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

ever happened to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations
such as those of chess, for example, which a normal would do in half an hour, in ten or
fteen seconds.” Such claims presumed that there was already a sizable population of
Dianetic graduates with exceptional abilities, and Hubbard’s readers naturally wondered
where they were.
In August 1950, Hubbard presented the “World’s First Clear” at the Shrine Auditorium
in Los Angeles. Sonia Bianca, a very nervous physics student from Boston, was brought
to the stage. Hubbard claimed that through Dianetics, Bianca had attained “full and
perfect recall of every moment of her life.” The audience began peppering her with
questions, such as what she had had for breakfast eight years before, or what was on
this page of Hubbard’s book, or even elemental formulas in physics, her area of
specialty. She was incapable of responding when someone asked the color of Hubbard’s
necktie, when he briey had his back turned to her. It was a very public asco. Hubbard
would not announce another Clear for sixteen years. One of his disillusioned acolytes
later concluded that the concept of clearing was just a gimmick to dramatize the theory
of Dianetics. “The fact is that there were never any clears, as he had described them,”
Helen O’Brien, Hubbard’s top executive in the United States, wrote. “There were
randomly occurring remissions of psychosomatics.”
Meanwhile, his bigamous marriage to Sara was careening toward a spectacular
conclusion. A month after the Sonia Bianca debacle, Ron and Sara were living at the
Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. He was beating her regularly. “With or without an
argument, there’d be an upsurge of violence,” Sara recalled. “The veins in his forehead
would engorge” and he would strike her, “out of the blue.” One time he broke her
eardrum. And yet, she stayed with him, a hostage to his needs. “I felt so guilty about the
fact that he was so psychologically damaged,” Sara said. “I felt as though he had given
so much to our country and I couldn’t even bring him peace of mind. I believed
thoroughly that he was a man of great honor, had sacriced his well being to the
country.… It just never occurred to me he was a liar.” Ron nally explained his
dilemma: he didn’t want to be married—“I do not want to be an American husband for I
can buy my friends whenever I want them”—but divorce would hurt his reputation. The
solution: if Sara really loved him, she should kill herself.
Sara took little “Alexi,” as she called their daughter, and moved into the Los Angeles
Dianetics Research Foundation, in a former governor’s mansion near the University of
Southern California campus. Soon after that, Sara began an aair with another man,
Miles Hollister.
Hubbard furiously told his own lover, Barbara Klowden, that Sara and Miles were
plotting to have him committed to a mental institution. Indeed, Sara had consulted a
psychiatrist about Hubbard’s condition. She told him that Ron had said he would rather
kill her than let her leave him. The psychiatrist said that Hubbard probably needed to be
institutionalized, and he warned Sara that her life was in danger.
Nonetheless, Sara went directly to Ron and told him what the doctor had said. If he
got treatment, she said, she would stay with him; otherwise, she was going to leave. Ron
responded by threatening to kill their child. “He didn’t want her to be brought up by me