<Archive Obituaries> Timothy Leary (May 31st 1996)
Bill Schenley
Controversial Figure Called Both Prophet And Menace
Photo: http://www.altmanphoto.com/TimLeary.jpeg
FROM: The San Francisco Chronicle (June 1st 1996) ~
By Edward Epstein, Staff Writer
Timothy Leary -- the high priest of the 1960s movement to
create a better world by turning on to LSD -- died of
prostate cancer yesterday, leaving behind bitterly
conflicting opinions over what his brilliant, erratic and
colorful life meant.
Leary, who died in his sleep at 75 at his hilltop Beverly
Hills home, was recalled by some as the prophet of a new age
of enlightenment. To others, he was a menace who destroyed
countless lives by encouraging people to experiment with a
dangerous and illegal drug.
Always media conscious, the former Harvard professor
popularized the phrase ''turn on, tune in, drop out'' during
an era when the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and
the sexual revolution reflected youthful rebellion against
authority.
He even managed to turn his protracted death, which he
dubbed ''High Tech Designer Dying,'' into a media event. His
friends created a home page on the World Wide Web, where
users could click onto updates on his deteriorating
condition, help themselves to a virtual tour of his home and
learn about the drugs he was taking to deal with the pain of
the disease that killed him. His recent daily intake
included 30 cigarettes, one ''Leary (marijuana) biscuit,'' a
bong hit and half a cup of coffee. For a time, he had even
contemplated committing suicide online.
Web Announcement
Those who got through yesterday to his busy Web site --
http://leary.com -- could read of his quiet death. ''Timothy
has passed . . .'' the page began.
''Just after midnight, in his favorite bed among loving
friends, Timothy Leary peacefully passed on. His last words
were 'Why not?' and 'Yeah.' Our friend and teacher, guide
and inspiration will continue to live within us,'' his
friends wrote.
Carol Rosin, a friend of 25 years, was present when Leary
died. ''I had my finger on the pulse on his neck when he
died,'' she said. ''What an experience to have that
incredible mind and soul leave that body.''
And some of him will leave the planet in October. About
seven grams of his ashes will be launched into space by a
Houston company. The remains, along with those of ''Star
Trek'' creator Gene Roddenberry and 28 others, will be
attached to the final booster stage of a rocket.
Another old friend, Wavy Gravy, the Berkeley counterculture
clown who recently turned 60, said Leary died the way he
lived. ''He attacked life the same way he attacked death --
with a questioning of all authority and like a scientist.''
Mixed Views
But others who knew Leary, who earned a Ph.D in psychology
from the University of California at Berkeley before he
joined the faculty at Harvard University and began
experimenting with lysergic acid diethylamide in the early
1960s, were less reverential.
Their views reflected, in part, hardening attitudes toward
not just LSD but all recreational drugs.
''He was a friend, but he did a lot of harm,'' said G.
Gordon Liddy, the convicted Watergate figure who like Leary
became a media perennial. The two were a debating odd couple
on the lecture circuit in 1982, an act they continued
sporadically for more than a decade.
''He telephoned me and told me he had terminal prostatic
cancer,'' Liddy, who hosts a daily radio talk show in
suburban Washington, D.C., said in a telephone interview.
''He discussed death as yet another great adventure that he
was looking forward to,'' said Liddy, who as a New York
prosecutor once arrested Leary on drug charges in a police
raid.
Leary's life was quite an adventure. Born Timothy Francis
Leary in Springfield, Mass., he attended West Point before
entering the Army during World War II.
His life was conventional until his Harvard days, when he
met colleague Richard Alpert, today known as Baba Ram Dass,
the New Age philosopher and speaker. The two began
experimenting with LSD and after four years were fired from
the university.
Tall, handsome and often turned out in a natty suit and tie,
Leary began expounding the virtues of taking LSD as a
vehicle for personal growth. And because the substance was
and is illegal, his long troubles with the law began.
For a time, Leary and Alpert lived on Millbrook Estate, a
63- room mansion in New York state where at times they were
joined by fellow drug experimenters Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman and Aldous Huxley.
