Night Beat (66 page)

On the evening of September 12, 1970, following a carefully mapped plan that depended on exact timing, Leary methodically made his way from his cellblock along a complex maze of twists and turns into a prison yard that was regularly swept by a spotlight. Dodging the light, he crossed the yard to a tree, climbed it, and then dropped down to a roof top covering one of the prison’s corridors. He crept along until he came to a cable that stretched to a telephone pole outside the walls of the jail. Wrapping his arms and legs around the cable, he began to shimmy its length until, only a third of the way across, he stopped, exhausted, gasping for breath, barely able to keep his grasp. A patrol car passed underneath him. “I wanted Errol Flynn and out came Harold Lloyd,” he wrote in
Flashbacks.
“I felt very alone. . . . There was no fear—only a nagging embarrassment. Such an undignified way to die, nailed like a sloth on a branch!” Then, some hidden reserves of strength and desire kicked in, and Leary grappled his way to the outside pole and descended to freedom. A couple of miles up the road, he was met by a car driven by sympathetic activists in the radical underground—members of the Weathermen, Leary later implied—and in a few days, he was out of the state, then out of the country.

A few weeks later, Timothy and Rosemary surfaced in Algiers, Algeria, where they had been offered asylum and protection by Eldridge Cleaver and other members of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver and his fellow Panthers had fled the United States after a 1968 shoot-out with policemen in Oakland and had been recognized by the socialist-Islamic Algerians as the American government-in-exile. At first Leary was excited at the idea of setting up a radical coalition abroad with Cleaver, but he soon found Algiers a grim, prudish town with little tolerance for culture or fun. The Learys also soon ran into trouble with Cleaver. Writing in
Rolling Stone
in the spring of 1971, Cleaver declared that it had become necessary for the Panthers to place Timothy and Rosemary Leary under house arrest in Algiers, claiming that Leary had become a danger to himself and to his hosts with his uncurbed appetite for LSD. Such drug use, Cleaver stated, would have no positive purpose in trying to bring about true revolutionary change—and what’s more, he thought it had damaged Leary’s once brilliant mind. “To all those who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration or even leadership,” Cleaver wrote, “we want to say that your god is dead because his mind has been blown by acid.” Leary, for his part, claimed that Cleaver simply wanted to flex some muscle, and to demonstrate to his guests what it was like to live under oppression and bondage.

Looking back at the episode, Rosemary still feels a great sadness that the experiment between Leary and the Panthers failed. “That’s always haunted me,” she says, “the idea that we had the possibility for some kinship. I think Eldridge and the others wanted us to recognize the experiences that had brought them there, and how different it was from the experiences that they thought had brought
us
there. I mean, we were all exiles, but Tim and I were exiles from a different kind of America. They recognized that we weren’t going to be killed in any confrontation with the law. The Black Panthers, though,
had
been killed. They’d been wiped out, slaughtered. We were so naive, so stupid. At the same time, we were frightened. Eldridge was very dictatorial. He kept me away from the women and the children, and then the Panthers threatened us and kept us in a dirty room in an ugly place for three days. So what were we to do?”

The only thing they could do: flee. Next stop: Geneva, Switzerland, where they enjoyed a short respite until the Swiss arrested Leary after the U.S. government filed extradition papers. Leary was in the Lausanne prison for six weeks—”the best prison in the world,” he once told me, “like a class hotel”—until the Swiss, following the petitions of Allen Ginsberg and others, refused the Nixon administration’s requests for deportation. By this time, though, all the years of harassment, fear, flight, and incarceration, plus the lost opportunities for any stable and real family life of their own, had taken a toll on Rosemary, and she decided to part with Leary. “I think I just had to consider that fate was really intervening in our lives, playing a role,” she says, “and that we weren’t going to have this prosaic family life. I had always felt it was my job to protect Tim—that seemed to be the role that I played. But Tim . . . he was Sisyphus: He was the mythic hero chained to the rock, and he was always going to be pushing that rock. He seemed to thrive on notoriety. He’d become a celebrity during those years, and that carries its own weight with it. It’s not the lifestyle
I
would have chosen. I’d always wanted the quiet life, and with Tim, there simply wasn’t the possibility for it.

“Did I regret having chosen Tim to love? I don’t think so. He was always the most interesting person. Everyone else seemed boring, by comparison. Of course, by the time I wanted boredom, it was too late.”

By late 1972, Leary had become a man without a country, and without recourse. The United States was exerting sizable pressure on foreign governments not to harbor the former professor—indeed, an Orange County D.A. announced he had indicted Leary on nineteen counts of drug trafficking, branding him as the head of the largest drug-smuggling enterprise in the world—and though the Swiss would still not extradite him, they would also not extend him asylum. Accompanied by his new girlfriend, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, Leary fled to Afghanistan, but he was arrested at the Kabul airport by an American embassy attaché and turned over to U.S. Drug Enforcement agents. He was brought back to Orange County, tried for escape, and sentenced to five years, in addition to his two previous ten-year sentences. He was also facing eleven counts from the second Millbrook bust and nineteen conspiracy counts related to his indictment as the head of a drug-smuggling outfit.

