Interesting piece at The New Yorker about Timothy Leary, the godfather of LSD. A few random excerpts:
Leary's father was a dentist whose career was ruined by alcoholism; he abandoned the family in 1934, ending up as a steward in the merchant marine.
It's amazing how often biographical details of disturbed individuals include a poor father figure. I realize that's not insightful, but occasionally such things really strike me. Perhaps this one struck me b/c I'm only 72 hours removed from Father's Day.
And was Leary disturbed? Well, the LSD promotion might be a clue, but if not:
Leary had already had a bad run of personal troubles. His first wife had committed suicide on his thirty-fifth birthday. (When she complained, during a night of heavy drinking, about his having a mistress, he is supposed to have said, “That's your problem.”) Leary then married the mistress, but, soon afterward, he struck her, the landlady called the cops, and the marriage ended. In 1956, Leary's father, with whom he had just reconnected, died, destitute, in New York City. Soon after, a former faculty adviser, a married man with whom Greenfield believes Leary was having a sexual affair, was arrested while cruising a public men's room, and Leary had a nervous breakdown.
And another instance of vice and utopianism going hand-in-hand:
After his experience with Mexican mushrooms, Leary read “The Doors of Perception” with excitement. This was a style of mystico-pseudoscience that suited him perfectly, a kind of shamanistic psychology delightfully immune to empirical challenges. As it happened, Huxley was then lecturing at M.I.T., and Leary arranged a meeting. They had lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, which was, and remains, the unlikeliest venue in which to plan the future of a psychedelic movement. But that is what Leary and Huxley did. Huxley's idea was that, if the world's leaders could be turned on, the lion would lie down with the lamb, and peace would be at hand.
I found this next part surprising and a little disturbing. Marshall McLuhan (the media guru and daily-communicant Catholic) may have offered Leary advice on spreading the LSD gospel:
Leary's immortal message to this audience–“Turn on, tune in, and drop out”–was quickly picked up on and widely pastiched. . . The inspiration came from a fellow pop visionary, Marshall McLuhan. In 1966, McLuhan and Leary had lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York City; there, in Leary's account, the media-wise McLuhan offered the following counsel:
The key to your work is advertising. You're promoting a product. The new and improved accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain can produce–beauty, fun, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical romance. Word of mouth from satisfied consumers will help, but get your rock and roll friends to write jingles about the brain.
Also:
Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage. Never complain or appear angry. It's okay if you come off as flamboyant and eccentric. You're a professor, after all. But a confident attitude is the best advertisement. You must be known for your smile.
Whether or not McLuhan ever uttered these precepts, they guided Leary for the rest of his public life. He was a counterculture salesman, and he wore, on every occasion, the same blissed-out smile, a rictus somewhere between a beatific, what-me-worry grin and a movie star's frozen stare into the flashbulbs. One of his ex-wives described it as “the smile of the ego actually eating the personality.”
The end of the article is worth reading. Highly interesting biography, most of it unknown to me. This post is already too long, but if you want to read some real good stuff:
Leary remained free on appeal, but, meanwhile, the activities at Millbrook had attracted the attention of local law enforcement. Leary's chief nemesis there was the assistant district attorney for Dutchess County, G. Gordon Liddy, who staged a raid on the house, and had Leary arrested on marijuana-possession charges. Then, in 1968, Leary was pulled over while driving through Laguna Beach and, along with his wife and children, arrested again after drugs were found in the car. Leary's son, Jack, was so stoned that he took off his clothes in the booking room and started masturbating. When he was shown what his son was doing, Leary laughed. Rosemary was sentenced to six months, Jack was ordered to undergo psychiatric observation, and Leary got one to ten for possession of marijuana.
He was sent to the California Men's Colony Prison in San Luis Obispo, and this is where the story turns completely Alice in Wonderland. Assisted by the Weathermen, Leary escapes from prison and is taken to a safe house, where he meets with the kingpins of the radical underground–Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd. With their help, he and Rosemary (in violation of her probation) are smuggled out of the country and flown to Algiers, where Leary is the house guest of Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' minister of defense. Cleaver would seem to be Leary's type, since his book “Soul on Ice” contains such sentences as “The quest for the Apocalyptic Fusion will find optimal conditions only in a Classless Society, the absence of classes being the sine qua non for the existence of a Unitary Society in which the Unitary Sexual Image can be achieved” and (to explain why white women want black men) “What wets the Ultrafeminine's juice is that she is allured and tortured by the secret, intuitive knowledge that he, her psychic bridegroom, can blaze through the wall of her ice, plumb her psychic depths, test of the oil of her soul, melt the iceberg of her brain, touch her inner sanctum, detonate the bomb of her orgasm, and bring her sweet release.” But, alas, the visionaries do not get along.
Though the Panthers hold a press conference in New York to announce that Leary, formerly contemptuous of politics, has joined the revolution–Leary's new slogan: “Shoot to Live / Aim for Life”–Cleaver is eager to get him out of Algeria, an Islamic country not exactly soft on drugs. He begins to harass Leary and his wife, and they manage to get to Switzerland. There Leary meets a high-flying international arms dealer named Michel Hauchard, who agrees to protect him in exchange for thirty per cent of the royalties from books that Leary agrees to write, and then has Leary arrested, on the theory that he is more likely to produce the books in jail, where there is less to distract him. Thanks to his wife's exertions, Leary is released after a month in solitary, but she leaves him. He takes up with a Swiss girl, and begins using heroin, then meets a jet-setter named Joanna Harcourt-Smith Tamabacopoulos D'Amecourt, who becomes his new consort.
Leary's visa is expiring, so he and Joanna seek refuge in Austria, where Leary issues a statement that Austria “for us personally and I think for the world at large exists as a beacon of compassion and freedom.” (Half of all Nazi concentration-camp guards were from Austria.) It is not clear that Austria feels equally warmly about Leary, and, after Leary's son-in-law shows up, a plan is hatched to go to Afghanistan, where there are friends among the hashish suppliers. Leary flies to Kabul–it is now January, 1973–and is immediately busted. The son-in-law, it turns out, had set him up. Leary is flown to Los Angeles in the custody of an agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and remanded to Folsom Prison, where he is put in the cell next to Charles Manson's. King Kong meets Godzilla.
The rest is bathos. The United States Supreme Court had thrown out the Laredo conviction, but Leary clearly faced major jail time. He met the problem head on: he coöperated fully with the authorities and informed on all his old associates, including his lawyers and his former wife Rosemary, who had gone underground. Leary also wrote articles for National Review, William F. Buckley's magazine, in which he attacked John Lennon and Bob Dylan (“plastic protest songs to a barbiturate beat”), in order to demonstrate that he was rehabilitated. When he was released, in 1976, he was placed in the Witness Protection Program. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he thrived in a B-list Hollywood social scene. Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, was a friend, and Leary became a regular contributor to the magazine. He was also a welcome guest at the Playboy Mansion, and he went on the road “debating” his former adversary Gordon Liddy. His new promotion was space migration. He fell out of touch with his son; his daughter committed suicide, in 1990. He died, of prostate cancer, in 1996.
