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

by Tony Ortega

  Jerry was a little below average height, a little stocky, and being a redhead didn’t look like a “Jerry Levin.” He said he had grown up in Wappinger Falls in Duchess County, north of the city and that he had seen combat flying helicopters in Vietnam. On weekends he drove a car for a living and they wouldn’t see him. But during the week he’d stay with Paula Tyler, and the two of them came over day after day, to hang out with Paulette and Barbara.

  Paulette also had developed a deepening friendship with John Seffern, the attorney who had handled a lawsuit for the Greens. Seffern had been a Scientologist and had amassed a large collection of the organization’s magazines and newsletters.

  Seffern lived in a large rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side, and had rooms to keep the many publications the church sent him. (And kept sending – Scientology was already well known for never taking people off its mailing lists.) He had boxes full of the stuff. And as an attorney, he knew it might come in handy at some point.

  One day, Paulette found herself leafing through some of his copies of Scientology’s Freedom magazine when she saw a photograph that made her jump.

  It was a young woman who looked very much like Paula Tyler.

  She showed Seffern, and they talked about what she should do with it. She returned home and went to Barbara’s apartment to show it to her—she agreed that it did look like the young woman living upstairs. They discussed their next move, and then Paulette asked Jerry Levin to come over. She told him she wanted to show him something, then handed him the folded magazine so that only the photograph showed.

  She asked Jerry if it looked like Paula, and he said yes, it did. What was it from?

  She then unfolded the magazine to show him what it was. He looked shocked.

  Paulette and Barbara went to Paula’s apartment later to confront her. But when they showed the magazine to her, Paula seemed genuinely surprised.

  I’m insulted, she said. It clearly wasn’t her, and she said she was hurt that they would think she was a Scientologist.

  Paula’s reaction seemed genuine. Maybe it wasn’t her, Paulette thought. She apologized.

  A couple of weeks later, Paula came down to Paulette’s apartment shaking and crying. She said she’d received a telegram from Europe. Her parents had been injured in a car accident, and she needed to leave right away.

  Paulette never saw her again.

  Thankfully, there was Jerry. He came over to her apartment nearly as often as Barbara did, helping her to take care of her apartment as well as talk long into the night about what was happening in her case. In May, he offered to move in with her. Just to keep an eye on her and help her with things, he said.

  Jerry seemed harmless. At least, she had no interest in sleeping with him. But a companion did seem like a good idea. Her boyfriend, Bob, even encouraged it – he could see Jerry was no threat, and besides, Paulette was already in such a poor mental state, she wasn’t sleeping with Bob anyway. Jerry brought down his few things and stuffed them into a closet.

  During the week, he stayed with her in apartment 3H at the Churchill. He took care of Tiki, her Yorkie, when she could barely get out of bed, and then only to wander around in her pink bathrobe. Jerry went shopping for her when she couldn’t bear to leave the apartment, and he purchased the few things she ate each day, as well as her vodka. It was all she could keep down.

  Barbara would come over, and the two of them would try to lighten her mood, take care of some things around the apartment, and try to get her to put something into her body besides vodka and cigarette smoke. Jerry would listen to her patiently, and said things she wanted to hear. “You have to be brave if you’re going to take on those bastards,” he said about Scientology.

  Bob was coming around less and less. By June, Paulette knew he was starting to see someone else. She really couldn’t blame him. She’d never been as into the idea of starting a family with him as Bob had. And now she didn’t want anyone to touch her. Her weight was getting dangerously low and she looked terrible. All she could think about was that at any point, the press would start writing about her indictment, and then her career—and her life—would be over.

  For the first time, she began to think about suicide. She could not put herself, or her parents, through the publicity and humiliation of the trial scheduled in October. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t sent the bomb threats. The press wouldn’t care. Scientology would have accomplished what it wanted. She’d be ruined. Her parents would be humiliated and might stop supporting her – they had been paying her rent and her legal bills.

  She began to have nightmares about prison. She had no real knowledge of what a federal prison for women would be like, but that only fueled her worst fears. She’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat – if, that is, she hadn’t drunk herself into a stupor in a vain attempt to fall asleep.

  Jerry’s presence in the apartment helped. Weekends when he went driving and she was alone were especially difficult for her, but at least during the week he was around, and he was always supportive. It was getting hard not to think that everyone she knew thought privately that she had sent the letters and was lying about it. Her attorneys didn’t really seem to care one way or the other, and her parents claimed that they believed her. But she couldn’t help thinking that everyone doubted her and only told her what she wanted to hear. Her paranoia only got magnified by the excessive drinking and lack of sleep. As time went on, she couldn’t pass out until about 6 in the morning, and then she’d wake up just a few hours later feeling like she was going to retch.

  It was in the mornings when her attorney, Jay, was likely to call with bad news. She’d have a hard time getting back to sleep while she worried about the telephone ringing. But weeks would go by without any word from Stillman or Zelermyer about what they were trying to do to head off the October trial. And sometimes it was worse not to hear anything at all.

  After she dragged herself out of bed, she’d force herself to eat a boiled egg or two. Then she’d have nothing until a glass of Clamato juice in the evening. The pain from her surgery the year before returned, and she had lost so much weight – down to 83 pounds – her periods stopped.

