One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Young John Cooke had become friendly with Porter on board the Franconia, and always felt that the song was somehow written for him. True or not (Porter himself told many variations of stories concerning the genesis of the tune, and none of them included a fifteen-year-old boy), the notion of the music of the South Pacific filtering into the collective consciousness of Western culture was something the future guru carried with him long after the cruise had returned to Hawaii. From that time on, Cooke was drawn to practices that seemed to provide a mystical bridge between worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the East and the West.

  In this he was perhaps the perfect target audience for the runaway supernatural fad of the day. While still a teenager, he started to use the Ouija board, which had begun as a parlor-game version of automatic writing (the nineteenth-century practice of recording on paper messages from a subconscious or a spiritual source) but soon became a controversial occult item promising a means of communicating with the dead. Having first appeared in Baltimore as a novelty in the 1890s, Ouija was lauded in the press early on as “a very popular means of entertainment in many intelligent families,” and like the best of entertainments, it was simplicity itself: Consisting of just an alphabet board and heart-shaped wooden planchette used to point at letters, its workings were somewhat mysterious, which only heightened the fun.

  “When the right conditions prevail,” a newspaper columnist wrote in 1892, “the board seems to grow electric, and questions are answered and advice and information given with head-swimming, brain-turning dispatch.”

  Despite this initial reputation as a harmless diversion, the “talking board” transformed through the following two decades into a device many took seriously as a portal to realms beyond the material. By 1920, with the desire to connect to the “spirit world” spurred on by the First World War’s unprecedented loss of life, the makers of the Ouija had created, as the New York Times said at the time, “a national industry which bids fair to rival that in chewing gum.” Alphabet boards and planchettes had become so popular on college campuses, for example, that one university faculty member declared that “the lure of Ouija is becoming a national menace.” Health professionals likewise reported that Ouija-related nervous conditions were on the rise.

  After a plateau in its sales through the lean years of the 1930s, the new World War apparently brought a boom in the desire to communicate with the dead. One New York City department store sold fifty thousand Ouija boards within a five-month period in 1944. Sales peaked again during the 1960s, just as the conflict in Vietnam was beginning to escalate. After acquiring the game from its inventor’s heirs in 1967, Parker Brothers sold 1.5 million units without spending a dime on marketing or promotion. For a board that offered the chance to connect with the spirit world, the uncertainty of wartime may have been advertisement enough.

  John Cooke took to the Ouija board not long after his return from the voyage on the Franconia, and discovered he had great skill with it. While the game’s conceit was that ghostly powers, rather than the mischievous natures of those playing, moved the planchette from letter to letter, inevitably some were more talented than others at creating messages. Likewise, some players were more likely to believe what those messages might say. Cooke was both skilled in the manipulation of the game and credulous of its results. When he asked it, as a young man, where he should go to begin his adult life, he followed the Ouija’s instructions to move to California to try his luck as an actor and dancer in Hollywood. When the Ouija gave him further career advice after he had left Hawaii, he followed its directions first to New York, where he appeared in a poorly reviewed production of King Lear as a bit player in a Shakespeare troupe (“the performance is loose and flabby,” one critic opined), and then back to California, where family connections and a job working in a hospital for paralyzed children kept him safe from the draft.

  His sister was at the time an ardent follower of the dashing Indian philosopher groomed since boyhood to be the leader of the Theosophy movement, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was then living in Ojai, California. Despite John’s growing esoteric interests, the teachings of his sister’s guru were not for him. “There’s no hocus pocus mysticism about [Krishnamurti],” Alice Cooke later explained. “He says we all have the same abilities and anything we believe about past lives or future lives or whatever is really symbolic of a way of saying who you are, and who cares if you were in Egypt once when you were Tutankhamen or whoever you want to be?” Such belittling of reincarnation and other subjects John was beginning to take seriously caused a rift in the family. “We always disagreed on that because I was much more the thinking type and he was much more the mystic,” Alice said.

  Parting ways with his sister for a time, Cooke soon found an Indian teacher more in keeping with his mystical inclinations. While traveling in Europe, he met Meher Baba, whose devotees believed him to be the “avatar of the age” and “God in human form.” When they met, Baba was planning a trip to America to “lay cables,” he said, for the worldwide spiritual network he hoped to build. He had toured the United States once before, in 1932, and during his short stay he had become the toast of high society and young Hollywood by visiting with stars including Douglas Fairbanks, Tallulah Bankhead, and Mary Pickford. In his address to a reception of admirers at Paramount Studios, he delivered some tough love to an industry built on image management and self regard: “The root of all our difficulties, individual and social, is self-interest,” he said. “But the elimination of self-interest, even granting a sincere desire on the part of the individual to accomplish it, is not so easy, and is never completely achieved except by the aid of the Perfect Master.” To demonstrate his availability for this role, Meher Baba expressed his desire to find a West Coast outpost to complement the five-hundred-acre East Coast retreat his followers had recently purchased for him in South Carolina.

