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

by Tony Ortega

  That wasn’t Paulette’s only idea for raising her profile. She figured she had to do something flashy to get noticed, just like her friend who had driven around the world had done. And so, she decided to become the world’s first female stowaway. In the winter of 1970, Paulette boarded the Leonardo Da Vinci cruise ship in New York harbor without a ticket.

  For the next seven days, as the Leonardo headed for the Caribbean and back, Paulette pretended to drink like a sailor in one of the ship’s bars, the only place she could loiter all day without raising suspicions that she didn’t actually have a cabin. In a piano, she hid a small attaché case, in which she’d stuffed two blouses, four evening dresses, and a long evening gown.

  Over the next several days, she had to fend off one proposition after another by men who found her an irresistible target – not only was she an attractive single woman traveling alone, but at the pool she wore a bikini, swimwear which was still somewhat uncommon for the cruising set. On the first night, the ship’s doctor insisted on taking her back to her cabin, and she thought the game was up. But she managed to find an unoccupied cabin by pure luck, and kept him out of it by pretending that she was coming down with the flu. After he left, she hurried to a hiding spot in an out-of-the way lounge. She then had to make up more excuses the next morning when the doctor called the room where he’d left her and the man who was actually staying there answered the phone.

  The idea to stow away was something Paulette had been thinking about for years. She’d read a book that described various stories of stowing away through history and it had struck her that they were all stories about men. Then, on a cruise with her parents, a young man had been arrested when he was found hiding somewhere in the ship. Paulette told her friends about it, pointing out that the stowaway’s mistake was trying to stay hidden. She said the only way to succeed was to remain out in the open so everyone got used to seeing you. She told her friends she was familiar enough with life aboard cruise ships that she could easily pull it off. They made her pay for that brag with a lot of teasing, and she knew she’d never live it down until she made the attempt.

  Although it was her first attempt to stow away, Paulette’s trip on the Leonardo was her fifteenth cruise. She was very familiar with the kind of people who sailed – including the randy men. After the near disaster of the first night, she became more careful about offers to see her home to her nonexistent cabin. Her strategy was to outlast the other drinkers, staying at the bar well after the midnight buffet. It left her severely sleep-deprived, but one day she allowed one man to take her to the early afternoon showing of Bonnie & Clyde in the ship’s theater, and then another man to take her to the late afternoon showing. She slept through both. For seven days, she dodged one pass after another with similar schemes, but she always stayed in the open, knowing that her growing reputation as an odd character actually helped her chances. By the cruise’s end, she was exhausted, and she was also terrified that she’d get caught at the last minute by police at the dock. Instead, two of the ship’s security agents helped her get home.

  Although she’d succeeded, she knew that if she wrote about the experience, there was still a chance she could be prosecuted. So she sat on the story for several months. In the meantime, Paulette kept developing her travel writing career. Just a few weeks after her Queen magazine story was published, she appeared in the New York Times for a story on a bargain three-lake cruise in Switzerland. The Washington Post bought another cruise story from her, this time about a computer dating gimmick on the Greek Line to Bermuda. Then, two months later, in September 1970, the Post ran a short account of her week as a stowaway—she’d decided enough time had passed since stealing a week on the Leonardo da Vinci that she could risk writing about it. Her risk paid off: Stanley Donen, director of Singin’ in the Rain, took out an option on the story for a possible movie on her experience, and Paulette was asked to appear on radio and television shows, including an episode of To Tell the Truth.

  Paulette craved the glamorous life of a magazine writer, and it was quickly falling into place for her. She joined the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and at one of its events she met a woman named Barbara Lewis. Barbara was tall, brunette, and stunning, and she had just written a book with the provocative title The Sexual Power of Marijuana. Like Paulette, she spent much of her time on travel stories for women’s magazines, and with her good looks she seemed like the model of a Manhattan freelance writer at the time. The two immediately hit it off and quickly became friends.

