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

by Tony Ortega

  The day after Milner’s memo was written, on November 7, 1972, Nibs made a videotaped deposition, recanting previous testimony that he’d given in a lawsuit between the IRS and the Church of Scientology. After spending the summer writing with Paulette Cooper, visiting her at her apartment, and appearing on television and radio shows with her, Nibs now said he’d been wrong to criticize his father and the church.

  “I felt it was about time that I quit fooling around and being a child and quit messing about and lay the facts on the line and say what I have been doing is a whole lot of lying, a whole lot of damage to a lot of people that I value highly,” he said.

  Nibs was back in Scientology’s camp.

  Later that month, he sent a letter to Ted and Stella Cooper, whose hospitality he had enjoyed so much just a few months earlier. The note urged the Coopers that their daughter should keep her wits about her. It was a subtle and odd warning, but one that didn’t seem out of place – Paulette and Nibs had been antagonizing Scientology all summer. Nibs merely seemed to be giving friendly advice.

  What the Coopers didn’t know was that their daughter was being targeted for even worse harassment. It was time for Operation Dynamite to enter its next phase. It was time to get Paulette Cooper committed.

  5

  Joy

  In the fall of 1972, Paulette was running her own subterfuge operation. She was helping her second cousin Joy Heller keep her parents from freaking out about her sleeping arrangements. Joy was seven years younger and a few inches taller than Paulette, but in other ways they were very much alike. Both were petite young women living in swinging Manhattan and had parents from a generation which didn’t fully grasp the opportunities that presented themselves in such a bustling environment.

  Paulette was taking full advantage of the glamour her writing career made available. She was attracted to powerful, intellectual men. After meeting Eric Sevareid during a 1968 cruise, she’d seen him occasionally over the next couple of years. Paulette was a local dalliance – neither of them took it very seriously. But after that had faded away, Paulette started dating an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn. His name was Bob Straus. He was smart, he made her laugh, and he wanted to have lots of kids. They argued about it, playfully, through 1972. It was the closest Paulette had come to the thought of marriage.

  She was concerned enough about her future with Bob – who she thought might have political ambitions – that she contacted her old boyfriend, Roger, and persuaded him to return to her the photograph he had taken of her in her sheer nightgown. She was relieved when he agreed and turned it over.

  Paulette’s parents adored Bob, and when he came to visit her that summer when she was staying in Mamaroneck after her surgery, she had to keep him away because he made her laugh so hard her pain flared up awful and she feared her stitches would come loose. Bob lived in Brooklyn, and when Paulette was back in Manhattan, he’d drive over with his giant dog Virgil and they’d invade Paulette’s apartment. Paulette was always a little nervous of Virgil (she’d been spooked by a large dog as a child) but he’d jump on her playfully and sloshed around on her waterbed, nearly causing a rupture. Bob would bring his legal work over, and made her laugh by the way he’d read court transcripts aloud. Or they’d go out with his lawyer friends, and they’d talk not about the law but about their dogs.

  Joy, on the other hand, had fallen hard for a law student who lived just two blocks from Paulette, and both women understood what hell there would be to pay if Joy’s parents knew she was spending just about every night at his apartment.

  Paulette proposed a solution: Put some of your things here in my apartment and we’ll tell your parents that you’ve moved in with me. It was a relief for Joy. She liked hanging out with her cousin anyway, and she dug the 16 E 80th Street apartment – she thought Paulette had great taste, with everything in black and white and red like in the best magazines. And the centerpiece was a glass kidney-shaped Noguchi coffee table. At night, when Joy stayed over, she slept in the small living room, and then shoved her things next to the couch so they were out of the way.

  Meanwhile, the harassment had seemed to die down over the summer. But in the fall it started to pick up again. The obscene calls, the calls for dates. Also, there were more pranks. While Paulette was away on a travel story, someone called the phone company claiming to be Paulette and asked that her phone be disconnected. It was, and so was her father’s when someone claiming to be Ted Cooper called the phone company and asked that his phone be shut off. Paulette had to work for a few days without a telephone until it was reconnected. For her father, who relied on calls from customers, it was a bigger problem.