'The Inevitable Goals Of LSD'
Leary once told a Playboy magazine interviewer: ''The
inevitable goals of the LSD session are to discover and make
love with God, to discover and make love with yourself and
to discover and make love with a woman.''
It was not LSD, but rather marijuana, that actually sent
Leary to prison. On Dec. 26, 1969, he was sentenced to 10
years in prison for marijuana possession. In September 1970,
he escaped from the California State Men's Colony in San
Luis Obispo and disappeared.
A few days later, it was learned that the Weather
Underground, a radical group of the era, had helped Rosemary
Leary, the third of the LSD guru's four wives, in planning
his escape. A few weeks later came even more spectacular
news. Leary was in Algiers, where he joined such other
fugitives from American law enforcement as Black Panther
Eldridge Cleaver, who kidnapped Leary and his wife after a
political disagreement.
The couple escaped and flitted from country to country.
In 1973, Leary was caught in Afghanistan and returned to
California, where he was sent to Folsom Prison. He was
paroled in 1976, after cooperating with federal law
enforcement authorities in their investigation of other drug
icons. That led to denunciations of Leary by his own son,
Jack, and such old friends as Ginsberg and Ram Dass.
''He cost us a lot of man hours,'' said Daniel Addario, who
in the late '60s was chief agent for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration in Northern California.
''He was very intelligent and charming. He was a great
speaker and made a great appearance. He could convince
people that LSD was the greatest thing going,'' added
Addario, who is now chief investigator for San Francisco
District Attorney Terence Hallinan.
''But I would say he was an evil figure. He ruined a lot of
lives.''
Over the years, Leary also tried a host of legal ways to
make a living. He was director of psychological research for
the Kaiser Foundation, a stand-up comedian and actor, an
author, a software developer and a failed candidate for
governor of California in 1970. He also attended a
Libertarian Party national convention.
He appeared in a number of little-known films, including
''Banana Chip Love'' and ''Sex Police.''
Another old friend, San Francisco public relations man Lee
Houskeeper, recalled his days as the traveling manager of a
psychedelic rock band, Clear Light. Leary was their opening
act when they were booked for a week at the Electric Circus
in Manhattan's East Village.
''He was lecturing these drugged-out burnouts who followed
him like lemmings,'' said Houskeeper. ''He started out with
the best of intentions, but during the week he ended up as a
drug counselor, telling these people to stop it.
''The LSD scene was not the wonderful, intellectual pursuit
he thought it would be.''
To Todd Gitlin, a historian of the 1960s who now teaches at
New York University, Leary was an important figure who
influenced many people to sample the drug scene. ''He was
right out of central casting, and offered an invitation to
people to drop out and find chemical salvation,'' Gitlin
said.
A Mystery
To Michael Harrison, another talk show host who now
publishes ''Talkers Magazine'' about the industry, his old
friend was something of a mystery.
Harrison said that most of all, ''He was very preoccupied
with being Timothy Leary.''
Leary agreed with that. ''I am a very courageous person,''
he once told the Associated Press. ''And I am a very
self-confident person. To be self-confident, you have to be
(expletive) intelligent.''
Leary is survived by a son, Jack, from his first marriage,
and by a stepson, Zach, from his final marriage, which ended
in 1994.
In Leary's Words
'I learned that conscious- ness and intelligence can be
system- atically expanded. That the brain can be repro-
grammed'
'I wanted to be a philosopher. Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire
and all these guys who were out there in nirvana. I
discovered as I grew up that I was different'. Life was to
have adventures and quests and Huckleberry Finn'
'Turn on, tune in, drop out'
'Don't ask me anything. Think for yourself and question
authority.'
'I often don't remember what I did two days before. It makes
life interesting.
'I wanted to be a philosopher -- Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire
and all these guys who were out there in nirvana. I
discovered as I grew up that I was different'
'I wanted to be a philosopher -- Aristotle, Plato,
Voltaire and all these guys who were out there in nirvana. I
discovered as I grew up that I was different'
- Timothy Leary -
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Photo:
http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/PersonalMusings/AsahiTimothyLeary.jpg
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Timothy Leary, Pied Piper Of Psychedelic 60's,
Dies At 75
FROM: The New York Times (June 1st 1996) ~
By Laura Mansnerus
Timothy Leary, who effectively introduced many Americans to
the psychedelic 1960's with the relentlessly quoted phrase,
"turn on, tune in, drop out," died yesterday at his house in
Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 75.
