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

by Tony Ortega

“No,” he said. And he lit into her and Barbara for confronting him. “Jerry Levin” was a pretty common name, especially in New York, he pointed out. Was she really getting so paranoid that she thought the guy who had helped her through such a terrible time was working for the church?

  “How could you accuse me of being a Scientologist?” he asked.

  Barbara tried to calm them down. Paulette apologized. It did seem far-fetched. Jerry Levin was a common name. It all seemed like a replay of four months ago, when they had found the photo that looked like Paula Tyler. But this time, the evidence was even less convincing—a common name in a magazine.

  Paulette muttered an apology, saying she’d been working too hard and jumped to conclusions. Jerry had offered to testify as a character witness in her trial. He’d been a friend. He’d cleaned up after her dog. It was ludicrous even to think that he was the Jerry Levin in the magazine.

  It was a Friday afternoon, and after the confrontation, Jerry left for his weekend job driving a car. Paulette worried about his reaction, and she hoped Jerry had cooled off about it by the time he returned.

  But he never did.

  In long conversations with Jerry and Paula before they each left, and usually well into her night’s supply of vodka, Paulette had poured out her doubts, her fears, even admitting that she got so drunk with her old advertising pals on a few occasions that she had blacked out and lost periods of time. She had admitted to them that she couldn’t help wondering if, during one of these blackouts, she had managed to type those crazy letters and mailed them and later didn’t remember doing it.

  When she was sober, she realized that it was an impossibility. The first letter, at least, had been mailed, and its envelope included a Zip Code. She didn’t know the Zip Code of the New York org, and in those days, it took some effort to look it up—usually a trip down to the local post office, something she couldn’t have done drunk with no memory of it.

  In May, Paula had suddenly left after she got a telegram from her parents. And now, in September, Jerry was gone without a word. Had she blown his cover by confronting him about the magazine? It was too awful to think about. If Jerry had been working for the church, those late night conversations, whether they had any truth to them, would have been reported to Scientology, and Paulette couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  She decided it couldn’t be true. Jerry had not been the “Jerry Levin” in the magazine. It was just a common name.

  But it was finally dawning on her the lengths the Church of Scientology would go to ruin her. She still had no idea that the Guardian’s Office had been watching her closely for more than two years, and the extent to which it had proposed and attempted numerous ways to damage her career, hurt her father’s business, and smear her reputation. But even ignorant of the full program against her, Paulette had some idea of what she was up against.

  She knew she had to take the truth serum test. The polygraph exams had been inconclusive. She had tried hypnotism with a prominent (and expensive) doctor, but he declared her unhypnotizable. She had even tried a voice-stress analysis test, even though she didn’t believe it had any validity.

  So that left truth serum. When she called a few doctors about administering the test, including her family physician, they refused, telling her that it would be dangerous for someone in poor health and weighing only 83 pounds. They told her there was a risk she might not survive it. But she told Barbara that she really had nothing to lose. If the trial actually began on October 31, she was still determined to kill herself anyway.

  If her indictment hit newspapers, she believed her life wouldn’t be worth living. And there had already been a close call – her mother was called for jury duty in Westchester County, and during the selection procedure, she was asked in front of the other potential jurors if any members of her family had ever been indicted for a felony. Stella Cooper didn’t have it in her to lie, so she admitted that her daughter had been indicted in federal court. The judge seemed stunned, and so did the other potential jurors. Stella was immediately dismissed. She later told Paulette it had been a humiliating experience.

  But no one had bothered to follow up on that startling disclosure in open court, and Paulette’s secret, for now, was still safe. And her best chance of keeping it that way, the potentially fatal truth serum examination, had to happen fast, with the trial date rapidly nearing.

  Len Zinberg first learned about Scientology in 1969 and in Sixties fashion: The couple that introduced him to Scientology’s basic ideas, Rick and Minty Alexander, spoke to him in their Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn home from their bed, John Lennon and Yoko Ono style.

