Being Married to Timothy Leary Was Tough. It Helped to Be High.
In 2011, the New York Public Library paid $900,000 for 335 boxes of Timothy Leary's papers. Five years later, when his ex-wife Rosemary Woodruff Leary's papers were to be added to the collection, her friend David Phillips insisted that her records not be 'subsumed into' Leary's archive. After all, he argued, Woodruff, who died in 2002, 'was a separate person with a separate voice and viewpoint and identity.'
Susannah Cahalan's new book, 'The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary,' reads as an attempt to prove the point. Cahalan tries to reclaim Woodruff's historical significance with the same energy and dogged research that distinguish her previous books, 'Brain on Fire' (2012), which recounts Cahalan's descent into madness owing to a rare, autoimmune-induced encephalitis, and 'The Great Pretender' (2019), which exposed how a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan falsified the research behind his influential 1973 study, 'On Being Sane in Insane Places.'
Both those books grapple with the obscure line between sanity and insanity and the dangers of confirmation bias in the diagnosis — and misdiagnosis — of mental illness. 'The Acid Queen' extends Cahalan's concern with the fragility of the self, exploring how Woodruff fell into her husband's powerful orbit, becoming at times nothing more than a 'ghost in a fog.'
She was the third wife of Leary, the charismatic Harvard professor turned high priest of 1960s psychedelic counterculture who urged us to 'turn on, tune in, drop out.' Much of 'The Acid Queen' focuses on the couple's chaotic, drug- and sex-filled lives between their first meeting in 1965 and their split in 1971, years that included communal compounds in New York and California, arrests, jail time, a prison break and travel as fugitives in North Africa and Europe.
As Leary's 'gorgeous, blissed out model of earthly transcendence,' Woodruff — a former airline stewardess 15 years his junior — served as hostess, cook, cleaner, seamstress, editor, archivist and on-and-off surrogate mother to his two children. (He later had a third.) 'When he was home,' Cahalan writes, 'she fixed his coffee every morning and offered herself to him every night.'
Given her previous work, I expected Cahalan to delve further into what it means to lose one's mind — or find it — on LSD. Aside from vague references to 'ego death' and a single reference to 'psychotic depersonalization,' sentences like this one describe the couple's experiences: 'Rosemary and Timothy regularly took the sacrament together, or with a group, disappearing into the mountain range to drop acid and run around naked in the ancient geometric paradise where they claimed to see U.F.O.s.'
Whether they're high or sober — usually high — Leary commandeers Woodruff's identity and her narrative no matter how often she (or Cahalan, for that matter) attempts to claw it back. I kept rooting for her to escape Leary and his cult of hangers-on, but as she wrote to her mother during the final phase of her marriage: 'It has been so hard to wake up and be free of Timothy's influence. I have delayed over and over and over again a final separation.'
'The Acid Queen' reveals a painfully unrealized woman, a lifelong seeker whose reliance on the I Ching marks the most visible edge of a spiritualism born of too much acid, hashish and Ritalin. Whether she was playing the sex symbol or the housewife, writing her memoir or enduring the painful consequences of infertility, Cahalan argues, she was 'too overwhelmed, too high, really, to face the reality of her husband.'
In 1992, at the age of 57, after 22 years in hiding for her role in Leary's 1970 jailbreak, Woodruff returned to him one last time. The capitulation comes as a relief — for subject and reader. 'Without him,' Cahalan writes, 'her life meandered into the humdrum. But with him, the excitement of possibility came rushing back.'
Whatever readers may think of Woodruff's claims on posterity, the New York Public Library, like Cahalan herself, has done its best to preserve her legacy. As a curator at the library wrote when it accepted the gift of her papers, 'It would be a bad thing to hide this in Timothy's archive, because again she'd disappear.'
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