Pubdate: Wed, 31 May 2006
Source: LA Weekly (CA)
Copyright: 2006, L.A. Weekly Media, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.laweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/228
Author: Lewis MacAdams
Note: Lewis MacAdams is writing a biography of Jann Wenner. Robert 
Greenfield reads from his book at Book Soup on Friday, June 9, at 7 p.m.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Timothy+Leary

TIMOTHY LIAR - A BIOGRAPHY

Who was Timothy Leary? He's mostly remembered as the Johnny Appleseed 
of acid, the man who turned the world on to LSD. When he was dying in 
1996, he was mostly famous for being famous, the oldest celebutant, a 
76-year-old guy in a wheelchair at the Viper Room. But back in the 
1960s and 1970s, Dr. Timothy Leary was an icon of the counterculture, 
a beatific presence at San Francisco's Human Be-In, which ushered in 
the 1967 Summer of Love. He was the most famous member of the World 
War II generation to embrace the hippies -- a handsome, charming 
rogue hero, incessantly hounded by federal, state and local police 
intent on stomping out his psychedelic search.

Born in 1920, Leary was raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, a small 
industrial city 90 miles east of Boston. His father, Timothy Francis 
Leary, was a dentist, a charming drunkard known as "Tote" who 
abandoned his wife, Abigail, and son and drifted down the social 
ladder in an alcoholic haze. Abigail was the most important woman in 
young Tim's life, a virtuous, devout Catholic with big plans for her 
only child.

Like his dad, Tim was a natural-born shit disturber, who ditched high 
school so many times his principal wouldn't write him a college 
recommendation. Abigail used her church connections to get him into 
Holy Cross. He failed half his freshman classes there, but Abigail, 
undeterred, somehow got him an appointment to the United States 
Military Academy. In December 1940, Leary got drunk on the train 
coming back to West Point from the Army-Navy football game, then lied 
about it to the Honor Committee, which asked him to resign from the 
corps. His refusal brought on the silent treatment from the entire 
Academy, and Leary resigned at the end of his first year.

Leary's next stop was the University of Alabama, where he discovered 
an interest in psychology. During a brief pit stop at the University 
of Illinois -- he was expelled from Alabama for spending the night in 
the girls' dorm -- he wooed and wed a wild and beautiful Catholic 
girl named Marianne Busch. In 1947, Leary was accepted into the 
doctoral program in psychology at UC Berkeley, and there they lived 
for the next decade, raising their two children, Jack and Susan, 
before Marianne killed herself on Leary's 35th birthday because of an 
affair he was having.

In 1957, Leary published The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, 
a book that represented a serious break with determinism, the 
dominant theory of the time. Leary's message was essentially upbeat. 
Though he posited the world as a madhouse, much like his madder, but 
far more responsible, colleague R.D. Laing, Leary believed everyone, 
whether "sane" or "insane," could be taught the tools to determine 
his or her own place in the world.

The book established Leary as one of psychology's brightest new stars 
and led to a five-year appointment as an assistant professor at 
Harvard. There, a colleague told Leary that he'd begun experimenting 
with magic mushrooms. Up to that time, Leary had always eschewed 
drugs because he doubted their ability to produce genuine 
transcendental experiences. But now he was intrigued. Late in the 
summer of 1960, in a small town near Cuernevaca, a curandera gave 
Leary his first psychedelic mushrooms. It was an experience he wanted 
to share, at first with colleagues and later with the world.

It wasn't easy to get magic mushrooms in those days, but when Leary 
wrote -- on Harvard stationery -- to Sandoz, the Swiss laboratory 
where Dr. Albert Hoffman had synthesized LSD-25 almost two decades 
earlier, the company was only too happy to supply him and his 
researchers with ample amounts of (then legal) psilocybin. Leary 
began his crusade by feeding the chemical to Allen Ginsberg and the 
poet's lover Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg quickly brought other poets 
around, including the rector of Black Mountain College, Charles 
Olson, and Jack Kerouac, who called Leary "Coach" and warned him that 
"walking on water wasn't built in a day."

In the fall of 1961, a mysterious Englishman named Michael 
Hollingshead arrived at Leary's door with a 16-ounce mayonnaise jar 
containing a thick, white paste made from confectioner's sugar and a 
gram of pure, Hoffman-synthesized LSD -- 5,000 spoonfuls of acid. A 
year and a half later, Leary and his colleagues Ralph Metzner and 
Richard Alpert (later renamed Ram Dass) were fired from Harvard for 
taking acid with their students, earning scare headlines all across 
New England and igniting a media frenzy that lasted the rest of Leary's life.

