The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Pedro was his last hope, and he was not an easy guy to find. Weil parked his Land Rover, traveled by boat to a small frontier settlement, and then found an Indian who took him by canoe to the trailhead that led to Pedro’s hut. Weil set out but soon came to a fork in the trail—a junction his guide did not mention. He decided to take the right-hand road. It was the wrong trail. Weil ended up in a dense thicket back at the river. It was a dead end. Weil had a hammock in his backpack and thought about spending the night, but the mosquitoes were eating him alive. Plus, he hadn’t brought much food with him. He did have a package of cocoa mix and some dried fruit. He fired up his little backpacking stove, heated up some river water, sat down with his cup of hot chocolate, and pondered his next move.

  Wading into the river, he noticed a sandbar upstream, a perch that might give him a better vantage point. It did. He came to a clearing where two rivers joined and spotted a hut in a small clearing by the river—a thatched hut elevated on stilts, with a crude stairway leading up to a small deck. Weil was ecstatic. He’d found it, and just in time. The sun was going down in a spectacular Technicolor sunset. He ran up to the hut, where he found a young Indian girl, but no Pedro. He’d left ten days ago, she said, and was supposed to be back by now. The girl agreed to let Weil string up his hammock on the deck and pass the night. One night led to two and two nights led to three. Still no Pedro. Weil passed the time lying around, swimming in the river, and reading a Jack London novel he’d brought with him.

  Andrew Weil, in the early 1970s, on his pilgrimage to South America (Photo courtesy of Andrew Weil.)

  Pedro appeared on the fourth day. He turned out to be a serious man in his early forties. He was friendly enough, but he had absolutely no interest in talking to Weil about indigenous healing techniques. He told Weil that he had stopped working as a healer and had become a political activist organizing against an oil company that had come into the region to exploit its rich reserves. Weil spent one more night, then headed back down the trail to his Land Rover and civilization. Weil would spend another year in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, but he was done playing the Carlos Castaneda game. Never again, he told himself. Never again would he embark on an arduous journey in search of a man with magical power.

  “Pedro taught me that I was looking for answers in the wrong way,” Weil would later say. “I did not have to turn away from my own land and culture, my formal education, and my own self to find the source of healing. But I did have to spend those years wandering in order to figure that out.”

  Trickster: Lausanne, Switzerland Summer 1971

  Timothy Leary had been in jail before, but this time was different. Three Swiss cops had shown up at his apartment in Villars-sur Ollon, a ski resort in the Bernese Alps, and taken him into custody on an Interpol warrant. Leary had been enjoying a life of exile in politically neutral Switzerland when the long arm of international law reached out and tossed him in the Prison du Bois-Mermet in Lausanne. The cell door slammed shut, and Tim sank into a deep depression. Suicide crossed his mind. He began to cheer up only when one of his Swiss protectors sent over a box of wine and cheese, some books, a typewriter, and several reams of blank paper. After all, Leary did have that book to write—a sensational story about his escape from another prison.

  Leary had been on the run since September 12, 1970, when he made headlines around the world by eluding his previous captors. The man who told a generation of Americans to “drop out” had been forced to drop off the face of the earth. His new life had begun, and it was a life in exile.

  Richard Alpert, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil left the country on pilgrimages to India, Japan, and Latin America, respectively. Though Leary did visit India in the mid-1960s, that trip was more of a vacation than a pilgrimage. Actually, it was a honeymoon with his third wife, Nena von Schlebrügge, who would soon divorce him. Leary’s real “pilgrimage” was the period of his life from 1970 to 1974, when he was either on the run, living in exile, or locked away in prison.

