HUBBARD NOW LIVED two lives: one on the farm in Port Orchard, surrounded by his parents and Polly and the kids; the other in New York, where he rented an apartment on the Upper West Side. The city rewarded him with the recognition he craved. He enjoyed frequent lunches at the Knickerbocker Hotel with his colleagues in the American Fiction Guild, where he could swap tales and schmooze with editors. He also became a member of the prestigious Explorers Club, which added credibility to his frequently told stories of adventure.
“In his late twenties, Hubbard was a tall, well-built man with bright red hair, a pale complexion, and a long-nosed face that gave him the look of a reincarnated Pan,” a fellow science-fiction writer, L. Sprague de Camp, later recalled. “He arranged in his New York apartment a curtained inclosure the size of a telephone booth, lit by a blue light bulb, in which he could work fast without distraction.”
The fact that Hubbard was a continent away from his wife offered him the opportunity to court other women, which he did so openly that he became an object of wonder among his writer colleagues. Ron blamed Polly for his philandering. “Because of her coldness physically, the falsity of her pretensions, I believed myself a near eunuch,” he wrote in a private memoir (which the church disputes) some years later. “When I found I was attractive to other women, I had many affairs. But my failure to please Polly made me always pay so much attention to my momentary mate that I derived small pleasure myself. This was an anxiety neurosis which cut down my natural powers.”
One of those momentary mates was named Helen. “I loved her and she me,” Hubbard recorded. “The affair would have lasted had not Polly found out.” Polly had discovered two letters to different women that Hubbard left in the mailbox when he was back in Port Orchard; she took the letters, read them, then vengefully switched the envelopes, and put them back in the mail. For a while, Ron and Polly didn’t speak.
They were apparently reconciled in 1940, when the two of them cruised to Alaska on their thirty-foot ketch, the Magician, which they called Maggie. They left their children with other family members for the several months they were gone. Hubbard called the trip the Alaskan Radio-Experimental Expedition, which entitled him to fly the Explorers Club flag. The stated goal was to rewrite the navigation guide of the Alaskan coast using new radio techniques; however, when the engine broke down in Ketchikan, he told a local newspaper that the purpose was “two-fold, one to win a bet and another to gather material for a novel of Alaskan salmon fishing.” Some of Hubbard’s friends, he related, had wagered that his boat was too small for such a journey, and he was determined to prove them wrong.
While he was stranded in Ketchikan, waiting for a new crankshaft, Hubbard spent several weeks regaling listeners of the local KGBU radio about his adventures, which included tracking down a German agent who had been planted in Alaska with orders to cut off communications in the case of war, and lassoing a brown bear on a fishing trip, which proceeded to crawl into the boat with him.
When the crankshaft finally arrived, Ron and Polly headed home, arriving a few days after Christmas, 1940, nearly six months after they set out. Little had been accomplished. “Throughout all this, however,” the church narrative goes, “Mr. Hubbard was continuing in his quest to answer the riddles of man.”
THE COMPETING NARRATIVES of Hubbard’s life arrive at a crucial point in the quarrel over his record in the US Navy during the Second World War and the injuries he allegedly received. He certainly longed for a military career, but he failed the entrance examination for the US Naval Academy and was further disqualified because of his poor eyesight. He lied—unnecessarily—about his age when he signed up for the US Marine Corps Reserve in 1930, backdating his birth by two years; this stratagem may have helped him get promoted over his contemporaries to first sergeant. His official record notes that he was “inactive, except for a period of active duty for training.” He requested to be discharged the following year because “I do not have the time to devote to the welfare of the Regiment.”
Months before Pearl Harbor, however, Hubbard was once again angling to get a commission in the Navy. He gathered a number of recommendations, including one from his congressman, Warren G. Magnuson, who wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt, praising “Captain” Hubbard, “a well-known writer” and “a respected explorer,” who has “marine masters papers for more types of vessels than any other man in the United States.… In writing organizations he is a key figure, making him politically potent nationally.” The congressman concluded: “An interesting trait is his distaste for personal publicity.” Senator Robert M. Ford of Washington signed his name to another letter of recommendation that Hubbard actually wrote for him: “This will introduce one of the most brilliant men I have ever known: Captain L. Ron Hubbard.”