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

by Tony Ortega

  She told him it was just the latest form of harassment that she’d been enduring. She explained how Scientology was given to pranks and dirty tricks – she’d sued the church earlier in the year after she found evidence that her telephone had been tapped. Of course such an organization would be capable of sending itself fake bomb threats, she pointed out. The whole thing was so ridiculous, she thought. And when the agents asked her to be fingerprinted, she readily agreed.

  She had nothing to hide, after all.

  About a month later, in January 1973, agent Brotman was back. In the ensuing weeks, things had seemed to calm down. The dirty phone calls and threats had fallen off, to Paulette’s relief. She assumed that her change in address to the Churchill had bought her some time before the church realized that she’d moved. (At this point, she simply didn’t grasp the breadth of the Guardian’s Office surveillance operation. The church in fact knew immediately where she had moved and when.)

  She was surprised to see Brotman, but welcomed him into her apartment again. He was still looking into the bomb threats, he told her. And now her stomach started doing flips as he told her that he had interviewed her boyfriend, Bob Straus, as well as Joy’s boyfriend. They had each told Brotman that Paulette was not the type to send bomb threats through the mail.

  Well, that was some reassurance, she thought. But why was the FBI even considering Meisler’s nonsense that she might have done something as ridiculous as threaten to blow up a church of Scientology? Brotman left after she said she had nothing else to tell him.

  It still didn’t occur to her to hire an attorney and put the FBI on the spot about its investigation, possibly because she had other things occupying her mind. She had The Medical Detectives to finish up. It was turning into her best book, and her agent Ted told her he thought it could be a bestseller. Deeply researched, it really had no precedent, and would bring to light dramatic new ways of solving crimes. It had the potential to turn into television or movie projects. She bore down to get it done, but also managed a trip to the Caribbean, still developing her travel writing career.

  Then, on February 4, Barbara Lewis came downstairs to her apartment. The two visited with each other a few times a day, so Barbara’s knock on the door didn’t come as a surprise. But the ashen look on Barbara’s face did.

  She had in her hands a piece of paper with some typing on it, with words in all capitals, like it had been created on an IBM Selectric typewriter.

  “What is it?” Paulette asked. Then, when she saw what it was, she wanted to vomit.

  “They’re all over the building,” Barbara said.

  DEAR FELLOW TENANT:

  THERE IS A WOMAN OF VERY BAD CHARACTER WHO HAS RECENTLY TAKEN RESIDENCE IN OUR BUILDING. MR. FREDRICKSON, OUR MANAGER, HAS PERMITTED THIS. PERHAPS MR. FREDRICKSON DID NOT KNOW OF HER PAST HISTORY, BUT I DO.

  SHE HAS RECENTLY BEEN FORCED TO MOVE OUT OF TWO APARTMENTS FOR ILLICIT PARTIES AND SEXUAL PERVERSIONS. AS A MATTER OF FACT, HER LAST EXCURSION TO EUROPE PROVED QUITE EMBARRASSING, AS SHE WAS CAUGHT, BY OFFICIALS, TRYING TO SEXUALLY ABUSE A 2 YEAR OLD BABY GIRL.

  I AM APPALLED THAT SUCH A DEGENERATE BE PERMITTED TO LIVE AND WORK AMONG DECENT PEOPLE SUCH AS OURSELVES. IT’S TRUE THAT WE’RE NOT PERFECT, BUT THIS 30 YR OLD SICK CHILD IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT THE SCUM OF THIS SOCIETY IS CAPABLE OF.

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. IT’S EASY TO SEE FOR YOURSELF. SHE’S 30 YEARS OLD, WITH THE BUILD OF A 10 YEAR OLD CHILD. HER NOSE IS VERY LARGE, AND NOT UNLIKE THAT OF A “HALLOWEEN WITCH.” HER TONGUE IS NOTICABLY SWOLLEN FROM AN ATTACK OF VENEREAL DISEASE IN THE PAST.

  SHE IS A TENANT IN APARTMENT 3 H. HER NAME IS MISS PAULETTE COOPER.

