by Tony Ortega
Paulette and Podell met with Farney over several more days at Aiello’s to hammer out the details. Eventually, in February 1985, they reached a deal for an undisclosed amount, and Mike Flynn signed off on it and was paid from the settlement.
But there was another part of the deal Flynn didn’t sign. It was a brief affidavit, signed by Paulette. In it, Paulette said she’d been in litigation with the Church of Scientology since 1971, but that all of the lawsuits had now been settled.
In 1978, she had sued Scientology in California but Flynn had convinced her to file another suit in Boston and replace her attorney in the California lawsuit. She did that, she said, because Flynn had come up with a strategy she thought would quickly win her cases.
“He explained that this whole strategy was based upon conducting an attack against Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard by naming Mr. Hubbard as a defendant in my lawsuits,” she wrote.
She claimed that Flynn told her Hubbard had “severed his ties” with the church in 1979, and if they named him as a defendant, the church would settle to protect him. In other words, Flynn knew that Hubbard was no longer running Scientology, she said, but that wouldn’t keep them from filing lawsuits accusing Hubbard of being in total control.
“However, I never had any real evidence or reason (other than the word of my lawyers) to believe that Mr. Hubbard was in control of the activities of the Church of Scientology, and my attorneys never presented me with any evidence that such was the case. It is clear to me, on the basis of my conversation with Mr. Flynn on this subject, that the allegations concerning Mr. Hubbard’s control over day-to-day Scientology activities had no basis in fact, but were being made solely for strategic reasons in pursuit of a default judgment.”
It was a devastating accusation to make. Paulette was blaming Flynn for making allegations he knew were untrue but that the church couldn’t afford to refute and would cause the church to settle. Flynn, in other words, was extorting the church through his knowledge of what was really going on—that Hubbard had actually ceded control.
Whether that was actually true was debatable. Hubbard had gone into seclusion in February 1980. With Pat and Annie Broeker as his companions, he kept hidden in an apartment in Culver City, California and then in nearby Manhattan Beach before the three of them settled into a ranch north of Los Angeles near the town of Creston in 1983. (None of this was known to anyone beyond Hubbard, the Broekers, David Miscavige, and a few other people who worked at the Creston ranch.)
And although Hubbard kept out of sight, his instructions for the Scientology empire were carried by Pat Broeker to Miscavige, who met in the middle of the night in parking lots near all-night diners in the San Bernardino area, each meeting spot with a different code name. Miscavige would take Hubbard’s instructions to the rest of the Scientology world, and in that manner “the old man” kept his hand on the church’s rudder.
But by 1985, his health was beginning to fail, and Broeker and Miscavige were wielding greater control—no one else had access to Hubbard, and didn’t dare question their authority when they said what Hubbard wanted Scientology to do.
So when Paulette Cooper signed her affidavit in March 1985, claiming that Hubbard was no longer in control, she may have been at least partly correct. Still, Flynn considered her affidavit a stunning betrayal. He hit back by telling the Clearwater Sun that he was preparing to file his own court document that would say Paulette had told a cult deprogrammer she had been paid by Scientology to settle her suits and include the affidavit.
Paulette didn’t comment in the press. But privately, she felt her own sense of betrayal by Flynn, and believed that her affidavit would be meaningless. Within weeks of signing it, Scientology approached her again, this time through one of its private investigators, who offered her another large amount, asking her to spy for the church.
She turned it down.
She was done.
Scientology’s secretive ranch near Creston, California was 160 acres of bucolic serenity with horse stalls, a house, a trailer, and a Bluebird bus. Locals who went to the place to deliver things or do day work would usually deal with a young woman or a ranch hand who went by the name Joe Carpenter. Occasionally, they might spot an older man named Jack Farnsworth.
Farnsworth was actually L. Ron Hubbard, looking more bedraggled than ever, with long greying locks and sideburns – he knew that he was increasingly resembling Colonel Sanders, and joked about it.
Joe Carpenter was actually Steve “Sarge” Pfauth, who worked the ranch and grew close to Hubbard as he helped care for him. But it was the young woman – Annie Broeker – who spent the most time with the old man, seeing to his needs.
Her husband, Pat Broeker, was seen less and less at the ranch. Pat and Annie had been Hubbard’s sole companions during his first few years of seclusion, but after they had settled at the ranch some distance had started to grow between Hubbard and Pat.
By early 1985, Pfauth could see that Broeker was actively avoiding Hubbard, and Broeker would only come to the ranch late at night and leave before Hubbard rose in the morning.
Pfauth didn’t know what the falling out was about. He did know that Hubbard still badly wanted the All-Clear Signal to happen – the mission that Marty Rathbun and others were working so hard to make happen so Hubbard could emerge from hiding and rejoin the action at Scientology’s main headquarters. They referred to that compound, near Hemet, with the code name “S,” and it was only a few hours away by car. But as much as Hubbard wanted to go there, he knew he couldn’t leave the Creston ranch as long as he was named in so many lawsuits.
By early 1985, Hubbard had quit smoking, but he had to be hospitalized for a few days for pancreatitis. As soon as possible, they got him back to the ranch, and were fortunate that news of his sickness hadn’t become public.
Hubbard lived in the Bluebird bus, and would take walks around the ranch to stretch his legs. One evening, at twilight, he ran into Pfauth, and pointed up at some stars that were just coming into view in the deepening dark.
“There’s nothing but a bunch of cowboys out there,” he told the ranch hand. “Yeah, they’re all cowboys, they kill each other and shoot each other, and they’re just a bunch of cowboys out there.”
As 1985 wore on, Hubbard’s health continued to decline. In October, he told Annie Broeker that he wanted Pfauth to construct something for him, and she summoned Sarge to the bus to hear it from Hubbard himself.
Scientologists used a machine they called an “e-meter” in counseling they called auditing. The device was a cheap contraption (Texas Instruments gave a quote of $40 when they were asked to make them in 1981) that ran a small amount of electricity through a couple of sensors (soup cans, originally) held in a subject’s hands. The e-meter measured tiny fluctuations in the galvanism of skin, making a needle move. According to Hubbard’s philosophy, the machine was actually measuring the “mass” of a subject’s thoughts. Conditioned to believe that the machine was all-knowing, Scientologists become convinced that they could not hide negative thoughts from the e-meter.
At higher levels, after a church member spent years in the organization, he or she learned that the meter could also be used to rid the body of unseen entities which Hubbard named “body thetans” or “BTs.” These entities, Hubbard explained in confidential documents only the highest-level members were allowed to see, were the disembodied souls of extraterrestrials that had been placed on earth by a galactic overlord named “Xenu,” who had stranded the aliens on earth 75 million years ago.
Now, with his health failing, in October 1985, Hubbard told Pfauth that he wanted him to construct a special e-meter with enough voltage that could, once and for all, rid him of all of his BTs, and also “kill the body.”
Pfauth was stunned when he realized what the old man was saying: Hubbard wanted to commit suicide through electrocution. Pfauth wanted nothing to do with it, so for several weeks he dragged his feet. Then, in late November, Annie angrily told him that if he didn�
�t construct the special e-meter, Hubbard would have an electrician in town do it – and imagine what a disaster that could be, she said. So Pfauth took apart his own Mark VI e-meter, and modified it with “some Tesla coils and some up-transformer things,” he told Marty Rathbun years later. The machine was still battery-operated, so there wouldn’t be enough voltage to harm Hubbard, but it would put on a good show when he used it.
Hubbard did use it late in November or early in December, and the machine fried itself in a spectacular show that probably gave him a good jolt. Hubbard may even have been burned. But it didn’t kill him. And that was the end of talk about an e-meter.
