Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Richard de Mille and Barbara Kaye at the house in Palm Springs
where Hubbard plotted to kidnap his daughter Alexis.
'There was a lot of turmoil and dissension in the Foundation at the time; he kept accusing
Communists of trying to take control and he was having difficulties with Sara. It was clear their
marriage was breaking up - she was very critical of him and he told me she was fooling around
with Hollister and he didn't trust her.'[13]
Predictably, Sara did not stay long in Palm Springs - the tension was more than she could stand.
Hubbard did not try to detain her and as soon as she and Alexis had departed for Los Angeles, he
sent a telegram to Barbara Kaye telling her he loved her and needed her. She caught a bus for
Palm Springs on 3 February and was met by Hubbard at the bus station. 'As he walked towards
me,' she said, 'I could see that he was ill.'
Kaye, who would later become a psychologist, said she made a clinical diagnosis of Hubbard
during the weeks they spent together in Palm Springs. 'There was no doubt in my mind he was a
manic depressive with paranoid tendencies. Many manics are delightful, productive people with
tremendous energy and self-confidence. He was like that in his manic stage - enormously creative,
carried away by feelings of omnipotence and talking all the time of grandiose schemes.
'But when I arrived he was in a deep depression. He had been totally unable to work on his book,
which had been originally scheduled for publication that month. That's why he had called me - he
was hoping I could help him get through his writers' block. He was very sad and lethargic, lying
around feeling sorry for himself and drinking a great deal. Sometimes he would go to the piano and
fiddle around, improvising weird melodies of his own composition. He thought that Sara had
hypnotised him in his sleep and commanded him not to write. He told me that the people in
Elizabeth had tried to "slip him a Mickey" in his glass of milk and another time they attempted to
insert a fatal hypo into his eye and heart to try and stop him from ever writing again. Those were the
engrams he was running.
'I tried to help him by using a technique I had learned at college, breaking down the problem into
small parts and presenting it a step at a time. I got a block of butcher's paper and said to him,
"Look, you don't have to write. Just sit down at this table and look at the paper and when you don't
want to look at it any more, get up and leave." He sat there for ten minutes on the first day and this
went on for several days until one day he picked up a pencil and began to write. Next day he was
back at work, very excited and enthused about what he was doing. He was singing and horsing
around, talking, laughing and discussing ideas in the kitchen until three o'clock in the morning.'
One of Hubbard's favourite topics of conversation was psychiatrists. One night over dinner at Mel