  Zinberg was ripe for recruitment. He was from a secular Jewish family but had attended an Orthodox yeshiva, then James Madison High School. Now 22, he was confused about his place in the world and was looking for something new.

  The Alexanders gave him a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Fundamentals of Thought and encouraged him to start taking courses at the Hotel Martinique. He got some auditing, and then scrounged up a couple of thousand dollars for a multi-course package. By 1970, he had signed a contract to work on staff.

  The hours were long and the pay was very bad, only a few dollars a week. He sold plastic flowers in Times Square on Saturday nights to make enough for his food for the week. But he was in with a merry band of youngsters at the hotel who were genuinely excited about the introductory courses of Scientology and the “wins” they were getting in their communication skills.

  Gradually, Len began to understand that there was a darker side to Scientology. They were engaged in a war against many enemies, and he found himself helping to do his part in that war.

  His labors for the Guardian’s Office started in the family home in Brooklyn. Len’s father worked for the IRS, and on occasion he’d hear his father say that the agency was looking into L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. When his father wasn’t looking, Len would go through his dad’s briefcase and pull out agency bulletins marked “official use only.” These weren’t highly classified documents, but the Guardian’s Office operatives at the Hotel Martinique were happy to get them.

  Then, Len met a beautiful girl at the org named Sylvia Seplowitz. They started dating, and he soon moved into her Mill Basin, Brooklyn apartment. Like Len, she was beginning to do volunteer work for the Guardian’s Office. In particular, she had been asked to target a writer named Robert Kaufman.

  Sylvia was told that Kaufman played piano at a dance studio in Manhattan. She went there with instructions to chat him up and convince him to take her back to his apartment, where she would then look for materials related to his upcoming book about Scientology. But despite her beauty, she found that she was all wrong for the assignment. Kaufman was playing piano, but it was a ballet studio, and she was no ballet dancer. Her advances to Kaufman were too obvious, and he didn’t take the bait.

  Len, meanwhile, was asked to stake out and photograph Kaufman when the writer was giving an interview near Grand Central Station. Later, Len spent several hours in a coffee shop across the street from the Churchill building, waiting for Paulette Cooper to come out so he could tail her. But she never did, and he never got the chance.

  Len had been told that Paulette and Kaufman were evil “suppressives” who meant the church harm. It was all he needed to hear. Whatever he was asked to do about them, he would, which meant that in the summer of 1973, he was with three other Scientologists who broke into Kaufman’s Riverside Drive apartment. It was the culmination of a complex operation run against the writer, even though his book had been out for a year and had achieved only modest sales.

  An African-American Scientologist named Jerry had rented an apartment down the hall from Kaufman, and then he found a way to get introduced to the pianist through some Ghanians who also lived in the building. Jerry was himself a musician, a drummer, and before long they were regularly having breakfasts together and Kaufman got Jerry a membership at his gym.

  Jerry thanked him by getting them each new combinatio
n locks for their gym lockers. He also introduced Kaufman to an attractive woman named Rosalyn and encouraged Kaufman to ask her out. Kaufman eventually did, and they went to a movie. But throughout the date, he found Rosalyn strangely distant.

  Meanwhile, back at Kaufman’s apartment building, Len Zinberg met Jerry with two other Scientologists. Jerry gave them a key to Kaufman’s apartment, but didn’t say where he had obtained it. It was obviously a copy, and a poorly made one, and one of the Scientologists had to file it down before it would work properly.

  With Kaufman still on his date with Rosalyn, Len and two others went into Kaufman’s apartment. They tried to disturb as little as possible, looking through papers and trying to gather information for the Guardian’s Office. Len didn’t think there was much in the papers of any value. If he briefly wondered why the GO was going to so much trouble to keep tabs on a man who seemed of so little importance, his training kicked in and he quickly banished the thought from his mind. Finished with their snooping, the three men left the apartment, leaving it as close as possible to how they had found it.

