Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief Read Online Free PDF Page B

detector. “Strong emotional reactions do cause changes in muscle tension or micro-tremors of the fingers will also cause changes in the current flowing to the meter, so it’s not purely measuring the physiological changes associated with skin resistance like a real lie detector would. (And real lie detectors also look at other variables, such as pulse and respiration rates.)” (David Touretsky, personal correspondence.)

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    T he many discrepancies betweenHubbard’s legend and his life have overshadowed the fact that he genuinely was a fascinating man: an explorer, a best-selling author, and the founder of a worldwide religious movement. The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s biography has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard himself seemed to revolve on this same axis, constantly inflating his actual accomplishments in a manner that was rather easy for his critics to puncture. But to label him a pure fraud is to ignore the complex, charming, delusional, and visionary features of his character that made him so compelling to the many thousands who followed him and the millions who read his work. One would also have to ignore his life’s labor in creating the intricately detailed epistemology that has pulled so many into its net—including, most prominently, Hubbard himself.
    Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, a striking, happy child with gray eyes and wispy carrot-colored hair. His father,Harry Ross “Hub” Hubbard, was in the Navy when he met Ledora May Waterbury, who was studying to be a teacher in Omaha. They married in 1909. By the time their only child came along two years later, Hub was out of the service and working in the advertising department of the local Omaha newspaper. May returned to her hometown of Tilden for the birth.
    When Ron was two, the family moved to Helena, Montana, a gold town that was famous all over the West for its millionaires and its prostitutes. It was also the capital of the frontier state. Hub managed theFamily Theater, which, despite its name, shared a building downtown with two bordellos. Even as a young child, Ron loved to watch the vaudeville acts that passed through, but the enterprise shut its doors when a larger theater opened nearby.
    Ron’s maternal grandparents lived nearby.Lafayette Waterburywas a veterinarian and a well-regarded horseman who doted on his redheaded grandson. “I was riding broncsat 3½ years,” Hubbard later boasted. He supposedly began reading at the same precocious age, and according to the church he was “soon devouring shelves of classics, including much of Western philosophy, the pillars of English literature, and, of note, the essays ofSigmund Freud.”
    When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Hubbard’s father decided to re-enlist in the Navy. Ledora got a job with the State of Montana, and she and six-year-old Ron moved in with her parents, who had relocated to Helena. When the war ended, Hub decided to make a career in the Navy, and the Hubbard family was launched into the itinerant military life.
    Hubbard’s family was Methodist. He once remarked, “Many members of myfamily that I was raised with were devout Christians, and my grandfather was a devout atheist.” Ron took his own eccentric path. Throughout his youth, he was fascinated by shamans and magicians. As a boy in Montana, he says, he was made a blood brother to theBlackfoot Indians by an elderly medicine man namedOld Tom Madfeathers. Hubbard claims that Old Tom would put on displays of magic by leaping fifteen feet high from a seated position and perching on the top of his teepee. Hubbard observes, “I learned long agothat man has his standards for credulity, and when reality clashes with these, he feels challenged.”
    A signal moment in Hubbard’s narrative is the seven-thousand-mile voyage he took in 1923