Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Before long, branches had opened in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Honolulu, and Kansas City. In Elizabeth, which Hubbard visited in October, the money was being spent as quickly as it came in, with its founder writing in a memo, “Funds received by the foundation have been expended to the best of the foundation’s ability.” Campbell, the treasurer, seemed unconcerned. Despite his admiration for executives, he had always left the administrative side of the magazine to Tarrant, and he came off as detached from the practical end—a visitor found him “cold and uncordial.”

  Campbell was also preoccupied by what he saw as a breakthrough in his sessions with Peg, in which they were departing from orthodox techniques to concentrate on emotion and instinct. Much of the remaining workload fell on Winter, who grew concerned after two patients developed psychoses. The only real research being conducted was a study of “guk,” a mixture of vitamins and amphetamines that was believed to facilitate auditing. Winter called it “a dismal, expensive failure.”

  In the end, Winter decided that he had no choice but to resign, followed in short order by Art Ceppos of Hermitage House. Their departures marked the first public defections from the foundation, and Hubbard, who was becoming paranoid, responded by claiming that he had pushed them out when they tried to grab power. He believed that he was being watched by the American Medical Association and the CIA, and in Los Angeles, he had told Barbara Klowden, an employee with whom he was having an affair, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a target.”

  His visit to New Jersey lasted less than a week. After returning to California, he was arrested for leaving his baby daughter Alexis alone in his car, which he blamed on Sara. They also met the writer Aldous Huxley, who recalled them as “stiff and polite” when they brought coffee and cakes to his house. Huxley and his wife were audited, apparently to negligible effect: “I have proved to be completely resistant—there is no way of getting me onto the time track or of making the subconscious produce engrams. . . . Maria, meanwhile, has had some success.”

  But the issues at the foundation persisted. Van Vogt was struggling with its finances—it had spent a million dollars and was heavily in debt—and slashed its head count to stay afloat. On his return, Hubbard hired new people, putting them right back where they had started. Van Vogt remained loyal, and dianetics took him out of writing at the very moment when authors like Heinlein and Asimov were breaking into the mainstream, forever diminishing his status in the genre.

  Hubbard’s personal life was also imploding. On the suspicion that his wife was cheating on him, he arranged a double date with Sara, Klowden, and an instructor named Miles Hollister. The plan, whatever it was, backfired, and Sara and Hollister began an affair of their own. Hubbard hated Hollister, who was handsome and intelligent, and fired two of his friends on suspicion of being communists. Campbell was more than supportive. When Hollister visited Elizabeth to accuse the trustees of enriching themselves, they laughed at him, and he left, Campbell wrote, “when the group decided he was in need of some intensive processing himself.”

  After Hollister’s departure, however, Campbell took it upon himself to get to the bottom of the rumors, and the foundation established a board of ethics. There was concern over “black dianetics,” which twisted the therapy into a form of mind control, but the investigation was primarily an extension of Hubbard’s accusations about communism. The editor began “a simple process of getting all the gripes I could, airing them in the meetings, and back-checking on the information until we found where it started,” with the assistance of the former FBI agent C. Parker Morgan, whose investigative methods included “desk-prying [and] wastebasket studying.”

  Campbell informed Heinlein, “The thing blew sky-high with a horrible stench at that point.” He encouraged an atmosphere of suspicion, with offenders sent away for intensive auditing, and it ended with Morgan approaching the FBI with the allegation that Art Ceppos had tried to use the foundation’s mailing list to disseminate communist propaganda: “Many clubs have been formed, and [Morgan] believes they would be a fertile source for communist infiltration on a national scale, inasmuch as they have already been set up on an organizational plan.”

  There was also a growing debate over past lives. Dianetics had always encouraged its subjects to think back to the moment of conception, which Campbell accepted as a valid line of inquiry, noting that his daughter had been born two months prematurely: “What’s magic about the instant of birth?” After some subjects went back even further, retrieving memories that seemed to come from previous incarnations, the board voted to discourage such research, but Hubbard was receptive, advertising for a volunteer to run past lives at the end of the year.

