Inside Scientology (7 page)

"For a world frightened by atomic-bomb destruction, with limited faith in the afterworld, no more hypnotic slogan could have been used to entrance people and allay their fears," wrote Milton Sapirstein in an essay printed in August 1950 in
The Nation.
"The real and, to me, inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 per cent efficient mechanical man—superbly free-floating, unemotional, and unrelated to anything. This is the authoritarian dream, a population of zombies, free to be manipulated by the great brains of the founder, the leader of the inner manipulative clique."

For a man with no prior business experience, L. Ron Hubbard proved very adept at turning
Dianetics
into a phenomenon. Weeks before the book was published, Hubbard and Campbell had set up a training school, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As the book's popularity grew, devotees made the trek to the so-called Elizabeth Foundation to be trained as licensed Dianeticists, or practitioners, for which they received a certificate. Soon Hubbard had opened similar Dianetic Research Foundations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Washington, D.C. Each center offered a similar package. A five-week course, priced at $500,
including lectures and demonstrations (often delivered by Hubbard personally), would turn a starry-eyed fan into a "professional auditor," as Hubbard called those who, having completed the course, often hung a shingle and began seeing clients. A one-on-one session at one of the foundations with a Dianeticist cost $25.
More aggressive therapy, offered in ten-day processes known as "intensives," could be had for between $600 and $1,000, depending on the experience level of the auditor.

For all the talk about a "poor man's psychoanalysis," Dianetics was turning into a pricey undertaking. One $25 session with a Dianeticist cost $10 more than many psychiatrists at the time charged for a consultation. The ten-day intensive cost more than thirty times that amount. But Hubbard's therapy promised a cure. And, according to John Campbell, Dianetics delivered. Gushing in a letter to Jack Williamson that just "fifteen minutes of Dianetics can get more results than five years of psychoanalysis,"
Campbell, a board member of the Elizabeth Foundation, claimed that Hubbard's technology had cured homosexuals, asthmatics, arthritics, and nymphomaniacs. "It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries. And a sort of physical vitality men didn't know they could have!" he said.

Such claims were very hard to verify. Though Hubbard craved the approval of the medical and psychological establishment—and indeed, a stated purpose of the Dianetic Research Foundations was to stimulate further research—he rejected numerous pleas by Dr. Winter, now the Elizabeth Foundation's medical director, to submit his findings for peer review.

Instead, Hubbard hit the lecture circuit, adopting the dignified mien of a professor while simultaneously holding large demonstrations at concert halls or on university campuses. The
Los Angeles Daily News
described him as "a personality, a national celebrity and the proprietor of the fastest-growing 'movement' in the United States."
Gracious to the press and imbued with a huckster's exuberance, he posed for pictures and entertained reporters with stories of his life as an engineer, explorer, and nuclear scientist.

At times, Hubbard would fail to produce a promised result in front of an audience of thousands. For example, on one occasion he presented the "World's First Clear"—a woman, Hubbard claimed, who would be able to demonstrate "full and perfect recall of every moment of her life."
Yet, as witnessed by the crowd, she couldn't even remember the color of Hubbard's tie. Nonetheless, Hubbard continued to pull in sellout audiences. "I thought he was a great man who had made a great discovery, and whatever his shortcomings they must be discounted because he had the answer,"
said Richard De Mille, the adopted son of the film director Cecil B. De Mille. Then just out of college, De Mille was present at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on August 10, 1950, the night of the Clear disaster. He'd brought his girlfriend, who dismissed Hubbard as a fraud; De Mille, though, was unswayed. "He promised heaven," he explained. "It did not matter that his qualifications were suspect; he held the key. People present new ideas that they say are going to change the world and there are always a certain number of people who believe them. Lenin was the Hubbard of 1917. Hubbard was the Madame Blavatsky of 1950."

Another person who believed in Hubbard was Helen O'Brien. She was a young, recently married housewife living in Philadelphia when she read in the
New York Times
that the American Psychological Association had publicly condemned Dianetics. O'Brien didn't pay much attention to fads, and the word
Dianetics
was new to her. Nor did the article shed much light on the concept. What the article revealed was what she later called the "immoderate, almost panicky tone" that the psychological establishment took when discussing this new therapy. Intrigued, O'Brien bought the book and read it in one sitting.

