Their luck didn’t improve when they flew back to the USA. Their LSD was in a mouthwash bottle in Alpert’s luggage, and he saw his bag fall to the ground whilst being loaded into the cargo hold. The bottle was smashed, and the drug soaked into his white linen suit. Obtaining new supplies of LSD was difficult now that it was regulated by the FDA, so for the next few months they were reduced to nibbling the suit when they wanted to trip.11
Fortunately, their luck improved considerably once they returned. They found the base that they had been searching for.
The house at Millbrook was a 64-room Gothic mansion in Duchess County, New York, about 80 miles north of Manhattan. The grounds covered 2500 acres across landscape where Rip Van Winkle, the stories said, had once encountered the Dutch elves. There were orchards, hills, pine forests, a waterfall, a three-storey gatehouse and a separate bungalow. It was empty and deserted when Richard first saw it, exploring its labyrinth of rooms by candlelight, and despite it being an ‘exquisitely horrible house’, he knew that they had found their home.
The house had recently been bought by Billie and Tommy Hitchcock, two grandchildren of William Larimer Mellon, the founder of Gulf Oil. The Hitchcocks were young businessmen, and their trust funds alone give them an income of around $7 million a year each. Their sister Peggy had been a strong supporter of Tim’s since Harvard, and she arranged for Richard to introduce Billie to acid in order to convert him to the cause. Once enlightened, he agreed to allow Tim, Ralph, Richard and a fluctuating group of between 10 and 20 of their friends and families to set up a communal home at Millbrook for a nominal rent.
It was a fitting home for the history-shaping research that they intended to pursue. ‘Big houses with intricate floor plans figure prominently in the drama and fantasy life of individuals and races,’ wrote a Millbrook resident, Art Kleps. ‘One expects, quite reasonably, on the basis of experience, personal and vicarious, that if one is destined to perform noble deeds or to encounter great and mysterious figures, that such a setting will be provided. We do not expect history to be made in hovels.’12
And so began the story of the experimental commune at Millbrook. Their presence was at first cautiously welcomed by the local town people, for the new residents were friendly, kept up a respectable academic demeanour and spent a lot of money in the local liquor store. Initial concerns were minor. The estate ‘once employed several dozen gardeners’, one newspaper commented, ‘but has not been manicured lately’.13 Only slowly did stories about the lifestyle within start to circulate, and the realisation that the new ‘lords of the manor’ were dedicated to strange drugs, group sex and the most un-Christian interpretation of religion imaginable. It did not help matters that the grounds backed onto those of Bennett College, a private girls’ school.
The Millbrook estate was quickly declared ‘out of bounds’ for the pupils, who were informed that any visits could result in their expulsion. This, the president of the college declared, was just ‘a precautionary measure’.
Once installed at Millbrook, Tim adopted a public persona that was, for him, surprisingly cautious. Plans to open IF-IF centres across the country were shelved as legal access to LSD had become too difficult. Instead he focused on the religious dimension of the psychedelic experience, and explored ways to communicate this to people without the use of any psychedelic drug. ‘Chemicals are only one psychedelic method,’ he told Newsweek. ‘There are hundreds of others we can employ here—diet, fasting, dance, breathing exercises, sensory withdrawal, Zen, photography, archery’14 He announced that Millbrook would host a series of drugless consciousness-raising seminars each weekend. ‘The Beats come, they see a straight scene, and they go away,’ he claimed.
These drugless seminars were unusual events. Guests paid $60 a head for the weekend, and would find themselves meditating alone in empty rooms while cards containing written instructions were occasionally posted under the door. The guests had to dress in togas and eat meals together in total silence. A voice would intermittently read ‘bright sayings’ over a Tannoy system, or a gong would be hit. For the full-time residents of Millbrook, who gobbled endless LSD tablets and giggled away in the background, the whole thing was completely ludicrous.
Tim kept up the ‘drugless’ angle for at least the next three years, when he went out on the road and performed ‘Psychedelic Religious Celebrations’ in theatres across the country. These were multimedia events, an hour and a half in length, which attempted to create a sense of spiritual awareness in the audience through light shows, prayers and the stories of Christ and the Buddha.15
The irony of this drugless stance is that by the time Tim arrived at Millbrook it was already too late to stop the swelling interest in LSD that would erupt into the mainstream during 1967’s ‘Summer of Love’. His advocacy at Harvard and Zihuatanejo had gained enough publicity that the existence of LSD was now public knowledge. Curious people wanted to know more, so they started to investigate the subject themselves. The establishment of an underground drug infrastructure that would eventually produce enough LSD to supply an estimated seven million Americans was now under way. Tim could talk about meditation and yoga all he liked, but nothing would put this genie back into its bottle.
Life at Millbrook, of course, was about as far away from the pious earnestness of the ‘drugless’ consciousness work as it is possible to get. Tim, like the CIA before him, was interested in the effect LSD had on what was known as ‘imprinting’. This is the idea that not all behaviour is learnt through a long process of repetition. Instead, there are certain times when a behavioural trait is ‘imprinted’ in the psyche during one specific event. The classic demonstration of this is a famous experiment by the zoologist Konrad Lorenz in which ducklings were hatched, not in the presence of their mother, but in the presence of a tennis ball. The newborn birds then imprinted this ball as their mother image. From that point on the poor ducklings would blindly follow the ball around, even after their real mother had been introduced to them.
It was possible to use LSD to imprint new behaviours, as the CIA discovered in their experiments in brainwashing. Indeed, one of the dangers of LSD is that it is possible for a careless tripper to ‘imprint’ a ludicrous belief by accident. But what the CIA hadn’t understood, Leary believed, was that at the height of an acid trip it is possible to ‘rise above’ all the imprinted patterns. In that state you could see that your behaviour was not the result of free will but of conditioned, robot-like reflexes. This awareness was like a laboratory rat, which had spent its life running along the corridors in a maze, being suddenly lifted up by a scientist to a height where it can look down and for the first time comprehend the maze it had lived in. LSD would allow the duckling in the experiment, for example, to become aware of his automatic response to the tennis ball and understand why it was acting in that way. It was this awareness that interested Tim, for it allowed an individual to work through previously destructive habits and become, he felt, truly free.
Tim’s research was now focusing on eradicating previous mental conditioning. The idea was that an individual could use LSD to replace a specific, unwanted personality trait with an imprint of new, less destructive behaviour. The ability to ‘reprogram’ yourself like this, Tim claimed, was perfectly natural. It was simply the next, unavoidable evolutionary step. Not everyone was convinced by this argument, however, as attempting to improve upon millions of years of evolution by taking conscious responsibility for the way your brain operated seemed arrogant and dangerous. Fortunately, this debate was mostly academic, for it was soon realised that permanently eradicating behaviour was extremely difficult. The problem was that the awareness granted