Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  Hubbard was sixty-four years old in 1975, as the Apollo began its circumnavigation of the Caribbean. He weighed 260 pounds. He was still meticulously groomed, but his teeth and fingers were darkly stained from constant smoking. He was on the run from the courts, fearful of being discovered, marked by age, and visibly in decline. In Curaçao, he suffered a small stroke and spent several weeks in a local hospital. It was becoming clear that life at sea posed a real danger for a man in such frail health. His crew rationalized his obvious decline by saying that his body was battered by the research he was undertaking and the volumes of suppression aimed at him. “He’s risking his life for us,” they told each other.

  By now the rumor about the CIA spy ship had spread all over the Caribbean, making the Scientologists unwelcome or at least under suspicion everywhere they went. They were kicked out of Barbados, Curaçao, and Jamaica. Moreover, the Arab oil embargo had sent the price of fuel skyrocketing, so the roving life was getting too expensive to support. It was time to come ashore.

  FROM THE APOLLO, Hubbard sent a couple of delegations to locate a land base for Scientology—specifically, a town that the church could take over. One team arrived in the Florida retirement community of Clearwater—a resonant name for Scientologists—to look over a dowdy downtown hotel called the Fort Harrison, which had earned a place in popular history when Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics for “Satisfaction” beside the swimming pool in 1965. Hubbard purchased the Fort Harrison and a bank building across the street using a false front called the United Churches of Florida, which he calculated would not disturb the staid moral climate of the conservative community. When the mayor of Clearwater, Gabriel Cazares, raised questions about the extraordinary security that suddenly appeared around the church buildings, Guardian’s Office operatives tried to frame him in a staged hit-and-run accident and planted false marriage documents in Tijuana, Mexico, to make it appear that Cazares was a bigamist. Several months passed before the flabbergasted citizens discovered that Clearwater had become the Flag Land Base for the Church of Scientology. (Scientologists would simply call it Flag.)

  Hubbard had been keeping a low profile in a condominium nearby, but in January 1976 his tailor leaked the news to a St. Petersburg Times reporter that the leader of Scientology was in town. As soon as Hubbard heard this, he grabbed twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, collected Kima Douglas, his medical officer, and her husband, Michael, and lit out in his Cadillac for Orlando. The next day, he announced that they were going to his old hideout in Queens. The Cadillac was too conspicuous, so he sent Michael out to buy a nondescript Chevy hatchback. The trip to New York took three days, with Hubbard smoking continuously in the backseat and crying, “There they are! They’re after us!” every time he saw a police car. When they finally arrived, Kima judged Queens too depressing, so they turned around and went to Washington, DC.

  Meanwhile, agents from the Guardian’s Office raced to Southern California to look for remote properties where Hubbard could operate more discreetly. Soon, Hubbard and Mary Sue, along with her Tibetan terriers, Yama and Tashi, set up in their new quarters on three large properties in La Quinta, California, a desert town south of Palm Springs. Hubbard grew a goatee and let his hair hang down to his shoulders. “He looked like Wild Bill Hickok,” one Sea Org member recalled. He kept a hopped-up Plymouth and half a million dollars in cash ready for a quick getaway.

  Left behind in Clearwater, and without his father hovering over him, Quentin became freer and more assertive. He befriended an older Scientologist from New Zealand, Grace Alpe, who arrived at Flag Base with terminal cancer. “She looked like a witch, with gray hair and a hooked nose, like she was in a haunted house,” said Karen de la Carriere, who was Alpe’s auditor. During auditing sessions Alpe would just rock back and forth, crying, “I’m going to die! I’m going to die!” Everyone kept a distance from the woman, except Quentin, who took over her case. He actually let her move into his room and sleep in his bed, while he slept on the floor. Then he made a catastrophic mistake.

  Dennis Erlich, the chief “cramming officer” at Flag, who supervised the upper-level auditors, noted jarring disparities between Quentin’s upbeat reports on Alpe and her glaring lack of progress. Erlich called Quentin in for a meeting. “Quentin, or ‘Q’ as his friends called him, was 22 at the time,” Erlich later wrote. “He looked 15 and acted 5.” During the interview, Quentin continually zoomed his hand through the air and made airplane noises. He calmly told Erlich that he had falsely reported the results. “I think a lot of my father’s stuff doesn’t work,” he said. “So I false report whenever I need to. Personally, I think my father’s crazy.”