  But the real turmoil was back in Los Angeles. Hubbard told Klowden that his wife had swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills—although Sara later said that Hubbard had forced her to take the medication—and around Christmas, he allegedly strangled her so violently that she ruptured a tube in her ear. In January 1951, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners filed suit against the foundation for teaching medicine without a license. Hubbard asked two students, including Ernest Hemingway’s son Greg, to drive his belongings to California, and he arranged for Countess Motorboat, the cat that had attacked Campbell’s shoes, to be shipped by air express.

  In Palm Springs, he was joined by Sara, Alexis, and his assistant Richard de Mille, the nephew and adopted son of the director Cecil B. de Mille—another early example of his fondness for famous last names. He remained abusive toward Sara, and she finally left with the baby. Hubbard, who was drinking heavily, ranted that he had seen evidence of a conspiracy between Hollister, Winter, and Ceppos to take over the foundation. He had managed to hold himself together for just long enough to found a movement, and now he was falling apart. As the imaginary Dr. Kutzman had noted, there was no evidence that any improvement would last.

  On February 24, John Sanborn, one of the students who had driven Hubbard’s possessions across the country, was watching Alexis at the Casa. Around ten at night, Alexis, who was eleven months old, awoke. When Sanborn tried to comfort her, she looked up and whispered, “Don’t sleep.”

  Feeling a chill, Sanborn put her back to bed. An hour later, there was a knock at the door. When he answered, he found himself looking at Frank Dressler, one of Hubbard’s aides, who seemed to be carrying a gun. “Mr. Hubbard’s coming,” Dressler said. “He’s here to get Alexis.”

  Hubbard arrived, took the baby, and left. After depositing Alexis at the Westwood Nurses Registry in Palm Springs, he went to Sara’s house and forced her into the car. As they pulled away with de Mille behind the wheel, Sara shrieked at her husband, who shot back, “If you really loved me, you would kill yourself.” When they halted at a red light, she tried to jump out, but he wrestled her inside by the throat. After dropping off Dressler, they continued to San Bernardino, where Hubbard tried unsuccessfully to find a doctor who would declare Sara insane.

  As Sara threatened to call the police, they crossed the border into Arizona. Finally, at Yuma International Airport, Hubbard said that he would let Sara go if she signed a statement saying that she had gone with him willingly. Sara agreed, weeping. Hubbard got out with de Mille, leaving behind a note with the name of the agency where the baby was being kept, and Sara drove back to Los Angeles.

  Hubbard went immediately to a phone booth, where he called Dressler, ordering him to pick up Alexis before Sara arrived and find a couple to drive the baby to New Jersey. He then flew to Chicago, where a psychologist gave him a clean bill of health, which pleased him enormously. Hubbard also found time to phone Sara, who recalled, “He said that he had cut [Alexis] into little pieces and dropped the pieces in a river and that he had seen little arms and legs floating down the river and it was my fault, I’d done it because I’d left him.”

  After visiting a local FBI office to denounce Hollister as a communist, Hubbard took a plane to New York and continued by taxi to Elizabeth, where he and Campbell had one last encounter. C
ampbell later claimed that he resigned in February, around the time of this visit, in what was evidently an attempt to revise the date of his departure. In fact, he gave no indication that he was planning to leave. Instead, he discussed his work with Peg, who was watching the girls two days a week—Astounding had moved back to the city—and seeing patients in New York. As soon as her divorce was settled, they hoped to get married.

  In Elizabeth, Hubbard filled the editor’s ears with allegations of communist activity at the Los Angeles foundation, to which he added an even more startling accusation: “Joe [Winter] had been spreading rumors, while in California, that he, Ron, was homosexual.” Campbell took these assertions at face value, and he failed to raise any objection to Hubbard’s proposal that members sign a loyalty oath to the United States and have their fingerprints sent to the FBI.

