Transcript

Steve Paulson: Hey, it's Steve, and this is Luminous, a podcast about the science and culture of psychedelics from To the Best of Our Knowledge. One of the reasons I love doing this podcast is that I discover people I'd never heard of before, fascinating characters who've hovered around the edges of psychedelic history. Rosemary Woodruff Leary is one of those people. She was Timothy Leary's partner during the late 1960s when the counterculture really took off. And Rosemary helped create Leary's public persona as the high priest of the psychedelic movement.

Now I should say, this is tricky territory to focus on a woman who's known because of the man she was with. I talk about this with Rosemary's biographer, Susannah Cahalan. But Rosemary made her own mark. As Susannah says, her art was to elevate the world. This is also just a rollicking good story. I mean, what Rosemary and Timothy did together, not just to help launch the modern psychedelic movement, she also breaks him out of prison with the help of the Weather Underground, the radical anti-war group of the late 60s. And then they go on the run, end up in Algeria under the protection of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. But spoiler alert, this does not go well. Then Rosemary breaks up with Leary. For all his charisma, he's a total narcissist. And because she is still facing drug charges, she ends up working anonymously as an innkeeper on Cape Cod for two decades. This woman who'd been at the white-hot center of the psychedelic movement, and she goes completely off the radar.

Susannah Cahalan tells this story with great gusto in her book, "The Acid Queen, The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary." I love this book, and I really enjoy talking with Susannah. I think you will, too.

Steve Paulson: So there's been a lot written about modern psychedelic history. Timothy Leary always plays a central role in this story. You call him the “high priest of acid,” which seems pretty accurate. And his wife, Rosemary, was also a pivotal figure in this history, but she was usually just a footnote in these books. And you have now restored her to her rightful place. So how would you describe her role in the sort of psychedelic flowering of the 1960s?

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah, you know, she was a behind-the-scenes character, obviously, a person who was kind of always on the edge of a shot, let's say. But she was a very important figure in creating the mythology that became Timothy Leary. And so you kind of can't talk about Rosemary Leary without talking about Timothy Leary. She was someone who helped him write his speeches and create his look. Literally, she sewed his clothing. So the way that we understand Timothy Leary, which is so, he's so baked in centrally to our understanding of psychedelic history. Well, that wouldn't be the same without her. She was a key figure in the creation of a key figure.

Steve Paulson: You describe her as the perfect hippie.

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah. And she wasn't even a baby boomer.

Steve Paulson: And she was a little older, though. I mean, by the time she met him, she was 30, right?

Susannah Cahalan: Yes, exactly. So she was a part of the silent generation, but she represented especially the kind of feminine, the divine feminine, that ideal of the flower woman, this kind of sensual, warm, creatively fertile — a muse — but also a little bit regressive too in terms of upholding a lot of the gender norms of the time. She both represents this renegade spirit of a hippie woman, but also a little bit of the regressive side of that as well.

Steve Paulson: Well, I want to come back to her story, but first of all, I just want to talk about the fact that you wrote this biography, because I know you got some flack about doing a whole biography about Rosemary, right? I mean, the question was, is she worth a biography of her own?

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah, and I think you're talking specifically about a New York Times review that I had that kind of did question [the idea of a whole biography about Rosemary]. I was personally shocked because I thought this woman is so, in my mind, so deserving. The six decades that she lived were filled with so much tumult, passion, experiences of all kinds. I mean, she lived many lives. So to me, she was a perfect biographical subject.

Steve Paulson: However, she is not the typical biographical subject. In this day and age of writing about women who were basically known because of the men they were with, I mean, that's just a very fraught subject.

Susannah Cahalan: Extremely fraught. And one that I found both intimidating in a way, but also very exciting. Because I think once you kind of shift your perspective on someone who is marginalized during her time, you take in new data and information about that time. So to me, it wasn't just a story about Rosemary, though. Of course, very much deserving of her own story and fascinating cinematic story. But it was also a way to look at that time through a different lens. And, you know, in my opinion, tell a different story about a time we think we know, but I think there are still so many unknowns and shadows about that time.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. So let's talk about Rosemary Woodruff. So she grew up in this very conventional family in St. Louis, dropped out of high school early, seemed to kind of have this craving for a more adventurous life. And she ended up hanging out with a bohemian crowd, right?

Susannah Cahalan: Yes. Long before she met Timothy Leary, she was already involved with the beatniks, the jazz scene. And, you know, it's interesting because even before that, at age seven, she had a mystical experience. She had one just kind of spontaneously while walking down the street. So this is a woman who was drawn to the ineffable, drawn to the mysteries of life. And that led her initially to the beatniks. And she married a jazz accordionist, which was something I didn't know existed. I don't know, did you know that jazz accordion existed?

