Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (13 page)

In August 1950, Hubbard presented the “World’s First Clear
” at the
Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Sonia Bianca, a very nervous physics student from Boston, was brought to the stage. Hubbard claimed
that through
Dianetics, Bianca had attained “full and perfect recall of every moment of her life.” The audience began peppering her with questions, such as what she had had for breakfast eight years before, or what was on
this page
of
Hubbard’s book, or even elemental formulas in physics, her area of specialty. She was incapable of responding when someone asked the color of Hubbard’s necktie, when he briefly had his back turned to her. It was a very public fiasco. Hubbard would not announce another Clear for sixteen years. One of his disillusioned acolytes later concluded that the concept of clearing was just a gimmick to dramatize the theory of Dianetics. “The fact is that there were never any clears
, as he had described them,”
Helen O’Brien, Hubbard’s top executive in the United States, wrote. “There were randomly occurring remissions of psychosomatics.”

Meanwhile, his bigamous marriage to Sara was careening toward a spectacular conclusion. A month after the Sonia Bianca debacle, Ron and Sara were living at the
Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. He was beating her regularly. “With or without an argument
, there’d be an upsurge of violence,” Sara recalled. “The veins in his forehead would engorge” and he would strike her, “out of the blue.” One time he broke her eardrum. And yet, she stayed with him, a hostage to his needs. “I felt so guilty about the fact that he was so psychologically damaged,” Sara said. “I felt as though he had given so much to our country and I couldn’t even bring him peace of mind. I believed thoroughly that he was a man of great honor, had sacrificed his well being to the country.… It just never occurred to me he was a liar.” Ron finally explained his dilemma: he didn’t want to be married—“I do not want to be an American husband
for I can buy my friends whenever I want them”—but divorce would hurt his reputation. The solution: if Sara really loved him, she should kill herself.

Sara took little “Alexi,” as she called their daughter, and moved into the
Los Angeles Dianetics Research Foundation, in a former governor’s mansion near the University of Southern California campus. Soon after that, Sara began an affair with another man,
Miles Hollister.

Hubbard furiously told his own lover,
Barbara Klowden, that Sara and Miles were plotting
to have him committed to a mental institution. Indeed, Sara had consulted a psychiatrist about Hubbard’s condition. She told him that Ron had said he would rather kill her than let her
leave him. The psychiatrist said that Hubbard probably needed to be institutionalized, and he warned Sara that her life was in danger.

Nonetheless, Sara went directly to Ron and told him what the doctor had said. If he got treatment, she said, she would stay with him; otherwise, she was going to leave. Ron responded by threatening to kill their child. “He didn’t want her
to be brought up by me because I was in league with the doctors,” Sara recalled, in her deathbed tape. “He thought I had thrown in with the psychiatrists, with the devils.”

On the night of February 24, 1951, Sara went to the movies and left her baby in the care of a young man named
John Sanborne, who was studying at the foundation.
Alexis had become a kind of celebrity, or at least a curiosity. Hubbard had been touting her as the world’s first “dianetic baby
”—shielded since birth against any engram-forming disruptions or parental conflict. As a result, Hubbard boasted, Alexis talked at three months, crawled at four, and had no phobias. At about ten o’clock, eleven-month-old Alexis began crying in her crib, so Sanborne picked her up to comfort her. Suddenly, the infant said in a hoarse whisper, “Don’t sleep.
” Sanborne was startled. He didn’t think a baby could talk like that. “It went through me in a funny way,” he later said. “The hair raising on the back of the neck type of feeling.”

At eleven p.m. there was a knock on the door. One of Hubbard’s aides appeared, wearing a topcoat, with his hand in his pocket. Sanborne believed he was carrying a gun. The man said that Hubbard was here to take his daughter. Hubbard himself then came through the door, also wearing a topcoat, with his hand in his right pocket. They took the child and disappeared.

Later that night Hubbard returned with two other men to abduct Sara. “We have Alexis
and you’ll never see her alive unless you come with us,” Hubbard said. They tied her hands and dragged her out of bed into a waiting Lincoln. She says that Hubbard had her in a chokehold to keep her from screaming. Hubbard’s assistant,
Richard de Mille (son of the famous movie director and producer Cecil B. DeMille), drove aimlessly, while Hubbard and Sara, who was wearing only a nightgown, sat in back. She warned him that kidnapping was a capital offense.

