Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

All the salacious details were included in the divorce complaint. While they were living at the
Chateau Marmont, Sara said Ron had told her he no longer wanted to be married to her but did not
want a divorce as it might damage his reputation. His suggestion was that she 'should kill herself if
she really loved him'. Subsequently he prevented her from sleeping for a period of four days and
then gave her sleeping pills 'resulting in a nearness to the shadow of death'.
Sara accused her husband of frequently trying to strangle her; on one occasion, shortly before
Christmas 1950, be had been so violent he ruptured the Eustachian tube in her left car. The
following month, at Palm Springs, he had started his car in gear while she was getting out and
knocked her to the ground. As a result of Hubbard's behaviour, the divorce complaint continued, the
'plaintiff and her medical advisers . . . concluded that said Hubbard was hopelessly insane, and,
crazy, and that there was no hope for said Hubbard, or any reason for her to endure further; that
competent medical advisers recommended that said Hubbard be committed to a private
sanatarian for pshychiatric observation and treatment of a mental ailment known as paranoid
schizophrenia . . .'[18]
Caryl Warner, Sara's flamboyant Hollywood attorney, did his best to ensure the case received
maximum publicity. The reporters covering the Divorce Court for the LA Times and the Examiner
were both women and early feminists. 'Before the case I made stare they knew what a bastard this
guy Hubbard was,' said Warner. 'I told them he was a sadist, that he'd kept his wife awake for days
and burned her with cigarettes and that he was crazy, crazy like a fox. They could hardly wait for me
to file the complaint.
'I liked Sara and Miles a lot. They eventually married and got a house in Malibu and we became
friends; I remember they introduced me to pot. I believed Sara absolutely; there was no question
about the truth in my opinion. When she first came to me with this wild story about how her
husband had taken her baby I was determined to help her all I could. I telephoned Hubbard's
lawyer in Elizabeth and warned him: "Listen, asshole, if you don't get that baby back I'm going to
burn you."'[19]
The first singe was inflicted by the damaging headlines in newspapers across the country the day
after the kidnapping complaint was filed on 11 April. (The only unforeseen setback to Warner's
carefully laid plans was that President Harry S. Truman inconveniently chose the same day to sack
General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination in Korea and thus rather hogged the front page.)
The divorce itself received more extensive coverage and was better handled: the pictures of Sara
smiling broadly were replaced by pictures of her weeping pitifully and being comforted by her
attorney.
In Cuba, Hubbard's condition regressed. 'I think what really caught up with him,' said de Mille, 'was
that he felt he was losing control of the organization. That's what it amounted to.'
There was no question that Hubbard's fortunes had undergone a radical revision in the twelve
months since his emergence as the adored founder of Dianetics. His personal life was in disarray,
the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundations in Elizabeth and Los Angeles were disintegrating,
most of the money had somehow been frittered away, he was months behind with his second book
and he was stuck in Cuba with Alexis and he had no idea what to do with her.
What he needed was a saviour, preferably a saviour with plenty of ready cash. And there was one
obvious candidate - Don Purcell, a businessman in Wichita, Kansas. Mr Purcell was not only an
enthusiastic Dianeticist, he also happened to be a millionaire.