  It all began with his dramatic escape from the California Men’s Colony, a minimum-security prison outside San Luis Obispo where Leary had been sent after losing an appeal on a 1968 conviction for marijuana possession. He got out by climbing a utility poll, then lowering himself hand-over-hand down a support cable that crossed over the twelve-foot-high cyclone fence. Members of the Weather Underground rendezvoused with the fugitive and stashed him in a camper in nearby Morro Bay. Another team of radicals took Leary’s prison clothes and left them in a gas station men’s room south of the prison to make it look like he’d headed down to Los Angeles. But Leary headed north, to a safe house in the Bay Area, where he dyed his hair red and shaved some of it off so that he appeared to be a balding man. Timothy Leary was now “William John McNellis,” a salesman from Salt Lake City. After hiding out for a week in a farmhouse near Redding, California, Leary made his way down to Utah to meet leaders of the Weather Underground, including Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadette Dohrn. They created “William McNellis” with a forged birth certificate, Social Security card, and hunting license—papers that required no preexisting photo ID.

  Leary then flew off to Detroit, where the task at hand was to obtain a U.S. passport for a guy who did not really exist. Leary, posing as McNellis, walked into the federal building in Detroit with another Weather Underground fugitive calling herself “Aunt Bridget.” Standing at a counter beneath a framed portrait of President Nixon, they filled out the passport application, inventing a wife named Sylvia and two lovely children. McNellis was supposed to have a birth certificate and a driver’s license to get a passport. He had no photo ID. Leary and his supposed auntie were hoping they could radiate enough down-home charm to get around that requirement.

  Leary handed his papers and birth certificate to the woman at the passport counter, who asked him, “Do you have a driver’s license, Mr. McNellis?”

  “No, I don’t,” Leary answered, fumbling through his wallet. “I’m afraid I don’t drive. Will my Social Security card do?”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry. We’re supposed to have a photo ID.”

  “What about your hunting license, dear?” Aunt Bridget suggested.

  Leary pulled it out and offered that forged document.

  “Well, it has your description, so I guess we can accept this,” the clerk said with a smile. “It doesn’t have your eye color on here, but I can see your Irish eyes are smiling.”

  Three hours later, Leary had his passport in hand. And that was all he needed to fool the FBI team at O’Hare International Airport and escape on a flight from Chicago to Paris. His wife, Rosemary, escaped on the same plane, wearing a blond wig and traveling as Mary Margaret McGreedy. From there, the couple flew separately to Algeria, where a new socialist government was offering refuge to a rogue’s gallery of leftist fugitives. Leary and his fugitive wife wound up under the protection of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who had set up his own “embassy” in a white mansion overlooking the Mediterranean. At first, Leary seemed to revel in his new militant role. He issued a series of manifestos urging the youth of America to revolt. “We have always followed a philosophy of live and let live, love and let love, feel good,” Leary wrote. “But never did we suggest or imply that it was our duty or our trip to become masochistic pigeons or sit quietly like good Germans and let a genocidal robot police establishment wipe us out one by one. . . . Anyone who’s been through the whole LSD experience with us is an acid revolutionary now. Dynamite is just white light, the external manifestation of the inner white light of the Buddha.”

  Back in the States, the “peace and love” flock was shocked by Leary’s angry messages coming out of Algiers. “One thing we do not need,” Richard Alpert quipped, “is one more nut with a gun.”

  As it turned out, the bomb-throwing incarnation of Timothy Leary did not last long. He and Cleaver soon had a falling-out. The Panthers wanted the lion’s share of a $250,000 book advance Leary scored to tell the inside story of his prison escape. They also
wanted Leary to renounce the use of LSD. Tim declined, and was put under house arrest for “re-education.” Once again, Leary had to escape, but this time it was from the Black Panthers. Leary soon came to see Cleaver and his Panther lieutenants as “confused, fearful, uneducated young men who had spent most of their lives in prison or getting there.” They spent their time in Algiers “roaring around in their cars and trying to pick up women—a terrible idea in a moralistic Arab land. . . . They were a pathetic joke.”

