Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(52)

But only a few days later, Las Vegas police were trying to identify a slight young man with blond hair and a reddish moustache who had been discovered comatose in a car parked on Sunset Road facing the end of the runway of McCarran Airport. He was naked. He was five feet one inch tall, and weighed just over a hundred pounds. There were no identifying marks on his body and no personal identification. The license plates had been removed. The engine of the white Pontiac was still running when he was discovered. The windows were rolled up, and a vacuum tube led from the exhaust through the passenger’s vent window. Two weeks later, on November 12, 1976, the young man died without regaining consciousness. Las Vegas police were finally able to connect the Pontiac with Quentin through a Florida smog sticker and the vehicle identification number.

An agent from the Guardian’s Office came into Hubbard’s office in La Quinta as he was having breakfast and handed him the report on Quentin’s death. “That little shit has done it to me again!” Hubbard cried. He threw the report at Kima Douglas and ordered her to read it. The report said Quentin had died of asphyxiation of carbon monoxide. It also noted that there was semen in his rectum. When Hubbard told Mary Sue that Quentin was dead, she screamed for ten minutes. For months, she was disconsolate, hiding behind dark glasses. Everyone knew that Quentin was her favorite.

A spokesman for the church said that Quentin had been on vacation. Meantime, Mary Sue arranged for three further autopsies to be performed. In the last one, the cause of death was said to be unknown. She put out the word that he had died of encephalitis. Hubbard himself was convinced that Quentin was murdered as a way of getting at him.




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1 Harriet Whitehead, an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in Scientology in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1969 and 1971, writes of the “fundamental kinship” between psychotherapy and religion. “The cosmological system that surrounds a renunciatory discipline cannot for long remain ‘secular,’ that is, finite and this-worldly, in its orientation,” she writes. “This is one of the reasons … secular therapeutic doctrines often develop a religious or mystical cast.” Although Freud was a nonreligious Jew, the techniques of analysis he developed may have had their roots in certain mystical practices rooted in the kabbalah, such as the interpretation of dreams and the use of free association to uncover hidden motivations. Jung subsequently steered psychoanalysis into deeply spiritual waters—a course, as Whitehead points out, that parallels the evolution of Dianetics into Scientology: “It would thus be facile to dismiss the promulgation of a quasi-empirical supernaturalism in the Dianetics movement as simply the product of amateur theorizing by a spinner of tales, when Hubbard’s predecessors who established the framework within which psychotherapy, amateur and otherwise, would subsequently develop, did hardly any better” (Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation, pp. 27–8).

2 A federal district court eventually allowed E-Meters to be used for “bona fide religious counseling,” but ordered that each device bear a warning that “the E-Meter is not medically or scientifically useful for the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease. It is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily functions of anyone” (Amended Order of US District Court for the District of Columbia, No.71–2064, Mar. 1, 1973).

3 The ban was repealed in 1973.

4 According to the church, “The first Sea Organization members formulated a one-billion-year pledge to symbolize their eternal commitment to the religion and it is still signed by all members today. It is a symbolic document which, similar to vows of dedication in other faiths and orders, serves to signify an individual’s eternal commitment to the goals, purposes and principles of the Scientology religion.”

5 The church explained, “As it became a matter of tradition among the crew members at that time having adopted the practice of overboarding, Mr. Hubbard set forth rules in October of 1968 to ensure it was conducted safely in attaining the spiritual benefit intended. To that end, given that it was an ecclesiastical penance, the procedure includes the Chaplain making the following statement as part of the observance: ‘We commit your sins and errors to the waves and trust you will arise a better thetan.’ ”

6 The church denies that Scientologists worked with General Oufkir’s men or used the E-Meter to provide security checking for the Moroccan government.

7 The church supplied me with a number of affidavits from former Sea Org members saying that they had not been forced to terminate their pregnancies.

8 The CIA at the time was taking note of Hubbard, mainly through newspaper clippings. “There is no indication that HUBBARD or members of his organization have been engaged in intelligence or security matters,” an agency dispatch notes. “Rather, HUBBARD appears to be a shrewd businessman who has parlayed his Scientology ‘religion’ into a multi-million dollar business by taking advantage of that portion of society prone to fall for such gimmicks” (“Scientology/L. Ron HUBBARD,” CIA dispatch, Mar. 18, 1971).





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The Faith Factory


Despite its reputation for carnality and narcissism, Los Angeles has always been a spawning ground for new religions. In 1906, a one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour set up a church in a livery stable on Azusa Street and began a revival that lasted for three years. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came to hear his message. Stigmatized as Holy Rollers and decried because of their interracial worship, Seymour’s followers gave birth to the Pentecostal movement, which quickly spread across the world, becoming an enduring force in modern Christianity. In 1912, a theosophist colony called Krotona took root just below the current Hollywood sign, where the hills were said to be “magnetically impregnated.” An organization called Mighty I AM Presence began in Los Angeles and expanded all across America, gaining about a million followers by 1938. The founders were Guy and Edna Ballard, who claimed to be able to communicate with “ascended masters.” Guy wrote a popular book titled Unveiled Mysteries, in which he related his travels through the stratosphere, visiting great cities of antiquity and unearthing buried loot—much as Hubbard attempted to do several decades later. Writers William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley passed through the city, all drawn by its reputation as a center for spiritual innovation.