Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(10)
In 1927, Hubbard’s father was posted to Guam, and Ledora went along, abandoning Ron to the care of her parents. For a man as garrulous as L. Ron Hubbard turned out to be, reflections on his parents are rare, almost to the point of writing them out of his biography. His story of himself reads like that of an orphan who has invented his own way in the world. One of his lovers later said that he told her that his mother was a whore and a lesbian, and that he had found her in bed with another woman. His mistress also admitted, “I never knew what to believe.”
Hubbard made two voyages to visit his parents in Guam. One trip included a detour to China, where he supposedly began his study of Eastern religions after encountering magicians and holy men. According to the church’s narrative, “He braved typhoons aboard a working schooner to finally land on the China coast.… He then made his way inland to finally venture deep into forbidden Buddhist lamaseries.” He watched monks meditating “for weeks on end.” Everywhere he went, the narrative goes, the teenage Hubbard was preoccupied with a central question: “ ‘Why?’ Why so much human suffering and misery? Why was man, with all his ancient wisdom and knowledge accumulated in learned texts and temples, unable to solve such basic problems as war, insanity and unhappiness?”
In fact, Hubbard’s contemporary journals don’t really engage such philosophical points. His trip to China, which was organized by the YMCA, lasted only ten days. His parents accompanied him, although they are not mentioned in his journals. He did encounter monks, whom he described as croaking like bullfrogs. The journals reflect the mind of a budding young imperialist, who summons an unearned authority over an exotic and unfamiliar culture. “The very nature of the Chinaman holds him back,” Hubbard observes on the ship back to Guam. “The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.”
The journals provide a portrait of an adolescent writer trying on his future craft by cataloguing plot ideas, such as, “A young American in India with an organized army for rent to the various rajahs. Usual plot complications.” Another idea: “Love story. Goes to France. Meets swell broad in Marseilles.” He is trying uncertainly to find his voice:
Rex Fraser mounted the knoll and setting his hat more securely against the wind squinted at the huddle of unpainted shacks below him.
“So this,” he said to his horse, “is Montana City.”
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Hubbard entered the School of Engineering at George Washington University in the fall of 1930. He was a poor student—failing German and calculus—but he excelled in extracurricular activities. He began writing for the school newspaper. A new literary magazine at GWU provided a venue for his first published works of fiction. He became director of the gliding club, a thrilling new pastime that was just catching on (Hubbard’s gliding license was #385). The actual study of engineering was a secondary pursuit, as his failing grades reflected.
In September 1931, Hubbard and his friend Philip “Flip” Browning took a few weeks off to barnstorm through the Midwest in an Arrow Sport biplane. “We carefully wrapped our ‘baggage,’ threw the fire extinguisher out to save half a horsepower, patched a hole in the upper wing, and started off to skim over four or five states with the wind as our only compass,” Hubbard writes. By now, he had taken to calling himself “Flash.”
Hubbard’s account of this adventure, “Tailwind Willies,” was his first commercially published story, appearing in The Sportsman Pilot in January 1932. It was the launch of an unprecedented career. (He would go on to publish more books than any other author, according to the 2006 Guinness World Records, with 1,084 titles.)
In the spring of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Hubbard undertook a venture that displayed many of the hallmarks of his future exploits. He posted a notice on several university campuses: “Restless young men with wanderlust wanted for the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Cost to applicant $250 payable at the dock in Baltimore before sailing. Must be healthy, dependable, resourceful, imaginative, and adventurous. No tea-hounds or tourist material need apply.” The goals of the expedition were grand and various—primarily, to make newsreels for Fox Movietone and Pathé News, while exploring the pirate haunts of the Caribbean and voodoo rites in Haiti. There were also vague plans to “collect whatever one collects for exhibits in museums.”
“It’s difficult at any age to recognize a messiah in the making,” wrote one of the young men, James S. Free, a journalist who signed on to the expedition. He was twenty-three years old, two years older than Hubbard. They were going to be partners in the adventure, along with Hubbard’s old flying buddy, Phil Browning. “I cannot claim prescient awareness that my soon-to-be business partner possessed the ego and talents that would later develop his own private religion,” Free wrote in a notebook he titled “Preview of a Messiah.”
Hubbard was living with his parents in Washington, DC, when Free arrived. “Ron introduced me to his mother, whose long light brown hair seemed dark beside the reddish glow of her son’s hair and face,” Free wrote, in one of the few records of the actual relationship between Hubbard and his mother. “I recall little else about her except that like her husband, Navy lieutenant Henry Ross Hubbard, she plainly adored young Ron and considered him a budding genius.”
Hubbard filled Free in on new developments. Phil Browning, the other partner, had dropped out at the last minute, but he had managed to get the loan of some laboratory equipment from the University of Michigan; meantime, Hubbard was negotiating with a professional cameraman for the anticipated films of the voodoo rites “and that sort of salable material.” Thanks to Free’s efforts to sign up more than twenty new members of the expedition, Hubbard said, “We have enough cash to go ahead.”