  Another time, a friend told Paulette that she was on a bus and noticed something startling on a newspaper another rider was reading. She said she was certain that she was seeing a photo that featured Paulette’s face on a naked body. Paulette was sure it was a composite image, but she was never able to find out where the image had appeared.

  Then there was also a scandal sheet that suddenly appeared. It was supposedly put out by a group called “Christians and Jews Against Pornography,” and it was hand-distributed to various places around town. It claimed that Paulette Cooper had started out writing porn. (She’d once written an article about Eros magazine publisher Ralph Ginzburg, but hadn’t written erotica herself.) It called her a pathological liar, a shoplifter, and said she achieve sexual satisfaction only through being whipped, which the leaflet said was something that she had been taught by a rabbi. It said she was spying for the Attorney General’s office, that she worked as a part-time prostitute, and that she’d been fired from BBDO for corrupting the morals of her bosses.

  The sheet also complained about two other authors, but they were pen names used by writers employed by Maurice Girodias. Clearly, Paulette was the real target, and the claims were based on things that her old boyfriend Roger had told the church, twisted for effect. At 15 years old she had stolen something from a shop, for example, something she never tried to hide. And before Roger, she had at one time dated a rabbi, which she mentioned to him. The rest of it was pure invention. The leaflet enraged Paulette, and she turned over a copy of it to her attorney, Paul Rheingold, as another example of harassment to cite in her lawsuit against the New York church.

  And there was more fodder for the lawsuit: It was becoming harder for Paulette to make a living. The harassment and her legal issues were making it tough to do certain stories. In September, for example, she had traveled to Las Vegas for a unique story: She’d heard about the “loser’s bus,” which drove to Los Angeles late at night for those who had lost so much at the gaming tables they didn’t have money for rooms. The bus stopped in Baker, California, in the middle of the desert, where Paulette recorded a wild scene in the predawn hours. Editors at the New York Times told her they loved the story and scheduled it for publication, but under Rheingold’s orders, Paulette withdrew it – they were afraid that publishing the story would give the church an excuse to claim legal jurisdiction in California for their lawsuit (which eventually happened anyway).

  On Monday, December 4, 1972, Paulette typed up the final page of a document she’d been putting together for several months. It was a diary of harassment that Rheingold had asked her to put together to bolster her claims in the March lawsuit.

  Paulette was alleging that Scientology had tapped her phone and put her through constant harassment since the publication of her Queen magazine article and The Scandal of Scientology. Rheingold asked Paulette to write down a record of the obscene phone calls, the pranks, the smear sheet from “Christians and Jews Against Pornography,” and the times she found herself being followed.

  Just that morning a man had called and told her, “I don’t want to upset you, Paulette, but I think you should know about the terrible things that have been written about you on a bathroom wall. Did you know there was something on a bathroom wall about you?”

  “Obviously,” she wrote in her diary, “the Scientolog
ists didn’t feel they got the message through [yet].”

  Not only was her harassment continuing, she worried that Nibs had changed camps. She wasn’t aware that the month before, he had given testimony for his father. “I’m beginning to suspect he may have gone over to the Scientologist’s side and is playing both of us against the middle,” she wrote, but she wondered if he had only recently had a change of heart. “I think he was OK while he was here this summer.”

  On that same Monday when Paulette finished up her diary of harassment for her attorney, three men checked into a Howard Johnson’s motel in Manhattan under the names Frank Morris, Don Shannon, and Lawrence Harris. They had just arrived from JFK airport after a long flight from Lisbon, and they were still recovering from a shock. At the airport, a customs official had pulled “Larry” aside, and questioned him about the $100,000 he was carrying in various currencies, including Portuguese escudos, British pounds and Moroccan dirhams.

