Leary also wasn’t distressed at the idea that his Harvard career was finished. He had, in fact, found a new passion. In the spring of 1962, a British philosophy student named Michael Hollingshead paid a visit to Leary and had brought with him an ominous gift. Hollingshead—who died a few years ago—is perhaps the shadiest, most mysterious figure in Leary’s entire story. Alpert describes him as “a scoundrel—manipulative and immoral,” and others have characterized him in even darker terms. But it was Hollingshead who first brought a jar of powdered sugar laced with LSD—an intensely psychedelic solution (in fact, the most potent chemical ever developed) whose psychoactive properties had been accidentally discovered in the 1940s by a Swiss scientist, Dr. Albert Hoffman—into Leary’s home, and taunted Tim by ridiculing psilocybin as “just pretty colors,” compared to the extraordinary power of LSD. Leary resisted the bait at first, as he had with the magic mushrooms, but one weekend he finally caved in. “It took about a half hour to hit,” he later wrote. “And it came suddenly and irresistibly. Tumbling and spinning, down soft fibrous avenues of light that were emitted from some central point. Merged with its pulsing ray I could look out and see the entire cosmic drama. Past and future . . . My previous psychedelic sessions had opened up sensory awareness, pushed consciousness out to the membranes. . . . But LSD was something different. It was the most shattering experience of my life.”
Hollingshead would come and go in Leary’s life, sometimes valued, often reviled. But Hollingshead’s gift, the LSD . . . that was a gift that stayed.
DESPITE THEIR FALL from Harvard, Leary and Alpert intended to continue their research into psychedelics, now focused primarily on the far more potent drug, LSD. They tried setting up a research community in Mexico, but the bad publicity of their troubles in the States resulted in their expulsion from that country. They made other attempts in a sequence of Caribbean islands and countries, with the same results. Then, in the fall of 1963, a friend and benefactor, Peggy Hitchcock, helped provide them with a sixty-four-room mansion that sat on a sprawling estate two hours up the Hudson River from Manhattan—a place called Millbrook. From 1963 to early 1967, Millbrook would serve as a philosophic-hedonistic retreat for the curious, the hip, and the defiant. Jazz musicians lived there, poets, authors, and painters visited, journalists scouted the halls; and actors and actresses flocked to the weekend parties. Some came for visions, some for the hope of an orgy, some to illuminate the voids in their souls. All of them left with an experience they never forgot.
This was a time of immense change in America’s cultural and political terrain. It was, on one hand, an epoch of great dread and violence: the bloody civil rights battles, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the rising anger over the war in Vietnam made it plain that America had quickly become a place of high risks. At the same time, youth culture was beginning to create for itself a sense of identity and empowerment that was unprecedented. The new music coming from Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Motown and Southern soul artists, and San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane only deepened the idea that an emerging generation was trying to live by its own rules and integrity, and was feeling increasingly cut off from the conventions and privileges of the dominant mainstream culture. More and more, drugs were becoming a part of youth’s sense of empowerment—a means of staking out a consciousness apart from that of the “straight world,” a way of participating in private, forbidden experiences.
It was during this time of strange possibilities (and the fear of strange possibilities) that LSD began to become the subject of a frenzied social concern. Despite the best efforts of such qualified experts as Frank Barron and Oscar Janiger, LSD was seen as a major threat to the nation’s young, and therefore to America’s future. Newspaper and television reports were full of sensationalistic accounts of kids trying to fly off buildings or ending up in emergency rooms, howling at the horrors of their own newly found psychoses. The level of hysteria drove Leary nuts. “[B]ooze casualties were epidemic,” he wrote in Flashbacks, “so the jaded press paid no attention to the misadventures of one drunk. Their attitude was different with psychedelic drugs. Only one out of every thousand LSD users reported a negative experience, yet the press dug up a thousand lurid stories of bark-eating Princeton grads.”
