by Tony Ortega
Rev. Kinsolving pointed out that two years earlier, he had written about Scientology for the first time, and quoted Hubbard describing his invention, Dianetics, as “a milestone for man, comparable to his discovery of fire, and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.” Scientologists then threatened to sue Kinsolving, demanding a retraction. But the reverend owned a copy of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and he pointed out that the statement is practically the first one Hubbard makes in it.
Paulette was thrilled with Kinsolving’s story, and sent out copies of it to other prominent writers, hoping to get even more support. On April 5, 1972, she heard back from one of L. Ron Hubbard’s old colleagues, the science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp. “I saw the piece in last Saturday’s paper about your countersuit. That’s socking it to ‘em,” he wrote.
He pointed to a statement James Meisler, the Scientology reverend, had made, expressing surprise that Paulette was suing the church after, he assumed, she had “sort of faded away.” Meisler’s statement, de Camp wrote, “seems to me a virtual admission that the [church’s] suit was meant to harass and that the Scientologists had been engaged in the offense of barratry. You might ask Mr. Rheingold whether barratry is a criminal offense in New York State.”
Ten days before she sued the Church of Scientology, Paulette was sent a letter that helps explain why L. Ron Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue considered her such a threat. The letter was from Hubbard’s second wife – the wife he had tried to erase from existence.
Hubbard met Sara Elizabeth Northrup in 1945, when he’d been demobilized from the Navy following the war. His wanderings in California had taken him to the large, notorious Pasadena house of rocket scientist Jack Parsons, an amateur occultist who only rented rooms to other eccentrics. Northrup was Parsons’s girlfriend, but soon after Hubbard moved in and joined Parsons in his occult activities, he stole Northrup away. Parsons didn’t seem too put out by it. By that time, Hubbard had separated from his first wife, Margaret “Polly” Grubb, but he was still legally married to her when he proposed to Northrup. They were married in Maryland in 1946.
Northrup reportedly wrote some of Hubbard’s published stories, perhaps helping to explain his prodigious output, and she was with him when, in 1950, he published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the popular book that sparked a brief craze. (Their daughter Alexis arrived just a few weeks before the book did.) By 1951, however, the craze had subsided, Hubbard was broke, and his marriage was a shambles. Things got so bad, at one point Hubbard absconded with Alexis to Cuba, while Sara went to the press with damning allegations about the state of her husband’s mind. She also accused him of torture.
A few months later, Sara got custody of her daughter when she signed a retraction of her previous statements about Hubbard, and the marriage was legally ended. But then Hubbard began a long campaign to erase any mention of her and to pretend that he’d never married her and even that Alexis wasn’t his daughter.
In 1968, Hubbard gave an interview to the UK television program, Granada. By then, he’d had four children with his third wife, Mary Sue Whipp. The interview included this exchange:
Hubbard: How many times have I been married? I’ve been married twice. And I’m very happily married just now. I have a lovely wife, and I have four children. My first wife is dead.
Interviewer: What happened to your second wife?
Hubbard: I never had a second wife.
It was a nonsensical answer that made obvious how badly Hubbard wanted to erase from his life his bigamous marriage to Sara Northrup, and his fathering of her child, Alexis.
By the time Paulette’s book came out in the spring of 1971, Alexis Hollister was in college. (She had taken the last name of the man Sara had married after Hubbard, Miles Hollister.) While she was researching the book, Paulette had contacted Sara Hollister in Hawaii. They had exchanged some letters. After the book came out, Alexis also reached out to Paulette. She said she wanted to visit Paulette in New York.
Paulette was wary, suspecting that it might be a hoax. But she gave Alexis directions for how to find her at 16 E. 80th Street, and the young woman came down from Smith College in Massachusetts. As Paulette waited for her to show up, she thought about all the forms of identification she was going to ask for. This woman was going to have to do a lot to convince Paulette that she really was the daughter of L. Ron Hubbard.