  Naturally drawn to this charismatic teacher (not least of all because Meher Baba communicated, like a human Ouija, solely by pointing at letters on an alphabet board), Cooke helped secure 170 acres of mountain property two hours from downtown Los Angeles for the avatar’s devotees. His family fortune may have been acquired by moving Hawaii toward Christianity and taking land in return, but now Cooke wanted to put that same wealth to the opposite purpose. He would spend his missionary inheritance to further complicate the religious geography of the nation.

  A few years before Cooke involved himself in the purchase of the property now known as Meher Mount, he had become involved with another mystic—this time intimately so. Thanks again to the Ouija board’s guidance, he had impulsively married a woman several years his senior, Wilma Dorothy Millen Vermilyea. Known as Millen, she often spoke of being visited at night by a Tibetan guru eager to impart esoteric knowledge, and would later claim to have taken Polaroid pictures of an alien spacecraft flying over her home, and to be a practitioner of a means of interplanetary communication she called “galactic telepathy.” Given such claims, it is perhaps not surprising that she was also an aspiring science fiction writer, and that her literary interests were not unrelated to her husband’s future endeavors.

  When John met Millen, she had just begun to submit her writing to various twenty-five-cent pulp magazines. The publications she favored mostly featured short stories—ranging from juvenile space operas to the dark “social science fiction” pioneered by writers like Isaac Asimov through the 1940s—but occasionally the pulps published essays as well. No doubt keeping an eye on the competition, she happened to read a remarkable manifesto by a fellow science fiction writer by the name of Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” appeared in the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and provided the broad strokes for a pastime that soon came to compete with Ouija boards for John Cooke’s attention—as well as that of a significant portion of the national consciousness.

  Hubbard’s Astounding Science Fiction essay was the first published explanation of the practice now known as Scientology. Building on
the stir caused by the initial article, a book-length treatment of the subject, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, became an international publishing phenomenon later that same year. The reviews it received ranged from the derisive (“a set of fantastic theories without proof”) to the concerned (the book, it was often said, was “dangerous”), but with the public it hit a nerve. As the New York Times attempted to explain the months Dianetics spent on its best-seller list: “Suffering people will understandably run to any movement which promises infallible cure of all their psychosomatic and psychological ills.”

  While the particular ills that caused her to seek out the movement are now unknown, Millen Cooke not only ran but flew. When she read about Hubbard’s “modern science of the mind,” she left her husband in California to be close to one of the rising centers of the Dianetics practice in New York City. At this point in its development, Hubbard’s teachings amounted to a kind of do-it-yourself psychotherapy. The basic notion was that every human being’s development is scarred throughout life by “engrams,” traumas recorded on the unconscious “reactive mind” that can be removed through “auditing,” a process of intentional revisiting of the moment at which the pain was first experienced. After submitting successfully to the long process of auditing, Dianetics practitioners were said to be “clear” and could accomplish anything to which they set their newly unscarred and allegedly unmuddled minds.

  In the beginning, Dianetics was self-help in the truest sense. Anyone could buy the book, learn the fundamentals, and perform audits on friends and family. It was not a religion; in fact, it was generally opposed to religions as external forces counter to the concept of “self-determinism” central to the process. While religion might be a cause of repression, a “clear” “is an unrepressed person, operating on self-determinism.” Hubbard turned his idea of helping readers “rehabilitate” their natural ability to control their lives into an empire by offering progressively more intense auditing sessions for ever greater fees, as well as a certification system through which one could become one of his official auditors. In a spirit similar to Michael Bowen’s assertion that the Human Be-In was “designed to reverse the entire thought process of the human race,” Hubbard called the creation of Dianetics “a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch.”

  Though he was usually an easygoing fellow, content to let people come and go as the Ouija board directed, after Millen took an unannounced flight from California to New York to begin her Dianetics process, Cooke drove across the country in a rage-fueled burst, determined to bring his wife back home. When he arrived in New York and met the other practitioners of this strange new “technology,” however, he was no longer so angry. In fact, he found he fit right in. The Dianetics people were visibly impressed with what they considered to be his powers, which he demonstrated by means of his trusty Ouija. The practice of letting the alphabet board and the planchette speak while those around it remained silent turned out to be particularly well suited for discovering troublesome engrams wherever they might hide. In fact, the device soon adopted by Dianeticists to add the veneer of technology to the process, the e-meter, was in some ways a Ouija board reimagined for the computer age then being born.

  Particularly impressed with the newcomer was a young woman from Oregon, Mary Oser, who believed that Cooke might be able to cure her husband of what she considered his “money sickness.” Peter Max Oser was the grandson of the founder of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller. He had nearly endless resources and only a vague sense of how they might best be used. Mary proposed that John, who was obviously not burdened with caring too much about his own wealth, travel with them in order to cure her husband of the malady another of their friends later referred to as his “havingness”: the affliction of having it all.

