Adventure on the HIGH SEAS

In the winter of 1969 Paulette Cooper embarked upon a mission to become the world’s first successful female cruise ship stowaway. What followed was seven days of action, adventure and daring before men in uniform finally arrived. But had she really been caught? Paulette recounts her unlikely tale to Tiffany Dunk.

As New York shivered through the bitter winter of 1969, an elegant queue of travellers was waiting to board the SS Leonardo Da Vinci, a gleaming ship destined for the warmer waters of Puerto Rico and St Thomas before returning to port seven days later. Among them was 29-year-old Paulette Cooper, a slender brunette with aspirations to become a travel writer. But while the other passengers toted luxury luggage and wore furs to withstand the cold, Paulette stood apart. Instead, she wore a glamourous chiffon evening gown and carried only an attaché case. For over the course of this seven-day journey she planned to embark upon her own secret adventure, becoming the world’s first successful female cruise ship stowaway and launching her writing career with a glorious bang.

The idea, she tells The Weekly now, had come to her one evening after reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter. In the short story, an amateur detective finally cracks a case after realising that the stolen missive he is searching for has been hidden in plain sight. It got Paulette – who had been on many cruises with her parents over the years – thinking. What if she applied that principle to stowing away? Instead of hiding out in a cupboard, could she avoid capture by brazenly posing as a guest?

“No one is expecting that,” she mused over drinks with friends as she expounded her theory. “Be conspicuous, be flashy, be great.”

They laughed uproariously, believing it was simply one martini too many talking. But for Paulette it sparked an audacious plan. In 1969 cruising was a luxurious and glamourous mode of transatlantic travel. The best lines had upped their game since the increasing affordability of air travel had reduced the number of passengers doing long-haul ocean trips. Steerage class had been abandoned as commercial vessels focused on first- and secondclass cabins. And this, Paulette knew, would come in handy.

Certainly, that was the case for the SS Leonardo Da Vinci, which Paulette discovered when she visited the Italian Line’s office, requesting a map of the ship so that she could familiarise herself with the layout. “I thought the lower level would be a good place to hide something because I realised I couldn’t go on a week-long cruise with just the dress I was wearing,” she says. “And that’s how everything developed.”

A friend who had served in the army taught her how to roll up her clothing tightly, using rubber bands, to ensure they took up minimum space. “So, I began working on my wardrobe,” she recalls. “At that point I still didn’t know if I was going to go through with it. But I had a beautiful chiffon evening gown that didn’t take up much space. And I thought that if I did a black and white wardrobe I could take four or five things – blouses, skirts and pants – and mix and match them so nobody would know I was basically wearing the same thing.

“I also reduced the size of all my necessities. I took my toothbrush and broke it in half so it was just the bristles. They had in those days 5 Day deodorant pads – I took seven of them and wrapped them in aluminium foil. My hairbrush was just five little bristles. But I had all my make-up. Part of the plan was to be attractive and attract attention, and to do that I had to look good.” With a final burst of determination, she managed to cram everything into her discreet attaché case. “I had to do it then,” she laughs. “We use that expression over here, ‘Put up or shut up’.”

And so it came to be that, using the nom de plume of Paula Madison (“A friend told me that if you’re going to use another name, use one close to your real name, otherwise you won’t respond if somebody calls. And I lived right off Madison Avenue,” she explains), she strode purposefully up the gangway.

“I’m going to a bon voyage party for the Smiths,” Paulette announced, her heart beating fast.

“Do you know which cabin they are in?” she was asked in return.

“No,” she replied breezily as she was waved on board, “but I’ll find them.”

In those years, friends and families of guests were invited on board to toast the impending voyage. Drifting around the different bon voyage parties, she blithely chatted to those she encountered until the announcement was made for visitors to return to shore. Paulette – or Paula as fellow travellers now knew her – stayed firmly put. “I kept thinking, am I crazy, am I really doing this?” she laughs now in disbelief at her daring, saying she was certain she

“The plan was to attract attention ... I had to look good.”

would be promptly caught and taken back to dock in disgrace. But The Purloined Letter principle held up: nobody questioned the presence of an attractive, well-groomed young woman who looked very much the part of a world traveller.