Steve Paulson: Barely, yes.

Susannah Cahalan: This was news to me. But, you know, through him, he was a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands, a very kind of rough guy around the edges, but hung out with Stan Getz and Miles Davis and the whole amazing group of jazz musicians there. And then also was kind of rubbing shoulders with the people of the beats, like Jack Kerouac was someone who was around during that time. And she was able to keep up with these kinds of figures, some of them, these alcoholics, these grifters, these writers, these jazz musicians. I interviewed someone named David Amram, who you might be familiar with. He was a musician, composer. He actually composed [the score for] "The Manchurian Candidate." And he remembered Rosemary, I mean, with such clarity. He's met everyone. He's met everyone.

Steve Paulson: So she stood out.

Susannah Cahalan: She stood out even then. I loved his quote. He said that "her art was to elevate the world."

Steve Paulson: Oh, that's great.

Susannah Cahalan: Isn't it? And again, it's a strange subject for a biographer because she wasn't a writer, musician, dancer, singer. "Her art was to elevate the world."

Steve Paulson: Yeah. Oh, that's perfect. And frankly, we need more people like that.

Susannah Cahalan: I agree completely, wholeheartedly.

Steve Paulson: Rosemary, by the time she was 21, she had been married and divorced twice.

Susannah Cahalan: Yes, which was unusual at that time, to be married and divorced once.

Steve Paulson: Incredible. By the age of 21. So how did she meet Timothy Leary?

Susannah Cahalan: Well, at the time, she had already been dabbling in psychedelics. They had kind of, as the beatniks were starting their initial evolution into the hippies, she was in that moment. And she had her first psychedelic experience with LSD and found it shattering in a very profound way. And she just started to surround herself with these, she called them acid gypsies. And one of them was a very abusive, unfortunately, abusive jazz musician who she had gotten involved with. And she was dating him. His name was Alan Eger. But she was attending the kind of literary events of the time and happened to go to a gallery opening where Timothy Leary was. They both write about this first encounter in very—they spoke in these ways about each other, very mythological. You know, there was like a sense of inevitability and fate about their union. And he describes—or she was wearing a button-down, a men's button-down tied at the waist with these tight bell-bottom jeans and canvas sneakers— And he immediately just went gaga. And he said that if she was a, I think this was something that he would say later, but he said if the feds knew his taste in women and she was an undercover kind of narc, they had nailed it. And she was also carrying Wittgenstein, the philosopher. So, I mean, she was out for it too. You know, they both were very much. So this was 1965.

Steve Paulson: And just to put this in historical context, I mean, by then, Timothy Leary had been kicked out of Harvard. He'd been a psychology professor there, given LSD to students, which didn't go very well. So he and Richard Alpert, later Ram Dass, were kicked out. And so he sort of was becoming known for talking about the virtues of psychedelics at that time.

Susannah Cahalan: Absolutely. He and Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner had released "The Psychedelic Experience," which became the manual for tripping. Even if you hadn't read it directly, indirectly, most people's experiences with LSD are shaped by that manual. I mean, continually today. The Beatles were inspired by that book. You know, "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream" was from the psychedelic experience. So that was out. And at the time, Timothy Leary started to become, out of the three, really the person who you could rely on for a great soundbite and a great interview. He was charming and funny and charismatic. And so he was starting to emerge as the face of the movement, though he hadn't yet fully... transformed himself into that white linen, open button, barefoot persona that would come later with Rosemary.

Steve Paulson: Right, right. So Rosemary and Tim met at this art gallery and then he invited her out to Millbrook, right?

Susannah Cahalan: Yes, exactly.

Steve Paulson: Explain what Millbrook was.

Susannah Cahalan: Millbrook is this amazing, it's the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, New York. It's 200 acres. It's old money, real estate. There's a main beautiful Queen Anne Victorian called the Big House, but that's just one of about 11 structures on the property. There's a gold-plated ceiling bungalow. There's a tennis court. There's a bowling alley, Olympic-sized swimming pool. I mean, it's amazing, and in fact, it's currently on the market right now for $65 million.

Steve Paulson: Wow.

Susannah Cahalan: Of course, yes. But at the time, it was owned, and it still is owned by the Hitchcock family. They are old oil money. And Peggy Hitchcock, whose brothers owned the property, had a relationship with Leary, was very much a part of this countercultural movement. She was in the jazz scene. She was supplying money to people and causes that she respected. And one of those causes was psychedelics. And she arranged for Timothy Leary and company from Harvard to relocate there for a dollar a year. I described it, I think, a bit as like an acid experimental commune. It blended some of the psychological research going on in Harvard with some of the Eastern religious practices that started to become part of the psychedelic experience.