And then there was a knock at the door. Paulette opened it, and all of her doubts melted away. It was L. Ron Hubbard’s daughter all right. There was no mistaking it. Alexis was 22, she had the characteristic red hair, and she even had some of his facial features. Paulette was convinced. Alexis explained her reason for wanting to see Paulette, and it made her wince. Alexis wanted to know how Paulette had been convinced that her father had committed bigamy. Because if it were true, Alexis said, it made her a bastard.
Paulette’s heart sank. In the early 1970s, the notion of “illegitimacy” was still a serious social stigma. Paulette didn’t know what to say.
“Don’t worry. I’d rather know the truth. I can take it,” Alexis told her.
Paulette showed her the documents which proved that Hubbard had still been married to his first wife, Polly Grubb, when he married Sara Northrup in 1946. Even though the divorce with Polly was final by the next year, 1947, and Alexis wasn’t born until 1950, the fact that her mother’s marriage had been bigamous when it started was enough to convince Alexis that her birth wasn’t legitimate. She thanked Paulette.
Then, on March 20, Sara sent Paulette a lengthy letter from Maui. She said that in the fall – in the months after Paulette’s book came out – a couple of men had come to visit her. “They were very pale – wore cheap black suits, white shirts, dark ties,” Sara wrote. They claimed to be “agents,” but wouldn’t tell her what agency they worked for. They asked her a lot of questions, and then warned her that reporters – or people posing as reporters – would be coming around to ask about Hubbard. They told her not to say anything. When Sara said she wouldn’t answer any of their questions unless they properly identified themselves, the men left, saying they were going to check with “headquarters.” They never returned.
Sara wrote that Alexis had also been approached by Hubbard’s agents, and they had delivered her a note at college that said Sara had been a prostitute, that she’d worked during the war as a Nazi spy, and that Alexis was an illegitimate child. The men who read it to her told her the note was written by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
But Alexis didn’t buy it. She knew they weren’t FBI agents. She understood who had written the note. “She was both angry and shocked that Ron could do such a thing,” Sara wrote to Paulette.
In June 1951, Sara had signed a retraction of her earlier claims about Hubbard in order to get custody of Alexis and to finalize the divorce. But her 1972 letter to Paulette showed that in fact, she hadn’t changed her mind at all. And if Sara went public with such thoughts, it could be the nightmare of 1951 all over again for Hubbard.
But he and Mary Sue, if they knew about Paulette’s interactions with Sara and Alexis, had even more reason to be alarmed as the summer of 1972 came on. Because it was then that Paulette began working directly with another member of the family.
4
Nibs
While she was finishing up the manuscript of her book in 1970, Paulette was approached by a man named Robert Kaufman, who had written a book of his own about his experiences inside Scientology. Kaufman was a musician living in New York, a pianist who had played in major Broadway productions and had some success in solo concerts. In 1966, Kaufman had been brought into Scientology by friends on the Upper West Side. Extremely skeptical at first, Kaufman had eventually become so dedicated to Scientology he stopped working and went to England to complete the “Saint Hill Special Briefing Course” so he could go “Clear.” As he went Clear and beyond with additional courses in Scotland, however, he became increasingly frustrated with what he considered
inconsistent and capricious instructions by counselors (some of whom were only teenagers). And the interruptions always ended up costing him more money. Finally fed up, Kaufman came back to New York, suffered a mental breakdown, and hospitalized himself. Then, to help get through his recovery, he’d written down his experiences.
By 1969 he had a completed manuscript, but he’d spent more than a year in a failing attempt to find a publisher. Then, about the time he got to know Paulette, his fortunes changed as he gained the interest of a man who saw in Kaufman’s inside account of Scientology the possible answer to his company’s decline.
Maurice Girodias was a remarkable publisher. At 15, he’d drawn the cover image for the original edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was published by his father Jack Kahane’s Paris company, Obelisk Press. After his father’s death in 1939, Girodias inherited Obelisk, nursed it through the war, and then founded his own imprint, Olympia Press. In its familiar green covers, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in 1955, and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in 1959 (about the time Burroughs was starting his own involvement in Scientology). By 1971, Girodias had left Paris and was working out of New York and London, and his company was in decline. To Girodias, Kaufman’s book looked like what he needed to turn things around. It promised to be explosive. Kaufman planned to reveal, for the first time, the secrets to Scientology’s upper-level teachings in a book written not by a journalist, but by someone who had been inside the organization.