Slowly, guests dispersed to get ready for dinner. It was now that Paulette slipped down to a disused steerage lounge she’d already identified on her map. Just a piano and a couple of chairs stood in the dingy room. Lifting the lid of the piano she hid her attaché on top of the keys, praying that nobody would swing by to try to play a tune.

“To the bar!” thought Paulette. And that was when she encountered the first of several hurdles that hadn’t occurred to her during her rigorous planning. Firstly, the bar was closed until they reached international waters and alcohol service could resume. That also meant no free midnight buffet on night one.

Secondly, all the ladies’ rooms she’d planned to hide out in were locked – no doubt in an effort to discourage stowaways like herself.

Finally, and this would prove increasingly problematic in days to come, the number of single men far outweighed single women on cruises in the 1960s. And the sight of a pretty girl alone attracted far more attention than she had accounted for.

“There was one guy, I called him Bob, who followed me around constantly,” she remembers. “He would not leave me alone – and he was a problem.”

Retreating in a panic to the disused lounge as the last guests retired for the night, Paulette tried to nap on two chairs she’d pulled together. “But one of the crew came in and I woke up because he was touching me,” she recalls. “So I ran upstairs – I didn’t sleep at all that first night. After that I never tried to sleep down below again.”

Instead she put her initial plan into action – she became the most dedicated regular at the ship’s bar every evening. “There were first and second dinner sittings, so if someone asked you to join them you could just say, ‘Oh no, I was in the first sitting’ or ‘I’m in the second’. Or, ‘No, I’ll just have another drink.’ But all these guys were very anxious to buy me drinks so I was getting higher than I wanted to – I couldn’t really hold that much liquor!”

One of those men plying Paulette with drinks was the ship’s doctor, who had taken an instant shine to the mysterious beauty. And it was with him that she had her very first close call. Pretending to pass out on a secluded lounge after over-imbibing (a trick she repeated on each day of her journey in order to catch a few hours’ sleep before sunrise) she had to think fast when the dashing doctor offered to escort her to her cabin.

“I said, ‘Oh no, I’m not feeling so well,’ and he said, ‘Well then, I really should tuck you in’,” she recounts. So the pair wandered the hall until Paulette spotted a door with a key still in the lock. Opening the door a crack, she said good night, breathing a sigh of relief that there was nobody in what was clearly a man’s room replete with dress shoes on the floor and shaving equipment laid out on the dresser.

“He said, ‘Okay, let me escort you in.’ So I kicked the shoes under the bed and somehow managed to get him out,” she laughs now. “But the next day he was very angry at me. He’d memorised the cabin number and when he called me to check on how I was doing later that evening,

a man answered. He thought I had ditched him and picked up somebody else that night!”

Certainly, she was spoiled for choice. On her third day at sea Bob finally landed a much longed for date, taking her to the 1.30pm session of the movie playing that day, Bonnie And Clyde. Little did he know, as she slept all through the film, that Paulette had a second date already lined up for the 4.30pm session. She slept through that one too.

“I did go out with guys but I didn’t want to do anything more than just go to an event with them,” she says. “I had to stay out in the open until quite late at night and that’s when the single men’s hopes get up, you know? They’d think, maybe I can take her to my cabin or to hers and we can do something. I remember them all trying to outwait me at night at the bar. If they were insistent on coming to my cabin, I made up a non-existent roommate who was always throwing up. Nobody wants to go into a room where someone has been throwing up.

“Another problem was that my name was not on the passenger manifest. So sometimes they’d say, ‘Oh, I looked you up and I couldn’t find you.’ And

I’d have to say that I’d booked at the very last minute so I guess they didn’t have time to put me on.”

To further allay any suspicions, Paulette decided it was time to put on a show for any guests who thought her near-permanent presence at the bar – where she was surreptitiously eating the array of olives, cocktail onions and lemons to allay her hunger ahead of the regular midnight buffet – was a little strange.

She’d spotted a sign encouraging guests to sign up for a ping pong competition. “I’m a pretty good player so I thought I’d join and then be sure to lose at the end,” she says. “But nobody else signed up!”

Hers being the lone name on the sign-up sheet, the social director informed Paulette she’d won the competition by default. Her prize – a bottle of champagne – would be delivered to her table that night at dinner. Thinking fast, Paulette retorted, “Oh, I don’t like champagne.” Perhaps, suggested the social director, her dining companions would enjoy it? “Oh, I don’t like my table,”

Paulette spluttered. No problem, said the social director, they had another gift for her – they’d deliver it to her later that day.