However indelible his connection with another era, Mr. Leary
was very much a man of the moment, and made his death a
final act of performance art by having video cameras record
it for possible broadcast on the Internet. He had planned a
celebration, and Web sites had collected Leary
memorabilia -- texts of his books and lectures, tributes
from friends, a listing of his daily drug intake, legal and
illegal -- from the time he was told last year that he had
prostate cancer.
Carol Rosin, a friend who was at Mr. Leary's bedside, said
his last words were: "Why not? Why not? Why not?"
Mr. Leary's stepson, Zachary Chase, said that until the end,
"he was maintaining his rascal quality." And R. Couri Hay,
another friend who joined a small gathering around Mr. Leary
on his last night, said: "Tim told us, 'Don't let it be sad.
Buy wine. Put soup on the stove.' Tim loved life."
In his long and extravagant public career, Mr. Leary was an
accomplished clinical psychologist at Harvard University, a
dabbler in Eastern mysticism, a fugitive and convict, a
stand-up comedian and actor, a writer and a software
designer and an exponent of cybernetics.
Most of all, he was known as a kind of publicist for
psychedelic experience, a career that blossomed in the heady
days of the 1960's after he was dismissed from Harvard for
his drug experiments. The phrase "turn on, tune in, drop
out" came to him shortly afterward, in the shower, after
Marshall McLuhan advised him to come up with "something
snappy" to advertise the wonders of LSD.
As the era of drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll unfolded, it
seemed that Mr. Leary was at every scene, alongside a
strange cast of famous characters. He took psilocybin trips
with, among others, Arthur Koestler, Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Maynard Ferguson and William
Burroughs. He was arrested by G. Gordon Liddy. He sang "Give
Peace a Chance" with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. As a fugitive
on drug charges, he lived in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver
and dined in Gstaad with Roman Polanski; back at Folsom
prison in California, he was a jailmate of Charles Manson.
To each of his enthusiasms, including death, Mr. Leary
brought an elegant, happy contempt for authority that made
him popular with college audiences decades after the
psychedelic experience had expired. Over and over, he was
referred to as a priest or a guru, but Mr. Leary hated
everything the titles stood for; at most, he said, he
thought of himself as a coach.
Well into his 70's, though he had lost his reputation as a
corrupter of youth, Mr. Leary was stepping up to microphones
in his white sneakers, telling audiences that the liberation
and exchange of knowledge by electronic communication would
free their brains and souls from the oppressive orthodoxies
of education, religion and politics. He often presented a
multimedia show called "how to operate your brain," and his
new motto was "just say know."
Timothy Francis Leary was born Oct. 22, 1920, in
Springfield, Mass., an only child in an Irish Catholic
household. He attended Holy Cross College, West Point and
the University of Alabama, was a discipline problem at each,
and finally earned a bachelor's degree in the Army during
World War II.
He received a doctorate in psychology in 1950 from the
University of California at Berkeley, where he became
convinced that conventional psychotherapy was not only
politically disagreeable but also useless. He began
experimenting with group therapy and theories of
transactional analysis, which the psychiatrist Eric Berne
would later popularize in his book "Games People Play."
He taught at Berkeley, was director of psychological
research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland,
Calif., from 1955 to 1958, and joined Harvard's faculty in
1959.
At this point, he was personally unsettled. His wife,
Marianne, had committed suicide in 1955, leaving Mr. Leary
to raise their school-age son and daughter. On a trip to
Spain, he suffered a mysterious wrenching illness. In his
1968 book "High Priest," he recalled a powerful moment in
his delirium: "With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my
social self were gone. I was a 38-year-old male animal with
two cubs. High, completely free."
The succeeding mind-altering experiences would be
purposeful, beginning with a mushroom-induced high in
Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1960. With a few Harvard colleagues,
notably Richard Alpert (who later took the Hindu name Ram
Dass), Mr. Leary introduced others to psilocybin, the
mushroom's active ingredient, which was legally available
for psychiatric research.
