Fair Game Read online

What went on in the hours before the Granada Television interview casts further doubt over the authenticity of Hubbard’s claim that Scientology was a legitimate religion. For the first time, over 45 years after it was filmed, the documentary maker behind the Granada program The Shrinking World of L. Ron Hubbard has spoken out about the extraordinary story of what happened before the cameras started rolling. From the conversations he had beforehand, Charlie Nairn is convinced Hubbard did not believe in his own creation. ‘He did not believe a single word of it, there’s no doubt about it at all,’ Nairn told me.11

  The Scottish documentary maker had a deep fascination for people who invented religions. His mother, Lady Helen Nairn, the niece of Australia’s eighth Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce, had developed something of an existential crisis when Charlie was a teenager, just after her beloved sister had committed suicide. ‘I’d say she had or developed what has been called a God-shaped-hole inside of her,’ says Nairn. His mother dabbled in a number of versions of Christianity and spiritualism before fashioning a personal faith that filled her ‘God-shaped-hole’.

  Charlie Nairn felt Scientology would provide the perfect vehicle to further explore this interest. His 1967 documentary Scientology – A Faith for Sale examined the Scientologists’ need to believe in Hubbard. ‘Having looked at the needy,’ says Nairn, ‘the next stage for me was to go off and talk to the inventor – the filler of their God-shaped-holes.’12 Nairn got to work on his follow-up, The Shrinking World of L. Ron Hubbard.

  At the time, Hubbard was bouncing between Mediterranean ports aboard his ship the Royal Scotman. Nairn worked out through marine radio channels that Hubbard had dropped anchor in the Tunisian city of Bizerte. The World in Action crew hotfooted it to North Africa. When they arrived, Nairn headed straight for the docks. It was after midnight, and the filmmaker was alone. He looked up at the Scientology ship and saw the outline of an older man in a Captain’s hat smoking away. Nairn was sure it was Hubbard and decided to try his luck:

  I went up the gang-plank, up to the bridge. He was alone. I said, ‘Hello.’ I made my excuses, told him that I wasn’t a Scientologist like all those sleeping innocently below but that I was a young filmmaker fascinated by the process of inventing a religion. Immediately he seemed interested, intrigued – there was absolutely no whiff of a ‘what are you doing on my ship?’ response. I remember telling him about why I was interested in this – about my mother.13

  According to Nairn, Hubbard was undeterred by the provocative premise of his interest in him. He welcomed the conversation and the pair talked for over an hour. The filmmaker asked Hubbard why he invented Scientology. As around 200 Scientologists slept in their bunks on the Royal Scotman, he gave Nairn an answer he could never have uttered if his followers were awake: ‘He said it started out purely as a way to make money,’ says Nairn. ‘This did seem to me the most extraordinary and fascinating opening. There he was saying this – that the whole thing was just a ‘con’ – very simply – with 200, or whatever it was, Scientologists innocently asleep just below us.’14

  As the conversation developed, Hubbard told Nairn that making a buck was not the only motivating factor. ‘He did say that although the initial thing was money, he had also become fascinated by “catching” people, especially clever people, at luring them in,’ recalls Nairn. ‘I remember him saying it reminded him of fishing with his father. You cast out your line to fool a beautiful silvery fish – that was the whole fun of it – of tricking it and luring it in, deceiving it.’15

  Hubbard explained to Nairn that as a child, he and his father made fishing flies and lures together, experimenting with what would work, and what wouldn’t. According to Nairn, Hubbard said, ‘I never understood why a beautiful fish could be caught by a fake fly.’ Hubbard was admitting his life’s work was, like fly-fishing, all about camouflage and deception. Hubbard mused about how intelligent people got caught up in Scientology. ‘I remember him specifically talking about two medical doctors (who got involved in Scientology) as if they should have known better,’ says Nairn. ‘I remember a sense of triumph from him over this idea – as if he felt some of his victims were maybe brighter than he was – but that they were needy, gullible – that he understood the human animal and its “needs” – exploitable needs – backwards.’16