  Not only was Quentin the founder’s son, he was also one of the highest-ranked auditors in the church, and yet he had committed an unpardonable offense. Erlich had no choice but to tell him that he would have to surrender all of his training certificates and start the entire Scientology series all over again—years of work. Quentin seemed completely nonchalant.

  What happened after this is full of contradiction and mystery. Tracy Ekstrand, who was Quentin’s steward, set a cookie on his bedside table that evening. It was still there the next night. The bed had not been slept in. Erlich was expecting Quentin to show up to go over his new training program, but he didn’t appear that day or the next. Word went out that Quentin had “blown”—in other words, he had fled. He left a confused note, full of references to UFOs, saying that he was going to Area 51, the secret airbase north of Las Vegas, Nevada, where the CIA has developed spy planes; in popular culture, Area 51 was said to be where an alien spacecraft was stored. Quentin had only just learned to drive a car, in the parking garage of the condominium, where he accidentally ran into the wall with such force that the entire building registered the shock. He was scarcely qualified to drive all the way across the country by himself. Quentin had repeatedly requested a leave to take flying lessons, but Hubbard was convinced that Quentin couldn’t be trusted to fly a plane under any circumstances.

  Frantic, Mary Sue dispatched three hundred Guardian’s Office operatives to find him. Weeks passed, as the Scientologists checked hotels and flying schools in multiple states. A cover story was put out that Quentin had been given flying lessons as a present from his parents, and he was driving to California to fulfill his lifelong ambition.

  Quentin was indeed headed for Nevada. It was one of the very few times in his life when he was on his own and free. He stopped in St. Louis on his drive west and took a VIP tour of the giant aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas. He was enthralled by the display of aircraft and artifacts of the Mercury and Gemini space programs; he even got a ride in one of the company’s business jets. “He was so happy,” Cindy Mallien, who had lunch with him that afternoon, recalled. “He was just beaming.”

  But only a few days later, Las Vegas police were trying to identify a slight young man with blond hair and a reddish moustache who had been discovered comatose in a car parked on Sunset Road facing the end of the runway of McCarran Airport. He was naked. He was five feet one inch tall, and weighed just over a hundred pounds. There were no identifying marks on his body and no personal identification. The license plates had been removed. The engine of the white Pontiac was still running when he was discovered. The windows were rolled up, and a vacuum tube led from the exhaust through the passenger’s vent window. Two weeks later, on November 12, 1976, the young man died without regaining consciousness. Las Vegas police were finally able to connect the Pontiac with Quentin through a Florida smog sticker and the vehicle identification number.

  An agent from the Guardian’s Office came into Hubbard’s office in La Quinta as he was having breakfast and handed him the report on Quentin’s death. “That little shit has done it to me again!” Hubbard cried. He threw the report at Kima Douglas and ordered her to read it. The report said Quentin had died of asphyxiation of carbon monoxide. It also noted that there was semen in his rectum. When Hubbard told Mary Sue that Quentin was dead, she screamed for ten mi
nutes. For months, she was disconsolate, hiding behind dark glasses. Everyone knew that Quentin was her favorite.

  A spokesman for the church said that Quentin had been on vacation. Meantime, Mary Sue arranged for three further autopsies to be performed. In the last one, the cause of death was said to be unknown. She put out the word that he had died of encephalitis. Hubbard himself was convinced that Quentin was murdered as a way of getting at him.