At Harvard, he administered the drugs to other researchers,
prison inmates and even a group of divinity students, who,
Mr. Leary wrote later, showed that "spiritual ecstasy,
religious revelation and union with God were now directly
accessible."
Still, his superiors were growing nervous, and after he
tried LSD in 1962 and proposed to use it in experiments, the
departmental powers turned on him. Newspapers reported a
drug scandal at Harvard. In 1963, having confirmed that
undergraduates had shared in the researchers' stash, Harvard
dismissed Mr. Leary and Mr. Alpert. Mr. Leary's status as an
outlaw, quite literally at times, would continue for years.
Once dismissed, he was free to embrace drugs strictly for
sensation -- and he did. With Mr. Alpert, Mr. Leary left
Cambridge for a country estate in Millbrook, N.Y., which was
provided by a millionaire sympathizer and was to be the
headquarters of a foundation for drug research. It turned
out to be more like a hippie commune, suffused with Eastern
religion. Guests meditated and took drugs. The neighbors
were horrified.
As the Millbrook group (and a brief second marriage) split
up, a decade of legal troubles began. Mr. Leary was stopped
in Texas with a small amount of marijuana and was convicted
on several charges. While the verdict was on appeal, the
Millbrook house was raided; Mr. Leary was roused from bed
and arrested by G. Gordon Liddy, then of the Dutchess County
Sheriff's Department, who would later gain notoriety as an
overseer of the Watergate burglary.
Mr. Leary's career veered into light shows and exhortations
at love-ins and be-ins. He started a church called the
League for Spiritual Discovery. He threw over Millbrook for
Hollywood. When he married his third wife, Rosemary
Woodruff, in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of
"Bonanza." All the guests were on acid.
Mr. Leary was still productive, writing two books, "High
Priest" and "Politics of Ecstasy," in 1968 alone. He was
busy on the lecture circuit, usually appearing in white duck
trousers, Indian silk shirts and bare feet.
"Dr. Tim" was accused of sending many young people off on
bad drug trips, and Richard Nixon called him "the most
dangerous man in America." But it was not only the right
that was cutting: "His rhetoric has a patina of phoniness,"
The New Republic's review of "High Priest" said. The New
Yorker, reporting on a "celebration" in 1966, was merely
condescending, saying that after the show, "with his
disheveled hair and his white garments, he looked like a
shipwrecked sailor, and very much alone."
In that era Mr. Leary publicly disavowed politics,
dismissing the left's power games as much as anyone else's,
but in 1970 he suddenly declared his candidacy for governor
of California. The campaign was interrupted when Mr. Leary
was convicted on a new marijuana charge in California and
sentenced to 10 years in prison; he was still awaiting 10
years on the Texas charge.
In prison at San Luis Obispo, Mr. Leary plotted escape from
Day 1. In his autobiography, "Flashbacks" (Tarcher/Patnam
1983), he wrote:
"Consider my situation. I was a 49-year-old man facing life
in prison for encouraging people to face up to new options
with courage and intelligence. The American Government was
being run by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, John Ehrlichman,
Robert Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, John Mitchell, J. Edgar
Hoover and other cynical flouters of the democratic process.
Would you have let men like these keep you in prison for
life for your ideas?"
The escape was spectacular: Mr. Leary hoisted himself to a
rooftop and up a telephone pole, shimmied along a cable
across the prison yard and over barbed wire, and dropped to
the highway.
A clutch of helpers, described by Mr. Leary and others as
members of the ultra-leftist Weathermen but never
conclusively identified, spirited him to Algeria, where,
oddly, he was placed under the watch of Eldridge Cleaver's
American government-in-exile.
Mr. Leary chafed under constant instructions from Mr.
Cleaver's rather militaristic band of fugitive Black
Panthers, and made his way to Switzerland and then
Afghanistan. He was captured there, and, in 1973, returned
to the United States.
He spent three more years in California's prison system and
was released in 1976 by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.
The last two decades of his life were divided between his
home in Beverly Hills and the campus lecture circuit. He
tried comedy clubs, too, and public debates with Mr. Liddy.
To some he was a has-been and a crackpot, and to others an
interesting relic, but he tapped into the information age
early, around 1980, attracting an entirely new following
among the young and wired.
