going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

period. “I was abandoned by my family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.”
Hubbard says he healed himself of his traumatic injuries, using techniques that would
become the foundation of Dianetics and Scientology. “I had no one to help me; what I
had to know I had to nd out,” he recalled. “And it’s quite a trick studying when you
cannot see.”
Doctors at Oak Knoll were never sure exactly what was wrong with him, except for a
recurrence of his ulcer. In records of Hubbard’s many physical examinations and X-rays,
the doctors make no note of scars or evidence of wounds, nor do his military records
show that he was ever injured during the war.
In the hospital, Hubbard says, he was also given a psychiatric examination. To his
alarm, the doctor wrote two pages of notes. “And I was watching this, you know,
saying, ‘Well, have I gone nuts, after all?’ ” He conspired to take a look at the records to
see what the doctor had written. “I got to the end and it said, ‘In short, this ocer has
no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever.’ ” (There is no psychiatric
evaluation contained in Hubbard’s medical records.)
POLLY AND THE TWO CHILDREN had spent the war waiting for Ron on their plot in Port
Orchard, but there was no joyous homecoming. “My wife left me while I was in a
hospital with ulcers,” Hubbard noted. “It was a terrible blow when she left me for I was
ill and without prospects.”
Soon after leaving the hospital, Hubbard towed a house trailer behind an old Packard
t o Southern California, where so many ambitious and rootless members of his
generation were seeking their destiny. There was a proliferation of exotic new religions
in America and many other countries, caused by the tumult of war and disruptions of
progress that older denominations weren’t prepared to solve. Southern California was
lled with migrants who weren’t tied to old creeds and were ready to experiment with
new ways of thinking. The region was swarming with Theosophists, Rosicrucians,
Zoroastrians, and Vedantists. Swamis, mystics, and gurus of many dierent faiths pulled
acolytes into their orbits.
The most brilliant member of this galaxy of occultists was John Whiteside Parsons,
known as Jack, a rocket scientist working at what would later become the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory at the California Technical Institute. (Parsons, who has a crater
on the Moon named after him, developed solid rocket fuel.) Darkly handsome and
brawny, later called by some scholars the “James Dean of the occult,” Parsons was a
science-ction fan and an outspoken advocate of free love. He acquired a three-story
Craftsman-style mansion, with a twelve-car garage, at 1003 South Orange Grove
Avenue in Pasadena—a sedate, palm-lined street known as Millionaires Row. The house
had once belonged to Arthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had
hosted former president Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Albert Einstein in its oval
dining room. The street had also been home to William Wrigley, of the chewing-gum
fortune, and the beer baron Adolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door.
She must have been appalled to watch as Parsons divided the historic home and the