  She was smoking up to four packs a day now, and the vodka wasn’t enough; she started adding valium to the mix to calm her nerves and to help her sleep. She started to hoard the pills, saving up for October. She wanted to have enough valium to kill herself just before the trial, if it really came to that.

  While Paulette spent much of the day during the summer of 1973 in a despondent haze, her paranoia and despair alternated with rage. She thought about what she would have to go through to prove her innocence at a trial and it made her furious. She was fed up with her attorneys, who didn’t seem to take her suggestions seriously. And she went over and over the details with Barbara and Jerry. The bomb threat letters had language that pointed to her old boyfriend Roger, who had joined Scientology and, as far as she knew, was still in it. But other phrases made her suspect Nibs, L. Ron Hubbard’s son, who by now had flipped and was working for the church again. Not only was there the phrase – “I hurt, my operation” – that made her think of the previous summer, when Nibs had been with her following her surgery, but the lack of punctuation, the lack of apostrophes, was how Nibs scribbled the notes she had turned into writing when they worked together.

  One of the smear letters had also pointed at the Greens, and as ridiculous as that seemed, could they be a part of it, helping the church frame one of its enemies in order to get back the franchise they lost? She searched her mind for the memory: Had she touched their stationery while she was at their house?

  The Greens had told her attorneys that Nibs had visited them in December, about the time the letters were mailed. But that was a strange detail. Nibs hadn’t told Paulette he was in town then, and she couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t look her up. Could Nibs and the Greens have been working together to frame her? Could Nibs have worked with Meisler? How else could that
reference to her abdominal pain have appeared on the letter? Her mind reeled.

  But even more puzzling than who was behind it was the question of how. How had one fingerprint from the third finger on her left hand ended up on the back of the second bomb threat letter? And how had they been typed up on her machine without her knowing it? Had stationery from the apartment somehow been taken? By Nibs? By Bob Kaufman? Each of them had been in her apartment in the months leading up to the letters being sent in December. Either of them could have typed them up when she wasn’t in the room. She hated to suspect Kaufman, who had been such a good friend and had helped her with her book. But he was unstable – he’d been hospitalized after leaving Scientology, and he had been under his own harassment campaign by the church.

  She went around and around with it, and none of it made sense. And when she wasn’t obsessed with the letters, she was imagining what her life would be like if the trial happened. As June slid into July, her black despair deepened. She stopped taking care of Tiki – and she was grateful that Jerry helped. She also needed the half of the rent payment he was supplying. She couldn’t bring herself to leave the apartment, or take care of herself. The impending trial meant she couldn’t leave the state of New York, but it hardly mattered – she couldn’t pull herself together even to leave the Churchill.

  A few times when she tried, she broke down and cried after taking only a few steps outside the building.

  She didn’t blame Jerry that he took long breaks upstairs at night on the pool deck, smoking. She didn’t blame him for wanting a little privacy. He kept asking her to come up to the rooftop pool at night that summer. It will make you feel better to get out of the apartment and get some fresh air, he said. She went a few times at his insistence to the pool. But he would climb on the small ledge surrounding it, with nothing to keep him from falling 33 floors down. He kept needling her to climb up on the ledge with him. “Come on up! I’ll take care of you,” he said. “If you don’t have the guts to do this small thing, how are you going to have the courage to face up to those bastards in court?”

  He seemed unusually insistent about it at times. But she begged off. She knew there was a great nighttime view of the Empire State Building and the new World Trade Center towers, which had opened just that April. But the thought of the sheer drop made her nauseous. And frightened. Too frightened even to trust her good friend.

  One of the few things that took her attention away from her problems were the Watergate hearings, which had been going on since May 17. Broadcast each day live on one of the three major networks, which took turns covering it, the unfolding Senate inquiry at least gave Paulette and Jerry and Barbara something to talk about besides her indictment.

  The hearings had also inspired a new book project. With people talking about break-ins and surveillance, Paulette thought up a title – “Are You Bugged? How to Tell if You’re Being Bugged, Followed, Tapped, or Sexually Trapped” – and looked for someone to “front” the book. She needed someone with the credentials and experience to provide information that she could write up.

  She knew a young private investigator who had helped her on a case of a man whose wife had become a Scientologist. The detective’s name was Anthony Pellicano, and he was thirsty for publicity. With his knowledge of surveillance and Paulette’s experience of investigating a shadowy organization like Scientology, they figured they could make a good team.

  On July 2, they signed a contract to produce the book together. But over time, Pellicano didn’t give her the information he had promised. She gamely finished a manuscript on her own, but it was ultimately rejected for publication.

  That she managed any writing at all surprised Barbara, who had done little writing of her own since her own trauma. Barbara told a friend, “Paulette can do more during a nervous breakdown than most healthy people can in a lifetime.”

  As her 31st birthday – July 26, 1973 – neared, there was really only one thing Paulette was looking forward to. The Medical Detectives was coming out, after her own attorneys had delayed its publication. When she had showed them a prepublication copy, they told her they were alarmed by a reference to a bombing on the back cover. It had nothing to do with her case, but the association was too risky. They called the publisher and told him the lines could not appear on the book. Making the change had set the book back. But in July, it was finally coming out.

