by Don Lattin
Since their breakup back in the mid-1960s, Ram Dass had been watching the Timothy Leary show, mostly from afar. Leary was kicked out of Switzerland in January 1973 and, after a brief stop in Beirut, landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was kidnapped by agents of the U.S. government and brought back to California. In April, he was sentenced to thirty-five years in Folsom State Prison for three prior drug convictions and his 1970 escape from the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo. His last year in exile had been consumed by an orgy of constant drug use—marijuana, Quaaludes, cocaine, heroin, and a mind-warping marathon of LSD intoxication. It’s not surprising that large sections of his much-anticipated account of those years, the Bantam paperback titled Confessions of a Hope Fiend, were a jumble of incomprehensible fantasies.
Leary’s latest consort, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, tried to keep the convict in the public eye and his appeal hopes alive with a series of benefits and press conferences. “His mind is already freed,” she said. “All we need now is his body.”
Leary’s actions and bizarre writings made it seem like the man had lost his mind. Such a conclusion seemed to be warranted considering the mountain of mind-altering drugs he’d taken. But Leary’s brain was still in fine shape. At his March 1973 trial, a criminal psychologist testified that Leary had just scored “genius level” on a standardized intelligence test. He was also given the standardized creativity test and got the highest score the psychologist had ever witnessed.
Leary would soon show the world that he was smart enough to talk his way out of prison, and he would do so by ratting on his friends, including several lawyers who were alleged intermediaries in the Weather Underground caper to smuggle Leary out of the country and into Algeria. Working in collusion with Joanna Harcourt-Smith and the FBI, Leary turned over boxes of documents from his archives while Harcourt-Smith wore a wire in an effort to entrap several associates who helped Leary and his previous wife, Rosemary, elude the FBI and make their way to Algeria.
As part of his deal with the government, Leary even tried—unsuccessfully—to get Rosemary to come out of hiding and join him as a federal informant. In a handwritten letter penned at the FBI offices in southern California on June 1, 1974, Leary portrayed himself as a loyal, law-abiding citizen of the United States of America. “It was a mistake in judgment for us to get involved with dope dealers and illegal revolutionaries,” he wrote. “Please do not fear the American law or American law enforcement officials. . . . The old polarities and conflicts of the sixties are over.”
Word soon got out that the high priest of LSD had become a government snitch. A group of Leary associates—including Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, and Ram Dass—convened a press conference in San Francisco to denounce their old friend. Leary’s twenty-four-year-old son, Jack, joined the proceedings and condemned his father. “Timothy Leary lies at will when he thinks it will benefit him,” his son said. “He finds lies easier to control than the truth. And he creates fantastic absurd stories which he gets caught up in, and then cannot distinguish them from the truth.”
One longtime Leary associate, Gene Schoenfeld, could not believe that his old friend had become a government snitch. Schoenfeld, better known at the time as Dr. Hip, had a medical-advice program on alternative radio stations and an underground-newspaper column. Schoenfeld had also been the Leary family doctor when Tim, Rosemary, Jack, and Susan were all living in Berkeley in the late 1960s. He didn’t believe the story that Leary had turned against his old friends. He also didn’t think it was right that the organizers of the press conference had brought Jack Leary into the proceedings to denounce his famous father.
Dr. Hip decided the press conference was a kangaroo court. To make his point, in true sixties style, he obtained a kangaroo suit from a friend who ran a costume shop. Schoenfeld climbed into the suit, grabbed a coconut cream pie, and hopped into the press conference at the St. Francis Hotel. His plan was to throw the pie in Jerry Rubin’s face. “I had these boxing gloves on so I wasn’t able to get the Saran Wrap off the pie. Then someone started pulling me off the stage, and in the process, pulled my head off. There was a gasp in the audience when people saw it was me.”
Schoenfeld was later shown a grand jury transcript that convinced him that both Tim and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who became Leary’s partner following the breakup of his fourth marriage, had, in fact, been government informants.