By late December, Hubbard was declining quickly. He would wander around the ranch in his nightgown and slippers, following Pfauth and telling him about how “rose perfume” was a conspiracy of the “goddamn psychs.” (Hubbard had always hated flowery scents, in his laundry and otherwise. At some point, he began telling people that the scents in laundry detergent were part of some vague plot against the populace by the psychiatric profession.)
In early January, Hubbard began seeing body thetans at places around the ranch, and Annie would ask Sarge to go find them, apparently to mollify Hubbard.
Just before Hubbard died, Pfauth was present as the old man was asked to sign papers about his estate. Hubbard was impatient, and complained of a headache, and Pfauth thought he was in no shape to be signing important documents.
On Friday, January 24, 1986, Hubbard breathed his last. Three days later, Pat Broeker and David Miscavige spoke to a gathering of Scientologists at the Hollywood Palladium, and told them that Hubbard had voluntarily decided to leave his body, which had only become an impediment to the higher-level research that he wished to accomplish. Hubbard’s attorney, Earle Cooley, assured the crowd that Hubbard had actually been a very healthy man.
Hubbard was 74 when he died.
When she heard about it, Paulette thought briefly of contacting the press and making a statement. Since she had signed her final legal settlement a year before, by choice she had gone completely silent about Scientology, and was getting used to the idea that she would no longer be the person reporters called for quotes about the church.
Now, for a moment, she hungered to be heard once again. To tell the world what Hubbard had tried to do to ruin her life. That he had been obsessed with her for years. That the organization he left behind was as corrupt as ever, and would remain a danger for other people who dared to speak out.
She thought about it, and was very tempted. But she knew her parents were relieved that finally she was no longer in the fight, and she also knew that speaking out might start the harassment all over again – and Ted and Stella Cooper would never forgive her if that happened.
Paulette’s life was going in another direction, and she decided it was best to let things be.
February 25, 1987 was Albert Podell’s 50th birthday, and the attorney who had handled Paulette’s settlement two years earlier had come up with an interesting way to celebrate it. On March 6, he rented out the Bouwerie Lane Theater – at Bond Street and The Bowery in Manhattan’s East Village – for a performance of School for Scoundrels, and invited about 100 friends, half married couples, half singles.
Among the singles he invited were his old friends Paulette Cooper and Paul Noble. They hadn’t seen each other since they dated briefly after the last time Podell had invited both of them to a party at his Sullivan Street apartment in the Village, 19 years earlier.
Like the previous time, they easily struck up a conversation – Paulette admitted to Paul that she wasn’t enjoying the show, and asked him, “Will you help me get a cab at intermission?” They quickly caught up on their way out of the theater, and Paulette mentioned that she was now living on the east side. Paul said he played tennis near her apartment building.
“Hey, pop by for a takeout dinner after you play tennis sometime,” Paulette said as she got into the cab. A few days later, Paul did just that.
The last time they had met, Paul was producing The Alan Burke Show for local television. Now he was producing shows for WNYW Channel 5, the Metromedia station that had become the flagship station for Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox network created the year before.
For years, Paul had produced local talk shows, and had met and become friendly with many of the era’s big celebrities. When he took Paulette on their second date to the opening of a movie at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, Ingmar Bergman’s daughter Isabella Rosselini stopped and said “Hello, Paul!”
Paulette couldn’t help being impressed. Paul’s timing was also impeccable: Paulette craved companionship, but for years she’d worried that any man she dated might turn out to be another Scientology spy – another Jerry Levin or a Richard Bast. She had almost given up the idea of finding someone she could really trust. But she had first met Paul in 1968, before any of the problems with Scientology had begun – he couldn’t be a plant, she knew.
Within a year, they were engaged, and ten weeks later, on May 17, 1988, they were married at the Harmony Club in New York. One of their guests was Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who Paul had brought to television to appear on his talk show.
