Mary's Mosaic (41 page)

In the early 1960s, the world was fighting a war, albeit a Cold War, fraught with tensions that were constantly on the verge of escalating. Watching this unfold, Mary had a “catbird seat” as Cord’s wife. Perhaps through her own experience, psychedelic exploration had predisposed her to Allen Ginsberg’s vision. In any case, Timothy Leary portrayed Mary as a woman in possession of considerable feminine power, someone who had undergone her own personal transformation who now wanted to become an acolyte for world peace, intent on laying the groundwork for such a mission. Yet no one else has ever gone public to substantiate Leary’s claims about Mary’s mission, nor publicly verified the existence of any “LSD cell group” that she was supposedly working with. There is, however, one caveat to this dilemma that will be discussed shortly.

In addition, some of Leary’s critics (and there are many) even doubt that he actually had any contact with Mary Meyer at all. The majority of these critics believe he shamelessly exploited the story of Mary Pinchot Meyer, and engineered
it for publicity for
Flashbacks
. In particular, the thrust of this criticism has been that if Leary had a relationship with Mary that began in 1962, why did he wait until 1983, some twenty years after the fact, to write about it? After all, Timothy Leary was a prolific author. Two of his major books from mainstream publishers,
High Priest
and
The Politics of Ecstasy
, both published in 1968—four years after Mary Meyer had been murdered—contain no mention of her.

However, it appeared that Leary did make an initial attempt to investigate Mary’s murder in late May of 1965 when he returned from his around-the-world honeymoon with his new wife. He told Leo Damore, and stated in
Flashbacks
, that he had finally called Vassar College in 1965 to find out Mary’s current whereabouts, only to discover she’d been murdered the previous fall. It was only at this juncture that Leary learned Mary had been married to Cord Meyer. In
Flashbacks
, Leary recorded that he broke down and sobbed at the time; he recounted the event to Damore in 1990.
¹¹
Enlisting the support of his friends Van Wolfe and Michael Hollingshead, Leary planned to do his own investigation and write a book about it. According to Van Wolfe, someone in “police intelligence in Washington” had told him Mary’s murder had been an assassination. The Leary-Wolfe plan was to “dig up the facts,” but Wolfe’s attorney warned him “nobody wanted this incident investigated,” that it was too dangerous to pursue.
¹²

Another unanswered question still lingered: If Timothy Leary had returned from his around-the-world travels to Millbrook, New York, in the early summer of 1965, why hadn’t he followed Mary’s murder trial, particularly after having been so shocked and upset over her murder?

In an in-depth, nearly two-hour recorded interview in 1990, never before published, Leary told Damore that he did, in fact, know the trial was about to begin that summer, but that he had been blindsided by the emotional intensity of the breakup of his new marriage, as well as the crumbling of his Millbrook community, which included an onslaught of intimidation by local police. The campaign of police surveillance and interference had started just after Leary’s return, right before Ray Crump’s trial for the murder of Mary Meyer. After nearly a full year of harassment, the final hammer came down in March 1966, when G. Gordon Liddy, who had been attached to J. Edgar Hoover’s elite personal staff at FBI headquarters (and who would eventually become notorious as one of the Watergate break-in artists in 1972), raided Leary’s Millbrook compound.

“Had this been planned deliberately to keep you away from Mary’s murder trial?” Leo Damore asked Leary in 1990.

Prompted by Damore’s query, Leary entertained the possibility that the harassment might well have been deliberately timed to coincide with Mary’s murder trial. There had been an uptick in harassment and surveillance activity at Millbrook, said Leary, all through that summer and fall. Not wanting to stay for the winter, Tim and his new lady friend, Rosemary Woodruff, took off for the Yucatán in Mexico, only to be arrested at the Laredo, Texas, border crossing for “smuggling marijuana.” Rosemary Woodruff would famously remark: “Have you ever been in the situation where you feel all the gears shift, when everything changes? Poignant doesn’t begin to express it. I think Tim knew as well. Something like this had been waiting in the wings for a long time.”
¹³

Media headlines all across the country would herald the Leary arrest. The backlash against him, and all recreational drugs, had begun. In spite of doing all he could to publicize and garner support for his trial, he was convicted on March 11, 1966, and sentenced to thirty years in jail and a $20,000 fine. The judge would eventually dismiss all the charges because of a failure to advise Leary and his family of their Miranda rights. But Leary was jailed again in 1969 on other drug charges, and then fled the country in 1970 and lived in exile for nearly three years. Finally captured in Afghanistan and extradited back to the United States, Timothy Leary would remain in the California prison system until April 1976.
¹⁴
For more than ten years, Timothy Leary would be under siege, fighting for his life.

Upon his release from prison in 1976, having read the
National Enquirer
exposé about Mary’s affair with Jack published earlier that year, Leary would attempt a second investigation of Mary’s murder after coming across a copy of Deborah Davis’s book
Katharine the Great
at the home of his friends Jon and Carolyn Bradshaw.
¹⁵
The Davis book revealed more details about who Mary Meyer had been, including her marriage to the CIA’s Cord Meyer, as well as her affair with the president. So incensed had Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham become over the book’s publication—purportedly because it accused Bradlee of having CIA connections—the two pressured publisher William Jovanovich of publishing giant Harcourt Brace Jovanovich to recall and shred the book.
¹⁶

Leary would eventually oversee a further effort by
Rebel
magazine in the early 1980s to investigate Mary’s murder. He produced for Leo Damore several lengthy letters/reports from a private investigator by the name of William Triplett, whom he and
Rebel
had hired to do investigative work. Damore further confirmed the authenticity of Triplett’s investigation and association with Leary in early 1991.
¹⁷

