Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright Page A

which caused achronic case of conjunctivitis. He also complained that he was lame from a bone infection, which he theorized must have occurred by the abrupt change in climate when he was shipped to the East Coast. “My earning power, due to injuries, all service connected, has dropped to nothing,” he summed up. Sara Northrup added a handwritten note of support. “I have know[
sic
] Lafayette Ronald Hubbard for many years,” she claimed. “I see no chance of his condition improving to a point where he can regain his old standards. He is becoming steadily worse, his health impaired again by economic worries.”
    Parsons grew to believe that Hubbard and Sara had other plans for his money, and he flew to Miami to confront them. When he learned that they had just sailed away, he performed a “Banishing Ritual,” invokingBartzabel, a magical figure associated with Mars. According to Parsons, a sudden squall arose, ripping the sails off the ship that Hubbard was captaining, forcing him to limp back to port. Sara’s memory was that she and Ron were on their way to California, when they were caught in a hurricane in the Panama Canal. The ship was too damagedto continue the voyage. Parsons gained a judgmentagainst the couple, but declined to press criminal charges, possiblybecause his sexual relationship with Sara had begun while she was still below the age of consent, and she threatened to retaliate.Hubbard’s friends were alarmed, both about his business dealings with Parsons and his romance with Sara. “Keep him at arm’slength,”Robert Heinlein warned a mutual friend. His wife,Virginia, regarded Ron as “a very sad caseof post-war breakdown,” and Sara as Hubbard’s “latest Man-Eating Tigress.”
    Sara repeatedly refused Ron’s entreaties to marry him, but he threatened to kill himself unless she relented. She still saw him as a broken war hero whom she could mend. Finally, she said, “All right, I’ll marry you, if that’s going to save you.” They awakened a minister in Chestertown, Maryland, on August 10, 1946. The minister’s wife and housekeeper served as witnesses to the wedding. The news ricocheted among Hubbard’s science-fiction colleagues. “I suppose Polly wastiresome about not giving him his divorce so he could marry six other gals who were all hot & moist over him,” one of Hubbard’s writer friends,L. Sprague de Camp, wrote to the Heinleins. (In fact, Polly didn’t learnof the marriage till the following year, when she read about it in the newspapers.) “How many girls is a man entitled to in one lifetime, anyway?” de Camp fumed. “Maybe he should be reincarnated as a rabbit.”
    The Church ofScientology admits that Hubbard was involved with Parsons and the OTO, characterizing it, however, as a secret mission for naval intelligence. The church claims that the government had been worried about top American scientists—including some from Los Alamos, where the atom bomb was developed—who made a habit of staying with Parsons when they visited California. Hubbard’s mission was to penetrate and subvert the organization.
    “Mr. Hubbard accomplishedthe assignment,” the church maintains. “He engineered a business investment that tied up the money Parsons used to fund the group’s activities, thus making it unavailable to Parsons for his occult pursuits.” Hubbard, the church claims, “broke up black magic in America.”
    EVEN IF HUBBARD WAS a government spy, as the church claims, the available records show him at what must have been his lowest point in the years just after the war. His physical examination at the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles in September 1946 notes, “No worksince discharge. Lives on his savings.” (The VA eventually increased his disability to forty percent.) Sara noticed that he was having nightmares. That winter, they moved into a lighthouse on a frozen lake in the Poconos near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It was an unsettling time for Sara; they were