The Unbreakable Miss Lovely looks at one of Scientology’s most formidable foes
Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club is Nathan Rabin’s ongoing exploration of books involving show business, with a special emphasis on the very bad and the very sleazy.
The “Church” of Scientology likes to compare what it sees as the unfair religious persecution it experiences under the German government for being an abusive commercial enterprise masquerading as a religion to the genocide Jews experienced during the Holocaust. Arguments that can be reduced to “our enemies are just like the Nazis!” are famously flimsy and hyperbolic, and as a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust I am personally offended by the Church’s disingenuous attempts to link the richly merited scrutiny they experience from a vigilant government looking out for its citizens to a historic tragedy where millions were cruelly executed for their religion.
But no one is more entitled to be nauseated by Scientologists continually playing the Holocaust card than journalist and author Paulette Cooper. When Cooper was a little girl in Europe, her Jewish parents were both killed in the Holocaust. From the time she was born, her life was defined by brutal persecution from a sinister organization.
As an adult, Cooper wrote one of the first and most important muckraking exposés about Scientology, 1971’s The Scandal Of Scientology. For her troubles, she was relentlessly persecuted by another sinister organization with no mercy: Scientology. Oh sure, there are plenty of comparisons that can be drawn between Nazis and Scientology, but they aren’t in service of L. Ron Hubbard’s long, long con. For example, the Nazis succeeded in destroying Cooper’s parents for what they believed, and the Scientologists tried their damnedest, but did not succeed, in trying to destroy Paulette Cooper for the uncomfortable truths she uncovered.
As a longtime Scientology obsessive (my editors here are encouraging me to subtly turn this into the “Silly Little Scientology Book Club” but I am resisting, for the time being), I’ve read an awful lot about Paulette Cooper. Her larger-than-life tale of being the victim of a Kafkaesque program of surveillance, persecution, and bullying appears again and again in stories of Scientology’s rise and fall, including Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear.
But before Tony Ortega’s The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, Cooper’s story had never been told in full. It is one of the most remarkable and unlikely narratives in the sprawling field of Scientology exposés. Ortega’s specialty is his ability to contextualize Cooper’s soap-opera life within the raging currents of history. Cooper embodied her times: She was a child of World War II and the Holocaust, an orphan of one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies who grew up to be the epitome of the chic New York career woman. Though her loving adoptive parents were conservative-minded American Jews, Cooper took advantage of the freedoms of the sexual revolution and led a Mad Men existence at advertising powerhouse BBDO, where her life consisted of an endless series of three-martini lunches and casual trysts with hard-drinking ad men eager to blow off steam.
It was through her work in advertising that Cooper first became fascinated by Scientology. While working at BBDO, an eccentric colleague told Cooper that he was the reincarnation of Jesus. In a possibly related development, this same gentleman informed her that he was really getting into Scientology. She found her associate’s assertion that he was Jesus to be perplexing even by the lenient standards of the time. So a curious Cooper asked another friend who had gotten into Scientology about her friend’s claim to be Jesus’ reincarnation and he replied, to her surprise, that, yeah, it was entirely possible that her friend was the reincarnation of Jesus.
Cooper wondered what could make such seemingly smart and savvy people like her colleagues believe in such far-fetched nonsense and began investigating the religion, first for a magazine article and then for The Scandal Of Scientology. When Cooper signed on to write her pioneering exposé of Scientology, she had no idea that she had unwittingly signed on for years upon years of psychological warfare with a wily, unrelenting adversary.
Scientology’s attacks on Cooper came in all forms and from all sides. They ranged from the banal to the utterly bizarre, even surreal. Scientologists would send Cooper’s neighbors smear sheets alleging that, among other transgressions, Cooper worked as a prostitute, sexually assaulted a 2-year-old baby, and could only attain sexual satisfaction by being whipped, something she learned at the hands of a rabbi-lover. Scientology agents would write Cooper’s name and number on bathroom walls, with an inducement to call her for a good time. Scientology sent Cooper vast volumes of pornography and filled her phone line with obscene calls.