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Timothy Leary: A Biography
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Timothy Leary: A Biography
by Robert Greenfield Quote:
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Darren Aronofsky did Requiem for a Dream and Pi. Two very good movies. I expect this one to be something worth watching! Good find.
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New Timothy Leary Biography and Film?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/015...lance&n=283155
Timothy Leary : A Biography by Robert Greenfield has been published. It NOT a sympathetic biography and those who wish to castigate Leary for popularising LSD will find plenty of ammunition here. Quote:
However, it looks like the movie industry is interested. http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...762429,00.html |
There is some sensational interest in the new book:
A portrait of Uma's mom, etched in acid http://www.nydailynews.com/front/sto...p-355511c.html Details of the mind-bending marriage of Uma Thurman's mom, Nena von Schlebrugge, to Timothy Leary are *revealed in a new biography of the LSD guru. Uma Thurman isn't keen on talking about her mother's first marriage, to LSD frontiersman Timothy Leary. ("People shouldn't be defined by these early alliances in their lives," she tells Julia Reed in June's Vogue.) Then again, how many of us wouldn't love a mom as shagadelic as Nena von Schlebrugge Thurman? It's easy to see how Uma came by her beauty and spunk, based on Robert Greenfield's exhaustive new bio, "Timothy Leary." According to a Ford agency catalogue from the '60s, the 5-foot-9 von Schlebrugge was a prototype of today's supermodel. She earned $60 an hour (the highest rate at the time), posed for Vogue, Mademoiselle and Harper's Bazaar, and was never seen without her Pekingese. Nena was 28 when she met Leary, who was then 45, at his annual Fourth of July party upstate in Millbrook. According to Greenfield, she told the mind-altering Harvard professor that she "wanted to go to India to seek ultimate wisdom, not to mention the secret sexual practices of the Orient." "They took LSD and three days later they decided to get married," recalls Leary's ex-girlfriend Peggy Hitchcock. By Monday, Nena had called modeling maharani Eileen Ford to tell her to cancel all her bookings. Their Millbrook nuptials were a "phantasmagoric, magical mystery tour, the first real big coming-out party for all the A-list, jet-set, high-fashion beautiful people from New York who had recently discovered LSD," writes Greenfield. "Guests lined up to present the newlyweds with hash, grass and psychedelic mushrooms, as well as snuffboxes filled with LSD and cocaine." The wedding cake was crowned with the Hindu deities Shakti and Siva having sex. The honeymooners headed to India, where they "ate psychedelic mushrooms to imprint a kabuki performance" on their memories. But it wasn't long before the marriage began unraveling. They took LSD once more to try to mend it. The drugs only made Leary flip out, says Greenfield. The pair called it quits, divorcing in 1965, a few months after returning to the United States. Nena later met a student of Leary's, Robert A.F. Thurman, a serious explorer of Buddhism, at a New York party. They married in 1967. Leary had no hard feelings. Nena and Robert made him the godfather of their daughter, Uma. She became a goddess in her own right, and the group remained close until Leary's death in 1996. |
Timothy Leary's trip
It's 10 years since the pied piper of pharmaceuticals died. Where did all the attention go? By Robert Greenfield (ROBERT GREENFIELD is the author of "Timothy Leary: A Biography," to be published in June by Harcourt Books.) Quote:
For someone who never met an interviewer (or a drug) he did not like, this constitutes a sad state of affairs indeed. Far more than most of his psychedelic cohorts, Leary understood marketing. He came up with "turn on, tune in, drop out," the catchy mantra he's remembered by (when he's remembered at all), only after consulting with media guru Marshall McLuhan. Even by 1960s' standards, Leary's life was outsized. Booted out of West Point for violating the honor code, he earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, only to suffer a nervous breakdown after his wife committed suicide on his 35th birthday because he was having an affair with another woman. After ingesting magic mushrooms in Mexico, Leary, by then an instructor at Harvard, began turning on the leading writers, artists and intellectuals of the day. (The university dismissed him in 1963.) When LSD became the drug of choice for the youth of America, he skyrocketed to fame as a genial and beneficent pharmaceutical pied piper. While living in a sprawling mansion in Millbrook, N.Y., Leary met and married high-fashion model Nena von Schlebrugge (now the wife of Tibet scholar Robert Thurman and the mother of actress Uma Thurman), only to separate from her during their honeymoon in the Himalayas. Moving to Orange County in 1968, Leary threw his lot in with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a band of spiritual surfers turned drug dealers. He announced his candidacy for governor of California, and he flew off to Montreal to join