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

  Paulette nodded, wondering how the man had become so delusional. He prattled on about his abilities to change the world now that he was immortal. He seemed happy and genuinely excited about his new life, but in his eyes, Paulette saw something else. Her training from working years earlier with very ill mental patients kicked in. She understood the situation.

  And then Bill wrapped his arms tightly around her and said, “God has decided to rape you.” Paulette struggled against his grip and had the presence of mind to keep him talking about Scientology. How did it work? What did he hope to do with it? It distracted him enough that she was able to slip from his arms and then move him, little by little, to the door.

  “Just look what it’s done for me,” he said, still going on about how Scientology had changed his life.

  It was a relief when Paulette finally got him to leave.

  After Bill was gone, Paulette looked for a phone number. She wanted to talk to Roger, a former boyfriend, someone she had worked with at BBDO. She knew that Roger had also dabbled in Scientology, and thought he might be able to make sense of what just happened.

  She first noticed Roger when she went for a job interview at BBDO’s offices on Madison Avenue in 1966. She spotted him on her way past some cubicles – he was the handsome, dark-haired man giving her the once over. She already knew another man in the office. Barry was an old grade school classmate, and he was excited to see her. He had been hired a few weeks earlier, also as a junior copywriter, and he hoped she could get work there too.

  Paulette wanted it badly. Not only for the creative opportunity and a decent starting salary, but because there were few women in copywriting and she liked the challenge of breaking into the field. She passed the interview and got the position. (And soon found that Barry was making $500 more in salary for the same job, which irked her.)

  On her first day of work, she stopped at Barry’s cubicle to say hello, and she wondered if the good looking man was also still there. When he saw her, Roger stopped typing and stood up. He was tall, which she liked. He shook her hand and said he hoped he’d be seeing her around. After work, Roger asked her for a drink, and soon they were dating.

  At BBDO, Paulette mostly worked on the Campbell’s Soup account, and she got noticed when she came up with a campaign that encouraged customers to mix soups (“One Plus One Equals New!”). It even got her written up with praise in the industry bible, Madison Avenue magazine.

  The copywriters at BBDO worked in groups, and lunches were the three-Martini type. After work they would hit the bar downstairs at the 383 Madison Avenue building where they drank some more. On Friday afternoons all but one of Paulette’s coworkers ditched their cubicles to spend the afternoon in the bar, leaving behind one designated non-drinker to keep an eye out for bosses. Most of her co-workers were men, and Paulette tried to keep up with their heavy drinking, and sometimes the next morning she had only a hazy memory of what had gone on.

  After one night of prodigious consumption, she recalled the next morning in a haze that she’d let Roger take a Polaroid photograph of her wearing a sheer nightgown that showed her silhouette underneath. She had some worries about it, but did nothing at the time.

  Her fling with Roger didn’t last long, and by 1967 she was poached by another ad agency that offered her $17,000 a year, almost triple what BBDO was paying her. At the new agency, she remained friends with Roger, and that’s how she knew that he’d become interested in Scientology.

  Roger had stumbled onto it while pursuing a waitress who kept putting him off because every evening she had to go to some kind of night school. “How about the weekend?” he asked her, but she went to classes then, too.

  What was this place that took up so much of her time? He decided to find out, and it turned out to be the Scientology “org” at the Hotel Martinique on Greeley Square, a block from the Empire State Building. Thinking it might help him get in with the waitress, Roger agreed to take Scientology’s introductory class, its “Communication Course.” But the waitress was soon forgotten because he became hooked on Scientology. Roger then began to tell his friends about it. Including Bill, his colleague at BBDO.

  Bill was gifted and smart, but the break-up of his marriage and his heavy drinking had him fighting despair. Others thought he was eccentric, but he didn’t mind that. He enjoyed the shock value of walking around the city in a black cape and black hood, like something out of an Ingmar Bergman film. With his penchant for weirdness and his emotional state after his break-up, perhaps anything could have sent him over the edge. But it was Scientology that had clearly unhinged him.

  Bill never forgot that while others thought he was weird, Paulette had befriended him, trying to help him snap out of his funk. So when things had gotten truly strange, he had looked her up. After she convinced Bill to leave her apartment that day after RFK was assassinated, Paulette called up Roger and told him what had happened, that Scientology had convinced Bill that he was Jesus incarnate.

  Roger’s answer stunned her. “Maybe he really is,” he said.

  Maybe he really is? The words stuck in her mind, and made her wonder about Scientology – what about it could have attracted these two men she had known in such a cauldron of talent and smarts as BBDO, and made them consider, even for a moment, something so bizarre?

  By this time, she’d ditched advertising altogether and was trying to make it as a magazine writer. Paulette began to wonder if she’d found her next big story subject. Maybe it was time to find out how Scientology was attracting people like Roger and Bill. How did it work? And was Bill’s experience a warning that there was something off, maybe even something dangerous about Scientology?

  She started looking into taking a course at the local church.

  The Scientology “org” at the Hotel Martinique on Broadway at 32nd Street was a hive of activity. The Beaux Arts hotel had been constructed between 1897 and 1911 and became a glamorous attraction. The Professional Golf Association of America – the PGA – was created during a meeting there in 1916. But by the 1960s the hotel had faded, and Scientology took over its large ballroom and a collection of offices for workers who ran the org.

