Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [8]
Hubbard's destiny, he felt certain, lay in more exciting realms. Fascinated by the concept of "motorless flight," he'd earned a commercial glider pilot's license in 1931 and also learned how to fly a small stunt plane. That summer, he and a friend took off to "barnstorm" around the Midwest. It was a rather hapless adventure; the stunt plane, "which had a faculty for ground-looping at sixty miles an hour," Hubbard later said, by turns sank into mud, went off course, and nearly plowed into a fence. But it was a genuine adventure nonetheless. Hubbard returned to college that fall with a new self-coined nickname: L. Ron "Flash" Hubbard, "daredevil speed pilot and parachute artist."
The following summer, Hubbard chartered an aged four-mast schooner, intending to lead an expedition around the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure. He promoted the trip as a research and motion-picture voyage—he dubbed it the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Placing an ad in local college newspapers for "adventurous young men with wanderlust," he managed to recruit some fifty other students to go with him, at the cost of $250 per person. The trip was a bust: not only did the expedition fail to explore or film a single pirate haunt, but, plagued first by bad weather and then by financial difficulties, the men made it only as far as Martinique before the captain, who would later call the voyage "the worst trip I ever made," decided to turn back. Hubbard, however, maintained that the trip had been a great success, even telling his college newspaper that the New York Times had agreed to buy some of the group's photographs.*
The ability to spin a setback as a triumph was a quality that would define Hubbard throughout his life. He was an immensely charming young man whose stories, while sometimes dubious, were often, by virtue of his own salesmanship, utterly convincing. Garrulous, with self-deprecating humor and a ready wit, he attracted people like a magnet and made them believe in his dreams. What's more, he seemed to believe in them himself. A naval commander named Joseph Cheesman "Snake" Thompson had imparted to the youthful Hubbard a crucial bit of wisdom: "If it's not true for you, it's not true." Hubbard took that as a motto. "If there is anyone in the world calculated to believe what he wants to believe," he later said, "it is I."
By 1938, L. Ron Hubbard was twenty-seven years old, a tall, strapping young man with a head of thick, fiery red hair and one of those unforgettable faces: pale, long-nosed, a bit fleshy around the lips, and frequently flushed—all of which, as one acquaintance noted, gave him "the look of a reincarnated Pan who'd been a bit too long on the ambrosia." But he also had tremendous self-confidence, which had served him well through the hardest years of the Great Depression. "I seem to have a sort of personal awareness which only begins to come alive when I begin to believe in a destiny," he wrote to his wife, Polly, a flying enthusiast he'd met on a Maryland airfield in 1932 and married the following year.
Hubbard had dropped out of college in 1932, having spent two unimpressive years there. With neither a job nor a college degree, he tried his hand at freelance journalism but soon gave it up for mass-market fiction, action-packed stories that constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 1930s—a precursor, in many ways, to TV. Published in cheap, dime-store magazines known as "pulps," the narratives generally featured hearty, adventurous men who'd fly spy missions over occupied Germany, engage in battle on the high seas, or romance weak-kneed women held captive in enemy forts—a perfect format, in other words, for Hubbard to express his own lusty sensibilities.
Within a year of embarking on this career, he'd found success, largely due to his journeyman's approach. Tremendously