Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (50 page)

Hubbard would arrive at eight in the evening, and the crew
would slavishly follow his screamed instructions until seven the next morning
with a single half-hour break, but nothing to eat or drink.
¹³

As a make-up assistant, Adell Hartwell helped Hubbard to
satisfy one of his obsessions. Gallons of imitation blood were prepared:

Did he ever like those films to be bloody ... We’d be
shooting a scene and all of a sudden he’d yell “Stop! Make it more gory, make
it more gory.” We'd go running out on the set with all this Karo syrup and food
coloring and we'd just dump it all over the actors. Then we'd film some more
and he'd stop it again and say “it's not gory enough.” And we'd throw some more
blood on them.
¹³

... we were doing a scene where they were bombing the
FBI office ... and we had so much blood on those actors ... we couldn't even
get enough on them to suit Hubbard. We had guys’ legs off, there were hands
off, arms - I mean, it was a mess from the word go. We had so much blood on
those actors that they had to take their clothes and all and soak in the shower
before they could undress. This is what Hubbard wanted.
¹⁴

This film about the FBI was shown to US Scientologists
through the lead up to the trial of Mary Sue Hubbard and other Guardian’s
Office staff.
¹⁶
On one occasion, Hubbard ordered so much gore that
two actors had to be cut out of their clothes which had stuck fast.
¹³

 The Commodore would explode into furious tantrums.
According to Adell, “I actually saw him take his hat off one day and stomp on
it and cry like a baby. I have seen him just take his arm ... and throw it wild
and hit girls in the face ... one girl would follow him with a chair. If he sat
down, that chair had to be right where he was going to sit. One girl missed by
a few inches; he fell off of it, and she was put in the RPF.”
¹⁴

The crew were kept under intense and constant pressure. Even
Hubbard’s cook would work from six in the morning to ten at night simply to
prepare three meals to the Commodore’s satisfaction. Hubbard frequently
complained that the crew were overspending. At one time they had to use pages
from phone directories for toilet paper, because of the supposed extravagance.

Conditions were dreadful even for the crew who were in “good
standing,” but for those on the Rehabilitation Project Force conditions were well-nigh
impossible. RPF’ers kept their few clothes in boxes, and slept on mattresses
thrown out in the open, through the few daylight hours given them for sleep.
¹⁵

Adell’s teenage daughter was put on the RPF, and Adell was
traumatized when she was not even allowed to talk to her: “I would see her
dragging her mattress from one shade tree to another. I said, ‘Why are you
doing this?’ And she was ill and she couldn’t be in with the others, and so she
was hunting shade... it’s 117 degrees.”

 Ernie Hartwell takes up the story: “We were not programmed
into Scientology; we were not brainwashed. We were not following a great
guiding light or any great pull that L. Ron Hubbard had ... all the other
people ... accepted those conditions ... They didn’t mind the bugs and the
snakes and ... the lousy food, the lousy living conditions, all the dirt.”

The Hartwells decided they were not going to take any more,
and were told they would have to appear in front of a “Board” before they could
leave. They were kept waiting for two weeks. Throughout this time the
Scientologists worked on Adell, and on the day they were due to go, she told
Ernie she was staying behind. They had been married for nearly fifteen years.
She was ill, and both of them felt that Scientology auditing would help her.
Ernie resolved to go back to Las Vegas, and find a job to help pay for any
medical treatment that Adell needed to supplement her auditing. Ver-Dawn was
determined to stay close to Hubbard.

Ernie said, “It seems like they do everything they can to
destroy families and happiness. For me ... it was the hardest thing I ever had
to do in my life, leaving them there in the condition that they were in and
leaving them with a man that was totally insane.”

Back in Las Vegas, Ernie found work. About six weeks after
he left CMO Cine, he was visited by a Scientologist “chaplain,” who accused him
of disclosing Hubbard’s whereabouts. Having done this, the Scientologist
produced the Hartwell’s marriage license, and said Adell wanted a divorce.
Ernie was speechless. Then he was asked if Adell and Ver-Dawn could use his
address for passport applications, as they were leaving the United States.

Adell had been told that because Ernie had given away
Hubbard’s location, the whole crew would have to go overseas. She was told that
her marriage license would be needed to obtain a passport. She knew nothing
about any divorce.

