Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [61]
Hubbard could be cruel to his Messengers, and his ever-shifting moods caused even the toughest to occasionally burst into tears. "He was a roller coaster," said DeDe Reisdorf. "His expectations were always the max and you wanted to please him and get a 'well done' from him. But sometimes he would be in such a crappy mood, you wanted to run and hide in the closet"—which several of the Messengers did, according to her.
But the mission motivated the Commodore's Messengers just as it had their parents. "Obviously we knew that other kids didn't live this way, but we didn't really think about it one way or another," said Gale. "Yes, the work was hard. I didn't go to school. A GED was not considered necessary or even thought about. But I never considered that I would be doing anything else, as I had given my life to this endeavor." She and everyone she knew "felt like we were doing the most important thing there was, which was to help people become happier and to help mankind get out of the mess we were in as a human race," she said. "It was a pretty noble cause."
It was also the great teen adventure of a lifetime. On his good days, L. Ron Hubbard was "charming and funny," as DeDe said, as well as generous. "He was never inappropriate," said Gale, but he doted on the Messengers: sending them flowers on their birthdays and often buying them expensive gold and sapphire rings or earrings as Christmas presents. He considered himself their surrogate father—many felt he was closer to them than he was to his own four children by Mary Sue, who were also on the Apollo—and he also considered himself their tutor. As Reisdorf recalled, he was particularly fond of teaching them tactics for use on covert missions. "Once, in Curaçao, he decided to teach us how to 'lose tail,' as he called it. So he gave us drills to do, like having one or two Messengers follow a third, and then see if she could lose them in town." The girls spent the entire afternoon practicing escaping from one another, she said.
Mary Sue Hubbard, the mother of four teenagers of her own, tried to take responsibility for the girls—sometimes at the behest of their parents—but it wasn't easy. "Some of the Messengers were pretty wild," Reisdorf said. "Our logbook always had notes as to where to find people. Like ... 'If you're looking for Jill she is currently sleeping with Allen.'"
Eventually, Hubbard instituted a "no sex until marriage" rule (possibly at Mary Sue's insistence, DeDe thought) within the Sea Org. This toned things down a bit, though not much. The girls simply married their beaux. Hubbard did not oppose a teen marriage—indeed, he once informed his Messengers that anyone who got married would receive a promotion—but he insisted on approving the match. "He expected the guys we were dating to ask him for permission to marry us," said Reisdorf. Over the years at sea, there were numerous weddings on the ship, attended solely by the crew—even the Messengers' parents would not be allowed to attend, as the ship was always in a "secret" location. In 1974, one of Hubbard's favorite Messengers, Terry Gilham, was married to the Sea Org member Gerry Armstrong in a double wedding ceremony with friends and fellow shipmates Trudy Venter and Pat Broeker. Hubbard gave away the brides.
"It was a bizarre scene," said Jeff Hawkins, who spent the summer and early fall of 1975 aboard the Apollo, designing Scientology's new brochures. It was the first time Jeff had been admitted to Hubbard's rarefied circle, and he was both mystified by the goings-on around him and also determined not to let his perplexity show. What Hubbard said in meetings dealt largely with promotion—after his television-watching sojourn in Queens, Hubbard believed that Scientology needed to use more visual imagery to attract the younger generation. To accomplish this, he established a Photo Shoot Org to take pictures for Scientology