|
Sara Elizabeth Bruce Northrup Hollister (Betty)
Born: 8 April 1924 in Pasadena, California. Died: 19 December 1997 in Hadley, Massachusetts.
Sara "Betty" Northrup was initiated into the 0° and 1° degrees of the O.T.O. on 13 June 1941 and the 3° degree on 21 June 1943 through the Agape Lodge.
Sara Elizabeth Bruce Northrup Hollister was an occultist who played a major role in the creation of Dianetics, which evolved into the religious movement Scientology. Sara was the second wife of science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, who would become the leader of the Church of Scientology.
Sara Northrup was a major figure in the Pasadena branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), a secret society founded by the English occultist Aleister Crowley, where she was known as "Soror Cassap". She joined as a teenager. From 1941 to 1945 she had a turbulent relationship with her sister's husband Jack Parsons, the head of the Pasadena branch. Though a committed and popular member, she acquired a reputation for disruptiveness that prompted Crowley to denounce her as a "vampire." She began a relationship with L. Ron Hubbard, whom she met through the O.T.O., in 1945. She and Hubbard eloped, taking with them a substantial amount of Parsons' life savings and marrying bigamously a year later while Hubbard was still married to his first wife, Margaret Grubb.
Sara played a significant role in the development of Dianetics, Hubbard's "modern science of mental health", between 1948 and 1951. She was Hubbard's personal auditor and along with Hubbard, one of the seven members of the Dianetics Foundation's Board of Directors. However, their marriage was deeply troubled; Hubbard was responsible for a prolonged campaign of domestic violence against her and kidnapped both her and her infant daughter. Hubbard spread allegations that she was a Communist secret agent and repeatedly denounced her to the FBI. The FBI declined to take any action, characterizing Hubbard as a "mental case". The marriage broke up in 1951 and prompted lurid headlines in the Los Angeles newspapers. She subsequently married one of Hubbard's former employees, Miles Hollister, and moved to Hawaii and later Massachusetts, where she died in 1997.
Early life: Sara was one of five children born to Olga Nelson, the daughter of a Swedish immigrant to the United States. She was the granddaughter of Russian emigrant Malacon Kosadamanov (later Nelson) who emigrated to Sweden. Sara's mother first married Thomas Cowley, an Englishman working for the Standard Oil Company. The couple had three daughters. In 1923 the family moved to Pasadena, a destination said to have been chosen by Olga using a Oujia board. Although she later remembered her childhood with warmth, Sara's upbringing was marred by her sexually abusive father, who was imprisoned in 1928 for financial fraud. She was sexually active from an unusually young age and often claimed to have lost her virginity at the age of ten.
Relationship with Jack Parsons: In 1933, Sara's 22-year-old sister Helen met the 18-year-old Jack Parsons, a chemist who went on to be a noted expert in rocket propulsion. Jack Parsons was also an avid student and practitioner of the occult. Helen and Jack were engaged in July 1934 and married in April 1935. Parsons' interest in the occult led in 1939 to him and Helen joining the Pasadena branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.).
At age 15, Sara moved in with sister Helen and her husband Jack, while she finished high school. Parsons had subdivided the house, a rambling mansion next door to the estate of Adolphus Busch (which later became the first Busch Gardens), into 19 apartments which he populated with a mixture of artists, writers, scientists and occultists. Her parents not only knew about her unconventional living arrangements but supported Parsons' group financially.
Sara joined the O.T.O. in 1941, at Parsons' urging, and was given the title of Soror Cassap. She soon rose to the rank of a second degree member, of the O.T.O.
In June 1941, at the age of seventeen, she began a passionate affair with Parsons while her sister Helen was away on vacation. She made a striking impression on the other lodgers; George Pendle describes her as "feisty and untamed, proud and self-willed, she stood five foot nine, had a lithe body and blond hair, and was extremely candid." When Helen returned, she found Sara wearing Helen's own clothes and calling herself Parsons' "new wife." Such conduct was expressly permitted by the O.T.O., which followed Crowley's disdain of marriage as a "detestable institution" and accepted as commonplace the swapping of wives and partners between O.T.O. members.
Although both were committed O.T.O. members, Sara's usurpation of Helen's role led to conflict between the two sisters. The reactions of Parsons and Helen towards Sara were markedly different. Parsons told Helen to her face that he preferred Sara sexually: "This is a fact that I can do nothing about. I am better suited to her temperamentally—we get on well. Your character is superior. You are a greater person. I doubt that she would face what you have with me—or support me as well." Some years later, addressing himself as "You", Parsons told himself that his affair with Sara (whom he called Betty) marked a key step in his growth as a practitioner of magick: "Betty served to affect a transference from Helen at a critical period ... Your passion for Betty also gave you the magical force needed at the time, and the act of adultery tinged with incest, served as your magical confirmation in the law of Thelema."
