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The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Acid Queen by Susannah Cahalan review – Timothy Leary's right hand woman
Of Timothy Leary, we know plenty. How, in the early 1960s, he gave LSD to his psychology students at Harvard, to the inmates of a maximum-security jail to see whether it would stop them reoffending, to artists such as Charlie Mingus and Allen Ginsberg to map how it expanded their creativity. The Beatles' song Tomorrow Never Knows was based on his writings. Mick Jagger flew to Altamont in a helicopter with him. He had perma-smile good looks, evangelical patter and likened himself to Socrates and Galileo. He even had a Pied Piper invitation: 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'. No wonder Richard Nixon believed he was 'the most dangerous man in America'. What of Rosemary Woodruff? She was the fourth of his five wives, helping take care of his children in the long wake of their mother's suicide. She buffed the branding of the self-styled 'wisest man of the 20th century'. She fitted him with a hearing aid and sewed his clothing. She helped write speeches and the books that made him a must-read for any would-be prankster or beatnik. In 1970, she aided his escape from prison after he had been landed with a 30-year sentence for possessing drugs. She herself was forced underground for two decades. So much has been written about Leary, observes Susannah Cahalan: why so little about Woodruff? Her life had been eventful long before she met the US's most notorious trip adviser. She was born in 1935 in St Louis, Missouri to a father – Victor the Magician – who performed card tricks at local taverns, and a mother who was an amateur cryptologist. Early on, Woodruff wanted out. She needed, she said, 'things to be grander than they were in my little neighbourhood, in my little home'. She decamped to New York, took amphetamines to ensure she was skinny enough to be hired as a stewardess for the Israeli airline El Al, and landed an uncredited role in a naval comedy called Operation Petticoat. Woodruff was looking for otherness. She read Antonin Artaud and science fiction, explored theosophy, smoked cannabis and hung out at jazz clubs. She married a Dutch accordionist who yelled at and cheated on her; then a tenor saxophonist who, when he wasn't shooting up, beat her and cheated, too. 'I subscribed to 'the genius and the goddess paradigm',' she later reflected. 'I wanted genius men.' She met Leary at a gallery and was taken by his talk of 'audio-olfactory-visual alternations of consciousness'. They shared a ride to a psychedelic commune he'd established in upstate New York. What did she hope to find there, he asked. 'Sensual enjoyment and mental excitement.' 'What else?' 'To love. You, I suppose.' The following years are the stuff of legend. Leary titillated and horrified the US in equal measure, telling Playboy readers that women would have hundreds of orgasms during sex on LSD, and claiming that the drug would 'blacken' white people so that they could pursue 'a pagan life of natural fleshly pleasure'. When he ran for the governorship of California against an actor called Ronald Reagan, Woodruff devised the campaign slogan: 'Come together, join the party'. Lauded for her cheekbones and elegance, she fed the press zingy one-liners, and was, says Cahalan, 'a natural high priestess'. Does this add up to the greatness that Cahalan believes Woodruff sublimated during her life with Leary? Cahalan describes him as a 'so-called psychedelic guru' and 'a sweet-talking snake charmer'. Does that make her heroine a gull? Cahalan astutely observes that, for much of the 1960s, 'women were confidantes, calming tethers for the men to embark on frightening journeys into the psychic unknown'. In practice this meant, even when they were on the run, Woodruff ensured Leary never lacked for smoked oysters and fine wines. Like the children of many LSD proselytisers, Leary's son, Jack, got high at a young age. Home life was chaotic. He was so hungry and tired by the time he got to school that he could barely read the blackboard. Meanwhile, Leary's daughter, Susan, taunted Woodruff for being 'frigid and barren', and played Donovan's Season of the Witch at maximum volume for hours on end. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she later killed herself in jail while awaiting trial on charges of shooting her sleeping boyfriend in the head. This is what Yippies co-founder Abbie Hoffman meant when he told Leary: 'Your peace-and-love bullshit is leading youth down the garden path of fascism … ripe for annihilation.' Biographies of lesser-known figures often end up high on their own supply. Their subjects are reappraised as radical, transformative, historical missing links. Cahalan is pleasingly sharp and satiric. She characterises some of Leary's extended circle as 'people who belittled their maids, fed their tiny dogs with silverware, and complained of the cost of shipping priceless art overseas'. Was Leary a visionary who foresaw today's boom in microdosing? 'Psychedelics have become too big not to fail,' Cahalan writes. 'The twin issues that helped curtail the study of these substances in the 1960s are back: evangelism and hubris.' Woodruff and Leary divorced in 1976, but her later life was far from boring. Travelling on a 'World Passport', a document created by peace activists, she zigzagged through Afghanistan where she used a burqa to hide contraband; travelled to Catania where she met a count and 'made love in a secret grotto by a waterfall, drank grape brandy, and helped raise chickens'; to Colombia where she had encounters with venomous spiders and drug cartels. For many years she lay low in the US, lacking social security or health insurance, 'an exile in her native land'. Only in 1994 was she able to emerge from hiding. While she never did publish the memoir she'd been working on for many years, The Acid Queen is a fond, imaginatively researched tribute to her free, forever-seeking spirit. The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan is published by Canongate (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Drugs, prison, wild affairs – welcome to marriage to the king of LSD
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'.