Steve Paulson: So Hinduism, Buddhism, it sort of all got folded in.

Susannah Cahalan: Exactly. All folded in, in a kind of mishmash of a little bit of a New Age self-improvement side of it. Then you have some of the Eastern religious practices, and then you have Timothy Leary's brand of kind of psychological experimentation. And it's all going on at this estate where their intention is to take psychedelics regularly. And eventually they incorporated it as a religion. But to take "the sacrament," as they called it, regularly in order not only to change their own psyches themselves, their consciousness, expand their consciousness, but actually to change the world. That was the goal. Vegetarianism, communal child rearing. You know, they tried to mess with hierarchies and relationships. Initially, there was a lot of idealism that you would see in kind of a utopian vision of what the world could be.

Steve Paulson: So Timothy invited Rosemary out there and it sounded like it was immediately this very intense, highly sexual relationship.

Susannah Cahalan: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, the first night that she stayed there with Timothy, they actually didn't have sex and they didn't do drugs, which was like Timothy Leary, obviously always, you know, subverting expectations, but they did a lot of that following their first night. There was making love by a waterfall. There was a lot of yoga, a lot of LSD. And she became a little bit of his kind of Pygmalion. She had already had her own experiences, obviously, but she really did learn about philosophy and psychedelics. She was reading books — about the tarot, she was throwing the I Ching. She was surrounding herself with a lot of Buddhism and Hinduism. And they were reading aloud to each other. I mean, it sounds, it's very of its time, but also was very magical. She described herself as kind of Eve before the apple.

Steve Paulson: What did she make of psychedelics herself? I mean, we kind of know this from Tim Leary's perspective. He wrote a lot about it, talked a lot about it. How do you think that figured into her life?

Susannah Cahalan: You know, it's a harder thing to parse out because she didn't write explicitly, even in her own writings that I have and had access to her deep thoughts or her diaries. It was never explicitly, as explicitly stated as it has been with Timothy. So it was more through the edges of how she lived her life and certain conversations that she had that I can glean this. But she really did, you know, from that time when she was seven, she had this sense that she was connected to an electrical grid. That's how she described it, that they were, everyone was connected. Yeah. And I think for Rosemary, psychedelics not only kind of expanded this consciousness, made her aware of another realm, another part of life that isn't initially apparent to us in a kind of very materialist viewpoint, this other layer of life, there's that, which is very exciting. But I think she also was very drawn to the sense of community. And I think that psychedelics made her feel connected, not only to something greater, but to her fellow humans.

Steve Paulson: So you make the case that when Rosemary entered this scene, when she and Timothy connected, this was sort of the birth of Timothy Leary, the mythical figure, the larger than life public face of the psychedelic movement. What was Rosemary's place in all of that? Why was she such a pivotal figure?

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways it's direct, in some ways very subtle. So in the direct ways, she edited and helped write parts of what I believe are some of his best works. "High Priest" is my favorite of his books and probably the best-selling book that he's written, "Politics of Ecstasy" and "High Priest," both of which she was involved in, were his best-selling books and his best in terms of critical response and my own feelings about it. And so there was that, and she was helping him hone an image. She sewed his clothes. You know, she actually made a costume for him.

Steve Paulson: So he had been sort of this, before that, kind of this conventional academic, right? And then he became something totally different.

Susannah Cahalan: Yes. you know, the tweeds and the leather elbows and the heart. I mean, he had the sneakers with it. So he was a little bit, you know, I'm a cool professor, but he hadn't quite narrowed into how he was going to present to a younger generation. We have to remember he was born in 1920. So he was significantly older than the baby boomers who were following in his stead. He was the kind of father of the movement. And Rosemary was the connective tissue, I think, between the father and the children. She was in between. And she gave him a sense of hipness, authenticity in a way. She was obviously very beautiful, but she was also plugged in. She knew what was cool. She knew what the kids were thinking. She had a lot of life experience. She had lived in poverty. She had lived in New York. She had worked as a stewardess and a model. I mean, she had really done a lot more than Leary, who had been largely an academic or psychologist his whole life. And so she gave him a sense of that. And I think he wouldn't have connected to the younger generation in that way that he did without her there.

Steve Paulson: Especially at a place like Millbrook, I mean, a community where people are living and gathering, you need the people who have that kind of emotional literacy, who can bring people together and who are liked. And it sounded like everyone liked Rosemary.