  In April 1971, after his falling-out with the Panthers, Leary was given direct protection as a political refugee by the Algerian government, then fled North Africa for the relative comfort of Switzerland. As spring turned to summer in Switzerland, Tim and Rosemary settled into their new lives as political refugees in exile. At first, the Swiss government agreed that the long prison term Leary had been given for marijuana possession was a flagrant abuse of human rights. Leary had been thrown into an American prison because of his political stance, not because he was caught carrying a tiny quantity of pot for his own personal use. But back in the States, the American government was preparing a new case against Leary that focused on his ties to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which claimed to be a nonprofit “religious corporation” but looked a lot like a sophisticated drug-smuggling ring. The brotherhood had been created by a group of acid heads who had first crossed paths with Leary back at Millbrook and later opened up a bookstore and head shop in Laguna Beach, California, south of Los Angeles.

  Leary’s legal troubles began back in 1968, on the day after Christmas, when Tim, Rosemary, and Jack, Leary’s son from his first marriage, left the Brotherhood’s three-hundred-acre ranch in a rural section of southern California. They were headed to Laguna Beach in their blue Ford station wagon when police recognized Leary, stopped the car, conducted a search, and found two half-smoked joints.

  On May 23, 1969, Timothy Leary looks heavenward as he announces that he is running for governor of California against the incumbent, Ronald Reagan. His wife, Rosemary, sits at the right hand of the counterculture candidate. On his far left, Wes “Scoop” Nisker, then a reporter for KSAN radio in San Francisco, holds a microphone. Shortly after this photo was taken, Nisker dropped acid with Leary while driving him across the Bay Bridge. About a year later, Nisker would run into Richard Alpert at a meditation retreat in India. (Photo by Robert Altman.)

  At first, Leary’s arrest didn’t slow down his whirlwind appearances as the trickster of the stoner counterculture. Five months later, in May 1969, Leary announced that he was running for governor of California. At a press conference in Berkeley, as police and demonstrators battled over a piece of university-owned land that had been christened “People’s Park,” Leary outlined his vision for the Golden State, sitting in the poster-festooned offices of the Berkeley Barb, a leading underground newspaper. “Helicopters would not be spraying down war gas,” he said, “but love gas and flowers.”

  Wes “Scoop” Nisker, who would soon meet Richard Alpert at a Buddhist retreat in India, covered the Leary announcement for KSAN, the alternative FM radio station in San Francisco. After the Berkeley press conference, Nisker offered Leary a chance to directly address the people of the Bay Area from the KSAN studios. Scoop even offered to drive Leary from Berkeley to San Francisco. Leary accepted, and on the way to the city, Leary turned to Nisker.

  “Hey, man, I’ve got some acid here and I was going to drop,” Leary told his driver. “You want some?”

  Nisker wasn’t really in the mood for an LSD trip. After all, he was in a car and heading toward the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then Scoop started thinking to himself. Well, the guy is the “high priest of LSD.” What else can I do? When else am I going to get a chance like this? So, Nisker dropped the acid. By the time they got to the radio station Scoop was so stoned he couldn’t put two words together. But Leary sat down behind the microphone and just let out all this beautiful, flowing prose. He was his usual glib, funny self. Nisker was melting into the floor, mumbling to himself. But there was Leary, totally in charge of himself—so charismatic, so facile. What a performance!

  Just three days later, Tim and Rosemary Leary were in Montreal, seated at the foot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed for the iconic recording of the sixties anthem “Give Peace a Chance.” Tommy Smothers sat next to Leary, strumming the guitar. Lennon returned the favor by writing a song in honor of Leary’s run for governor. It was titled “Come Together” and was released in September 1969—the first song on Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles started recording before their breakup.

  Later that fall, Leary appeared as a defense witness in the conspiracy trial of the “Chicago Seven,” who stood accused of starting a riot outside the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nominating convention. In December 1969, the pied piper of psychedelia ended the year and the decade with an appearance at the infamous free concert the Rolling Stones held at Altamont Speedway east of San Francisco. Leary blamed the violence that marred the concert on the type of intoxicants consumed. “The drugs most on display at Altamont, particularly around the bandstand, were not psychedelic drugs but speed, smack, and booze,” he explained.

