Strange Angel (38 page)

Even Parsons, blind to all suspicion, might have recognized the danger had he seen the letter Hubbard now wrote to the chief of naval personnel, requesting permission to leave the United States “to visit Central & South America & China” for the purpose of “collecting writing material” under the auspices of Allied Enterprises. Hubbard was preparing for a world cruise, not a business trip. Ignorant of these plans, Parsons waved good-bye to his best friend and his ex-lover as they headed east with over $20,000 of his money in their pockets.

However, once out of the direct beam of Hubbard's charisma, Parsons began to lose confidence in the venture. As the weeks passed, Parsons' explosives work dwindled to a halt—he had no money for supplies. He began to worry. He told friends that he was going to persuade Hubbard and Betty to return to Pasadena immediately so they could dissolve the partnership; he realized it had been a mistake to invest all his money in such a scheme. But when he received a phone call from Hubbard, collect from Miami, his manner changed immediately. Parsons succumbed once more to Hubbard's ebullient persuasiveness, swinging from anger and distrust to acquiescence and an almost childlike respect. Louis Culling, one of the remaining OTO members, was shocked to hear Parsons end the conversation “eating out of Ron's hand,” telling Hubbard, “I hope we shall always be partners.”

The other members of the household saw the dangers of the situation clearly. Culling wrote to Germer and Crowley, expressing his frustration at Parsons' gullibility, “Ron and Betty have bought a boat for themselves at Miami Florida for about 10,000 dollars and are living the life of Riley, while Bro John is living at Rock Bottom, and I mean
Rock Bottom.
It appears that originally they never secretly intended to bring this boat around to California coast to sell at a profit, as they told Jack, but rather to have a good time on it in the east coast.”

Crowley needed no more evidence. In a cable to Germer, he cast his judgment: “Suspect Ron playing confidence trick—Jack Parsons weak fool—obvious victim prowling swindlers.” When Parsons heard this assessment, he finally shook himself out of his indecisive stupor. With the last of his money, he bought a plane ticket to Miami.

Hubbard and Betty had been busy. They had bought three sailing yachts, the
Harpoon,
the
Blue Water II,
and the
Diane,
and were only waiting for Hubbard's latest navy disability check to arrive before they set sail. Parsons, meanwhile, was hot on their heels. He checked into a cheap hotel in Miami Beach and began scouring the marinas and yacht clubs for any information about the two or their purchases. It did not take long before he traced the sale of the
Harpoon
to a harbor on County Causeway, but Betty and Hubbard were nowhere to be seen. On July 1, Parsons managed to place a temporary injunction and restraining order on Hubbard and Betty to stop them from leaving the county, selling the yachts, or touching any other assets of Allied Enterprises. Now all he could do was wait for them to appear.

After four days of pacing in his hotel room, Parsons received a phone call from the marina. Hubbard and Betty, presumably having heard of his presence in Miami, had rigged up the double-masted
Harpoon
and sailed out of the harbor with the aid of a crew paid for with Parsons' money. He was powerless to stop them. In his hotel room, he drew a magic circle on the floor and stepped into it. He performed “a full invocation to Bartzabel,” a ritual for invoking the spirit of Mars to help him in his plight. The spirit failed to materialize, or did it? “At the same time, as far as I can check,” he wrote to Crowley, “his [Hubbard's] ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast, which ripped off his sails and forced him back to port.” Was this yet another side effect of his magic? Alerted by the harbor master, Parsons was waiting for the errant pair when they limped back in.

In court the following week, Allied Enterprises was dissolved. The court settlement ordered Hubbard to give Parsons a promissory note for $2,900, and Parsons agreed not to press any further charges—partly, it seems, because Betty had threatened to press charges against him over their past relationship, which began when she was under the legal age of consent. The episode left Parsons shattered. He flew back west. One month later, Betty and Hubbard were married.

When Parsons arrived back in Pasadena, 1003 looked more overgrown and dilapidated than ever. The last of the OTO lodgers had moved out, but not before stripping the gold leaf from the library ceiling. The remaining members of Agape Lodge now met in Los Angeles. From the coach house where he now lived with Candy, Parsons wrote to Crowley and once more offered his formal resignation from the OTO. This time Crowley accepted it.