Susannah Cahalan: Absolutely. I mean, Timothy Leary had that star quality of bringing people together on a grand scale. Rosemary had the intimacy of a smaller gathering and making them feel grounded and comfortable and warm and safe. Timothy did not have that gift. She did. He could do it on the large scale. She could do it on the smaller scale.

Steve Paulson: So he then took off. Timothy was obviously very charismatic. He loved the attention. He loved being famous. And he was, I think it's fair to say, he was a narcissist. Is that a fair label?

Susannah Cahalan: You know what? Yes. I think that's very fair. You could argue probably both of them have those traits. I mean, it's a narcissistic age. We all do. But Timothy took it to another level of narcissism.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. And he was not above using people around him. He was very charming. I mean, people wanted to be around him, but it could go bad. And he had a cruel streak as well. I mean, especially as he became more famous, as he started going out around the country, he was giving talks everywhere, interviews. I mean, he became sort of the face of the psychedelic movement. Once that started happening, how did that play out for Rosemary?

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah, I mean, there's a wonderful line by John Updike that "fame is a mask that eats into the face." And Timothy's mask of fame, I mean, it became, I think, the most important thing in his life. Rosemary realized that and through a good bulk of that, I mean, real extreme anger fame into notoriety. She stuck by him and she loved him anyway. But you're right. I mean, he was a difficult person. It was a friend of his who said that he could love in a kind of wide way, but when he had a hard time with loving someone one-to-one, right? And Rosemary was his right-hand woman. And she definitely took the brunt of a lot of his cruelty. You know, at various points, he was someone who relied on her and then took her for granted. And it was a cycle of that for a good deal of time before they actually got married. And that kind of shifted. But in that period between when his fame was really taking off, I think he was at his most reprehensible to her.

Steve Paulson: Now to complicate matters, he had a couple of kids from a previous marriage. One of them, Susan, was living at Millbrook, right? And really came to resent Rosemary because Rosemary was this presence beside her father. And it seemed like that was an important piece of this story.

Susannah Cahalan: It was. Susan's story was something that was very difficult to write because it was a very tragic story. But Susan had gone through quite a lot. Susan and Jack, his children, lost their mother to suicide when they were very young. And that kind of shifted their whole lives, Timothy's life. And when he moved off to Harvard, all of a sudden he's in a whole— kind of new group of people doing psychedelic drugs in his house with them. It was a difficult childhood. And the little attention and love that she did receive from her father would oftentimes be overshadowed by the women that he would take into his life. And so when Rosemary became the new woman, I mean, he had been married three times before, so she had been through it. But Rosemary stuck around in a way that I think bothered Susan. And there were various points where Rosemary had to act as a mother figure to someone who wanted nothing to do with her. So there was a lot of animus, there was a lot of pain that went between them, but that was a relationship that really haunted Rosemary.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. And then just to finish that piece of the story, I mean, Susan, some years later, ended up committing suicide herself.

Susannah Cahalan: Yes. After shooting her husband in the head. Just a bizarre story. One that isn't told very often, but her life now, you know, you don't know what causes these things, but we can say that her life was not made better by the use of psychedelics.

Steve Paulson: Yeah.

Susannah Cahalan: She's an extreme example of something that went terribly wrong. And she probably experienced traumas that we'll never really know. So in many ways, I thought it was important to tell that side of the story that is very, very rarely told when talking about Timothy. But it was, you know, it was Susan that really kind of made Rosemary a mom because Rosemary did consider herself, you know, to fill in that role for her as much as she possibly could and was allowed to.

Steve Paulson: So we've been talking about the flowering of the psychedelic culture in the mid-60s going into the late 1960s. Timothy Leary was very much at the center of that. I mean, he was at festivals with tens of thousands of people, hanging out with lots of famous people and all of this. And then there was a backlash against all of this. And you describe it as a national panic. And there were then cases of people jumping out windows, tripping on acid. And the FBI stepped in and started cracking down and this became a whole, well, there's sort of the legal story and then there's the change in the culture. What do you think changed?

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah, you know, I think there were these stories. They did happen, whether they were caused by the psychedelic use or just associated correlation or causation, we don't know. But there were stories of people who jumped out of windows, that did happen. In fact, Timothy Leary said something about that being a risk. So he says something very kind of offhandedly "just don't go high up on the floors when you're tripping on acid." But so there were those stories, but they were sensationalized by the media and they became the story as opposed to obviously a more nuanced look at this. And Leary didn't help it. You know, now there's been a kind of reexamination of this, of psychedelic history and the role Timothy Leary played in forcing and pushing these drugs into kind of schedule one category.

