THE MAD SCIENTIST OF SCIENTOLOGY
“I have high hopes of smashing my name into history
so violently that it will take a legendary form.”
Ron Hubbard, 1938 letter to his literary agent, Forrest J. Ackerman
The most published author in history, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, is the godfather of Mission Impossible's Tom Cruise: L. Ron Hubbard. In his lifetime, HubbarD released 1,084 books, 29 of which were novels.
The Scientology founder also holds the record for the most popular self-published book: Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Bridge Publications, its current printer, states that the title has sold 83 million copies to date. The unfaithful estimate 20 million. The heretical Neilson BookScan reported 52,000 sold between 2001 and 2005.
In 1938, Macaulay Publishers paid Hubbard $2,500 for his first novel, Buckskin Brigades, a western based on explorers Lewis and Clark experience with the Blackfoot Indians. Establishing his platform, the college drop-out claimed to have become, at age 6, a blood brother to a medicine man of the tribe, though the Blackfoot never practiced the tradition. With his advance, Hubbard bought The Magician, a boat. On a trip to Asia as a teen he claimed to have trained with Buddhist lamas and the last in the line of Kublai Khan's wizards.
While sailing the seven seas, Hubbard continued to write novels, stopping in Hollywood to write scripts such as “The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok” (1938) and “The Spider Returns” (1941), though his name never appeared in the Columbia credits.
The cloud-parting of his literary career occurred at about the time he was working on Wild Bill. While under the influence of nitrous oxide during a dental extraction, he said he died for eight minutes, during which time “the basic principles of human existence” were revealed to him. Returning to life, he jotted them down, and called the work Excalibur, after Arthurian legend.
Hubbard phoned Arthur J. Burks, President of the American Fiction Guild, informing him he’d just finished ‘THE Book,” just as Edgar Allen Poe had declared about his Eureka and, later, Faulkner about his Flags in the Dust. Hubbard upped their ante: he described Excalibur as “Somewhat more important… than the Bible." Burke brushed him off since, coincidentally, he was busy working on his own apocalyptic revelation, Who Do You Think You Are?
Undiscouraged, Hubbard telegrammed New York publishers, telling them to meet him at Penn Station to review THE Book and make offers.
Nobody showed.
Pressing on, he shelved his skeleton key to human existence and wrote Typewriter in the Sky. This novel concerned a struggling musician who discovers he is a time-traveling pawn in his friend’s buccaneer pulp novel, the plot turns of which are preceded by the ding of a celestial typewriter.
The most published author in history now took a sabbatical to save his country. He joined the Navy but continued to work on his self-mythology during the War. He allegedly won 21 metals, though, according to his biographer, Russell Miller[1], military records only account for 4. He was rushed to a military hospital wounded, crippled, and blinded though documents only mention ulcers and conjunctivitis. And he was pronounced dead twice though no evidence of continued nitrous abuse ever surfaced.
Postwar, Hubbard wrote that he was “abandoned by family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple.”[2] In a petition to the Veterans Administration for a pension increase, he complained of “moroseness and suicidal inclinations.” But, out of “pride,” he admitted to refusing the psychiatric treatment his physician had recommended.
Strapped for cash in spite of a disability raise, the novelist was arrested for shoplifting. But soon, according to his disciples, he was deputized by the LAPD to study criminals. In his spare time, he cured neurotics from Hollywood to Georgia, he wrote more sci fi thrillers, and he dabbled in black magic.
His wizard sidekick was Jack Whitside Parsons, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder. Parsons ran the California chapter for the international sorcery temple of The Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, aka “the wickedest man in the world.” The scientist wrote the warlock that his new recruit was “in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel… a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through his life and saved him many times.”[3]
The Great Beast smelled a rat. He prophesied that Hubbard would make off with Parson’s mammon and his own Angel, a 21-year-old Empress by the name of Sara.
And, so, Hubbard did.
