Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

members of the crew he could trust. At nights, when they were undressing him and going through
the elaborate business of getting him ready for bed, he liked to talk to them, sharing confidences
and telling them about his adventures. They would sit on the carpet at the end of his bed listening
to his stories, wide-eyed, for hours. The special status they enjoyed did nothing for their characters.
'We became', Jill Goodman admitted, 'poisonous little wenches. We had power and we were
untouchable.' It was not in the least unusual for a fourteen-year-old messenger to march up to a
senior executive on the ship and scream: 'You fucking asshole, you're going to the RPF. That'll
teach you to fuck up.' It was unthinkable to answer back; it would have been like answering back to
Hubbard.
'A sort of "Lord of the Flies syndrome" began working with the messengers,' said Rebecca
Goldstein, who had been recruited into Scientology by her brother, Amos Jessup. 'They were so
drunk with their own power that they became extremely vengeful, nasty and dishonest. They were a
very exclusive, dangerous little group.'
In May 1974, Hubbard did a very curious thing which perhaps indicated that he was losing his
facility to distinguish, even in his own mind, between fact and fiction: he applied to the US Navy for
the war medals he had always claimed he had been awarded but knew he had never won.
On 28 May, the ship's liaison office in New York wrote to the Navy Department enclosing an
authorization from Hubbard to obtain his medals and asking for them to be forwarded as soon as
possible. The letter provided some helpful background data on Mr Hubbard, quoted from one of his
spurious 'official' biographies: 'He served in the South Pacific and in 1942 was relieved by fifteen
officers of rank and was rushed home to take part in the 1942 battle against German submarines
as Commanding Officer of a Corvette serving in the North Atlantic. In 1943 he was made
Commodore of corvette squadrons and in 1944 he worked with amphibious forces.' There followed
a list of seventeen medals awarded to Mr Hubbard, including the Purple Heart and the Navy
Commendation Medal, many of them with bronze stars.
On 18 June, the Navy Department replied, enclosing the four routine medals awarded to former
Lieutenant Lafayette R. Hubbard, US Naval Reserve, and noting, 'The records in this Bureau fail to
establish Mr Hubbard's entitlement to the other medals and awards listed in your request.'[9]
The Commodore apparently had no difficulty circumventing this little problem: he quickly put into
circulation an eight-by-ten colour photograph of twenty-one medals and palms he had won during
the war. Some were missing, he explained to the crew. He had actually won twenty-eight medals,
but the remainder were awarded to him in secret because naval command were embarrassed that
he had sunk a couple of subs in their own 'back yard'.
In the summer, the Commodore turned his attention from his own image to that of his ship. He was
taken with an idea to improve the Apollo's public relations by staging free concerts and dance
performances for the local residents at her regular ports of call. After hours of watching television in
Queens, he considered himself an expert on popular music and modern dance and believed he
had made important 'discoveries' about the nature of rock music and the need for a strong heavy
beat. He often demonstrated his theories to a mystified Jim Dincalci. On the ship, he was able to
put his ideas into practice with his own band, the 'Apollo Stars', made up of volunteers from the
crew chosen at auditions conducted by the Commodore with all the confidence and aplomb of a
man who had spent a lifetime in show business.