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reserved.
Cult founder avoids press, most followers but court files
shed light on a tangled past
The mysterious Lafayette Ron
Hubbard isn't talking.
The founder of the Church of Scientology remained the supreme
authority in the cult even after his departure as leader was announced
in 1966, according to documents submitted to the recent
U. S.
conspiracy trial of nine top Scientologists.
Mr. Hubbard was among 23 people named as unindicted co-conspirators
in the case. But court officials say he never appeared at any of the
sessions of the U. S. District Court in Washington that convicted the
nine accused, including his own
wife, of a
part in a conspiracy to steal confidential government documents.
He has not accepted an invitation by The Globe and Mail to comment on
the case, and church spokesmen will not say or do not know where he
lives.
The court saw evidence in the defendants' own words that they aimed
to protect Mr. Hubbard personally and Scientology generally when they
planted spies in government and private offices to steal income tax data
and other information.
In many of the thousands of documents seized in 1977 raids on church
offices in Los Angeles and Washington, it was made clear that orders
from Mr. Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue, who was sentenced to five years
in prison, were to be given priority by all members of the international
movement.
So when Hugh Wilhere, a Scientology spokesman in Washington, offered
to provide the other side of the story presented by the court documents,
he was told: Get me Mr. Hubbard.
He said it wasn't possible.
Mr. Wilhere was told a Globe reporter would fly immediately to any
place Mr. Hubbard chose for a meeting at which he could make a statement
in defence of his convicted followers and his church.
I don't think it's going to happen. It's not his job, Mr. Wilhere
said.
Only the man who founded and set up the highly centralized
organization could make a definitive comment, I suggested, noting that
even the Pope has spoken to the press.
You're being unreasonable, Mr. Wilhere said unhappily. That was Dec.
4. There has been no further word on the offer, which was repeated this
week through the Toronto organization.
In every Scientology establishment, the Hubbard picture greets
recruits entering for their low-cost introductory mind-improvement
courses (advanced ones, according to glossy brochures, can
cost as much as $8,500 for 25
hours). But that benevolent-looking picture — and the words in the many
tapes and books the recruits will be induced to buy, with royalties
going to Mr. Hubbard — is the closest they are likely to get to the
69-year-old cult founder.
Even many top officials of the movement that he decided to convert
into a religion 25 years ago have been no closer, except for little
notes of commendation that sometimes come through channels in his name.
For some who have worked beside Mr. Hubbard, that's close enough.
Former Scientologist John McLean
of Sutton, Ont., served on board a ship on which Mr. Hubbard lived after
he was declared persona non grata in England, where Scientology's world
headquarters are situated.
The cult leader, who claims to be able to make wogs (ordinary people)
into clears and
operating thetans (described as happy
superhuman individuals in control of their emotions and everything and
anyone around them) was noted for foul-mouthed tirades, Mr. McLean has
said.
His description is confirmed, according to a Florida newspaper, by
Dell and Ernie Hartwell, former Scientologists who spent some time in
1978 trying to help Mr. Hubbard, a sound and film buff, make movies for
Scientology.
The Hartwells told the St. Petersburg Times that their daughter was
induced to leave high school to become one of Mr. Hubbard's
24-hour-a-day teenage special messengers (record his every word, catch
his cigaret ashes).
But the family became disenchanted by the leader's erratic behavior
and by the way he shouted curses at his crews.
He was filming a movie for his cult called The Unfathomable Man, with
script by Mr. Hubbard, direction by Mr. Hubbard, production by Mr.
Hubbard and ultimately, according to the Hartwells, total foul-up and
shelving by Mr. Hubbard.
The puffy-faced, pouty-lipped movie-maker — for five months always
costumed in cowboy hat, neck bandanna and baggy pants hanging under his
big stomach from a single suspender — drove his crews from
about 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. Mrs. Hartwell told the Times reporter: We'd take
a half-hour break at 1 a.m. but nobody was allowed to eat — except for
Ron, of course.
Autocratic and erratic, Mr. Hubbard always was accompanied by a
retinue of as many as 30 disciples, who would elbow slow-movers out of
the way when he came on the set at a plush California desert resort
taken over for the movie project, the Hartwells said.
In spite of his own never-changing costume, he had a fetish about
cleanliness. Before he paraded on the set, women checked for dirt with
white gloves on their hands, and any cleaning required was done with a
special soap.