  Kaufman never knew that his apartment had been searched.

  Across town, L. Ron Hubbard and Paul Preston packed their things and began their trip back to the yacht Apollo, which was still in Lisbon. Jim Dincalci followed some time later, after staying behind to pack up and clean out the Codwise Place apartment in Queens.

  Hubbard had been in New York City for ten months, and his major accomplishment was putting together the Snow White Program in April, which was still kicking into gear around the world.

  Hubbard and Paulette Cooper had not run into each other while he was in town.

  Before he had become Paulette’s lawyer, Charles Stillman had been a prosecutor at the Southern District of the US Attorney’s office, working under Robert M. Morgenthau’s leadership with other prominent attorneys like Bob Morvillo, who would go on to be a legendary defense attorney in his own right.

  Stillman had imparted some of that experience and those connections on his younger colleague, Jay Zelermyer, who was just three years out of NYU Law School. It was Zelermyer who was doing most of the work on Paulette’s case. And like Stillman, he also had made powerful connections in the US Attorney’s office, including Morvillo.

  At the time, Morvillo was John Gordon’s boss and chief of the district’s criminal division. And while Gordon was clearly enthusiastic about prosecuting Paulette Cooper in what at first had seemed a slam-dunk case, Morvillo had less to prove, Zelermyer figured.

  After talking it over with Stillman, Zelermyer met with Morvillo to discuss the case.

  The evidence – the fingerprint and the typewriter – did appear strong, but the motive made no sense, and Paulette insisted she had nothing to do with the letters, which were comical and didn’t sound anything like Paulette’s own writing. And there was plenty of evidence that the church had harassed her.

  After listening to the young lawyer lay out all the lousy things about the case, Morvillo surprised Zelermyer by offering a deal. If Paulette would go back to the grand jury, admit that she had sent the letters, apologize, and promise never to do anything like it ever again, then the government would defer the prosecution. Meanwhile, records of the case would be sealed, and her confession would never be made public.

  Zelermyer took the offer to Paulette, and they discussed it in his office on the 34th floor at 110 E. 59th Street. He laid out the details for her, explaining that the deal would ensure that her case wouldn’t go public, which was her chief concern.

  The thought of making the case go away was the first real hope Paulette had had in a long time. She told Zelermyer that the deal did seem to be a good one. She said she would take it.

  “There’s one hitch,” Zelermyer told her.

  He couldn’t, ethically, have her go before the grand jury and say that she had lied previously and admit that she had actually sent the letters to the church, not if she wasn’t now telling the truth.

  “You have to tell me you did it. Here, now,” Zelermyer said.

  It was a test. She had been denying from the start that she had sent the letters. Now, with a deal in her grasp, would she change her story?

  “I can lie to them, but I can’t lie to you. I didn’t do it,” Paulette told him.

  Zelermyer was impressed, and believed that she was telling the truth.

  She had passed the test, but the deal was off.

  For the truth serum examination, Zelermyer had selected David R. Coddon, a well-known neurologist at Mt. Sinai Medical Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

  Coddon took a serious interest in Paulette’s case, talking with her and her parents and her attorneys in order to prepare numerous questions to ask her under the influence of the sodium pentothal. He encouraged her parents, Ted and Stella, to attend the test, which made Paulette uncomfortable. She had no idea what she’d say in front of them about her life as a single woman they might not know about.

  She had to lie back on an operating table in a hospital gown. Coddon put a needle into the back of her hand and told her to count backwards from 10. She got to about four before falling under the drug’s effect, and her last impression was that Coddon looked slightly alarmed. He later told her that it had taken longer than usual for the drug to take, but he figured it was because she had been drinking so much in recent months.

  The drug relaxed her, and Coddon began to question her, asking her if she knew how the bomb threat letters had been typed up and mailed. She said she didn’t know.

  He asked her how to make a bomb, and she said she had no idea.