Dr. Hip knew that the prison time was getting to Leary. He’d visited him a few times and saw that his confinement, coming on top of nearly two decades of weekly LSD trips, was finally taking a toll on the mind of Timothy Leary. Tim was convinced he’d be locked up for the rest of his life, and he would do anything to get out. “One time when I visited him in prison he accused me of having an affair with Joanna. Then he said something about how he could summon up evil forces from the earth and direct them at me. I thought, ‘This is not a good sign.’”
That wasn’t the first time Schoenfeld wondered about Leary’s sanity: “When he was running for governor of California, he actually started believing that he might win. Tim was very charismatic, but he was a bit of a megalomaniac. I remember back in the sixties there were all these psychedelic posters that portrayed Tim as some kind of God. Tim liked that kind of adulation. At a certain point, he became the victim of his own image.”
It would take two years, but in April 1976 Leary finally walked out of jail and into the Federal Witness Protection Program. Within a few months, he was scheduling a new round of media interviews, starting with a spread in People magazine. Over the next two decades, there would be various crusades—starting with space migration—and assorted attempts to make a comeback. Most of his friends eventually forgave him for his indiscretions with the FBI. In 1983, Leary and Ram Dass shared a stage at Harvard to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their expulsion from the ivy-covered halls. Seven years later, they were at the podium at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, where they and six hundred other proponents of enlightenment through modern chemistry came together for a discussion titled “Psychedelics in the 1990s: Regulation or Prohibition.” Ram Dass thought back to the early sixties and had to laugh at their naiveté. “Tim and I actually had a chart on the wall about how soon everyone would be enlightened,” he said. “We found out that real change is harder. We downplayed the fact that the psychedelic experience isn’t for everyone.”
Seven years later, Leary was lying on his deathbed, surrounded by a new generation of devotees. One of them, Robert Forte, was just a young kid in the 1960s. Forte hadn’t really thought much about the life and times of Timothy Leary until the late 1970s, when he was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His introduction to Leary came through Frank Barron, the man who first opened Leary’s eyes to the wonders of magic mushrooms. Barron, who’d studied with Leary at Berkeley in the 1950s, had moved to Santa Cruz in 1969, where he taught a popular course at the University of California campus there on the psychology of creativity.
Forte became interested in the expanding field of consciousness research. He met Leary in the 1980s, but he didn’t really get to know the man until the 1990s. His fascination with the sixties icon deepened in 1993, when Forte attended an LSD conference in Switzerland. The assembly had been convened by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Company and the Swiss Academy of Medicine to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the drug’s discovery by Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann. It was mainly a gathering of psychiatric researchers, and most of them mentioned Leary’s name with a dismissive and scornful tone. They blamed Leary’s messianic crusade for the subsequent crackdown on serious research into the properties and potentialities of LSD.
People love to blame Timothy Leary for all the casualties of the sixties drug culture—for all those people who suffered serious mental problems after taking LSD or who later became addicted to other drugs. Gather together a large group of people from that era and you’re likely to find someone who will blame Timothy Leary for the suicide of a friend or loved one. Some of this critic
ism is unfair. Leary and Alpert, at least in their early years at Harvard and Millbrook, always stressed that LSD should be taken in a safe setting by someone ready to deal with whatever psychological and emotional issues were likely to arise. They were the cautious advocates of psychedelic drug exploration—especially when compared with the scene out on the West Coast, where Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were indiscriminately dosing the crowds at rock concerts and “Acid Tests.” At the same time, it was Leary’s own proselytizing that made him the lightning rod for critics of sixties excess. Leary loved to take the credit—but not the blame—for the drug revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. “Seven million people I turned on,” he said near the end of his life, “and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.”
