Mary's Mosaic (38 page)

Mary might also have associated with Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who began conducting psychedelic sessions with prominent literary and artistic avant-garde figures in the mid-1950s. Janiger, also a devotee of Captain Hubbard’s, had experienced his own personal transformation with psychedelics, which had, in turn, fueled his professional interest in using them in his clinical practice. Of Hubbard’s visits, Janiger once memorably remarked, “We waited for him like the little old lady on the prairie waiting for a copy of the Sears Roebuck catalogue.”
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Allen Dulles and his CIA coterie had tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Captain Al Hubbard in the early 1950s. Hubbard wanted no part. “They [the CIA] lied so much, cheated so much. I don’t like ‘em,” Hubbard told Janiger in 1978. He was furious about how the CIA had exploited LSD. He told Janiger, “The CIA work stinks. They were misusing it. I tried to tell them how to use it, but even when they were killing people, you couldn’t tell them a goddamn thing.”
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In addition to the CIA, the U.S Army, and Britain’s MI6 all had a keen interest in using LSD and other hallucinogens for chemical warfare, in what they hoped would be “mind control.”

In point of fact, the CIA’s top secret Special Operations Division at the Army’s Fort Detrick, Maryland, facility had, in one experiment, used a cropduster airplane in 1951 to douse the entire town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France with an aerosol of highly potent LSD. That event had caused
mass hysteria, affecting close to seven hundred people for several days. With hundreds of people gripped by terror in acute psychosis, wildly hallucinating, the town became a veritable insane asylum. Four people committed suicide before the trauma subsided.
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One CIA chemical warfare expert who was responsible, Frank Olson, realized he had made “a terrible mistake.” He was so disturbed by the project, he blundered further by sharing his consternation with several colleagues. Olson soon realized that the Agency had surreptitiously dosed him with LSD as well, ostensibly to see how much greater a security risk he might become. Days later, Olson started to unravel. Agency personnel attempted to move him out of his hotel room at the Statler Hotel in New York late one night so they could secretly, under the cover of darkness, transport him for commitment to the CIA-affiliated sanitarium Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. Frank Olson became unruly and uncooperative, and was finally thrown out of his tenth-floor hotel window, in what would for years be disguised as a suicide.
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According to one source, Captain Al Hubbard was immediately convinced the CIA had used LSD to destabilize Olson in 1953. He also suspected there had been a murder, not a suicide. Fifty-six years later, in his 2009 book
A Terrible Mistake
, journalist Hank Albarelli confirmed Hubbard’s suspicions about this event, masterfully exposing the CIA’s murder of Frank Olson—along with a myriad of details about the CIA’s vast, illegal drug experiments.
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When the CIA found that they couldn’t recruit Hubbard, they started keeping tabs on him. Hubbard’s legendary purchases of LSD from Sandoz, a global pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, were being monitored. The CIA had “an agreement” whereby Sandoz would keep the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apprised of all purchases.
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On his own, and long before Timothy Leary’s ascent at Harvard in the early 1960s, Captain Al Hubbard was instrumental in paving the “psychedelic highway” for those who sought out the experience. Exactly what impact he may have had on Mary Meyer isn’t known. Anne Chamberlin, who had been in a position to shed light on Mary’s exploration with psychedelics up until the end of 2011 when she [Chamberlin] died, vehemently declined to be interviewed.

R
obert Budd, another painter who was part of the Washington Color School to which Mary belonged, recalled seeing her in the company of artist Ken Noland between 1958 and 1959. “She was a beautiful,
beautiful
[Budd’s emphasis] woman,” Budd remembered. “We were all part of a group that used to hang out at Charlie Byrd’s Showboat Lounge on Eighteenth Street and
Columbia Road. We’d meet upstairs and talk about art and music. The jazz musicians would join us between sets. Marijuana had also arrived on the scene.”
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Budd recalled that a number of artists in the Washington Color School were intensely committed to self-exploration. In the late 1950s, a group of them—including Budd himself, Mary Meyer, and Ken Noland—took weekly train trips to Philadelphia to have therapeutic bodywork sessions with Dr. Charles I. Oller, a highly respected practitioner of orgonomy—a therapeutic technique developed in the 1940s by Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a former protégé of Sigmund Freud. In the 1920s, Reich had been part of Freud’s inner circle—some called him “Freud’s pet”—but he eventually broke with Freud. Like any paradigm challenger, Reich was both acclaimed and ostracized.

Orgonomy, sometimes referred to as “orgone therapy,” attempted to break down what Reich termed “character armor,” those unique configurations in the human psychic structure and body that blocked the free-flowing movement of what he termed “orgone energy,” what Chinese Oriental medicine called “chi.” Charged with living energy, the sexual orgasm was the mechanism for the release of this “orgonotic charge,” which, after discharge, built up again in an ongoing cycle of “charge-tension-discharge-release.” If life’s traumatic events precipitated the development of character armor, there would be, Reich believed, an inadequate release in the orgasm function, thereby leading to rigidities in character and muscular tensions in the body, which eventually created maladaptive character states, such as becoming masochistic, sadistic, reactionary, submissive, or hateful. Orgonomic therapy sought to restore the free flow of orgone energy, not only resulting in a more complete, deeply satisfying sexual orgasm, but also yielding a more fully integrated, healthy, and happy individual.