  On March 6, Campbell wrote to Heinlein, “Privately, for your close-held information, dianetics appears to have been attacked by a communist group that was not playing for marbles.” The editor expressed his belief that six people had conspired against Hubbard and that the primary target of their efforts had been Sara: “Three times she was drugged and beaten.” He betrayed no trace of concern over Hubbard’s instability. In the founder’s absence, Campbell was effectively in charge in New Jersey, and he persisted in thinking that he could continue his work in peace.

  While in Elizabeth, Hubbard wrote to the FBI with the names of fifteen suspected communists, including Hollister and Sara, and offered to submit the fingerprints of all members for analysis. The response, over J. Edgar Hoover’s signature, concluded blandly, “I wish to thank you for the information you have made available to this Bureau.” Four days later, Hubbard told an agent that Art Ceppos was organizing a rival organization called the Caduceus Foundation. His interviewer concluded that Hubbard was “a mental case.”

  Sara Hubbard at a custody hearing, April 1951.

  Courtesy of USC Digital Library

  As soon as Alexis arrived in Elizabeth, Hubbard flew down to Tampa with de Mille. They went from there to Havana, where two local women were hired to watch the baby, keeping her in a crib covered in chicken wire. On April 12, Hubbard learned through the papers that Sara had filed a complaint for the return of their daughter. It was far from good publicity, as Heinlein dryly noted: “The story about Ron and another man ‘kidnapping’ Sara . . . would lead me to think that dianetics had not made the founder thereof into a stable personality.”

  Hubbard’s ulcer was acting up, which he claimed was the result of hypnosis that had been performed by Winter and Sara. After his wife filed for divorce on April 23, accusing him of “systematic torture,” he saw just one way out. He sent a telegram to Don Purcell, a wealthy supporter in Wichita, Kansas, who immediately dispatched a plane with a nurse. Hubbard boarded with Alexis, telling de Mille to stay behind to finish transcribing the dictation for his new book.

  The following month, Hubbard wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney general, describing himself as “a scientist in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena.” He referred to Winter as “a psycho-neurotic discharged officer of the U.S. Army Medical Corps,” hinting that he might have been responsible for the death of a medical director at the foundation, and intimated that Greg Hemingway was part of the plot. Hubbard also claimed that Sara had been intimate with scientists from “Los Alamo Gordos”—an apparent reference to Robert Cornog.

  A year after it was founded, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was in ruins. Campbell was gone as well. The date of his resignation is unclear, although it could have been no earlier than the second week of March. Toward the end of May, he summed up the situation:

  The original group has sort of moved off in various directions, each developing one aspect of dianetics further. . . . Hubbard’s trying to develop the professional auditing business end; Dr. Winter is researching psychosomatic difficulties, and I’m doing my own research on the philosophical development of dianetics. . . . The result is that the original Hubbard foundation is sort of scattered.

  But Campbell’s faith in dianetics, if not in Hubbard, remained unshaken. The following week, he wrote to Heinlein, “I can tell you, Bob, that you’re inevitably going to have to take up dianetics; it’s inescapable for a man of your mental bent. For one thing, you won’t be fully, consciously aware of the methods you are already using in writing until you have actually explored your own mind, to find what those techniques you use are.” Hubbard may have been gone, but Campbellian dianetics—on which he was still working with Peg—was very much alive.

  What had been lost was the foundation, which Campbell had played no small part in destroying by his encouragement of Hubbard’s paranoid fantasies. Campbell later admitted that he hadn’t been prepared for the responsibility: “I wasn’t yet competent for the job. The result was that I failed to make Ron Hubbard realize his own limitations.” Afterward, he framed his resignation as the product of his discomfort with “extreme mismanagement” and Hubbard’s dogmatism: “I departed from Hubbard’s ideas . . . when he started mistaking himself for The Second Coming—a delusion he doesn’t seem to have abandoned.”

  While these may all have played a role, they minimized the extent to which Campbell enabled Hubbard’s worst tendencies. He had been insulated by distance from Hubbard’s excesses, and it wasn’t until they became impossible to overlook that he left. Ultimately, he hadn’t been in charge. It was Hubbard’s name on the book, and although Campbell had hoped to run the foundation on his own authority, he became just as frustrated as he had during the war. As always, the magazine was the only place where he had ever been in control—and even his sinusitis was back.