The same obsession was shown when Mr. Hubbard ran his cult from a
sea-going ship. On at least one occasion the crew was compelled to
dismantle and clean out the ship's ventilation system with toothbrushes.
He had a different obsession in his filming, said Mrs. Hartwell, who
served as a makeup assistant. He screamed for so much fake blood (a
mixture of karo syrup and food coloring) that it was prepared in gallon
lots.
She recalled: We'd be shooting a scene and all of a sudden he'd yell,
'Stop! Make it more gory, make it more gory!' The stuff would be poured
on the actors, filming would resume, and before long Mr. Hubbard would
scream for more.
Once, Mrs. Hartwell said, so much of the sticky concoction was used
that costumes became stuck to the bodies of two of the actors and had to
be cut off with scissors.
While Mr. Hubbard would pour money into this and other movies that
were never completed, he would get capricious about overspending.
Once the man who is said to be a millionaire clamped a ban on all
spending at the ranch for 10 days. Unfortunately the supply of toilet
paper ran out during the ban and the resort's telephone books took a
beating, Mrs. Hartwell recalled.
Times reporter Bill Cornwell says that since publication of his story
quoting the Hartwells the Las Vegas couple have been the targets of a
smear campaign including criminal allegations against Mr. Hartwell, who
acted as an editor on the movie project.
In one
document written by Mr. Hubbard and submitted to the Washington
court in the conspiracy trial, followers were told always to attack
attackers: Start investigating them promptly for FELONIES (his
capitalization).
That was the kind of extravagant writing that resulted in an
Australian
inquiry into his cult reporting: Expert psychiatric evidence was to
the effect that Hubbard's writings are the product of a person of
unsound mind.
Assessments of that kind have prompted Mr. Hubbard and his
organization to mount a long-running battle against the mental health
establishment in general. Court documents in the Washington case showed
that this included the planting of spies in mental health association
offices and the establishing of various front groups to draw others into
the fight against psychiatrists and psychologists working in schools and
elsewhere.
In October of 1947, Mr. Hubbard was pleading for psychiatric
treatment from the U. S. Veterans Administration, according to a
letter
he wrote that became part of the documentation in the recent Washington
proceedings.
He had served as a U. S. Navy lieutenant from 1941 to February, 1946,
ending up in the military police in Korea. Published Scientology
mythology about him suggests that he was a hero and that he ended the
war crippled and blind and
that he twice had been declared dead. Through his discoveries, his
followers were told, he cured himself.
However, Scientology leaders know better. According to documents from
files in their U. S. headquarters that became part of the Washington
trial record, government medical records tell a different story: Mr.
Hubbard was hurt in 1942. He fell from a ship's ladder and injured his
back, right hip, left knee and right heel. He spent a few days in
hospital that year, in part for treatment of an eye infection. In 1943
he received both hospital and outpatient treatment for his eyes and for
ulcers and back problems. There were no reports about his being declared
dead or even being in any kind of serious condition.
He received a disability pension of $34.50 a month when he was
discharged. His condition, according to medical records, involved some
arthritis and bursitis, a spine freely flexible in all directions, and
short-sightedness corrected by eye glasses (which he still uses). There
were no signs of any chronic illness, a doctor reported.
If Mr. Hubbard did not have serious physical problems, he did have
emotional ones.
In the 1947 letter in the court records, he told government medical
authorities: This is a request for treatment . . . . After trying and
failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil life, I am
utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence.
My last physician informed me it might be very helpful if I were to
be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psychiatric
analyst.
He wrote that toward the end of his service life he had avoided any
mental examination, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had
every reason to suppose was seriously affected . . . .
I can't account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and
suicidal inclinations . . . . Would you please help me.
This was in the period when, Mr. Hubbard has often said later, he was
in the middle of research and writing on his theory of
Dianetics and was starting to
use it on others.
He parlayed a first pulp magazine article about Dianetics into a
best-selling book, which was published in 1950 and still is being pushed
by his followers, although publicly they softpedal some of the more
lurid passages about people having fetal memories of their mothers'
attempts at aborting them.
In the early 1950s, a period when many were lured into following the
Hubbard path to mental health, he was writing letters to the FBI (also
submitted to the Washington court) that prompted someone in the agency
to make a notation in the file: Appears mental.