John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their "bed-in" for peace. After being sent to the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo for possession of marijuana, Leary escaped with the help of the radical Weather Underground and fled to Algeria, where he was placed under house arrest by fellow exile and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Leary then found temporary sanctuary in Switzerland, only to be busted while trying to enter Afghanistan. Flown back to the United States under armed guard, he was locked up in Folsom State Prison, where his neighbor was Charles Manson. In exchange for his freedom, Leary became an FBI informant and betrayed his former friends and associates. In 1976, Leary moved to Los Angeles and, among other things, began working as a "stand-up philosopher," performing in clubs on Sunset Boulevard and hanging out with A-list celebrities such as Helmut Newton, Susan Sarandon and Johnny Depp (then keeping company with Leary's goddaughter, Wynona Ryder). Leary became an early computer enthusiast, engaged in a series of well-publicized "debates" with convicted Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy and appeared on stage at Lollapalooza. When Leary learned he was suffering from incurable prostate cancer, he went public with his dying, threatening at one point to commit suicide online. Leary's ashes were shot into space on the same rocket that carried the mortal remains of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek." Although many of his books remain in print, it was his outrageous conduct rather than his work that shaped the zeitgeist. Still, Leary should not be remembered only for his unflagging advocacy of better living through chemistry. By the end of his life, his real message was no longer turn on, tune in, drop out, but rather think for yourself, question authority, learn how to operate your own brain. At a time when most people have long since given up believing that consciousness expansion can save the world, a small, unruly celebration would seem to be in order to honor Timothy Leary. If nothing else, he was a man who always marched to the beat of his own drum, whether or not anyone else was actually following along behind. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ck=1&cset=true |
Timothy Leary's Trip
Timothy Leary's trip
It's 10 years since the pied piper of pharmaceuticals died. Where did all the attention go? By Robert Greenfield, ROBERT GREENFIELD is the author of "Timothy Leary: A Biography," to be published in June by Harcourt Books. May 29, 2006 Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in — "Legend of a Mind," the Moody Blues ALTHOUGH MAY 31 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Timothy Leary, there will be no gathering of the tribes anywhere to commemorate the event. Unlike Jerry Garcia, whose posthumous profile remains so high that the toilet from his home in Marin County was recently stolen after it was auctioned off for charity, Leary's name has not been enshrined on a Ben & Jerry's ice cream carton. For someone who never met an interviewer (or a drug) he did not like, this constitutes a sad state of affairs indeed. Far more than most of his psychedelic cohorts, Leary understood marketing. He came up with "turn on, tune in, drop out," the catchy mantra he's remembered by (when he's remembered at all), only after consulting with media guru Marshall McLuhan. Even by 1960s' standards, Leary's life was outsized. Booted out of West Point for violating the honor code, he earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, only to suffer a nervous breakdown after his wife committed suicide on his 35th birthday because he was having an affair with another woman. After ingesting magic mushrooms in Mexico, Leary, by then an instructor at Harvard, began turning on the leading writers, artists and intellectuals of the day. (The university dismissed him in 1963.) When LSD became the drug of choice for the youth of America, he skyrocketed to fame as a genial and beneficent pharmaceutical pied piper. While living in a sprawling mansion in Millbrook, N.Y., Leary met and married high-fashion model Nena von Schlebrugge (now the wife of Tibet scholar Robert Thurman and the mother of actress Uma Thurman), only to separate from her during their honeymoon in the Himalayas. Moving to Orange County in 1968, Leary threw his lot in with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a band of spiritual surfers turned drug dealers. He announced his candidacy for governor of California, and he flew off to Montreal to join John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their "bed-in" for peace. After being sent to the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo for possession of marijuana, Leary escaped with the help of the radical Weather Underground and fled to Algeria, where he was placed under house arrest by fellow exile and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Leary then found temporary sanctuary in Switzerland, only to be busted while trying to enter Afghanistan. Flown back to the United States under armed guard, he was locked up in Folsom State Prison, where his neighbor was Charles Manson. In exchange for his freedom, Leary became an FBI informant and betrayed his former