‘The Acid Queen’ Reclaims the Life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary

Susannah Calahan understands how rudely history sweeps women the record; it disregards them as sidekicks or seductive muses who the world pressured into the obedient service of male manipulation.  Her fabulous new biography about the wife of Timothy Leary, The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, feels like her attempt to resurrect the life of one extraordinary woman who the world has already forgotten. Rosemary Woodruff Leary was an integral part of Leary’s road show and radical preachings almost from the get-go and brought her indelible energy and creativity to help turn the Harvard professor into a psychedelic high priest of sorts that was able to seduce the youth culture about the virtues of LSD as the cure-all for self-exploration and healing.

 Author Cahalan is only 39, but one senses had she lived through Leary’s times, she might have been drawn into his orbit.  She likes to draw outside the margins.  Perhaps this hunger sparked by her own near-death experience during her twenties with a mysterious brain disease that almost killed her.  A neurologist prescribed steroids to be administered to the right side of her brain, which he believed was inflamed. This cured her, almost by accident. She wrote about this trauma in her bestselling book Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness.

 In her work on Rosemary Woodruff Leary, she writes with empathy and insight, bringing along her modern woman’s perspective to the challenges Mrs. Leary faced. She tells us that even after a night of intense tripping at Leary’s compound, the men expected the women to clean up and get some sort of dinner on the table while the men lounged. They also expected her to set up the room for the next night’s festivities.  She ordered and arranged the flowers, set the lighting, tended to her visitor’s needs, and helped those in distress experiencing a bad trip.

Most readers will be familiar with the famous photograph of John and Yoko in a hotel room bed in flowing white robes protesting the Vietnam War.  You can see Rosemary in that picture beside the silver-haired handsome Timothy Leary who has placed himself strategically. However, Callahan observes that Rosemary appears “to exist outside the scene, commenting on it, an appropriate look for a woman who stood unnoticed on the edge of the world stage.”

 The world had only become aware of her presence when she was arrested with Leary at the Mexican border with drugs in the car. She married him in 1967 and became known as his love goddess, whose primary function was to nurture his greatness as he pursued his goal of turning the world on to the power of psychedelics, particularly LSD. Cahalan bristles at the public perception of Rosemary as little more than eye candy when her research has shown otherwise. She was a pivotal player in almost everything he did.

 The couple seemed convinced that the quest to find a higher lever of contentment was within their reach. They both seemed to have suffered from feeling of inner emptiness coupled with the desire to live a grand life. There was almost an electric energy between them as if they recognized a reflection of their own hunger in one another, and perhaps the possibility of some sort of transcendence.

Rosemary was the daughter of an amateur magician who performed card tricks at the local tavern in St. Louis every night.  He would bring young Rosemary along and she became part of his act which would always end with her tap dancing on the bar to the hoots and howls of the men below.  She learned early “how easy it was for men to fall in love with her.” Rosemary married young and divorced. She did so again, and the marriage also faltered landing her in Manhattan in 1953, where she flirted with the idea of modeling.

She read a lot and was drawn to the Beats. Like her Beat heroes, she often played loose with the truth when it came to the details of her personal biography, and justified her exaggerations by referring to Albert Camus’ writing that said “Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth?  And don’t all my stories, true of false, tend toward the same conclusion.”  Leary seemed to have similar talents when it came to distorting the truth to make himself appear larger than life, mysterious, and all-knowing. From the beginning, the couple played head games with each other, often marked by a litany of petty cruelties and deceptions that defied their sworn loyalty.

The electricity between the couple was obvious to those who saw them together.  Leary recalls her tight blue bottom jeans and was instantly smitten by her beauty and the book by Wittenberg poking out of her bag. A sense of the older man’s gracefulness seduced her. For the longest time, she held onto the illusion that he was a great man. Leary had a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He taught as a respected professor at Harvard until an experience with magic mushrooms in Mexico changed his perspective. He wrote, “I learned more about psychology in five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding fifteen years of doing research in psychology.”