Mr. Leary took drugs well into his 70's, but his regular
pleasures were cigarettes and wine. He hailed cybernetics as
the new vehicle of expanded consciousness, played with
virtual reality, designed computer games and started a
software company.
At the same time, Mr. Leary became fascinated by death, both
by the near-death, out-of-body experience and by the social
controls surrounding the dying. In his last book, "Chaos and
Cyber Culture" (Ronin Publishing, 1994), which skewered "the
priests and mullahs and medical experts" who "swarmed around
the expiring humans like black vultures," he wrote, "The
time has come to talk cheerfully and joke sassily about
personal responsibility for managing the dying process."
When he learned in January 1995 that he had inoperable
cancer, Mr. Leary said he was "thrilled."
"I'm looking forward to the most fascinating experience in
life, which is dying," he said in the interview last fall.
"I've been writing about self-directed dying for 20 years.
You've got to approach your dying the way you live your
life, with curiosity, with hope, with fascination, with
courage and with the help of your friends."
His friends were everywhere, it seems, and often at his
house. They helped in his death project, collecting his
older writings and papers and filming the ever-discursive
Mr. Leary. From a site on the World Wide Web
(http://www.leary.com), he greeted visitors and recorded his
drug intake, which consisted mostly of cigarettes, coffee
and wine but also included marijuana, cocaine, nitrous oxide
and a modest list of pharmaceuticals.
His family life was not so blessed. After his first wife's
suicide and two divorces, he separated from his fourth wife,
Barbara, a few years ago. His daughter, Susan, committed
suicide in 1990.
In addition to Mr. Chase, his stepson, Mr. Leary is survived
by a son, Jack, three grandchildren and two
great-grandchildren.
Mr. Chase said the family was planning a small wake next
week. No public service is planned.
CORRECTION (June 7th 1996):
An obituary of Timothy Leary on Saturday misstated the
surname of his surviving son Zachary. Formerly a stepson,
Zachary was adopted by Mr. Leary. He is Zachary Leary, not
Chase.
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Photo: http://60sfurther.com/Gilbert2/TIMOTHY-LEARY-4-LA-CA-th.jpg
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'60s Drug Guru Timothy Leary Dies At 72;
Psychology: Former Harvard Professor Touted LSD To 'Turn On,
Drop Out'
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (June 1st 1996) ~
By David Colker, Staff Writer
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist whose advocacy of
mind-altering drugs and defiance of the status quo made him
an icon of the psychedelic 1960s and, in President Richard
Nixon's words, "the most dangerous man in America," died
early Friday at his Beverly Hills home.
He was 75 and had disclosed last year that he had inoperable
prostate cancer.
Leary had wanted to meet death on his own terms, declaring
that he planned to commit suicide and have it broadcast
worldwide on the Internet. But the illness overtook him in
his last weeks, and he was unable to carry out what would
have been his final act of defiance. He did, however,
request that his ashes be shot into space.
His last coherent words came about six hours before he died.
"Why?" Leary suddenly blurted out. There was a long, silent
pause, and then he said, much more softly, "Why not?"
At his bedside when he died were about 20 friends, his
stepson Zach Leary, and his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff
Leary--they had divorced but remained close.
It was a quiet end for a man whose scholarly explorations
into the effects of hallucinogenic drugs--especially
LSD--caused a social explosion that propelled him to hero
status among those who embraced drugs as a symbol of
rebellion.
"Turn on. Tune in. Drop out," he urged the 1960s flower
children, who bestowed upon him the adulation usually
reserved for rock stars. But much of the older set--who
believed he was leading a generation of Americans
astray--agreed that he was indeed dangerous.
Leary relished both roles. Starting early in life, he
delighted in tweaking conventional wisdom, using humor and
his charisma as a speaker as his main weapons. His life
mirrored the eras in which he lived, even while he raged
against them.
"He was some kind of Zelig among the Zeitgeist," said his
friend John Perry Barlow, a writer and activist on Internet
issues. "Whatever was going on in the culture, it was
something he could not help to emulate.
"In the '40s he was a cadet at West Point, in the '50s he
was a tweedy college professor, in the '60s he was Timothy
Leary, which was exactly right for that time," Barlow said.
