Fair Game

by Steve Cannane

  Hubbard was not only losing his wife, his child – and seemingly his mind – he had also lost his Dianetic research foundations. Original supporters like John Campbell and Dr Joseph Winter had given up on him. In April 1951, Hubbard resigned from the organisation that bore his name.44 That same month he sent a telegram from Havana to Don Purcell, a Dianetics enthusiast and the head of Omega Oil. In poor health and short of a buck, Hubbard asked for help.45 After Richard de Mille called the Kansas-based millionaire to tell him Hubbard was dying, Purcell took action, chartering a flight that brought Hubbard back to the US.46

  With Purcell’s help, Hubbard set up Dianetics’ new headquarters in Wichita, Kansas. The other foundations were closed and the debts from the New Jersey foundation became Purcell’s responsibility.47 Hubbard was in a bad way when he arrived in Kansas. When he summoned his young lover Barbara Klowden with a proposal of marriage, Hubbard did not present as Wichita’s most eligible man. ‘I went there and he was like Howard Hughes’s last days, really in a bad depression,’ Klowden told Hubbard’s biographer Russell Miller. ‘His fingernails were long and curved; his hair was stringy. He met [me] at the hotel and was in such bad shape, he was trembling, like someone who should be in a mental institution.’48 Klowden, who also worked as Hubbard’s PR assistant, left Kansas the day after.

  The following month, Sara travelled to Kansas and agreed to drop her divorce action in California, and allow Hubbard a divorce on his own terms. This included having Sara sign a note that contained statements such as ‘L. Ron Hubbard is a fine and brilliant man’.49 The testimony carried the same level of authenticity as Hubbard’s autobiographical references he had manufactured during World War II. Hubbard made out he was the victim, eventually being awarded a divorce on the grounds of Sara’s ‘gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty’.50 Sara later recanted her statement in an interview with Bent Corydon. ‘I thought by doing so he would leave me and Alexis alone,’ she said. ‘It was horrible. I just wanted to be free of him!’51

  Rejected by his lover, and divorced from his second wife, Hubbard was soon checking out the engrams on Mary Sue Whipp, a 19-year-old student from Houston, Texas. Mary Sue had travelled to Wichita with a friend who had read about Dianetics in Astounding Science Fiction.52 The auburn-haired student moved in with Hubbard and was placed on the payroll as an auditor.53 As Hubbard’s relationship with Mary Sue flourished, his partnership with Purcell broke down. The foundation was bleeding money, and Purcell was uncomfortable with Hubbard’s move into ‘past life’ recall.54 At one Friday night lecture, Hubbard turned up with a limp, a result he said, of returning on his ‘time track’ to a Civil War battlefield.55 When a court ruled that the Wichita Foundation was liable for the debts of the old New Jersey foundation, Purcell suggested the organisation be put into voluntary bankruptcy. Hubbard refused, but was outvoted at an emergency meeting.56

  Don Purcell, the man who bailed the founder of Dianetics out of trouble when he was floundering in Havana, was about to get the full Hubbard breakup catastrophe – law suits, restraining orders, and accusations of criminal behaviour. Hubbard used the foundation’s mailing list to accuse Purcell of accepting a US$500,000 bribe from the American Medical Association to destroy Dianetics.57 When Purcell bought the Wichita foundation back in the bankruptcy court, Hubbard had to start afresh. In March 1952, he married Mary Sue and the following month the newlyweds moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where Hubbard reinvented himself once more by launching his latest discovery, a new ‘science’ and new belief system that built on the foundations of Dianetics and would change humanity forever. He called it Scientology.

