Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(37)

Slender and stately, Hana was one of the first thirty-five Sea Org recruits. The mission of the Sea Org, according to the contract she signed, is “to get ETHICS IN on this PLANET AND THE UNIVERSE.” She agreed to “subscribe to the discipline, mores and conditions of this group.… THEREFORE, I CONTRACT MYSELF TO THE SEA ORGANIZATION FOR THE NEXT BILLION YEARS.”4

Hana married another Sea Org member, an American named Guy Eltringham, but they were separated when Hubbard ordered her to Las Palmas, where he was refitting an exhausted fishing trawler called the Avon River. The decks and the hold were coated with decades of fish oil that had to be scraped away. During the two months the Avon River was in dry dock, Hubbard would often linger for dinner with his Sea Org crew, and afterward he would sit on the deck and regale them with stories. Hubbard’s depression had lifted and he seemed completely in control—relaxed and confident, even jovial. The crew were mainly drinking Spanish wines, but Hubbard favored rum and Coke—an eighth of a glass of Coke and seven-eighths rum—one after another through the evening. The heavens seemed very close in the dark harbor. Hubbard would point to the sky and say, “That is where the Fifth Invaders came from. They’re the bad guys, they’re the ones who put us here.” He said he could actually spot their spaceships crossing in front of the stars, and he would salute them as they passed overhead, just to let them know that they had been seen.

During a session with her auditor, Hana revealed the story of Madame Blavatsky’s prophecy of the red-haired man. Soon afterward, Hubbard came up on deck and gave her an intense look. From that point on, she became his favorite. He appointed her the first female Sea Org lieutenant. That day, she had a photograph made of herself in her Sea Org uniform—white shirt, dark tie and jacket, with a lanyard over one shoulder. She is young and elegant, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. After that, she rose through the Sea Org ranks with astonishing speed, often wondering if the revelation about the red-haired man was responsible for her rapid promotions.

Hubbard would drive over from his villa in Las Palmas to inspect the work on the Avon River. The lower holds of the ship were converted into offices and berthing spaces; new equipment—including radar and a gyrocompass—were installed, the screw replaced, and the hydraulic system completely overhauled. The inexperienced Sea Org members did most of the work, although Spanish laborers did the welding and sandblasting. Whenever Hubbard spotted something wrong, he would be instantly transformed from the jovial and avuncular figure the crew adored into a raging, implacable tyrant. Hana, who was serving as master-at-arms, would dread seeing the “Commodore”—as Hubbard titled himself—arrive, since she felt responsible if anything went wrong. One day, when the Spanish workmen were painting a rust coat on the hull of the ship, she spotted Hubbard walking across the beach with his chief officer and his first mate, smoking and chatting happily. Then he suddenly stopped. His eyes went into slits and he began bellowing, “The rollers! The rollers!” Puzzled, Hana leaned over the side of the ship, then saw what had caught Hubbard’s attention: tiny threads poking through the paint, which had been left by the cheap rollers that the workmen were using. “As those threads decomposed, they would leave little apertures for seawater to leak behind the rust coating,” she realized. “It destroyed the integrity of the entire rust coating, and that’s what Hubbard was screaming about as he lumbered toward the ship. And what amazed me was that he saw it at forty to sixty feet away from the ship. Later on, I walked that distance from the ship to see if I could see those little hairs coming out of the rust coat. There was no way I could see them. That added to my feeling of wonder and mystique about Hubbard.”

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IN TRUTH, Hubbard had very poor eyesight. Before the war, both the Naval Academy and the Naval Reserve had rejected him because of his vision, and all during the war he wore glasses. In 1951, when he was being evaluated for a medical disability, his vision tested at 20/200 for each eye, correctable to 20/20 with glasses, much the same as it had been before the war. The examiner noted, “Eyes tire easily, has worn all types of glasses but claims he sees just as well without as with glasses.” Was that even possible? Eyesight does change over the years, but Hubbard’s eyes were astigmatic—meaning they were more football-shaped than round—and not likely to have improved, certainly not dramatically. And yet many of Hubbard’s associates testify to his keen eyesight. Without glasses, Hubbard would have been legally blind; perhaps that’s what he was referring to when he said he had cured himself of blindness after the war. But, clearly his eye examination showed different results.

Hubbard had written in Dianetics that the eyesight of a Clear gradually improves to optimum perception. And yet, he admitted elsewhere that his vision was so bad in the postwar years that he could scarcely see his typewriter to write. He wore glasses and early versions of contact lenses. Through the use of Dianetic processing, he says, his eyes began to change. Many noticed that Hubbard had a habit of squinting, which has the effect of pressing astigmatic eyeballs into a rounder shape, which might momentarily improve his vision. He theorized that “astigmatism, a distortion of image, is only an anxiety to alter the image.” One day, for instance, he was reading an American Medical Association report and couldn’t make it out at all. He thought he might have to resort to using a magnifying glass. Then he realized that the reason he couldn’t read it was that he wasn’t willing to confront what it said. “I threw it aside, picked up a novel and the print was perfect.”