The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper

by Tony Ortega

  “She would never have known. Why would you do that?” Paulette asked her dad.

  “Because I knew,” he said.

  Until that summer, she’d thought of her father as a henpecked man who simply did what her mother told him. But working for him, she could see that people respected him, and he was savvier than she had given him credit for. That same summer, when she brought home a man she liked for dinner, she knew her parents were uncomfortable simply because the man wasn’t Jewish. But her father handled it well.

  “I’m not going to tell you to break up with him, because then you’ll be even more anxious to date him,” he told her. “But I will mention that there was only a 20 percent chance of rain this evening, and he wore galoshes. Given your personality, would you ever really be happy with someone like that?”

  Ted Cooper knew his thrill-seeking, ambitious daughter well.

  By 1967, when she lived at the St. Tropez, Paulette knew that what she really wanted to do was write for magazines. She asked how long she had to work on the Ajax account at Norman, Craig, & Kummel before she qualified for unemployment. Five months, she was told. So at four-and-a-half months, she gave two weeks’ notice.

  Living on unemployment, she started looking for splashy story subjects that would get her noticed. For an example, she didn’t have to look farther than her friend Albert Podell. In a city of outsized characters, Podell stood out. He was an attorney in the Village who had recently returned from a 19-month drive around the world. He and a friend had motored a four-wheel drive vehicle to the most remote ends of the planet, and then had written a book about it. While promoting the book early in 1968, Podell appeared on the Alan Burke television show – one of the earliest shows that featured a host who insulted the audience as he barked about politics and the news of the day. After the show, Podell invited the entire staff of the show back to his Sullivan Street apartment for a party.

  He also invited Paulette. She was surprised to see that one of her old classmates from Brandeis, Sheila Rabb, was there. Sheila was an associate producer at the television show, and she introduced Paulette to her boss, the show’s producer. His name was Paul Noble.

  Paul had grown up in Forest Hills, Queens, and had gone to Forest Hills High School, Cornell University, and then Boston University for a master’s degree. He got a job at WGBH in Boston and helped produce Prospects of Mankind, one of the earliest public affairs shows on television, hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt. Some episodes of the show had been taped at Brandeis while Paulette was a student there, but the two had never met.

  One of Mrs. Roosevelt’s guests was John F. Kennedy, and Paul explained how he’d literally given JFK the shirt off his back when it turned out the new president had worn a white shirt, which drove the TV cameras of the time crazy. Paul gave him a blue shirt and then mailed JFK’s white J. Crew shirt to him. Paulette liked that detail – she could tell that Paul Noble was a man of integrity.

  Paulette was 25, Paul was 32. She was impressed that he was in television and had met such important people, producing shows for Eleanor Roosevelt and Bishop Fulton Sheen. She told him about her graduate work in psychology, studying early childhood memory. But now she was trying to make it as a writer. Like her friend Albert, she wanted to write books that got noticed.

  After Podell’s party, Paul and Paulette went on a couple of dates. They liked each other’s company, but nothing romantic developed. They had made strong impressions on each other, but went their separate ways.

  Several months later, around the time Bill told Paulette he was Jesus Christ, and after she’d moved uptown to a place of her own, the cockroach-infested ground-floor apartment on East 80th Street, she began having success landing stories in magazines. For TV Guide, she advised readers how to get their pets into commercials, and for Cosmopolitan she wrote “A Girl’s Guide to Diamonds,” which came easy, with her father in the business.

  Ted Cooper had worked in a well-known and prestigious diamond import business started by his father-in-law, Solomon Toepfer, before he opened his own concern. And it was diamonds that kept Ted and Stella Cooper making regular trips to Antwerp, the industry’s world headquarters. The Coopers preferred to go to Europe by sea and Paulette got used to the life aboard cruise ships at an early age.

  When she was only 18, in 1960, Paulette spent one cruise from Europe to New York dodging a Marine major-general who insisted on dining with her parents several times. He’d find excuses to talk to Paulette alone, and kept telling her that he wanted to be her first sexual experience. She wasn’t tempted. But that same cruise, she did have a heavy crush on a California man named Robert Smith who had been living in Italy as an opera singer, and who called himself “Roberto Smittini.” She made the mistake of writing about what they got up to together in her trip diary, and when her mother read it, Stella and Ted had meltdowns.

  Paulette gave Smith her address, and they exchanged a few letters before the connection faded, probably hastened by Ted’s threats to go after him if he ever contacted Paulette again. And despite her father’s worst fears, Paulette’s virginity was still intact. (She saved that for one of her Brandeis professors.)

  She was accustomed to older men approaching her during ocean cruises. In 1968, aboard the S.S. France, she was picked up by a 55-year-old man who threw his back out when he lifted her during a dance. He was CBS news anchor Eric Sevareid. For the next couple of years, Sevareid would stop in to see Paulette every few months when he was in town. They’d hole up in the Stanhope Hotel and take in the Bobby Short show.