  * * *

  1 Harriet Whitehead, an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in Scientology in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1969 and 1971, writes of the “fundamental kinship” between psychotherapy and religion. “The cosmological system that surrounds a renunciatory discipline cannot for long remain ‘secular,’ that is, finite and this-worldly, in its orientation,” she writes. “This is one of the reasons … secular therapeutic doctrines often develop a religious or mystical cast.” Although Freud was a nonreligious Jew, the techniques of analysis he developed may have had their roots in certain mystical practices rooted in the kabbalah, such as the interpretation of dreams and the use of free association to uncover hidden motivations. Jung subsequently steered psychoanalysis into deeply spiritual waters—a course, as Whitehead points out, that parallels the evolution of Dianetics into Scientology: “It would thus be facile to dismiss the promulgation of a quasi-empirical supernaturalism in the Dianetics movement as simply the product of amateur theorizing by a spinner of tales, when Hubbard’s predecessors who established the framework within which psychotherapy, amateur and otherwise, would subsequently develop, did hardly any better” (Whitehead, Renunciation and Reformulation, pp. 27–8).

  2 A federal district court eventually allowed E-Meters to be used for “bona fide religious counseling,” but ordered that each device bear a warning that “the E-Meter is not medically or scientifically useful for the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease. It is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily functions of anyone” (Amended Order of US District Court for the District of Columbia, No.71–2064, Mar. 1, 1973).

  3 The ban was repealed in 1973.

  4 According to the church, “The first Sea Organization members formulated a one-billion-year pledge to symbolize their eternal commitment to the religion and it is still signed by all members today. It is a symbolic document which, similar to vows of dedication in other faiths and orders, serves to signify an individual’s eternal commitment to the goals, purposes and principles of the Scientology religion.”

  5 The church explained, “As it became a matter of tradition among the crew members at that time having adopted the practice of overboarding, Mr. Hubbard set forth rules in October of 1968 to ensure it was conducted safely in attaining the spiritual benefit intended. To that end, given that it was an ecclesiastical penance, the procedure includes the Chaplain making the following statement as part of the observance: ‘We commit your sins and errors to the waves and trust you will arise a better thetan.’ ”

  6 The church denies that Scientologists worked with General Oufkir’s men or used the E-Meter to provide security checking for the Moroccan government.

  7 The church supplied me with a number of affidavits from former Sea Org members saying that they had not been forced to terminate their pregnancies.

  8 The CIA at the time was taking note of Hubbard, mainly through newspaper clippings. “There is no indication that HUBBARD or members of his organization have been engaged in intelligence or security matters,” an agency dispatch notes. “Rather, HUBBARD appears to be a shrewd businessman who has parlayed his Scientology ‘religion’ into a multi-million dollar business by taking advantage of that portion of society prone to fall for such gimmicks” (“Scientology/L. Ron HUBBARD,” CIA dispatch, Mar. 18, 1971).

  4

  The Faith Factory

  Despite its reputation for carnality and narcissism, Los Angeles has always been a spawning ground for new religions. In 1906, a one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour set up a church in a livery stable on Azusa Street and began a revival that lasted for three years. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came to hear his message. Stigmatized as Holy Rollers and decried because of their interracial worship, Seymour’s followers gave birth to the Pentecostal movement, which quickly spread across the world, becoming an enduring force in modern Christianity. In 1912, a theosophist colony called Krotona took root just below the current Hollywood sign, where the hills were said to be “magnetically impregnated.” An organization called Mighty I AM Presence began in Los Angeles and expanded all across America, gaining about a million followers by 1938. The founders were Guy and Edna Ballard, who claimed to be able to communicate with “ascended masters.” Guy wrote a popular book titled Unveiled Mysteries, in which he related his travels through the stratosphere, visiting great cities of antiquity and unearthing buried loot—much as Hubbard attempted to do several decades later. Writers William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley passed through the city, all drawn by its reputation as a center for spiritual innovation.

  One of the most famous preachers in American history, Aimee Semple McPherson, built the Angelus Temple near Echo Park in 1923, where she married Pentecostalism with Hollywood theatricality. She created sets for her sermons on a stage designed for her by Charlie Chaplin, who may have been one of her secret Hollywood paramours (Milton Berle claimed to be another). Anticipating the garb of Hubbard and the Sea Org, McPherson liked to dress in an admiral’s uniform, while her disciples wore nautical outfits. As a teenager, Anthony Quinn played the saxophone in the church and translated for Sister Aimee when she preached in Mexican neighborhoods. After he became a movie star, Quinn would compare her to the great actresses he worked with, including Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn. “They all fell short of that first electric shock Aimee Semple McPherson produced in me.”

