Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

on to the New York Times's bestseller list.
For students taking courses at the Foundation, the highlight of the week was the lecture Hubbard
delivered every Friday evening. Helen O'Brien, a young woman from Philadelphia who had
negotiated a bank loan in order to train as a professional auditor, described the scene: 'He would
appear at the back of the crowded hall and walk down the centre aisle to the platform, amid
applause. It was well staged. He spoke against a background of rich drapes, bathed in spotlights
that set off his red hair and weird, enthusiastic face . . .
'Hubbard was a marvellous lecturer, and he spoke quite frankly then, introducing the soberest and
wildest ideas without apology, seeming to share the uproarious delight of some of the members of
his audience at his flights of intellectual audacity. His rhetoric had a tempo that usually carried
everyone along in at least pseudo acceptance of everything he said, although some of it was far
afield of the "science of mental health" which had brought us all together.'[9]
Helen O'Brien soon became a member of Hubbard's 'honour guard', a small group of awed,
intensely loyal admirers who considered it the highest privilege to be in Ron's presence. 'It was not
like being with a human being,' she said. 'He was shaking with energy and there was a sort of light
around him, a cloak of power.
'Sometimes at his house be would play the organ and sing songs he had composed in college.
Ron told me quite a bit about his life. He said his father was some sort of conman, a very shadowy
kind of character, who he suspected was trying to take over Dianetics. Ron said he'd destroy the
whole thing if that happened. He talked a lot about Sara. When she ran off with another man Ron
followed them and they locked him in a hotel room and pushed drugs up his nose, but he
managed to escape and went to Cuba.
'He was not promiscuous, but he was available sexually. I had sex with him one night. Several of us
were working late with him, taking notes and we all went out to a coffee shop. Ron and I left the
others there and went up to bed. It was real matter of fact.'[10]
Among the motley collection of well-meaning people who trekked to Wichita in the summer of 1951
was a slim, pretty girl from Houston, Texas, by the name of Mary Sue Whipp. Born in Rockdale, Mary
Sue was a nineteen-year-old coed at the University of Texas intent on making a career in petroleum
research. She arrived in Wichita with a friend, Norman James, who had read about Dianetics in
Astounding and had persuaded her to join him on the course. Blue-eyed and auburn-haired, Mary
Sue aroused predictably mixed feelings at the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation. Most of the men liked
her; most of the women did not. 'She was a nothing,' said Helen O'Brien sourly. 'Her favourite