Parsons completed the sale of 1003 and watched as the new owners demolished it with tractors and wrecking ball. For all his talk of new aeons, of new ways of living, of a whole new morality, the demolition did not feel like a new beginning. The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets. Now it was gone forever. A few months later one of the former residents came to visit the ruins. A copy of
The Book of the Law
was found amidst the rubble. It seemed like a tombstone.

 

Parsons' pursuit of Hubbard had been closely followed by Hubbard's fellow science fiction writers. For L. Sprague de Camp, a Caltech graduate in aeronautical engineering and now one of the most popular science fiction and fantasy writers of the day, the events confirmed his already low opinion of Hubbard. In a letter to Isaac Asimov, he wrote:

 

The more complete story of Hubbard is that he is now in Fla. living on his yacht with a man-eating tigress named Betty-alias-Sarah, another of the same kind ... He will probably soon thereafter arrive in these parts with Betty-Sarah, broke, working the poor-wounded-veteran racket for all its worth, and looking for another easy mark. Don't say you haven't been warned. Bob [Robert Heinlein] thinks Ron went to pieces morally as a result of the war. I think that's fertilizer, that he always was that way, but when he wanted to conciliate or get something from somebody he could put on a good charm act. What the war did was to wear him down to where he no longer bothers with the act.

 

Yet Hubbard was not as washed-up as de Camp had thought. Indeed, Hubbard was about to begin the greatest work of his life. Succeeding exactly where Crowley had failed, he would found a worldwide religion.

For the May 1950 edition of
Astounding Science Fiction,
Hubbard wrote an article entitled “Dianetics—The Evolution of Science.” The magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, prefaced the story with a glowing testimonial that praised Dianetics as a truly “scientific method” of mental therapy. Hubbard described Dianetics as a form of psychotherapy that he had discovered through his “dabbles” in mysticism and through a lifetime of mingling with “the shamans of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men,” and, most notably, “the cults of Los Angeles.” Dianetics depicted the human brain as an “optimum computing machine” in which there are “aberrative circuits”—traumas from the past—introduced to it from the outside world. If these circuits could be swept away, the “optimum brain” could be revealed and the subject would become “clear.”

Astounding Science Fiction
didn't class Hubbard's essay as fiction, but its language was clearly tailored to the science fiction fan. Like the Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisements that also ran in the pulp's pages, Dianetics promised to transform the reader's ‘normal' brain into an “optimum” brain and thus help man “continue his process of evolution toward a higher organism.” Stutters could be eliminated, bad eyesight corrected, learning disabilities overcome, intelligence boosted. Even schizophrenia and criminal behavior could be cured. Although some of Hubbard's fellow science fiction authors might have disapproved of him, Dianetics became an immediate success with the fans. Forrest Ackerman, the heart and soul of the LASFS remembered, “Here in Los Angeles we felt we were going to have a brave new world. That everyone was going to be a ‘clear,' were going to take off all their glasses, there would be no more colds, one fella even had a finger missing from a hand and he felt like a chameleon that he was going to be able to grow a new finger.”

Within months Hubbard published a book, an expanded version of his essay, which became a national best-seller. It was easy to see why. Dianetics denied the complexities of psychiatry and instead proposed a much simpler model of the mind. Adherents needed no formal education and could begin practicing the techniques after only a few hours of training. Over the ensuing months, thousands converted to Hubbard's creed. The public were invited to come to the newly formed Dianetics Institute and undergo a ten-day “auditing” for only $600. During this period an “auditor” (the therapist) would encourage the patient to relive traumatic shocks (known as “engrams”) that they had received as children or even in the womb. Hubbard claimed these shocks were the cause of all mental aberrations in later life. When pinpointed, he explained, the shocks could be erased. The
Los Angeles Daily News
reported that “Hubbard has become in a few swift months, a personality of national celebrity, and the proprietor of the fastest growing movement in the US.” Within two years Hubbard had elaborated a religion around his book. Dianetics would become the central text of Scientology, which echoed the themes of the pulps in concerning itself not only with this life but with past lives spent on other planets.