Not long afterward, Dr. Joseph Winter came to Philadelphia to lecture on Dianetics at a local church. O'Brien had read Winter's glowing introduction to Hubbard's book, in which he stated that Dianetics was "the most advanced and most clearly presented method of psychotherapy and self-improvement ever discovered."

But now, during the lecture, Winter seemed far less enthusiastic. In the audience, O'Brien wasn't sure why. She guessed he was feeling pressure from the medical establishment. "You could practically see the AMA reaching for the back of his neck,"
she told her husband later that night. In fact, Winter's equivocation was attributable to his growing conviction that Dianetics should be in the hands of people with at least a minimal amount of medical training. Since the book's publication, he'd been bothered by the slapdash atmosphere at the foundations and was frustrated by Hubbard's sloppy research techniques. Two preclears he knew of had suffered nervous breakdowns as a result of auditing, a result that wasn't unusual. "People had breakdowns quite often,"
Perry Chapdelaine, a former student at the Elizabeth Foundation, told the biographer Russell Miller in 1986. "It was always hushed up before anyone found out about it. It happened to a guy on my course, a chemical engineer. They wanted to get him out of the school and I volunteered to stay with him in an adjoining building. He never slept or ate and was in a terrible state, no one could do anything with him, and in the end they took him off to an asylum."

And yet new auditors were being certified every day. Winter was also bothered by Hubbard's continued claim that he could produce Clears—he once maintained he could produce this state in as little as twenty hours of auditing. Winter felt sure that it was impossible. "I know of persons who have had 1,500 to 2,000 hours of therapy and do not approximate the state of 'clear' as defined," he later wrote. "I have not reached that state myself, nor have I been able to produce that state in any of my patients."

But O'Brien knew nothing about Winter's reservations, and not long after attending his lecture, she signed up to be audited by a man she had met there. "Looking back, it is hard to believe that I had no doubts or hesitation about entrusting myself to these unorthodox therapies,"
she wrote in her 1966 memoir,
Dianetics in Limbo.
"I became a Dianetic preclear by the simple actions of taking off my shoes and lying down on a cot."

Though she'd been raised a Christian, O'Brien had never been particularly devout. A generation later, she might have been called a "seeker," for she had studied Sanskrit and Chinese and was familiar with the
I Ching,
the
Tao Te Ch'ing,
and the
Rig-Veda.
Nothing she'd learned previously prepared her for Dianetics—in her very first auditing session, O'Brien felt she had returned to her mother's womb. On another occasion, she reexperienced her own birth. The event was so traumatic, she said, that she continued to experience it for a week between auditing sessions. "It nearly floored my auditor and it was a living nightmare to me," she said. "I can vividly recall how it felt to be smothered and helpless while being violently handled by the flesh, muscles, and bones of another human body."

Soon afterward, O'Brien was being audited when she found herself in another body. "I was a husky young woman wearing a rough-textured, full-skirted dress," she recalled. She was in Ireland, circa 1813. British soldiers had arrived in her barnyard, and a boy she recognized as her fourteen-year-old son lay on the ground, about to be bayoneted. "The violence of that sight was terrific. I literally shuddered with grief," she said. Moments later, O'Brien felt herself being thrown down onto a hillside, about to be raped by one of the soldiers. "I snapped into vivid awareness then, and spit into his face. His response was immediate. He picked up a loose cobblestone and crushed my skull."
At that moment, O'Brien experienced her own earlier death.

The session lasted for three hours, with O'Brien continually reliving the violence and horror of the incident until its "charge," or emotional impact, was nullified. "By the end of it, I was luxuriously comfortable in every fiber, yawning and stretching and taking breaths in full, deep satisfaction that seemed to reach to the soles of my feet." When the sessions ended, she walked down the stairs into her living room, which was decorated with Christmas lights. O'Brien was dazzled. "I was freshly there from another age. For the first time in this lifetime, I knew I was beyond the laws of space and time," she said. "I never was the same again."

