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

by Tony Ortega

  Then, in May, with just weeks to go before the release of the book, Tower received a flurry of messages from various Scientology churches, threatening the company with lawsuits if Paulette’s book actually came out. From attorneys representing the Church of Scientology of Hawaii, a telegram arrived, warning Tower that its author had not been telling the publisher everything about herself: “BE ADVISED OF MY CLIENTS INTENTION TO PURSUE MAXIMUM LEGAL RECOURSE SUGGEST YOU PRIZE YOURSELF OF COOPER LIBEL ATTEMPT BOTH HERE AND ABROAD OF WHICH SHE HAS BEEN CAREFUL NOT TO INFORM YOU.”

  Joel Kreiner, the attorney for the mother church in California, sent a similar telegram: “THIS WILL ADVISE YOU ON BEHALF OF MY CLIENTS THAT PREPARATION IS NOW UNDERWAY ON COMPLAINT TO BE FILED IN THE EVENT YOU PUBLISH THE MANUSCRIPT ON SCIENTOLOGY SUBMITTED TO YOU BY PAULETTE COOPER…”

  An attorney for the New York church informed Tower that publication of the book would result in an immediate lawsuit for libel. And on May 24, a week before publication, Kreiner sent another letter: “…a complaint for libel is under preparation and will be filed immediately upon the publication of the Cooper manuscript…I have been advised by the Church to proceed with legal action immediately…”

  A notation in a Guardian’s Office document shows that with just days to go, the same unnamed person who had called Paulette in March phoned her again, and got her to confirm that June 1 was still the date for the book to come out. Paulette also revealed that she was well into her next project: the first book for the layman about forensic crime scene investigation (still a new idea then) that she planned to call “The Medical Detectives.”

  Then, on May 30, just two days before The Scandal of Scientology was to be released, the Guardian’s Office began a new strategy. A notation in a GO document showed that on that day, one of its operatives met with Roger, Paulette’s old BBDO boyfriend.

  After a flurry of intense activity by the church had failed to stop the publication of the book, Scientology was shifting to a new strategy: it wanted to learn about Paulette’s sexual history

  3

  The Scandal of Scientology

  There was nothing subtle about The Scandal of Scientology. From almost the first page, Paulette set out to warn the world about Scientology’s real aims, its track record for legal battles, and its potential for harm. After a brief caveat in her foreword that Scientology might be able to clean up its act and someday become a mainstream religion, her book was an unrelenting, 22-chapter indictment of Hubbard and his creation.

  Paulette’s book was a paperback intended for a mass audience, and it was consciously more harsh than previous books – in the cover’s subtitle, it even carried a subtle reference to Malko’s more positive hardcover that had preceded it:

  A chilling examination of the nature, beliefs, and practices of the “now religion”

  Paulette also referred to Malko’s book inside, noting that Scientology: The Now Religion had been sued by Scientology in September 1970. After a judge refused to grant summary judgment to the defense, Malko’s publisher settled with the church, paying $7,500 and putting out a statement of “regret for any misstatements which may have been made in the book,” and pulled the book off the market. Malko learned about the capitulation while he was on assignment on another story in Australia. He seemed to have little interest in continuing to cover the story or in speaking out further.

  Paulette’s book, on the other hand, was immediately in great demand. In fact, suspiciously so. Dropping by the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue one day, Paulette checked to see how many copies had been ordered. But when she looked for the book in the card catalog, she found that “Book Missing” had been written on the relevant card, and not by a librarian. When she asked about it, she was told that the library had ordered 50 copies, but all of them were stolen hours after they had been stocked. She could guess who had done it.

  She heard similar stories around the country. (Years later, in Los Angeles, a librarian told her that The Scandal of Scientology was kept under lock and key, and if a patron wanted to read a copy, it had to be within sight of the staff because there had been so many attempts to steal them.) But the paperback was a great success despite the attempts at sabotage. Some 50,000 copies were printed because it was packed with so much surprising information about an organization that had received so little coverage in the past.