In San Bernardino, Hubbard ordered de Mille to stop at the county hospital so he could have Sara committed, but it was the middle of the night and no doctor would talk to him. Eventually, Hubbard and Sara
negotiated a truce. Hubbard told her where Alexis was hidden—he had hired a nurse in West Los Angeles to watch her—and Sara signed a note saying that she had gone with Hubbard of her own free will. Hubbard and de Mille went to the Yuma, Arizona, airport and flew to Phoenix, while Sara drove the Lincoln back to Los Angeles in her nightgown to pick up Alexis. When she arrived at the nursing center, however, she was told that a young couple had just left
with the baby.

Hubbard and de Mille flew on to
Chicago, where Hubbard voluntarily presented himself for a
psychological examination in order to counter the accusation that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. The psychologist administered some diagnostic tests, including Rorschach inkblots, and later provided a report that said that Hubbard was a creative individual who was upset by family problems and depressed about his work. Hubbard was extremely pleased; he would often mention that he had been given a clean bill of health
by the psychological profession. Sara remembered that he then called her and told her that he had killed Alexis. “He said that he had cut her 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,” Sara remembered.

Hubbard and de Mille then traveled to
Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the
Dianetics Foundation had its headquarters. Meantime, the young couple that Hubbard had hired to abduct Alexis from the nursing center drove the infant all the way across the country to deliver her to Hubbard. It was the middle of March and snowing in New Jersey, so Hubbard decided to move on to Florida, where he intended to write his next book. De Mille came along with the baby. After a few days in Tampa, Hubbard still felt edgy and announced that the three of them were flying to
Cuba. “He believed that as long
as he had the child he could control the situation,” de Mille told one of Hubbard’s biographers.

For six weeks, Sara had searched for Alexis in Southern California, enlisting local police, sheriffs, and the FBI, but the authorities regarded the abduction as a domestic dispute. Finally, she filed a writ of habeas corpus demanding Alexis’s return, setting off a press uproar. On April 23, 1951, Sara added to the sensation by finally filing for divorce in Los Angeles County, revealing that Hubbard was already married when they wed. She accused Hubbard of subjecting her to “systematic torture
,” including sleep deprivation, beatings, strangulations, and “scientific
torture experiments.” She said that she had consulted medical professionals, who concluded that
Hubbard was “hopelessly insane, and crazy.”

Soon afterward, Sara received a surprising letter of support from Polly:

Meantime, in Havana, Hubbard hired a couple of women to take care of the baby. They kept her in a crib with wire over the top. To de Mille, it seemed that Alexis was being held like a monkey in a cage
.

Cuba was run by mobsters, who had turned it into a hedonistic paradise, but Hubbard took little advantage of the nightlife; he locked himself in a hotel room, rented an old typewriter with Spanish-language keys, and began to write. According to de Mille, Hubbard wrote all night
with a bottle of rum at hand, which was empty in the morning.

The book Hubbard was pounding out in Havana was
Science of Survival
. He introduced his readers to the
Tone Scale, which had evolved since he sketched it out in his letter to
Robert Heinlein two years before. The scale classifies emotional states, starting at zero,
Body Death. The lower tones are characterized by psychosis, where hatred and anger give way to perversion, artful lying, cowardice, withdrawal, and apathy. “People below the 2.0 level
, no matter their avowed intention, will bring death or injury to persons, things and organizations around them if in the anger bracket, or death to themselves if in the apathy bracket,” Hubbard writes. “Anyone below 2.0 level is a potential suicide.” Their bodies stink, as does their breath. At 2.5, there is a break point between the normal and the neurotic. This stage is characterized by boredom, vagueness, indifference, and pointless conversation. At level 3.0 one enters a stage that Hubbard characterizes as “very high normal,” where one is resistant to infections, tolerant, and reasonable; however, he is also insincere, careless, and untrustworthy.