Orgonomy represented a radical departure from conventional psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy. Patients started a session by lying face up on a platform-like bed in their underwear. There, they were encouraged to deepen and to slow their breath and to allow whatever emotional expression was in their awareness to come into their being without talking about it. In the safety of the therapist’s office, patients gradually surrendered to the experience of
feeling
their bodily and emotional awareness. Those with traumatic memories might be eventually encouraged to express themselves with fits of kicking and pounding, giving voice to screaming rage, as well as intense terror and deep sadness. The result was often not only catharsis, but, also, over a period of time, the diminution of the
fear of feeling
itself, thereby restoring the capacity for living more deeply. Mary Meyer’s foray into orgonomy lasted only a few
months, but it demonstrated once again her pioneering spirit and commitment to self-examination and personal evolution. It also evidenced the deep pain she continued to experience at the death of her son.

In the opinion of Dr. Morton Herskowitz, a close colleague of Dr. Charles Oller’s, if Mary had gone to Oller for help with her grief over Michael’s death, Oller “could have helped her a great deal in three months of work, because she was amenable to it.” Upon viewing a picture of Mary Meyer taken in 1963, Dr. Herskowitz was impressed by “the energy and light in her eyes.” He knew his colleague Oller to be an exceptional, intuitive clinician. “Oller would have validated her feelings immediately,” continued Herskowitz. “With a woman of that caliber, I can imagine he would have accomplished a lot, even in a short period. Even though she was a free spirit already, to have gotten to the depths of her grief could have made a significant change in her. He would have worked on her breathing and softening of the eyes, it would have precipitated the deepest crying and expression of her grief. She would have felt very safe to feel almost anything with his guidance.”
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Ken Noland championed Reichian therapy and believed it “profoundly affected his art during the late 1950s.”
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However, Reichian therapists in general, and orgonomists in particular, were strongly opposed to the use of
any
recreational drugs. According to Robert Budd, Dr. Oller abruptly terminated working with Noland as a patient. Budd suspected that it was “because Noland was using LSD and recommending others do it as well. I always had a feeling that Noland had crossed the line, but I have no proof.”
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Noland himself initially denied that LSD had been a part of his life at that time, then several months later mentioned to Nina Burleigh that he had used LSD with Mary. Noland also vaguely recalled something about Mary visiting Timothy Leary at Harvard in the early 1960s.
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Eventually, Mary did undertake a more conventional course of psychotherapy during which, according to one friend, she “really started to work on herself,” though her experience with orgonomy had left an indelible impression.
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W
hile Mary’s post-divorce activities focused on deepening self-exploration and healing, Jack Kennedy’s attention was on getting to the White House, albeit while mired in marital infidelity and personal unhappiness. Jack had long been attracted to Mary, but she wasn’t interested. “Mary had been aware of Jack’s womanizing since college,” a confidential source familiar with both of them told author Leo Damore in 1991. “She wasn’t interested in becoming another notch on Jack’s gun. She was a serious person of quality, not
frivolity. He had always been enamored by her, but she saw through his superficiality with women, and he knew it, though she always admitted to some remote attraction to him.”
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According to author Sally Bedell Smith, Cicely Angleton once witnessed a conversation between them.

“What does Kenneth Noland have that I don’t have?” Jack had asked Mary.

“Mystery,” she retorted.

“The President was duly taken aback,” Cicely remembered.
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The response may have made Mary all the more alluring.

Before Jack arrived at the White House, Mary had rebuffed all his pleas for her attention, save one. Sometime during the spring of 1959, Kenneth Noland recalled attending a cocktail party with Mary at the Bradlee house in Georgetown. Jack was there, apparently letting it be known that he would formally announce his candidacy for the presidency at the beginning of 1960.
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Noland remembered “a stirring” between the two at the party. “She was coming alive in a way Noland remembered from the early days of their own affair,” wrote Nina Burleigh. That summer, Mary rented a small cabin for two weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before joining Noland and his children on Long Island. Noland always suspected that she and Jack got together during that time, since the Hyannis Kennedy compound was less than an hour away.
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According to a confidential source who spoke to author Leo Damore, they did.

“Jack was distraught over his marriage to Jackie,” that source told Damore. “He was miserable. He wanted out in the worst way but he knew it would be political suicide. He visited with Mary because he knew he could talk with her. He trusted her. She was one of the few women he really respected, maybe the only one. Her independence always impressed him—she didn’t need or want anything from him.”
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“Mary didn’t mince words with him that day,” the source continued. “She told him he was crazy to be womanizing, that it would wreck his run for the presidency unless he got control. Jack admitted his problem but felt powerless to do anything about it. His physical health, medical difficulties were complicating things, too. At one point, Mary said he was almost in tears. He was so unhappy, and alone, she told me. Mary wasn’t about to get involved with him then, though she told me she held him tenderly that day.”
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Six years earlier, just after his marriage to Jackie, Jack said something revealing to his Senate staffer Priscilla McMillan: “I only got married because I was 37 years old. If I wasn’t married, people would think I was queer.”
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The remark revealed more about Jack’s concern for his political image than anything else. His father once remarked to Jack’s sister Eunice, who confided doubts
about Jack’s political future, that “it’s not what you are that counts. It’s what people think you are.”
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Jack needed a glamorous, beautiful wife for his image. Shortly before marrying Jackie, he reportedly said to a Senate colleague who was trying to fix him up with a date, “Look, you might as well know, I talked to my dad and he told me now is the time to get married.” He then added that his father considered Jackie to be the best choice “for a lot of reasons. I mean, she’s the perfect hostess; she’s got the background; and she’s Catholic.”
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