Hubbard's affirmations, it seemed, had paid off. No longer a struggling science fiction writer, he was flush with cash, and his Dianetic Research Foundations were thriving across the country. Sara Hubbard would later estimate that the foundations took in over $1 million
in less than a year. The most successful branch stood in Los Angeles, housed in an elegant Spanish-style mansion once occupied by the governor of California. Known as the Casa, for its Mission architecture, the Los Angeles Foundation featured an auditorium big enough for five hundred people, and it was routinely full, according to the science fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt, whom Hubbard had enlisted to run the organization.

But the flourishing was brief. The revenues generated by the Los Angeles branch of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation weren't enough to cover its expenses. Hubbard thought nothing of drawing cashier's checks against the proceeds of the foundation. "The organization spent $500,000 in nine months and went broke," Van Vogt later told the interviewer Charles Platt. By the spring of 1951, Van Vogt would have no choice but to fold the operation to avoid declaring bankruptcy.

Similar things were happening at Dianetic Research Foundations all over the country. One official of the Elizabeth Foundation
later told Helen O'Brien that he'd resigned after watching the foundation take in $90,000 in a single month and account for only $20,000 of it. By the end of 1950, the income of the Elizabeth Foundation, as well as the Dianetic Research Foundations in Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., and virtually everywhere else, had dropped so significantly that they were unable to meet their payroll and other costs.

"The tidal wave of popular interest was over in a few months," O'Brien wrote in
Dianetics in Limbo.
"People began to see that although Dianetics worked, in the sense that individuals could cooperate in amateur explorations of buried memories, this only occasionally resulted in improved health and enhanced abilities, in spite of Hubbard's confident predictions." She recalled an empty fishbowl at one of the foundation's reception desks, placed there for people to discard their eyeglasses once Dianetics had "cured" them of nearsightedness. It remained empty. "The only thing I ever saw in it was a cigarette lighter left there by someone who had quit smoking," O'Brien said.

Now struggling to maintain control of a ship that was sinking fast, Hubbard grew intensely paranoid, sniping at foundation officials for minor infractions and accusing his staff of using irregular, non-Hubbard-approved methods, or "Black Dianetics," as he called them. The New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners began an inquiry into the activities of the Elizabeth Foundation, as it was apparently practicing medicine without a license.
Feeling persecuted, Hubbard began to believe that some of his students might be spies. His fears worsened when
Look
magazine published a scathing article in December 1950, in which the head of the famous Menninger Clinic, a leading psychiatric hospital, denounced Hubbard as a charlatan and condemned his techniques as potentially harmful.

By then, Dr. Joseph Winter and another key figure, Arthur Ceppos, the man who'd published
Dianetics,
had resigned from the foundation; Winter, having concluded that Dianetics might be dangerous in the hands of those not licensed as health-care professionals, was dismayed that most practitioners had absolutely no medical training. In March 1951, Hubbard's most ardent disciple, John Campbell, unhappy with the general disorganization of the Dianetics movement, returned to editing science fiction.

Upset by the defection of these apostles, Hubbard accused Winter and Ceppos of trying to take over the foundation. He also accused Ceppos of being a Communist sympathizer.
This was a serious matter, as the increasingly shrill anti-Communist rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy made itself felt throughout the country. At the peak of this frenzy, in 1951, Hubbard wrote a letter to the FBI, denouncing more than a dozen members of his organization as suspected members of the Communist Party.
They included leaders of both the Chicago Foundation and the New York Foundation, numerous figures in the Dianetics movement in California, and, most astoundingly, Sara Northrup, Hubbard's own wife.

Hubbard and Sara's marriage had grown increasingly strained after the publication of
Dianetics,
and they had been largely living apart. Both were having affairs, Sara with a handsome young member of the Los Angeles Foundation named Miles Hollister, and Hubbard with a twenty-year-old college student named Barbara Klowden, who'd been hired by the Los Angeles Foundation as a press agent. Klowden, who ultimately became a psychologist, believed that Hubbard suffered from manic depression with paranoiac tendencies. As she said, "Many manics are delightful, productive people with tremendous energy and self-confidence. He was like that in his manic stage—enormously creative, carried away by feelings of omnipotence and talking all the time of grandiose schemes."