  I ASK YOU TO PLEASE CONTACT MR. FREDRICKSON, AND HELP ME TO HAVE THIS WOMAN REMOVED FROM OUR RESIDENCE, AND, IF POSSIBLE, PUT UNDER APPROPRIATE PSYCHIATRIC CARE.

  A CONCERNED NEIGHBOR

  Hundreds of the letters reached the residents of the Churchill.

  None of it was true, except for her age – and even that bothered her. She was in the habit of keeping her age unknown, for reasons that were even more obvious in 1972.

  It was Scientology, she knew. But she wondered at some of the details. The mention of the swollen tongue was odd, and she thought it could have come from only one source: Roger, her old boyfriend from BBDO. He had known that her tongue was slightly unusual. He noticed it for the first time when she was eating an ice cream cone, and asked her about it. She explained that she had what doctors called “geographic tongue,” which resulted in slight striations, possibly because of a vitamin deficiency in her childhood. It wasn’t something others would notice. Could Roger be working to help them with her harassment?

  The letter’s reference to the two-year old girl also confirmed to Paulette that the smear had to come from Scientology. In her book, she had written about a church auditor who had molested a child. She withheld from the book that the child was only two years old. But the church knew. And now they were accusing her of the same thing. The letter also said she had just returned from Europe. She thought it was an odd mistake. She’d actually just come back from the Caribbean, but that they knew she’d traveled at all suggested they were keeping tabs on her.

  She was still puzzling over the letter when there was another knock at her door. It was Margie Shepherd, the young woman who had visited Paulette at her E. 80th Street apartment two months earlier, when she was canvassing for the United Farm Workers. Margie was standing there with another young woman she introduced as Paula Tyler. Margie said she’d thought of Paulette when Paula told her she needed help finding a place to live.

  Paulette invited them in, and they talked about what a great place the Churchill building was. She might have stopped to wonder how Margie had known that she’d moved since the last time she saw her. She also might have thought it curious that Margie had looked her up to do her a favor when their only previous encounter was the short time it took for Paulette to give her a check and a signature for Cesar Chavez.

  But Paulette’s head was still spinning over the smear letter. She was extremely trusting, and felt flattered that she’d be called upon for her ability to help Paula, who was hoping she could also get an apartment in the Churchill. Paula told a distressing tale of how she’d come to need Paulette’s help. She had come out from California, hitch-hiking all the way, and during her trip, she’d been raped. Now she was in New York without a place to stay and not knowing anyone. She had money, and could afford an apartment at the Churchill, and could Paulette help her get a place?

  In fact, Paulette did know about an apartment that was coming open on the 16th floor. Pleased to have put them together, Margie Shepherd told Paulette that she needed to get going. She was headed to Boston, she said, and took her leave. Paulette never saw her or heard of her again.

  Paulette did help Paula Tyler get into an apartment, and also introduced her to Barbara Lewis. After she moved in, Paula began joining Paulette and Barbara in Paulette’s third floor apartment almost every day to spend time with them.

  A couple of weeks after Margie and Paula’s visit, Paulette was subpoenaed to appear at a federal grand jury. She felt flattered, and was excited to appear. Expecting that she would be consulted as an authority on Scientology, she went alone to the proceedings – without a lawyer – thinking that the grand jury needed her expertise to make sense of James Meisler, his church, and the phony “bomb threats.”

  Meisler was there, at the federal courthouse, wearing a long black robe and an oversized cross. Paulette rolled her eyes. Meisler looked ridiculous – at least, to someone who understood that L. Ron Hubbard had sold Scientology as an “exact science” for more than 20 years, but had only recently asked that some “ministers” adopt clerical garb. It was a show for tax reasons, she thought, and she looked forward to explaining that to the large number of grand jurors in the sizeable chambers.

  The night before, her boyfriend, Bob Straus, the assistant district attorney, warned her that she might be on dangerous ground
. Don’t open your mouth, he told her, until you’re sure that you’re not the target of the investigation. He wrote up for her a short script to keep with her when she was asked to testify. He told her to ask, “Am I the target of this investigation?”

  She was alarmed, but Bob told her not to worry. He told her the prosecutor, assistant US Attorney John D. Gordon III, would surely tell her that she was not the subject of the investigation. But just in case, Bob wrote down what she should say next, depending on how Gordon answered.