Helen was far less sanguine, writing in her diary of "the sore spot I carried where my heart should be", and had furious—sometimes violent—rows with both Parsons and Sara. She began an affair with Wilfred Talbot Smith, Parsons' mentor in the O.T.O. and had a son in 1943 who bore Parsons' surname but who was almost certainly fathered by Smith. Sara also became pregnant but had an abortion on April 1, 1943, arranged by Parsons and carried out by Dr. Zachary Taylor Malaby, a prominent Pasadena doctor and Democratic politician.
Sara's hostility towards other members of the O.T.O. caused further tensions in the house, which Aleister Crowley heard about from communications from her housemates. He dubbed her "the alley-cat" after an unnamed mutual acquaintance told him that Parsons's attraction to her was like "a yellow pup bumming around with his snout glued to the rump of an alley-cat." Concluding that she was a vampire, which he defined as "an elemental or demon in the form of a woman" who sought to "lure the Candidate to his destruction," he warned that Sara was a grave danger to Parsons and to the "Great Work" which the O.T.O. was carrying out in California.
Similar concerns were expressed by other O.T.O. members. The O.T.O.'s US head, Karl Germer, labeled her "an ordeal sent by the gods". Her disruptive behavior appalled Fred Gwynn, a new O.T.O. member living in the commune [Agape Lodge] at 1003 South Orange Avenue: "Betty went to almost fantastical lengths to disrupt the meetings [of the O.T.O.] that Jack did get together. If she could not break it up by making social engagements with key personnel she, and her gang, would go out to a bar and keep calling in asking for certain people to come to the telephone."
Relationship with L. Ron Hubbard: In August 1945, Sara met L. Ron Hubbard for the first time. He had visited 1003 South Orange Avenue at the behest of Lou Goldstone, a well-known science fiction illustrator, while on leave from his service in the US Navy. Parsons took an immediate liking to Hubbard and invited him to stay in the house for the duration of his leave. Hubbard soon began an affair with Sara after beginning "affairs with one girl after another in the house." He was a striking figure who habitually wore dark glasses and carried a cane with a silver handle, the need for which he attributed to his wartime service: as Sara later put it, "He was not only a writer but he was the captain of a ship that had been downed in the Pacific and he was weeks on a raft and had been blinded by the sun and his back had been broken." She believed all of it, though none of his claims of wartime action or injuries were true.
Parsons was deeply dismayed but tried to put a brave face on the situation, informing Aleister Crowley:
Hubbard became Parsons' "magical partner" for a sex magic ritual involving that was intended to summon an incarnation of a goddess. Although they got on well as fellow occultists, tensions between the two men were apparent in more domestic settings. Hubbard and Sara made no secret of their relationship; another lodger at Parsons' house described how he saw Hubbard "living off Parsons' largesse and making out with his girlfriend right in front of him. Sometimes when the two of them were sitting at the table together, the hostility was almost tangible." Despite the tensions between them, Hubbard, Sara and Parsons agreed at the start of 1946 that they would go into business together, buying yachts on the East Coast and sailing them to California to sell at a profit. They set up a business partnership on 15 January 1946 under the name of "Allied Enterprises", with Parsons putting up $20,000 of capital, Hubbard adding $1,200 and Sara contributing nothing. Hubbard and Sara left for Florida towards the end of April, taking with him $10,000 drawn from the Allied Enterprises account to fund the purchase of the partnership's first yacht. Weeks passed without word from Hubbard. Louis Culling, another O.T.O. member, wrote to Karl Germer to explain the situation:
Germer informed Crowley, who wrote back to opine: "It seems to me on the information of our brethren in California that Parsons has got an illumination in which he has lost all his personal independence. From our brother's account he has given away both his girl and his money. Apparently it is the ordinary confidence trick."
Parsons initially attempted to obtain redress through magical means, carrying out a "Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram" to curse Hubbard and Sara. He credited it with causing the couple to abort an attempt to evade him:
Hubbard attempted to escape me by sailing at 5 P.M., and I performed a full evocation to Bartzabel within the circle at 8 P.M. At the same time, so far as I can check, his ship was struck by a sudden squall off the coast, which ripped off his sails and forced him back to port, where I took the boat in custody... Here I am in Miami pursuing the children of my folly; they cannot move without going to jail. However I am afraid that most of the money has already been dissipated.