  Before they headed for the desert, the Hubbards introduced to their followers the E-Meter, a black metal box attached to two soup cans with a needle that swung back and forth. It was built and designed by chiropractor Volney Mathison in the 1940s. Like other lie detectors, the E-Meter measures the conductivity of skin and any activity in the sweat glands.58 Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, the authors of Trick or Treatment, describe it as ‘nothing more than a piece of technical hocus-pocus’.59 Hubbard argued it gave ‘an auditor a deep and marvelous insight into the mind of his preclear’.60 (A preclear is someone receiving auditing who has not yet achieved clear status.) It also gave Hubbard a revenue source, with his followers expected to buy the gadgets at inflated prices.61

  The new headquarters in Arizona was called the Hubbard Association of Scientologists. Hubbard had not just come up with a new brand, he had also invented a new theory of the universe. Scientology’s first text, What to Audit, later renamed Scientology: A History of Man, was released in July. Never one to undersell his work, Hubbard described it as ‘a coldblooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years’.62

  Central to Hubbard’s new cosmology was the theory that thetans, or theta-beings as he called them then, created the universe as their own playground. Thetans, according to Hubbard, are immortal spiritual beings. But having inhabited so many bodies over trillions of years, they have become so consumed by the universe they live in, that they have forgotten about their special powers and degenerated to the extent that they believed they were simply ‘meat bodies’. Their super-powers could be restored through Scientology, the goal being to make an individual an Operating Thetan, or OT, who could ‘operate’ independently of the human body.

  Hubbard’s new belief system turned into a nice little earner. With Dianetics you only had one lifetime to audit. In Scientology, the ‘thetans’ running human bodies came burdened with engrams from past lives. That meant auditing past lives from this and even other universes. And it wasn’t just the thetans that needed work, there were engrams lurking from the primordial swamp that needed clearing too. Hubbard told his followers their bodies were also occupied by another ‘lower grade’ soul called a ‘genetic entity’, or GE.63 The GE, according to Hubbard, passed through an evolutionary line going back to molluscs, seaweed, right back to single atoms. Hubbard believed many engrams could be traced back to clams. He warned of the dangers of talking about ‘clam incidents’ with the uninitiated. ‘Should you describe the “clam” to some one [sic], you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. One such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days.’64

  In the lead-up to the publication of Hubbard’s first book under the Scientology brand, he was reunited with his son from his first marriage, Nibs. Just a year younger than Mary Sue, Nibs moved into the newlyweds’ rented home near Camel Back Mountain. If Hubbard’s last book had been fuelled by Cuban rum, A History of Man seemed to have been inspired by more illicit substances. As Jon Atack wrote in Let’s Sell These People A Piece of Blue Sky: ‘The book leaves the strong suspicion that Hubbard had continued with his experiments into phenobarbital, and into more powerful ‘mind-expanding’ drugs as Nibs later asserted.’65 Hubbard had frequently advocated amphetamines after the launch of Dianetics.66 According to Hubbard’s former medical officer Jim Dincalci, the clam story came from Nibs being pumped full of amphetamines: ‘His dad kept giving him speed and all of a sudden he was talking about his history, when he was a clam and all these different situations in early Earth. And out of that came A History of Man.’67

  BACK IN AUSTRALIA, TREASURE Southen was among the first to shift from Dianetics to Scientology. In her search for meaning as a former theosophist, she already believed in past lives. But D’Arcy Hunt was weirded out by Hubbard’s latest book. He couldn’t even finish it. ‘I tried to read that,’ he said. ‘It was very disturbing to me. I did not like it.’68 But Hunt stuck by Hubbard nonetheless, and played a critical role in establishing Scientology in Australia. ‘We decided, all of us, by vote, that we would try to get somebody over here from America to train us under Hubbard’s guidance,’ Southen recalled.69 The group raised the money to pay for the airfares to bring John Farrell and his wife Tucker to Melbourne.70

  The Farrells had been running Scientology courses in Hubbard’s old black magic beat of Pasade
na71 before they got married in Arizona in November 1954 in a service personally drafted by Hubbard.72 Three months later, D’Arcy Hunt was one of the signatories on an application to the Department of Immigration to bring the Farrells out to Australia to give advice and assistance to their ‘movement for spiritual and mental therapy’ and to attend their Easter Congress.73 The Commonwealth Migration Officer reported that the association was not financially sound and ‘insofar as Australia is concerned, is a very minor and unimportant organisation’.74 The Farrells were granted six-month visas and arrived in Melbourne in April 1955. The first Hubbard Professional Auditor course was run over eight weeks out of a rented home in Kew, attended by Treasure Southen, D’Arcy Hunt and around 20 others.75