friends and associates. In 1976, Leary moved to Los Angeles and, among other things, began working as a "stand-up philosopher," performing in clubs on Sunset Boulevard and hanging out with A-list celebrities such as Helmut Newton, Susan Sarandon and Johnny Depp (then keeping company with Leary's goddaughter, Wynona Ryder). Leary became an early computer enthusiast, engaged in a series of well-publicized "debates" with convicted Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy and appeared on stage at Lollapalooza. When Leary learned he was suffering from incurable prostate cancer, he went public with his dying, threatening at one point to commit suicide online. Leary's ashes were shot into space on the same rocket that carried the mortal remains of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek." Although many of his books remain in print, it was his outrageous conduct rather than his work that shaped the zeitgeist. Still, Leary should not be remembered only for his unflagging advocacy of better living through chemistry. By the end of his life, his real message was no longer turn on, tune in, drop out, but rather think for yourself, question authority, learn how to operate your own brain. At a time when most people have long since given up believing that consciousness expansion can save the world, a small, unruly celebration would seem to be in order to honor Timothy Leary. If nothing else, he was a man who always marched to the beat of his own drum, whether or not anyone else was actually following along behind. |
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 source mapt usa |
I want to read this book, becuase the author has done a lot of research on Leary's life, but apparently it's very light on his actual ideas and heavy on criticism of his personality.
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its almost sad to hear these things about people you have thought highly of, people you felt were really something...
you can have the most brilliant words ever concieved (im not saying he did...) but if you had a personality worth shit to nothing then none of your words even matter can i still have my love for terence mckenna? words |
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Timothy certainly let his ego get the better of him, but his Terence Mckenna's theories are more far-fetched!
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10 years since Timothy Leary's death, by Joi Ito
^That Greenfield trying to sell his book. Some people have less negative views of leary like this:
10 years since Timothy Leary's death by Joi Ito http://joi.ito.com/tim321-tm.jpg Photo 1995 at Timothy Leary's home Timothy Leary passed away 10 years ago today. I was with him the evening before he died and I still remember his humor even in his final hour. I met Timothy Leary in Tokyo in the summer of 1990. Tim was excited about virtual reality and had told his friend David Kubiak in Kyoto to help him track down "young Japanese kids who know about virtual reality". I wasn't a VR expert, but I was into computer graphics, games and the rave/club scene. I had also just opened a nightclub in Tokyo. David, who lived in Kyoto, directed Tim to me and several others in Tokyo and we hooked up with him at a bar. I hijacked the situation. After dinner I grabbed Tim and took him on a whirlwind tour of the Tokyo club scene. His visit happened to coincide with the time in my life when I was more tuned in to the Tokyo club scene than any other time in my life being the operator of one of the weirder nightclubs in Tokyo. I tried to explain how the Japanese youth were interpreting the rave and cyberpunk cultures. Tim got excited and we continued our dialog. He called these new funky Japanese kids "The New Breed". He changed the "tune in, turn on, drop out" to "tune in, turn on, take over." We talked a lot about neoteny, the retention of child-like attributes in adulthood, which he felt was exhibited in the culture of the Japanese youth at the time. When I met Tim, I had been exposed to a lot of his work through his early writings and through the writings of people like Robert Anton Wilson. When I asked him whether he had actually talked to aliens as Robert Anton Wilson says in Cosmic Trigger, Tim explained that it was all a joke. A big joke. All that stuff about magic numbers and talking to aliens was a joke. Tim had an interesting relationship with the New Age culture that he helped create in the 60's but his interests had moved on to cyberspace and the next generation of youth. Tim was practical and analytical while also being an amazing performer and communicator. Above all, he was almost always very funny. He called himself a "performing philosopher." When my mother moved to Los Angeles and I decided to base myself partially out of LA, Tim picked us up at the airport in LA and immediately threw a party for us at his home in Beverly Hills. That weekend, he insisted that we (mom, sister and myself) drive with him to San Francisco so he could introduce us to his friends there. He called Queen Mu, the publisher of Mondo 2000 and asked them to organize a party at the Mondo house. At that party, my sister met Scott Fisher, who she eventually married. We also met Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs and probably 80% of the people I know in San Francisco. I have a feeling I might have met John Perry Barlow there as well. Tim also took me to the offices of The Well and introduced me to Stewart Brand. In one week, Tim had introduced us to his amazing network and had "plugged us in". I would not be where I am today if it were not for Tim's generosity in making his entire network available to us. In LA, I spent a lot of time with Tim working on a book and producing a TV show in Japan called "The New Breed" based on our conversations. He enlisted me as a "God Son" which he has been known to do from time to time to people he considered family. I continued to meet people through Tim. Tim's house was always open to anyone and was a crossroads where Hollywood stars, hippies, technologists, academics, artists and just about any other kind of person you could imagine would come and hang out and enjoy his hospitality and share thoughts. I miss Tim very much and I miss the network of people he helped bring and keep together. I am still in touch with many of the people from those days but it's obviously not the same without him. However, I believe his influence and legacy lives on and every day I say my favorite words of his: "Question Authority and Think for Yourself." That is the motto that I live by. I just got this from Zack Leary, Tim's son. Zack Leary http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/sho...ighlight=leary |
A Long, Strange Trip: Leary’s Circus Chronicled
http://www.observer.com/20060619/200...ure_books3.asp By Ann Marlowe Timothy Leary, by Robert Greenfield. Harcourt, 689 pages, $28. Tripping: A Memoir, by B.H. Friedman. Provincetown Arts Press, 169 pages, $20. In 1959, in Torremolinos, on a break from a failing academic career and a year after the end of his second marriage, Timothy Leary had a sudden attack of a mysterious illness which gave him enormous blisters. On one night of suffering, as he described it in his 1968 autobiography High Priest under the title “Trip 1,” “I died. I let go. Surrendered …. My career, my ambitions, my home …. With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social self were gone.” This incident occurred a year before Leary took his first psychedelic drugs in August of 1960, when he was nearly 40. But the pattern that would characterize Leary’s next 35 years as the self-proclaimed “high priest” of LSD—unusual receptivity to extreme experiences combined with reckless ambition—was already well established. LSD was only the excuse Leary found to turn his peculiar blend of charisma, creativity and self-indulgence into a career that changed American culture. Robert Greenfield’s compulsively readable if sometimes choppy book—the first major biography of Leary and the result of 10 years of research—details the amazing variety of famous people Leary met, the drugs he ingested and the women he bedded over the course of an unlikely 75-year lifespan. It’s also a powerful argument against the inchoate belief shared by many who have used psychedelics—and I was one—that tripping almost automatically makes you a better, more enlightened person. Though Mr. Greenfield maintains an evenhanded tone, the effect of his accumulation of detail is to show that Timothy Leary was a scumbag—a charming, energetic and inventive scumbag—despite decades of taking LSD. He was also adept at self-sabotage: Although he made much of his status as a martyr (he was imprisoned for marijuana possession), driving while smoking pot can’t be a good idea when you’re a celebrated advocate of recreational drugs. But Leary had an astonishing ability to land on his feet. Shortly after his nervous breakdown in Torremolinos, Leary—who attended Holy Cross, was forced out of West Point for lying and expelled from the University of Alabama before finally making it to graduate school at Berkeley—talked his way into a lecturer’s appointment at Harvard by espousing “existential psychology.” This meant that the psychologist should observe real-life situations “like a naturalist in the field” and actually engage with the patient, scrapping the customary clinical detachment (detachment was never a Leary trait). Leary’s introduction to mushrooms occurred in Mexico in the summer after his first year at Harvard. He proclaimed that it changed his life: “I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than in all my years as a psychologist.” At the time, a colleague who’d tried mushrooms a few years earlier warned Leary of “the compulsive tendency to run around explaining to everyone about these amazing events.” But Leary was no more able than most people to resist the urge. What separated Leary from many others who were using psychedelics at the same time was his simpleminded and single-minded advocacy. He supplied the sound bite—“tune in, turn on and drop out”—that the media needed to talk about the new drugs. And Leary never decided that he’d learned what he needed to learn from psychedelics; he never moved on. He tripped regularly for decades, sometimes daily, and also consumed other drugs in great quantity, including alcohol. He had little interest in research on psychedelics, preferring just to turn on as many people as possible with the notion that the world would somehow right itself once everyone was tripping. He was fired from Harvard not for giving LSD to grad students and prison inmates “to accelerate behavior change” (that was fine by the administration), but for abandoning his classes in March and going to Hollywood. http://www.observer.com/20060619/200...e_books3-2.asp |