  Barbara had Paulette over to her apartment at the Churchill, a luxury 34-story building a few blocks from the United Nations at 300 E. 40th Street, and Paulette became enchanted with it. This was the kind of place where she saw herself living – a spacious apartment in a large building with an elegant front portico, mahogany lobby, and with amenities like a pool and sauna on the roof and 24-hour doormen in the lobby. She often visited Barbara at the Churchill to discuss their writing assignments and the men they were dating.

  And very soon, Paulette learned that Barbara had a terrible secret. A year earlier, a man who worked in the Churchill, using a master key, stole into Barbara’s room one night, then bound and raped her violently over a six to seven hour period, beating her with the butt of a handgun. In the morning, still bound, Barbara managed to crawl out to the hallway and, with her nose, rang a doorbell for help. She never saw the man, who covered up her eyes. But she knew the sound of his voice.

  Later that day, a utility man didn’t show up to work. He was immediately suspected, and when it turned out that he had fled to Puerto Rico, he was extradited. Police asked Barbara to identify him, telling her that they had found her radio in his apartment. They showed her a photo lineup, and then told her which one to pick out. He pleaded guilty, receiving a seven-year sentence. Barbara admitted to Paulette that she lived in fear that he would return after getting out of prison to kill her, and it didn’t help that a friend of his would call her, telling her that she’d identified the wrong man.

  Even after Barbara told her about the attack, Paulette was still determined to get her own apartment at the Churchill, in part so she could remain close to her new friend.

  In the spring of 1970, George Malko turned his 1969 EYE magazine article into a book, Scientology: The Now Religion. Once again, Malko had done a skillful job probing the church, and the way he took apart Hubbard’s ideas with a fine-toothed comb must have taken incredible patience. He pointed out that everyone in the church seemed to agree that Scientology worked and was helping them, but none of them could really define exactly what it was. As in his previous article, Malko’s criticisms of Hubbard’s ideas were devastating, but presented in a clever, dispassionate style. Malko uncritically accepted Scientology’s claim to 15 million members, which turned out to be pure fantasy (the true number at that time was probably closer to 60 or 70 thousand). He seemed impressed by the enthusiasm of young people flocking to the Hotel Martinique, and he also admitted to some admiration for Hubbard, for his bravado if nothing else. Malko’s book received good reviews. The Village Voice in particular praised the way it took apart Hubbard’s philosophy.

  Paulette, meanwhile, worried that Malko’s book getting to market first had reduced her own chances with a big publisher, namely Random House. In 1970, she corresponded with Random House editor Robert Loomis, who expressed an interest in her manuscript, but was wary about legal problems. She tried to ease his fears by acknowledging, in a letter, that she understood that the final edit would have to be “more objective, weaker, and greatly watered down.” She wasn’t married to her writing, she said, and was more than willing to take out some of the more sensational passages—particularly those based on foreign newspaper articles that would be harder to shore up with additional research. She also tried to sway Loomis by telling him that the book would get support from the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

  One of Scientology’s original touchstones was that L. Ron Hu
bbard published Dianetics in 1950 because the AMA and APA had scoffed when he tried a couple of years earlier to give them the “technology” that he had discovered which could heal the human mind. Since then, Hubbard and Scientology had demonized the medical and psychiatric establishments, which Hubbard claimed were out to destroy him. The truth was that doctors and psychiatrists mostly ignored Scientology, and when they thought about Scientology at all, they were annoyed by the unscientific claims made by the organization. Paulette knew that various medical journals would review and promote a book that debunked Hubbard’s claims.

  She was also hoping to get the support of the National Association for Mental Health in Great Britain, a relationship which she believed could pay off in new material to bolster the book and address Loomis’s legal concerns.

  The NAMH had been at the center of a growing debate about Scientology in the UK. In 1968, locals had grown impatient with the large numbers of Americans, Europeans, Australians, and South Africans who were coming to Scientology’s headquarters in East Grinstead, England for courses, and there was increasing talk about kicking them out. (Hubbard himself had abandoned East Grinstead a couple of years earlier and at the time was running Scientology from a small armada of ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.)

