Night Beat Part 15

The inside of the hall was no less colorful or joyful. Several thousand young people lined the various foyers and corridors of the Garden, pirouetting to the band's genial rhythms, swirling their long hair and flowing dresses, twisting their hands and arms in elaborate gestures. One young woman-about fifteen, I'd say, dressed in a sweeping, black gossamer gown, her face adorned with multihued sparkles and tiny iridescent mirror discs-stopped me as I walked past one group of dancers. "Hey, mister," she said. "Did anybody ever tell you you have beautiful eyes? I mean, you know, for an old guy?"

In every Dead show I saw, there was always a moment when it became plain that the audience's partic.i.p.ation in these gatherings-and its sanction of the band-was as much the purpose of the shows as was the musical performances. As often as not, I found that moment in the band's reading of the Buddy Holly hit, "Not Fade Away." There came a point toward the song's end when the guitars, ba.s.s, drums, and keyboards would drop out of the sound, and there was only the band and the audience shouting those old and timeless lyrics: "Love is love and not fade away/Love is love and not fade away."

"Not fade away, the crowd would shout to the band.

"Not fade away," the band shouted back.

"NOT FADE AWAY!" the crowd yowled, leaning forward as one.

It would go on like that, the two bodies of this misfit community singing hard to one another, bound up in the promise that as long as one was there, the other would always hold a hope.

Now that promise is gone, and along with it perhaps one of the last meaningful dreams of rock & roll community as well. In the seasons since Jerry Garcia's death, I have thought many times about that young woman in the flowing black gown who smiled, touched my face, and danced away into the darkness of the hallway, moving to the Dead's rhythms. And I have wondered: For whom will she dance now? Who will stir her hopes? I don't know, but I know this: We are poorer for having lost such dreamers.

tupac shakur: easy target.

I don't know whether to mourn Tupac Shakur or to rail against all the terrible forces-including the artist's own self-destructive temperament-that have resulted in such a wasteful, unjustifiable end. I do know this, though: Whatever its causes, the murder of Shakur, at age twenty-four, has robbed us of one of the most talented and compelling voices of recent years. He embodied just as much for his audience as Kurt Cobain did for his. That is, Tupac Shakur spoke to and for many who had grown up within (and maybe never quite left) hard realities-realities that mainstream culture and media are loath to understand or respect-and his death has left his fans feeling a doubly-sharp pain: the loss of a much-esteemed signifier, and the loss of a future volume of work that, no doubt, would have proved both brilliant and provocative.

Certainly, Shakur was among the most ingenious and lyrical of the present generation of rappers, often pitting his dark-toned staccato-yet-elastic cadences against lulling and clever musical backdrops, for an effect as memorable for its melodic contours as for its rhythmic verve. In addition, his four alb.u.ms-2Pacalypse Now, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. . . . , Me Against the World, and All Eyez on Me (a fifth alb.u.m, Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, was released under the name Makaveli late in 1996)-ran the full range of rap's thematic and emotional breadth. In the first two alb.u.ms alone, you could find moments of uncommon tenderness and compa.s.sion (the feminine-sympathetic portrayals in "Brenda's Got a Baby" and "Keep Ya Head Up"), astute political and social observation ("Trapped," "Soulja's Story," and "I Don't Give a f.u.c.k"), and also declarations of fierce black-against-black anger and brutality (the thug-life anthems "Last Wordz" and "5 Deadly Venomz"). What made this disconcerting mix especially notable was how credible it all seemed. Shakur could sing in respectful praise and defense of women then turn around and deliver a harangue about "b.i.t.c.hes" and "ho's"-or could boast of his gangster prowess one moment, then condemn the same doomed mentality in another track-and you never doubted that he felt and meant every word he declaimed. Does that make him sound like a confused man? Yes-to say the least. But Shakur was also a man willing to own up to and examine his many contradictory inclinations, and I suspect that quality, more than any other, is what made him such a vital and empathetic voice for so many of his fans.

