Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(12)

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?

Suppose all the wisdom of the world were reduced to just one line—suppose that one line were to be written today and given to you. With it you could understand the basis of all life and endeavor.… There is one line, conjured up out of a morass of facts and made available as an integrated unit to explain such things. This line is the philosophy of philosophy, thereby carrying the entire subject back into the simple and humble truth.

All life is directed by one command and one command only—SURVIVE.


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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.”