Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(9)
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, a striking, happy child with gray eyes and wispy carrot-colored hair. His father, Harry Ross “Hub” Hubbard, was in the Navy when he met Ledora May Waterbury, who was studying to be a teacher in Omaha. They married in 1909. By the time their only child came along two years later, Hub was out of the service and working in the advertising department of the local Omaha newspaper. May returned to her hometown of Tilden for the birth.
When Ron was two, the family moved to Helena, Montana, a gold town that was famous all over the West for its millionaires and its prostitutes. It was also the capital of the frontier state. Hub managed the Family Theater, which, despite its name, shared a building downtown with two bordellos. Even as a young child, Ron loved to watch the vaudeville acts that passed through, but the enterprise shut its doors when a larger theater opened nearby.
Ron’s maternal grandparents lived nearby. Lafayette Waterbury was a veterinarian and a well-regarded horseman who doted on his redheaded grandson. “I was riding broncs at 3? years,” Hubbard later boasted. He supposedly began reading at the same precocious age, and according to the church he was “soon devouring shelves of classics, including much of Western philosophy, the pillars of English literature, and, of note, the essays of Sigmund Freud.”
When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Hubbard’s father decided to re-enlist in the Navy. Ledora got a job with the State of Montana, and she and six-year-old Ron moved in with her parents, who had relocated to Helena. When the war ended, Hub decided to make a career in the Navy, and the Hubbard family was launched into the itinerant military life.
Hubbard’s family was Methodist. He once remarked, “Many members of my family that I was raised with were devout Christians, and my grandfather was a devout atheist.” Ron took his own eccentric path. Throughout his youth, he was fascinated by shamans and magicians. As a boy in Montana, he says, he was made a blood brother to the Blackfoot Indians by an elderly medicine man named Old Tom Madfeathers. Hubbard claims that Old Tom would put on displays of magic by leaping fifteen feet high from a seated position and perching on the top of his teepee. Hubbard observes, “I learned long ago that man has his standards for credulity, and when reality clashes with these, he feels challenged.”
A signal moment in Hubbard’s narrative is the seven-thousand-mile voyage he took in 1923 from Seattle through the Panama Canal to Washington, DC, where his father was being posted. One of his fellow passengers was Commander Joseph C. “Snake” Thompson of the US Navy Medical Corps. A neurosurgeon, a naturalist, and a former spy, Thompson made a vivid impression on the boy. “He was a very careless man,” Hubbard later recalled. “He used to go to sleep reading a book and when he woke up, why, he got up and never bothered to press and change his uniform, you know. And he was usually in very bad odor with the Navy Department.… But he was a personal friend of Sigmund Freud’s.… When he saw me—a defenseless character—and there was nothing to do on a big transport on a very long cruise, he started to work me over.”
No doubt Thompson entertained the young Hubbard with tales of his adventures as a spy in the Far East. Raised in Japan by his father, a missionary, Thompson spoke fluent Japanese. He had spent much of his early military career roaming through Asia posing as a herpetologist looking for rare snakes while covertly gathering intelligence and charting possible routes of invasion.
“What impressed me,” Hubbard later remarked, “he had a cat by the name of Psycho. This cat had a crooked tail, which is enough to impress any young man. And the cat would do tricks. And the first thing he did was teach me how to train cats. But it takes so long, and it requires such tremendous patience, that to this day I have never trained a cat. You have to wait, evidently, for the cat to do something, then you applaud it. But waiting for a cat to do something whose name is Psycho …”
One of Thompson’s maxims was “If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.” He told young Hubbard that the statement had come from Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha. It made an impression on Hubbard. “If there’s anybody in the world that’s calculated to believe what he wants to believe and to reject what he doesn’t want to believe, it is I.”
Thompson had just returned from Vienna, where he had been sent by the Navy to study under Freud. “I was just a kid and Commander Thompson didn’t have any boy of his own and he and I just got along fine,” Hubbard recalls in one of his lectures. “Why he took it into his head to start beating Freud into my head, I don’t know, but he did. And I wanted very much to follow out this work—wanted very much to. I didn’t get a chance. My father … said, ‘Son, you’re going to be an engineer.’ ”
THOMPSON WAS ABOUT to publish a review of psychoanalytic literature in the United States Naval Medical Bulletin; indeed, he may have been working on it as he traveled to Washington, and no doubt he drew upon the thinking reflected in his article when he tutored Hubbard in the basics of Freudian theory. “Man has two fundamental instincts—one for self-preservation and the other for race propagation,” Thompson writes in his review. “The most important emotion of the self-preservation urge is hunger. The sole emotion of the race-propagation urge is libido.” Psychoanalysis, Thompson explains, is the “technic” of discovering unconscious motivations that harm the health or happiness of the individual. Once the patient understands the motives behind his neurotic behavior, his symptoms automatically disappear. “This uncovering of the hidden motive does not consist in the mere explaining to the patient the mechanism of his plight. The understanding alone comes from the analytic technic of free association and subsequent rational synthesis.” Many of these thoughts are deeply embedded in the principles of Dianetics, the foundation of Hubbard’s philosophy of human nature, which predated the establishment of Scientology.