The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Friends, academics, students, and other explorers of higher consciousness gathered at the Hotel Catalina, where you could check out anytime you liked, but you could never leave. For Peggy Hitchcock, it wasn’t just some beach party. Sure, it was loads of fun. There were times of joy and excitement. But there was a purpose to it all, a higher discipline. They were not just getting high. They were transforming themselves into another kind of being.

  For Leary, it was a glimpse of utopia, a glimmer of something that would not last. At first, they felt like they were living out Huxley’s vision in Island. But before long, the scene began to feel more like Brave New World. That peaceful, easy feeling soon gave way to creeping paranoia.

  It started out fine. There were the usual psychiatrists and students signing up for sessions, plus a Hasidic rabbi and a businessman trying to kick a booze habit. They took acid once a week, then spent the rest of the time discussing their experience, strumming guitars, playing chess, and listening to talks on the history of mysticism. But Leary and Alpert’s ouster from Harvard had gotten international media attention, and the trickle of guests soon turned into a flood. All that publicity inspired a wave of protohippies to wash up onto their shores. They arrived broke and unkempt, begging for food, shelter, and cosmic illumination.

  According to Leary, the real trouble began when a mysterious woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer failed to appear for a scheduled visit to Zihuatanejo. Meyer was a Washington, D.C., socialite, the former wife of a CIA agent named Cord Meyer, and an intimate friend to President Kennedy. One of the more sensational stories in Leary’s 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks, is his claim that he supplied Meyer with LSD and that she used Leary’s acid to turn Kennedy on in the White House.

  In the early summer of 1963, Leary writes, he was in Zihuatanejo when he received a cryptic note from Meyer. “I won’t be joining you,” she wrote. “Too much publicity. Your summer camp is in serious jeopardy.” Leary says Meyer warned him that the federal government was cracking down on his psychedelic crusade. “It’s the publicity. I told you they’d let you do anything you want as long as you kept it quiet,” she purportedly told Leary. “But they’re not going to let CBS film you drugging people on a lovely Mexican beach. You could destroy both capitalism and socialism in one month with that sort of thing.”

  Leary goes on to write that Meyer called him following the Kennedy assassination. “He was learning too much,” she said over the phone. “They’ll cover everything up. I’m scared. I’m afraid.”

  Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered in a Washington, D.C., park on October 12, 1964, eleven months after the Kennedy assassination.

  Regardless of whether one chooses to believe Leary’s tale, there was enough factual evidence to keep conspiracy theorists busy for decades. Leary did have an early encounter in Berkeley in the 1950s with Cord Meyer, who would go on to become a CIA division chief and marry Mary Pinchot. The CIA did conduct its own LSD research at Harvard a decade before Leary discovered psychedelic drugs. It appears that Mary Pinchot Meyer did have an LSD session with Leary, and that she did have an affair with John F. Kennedy. And, for whatever reason, the Mexican authorities did kick Leary and the crew out of the Hotel Catalina and out of the country in the summer of 1963.*

  Seeker: Millbrook, New York Fall 1963

  Not only had Alpert and Leary been kicked out of Harvard. Now they had been booted out of Mexico. Later that summer, their efforts to set up shop on Antigua and Dominica abruptly ended with their eviction from those Caribbean islands. They would soon laugh at how they’d been kicked out of one college and three countries in three months. Years later, Leary and Alpert would get their federal intelligence files under the Freedom of Information Act. It turns out that the CIA had tracked them all the way down to Dominica, where the agency reported that the professors planned to open “an alleged Happiness Hotel.”

  “We should have hired the CIA as our press agent,” Alpert quipped.

  Their summer exodus across Mexico and the Caribbean turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert would soon find their promised land on a twenty-five-hundred-acre estate in Dutchess County, New York. They had found Mill-brook, and they were about to turn it into the Disneyland of the psychedelic sixties.