The recruiters had promised that Adell Hartwell would be
given special auditing and proper medical care for her illness. No treatment
was given, and her condition was growing progressively worse. One day she
worked without eating. It was 102 degrees in the shade:

By five-thirty I just got deathly ill, and I told
them I had to leave. And I staggered quite a ways ... I fell in the ditch; it
was like I was drunk ... They came in and woke me up and said it was seven
o’clock I had to go down because Hubbard was going to be on the set. And I
wouldn’t do it. And I was written up [reported to Ethics]

... Another time I complained I had to go home because
I wasn’t being treated. I was thin and bleeding and in quite severe pain, and
they took me right in and put me on the Meter ... the next night they had us
scrubbing the barn. We started at six o’clock and we scrubbed that barn until
four o’clock in the morning ... anybody that ran a fever was immediately put
out of commission. But anybody that was ill and not running a fever, they were
made fun of and ridiculed.

 Nearly three months after their separation, Adell Hartwell
left the film crew, and rejoined her husband. Their next shock was receiving a
“Freeloader Bill” for the auditing and training Adell had received during her
five month ordeal in the desert. The bill was for $5,500. When Ernie complained
to the Las Vegas Guardian’s Office, he was told that they had neglected to bill
him the $5,000 he owed, bringing the total to $10,500.

A few days later, Ernie Hartwell was asked to sign a bond
for $30,000, payable if he said anything bad about Scientology. Infuriated,
Ernie pointed out that he had kept his part of every bargain, while the
Scientologists had kept to none. He demanded a letter from
them
, saying
they would leave him alone. After half-a-dozen futile meetings, the
Scientologists raised their demands. Ernie was to sign a statement that he had
been an alcoholic all his life, had abused his children, had been a poor father
and provider, had murdered his father, and owed Scientology $60,000. The
threats and harassment continued for several months. Even the FBI raids had
failed to halt the excesses of the Guardian’s Office.

Eventually, worn down and scared half out of his wits, Ernie
felt compelled to do exactly what the GO was trying to prevent. To protect himself
and his wife, he went to the police and told them the whole story.

Somehow the GO persuaded a newspaper to run a story saying Ernie
Hartwell had tried to extort money from Scientology. Television picked it up.
Ernie was one man against a powerful organization. Eddie Walters, who was
working for the Las Vegas GO at the time, has since confirmed the Hartwells’
claims of harassment.
¹⁷
Another witness has testified that Hubbard
himself ordered that Ernie Hartwell’s confessional folders be “culled” for
anything reprehensible.
¹⁸

Indeed, there are many witnesses to the systematic “culling”
of confessional folders throughout Scientology over a period of many years,
with the purpose of finding material to blackmail individuals into conformity
with Church objectives. Mary Sue Hubbard wrote an order in 1969 for the GO to
use this as an information gathering tactic.
¹⁹
During the making of
the Tech films, most of the crew’s folders were similarly culled for potentially
useful information.
¹⁸

Most of the energy put into the films was wasted anyway, as
Adell has said: “Funny thing about those movies is that they never get shown to
anyone. Hubbard would always blame somebody for screwing it up and order the
movie shelved.”
²⁰

In 1986, the Church of Scientology paid $150,000 to Adell
Hartwell in a secret settlement of her litigation against it.

While pursuing his bloodlust through the Tech films, Hubbard
once more revised Dianetics. It became New Era Dianetics, or “NED.” Hubbard had
also been railing against LSD, and devised the “Sweat Program.”
²¹
Hubbard was convinced that LSD “sticks around in the body,” a questionable
hypothesis, as LSD is both unstable and water-soluble. Hubbard’s program was
supposed to “flush” traces of LSD from the body. Anyone who had taken LSD was
to take a mega-dose of vitamins and a teaspoon of salt a day. The diet was
restricted to fruit, fruit juice and “predigested liquid protein.” The victim
was then to jog in a rubberized nylon sweat suit, for at least an hour a day.
Some unfortunates spent months on this program, until it was eventually
replaced with the “Purification Rundown.” There is no doubt that this bizarre
program severely damaged some peoples’ health.