  That year, in September 1968, when the Washington Post wanted to understand a new trend in the cruise business, it bought a story by Paulette that explained the marvel of the S.S. Independence. The ship was breaking with tradition, asking extremely low rates for passage, but charging for all meals—an unheard-of practice in the stuffy, custom-laden world of class-conscious cruising. “Whether it was the attractive ship, the informal style, or the ‘bargain’ that attracted them, there is no doubt that the passengers sailing were very different from the conservative, elderly, well-traveled crowd who were there last year,” Paulette wrote with the experience to know the difference. Not everyone was happy with the change. She quoted a crew member who complained about “people who don’t know how to tip, don’t know fore from aft, a bow from their elbow, and keep calling the damned ship a ‘boat’.”

  For Paulette, the story was validation that her career was going in the right direction. She was 26 years old and had three stories published, and all three were in major publications—TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, and the Washington Post.

  2

  ‘Have you ever practiced cannibalism?’

  Paulette knew she wouldn’t get much more information from the Scientology org itself. She needed to talk to people who had more experience with the church and she was fortunate to find a few people who proved very helpful. Two years earlier, a man named Ray Buckingham had spoken out about his experiences in Scientology on a New York radio program. He was a voice teacher who had spent some time in the church and had helped get several of his students into it, but then he had found himself the target of Scientology’s program of “ethics”.

  Reacting to breakaway groups that had threatened to undermine his authority, in 1965 L. Ron Hubbard had put in place strict new security measures which included labeling Scientology’s perceived enemies as “Suppressive Persons.” Once the ethics apparatus of Scientology labeled a person an “SP,” everyone who wanted to remain in good standing with the church had to “disconnect” from that person entirely.

  Buckingham was stunned when his star pupil, a young Broadway singer, announced that she was disconnecting from him because he’d been labeled suppressive. He’d invested about $30,000 in her career and had several parts lined up for her that she walked away from. Suddenly no one in the church would talk to him, which is how he learned he’d been branded an enemy of Scientology.

  Paulette heard about Buckingham and tracked him down. He was a
very useful source, giving her an insider’s view of the church and connecting her with other people who had run afoul of the organization. He was also the first person who told Paulette that he had received death threats and was literally afraid for his life because of his involvement with Scientology.

  Through Buckingham, Paulette met other ex-church members, and she started hearing other troubling stories about interrogations and control. She learned that high-level Scientologists were regularly put through humiliating “security checks,” which were lists of questions asked by ethics officers as a subject is holding onto an “E-meter.” A device that measures skin galvanism (only one-quarter of the operations of a polygraph, which also measures respiration, blood pressure, and heartbeat), the machine reacts in a way that Scientologists were convinced would show when they were hiding something. Under that kind of pressure, they were asked questions from a list Paulette obtained:

  Have you ever raped anyone?

  Have you ever been raped?

  Have you ever been involved in an abortion?

  Have you ever assisted in an abortion?

  Have you ever practiced cannibalism?

  Have you ever committed adultery?

  Have you ever practiced sex with animals?

  Have you ever exhibited yourself in public?

  Have you ever had intercourse with a member of your family?

  Have you ever slept with a member of a race of another color?

  Have you practiced sex with children?

  Have you ever taken money for giving anyone sexual intercourse?

  Have you ever been a voyeur?

  Have you ever masturbated?

  And there were many more. Another document that unnerved Paulette was one she had managed to pick up during her weekend at the org. It was an official announcement that a woman had been declared a suppressive person – in effect, it was the woman’s excommunication order. The document accused the woman of outrageous (and hard to believe) crimes. She had supposedly pushed five men down a flight of stairs, for example. When Paulette tried to locate the woman, she turned out to have an unlisted number, which in those days was unusual. Paulette couldn’t help wondering if the woman was being harassed. And she also wondered if Buckingham really wasn’t exaggerating about being afraid for his life.

  As Paulette continued to gather information, she used some creative methods she’d learned from other reporters. There was the way she learned more about L. Ron Hubbard’s family, for example. She knew that Hubbard’s father was supposed to be a naval commander living in the Midwest, and the pulp fiction writer had referred to his father as Commander H. L. Hubbard. Paulette managed to find a listing for a Harry Hubbard, and when she called and he asked who she was, she quickly made up a name.

  “Paula Hubbard. I wonder if we’re related,” she said.

  That got the old man talking. He went through the entire family tree, and told her birth dates and locations and marriage details, all in an attempt to figure out if “Paula” was a member of the family. She later made extensive use of the details he gave her. Paulette also scheduled a train trip down to Washington D.C., where she knew there was a mother lode of documents on the church.

  In 1958, concerned about the health claims being made by Hubbard, the Food and Drug Administration had infiltrated Scientology’s “Founding Church” in Washington D.C. (Hubbard had actually incorporated his first church in Camden, New Jersey in December, 1953, and then some of his followers opened what would come to be known as the “mother church” in Los Angeles in February, 1954. Hubbard didn’t create the “Founding Church of Scientology” in D.C. until July 1955.) For several years, the FDA quietly gathered information about the way Scientologists used “E-meters” and made claims about their ability to heal ailments.