  Some of the Scientologists blamed the NAMH for stirring up opposition to them and for chasing Hubbard out of England. Then, in 1969, they attempted to take over the organization by flooding it with new members and electing new board members, including Scientology’s UK spokesman, David Gaiman, who was nominated for chairman. When the organization fought back and expelled the Scientologists, they were taken to England’s High Court in a well-publicized action, but the court found for the NAMH.

  Paulette believed that in the court case, the NAMH had been able to pry “an extensive file of interesting and…supportable material” from Scientology that could help her book. She had contacted the organization and sent it four chapters of her manuscript, hoping to get access to its documents. She told Loomis that a “prestigious British psychiatrist” was willing to give her access to the court file, and the psychiatrist also planned to introduce her to Sir John Foster, who was then leading a government investigation into Scientology.

  The NAMH’s files, Paulette wrote Loomis, “will easily run more than the 20-30 pages lost from the [foreign] newspaper pieces and will be legally defensible, I suspect exciting material that has never appeared in print before.”

  She also told Loomis that a Scientology spy at the NAMH had managed to copy her four chapters and got them to David Gaiman, who had been sending her aggressive letters. “At the advice of my attorney (who has been working with me right along on this book), I turned around and asked David to help me on the book, and tell me the Scientologists’ side of the story.”

  She had then received a “chummy” letter from Gaiman, saying that he was delighted with the offer and hoped to “vet” the rest of her book. Paulette laughed off that offer, but she did send him questions and ultimately included his answers as an appendix to the book.

  Besides the legal questions, Paulette was also worried that Loomis might be having second thoughts about her manuscript because Malko’s book had not set the world on fire. But she suggested that Malko’s book had not been bold enough, and that it was important for a writer and publisher to “stick their necks out a little” and publish “exciting, interesting, unknown, controversial material.”

  Despite her pitch, Loomis ultimately passed on the book. She had better luck with Harry Shorten and his paperback house, Tower Publications, Inc. Shorten was a cartoonist from the Golden Age of comics – he’d helped work on Archie comics and had started a longtime newspaper cartoon feature, “There Oughta Be a Law,” in the early 1940s. In the late 1950s, he started a paperback line to go along with Tower Comics.

  Tower Books looked for legitimate subjects that could be sold with a little sizzle. In 1970, for example, when Paulette was looking for a deal, Shorten had put out a lawyer’s examination of the way political prisoners were being treated in Athens – it had the catchy title Barbarism in Greece.

  Shorten paid Paulette a $1,500 advance, and scheduled The Scandal of Scientology for the spring of 1971. Scientology soon found out about the deal, and began sending Shorten increasingly threatening letters as the publishing date neared, vowing to sue him if the book came out. What neither Paulette or Shorten realized was that as the spring of 1971 loomed, they had already come under intense surveillance by a shadowy group that had decided Paulette posed a serious threat.

  L. Ron Hubbard had long told friends that he had visions of a guardian angel. He would see her in odd places – even, he told one friend, on the wing of his glider as he flew it in the 1930s. She had wings, and fiery red hair, and he referred to her as his “Empress.”

  Hubbard received plenty of encouragement about his visions. In 1945 and 1946, after the war, he had lived with John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons, a Caltech rocket scientist who, along with Hubbard, studied the arcane ideas of English occultist Aleister Crowley. Among Crowley’s ideas was that each person has a “Holy Guardian Angel.” Years later, after Scientology had come under attack, Hubbard once again turned to his Empress, his guardian angel.

  In 1966, Hubbard created a new intelligence-gathering and covert operations unit in Scientology and called it the Office of the Guardian. He put in charge of it his third wife, Mary Sue, and she came to be known as the Guardian. She had fiery red hair and a steely temperament to match. Within a few years, the Guardian’s Office became as sophisticated a spy network and intelligence-gathering outfit as any in the world, matching or exceeding the resources of many nations. It would even make fools, for years, of the most sophisticated government on earth.