RYDER HAILS GODFATHER IN NEW BOOK
Hollywood star WINONA RYDER has turned her creative talents to writing, penning the forward to her late godfather's biography. Counter-culture icon TIMOTHY LEARY died in 1996 aged 75, and has been remembered fondly by Ryder in a short introduction tohis memoirs. She says of the psychedelic drug advocate, "He made me believe I could do anything." Ryder and her father MICHAEL HOROWITZ, Leary's best friend, have already signed to be creative consultants for a forthcoming project by LEONARDO DiCAPRIO's production company to make the first biopic of the LSD pioneer. http://www.pr-inside.com/ryder-hails...book-r8064.htm |
Psychedelic, Man
By Nick Gillespie, the editor in chief of Reason Thursday, June 15, 2006; Page C04 TIMOTHY LEARY A Biography By Robert Greenfield Harcourt. 689 pp. $28 "The novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow's newspaper," wrote Philip Roth in 1961. "The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist." He could have been writing about Timothy Leary, who then was gaining notoriety for experimenting with psychedelic drugs at Harvard and now is the subject of an eminently readable but ultimately disappointing biography by music writer Robert Greenfield. Leary didn't just champion the use of mind-blowing substances and technologies in the years before his ashes were shot into space after his 1996 death from prostate cancer. His very life was as richly bizarre -- in ways both good and bad -- as any acid trip could possibly be. Leary's story reads like a glorious Day-Glo inversion of what we've come to expect of the Greatest Generation, that cohort of Americans who suffered through the Great Depression and braved World War II and are now revered for an implacable sense of civic responsibility and a casual stoicism. As his famous catchphrase -- "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" -- attests, Leary, born in 1920, was no organization man, saying in his final interview, "My life work has been to empower individuals . . . to free herself and himself to grow and be more free."Even as Greenfield exhaustively catalogues Leary's many failings as a four-time spouse (his first wife committed suicide, and he beat his second one on at least one occasion); a father (his daughter also killed herself, and he remained basically estranged from his son); and a comrade (he earned early release from prison in the 1970s by cooperating with federal agents going after New Left heavyweights), there's no question that Leary was one of the great transformative iconoclasts of postwar America, forever demolishing all sense of propriety while expanding all sense of possibility. If Philip Roth -- or perhaps a more drugged-out, phantasmagoric writer such as Philip K. Dick -- had invented Leary, we simply wouldn't find him a credible character. Leary resigned from West Point in 1941 in a contraband-booze scandal, and, after earning a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, landed at Harvard in the late '50s, where he and faculty colleague Richard Alpert (later to be known by the nom de hippie Baba Ram Dass) discovered psilocybin and LSD and began dosing everyone from Arthur Koestler to Jack Kerouac (who propelled Leary into what he called "my first negative trip") to graduate students to hardened convicts. Cashiered by an embarrassed and outraged Harvard in 1963, Leary and Alpert decamped to Millbrook, a 2,500-acre estate in Upstate New York owned by a rich patron; started a commune centered on massive acid trips; and wrote "The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead," which became a bestseller in 1966 (the same year that LSD and psilocybin were outlawed). Leary became the great champion of LSD as good for whatever ails you, telling Playboy that the drug was "the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man" and that "a woman can have several hundred orgasms" during a trip. In the '60s, Leary was everywhere, including off-Broadway in a show called "Death of the Mind" that was a trippy homage to Hermann Hesse's novel "Steppenwolf"; in the U.S. Senate, testifying about the possibilities of LSD; in pop songs by the Who, the Moody Blues and the Beatles. By 1970, Leary was serving a 10-year sentence for pot possession in a California prison. Aided by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, major distributors of LSD in the western United States, and the Weather Underground, he escaped and fled to Algeria, where he lived in exile with the Black Panthers, before heading out for Switzerland and Afghanistan. Three years later, he was back in prison, temporarily housed in Folsom next to Charles Manson, who told him, "I've been waiting to talk to you for years." Released in 1976, Leary seemed to be an anachronism, a Wild West outlaw whose time had come and gone while behind bars. Certainly that seems to be Greenfield's take, as he compresses Leary's final two decades into the shortest section of the book. While there's no question that Leary ceased to