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

Switzerland containing more than $300 million. At one point, panicked that Switzerland
was going to make a change in its tax laws, Hubbard ordered his medical ocer, Kima
Douglas, to move those funds from Switzerland to Lichtenstein. She described stacks of
cash sitting in the bank vault, mostly hundred-dollar bills, four feet high and three to
four feet wide, one pile in Hubbard’s name, the other in the church’s. “Church’s was
bigger but his was big too,” she told Hubbard’s biographer Russell Miller. L. Ron
Hubbard, Jr., remembered shoeboxes full of money in his father’s closet. He later
testied that Hubbard habitually kept “great chunks of cash” within easy reach, “so that
if there was any problem he could just take off right out the window.”
“Making money, I think, to Hubbard was paramount,” Hana Eltringham later
speculated. “He wasn’t that interested in it for himself. He did have perks, he did have
his cars, his motorbikes, his books, his good food, and things like that, and eventually he
had his villas and he had his estates and so on, but the money that he wanted
predominantly was for power.”
For all his wealth, Hubbard spent much of his time in his cabin alone, auditing himself
on the E-Meter and developing his spiritual technology. He may have been grandiose
and delusional, but the endless stream of policy letters and training routines that poured
from his typewriter hour after hour, day after day, attests to his obsession with the
notion of creating a step-by-step pathway to universal salvation. If it was all a con, why
would he bother?
Hubbard and Mary Sue slept in separate staterooms. In the opinion of members of
their household sta and others, by the time they boarded ship, Hubbard had lost
interest in Mary Sue sexually. Yvonne Gillham had managed to get herself posted on
another ship, out of range of Hubbard’s longing and Mary Sue’s wrath. For the most
part, the Commodore left his female crew members alone. One exception was a tall,
slender woman from Oregon. She approached Hana Eltringham with a big smile on her
face and confessed that she was having an aair with Hubbard. Soon after that,
Hubbard busted the woman down to deckhand and assigned Eltringham to audit her.
The woman would weep through the session. Eltringham would dutifully pass along the
auditing files to Hubbard for review. “I could hear him chortling,” she recalled.
The situation was much less restrained belowdecks. The Sea Org members were young
and vigorous; sexual escapades were routine, and marriages quite uid. Hubbard
seemed to be oblivious, but Mary Sue was increasingly scandalized. When she learned
that a crew member, who was nineteen or twenty, had slept with a fteen-year-old girl
on the ship, she got a dagger out of her cabin and held it against his throat and told him
he had to be o the ship in two hours or else. In 1971, on New Year’s Eve, there was a
drunken orgy of historic proportions. “Maybe a hundred Sea Org members were having
sex everywhere from the topside boatdecks to the lowest holds of the ship,” one of the
participants recalled. Mary Sue had had enough. With two attractive teenage daughters
of her own on the ship, she started cracking down on premarital sex. Hubbard observed
that 1972 was a leap year, and said that any woman on the ship could propose to any
man, leading to a sudden rash of weddings. Hubbard had forbidden babies on board, but
so many women were getting pregnant that he began permitting the children to stay,