  In 1968, the ballroom was regularly filled with young people taking courses, day and night. Leonard Cohen was known for showing up with his two girlfriends for some auditing. John McMaster, the world’s first “Clear,” stopped through on his frequent trips around the world as Scientology’s ambassador. Jim Dincalci, who would become L. Ron Hubbard’s personal medical aide, made his first forays into Scientology there and liked it so much he ditched medical school so he could spend more time on his courses.

  People were flowing in and out at all hours, and all under the watchful gaze of a large black and white photograph of Hubbard. Some of the seekers had been attracted to the place after seeing stickers that someone had placed in the bathrooms of just about every bar in the city: “After drugs comes Scientology.”

  The movement was in one of its growth spurts, attracting young people who had come to Manhattan looking for the counterculture, but wanting more than an acid trip. Scientologists told anyone who would listen that they were having out-of-body experiences without any drugs, and that taking courses would unleash their true potential. For those who gave it a try, they soon found themselves in the Hotel Martinique’s ballroom, watching people shout and scream at each other. Part of L. Ron Hubbard’s training involved something called “bullbaiting.” It required one person to hold perfectly still, without flinching or even blinking, while his partner screamed obscenities or tried to find an insult or tease that caused the subject to react.

  Jim Dincalci was shocked when he saw how rough it could get. Men were not only shouting at women during bullbaiting, but also touching them in an attempt to get them to react. Some of it would have been offensive in another context. But this was Scientology. And it was what Paulette walked into one weekend as she began her investigation into the church.

  She had signed up for Scientology’s introdu
ctory course using a pseudonym – Paula Madison – which she’d borrowed from the famous avenue near her apartment. The course, “Success through Communications,” involved a series of different exercises that would take place over two days. The first exercise had her sitting across from another person, staring into his eyes and daring not to blink. After suppressing an urge to laugh, Paulette soon found the experience almost unbearable. She itched. Her muscles twitched. Her vision began to blur and her mind lost focus, but she had to keep staring without moving or she’d hear “FLUNK!” screamed at her.

  If that happened, she had to start all over again. As the hours went by, her vision increasingly played tricks on her as the face of the man she stared at went through ugly transformations. She was hallucinating, which was the point.

  Like other movements of the time, Scientology offered mind-bending trips into an alternative reality. New recruits were told that L. Ron Hubbard had discovered the true nature of the human mind, and through his training routines, they could explore a universe inside themselves. That exploration could take them into their past lives and could eventually bring them “total freedom”—an attractive promise, if a vague one. And to begin that journey, their career as Scientologists began with hours-long staring contests. From the outside, it looked like a cheap carnival trick that produced a mild trance state, but to Scientologists it was deadly serious. Especially when it got to the exercise on the second day—bullbaiting.

  For this, Paulette had to hold perfectly still as a Scientologist yelled things at her to get her to flinch. Watching how others had done it, she expected that the man facing her would pick on her appearance. The trick seemed to be to find the “button” that would make someone react by saying something about the shape of their nose, the blemishes on their skin, or their taste in clothes. But with Paulette, the men who took turns testing her went for something else. They tried to outdo each other with obscene talk. “You know what I’m going to do to you?” they’d ask. And then they’d watch her face closely as they described the most vivid perversions they could think of.

  Paulette was disgusted, but managed to take it. Like most single women in New York, she’d been through her share of dirty telephone calls. She’d just never had one in person before. She really only got uncomfortable when a senior official walked over to take a turn with her. Holding rock steady, she kept staring ahead as he began talking to her, discussing nothing important. Then, suddenly, he lunged forward until his nose was nearly touching hers. Staring into her eyes, he said, “We’ve been watching you since you first came in here. We think you’re really a writer.”

  She blanched, but held still. He interrogated her roughly, trying to get her to flinch. All she could do was stare straight at him, letting her eyes out of focus a little. And then she hit on a strategy to keep her mind off of what he was yelling at her. She thought about kissing him. It revolted her, and she knew that her face must have shown it, but not enough to get the dreaded “Flunk!” shouted at her. She wasn’t allowed to flinch, or move, or say anything. She just kept her look of distaste while he kept accusing her of spying.

  Before the bullbaiting, when she was between other sessions, Paulette had wandered around the place, asking questions. At one point, she’d even lifted several documents from one office, some of which had lists of Scientology students who had been designated something called “suppressive.” She tried to do some other poking around in the few minutes she had before another exercise started up. But after the senior official had accused her of being a writer, she wondered if they really were on to her.

  Finally, he changed the subject and, like the others, started up with the sex talk. But he was obviously an old pro, and his dirty talk was levels of magnitude more disgusting than what the other men had come up with. And after all that, he finished with an invitation. “Why don’t you come over and join in the some of the great orgies we have over here on Tuesday nights?”