Shakur was also a clearly gifted actor (his first performance, as an adolescent, was in a stage production of A Raisin in the Sun)-though he wasn't especially well served by such mediocre young-blacks-coming-of-age films as Poetic Justice and Above the Rim. The 1992 Juice (his first film) wasn't much better, though it contains Shakur's best performance to date (two films, Gridlock'd and Gang Related, were released in 1997). In Juice, Shakur played Bishop-a young man anxious to break out of the dead-end confinements of his community, and who settles on an armed robbery as the means of proving his stature, his "juice." Once Bishop has a gun in his hand, everything about his character, his life, his fate, changes. He shoots anything that obstructs him-including some lifelong friends. He kills simply to kill, as if by doing so he will eventually shoot through the one thing that hurts him the most: his own troubled heart. "I am crazy," he tells a character at one point. "But you know what else? I don't give a f.u.c.k." Shakur speaks the line with such sure and frightening coldness, it is impossible to know whether he informed it with his own experience, or whether he was simply uncovering a disturbing but liberating personal ethos.

But it was with his two final recordings-Me Against the World and All Eyez on Me-that Shakur achieved what was probably his best realized and most enduring work. The two alb.u.ms are like major statements about violence, social realism, self-willed fate, and unappeasable pain, made by two different, almost opposing sensibilities. Or they could be read as the combined, sequential statements of one man's growth-except in Shakur's case, it appears that the growth moved from hard-earned enlightenment to hard-bitten virulence. Me Against the World (recorded after he was shot in a 1994 robbery and during his imprisonment for s.e.xually abusing a woman) was the eloquent moment when Shakur paused to examine all the trouble and violence in his life, and measured not only his own complicity in that trouble but how such actions spilled into, and poisoned, the world around him.

In All Eyez on Me, released a year later on Death Row Records, Shakur gave way to almost all the darkness he had ever known-and did so brilliantly. Indeed, Eyez is one of the most melodically and texturally inventive alb.u.ms that rap has ever produced-and also one of the most furious. Tracks like "California Love" and "Can't C Me" are rife with sheer beauty and exuberance, and even some of the more dangerous or brooding songs ("Heartz of Men," "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted," "Life Goes On," "Only G.o.d Can Judge Me," "Got My Mind Made Up") boast gorgeous surfaces over their pure hearts of stone. In both alb.u.ms, in song after song, Shakur came up against the same terrible realization: He could see his death bearing down on top of him, but he didn't know how to step out of its unrelenting way. So he stood there, waiting, and while he waited, he made one of rap's few full-length masterpieces.

The hardest-hitting, most eventful song of the Eyez project-and possibly of Shakur's career-appears as an extra cut on the "California Love" single: a track called "Hit 'Em Up." According to many in the rap community, the song is an attack aimed (mainly) at Sean "Puffy" Combs' Bad Boy label, (specifically) at recording artist Biggie Smalls (the Notorious B.I.G.). In the last couple of years, these figures had become arch rivals of Marion "Suge" Knight, owner and co-founder of Death Row Records, and Shakur indicated that he suspected they were involved in his 1994 shooting. As a result, "Hit 'Em Up" was much more than just a song-it was Shakur's salvo of revenge and warning. "I f.u.c.ked your b.i.t.c.h, you fat motherf.u.c.ker," he says, addressing Biggie Smalls as the track opens, referring to a rumor about B.I.G.'s wife and Shakur. But that boast is trite compared to what follows: "Who shot me?" he barks. "But you punks didn't finish. Now you're about to feel the wrath of the menace, n.i.g.g.a." A minute later, Shakur steps up his rage: "You want to f.u.c.k with us, you little young a.s.s motherf.u.c.kers . . . ?" he rails. "You better back the f.u.c.k up or you get smacked the f.u.c.kup. . . . We ain't singin', we bringin' drama. . . . We gonna kill ALL you motherf.u.c.kers. . . . f.u.c.k Biggie, f.u.c.k Bad Boy . . . and if you want to be down with Bad Boy, then f.u.c.k you too. . . . Die slow motherf.u.c.ker. . . . You think you mob, n.i.g.g.a? We the motherf.u.c.king mob. . . . You n.i.g.g.as mad because our staff got guns in their motherf.u.c.kingbelts. . . . We bad boy killers/We kill 'em."