Clear registers 4.0 on the scale. A person who has attained this level is nearly accident-proof and immune to bacteria. He is exhilarated,
eager, strong, able, curious, ethical, creative, courageous, responsible, and impossible to hypnotize. And yet this state is only one-tenth of what Hubbard forecasts in the realm of human potential. His scale goes all the way to 40.0,
Serenity of Beingness, but the capabilities of the upper regions are largely unknown.

Given the circumstances that surrounded the creation of this book, it’s interesting to read what Hubbard writes about sexual behavior and attitudes toward children. Not only was he on the run in Cuba with his abducted daughter when he wrote this, he was also being sued for non-support of the two children from his first marriage, whom he hadn’t seen for years. “Sex,” he wrote
, “is an excellent index of the position of the preclear on the Tone Scale.” The highest levels are characterized by monogamy, constancy, a pleasurable attitude toward sex, and an intense interest in children, although the urge to procreate is mitigated by the sublimation of sexual desire into pure creative thought. At 3.0 on the scale, sexual interest is diminished but the urge to procreate remains high. That begins to fall off at 2.5, “not for any reason beyond a general failure to be interested in anything.” Children are tolerated, but there is little interest in their affairs. At 2.0, sex becomes revolting and children provoke anxiety. Rape and child abuse characterize 1.5.

Then Hubbard arrives at a level that preoccupies him, 1.1 on the Tone Scale. “Here is the harlot
, the pervert, the unfaithful wife, Free Love, easy marriage and quick divorce and general sexual disaster,” he writes. “A society which reaches this level is on its way out of history.” A mother who is at 1.1 on the Tone Scale will attempt to abort
her child. However, once the child is born, “we get general neglect
and thoughtlessness about the child and no feeling whatsoever about the child’s future or any effort to build one for it. We get careless familial actions, such as promiscuity, which will tear to pieces the family security upon which this child’s future depends. Along this band, the child is considered a thing, a possession.”

Hubbard finished the book and wrote this dedication:

To
Alexis Valerie Hubbard
For Whose Tomorrow May
Be Hoped a World That
Is Fit To Be Free

Hubbard eventually wrote a note to
Sara to explain his whereabouts, saying that he was in a Cuban military hospital, about to be transferred to the States “as a classified scientist
immune from interference of all kinds.” He adds, “I will be hospitalized probably a long time. Alexis is getting excellent care. I see her every day. She is all I have to live for. My wits never gave way under all you did and let them do but my body didn’t stand up. My right side is paralyzed.… I hope my heart lasts.…
Dianetics will last 10,000 years—for the Army and Navy have it now.” He concludes by warning that in the event of his death, Alexis will inherit a fortune, but if Sara gains custody, the child will get nothing.

Hubbard did return to the United States and hunkered down in Wichita, Kansas, where a wealthy supporter,
Don Purcell, provided him sanctuary. Hubbard’s old friend
Russell Hays was there, consulting for the
Cessna Aircraft Corporation. Hubbard arrived with “a Cadillac so damn long
he couldn’t hardly park it anywhere, and two concubines,” Hays marveled. When Sara discovered where her husband was, she sought to enjoin his assets. Hubbard retaliated by writing a letter to the US attorney general, explaining the peril he was in. “I am, basically, a scientist
in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena,” he said by way of introduction. He said that his own investigation showed that Sara was tied to Communists who had infiltrated the
Dianetics Foundation. This was at the height of
McCarthyism and the
Red Scare. “I did not realize my wife was one until this spring,” Hubbard wrote. He named several of his disaffected followers, including
Gregory Hemingway, son of the famous novelist. “When, when, when will we have a round-up?” he implored.

Meantime, Sara came to Wichita to pursue the divorce and to get Alexis back. Ron blithely suggested that they should take a trip together. “He told me that I was under the influence
of this communist cell” run by her husband, Sara recalled. “And that they were dictating to me what to do, and that I was in a state of complete madness. I told him, ‘Yep, I think you’re right. The only thing I can do is to work through it and do whatever they say.’ ” Ron replied that the Communists had hypnotized her. Sara played along, but insisted she would have to go through the divorce; only then would she be able to break free of their power.