Читать книгу I Have America Surrounded - John Higgs - Страница 11

Tim and Richard had run a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico the previous year, in 1962, and it had been a great success. They had rented out the neglected and decaying Hotel Catalina, which sat on the beach about a mile and a half down a dirt road from the town of Zihuatanejo, 180 miles north of Acapulco. Electricity and water supplies were erratic, but the setting was idyllic and they knew they would not be disturbed. About 35 academics, students, friends and interested parties attended, and they spent six weeks running countless LSD sessions together.

According to Huxley’s insights into how to run a positive, successful trip, the beauty of the location and the calm atmosphere were important. The key was to pay attention to what Leary called ‘set and setting’.¹Here ‘set’ refers to the individual’s mental state, or ‘mindset’, and ‘setting’ refers to both the environment and the people present. It was important to be in a good frame of mind, not anxious or distracted by other concerns, and to be in a harmonious location with people you trusted and liked. If set and setting were good, a positive and pleasurable trip would occur. If they were lacking, however, then the horrors of a bad trip could result. LSD amplifies the surroundings and pre-existing feelings, Huxley realised, but it does not create anything that is not already present. It was the recognition of this principle that explains the different results obtained by Leary and the CIA, and why the same drug could be regarded by different researchers as causing either visionary ecstasy or profound terror. Individuals who were spiked with the drug without their knowledge, or those who were administered it in a clinical medical facility by unfamiliar doctors, were almost guaranteed to descend into nightmares.

For Leary’s party of like-minded friends, relaxing for weeks on a blissful Mexican beach, the results were about as positive as could be. The LSD sessions were joyful, and relations with the local Mexicans were good. Before they returned to America they played a baseball game against the villagers, with most of the American team still under the influence of acid. This gave them an unfair advantage, they discovered, as time kept slowing down after the baseball was pitched. They found they had all the time in the world to study the ball and line up their swings.² After quickly going 8–0 up, Tim instructed his team to stop scoring and let the opposition catch up in order to preserve good international relations. The game ended a draw, and ‘everybody urged us to come back next year’, Tim wrote.³ And we planned to. Those six weeks at Zihuatanejo had given us a glimpse of Utopia.’

The following summer, however, was not a success. It started promisingly, and the guests arrived in good spirits. A 25-foot-tall wooden observation tower was built on the beach where it could be seen from every part of the complex. A relay of people would stay in the tower, tripping, for the duration of the summer camp. Being selected to be in the tower was a great honour, and there would be a ceremony whenever a new person was chosen. Ralph Metzner has since described a memorable night in the tower, ‘watching the moon rise and travel over the bay, its silvery radiance reflecting from the murmuring surf. I watched it set behind the mountains as the pink-orange light of dawn suffused the sky. Hour-long electrical storms soundlessly shattered the sky into shards of yellow, turquoise and violet.’⁴ But there were signs that such memorable experiences could not continue much longer. Tim received a telegram from Mary Pinchot Meyer in Washington warning him that his summer camp was ‘in serious jeopardy’.⁵

The hotel started to attract visits from young, impoverished American travellers, people who in a few years time would be given the name ‘hippies’. They had heard about LSD and wanted to try it, but were turned away by Tim. They took to sleeping on a beach on the opposite side of the bay. Then a gruesome murder was linked by the press to their project. ‘Harvard Drug Orgy Blamed for Decomposing Body’ ran one newspaper headline, although there seemed to be no reason to connect the death to the camp. According to Tim, it had occurred in a village 100 miles away. When the police came to investigate, however, a tripping middle-aged woman, who resembled ‘the lank-haired vampire mistress from cartoonist Charles Addams’ haunted Victorian house’, jumped out at them from a doorway in a narrow corridor. She was naked except for a red and blue ink drawing of a ‘grotesque artistic parody of the crucified Christ’ on her body⁶ This was not the sort of thing that went down well in Catholic Mexico.

The police informed Tim that his summer camp was being shut down. The official reason was because he was running a business on a tourist visa. His attempts to appeal against the decision failed. He was told that the President of Mexico himself was insisting that they go, for he had received calls from the American ambassador, the CIA and the Justice Department, all urging Leary’s expulsion.

