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Foundation had its headquarters. Meantime, the young couple that Hubbard had hired to
abduct Alexis from the nursing center drove the infant all the way across the country to
deliver her to Hubbard. It was the middle of March and snowing in New Jersey, so
Hubbard decided to move on to Florida, where he intended to write his next book. De
Mille came along with the baby. After a few days in Tampa, Hubbard still felt edgy and
announced that the three of them were ying to Cuba. “He believed that as long as he
had the child he could control the situation,” de Mille told one of Hubbard’s biographers.
For six weeks, Sara had searched for Alexis in Southern California, enlisting local
police, sheris, and the FBI, but the authorities regarded the abduction as a domestic
dispute. Finally, she led a writ of habeas corpus demanding Alexis’s return, setting o
a press uproar. On April 23, 1951, Sara added to the sensation by nally ling for
divorce in Los Angeles County, revealing that Hubbard was already married when they
wed. She accused Hubbard of subjecting her to “systematic torture,” including sleep
deprivation, beatings, strangulations, and “scientic torture experiments.” She said that
she had consulted medical professionals, who concluded that Hubbard was “hopelessly
insane, and crazy.”
Soon afterward, Sara received a surprising letter of support from Polly:
If I can help in any way, I’d like to—You must get Alexis in your custody—Ron is not normal. I had hoped that you
could straighten him out. Your charges probably sound fantastic to the average person—but I’ve been through it—the
beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits you charge—twelve years of it.… Please do believe I do so want to
help you get Alexis.
Meantime, in Havana, Hubbard hired a couple of women to take care of the baby.
They kept her in a crib with wire over the top. To de Mille, it seemed that Alexis was
being held like a monkey in a cage.
Cuba was run by mobsters, who had turned it into a hedonistic paradise, but Hubbard
took little advantage of the nightlife; he locked himself in a hotel room, rented an old
typewriter with Spanish-language keys, and began to write. According to de Mille,
Hubbard wrote all night with a bottle of rum at hand, which was empty in the morning.
The book Hubbard was pounding out in Havana was Science of Survival. He introduced
his readers to the Tone Scale, which had evolved since he sketched it out in his letter to
Robert Heinlein two years before. The scale classies emotional states, starting at zero,
Body Death. The lower tones are characterized by psychosis, where hatred and anger
give way to perversion, artful lying, cowardice, withdrawal, and apathy. “People below
the 2.0 level, no matter their avowed intention, will bring death or injury to persons,
things and organizations around them if in the anger bracket, or death to themselves if
in the apathy bracket,” Hubbard writes. “Anyone below 2.0 level is a potential suicide.”
Their bodies stink, as does their breath. At 2.5, there is a break point between the
normal and the neurotic. This stage is characterized by boredom, vagueness,
indierence, and pointless conversation. At level 3.0 one enters a stage that Hubbard
characterizes as “very high normal,” where one is resistant to infections, tolerant, and
reasonable; however, he is also insincere, careless, and untrustworthy.