The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  They were both living there when Weil’s story broke in the Crimson, but Leary was already away setting up the next stage of the crusade. Alpert was fired for giving drugs to an undergraduate. Leary was officially relieved of teaching duties for “leaving Cambridge and his classes without permission.” Where was he? Leary had already removed himself to the Hotel Catalina, a funky seaside resort in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. There, his psychedelic storm troopers would continue their explorations under the mantle of a new organization called the International Federation for Internal Freedom.

  Meanwhile, back in Boston, Alpert was left holding down the fort on Kenwood Avenue. Leary left his two young children, Jack and Susan, in Alpert’s care—establishing a pattern that would continue for the next several years. Leary’s kids would have a front-row seat for the psychedelic revolution that Alpert and Leary were about to lead. Filling out the Kenwood Avenue commune were an assortment of Harvard students and other hangers-on, including Barbara and Foster Dunlap, a young couple with a sixteen-month-old child.

  It had been nearly three years since Leary first tasted magic mushrooms at his summer villa south of the border, so Mexico seemed like a good place to go and seek shelter from the storm. Leary and Alpert had been kicked out of Harvard. Now their Newton commune’s neighbors were on the warpath. This was a single-family neighborhood, not the kind of place that welcomed a tribe of troublemakers who played loud music and were coming and going at all hours of the night. Alpert had purchased the house himself and moved in during the fall of 1962. It didn’t take long for the good people of Newton to see that something strange was going on inside the house. They filed a complaint with the city that the occupants of 23 Kenwood Avenue were living in flagrant violation of the town’s zoning ordinance. Richard solicited the representation of his father, George Alpert, the well-known Boston lawyer, businessman, and Jewish philanthropist, to represent the commune members. Yes, Alpert argued, there were a total of twelve people living in the home—eight adults and four children—but they considered themselves “a single family.” George Alpert appeared before the Newton board of zoning appeals on February 26, 1963, just three months before his son got kicked out of Harvard. Alpert stood before the board in his three-piece suit, thumbs in the watch pockets, looking like Clarence Darrow. He was a well-known lawyer, not to mention president of the New Haven Railroad. “This is the Family of Man,” he proclaimed, “but a family nonetheless.” In this family, the renowned lawyer explained, the five men did the shopping and washed the dishes, while the three women did the cooking and housework. Money was contributed to a common fund, Alpert said, according to the means of the individual. This seemed like a very radical idea at the time—at least to the Boston Herald, which proclaimed: “BIG ‘FAMILY’ STIRS PROTEST: Men Do the Dishes in Newton ‘Commune.’”

  Richard Alpert and the Family of Man won that battle. They appealed the Newton eviction order and won in court. But the powers that be at Harvard and the city fathers of Newton were right in one way. Alpert and Leary and their growing family were living too large for Harvard to contain them. This Family of Man was too universal to fit into a single-family home on the leafy streets of Newton.

  Residents of the Kenwood commune shared more than the housework. One account of life in the house reports that “Alpert was in love” with Foster Dunlap, who, like Winston, was an undergraduate at Harvard. According to Alpert, it was not that simple. Yes, he said, there was a strong and loving bond between the people living in the Kenwood Avenue house. Taking psychedelic drugs together on a regular basis will do that. Casual acquaintances become soul mates. The connection may have a sexual component, or it may not. It almost doesn’t matter. Years later, Alpert tried to describe the relationship.

  “Barbara and Foster were lovers. You see, in cases like this I was not an actively sexual partner. But there was an intimacy that came with the experience. It was the same kind of thing with Ronnie. We were psychedelic lovers.”

  It was the kind of connection that Grace Slick, the female vocalist with the Jefferson Airplane, would sing the praises of a few years later in the David Crosby free-love anthem, “Triad.” Sister lovers. Water brothers. And in time, maybe others . . . I don’t really see; why can’t we go on as three.

