Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(17)
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.)
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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.”