Like Ray Buckingham, Kaufman told Paulette that he literally feared for his life, and he urged her to be cautious. Kaufman’s book, Inside Scientology: How I Joined Scientology and Became Superhuman came out in June 1972. And by the time it hit bookstores it was already being sued. The church had filed suit in March, naming 18 defendants, including Paulette, who was accused of convincing Kaufman to write his book in a conspiracy – even though she didn’t actually meet him until after he’d completed his manuscript. There was subsequently an attempt to serve her the lawsuit at her apartment at 2:30 in the morning. Just what she needed – a knock on the door in the middle of the night while living alone and already spending time and money on her other legal issues cutting into her ability to make a living.
But Inside Scientology’s publication had another surprising result: Girodias soon heard from an unlikely person who said he wanted to help promote the book: L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. Called “Nibs” by the family, he was one of two children Hubbard had by his first wife, Polly. Like his father, Nibs was fair skinned and red-haired. But unlike his father, Nibs was uncomfortable in front of a crowd and seemed to have inherited few of the traits that made his father a leader of men. During Scientology’s early years, Nibs had tried to be his father’s lieutenant. But he walked away from the church multiple times, struggled to raise his own family, and would come crawling back, looking for his father’s forgiveness. He was in and out of Hubbard’s good graces multiple times, but now, in 1972, he claimed to be finished with Scientology and his father. In fact, he was looking to cause trouble for the organization.
Kaufman told Paulette about Nibs wanting to get involved, and he asked her to help Nibs write a foreword for another edition of his book. Kaufman told her that Girodias was planning both a paperback and a German translation of Inside Scientology.
In the summer of 1972, Paulette had left her apartment in New York and was staying with her parents in Mamaroneck. So Nibs took the train each day from the city, and Stella Cooper, Paulette’s mother, picked him up at the station and brought him to the house so he and Paulette could hammer out the new foreword for Kaufman’s book.
Paulette was staying with her parents because she was recovering from surgery. She’d had benign uterine fibroid tumors removed, and although it was a routine procedure, it left her with serious pain and lingering effects. “I hurt, I hurt,” Paulette would mutter as the pain from her surgery kept recurring, and her mother did what she could to help alleviate it.
Paulette was unusually sensitive to what Ted and Stella Cooper thought of her. She knew that much of her own motivation for becoming a writer was simply to give her parents something to be proud of. And now, a year after her first book, the second was coming out. It was a short book, published by Arbor Press, with the title Growing Up Puerto Rican. Paulette had interviewed 19 Puerto Rican children growing up in New York. The unrelenting stories of poverty and discrimination prompted the Hartford Courant to call it a “sad book” that “should be read by whites.” Publisher’s Weekly compared it favorably to another work that had won the National Book Award. Another slim volume by Paulette, this one for young children, was coming out in a few months: Let’s Find Out About Halloween, was its title. Three books published and she was only 30. She knew her parents were impressed.
But she also struggled in her relationship with Ted and Stella. Maybe it wasn’t unusual for a young woman – and especially during the Sexual Revolution – to have deep-seated issues with her parents. Her differences with them had come on when she was a teenager, which was also not unusual. Being adopted also contributed – Paulette was tiny, and both of her parents were tall, and sometimes people asked about it. Ted had even spent a year before he was married as a semi-pro basketball player in a Michigan league of trade teams. His team was sponsored by a dentist, and Ted was paid $40 a week to cover his salary and expenses as he barnstormed around the state. But things did not always run smoothly, because on at least one occasion, he had to sit out a game when a town wouldn’t let a Jew play its local squad.
Paulette loved his stories about his time as “Shorty” Cooper, semi-pro ballplayer, his time as a margin clerk working the a frantic floor the day of the 1929 stock market crash, the time he met Harry Houdini, the time he saw a rollercoaster go off the rails and people were killed…she hung onto his every word.