If this was the case, the most likely reason for this high-level pressure was the publicity that Leary was generating. The CIA had managed to keep their work on behaviour modification relatively secret. While parts were available in academic journals, much of the rest of the work was considered to be military intelligence and should not be available to foreign states. IF-IF, however, had a press officer who naively invited the world’s press to Mexico to witness Tim’s work. Life magazine, CBS, NBC and the BBC all planned stories, and Time, Newsweek and scores of other journals and newspapers were also invited. This was Tim’s reaction to the dismissal from Harvard. As he was no longer protected by the reputation of the famous university, he needed some other form of power base to support his work. Public opinion seemed to be the best option, so he did everything he could to court the press. It made a great story too, thanks to the sacking from Harvard and the idyllic surroundings of the Mexican beach. The majority of the press coverage was negative, but the idea of the establishment stamping down on a rebel scientist who claimed to be able to create enlightenment took hold in the public imagination. Thanks to his academic background, his enthusiasm for the drug, and his willingness to talk to journalists, Tim was by now firmly established in the eyes of the press and the public as the figurehead of LSD.

While the police were shutting down the summer camp, and with the residents in the process of being deported, a few people decided to take a last acid trip. This broke the golden rule of set and setting, and the more paranoid, persecuted atmosphere helped trigger the first cases of prolonged negative effects that Leary had ever seen. One tripper came to believe that he was a gorilla. He went swinging through the trees and terrorised everyone he met. He was eventually captured by Tim and five other men, who trapped him with a rope, tarpaulin and blankets. He was given a tranquilliser and returned to some form of lucidity the next morning. Another casualty, however, went into an almost catatonic state and remained like that for many days. Tim went through this man’s wallet and found several US government identity cards that attested to high-level clearance. When the airline refused to allow him to fly back to the United States in his catatonic state, Tim sent a wire to the US Defence Department. It read, ‘Your agent Duane Marvy is in the Chapultepec Mental Hospital, Mexico City’⁷ Then Leary returned to America in order to plan his next move. His first exposure to the dangers of the drug had in no way dampened his enthusiasm for it.

By now IF-IF had a head office in a medical centre in Boston, which boasted the wonderful address of Zero Emerson Place. The first issue of their journal the Psychedelic Review⁸ had been published and was a great success. It had a circulation of around 4000 copies, the majority coming from subscriptions. Tim, Richard and Ralph also completed their psychedelic reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was published as The Psychedelic Experience. This was intended as a manual or a guide to navigate the realms of inner space, and emphasised the similarities between an LSD trip and the Tibetan description of the soul’s journey after death. IF-IF was clearly a productive organisation and could hardly be considered a failure, but it still had not managed to found a retreat or a centre to which people could come for a safe, guided psychedelic session.

Tim set off to Dominica, on an ultimately futile journey to seek a suitable location in the Caribbean. That he was starting to become a little desperate was shown in his attempts to settle here, for he considered the location to be far from the idyllic paradise demanded by the laws of set and setting. At night the black sands and thick jungle seemed oppressive and sinister. The island was poverty-stricken and dependent for survival on the foreign corporations that ran the banana industry.

Initial approaches to the island’s officials were highly favourable, however, until a sudden change of mind further up the chain of command led to being told to leave. Tim has claimed that this was because of an approach to the island’s governor by the CIA. He left the island and headed to Antigua, where he met Richard Alpert. Alpert was still in the process of travelling to Dominica and was furious that Tim had got himself thrown off the island before he had even arrived. They set up in an old seafront bar called the Bucket of Blood, which was deserted and almost devoid of furniture, in order to investigate the possibility of establishing themselves in Antigua. They were now about $50000 in debt and Richard had taken to selling his antiques and his Mercedes to support their efforts. The pair began to fight during a group acid trip. ‘There were, like, 14 people sitting around us in a circle,’ Alpert recalled, ‘and Tim felt that what we were really fighting about was sexual in nature and so he took off all his clothes and offered himself to me, really. And the whole thing was totally bizarre. So we rolled around on the floor and then worked it out and we all went swimming the next morning. There wasn’t any real sex between us; not that time or ever. Tim was threatened by homosexuality. I think he’d had some unpleasant episodes in his life that he wanted to forget.’⁹

One of those present, a man called Frank Ferguson, who was working as Tim’s secretary, had a psychotic episode during the trip. The group was attempting to befriend the leading psychiatrists on Antigua in order to gain support, and one of these was known to be a specialist in lobotomies. As the IF-IF members had come to view the brain as an almost sacred organ, they viewed performing a lobotomy as an almost evil act. Ferguson was troubled by the ethics of dealing with this man. While under the influence of LSD, he decided that the only thing to do was approach the unsuspecting doctor and offer to be voluntarily lobotomised himself, as a sacrifice.¹⁰ This he promptly did and the resulting scandal wiped out any hope of IF-IF being accepted in Antigua.

