Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [24]
Hubbard and Sara's marriage had grown increasingly strained after the publication of Dianetics, and they had been largely living apart. Both were having affairs, Sara with a handsome young member of the Los Angeles Foundation named Miles Hollister, and Hubbard with a twenty-year-old college student named Barbara Klowden, who'd been hired by the Los Angeles Foundation as a press agent. Klowden, who ultimately became a psychologist, believed that Hubbard suffered from manic depression with paranoiac tendencies. As she said, "Many manics are delightful, productive people with tremendous energy and self-confidence. He was like that in his manic stage—enormously creative, carried away by feelings of omnipotence and talking all the time of grandiose schemes."
At other points, Hubbard became extremely depressed, drinking heavily and sedating himself with drugs like phenobarbital. He had come to believe, as he told Klowden, that Sara had caused his most recent bout of writer's block, having hypnotized him in his sleep and "commanded" him not to write. And Sara wasn't the only one who was against him, he said. Officers of the Elizabeth Foundation had tried to "slip him a mickey" in a glass of milk; he claimed they had also attempted to "insert a fatal hypo[dermic needle] into his eye and heart to try and stop him from ever writing again."
During one of these episodes, Klowden was visiting Hubbard in Palm Springs when he suddenly announced that "something was brewing" in Los Angeles, and he needed to return home. A week later, he knocked on the door of her apartment, disheveled and pale, and announced that he'd discovered Sara and Miles Hollister in bed together. He was afraid they were plotting to have him committed.*
"Please don't ask me anything," Hubbard told her. "I'm in a very bad way."
The next evening, February 24, 1951, Hubbard took his one-year-old daughter, Alexis, from her crib at the Los Angeles Foundation and deposited her at a local nursing agency. A short while later, Richard De Mille, who was now working as Hubbard's personal assistant, arrived at Hubbard's apartment and took Sara by force into Hubbard's waiting Lincoln Continental.
Striking first, Hubbard had decided to declare his wife insane. De Mille sped the Lincoln out of Los Angeles toward San Bernardino as the couple argued venomously about their marriage. For an hour or so, Hubbard searched in vain for a psychiatrist who'd agree to commit his wife in the middle of the night; then he ordered De Mille to drive into the desert.
In Yuma, Arizona, Hubbard agreed to release Sara but had an aide take his infant daughter to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where her father joined her several days later. Then, together with De Mille and baby Alexis, Hubbard flew to Havana, Cuba, at that time a rum-soaked, anything-goes city where Americans were free to enter without a passport. There, he rented an apartment in a wealthy section of town and, putting Alexis into the care of a nanny, sat down to finish his next book, Science of Survival.
Sara meanwhile filed divorce proceedings against Hubbard, accusing him of kidnapping both her and their daughter and alleging physical and mental abuse. After a protracted battle, she finally regained custody of Alexis in June 1951—though not before agreeing to drop her divorce suit, in which she'd asked for a portion of the $1 million she said the Dianetic Research Foundations had earned. Instead, Sara agreed to let Hubbard divorce her and then signed a statement retracting all of her prior attacks on her husband, which she said had been "grossly exaggerated or entirely false." Contrary to what she may have said before, she now asserted that "L. Ron Hubbard was a fine and brilliant man." She added that Dianetics