I have never heard anything remotely like Tupac Shakur's breathless performance on this track in all my years of listening to pop music. It contains a remarkable amount of rage and aggression-enough to make anything in punk seem flaccid by comparison. Indeed, "Hit 'Em Up" truly crosses the line from art and metaphor to real-life jeopardy. On one level, you might think Shakur was telling his enemies: We will kill you compet.i.tively, commercially. But listen to the stunning last thirty seconds of the track. It's as if Shakur were saying: Here I am-your enemy, and your target. Come and get me, or watch me get you first. (In a horrible echo of Shakur's own end, the Notorious B.I.G. was also gunned down a few months later, on the streets of Los Angeles.) SO: A MAN SINGS about death and killing, and then the man is killed. There is a great temptation for many to view one event as the result of the other. And in Tupac Shakur's case, there's some grounds for this a.s.sessment: He did more than sing about violence; he also partic.i.p.ated in a fair amount of it. As Shakur himself once said, in words that Time magazine appropriated for their headline covering his murder: WHAT GOES 'ROUND COMES 'ROUND. Still, I think it would be a great disservice to dismiss Shakur's work and life with any quick and glib headline summations. It's like burying the man without hearing him.

I suspect also that Shakur's death will be cited as justification for yet another campaign against hardcore rap and troublesome lyrics. By this point, it's become one of the perennial causes of the last decade. In 1989, the FBI got into the act by contacting Priority Records to note the bureau's official distaste for the groundbreaking group N.W.A.'s unyielding, in-your-face song, "f.u.c.k tha Police." In 1990, Newsweek ran a cover story t.i.tled "Rap Rage, Yo!," calling rap a "streetwise music," rife with "ugly macho boasting," and three years later the magazine reiterated its disdain with a Snoop Doggy Dog cover posting the question: WHEN IS RAP 2 VIOLENT? In 1992, conservative interest groups and riled police a.s.sociations pressured Warner Bros. Records to delete "Cop Killer" from Ice-T's Body Count alb.u.m (subsequently, Warner's separated itself from Ice-T). And in 1995, moralist activists William Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker succeeded in pressuring Warner's to break the label's ties with Interscope Records, due to Interscope's support of a handful of hardcore rap artists-including Tupac Shakur. You can almost hear Bennett and Tucker preparing their next line of argument: "Look what has come from the depraved world of rap: real-life murder on the streets! It's time to stop the madness." It isn't altogether unlikely that such a campaign might have some effect-at least on wary major labels. Already, according to reports in various newspapers and trade magazines, some record executives are questioning whether any further a.s.sociations with rap and its bad image will be worth the political heat that labels will have to face.

It is true, of course, that certain figures in the rap community have taken their inflammatory rhetoric and violent posturing to an insane, genuinely deadly level. It is also saddening and horrible to witness such lethal rivalry between so many young men with such innovative talents-especially when these artists and producers share the sort of common social perspective that should bring them together. Death Row and Bad Boy could have a true and positive impact on black America's political abilities-but that can't happen if the companies seek merely to increase their own standing by tearing away at perceived-enemy black opponents. From such actions, no meaningful or valuable victories are to be had.

At the same time, there's nothing meaningful or valuable to be gained by censuring hardcore rap-or at least that course would offer no real solutions to the very real problems that much of the best (and worst) rap signifies. For that matter, it would only undermine much of rap's considerable contribution to popular culture. Rap began as a means of black self-expression in the early 1980s, and as it matured into the wide-ranging art form of hip-hop, it also became a vital means of black achievement and invention. In the process, rap began to report on and reveal many social realities and att.i.tudes that most other arts and media consistently ignored-that is, rap gave voice and presence to truths that almost no other form of art or reportage was willing to accommodate. Works like N.W.A.'s "f.u.c.k tha Police" and n.i.g.g.az4Life may have seemed shocking to some observers, but N.W.A. didn't invent the resentment and abuse that they sang about. Nor did Ice-T, Ice Cube, or the Geto Boys invent the ghetto-rooted gang warfare and drive-by shootings that they sometimes rapped about. These conditions and dispositions existed long before rap won popular appeal (also long before the explosive L.A. riots of 1992), and if hardcore rap were to disappear tomorrow, that state of affairs would still exist.

What disturbed so many about rap-what it is actually deemed guilty for-is how vividly and believably it gave force to the circ.u.mstances that the music's lyrics and voices illuminated. It wasn't pleasant to hear about murderous rage and s.e.xist debas.e.m.e.nt-to many, in fact, it came across as actual threat. As one journalist-author friend told me when I recommended that he hear Snoop Doggy Dog's Doggystyle: "I don't buy records from people who want to kill me." Interestingly, such music fans didn't seem to brandish the same scrupulous distaste when rock groups like the Rolling Stones, the s.e.x Pistols, the Clash, and several others also sang about murder, violence, rage, and cultural havoc.