Leary was soon on his way to becoming a superstar.  He released “The Psychedelic Experience.”  Television shows begged him to appear as a guest. The well-compensated lecture circuit beckoned. Rosemary noticed early on how much he loved adulation, “His mind did backflips, while the rest of the world watched and cheered him on. He had a kind of animal magnetism, a hot heat.”  When he spoke onstage, she would sit by his side, and in today’s parlance, one might suggest her serene and seductive presence empowered him as he spoke. She was part of his brand, an uncredited participant.

Rosemary initially took great pride in being his assistant. She had the courage to tell him things others wouldn’t dare to; she knew instinctively how to make him more effective with crowds. The celebrity magic that surrounded them enchanted her. Marshall McLuhan might be at their breakfast table.  The Beatles were calling in. Charlie Mingus would be playing piano in the living room. Allen Ginsberg and his coterie would drop by.Leary reveled in their attention.

 Cahalan explains to us, drawing on a wealth of sources that include interviews, diaries, archives, and unpublished sources, how things began to spin out of control. Leary began to ignore her and started having affairs he didn’t bother to conceal. Their turbocharged sex life began to wither. She couldn’t get pregnant and desperately wanted to. She began to see the serious flaws in his humanity. He was abusive to many, and he ignored his children. When he got in trouble with the law, he offered the police the names of others so they would go easy on him.  In short. Cahalan allows us to witness her realization of his toxic narcissism. Like so many spiritual gurus, he was always thinking about his own survival first.  She tried repeatedly to get away from him, but he kept manipulating her back into his circle, promising things would be different.

The acid backlash was beginning to grow. There were reports in 1968 of young people jumping to their deaths from windows high on LSD. Art Linklater, a genial talk show host, blamed the death of his 21-year-old daughter on Leary. Rosemary saw the carnage and tried to get her husband to at least speak out against the war in Vietnam and he refused. Abbie Hoffman was furious, telling him “Your peace-and-love bullshit is leading youth down the garden of fascism. You’re creating a group of blissed out pansies for annihilation.”  Another writer whom Cahalan doesn’t identify wrote about Leary that he was like a “well-fed Brahmin who lectures his starving children on the karmic values of hunger while stuffing down a ten-course dinner.”

One of the most riveting passages details how Leary escaped from prison with Rosemary’s assistance.  It follows the couple from safe house to safe house. The Learys stayed for a while with Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers in Algeria and the two men were soon at each other’s throats.  Cleaver tried to get Leary to embrace his revolutionary thinking, but Leary thought only of Leary.  Hunger, poverty, and world injustice would have to wait.

Rosemary began to question the “banality of her husband’s mind.” LSD was his stated conclusion to everything, and this didn’t make sense to her anymore. She left and took up with a new man who didn’t have any children and treated her kindly.  He was interested in Buddhism, yoga, and other spiritual practices like she was. She felt safe with him. But when she read about Leary’s daughter’s suicide, she contacted him, and they briefly reunited, only for her to leave again.

She started to think about how she could regain her identity after living in hiding for almost a quarter of a century since helping Leary break out of prison. She contacted lawyers and managed to secure her freedom and emerge from the shadows.  The book she had been writing in bits and pieces during all her years underground finally coalesced, and with the help of David Phillips she published it as Psychedelic Refugee: The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run.

 When Calahan came across Rosemary’s book accidentally, she had just given birth to twins and was feeling vulnerable and at the same time immersed in the bliss of new motherhood, feeling a sense of interconnectedness with Rosemary’s odyssey she couldn’t quite put her finger on. But she knew she had to pursue it.  The result is this extraordinary work that looks back at the counterculture revolution and its obsession with psychedelics as the path to a higher enlightenment. What were they looking to find? What did it feel like to be part of a movement that felt like they were changing the world?  Where are they now? Something tells me that the author has channelled some of the enormous energy of those heady times into her overflowing heart.