  When the bullbaiting was done, a woman told her that she was wanted by the “ethics officer” upstairs. Paulette didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t sound good. She was taken to a waiting area and was asked to take a seat. But she’d hardly arrived when the name “Paula Madison” was called out. She was directed into an office by a young woman. Paulette said she’d go in a minute, after she went to the bathroom. “No, you need to go in here now,” the woman insisted.

  Paulette didn’t like the sound of that. She repeated that she had to go to the bathroom, and nervously watched as other Scientologists gathered around. The woman insisted again that she see the ethics officer, whoever that was.

  “I have to go to the bathroom, and if you don’t let me go, I will pee right here on your rug,” Paulette said.

  The woman, defeated, nodded to the bathroom, and Paulette went to it quickly. She stayed in there for a while, waiting for an opportunity to escape, and then made for the door.

  Once she was out, she never went back.

  Even before her trip to the org, Paulette already knew more than most members of the public about Scientology. She had first learned about its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, when she read a book by Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Gardner eviscerated Hubbard’s book Dianetics, lumping the science fiction writer in with dozens of other people he considered “cranks.”

  A revised version of Gardner’s book had come out in 1957, and that’s when Paulette had read it, when she was 15. She had always been a voracious reader. At Mamaroneck High School, in the Westchester County town where Paulette’s adopted parents had moved from Manhattan’s Upper West Side when she was 12, she would arrive a half hour early in the mornings to study Greek. She figured it was a good way to supplement the Latin she was learning later in the day.

  Paulette wanted badly to get into Wellesley, the prestigious Massachusetts women’s liberal arts college, but even though her grades were good enough, she failed an important test during an interview with the school’s dean of women. When she was asked what she’d been reading lately, Paulette answered that she’d just finished Crime and Punishment. “By Tolstoy,” the dean said. “No, by Dostoyevsky,” Paulette answered. The dean repeated her error twice, but Paulette didn’t back down, insisting that she was correct.

  She realized later that the proper response to the dean should have been, “I thought it was Dostoyevsky, and I’ll look it up when I get home.” In 1960, that’s how a Wellesley woman handled such a situation. It dawned on her years later that that she’d been too insistent that she was right. She was feisty, and she knew it.

  Paulette was tiny, just slightly over five feet tall. She was petite and a brunette with a great figure, but her city smarts made as much of a good first impression as her good looks. She was formidable and ambitious, anyone could see that. But if she wasn’t Wellesley material, it was fine with Paulette’s parents, who wanted her to go to Brandeis anyway.

  Named after Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court’s first Jewish justice, the Waltham, Massachusetts liberal arts college had been founded in 1948 by Jewish immigrants who were trying to create a sort of Harvard for Jews. Soon enough, Jewish students were breaking barriers and getting into Ivy League schools on their own. Still, Brandeis remained a prestigious destination for a Jewish girl from New York.

  Paulette graduated from Brandeis in January 1964, taking a degree in psychology with honors after only three years (including a semester off for an appendix operation and a summer at Harvard studying comparative religion). After graduating, she worked for several months at Harvard’s medical school in a study on schizophrenia. It was there that she learned to read the warning signs which appear when a patient is about to blow a gasket.

  When her internship was over, she moved to Manhattan, getting a tiny place at 15 Charles Street in the Village, and began absorbing the life of a city going through a cultural upheaval. Paulette began taking graduate courses at Columbia University’s Teachers College, but soon realized it wasn’t a good fit for her. She finished
a master’s degree at City College while she worked at a job in a research firm during the day.

  The job had her psychoanalyzing television commercials, and it put Paulette in contact with people at BBDO, eventually resulting in an interview for a position. And that’s when she walked in for the first time and spotted Roger, and later made friends with Bill.

  After she was poached a year later by a second ad agency – Norman, Craig, & Kummel – she began to wonder if she’d made the right decision to leave BBDO when she found herself day after day storyboarding ads for Ajax, the window cleaner. By then Paulette had moved out of the Village to the East 60’s, first in a place on 63rd Street, then into one of the first condominium buildings in the city at 64th Street and 2nd Avenue. Just months before, down the block at 1st Avenue, Warner LeRoy, son of Wizard of Oz producer Mervyn LeRoy, had opened the city’s new hot spot, Maxwell’s Plum, which combined a movie theater with an upscale hamburger café that attracted a thriving singles scene.

  Paulette would look out her window on the third floor to see if she could spot good-looking men heading to Maxwell’s Plum, and if she spied some, she’d go for a drink. Downstairs in her own building – the 34-story St. Tropez – was Frank Valenza’s booming restaurant, Proof of the Pudding, which introduced cherry tomatoes to trendy eaters. The smell of garlic coming from the place drove Paulette nuts, especially because her meager freelance budget often had her skipping meals. “One day, if I work hard enough, I’ll be successful enough to eat there every night,” she vowed.

  She shared the cramped quarters with a couple of roommates. The apartment was owned by a woman Paulette knew through her father Ted’s jewelry business. The summer before, Paulette had spent a month working in his office when the woman who would become her landlord sold several pieces to finance a diamond engagement ring for herself. Later, after the woman had paid for the piece, Ted Cooper caught a glimpse of a flaw in the diamond that was only barely perceptible. Paulette was stunned when her father refunded the woman $16,000.