  Millbrook’s crown jewel was a sixty-four-room Gothic mansion built around the turn of the century by William Dietrich, a manufacturer of carbide lamps. Located about eighty miles north of New York City, the white, four-story building is an architectural jumble of towers and turrets surrounded by a broad veranda. The interior is busy with hand-carved woodwork and faded tapestries. It has ten bathrooms. There are orchards, pine forests, a waterfall, horse stables, and various other buildings, including a three-story gatehouse and a chalet containing a bowling alley. Leary described the place as “Bavarian baroque.”

  It was provided as a refuge to Leary, Alpert, and their growing entourage by Peggy Hitchcock and her two brothers, William and Tommy—their patrons and trust-fund millionaires. Profits from Gulf Oil—one source of the family fortune—were now fueling the psychedelic crusade. At Peggy’s suggestion, Alpert turned William Hitchcock onto acid and into a key supporter of their cause. Who needs Harvard when Mellon’s millions are backing you up? William and Tommy would come up from Manhattan on the weekends to unwind in a four-bedroom cottage about a mile away from the main mansion, which was eerily empty when Peggy and Alpert first explored its labyrinth of rooms one night using candlesticks for illumination.

  Over the next three years, Millbrook would provide the backdrop for Leary and Alpert’s psychedelic drug research. During this period, legal access to LSD would get more and more difficult, inspiring Leary to sponsor a series of seminars in which other methods of consciousness expansion were employed, such as meditation, dance, breathing exercises, and sensory deprivation. Guests would pay sixty dollars to sit and meditate in the many empty rooms of the main house.

  Down in sunny Mexico, the utopian society Huxley envisioned in Island provided a guidebook for guests at the Happiness Hotel. Up in woodsy Millbrook, a more fitting model was found in Hermann Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game. This futuristic story unfolds in Castalia, a remote region set aside for the intellectual elite to achieve advanced personal development in philosophy, music, and the arts. Leary and Alpert established a new organization at Millbrook, the Castalia Foundation, to continue the consciousness-raising campaign they began with the International Federation for Internal Freedom. Appropriately enough, Castalia was also the name of a sacred spring near Delphi, whose waters were used to inspire the muses of ancient Greece.

  Hesse was a major influence on Leary, as was the Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. One of the exercises performed at Millbrook was based on the Gurdjieffian strategy of using shock tactics and puzzling games to awaken initiates out of their normal way of thinking and experiencing the world. One trick at Millbrook was to serve the paying guests green eggs and black milk for breakfast. Another was to require that everyone immediately stop what they were doing or thinking whenever Ralph Metzner would strike a bell that would echo throughout the main house.

  Paul Lee was visiting Millbrook one weekend with Huston Smith, who had packed Lee and his entire family into their van and headed up to check out the scene. At one point during the weekend, Lee was sitting in the house chatting away with Huston about how he was never really sure why he got into the study of religion. “Maybe it was all because my grandmother and grandfather got divorced, and broke my mother’s heart,” Lee said to Huston. “I started flirting around about going into the Lutheran ministry, probably for the sake of my mother. I’d been studying philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and for some reason decided to go to Luther Theological Seminary in—”

  Then, out of the blue, Metzner rang the bell. “GONG!”

  At first, Lee was pissed off at the rude interruption of his story.

  “Jesus, man! What are you doing?” he asked Metzner. “We were just havin
g a conversation!”

  Lee then remembered that this was all part of some psychospiritual exercise. As instructed, he stopped and began reflecting on his nonverbal experience of the moment. That in itself was something new to the verbose professor. Lee would later recall that weekend as an important turning point in his life. And it happened simply because Metzner rang a bell and Lee started exercising the nonverbal side of his brain.

  There was another experience that weekend that was not so profound. It was an unpleasant encounter that Lee had with Van Wolf, a New York entrepreneur and talent agent who had first introduced Leary to Peggy Hitchcock. On this weekend, Leary and Alpert had run out of LSD, which was a big disappointment to Wolf. It turned out, however, that Lee did have some LSD. Leary had previously given him a couple of hits, and Lee had brought it up to Millbrook. Wolf was sniffing around for some LSD, and Lee made the mistake of mentioning that he had some. Wolf really wanted it and got very agitated when Lee wouldn’t give it to him.