  And so when the Church of Scientology was officially founded in Los Angeles, in February 1954, by several of Hubbard’s devoted followers, there was already a history of religious celebrities and celebrity religions. The cultivation of famous people—or people who aspired to be famous—was a feature of Hubbard’s grand design. He foresaw that the best way of promoting Scientology as a ladder to enlightenment was to court celebrities, whom he defined as “any person important enough in his field or an opinion leader or his entourage, business associates, family or friends with particular attention to the arts, sports and management and government.” It was not surprising that Hubbard would hire as his personal assistant Richard de Mille, son of the legendary producer and director Cecil B. DeMille, who had started Paramount Pictures and was in some ways responsible for the creation of Hollywood itself.

  In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an editorial in Ability, a publication affiliated with the church, urged Scientologists to recruit celebrities. A long list of desirable prospects followed, including Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Jackie Gleason, John Ford, Bob Hope, and Howard Hughes. “If you want one of these celebrities as your game, write us at once so the notable will be yours to hunt without interference,” the editorial promised. “If you bring one of them home you will get a small plaque as your reward.” Author William Burroughs and actor Stephen Boyd were drawn into the church in its early days. Scientology was a religion rather perfectly calibrated for its time and place, since American culture, and soon the rest of the world, was bending increasingly toward the worship of celebrity, with Hollywood as its chief shrine. At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) The object was to “make celebrities even better known and to help their careers with Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. “By accomplishing this Major Target I know that Celebrity Centres can take over the whole acting-artists world.”

  Hubbard was particularly interested in stars whose careers had crested but still had enough luster that
they could be rehabilitated and made into icons of Scientology. The prototype was Gloria Swanson, one of the greatest stars of the silent movie era, who personified the lavish glamour of that era. Although she never regained the international fame she had known before the talkies, she continued acting on television and in occasional movies—most memorably, as Norma Desmond in the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard. Hubbard’s top auditor, Peggy Conway, a South African entertainer, ardently cultivated Swanson, calling her “My Adorable Glory,” in her many letters to the star, although she saves her highest praise for Hubbard, who was also her auditor: “The Master did his Sunday best on me,” she wrote Swanson in 1956. “He never went to bed—we talked the clock around—day after day—night after night—I was six thousand light years above Arcturus—what a genius is our Great Red Father!”

  A constant stream of aspiring young actors, writers, and directors came to Hollywood with common dreams, trying to leverage whatever ability or looks they might have in a market already overwhelmed by beautiful and talented and chronically unemployed young people. Many of them were rather poorly educated—they had left school to gamble on stardom—but they were smart, talented, and desperately ambitious. Scientology promised these neophytes an entry into the gated community of celebrity. The church claimed to have a method for getting ahead; just as enticing was the whispered assertion that a network of Scientologists existed at the upper levels of the entertainment industry eager to advance like-minded believers—a claim that never had much to support it, but was not entirely untrue. Scientology was a small but growing subculture in the Hollywood studios.

  Kirstie Alley was an aspiring actress from Wichita who left the University of Kansas in her sophomore year, then struggled with an addiction to cocaine. She says that a single auditing session cured her habit. “Without Scientology, I would be dead,” she declared. The testimonials of such celebrities would lead many curious seekers to follow their example. Posters with the faces of television and movie stars were placed outside Scientology churches and missions, saying, “I AM A SCIENTOLOGIST…COME IN AND FIND OUT WHY.” In the Hollywood trade magazine Variety, Scientology offered courses promising to help neophyte actors “increase your self-confidence” and “make it in the industry.” Scientologists stood outside Central Casting, where actors sign up for roles as extras, passing out flyers for workshops on how to find an agent or get into the Screen Actors Guild. Courses at the Celebrity Centre focused on communication and self-presentation skills, which were especially prized in the entertainment industry. The drills and training routines would have felt somewhat familiar to anyone who had done scene work in an acting class. Many actors, at once insecure but competitive by nature, were looking for an advantage, which Scientology promised to give them. The fact that anyone was interested in them at all must have come as a welcome surprise.