Drugs, prison, wild affairs – welcome to marriage to the king of LSD

Telegraph

25-05-2025

Even before meeting and marrying Timothy Leary, the self-styled prophet of LSD, who urged America to 'turn on, tune in, drop out', Rosemary Woodruff had displayed a distinct propensity for choosing unsuitable men. Her first husband, an air force pilot, whom she married at 17, beat her so often he caused a miscarriage. Her second was a Dutch jazz accordion player, who taught her 'how to snort, smoke and inhale', and according to one friend 'treated her like s--t'.
The daughter of a magician's assistant and serial debtor, Woodruff had abandoned her job as an air stewardess and was living with yet another jazz musician, and a junkie when, in 1965, she met Timothy Leary. Having been dismissed as a lecturer from Harvard, where he was pursuing research into the mind-expanding qualities of psychedelic drugs, Leary had established himself at Millbrook, the rambling estate in upstate New York owned by the oil heiress Peggy Hitchcock, and founded the Castalia Foundation (named after the intellectual colony in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game), undergoing a transformation from tweed-clad professor to self-styled high priest of what William Burroughs would dyspeptically describe as an LSD fuelled 'religious do-good cult'.
Arriving with a friend for a guided LSD session, Woodruff was swept off her feet by – as Susannah Cahalan writes in a new biography – 'the alluring silver-haired psychologist', who had 'high cheekbones on a handsome face that projected a high IQ'. 'You remind me of someone I once loved,' he told her. The practised inventory of pick-up lines, and the fact that Leary's first wife had died by suicide, might have sounded a warning note.
In most histories of the psychedelic 1960s, and of Leary himself, Woodruff is largely overlooked. But The Acid Queen, an eye-widening account of the madcap melange of drugs, radical politics and idealism, and the quixotic search for kicks and deeper truths that made up the 1960s, places her centre stage in Leary's life as collaborator and inspiration at a time when his evangelism for LSD led to him being being described by Richard Nixon as the most dangerous man in America.
Leary was a brilliant, charming trickster, whose initially sober scientific research into mind-expanding substances had become cloaked in messianic fervour. According to Leary, LSD connected the user to 'the long telephone wire of history that goes back two million years' – 'a key evolutionary touchstone for humanity… one of the most important discoveries of the century, up there with the atomic bomb'. (There was much more of this kind of stuff.) Woodruff was 15 years younger than Leary. But she found 'unbelievable alchemy' between her sun in Taurus and his in Libra, their shared moons in Aquarius and ascendants in Sagittarius. What could possibly go wrong?
Under Leary's spell, Cahalan relates, 'the superficiality of Rosemary's life before became impossible'. Among the hipsters and well-heeled bohemians at Millbrook, she was quickly established as Leary's 'first lieutenant', 'wearing smock dresses cut from fabric she found in the communal clothing heap… a sublimely gorgeous, blissed-out model of earthly transcendence'.
Life was less transcendent for Leary's two children from his first marriage. 'No-one is real until they have children,' Leary pronounced, but his son Jack would later recall that he would 'moan about us being millstones around his neck'. Following Leary's advice to drop out of school, Jack spent much of his adolescence at Millbrook, subsisting on peanut butter sandwiches, getting high on LSD and DMT, and endlessly playing The End by the Doors – no doubt paying particular attention to its theme of patricide. He would subsequently cut Leary completely out of his life. Leary's daughter Susan, meanwhile, was sent off to boarding school. On a family trip to Mexico she was busted at the border after trying to conceal Leary's drugs from the police, and sent to prison; her mental health deteriorated and she attempted suicide. She would die that way in 1990, hanging herself in a Los Angeles prison, where she was being held after shooting her boyfriend.
Leary became a figure of public fascination and notoriety. He toured lecture theatres and television talk shows, the PT Barnum of acid, describing himself as 'the wisest man of the 20th century' and talking blithely of 'turning on' everyone in America. Woodruff, the 'blissed-out model of earthly transcendence' stayed at home, cataloguing the lectures she had helped to write, 'smoking hash, doing yoga and cleaning up mice droppings'.
In 1970, Leary was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for possession of marijuana, a sentence that reflected the threat he was perceived to present to the nation's youth rather than the magnitude of the crime itself. Woodruff collaborated with the far-Left terrorist group the Weather Underground to spring him from prison, and, adopting a new identity fled with him to Algeria, where Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the Marxist revolutionary Black Panthers, had also been given sanctuary. Cleaver, a former jail-bird and self confessed rapist – who, bizarrely, would later market his own range of trousers featuring a grotesquely exaggerated codpiece, with the slogan 'you'll be cock of the walk' – would, not surprisingly, prove to be a less than congenial host. Scornful of Leary's love-and-peace philosophy, he ordered them to undertake political orientation classes, 'lending them five volumes of Kim Il-sung's biography'. Broke and in fear of their lives, they duly obliged, with Leary now urging audiences to 'off a pig who threatens your life or freedom' and Woodruff talking of wanting to 'go back to Amerika… and blow things up'.
Freed from Eldridge's malevolent grasp by an international arms dealer, Leary and Woodruff found refuge in Switzerland. From the outset, it seems, Woodruff had been torn between her emotional dependence on Leary and a growing realisation that he was an egomaniacal grifter, concerned only with perpetuating his own myth, and always ready to put his interests before hers. Finally abandoning him in 1973, she fled to Sicily, taking up with a count who, Cahalan writes, 'looked like a Roman emperor crossed with Serge Gainsbourg'. They 'made love in a secret grotto by a waterfall, drank grape brandy and helped raise chickens'. Accusing her of betrayal, and now co-operating with the American authorities to secure his own freedom, Leary turned his attention to the socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith. 'Perhaps she will not feel, as I do,' Woodruff wrote, 'that she was duped into supporting something that was less than human.'
Woodruff made it back into America, but was forced to live under an assumed name. She was working at a bed and breakfast establishment in San Francisco when, in 1992, out of the blue, she received a letter from Leary. who had been left by his most recent wife, telling her 'you are very dear and radiant in my memory banks.' They reconciled, as Leary put it, as 'best friends, not husband and wife'. He arranged a lawyer who managed to get all the outstanding charges against her dropped. After 24 years on the run, she was free to become Rosemary Woodruff once again. Leary, meanwhile, reinvented himself as a guru for the cyberspace age, lionised by a new generation, appearing in ads for Gap, and talking of having his head cryogenically frozen. He called his announcement in 1995 that he was dying of cancer 'the best publicity move I've ever made'.
Cahalan tells an incredible story, but The Acid Queen is an odd book. It's part psychedelic Mills and Boon – Leary, we're told, 'had a kind of animal magnetism – a hot heat'; is there any other kind? – part paean to the psychedelic movement, and part morality tale. One finally leaves it with the thought that Woodruff, smart, and in her own way courageous, was less 'a psychedelic pioneer', than a victim of Leary's manipulation. Leary died at the age of 75 in 1996; Woodruff died in 2002 at the age of 66, leaving behind an unpublished memoir from which large parts of Cahalan's book are drawn. Late in life, she confessed to a friend that after hundreds of acid trips, she 'hadn't learned a thing'.