Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

them ran to tell the Commodore what had happened. As Doreen got back to her post outside
Hubbard's office, she saw Mary Sue going in and heard him roar, 'Close the fucking door!' Through
the engraved glass, she could see Mary Sue's silhouette standing to attention in front of the
deskwhile the Commodore ranted. Doreen could not make out everything he said, but she distinctly
heard him bellow at the top of his lungs, 'Nobody manhandles my messengers, is that clear?' Mary
Sue mumbled her agreement. 'Yes what?' he bellowed. 'Yes sir!' she replied smartly.
Outside, the messengers were trying hard not to put their ears to the keyhole, but they heard
enough to be thrilled.
A few months later, Diana upset her father in some way. Hubbard reeled off a long reprimand to the
messenger on duty, adding at the end of it: 'OK, go and spit in Diana's face.' The messenger was a
little dark-eyed girl called Jill Goodman, thirteen years old. She ran along the deck to Diana's office,
burst in, spat in her face with unerring accuracy and began shouting her message as Diana let out
a scream of fury. Mary Sue, who was in an adjoining office, burst in as her daughter was wiping the
spittle from her face. She grabbed Jill round the throat as if she was going to strangle her and also
began screeching. Jill started crying and when Mary Sue let her go, she immediately rushed off to
tell the Commodore. Another acrimonious husband and wife row followed, which ended with Mary
Sue throwing her shoes at the luckless messenger Hubbard despatched to chastise her further.
The Commodore was soon embroiled in another domestic drama of a different, and totally
unexpected, nature. He received word from Los Angeles that his daughter Alexis was trying to make
contact with him. Now twenty-one years old, Alexis lived with her mother and stepfather, Miles
Hollister, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Although her mother rarely spoke about her father - Sara
was still frightened of her first husband and looked back on her divorce as a lucky escape from his
clutches - Alexis had read enough about L. Ron Hubbard to begin to think of him as a rather
romantic figure and she was naturally curious to meet him. In 1970, on a visit to England, she
called at Saint Hill Manor in the hope of seeing him and was disappointed to discover he was not
there. A year later, while she was home from college for the summer vacation, she wrote to him
care of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles.
Hubbard acted swiftly when he heard about Alexis' inquiries. He scribbled a note to her and
dispatched detailed instructions to Jane Kember who was running the Guardian's Office at Saint
Hill, about how the matter was to be handled. The messengers had got into the habit of standing
beside the Commodore when he was writing at this desk and whipping away each sheet of paper
as he reached the bottom of the page. Doreen Smith was on duty when the Commodore was
writing to Alexis and she was shocked by what she was surreptitiously reading as his hand flew
over the page. He ended his instructions to Kember with a little homily, 'Decency is not a subject
well understood.'
When Alexis returned to college in the United States she learned that there was a man staying in
the local motel who had been asking to see her. She invited him to her dorm, where he introduced
himself as L. Ron Hubbard's agent and said he had a statement to read to her. While Alexis sat
stunned, the man read out a statement in which Hubbard categorically denied he was her father:
'Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948 . . . In July 1949 I was in
Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie. She turned up destitute and pregnant.' Hubbard implied that
Alexis's father was Jack Parsons, but out of the kindness of his heart he had taken her mother in to
see her through 'her trouble'. Later he said he came up from Palm Springs, California, where he
was living, and found Alexis abandoned; she was just a toddler, a 'cute little thing', and so he had
taken her along on his wanderings for a couple of years.