be a pop cult superstar, he remained a vital and visionary guide to a bleeding-edge "transhumanist" and "extropian" future, using the acronym SMI2LE to summarize his interests in "space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension." He was an early champion of not only personal computers but also the Internet and its potential for new forms of community and individuation. Never too comfortable with politics (he dismissed student activists as "young men with menopausal minds" and proclaimed that LSD stood for "Let the State Disintegrate"), he nevertheless hosted a Los Angeles fundraiser in 1988 for the very buttoned-down Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul (now a congressman from Texas). That Greenfield gives scant attention to such material illustrates the main shortcoming of "Timothy Leary": The biographer seems far more interested in deconstructing his subject's voluminous self-serving assertions over the years than in explaining his enduring significance to hippies, straights and cyberpunks alike. In a real way, Leary helped conjure not only the '60s counterculture but the '90s high-tech counterculture, too. A clear theme of individual fulfillment runs through all of his thought, and it's a shame that Greenfield didn't discuss his ideas more seriously, much less put them in a richer social and intellectual context. "Someone told me," Greenfield writes, " 'Those who love Timothy Leary will hate your book. And those who hated him will never read it.' " That's about right, and it reflects poorly on Greenfield's framing of the material. While his account of Leary's "most improbable life" is a fascinating read, that has more to do with subject matter that would make Philip Roth jealous than with the perspective Greenfield brings to it all. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061402139.html |
RU Sirius interviews author of new Timothy Leary biography
I haven't read the new biography of Timothy Leary, and I'm not sure I want to, because from what I've heard about it, author Robert Greenfield takes every opportunity to make Leary look bad. On the RU Sirius Show this week, R.U. plays brain tennis with Greenfield about his very negative biography. RU Sirius: “… so now they have two guns. Tim picks up the gun and he folds it up into a newspaper and he hands it back to the Sheriff. The plan is off. So he goes off to talk to Joanna, and his explanation is, ‘we couldn’t have pulled it off. If we shot these two guys, then we’d have to shoot two other guys.” And this is Joanna’s explanation. And you just leave that hanging as sort of the final… Robert Greenfield: But that’s not my take. He… |
This is the one of the most most balanced reviews of the Leary biography I have read yet. Leary had many flaws but why is Greenfield so negative?
http://www.avclub.com/content/files/...hy.article.jpg Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield (Harcourt) Reviewed by Nathan Rabin June 21st, 2006 Robert Greenfield acknowledges being told that people who love Timothy Leary would hate Greenfield's biography of the '60s icon, while people who hate Leary would never pick up a Leary biography in the first place. So why write the book? Perhaps because Leary's improbable existence was just too damned juicy and incident-packed to resist this kind of thorough documentation. Parts of Greenfield's Timothy Leary read like lurid pulp or an off-Broadway play, like a jailhouse conversation about philosophy between Leary and Charles Manson. The bit about Leary acolytes hating the book isn't a joke, either. Greenfield seems more interested in presenting the case against Leary than in objectively documenting his life. The tone is stern and prosecutorial, and Greenfield seems eager to try Leary—and the hedonistic '60s counterculture he embodied—for crimes against humanity. Part of Leary's iconic appeal was the sheer incongruity of an Ivy League academic coming out in favor of LSD and psilocybin. If such a respectable figure says mushrooms and acid represent the path to righteousness, then they've got to be legit, right? But rather than validating psychedelic experimentation in the eyes of straight society, Leary's controversial endorsement of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out merely invalidated his credentials as a psychiatrist and scientist. In Timothy Leary, he comes off as a cross between a glorified con man and a narcissistic, deluded false prophet. Leary never stopped donning the flamboyant accoutrements of each successive counterculture, but after his '60s heyday, he devolved into a grotesque caricature of himself, a middle-aged guy still trying to pass as one of the kids. The most damning portions of Greenfield's book concern Leary's treatment of his family. While Leary was busy being the elfin father figure to an entire generation, his own nuclear family rotted and died under his neglect and indifference. Decades of abusing a wide variety of mood-altering substances may not have done much good for Leary's mind or body, but Greenfield argues convincingly that what messed Leary up the most was the mood-altering, ego-inflating intoxicant of fame. Still, while Greenfield has written a compulsively readable page-turner, his utter lack of empathy for his subject leaves an emotional emptiness at the book's core. B- |