  Leaving Millen after eight years of marriage, Cooke flew off with Mary and Peter to Switzerland and followed the direction of the Ouija from there. Peter became John’s eager pupil, and Mary became his muse. By the end of the threesome’s adventures first through Europe and then on various expeditions in Africa, Rockefeller’s grandson had not been relieved of the illness of inheritance, but he had been relieved of his wife.

  Around this time, the center of the Dianetics movement had shifted across the Atlantic to England, and so that was where John and Mary, now the new Mr. and Mrs. Cooke, settled. While in London, they were known to wear flowing African robes they had acquired throughout their travels, and passed the days often in the company of L. Ron Hubbard himself. During their meetings, they discussed John’s magical abilities and memories of past life experiences, and Hubbard’s “science of the mind” began to take on a cosmic dimension. Hubbard in the mid-1950s was in the process of transforming the vaguely spiritual technique of auditing into the central ritual of an actual religion. An often-quoted Hubbard statement on this period of transformation (“I’d like to start a religion,” several acquaintances recall him saying. “That’s where the money is”) may be apocryphal, but recasting Dianetics as the scripture of a new faith proved to make it even more lucrative than it had been as a “poor man’s psychotherapy.”

  Many of the original followers of Dianetics, which began to be known as Scientology with the establishment of several official churches in the United States, were uneasy with the transition. “The news was received with mixed emotions,” a 1954 newsletter popular among early practitioners declared. “Some were outspokenly antagonistic to the idea. Some who’d nursed the glories of self-determinism since Book One,” as Dianetics came to be called, “couldn’t subscribe to the new idea that the best way to win is to BECOME the enemy. Many from California feared that designating Scientology as a religion would classify it with that state’s 9,857,385,237 cults.”

  John and Mary were less concerned. They had witnessed the development of the movement’s religious dimension firsthand in London, and may have even played a part in the incorporation of some of its more esoteric elements. Like Amos Starr Cooke setting off for the islands a century before, they soon returned to Africa as missionaries of Hubbard’s increasingly supernatural notions. Following a similar zeitgeist as the one that would flood Haight-Ashbury with hippies a decade and a half later, they arrived in the Moroccan city of Tangier, at the time an autonomous International Zone on the southern shore of the Strait of Gibraltar, just as it was becoming the destination of choice for a previous generation of nonconformists, recreational drug users, and others with a reason to be free of governmental attention. As one such famous drug user the Cookes soon would meet, the writer William Burroughs, once said of his adopted hometown, “Nobody in Tangier is exactly what he seems to be.” A city of reinvention, it was “one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don’t proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want.”

  A perfect place, in other words, to plant a new religion, though how far its branches would reach remained to be seen.

  When the Cookes arrived in Tangier in the mid-1950s, it was perhaps best known in the United States as the home of the writer Paul Bowles, who had become a household name with the 1949 publication of his novel The Sheltering Sky. Bowles himself had originally gone to Tangier with his friend the composer Aaron Copland at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein in the 1930s. After more than a decade away, he settled there for good in 1947. His presence, as well as the Moroccan setting of the book that made him famous, and the notion that, as he later wrote of Tangier, “certain areas of the earth’s surface contained more magic than others” soon attracted the likes of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the artist Brion Gysin.

  Now a lesser-known figure of the Beat Generation, Gysin was known by his contemporaries as both a devilish prankster and a visionary saint. Timothy Leary once called him “one of the great hedonic mystic teachers”; to Burroughs, he was “certainly the greatest painter living.” Among his other claims to fame, he was the original so
urce of the recipe for the cannabis-laced confection known from the 1950s to the 1970s as “Alice B. Toklas brownies.” Gysin had sent Toklas, his friend Gertrude Stein’s lover and longtime companion, instructions for making what he called “hashish fudge,” which she included in her best-selling memoir-with-recipes, The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, in 1954. Upon preparing this dish, Gysin warned, “euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries and extension of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected.”

  The man responsible for the dessert now more commonly known as pot brownies also proved to be the Cookes’ entree to Tangier’s vibrant expatriate community. Unlike many of the Westerners who came and went in those days, Gysin was enough a part of the life of the city that he had opened a popular, if financially struggling, café. Called 1001 Nights, it was a gathering place for the International Zone’s visitors, who unfortunately came more often to gawk and be seen than to spend money. It was there one night that a mysterious couple made a grand entrance into the tangled affairs of the assembled bohemians. Burroughs later suggested that they had suddenly materialized, as if they were “holograms.” As Gysin recalled, John and Mary Cooke came “floating into my restaurant… telling me that they had been on my trail for a long time.” Their Ouija board, they claimed, had given them directions.

  “They were the first rich hippies I had ever seen,” Gysin remembered. Dressed in “sandals and saris and sarouels,” and “dripping with real jewels of great price in the best possible taste,” they were flush with cash and drank only champagne. They seemed to Gysin to be “Magic People,” and it was obvious that the most potent spell in their store of enchanted resources was a level of wealth that surprised even the International Zone’s traveling class.