Sci-fi author, L. Sprague de Camp, explained the scam to his colleague, Isaac Asimov, writing that their colleague, Robert Heinlin, thought: “Ron went to pieces morally as a result of the war. I think that’s fertilizer, that he was always that way.” De Camp, Asimov, and Hubbard were all fraternal brothers in the famous literary Trap Door Spider Club.
Hubbard’s caper might have succeeded had Parsons not magically conjured a typhoon to intercept his yacht. The pirate and Sara, his “man-eating tigress” angel, as de Camp called her, were forced to shore and into the custody of the Florida Coast Guard. Soon Parsons, nearly bankrupt, was blown up in a laboratory explosion.
Hubbard himself survived the magical adventure with a slap on the wrist and a new lease on life. “I became used to being told it was all impossible, that there was no way, no hope. Yet I came to see again and walk again, and I built an entirely new life,” he wrote in My Philosophy.
At this point he might have at last penned THE Ms Impossible novel which would have made Frey’s Million Little Pieces and LeRoys Sarah memoirs seem like child’s play. He’d been crippled, he’d been blinded, he’d died three times. He’d studied with Kublai Khan’s sorcerer, he was a Blackfoot medicine man blood brother, and he had nearly fathered a “moonchild” Rosemary’s baby during “Babalon Working” sessions with his Empress, Sara, whom Crowley called a “vampire.”
But, instead of writing such a nonfiction novel synergizing all popular genres – Romance, Mystery, Horror, Fantasy, Action-Adventure, Sci-Fi, and Vic Lit – he set to work on Dianetics. Having built an entirely new life for himself, he wished to share his existential secrets with other lost souls.
Hubbard claimed to have completed his 400-page Modern Science of Mental Health in three weeks[4] in a rundown trailer (like Stephen King’s for Carrie) on a long scroll (like Kerouac’s for On the Road). With customary modesty, he called it "a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel."
Neither the American Medical Association Journal nor the American Journal of Psychiatry agreed. Both summarily rejected the Dianetics paper.
When Hubbard submitted the full ms to a New York publisher, he told his agent, Forrest J. Ackerman, that the reader threw himself out of a skyscraper window. He went on to warn Ackerman that "whoever read it either went insane or committed suicide.”[5]
In order to avoid further publisher skydiving, Hubbard formed his own pub company, Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. In spring of 1950, the HDRF released signed, gold-bound copies of his magnum opus, bargain priced at $1,500 apiece ($29,000 now). This premiere special addition warned readers that "four of the first fifteen people who read it went insane.” So, buyers were required to issue a sworn statement not to lend the book out.
Despite generally poor reviews, Dianetics became a blockbuster. Hubbard’s ten book sci-fi novel series, Mission Earth – which involves invading ETs pitted against lesbians, nymphomaniacs, and drug dealers -- rode its coattails to become a bestseller, too.
The visionary author, according to his followers, dropped his “meat body” in 1986 to continue with his writing and research in other galaxies. Leaving an unprecedented literary legacy, Hubbard not only created a blockbuster, but became the messiah protagonist of his own work. In 1948, while writing Dianetics, history’s most ambitious Ms. Impossible author told a writers’ convention: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.”
[1] Russell Miller, Bare-faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988)
[2] "My Philosophy," Church of Scientology International, 1965
[3] John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley (MacDonald and Co., 1971)
[4] On other occasions, he said six weeks. Sara, married to Hubbard in 1946 and divorced in 1951, told biographer, Bent Corydon, that it took 18 months.
Bent Corydon, L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman? (Barricade Books, 1996)
[5] “Secret Lives: L. Ron Hubbard,” Channel 4 Television, November 19, 1997
Ackerman, a sci-fi writer himself who also did monster movie cameos (his last for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”) called himself an “illiterary agent.”
The author is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and has been a finalist for the Faulkner Award, Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, America’s Best, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Helicon Nine, and Heekin Graywolf Fellowship. His current short fiction appears in The Evergreen Review, Cortland Review, The Morning Newes, Scholars & Rogues, and Inkwell.
