Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

door. Ron went and talked to a guy outside for about five minutes and came back with a big grin on
his face. He said the guy at the door wanted to give him a cheque for $5000 for a copy of Excalibur.
Then he laughed out loud and said, "One of these days I'll have to get round to writing it." We
cracked up. It was the only time Ron ever admitted there was no such book.
'It didn't matter too much to us. From our standpoint at that time Scientology was the only game in
town and it was Ron's game. It was like exploring the moon, like being in the space programme,
except that we were exploring the mind instead of space. Religion didn't cut it, psychology didn't cut
it. If Ron wanted to tell tall stories about himself to make himself look good, so what? We didn't
worry a whole lot about it. His genius outflowered his craziness.'[13]
Many of Ron's most fervent admirers, Horner included, found it difficult to include Mary Sue in their
devotion. 'I hated her,' said Horner. 'She was a real tight-lipped Baptist. One night I got into a fight
with her because she called my girlfriend a whore. I really tore into her verbally and Hubbard threw
me out of the house.'
Hubbard would never allow anyone to criticize Mary Sue and although he rarely showed much
affection for her in public, it seemed, after two failed marriages and innumerable affairs, that he had
at last formed a stable relationship, improbable as it had first appeared. They were indeed an
unlikely couple - a flamboyant, fast-talking extrovert entrepreneur in his forties and a quiet, intense
young woman twenty years his junior from a small town in Texas. But anyone who underestimated
Mary Sue made a big mistake. Although she was not yet twenty-four years old, she
exercizedconsiderable power within the Scientology movement and people around Hubbard quickly
learned to be wary of her. Fiercely loyal to her husband, brusque and autocratic, she could be a
dangerous enemy. She also had a remarkable capacity for motherhood; only four months after
Quentin was born, she was pregnant again.
In June, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International produced an imaginative reworking
of Hubbard's biography in a letter to the Better Business Bureau in Phoenix, clearly
designed to improve HASI's standing in the town. Much new information was included, not all of it
entirely comprehensible.
The mysterious Commander Tompson [sic], for example, was said in the letter to have 'instituted
psychoanalysis in the US Navy for use in flight surgery'. A Dr William Alan White, superintendent of
St Elizabeth's, a government asylum in Washington, made his debut as someone under whom
Hubbard had trained and mention was made of a hitherto unmentioned book: 'In 1947 Hubbard
published a book for the Gerontological Society and the American Medical Association called
Scientology. A New Science.'
This non-existent publication, it seemed, was 'politely received', but thereafter events had conspired
against the scientist-author. Like 'almost any nuclear physicist' be had often written science fiction
'for amusement' and unscrupulous publishers took advantage of this fact. While poor Ron wanted
nothing for himself but to be left in peace to continue his study and research, he was pressurized to
produce a popular book for Hermitage House, who then 'unwisely' published an article in a pulp
magazine. The sorry tale continued with Hubbard constantly being taken advantage of by all and
sundry, with everyone but Ron trying to make money out of his discoveries and his wicked
estranged wife threatening to stir up a 'great deal of scandal'.
However, the biography had a happy ending in Phoenix in the Hubbard Association of
Scientologists - the first organization in the field to be under Hubbard's sole control and therefore
untainted by all the previous manoeuvrings. It had established a two-year record of good repute