Nevertheless, for some in the psychiatric community, Leary had become part of the problem. By the nature of his flamboyance and his disdain for the medical model, they felt he had singlehandedly given psychedelics a bad name, and that he was endangering the chance for further valid research. “It was easy,” says Frank Barron, “for Tim to say, ’There are people who are going to have psychoses under these circumstances; if they have that within them they should let it out.’ These are brave words, but Tim and I had plush training in psychology. We had personal analysis. We were well prepared. But if you have an adolescent in the middle of an identity crisis and you give him LSD, he can be really shaken. And I think that’s where some of the more serious casualties occurred.”
Indeed, Leary became indelibly identified with what Time magazine termed the “LSD Epidemic,” and he was under fire from several quarters. When he appeared before the 1966 Senate hearings on LSD, he was held up to sustained ridicule by Senator Ted Kennedy. It was then, Leary realized, that—before much longer—LSD would be declared illegal and its users would be criminalized. At the same time, things in his personal life were going through momentous change. In late 1964, he married Nena von Schelbrugge. By the time the couple returned from their honeymoon a few months later, both the marriage and Millbrook were in trouble. Leary felt that Alpert had let the place get out of hand. The two friends argued over various grievances—including Leary’s apparent discomfort with Alpert’s homosexuality—and Alpert ended up cast out from Millbrook and, for a time, from Leary’s life. (Alpert went on to change his name to Baba Ram Dass and became one of America’s most respected teachers of Eastern disciplines. In time, the rift between him and Leary healed, but they were never again the fast partners they’d once been.)
Then, in the summer of 1965, Leary became close to a woman named Rosemary Woodruff, whom he eventually married in late 1967. The romance with Rosemary would prove to be perhaps the most meaningful of Leary’s life, but it would also prove to be the one most beset by difficulties. During the week following Christmas 1965, Tim and Rosemary shut down Millbrook for the season and set out, along with Leary’s children, in a station wagon, bound for a Mexico vacation. The couple had thoughts of changing their lives: Rosemary had hopes that perhaps they would have a child of their own, and Timothy entertained notions of returning to his studies and writings. At the Mexican border, however, they were denied entrance, and as they attempted to reenter America near Laredo, they were ordered out of the car. They were searched and a matron found a silver box with marijuana in Susan Leary’s possession; she was then eighteen. Leary didn’t hesitate. “I’ll take responsibility for the marijuana,” he said. The consequences of that moment reverberated through Leary’s life for years. He was arrested for violating the marijuana laws in one of the most conservative jurisdictions in the nation. When his lawyer advised him to repent before the judge, Leary said he didn’t know what the word meant. Eventually, he was given a thirty-year sentence and a $30,000 fine—the longest sentence ever imposed for possession of marijuana. Susan got five years. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction because Leary had been tried under antiquated tax-violation laws. The Laredo prosecutor simply retried Leary for illegal possession and sentenced him to ten years.
Timothy Leary quickly became a national symbol for both sides of the drug-law dispute, and he did his best to rise to the occasion with wit and grace, but also with a certain recklessness. While free during his appeal of the Laredo conviction, he gave lectures and interviews around the country about drugs. He was invited as an honored guest to the Gathering of the Tribes festival, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and he and Rosemary sang and clapped along at John Lenn
on and Yoko Ono’s recording session for “Give Peace a Chance.” He also recorded his own album of chants with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Stephen Stills, and John Sebastian as sidemen. It all made for heady days and high nights, but it also made Leary the most obvious target for the country’s rising mood of anger about drugs. President Richard Nixon told the American people that Timothy Leary was “the most dangerous man alive,” and the directive couldn’t be more plain: Both Leary and his philosophies should be brought down.
And, more or less, that’s what happened. Back in New York, a local assistant district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy organized a raid on Millbrook. The charges were soon dismissed, but another raid followed—and those charges stuck. The raids had the desired effect of finishing Millbrook for good. Leary moved Rosemary and his family to Laguna Beach, California, but the day after Christmas 1968, he was arrested again for marijuana possession, this time along with Rosemary and his son Jack. (Leary always claimed that the joints had been planted by the arresting officer.) At the trial in January 1970, Rosemary and Jack were given probation, but Timothy was found guilty and sentenced to ten years. But this time the judge did something unexpected and rather extraordinary: Declaring Leary a menace to society and angrily waving a recent Playboy interview with the ex-Harvard professor, the judge ordered Leary to jail immediately, without an appeal bond.