  But he had also been shown a way forward. He would take the hard, unsparing look at the mind that Hubbard had been unwilling to attempt, and he and Peg could do it alone. Campbell wrote to Heinlein, “Peg and I have advanced almost as far beyond Ron and his book as that is beyond standard psychiatric techniques.” And in the years that followed, he would drag the entire genre, willingly or otherwise, into the strange land that was unfolding before him.

  On May 28, 1951, Campbell told Asimov that he had broken with Hubbard. Asimov was less than surprised. He later recalled, “I knew Campbell and I knew Hubbard, and no movement can have two Messiahs.”

  IN JUNE, HUBBARD’S DIVORCE FROM SARA WAS FINALIZED. AS PART OF THE SETTLEMENT, SARA HAD signed a document stating that everything she had said about her husband in public was false: “I wish to lead a quiet and orderly existence with my little girl far away from the enturbulating influences which have ruined my marriage.” The word “enturbulating” didn’t appear in any standard dictionaries, but it could often be found in Hubbard’s writings.

  Hubbard remained convinced that Sara would come back to him, as soon as whatever spell the communists had cast over her was broken. After leaving the courthouse, he took her to pick up Alexis, but as they were driving to the airport in Wichita, Hubbard said that he didn’t want to give them up. “You’re going to get on that plane and go away, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I have to follow their dictates,” Sara said. “I’ll just go to the airplane.”

  After parking at the airport, Hubbard told her that he hated the idea of abandoning her to the psychiatrists. “I’m not going to let you go.”

  Sara simply jumped out. Leaving her suitcase and Alexis’s clothes in the car, she ran across the airfield, carrying nothing but her daughter and her purse. Finally, she made it to the plane, leaving Hubbard behind forever. Alexis, the world’s first dianetic baby, had lost one of her shoes.

  V.

  The Last Evolution

  1951–1971

  The average [science fiction] author is more stage magician, a creator of convincing illusions, than scientist or serious prophet. In practice, once you’re into the process of actually writing a work of fiction, the story itself gets to be more important than futurology. . . . You may find yourself even opting for the least probable event rather than the mo
st probable, simply because you want the unexpected.

  —JACK WILLIAMSON

  13.

  A Fundamental Attack on the Problem

  1951–1960

  Man molded the machine, but the machine is going to mold Man. . . . He’s darned well got to learn to escape cruising machines. And he’s got to learn to control machines, or be smashed up.

  —JOHN W. CAMPBELL, IN A LETTER TO ASTOUNDING, APRIL 1938

  On May 21, 1951, Campbell was driving from Westfield to Elizabeth when he picked up three teenage hitchhikers who were on their way to see The Thing from Another World. None of them had a pen for an autograph, and they later said that their parents would never believe that they had been given a ride to the movie from the man who had written its original story. Campbell, for his part, didn’t bother telling them that its monster had been inspired by his own mother.

  In 1950, the rights to “Who Goes There?” had been bought for $1,250 by Winchester Pictures—the production company of the director Howard Hawks—at the urging of the writers Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer. Van Vogt had hoped to write the script, but the assignment went to Lederer, with uncredited contributions from Hawks and Hecht. The direction was by Christian Nyby, but Hawks was always on set and claimed most of the director’s fee, leading to much subsequent disagreement over who was responsible for the finished product.

  The film threw out nearly all of Campbell’s story, shifting the setting from Antarctica to Alaska. Hawks was more drawn to his favorite theme of a group of men in danger, and he took a greater interest in the types that he understood—the pilot, the girl, the reporter—than in the scientists, who were reduced to thankless foils. But there were striking images—the burning letters of the opening titles, the crew standing in a circle on the ice to reveal the outline of a flying saucer, the shock reveal of the alien in the doorway, and the final warning to the world: “Watch the skies.”