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 by LSD was fleeting and easily lost after the drug had worn off. How could they make that level of understanding permanent?

And so began a strange regime of ‘deconditioning’ behaviour patterns. It owed a lot to the Armenian mystic and writer Georges I. Gurdjieff, who attempted to bring his followers to enlightenment through tactics such as shock, or mind-numbing physical exertion, such as cutting a lawn with a pair of scissors. At Millbrook, a bell would ring four times a day and everyone in the house would have to stop and write in a diary the behavioural ‘game’ they were currently involved in. Food would be dyed strange colours to confuse the senses, and visitors could find themselves presented with, for example, a plate of green eggs and a glass of black milk. Communal parenting was introduced, much to the dismay of the non-parents, who suddenly found themselves with the responsibilities of unpaid nannies.¹⁶ The aim of all this was to conquer the routine, unconscious patterns that leave us sleepwalking through life. Even 10 years later it was noticed that Tim studiously avoided routine,¹⁷sleeping in different rooms, brushing his teeth with different hands, and ordering different drinks in bars.

Sexual hang-ups and jealousy are a big part of our conditioning, so they clearly had to go. The third floor was designated as an ‘anything goes’ area, and all beds were open to all-comers. Initial enthusiasm for the idea gradually declined, however, and it was grudgingly accepted that the plan was causing more tension than it relieved. Nevertheless, there was still plenty of sexual exploration in the house, especially for Tim. As the group’s alpha male, he was the focus of attention for the many female visitors who passed through the house. Art Kleps remembered being in the kitchen one morning discussing the similarities between Leary and Jesus with a Christian IF-IF member, when Tim arrived ‘tousled and haggard, drew a coffee and turned to the assembled breakfasters to inquire rhetorically: ‘Jesus Christ, do I have to fuck every girl who comes to this place?’¹⁸

All this was extremely difficult for his children, who were now in their early-to-mid teens. After attempts at communal parenting had broken down, Susan and Jack were more or less left to their own devices. Tim claimed that his unorthodox, hands-off parenting was in the children’s best interests, but it seems more likely that he was just too preoccupied with his work to give enough of his time to them. His parenting method, certainly, was the polar opposite of what is currently considered good parenting, since nowadays establishing a routine and clearly defined limits is recommended as the best way to allow children to flourish. His children were soon taking acid and other drugs. Leary stated on stage in 1967: ‘I know no child over the age of seven who hasn’t been given drugs, and I know many of them.’¹⁹ There was certainly no effort to provide set and setting and an experienced guide for the first trips of Jack and Susan.

The children reacted in opposite ways. Jack became increasingly aware of his father’s faults, and the disillusionment that began to set in slowly evolved into anger, and eventually outright hatred. Susan, on the other hand, became devoted to her father, and jealous and vindictive towards anyone else who wanted to take up too much of his time.

An attempt to gain a little normality was made at the end of 1964, when Tim entered into a short-lived marriage with Nena von Schlebrugge. Nena, the daughter of a Swedish baron, was one of the many exotic people who passed through Millbrook that year. She was, as Tim wrote to his mother informing her of the wedding, ‘a most remarkable person of unusual intelligence, character and wisdom. She is deeply committed to spiritual goals and is an ideal companion for the metaphysical explorations in which I have been involved. For the last six years, she has been one of the top fashion models in the world.’²⁰

Nena was indeed incredibly beautiful. Tall, blonde and graceful, she had inherited the looks of her Swedish mother, and in time she would come to pass them on to the children of her next marriage, most famously to her daughter, the actress Uma Thurman.

Following their wedding on 19 December 1964, Tim and the third Mrs Leary embarked on an extended honeymoon around the globe. They said goodbye to their friends and family and they headed off, via Japan, to India. Tim had been planning to visit India for a couple of years, a journey he would undertake with a very specific aim. What he was looking for was nothing less than spiritual enlightenment. It was time to undertake what he called his ‘obligatory pilgrimage’.