January 5, 2008
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I had first met Tim Leary in Mexico at a dinner party in Cuernavaca to which I was taken by my companion at the time, a Berkeley divorcee who seemed to know everybody who mattered. My memories of Tim were this tall, smiling professor conventionally dressed but for some bright red socks. Obviously his mind was pretty sharp but the conversation did not seem in any way unusual. I didn't know anything about his background--how his years as a clinical psychologist and now at Harvard had soured him on the basics of a discipline that merely helped "patients" to adjust to a society which itself was out of kilter. "Psychotherapy", he had written, "is in some respects an implausible procedure offering to the individual the opportunity to learn those things about himself which, by definition, he does not wish to know". Something dramatically new was needed to open up people's minds, Tim felt, and he was beginning to think the answer might lie in some consciousness-changing drug. A voracious researcher, he was familiar with Havelock Ellis' turn-of-the-century experiments with peyote and those of William James and doubtless knew about the experiences of Dr. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who had invented LSD in 1938 and psilocybin 20 years later. By the late 1950s, R. Gordon Wasson's studies about the mystical and religious properties of Mexican "magic" mushrooms had been widely publicized as well as the ways the English psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond had been using LSD to rehabilitate alcoholics in a Canadian mental health clinic. Similar experiments had been taking place in England at the Powick mental hospital in Worcestershire and many of the patients (given the drug without their consent) subsequently suffered horrendous flashbacks which continued for years. At the time, though, LSD seemed to be a new wonder drug capable of dramatically inbueing its subjects with a new sense of reality. "That summer in Cuernavaca", wrote Leary biographer John Bryan of 1960, "Tim was looking for a 'cure' that would not only help struggling humanity but himself. He sought a youth potion, a magic elixir to bend his mind, tone up his muscles, stiffen his cock, drive the death-thinking, middle-aged blues away". What he found, sampled and was transformed by, was the magic mushroom, psilocybe mexicana. "You are never the same after you've had that one flash glimpse down the cellular time tunnel" Leary wrote. "You are never the same after you've had the veil drawn". The phone rang in my Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon and a voice identified itself as Michael Hollingshead, a visitor from London where he said he'd been told that I always knew about what parties were going on. I said that, indeed, I was shortly setting off for one uptown with my friend Sophie, and if he'd care to wait for me at 9pm on the steps of the main post office on Eighth Avenue, I'd pick him up en route. I duly introduced them and after the party didn't see either of them again for two years during which time they married, had a child and separated. It was only much later I discovered that Hollingshead had been the courier bringing to Leary his first supply of LSD direct from Albert Hoffman's lab. "The man who turned on the world" is how Michael subsequently styled himself. Meanwhile, Leary and his working partner Richard Alpert, under the cover of scientific research, were handing pink pills of psilocybin turning people on singly and in groups--400 in the first series of experiments of which 157 answered a questionnaire. Nine out of ten said they wanted to repeat the experience, 83 per cent said they had "learned something or had insight" and 62 per cent (including myself) swore it had changed their lives for the better. My experience came via Dave Solomon, the genial editor of the jazz magazine Metronome, whose emphasis on the impeccability of "these two Harvard professors" quickly overcame my misgivings. "And besides", Dave added, "your friend (novelist) Dan Wakefield will be present and we'll all watch over you". What I recall most from that afternoon is the pervasive feeling of goodwill, gusts of laughter from me about whatever subject was discussed, and a scary moment as we walked along 42nd Street and I saw a cop approaching. Dave took my arm to calm my paranoia and whispered in my ear. "No law against laughing man; no law against laughing". It was an epiphany. Subsequently described by High Times as “an elder statesman of turned-on America”, Dave went on to write seminal books about LSD, cocaine and marihuana, was busted over his relatively minor connection to a drug-conspiracy smuggling scheme and spent more than five years in a British jail. Deported back to the U.S. in 1983, he told the magazine that he had first experienced mescaline as far back as 1957 while working as an editor at Esquire. He died in the ‘90s. One afternoon not long after my first drug experience I tried LSD for the first time. The celebrated movie director Milos Forman arrived back at the Village apartment where he staying to find half a dozen of us totally stoned. It must have been a shock but he took it in his stride and refrained from evicting us all until we came down. Al Aronowitz, probably the most sympatico chronicler of the underground in the "straight press' (he was a feature writer for the New York Post) invited me up to the Plaza Hotel to meet Derek Taylor. "We're bringing the Beatles over to introduce them to America and thought you'd be interested," Derek said, "and, of course, you might have some ideas". I didn't, but I was flattered to be asked. I knew of the Beatles partly because of my regular monitoring of the British papers and magazines. And because Art Unger had told me of the incredible sales racked up by his