  The other two barely concealed their panic, figuring they were all about to be slapped into custody. But Larry emerged from the encounter unscathed, if looking somewhat stunned, and the three grabbed a cab for the city. In the taxi, Larry explained that the customs official recognized him for who he really was – L. Ron Hubbard – but it turned out the federal agent happened to be a fan of Hubbard’s science fiction, and he’d let him go without further questioning. “Frank Morris” was actually Jim Dincalci, Hubbard’s medical officer, and “Don Shannon” was Paul Preston, their bodyguard.

  Dincalci worried that news would spread of Hubbard’s return to America after the airport incident. But Hubbard didn’t seem concerned. Dincalci went out to buy them lunch and new clothes, and the next day he went to search for an apartment. The three were in New York because things in Morocco and Portugal had gotten too hot for Hubbard. Since 1967, he had been at sea, the “commodore” of his own small navy consisting of three ships, the flagship Apollo, the Athena, and the sloop Diana, which was not only the name of a Greek goddess but also the name of one of Hubbard’s daughters.

  One country after another had proved to be unfriendly to Scientology, and Hubbard was running out of safe ports. He had left the US for England in 1959, had tried to establish a presence in (and had hopes of taking over) Rhodesia in 1966, and then had launched his navy. In turn, governments in Greece and North Africa had chased out the aging science fiction writer and his crew of several hundred young followers.

  In 1972, after more than five years at sea, the Apollo needed serious repairs and was in dry dock in Lisbon. For several months, Hubbard, his wife Mary Sue, and some of their crew had lived in Morocco and had become involved in political intrigue there. But then they received intelligence that French agents were moving in to arrest Hubbard on fraud charges. Hubbard, Mary Sue, and the rest of the crew packed quickly and headed for Lisbon on May 3. Finding that it wasn’t safe there, the next day Hubbard had flown with Dincalci and Preston, bound for Chicago with a layover at JFK. After the incident with the customs agent at the airport, they decided to stay put in New York. Now, accompanied by just Dincalci and Preston, and with his wife and the rest of the crew back in Lisbon, Hubbard decided to wait things out for a while.

  Dincalci soon found a sizable place in a 13-story building in Forest Hills, Queens on 112 Street, called “Executive House.” Hubbard, who had not been in the US for 13 years, seemed mesmerized by how much the country had changed since 1959 and sat for hours at a time, watching television.

  Joy Heller was slightly in awe of her older cousin. She was impressed that Paulette was a published author. Joy stopped by the apartment each day after working in sales at Bergdorf Good-man, in part to keep up the fiction that she was living there, but also because she liked hanging out at the apartment when she wasn’t seeing her boyfriend. Which is why she was there with Paulette on December 6, 1972, when someone knocked at the door.

  It was a young woman, bundled up against the chill outside, and Joy wondered how she had managed to get through the building’s front door and into the vestibule outside their apartment. The woman had long black hair under a hat, and she wore a dark pea coat and gloves. She introduced herself as Margie Shepherd to Joy and Paulette, who invited her in. Margie didn’t take off her coat, but went directly into her spiel, that she was gathering signatures for a petition and donations to support Cesar Chavez, the human rights activist, and the United Farm Workers. Paulette generously offered to help, and went looking for her checkbook. Margie asked for a glass of water, and Joy and Paulette went into the kitchen to fetch her one, leaving Margie alone briefly in the living room.

  When they came back, and Paulette began writing out a check, Joy couldn’t help noticing that Margie had not only kept her coat on, she also hadn’t taken off her gloves. Joy thought it was slightly odd – the weather outside might have been cold, but in the ground floor apartment the temperature was warm. Paulette gave Margie the check and took the petition, which was on a clipboard, and signed it. Joy signed it as well. Then Margie went on her way.

  Soon, Paulette and Joy had nearly forgotten about Margie’s visit.