"In the '70s he was a political prisoner and in the '80s he
lived in Beverly Hills and hung out at Spago. He found a
place in whatever was going on around him."
Timothy Francis Leary was born in Springfield, Mass., in
1920, the only child of an Army captain and a woman who
counted among her friends Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Following
the family tradition, Leary entered the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point in 1940.
He soon became embroiled in a controversy over a drinking
party on a troop train, openly confessing his participation.
Under pressure, he left the academy in 1941.
That year, he decided to become a psychologist, "because, at
the time, this profession appeared to be the sensible,
scientific way of dealing with the classic human
predicaments of boredom, ignorance, suffering and fear," he
later wrote.
It didn't take him long to challenge the tenets of that
field. While a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Leary
questioned accepted theories of personality.
"He believed what people called abnormal was really just an
exaggeration of normal personality," said University of
British Columbia psychologist Jerry Wiggans, who studied
Leary's early work.
Leary's 1957 book, "The Interpersonal Diagnosis of
Personality," was declared the year's "most important book
on psychology" by the Annual Review of Psychology.
As he rapidly moved up in his field, his personal life was
in turmoil. On his birthday in 1955, he and his two small
children discovered his wife in their car, locked inside the
garage with the motor running.
"I don't think Tim ever really got over his wife's suicide,"
said Steven Strack, a Los Angeles psychologist who organized
a 1994 American Psychological Assn. tribute to Leary. "I'm
not sure his family life ever recovered."
Leary joined the faculty at Harvard's Center for Personality
Research in 1959.
"Tim in many ways is still that 1950s-type professor," his
close friend Vicki Marshall said a few months before he
died. "He's a bit of a chauvinist, he likes to engage people
in discussions and he likes to be in control of what's going
on around him."
But the seemingly stereotypical professor again took on the
establishment. He wasn't content to simply study
personality, he wanted to discover a way to change it.
On a trip to Mexico in 1960, an anthropologist suggested
that Leary ingest a fungus popularly known as "magic
mushrooms."
"I gave way to delight as mystics have for centuries when
they peeked through the curtains and discovered that this
world--so manifestly real--was actually a tiny stage set
constructed by the mind," he later wrote in "Flashbacks,"
his 1983 autobiography.
"I learned that . . . consciousness and intelligence can be
systematically expanded. That the brain can be
reprogrammed."
Upon returning to Harvard, Leary began a series of
experiments in which his subjects, including students, took
psilocybin and later LSD. As word spread about his work,
Leary was sought out by Bohemian and literary luminaries,
some of whom had already tried psychedelics.
Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Arthur
Koestler, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady
all participated in experiments with Leary.
With these well-known people involved--Ginsberg declared
that world conflict would end if only President John F.
Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev would take LSD
together--public interest in the drugs grew rapidly.
Leary began traveling and lecturing widely, his credibility
boosted by his Harvard credentials. He enjoyed his first
brushes with Hollywood-style celebrity. In his autobiography
he wrote about a drug experience with Marilyn Monroe and
chats with Cary Grant.
At the same time, he knew a backlash was simmering.
"This control of the mind through drugs, which we call
internal politics, will be the leading civil liberties issue
in the coming decades," he said during a 1962 visit to Los
Angeles.
He didn't have to wait that long.
Back at Harvard, a group of faculty members already was
criticizing Leary's work, saying LSD and similar drugs
should be administered only by physicians in medical
settings. Even scientists who had applauded his pre-drug
work questioned Leary's assertion that LSD could be used to
change personality traits.
Rather than back off, Leary proclaimed that taking LSD was a
"sacramental ritual" and continued to fervently promote its
use to expand consciousness.
By 1963, his relationship with the university had reached
the breaking point. Harvard, which had rarely let a
professor go in its long history, fired him. The official
reason was that he had failed to show up for classes. Leary
called it "a phony rap."
On Friday, Harvard officials declined to make any comment
about Leary other than to confirm that he once worked there
and to reissue a one-sentence, 1963 statement that said the
university had moved "to relieve him from further teaching
duty and to terminate his salary as of April 30, 1963."
