Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

doctor's opinion that she was out of her mind. Sara would have been eager to get the same opinion
about him, but he had the troops at that point. That was a little farce conducted in the heat of night in
Bakersfield. He couldn't find a doctor to talk to him, I suppose. We went to the state or county
hospital, or something. We finally ended up in Yuma, Arizona in the morning having driven all night
and they came to some kind of agreement, I don't know exactly what. He put Sara on a plane and
she flew back to LA, or he gave her the car, I don't remember which. We got in a little aeroplane and
flew to Phoenix and then flew to Chicago, where Ron proceeded to be interviewed by a psychiatrist
and psychologist. He wanted to establish an answer to her charges that he was, in the words of a
psychistrist who hadn't even seen Ron, a paranoid schizophrenic. He wanted a testimonial from a
professional who would say he was OK.
He and I together went to the psychiatrist. It was a short interview, the psychiatrist didn't like the
smell of it and thought he was being manipulated so he made a few psychiatric noises and
nothing much came of it. We paid him $10 and left. Then Hubbard went to Murray Krout, who was a
prominent diagnostic psychologist of that era. He did projective testing , Rorschach tests and that
kind of stuff, of Hubbard and said he would send a report. The report he sent later was very bland
encouraging, man of creative talent who is upset by family problems and dissension and so forth
depressing his work... an upbeat harmless report. The main value of it to Hubbard was that it didn't
say he was crazy. He claimed he had been given a clean bill of health by the psychiatric profession.
He was pleased with it. No psychiatric judgement of Hubbard on the record has any validity,
because the only ones accessible to the public were made after he no longer submitted himself to
examination.
We got in a plane at O'Hare [Chicago] and flew to one of the most unattractive places in the world,
which is Elizabeth, NJ, where the main central foundation was. The two guys running it were Jack
Maloney and Jim [unintellible]. It was in a much less turbulent condition and John Campbell
showed up for a meeting. Alexis was in a hotel with a nurse. She was about 13 months, just
learning to walk.
Then Hubbard said he had to get away and write his book, the second book, which was called
Science of Survival. He said, "Well, Dick, we're going to Florida, where the weather is nice." It was
snowing in Elizabeth.
We went to Tampa, Florida, where we looked at property for the Foundation, Hubbard, me and
Alexis. In Tampa we were interviewed by an amateur writer and dianeticist and real estate agent.
He showed us a nice place on edge of town. Hubbard was very edgy. He had a loaded .45 calibre
service automatic. I went and knocked on his door and he opened the door with the gun. "Dick, you
shouldn't creep up on me." This was in a hotel in Tampa. He said, "I don't like the way things feel
around here. I want to go where I can breathe free. We're going to Havana." We got on a plane with
the baby and flew to Havana.
It was the first time I had seen a tropical airport. Coming in over lush vegetation it was a remarkable
change, warm damp air. We got in a taxi and went downtown and found a very noisy hotel on the
Paseo Marquis [?], the main drag of Havana. We stayed there for a couple of nights. I had Alexis in
my room, taking care of the baby. Hubbard had his room with a typewriter he managed to rent, a
very old one with all kind of Spanish characters on it. He was madly banging away on his typewriter
and I was trying to sleep with rattling water pipes in the wall.
It was a family hotel and we ate in a big dining room. He wanted a better place so we went to a real
estate agent and were taken out and shown various places, including the country estate where
Hemingway wrote something, and we rented an ground floor apartment in the Vedado district, the