  Doug Moon, a local entertainer who was part of the early Dianetics groups in Melbourne, remembered John Farrell bringing a sense of structure to Scientology in Australia. ‘Farrell would run professional courses, he would align our activities to the goals of Scientology, he would tell us what Hubbard wanted, and generally advise and monitor.’76

  Scientology became formally recognised in Australia with the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International (HASI) registered in Victoria as a foreign company on 15 June 1955. The directors were all Americans – Hubbard, his wife Mary Sue, Burke Belknap, Robert Sutton and Ken Barrett. Their head office was based in Phoenix, Arizona.77 The local agent was listed as Ron Chittock, an Electro-Medical Engineer from the General X-Ray Company in Fitzroy.78

  Melbourne’s Scientology headquarters was established at 157–159 Spring Street, almost directly opposite the Victorian parliament. ‘It may be prime real estate now, but it certainly wasn’t then,’ says Roger Meadmore, who was involved in setting up the original association. ‘Spring Street was an old building with lots of dirty rooms. The Farrells were living there with a small child. It was disorganised. Much of it was an empty building.’79

  Australia’s first Scientologists were an eclectic bunch. They included teachers, businessmen, accountants, housewives, musicians and public servants.

  David Cooke, whose father, Alan, was involved in Scientology in Melbourne in the 1950s, remembers them fondly:

  They were good people. These were among the bright young freethinkers of the post World War 2 generation, the ‘angry young men’ who prepared the ground for the counter-culture movements of the sixties. They could not accept the stupid, oppressive society of the day and wanted to try something – anything – that might be better. As a kid I met scientologists like Richard King, Ian Tampion, Les Verity, Roger Dunn, Jessie Gray, Doug Myers and loved their open discussions of past lives, lost civilizations, UFOs, alternative medicine, ESP and even political conspiracies.80

  In April 1955, over four days, the first Australian Scientology Congress was held at Coppin Hall in Prahran. The Farrells, billed as Doctors of Scientology, were keynote speakers, along with Englishman Raymond Kemp, who had left the merchant navy to become a Doctor of Scientology. The advertisement, placed in a prominent spot on page five of The Argus, boasted that Scientology offered greater health, more energy, increased ability, broader knowledge, higher understanding.81

  By the end of 1955, John Farrell was getting more entrepreneurial, advertising his services under the Personal Relations column in the classifieds: ‘I will talk to anyone for you about anything. Phone FB3670. FB3396, between 12 and 1.30.’ It was signed Rev. John R Farrell, Church of Scientology.82 He was following a Hubbard directive.

  Not only was he calling himself a Reverend, and Scientology a church, Farrell was getting around with a collar that made him look like a religious minister. ‘Farrell used to tell us if we had a collar reversed we could walk into places where we may not otherwise be admitted,’ recalled Doug Moon. ‘If there were any questions asked about what we were doing we would raise a finger and say, “Would you interfere with the work of a man of God?”’83 Again, Farrell took his lead from Hubbard, who gave this advice in a memo.84

  George Maltby, a picture framer from Olinda and one of Melbourne’s pioneering Scientologists, was not sure why Farrell was portraying himself as part of a religious movement. ‘Farrell seemed to have got the idea firmly into his head,’ said Maltby. ‘I don’t think anybody else was greatly impressed with it.’85 But Farrell’s dog collar was part of Hubbard’s grand plan. He was determined to turn his rebranded form of Dianetics into something much bigger.

  CHAPTER 5

  OLD RON’S CON

  DEATH AND TAXES, BENJAMIN Franklin’s two great certainties of life, became two of the great motivating forces that helped transform Scientology into something beyond a self-help movement. By turning Scientology into a religion, Hubbard’s new church would not have to pay tax, and his followers would not have to worry about the afterlife. He could provide Scientologists with the key to salvation and immortality while locking them into a lifetime of lucrative courses and auditing sessions. Religion at the price Hubbard would sell it, with no company tax obligations and lifelong proselytising customers, was a faultless business model.