  When the time came, and she was standing before the grand jury after Gordon had called her, she asked the question from the piece of paper Bob had written for her.

  “Am I the target of this investigation?” she read.

  Gordon told her that yes, she was.

  Paulette was stunned, but she looked at the piece of paper again, and read what Bob had written down in case that was Gordon’s answer.

  “May I return with a lawyer?” she asked.

  Gordon said yes, and Paulette went back to her apartment with her stomach in her throat.

  After she told Bob what had happened, he told her to get an attorney, and fast. But as she began calling around, she was told she’d need to come up with at least $5,000 cash for a retainer – and on her measly freelancing income, that was out of the question.

  One attorney she consulted said he would call Gordon to get a sense of how serious the prosecutor was. He then called her back and said Gordon had told him the government had physical evidence against Paulette, but he wouldn’t explain what it was. The attorney told her an indictment was very likely, and she’d need to pay premium prices.

  Shaken, she decided if she was going to have to pay so much, she might as well have an attorney with a strong reputation. She hired Charles A. Stillman, who was becoming known for defending high-profile clients after previously working as a federal prosecutor.

  She managed to come up with $5,000 when her parents agreed to pay half of it. And telling them why – well, she couldn’t bring herself to tell the entire story yet. She just told them she was in trouble and needed help.

  Stillman and his younger colleague, Jay Zelermyer, told Paulette they didn’t know what evidence the prosecutor, Gordon, believed that he had. Stillman told her he wanted to get an initial question out of the way first: Did she do it? Paulette was gutted. She had to convince her own attorney that she hadn’t sent bomb threats to a church?

  She asked if taking a polygraph exam might help, and they agreed to set one up. She assumed the tests were infallible and that taking one would make the whole problem go away. They sent her to be examined by Nat Lorendi, a police department examiner who was known for getting confessions out of suspects. Paulette didn’t like his coarse, dees-and-dose style, and she was surprised when he yelled some of the questions at her. Lorendi told her attorneys that the results were inconclusive, but indicated heavy stress, which correlated with lying. His conclusion – which she knew he’d give in court – was that she was probably guilty.

  Alarmed, Paulette and her attorneys then turned to polygraph expert Richard O. Arther’s firm, but the results were also inconclusive – Paulette failed the control questions, suggesting that she was not someone who should be tested on the machines. When she was asked if a pink piece of paper with a blue border was pink, she said yes – but the machine indicated that she was “lying.” Paulette was told that as a professional writer, her sensitivity to the multiple meanings of words made her a bad subject for a polygraph.

  On March 14, 1973, Mo Budlong of the Guardian’s Office received a report which suggested that Paulette Cooper was still under heavy surveillance, and that her apartment or her attorney’s office may have been broken into. “Dear Mo: These are Paulette’s notes. They are headed accordingly by herself. It has given us insight into how they may proceed in Rheingold’s legal case,” the document said, referring to Paulette’s 1972 harassment lawsuit against the New York org.

  The next day the GO in New York sent out another report about what had now come to be known as “Operation Lovely.” The opening lines of the memo, addressed to Terry Milner, made it clear that Scientology’s spy network was closely watching Paulette’s prosecution over the bomb threats. “As you well know, Op. Lovely is getting much hotter on this end, but is nevertheless moving along quite nicely. The decision on Miss Lovely’s court trip should be coming down any day now.”

  The memo went on to say that the GO had discovered a “large amount” of additional “enemy connections” to Paulette, in part through – somehow – getting 458 pages of copies of her correspondence to other people, including Nibs.

  6

  ‘you people are always watching me’

  While her legal situation was getting dicier by the day, Paulette by now had an unlikely new ally—a Toronto grandmother. The previous fall, Nan McLean and her family had decided to defect from Scientology after three years of enthusiastic participation. After joining in 1969, by the next year Nan was regularly making the 100-mile round trip drive to the Toronto org from her home north of the city. Her son, John, had quit high school to join the “Sea Org” crew on the yacht Apollo, where L. Ron Hubbard was running Scientology from the Mediterranean and Atlantic.