Leary was forty-nine years old, and his future appeared certain. He was going to spend the rest of his life in jail for the possession of a small amount of marijuana that—even in the furor of the 1960s—rarely netted most offenders more than a six-month sentence.
UPON ENTERING the California State Prison at Chino, Leary was administered an intelligence test, to determine where he should be placed within the state’s prison strata. The test happened to be based on psychological standards that Leary himself had largely authored during his groundbreaking work in the 1950s. He knew how to make it work for him. He marked all the answers that, in his own words, would make him seem “normal, nonimpulsive, docile, conforming.” As a result, he was transferred to California Men’s Colony-West at San Luis Obispo—a minimum-security prison.
On the evening of September 12, 1970, following a carefully mapped plan that depended on exact timing, Leary methodically made his way from his cellblock along a complex maze of twists and turns into a prison yard that was regularly swept by a spotlight. Dodging the light, he crossed the yard to a tree, climbed it, and then dropped down to a roof top covering one of the prison’s corridors. He crept along until he came to a cable that stretched to a telephone pole outside the walls of the jail. Wrapping his arms and legs around the cable, he began to shimmy its length until, only a third of the way across, he stopped, exhausted, gasping for breath, barely able to keep his grasp. A patrol car passed underneath him. “I wanted Errol Flynn and out came Harold Lloyd,” he wrote in Flashbacks. “I felt very alone. . . . There was no fear—only a nagging embarrassment. Such an undignified way to die, nailed like a sloth on a branch!” Then, some hidden reserves of strength and desire kicked in, and Leary grappled his way to the outside pole and descended to freedom. A couple of miles up the road, he was met by a car driven by sympathetic activists in the radical underground—members of the Weathermen, Leary later implied—and in a few days, he was out of the state, then out of the country.
A few weeks later, Timothy and Rosemary surfaced in Algiers, Algeria, where they had been offered asylum and protection by Eldridge Cleaver and other members of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver and his fellow Panthers had fled the United States after a 1968 shoot-out with policemen in Oakland and had been recognized by the socialist-Islamic Algerians as the American government-in-exile. At first Leary was excited at the idea of setting up a radical coalition abroad with Cleaver, but he soon found Algiers a grim, prudish town with little tolerance for culture or fun. The Learys also soon ran into trouble with Cleaver. Writing in Rolling Stone in the spring of 1971, Cleaver declared that it had become necessary for the Panthers to place Timothy and Rosemary Leary under house arrest in Algiers, claiming that Leary had become a danger to himself and to his hosts with his uncurbed appetite for LSD. Such drug use, Cleaver stated, would have no positive purpose in trying to bring about true revolutionary change—and what’s more, he thought it had damaged Leary’s once brilliant mind. “To all those who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration or even leadership,” Cleaver wrote, “we want to say that your god is dead because his mind has been blown by acid.” Leary, for his part, claimed that Cleaver simply wanted to flex some muscle, and to demonstrate to his guests what it was like to live under oppression and bondage.
Looking back at the episode, Rosemary still feels a great sadness that the experiment between Leary and the Panthers failed. “That’s always haunted me,” she says, “the idea that we had the possibility for some kinship. I think Eldridge and the others wanted us to recognize the experiences that had brought them there, and how different it was from the experiences that they thought had brought us there. I mean, we were all exiles, but Tim and I were exiles from a different kind of America. They recognized that we weren’t going to be killed in any confrontation with the law. The Black Panthers, though, had been killed. They’d been wiped out, slaughtered. We were so naive, so stupid. At the same time, we were frightened. Eldridge was very dictatorial. He kept me away from the women and the children, and then the Panthers threatened us and kept us in a dirty room in an ugly place for three days. So what were we to do?”
