When Del met Elron

Last week, I posted a quote about the legendary acting teacher and performer Del Close, who is revered as one of the founders of modern improvisational comedy. (Close served as the “house metaphysician” for years on Saturday Night Live, and his students included John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Mike Myers. He only rarely appeared on camera himself, but you might recognize him from a very peculiar cameo in one scene in The Untouchables, in which he plays the alderman who tries to bribe Eliot Ness.) While reading about his life, I also came across the interesting claim that Close had met L. Ron Hubbard sometime in the early fifties. As Kim Howard Johnson notes in the biography The Funniest One in the Room, Close was a science fiction fan in his teens in Kansas, reading such pulps as Startling Stories and making plans to publish his own fanzine, and his attention was caught by a noteworthy development in the genre: “During the summer of their sophomore year, Del introduced [a friend] to Dianetics, the book by then-science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, and Del led them in experiments in prebirth awareness.” There was nothing particularly unusual about this—dianetics was unquestionably the story of the year among fans, and a majority of readers were disposed to approach it favorably. Most teenagers in the midwest had to be content with observing the movement from a distance, but fate intervened, as Close recalled years later:

I immediately fell madly in love with [local actress Aneta Corsaut]…I was utterly enthralled with this young lady. I used to go down to Wichita—well, that’s where the bus went, then you get a bus from Wichita to Hutchinson, which is about thirty-five miles further on. That’s where I met L. Ron Hubbard, was visiting Aneta.

Hubbard had moved to Wichita at the invitation of his benefactor Don Purcell, a local real estate investor and businessman who had rescued him after the sudden implosions of the dianetics foundations in Los Angeles and Elizabeth, New Jersey. Close documented his visit to Hubbard, which seems to have taken place sometime in second half of 1951, in an autobiographical story in the comic book Wasteland, which he wrote with John Ostrander in the late eighties. I’ve gotten my hands on a copy of the issue, and it’s quite something. It opens with a dramatization of one of Close’s dreams, in which he’s living on an island with a goat, a lion, and a “mother bear.” He’s reluctant to leave, protesting that he can’t breathe water, but the goat butts him off the edge of a cliff. The scene then cuts to the auditing session in Wichita, where Hubbard, identified as “Elron,” asks Close: “Strange dream. Were you delivered with forceps?” Hubbard proposes that they check with Close’s mother, but the teenager refuses to consider it. After offering his interpretation—“Well, I don’t ordinarily deal in dreams—leave that to the psychiatrists—but this is obviously a birth dream”—Hubbard invites Close to have a fencing match. As they cross sabers, Hubbard suggests that the bear, who hums rhythmically throughout the dream, is a memory of the mother’s heartbeat, while the pressure of the goat’s horns represents her ribs. He informs Close that this will be their last auditing session, saying that he’s having “some serious difficulties with the powers that be,” and gives the unwary fan a whack across the face. Before they part ways, Hubbard muses over turning dianetics into a religion, and he’s thrilled when Close asks him to autograph his novel Death’s Deputy: “I don’t have a copy of this myself! Let me buy it off ya!” Close leaves, thinking to himself: “I feel like the goat has kicked me out again.” And the story ends there.

There’s no way to know for sure, but the account strikes me as utterly convincing, with many small details that would never occur to anyone who was simply fabricating a story. Hubbard’s suggestion that they call Close’s mother recalls an incident in the book Dianetics, in which an anonymous patient—actually John W. Campbell himself—recounted a birth memory that was then checked directly with the source:

Objective reality did not matter but this patient had a mother near at hand and objective reality was established simply by returning her in therapy to his birth. They had not communicated about it in detail. The recording of her sequence compared word for word with his sequence, detail for detail, name for name.

Hubbard had fenced with Jack Parsons in Pasadena, including one memorable incident with the woman who became his second wife, as George Pendle recounts in Strange Angel: “Hubbard, regaining his composure after the initial ferocity of the attack, fought the formidable Betty back a few steps and stopped the assault by rapping her smartly across the nose with his foil.” And Hubbard’s identification of the humming bear with the mother’s heartbeat recalls a similar lecture that Campbell gave to Frederik Pohl in 1950, after asking if he ever had migraines:

And I said, “No, I’ve never had a migraine headache,” and [Campbell] said, “Most people do, and I know how they’re caused—they’re caused by the fetal memory. Because in the womb of the mother, there are these rhythmic sounds. There’s this slow one”—the food gurgling down her intestinal canal or something—“and a rapid one which is her heartbeat.” And he beat them out simultaneously on the desk and I got the damnedest headache I ever had in my life.

The comic is also filled with numerous touches that aren’t conclusive in themselves, but which ring very true, like the fact that Close asks Hubbard to sign a copy of Death’s Deputy. (It’s probably Hubbard’s best novel, but it’s fallen into obscurity, and it isn’t a title that would occur to most people.) Johnson’s biography of Close takes it as an accurate representation:

The comic book story agrees with the accounts Del would give to friends of his time with Hubbard. In his later years, Del would explain that Hubbard cured his asthma in 1951 at the Witchita Dianetics Foundation; however, Del also said that Hubbard taught him to smoke Kools. He claimed that Hubbard was always complaining about the AMA and the IRS, reiterating his desire to start a religion. His retellings of his experiences with Hubbard remained consistent, and there is little doubt he was being truthful.

If anything, those Kools might be the most convincing detail of all—they were Hubbard’s cigarette of choice from at least the early fifties until his death. Close’s account is particularly valuable because it’s one of the few outside glimpses we have of Hubbard during a crucial period in his career, when he was transitioning from dianetics into what would soon become the Church of Scientology. If Close can be trusted, the transformation into a religion was on the founder’s mind as early as 1951, which is a useful data point—its earliest prior appearance in the public record was a letter from Hubbard to Helen O’Brien, dated April 10, 1953, in which he wrote: “I await your reaction on the religion angle.” Which doesn’t mean that it was a coherent plan. Hubbard rarely seemed to know what he was doing from one week to the next, and for most of his improbable life, he was improvising.

The third thought

[Improv teacher Del Close said] to always go to your third thought. Sounds really simple, but when you’re onstage, your first thought is knee-jerk. Your second thought is usually okay, but not great. Del would make you stay in a scene until you found your third thought, which was a little above and beyond what most other teachers would suggest. Basically, he wanted your third thought for your character choice, your third thought for your premise or your scene, your third thought for your heightened move…Another lesson was to always play to the top of your intelligence. If you treat the audience like poets and geniuses, that’s what they will become.

—Adam McKay, in an interview with Mike Sacks in Poking a Dead Frog