Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(23)
Hubbard was casting around for a new direction in his life. He took up acting at the Geller Theater Workshop, paid for in part by the VA, but that didn’t satisfy him. There was a larger plan stirring in his imagination. “I was hiding behind the horrible secret. And that is I was trying to find out what the mind was all about,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even tell my friends; they didn’t understand. They said, ‘Here’s Hubbard, he’s leading a perfectly wonderful life. He gets to associate with movie actresses. He knows hypnotism and so has no trouble with editors. He has apartments and stuff.’ ”
IT WAS THE LARVAL STAGE of Hubbard’s astonishing transformation—from the depressed, rejected, impoverished, creatively exhausted figure he paints in the Affirmations, to his nearly overnight success as a thinker and founder of an international movement when his book Dianetics was finally published. He wrote his friend Robert Heinlein, “I will soon, I hope give you a book risen from the ashes of the old Excalibur which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages, and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs and plays the mouth organ with the left foot.” He writes a little about recovering from the war, then remarks, “The main difficulty these days is getting sane again. I find out that I am making progress. Of course there is always the danger that I will get too sane to write.” He is angling for a Guggenheim grant for his book on psychology. Meantime, he was so pressed financially that he begged Heinlein for a loan of fifty dollars. “Golly, I never was so many places in print with less to show for it,” Hubbard complained. “I couldn’t buy a stage costume for Gypsy Rose Lee.”
Hubbard was writing these letters from Savannah, Georgia, in the waning days of 1948 and the spring of 1949. He said he was volunteering in a psychiatric clinic at St. Joseph’s Medical Center, “getting case histories at the request of the American Psychiatric Assoc.” It is a shadowy period in his life, but it was in Savannah that he began to sketch out the principles that would form the basis of his understanding of the human mind. He claimed to be getting phenomenal results on nearly every malady he addressed. “One week ago I brought in my first asthma cure,” he writes to Heinlein. “I have an arthritis to finish tomorrow and so it goes.”
It’s unclear whether Hubbard himself was receiving treatment in Savannah. “My hip and stomach and side are well again,” he writes to Heinlein, adding that he is “straightening out the kinks that have held down production on the money machine.”
In his letters, Hubbard continually speculates about the book he hopes to finish soon. “It ain’t agin religion,” he boasts to Heinlein. “It just abolishes it.… It’s science, boy, science.” He makes a vague reference to the research he’s performing on children. “This hellbroth I cooked up works remarkably well on kids,” he remarks. “Took a scared little kid that was supposed to be stupid and was failing everything and worked on him about thirty-five hours just to make sure. That was last month. So now he turns up this afternoon with all A’s and all of a sudden reading Shakespeare.” He was also noting improvement in himself, both in his work and in his recovered sexual powers. “I am cruising on four hours sleep a night. But the most interesting thing is, I’m up to eight comes. In an evening, that is.”
Heinlein was eager for details. Hubbard responded by outlining what he would later call the Tone Scale. It describes the range of human emotional states, from one to four. At bottom, there is Apathy, then Anger. These lower tones were governed by the unconscious, which Hubbard says should be called the “reactive mind.” The third level, which was as yet untitled, is the normal state for most of humanity; and the fourth is a condition of happiness and industriousness. Hubbard’s experimental technique aimed at raising an individual out of the lower tones and into the superior state of the fourth tone. His method, as he described it to Heinlein, was to drain off the painful experiences and associations that an individual has accumulated in his lifetime. Once that’s done, “astonishing results take place.” Asthma, headaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps, astigmatism, and ulcers simply disappear. There is a huge boost in competence. The reactive mind is eliminated, and the rational mind takes over.
At the end of April 1949, Hubbard sent a note to Heinlein that he was moving to Washington, DC, for an indefinite stay. There was no word about Sara. Three weeks later, the thirty-eight-year-old Hubbard applied for a license in Washington to marry twenty-six-year-old Ann Jensen. The application was canceled the next day at the request of the bride. Perhaps she had learned that Hubbard was already married to his second wife and had previously committed bigamy. In any case, Ann Jensen’s name disappears from Hubbard’s life story.
He and Sara moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where John Campbell, Hubbard’s editor at Astounding Science-Fiction before the war, resided. Campbell visited Hubbard often and became one of his first and most important converts. “Dammit, the man’s got something—and something big,” he wrote excitedly to Heinlein.
Campbell underwent the treatment, which employed “deep hypnosis.” In that entranced state, Campbell was able to retrieve traumatic memories of his birth. “I was born with a cord wrapped around my neck, strangling me,” he recounted to Heinlein. The doctor who delivered him, whom Campbell now remembered had a German accent, had barked at Campbell’s mother, saying, “You must stop fighting—you are killing him. Relax!” Later, the doctor put some corrosive medication in the baby’s eyes, and said, “You’ll forget all about this in a little while.” Campbell characterized these instructions as “unshakeable posthypnotic commands of tremendous force,” which governed much of his subsequent behavior. “The neighbor bratlings could tease me unmercifully—and did—because I couldn’t fight,” he told Heinlein; his mother would often attempt to console him by telling him that he would forget the painful experiences of his childhood soon enough, with the result that many of the most important moments of his life were lost to him. “Ron’s technique consists of bringing these old memories into view, and then erasing the memory,” Campbell explained. He writes that although he now doesn’t remember his actual birth, he does remember retrieving it and relating it to Hubbard, who then erased the real memory, with its painful associations, leaving Campbell with the experience of knowing what happened to him without actually having the memory continue its sinister influence. Obviously, the line between a real memory and an implanted one, or a confabulation, was very difficult to draw.