While Timothy Leary’s biographer, Robert Greenfield, lamented that Leary’s book
Flashbacks
wasn’t entirely accurate, he persisted in quoting many of the events in the book to support his portrait of Leary as a narcissistic miscreant. Greenfield did, however, verify in an interview for this book that Tim Leary knew Mary Meyer, and “probably did supply her with psychedelics.” Moreover, Mary was using her maiden name when she began their association. He wasn’t aware, perhaps intentionally so on Mary’s part, that she had been married to CIA operative Cord Meyer, with whom Leary himself had had a number of combative encounters when he was part of the American Veterans Committee (AVC) during his graduate student days at the University of California at Berkeley.
¹⁸

“Tim didn’t like Cord Meyer,” said Greenfield. “His secretary in Berkeley confirmed that for me, as well as his relationship with Mary. My sense was that this [Leary’s relationship with Mary Meyer] did happen. If she came to him at Harvard, that’s the period where he was out to turn on the world and the aristocracy—people like Robert Lowell, Barney Rosset, Charles Mingus, Theolonius Monk, and Maynard and Flo Ferguson. At Millbrook, Tim still had the patina of respectability. He looked straight. He was an ex Harvard professor. It was the early sixties, pre-psychedelic. Based on all the research I did, it seems entirely likely to me Tim would have met with somebody like this, only Tim would have not made the association, given that Mary was only identifying herself as Mary Pinchot.”
¹⁹

A
s authoritative and well-researched as Robert Greenfield’s 2006 biography of Timothy Leary had been, Greenfield didn’t have access to the important two-hour tape-recorded interview of Leary with the late author Leo Damore in November 1990. The Leary-Damore interview focused almost entirely on Leary’s relationship with Mary and the events surrounding her death, in addition to what was taking place in Leary’s own life at the time. During this interview, Leary offered many fascinating new details and insights about Mary and what he had learned about her activities. Damore and Leary also had a number of follow-up telephone conversations for nearly three years after the initial 1990 interview.
²⁰

“I knew Cord quite well in 1946 during my involvement with the American Veterans Committee,” Leary told Damore. “He was an absolute fanatic who fought with everyone, a real monster-machine!”
²¹
Again, this may have indicated Mary’s knowledge that confrontations between Cord and Leary had taken place years earlier; Mary’s deception was likely deliberate. She clearly
understood some of the risks involved in being identified, Leary told Damore, and she had wanted to keep a low profile from the very beginning. Throughout the interview, Leary reiterated several times that Mary never mentioned names.

“Mary first wanted to turn on the wives and girlfriends of important powerful men,” Leary explained. “That’s what she said. She never gave me any indication who these men were, or the women for that matter.”

“Weren’t you at least curious?” asked Damore.

“Mary was like a crusader,” responded Leary. “The early ones were almost always crusaders for a higher consciousness, like ministers of the gospel. And a lot of them were women. Peggy Mellon Hitchcock was another.” Indeed, so enthralled by the potential of hallucinogenic consciousness expansion was Ms. Hitchcock that when Leary was fired from Harvard in 1963, she and her brothers offered their family’s Millbrook, New York, estate as a base for psychedelic research. The legendary en masse exodus from Cambridge to Millbrook had taken place almost immediately.
²²

“What about details? How was she putting this together?” Damore wanted to know.

“When we met, it was clear Mary was unwilling to talk about specifics,” Leary recalled. “I really didn’t pay that much attention to her. I helped her when I could, when she called or came up to Boston, but I never gave much thought about it until after I found out she’d been murdered. Both at Harvard and Millbrook, we were being besieged from people all over the country and all over the world. It was overwhelming and never-ending.”
²³

One person still alive today, Mary’s close friend Anne Chamberlin, might well be able to authoritatively comment on Mary’s mission, because she was, according to Damore, part of Mary’s LSD cell group in Washington. But Anne Chamberlin has repeatedly refused to be interviewed for this book, although she did apparently talk with Damore on several occasions, starting in the late 1980s. During his interview of Leary, Damore revealed that he had been in contact with Chamberlin on more than one occasion:

One of the women who was involved with Mary in the LSD group is now living in Maine. And I’ve talked to her at great length. Anne Chamberlin. Anne Chamberlin is a writer, an essayist, extremely wealthy, out of San Francisco,
out
of Washington—out of, out of fear, actually. And Anne is more and more forthcoming because I think enough time has passed and those people in power who felt threatened by Mary
Pinchot Meyer as a person who held an awful lot of information and a lot of secrets who could make certain politicians in this town very uncomfortable.
²⁴

In a follow-up request to Anne Chamberlin in early 2009, I alerted her to my ownership of the Damore material and the fact that I had become privy to some of what she had told him. I offered her every confidentiality if she would be willing to talk with me about it.
²⁵
A week later she replied by letter: “It saddens me that you continue to pursue the long-gone phantom prey. I have nothing to say about Mary Meyer, or anything connected with Mary Meyer. I have told you this before. I am telling you now. Don’t make me tell you again.”
²⁶
For whatever reason, Ms. Chamberlin never wanted to make known her relationship with Mary Meyer, nor reveal why she apparently abruptly left Washington shortly after Mary’s murder.

Leo Damore was curious about other sources of information regarding Mary’s possible use of psychedelics, though he wanted primarily to hear from the LSD guru himself where Mary had gone for assistance. Purportedly, there had been one other account. In 1989, C. David Heymann published the book
A Woman Named Jackie
. There, Heymann quotes from an alleged interview with former CIA counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton. Angleton was said to have told Heymann—referring to Mary’s affair with Kennedy—that “Mary kept an art diary in which she began making notations concerning their meetings, of which there were between thirty and forty during their affair—in the White House, at her studio, in the homes of friends.” Angleton then, according to Heymann, said that Mary and Jack “took a mild acid [LSD] trip together, during which they made love.”
²⁷