Richard de Mille - Writing Career

Writing Career

He served with the United States Army Air Corps from 1943 to 1946. That year, he became a writer and director at KTLA, remaining in that position through 1950. Around this time he became an early convert to the movement that was to become Scientology leaving KTLA to become an editorial/personal assistant to founder L. Ron Hubbard. De Mille used the nom de plume "D. Folgere" (an Anglo-Saxon phrase meaning "follower") when editing and/or ghost-writing during that time, despite Hubbard's protests that it would appear "Dick de Mille wasn't a true believer". Still, he remained with Hubbard through 1953, when the two men finally parted company due to "mutual dislike". He then became a freelance writer and editor. In 1955, he completed his B.A. degree at Pepperdine University and married Margaret Belgrano. He went on to get a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1961. He would remain with that institution as a research psychologist until 1962, when he became a lecturer in psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1965, he left that position, becaming editorial director of the Brooks Foundation the following year. He stayed there until 1967, becoming a research psychologist at the General Research Corp. in 1968, where he remained through 1970.

De Mille wrote Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory (publ. 1976), a book describing the detective work through which he alleged that controversial author Carlos Castaneda was a charlatan and plagiarist. He edited a second book on the same subject, The Don Juan Papers (publ. 1980), when he found that his exposé did not lead Casteneda's most ardent followers to fall away. Nor did he expect them too. This book contains documents representing views of Castaneda across the spectrum. He also wrote a biography of his birth mother, screenwriter Lorna Moon entitled My Secret Mother: Lorna Moon. Fellow writer Carol Easton (author of No Intermission: The Life of Agnes de Mille), had this to say about him and his life: "None of Richard de Mille's extraordinary relatives, not even the legendary Cecil B. de Mille himself, could have invented this riveting true story of celebrity, passion, betrayal, and tragedy".