One Legacy of L. Ron Hubbard

When it came to marriage and family life, the late L. Ron Hubbard did not practice what he preached.

According to its official teachings, the Church of Scientology "regards the family as the building block of any society and marriage as an essential component of a stable family life."

According to his unofficial biographers, Hubbard, who lived from 1911 to 1986, had at least seven children by three different wives, including one bigamous marriage.

His first son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., was born May 7, 1934, in Southern California to Hubbard's first wife, Margaret "Polly" Grubb. Their second child, Katherine May Hubbard, was born Jan. 15, 1936.

Hubbard Jr., who later changed his name to Ronald DeWolf, helped build his father's Scientology empire in the 1950s but later denounced his dad as a "fraud."

"Scientology is a power- and money- and intelligence-gathering game," he said in a 1983 interview. DeWolf died in 1991.

Hubbard's second wife, Sara Northrup Hubbard, gave birth to Hubbard's third child, Alexis Valerie Hubbard, on March 8, 1950.

Just three months later, Hubbard would unveil Dianetics, his "new science of the mind," in the May 1950 issue of the magazine "Astounding Science Fiction." His longer treatise, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health," would be published later that year and become a national craze, laying the groundwork for the tax-exempt Church of Scientology.

In divorce papers filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1951, Sara Hubbard said the founder of Scientology did not mention that he was already married--and had two children--when they exchanged their vows on Aug. 10, 1946.

Hubbard did not secure a divorce from his first wife until Dec. 24, 1947.

In her divorce papers, Sara Hubbard accused the self-help guru of "systematic torture, beatings, strangulations and scientific torture experiments." She also accused Hubbard of kidnapping Alexis, a story that made headlines in Los Angeles in 1951.

Hubbard married his third wife, Mary Sue Whipp, in 1952. She gave Hubbard four more children--Diana, Quentin, Suzette and Arthur--over the next six years.

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