Sara Northrup Hollister - Life After Hubbard

Life After Hubbard

After divorcing Hubbard, Sara married Miles Hollister and bought a house in Malibu, California. For his part, Hubbard sought to disavow Sara. In his October 1951 work The Dianetics Axioms, he explained his marital problems as being entirely the fault of Sara:

The money and glory inherent in Dianetics was entirely too much for those with whom I had the bad misfortune to associate myself ... including a woman who had represented herself as my wife and who had been cured of severe psychosis by Dianetics, but who, because of structural brain damage would evidently never be entirely sane. ... Fur coats, Lincoln cars and a young man without any concept of honor so far turned the head of the woman who had been associated with me that on discovery of her affairs, she and these others, hungry for money and power, sought to take over and control all of Dianetics.

Many years later, one of his followers, Virginia Downsborough, recalled that during the mid-1960s he "talked a lot about Sara Northrup and seemed to want to make sure that I knew he had never married her. I didn't know why it was so important to him; I'd never met Sara and I couldn't have cared less, but he wanted to persuade me that the marriage had never taken place. When he talked about his first wife, the picture he put out of himself was of this poor wounded fellow coming home from the war and being abandoned by his wife and family because he would be a drain on them." His desire to write Sara out of his life story was evident in a 1968 interview with the British broadcaster Granada Television, in which he denied that he had had a second wife in between his first, Margaret, and the present one, Mary Sue:

HUBBARD: "How many times have I been married? I've been married twice. And I'm very happily married just now. I have a lovely wife, and I have four children. My first wife is dead."

INTERVIEWER: "What happened to your second wife?"

HUBBARD: "I never had a second wife."

Granada's reporter commented: "What Hubbard said happens to be untrue. It's an unimportant detail but he's had three wives... What is important is that his followers were there as he lied, but no matter what the evidence they don't believe it." To this day, Church of Scientology biographies of Hubbard's life do not mention either of his first two wives.

Hubbard also rewrote the account of why he had been involved with Jack Parsons and the OTO in the first place. After the British Sunday Times newspaper published an exposé of Hubbard's membership of the OTO in October 1969, the newspaper printed a statement by the Church of Scientology that asserted:

Hubbard broke up black magic in America... L. Ron Hubbard was still an officer of the US Navy because he was well known as a writer and a philosopher and had friends amongst the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation. He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad. Hubbard’s mission was successful far beyond anyone’s expectations. The house was torn down. Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and destroyed and has never recovered.

By 1970, Sara and Hollister had moved to Maui, Hawaii. Sara's daughter Alexis, who was by now twenty-one years old, attempted to contact her father but was rebuffed in a handwritten statement in which Hubbard denied that he was her father: "Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948 . . . In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie. She turned up destitute and pregnant." He claimed that Sara had been a Nazi spy during the war and accused her and Hollister of using the divorce case to seize control of Dianetics: "They obtained considerable newspaper publicity, none of it true, and employed the highest priced divorce attorney in the US to sue me for divorce and get the foundation in Los Angeles in settlement. This proved a puzzle since where there is no legal marriage, there can't be any divorce."

Neither Sara nor Alexis made any further attempt to contact Hubbard. Sara broke her silence briefly in 1972 to write to Paulette Cooper, the author of The Scandal of Scientology. She told Cooper that Hubbard was a dangerous lunatic, and that although her own life had been transformed when she left him, she was still afraid both of him and of his followers whom she later described as looking "like Mormons, but with bad complexions."

In June 1986, following Hubbard's death, the Church of Scientology and Alexis agreed a financial settlement under which she was compelled not to write or speak on the subject of L. Ron Hubbard and her relationship to him. An attempt was made to have her sign an affidavit stating that she was in fact the daughter of L. Ron Hubbard's first son, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. Sara herself did not comment publicly on her former husband until she was interviewed in July 1986 by ex-Scientologist Bent Corydon several months after Hubbard's death, which had reduced her fear of retaliation. Excerpts from the interview were published in Corydon's 1987 book, L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?.