Tupac Shakur, like many other rappers, intoned about a world that he either lived in or witnessed-in Shakur's case, in fact, there was a good deal less distance between lyrics and life than is the case with most pop music figures. Sometimes, Shakur saw clearly the causes for his pain and anger and aspired to rise above being doomed by that delimitation; sometimes, he succ.u.mbed to his worst predilections. And far too often he partic.i.p.ated in actions that only spread the ruin: He was involved in at least two shootings, numerous vicious physical confrontations, several rancid verbal a.s.saults, and was convicted and served time for s.e.xual abuse. In the end, perhaps Shakur's worst failing was to see too many black men and women with backgrounds similar to his as his real and mortal enemies.

But listen to Tupac Shakur before you put his life away. You will hear the story of a man who grew up feeling as if he didn't fit into any of the worlds around him-feeling that he had been pushed out from not only the white world, but also the black neighborhoods that he grew up in. You will also hear the man's clear intelligence and genius: his gifts for sharp, smart, funny perceptions, and for lyrical and musical proficiency and elegance. And, of course, you will hear some downright ugly stuff-threats, rants, curses, and admitted memories that would be too much for many hearts to bear. Mainly, though, you hear the tortured soul-searching of a man who grew up with and endured so much pain, rancor, and loss that he could never truly overcome it all, could never turn his troubled heart rightside up, despite all his gifts and all the acceptance he eventually received.

In case anybody wants to dismiss this man's reality too readily, consider this: We are experiencing a time when many of our leaders are telling us that we are vulnerable to people who live in another America-an America made up of those who are fearsome, irresponsible, lazy, or just plain bad; an America that needs to be taught hard lessons. And so we have elected to teach these others their hard lesson. In the years immediately ahead, as a result of recent political actions, something like a million kids will be pushed into conditions of poverty and all that will come with it-including some of the horrible recourses left to them. Imagine how many Tupac Shakurs will emerge from this adventure-all those smart kids, who despite whatever talents they'll possess, will not be able to overcome the awfulness of their youths, and who will end up with blood on their hands or chest, or both.

Indeed, what goes 'round comes 'round. The America we are making for others is ultimately the America we will make for ourselves. It will not be on the other side of town. It will be right outside our front doors.

ella fitzgerald: grace over pain.

Time and again, in the days following Ella Fitzgerald's death in mid-June, at age seventy-eight, you heard the same a.s.sessment of what made her art great and what made it endure: She was among America's most prized jazz and pop vocalists because, unlike so many of her notable contemporaries, she sang in a voice that did not confess pain-indeed, she did not allow the emotional realities of her life to infuse or consume her craft. On the surface, this is an easy judgment to offer, and certainly not a disparaging one. It is true that Fitzgerald did not live a life that made the headlines, unlike Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, whose legends and whose art seemed carried along by rhythms born of darkness and despair. It is also true that, whereas Holiday found a personal release in the expression of other writers' material, and Sinatra understood the emotional fiber of a lyric better than any other vocalist of the century, Fitzgerald seemed virtually to purge personal considerations from her singing in favor of exalting the purity of melodic composition itself. She was often called an instrumentalist who sang-whose entire attention was given to form, tone, mellifluence, and a brilliant ability to improvise on how those elements mixed with a song's cadence and a band's beat. Listening to Ella, many fans got caught up in the pure joy of her ingenuity and balance, and because those things were such a wonder to hear, it did not appear that anguish might be a part of what had shaped her creativity.

Still, there was real pain-possibly even horror-in Ella Fitzgerald's early life, and it almost certainly played a decisive part in fas.h.i.+oning her artistry. She was born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917, the child of a common-law marriage. She never knew her father-he left the family while she was an infant-and her mother died when Ella was a young teenager. That was when her true troubles began. According to a 1996 New York Times article by Nina Bernstein, Fitzgerald was abused by her stepfather following her mother's death, and at age fifteen, was taken in by an aunt in Harlem. There, Ella scavenged the neighborhood for money, running numbers for a time and helping street prost.i.tutes avoid police searches. Eventually, she was caught by authorities and ended up in an orphanage, the New York State Training School for Girls, where, according to Bernstein's reportage, Fitzgerald-like many of the other young girls crowded into the school's decaying cottages and dark bas.e.m.e.nts-was likely subject to frequent beatings by male staff members, and endured other tortures as well. According to at least one source, Fitzgerald never forgot her hatred of that experience.

