Free Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

‘In short, this officer 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 inPort Orchard, but there was no joyous homecoming. “My wife left mewhile 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 trailerbehind an old Packard toSouthern 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 filled 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 different faiths pulled acolytes into their orbits.
    The most brilliant member of this galaxy of occultists wasJohn Whiteside Parsons, known as Jack, a rocket scientist working at what would later become theJet 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-fiction fan and an outspoken advocate of free love. He acquired a three-storyCraftsman-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 belongedtoArthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had hosted former presidentTheodore Roosevelt,John Muir, andAlbert Einstein in its oval dining room. The street had also been home toWilliam Wrigley, of the chewing-gum fortune, and the beer baronAdolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door.
    She must have been appalled to watch as Parsons divided the historic home and the coach house behind it into nineteen apartments, then advertised for renters. He sought artists, anarchists, and musicians—the more Bohemian the better. “Must not believe in God,” the ad stated. Among those passingthrough the “Parsonage” were an aging actress from the silent movie era, an opera singer, several astrologers, an ex-convict, and the chief engineer for the development of the atomic bomb. A number of children from various alliances constantly raced through the house. Parsons threw parties that featured “women in diaphanous gowns,” as one visitor observed, who “would dance around a pot of fire, surrounded by coffins topped with candles.” Parsons turned the mansion into the headquarters of theAgapé Lodge, a branch of theOrdo Templi Orientis, a secret fraternal organization dedicated to witchcraft and sexual “magick,” based on the writings of the notorious British writer and provocateurAleister Crowley, whose glowering countenance was captured in a portraithanging in the stairwell.
    Despite the bizarre atmosphere that he cultivated, Parsons took his involvement in the OTO seriously, making brazen ethical claims for his movement—claims that would sound familiar whenScientology arose only a few years later. “The breakup of the homeand family, the confusion in problems of morals and behavior, the frustration of the individual need for love, self-expression and freedom, and the immanence of the total destruction of western civilization all indicate the need for a basic reexamination and alteration of individual and social values,” Parsons writes in a brief manifesto. “Mature investigation on the part of philosophers and social scientists have [
sic
] indicated the existence of only one force of