  The unorthodox scene inside the Kenwood Avenue home, and in the larger cult that was starting to form around Leary and Alpert, was an early warning sign of a counterculture movement that would soon sweep across the nation. It would be a social upheaval fueled in no small part by two powerful pharmaceuticals: LSD; and that other pill, the birth-control pill. Many forces would forge the changes that were about to rock America in the 1960s, yet few would be as important as drugs and demographics. The baby boomers, whose story would keep sociologists and other trend spotters busy well into the new millennium, were just starting to come of age. Sexual roles, living arrangements, and family structures were about to undergo rapid, revolutionary changes. But the changes wrought by psychedelics are not just matters of the mind. They can transform the way we live and love.

  Ralph Metzner was living in the Kenwood Avenue commune with a woman who would become his wife. But in some deeper way, he felt married to the larger group. Tripping together opened up a kind of communication that blended into a spiritual communion. Everyone in the house felt a deep connection. Sometimes that would be expressed sexually. Other times it wouldn’t, but they were all in love. Metzner, his future wife, and a few other members of the household went out to Cape Cod one weekend to trip together. They camped out on the beach, built a bonfire, and took psilocybin. They felt so bonded after the session that no one wanted to leave. “Why don’t we all get married?” Metzner said the next morning. “Let’s start with the two of you and the two of us and go from there.”

  Another member of the Kenwood Avenue family, Peggy Hitchcock, would have a major role in the next chapter of the psychedelic saga. Hitchcock, along with her brothers, William and Tom, were heirs to the banking and oil fortune amassed by Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh industrialist, and Mellon’s nephew, William Larimer Mellon, the founder of Gulf Oil. Peggy and her brothers would become Alpert and Leary’s primary patrons after the two renegade professors were kicked out of Harvard. Peggy met Tim in early 1962 at a New York salon frequented by actors, artists, and jazz musicians. They became close that summer, when Hitchcock first flew down to Mexico with Leary and Alpert to establish their south-of-the-border retreat in Zihuatanejo.

  Peggy was instantly attracted to Leary. He was absolutely charming, so bright and funny and charismatic. So charismatic. Hitchcock was swept off her feet by Leary’s charm, and by his psychedelic vision. The young heiress was an instant convert. Peggy longed to share this feeling, this profound experience they were having, with all of mankind. They could change the world.

  Peggy Hitchcock would follow the psychedelic family from Kenwood Avenue to Mexico and finally to a vast estate in upstate New York that her brother William bought and turned over to Leary. Tim and Peggy would be on-and-off lovers over the next few years. To her, the people who gathered around Leary and Alpert did seem like a family, but Hitchcock kept looking back at the other family—what was left of Leary’s original family following his wife’s suicide back in Berkeley in 1955. That family tragedy had yet to play itself out, but Peggy saw what was there, and it was not good. She was in love with Tim, and was thinking about marrying him, but she just couldn’t accept the way he related to his children. It was a red flag. He was dismissive of the kids. He spent very little time with them. He didn’t have time for that. He was on his own voyage of self-discovery.

  Taking care of the kids was Alpert’s job. Hitchcock saw how Richard cared for the kids, how much he loved them. He was much more of a nurturing type than Leary. Peggy had romantic feelings for Richard, too, but Alpert’s preference for male love kept that relationship in check.

  Kenwood Avenue became the new command center for the psychedelic revolution after Leary and company got kicked out of the house
over on Homer Street. The professor who’d rented it to Tim returned from his sabbatical and found the place trashed. There were those burn marks on the floor around the fireplaces in the living room, dining room, and study. There were busted wall lamps and big scuff marks on the white ceiling of the third floor from the days when Leary’s son, Jack, would come home with his friends from their football matches and continue the game indoors. Jack liked to play catch on the third floor with Lafcadio Orlovsky, who lived in the house for a time with his brother, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg’s lover. William Burroughs, the writer and heroin addict, was holed up in one of the rooms for a while.