But Ella also found a way to transcend-or at least to dream of transcending-some of that torment: She developed a love of pop singing and show dancing, and aspired to dance professionally in one of Harlem's many nightclubs. In 1934, she went onstage as a dancer at an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater, but when her moment in the spotlight came, she froze-too frightened to dance. Instead, she opened her mouth and sang-a rendition of Connee Boswell's "The Object of My Affection"-and she won first prize.

After that, Ella caught the attention of saxophonist Benny Carter, who had played with bandleaders Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb. Carter pestered a reluctant Webb to give the ungainly-looking young singer a try, and after Ella won the favor of the bandleader's audiences, he arranged for her parole from the Hudson orphanage, into his custody. Fitzgerald became Webb's star attraction and co-wrote the band's biggest hit, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket." When Webb died in 1939, Ella became the band's leader for a time, and further developed her elegant swing sensibility and her remarkably lucid talent as a balladeer. In 1942, she went solo, and as jazz music changed over the years-from the fluid rhythms of swing to the complex melodic and rhythmic permutations of bop-so did Fitzgerald's style. She was one of the first singers to take the innovations of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and apply their bebop methods to vocal improvisation. She developed a wild, gliding style of melodic extemporization and phonetic phrasing that became known as "scat" singing, and next to Billie Holiday, it established her as the most influential and admired vocalist in jazz.

It wasn't until the mid-1950s, though, that Fitzgerald began to make a major contribution to the recorded body of popular music. For several years, jazz producer Norman Granz had featured Ella in his Jazz at the Philharmonic productions-an annual tour series that featured such instrumentalists as Illinois Jacquet, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker playing in freewheeling improvisational jamborees. Granz came to believe that Ella's considerable prowess had been largely wasted on trite, novelty-minded material in her lengthy tenure at Decca. To offset that mistake, he set out, in 1956, on what was considered by many (including the singer herself) as a risky venture: He would pair Fitzgerald with the great songs of America's finest Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musical, and jazz composers-including Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Johnny Mercer, and Duke Ellington-in effect creating a ma.s.sive recorded encyclopedia of American popular song. The results proved not only popular and groundbreaking (along with Sinatra's Capitol alb.u.ms from this same period, the Granz-Fitzgerald recordings helped define the conceptual possibilities in the new long-player alb.u.m format), but also historic in the best sense. There have been numerous other great composers of American popular music and there have been many other great interpreters of that work. But n.o.body outside of Fitzgerald and Granz ever set out to define an entire era's musical spirit, and managed to do so with such an epic effect. Forty years later, the series still stands as a matchless and indispensable achievement.

Ella would go on to make several other fine alb.u.ms for Granz on Verve and his subsequent Pablo label, and would also join in memorable collaborations with Louis Armstrong (her most consistent vocal partner), and Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. But after the Songbooks-as before them-she was esteemed primarily for her prowess as a live artist. I had the pleasure of seeing Fitzgerald in concert a few times during the mid-1980s-a period in which her voice was widely regarded to be in decline, though I've often been drawn to aging singers; it is both instructive and poignant to hear how an older vocalist reconciles earned emotional wisdom with losses in tonal range and breath control. To my ears, Ella really didn't have much to compensate for; she was, in fact, probably the most vibrant jazz vocalist I've ever watched. She could steer through such larks as "Sweet Georgia Brown" with a matchless, careening wit, wielding her springy swing sense, cheery phrasing, cla.s.sical tonality, and gospel-inflected soulfulness with a dizzying apt.i.tude. In addition, her frequent duets with her longtime bop-based guitarist partner, Joe Pa.s.s, on Duke Ellington songs-such as "Satin Doll," in which Ella wove a minor-key scat fugue around Pa.s.s' major-key harmonic patterns-were spellbinding and joyful. Clearly, she had been around this same territory many times before; she knew every melodic twist and turn with the certainty that a driver brings to his favorite homeward route. And yet, like a driver who couldn't resist kicking new life into familiar curves, she brought an impulsiveness to the material that transformed their performances into a thrilling ride for anybody within range.

In her later years, Fitzgerald was beset by increasingly debilitating physical problems-including eye cataracts, heart trouble, and diabetes. She kept performing until 1992, when the diabetes became incapacitating. In the following year, the condition led to the amputation of both her legs below the knee. After that, Ella stayed close to her home. She never sang again in public, but there was really no need. For over half a century, she expressed remarkable ideals of invention and beauty through her singing, but her voice wasn't just a pleasure to hear: It was also an amazing work of personal redemption. It is true that Ella sang in tones filled with joy, but her joy was not a simple thing-it was a joy born from her self-willed refusal to succ.u.mb to all the limitation and degradation that her childhood had known. Ella Fitzgerald's victories were all her own, and the rest of us-anybody who ever loved her or her voice-can only hope that someday, somehow, we are once again lucky enough to witness such glorious and hard-won grace in popular music.

timothy leary: the death of the most dangerous man.

