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

unlucky voyage, which he termed a “glorious adventure.” Hisinfatuation with motion pictures first became evident on this trip, although no movies were actually made. Despite the defections, Hubbard demonstrated an impressive capacity to summon others to join him on what was clearly a shaky enterprise. Throughout his life he would enlist people—especially young people—in romantic, ill-conceived projects, often at sea, where he was out of reach of process servers. He was beginning to invent himself as acharismatic leader. The grandeur of his project was not yet evident, even to him, but in the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition he clearly defined himself as an explorer, sailor, filmmaker, and leader of men, even though he failed spectacularly in each of those categories. He had an incorrigible ability to float above the evidence and to extract from his experiences lessons thatothers would say were irrational and even bizarre. Habitually, and perhaps unconsciously,Hubbard would fill this gap—between reality and his interpretation of it—with mythology. This was the source of what some call his genius, and others call his insanity.
    WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-THREE , Hubbard married Margaret Louise Grubb, an aspiring aviator four years his senior, whom he called Polly. Amelia Earhart had just become the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic, inspiring many daring young women who wanted to follow her example. Although Polly never gained a pilot’s license, it wasn’t surprising that she would respond to Ron’s swashbuckling personality and his tales of far-flung adventures. They settled in a small town in Maryland, near her family farm. Ron was trying to make it as a professional magazine writer, but by that point—at the end of 1933—he had only half a dozen articles in print. Soon, Polly was pregnant, and Ron had to find a way to make a living quickly.
    Pulp fiction derives its name from the cheap paper stock used in printing the garish magazines—
Weird Tales, Black Mask, Argosy, Magic Carpet—
that became popular in Depression-era America. The pay for contributors was miserable—the standard rate was a penny a word. To fill the usual128 pages, each pulp magazine required 65,000 words, so that the yearly quota to fill the 150 pulp weeklies, biweeklies, and monthlies that crowded the newsstands in 1934 amounted to about 195,000,000 words. Many well-known writers began their careers by feeding this gigantic maw, includingDashiell Hammett,H. P. Lovecraft,Erle Stanley Gardner,Raymond Chandler,Ray Bradbury, andEdgar Rice Burroughs. The pulps nurtured genres that were perhaps not new but until then had never been so blatantly and abundantly expressed.
    Hubbard’s actual life experiences seemed wonderfully suited for such literature. His first pulp story, “The Green God,” published in
Thrilling Adventures
in 1934, is about a naval intelligence officer (possibly based on SnakeThompson) who is tortured and buried alive in China. “Maybe Because—!,” published in
Cowboy Stories
, was the first of Hubbard’s forty-seven westerns, which must have drawn upon his childhood in Montana. Soon, however, there were stories about submarines and zombies, tales set in Russia or Morocco. Plot was all that really mattered, and Hubbard’s amazing capacity for inventionreadily colored the canvas. Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, andHubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand wordsof fiction a month. He waswriting so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paperto save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher. Because the magazines didn’t want an author to appear more than once in the same issue, Hubbard adoptedpen names—Mr. Spectator, Capt. Humbert Reynolds, Rene Lafayette, Winchester Remington Colt, et cetera—accumulating about twenty aliases over the