  In the book, Paulette warned readers about the way members were mined for extremely private information which was then stored and shared among Scientology officials. Even L. Ron Hubbard might see the most private confessions made by a “preclear” in the process of auditing. She noted that Hubbard’s foundational text, Dianetics, had an obsession with marital violence and abortions: “In the case studies of his first book, you discover that most fathers spent a good portion of their marital lives giving engrams to their unborn children by beating their wives while they were pregnant.”

  She told how the prenatal obsessions of Dianetics, written in 1950, were supplanted two years later by Scientology’s interests in past lives, and seeing how far back in the past one could “remember” living in another solar system or galaxy. “One Scientologist claims he fell out of a spaceship 55,000,000,000,000,000,000 years ago and became a manta ray fish after having been killed by one.”

  At the time, in 1971, Hubbard was somewhere on the ship Apollo, running Scientology from sea, and was surrounded by followers who had signed billion-year contracts, even children under the age of ten, some of whom had been made to walk the plank and plunge into the Aegean, which Paulette also wrote about.

  She described how Scientology responded to criticism by attacking the critic. This was a policy that Hubbard very clearly spelled out: “We do not want Scientology to be reported in the press anywhere else but on the religion page of newspapers. It is destructive of word of mouth to permit the public press to express their biased and badly reported sensationalism. Therefore we should be very alert to sue for slander at the slightest chance so as to discourage the public press from mentioning Scientology.” Their real hatred was reserved not for outsiders but for Scientologists who had turned away from the organization—dubbed “suppressive persons.”

  Paulette dug up the divorce complaint of Hubbard’s second wife, Sara Northrup, which revealed that Hubbard had not divorced his first wife, Margaret Grubb, before marrying Northrup in 1946. Paulette’s publication of this fact was the first since 1951, when newspapers first reported Northrup’s revelation of Hubbard’s bigamy.

  Her book detailed how Hubbard was particularly interested in attracting children and celebrities to Scientology. A Scientology Celebrity Centre in Hollywood had opened up, and Scientology had managed to attract Tennessee Williams, Mama Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, and William Burroughs. (Burroughs had left by the time Paulette’s book appeared.) Scientology had also captured the imagination of Charles Manson, who had first encountered it in prison. “After his release, The [New York] Times reported, he went to Los Angeles where he was said to have met local Scientologists and attended several parties for movie stars, possibly the July 18 dedication of the Celebrity Centre. Scientology literature was also said to be found at the ranch when Manson and his family were captured. But for reasons unknown, it is claimed that Manson may have been made a ‘suppressive person’ by the Scientologists, and there have also been hints that he may have joined the Process, the sex and Satan group which originally broke away from Scientology.”

  Paulette discussed Scientology’s attempts to get tax-exempt status and recognition as a church, and its (mostly failed) attempts at political influence. “Scientology is perhaps a religion, is probably a philosophy, is definitely a business, is potentially a political force, and is also a form of therapy, or as they call it now, pastoral counseling. Most people do not realize this, since the Scientologists draw attention only to the idea that they are a religion and a philosophy. Thus, they have been able to keep the public in the dark about what is happening -- and they have also been largely able to a
void public outcry.” It was an astonishing read by any era’s standards.

  Three days after the book came out, a woman showed up at Paulette’s East 80th Street apartment to serve her legal papers. Just as she had been threatened previously, Paulette was being sued for libel. But this lawsuit was for damages resulting from her Queen magazine article that had come out a year and a half before, not her book which was fresh from the printing press. (Paulette was dismayed when she realized the church objected most strongly to the article’s strange headline about “necromancers” and a “con-man”—words that the editors of Queen had put on the article without her knowledge.)

  She tried not to let the lawsuit get her down—things were actually looking very good in her life. With her first published book in demand, on July 26, Paulette turned 29 years old. She had several more books in the works, and she was still developing her travel-writing career.