Steve Paulson: He's often blamed for this.

Susannah Cahalan: He's often blamed. I would say it's not as simple as that. But yes, he's definitely blamed because he became the face and he was irreverent and irresponsible and a proselytizer. And he did cause a lot of harm and a lot of harm, honestly, that Rosemary saw as well and did not like.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. They had a very complicated relationship, very problematic. I mean, she was pushed away at times. She kind of stuck with him a lot of the time. Then they had all kinds of legal problems too. Yes. They got busted for drug possession at the Mexican border. That led to later encounters with the law. Can you kind of give a brief summary of the legal history here with Timothy and Rosemary?

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah. So, I mean, the relationship troubles and the legal troubles are very much overlapping. So after that idyllic time in Millbrook and there she's Eve before the apple, it wasn't even five months really of that before they're arrested in Laredo for marijuana possession going into Mexico, which...

Steve Paulson: Going into Mexico.

Susannah Cahalan: Going into Mexico. Sometimes their behavior, they were very naive in many ways, oftentimes. And then you have, after that bust, things start to change for Timothy in Millbrook. That little hamlet in upstate New York is, you know, there are a lot of fancy estates, but also locals. And they didn't want their children going to the Hitchcock estates and engaging in who knows what and Allen Ginsberg in robes starts to show up and you have a woman in a fur coat wearing nothing underneath shopping downtown. So the town started to get very wary of Leary and company and raids started to happen. The cops were really after them there. And eventually that ends and Timothy and Rosemary relocate to California under the auspices of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a great name, basically a kind of hippie mafia type drug group that were also a religious organization centered around the use of psychedelics. And there they're arrested again in Laguna Beach. At that point, it's when Leary decides he's going to run for governor against Ronald Reagan of California. And it just was not, I mean, Rosemary was very upset. And the head of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, John Griggs, cried when he heard that he was doing that because they knew, oh, this was not going to be good. And so the long arm of the law was definitely a stranglehold around Rosemary and Timothy. And it was only a matter of time before they were going to be seeing some serious time behind bars.

Steve Paulson: Which then did happen eventually. And I lose track of which specific drug charges.

Susannah Cahalan: That part was one of the most complicated parts to parse out because they're facing, so Laguna, what happens is they get a conviction, but it's overruled. Basically it was a catch-22 law where part of their sentencing and conviction involved the fact that they didn't actually say that they had marijuana contraband so they could be taxed on it. But if you say you have marijuana, you'll be put in prison. So it didn't make sense. So it was a catch-22 law. They were able to get it overturned, faced a re-litigation of that and were convicted. Also, Laguna and each of them carried about a sentence of 10 years. So he was facing 20, 30 years in prison for these two unrelated drug charges.

Steve Paulson: My guest is Susannah Cahalan, the author of "The Acid Queen, The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary." You're listening to Luminous, a podcast about the science and culture of psychedelics. I'm Steve Paulson.

Steve Paulson: He was locked up then.

Susannah Cahalan: Oh, yeah.

Steve Paulson: And he had this really long sentence. And then I think at this point we get to the most astonishing part of the whole story.

Susannah Cahalan: It's wild.

Steve Paulson: Where she helps to break him out of prison with the aid of the Weather Underground, the radical anti-war group that did some bombings. It was crazy.

Susannah Cahalan: You couldn't make it up.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, you couldn't make it up. Yeah, absolutely. So how did she break him out of prison?

Susannah Cahalan: Yeah, it's wild. And, you know, it was so fun in the archive that I had. There were parts that were never seen before. Her brother gave me access to these letters that they had coded while they were planning the escape. So they had code names for the escape. And so I really got to piece it together through these love letters they sent back and forth. So basically what happened was it really comes down to a lawyer named Michael Kennedy, that kind of radical chic, as Tom Wolfe at the time described. He was the lefty lawyer. Everyone had him. Jane Fonda had him. Bernadine Dohrn from The Weather Underground had him. I mean, he was the guy. And he represented Timothy Leary. He also, as I said, represented Bernadine Dohrn in The Weather Underground. He also represented the Black Panthers and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. And so it was through Michael Kennedy, this linchpin, that they were able to come up with a plan for Timothy Leary to escape because their appeal was not looking good. And it looked like he was going to have to spend a decade or more behind bars for marijuana possession. So Rosemary became what she called the computer. She was the one who kept all the information. She facilitated between inside and outside. Timothy, at that point, was very paranoid and didn't trust many people. And so she was the one who he trusted. And so she brought together the Underground, who helped on the outside plan the escape. They had the getaway car. They had the places to stay underground. And then you had the money provided by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love to pay the Weather Underground. And then you had the Black Panthers, who offered Rosemary and Timothy asylum in Algeria, where they had set up an international headquarters.