The U.S. government had succeeded in its campaign. LSD had been declared illegal and its most influential researcher and proponent had been pursued across the world, arrested, brought home, and put behind bars once again—bigger bars this time, in fact. The psychedelic movement had been shut down in a brutal way, and for decades after, Timothy Leary would be vilified for the inquiring and defiant spirit that he had helped set loose upon the 1960s. Looking back on the collapse of that experiment, writer Robert Anton Wilson, a longtime friend of Leary’s and author of
The Illuminatus Trilogy,
says: “A lot of psychologists I’ve known over the years agreed with Leary—they acknowledged in private that LSD was an incredibly valuable tool for analyzing and effecting positive personality change in people. But these same psychologists backed off gradually as the heat from the government increased, until they all became as silent as moonlight on a tombstone. And Tim was still out there with his angry Irish temper, denouncing the government and fighting on alone.

“I don’t want to discount that there are people whose lives have been destroyed by drugs,” Wilson continues, “but are they the results of Timothy Leary’s research, or the result of government policies? Leary’s research was shut down and the media stopped quoting him a long time ago. Most people don’t even understand what Leary’s opinions were, or what it was he was trying to communicate. By contrast, the government’s policies have been carried out for thirty years, and now we have a major drug disaster in this country. Nobody, of course, thinks it’s the government’s fault—they think it’s Leary’s for trying to prevent it, for trying to have scientific controls over the thing.

“He deserves a better legacy than that.”

IN 1975, SOME nasty and frightening reports began to circulate about Timothy Leary. According to stories that appeared in
Rolling Stone
and other publications, Leary was talking to the FBI and was willing to give them information about radical activists and drug principals he had known, in exchange for his freedom. There was also a claim that he had written a letter to Rosemary—still in the underground—pleading with her to contact and cooperate with federal agents. Rosemary never answered the letter.

The rumors were hard to confirm—Leary was being moved from prison to prison on a regular basis by the FBI, and few friends saw or communicated with him for roughly a year—but even the idea had a chill effect on many of Leary’s former compatriots. Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass, Jerry Rubin, and Leary’s own son, Jack, held a press conference denouncing Leary for collaborating and asserting that his testimony shouldn’t be trusted by the courts.

The full truth about this matter has never been easy to uncover. In
Flashbacks,
Leary wrote that essentially he led the FBI on a wild goose chase and that nobody was imprisoned because of his statements—though he admitted that he had made declarations about certain people to a grand jury. “I think Tim played a very dangerous game with the FBI,” says Robert Anton Wilson, “but as far as I know, nobody did go to prison.” Says Rosemary: “Years later, I showed Tim a letter he had written me, urging me to turn myself in and lauding the minions of the law as being good, decent people. He said he didn’t remember writing it. I think the truth is, he couldn’t deal with it.”

In any event, Leary was released from the California prison system in 1976, his reputation pretty much in tatters. Many of his old friends would no longer speak to him. “There was no question he was no longer the Tim I’d known before,” says Frank Barron. “Prison doesn’t improve anybody very much, and he’d suffered for it. His sense of invulnerability was gone. But he was determined to come back into the public and to reassert his mission.”

Gradually, Leary rehabilitated his image. Shortly after his release, he separated from Joanna Harcourt-Smith, whom some thought had been an unfortunate influence in the whole FBI matter. He settled into Los Angeles and became a regular at Hollywood parties. In 1978, he married his fourth wife, Barbara Chase, and took her young son, Zachary, as his own. Though Timothy and Barbara would divorce fifteen years later, he would stay close to Zachary. It seemed that with Zachary, Leary found the sort of relationship that he had not been able to achieve with his son Jack—who stopped talking to Leary in 1975 and who only briefly saw him again two months before his death.

“It was a time for him to do it again,” says Zachary, “and see if the whole domesticity of having a family was something really applicable to his life, and he found that it was. He was happy about that, because the sadness of his earlier family had been so great. So I think it was great for him, in his late fifties and sixties, to be a father again with a little kid, taking me to the ballparks and playing sports in the back yard. Young people—that’s really what kept him going, that’s what kept his theories alive. And I think that the biggest moral ground that he covered for me was communication: ’Never try and shut anything down,’ he told me. I’m only starting to realize now the magnitude of the environment that I was lucky enough to grow up in. I really do consider Tim my father.”

Leary went on to other interests. Primarily he became a champion of computer and communications technology, and was among the first to declare that these new developments—particularly the rapidly growing Internet—had the same sort of potential to empower creativity on a mass level and to threaten authority structures as psychedelics had once had in the 1960s.

In time, the old friends came back. Ginsberg, Ram Dass, and others made peace with the man with whom they had once shared such phenomenal adventures. “When people ask me why it is I treasure and respect Timothy,” says Ram Dass, “I say it’s because he taught me how to play with life rather than be played
upon
by life. That’s the closest I’ve gotten to stating what it feels like. Timothy plays with life. People are offended by that because they think it doesn’t give life its due respect. But I think it’s quite a liberating thing.”

IN 1990, THE newfound equanimity of Timothy Leary’s life was shattered. His daughter, Susan Leary Martino, forty-two, had been arrested in Los Angeles for firing a bullet into her boyfriend’s head as he slept. Twice she was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. Then one morning she was found dead in her jail cell. She had tied a shoelace around her neck and hanged herself.