  But a sense of triumph was not all that Nairn got from Hubbard. ‘I also got a feeling of someone who didn’t actually seem to have much self-confidence, who was “boosted” by the respect and reverence that people he thought more intelligent than he was were prepared to pay him. And I’d say there was a funny mixture of triumph over his victims but then, once caught, a lack of respect for them – and now I wonder if that was what he ultimately couldn’t stand – and so all those later stories of his towering rages … Did he kind of “hate” his victims? I got that feeling pretty strongly.’17

  As their late-night conversation continued on the bridge of the Royal Scotman, Nairn put forward his idea of why intelligent people were so easily conned. ‘It’s because you are filling up the God-shaped-hole,’ Nairn told him. It must have been a confronting conversation for Hubbard. A young upstart filmmaker turns up unannounced and wants to ask provocative questions about how he invented a religion and how he was conning all those sleeping below the decks. Nairn says at no point did Hubbard argue with him, or shout at him, or ask him to leave. ‘What he absolutely didn’t say is, “No, that’s not what I’m doing, you haven’t understood.”’18

  Charlie Nairn felt Hubbard wanted to keep talking about the very topic you would least expect him to want to discuss with a documentary maker. ‘He settled down, in relief I’d say, finally to be able to talk to someone about inventing a religion and conning people – and I’d now say the trap he found himself almost intolerably stuck in,’ says Nairn.19

  A thought nagged away at the young filmmaker as Hubbard expanded on the theme. ‘I could well understand hopping into bed at night with one’s wife, rubbing one’s hands together and saying, “We made $10,000 today dear”,’ says Nairn, ‘but I couldn’t understand his own wife believing it all, believing in out-of-body experiences and previous lives. I couldn’t imagine lying in bed with someone who “believed” my con. And being surrounded all the time only by believers – all those people sleeping peacefully below us, all believing in him.’ Nairn asked Hubbard whether he felt trapped. Whether his situation made him feel utterly lonely? ‘That’s when he said – very, very slowly and with a smile that I can remember still – that was the first interesting question he had been asked in 20 years.’20

  Nairn thought he had hit the jackpot. Not only had he tracked down the elusive Hubbard in a remote port, but he had got him to talk openly about the topic Nairn was so desperate to make a film about. He asked Hubbard if he would be interviewed on camera. Hubbard agreed. Nairn went away and woke up his film crew. By the time they had returned it was around 3 am. But the mood, the entire scenario had shifted significantly. There were now around 30 Scientologists surrounding Hubbard. He could not repeat the kinds of things he had been so happy to talk about just hours earlier. ‘They were standing behind me, getting edgy if I pushed Hubbard,’ says Nairn. ‘I did try asking him “the first interesting question I’ve been asked in 20 years” again – but it didn’t work. He was back in front of the conned – so therefore back in his trap.’21

  Nairn could not replicate the frank and intimate conversation he had with Hubbard just hours earlier. The on-camera interview still provides extraordinary insights into the character of Hubbard. The Shrinking World of L. Ron Hubbard is still quoted and used by journalists and documentary makers across the world. But over 45 years later, Nairn sees what he missed, not what he captured. ‘I’ve always hated the results because it was all a million miles from our conversation about dreaming up a religion and God-shaped-holes of an hour earlier,’ says Nairn. ‘Of course, thinking afterwards, he couldn’t possibly have said any of this in front of his disciples, could he? Thinking about it now, how could Hubbard
have ever got away from the monster he created? What would have been in it for him to stand up and say he didn’t believe?’22

  WHEN AUSTRALIA WAS FIRST sold Scientology in the 1950s, it wasn’t quite the ‘spiritual marketplace’ of the United States, but it was a country in the process of opening up to the rest of the world. At the beginning of the decade, the population was just eight million – it would increase by another two million over the next ten years, due predominantly to immigration from war-torn Europe. In 1956, Australia held the Olympics for the first time, with Melbourne the host city. The same year saw the introduction of television, with American programs coming to dominate viewing habits. In August 1958, the ten most popular TV shows in Sydney included four sit-coms, five Westerns and Disneyland – all of them hailed from the US.23

  But the American influence wasn’t confined to Mickey Mouse and Lucille Ball. Music and movies from the US came to dominate popular culture. The American quest for perfection began to make headway into egalitarian Australia through the burgeoning self-help movement. Salesmen were sent off to Dale Carnegie courses. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking made its way onto many Australian bookshelves and Gayelord Hauser provided Woman’s Day magazine with beauty tips from his bestseller Look Younger, Live Longer.