Hubbard did not undertake the Sweat Program himself,
²²
but he did have a great deal of New Era Dianetic auditing. It did nothing for
his temper tantrums. The Tech film project ground to a halt shortly before
Adell Hartwell left. Hubbard was in a very bad way.

1.
   
Organizational Executive Course, vol.7, p.349.

2.
   
Author’s interview with former Sea Org executive.

3.
   
Author’s interview with Harvey Haber, November 1983; Tonja Burden
affidavit, 1982.

4.
   
Author’s interview with former Messenger.

5.
   
St Petersburg Times
“Scientology”, p.20.

6.
   
Tonja Burden affidavit, 1982.

7.
   
Author’s correspondence with DeDe Voegeding.

8.
   
Technical Bulletins
, vol.11, p.259.

9.
   
Rosenblum affidavit, p.22.

10.
 
see
7

11.
 
Armstrong
in CSC v. Armstrong, vol.9, pp.1469 & 1480.

12.
 
Jon
Zegel tape 2, 1983.

13.
 
St
Petersburg Times
“Scientology”, p.20.

14.
 
Ernest
and Adell Hartwell testimony at the Clearwater Hearings, vol.3.

15.
 
Author’s
interview with Harvey Haber.

16.
 
Michael
Flynn at the Clearwater Hearings, vol.3, p.298.

17.
 
Walters
in CSC v. Armstrong, vol.25, pp.4394-7.

18.
 
Douglas,
ibid
, vol.25, p.4437; also Nancy Dincalci,
ibid
, vol.20,
pp.3530f; also Janie Peterson in Clearwater Hearings, vol.4, p.81.

19.
 
Guardian
Order 121669 (16 December 1969), see Mary Sue Hubbard in CSC v. Armstrong,
vol.17, p.2792.

20.
 
see
13.

21.
 
Technical
Bulletins
, vol.11, p.324.

22.
 
Author’s
interview with David Mayo, October 1986.

Chapter twenty-eight

“A Commodore’s Messenger carrying an
order or running a project or otherwise on duty is an emissary of the
Commodore. What is said or done to that Messenger by staff or persons receiving
the Messenger’s orders is being said or done to the Commodore.”

—L.
Ron Hubbard,
Flag Order 3729
, September 1978

Hubbard’s health had deteriorated over the years. He
continued to suffer from heavy colds, and chain-smoked three to four packs of
cigarettes.
¹
In 1965, he was bedridden and thought he was going to
die.
²
This feeling recurred almost annually. Early in 1967 he was
again bed-ridden, this time because of drug abuse.
³
In 1972, he went
into hiding in New York for almost a year, again very ill for much of this period.
⁴
Shortly after his return to the ship at the end of 1973, he hurt himself badly
in a motorcycle accident. He had suffered a heart attack in 1975, and the
attendant embolism had forced him to take anti-coagulant drugs for a year. His
bursitis had never ceased to plague him, and he was usually grossly over-weight.
⁵

David Mayo had been involved in Scientology since the late
1950s. He had joined the Sea Org soon after its inception, becoming one of the
few Class XII Auditors. By the time the Flag Land Base was established in
Florida, in 1975, Mayo had become the Senior Case Supervisor Flag. He was the
top dog in the world of Scientology “Tech.”

In September 1978, a confidential telex ordered Mayo to quit
Florida immediately for Los Angeles. A Commodore’s Messenger met him at the
airport. As they drove down the freeway to Palm Springs, the Messenger
apologized to Mayo, but asked him to put on a pair of dark glasses. It was the
middle of the night, but Mayo humored his escort. The glasses had been painted
over. Top security was being maintained. Mayo dozed, until the driver braked
hard because he had nearly overshot the freeway exit. The glasses flew off and
Mayo had to reassure the driver that he had not seen the Indio exit sign.
⁶

Mayo was told that Hubbard was very ill, and was given
Hubbard’s “case folders” to study. Mayo was to determine what auditing errors
Hubbard’s current condition stemmed from. He was taken to see the Commodore: “I
must admit I got quite a shock, because the last time I’d seen him he’d been
full of energy and active and it was a surprise to see him lying on his back
... He was lying there almost in a coma, although he had his eyes open, and
when I went in the room and said hello to him his eyes flickered and he gave me
a little smile.”