Mr. Hubbard wrote of Communist plots against his organization and of
weird attacks on himself, including one in which he said he was stunned
in the middle of the night by an intruder who gave him electric shocks
and injected air into his heart with a needle.
During the period from his navy discharge in 1946 to the emergence of
his book in 1950, he also was in emotional turmoil over his married
life.
Two of his wives have divorced him — in both cases, according to
court records, after he had already gone through a form of re-marriage.
He married Sara Northrup in 1946 when he was discharged from the
navy. Margaret Grubb Hubbard, his bride of 1933, filed for divorce the
next year, saying he had abandoned her and his two children.
In 1950 he married his present wife, Mary Sue.
The following year, the second Mrs. Hubbard filed for divorce. Her
submission to the court claimed that Mr. Hubbard had experimented on her
by preventing her from sleeping for days at a time and that he had
physically abused her, in one case impairing her hearing by choking her
with his hands. She also said he falsely accused her of injecting him
with hypnotic solutions and of being in league with Communists and
psychiatrists out to destroy him.
The divorce court document also said Mrs. Hubbard's medical advisers
had recommended that her husband be admitted to a private sanitorium for
psychiatric observation and treatment for paranoid schizophrenia.
After her divorce was granted, she provided her former husband's cult
with a statement saying the things she had said were exaggerated and
false.
A St. Petersburg Times reporter found the original divorce document
on file in the Los Angeles County Superior Court basement after a
lengthy search. The microfilm record of the document was missing from
the court files.
There have been emotional problems concerning Mr. Hubbard's children,
too. One of them, who originally was named
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard Jr. but
changed his name to de Wolfe (his father claimed descent from a Normandy
de Loup family) once started to be publicly critical of Scientology. He
has dropped out of the limelight.
Another son, Quentin, was
found in a coma in a car on a back road near Las Vegas, a hose running
from the exhaust pipe into the car. He died several days later in
hospital without regaining consciousness.
There were no licence plates on the car and no identification on the
20-year-old Mr. Hubbard. His identification papers were found under a
rock nearby. His death was officially called a suicide and attributed to
carbon monoxide poisoning. There has been no explanation of the peculiar
circumstances.
Police say that when the victim was finally identified efforts were
made to reach his parents, Ron and Mary Sue Hubbard, but without
success. The couple would not even talk to investigators on the phone.
The police say Scientology spokesmen told them that the Hubbards
believed their son had been killed in an attempt to get his father to
come out in the open.
Mr. Hubbard has avoided any kind of appearance before persons other
than cult followers for a great many years.
In the early 1960s, he refused to appear before an exhaustive
Australian
inquiry into his teachings, a probe that he at first said was being
held at his organization's insistence. Later his request that the
Victoria state government pay his fare from England was rejected. That
prompted Scientologists to say they didn't get a fair hearing at the
probe, which produced a scathing report of their leader and their
practices.
Mr. Hubbard also refused to appear before a court in France that
convicted him and three other church leaders of obtaining money under
false pretences by claiming to be a charity when it was really a strong
well-run commercial enterprise.
He was sentenced in absentia in February, 1978, to four years in
prison and fined $7,000. Mr. Hubbard has had other brushes with the law.
A document in the Washington court case, FBI number 16288, is a
Philadelphia police report of December, 1958. U. S. marshals were trying
to serve a warrant on him to appear as a witness in connection with a
Dianetics organization that went bankrupt just after he left it.
Some of his followers at a lecture he was giving at the time were
arrested for fighting with the law officers in a futile attempt to
prevent their getting to Mr. Hubbard.
Except for rare instances in the early years of his movement, he has
been hiding behind his followers ever since.
He did not even grant an interview to Omar V. Garrison, the only
person to write an entire book saying Scientology is great and its
detractors are all wrong.
Before the book was published, information about Mr. Hubbard's phony
degrees and abysmal academic record (he got one degree from a degree
mill and one from himself, failed his first year at university and quit
part way through a second-year probation) was available for the reading
in the writings of other investigators.
Four full-length critical books, much of their material reconfirmed
by the Washington court documents, were published long before the
Garrison apologia.
Each became the object of multiple suits or threats of suits by the
Scientologists, resulting in limitation of the book's circulation.
Copies also often disappeared from public library shelves.
This is in spite of the Church of Scientology Creed written by Mr.
Hubbard.
It says in part: We of the Church believe: That all men have
inalienable rights to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely
their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of
others.
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