  In one travel assignment, she even had another strange religious order to investigate. That summer, she traveled to the Netherlands to the town of Staphorst, which was becoming famous for the odd behavior of its residents. Located about 120 miles from Amsterdam in the state of Overijssel, the insular town was home to about 10,000 people “described as more Calvinist than Calvin,” Paulette wrote for the New York Times in a story that appeared in October. Wearing drab clothes and practicing such medieval customs as bathing only once a week and only then in a tub that had a covering so no flesh could be glimpsed by others, the Staphorsters took their religion very seriously.

  Their suspicion of outsiders was so consuming, however, inbreeding was not only producing noticeable affects in their appearance, it was also bringing sterility. Bans on pre-marital sex had been lifted: Paulette noted that a couple had to prove that they could get pregnant before they could marry. Paulette had wanted to title the story “Bewitched, Bothered, and Be-Guildered,” but her editors settled on “Getting Stoned (by the Natives) in Staphorst,” a reference to the way the Staphorsters had pelted Paulette’s rental car with rocks when she first pulled into town. “Paulette Cooper, a freelance who lives in New York City, is the author of The Scandal of Scientology,” noted the lengthy story, which also carried photos of the Staphorsters in their medieval garb while wearing scowls on their faces.

  In July, she’d had an even bigger spread in the magazine of the Sunday Times of London – a 6,000-word account of her week as a cruise ship stowaway, including a glamorous shot of her in a bikini, splashed across two pages.

  Paulette was getting key placement in the world’s most important publications, she was becoming an expert in off-beat religions, and she even looked the part of an attractive, high-flying magazine writer. Three more books on completely different subjects were underway. Her career was taking off like a rocket. Even her legal problems seemed to be going away: In November, the lawsuit over the Queen magazine article was settled. Harper’s Bazaar, which had taken over Queen, paid a nominal amount after putting out an innocuous statement about the article.

  But then, in December, as promised, Scientology filed a lawsuit against Paulette’s book, asking for $1.5 million in damages for “untrue, libelous, and defamatory statements about the Church.” It was a public act by a church that was becoming known for using the courts to punish its critics. Cooper didn’t know, however, that Scientology was also still engaged in a very different, and very private, campaign to ruin her.

  On February 29, 1972, Jane Kember wrote a memo to one of her underlings, a man named Terry Milner, whose title was Deputy Guardian, Information, United States (DG Info US). “Re Paulette Cooper,” it began. “We need to know the following as she is an unhandled attacker of Scientology.” Kember asked Milner to find out when and why Paulette had begun her book. She asked him to find out how she had met some of the people she had relied on for information – Michael Sanders, the Justice Dept. employee, LIFE magazine writer Alan Levy and several former church members.

  “Who is Paulette connected to?” Kember asked in the memo, and complained that Paulette seemed to be so current on important information. Until they knew more about her, Kember griped, they couldn’t hit her back.

  “She has done an excellent smear job [of] Scientology, and we have no data with [which] to handle her!” Kember concluded.

  Milner understood what that meant. He immediately put out word to the operatives working for him: They were to continue their surveillance of Paulette, learn about her past and her associations, and then to begin spreading slander about her – particularly about her sex life. The Guardian’s Office and its spy division—Branch One of the Information Branch or “B-I”—used highly professional methods to place informants and gather information. But it could also use very crude methods to get what it wanted.

  The ensuing flood of obscene calls from men was a hassle, if not very creative. Even though she was listed in the phone book, until this time Paulette had only rarely received obscene calls. Now, suddenly, they were plentiful. One man admitted that he was calling from Cincinnati, and wanted to know when the second printing of her book was coming out. A long-distance literate obscene phone call – it made little sense. Some calls were more ominous.

  “We’re gonna push you under a subway car when we catch you at the station,” was one, while another went, “We’re gonna give you the .44 treatment.”

