Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

I first saw him in the Shrine Auditorium giving lecture in '50. I remember someone yelling "Are your
cavities filling up?" Hubbard had very bad teeth, he was always having trouble with dentists, which
fit in with his engram thing - they were always giving him laughing gas.
First impression. My girlfriend (now wife) was, "I don't want anything to do with this rube, this slob." I
thought this is the great man who made this great discovery and whatever his shortcomings may
be they must be discounted because he has the answer. He was fluent, informative, his tricks
worked on the people they worked on. It was a packed meeting. It's an enormous building.
Impact of Dianetics? It was a national craze, it was exciting, right across the country. The time is
never wrong for a cultist movement. LRH was the Madame Blavatsky of 1950. Lenin was the LRH of
1917. People present new ideas which are going to change the world and there are a certain
number of people willing to believe those ideas. There is never a time which isn't right.
He was living with Sara when I was first with him. Sara came with us to Palm Springs - she made
up a bed for me. He was living in LA at a house in Palm Springs, that was the first one I saw. In
Wichita he had a big two storey wooden house, in Phoenix a one storey country house.
My impression of Sara was prejudiced by the relationship between them. I can't say I knew her. She
could sing and play the piano, she sang Robin Adair and England's Green and Pleasant Land
[Jerusalem], songs she'd probably learned at college. She was large, gangly, energetic, and
carried the baby around her hip. Plain faced, long strides, not prepossessing. Their marriage was
about to break up. He told me she was fooling around with Hollister and "I don't trust her".
The marriage broke up because Sara got fed up with Ron. She was very critical of him.
When I worked for him he talked about himself a lot, but as is true with that kind of person, he didn't
give me any confidences, he was telling me his story as I ought to know it. He told me about Jack
Parsons, the magick and all that. He told me an important principle of magick which is straight from
Aleister Crowley, which was "Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law" - the rest of it is "And thou
harm not another person" but he left that part off. I was impressed by this, it was the first time I
heard the main rule was do anything you like.
He didn't take any responsibility for the black magic rituals; he blamed them on Parsons, but
admitted he was there.
I saw him write on mimeographed masters, the wax stuff you type mimeographs on. He wrote on
those, first draft, and they were run off perfect. He was writing stuff like running engrams, and the
bulletins. Most of them at beginning were not just written by LRH but typed by him on mimeograph
master. He'd take them out of the box, put it in and started at the top and wrote it right out. very fast. I
was very impressed. He was a man with an abnormal ability to put words on paper, a virtuoso. The
story of him writing books fast might be an exaggeration but an exaggeration of something very
unusual.
His rate of writing was about 25,000 words a day. Miles Hollister was working at 2600 S Hoover at
the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. He met Sara there, she confided in him. He was
younger, not bad looking.
Sara filed an action in LA. He wasn't there. It was a reaction to him abducting the child.
He abducted the child to try and get control of the situation. It was attempt to use what he had to get