The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Despite his inexperience in sexual matters, Fadiman was able to offer some insight into Alpert’s love life.

  They were having breakfast one morning. Alpert was back from one of his many dates. Jim moved the scrambled eggs around on his plate, gathering up the courage to offer an observation.

  “Hey, Dick, can I tell you something?” Jim asked.

  “Of course,” Richard replied. “You can tell me anything.”

  “Well, I’ve noticed that the women you are sleeping with this summer seem to be a lot brighter than the men you are sleeping with,” Jim said. “The women seem to be bright, capable women. The men just seem pretty.”

  Alpert took a sip of coffee and looked up at the wise undergraduate. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s true.”

  Their friendship continued during Fadiman’s senior year back at Harvard. One night that year, Alpert took him to a gay bar in Boston. It was a revelation to Fadiman that such a place even existed. And while there may have been some sexual signals, Jim never picked them up, and the professor never made a real pass. At Harvard, Alpert pretended he was straight, while out in San Francisco, the gay side seemed to flower.

  Jim noticed a few other things about his favorite professor. While Alpert was supposedly the mentor in their relationship, he would show flashes of insecurity about his own intellectual abilities. This insecurity was actually one of Alpert’s more charming characteristics, and it would express itself as Professor Richard Alpert, and in his later incarnation as Ram Dass. In both roles, Alpert made a career out of this charismatic mix of personal insight, bemused self-deprecation, and true confession. It made people love him, and Richard loved to be loved.

  One night, Fadiman and Alpert went out to see a production of Samuel Beckett’s existential comedy Waiting for Godot, a play that Fadiman—not Alpert—wanted to see. As they were walking to the theater, the professor turned to the student and quipped, “If this is one of those plays where afterward I’m going to say, ‘I didn’t understand a thing,’ and you’re going to look down on me, then I don’t want to go.” Of course, it was one of those plays. Alpert wasn’t sure what it was about. Fadiman didn’t really get it, either, but he tried his best to make it seem as if he did.*

  To most people, including Fadiman, Richard seemed fairly content with his life. But Alpert would later see these years as a time of alienation and hidden depression. “In the face of this feeling of malaise, I ate more, collected more possessions, collected more appointments and positions and status, more sexual and alcoholic orgies, and more wildness in my life. Every time I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was the professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was the horror that I knew inside that I didn’t know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved.”

  It was David McClelland, his old mentor at Wesleyan, who got him the Harvard job. McClelland had moved up the academic ladder and had brought his bright young protégé along. Alpert was given a huge corner office in an old mansion that housed the Center for Personality Research, which was part of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. One afternoon in the fall of 1959, McClelland walked into that office. He’d just come back from a sabbatical in Europe and had some big news.

  “When I was in Europe,” McClelland said, “I came across this interesting psychologist who is bright as hell. He was there bicycling across Italy or something. Anyway, I offered him a job. Do you have any idea where we can put him?”

  “Well,” Alpert replied, “there’s a broom closet down the hall. We can put him there.”

  “Oh, by the way, his name’s Leary,” McClelland said. “Tim Leary.”

  Trickster: Berkeley, California Fall 1955

  On the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, Timothy Leary woke up in his home in the Berkeley hills and found a note on his wife’s pillow. “What now?” Leary asked himself. “More drama?” They’d had another martini-fueled fight the night before, the main issue being Leary’s latest infidelity. It wasn’t so much that Leary was being unfaithful. He and his wife, Marianne, had what would later be called an “open relationship.” They called it “wife swapping” back in the fifties. Tim and Marianne both liked to flirt. The martini parties they held at their home at 1230 Queens Road had become notorious among the clinical psychologists down the hill on the University of California campus. Leary loved to hold court in his spacious home, which offered sweeping views of San Francisco Bay. He loved keeping the gin chilled, making sure the glasses were filled, and speculating as to which guests were on the verge of pairing up.