Steve Paulson: So to actually escape, he climbed over a fence?

Susannah Cahalan: It's wild. I mean, again, this is his recollection of events, and I'm always circumspect, you know, and I'm always a little bit careful. But according to many sources, and Timothy Leary himself, he climbed a very high pole, 40-foot high pole, and climbed across barbed wire. He was in a very low security prison at that time. In fact, according to lore, which has been confirmed by Timothy Leary's biographer, Robert Greenfield, he was actually given one of the personality assessments he created before he started to get into psychedelics called the Leary Circle. Since he knew it, he knew how to game it. And he basically presented himself as a doddering kind of ineffectual non-threat. And so they sent him off to a kind of prison where you play golf all the time and, you know, a very easygoing minimum security prison. And he was able to free himself that way. And a weather underground car was waiting to usher him off by a Buddha statue. And these details are just so good. And he was ushered off into a series of safe havens and eventually made it to Seattle where Rosemary was waiting for him with his favorite bottle of champagne and beer and smoked oysters. And she had made a makeshift car, kind of like an outdoor sauna using hot rocks and beautiful throws and pillows. That was very Rosemary.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. So they're on the run then. They have fake identity papers. They eventually got to Algeria, to North Africa, basically taking refuge with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. Again, you can't make this stuff up, but that proved to be very problematic.

Susannah Cahalan: It was not a happy cohabitation, I will say. And I think anyone could have seen that one coming. You know, Cleaver in particular was not a fan of psychedelics. He had had one very bad experience with psychedelics. They had an uneasy asylum in Algeria. He was escaping an attempted murder charge and had made his way to Algeria to form this international headquarters because there was no extradition treaty with the United States. But Algeria was just coming out of occupation, French occupation, and they were not friendly. They believed that drugs were a tool of occupiers, of the colonialists. So they were not a fan of drugs. In fact, they believed before Timothy Leary came, they thought he was an African-American psychiatrist. They did not realize that it was Timothy Leary, the high priest of acid, who was anything but that. And so Timothy and Rosemary were not, they didn't respect where they were. They were in a Muslim majority country. They would, at various points, disappear off into these beautiful desert hills and get naked and drop acid and really upset the locals. And Cleaver was not happy with that. Neither were the rest of the Black Panthers. Leary himself, he was very regressive in terms of racial politics. At one point, he called a porter, a “boy,” which was not great. And at that point, the FBI was infiltrating the Black Panthers. There was a lot of paranoia. Understandably, a good chunk of people in the Black Panthers were actually undercover narcs working for the FBI. So there was a lot of tumult. And Rosemary and Timothy went right directly in there. And later, Rosemary said, we had no right to be there, no right at all.

Steve Paulson: And there was a point where they were kind of held hostage, Rosemary and Timothy, right? By Eldridge Cleaver.

Susannah Cahalan: After a few more examples of misbehavior, including confiscating acid stuffed into a speaker or in a shaving lotion bottle, Cleaver had enough and he took them to a series of houses that were derelict and very scary. And apparently, according to where he got rid of people who he didn't like very much. And he kidnapped them and held them there, held them hostage there. It was only thanks to a reporter who came to cover Leary and Cleaver who found that they were not happy that they were actually kidnapped. And it was through him that Rosemary and Timothy eventually were freed and managed to escape their asylum with the Black Panthers and ended up in Switzerland into another horrible situation, just one after another.

Steve Paulson: There are lots of details here, but to sort of skip ahead a bit. So they go off to Switzerland. Things seem to be falling apart between Timothy and Rosemary at a certain point, right? And she decides she can't take this anymore. She has to leave. What happened there?

Susannah Cahalan: There was a combination of factors. You know, with the Black Panthers, Timothy was very dependent on Rosemary. And it was at his most needy, I would say, and vulnerable there. And in some ways, it was a position that Rosemary was in some ways attracted to. But she also saw what a fool he could be and how really embarrassed she was of him and how limited his mind was. At that time, she was trying to get pregnant. She was trying to get pregnant during the course of their relationship and found out that she had a congenital abnormality in her womb, basically a heart-shaped womb. It was going to be very hard for her to get pregnant, and she underwent all these fertility surgeries. And he got arrested again the night of their – they were trying to have a baby. And he was very dismissive about her pain around that and actually would say comments like,” if you wanted this enough, it would happen.” It was almost like this – if she was going to represent the ideal, the feminine ideal, that there was something wrong with her, something she wasn't doing right. And that was a key moment in terms of her decision to leave. I think that that struggle there, I mean, that to me is one of the cruelest things that he did to her. That was the moment when I think when she decided the combination of those factors really led to her decision to leave him.