Forte lived at the house on Sunbrook Drive during the last few weeks of Leary’s life. He accompanied Leary’s son, Jack, on a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. They had been estranged since the 1970s. Leary’s other child, his daughter, Susan, suffered from severe psychological problems during much of her life, and committed suicide in 1990. Jack Leary hadn’t seen his father since they crossed paths at a private memorial ser vice that had been held for his sister. On the flight down to L.A., Forte was amazed at how much Jack looked like early photos of Leary when he was teaching at Harvard. Forte was trying to prepare Jack for the deathbed meeting with his estranged father.
“What was remarkable to me was his lack of affect, how he was so cool—just an ordinary guy getting on a plane,” Forte recalled. “I said, ‘Wow, when I don’t see my dad for a year or so I’m all nervous and here you haven’t seen your father for fifteen years. You seem remarkably calm.’”
“He wasn’t really a father to me,” Jack replied.
Paul Lee, the Harvard Divinity School graduate who worked with Leary in the early years, paid for Jack Leary’s plane ticket and was there when father met son. “We were hoping that they would reconcile, or that Jack would at least show up,” Lee said. “I’m not sure it really worked. It was pretty frigid. Tim was pleased to see him, but Jack was real stiff.”
In the end, Timothy Leary kicked the cryonics crowd out of his house. His body was cremated, but he would have one last posthumous blast. Almost a year after he died, a small glass vial containing some of his ashes was blasted into outer space aboard a Pegasus rocket launched from the Canary Islands. Twenty-five people had prepaid a private company to send their remains into orbit. Joining Leary on the flight was a little bit of Gene Roddenberry, the man who created Star Trek.
Forte spent the last few weeks of Leary’s life trying to figure out what this man was all about. “Was Tim a wise man or was he a psychopathic egotistical maniac, or both?” Forte asked himself. “I’d hang out with him until three in the morning. Sometimes he would appear like a nonordinary being. There was a tangible aura. He would glow. Sometimes he was just so clear and present and positive, but other times he would just morph into this twisted, angry, fucked-up old man.”
Leary was different things to different people. He was reviled. He was revered. He was a prophet. He was a phony. He was a brilliant, innovative thinker. He was a fool. He captured the irreverent, rebellious spirit of the sixties. He was a fame-seeking, manipulative con artist. Who was he? Perhaps The Trickster said it best when he quipped, “You get the Timothy Leary you deserve.”
Teacher: San Diego November 2007
Friends and fans of Huston Smith were gathered at a San Diego restaurant to honor the man and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his landmark book, originally titled The Religions of Man. The event was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, which draws tens of thousands of scholars, graduate students, writers, editors, publishers, and others who make a living studying and otherwise explaining the various ways people approach God and try to understand the meaning of it all. Huston had not been feeling well in recent months. There were problems with his hip and problems with his hearing and all those other maladies that beset a man approaching his ninetieth birthday. Huston came late to the party, hobbling in with the assistance of a friend and a walker. He was barely noticed by most of the crowd, who were busy enjoying the open bar and luscious hors d’oeuvres.
His publisher made the introduction, mentioning that more than two million copies of the book have been sold over the last five decades. The book continues to sell about four thousand copies a month. The publisher told a story about running into an older woman and her grown daughter standing in line at one of Huston’s book signings. She had come to thank Huston. She’d read his book, now titled The World’s Religions, decades ago. It had transformed the way she looked at matters of faith. The woman’s daughter had recently come home from college and couldn’t stop talking about this book she’d been assigned in one of her classes, a book titled The World’s Religions.
Professor Smith was handed the microphone. His voice was shaky, but his spirit shone through. He didn’t say much, but what he said left tears in more than a few eyes.
Huston began by pulling an old letter from his pocket. A respected religion scholar had written it to him nearly fifty years ago. The woman who wrote the letter was long dead, but her words came down like a voice from heaven.
“Dear Huston,” the letter read, “I have spent the afternoon reading your book. I read it all the way through and then I sat down and read it all the way through again. . . . I want you to know that when you are an old man you will look back on the young man who wrote this book with a great deal of love and affection.”