Sara later recalled that the boat had been caught in a hurricane in the Panama Canal, damaging it too badly to be able to continue the voyage to California. Parsons subsequently resorted to more conventional means of obtaining redress and sued the couple on July 1 in the Circuit Court for Dade County. His lawsuit accused Hubbard and Sara of breaking the terms of their partnership, dissipating the assets and attempting to abscond. The case was settled out of court eleven days later, with Hubbard and Sara agreeing to refund some of Parsons' money while keeping a yacht, the Harpoon, for themselves. The boat was soon sold to ease the couple's shortage of cash. Sara was able to dissuade Parsons from pressing his case by threatening to expose their past relationship, which had begun when she was under the legal age of consent. Hubbard's relationship with Sara, while legal, had already caused alarm among those who knew him; Virginia Heinlein, the wife of the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, regarded Hubbard as "a very sad case of post-war breakdown" and Sara as his "latest Man-Eating Tigress".
Hubbard's financial troubles were reflected in his attempts to persuade the Veterans Administration to increase his pension award on the grounds of a variety of ailments which he said were preventing him finding a job. He persuaded Sara to pose as an old friend writing in support of his appeals; in one letter, she claimed untruthfully to have "known Lafayette Ronald Hubbard for many years" and described his supposed pre-war state of health. His health and emotional difficulties were reflected in another, much more private, document which has been dubbed "The Affirmations". It is thought to have been written around 1946–7 as part of an attempted program of self-hypnotism. His sexual difficulties with Sara, for which he was taking testosterone supplements, are a significant feature of the document. He wrote:
Around the same time, Hubbard proposed marriage to Sara. According to Sara's later recollections she repeatedly refused him but relented after he threatened to kill himself. She told him: "All right, I'll marry you, if that's going to save you." They were married in the middle of the night of 10 August 1946 at Chestertown, Maryland after awakening a minister and roping in his wife and housekeeper to serve as witnesses. It was not until much later that Sara discovered that Hubbard had never been divorced from his first wife, Margaret "Polly" Grubb; the marriage was bigamous. Ironically, the wedding took place only 30 miles from the town where Hubbard had married his first wife thirteen years previously. The wedding attracted criticism from L. Sprague de Camp, another science fiction colleague of Hubbard's, who suggested to the Heinleins that he supposed "Polly was tiresome about not giving him his divorce so he could marry six other gals who were all hot & moist over him. How many girls is a man entitled to in one lifetime, anyway? Maybe he should be reincarnated as a rabbit."
The couple moved repeatedly over the following year—first to Laguna Beach, California, then to Santa Catalina Island, California, New York City, Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania and ultimately to Hubbard's first wife's home at South Colby, Washington. Polly Hubbard had filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion and non-support, and was not even aware that Hubbard was living with Sara, let alone that he had married her. The arrival of Hubbard and Sara three weeks after the divorce was filed scandalized Hubbard's family, who deeply disapproved of his treatment of Polly. Sara had no idea of Hubbard's first marriage or why people were treating her so strangely until his son L. Ron Hubbard Jr. told her that his parents were still married. She attempted to flee on a ferry but Hubbard caught up with her and convinced her to stay, claiming that he was in the process of getting a divorce and that an attorney had told him that the marriage with Sara was legal. The couple moved to a rented trailer in North Hollywood in July 1947, where Hubbard spent much of his time writing stories for pulp magazines.
The relationship was not an easy one. According to Sara, Hubbard began beating her when they were in Florida in the summer of 1946. Her father had just died and her grief appeared to aggravate Hubbard, who was attempting to restart his pre-war career of writing pulp fiction. He was struggling with constant writer's block and leaned heavily on Sara to provide plot ideas and even to help write some of his stories. She later recalled: "I would often entertain him with plots so he could write. I loved to make plots. The Ole Doc Methuselah series was done that way." One night while they were living beside a frozen lake in Stroudsburg, Hubbard hit her across the face with his .45 pistol. She recalled that "I got up and left the house in the night and walked on the ice of the lake because I was terrified." Despite her shock and humiliation, she felt compelled to return to Hubbard. He was severely depressed and repeatedly threatened suicide, and Sara believed "he must be suffering or he wouldn't act that way".
After Hubbard was convicted of petty theft in San Luis Obispo in August 1948, the couple moved again to Savannah, Georgia. Hubbard told his friend Forrest J. Ackerman that he had acquired a Dictaphone machine which Sara was "beating out her wits on" transcribing not only fiction but his book on the "cause and cure of nervous tension". This eventually became the first draft of Hubbard's book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which marked the foundation of Dianetics and ultimately of Scientology. |
cicra 1951
Jack Parsons and Sara "Betty" Northrup
L. Ron Hubbard and Sara "Betty" Northrup June 1946
|