'timothy Leary: A Biography By Robert Greenfield
'TIMOTHY LEARY: A BIOGRAPHY,' BY ROBERT GREENFIELD
The Nutty Professor IT has been a mere 10 years since Timothy Leary's death, but already his career seems improbable. A onetime psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs for personal growth, Leary loomed large in the 1960's as something of a cross between a pop star and a religious leader. Both those roles involve performance, but Leary, although blessed with considerable charm, was not a terribly effective performer. He didn't sing or dance; he was a vague speaker and a hopeless writer; his personality, up close, did not inspire confidence. And although he was among the major protuberances in the cultural bouillabaisse we call The Sixties, he was not much of a 60's type himself, as Robert Greenfield demonstrates in his thorough and judicious biography. While he may have been the leading spokesmodel for LSD, Leary remained to the end an old-fashioned booze hound, as well as a snake-oil peddler of the most traditional American sort. Had he been born a decade or two earlier, he would probably have been offering to cure arthritis through the application of the electric belt. Nearly every page is riveting in "Timothy Leary," which unfolds like the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written had he lived to the age of 120. Greenfield is not one of those biographers who set out to besmirch their subjects and deplore their lives, and for whom every detail is an indictment. Neither, unlike many, does he seek foreshadowing in every trespass of his subject's youth. Nevertheless, he cannot exactly airbrush a life that comes so lavishly shadowed: abandonment of the family by professional-drinker father in 1933, when Tim was 13; dismissal from West Point for blatant transport of hooch; suicide of first wife as a consequence of his dogging around - -- under the banner of non-bourgeois unpossessiveness, of course. Still, Leary went places. He was ambitious as well as charming and worked his way up the postgraduate ladder to Berkeley and, in 1959, to Harvard. He was initially known as an expert on personality assessment, but, while on a sojourn in Mexico the following year, he was introduced to psilocybin mushrooms, and the experience was so transformative that psychedelics promptly became the central force in his life, his research and his teaching. Along with his colleague Richard Alpert, son of the president of the New Haven Railroad ( and today a guru known as Ram Dass ), Leary tried to turn on all of Harvard. He was a proselytizer by nature -- soon after his arrival at Harvard, his department head had warned him against "using slogans and waving banners" -- and psychedelic drugs gave him a full-fledged cause. It wasn't long before any pretense to scientific detachment fell away and controlled experiments were chucked in favor of missionary zeal and contempt for all mundane exigencies. Chaotic tripping parties ensued, involving students, under "spiritual" or "philosophical" pretexts. In 1963, Harvard -- famous for protecting its own -- finally choked on the negative publicity and summarily dismissed Leary and Alpert. In the meantime, Leary had set about converting the rest of the world, beginning with the literary and artistic avant-garde. Most were enthusiastic, especially Allen Ginsberg, who brought in all his friends. ( "Coach Leary, walking on water wasn't built in a day" was Jack Kerouac's response to the incessant cheerleading. ) Leary had also by then reached out to the intellectual pioneers of psychedelia, Aldous Huxley and the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. Although years later Osmond would assess Leary as someone who "lives in an almost totally hypothetical future" and compare his "millennialism" to Hitler's, he and Huxley, in Greenfield's words, "handed the future of psychedelic research to the wrong man." Around the same time, the psychedelic caravan picked up the Hitchcock siblings, Peggy, Billy and Tommy, heirs to the Mellon fortune, and through them acquired the use of a fabulous rambling house and huge estate in Millbrook, N.Y. This became the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy. It was also at Millbrook that Leary, Alpert and Ralph Metzner wrote "The Psychedelic Experience" ( 1964 ), which contained the injunction to "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream," appropriated two years later by John Lennon for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the last song on "Revolver." ( Leary's epochal "Turn on, tune in, drop out" was first spoken by him at a conference in San Francisco in 1966. ) And it was at Millbrook that Leary's two children, Susan and Jack, who had been dragged through so much, beginning with their mother's death, and had been neglected and passively abused for many years, began to fall apart. ( In 1988 Susan shot her boyfriend, and eventually killed herself in jail; Jack managed to repair himself, but has avoided publicity ever since. ) FOR Leary, the late 1960's were a whirl of media events and arrests. Godlike to one portion of the population -- even if Haight-Ashbury hippies drove him out of the Digger free store in 1967, chanting, "You don't turn us on!" -- he