It is a late afternoon toward the end of spring, 1996. I am seated with several other people on the floor of a bedroom in a ranch house, high up in the hills of Benedict Canyon. Through the plate gla.s.s doors on one side of the room, you can see the day's light starting to fade, and a breeze soughs through the trees and bushes in the house's back yard. On the bed before us lies a gaunt, aged man, covered in a red blanket, sleeping a restive sleep.

We have all gathered into this room for the same purpose: We are here to watch this man as he takes sleep's journey to death. It is not the sort of thing that many of us have done before.

The man who is dying is Dr. Timothy Leary-one of the most controversial and influential psychologists of the last forty years, and a guiding iconic figure of the countercultural tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. It was Leary who, as a young promising clinical researcher, helped develop the theory of transactional a.n.a.lysis-effectively changing the doctor-patient relations.h.i.+p in modern psychology-and it was Leary, who only a few years later, conducted a provocative series of psychedelic experiments at Harvard University that helped pave the way for an era of cultural and psychosocial upheaval.

But nothing Leary has done in the years since has stirred as much reaction as how he has been preparing for his death. A year and a half ago, Leary learned that he had fatal prostate cancer-and he promptly did the one thing almost n.o.body does in such a situation: He celebrated the news. Leary announced to family, friends, and media that he intended to explore the consciousness of dying the same way he once explored the alternative realities afforded by drugs: with daring and with humor. As time went along, though, Leary's proclamations became more audacious. At one point he suggested that when the efforts of maintaining his life no longer seemed worth it, he might take one last psychedelic, drink a suicide c.o.c.ktail, and have the whole affair televised on his World Wide Web site. Then, following his death, a crew of cryonics technicians would come in and freeze his body, later removing and preserving his brain. Needless to say, these sort of hints have attracted a fair amount of media interest and have also stirred disdain and criticism from various quarters-even from a few right-to-death advocates who felt Leary wasn't taking dying somberly enough. "They'd have me suffer in silence," he once told me, "so I can save them the pain."

But when all is said and done, Leary is not dying outrageously. Rather, he is dying quietly and bravely, surrounded by people he loves and who love him.

Even as he is dying, though, he is still Timothy Leary, and he still has something to say.

Around 6:30 in the evening he wakes, blinks, wincing momentarily in pain. He looks around him, seeing familiar people, including his stepson, Zachary Leary, and his former wife, Rosemary, who once helped him escape a California state prison and flee the United States. He winks at Rosemary, then-looking at the rest of his visitors-says: "Why?"

He smiles, tilts his head, then says: "Why not?"

A couple of people in the room laugh and repeat the phrase back to him.

It goes on like that for a few minutes, Leary saying "Why not?" over and over, in different inflections, sometimes funny, sometimes sad. At one point he says, "Esperando"-Spanish for: "Waiting." A few moments later, after another litany of "why nots," he will say, "Where's the proof?" And still later: "Go now."

He looks back to Rosemary and mouths: "I love you," and she mouths the same back to him. Finally, barely above a whisper, he says "Why?" twice more, then drifts back into his heavy sleep.

I FIRST MET Timothy Leary only a few weeks before his death. I approached him nervously.

Like many of the people I knew who came of age in the 1960s, I had been influenced by Leary's spirit and by his teachings. As a result I had taken psychedelics-mainly mescaline and LSD-with the idea that I might see visions that would change my life, and once or twice, I guess that's what happened. I remember one night I went looking for G.o.d (a required acid activity at some point or another) and came back realizing that G.o.d was indeed dead-or that at least if G.o.d was a divine power that might judge and condemn us for our frailties and desires and madnesses, then he was dead in my own heart and conscience. Exit G.o.d. Hasn't been seen since.

Another time, I took acid not long after a brother of mine had died following surgery (I know: not such a good idea), and I plunged into what was called (appropriately, I decided) a bad trip. That night I saw the death of my lineage-the deaths of my ancestors, the deaths of my parents and brothers, the deaths of the children I had not yet had (and still have not had), and, of course, the death of myself. I sat in a dark-red oversized chair that night and watched death move before me and in and out of my being, and I gripped tight to the arms of that chair until the morning came. It was the only sunrise I have ever been happy to see. I was not the same for days after. Maybe I was not ever the same again.

