| Bare-faced Messiah | |
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Book Cover |
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| Author(s) | Russell Miller |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | biography |
| Genre(s) | non-fiction |
| Publisher | Michael Joseph |
| Publication date | October 26, 1987 |
| Pages | 380 |
| ISBN | 0-7181-2764-1 |
| OCLC Number | 20634668 |
| Dewey Decimal | 299/.936/092 B 20 |
| LC Classification | BP605.S2 M55 1987 |
Bare-faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard is a posthumous biography of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard by British journalist Russell Miller. First published in 1987, the book takes a critical perspective, challenging the official account of Hubbard's life and work promoted by the Church of Scientology.[1] It quotes extensively from official documents acquired using the Freedom of Information Act and from Hubbard's personal papers that were obtained via a defector.
The Church of Scientology was accused of organising a smear and harassment campaign against Miller and his publisher, and these accusations were strengthened by a leak of internal documents to the press.[2] The Church strenuously denied this accusation and a private investigator involved in smearing Miller denied that the Church was his client.[2][3] Hubbard's followers attempted to prevent the book's publication in court, resulting in cases that reached the Supreme Court of the United States, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and the Federal Court of Canada. The Supreme Court's decision denying fair use protection for the book set a precedent favouring copyright protection of unpublished material over biographers' freedom of speech. Courts in the UK and Canada took an opposite view, allowing publication of Bare-faced Messiah in the public interest.
Reviews of the book have been broadly positive, praising Miller's research but in some cases criticising the book for failing to explain Hubbard's success. Reviewers are divided over whether to interpret the book as a polemical attack on Hubbard or a neutral work which leaves conclusions to the reader.
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Russell Miller had been an investigative journalist for the Sunday Times[4][5] and had written well-received biographies of Hugh Hefner and J. Paul Getty.[6] He spent two years researching the book.[4][7]
Miller's research was assisted by a set of Hubbard's personal papers provided by Gerry Armstrong, a disaffected former employee of the Church of Scientology.[5] Armstrong had been preparing material for an official biography of Hubbard, but left the Church in 1981 after finding that Hubbard's claims about his life conflicted with independent sources.[8] The Church of Scientology obtained an injunction in California to prevent Armstrong from further distributing the documents. However, the court in England refused to enforce this order.[5][9]
The book stretches from Hubbard's birth to death, and covers his early life, his success as a science fiction writer, his military career, the rise of Dianetics and Scientology, his journeys at sea with his followers, and his period as a fugitive from the law in California.
There are 378 footnotes in the book. These include references to interviews conducted specially, to court or government documents and to Hubbard's own writings. In an "author's note", Miller wrote that the book would have been impossible without the United States' Freedom of Information Act. Among the private papers quoted in the book are Hubbard's letter to the FBI denouncing his wife as a spy, another in which he tells his daughter he is not really her father and an internal letter in which he suggests that Scientology pursue "religious" status for business reasons.[10]
While researching the book in the USA, Miller was spied on. His friends and business associates also received hostile visits from Scientologists and private detectives. Attempts were made to frame him for the murder of a London private detective, for a fire in a Wiltshire aircraft factory and for the murder of American singer Dean Reed. [1][4][11][12] Reed had died the day before Miller had arrived in East Berlin to interview him.[3] His family was approached by private detectives seeking to implicate Miller in his death, although these detectives would not say who their client was. Another private investigator interviewed Miller's friends and associates, claiming to be acting for Reed's family, though they denied employing him.[3] A former Scientology insider told the Sunday Times that Miller "is kept under constant watch. Every time he goes abroad a two-man mission will be waiting for him at the airport when he arrives. They will monitor where he goes, who he sees, where he stays. This information will be added to his file, which is already more than 100 pages thick."[2]
Senior executives at publishers Michael Joseph and at the Sunday Times, which serialised the book, received threatening phone calls and also a visit from private investigator Eugene Ingram, who worked for the Church.[4] Another private investigator, Jarl Grieve Einar Cynewulf, told Sunday Times journalists that he had been offered "large sums of money" to find a link between Miller and the CIA.[13] In 1990, nearly three years after the book's first publication, a defector from the Church of Scientology provided the Sunday Times with internal documents detailing the smear campaign against Miller.[2] These records listed several private investigators who had been hired to keep Miller under surveillance and feed false information about him to neighbours and the police. A Scientology executive had flown from Los Angeles to a flat in London where he and a private detective co-ordinated the campaign. Rubbish from the publisher's offices was regularly emptied into the flat's bathtub to be picked through. A Church spokesman dismissed these allegations, saying, "anyone giving you this sort of information must be crazy or on drugs."[2]
