Timothy Leary: A Biography

Author: By Robert Greenfield

Harcourt, Inc.

Timothy Leary was the famous guru of consciousness-expansion through LSD one of the original flower children of the 60s. Tragically, his expanded consciousness somehow failed to include the basic maturity trait of good parenting. Leary subjected his children, Susan and Jack, to drug usage in their early teens and the constant sight of stoned, naked, orgiastic adults “tripping” in the hallways of their home. “Timothy,” as his children called him, was neglectful of them, to say the least. Susan wound up committing suicide; Jack was estranged forever from the apostle of love.

Robert Greenfield, award-winning biographer of Jerry Garcia and concert promoter Bill Graham, has done his homework thoroughly. He had access to 426 boxes of archives, plus, of course, the several confessional books Leary wrote and documentary films created about the former Harvard professor. He interviewed dozens of Timothy’s friends, as well as four of his five ex-wives (Leary’s first wife Marianne committed suicide). What emerges, in sometimes academic language, is a picture of a man obsessed with fame and narcissistic to the point that, for Leary, the 60s weren’t about drugs and revolution but about Leary. He was naïve, reckless in his relations with women and quick to adopt whatever new cause might keep him on the vanguard of popularity.

What also emerges is a picture of the times Leary inhabited, through an amazing parade of the personalities who were Leary’s friends. The book’s most appealing aspect is certainly not learning the ugly dirt on Leary, but the various snapshots of the celebrities with whom he colluded. Leary was friendly with Alduous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Mingus, Jimi Hendrix, Ram Dass, Ken Kesey, Eldridge Cleaver, Bernadine Dorn, Larry Flynt, Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, G. Gordon Liddy, Susan Sarandon and Trent Reznor, to name but a few. This panorama of portraits is fascinating because these people are riveting and because Leary seems to float from one to the other without any mooring in his own bedrock personality or set of beliefs. Collectively, the one thing that can be said about Leary’s social set is that none of them were bland and all of them were vivid.

The second half of the book begins to bog down as Leary’s life becomes a routine of hassles with the law and ruptured relations. The consciousness-expansion revolution suffers from a lack of insight into what “consciousness” and “expansion” actually are. If Leary dropped acid over a thousand times and the result is this wet noodle hanging out with Larry Flynt and G. Gordon Liddy, count me out. I became offended at one point when Leary and his fourth wife dropped acid, smoked hashish and snorted cocaine, then drove a car around Europe. I began begging Greenfield to draw with broader strokes, rather than subjecting me to another up-close examination of Leary’s chaos.

Leary died in Los Angeles. Holding court among admirers, he missed an opportunity for a deathbed reconciliation with his son – he couldn’t be bothered – and Jack Leary left before the end. His father’s life was not about true love for real people but about personal celebrity. Greenfield is too successful in communicating this truth.  VS

John Hughes is a spiritual sojourner with a penchant for hoary old tunes from before the birth of rock and roll. A single father of two, he's lived in Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Calcutta, India, in search of elusive bliss.