  Leary and Alpert didn’t have a landlord or returning professor to worry about at the Kenwood Avenue house. Major renovations were possible there, so Leary decided to construct a special chamber for his ongoing experiments with psilocybin, LSD, and DMT (dimethyltryptamine), the latest drug to be added to the communal medicine cabinet. DMT is a powerful, short-lasting hallucinogen that was administered intravenously. Psychedelic sessions were held in the new trip chamber Leary built on Kenwood Avenue. The residents sealed off and wallpapered over the only door leading into one room. Leary then climbed in through the window with a chainsaw and cut a small hole in the floor. The window was covered over and wallpapered, so the only way to get into the chamber was to climb up on a ladder from the cellar. There were nothing but mattresses and cushions on the floor. A dim light illuminated a bronze Buddha statue donated by Peggy Hitchcock. Completing this prototype of the hippie crash pad were lots of Indian bedspreads and a seemingly unlimited supply of incense. The idea was to create a transcendental community whose members would fully experience life and go beyond routine ego trips and social games. Two of the leading graduate students involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, George Litwin and Gunther Weil, moved into a sister community with other devotees on nearby Grey Cliffe Road.

  There seemed to be a magical connection between the sister homes and the rest of the early psychedelic family living in the neighborhoods around Harvard. One night, Huston Smith was tripping in the special chamber Leary had built over at the Kenwood Avenue house when a burning candle ignited one of the Indian bedspreads. Suddenly, Huston found himself stoned on acid and sitting before a wall of flame. He was able to put the fire out and make it out the escape hatch and down the ladder, but it was a close call.

  That same night, Huston’s wife went to bed in the couple’s home in Belmont, Massachusetts, miles away from the Kenwood Avenue commune. At one o’clock in the morning, Kendra Smith woke up with a start. She smelled smoke—a strong smell of smoke. She got up and ran down to the basement to check the furnace. Everything was fine. The smell was so strong that she almost called the fire department, but she felt too embarrassed to report a fire when she couldn’t even find the smoke. So she went back to bed.

  Huston told her about the Kenwood Avenue fire only the next morning, when he returned home from his trip. To Kendra, the events that night seemed like a psychic experience—a feeling that often accompanies the ingestion of a psychedelic drug.

  Leary and Alpert’s transcendental community in the Boston suburbs was a harbinger of the hippie communes that would pop up across the country in the late 1960s. But it also harked back to an earlier social experiment conducted not far from Newton, in the Roxbury section of Boston.

  One hundred and twenty years before Leary and Alpert established their three homes in Newton, a transcendentalist and former Unitarian minister named George Ripley founded Brook Farm, a utopian community organized in the 1840s—the same decade in which Henry David Thoreau set up camp at Walden Pond. Leary would soon come to see his life as a continuation of the work of Thoreau, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, the American writer and protofeminist who participated in the Brook Farm experiment.

  Leary and Alpert liked to compare their ouster from Harvard with the earlier banishment of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wore out his welcome with a famous 1838 address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. In that speech, Emerson condemned the odious errors of historical Chris tian ity, calling its depiction of the Son of God a “noxious exaggeration.” True religion, Emerson proclaimed, would allow “every man to expand to the full circle of the universe.” Twenty years after he was kicked out of Harvard, Leary would cite the transcendentalists as the inspiration behind his call that every man “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

  “They, too, were saying turn on, tune in, go within. Become self-reliant. Before Emerson came back to Harvard in 1838, he was in Europe hanging out with notorious druggies like Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Leary said at a 1983 Harvard reunion. “They were expanding their minds with hashish and opium and reading the Bhagavad Gita. Then he came back here and gave that famous speech where he said, ‘Don’t look for God in the temples. Look within.’ Find God within yourself. Drop out. Become self-reliant. Do your own thing.”