His termination by Harvard only elevated his standing in
what came to be known as the counterculture. As the hippie
movement grew, his presence became a staple at major events,
including concerts and giant "love-in" gatherings--featuring
music, light shows and the flouting of drug laws--that he
helped organize.
He grew close to novelist Ken Kesey's "merry pranksters" and
many of the best-known bands of the era. The Moody Blues
recorded a song about him, and Jimi Hendrix accompanied his
chants on an album. He was one of the chosen few to sit at
the Montreal hotel room bedside of John Lennon and Yoko Ono
to sing along on "Give Peace a Chance."
Ever-smiling in public, he preached about the "contagious
nature of optimistic interactions" and he described himself
as a "hope fiend." But his friend and Harvard colleague,
psychologist Richard Alpert (who later took the name Ram
Das), said Leary in private could be autocratic and stubborn
in his refusal to deal with real-world issues.
In 1966, Leary appeared before a Senate committee to urge
"legislation which will license responsible adults to use
psychedelic drugs for serious purposes."
But many took LSD for a mental thrill ride. Reports arose of
young people having "bad trips" and behaving in a bizarre
manner. There were reports of suicides and fatal accidents.
Leary became the most visible target for anti-drug forces.
And be began to run afoul of the law.
He was charged with smuggling a small amount of marijuana
into the country from Mexico in 1965. A local lawyer advised
him to take a plea bargain, but Leary was intent on using
the trial as a forum to question the validity of drug laws.
On the stand in Laredo, Texas, he declared that he had a
right as a scientist and a Hindu to use marijuana in
research and as a sacrament.
His sentence: 30 years and $ 30,000.
The smuggling conviction was overturned, but on retrial he
was sentenced to 10 years for possession by a judge who
called him a "menace to the country."
More appeals followed, as did arrests. In 1966, G. Gordon
Liddy, later of Watergate fame, was on hand for a
drug-related Leary arrest in Dutchess County, N.Y., where
Liddy was an assistant district attorney. Leary avoided jail
until 1970, when he was sent to the state prison in San Luis
Obispo, facing up to 20 years for two possession
convictions.
He had no trouble negotiating the personality test the
prison psychologist administered--it was based on Leary's
own work in the 1950s.
On a moonless night in September 1970, he shimmied across a
telephone line to the other side of the prison fence. A
waiting car--arranged by the radical Weathermen underground
movement, according to news reports and his
autobiography--whisked him away, and he was smuggled out of
the country.
Leary became the guest of the Black Panthers in Algeria
until he fell into disfavor with that group. He moved from
country to country, trying to find a nation that would grant
him asylum. In 1973, he was detained while trying to enter
Afghanistan and was sent back to the United States.
Leary was returned to prison, this time in Folsom, and at
one point was placed in a cell across from Charles Manson.
He was released on parole in 1976.
The flower children now were parents and wage earners. Leary
was more of a curiosity, an object of nostalgia for the
recent past. People magazine did a photo feature on him.
He began lecturing again and joined a number of ventures,
including developing a self-analysis software program called
Mind Mirror. But Leary rarely stuck with projects long
enough to complete them.
Settling in Beverly Hills in the late 1970s, Leary made
numerous friends in the filmmaking community and soon became
a fixture at Hollywood parties and premieres. He had bit
parts in several minor movies. More successful was a
debating tour with his former nemesis Liddy.
His personal life was marked by tragedy and broken
relationships. In 1990, his daughter, Susan, 42, was in
custody at the Sybil Brand Institute, having been found
mentally unfit to stand trial for shooting her sleeping
boyfriend. That year, she used her shoelaces to hang herself
from the bars of her cell.
In January 1995, Leary called his closest friends to tell
them he had cancer. In interviews, he said he welcomed this
"third act" of his life.
Leary met several months ago with his son, Jack, whom he had
not seen in several years. But the reunion was brief. People
close to both of them say Jack felt he had been deserted by
his father at a critical time in his life.
In his final year, Leary surrounded himself mostly with
people under 30, several of whom were paid a salary to
attend to his needs and work on a World Wide Web site on the
Internet that would keep his legacy alive.