The Church of Scientology of California and related entities sought injunctions against the book's publication, claiming copyright infringement of Hubbard's private documents.[5][14] They threatened to sue in as many as fifty countries.[1] In the UK, they sued Penguin Books as well as Russell Miller, claiming additionally that the photograph of L. Ron Hubbard on the book's dust-jacket would mislead potential buyers. Mr Justice Vinelott dismissed the suit, describing it as a "mischievous and misconceived" attempt to stifle criticism.[1][4][14] That judgement was upheld by the Court of Appeal who argued that Hubbard's "cosmic significance" in Scientology—a group which itself had been the subject of a Government report in 1972—implied a strong public interest in the book's content.[1][5][15] In advance of the court case, a Scientologist woman was found collecting seven copies of the unpublished proofs from a copy shop in East Grinstead.[7] She was arrested but later released as there was no evidence of theft.[7] The Federal Court of Canada rejected a similar suit and another in Australia was withdrawn.[14][16]
The case against US publisher Henry Holt was brought by New Era Publications, who owned the rights to an official biography of Hubbard. The district court who first heard the case ruled that, although the quotation of private correspondence breached copyright law, an injunction would deny the publisher's First Amendment rights.[17][18][19] When the case was appealed, the Second Circuit disagreed with that judgement, arguing that copyright outweighed free speech arguments. However, the court still denied an injunction on the grounds that New Era had waited two years to bring the case after first learning about the book.[18][20] Although they had prevailed, Henry Holt and Company asked the court for a rehearing to establish that they had not just won on a technicality; a request that the court denied.[17] In 1990, Henry Holt petitioned the Supreme Court, who let the Second Circuit's judgement stand.[10][21][22] The Supreme Court decision drew a concerned reaction from publishers and journalists, complaining that biographies would become more legally and financially difficult to publish.[17][19][20][22] A brief for the PEN American Center and the Authors Guild expressed the publishing industry's "confusion, consternation and concern" at the outcome.[10] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. called the decision "a great sadness", arguing that had it been made earlier, he could not have published all three volumes of his history The Age of Roosevelt.[20][23]
Martin Gardner's review in Nature called Bare-faced Messiah an "admirable, meticulously documented biography". Miller's book persuaded Gardner that Hubbard was "a pathological liar who steadily deteriorated from a charming rogue into a paranoid egomaniac".[24] Sociologist J. Gordon Melton has stated that along with Stewart Lamont's Religion Inc., Miller's book is "by far the best" among the books published by Scientology critics, though he notes that the Church of Scientology has "prepared statements on each indicating factual errors and omissions."[25] According to Melton, Miller's book is compromised by its author's lack of access to documents charting the early history of the church.[25]
Marco Frenschkowski, in a survey of the available literature on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, called Bare-Faced Messiah the "most important critical biography of Hubbard. Like [Friedrich-Wilhelm Haack's Scientology - Magie des 20. Jahrhunderts] and [Bent Corydon's L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?] it is extremely polemical and very much tries to pull Hubbard to pieces."[26] He added that Miller's book had "definitely exposed some inflated statements about Hubbard's early achievements," but that the Church of Scientology had been able to counter a number of the points made by Miller: "Hubbard's assertions about his military career in WWII, e.g., have been much nearer to the truth than Miller is trying to show."[26] Malise Ruthven in the Times Literary Supplement observed that Miller "forces no thesis on his readers, allowing them to draw their own conclusion from the facts he uncovers."[27] He took this as both a strength and a weakness of the book, in that it leaves ambiguous whether Hubbard was a deliberate con-man or sincerely deluded. He also expressed frustration that Miller had not explained how Hubbard had achieved such a following, but complimented the author's meticulous research in separating fact from fiction. The satirical magazine Private Eye described the book as "meticulously documented" but observed that the author "does not theorise, nor even very often moralise. The reader must provide his own interjections, laughter and gasps of astonishment."[28]
The Sunday Times described the book as "admirably written, well documented and it must have entailed a great deal of painstaking research." It praised Miller for standing up to Scientologists' attempts to discredit him.[29] The New Statesman praised Bare-faced Messiah as accessibly written and diligently researched but, like Private Eye, criticised it for not illuminating why people find Scientology appealing.[6] The Oregon Law Review described it as "a revealing, enthralling biography of a controversial public figure."[14] Patrick Skene Catling's review in The Spectator recommended the book "unreservedly", calling it "an unsurpassably scathing study of money-mad, power-mad megalomania."[30]
A summary of the book was published in the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday Times over the course of three articles.
Extracts also appeared in The Weekend Australian and the Toronto Star.
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