Paulette’s differences with Stella were, on the one hand, the typical sort. Stella wanted her daughter to be a more observant Jew, to get married and give her grandkids. But Paulette sometimes pushed the boundaries with her mother. She would drive on Yom Kippur and go for Chinese food, for example, on a day when her mother was fasting and driving was forbidden.
While Paulette recuperated from her surgery in the summer of 1972, however, there was something of a truce in the Cooper household, especially now that they had such an illustrious guest. Nibs was glad to accept the hospitality of Ted and Stella Cooper. He told Paulette that he loved her mother’s cooking, and he had rarely lived so comfortably.
She enjoyed working with Nibs. He was clearly a tortured soul, the son of the Great Man who was trying to save humanity. They focused on getting down memories of his father for the short piece. A couple of times late that summer, when she felt well enough to go home, Nibs also visited Paulette in her Manhattan apartment on East 80th Street, where they worked on the document, sometimes taking turns on her typewriter. They talked about his memories of his father, and together they produced a 63-page manuscript titled “A Look Into Scientology, or 1/10 of 1 percent of Scientology.”
At the outset of the lengthy essay, Nibs wrote that he wasn’t out to “crucify” his father, but in the ensuing pages, L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology took a serious beating.
“The night before I was born on May 7, 1934, 8:05 am, the two of them had a vicious fight after a party, and although my mother was approximately five months pregnant, he beat her up. She went into premature labor and I was born,” Nibs wrote about Hubbard and his mother, Margaret “Polly” Grubb.
Polly and Hubbard had met in 1933 on a field while waiting to fly gliders. She was an aviator and five years his senior, but she was taken by the 22-year-old redhead with a strong singing voice and a flair for the dramatic. They were married on April 13. As her pregnancy with their first child developed, Hubbard’s father, Harry Hubbard, would ask Polly, “How is my Nibs?” The name stuck.
At the time he became a father, L. Ron Hubbard was struggling to make a living as a writer. “He wrote pulp adventure for men’s mag
azines on the level of the Arabian-Prince-who-saves-the-kingdom and later Dad often wrote that Scientology would save the world. He also wrote westerns, science fiction (he was best-known for this), screen plays, and confession magazine stories as if he were a woman. He was capable of writing in so many styles that he told me on two occasions he wrote every story in one magazine as if he were a different author. He wrote no outlines in advance, made no preparations, and he could write a novelette in one night with no rewrites. It helped that he typed 97 words a minute which was amazing since he only used 4 fingers.”
Hubbard and Polly had a second child, Katherine. But by the end of the war, they were living apart. Nibs wrote that in 1947, his father told him he was thinking of marrying for the second time, to Sara Northrup. Nibs later found out that his father had already married Sara in 1946, about a year before his divorce with Polly was final. (Hubbard’s third wife, Mary Sue Whipp, he met at a Dianetics Center in Wichita. They were married in 1952.)
Nibs wrote that his father actually lived a fascinating life and had several legitimate claims to fame – he had met a president (Calvin Coolidge), became an eagle scout at a very young age, and had set a glider record – but instead, his father made up a lot of untrue stories about himself to create a mythical background that didn’t exist. And that included myths about the work he was most famous for. Nibs wrote that his father claimed to have been working on what would become Dianetics and Scientology as early as 1938, but the first time Nibs heard anything about the new “mental science” from his father was in 1947.
In Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which was published in 1950, Hubbard claimed to have worked with hundreds of test subjects in what sounded like years of research. But he later admitted to his son that he’d thrown it together in about three months. As for those hundreds of cases, Nibs suspected that his father was really just describing his own neuroses. Hubbard, for example, claimed that abortion attempts were more common than people realized. In Dianetics, Hubbard made it sound as if every American woman made dozens of abortion attempts during a typical pregnancy. But Nibs wrote that it was his father who was obsessed with abortion, and related seeing his father sitting on his mother’s stomach at their Bremerton, Washington home in 1941, causing her to have an abortion. Later, his mother told him that Hubbard “had forced her to have two abortions during their marriage.” (Hubbard himself, in a letter he wrote to Veterans Affairs, claimed that Polly experienced “five spontaneous abortions.”)