“Well of course I had no cabin so I hung around the social director’s office like an idiot, saying, ‘Oh, I want my gift, where is it?’” she says, laughing. The gift was an engraved plaque of the ship bearing the name Paula Madison, ping pong championship winner. Clearly, this wasn’t going to fit in her attaché case. Believing she was alone, Paulette flung the plaque overboard, watching it float off into the distance before realising she was being observed by a stunned passenger.

“They must have thought I was crazy,” she chuckles. “By that point I’m sure I was the talk of the ship. I mean, a pretty woman out there drinking all the time and I’m sure people noticed I seemed to be passing out a lot. And I was always in the ladies room washing up. The lighting in there wasn’t good and I had great trouble getting my fake eyelashes, which I wore back then, on my eyes instead of my nose.”

Having taken a tiny bar of soap on board, Paulette’s first thought was that she would be able to discreetly bathe in the pool. “But that soap created bubbles and it looked like I was peeing in the pool, so that was out,” she laughs.

Still, being able to dock in Puerto Rico for 24 hours, plus another day

and night in St Thomas, helped her look the part again after she made good use of the offshore facilities.

Running into the ship’s doctor on her return, Paulette was sure she’d been caught after he urged her to travel with them again in future.

“I said something like, ‘Well, it’s lovely but this kind of thing is a little too expensive for me,” she recalls. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Well why not stow away?’ Oh my God! But do you know, thinking about it now, in those days it was really common to joke about stowing away. I don’t think he knew.

“There were a lot of scary times. It wasn’t fun at all. Everything panicked me. Every time the loudspeaker comes on, you think they’re going to announce a stowaway is on board. Every time you meet somebody, you think they suspect you.”

But it was as the ship pulled back into New York that her fear peaked. “Most stowaways aren’t caught on ships, they’re caught getting off,” she explains. And this time customs officers were waiting. Another lie was needed, and fast. After retrieving her attaché case, Paulette grabbed a passing steward. She was feeling incredibly nauseous, she said, and needed to lie down for a few minutes to recover. But she’d already turned in her key – could he please open a cabin for her to use ever so briefly?

Incredibly, he did so and it was there Paulette waited until she estimated the ship would be clear and customs officials had packed up.

With shaking legs, she walked down the gangway. “I thought, this is fabulous, I’ve done it,” she said, before stopping in horror as two uniformed men materialised in front of her.

Had she been on the ship, they asked. Yes, she answered, knowing that there was no other possible response. Well then, where was her luggage? And her coat?

“I said, ‘Oh, my boyfriend and I had a fight and he took everything’,” she recalls of her quick-witted response. Well that’s terrible, the men replied. They’d give her a lift home – it was far too cold for her to be walking all that way. And so Paulette’s journey came to its unlikely conclusion. The men who should have arrested her for stowing away instead escorted her home, and even came inside for a drink before heading back to their duties to her total disbelief.

“I couldn’t wait to boast to all my friends and I knew I was going to be able to write a really great story.” And that she did.

First, she sold a travel story to

Cosmopolitan magazine, although the ship was never named for fear she’d be arrested for her crime. Next, she wrote a piece on how to stow away for The Washington Post. And lastly, she penned a piece for British paper

The Times.

“That was sold all over the world, even in Australia,” she laughs of her splashy debut, which spawned a life-long writing career, with 26 books to her name and counting.

“The story was even optioned for the movies! They never made it, but Stanley Donen [the director of films such as Singin’ In The Rain, Funny Face, Charade and many more] optioned it, so there was a lot of excitement.”

The money she earned for stowaway stories also funded research for her first book – an explosive exposé on the Church of Scientology. Still, despite the risk she took on both endeavours, Paulette insists she’s not a thrill seeker.

“It gave people an image of me that’s actually far from true. I’m not adventurous at all,” she insists, speaking to us from her home in Palm Beach, Florida, which she shares with her husband, John Noble. “I just did this one crazy thing in my life. But it has made for very good cocktail conversation throughout the years.” AWW

“There were a lot of scary times. It wasn’t fun at all.”