  On December 8, 1972, two days after Margie Shepherd visited Paulette’s apartment, the Church of Scientology offices at the Hotel Martinique received a very strange letter. Incoherent, badly spelled, and vague, the short note contained the words “I’ll bomb you.”

  Five days later, a second letter arrived, this one just as badly put together, but it began with the word “James,” apparently a reference to James Meisler, the “reverend” who was the org’s spokesman. This second letter also contained a vague threat: “I’ll give you one week before scientology is a exploding volcano.”

  Meisler contacted the FBI. He told the agency that the notes were clearly bomb threats, and he had two main suspects in mind for who might have sent them: Paulette Cooper and Robert Kaufman.

  Paulette had no idea that the FBI was beginning an investigation of her. On December 15, two days after the Scientology org received the second threat letter, she made a move in the night to a new apartment.

  After dreaming about it for two years, she was finally moving into the Churchill, at 300 E. 40th Street. Barbara Lewis had notified her when an apartment opened up underneath her own place – Barbara was in 5H, and Paulette moved into 3H. She would now have a 24-hour doorman, and an apartment that wasn’t on the ground floor which made her feel much safer. Joy agreed to stay in the apartment on 80th Street as Paulette moved her stuff into the new place in the Churchill.

  Four days later, Joy heard a buzz at the front door of the townhouse. The building on 80th Street had a very distinctive red front door, and on either side of it were narrow windows. Joy could see through those windows that on the other side of the door was a light-skinned black man with a large afro. He was very well dressed in a camel hair coat, and he was holding a bouquet of roses in his gloved hands. Her boyfriend had just recently sent her flowers, and she assumed he’d done it again. She opened the door to let the man in.

  He handed her a card which had her last name on it, but the first initial was wrong. Joy didn’t really have time to think about it, because the man suddenly pulled a revolver out of the flowers, and grabbed her, putting the barrel of the gun against the back of her neck. Paralyzed with fear, Joy had no time to react. But he held her only for a moment. Then he pushed her away and went into her apartment. He was only inside briefly, and she watched in terror as he walked back out of the apartment, passed by her, and then fled the building.

  Joy screamed her head off until other people came and called the police. As soon as she had her wits about her, she called her boyfriend, who came running from his apartment two blocks away. She told him what had happened – the details about the flowers, the card, the gun to her neck, and that he’d pushed into the apartment, apparently looking for something but not finding it.

  They called Paulette, and all three of them immediately came to the same conclusion – this was meant to intimidate her. Joy’s boyfriend asked Paule
tte, “Does the church know that you moved? You have to tell them.”

  Paulette said that she would. But the incident left her shaken. What if the man had found her in the apartment? Is that what he was looking for?

  Paulette didn’t have much time to puzzle it over because within a few days, she was surprised by a visit by two FBI agents. One of them, Special Agent Bruce Brotman, told her that they just wanted to ask her a few questions and said perhaps she could help them out on a case.

  What a coincidence, Paulette thought. She happened to be working on her fourth book, the longest of her books so far, which would be called The Medical Detectives. Decades before CSI became a hit on television, Paulette was exploring the way science was changing the way police handled crime scene investigation. And now the FBI wanted her advice? Tell me how I can help, she told them.

  Brotman said that James Meisler, the public relations man at the Scientology org at the Hotel Martinique, had reported two bomb threats that had been received at the church.

  Meisler. She frowned. She was already tired of the man’s name. Not only had he tried to intimidate Bob Kaufman over his book, but she had noticed that when he was interviewed by the press, he tended to be hit with quotes from her book. When that happened, Meisler would accuse her and Kaufman of bigotry for investigating the church.

  The agents told Paulette that they were trying to figure out who might have sent the anonymous bomb threats. And they told her that when they asked Meisler who might have done it, he had named her.

  She laughed.

  “I was going to say Meisler was behind it,” she told them. “If he said I did it, then it’s a phony letter. They have a lot of real enemies they would have named if they’d received a real letter.”