  In recent weeks, Marianne had been becoming increasingly depressed about their marriage. Little flings were OK. Marianne was having one of them herself at the time with a married man. “They had a deal,” a friend explained. “They would always stay together. The deal was that they just couldn’t fall in love with their lovers. They could fuck around, but they couldn’t fall in love.” Tim was breaking the deal. Marianne was sure he was about to run off with his lover and leave her and their two children—Susan, who was eight years old, and Jack, who was five. Marianne was right in her suspicions. Tim was getting seriously involved with his latest lover. He’d even rented a little apartment down on Telegraph Avenue where they’d meet up several times a week for their liaisons. Marianne was downing tranquilizers and drinking heavily. She was fed up with the state of their marriage, but at the same time desperately wanted to save it.

  Tim woke up on his birthday morning with a vague recollection of the previous night’s dispute. “I can’t go on like this!” his wife had screamed.

  “That’s your problem,” he replied, then retired for the evening. In the morning, Leary reached over and unfolded the note on the pillow.

  “My darling,” it read. “I cannot live without your love. I have loved life, but through you. The children will grow up wondering about their mother. I love them so much and please tell them that. Please be good to them. They are so dear.”

  Leary bolted out of bed. He could hear the car running. Shouting his wife’s name, he ran into the garage. Choking on exhaust fumes, he swung open the door. Marianne was lying across the front seat in her nightgown. The kids heard all the commotion and ran out in their pajamas. “Susan! Run down to the firehouse,” Leary said. “Tell them to bring oxygen!”

  Tim hopped into the ambulance for the ride down the hill to Herrick Memorial Hospital, but it was too late. Marianne Busch Leary, thirty-three, was pronounced dead at 9:28 A.M. The Alameda County Coroner’s Office listed the death as a “probable suicide.”

  In his autobiography, published three decades and four wives later, Leary would single out one mind-altering drug—alcohol—as the cause of a series of tragedies that would haunt at least three generations of the Leary family. “Booze ruined my father’s life, smashed his marriage, eroded the lives of four uncles. Marianne’s suicide and thus the endless sorrows of my children were due to booze.”

  Those sorrows continued after the 1983 publication of Tim’s memoir, Flashbacks. Seven years later, in 1990, Susan Leary would hang herself in a jail cell while awaiting trial for attempted murder. Jack Leary, who would have his own troubles with the law, would become estranged from his father in the 1970s. They would never really reconcile before Timothy Leary’s death at his Los Angeles home on May 31, 1996.

  Timothy Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 22, 1920. He liked to say that he was conceived the day after Prohibition was enacted in the United States. His life began, in utero, on the night of January 27, 1920. His father, a dentist and a captain in the U.S. Army at West Point, didn’t let the new law against alcohol get in the way of his drinking.

  World War I was still raging across Europe when Timothy Leary Sr. married Abigail Ferris on January 7, 1918, just months after he was commissioned into the Army Dental Corps. That post allowed Tote, as he was known, to avoid seeing action in the Gre
at War. It also provided an opportunity after the war for him to hobnob with such luminaries as General Douglas MacArthur, Captain Omar Bradley, and Lieutenant George Patton.

  During her pregnancy, Abigail Leary was sometimes overcome by the sour smell of bathtub gin that hung over the officers’ quarters like “rowdy smog.” But the years following the war were the high point of the otherwise unremarkable life of Captain Leary, who soon returned to Springfield and set up a small dental practice.

  Young Timothy’s earliest memories of life with father revolve around Dad coming home late at night—drunk and disorderly. One night, when Tim was twelve years old, he got up the courage to yell down the stairs, “Hey! We’re trying to sleep up here!”

  Tote responded with rage. “I’ll teach you a thing or two right now,” he yelled, climbing up toward his son.

  Tim looked into the threatening face, and when his father got to the top of the stairs, he pushed him back, causing him to tumble back down the stairway, head over heels. Tote crashed into a telephone stand, busted his glasses, but managed to right himself and head back up the stairs, screaming, “I’ll get you for that.”