  But then the McLeans soured on Scientology. Nan had tried to report problems she saw at the Toronto facility, but soon found that following the church’s rules about submitting complaints only made her a target for harassment. By the fall of 1972, the entire family was out, and they wanted the public to know what they had experienced.

  Nan McLean became a vocal critic of Scientology, and after she made a television appearance early in 1973, she got a call from Paulette Cooper. The two rapidly became good friends. After 11 pm, when the long distance rates went down, Paulette would call Nan and they would talk for hours almost daily. Paulette soon made a trip to Canada to meet the family.

  The two women had little in common except that they were both being followed and harassed by agents of Scientology and were both determined to tell the world about it. At that time, there was almost no one in the U.S. and Canada but Paulette Cooper and Nan McLean who was willing to talk publicly about Hubbard’s church and its controversies.

  Nan soon understood every detail of Paulette’s history and the legal problems she faced. They talked into the night about what Paulette’s attorneys were doing to help her. They shared research they had done on the church, swapping documents and notes. And Nan was one of the few people who understood just how Paulette’s legal troubles were affecting her.

  As Paulette waited for her next date with the federal grand jury, she dragged through each day out of her mind with worry, chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes, eating little, and drinking a lot of cheap vodka. Her weight, already low, plunged.

  Paula Tyler, the woman she’d helped get a place in the building, worried about Paulette’s weight loss – she would go from 98 pounds down to only 83 by the summer – and Paula also worried about Paulette’s state of mind.

  Paulette was practically living in the same pink terry cloth bathrobe, unable to put on real clothes as she waited for the next call from her attorneys. She couldn’t even bring herself to leave the building for the funeral of Malcolm McTear Davis, the editor of Travel magazine, one of her closest friends, and a man who had helped her get her start in the business. She was becoming a wreck.

  The night before her next grand jury appearance, Paulette finally got to see photocopies of the two bomb threat letters that had been sent to the Scientology org. She couldn’t believe how comical they appeared, and nothing like the way she wrote. The first one was badly spelled, the spacing was odd, and the threat was vague…

  These damn books they are closingin on me

  I know you’re all around me everywhere. My tongue is swollen --- i hurt---- my operation----YOU did it to me-- you people are always watching me-Ill get you you’ re like the Nazis or thex Arabs--- I’ll bomb you i’ll kill you!

  I forget sometimes But I’ll get
you

  If my Friends dont do it then Ill do it!!!

  There was that reference to her tongue being swollen again, which she assumed came from Roger, her old BBDO boyfriend. But the next reference “I hurt – my operation,” surprised her. She thought about the previous summer, when she and Nibs had worked together at her parents’ house in Mamaroneck.

  “I hurt, I hurt,” she’d moan to her mother when the pain of her operation flared up. Nibs had heard her say that. Could Nibs have had something to do with the letters?

  The second letter, mailed five days after the first, appeared to be addressed to James Meisler, spokesman for the New York Scientology org…

  JAMES

  This is the last time i am warning you

  I don’t know why I’m doing this but you are all out to get me i’m sick of this

  Hitler -Hubbard-Meisler must be destroyed

  You no longer will look down on me

  I give you one week before scientology is a exploding volcano

  I will knock you out if my friends wont

  The reference to an “exploding volcano” was a puzzling one. An erupting volcano would eventually become a familiar symbol for Scientology on the cover of newer editions of Dianetics, its founding book. But in 1973, not many people knew that volcanoes were part of the church’s upper-level teachings.

  Paulette’s lawyers started asking her about Robert Kaufman, whose book Inside Scientology was the first to reveal what was in those teachings. Kaufman wrote that high-level members pay large amounts to learn bizarre things about the history of the galaxy, including a dictator named Xenu who lived 75 million years ago. Xenu had detonated nuclear bombs in Earth’s volcanoes to vaporize and cluster together billions of surplus beings, according to Hubbard.

  It seemed incredible, but could Kaufman have been involved in the bomb threats? Paulette told her lawyers she didn’t think so. She’d become good friends with him, and although he’d been under nearly as much harassment as her – and hadn’t handled it very well – she didn’t see him getting involved with the church to harass her.