Leary's wild ride is the subject of a hugely entertaining new 
biography by Robert Greenfield, the first man to take on the myth. A 
former staff writer and editor at Rolling Stone, Greenfield is a 
longtime chronicler of rock & roll culture. He is the author/editor 
of oral biographies of the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and rock 
impresario Bill Graham, and he is up to the task. In the 10 years of 
this book's making, Greenfield talked to practically everybody alive 
who was close to Leary. Though he is anything but a Leary apologist, 
Greenfield knows how to reserve judgment and let his subject's own 
story speak for itself.

For all Leary's notoriety, much of his life was secret. Flashbacks, 
the only one of Leary's three autobiographies currently in print, is 
riddled with errors and outright fabrications. Because this is the 
first comprehensive biography of Leary, Greenfield rightly 
concentrates on rendering his subject's extraordinary life 
accurately, following Leary through five marriages (including one to 
Nena von Schlebrugge, the gorgeous model mother of Uma Thurman, that 
failed to outlive the honeymoon); a succession of encounters, many of 
them sexual, with some of the brightest, most beautiful, young, rich, 
fabulous and fucked-up people of his era; at least a dozen arrests; 
and several lengthy penitentiary stays, including a stint in solitary 
confinement at Folsom Prison one cell over from Charles Manson.

Greenfield lays out clearly -- I believe for the first time -- the 
sequence of events that triggered Leary's most perfidious act. After 
escaping from prison in San Luis Obispo, where he was serving 20 
years for possession of a small amount of marijuana, he made his way 
to Algeria, which then had no extradition treaty with the U.S. He 
escaped the clutches of Black Panther Party minister of information 
and fellow exile Eldridge Cleaver, who put Leary and his third wife, 
Rosemary, under house arrest. Lured to Afghanistan, the Learys were 
captured by the CIA and flown back to the U.S. in chains. Fifty-three 
years old, facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in 
prison, Leary cut a deal with his jailers. In the process, he 
snitched out the very lawyers who'd fought to keep him out of jail; 
the Weather Underground people who'd organized his prison break; the 
Laguna Beach based dope-smuggling family, the Brotherhood of Eternal 
Love, who'd financed it; and even his now ex, Rosemary, who'd been 
forced to go underground. Few grownups swallowed Leary's lame-ass 
excuse -- that it wasn't really snitching because he'd told so many 
lies already, nobody in law enforcement should have believed anything he said.

By 1976, when he got out of jail and moved to L.A., Leary was a 
pariah in what was left of the counterculture. He reinvented himself 
as a "standup philosopher," even touring in a road-show debate with 
convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. (As assistant district 
attorney of Dutchess County, New York, Liddy had once busted Leary's 
pop ashram at Millbrook, a gorgeous estate Leary and his comrades 
retreated to after they were fired from Harvard.)

Leary would live to see his daughter hang herself with a shoelace in 
prison (having shot her sleeping husband in the back of the head); 
this was followed by his son's public denunciation of him as a 
traitorous dog. Despite events that would have destroyed a lesser -- 
or less self-centered -- man, Leary continued to preach his message 
of cheery optimism to a whole new generation of young people, many of 
whom joined him in a hillside aerie above Beverly Hills.

Dying of prostate cancer in 1996, he spent his final days working on 
a Web site that would extend his fame and teachings into cyberspace, 
and ingesting a daily pharmacopoeia of recreational and pain-reducing 
drugs that included Dilaudid, cocaine, many balloons of nitrous 
oxide, ketamine, DMT and marijuana cookies, while supporting a 
houseful of helpers, hangers-on and wisdom seekers with one 
outrageous and indefatigable hustle after another.

Greenfield originally met Leary in 1970 in Algiers, on assignment for 
Rolling Stone to write about Leary's prison escape. The author says 
he "wasn't impressed. None of what he said made any sense." If Leary 
were alive today, he says, "he'd be doing infomercials." But the way 
Leary died earned him the respect of his biographer.

In his book, Greenfield quotes Leary's final interview. What is our 
purpose? asks the interviewer. "Our purpose is to shine the light on 
others," Leary replies. "I have sought the light to use the light to 
be in space. Light is the language of the sun and the stars where we 
will meet again." Two days later, Leary was on his deathbed when he 
woke up one last time and asked, "Why?" then answered, "Why not?" -- 
asking and answering, as Doug Rushkoff later wrote in Esquire, "fifty 
times in fifty different voices. Clowning, loving, tragic, afraid." 
Then, holding his stepson Zach's hand, Leary said, "Beautiful," and died.

For a decade, Greenfield has been wrestling with the meaning of Tim 
Leary's existence -- and he would be the last to say he's got the man 
entirely figured out. "I kept saying to myself, 'This is about his 
life.' A book is not a life. It's my trip through his life. This was 
one of those projects that you either finish or you die." Fortunately 
for us, Greenberg has lived to tell the tale. At 600 pages, Timothy 
Leary is a genuine page turner, an epic tragedy and a cosmic farce.

TIMOTHY LEARY: A Biography | By ROBERT GREENFIELD | Harcourt | 689 
pages | $28 hardcover
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake