Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

very thoughtful and kind one minute and quite hideous the next. We were auditing about 50 hours a
week and I remember one afternoon a girl auditor burst into tears when she was telling Ron about
a particularly difficult case she had. He put his arm round her and said, "Jenny, anything we can do
for this pre-clear is better than doing nothing. She needs help and a bit of attention and that is what
you are giving her. Just keep on doing the same thing you're doing and you will resolve it in due
course. You can't expect miracles overnight." That struck me as a very humane and comforting
thing to say to her. There was no question he had something to contribute in the psychological
area. I mean, just to sit down with someone and listen to them for a couple of hours did them good.
'But then I have also seen him behave in a grotesque fashion. One afternoon during a lecture a
woman in the audience was coughing rather badly and he walked to the front of the stage, redfaced
and visibly angry, and shouted, "Get that woman out of this lecture hall!" She was one of his
most fervent supporters and she was also desperately ill - she died three weeks later of lung
cancer.'[4]
Aside from occasional temper tantrums, Hubbard considered things were going very well in
London. 'I am busy at a headlong rate of speed,' he wrote to Marilyn Routsong, an aide left behind
in Washington to keep an eve on his interests, 'really got things rolling off over here. Hope to have
some films that will help us before long, and am now dickering around on an international radio'.
He ended the letter with a titbit of information that must have made Miss Routsong's nerves tingle:
'Just between ourselves, I actually do have a method of as-ising the atom bomb. Anyway I'm not
quite as far away as you think. Love, Ron.'
In the peculiar argot of Scientology, 'as-isness' was a process of making something disappear.
What Hubbard was apparently saying was that he was well on the way towards removing nuclear
weapons from the face of the earth. However, something must have gone wrong since he would
soon be applying his awesome imagination to the problem of dealing with radiation.
The Hubbards' closest friends in London were Ray Kemp, now back home from Phoenix, and his
pretty girlfriend, Pam, both of whom worked at the HASI. Hubbard, as a minister of the Church of
American Science, performed the ceremony when they married in February 1956, in the lecture
room at the HASI, and Mary Sue was Pam's maid of honour. 'Ron and Mary Sue had dinner with us
the night before the wedding,' Pam said, 'and Ron told us he had written the ceremony specially for
us. He was a very good friend - he even fixed our honeymoon, made arrangements for us to use an
apartment in Tangier owned by a friend of his and paid for our air tickets.
'When we got back, we used to see a great deal of them, two or three times a week. Ron would
telephone and say, "I'm coming over to dinner and I'm bringing a chicken." Then we would sit up for
hours playing Cluedo and the men would start telling stories and there would be lots of laughter. It
was a lot of fun - I'd usually end up falling asleep and Mary Sue would go to bed. Their relationship
seemed OK, but there never seemed to be a lot of love between them. She was not the affectionate
type, she was more efficient than affectionate. They used to have fierce husband and wife domestic
arguments.
'We had a big old apartment in Palace Court, Kensington, with a huge living-room with a full-size
concert grand in the corner and we used to have parties every night. Ron was always the life and
soul, great fun. He loved to dance, play the guitar or ukulele; he was a real actor. He would drag me
up to sing with him and then we'd make up rude songs about him and auditing and he would top
each verse and roar with laughter and think it was terribly funny. I thought he was always very aware
as an individual. He would make a comment about something and he'd invariably be right and I'd
look at him and think "How did you know that?"'[5]