  In 1971, Mary Sue Hubbard still oversaw the Guardian’s Office, but the person who ran it day to day from the headquarters in England was another formidable figure: a tall, dark-haired woman with an intimidating manner whose name was Jane Kember. She could make men shake with fear, and part of her mystique came from her accent, which people had a hard time placing. (She had grown up in Rhodesia.)

  It was Jane Kember’s job to run a worldwide spy network that was tasked with informing Hubbard and Mary Sue about threats before they fully materialized, and to eliminate those threats immediately, often with stunning cruelty. Guardian’s Office records showed that by early 1971, it was surveilling Paulette Cooper with intense scrutiny.

  On March 11, 1971, Paulette received a telephone call from someone she spoke freely to about her upcoming plans. A short description of that call ended up in a Guardian’s Office internal document, suggesting that Paulette didn’t realize that a trusted friend was feeding Scientology information about her. Or, alternatively, the description could have been written in a manner to hide that the call was listened to through a wiretap.

  Paulette told the caller that she was flying to Scotland on March 31 for a travel story. And if previously she had told Robert Loomis that she was planning to visit the NAMH and its document trove, she now said that her friend Russell Barton—a psychiatrist who ran the Rochester State Hospital—told her not to waste her time. Despite the court case of the year before, the NAMH was still infiltrated by Scientologists, he told her. Paulette also said in the telephone conversation that her book was scheduled to be released on June 1.

  Scientology now had the date of publication, and stepped up its efforts to stop it from happening.

  Twelve days later, on March 23, an editor at Tower Publications received a letter from Joel Kreiner, representing the Church of Scientology of California—Scientology’s “mother church.” The letter was a threat to sue if Paulette’s book was published, and claimed, falsely, that “Miss Cooper’s manuscript was refused publication in the UK due to its libelous content.”

  On the night of March 31, Paulette flew on BOAC, the British airline, and arrived on the morning of April 1 at Edinburgh airport. Not realizing that her plans were being so carefully watched, she
assumed that no one but her parents knew exactly when she was traveling. She didn’t expect to be met at the airport. But there, waiting for her, was David Gaiman. A tall, somewhat gangly man with a doughy face, Gaiman had risen to be both the chief spokesman of Scientology in the United Kingdom as well as a top operative worldwide in the Guardian’s Office.

  He walked up to her, smiling, and handed her some papers. He informed her that they were writs for libel, and that she was being sued for her Queen magazine article, which had come out more than a year earlier. Her heart raced as she tried to understand what was happening. Later, she learned that his papers were a hoax. (She wouldn’t be served with an actual lawsuit about the magazine story for several more months.)

  Gaiman was the man who had cheerily offered previously to help her with the church’s side of things in her book, and now he’d accosted her in what seemed to be an obvious intimidation attempt.

  When Paulette checked into her hotel in Edinburgh, the front desk began getting peppered by phone calls from people who didn’t identify themselves but wanted to know her room number. Gaiman showed up and also asked for her room number, claiming he wanted to interview her for a “scientific publication.”

  Paulette found numerous people outside the hotel staring at her and following her movements. She told hotel officials about it, and the police were called—and the people, probably church members organized by Gaiman, quickly scattered. A freelance photographer who worked for the Sunday Dispatch later told her that he’d been hired by Gaiman to get a shot of her for Scientology’s propaganda magazine, Freedom, but he’d had a tough time getting a good angle because she wore a scarf and dark glasses when she went outside. Gaiman was unhappy with the result and tried to bargain down what he’d promised to pay. The photographer also said that when the police had been called, Gaiman quickly got out of Scotland.

  Two weeks later, the New York offices of Tower Publications got a visit from Reverend Arthur J. Maren, “Minister of Public Relations” to the U.S. Churches of Scientology. According to a Guardian’s Office document, Arte Maren’s visit was “badly received.”