The only thing they could do: flee. Next stop: Geneva, Switzerland, where they enjoyed a short respite until the Swiss arrested Leary after the U.S. government filed extradition papers. Leary was in the Lausanne prison for six weeks—”the best prison in the world,” he once told me, “like a class hotel”—until the Swiss, following the petitions of Allen Ginsberg and others, refused the Nixon administration’s requests for deportation. By this time, though, all the years of harassment, fear, flight, and incarceration, plus the lost opportunities for any stable and real family life of their own, had taken a toll on Rosemary, and she decided to part with Leary. “I think I just had to consider that fate was really intervening in our lives, playing a role,” she says, “and that we weren’t going to have this prosaic family life. I had always felt it was my job to protect Tim—that seemed to be the role that I played. But Tim . . . he was Sisyphus: He was the mythic hero chained to the rock, and he was always going to be pushing that rock. He seemed to thrive on notoriety. He’d become a celebrity during those years, and that carries its own weight with it. It’s not the lifestyle I would have chosen. I’d always wanted the quiet life, and with Tim, there simply wasn’t the possibility for it.
“Did I regret having chosen Tim to love? I don’t think so. He was always the most interesting person. Everyone else seemed boring, by comparison. Of course, by the time I wanted boredom, it was too late.”
By late 1972, Leary had become a man without a country, and without recourse. The United States was exerting sizable pressure on foreign governments not to harbor the former professor—indeed, an Orange County D.A. announced he had indicted Leary on nineteen counts of drug trafficking, branding him as the head of the largest drug-smuggling enterprise in the world—and though the Swiss would still not extradite him, they would also not extend him asylum. Accompanied by his new girlfriend, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, Leary fled to Afghanistan, but he was arrested at the Kabul airport by an American embassy attaché and turned over to U.S. Drug Enforcement agents. He was brought back to Orange County, tried for escape, and sentenced to five years, in addition to his two previous ten-year sentences. He was also facing eleven counts from the second Millbrook bust and nineteen conspiracy counts related to his indictment as the head of a drug-smuggling outfit.
The U.S. government had succeeded in its campaign. LSD had been declared illegal and its most influential researcher and proponent had been pursued across the world, arrested, brought home, and put behind bars once again—bigger bars this time, in fact.
The psychedelic movement had been shut down in a brutal way, and for decades after, Timothy Leary would be vilified for the inquiring and defiant spirit that he had helped set loose upon the 1960s. Looking back on the collapse of that experiment, writer Robert Anton Wilson, a longtime friend of Leary’s and author of The Illuminatus Trilogy, says: “A lot of psychologists I’ve known over the years agreed with Leary—they acknowledged in private that LSD was an incredibly valuable tool for analyzing and effecting positive personality change in people. But these same psychologists backed off gradually as the heat from the government increased, until they all became as silent as moonlight on a tombstone. And Tim was still out there with his angry Irish temper, denouncing the government and fighting on alone.
“I don’t want to discount that there are people whose lives have been destroyed by drugs,” Wilson continues, “but are they the results of Timothy Leary’s research, or the result of government policies? Leary’s research was shut down and the media stopped quoting him a long time ago. Most people don’t even understand what Leary’s opinions were, or what it was he was trying to communicate. By contrast, the government’s policies have been carried out for thirty years, and now we have a major drug disaster in this country. Nobody, of course, thinks it’s the government’s fault—they think it’s Leary’s for trying to prevent it, for trying to have scientific controls over the thing.
“He deserves a better legacy than that.”
IN 1975, SOME nasty and frightening reports began to circulate about Timothy Leary. According to stories that appeared in Rolling Stone and other publications, Leary was talking to the FBI and was willing to give them information about radical activists and drug principals he had known, in exchange for his freedom. There was also a claim that he had written a letter to Rosemary—still in the underground—pleading with her to contact and cooperate with federal agents. Rosemary never answered the letter.
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