  William Hitchcock had just bought a new station wagon. Wolf got ahold of the keys and said, “Who wants to take a ride? Let’s take a ride!” So a small gang piled into the station wagon, including the brother of Nena von Schlebrügge. Nena was a tall, blond fashion model, the daughter of a Swedish baron. She would later become Leary’s third wife in a marriage that would last less than a year. Nena would then marry Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman and give birth to a daughter who would grow up to become actress Uma Thurman.

  Van Wolf tore down the road and into the backcountry of the vast Millbrook estate, stopping first at the cottage of jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, who lived at the Millbrook estate with his wife, Flo. He emerged from the cottage with some extremely potent pot, which everyone in the car proceeded to smoke while Wolf drove around the property, getting totally ripped.

  It was a Sunday night, and there was a religious program on the radio. A choir sang the hymn “Our Father” as Wolf kept driving faster and faster, swerving from one side of the road to the other. Lee wasn’t sure if Wolf was engaged in one of Metzner’s psycho-spiritual exercises or if he was just being a stoned jerk. He was swerving so much on the dirt road that he finally banged the car into a tree.

  “Does anyone want to go over any of that again?” Wolf asked.

  “No, Van, that’s enough.” Lee replied.

  Wolf responded by backing up, throwing the car into drive, and ramming into the tree again. Then he backed up farther to give himself even more room to accelerate into the same tree a third time.

  By now, the whole front of the car was bashed in.

  “That’s enough, Van!” Lee yelled.

  Wolf backed up and ran into the tree again.

  Lee felt like he was being held hostage by some terrorist. “Don’t hit the tree, Van!” Finally, they headed back to the house. One whole side of the car was smashed, and the tailpipe was dragging along on the ground. When they got back, Lee headed up to his room to get away from the madman behind the wheel.

  Wolf was determined. He burst into Lee’s room.

  “I want your stuff and I want it now!”

  “No way, man,” Lee said. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Wolf left the room, but Lee lay in bed all night worrying that the guy was going to come back, kill him, and steal his acid.

  Fulltime Millbrook residents normally faced no such shortages of LSD, especially the leaders of the pack. Leary and Alpert took a lot of drugs at Millbrook, but the idea—at least at first—was not just to get high. One of the effects Leary and Alpert were studying was LSD’s ability to “imprint” new ideas and new behavior on the user—not just during the trip itself, but on a long-term basis. This was also one of the reasons the CIA was studying the drug.

  Most learning is done through a long process of repetition, but what if LSD could be used to instantly “imprint” new behavior on an individual? This could be of great benefit to society, curing people of alcoholism or helping to reduce the recidivism rate among criminals. It could also be used as a sinister means of social control. One could imprint upon a hapless victim the idea that he should assassinate a foreign leader, a story line played out in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. Both the CIA and the Castalia Foundation soon discovered, however, that it was not so easy to control the psychological insights or the psychotic terror one experiences with psychedelic drugs. Users may be blasted into a higher state of consciousness that completely transcends their previous mental constructs and social conditioning. But it is very difficult to turn that insight into long-term behavioral change.

  In one of his more extreme psychedelic experiments, Alpert locked himself in the bowling alley at Millbrook with five other test pilots. They took a huge dose of LSD (four hundred micrograms) every four hours for two weeks. The idea was to see if they could finally break through their mental conditioning and become a different kind of human being. They soon discovered that they quickly built up a tolerance for LSD. They could get only so high on repeated megadoses. The other finding from the bowling-alley experiment was even more discouraging. After two weeks of constantly dosing themselves, the test subjects came to thoroughly hate each other. It was the beginning of the end of the dream. Alpert was starting to see that LSD would not save the world.

  Alpert’s experiment in the Millbrook bowling alley occurred in 1965, when both Leary and Ralph Metzner were off on pilgrimages to India. Leary’s journey was also a honeymoon with Nena, the Swedish model. As usual, Alpert was left behind to take care of Leary’s kids. He was also left in charge of Nena’s mother, brother, and the strange assortment of druggies, artists, psychologists, and other mystical explorers who came to Millbrook to find The Answer, or to at least get high.