  For those involved in the early days in Australia, Scientology was more about personal improvement, than salvation. Nightclub singer Doug Moon found it helped him with stage fright.24 Businessman Phillip Wearne got involved to make more money.25 Roger Boswarva wanted to become a better athlete.26 Raised at Bronte Beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Boswarva was a champion swimmer and surf lifesaver. With its brutal rips, Bronte was the perfect training ground for an open water swimmer.27 Boswarva beat all-comers from across Sydney at the New Year’s Day surf carnival five years in a row. ‘The joke among us,’ Boswarva recalls, ‘was that I was the only silly son-of-a-bitch who was sober or not hung over!’28

  Boswarva was a sucker for punishment. Not only did he do constant battle with one of Australia’s most treacherous rips, known as the ‘Bronte Express’, he put himself forward to be a human guinea pig for Forbes Carlile, a young Physiology lecturer at the University of Sydney. Carlile was a pioneer in applying sports science to swimming, experimenting with diet and hypnosis, and introducing training methods that would soon be mimicked across the world.

  Carlile became Australia’s swim coach in 1948 and produced a long line of Olympic gold medallists including Shane Gould, Gail Neall and Ian O’Brien. In the 1950s, he needed someone to experiment on. His Bronte neighbour Boswarva made the perfect lab rat. ‘He was the most enthusiastic swimmer,’ remembers Carlile, ‘and he was always chasing new ideas.’29 When an advertisement ran in a Sydney newspaper for a course in applied psychology, Boswarva couldn’t contain his curiosity. He went into Marcus Tooley’s Scientology Centre at Circular Quay and signed up for his first course. Boswarva soon found himself participating in Scientology’s ‘Confronting’ drill:

  The first night I did a straight hour of TR0 (Confronting). I did not notice much change in myself while doing the drill … but once I got outside of the course room and drove home, I found myself ‘feeling larger’ and more aware as I would perceive in a 360-degree ‘mental’ manner about me … Also, events about me in the traffic appeared to be as though I was moving slower than usual. I recall having to check my speedometer to verify what the hell was going on. Next day, in my swim training session, I found my attention more directly under my control … and apparently less liable to physical fatigue.

  On the second evening, we continued with more TR0 for an hour. On this occasion, I spooked out when the fellow in front turned into some sort of giant insect. At the time I had no idea what had happened or what the hell this was … but I knew there was something going on and that this stuff was producing change, which, if I could get control of it, might benefit me and my athletic performance.30

  According to Steven Hassan, author of Combatting Cult Mind Control, the Scientology TR drills lead to an ‘altered state of consciousness or trance induction, where all kinds of time distortions take place, things speed up, things slow down or people’s faces turn into animals and insects … the brain is having a distortion effect – it’s not functioning properly and our normal filtering mechanisms are being disoriented.’31

  While Boswarva was seeing humans turn into insects, in Melbourne another young man with a thirst for new ideas and risk taking was experimenting with Scientology. Roger Meadmore lived to reach for the sky. After completing his six months national service in the air force, Meadmore flew Tiger Moths, Cessna Seaplanes and hot-air balloons, eventually winning the world ballooning championship in France. Scientology fit easily with his philosophy of life. ‘When I went into it,’ he said, ‘it was more as an adventure.’32 Meadmore embarked on that adventure with his brother Clem, who would later become a famous sculptor in New York. They started listening to tapes of Hubbard, and before long Roger was mixing with Dianetics groups and helping to set up Australia’s first accredited Scientology franchise, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International (HASI), opposite Parliament House in Melbourne.

