Night Beat (65 page)

At the insistence of several professors, McClelland scheduled an open meeting in the spring of 1962 to debate the merits of continuing the drug project. The day before the event, McClelland called Alpert into his office. “ ’Dick, we can’t save Timothy,’ ” Alpert recalls McClelland saying. “ ’He’s too outrageous. But we can save you. So just shut up at tomorrow’s meeting.’ ” Alpert gave McClelland’s advice some thought. “Being a Harvard professor,” he says, “gives you a lot of keys to the kingdom, to play the way you want to play. Society is honoring you with that role.”

The meeting turned out to be more like a prosecution session than a discussion. Two professors in particular, Herbert Kellman and Brendan Maher, tore into Leary with a vitriol rarely seen at Harvard meetings. They insisted that if he was to continue his project, he would have to surrender the drugs to the university’s control and only administer them in the environment of a mental hospital. To Leary, it would mean retreating to the medical standard of the doctor as authority and the subject as lab rat—the same model that Leary had sworn to bring down. “Timothy was blown away by all the vehemence and vindictiveness,” Alpert says. “He was, for once, speechless. At the end there was a silence in the room. And at that moment, I stood up and said, ’I would like to answer on behalf of our project.’ I looked at Dave McClelland, and Dave just shrugged, and that was the beginning of the process that would result in our end at Harvard.”

In 1963, in a move that made front-page news across the nation, Timothy Leary was “relieved” of his teaching duties and Richard Alpert was dismissed for having shared psilocybin with an undergraduate. (At the time Alpert and Leary were reported to be the only professors to be fired from the university in this century.) “I remember being at that press conference,” says Alpert, “surrounded by people who saw me as a loser, but in my heart, I knew we’d won.”

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 Lennon 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.