Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

one of his own invented words, 'enturbulating'. The English language was insufficiently rich and
diverse for Hubbard and he often made up new words to compensate for its inadequacies - to
'enturbulate' was a neologism meaning to 'bring into a confused state'.
On 12 June, Hubbard was awarded a divorce in Sedgwick County Court on the basis of Sara's
'gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty'. The court agreed to an emergency hearing after
Hubbard testified that the breakdown of the marriage had brought about severe damage to his
health and peace of mind and he feared that any delay would cause him to 'suffer further nervous
breakdown and impairment to health'.[8]
Sara did not give evidence in court. All she cared about was that she was awarded custody of
Alexis. Clutching her baby, she caught the first Greyhound bus out of Wichita and out of the life of L.
Ron Hubbard.
It did not take Don Purcell long to discover the role Hubbard expected him to play as president of
the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation of Wichita - to provide money, uncomplainingly.
Hubbard, the vice-president and chairman, was spending Purcell's money at a prodigious rate. He
had moved into a large, comfortably furnished frame house on North Yale opposite the snooty
Wichita Country Club and in the heart of a select residential area called Sleepy Hollow. Following
Barbara's abrupt departure he hired a comely housekeeper, a lady in her early forties, who very
soon succumbed to his advances and as a consequence was summoned to his bed most nights.
'Ron enjoyed women,' explained Richard de Mille. 'He didn't see any point in having an attractive
woman around without making use of her.'
At the Foundation on West Douglas, staff were hired and fired arbitrarily as Hubbard's attention and
enthusiasm flitted from project to project, from one grandiose scheme to another. He had a fiction
writer's gift for dreaming up impressive titles for every venture, even if it only existed as an idea.
Thus, courtesy of Hubbard, Wichita was briefly the home of an organization called 'The International
Library of Arts and Sciences', which no doubt caused some head-scratching among the local
farmers and factory workers.
Five-hundred dollar training courses for Dianetic auditors were run on a continuous basis and
although there was still a reasonable number of applicants making their way to Wichita, the
excitement of the previous summer had faded away. To thousands of people across America,
Dianetics was no more than a passing whim.
A major conference of Dianeticists organized in Wichita at the end of June 1951 only attracted 112
delegates, but Hubbard continued to behave as if the movement was going from strength to
strength. Heedless of demand, the Foundation published a never-ending stream of booklets,
bulletins and pamphlets on arcane elements of the science - 'Child Dianetics', 'Handbook for Preclears',
'Lectures on Effort Processing', etcetera - which piled up at 211 West Douglas despite the
best efforts of the staff to press them on to every visitor.
Hubbard's second book, Science of Survival, was published by the Wichita Foundation in August.
Dedicated to 'Alexis Valerie Hubbard, For Whose Tomorrow May Be Hoped a World That Is Fit To
Be Free,' it delved into metaphysics and reincarnation and elaborated on what Hubbard called the
'tone scale', a device for measuring an individual's emotional state and a key to the interpretation of
personality. Hubbard provided a veneer of authority for the book by acknowledging the influence of a
long list of philosophers from Aristotle and Socrates, through Voltaire and Descartes, to Freud and
Korzybski. But despite their contribution, Science of Survival significantly failed to follow Dianetics