Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(20)

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.”

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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:

I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence. My last physician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psychoanalyst.… I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected.… I cannot, myself, afford such treatment.

Would you please help me?



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.