'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.