It is hard to ignore certain similarities between Crowley's Thelema and Hubbard's Scientology. Both religions have as leaders charismatic men with logorrheic tendencies. Both preach that man is an immortal spiritual being, that his capabilities are unlimited, and that his spiritual salvation depends upon his attainment of a “brotherhood with the universe.” While Thelema was born of the Old World, however, Scientology was distinctly a product of the New. The OTO arose out of the Victorian fascination with mysticism, magic, and the secret societies of Europe. Scientology was a direct product of the twentieth century's childlike trust in scientific knowledge, the success of scientific fantasy, and the Californian desire for self-improvement. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two was in popularity. While Crowley struggled throughout his life to popularize the OTO, the Church of Scientology became hugely successful, and now claims over eight million members in some 3,000 churches spread across fifty-four countries. It is said to make more than $300 million a year, and Hubbard's numerous writings are central to its success. It is, in short, everything Crowley had wanted the OTO to be.

The story of L. Ron Hubbard's involvement with Parsons has proven controversial. After
The Sunday Times
(London) published an article in December 1969 revealing the Hubbard-Parsons connection, the Church of Scientology issued a statement asserting that Hubbard had actually been sent by the United States Navy to live at 1003. He was, it said, under orders to break up the “black magic” cult that resided there. In the process, he “rescued a girl” and “dispersed and destroyed” the group. There is no doubt that Hubbard's arrival at the house on Orange Grove signaled a turning point in the fortunes of both Parsons and the OTO, but whether he acted at the behest of a government agency or because of personal motives is a question best left for the reader to decide.

 

The summer of 1946 was a ghostly one. The United States Army exploded two atomic bombs off Bikini atoll in the Pacific, one above and one below the water, in order to see what impact they would have on ships. The Nuremberg trials of the captured Nazi leaders were drawing to a close; eleven men were sentenced to hang. From around the world came reports of peculiar sightings. A “ghost rocket” was seen above Denmark, “flying noiselessly at 1,000ft.” Three days later a “bluish ball of light” was spotted over Portugal, and the next day a rocketlike object was seen in the skies over Yugoslavia. Back home little could be seen in the skies. An eye-stinging layer of smoke and fumes cast a “mysterious pall” over Los Angeles, reducing visibility to just two blocks.

In October, thirty-two-year-old Jack Parsons moved out of Pasadena. The move was an expulsion from a rapidly fading dream world. Many of the grand estates of Orange Grove were falling to the wrecker's ball. Architectural expressions of outsize personalities were not in keeping with the new postwar austerity. Sprawling plots of land were subdivided and fenced in. Utilitarian conformity inundated grandiose Millionaire's Row. Garden apartments replaced the Busch Gardens; condominiums were built on the grounds of 1003; industry began to flood into the city; resort hotels became business hotels. Pasadena, once the jewel of the valley, was losing its luster. A glance up at the San Gabriel Mountains to the north revealed startling evidence of the change. Where once the mountains had stood imperiously clear against the blue sky, now they were hazed over with smog and growing increasingly indistinct. Indeed, the pollution was enfolding Pasadena into the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis, slowly erasing the city's sovereign and fanciful past.

In an attempt to recoup some of his losses from the Allied Enterprises debacle, Parsons got a job at North American Aviation in Inglewood, in west Los Angeles. The rocket boom triggered by the Second World War had seen the company embark upon the government-funded Navaho Missile Program. Parsons worked in the laboratory, presumably making rocket fuel once more, and he and Candy moved to nearby Manhattan Beach.

Candy's striking looks, particularly her shock of red hair, attracted constant attention, though it was not always complimentary. George Frey, a friend of Parsons from North American Aviation, remembered that one day Candy had returned home quite disturbed. She had been driving around in Parsons' old convertible Packard when she stopped at some traffic lights. Some children at the side of the road began to shout and scream, “Look at the witch! Look at the witch!” before she hurriedly drove off. Parsons found the incident amusing. He took to calling her his “witch” as a term of affection—he had conjured her up after all—and she had all the characteristics of the mysterious and seductive witch mentioned in Jack Williamson's story “Darker Than You Think.”