Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

They were unlikely fellow travellers: a large, forty-year-old man with a florid complexion, flaming red
hair and a Kool cigarette constantly between his lips; his diminutive companion, twenty-nine years
old, rather shy and very much in awe of the older man; and a gurgling twelve-month-old baby in
nappies just learning to walk. The three of them arrived in Tampa, Florida, in the middle of March.
They took two rooms in a small hotel: Hubbard had a room to himself, de Mille and the baby
shared. 'It never crossed my mind that the baby should go in with him,' said de Mille. 'He was the
leader and I was the follower. He gave the orders; I was privileged to serve.'
Hubbard pretended to look for property in Tampa, but de Mille noticed that he seemed nervous and
ill at ease much of the time. 'One evening I knocked on his door and he opened it carrying a loaded
.45 service automatic. I must have looked a bit surprised because he said, "You shouldn't creep up
on me like that, Dick." I didn't even know he had a gun until that moment.'
A couple of days later Hubbard said to de Mille: 'I don't like the way things feel around here. I want to
go to a place where I can breathe free. We're going to Havana.'
Havana in the early 'fifties, before Castro, was the fun capital of the Western hemisphere - a corrupt,
colourful, hedonistic, wide-open city where tourists with money were guaranteed a good time.
Americans did not even need a passport to enter Cuba and no one raised an eyebrow at the two
men who arrived from Florida in the company of an apparently motherless baby. They took a taxi
downtown and checked into a hotel on the Paseo Marti, Havana's bustling main street.
'Hubbard managed to rent a very old Spanish typewriter', de Mille recalled, 'and was madly banging
away on it all night, while I was taking care of the baby and trying to sleep with the water pipes
rattling in the wall. After we had stayed there a couple of nights, we went to a real estate agent and
rented a ground-floor apartment in the Vedado district, the Beverly Hills of Havana. Once we had
moved in, we hired two Jamaican women to look after Alexis, which was a great relief to me.'
Comfortably installed in the apartment, Hubbard began working intensively in his book, dictating
into a recording machine. As was his usual habit, he worked all night with little to sustain him but a
bottle of rum, which was usually empty by dawn.
In the afternoons, he would often sit and talk with de Mille. 'He talked about himself a lot, but as is
often true with that kind of person he didn't really give me any confidences: he was telling me his
story as he thought I ought to know it. He told me about Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley and all
that. He didn't take any responsibility for the black magic rituals and blamed them on Parsons, but
he admitted he was there.
'What I didn't understand about him at the time was his lack of personal attachment. He thought
people were there to be used, to serve the user and didn't have any importance in their own right. I
don't think he abducted Alexis, for example, with any intention of keeping her; he was just using her
to keep control of the situation.
'When I first saw him at the meeting at The Shrine auditorium I was very impressed. I thought he
was a great man who had made a great discovery and whatever his shortcomings they must be
discounted because he had the answer. He promised heaven. He said I have the key which can
open the door, do you want to go there? It did not matter that his qualifications were suspect; he
held the key. Actually, he was very widely read, a sort of self-made intellectual. I don't think he did
any research in the academic sense, but he knew a lot about Freud, hypnosis, the occult, magic,
etcetera, and Dianetics grew out of that knowledge.