  Leary was notorious for his overstatements, grandiose thinking, and inflated sense of his own place in the universe. After all, this was a guy who had enough chutzpah to stand in front of a New York City theater marquee that proclaimed, “Dr. Timothy Leary—Reincarnation of Jesus Christ.” But at the same time, the iconoclastic Leary truly was following in the footsteps of Ralph Waldo Emerson. So it’s not surprising that Harvard University—founded by Puritans and nurtured as an exclave for the Protestant elite—was not quite ready for Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. Neither were their neighbors on Homer Street, Kenwood Avenue, or Grey Cliffe Road. This early chapter in the psychedelic sixties was coming to an end, and the band of gypsies would have to find somewhere else to go.

  Chapter Five

  Trouble in Paradise

  Trickster: Zihuatanejo, Mexico Summer 1963

  Leary and Alpert had been kicked out of Harvard, but that wouldn’t end the research, nor would it stop the party. It was summertime, and time for the second season of Tim and Richard’s psychedelic summer camp. Their tropical encampment had been inaugurated in the summer of 1962, when they packed Peggy Hitchcock into Alpert’s Cessna and flew down to this sleepy beach town north of Acapulco, checking into the Hotel Catalina. This year, hardly pausing after their expulsion from Harvard, Leary and Alpert started spreading the news about a second summer session down on the Mexican Riviera. But this year was different. There would be no Harvard classes for these two professors to go back to in the fall. No more professional prestige. Those days were gone. It was time to start anew, and what better place to do it than in the land of the magic mushroom.

  For Ralph Metzner, the German grad student who was quickly becoming a full partner in Leary and Alpert’s crusade, Mexico was a refreshing change from all the psychodrama back at Harvard. They tripped amid the exuberant lushness of the Mexican jungle, within earshot of the ceaseless rhythm of the surf. They reveled in extravagantly beautiful sunsets, silent lightning storms over the Pacific, and the sweet aroma of exotic flowers. It was a mythic setting, especially when experienced through psychedelic lenses. Women were transformed into sea nymphs or mermaids, while the men became Aztec warriors and jungle shamans.

  It was a little piece of paradise, and that was exactly the idea. Leary no longer saw Mexico as an exotic place to escape for his summer vacation. Life among the three dozen pilgrims gathered at the Hotel Catalina was to be patterned after the utopian vision described in Huxley’s final novel, Island, which had just been published the previous year. It’s the story of a cynical reporter who gets shipwrecked on a mysterious Pacific island where the residents live in cosmic harmony with each other and the cosmos. The book was the counterpoint to Brave New World, Huxley’s futuristic best seller in which the populace was controlled by an authoritarian regime using a mind-numbing drug called Soma. On Huxley’s mythic island, the natives take moksha-medicine to tune into the wonders of the world with “pure receptivity.”

  LSD replaced psilocybin as the focus of Alpert and Leary’s research in Zihuatanejo. In one session on a hotel balcony, Metzner took a moderate
dose. With Leary as his guide, Ralph waited anxiously for the LSD to take effect. Tim was starting to see that people on acid could get beyond the limits of the obsessive mind by focusing on sensory awareness. In one of Metzner’s sessions, Leary simply lit a candle. What wonder! He’d open a cool bottle of beer and hand it to Ralph—not to drink, but simply to touch. So cool! So calming! Metzner looked into Leary’s eyes and saw the face of some godlike being. How amazing! Such radiant light! Then he’d suddenly see that half of Leary’s face was terrifyingly ugly. Not just ugly. My God, he’s demonic! Is this Satan? Is this heaven, or hell?

  Leary saw the fear in Metzner’s face and calmly reassured his eager protégé. The teacher was sounding less like a professor, more like a guru: “Remember, both the fear and the light come from within you. Pretty soon you’ll be able to see divinity in the whole face, or in this candle, or this cigarette, or the whole day.”

  Ralph Metzner calmed down. His identity and his awareness seemed to be spread throughout the room and even beyond, into the forest outside the hotel. When somebody came into his room, it was as if they were walking into his soul. They were accepted like thoughts entering his head. They would walk around in his head, and he’d examine their relationship with extreme equanimity. All these people were just parts of himself. Seeing that was so powerful, so liberating, so psychologically healing.