Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(46)
Soon after her book came out, Cooper received a visit from Ron and Sara Hubbard’s daughter, Alexis, who was then studying at Smith College. Cooper had demanded that Alexis bring substantial identification to prove who she was, but when she opened the door, she drew a breath. It was as if Hubbard had been reincarnated as a freckled, twenty-two-year-old woman. Alexis asked Cooper whether or not she was legitimate. In her social circle, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma. Cooper was able to show her Ron and Sara’s marriage certificate.
Alexis had been to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays to visit her mother. When she returned to college, she learned that there was a man who had been waiting to see her for four days. He identified himself as an FBI agent and said he had several pages of a letter he was required to read aloud to her. The letter said that Alexis was illegitimate. It was clearly written by Hubbard. “Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948,” the letter stated. He said he had to fire Sara because she was a “street-walker” and a Nazi spy. “In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie,” the letter continues. “She turned up destitute and pregnant.” Out of the goodness of his heart, Hubbard said, he had taken Sara in, to see her “through her trouble.” Weirdly, the letter was signed, “Your good friend, J. Edgar Hoover.”
After The Scandal of Scientology, Cooper’s life turned into a nightmare. She was followed; her phone was tapped; she was sued nineteen times. Her name and telephone number were written on the stalls in public men’s rooms. One day, when Cooper was out of town, her cousin, who was staying in her New York apartment, opened the door for a delivery from a florist. The deliveryman took a gun from the bouquet, put it to her temple, and pulled the trigger. When the gun didn’t fire, he attempted to strangle her. Cooper’s cousin screamed and the assailant fled. Cooper then moved to an apartment building with a doorman, but soon after that her three hundred neighbors received letters saying that she was a prostitute with venereal disease who molested children. A woman impersonating Cooper voiced threats against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford at a Laundromat, while a Scientologist who happened to be present notified the FBI. Two members from the Guardian’s office broke into Cooper’s psychiatrist’s office and stole her files, then sent copies to her adoptive parents. Cooper was charged with mailing bomb threats to the Church of Scientology. In the courtroom, the prosecutor produced a threatening letter with her fingerprint on it, and Cooper fainted. (Later, she remembered signing a petition, which may have had a blank page underneath it.) In May 1973, Cooper was indicted by the US Attorney’s office for mailing the threats and then lying about it before the grand jury.
IF THE RUMORS about Hubbard were true—that he had created a religion only in order to get rich—he had long since accomplished that goal. One of his disaffected lieutenants later claimed that Hubbard had admitted to “an insatiable lust for power and money.” He hectored his adherents on this subject. “MAKE MONEY,” he demanded in a 1972 policy letter. “MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHERS PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MONEY.” In order to siphon money into Hubbard’s personal accounts, a number of front organizations were established, including the Religious Research Foundation, which was incorporated in Liberia. In the mid-seventies that single foundation had an account in Switzerland containing more than $300 million. At one point, panicked that Switzerland was going to make a change in its tax laws, Hubbard ordered his medical officer, Kima Douglas, to move those funds from Switzerland to Lichtenstein. She described stacks of cash sitting in the bank vault, mostly hundred-dollar bills, four feet high and three to four feet wide, one pile in Hubbard’s name, the other in the church’s. “Church’s was bigger but his was big too,” she told Hubbard’s biographer Russell Miller. L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., remembered shoeboxes full of money in his father’s closet. He later testified that Hubbard habitually kept “great chunks of cash” within easy reach, “so that if there was any problem he could just take off right out the window.”
“Making money, I think, to Hubbard was paramount,” Hana Eltringham later speculated. “He wasn’t that interested in it for himself. He did have perks, he did have his cars, his motorbikes, his books, his good food, and things like that, and eventually he had his villas and he had his estates and so on, but the money that he wanted predominantly was for power.”
For all his wealth, Hubbard spent much of his time in his cabin alone, auditing himself on the E-Meter and developing his spiritual technology. He may have been grandiose and delusional, but the endless stream of policy letters and training routines that poured from his typewriter hour after hour, day after day, attests to his obsession with the notion of creating a step-by-step pathway to universal salvation. If it was all a con, why would he bother?
Hubbard and Mary Sue slept in separate staterooms. In the opinion of members of their household staff and others, by the time they boarded ship, Hubbard had lost interest in Mary Sue sexually. Yvonne Gillham had managed to get herself posted on another ship, out of range of Hubbard’s longing and Mary Sue’s wrath. For the most part, the Commodore left his female crew members alone. One exception was a tall, slender woman from Oregon. She approached Hana Eltringham with a big smile on her face and confessed that she was having an affair with Hubbard. Soon after that, Hubbard busted the woman down to deckhand and assigned Eltringham to audit her. The woman would weep through the session. Eltringham would dutifully pass along the auditing files to Hubbard for review. “I could hear him chortling,” she recalled.