He raised money by charging fees to some of the magazines
and video outfits that came to interview him. The going rate
was $ 1,000 an hour.
Three weeks before he died he abandoned his long-held plans
to have his head frozen in "cryonic suspension" in the hope
he could be thawed and revived in the future. After his
falling-out with cryonics supporters, he complained: "They
have no sense of humor. I was worried I would wake up in 50
years surrounded by people with clipboards."
Even though he joked about death, "he is as afraid of dying
as any of us," said his friend Barlow. "Maybe more so,
because he really doesn't believe there is anything that
comes after this."
Barlow, who has become a prominent writer on cyberspace
matters, said that Leary's legacy should not be about drugs,
but about his message that authority should always be
questioned and usually defied.
"Timothy is the bravest man I've ever known," Barlow said.
"Unfortunately, that bravery did not always serve him well."
---
Photos: http://drognet.uw.hu/keptar/keptar/timothy.jpg
http://www.sticks-stones.net/images/Tim__quite.jpg
http://www.curtisknapp.com/IMAGES/portraitsphotos/p036_timothy_leary.jpg
http://www.antiqillum.com/images/art_pages/ad_tim.jpg
http://www.roninpub.com/TimLea.gif
http://www.rndng3rd.com/NYMHall/players/L/Timlea.jpg
http://wildcat.arizona.edu//papers/89/148/36_2_i.gif
Leary in art: http://fusionanomaly.net/lsdblottertimleary.jpg
http://shadow.mediafilter.org/images/ShadowILL/S39.Leary.gif
http://www.8weekly.nl/images/art/alice0.jpg
http://taolodge.com/leary_photos/images/0867194103_l.jpg
Chef Juke
I had seen clips of him speaking around that time and the fact that he
looked a bit frail even then and could seem to be a little spacey when
he spoke, made me think some of the usual "ah, too many drugs in the
60's" thoughts.
We were in Vegas with a group of friends for a big bookseller's
convention. My wife had met Leary at a big dinner party at a mutual
friend's house about 15 years earlier..as we walked up over to him,
she said hello and he looked at her for a second and said "Yes, you're
Jennifer, right?". She said yes and was surprised that he remembered
her. He then said "Of course" and even though it had only lasted
about 5-20 minutes, he proceeded to recall the exact conversation they
had had during their previous encounter 15 years earlier. In fact, he
pretty much took up the conversation where they had left off.
At any rate, seemed was a fascinating person with an amazing mind...
On Tue, 31 May 2005 07:33:38 GMT, "Bill Schenley" <stra...@ma.rr.com>
wrote:
-Chef Juke
"EVERYbody Eats When They Come To MY House!"
robertc...@yahoo.com
Louisiana Lou wrote:
> "Legend Of A Mind", by The Moody Blues
>
>
> Timothy Leary's dead.
> No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
> Timothy Leary's dead.
> No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
> He'll fly his astral plane,
> Takes you trips around the bay,
> Brings you back the same day,
> Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
>
Or, as the Jefferson Airplane once sang, "Arrive without travelling."
Bob Champ
Matthew Kruk
Timothy Leary's dead.
No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
Timothy Leary's dead.
No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
He'll fly his astral plane,
Takes you trips around the bay,
Brings you back the same day,
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
Timothy Leary's dead.
No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
Timothy Leary's dead.
No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in.
He'll fly his astral plane,
Takes you trips around the bay,
Brings you back the same day,
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
Along the coast you'll hear them boast
About a light they say that shines so clear.
So raise your glass, we'll drink a toast
To the little man who sells you thrills along the pier.
He'll take you up, he'll bring you down,
He'll plant your feet back firmly on the ground.
He flies so high, he swoops so low,
He knows exactly which way he's gonna go.
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
He'll take you up, he'll bring you down,
He'll plant your feet back on the ground.
He'll fly so high, he'll swoop so low.
Timothy Leary.
He'll fly his astral plane.
He'll take you trips around the bay.
He'll bring you back the same day.
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
Timothy Leary.
John M.
<robertc...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Uhmmm, that was the Beatles: The Inner Light
Was there a JA tune with the same line?
--
John M.
robertc...@yahoo.com
I'm sure you're right, John. I just misremembered.
Bob Champ