Datebook whenever it featured Beatles' pictures; what were the chances of doing a whole issue devoted to the group? It seemed a pretty safe bet, I agreed. The issue sold a million copies. A moviemaker named Stan Russell and his girlfriend Jan Tice had been the major influences on my life early in the 1960s. Jan, a slender model with waist-length hair whose quick mind belied her soft voice and laid-back manner, were virtually inseparable except when Stan felt it necessary to rendezvous with some other beauty, usually Nancy Friday. Jan had a remedy for that. "I make sure I fuck him until he's exhausted just before his date" she confided. She would frequently explain to me that being beautiful (and she was gorgeous) carried its own hazards, one being the way it made her a target for unwanted hostility. I expressed surprise. "Yes" said Jan. "I might be just standing by myself at a party and somebody will challenge me in some way by saying how much they hate my shoes--or my attitude". "Goodness", I said, "How do you cope with things like that?" Jan looked me in the eye. "I stare right back just like this" she said, "and I've found that I only need to remember two possible responses: I say either, 'Oh well, I'm just a dumb chick, you know' or I say, 'Oh, I don't agree with you at all; why do you say that?' I've found that one or the other will deal with just about anything". She went on to explain that the best policy was always to say yes to everything because "you can always say 'no' later, whereas if you say 'no' it's much harder to say 'yes' later".
It was Jan who taught me always to carry what she termed "de-fusers"--a marble, perhaps or a foreign coin or even an attractive pebble. "When somebody's angry, I just hand it to them and if they accept it--even if they're puzzled--it defuses the situation. Sometimes, later in the conversation if I get angry they'll hand it back and this little de-fuser can go back and forward interminably". I tried this and it works. Even to this day I carry de-fusers in my pocket, and I thought of Jan nostalgically years later when I was sitting across the table from Walter Bowart, EVO’s former publisher. He kept subtly imitating my postures. If I leaned on the table, he leaned on the table. If I crossed my legs so did he. "It's just body language" Walter explained. "If you act the same as the other person, it subconsciously makes you seem more sympatico". Jan lived in a magnificent floor-through apartment at Fifth Avenue and 9th Street, complete with marble-topped tables, four-poster bed, ornate hat racks, cane rocking chairs and a grand piano. Paul Desmond, a near-alcoholic, loved to play the piano at parties and Jan and Stan spent a lot of time persuading him to forsake his booze in favor of pot, although his conversion never lasted for long. There were lots of parties at Jan's pad, and after one rowdy session at the Corner Bistro with a bunch of cronies we all went back to Jan’s place for what inevitably turned into my first (and only) orgy, about which I remember little except that author Rona Jaffe refused to remove her panties (much to the annoyance of her date, Voice columnist Bill Manville). Rona had started as an editorial assistant at a publishing house before writing a novel The Best of Everything—considered pretty sexy at the time--which was then made into a successful movie by Jerry Wald. She had planned to be a writer when she was seven years old, and once told an interviewer: “I thought what I really wanted was to be a journalist and travel in the jungle with a man, and to share the experience with him”. She brought her journalistic talents into play at the orgy, subsequently selling the story to a skin magazine, reputedly for $2,000. According to Jan, the way she met Stan was by spotting him in the street and following him, planning to strike up an acquaintance. Stan walked into a building on West 66th Street and through an office door so Jan followed him--only to find herself in Dr. Harold Greenwald's group therapy class. When everybody took turns identifying themselves, Jan said: "Oh, I just followed this nice-looking man here because I liked the look of him" and thereafter she attended the class regularly. She took me along once, to satisfy my curiosity, and immediately after the session opened and Dr. Greenwald asked how everybody had spent the weekend, one nondescript fellow piped up with: "I dreamed that I was at a group fuck with everybody in the class". Greenwald was unfazed. "I'd like you all to tell me, in turn, how you feel about that" he said. We were about one and half minutes into the 50-minute hour. No wonder, I thought, group therapy was reputed to bring fast results. With Jan and Stan I had many enjoyable days. I accompanied them upstate to tend an acre of hemp they had planted in Rockland County, nurtured by frequent visits carrying water in collapsible canvas buckets and sacks of A&P fertilizer. Unfortunately, just before the harvesting, neighboring deer devoured the entire crop. Our most memorable caper was Stan's idea: enlisting Eugenia Lewis to photograph a naked Jan against historic New York backgrounds. The idea was to produce a sensational book (this was in 1960, long before everyday nudes were in fashion). We took pictures without incident early one morning beside the Washington Square Arch, but on our second foray--to Wall Street--were spotted by a passing police car and ended up in court. At the trial, in a brilliant coup, our lawyer made the successful argument that the Disorderly Conduct subsection under which were charged--causing a crowd to collect--was invalid because the only crowd had been a melee of enthusiastic policemen (several patrol cars turned up after the initial report was filed). We were all acquitted but this dream-tabloid story never appeared because that very day was when Bobby Kennedy was shot.
It was largely because of Stan that I was finally willing to sample marihuana, having turned it down when offered by Mailer several years previously. My experiences with Leary's psilocybin and later with mescaline had softened me up. Mescaline was easily (and legally) available from L. Light & Co, a British pharmaceutical company which packed it in little one-gram brown bottles for $6 and shipped it off by airmail. I took it on several occasions, experiencing wonderfully colorful scenes and sensations, but on the final time made the mistake of taking it with Sally Belfrage, an English writer friend I'd lusted after since meeting her years before. Naturally when stoned, my desires were magnified and I pestered her to collaborate. She was enjoying her own visions but finally, in exasperation, she flung off all her clothes, lay back naked on the bed and commanded: "Okay, fuck me!" Somehow, I just couldn't perform. Pot's pungent smell was so unfamiliar when I began smoking it in the early 1960s that a transit cop in the subway once told me to "put that cigarette out" and one of the most rewarding places to smoke in public was in the crowded lobby of Broadway theatres during intermission. You could tell by the expression, on those few people who recognized the smell, what their attitude was about it: they looked either envious or angry. Working with sensitive antenna, one could smoke almost anywhere. Obviously if a fire truck was going past you could puff away standing next to a cop and he wouldn't notice, but usually the classier the event the safer you were. Take a dressy opening at the Guggenheim Museum, for example. The hosts might even be able to identify the culprit but with Senator Jacob Javits in attendance, they sure as hell weren't going to have him busted and court a headline such as POL GETS CONTACT HIGH AT MUSEUM BASH. Actually I did panic at one swanky opening when, sharing a joint with artist Marty Greenbaum, a uniformed guard started towards us. "Be cool", Marty said. "You wanna know what that guard's gonna do? He's going to march nine steps in this direction, half turn and look at the crowd for 20 seconds, then turn and walk right back to where he came from". And that's exactly what the guard did--and Marty kept on smoking. From the beginning of the Sixties and through the '70s, I was toking every day-- albeit as a New Yorker, smoking after the day's work was done, rather than like one of those Californians who typically reached for a joint before getting out of bed. One’s desire for dope, I have discovered, tails off later in life and these days I smoke pretty much only when somebody offers me some. I have often thought, though, that when the powers-that-be rant about making another study of marihuana it might be a good idea to study former smokers such as myself, rather than rustling up yet another set of neophyte guinea pigs. Usually these studies conclude that persistent dope smoking results in the elimination of brain cells and if this is true, I can only mourn for the work I might have produced if I hadn't gotten stoned. In a typical year as a smoker, for example, I produced two or three books and 26 hours of television, but just think what I could have done as a non-smoker. Nobody sold dope in the blissful early Sixties. If you were enterprising enough to buy a kilo ($9) while you were vacationing in Mexico, you would wrap portions of it in aluminum foil and airmail it as gifts in cologne-soaked envelopes back to your friends. Just to be safe, Stan used to write on the envelope the return address of a fictitious Sister Maria Lopez at some non-existent convent, but in actual fact nobody ever checked the mail. Crossing the border required a little more ingenuity. Carefully removing most of the black cigarettes from a packet of Negritos and replacing them with pot-filled replicas was one way; filling up a talcum can with grass topped with a wax layer (leaving just enough talc for a suspicious customs officer to sprinkle) was another. During one of my trips to Mexico I fell in with a pair of artists in Taxco and for a week we hollowed out styrofoam balls to stuff with grass, covering the spheres with papier mache, a lace border masking the joint, smoothing them off with the glossy painted faces of jovial monks and nuns. A finish of clear varnish plus a colored ribbon for hanging, produced such beautiful objets d'art that doubtless many remain unbroken to this day. I always rolled joints in a Rizla machine, padding each end with one-sixth of a regular cigarette which could be broken off before lighting up. Sometimes when an uptight hostess would ask what I was smoking I would show her the tobacco end of the joint and her suspicions would be allayed. Long enough to stub it out, anyway. The audacious smell of pot has always intrigued me; how simple it would have been to disguise the aroma (think of the sweet smell of treated pipe tobacco). One obvious conclusion is that retaining the smell has been an unconscious--yet deliberate--act on the part of most smokers, who tended to be anti-Establishment rebels and were defiantly waving what amounted to the black flag of anarchy to see who saluted. Paul Krassner, a nonsmoker at the time, once accompanied me to a subterranean parking garage for the opening of Arrabal's incomprehensible Automobile Graveyard during whose intermission we adjourned to another level of the parking lot to discuss our mutual bewilderment. During the second act, my stoned laughter at almost every line convinced Paul that whatever the benefits of pot, it indisputably clouded one's critical judgment. Laughter, of course, has frequently been my companion when high on dope. A couple of years later I had the idea for a cartoon and Paul invited Howard Shoemaker to draw it: a bearded chap pulls down the blinds and methodically fastens the half dozen locks, bolts and chains on his door before levering up a floor tile and exhuming a tiny chest. From behind the bookshelves he salvages a book of papers, unlocks the chest and rolls a joint which he then lights. "I don't really enjoy smoking pot", he remarks in the last frame. "I just dig the ritual". Sitting next to Tim Leary on the floor of the San Francisco Fillmore some years later, I seized the opportunity during a break in the bedlam to ask the good doctor what the fast-escalating drug thing was really all about. Tim leaned over conspiratorially and in one cryptic sentence explained it all. "Takes you out of your box" he said. Yes, I mused, maybe one’s first drug experience was also the very first time not to be in control of one’s thoughts. I had been up to Millbrook in upstate New York--termed “tribal headquarters” by Tim--and I was aware how cautious they had become following the suspicion and vigilance of the local police. So I asked what the situation was like now. “We’ve been running seminars at which about a dozen people, carefully selected for background and interest, come to discuss theories and methods of consciousness expansion”, he said. “We concentrate on training people in neurological photography involving LSD. But no drugs are administered or used at Millbrook”. Who was their main enemy? I asked. Who were the people trying hardest to prevent use and acceptance of drugs like LSD? And, by now, I had turned on my mini tape recorder. The casual conversation, as so often happened with Tim, had turned into a lecture. “Societies are by definition conservers, i.e. consciousness-contracting institutions”, he replied. “This is right and good. But the task of the individual has always been the same—and is always in opposition to society—to expand internal potential, to save his own soul, to live an ecstatic life. Anyone who possesses external power is threatened by the growth of internal power. The deadlock between those who know through experience and those who refuse the new experience will never be resolved. The theologians wouldn’t look through Galileo’s telescope because the bible told them his experience wasn’t possible. But the locus of this eternal dialog does change from generation to generation. Today’s ecstasy is tomorrow’s orthodoxy”. One of the things that most impresses me about certain people is the manner in which they seemed to have incorporated everything known up to that moment into their state of awareness. Tom Forcade, the hippie Robin Hood, was like that, as was Andy Warhol. And even more so was Timothy Leary. But Tim’s unbridled optimism, shared by many of us at the time, turned out to be over the top. “The external political battle over psychedelic drugs has been won” he declared. “Psychedelic drugs will be legally available or on a limited license or special permit basis within two years [this was 1964]. Within a generation they will be available the way airplane pilots’ licenses are. Within two generations they will be used routinely in all forms of education ad will be available the way liquor is now available. Any great breakthrough in the realm of ideas takes at least one generation to be accepted. Within 20 years, religious institutions will be using psychedelic drugs as sacramental aids”. The son of a dentist and a devout Catholic, Tim had been kicked out of West Point but by the time I encountered him had achieved a spurious respectability as a professor at Harvard, which is surely what might have alleviated suspicion among straight people like myself when he began to peddle drugs. “The product he was selling was the experience of changing your reality”, was the later appraisal of a Michael Roth, a San Francisco academic. “Not by changing anything in the world but by changing the way your brain takes in the world”. Reviewing Robert Greenfield’s overly skeptical 2005 biography of Leary, Roth described it as “flawed by a lack of substance and an inability to separate fact from trivia”. Indeed, it was a good example of the distaste and outright hostility that so many people felt for the former professor. It was not shared by myself. Like many others, I felt that Timothy Leary had changed my life (and outlook) for the better.
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