was demonic to another, although in both cases less for who he actually was than for what he represented. He ran counter to the prevailing spirit in one sense: he had no interest in politics. He called student activists "young men with menopausal minds" and suggested that LSD could stand for "Let the State Disintegrate." But by 1968, his slogans were so poised between derangement and Madison Avenue that they could pass for visionary; "Everyone should start their own nation," he uttered, just days after Martin Luther King's assassination. It was awfully hard to tell charlatans from prophets at the time, and besides, the denatured, anti-intellectual language that dominated discourse then ( and is still with us, in a New Age guise ) had been rolling off Leary's tongue since before he had ingested a single microgram of lysergic acid: people engaged in emotional "games"; all the world's bad stuff was a "system"; the state of being clued-in was "consciousness," and so on. Leary did have real enemies in the law enforcement racket, however, and by 1969 he had accumulated enough outstanding indictments, mostly on penny ante marijuana charges, that he finally went to jail, and was likely to be kept there for years before he would be considered for parole. Characteristically, he compared himself to "Christ . . . harassed by Pilate and Herod." In a twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo -- he pulled himself along a telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car -- and transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act." But when he and his wife, Rosemary, arrived in Algiers, they found themselves wards of the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who was probably smarter than Leary, possibly crazier, and had little use for him. As Leary acknowledged, rather shrewdly: "It was a new experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played that role myself." For his part, Cleaver, having observed Leary in action, warned the hippies at home that rather than furthering the revolutionary cause, those who ingested psychedelics were "doing nothing except destroying your own brains and strengthening the hands of our enemy." The final dissolution of bonds between the politicos and the stoners can be dated from that communique. In 1971 the Learys fled to Switzerland, where they were sheltered and effectively imprisoned by a large-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an "obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers," but mostly had a film deal in mind. In rapid succession, Leary was jailed and released, was left by Rosemary and picked up a new better half, Joanna Harcourt-Smith -- whose mother told Leary that her daughter "lived in a dream world where nothing was real" -- and wrote a book. He was still wanted, however, so he and Joanna soon hit the road, to Vienna, then Beirut, then Kabul. Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners. Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. HE faced 25 years in prison ( in the course of his trial he compared himself to Jesus and Socrates ), and in 1973 was sent first to Folsom - -- where his neighbor was Charles Manson -- and then Vacaville. There, realizing he would be an old man by the time he was released, he decided to turn state's evidence. Although few of his intended betrayals did real damage, it was generally agreed that his volte-face -- greeted bitterly even by people who had long before lowered their expectations of Leary -- conclusively marked the end of the 60's. He dribbled away his remaining 20-odd years in a showbiz half-life: the lecture circuit, talk shows, unconsummated movie deals, parties. At the end, ill with cancer, he was adopted by young people who wheeled him to nightclubs and fed him drugs. He made posthumous headlines when a portion of his ashes was blasted into space aboard a collective hearse-rocket. The world needs scoundrels because they make good copy. Leary's life was so incident-filled that it would be difficult to make it sound dull. Still, Robert Greenfield, who has written books about the Rolling Stones and Jerry Garcia, does a particularly good job of being at once meticulous and brisk. In addition, the book provides a crash course in several aspects of 60's culture: its often gaseous rhetoric, its reliance on mahatmas and soothsayers, its endless bail-fund benefits and sometimes dubious appeals to conscience, its thriving population of informers, its contribution to the well-being of lawyers, its candyland expectations and obstinate denials of reality, its fatal avoidance of critical thinking, its squalid death by its own hand. That still leaves many meritorious elements largely outside Leary's sphere: civil rights, the antiwar movement, music and art, the impulse toward communitarianism, to name a few. In part because of Leary, however, ideals and delusions were encouraged to interbreed, their living progeny being avid consumerism and toothless dissent. |
Ralph Metztner on Robert Greenfield's hatchet-job biography
This is Metzner's response to Grenfield's 'hatchet job':
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Those interested in Leary will want to see this web site: http://www.leary.ru |
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