  As he had many times before, Tim jumped out of an upstairs window, ran up a steep gabled roof, and climbed back down a drainpipe, hiding behind the chimney until his mother let him know that his father had passed out and it was safe to come back inside.

  His father’s alcoholism only worsened, causing Tote to lose his dental practice, disappear from Springfield, and abandon his family in the midst of the Great Depression. Life lurched on for the Leary clan, and—despite a reputation for skipping school more than any other student in his senior class—Timothy graduated from Spring-field’s Classical High School in June 1938.

  Leary, like Alpert, didn’t have the grades to get into an Ivy League school, so at his mother’s urging Tim went off for a Jesuit education at the College of the Holy Cross in nearby Worcester. Despite mediocre grades in his sophomore year, young Leary managed to fulfill another of his mother’s dreams and transfer to West Point in the fall of 1940. But Leary had a rebellious streak that seemed destined to get him kicked out of the elite officer-training academy. His troubles began when he got so drunk following the Army–Navy football game in December 1940 that he was unable to stand up the next day at morning reveille. Leary was asked to resign from the academy, but he refused and was subjected to Coventry, or “silencing”—a disciplinary practice in which his fellow cadets were forbidden to talk with him or socialize in any way. Leary was undergoing this banishment around the same time that Alpert (who was eleven years younger than Tim) had been labeled “queer” and was getting the silent treatment from his classmates at Williston Academy.

  Leary’s tough times at West Point had a lasting effect on his philosophy of life. “I have changed so much,” he wrote in a letter to his mother. “I am so scared of the world at times and then I feel that after all it makes no difference what becomes of me, that I shall always be happy because I will not take myself too seriously. This is one of my new philosophies and it is the thing that keeps me from minding the men around here who silence me.”

  Tim managed to hang on at West Point and leave the army with an honorable discharge in September 1941—just three months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. Leary’s odyssey for an undergraduate degree took him to the University of Alabama, where he avoided active ser vice by enrolling in the ROTC. That made him eligible for a special program that offered psychology majors three months of study at Georgetown University and six months at Ohio State. Following those studies, he managed to sit out the rest of the war as a psychometrician, a measurer of mental traits, at Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he began his ill-fated courtship with Marianne Busch.

  Marianne grew up in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. Her roots in the Pacific Northwest were what originally inspired the young married couple to head out to the West Coast, first to Washington State University, where Tim got his master’s degree in psychology, and then to the University of California at Berkeley, where Leary began his doctoral studies in the fall of 1947.

  Leary arrived as both his field of study and the San Francisco Bay area were in the throngs of a postwar boom. Hundreds of thousands of GIs had passed through San Francisco on their way to serve in the Pacific, liked what they saw, and settled down in the Bay Area after the war. At the same time, thousands of those soldiers had returned from combat with serious psychological injuries, and the Veterans Administration faced a severe shortage of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists with the skills needed to treat them.

  Meanwhile, more and more Americans had begun moving away from religious counseling and toward psychotherapy. Therapists were becoming the new high priests. In the spring of 1956, Time magazine put Sigmund Freud on its cover, signaling that the psychoanalytic movement had established mainstream credibility. By then, the practice of psychology was already undergoing changes that would transform the field in the 1960s and 1970s. As a graduate student, Leary was learning the trade as two leading agents of psychological change were coming onto the scene. Carl Rogers, one of the founders of the humanist psychology movement, was on the faculty at Ohio State. Rogers, along with such humanistic pioneers as Abraham Maslow, sought to move beyond behaviorism and traditional psychoanalysis and take a more humane, positive approach to psychology—helping individuals foster creativity and discover their “true selves.” In Berkeley, Leary studied with Erik Erikson, the noted child psychologist, who believed that psychologically healthy individuals go through eight stages of life in which they learn to cultivate such qualities as hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, caring, and wisdom.