  Leary’s return would mark the end of his five-year partnership with Richard Alpert.

  Metzner had already left on his own journey to the Far East. He and Leary returned to Millbrook in the summer of 1965 and were shocked at what they found. In their view, Alpert had converted Millbrook from a community of scholars and scientists to a playground for rowdy omni-sexuals. The place had been taken over by street-tough New Yorkers using LSD for mischievous fun.

  Metzner came home and was met at the front door by a strange man wearing clothes Ralph had left behind. He soon realized that Millbrook had split into two camps. There was the camp of Alpert and his friends. They were into mind fucking—using psychedelics to manipulate other peoples’ minds. At staff meetings they’d say things like, “I’m telepathic and can tell you’re lying.” In Ralph’s view, everything they had cultivated before—openness, sharing, companionship—had turned around into manipulation. One group just wanted to be high all the time. They didn’t want to sweep the floor and do the dishes. Then there was another group of commune residents who, as Metzner saw it, were trying to keep some kind of order.

  Adding fuel to the fire were Leary and Metzner’s concerns about Alpert’s sexual appetite. Metzner had come to see that Alpert had this tendency to idealize young men. “He’d fall in love with these guys,” Metzner would later recall, “and he’d say, ‘Oh. He’s my guru now. Tim’s not my guru anymore.’” Metzner wouldn’t use the word gurus to describe the guys Alpert had brought into the scene. Words like idiots and punks were closer to the mark.

  Alpert and Leary’s partnership did not survive Tim’s return to the chaotic scene at Millbrook. They had developed an almost telepathic relationship, but it was not to last. Leary was the first to acknowledge that Alpert had taken on a maternal, wifelike role with his kids. Tim had to concede that his own children were closer to Richard than they were to him. But it suddenly dawned on Leary that the children had been eyewitnesses to all the craziness on the New York estate.

  Jack Leary was fifteen years old when his father returned from India. Part of the problem was that Tim was never comfortable with Richard’s eclectic but mostly gay sexuality. He got this idea in his head that Alpert had been seducing his son. Jack insisted there was no seduction under way, but Tim wouldn
’t drop the matter. At one point, he accused his son of being gay.

  “No, dad, I’m not gay,” Jack replied. “And even if I was, there’s nothing wrong with being gay.”

  Alpert reached the breaking point when Leary sat down with him and his children in Susan’s bedroom in Millbrook and uttered the words “Uncle Dick is evil.”

  “Oh, come on, Dad,” Jack Leary replied. “Uncle Dick may be a jerk, but he’s not evil!”

  Alpert turned to Leary. “If you really think I’m evil,” he told his own mentor, “you must be psychotic.”

  Whether Alpert was evil or not, psychotic or sane, it was the bitter end of the Leary and Alpert show. Alpert had devoted five years of his life to Leary’s vision. He’d sacrificed his coveted Harvard career. He’d given Tim and the psychedelic cause all his money. And here was his reward—being told he was “evil” in front of two children he had loved and nurtured while Leary was running off chasing women and promoting himself. He’d had enough. He’d baked the bread. He’d taken care of the children. He’d held the hands of all the women Leary seduced and left behind. And now he was being told that he had to leave Millbrook because he was “evil.”

  Alpert had gotten kicked out of Harvard, Mexico, Antigua, and Dominica. Now he was getting booted out of Millbrook. But he’d learned some important lessons. LSD was not going to save the world. Their grand experiment in new forms of communal living and loving-kindness had dissolved into rants of recrimination and a paranoid atmosphere of mutual distrust.

  Now what?

  Alpert loved playing the loyal lieutenant. He excelled at being the number-two man. In a few years, he would head off to India and find a new guru, but in the meantime, he was out on his own. There would be one more chapter in his life, and in the lives of the rest of the Harvard Psychedelic Club, before Richard Alpert made his storied journey to India and returned as Ram Dass. It was 1965. The whole world seemed to be heading out to San Francisco, with or without flowers in their hair. Richard Alpert decided to just go with the flow.