When Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard tried for the 2nd time to become a bigamist

With the publication of his epic history of Scientology, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright uncovered a lot of new ground that left many of us speechless.

And maybe the craziest was a paragraph that has largely gone unmentioned since then:

At the end of April 1949, Hubbard sent a note to Heinlein that he was moving to Washington, DC, for an indefinite stay. There was no word about Sara. Three weeks later, the thirty-eight-year-old Hubbard applied for a license in Washington to marry twenty-six-year-old Ann Jensen. The application was canceled the next day at the request of the bride. Perhaps she had learned that Hubbard was already married to his second wife and had previously committed bigamy. In any case, Ann Jensen’s name disappears from Hubbard’s life story.

Finally, a decade later, we have more information about who Ann Jensen was, and we’ve talked to a family member to confirm this wild story.

But first, let’s review Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s amazing history with women, shall we?

Hubbard met his first wife, Louise ‘Polly’ Grubb, while they were both flying gliders at George Washington University in the early 1930s. Polly was not only a pilot herself, she was four years Ron’s senior.

They were married in 1933 and had two children, Ron Jr. (1934, whom they called “Nibs”) and Katherine (1936).

As Russell Miller tells us in his essential biography of Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah, Polly was not happy with her husband’s adventures once the two had settled into a home in Bremerton, Washington with Ron’s parents. At one point, she found two letters that Ron had written to two different girlfriends. She opened the envelopes, swapped the letters, and then mailed them.

After the war, Hubbard spent time in a hospital (for hemorrhoids and pinkeye, not war wounds) and then traveled to Pasadena to look up a friend of a friend, the rocket scientist John Parsons, known as Jack.

Hubbard promptly took away Jack’s girlfriend, Sara Northrup, and in 1946 the two of them were married — a full year before his divorce with Polly was final.

That Hubbard was a bigamist is one of the most well-known features of his biography, and something that Scientology itself never talks about. (Peruse the official Scientology website all you want, you won’t find a word about any of Hubbard’s three wives or seven children.)

Sara bore Hubbard a child in 1950, their daughter Alexis, who arrived just weeks before the birth of his book Dianetics, which made him more famous than he was as a pulp fiction writer. (Alexis today never speaks about Scientology.)

But then, 1951 was a disaster as Hubbard and Sara went through a nasty split that was played out in local newspapers.

He was soon seeing Mary Sue Whipp, who would become his third wife in 1952, and their marriage produced four more children — Diana, Quentin, Suzette, and Arthur, three of whom are still alive today.

But what was Hubbard up to in 1949?

By then he was married to Sara, his second wife, and his divorce from Polly was final. They had been moving around the country while Ron pecked away at his manuscript for what would become Dianetics.

In April 1949, Miller tells us, Ron and Sara moved to Bay Head, New Jersey, where Ron’s Astounding editor John Campbell had found them a house rental by the sea. Campbell was hoping the stability would enable Ron to get his book finished.

But that same month, Lawrence Wright and his researcher Lauren Wolf found, Ron wrote to his old friend Robert Heinlein and said he was moving “indefinitely” to Washington DC.

How was he doing both? Living with Sara on the New Jersey shore and finishing up Dianetics, while also living in DC? (Lauren thinks the move to Bay Head might have happened a little later, in June.)

We don’t know the answers to those questions, but we only know what the documentary record shows, as found by Lauren Wolf.

On May 18, 1949, Hubbard, 38, took out a marriage license as he intended to marry a 26-year-old woman named Ann Jensen.

The next day, May 19, there’s a notation that the license was “cancelled at the request of Bride.”

But who was Ann Jensen, why did Ron think he could marry her while he was already married to Sara, and why did she think twice about it?

Lauren tells us that the only thing she could find about Ann Jensen was that she had, at some point, worked for the US State Department. But otherwise the trail went cold.

Fortunately for us, our helper who dives into newspaper archives and other databases hit paydirt once again, and we were able to piece together more about this fascinating woman.

Ann Marie Jensen had spent World War 2 as a cryptographer, encoding and decoding highly sensitive war dispatches at US embassies around Europe.

Her sister, JoAnn Jurries, tells us about hearing her older sister tell tales about sitting in the belly of a warplane as it shuttled her from Scandinavia to London, hoping it wasn’t shot down.

“She lived an interesting life,” JoAnn says.

After the war, she and Ron met, but JoAnn doesn’t remember how that happened.

“We all heard the story that he proposed to her. And it was announced in the paper,” she says.

Announced in the newspaper?

Wow.

We also don’t know why Ann got cold feet. Could it have been that she realized that Ron was already married?

“Could be. I don’t know,” JoAnn told us.

As Lawrence Wright pointed out, Ann Jensen then disappeared from Ron Hubbard’s life. But her own life was only beginning.

After her experience as a cryptographer, Ann turned to writing fiction, and became a well known and successful writer of children’s tales, selling hundreds of stories to Highlights for Children.

Choosing the right genre in which to write is often a beginning author’s biggest hurdle.

For a woman who was once a cryptographer in Europe for the U.S. Department of State, the choice would seem logical. Espionage and murder mysteries, of course.

But Ann Devendorf opted for children’s stories.

…An unassuming, soft-spoken woman who occasionally puffs quickly on a cigarette, Devendorf dislikes discussing her experiences in Finland as a cryptographer after the Russians took the country in 1945. “It was a bad time,” is all she will say.

Her eyes light up, however, when she recalls her assignment in Copenhagen, Denmark, several months later.

“Oh, that was party time,” she says. “The war in Europe was over and the Danes wanted to celebrate. There were so many parties,” she remembers, sighing, “one right after the other.” (North County Tribune, April 7, 1988)

Doesn’t Ann sound like the best? And she’s fortunate that she blew off Ron when she did, we figure.

She was the second of ten children, the oldest girl, and her younger sister JoAnn was one of three triplets. “We were 8, 9, and 10,” she says.

We were hoping that Ann, who died in Paso Robles in 2000, might have left behind some written record of her experiences in 1949, when Hubbard had tried to marry her. Her husband, Byron Devendorf, died just a few years ago, and they left behind a daughter who lives in Southern California but who hasn’t answered our entreaties.

Fortunately, we managed to reach JoAnn in Arizona, but she says she doesn’t know about any papers left behind by her sister.

Well, we hope some other members of her family might have something for us. We’ll keep trying!

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

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