  The first review arrived the morning of her birthday. It was the only one that would turn out not to be positive. (She would win an “Edgar” from the Mystery Writers of America in nonfiction for the book.) She was devastated by the negative review. Her black mood went into new depths. Meanwhile, Bob called, and said he had changed his mind about seeing her for her birthday that evening.

  She couldn’t blame him. She knew it was over with him – he’d hinted about meeting another woman at a family wedding. By then, Paulette hardly cared to see anyone. Jerry and Barbara tried to lift her mood, but by the evening, she was lower than she’d ever been. She could not understand how she would live through what was coming. It just seemed impossible. The stock of valium she’d been collecting looked lethal. As she drank more, she started thinking about consuming it.

  Then, the telephone rang.

  It was an old Brandeis friend who was now an editor at the Arts & Leisure pages of the New York Times. The friend had called to wish her old classmate a happy birthday, but she could tell immediately that Paulette was in trouble.

  Paulette never told her friend how close she came to killing herself that night. She poured out her troubles and her friend said the right things to help Paulette calm down. For hours, the friend kept her on the phone, until Paulette finally passed out.

  8

  Transport XXI

  Brussels, 1946

  Paulette awakes in bright light and sits up, rubbing her eyes. It takes a moment to remember where she is, until the mildew smell and the coarse linens remind her.

  It was a noise that woke her. There’s a scene playing out at the other end of the room, over the rows of similar beds, all of them illuminated by harsh, bright electric light. The sounds and movement at the other end of the room are out of place. It’s before dawn, and the lights shouldn’t be on this early. She feels a tightness in the pit of her stomach even before she can make out what’s going on. And then, as she becomes a little less sleepy, it becomes clear.

  Tante Brunya is leaving.

  Paulette knows it instantly, can sense it from the way Tante Brunya is dressed. Clearly she is going away somewhere. The woman has on an overcoat and a hat, and sturdy shoes. She’s dressed for a trip. And she’s standing over a young girl with blonde curls who is tying her shoelaces and gathering her things, as if Brunya’s journey can’t begin until the girl is packed and ready to go with her.

  Paulette understands: The young girl, DeeDee, is leaving the orphanage with Tante Brunya and they are going to America.

  The shock of it hits her like a blow to the chest.

  She sits there in her bed under the glaring light and watches Tante Brunya take DeeDee’s things in one hand and DeeDee in the other, and they walk out, never even glancing at her. She is too shocked to make any noise or try to stop them. Instead, she pictures herself running after them, begging to be taken along. Tante – “aunt” in French – has been the closest thing to a mother she’s had in the drab orphanage, and now not only is Brunya leaving, but she has chosen another girl to take with her.

  Tante Brunya had not even said goodbye.

  Paulette fights an urge to fall back on the bed in tears. She wipes her eyes and stands up to get dressed. She’ll go find her sister and tell her what’s happened. Sarah is two years older and knows more. But because of their age difference, the two girls are kept in different parts of the orphanage and don’t see each other very often.

  Paulette is only four years old, and has dim memories of other places where she and her sister had lived. Only one event before today had sharply stood out.

  Sh
e was lying in bed at another orphanage in a large room with many other children when the droning sound of airplanes grew in the distance. The sound seemed to send everyone into a panic. Adults ran into the room, screaming about turning out the lights and pulling down window shades.

  She remembered thinking she was going to die, and how awful it sounded as the other children kept screaming with the noise of the airplanes overhead. She needed to go to the bathroom, which was in the center of the large, bifurcated room, but she didn’t dare move. So she wet the bed while she waited for the planes to pass.

  There had been no air raids at Tante Brunya’s orphanage. Paulette and her sister had been moved there about a year ago, and she had a bare grasp of the idea that the war was over but that outside, things were still very bad. Many of the children weren’t even orphans. But their parents kept them there because they couldn’t afford to feed and clothe them on the outside.

  Things were difficult inside, too. They sometimes missed meals, or had to go without milk, or sometimes the bread or oatmeal was inedible. She was often ill, and she and her sister and just about everyone else was underweight, undersized, and suffering from other effects of malnutrition.

  A few months after Tante Brunya went to America, Paulette’s sister was gone too. Sarah was adopted by an aunt and went to live in Antwerp, hours away.

  Now, she was on her own. On the weekends, parents and aunts and uncles would come to be reunited with their children, and they sometimes brought nice things to eat and new clothes. But her parents never came. Paulette sat on the grass on visiting days and watched the others, wondering when her parents would come for her.

  Week after week, they never did. And neither Tante Brunya nor any of the other adults ever told her why.

  On July 22, 1942, Leonard Alexander Rodrigues Lopes, a Dutch Jew of Portuguese descent who lived in Antwerp and worked as a reporter for the London newspaper the Daily Express, brought the news to his friend Sijbren de Hoo that neither of them wanted to hear. Their good companion, Chaim Bucholc, had been arrested and taken to a Nazi concentration camp.