  Woodstock and Altamont would go down in the sixties iconography as the Jekyll and Hyde of the counterculture decade. As the sixties drew to a close, there was a harder edge to the drugs, and to the entire scene. There seemed to be more war than peace, more hate than love. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, and the Black Panthers were on the rise. The Human Be-In was a fading memory, and the Weather Underground were throwing bombs and making headlines. Richard Nixon was elected president, and then the Beatles broke up.

  For Timothy Leary, the close of the sixties was the beginning of a long downhill slide. In February 1970, an Orange County jury found Tim, Rosemary, and Jack Leary guilty of marijuana possession. Superior Court Judge Byron McMillan, who was appointed by Governor Ronald Reagan, the man Leary was running against for governor, sentenced Leary to ten years in prison for possession of two roaches. Leary still faced sentencing on a federal pot-smuggling charge stemming from his 1965 arrest in Laredo, Texas. U.S. District Judge Ben Connally, the brother of Texas Governor John Connally, who had been injured in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, sentenced Leary to another ten years in prison.

  So, as the new decade began, the forty-nine-year-old Leary faced the possibility of spending the next twenty years in prison. It looked like Timothy Leary would finally fade from the public eye, but the trickster would not be silenced. His September 1970 prison escape, and his subsequent reappearance at the Black Panthers’ “government-in-exile” in socialist Algeria, showed the world that he had a few more tricks up his sleeve. Suddenly, he was more infamous than ever—on the front page of newspapers around the world.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that Leary was back behind bars. It was the summer of 1971, and it looked like Leary might be spending the rest of the year at Bois-Mermet Prison in Lausanne. His situation was further complicated because he had signed away most of his book advance to his latest agent and protector, a mysterious French millionaire named Michel-Gustave Hauchard. According to Leary, Hauchard was an embezzler and arms merchant wanted by the French government and now living in Switzerland in luxurious asylum. Hauchard offered a lifestyle Leary could appreciate, especially after those brutal months in North Africa with the Black Panthers. In Switzerland, there were limousines, fine restaurants, endless champagne, fine Cuban cigars, and an assortment of lovely escorts. Hauchard set Tim and Rosemary up in Villars-sur-Ollon, explaining that it was his “obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers.” He told Leary not to worry about the Swiss police. “The police are no problem to me,” he said. “I have a dozen of them on my payroll.”

  Hauchard’s connections were apparently not good enough to keep the Swiss police from tossing Leary into the Prison du Bois-Mermet. Or maybe they were. One account of this chapter in the Leary saga contends that it was Hauchard who arranged for Leary to be ta
ken into custody—a trick designed to get him to focus on that book he had to write. Either way, the mysterious Frenchman was kind enough to treat Leary to a series of care packages. In addition to the typewriter, wine, cheese, and reams of stationery, Leary enjoyed French salami, Swiss chocolates, shredded lobster, and a carton of Gitanes cigarettes.

  While Hauchard tried to keep Leary as happy and productive as possible, Rosemary solicited the aid of Allen Ginsberg to circulate a petition calling on the Swiss government to free Leary from prison. The petition, delivered to the Swiss consulate in San Francisco on Bastille Day, July 14, 1971, called on the government to “grant our fellow author philosopher safe political asylum to complete his work.” Signers of the document included Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alan Watts, Anaïs Nin, and Laura Huxley, the widow of Aldous. Tim was released two weeks later.

  Leary was free, but his life was going nowhere. His marriage to Rosemary was on the rocks. A group of hardcore drug users from California had shown up in Switzerland. Leary went into a downward spiral and briefly added heroin to his pharmacological routine. His estranged wife thought he’d finally lost his mind.

  At the same time, the Swiss government rejected a request from the U.S. government that Leary be extradited back to the States. At least he didn’t have to worry about the immediate prospect of getting tossed back in jail. But the Swiss government also denied Leary’s request for permanent political asylum and said he had to be out of the country by October 31, 1972. Leary had a year of breathing room, but he still had a book to write. Now that he was free, there were way too many distractions, most of them involving sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.