  Hubbard had been burned by the experience of losing both money and control of his failed Dianetics foundations. On 10 April 1953, he wrote to Scientology executive Helen O’Brien about his plan for a new type of franchise:

  Perhaps we could call it a Spiritual Guidance Center. Think up its name, will you. And we could put in nice desks and our boys in neat blue with diplomas on the walls and 1. knock psychotherapy into history and 2. make enough money to shine up my operating scope and 3. keep the HAS (Hubbard Association of Scientologists) solvent. It is a problem of practical business.1

  Revealingly, while outlining his plans of how to be ‘swamped’ with money, Hubbard wrote to O’Brien about the benefits of becoming a religion:

  I await your reaction on the religion angle. In my opinion, we couldn’t get worse public opinion than we have had or have less [sic] customers with what we’ve got to sell. A religious charter would be necessary in Pennsylvania or NJ (New Jersey) to make it stick. But I sure could make it stick. We’re treating the present time beingness, psychotherapy treats the past and the brain. And brother, that’s religion, not mental science.2

  Hubbard’s religion angle became a reality by the end of the year when he incorporated three churches: the Church of Scientology, the Church of American Science and the Church of Spiritual Engineering.3 In early 1954, the Church of Scientology of California was established, followed soon after by another church in Washington, DC. None of this would have surprised Nieson Himmel, the legendary newspaperman who covered the Los Angeles crime beat for over 50 years.

  Himmel shared a room with Hubbard in Jack Parsons’ Pasadena mansion in 1946. ‘Whenever he was talking about being hard up,’ Himmel recalled, ‘he often used to say that he thought the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion.’4 The Church of Scientology denies Hubbard said anything of the sort, attributing a similar quote to George Orwell. But Sam Moskowitz, Theodore Sturgeon and Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, three science fiction writers who were contemporaries of Hubbard’s, back up Himmel’s claims. All three say they heard Hubbard make comments about the money-making potential of starting your own religion.5

  Money was not the only motivation, however. In a country where the right to freedom of religion is protected by the constitution, Hubbard could shield Scientology from attacks by doctors, scientists and psychotherapists by dressing his new franchises up as churches. In pursuing the religion angle, Hubbard’s timing was immaculate. Belief was booming in the United States.6 Church attendances were at record highs and fringe beliefs were starting to sprout. Historian Robert Ellwood describes the US at that time as a supply-side ‘spiritual marketplace’.7 Even the state was in on the act. In 1956, President Eisenhower signed a law declaring ‘In God We Trust’ to be the official motto of the United States. Two years earlier, he signed the bill that saw ‘One Nation Under God’ added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

  But in this growing spiritual marketplace was Hubbard buying w
hat he was selling? Did he truly believe he had lived before and that he had the secret to eternal life? Back in 1938, he was certainly not an advocate of reincarnation. In a letter to his first wife, Polly, he wrote, ‘Personal immortality is only to be gained through the printed word, barred note or painted canvas or hard granite.’8

  Thirty years later, Hubbard was asked on Granada Television’s World in Action, ‘Do you believe that you have lived before? Hubbard paused nervously, before answering, “Now to answer that question would be very unfair.”’9 The interviewer Charlie Nairn followed up by pointing out that ‘Scientologists believe they’ve lived before, though, don’t they?’ Hubbard, seemingly more comfortable answering questions about other people’s belief systems replied, ‘Oh yes, as a matter of fact it’s quite interesting that exercises can be conducted which demonstrate conclusively that there are memories which exist prior to this life.’

  It is rare to see the founder of a religion asked on television whether they believe in the fundamental tenets of the belief system they have created. Hubbard hardly passed the test with flying colours. He was nervous, evasive and unconvincing.

  It’s not surprising that Hubbard had difficulties answering the question. When the FBI raided the church in 1977, and top executives including his wife were indicted, Hubbard was trying to work out how they could increase their income to help bolster a legal defence. In a memo provided to me by former Scientology executive Nancy Many, Hubbard refers to one model for a non-profit fund that ‘would fit better with the church mock-up’.10 It was not the kind of language you would expect from a religious leader.