Huston is not alone. If the measure of a man’s life is the number of people who remember him with love and affection, Huston Smith measures up. All four members of the Harvard Psychedelic Club dedicated their lives to the study of the human consciousness, including chemically induced altered states of consciousness. What separates Huston and Ram Dass is their understanding that the real test of a person’s spirit is the way they live their lives. It’s what happens after the ecstasy.
Smith has lived a full life, personally and professionally. In 2009, he celebrated both his ninetieth birthday and his sixty-sixth wedding anniversary with Kendra. Huston knew she was the one from the beginning. He had dated other young women, but there was something different about the daughter of theologian H. N. Wieman. Their date ended with a political debate. Kendra was totally behind Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate for president in 1940. Huston wasn’t so sure. “There was none of the usual gazing deep into my eyes and nodding agreement with everything I said,” he recalled decades later. “Her physical charms are noteworthy, but what I find distinctive is her mind. She has ideas, stands up for them, and is articulate and persuasive.” Their marriage produced three daughters, Karen, Gael, and Kimberly, but Kendra was more than just a wife and mother. She was a lifelong partner in Huston’s work. She was there in Timothy Leary’s house on New Year’s Day, 1961, taking a stronger dose of psychedelics than Huston dared to swallow.
In 1957, just two years after the publication of The Religions of Man, Kendra accompanied Huston on a months-long round-the-world pilgrimage. The trip was paid for by William H. Danforth, who’d made a fortune selling animal feed with the Ralston Purina Company. The businessman had seen Huston lecturing on the world’s religions in a series of programs Smith hosted in the early days of public television. “I understand that some of the religions you are teaching in your television course are in countries you have not been to,” Danforth wrote. “If the university would grant you a semester’s leave and you added your summer vacation to it, a check to fund a round-the-world trip for you and your wife will be in the return mail.” The trip took Huston and Kendra from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris to the Lascaux cave paintings in the south of France; from Vatican City, where Huston had his wallet lifted at a high pontifical mass, to Athens and Jerusalem; from Istanbul, where they were entranced by the Muslim call to prayer, to Tehran, where they watched the whirling dervishes; and on to Burma, Ind
ia, and Japan. It was the first of many international sojourns Huston would take over his long life, including a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, an encounter with aborigines in Australia, and a memorable trek through the African bush. Closer to home, when he was a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1940s, Huston hopped over to San Francisco to witness the founding of the United Nations. In 1989, he just happened to find himself in Beijing when the Chinese student uprising broke out in Tiananmen Square. He sat down in interviews and other encounters with a string of noteworthy Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. For years, Huston resisted efforts to get him to write a personal memoir of his long and eventful life. He was more interested in the human search for meaning than he was in one man’s story, even if that story was his own. But in the spring of 2009, in his ninetieth year, Huston finally relented, and his publisher released an autobiography, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine.
As he entered his ninth decade, Huston Smith had buried his parents and one of his daughters, and lived through the bizarre disappearance and presumed death of one of his granddaughters. His father, the man who went to China to “Chris tianize the world,” died at Ozarks Methodist Manor, a retirement community south of Springfield, Missouri. Huston and Kendra’s oldest daughter, Karen, died of cancer when she was just fifty years old. As she awaited her death, Karen threw a party to celebrate her father’s seventy-fifth birthday. Karen had converted to Judaism when she married, and in her last sustained conversation with her father, she spoke of angels. “I sensed at once,” Huston says, “that she was thinking of the Kabalistic view in which every mitzvah (good deed) that people perform creates an angel. Those angels don’t vanish with the acts that brought them into being. They live on as permanent additions to the universe, affecting the balance between the forces of good and evil.” Then, in 2002, one of Huston’s grandchildren, Serena, disappeared under suspicious circumstances and was presumed dead after she vanished from a boat sailing in the South Pacific. She had been sailing with her boyfriend, Bison Dele, an NBA star who had suddenly given up a promising career in professional basketball and headed off to Tahiti. Authorities believe Dele’s troubled brother murdered him and Serena, but their bodies were never found.