  After getting his PhD from Berkeley in 1950, Leary helped start the Department of Psychology at Kaiser Hospital in nearby Oakland. The hospital began as a clinic for wartime shipyard workers employed by Henry Kaiser but would soon blossom into one of the nation’s most innovative health-care providers. It was here that Leary began his lifelong friendship with Frank Barron, a Berkeley classmate and Kaiser colleague. Leary and Barron shared many interests. They both liked to drink and play tennis, and both were more interested in the writing of James Joyce than of Sigmund Freud. And they were both, as Tim liked to say, “half-crazed Irishmen.”

  Leary’s career and life would veer so far off course in the 1960s and 1970s that it’s easy to forget that he was once considered a rising star in mainstream psychology. He and Barron collaborated on a much-discussed 1955 study of 150 patients awaiting psychiatric treatment at Kaiser Hospital. They found that a third of those patients improved following traditional psychotherapy, a third deteriorated, and a third pretty much stayed the same. Those were the same results for a control group of patients who did not receive any treatment. It was not good news for the psychological establishment. Over the next five years, Leary would publish three works that—in retrospect—prefigure the controversial ideas and research methods he would develop in the aftermath of his psychedelic baptism in the summer of 1960.

  He is best remembered in academic circles for his 1957 book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. The book presents a statistical analysis of data collected from hundreds of patients in group therapy sessions. It lays out five levels of interpersonal communication and proposes a new way to look at personality types. Leary’s work challenged the prevailing psychological theory of the time—behaviorism, which focused exclusively on observing, measuring, and modifying behavior. Leary argued that people have the power and freedom to change their unconscious reactions to external stimuli. To Leary, social interaction was a kind of game. People could be coached to become better players, and take power over their own lives. Tim devised a personality test that soon became known as “the Leary Circle,” a self-aggrandizing title that sparked resentment among research psychologists who thought Leary had unfairly capitalized on their work.

  Psychologist Herbert Kelman, who would later emerge as one of t
he fiercest critics of Leary and Alpert’s drug research, came to teach at Harvard in 1957, two years before Leary was brought into the psychology department. Kelman had been impressed with Leary’s early work, but he was not so enthralled by the man himself. At first, the two psychologists had a friendly relationship. Kelman and his wife helped Leary and his two kids find a place to live. But it didn’t take long for Kelman to start seeing Leary as more of a showman than a scholar. Kelman spotted a troubling megalomania in Leary, who had grandiose ideas about redefining the entire practice of clinical psychology. He came to lecture at one of Kelman’s classes and spent the whole time knocking traditional clinical psychology. Kelman found the lecture overly negative and destructive. He was not impressed with Leary’s iconoclastic approach. Leary loved using the word existential. Kelman knew a thing or two about existential philosophy, and he decided that Leary clearly did not.

  Leary may not have been an expert in existentialism, but he was having his own existential crisis. It started back in Berkeley, in 1955, with his wife’s suicide. Three years later, in 1958, Leary escaped to Europe with his two young children, sailing off to Spain aboard the SS Independence of the American Export Lines. He rented a villa on the Costa del Sol and sat down to write the great American novel. He didn’t get far into the book. Leary got sick, deadly ill, with a mysterious disease that swelled up his face and caused giant blisters to erupt on his cheeks. Leary survived that ordeal, and in the spring of 1959 he relocated to Florence, setting up shop in a penthouse overlooking the red-tiled domes of the picturesque Tuscan city. It had a great view, but there was a problem. Leary was broke. He’d exhausted a small research grant and liquidated several insurance policies. He’d quit his Kaiser job. His own research back in Oakland had made him believe that traditional psychotherapy was a waste of time. That’s when Frank Barron, his old drinking pal at Cal, showed up in Florence. Barron wouldn’t shut up about some strange experiences he had after eating “magic mushrooms” down in Mexico. Frank went on and on about his revelations, about all the mystical insights and transcendental perspectives produced by the strange fungi. Leary actually started to worry that his old friend was losing his mind, or at least in danger of losing his academic credibility.