Steve Paulson: And to leave him essentially for good. I mean, she had sort of always been coming back to him, but she really wanted a clean break.

Susannah Cahalan: Well, you know, at first, she had a younger lover named John Shule, who she left with. And she did believe she'd come back. She had this sense. She said, "I was mated to him." No matter what he was going to do, she was going to be there for him, which is in some ways so exasperating. And in some ways, I can't help but admire it a little bit. But I think it was an extremely abusive relationship. And It was time to leave for long before this time. But she thought she was going to come back. And then when she did, he had shacked up with a younger woman who was wearing her clothes, putting on her makeup and this young woman was actually saying that she was pregnant, which was really the end. And at that point, Rosemary left with John and they started many years on a long sojourn kind of around the world together.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, I mean, went to Sicily and then some years later, she ended up back in the US and she's still on the run. She still has drug charges against her. So she's living incognito And again, one of the most astonishing parts of this story, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around this, is she ends up in Provincetown in Cape Cod working as an innkeeper there. No one knows who she is. Maybe a couple of people did. I mean, she's living under this other name. And she lived this way for years. I mean, to put this in perspective, she had been so visible. She'd been at the cutting edge of the zeitgeist. And now she was completely anonymous working as an innkeeper in Provincetown.

Susannah Cahalan: Yes. For me, when I heard that part of the story, which had never been told before, that was when I knew this was a book, her time in Cape Cod. So she lived as Sarah Woodruff running an inn right at the edge of Provincetown. Very quiet, sober life. The owner of the inn where she worked, his son, described her as invisible. I mean, if you saw her during the height of her fame as the acid queen, she was anything but invisible. But all those years underground, she had learned how to be invisible. She had made herself invisible. And she lived that way for two decades. Two decades. It's amazing. Two decades.

Steve Paulson: What do you make of those years? That's the piece of the story that I don't know if it's tragic. I mean, certainly poignant. But yeah, what do you make of this?

Susannah Cahalan: I've come to think, talking about it, I've changed my decision. And in fact, this was so amazing. I did an event in Wellfleet in Cape Cod. And I asked if anyone knew her, Sarah Woodruff. And a man raised his hand. And he was a wonderful artist. And he had had a love affair with Rosemary. And I didn't know about it when I had written the book. So, you know, that time is still unveiling itself. But I think it was a moment she had no consistent male figure in terms of lover in her life. She had a friend, a very important male friend. No lover. She was on her own. She was, again, someone who really got a lot on her beauty. All of a sudden she was entering middle age. She started to, that was not the primary kind of takeaway. She said that she knitted herself together back on the Cape. And I think this is where she both became a little bit less shiny, a little bit less open in that way that was such a huge part of her personality. But she also became more substantial. I think that's where she found herself, her true self. So I think that there's a lot of poignance there. And I think there is tragedy there. But I also think there's resilience. I admire this version of her very much. And she was not doing psychedelics then. She had a glass of wine here and there, but she was largely sober at this point in her life, which is also a big shift.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. So she did have a kind of reunion with Timothy Leary near the end of his life. How did that happen?

Susannah Cahalan: What a wild, I mean, another thing that I really was at first befuddled by and a little bit annoyed at her, but also it's amazing. So basically what led to that was Susan's suicide.

Steve Paulson: Hmm.

Susannah Cahalan: When she learned about that, she was actually in San Francisco visiting her friend. At that point, she was comfortable enough to travel. She barely traveled for many years, but she was comfortable enough to stay at her friend's apartment. And she heard the news while she was in San Francisco and she reached out to Timothy. That's when she kind of broke the silence between them. And it took him a long time to return that call. But when they did, it was, they met in Golden Gate Park, you know, around the same place where he had said, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” you know, to the masses for the first time. It's interesting because in her archive, she doesn't write a lot during this blank period in between being with him and not being with him. And she said seeing him, she could see his walk, even though he was a lot older and sick at the time, he still had that jaunty walk that she could identify. And she saw him and she said that her world went technicolor again. And she was right back into his orbit.

Steve Paulson: So he still had it. He still had that charisma.

Susannah Cahalan: He still had it. And I think they had it together. You know, he wanted her back in as well.

Steve Paulson: Yeah.

