Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

'Out of curiosity, I pulled the letters out and read a couple,' she confessed. 'It sounded like Quentin
had gone crazy. He was talking about people coming from outer space and what we were going to
do about it and how he knew the Marcabs were coming every five thousand years to check on our
development. It seemed like he had taken his father's space odyssey stories and plumped them in
his own reality. It was real loony tune stuff.' She told no one about this except, of course, all the
other messengers.
Doreen was close to the younger Hubbard children and was shocked by Quentin's letters. She was
even more shocked by what happened when the Commodore fell out with his youngest daughter,
Suzette. 'She was dating another Scientologist but for some reason the Commodore didn't approve
of him and so he sent a messenger with $5000 in cash to buy him off. The messenger was told to
threaten the guy that he would be declared SP if he didn't take the money and sign an agreement to
stop seeing Suzette.
'But the agreement also made it look as if the guy was blackmailing Hubbard and threatening to
take her away. That's what Hubbard told Suzette was happening. I was in his office when he called
her in and showed her the agreement, shouting things like, "I told you so." Suzette might have seen
through it, but she was a toughie. She started dating wogs and then, when she was being audited -
auditing is like a confessional - she would describe everything she had done on the date in great
detail, knowing that her father would read her folder. It was her way of getting back at him. The only
form of communication she could have with her father was through her auditor.
'He went purple with rage when he read her folder with all that stuff in it and her saying things like,
"If my father doesn't like what I'm doing, I don't give a damn." When he had finished reading it, he
threw it across the room and then threw a yellow legal pad at me and told me to take down a letter.
He started dictating a letter disinheriting Suzette and I began to cry. In the end I said, "I can't do this."
I put down the pad and let him have it. "Quentin's dead," I said, "and now you're tearing your family
apart. You can't do this to your family and to Mary Sue. If you want to send this letter, write it
yourself." Then I excused myself from the watch and ran out. Afterwards, I discovered he tore up the
letter. He never did disinherit Suzette.' (Doreen was a particular favourite with the Commodore and
one of the few people at Olive Tree Ranch who would have dared suggest he might have made a
mistake. He called her 'Do', had a little engraved dog-tag made for her and in rare moments of
amiability he would give her an affectionate pat her on the head and say, 'That's my Do.')
Arthur, the youngest of the Hubbard children, was in rather better favour with his father, although he
made a pest of himself with everyone else at Olive Tree Ranch by riding his motor-cycle around the
property at breakneck speed. 'He was a brat,' said Jim Dincalci. 'All the time.' His talent as an artist
was being employed to paint a series of watercolours illustrating incidents in his father's early life,
which were to be used in a glossy, coffee-table tome published by the church under the title, What
Is Scientology?
There were pictures of little Ron riding on his grandfather's cattle ranch, sitting by a campfire with
the Pikuni Indians, journeying 'throughout Asia' at the age of fourteen, as a university student
attending one of the first nuclear physics courses and supporting himself as an essayist and
technical writer (the caption somehow failed to mention his science fiction). Two paintings showed
him crippled and blinded in a naval hospital after the war and a third depicted him miraculously
restored to health by the power of mind. Arthur's pictures were unremarkable art, but fascinating
inasmuch as they illustrated most of the significant lies told by his father about his life before
Scientology.
In the early part of 1977, Hubbard became enthused by a project called the 'Purification Rundown'