TIMOTHY LIAR - A BIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIMOTHY LEARY: A Biography | By ROBERT GREENFIELD | Harcourt | 689
pages | $28 hardcover