Susannah Cahalan: But they only had a few years. And he did right by her. In the end, he helped her come back above ground, which was something that needed to happen. And he helped facilitate. I think, you know, she learned to love him on her terms in a way that maybe couldn't have happened earlier.

Steve Paulson: So Rosemary herself ended up dying in 2002, I think, at the age of 66. I'm curious about your own experience of writing this book. I mean, as you were researching, digging through the archives, you started doing some of the stuff that Rosemary did, you know, practicing her style of Hatha yoga, throwing the I Ching yourself, sort of entering her world in a way. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Susannah Cahalan: I've never done that before. In my two prior books, I didn't have that sense of embodiment or association, that kind of personal intimacy with a subject. Rosemary was someone who I felt like I needed to try to get in her mind. So what I did was, as you said, I took on some of the things that were important to her. It made them part of my life. And what happened, it was very important to her, signs. symbols, synchronicities. She was led by that throughout her life. And as I started to try to embody her as much as I could, that started happening to me. So in the beginning of the project, it was in her archive and considering taking this on in some kind of form. I went to a clothing store and saw this amazing dress covered in poppies and found out later that that dress was inspired by - it was part of a collection inspired by Rosemary Woodruff Leary.

I walked down the street and I found this card just on the street, pristine, waiting for me and it was an owl with mushrooms coming out of its head. Which, I mean, that seems like a sign in and of itself. But later I would learn that during this Cape Cod period of her life, she went from identifying with Aphrodite to identifying with Athena. And Athena often took the image of an owl. And I turned on the radio, the local radio in Cape Cod, and the DJ started talking about Timothy Leary right when I was leaving the Provincetown Inn where Rosemary worked. I mean, I don't know how it sounds, but I can tell you that was the experience. And it was incredible. I loved every second of working on this book and spending time with Rosemary. She's amazing. In some ways, exasperating and complicated. And sometimes you just want to shake her, but I love her. And it was such a pleasure and an honor getting to spend time with her.

Steve Paulson: Well, it's sort of like, if you want to think of the universe as operating at an energetic level, you were on her level, on Rosemary's. I mean, you sort of entered that sphere in some way. I mean, you could be skeptical about it and say, oh, these are just all coincidences. But I don't know. If you're open to that, if you engage with that, if you run with that, you can go there.

Susannah Cahalan: I have to tell you, it's a really nice place to go. And it's a world that, at least during the writing of this book, it was a world that I wanted to be in. I felt very connected in that way that she described, that way that was so important to her. Yeah, that was really meaningful to me. And I think it changed my life, really.

Steve Paulson: How so? How did it change you?

Susannah Cahalan: I think it made me more open. You know, I'm a very kind of fact-based, rational person. I have the other sides too, but I think that I feel like there's this other mystical side of things that I became more aware of while being in Rosemary's world. And it's been really rewarding to open a little bit of that door for myself. That has endured after writing.

Steve Paulson: That's, I think, a wonderful place to leave it. It's more than just a sense of mystery, but I mean, engaging with that mystical self, that world. Again, to be willing to go there.

Susannah Cahalan: Being less certain. She has a great line, and I just love it so much, talking about what psychedelics have left, what she's been left with after her 200 LSD trips. And she said, like, basically it's a subtle thing and it's taking in beauty in a different way and appreciating the beauty of the world. That's part of it. But part of it is that she believes in everything and nothing, but it leaves her in a comfortable place. I think that's really interesting. There's a lot of humility there. And I love that. That to me sounds like a place I'd like to be too.

Steve Paulson: Oh, that's just so wonderful. Thank you so much for talking about all of this.

Susannah Cahalan: Thank you so much for, you know, engaging with the book on this level. And I'm just so pleased that you enjoyed spending time with Rosemary because she's worthy of it. I really feel this strong sense of like, I want people to know about her. She didn't get her due, and I want her to.

Steve Paulson: And you've given that to her. Yeah, thank you.

Susannah Cahalan: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.

Steve Paulson: That's Susannah Cahalan, the author of "The Acid Queen, The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary." You're listening to Luminous, a podcast about psychedelics from To the Best of Our Knowledge. You'll find more interviews on the science and culture of psychedelics on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the podcast feed where you will meet a lot of fascinating people, including a neuroscientist who's given MDMA to octopuses, and a scholar of ancient languages who spent a dozen years investigating the mystery of what really happened at the Temple of Eleusis and how this might have shaped the origins of Christianity. Luminous is produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Sarah Hopefl did the sound design for this episode. Angelo Bautista is our digital producer. And I'm Steve Paulson. Thanks for listening.