  That one rung a bell. Hubbard, at one point, had talked about “exteriorizing” from the body with the use of the “R2-45” method, and he’d fired a .45-caliber pistol while on stage. (Documents show that Hubbard later used the prospect of the “R2-45” method to intimidate church members who got out of line.)

  Other calls were comical. “This is President Nixon and I just want to make something perfectly clear,” and, “This is Flo Ziegfield and we’ve got a great part for you in the Follies. Call me at the Waldorf.”

  Others were blunt, such as one message left on her machine which said, “I want to fuck your cunt and suck your titties. Call me.” In another prank, someone mailed her pornographic magazines from Canada by way of her publisher, Tower Books. (In a notation in Guardian’s Office records, putting Paulette on two pornographic mailing lists had resulted in “nil results.”)

  Many of the men who called pretended to be interested in dating her. They would say, for example, that they had met her at a publisher’s party. (She rarely went to such events, so she would know right away that the call was phony.) They tended to ask what she was writing about next, pumping her for information at the same time that they were asking her out on a date. Paulette would usually ask them the same question: “If you met me, what do I look like?” They tended to get her hair correct – long and brown – but usually guessed wrong on her height and assumed she was tall.

  On February 18, 1972, Paulette was asked to speak at a MENSA meeting, and when she was walking to it someone jumped out of a car and handed her a summons related to the December lawsuit. It unnerved her, and she noticed that someone else from the church sat in the first row at the meeting itself, taping her talk.

  More worrisome were the threatening phone calls, and that some of the men who called her seemed to know what she had been doing and where she had been. It was becoming obvious that people were keeping a close eye on her, and Paulette couldn’t help but wonder if her phone had been tapped. She called the phone company and asked that a serviceman come out to look at her setup. After a short examination, the serviceman asked Paulette to follow her into the building’s basement so he could show her something. Her telephone line, he said, had been tampered with. The technician showed her that the lines that went only to her apartment had been frayed, as if alligator clamps had been put on them so someone could listen in. The lines for the other apartments appeared to be untouched.

  Paulette was livid. For months, she’d been putting up with prankish interruptions in her life. But now, things were getting out of hand. It was one thing to try to shake her up at a public speaking event. But to tap her phone?

  Paulette decided to a
ct fast, thinking that the church wasn’t used to getting a taste of its own medicine. If she could just get off a shot across its bow, perhaps Scientology would back off. She called up Paul Rheingold, the attorney who had represented Ralph Nader against General Motors in a similar harassment lawsuit a couple of years earlier. They quickly put together a 15-page complaint they knew would make news and that they both thought would scare the church off. On March 30, they filed a $15.4 million suit against the Church of Scientology of New York. Paulette was sure the lawsuit would end the harassment – she still thought it was only the New York org that was hassling her.

  To ensure that result, she sought as much publicity as she could about her harassment to give her lawsuit more impact. In February, the influential Reverend Lester Kinsolving responded to her request by writing about Paulette for his nationally syndicated column. “Churches have been generally reluctant to engage in the expense and acrimony of lawsuits,” he wrote, “But an organization called ‘the church of Scientology’ appears to have taken just the opposite course.”

  He praised Paulette’s book, and quoted her saying that she had spent two years researching it, and lawyers had vetted every word. She told Kinsolving, “They are suing me in England as well as the US. When I arrived in Edinburgh last April, they met the plane and hired a photographer to bug me for days. One hundred of them surrounded the hotel, and so many phone calls were received asking for my room number that the C.I.D. (police) had to come in.” In all, she said, Scientology was pursuing 58 lawsuits for libel against other people that she was aware of. Some were truly bizarre. The previous year, satirist and prankster Paul Krassner had promoted the upcoming 13th anniversary issue of The Realist by saying it would include an article titled “The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy.” Krassner had meant it as a joke – the article didn’t exist – but Scientology filed a libel suit against Krassner anyway, asking for $750,000.