FROM THE APOLLO, Hubbard sent a couple of delegations to locate a land base for Scientology—specifically, a town that the church could take over. One team arrived in the Florida retirement community of Clearwater—a resonant name for Scientologists—to look over a dowdy downtown hotel called the Fort Harrison, which had earned a place in popular history when Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics for “Satisfaction” beside the swimming pool in 1965. Hubbard purchased the Fort Harrison and a bank building across the street using a false front called the United Churches of Florida, which he calculated would not disturb the staid moral climate of the conservative community. When the mayor of Clearwater, Gabriel Cazares, raised questions about the extraordinary security that suddenly appeared around the church buildings, Guardian’s Office operatives tried to frame him in a staged hit-and-run accident and planted false marriage documents in Tijuana, Mexico, to make it appear that Cazares was a bigamist. Several months passed before the flabbergasted citizens discovered that Clearwater had become the Flag Land Base for the Church of Scientology. (Scientologists would simply call it Flag.)
Hubbard had been keeping a low profile in a condominium nearby, but in January 1976 his tailor leaked the news to a St. Petersburg Times reporter that the leader of Scientology was in town. As soon as Hubbard heard this, he grabbed twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, collected Kima Douglas, his medical officer, and her husband, Michael, and lit out in his Cadillac for Orlando. The next day, he announced that they were going to his old hideout in Queens. The Cadillac was too conspicuous, so he sent Michael out to buy a nondescript Chevy hatchback. The trip to New York took three days, with Hubbard smoking continuously in the backseat and crying, “There they are! They’re after us!” every time he saw a police car. When they finally arrived, Kima judged Queens too depressing, so they turned around and went to Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, agents from the Guardian’s Office raced to Southern California to look for remote properties where Hubbard could operate more discreetly. Soon, Hubbard and Mary Sue, along with her Tibetan terriers, Yama and Tashi, set up in their new quarters on three large properties in La Quinta, California, a desert town south of Palm Springs. Hubbard grew a goatee and let his hair hang down to his shoulders. “He looked like Wild Bill Hickok,” one Sea Org member recalled. He kept a hopped-up Plymouth and half a million dollars in cash ready for a quick getaway.
Left behind in Clearwater, and without his father hovering over him, Quentin became freer and more assertive. He befriended an older Scientologist from New Zealand, Grace Alpe, who arrived at Flag Base with terminal cancer. “She looked like a witch, with gray hair and a hooked nose, like she was in a haunted house,” said Karen de la Carriere, who was Alpe’s auditor. During auditing sessions Alpe would just rock back and forth, crying, “I’m going to die! I’m going to die!” Everyone kept a distance from the woman, except Quentin, who took over her case. He actually let her move into his room and sleep in his bed, while he slept on the floor. Then he made a catastrophic mistake.
Dennis Erlich, the chief “cramming officer” at Flag, who supervised the upper-level auditors, noted jarring disparities between Quentin’s upbeat reports on Alpe and her glaring lack of progress. Erlich called Quentin in for a meeting. “Quentin, or ‘Q’ as his friends called him, was 22 at the time,” Erlich later wrote. “He looked 15 and acted 5.” During the interview, Quentin continually zoomed his hand through the air and made airplane noises. He calmly told Erlich that he had falsely reported the results. “I think a lot of my father’s stuff doesn’t work,” he said. “So I false report whenever I need to. Personally, I think my father’s crazy.”
Not only was Quentin the founder’s son, he was also one of the highest-ranked auditors in the church, and yet he had committed an unpardonable offense. Erlich had no choice but to tell him that he would have to surrender all of his training certificates and start the entire Scientology series all over again—years of work. Quentin seemed completely nonchalant.
What happened after this is full of contradiction and mystery. Tracy Ekstrand, who was Quentin’s steward, set a cookie on his bedside table that evening. It was still there the next night. The bed had not been slept in. Erlich was expecting Quentin to show up to go over his new training program, but he didn’t appear that day or the next. Word went out that Quentin had “blown”—in other words, he had fled. He left a confused note, full of references to UFOs, saying that he was going to Area 51, the secret airbase north of Las Vegas, Nevada, where the CIA has developed spy planes; in popular culture, Area 51 was said to be where an alien spacecraft was stored. Quentin had only just learned to drive a car, in the parking garage of the condominium, where he accidentally ran into the wall with such force that the entire building registered the shock. He was scarcely qualified to drive all the way across the country by himself. Quentin had repeatedly requested a leave to take flying lessons, but Hubbard was convinced that Quentin couldn’t be trusted to fly a plane under any circumstances.