In January 1959 Tim became ill. He was staying in an apartment that had been tunnelled out of the rock in Calle San Miguel, in the south of Spain, where water ran down the bare rock walls and the beds were always damp. His scalp began to burn and his face began to swell. Water blisters formed on his cheeks. ‘Tim’s head was almost double in size,’ his son recalled later, ‘completely swollen up, incredible! He couldn’t see; his eyes were completely shut!’13 The Spanish doctors were unable to diagnose exactly what was wrong with him, for they had never seen anything like it before. The swelling and blisters began to spread to his body. Jack and Susan were sent to stay with a nearby American family, and Tim checked into a warm hotel. The mysterious disease spread to his hands and feet. He could barely walk and began to smell of decay.
The hotel did not permit guests to have pets, so he had had to smuggle Jack’s puppy into his room. The dog was also sick, and soon left a river of slimy yellow diarrhoea across the floor. Tim knew that he would be evicted from the hotel if the maid saw it, so he crawled to the bathroom, collected the toilet paper and set about mopping up the mess. It took him the best part of an hour. Then he discovered that the toilet had broken, and he couldn’t flush the evidence away.
The window overlooked the yard at the back of the hotel, so he crawled over to it and threw the paper out. It landed on electrical cables below, fluttering like flags for all to see. The only way to reach it was to head out across the hallway, down the stairs and out into the back yard. Every step was agony. He used his umbrella as a cane but fell more than once. Somehow he climbed on top of a packing crate, where he frantically waved the umbrella, desperately trying to reach the paper that dripped above his head.
When he finally made it back to his room, hours later, he collapsed into his chair. The pain was great and he had no intention of ever moving again. As the hours passed and the day turned to night, Tim basically just gave up. As he would later write, ‘I died. I let go. I surrendered. I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home. My identity. The guilts. The wants. With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social life were gone.’ 14 And then there came an incredible feeling of liberation.
At some point in the depths of that night Tim felt something new growing in him. When the dawn came he found the swelling had gone from his hands. The disease was leaving him. But it was not just physical healing that occurred, because for the first time in his life Tim believed that he had experienced something spiritual. He felt that he had been reborn, and he suddenly had hope and confidence. He felt that he could move away from the life that he had led, and embrace whatever new life was about to arrive.
This new life was not long in coming. Tim heard that Professor David McClelland, the director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, was taking a sabbatical in Florence. Professor McClelland had read Interpersonal Diagnosis and the pair met for lunch. Leary explained his thoughts in The Existential Transaction. They echoed emerging theories from a number of American psychologists, and McClelland recognised that these radical theories seemed to offer a way forward for the field of psychology. Impressed, he offered Leary a job. Tim would be returning to Massachusetts. He was off to Harvard.
CHAPTER 3 But Don’t You Think He’s Just a Little Bit Square?
Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard at the tail end of 1959. It was a good time to draw a line under the past and focus on the future. The 1960s were about to begin.
His new position called for a new outfit, so he visited a Harvard Square tailor and emerged wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a button-down shirt. With his greying hair, horn-rimmed glasses and hearing aid, he looked every inch a stereotypical East Coast academic. The only clue to his rebellious instincts were the white tennis shoes that he wore everywhere. He moved into a nearby hotel and enrolled the children in yet another school.
He soon settled into life at the Harvard Center for Personality Research, and his classes made an immediate impact on the students. There was some suspicion among the more conservative members of the faculty about his ideas, but he was undeniably interesting and it was possible that he was on to something important. He made friends quickly and was soon part of a drinking group called the White Hand Drinking Society. Evenings were spent hanging out in Harvard Square bars, discussing work and generally putting the world to rights. The return to Massachusetts also brought him near to his childhood home, so he was able to spend more time rebuilding his relationship with his mother. She was horrified when she discovered that her grandchildren had never once attended mass, but at least Tim’s current position gave her cause for pride.
Tim got into the habit of returning to his small office on Divinity Avenue to read and drink wine late at night, after his children were asleep. In this relaxed atmosphere he began to attract visits from eager and curious graduate students. Tim was always welcoming and willing to give time to their questions and concerns. It was during this time that he met Assistant Professor Richard Alpert, a man also prone to late-night hours. Alpert was 10 years younger than Leary, and was shorter with a fuller build and a round, friendly face. Like Leary, he was ambitious, a trait inherited from his extremely wealthy family. His father was a noted Massachusetts lawyer who had previously been president of the New Haven Railroad, and Richard had grown up in an atmosphere of money and success. He was a warm, fast-talking, eminently likeable psychologist who was a big hit with Tim’s children. When Tim decided to spend the summer vacation in Mexico, Richard agreed to join him. Their respective methods of journeying south said much about their different personalities. Tim was planning to make the journey in an old Ford that he had just bought, a plan that struck those who had seen the car as being both dangerous and extraordinarily optimistic. Richard tackled the journey with a little more style. He bought a small aeroplane and flew himself there.
That holiday took place in a Spanish-style villa at Cuernavaca. It was an idyllic environment, with a long veranda, terrace, swimming pool and a lush green lawn surrounded by ahuehuete trees and colourful flowering vines. Tim’s daughter Susan spent the summer with friends in Berkeley, but Tim and his son Jack were visited by many friends and colleagues, including Professor McClelland, Richard Alpert and an old friend and drinking buddy from graduate school in Berkeley, Frank Barron. Frank had been instrumental in setting up Tim’s meeting with Professor McClelland in Florence, which led to the offer of work at Harvard. Tim had returned the favour by recommending him for a similar position at Harvard soon after he had arrived.
When he visited Tim in Italy in 1959, Frank had been talking enthusiastically about some ‘magic mushrooms’ that he had obtained from a Mexican psychiatrist. Tim’s response to this was fairly standard for a psychologist in the 1950s. He was disconcerted and a little embarrassed when his previously rational friend suddenly began raving about mystical states and visions, and he warned him that he was in danger of losing his scientific credibility if he ‘babbled this way’ publicly.1
The idea of magic mushrooms had become known to mainstream society only a couple of years earlier, following an article by R. Gordon Wasson in the May 1957 issue of Life magazine. Wasson, an ex-vice-president of J.P. Morgan and Company, the leading investment bank, had the unlikely hobby of ethnomycology, the study of mushrooms in human society. Together with his wife Valentina, he had travelled the world investigating the importance of toadstools in tribal society. He had spent two years in Mexico investigating an intriguing report by anthropologists who, in 1936, witnessed a ‘sacred mushroom’ ceremony in a remote Mexican village. This report seemed to provide evidence that a mushroom cult, believed to date back 4000 years, was still in existence. This cult was centred on the ingestion of a mushroom called teonanacatl, or ‘God’s flesh’. These ceremonies had been driven underground following the arrival of the Catholic Church in Mexico. The cult had been dismissed as myth, and botanists had