Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

he was working in the field of 'nuclear physics on life sources and life energy' in order to avoid
being tagged as a psychiatrist or spiritualist. 'This will take some doing, perhaps,' he added, in a
rare moment of candour.[6]
Hubbard need not have worried overmuch as far as East Grinstead was concerned, since the
weather and the Royal Family were topics of much greater perennial interest than whatever was
going on at Saint Hill Manor. The cast list of the upcoming, absorbing and long-running British royal
soap opera was just being drawn up in spring 1960 - the Queen's third child, Prince Andrew, was
born in February and Princess Margaret was due to marry in May. To add a little spice to the
conversation in East Grinstead pubs, there was also the forthcoming obscenity trial of D. H.
Lawrence's masterpiece, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
This last event was being followed closely by Mary Sue as her husband had recently uncovered a
previous life coincidentally revealing her to have been none other than D. H. Lawrence! In a letter to
her friend, Marilyn Routsong, Mary Sue explained the considerable problems she had experienced
as D. H. Lawrence. It seemed the great writer had difficulty constructing plots, thought poetry was a
joke and believed little of what he wrote.
On the strength of this previous incarnation, Mary Sue confessed that she, too, was going to write a
book and outlined the plot with a somewhat unpromising grasp of grammar and spelling. She
wrote that it would be completely anti-Christ. The first sentence begins 'In the small town of Balei, a
bastard child was born.' She then intended to show how he was really a mongrel and the son of
three fathers (a joke on the Trinity of God) because the mother had, the night in question, slept with
three of the town's most virile men and not knowing whose sperm had reached her womb, had
thereupon decided to call him Ali, Son of ----, Son of ----, and Son of ---- which impressed the local
inhabitants and created a stir throughout the country. She concluded that she wouldn't have it in her
name, for obvious reasons.
In the same letter, Mary Sue mentioned the rumpus that had been caused when Ron ordered all
the staff at Saint Hill to be checked out on an E-meter. She noted that three office staff refused and
five domestic staff refused. She was surprised and wrote that they were all scared to death of the Emeter
and pretending that it was something that would only happen in America, adding that they
evidently have something to hide because of their fear to go on the E-meter.[7]
Hubbard's insistence that everyone who worked for him be interrogated on the E-meter was part of
the routine 'security checking' he deemed necessary to identify potential trouble-makers, dissidents
and spies. No one in Scientology now doubted the capability of the E-meter to expose visceral
emotions and ever more elaborate 'sec-checks' would become a common feature of life in the
Scientology movement - evidence of Hubbard's persistent paranoia about his enemies, both those
that existed in reality and those that thronged his imagination.
Despite the not unreasonable reluctance of some of the servants at Saint Hill Manor to be
interviewed about their private lives while grasping tin cans attached to a mysterious electric
machine, the Hubbards had settled in comfortably by the spring of 1960. The painters and
decorators had finished their work and the family was enjoying the Elysian delights of gracious
living in an English country house. On their 'personal staff' there were a secretary, housekeeper,
cook, butler, valet, nanny and tutor for the children.
The former billiards room, leading directly from the grand entrance hall, had been re-modelled into
Hubbard's private office, with a bench seat upholstered in red leather down one side of the room
and a personal teleprinter installed alongside his desk. Also accessible from the hall was the