  He asked if she even knew what was in a bomb, and she said “glycerine.” (Her parents laughed as Coddon explained that was what suppositories were made of.)

  Who, Coddon asked her, did Paulette suspect of writing the letters? Nibs, she answered.

  When the drugs wore off after the seven-hour procedure, she had no memory of the interview. Her parents told her about the funny thing about the “glycerine.” Stella laughed as she said her eyes were closed and Coddon kept opening one eye and asking her who wrote the letters, and she’d say “Nibs,” and then he’d open the other eye and she’d say “Nibs” again or sometimes “Meisler.”

  Coddon, meanwhile, was smiling. “There’s not going to be a trial,” he said, explaining that he was confident that she had told the truth and had no idea how the letters had been created. He would call her attorneys and stake his reputation on the results. He told her parents that he was angry that she’d been indicted, and if a trial went ahead, “I’ll chain myself to the courtroom.”

  Paulette dared to allow herself to feel some hope.

  Jay Zelermyer met again with Bob Morvillo to tell him what had happened at his office – that although Paulette Cooper had been offered a deal that Jay had told her was “costless” and that would prevent a trial and be kept sealed forever, she had turned it down because she couldn’t admit to something she didn’t do.

  Zelermyer already knew Morvillo wasn’t thrilled with the case. The Church of Scientology didn’t make for a very sympathetic “victim.” Word was gradually getting out about its odd ways, with tales about a strange man running things from a ship at sea, and families ripped apart by a paranoid organization.

  A trial would bring up the smears against Paulette, the nearly constant harassment she’d endured since the December 1969 publication of her Queen magazine article. And it would also come out that she’d been offered an attractive deal but had turned it down because she insisted on her innocence. And there was the sodium pentothal test, which supported her steadfast denial.

  Morvillo appeared impressed that Paulette had scuttled the previous deal by refusing to admit guilt. And how would it look, Zelermyer said, going after her when there were so many more important crimes to solve? Morvillo had, after all, already offered to make the thing go away. Zelermyer pressed him – what’s the point of a trial at this point?

  After the meeting, Zelermyer called
Paulette to give her the news.

  There would be no trial on October 31.

  Instead, Morvillo postponed the matter and planned to file a declaration of nolle prosequi – setting the prosecution aside – if there were no more bomb threats and Paulette kept out of trouble for the next year and also underwent psychiatric counseling (an ironic instruction, given Scientology’s hatred for the practice). In other words, if she kept her nose clean, Morvillo planned to drop the matter entirely.

  She wasn’t completely out of trouble – there was still the possibility that her indictment could become news, and she worried every day that Scientology would do something to make that happen. She worried that the church might send additional bomb threats, and the next time the government might not back down. But for now, Paulette began to breathe a little easier.

  It appeared that she wouldn’t have to kill herself after all.

  The trial had been averted, but Paulette was still suing Scientology, and it was suing her in multiple lawsuits. She worried about her publisher, Tower Publications. She spent hours talking to Harry Shorten’s attorney, Herb Rosedale, trying to make him understand what they were up against.

  But Rosedale didn’t want Shorten to fight. He told Paulette that she would have to come up with the money to pay for Tower’s legal costs, rather than the other way around. When she said she couldn’t do that, he then advised that Shorten do what Scientology wanted. (Several years later, Rosedale changed his mind and during the 1980s and 1990s became known as a crusading attorney for families who had been harmed by religious organizations, and he published widely in academic journals.)

  On November 27, on Rosedale’s advice, Harry Shorten got himself and Tower out of the lawsuit the church had brought against The Scandal of Scientology. Shorten paid $500, and addressed a letter to Rev. James C. Mulligan, president of the Church of Scientology of California.

  Dear Rev. Mulligan,

  We regret any difficulties caused to the Church of Scientology as a result of any half-truths or misstatements of fact in the book The Scandal of Scientology which we have published. Please rest assured that any such errors were not intentional on our part.