemed at odds with Hubbard's more fanciful, decidedly impractical side. But Hubbard was an interesting paradox: a man who not only dreamed improbably large, but also recognized the bottom line. "My writing is not a game," he wrote in an essay entitled "The Manuscript Factory" in 1936. "It is a business, a hardheaded enterprise which fails only when I fail."

There were roughly three hundred pulp fiction writers in New York during the 1930s, and most, if not all of them, knew of L. Ron Hubbard. He'd emerged on the scene in 1934 and joined the American Fiction Guild, which counted numerous pulp fiction writers as members. Every week, a number of guild members would meet for lunch at a midtown cafeteria, where Hubbard, a night owl who wrote in frenzied bursts and thought nothing of interrupting a colleague's sleep to discuss a story, or some other revelation, soon developed a reputation as a champion raconteur. In his memoir
The Pulp Jungle,
Frank Gruber, a writer of western and detective stories, recalled one New York get-together during which Hubbard, then twenty-three, regaled a group of writers with tales of his adventure-filled life. Fascinated, Gruber took notes. "He had been in the United States Marines for seven years, he had been an explorer on the upper Amazon for four years, he'd been a white hunter in Africa for three years ... After listening for a couple of hours, I said, 'Ron, you're eighty-four years old, aren't you?'"

It was a joke, but Hubbard, as Gruber recalled, "blew his stack." Most pulp fiction writers told tall tales—virtually everyone in the New York pulp world had a story, usually wholly made-up—but Hubbard regarded his own as gospel truth. His tall tales were part of his image, a self-created mythology that made him just as much a product of his imagination as his stories were. This seemed to suit his editors just fine. Beleaguered by the Depression, Americans were looking for heroes, and the editors of magazines like
Thrilling Wonder Stories
or
Adventure
were all too happy to publish the work of "one of aviation's most distinguished hell raisers," as Hubbard was described in one magazine; it went on to state that Hubbard, at various times in his life, had been a "Top Sergeant in the Marines, radio crooner, newspaper reporter, gold miner in the West Indies, and movie director–explorer."

But Hubbard's efforts did not transfer into monetary success: the average pulp fiction writer earned just a penny per word, and even the most prolific among them often found it hard to make a living. Hoping to break into the far more lucrative business of screenwriting, Hubbard moved to Hollywood in 1935 but produced just one script, an adaptation of his story "The Secret of Treasure Island," which was purchased as a Saturday morning serial by Columbia Pictures. In 1936, Hubbard moved with Polly and their two young children, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., known as "Nibs," and Katherine, to South Colby, Washington, near Hubbard's parents. There, Hubbard set out to work on a novel.

He also studied the world of popular advertising and at one point in the 1930s wrote a long letter to the head of Kellogg's Foods, proposing his ideas for new, more artistic packaging for breakfast cereal. He suggested that the lyrics to popular ballads, accompanied by watercolor pictures, be printed on cereal boxes; even short illustrated stories might be published on them. These innovations could, he believed, have a profound effect, making a functional box not only decorative but also a symbol of positive cultural values. "Corn flakes could, in no better way, become synonymous for bravery and gallantry,"
Hubbard wrote. Kellogg's didn't respond—though in later years some of these ideas would, in fact, find their way onto cereal boxes.

Hubbard remained undeterred. "I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form," he told Polly. "That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned."