Susannah Cahalan's ‘The Acid Queen' reclaims the legacy of a psychedelic pioneer

San Francisco Chronicle​

22-04-2025

Author Susannah Cahalan is admittedly obsessed with the human mind.
That intense interest developed after battling a life-threatening case of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis at the age of 24. Documented in Cahalan's bestselling 2012 memoir, 'Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness,' her harrowing experience was adapted into a film for Netflix in 2016. It also left the writer insatiably intrigued with altered states of consciousness and their profound, at times life-altering, effects.
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The Acid Queen The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary
By Susannah Cahalan
(Viking; 384 pages; $32)
Susannah Cahalan in conversation with Meg Josephson: 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 30. Free. 51 Book Passage, Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 415-927-0960. www.bookpassage.com
Cahalan's latest book returns to this theme by offering the first comprehensive biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, a pioneering psychonaut who helped to reshape the minds of an entire generation.
In 'The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary,' Cahalan offers a full portrait of the third wife of the pro-LSD psychologist Timothy Leary by providing rich details of her life beyond the exploits of her infamous spouse.
Cahalan traces her subject's story from her birth in St. Louis, Mo. as Rosemary Sarah Woodruff, to her first taste of the counterculture as wife of jazz accordionist Mat Matthews. Already twice divorced yet barely old enough to legally drink, her introduction to Leary in 1965 in Millbrook, N.Y., united two figures who together would help usher LSD into the American lexicon.
Among her many interviewees, Leary's son, Jack, from a previous marriage, told Cahalan that he 'thought more of (Rosemary) as my mother than Timothy as my father,' according to the book. He went on to praise Woodruff Leary as 'about the sanest and kindest of the hundreds of people' who came through his father's estate-turned-commune in Millbrook, where the couple spent their heyday ingesting copious amounts of LSD.
Following Leary's arrest for marijuana possession at the U.S.-Mexico border, Woodruff Leary spent 30 days in jail for refusing to testify on her husband's behalf before subsequently disguising herself to play a key role in his daring jail break in 1970. Woodruff Leary remained on the lam, living under assumed identities for large swathes of the next two decades before finally coming back above ground in her final years.
Though both figures would take other lovers, the pair's devotion to one another, if imperfect, always remained at least partially intact for the duration of their lives (Leary died at 75 in Beverly Hills in 1997; Woodruff Leary died at 66 in Aptos in 2002).
'The Acid Queen' includes many never-before-published details of Woodruff Leary's life on Cape Cod under the assumed name Sarah Woodruff, and marks yet another compelling entry in the growing body of work reclaiming the stories of women unfairly relegated to the footnotes of history.
Arriving just weeks after the release of David Sheff's new biography of Yoko Ono, Cahalan acknowledged that the moment feels right to be publishing books detailing the full, singular lives of women like Ono and Woodruff Leary, who both notably appear in the1969 'Give Peace a Chance' video filmed during John Lennon and Ono's anti-war 'bed-in' protest.
'The boomer narrative of peace and love doesn't focus a lot on women,' Cahalan told the Chronicle. 'When I went to look at serious work done on the women of that era, if you're not talking about Janice Joplin or Stevie Nicks — just like the everyday hippie woman, for lack of a better word — there's very little scholarship on them. They were not taken seriously at all, and I feel they haven't been afforded the place in the culture that they deserve.'
Cahalan described a moment of serendipity that led her to Rosemary Woodruff Leary's story. After visiting the Timothy Leary archives at the New York Public Library in search of inspiration for her third book, the author recalls browsing a Brooklyn boutique when she spotted a long maxi dress covered in black poppies.
She didn't buy the piece from Swedish designer Carin Rodebjer's 2020 resort collection, but upon further research Cahalan learned its aesthetic was inspired by the 'free intellect and relaxed style' of Rosemary Woodruff Leary.
'​​It was like something was conspiring in this very self-referential way to compel me to explore this deeper,' she shared.
Ahead of an appearance at Book Passage's Corte Madera store on Wednesday, April 30, Cahalan spoke with the Chronicle by Zoom from her New York City apartment about her research process and the critical role the Bay Area played in Woodruff Leary's life.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Was there a specific moment in your research where you realized Rosemary Woodruff Leary's life was a book-worthy story?
A: The first thing was realizing how big her life was before Leary. She was a stewardess. She hung out with the Kerouacs of the world and the jazz musicians of New York City. She was a beatnik chick, divorced twice before she had even met (Timothy Leary). Leary wasn't even the most fascinating thing about her.
The thing that sold it for me was the undercover life she lived later on. It wasn't even helping Leary with his jailbreak; it was this life she spent living as Sarah Woodruff under an assumed name in Cape Cod. That was never written about beyond a brief mention. That was my signal that this was a book.
Q: Is it fair to assume you tracked down a few colorful characters who knew Timothy and Rosemary to help you flesh out the story?
A: Yes, I talked to people from various stages of her life. (One of the) most important people was her brother, Gary Woodruff. He gave me access to archives that aren't in the New York Public Library. His sister was very much a mystery to him, and I think reading the book was somewhat revelatory for him as well.
Her lover, John Schewel, is who she was underground with during her time in South America and Europe and that was never known before. John had never spoken about it before, so that was amazing.
I found people from the pre-Leary New York days, like David Amram. I think he's 99 now and he's an amazing jazz musician who knew her.
And then there were the Cape Cod people. To some people, she was Sarah the whole time, so they had a fun time hearing about her life before that time.
Q: It seems like the Bay Area, and Northern California at large, played a pretty key role in Rosemary's life.
A: Golden Gate Park is where Timothy Leary told the world to ' turn on, tune in, drop out.' It has a critical place in the saga of Rosemary and obviously in Timothy's saga as well.
Interestingly, she was not present when he said that, because she was tired of all the fame. Once they got to California, that's when Timothy hit a new notoriety and apex in his fame.
They were also with the Grateful Dead at various points, and they rubbed shoulders with all these interesting Hollywood types too.
For Rosemary, when they went to California, it was at the height of her powers as a mediagenic person. It was where she became the 'Acid Queen,' as Allen Ginsberg called her. She was deeply intertwined with the counterculture press and got quoted constantly.
When Leary was put in jail, she was the one facing the cameras and advocating on behalf of freedom of use for psychedelic drugs. She was advocating for his release. She was raising money for his trial, then his appeal. She really came into her own in the Bay Area.
Q: You point out early in the book that one may never have noticed Rosemary's presence in the front left of the famous 'Give Peace a Chance' bed-in photo of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Timothy Leary.
Exactly. And if you extrapolate from there, this whole story is a question of where the camera should be, right? It was on Leary, and she was in the shots, and she augmented them because she was so beautiful. But it was so satisfying to shift the camera and focus it on her. It really changed the way I viewed everything about the whole story, and it also gave me an opportunity to focus on someone who's not typically the subject of a book or a biography.
At the end of the book, I talk about how Rosemary was a mythmaker, and how she spent her life creating her own myth and this idea that we only can get so close to the truth. It's something that I see as a through line in all my books.
I think a lot of us are seekers and looking for meaning, especially these days, and Rosemary was someone who saw that as a worthwhile pursuit, as something that can and should be taken seriously. She saw it as something valuable and it was so fun for me to explore that idea through her. It's something that I believe we all think about and I'm not sure if she ever found it.