Paul seemed to know everyone, and Paulette felt completely at home in the world he gave her access to. At an Emmy gala, Paul introduced Paulette to another of the famous figures he had gotten to know producing television shows. It was Henry Kissinger.
Paulette couldn’t resist. “Did you hear about a plot, in 1976, to send bomb threats to you in a woman’s name?”
Kissinger said that yes, he had, actually.
“I was that woman!” Paulette exclaimed, and they laughed. She sent Kissinger, a dog lover, a copy of a book she had written on pets, and he sent her a thank you note as if it were written by his dog, Amanda.
Early in their marriage, Paul and Paulette discussed her past and her fights with Scientology. Paul skimmed her book, but found that it creeped him out. He told her that he didn’t want that part of her life to return. He was proud of what she had done, but he wanted her to drop the whole thing. She agreed.
But each of them knew it was a promise she would have a hard time keeping.
19
Resurfacing
While Paulette was beginning a very different life with Paul Noble, L. Ron Hubbard’s death in 1986 suddenly opened the floodgates for another generation of writers to take on Scientology. Three major books about Scientology appeared in the four years after Hubbard’s death, and each of them owed a huge debt to Gerry Armstrong, who had won the right to keep his trove of Hubbard documents in the 1984 Breckenridge decision.
After Paulette had peeled away from Michael Flynn to sign her own settlement at the beginning of 1985, Armstrong and the other Flynn clients wrapped up their cases with a large deal at the end of 1986, ending 16 suits for about $5 million.
Hubbard finally had a big part of his all-clear, but it was too late to benefit him.
As Flynn faded away, the new authors appeared to become Scientology’s latest torment. Jon Atack, the former church member who had helped in the child custody case which produced the other big 1984 court decision against Scientology, connected with Flynn to get copies of the Armstrong documents as he became one of the most thorough researchers ever to study the church. Atack shared his manuscript with British author Russell Miller, who in 1987 published the best book ever written about Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard. Atack came out with his book about Hubbard and the church, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed, in 1990. And in the U.S. a New Zealand expatriate, Bent Corydon, who had once been a Scientology mission franchiser in Southern California, wrote another book with the help of Ron DeWolf (the new name Nibs had given himself), who backed out before publication in another of his habitual flip-flops. Corydon’s book, L. Ron Hubbard: Madman or Messiah? came out in 1987.
Like the cluster of books that had come out years earlier by George Malko (1970), Paulette Cooper (1971), Cyril Vosper
(1971), and Robert Kaufman (1972), each of the new books was attacked with fierce litigation and harassment by Scientology. And each, just like the 1970s books, were soon hard to find in bookstores or libraries.
In the press about the books and their legal problems, mention was often made of Paulette and her earlier struggles. She was not forgotten, if some of the details of what she had been through began to get muddled. But even though the struggles of the new books brought her new mentions in the press, Paulette kept quiet. She was done with Scientology, and she had other concerns.
In August 1990, she brought her sister Suzy to New York from Israel for safety during the Gulf War. Suzy moved into Paulette’s old apartment at the Churchill. Suzy had lived a hard life. Unlike Paulette, she had not been brought up by a family of means. And although she had excelled in school, she gave up any thoughts of college in order to support the aunt and uncle who had brought her up.
After she moved from Belgium to Israel, her husband was in and out of hospitals with ailments from his experience in Israel’s wars. Suzy became a widow, and was bringing up two children by selling jewelry 12 hours a day.
Paul Noble took an early buyout from Fox and retired in 1991. But a couple of years later, one of his former interns was made the head of programming at the Lifetime network. Paul went to work there in 1993, and helped develop its movie programming, which became so successful Lifetime became the number one basic cable channel for two years running.
Paulette continued to write, but she was focused on less controversial topics. She put out books on travel, missing persons, and psychics. And she became a prolific ghost writer, penning books under the names of other people, including one for Margaret Truman, daughter of the president.