  Then, on January 4, 1963, the FDA, with the help of the Capitol Police, raided the church, seizing more than a hundred of the devices and thousands of pages of documents. The ensuing court case descended into years of squabbling about the devices and the church’s First Amendment religious rights. After the matter had been appealed and returned to district court, a settlement was reached in 1971 that required Scientology to label every E-meter with a warning, sort of like on a cigarette pack. It read: “The device known as a Hubbard Electrometer, or E-meter, used in auditing, a process of Scientology and Dianetics, is not medically or scientifically useful for the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of any disease. It is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily functions of anyone.”

  Paulette was less interested in the court fight over the E-meters than getting a look at the piles of documents the raid had snared. For days, at the Justice Department, she pored over them, gaining valuable insight into Hubbard and Scientology’s history.

  Someone who noticed how hard Paulette was working was a Justice employee named Michael Sanders and he helped get her hands on a copy of the scathing 1965 investigation of Scientology by Australia’s state of Victoria. One of the harshest denunciations of the church ever produced by a government body, the probe had been launched in 1963, and after hearing from both current and former church members, its author, Queens Counsel Kevin Victor Anderson, recommended that legislators banish Scientology in no uncertain terms.

  “If there should be detected in this Report a note of unrelieved denunciation of Scientology, it is because the evidence has shown its theories to be fantastic and impossible, its principles perverted and ill-founded, and its techniques debased and harmful,” Anderson wrote. “While making an appeal to the public as a worthy system whereby ability, intelligence, and personality may be improved, it employs techniques which further its real purpose of securing domination over and mental enslavement of its adherents. It involves the administration by persons without any training in medicine or psychology of quasi-psychological treatment, which is harmful medically, morally and socially.”

  After her trip to Washington resulted in her reading so many key documents, Paulette knew she had sufficient material for her story. But she was also aware that she had competition, because if the crowds of young people down at the Hotel Martinique demonstrated Scientology’s growing popularity, it was also becoming popular as a subject for journalists.

  In November 1968, LIFE magazine printed a major article which featured a sidebar by a man named Alan Levy who had gone through quite a few levels of Scientology training in order to write about it. In April 1969, a hip New York publication, EYE, ran a lengthy and smart piece by a writer named George Malko. While its criticism of Hubbard’s ideas was cutting, Malko was impressed by the church’s popularity with the young. In June, a much more harshly critical story showed up in Parents magazine by a married couple, Arlene and Howard Eisenberg, under the title “The Dangerous New Cult of Scientology.”

  Paulette knew she had no time to waste. She finished her article and her agent, Ted Chichak, looked for a magazine that would run it. They both soon found that Scientology already had a litigious reputation, and most outlets weren’t anxious to take it on. One of the magazines that rejected the piece was one of the most popular magazines in the United Kingdom, Queen. But Queen, at least, let Paulette know that it was interested in her as a correspondent, and asked her to send a writing sample for future assignments. In a cheeky move, Paulette sent them the Scientology article draft as her writing sample. They then sent her a check for $240 and scheduled it for a future issue.

  Originally The Queen, a society magazine, the publication had changed hands in the 60’s and then began catering to younger readers fascinated with swinging London’s moneyed set at play. In 1968, it had been sold again, to its rival, Harper’s Bazaar, and it had only a few more issues left under its old name.

  Paulette didn’t know when her story would appear. Then, one day, she got two telephone calls from men she didn’t know. Each of them threatened to kill her if she kept writing about Scientology. She called Ted, her agent, and asked what the hell was going on. He checked, and sure enough
, the December 1969 issue of Queen had come out – the very last issue that would come out under that name – and it contained a story by Paulette Cooper, “The Tragi-farce of Scientology.”

  Things would never be the same.

  Paulette Cooper’s story on Scientology in Queen was not the first, not the longest, and not the most damning thing that had been written about the odd organization. Like others, she described Scientology’s emphasis on bringing in money and the increasing prices members paid as they went higher and higher on Hubbard’s scheme of courses. She was also not the first to point out that Hubbard had claimed to be a nuclear physicist but flunked the only class he took at George Washington University in molecular and atomic physics, and left school without a degree in his sophomore year.

  But Paulette’s Queen story was the first to highlight the sexual improprieties auditors tended to get into with their subjects (known as “preclears” in Scientology jargon). The relationship between auditor and preclear could be intensely personal, and some auditors took advantage of it. Church members who felt abused found themselves being harassed if they spoke up. And when some of them asked for refunds, they hit a brick wall. More than previous writers, Paulette focused on the harassment of those who dared to speak up about Scientology, whether they’d been in the church or not.

  Queen’s editors had saddled the story with an unwieldy full title that Paulette didn’t see until it was published: “The cringer, the bully, the necromancer, the con-man are all typical figures in the Gothic comedy. All play their part in THE TRAGI-FARCE OF SCIENTOLOGY”

  And at the bottom of the first page of the article there was a short notation:

  THIS MATERIAL IS TAKEN FROM THE SCANDAL OF SCIENTOLOGY, BY PAULETTE COOPER, WHICH IS TO BE PUBLISHED NEXT YEAR.

  Paulette didn’t have a publisher yet, but she already knew that she wanted to turn all the material she’d been gathering into a book.