  Still in his early 20s, Meadmore had already run coffee lounges and a catering service. He would later establish the Pancakes chain of restaurants across Australia. Meadmore’s entrepreneurial skills were needed at Melbourne’s first Scientology office. They were short of money and needed recruits. ‘I signed up 68 people to do the Hubbard Professional Auditor course,’33 Meadmore recalls proudly. He was selling something he believed in. Meadmore says Scientology courses ‘helped me enormously, raising my IQ from 115 to 156’.34 His recruitment tactics were simple, entice them in with a free Personal Efficiency course and then sell them the whole box and dice.

  Race Mathews was one of those who read Roger Meadmore’s advertisement in the newspaper. Returning to Melbourne University to study speech pathology, he was drawn to the promise that the five-nights-a-week course would ‘improve your study habits’. Mathews would later become the Principal Private Secretary to Gough Whitlam when he was leader of the federal Opposition. In the 1980s, he served as a Minister in the Cain Labor government in Victoria. Back in the late 1950s, he just wanted to get through university and signed up for Meadmore’s classes. ‘There was probably a dozen of us who did the course,’ says Mathews. ‘At the end of the course, everyone sat the Minnesota test. It was used to assess your need for processing.’35

  According to Mathews, the idea of processing had been introduced to the students on the last night of the course and everyone was offered an estimate of how many hours they would need to become ‘clear’ or ‘Operating Thetans’. ‘The question I raised was wouldn’t it be more credible if it was “cash for clarity” as the form of payment,’ says Mathews. He felt he got nothing from the course, but remembers that ‘one man expressed the intention of mortgaging his house to pay for more courses’.36

  While not advertised as such, the ‘Free Personal Efficiency Course’ was in fact an introduction to Scientology course, and was described this way in internal Scientology documents.37 Some students felt they were a ‘bait and switch’ scam and the courses even came under scrutiny from intelligence agents. In July 1958, Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, conducted an interview with an unnamed graduate of the course. According to one ASIO report, a student said he and other recruits were told, ‘Scientology increased one’s efficiency potential 100 per cent and built up a resistance that could even withstand the effects of atom bomb radiation.’38

  The student told security agents he considered the Scientologists ‘to be an organisation which extracts money from the naïve in an organised mass psychological appeal system’.39 Even back in the early days of Scientology, courses were expensive. The Hubbard Professional Auditor course that Roger Meadmore was selling cost around eight weeks’ worth of the average male wage.40 Processing was sold in 25-hour bundles for £105,41 which was over five weeks’ worth
of average earnings.

  Scientology courses and auditing became a nice little earner for Hubbard. One recruit paid £3065 for Scientology services between 1957 and 1963,42 or around three years’ worth of average earnings. 10 per cent of the Melbourne Scientology office’s corrected gross income was sent straight overseas into the bank account of Hubbard Communications Office (World Wide) Ltd.43 Over five years, from 1 July 1958, over £25,000 was sent from Melbourne to Scientology’s head office.44

  By 1959, Hubbard was doing well enough out of Scientology to buy Saint Hill Manor, an expansive estate in the Sussex countryside. He soon moved his family and Scientology’s headquarters to England. The Melbourne operation had little autonomy; it was under the control of a foreign company registered in Victoria under the Companies Act.45 If Scientology was a religious movement, it certainly wasn’t operating like one. On 30 June 1963, Saint Hill claimed the Melbourne headquarters owed them another £17,231 for management expenses, service charges and service expenses.46 If that wasn’t enough, both Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue had the right to draw cheques from any of the Melbourne accounts.47

  The pressure to keep pumping money back to Saint Hill was felt keenly by new recruits. Max and Jenny Anderson received a letter from the Melbourne office’s Director of Accounts asking that they help ‘keep Scientology surviving’ by paying their course fees sooner, ‘because we have accumulated debts to the amount of £3000 to our own creditors in Melbourne’.48 If the claims in the letter are true, the Melbourne headquarters was borrowing money so they could pay Saint Hill more training fees. While Hubbard was living the life of the landed gentry in his English manor, Australian Scientologists were struggling to get by on sub-standard wages. At times the highest paid person at the Melbourne office was the cleaner. One staff member received £4 8s for a 40-hour week – just a fifth of the average weekly male earnings at that time.49