That was 1971, and it was the last time I took acid. It wasn't that I didn't like the psychedelic experience-I loved it and had much wonderful fun with it over the years. It's just that I didn't fancy the idea of running into death any more than necessary.

And so when I went to see Leary the first time, I wasn't sure what I was getting into. I was fascinated by his history and had things I wanted to ask him, but there was this problem: The man was dying, and that meant getting close to death.

You could say I was unprepared for what I found. Death had already been welcomed into Timothy Leary's house, and it was being teased relentlessly, even joyfully. The place, in fact, was full of life. About a dozen staff members and friends, most of them in their twenties-were in and out of the house constantly. Some of them-a crew called Retina Logic-were busy working in the garage on Leary's web site. It was a cause that was close to Leary's heart: He planned to have all his writings and various memoirs stored on it in perpetuity, and he was thinking of maybe even dying there, on an Internet telecast. Other house regulars, such as Trudy Truelove and Vicki Marshall, were busy making Leary's schedule for him, slating him for a steady stream of interviews, visits with friends, dinner parties, and rock & roll concerts. Clearly, death did not hold the upper hand in this house-at least not yet.

As I waited for Leary in his front room-full of brightly colored art pieces-I noticed a contraption in the corner alongside his large gla.s.s patio doors. It was the cryonics coffin he was supposed to be placed in at the hour of his death. His blood would later be drained and replaced with antifreeze compounds, so that his brain might be preserved. It might have been a creepy thing to stumble across, except it was actually sort of comical. Somebody had draped it with Christmas lights and plastic toys, and a Yoda mask had been placed on the coffin's head pillow.

Leary entered the room seated in his motorized wheelchair. He was pretty adept with the thing, able to make sharp, quick turns and wiggle his way in and out of tight spots, though sometimes he would collide head-on with his big, beautiful golden retriever, Bo, who's blind as a bat. Bo wandered Leary's house and yard constantly, b.u.mping into tables, doors, people, trees-a sweet, majestic Zen-style guard dog.

I learned quickly that it was almost impossible to conduct anything resembling a linear interview with Leary. It had nothing to do with his temperament. I found him always cheerful, funny, and eager to talk. But he was easily distracted. He'd break off suddenly to focus on whatever was happening around him or to gaze appreciatively at the short skirts that one or two of the women around him wore. "I'm senile," he told me on that first visit, "and I make it work for me." Some of the distraction, I suspect, was the by-product of the steady stream of pain-killers and euphorics that he availed himself of-including morphine patches, marijuana biscuits, Dilaudid tablets, gla.s.ses of wine, and balloons of nitrous oxide, his seeming favorite. I was glad he had the stuff. In those moments when I saw him doubled over, cringing in pain, I could only imagine how much worse it might have been without his calmatives.

Other days, I found him completely lucid and focused. One afternoon we were talking about, well, death. I had been telling him about my last acid trip. He winked at me and laughed. "But of course," he said. "Everybody says it's a dying, death experience. If you don't die, you didn't get your money's worth from your dealer. Dying was built right into it. Why do you think we were using the Tibetan Book of the Dead as our guiding text?"

I understood then that I was talking with a man who had already died many times over his years. It's like he said: that was one of acid's core truths. It could take you into all kinds of deaths-deaths of ego, deaths of misconceptions-and you could then walk back alive. More or less.

I asked him what he thought real death would be like.

He reached over to his nitrous tank, filled a large black balloon, and sat quietly for a few moments. "I don't think of it," he said, looking a little surprised at his own answer. "I mean, yes, every now and then, I go: 's.h.i.+t!' You know, every now and then. The other night I was looking around and I thought, 'Good G.o.d, my friends here-their lives have been changed by this. The enormity of it.' But I just take it as the natural thing to do."

He took a sip from his balloon, and seemed to be looking off into his own thoughts. "It's true that I've been looking forward to it for a long time," he said. "The two minutes between body death and brain death, the two to thirteen minutes there while your brain is still alive-that's the territory. That's the unexplored area that fascinates me. So I'm kind of looking forward to that."

Leary stopped talking for a moment, clenching at his stomach, his face crumpled in pain. After several seconds, he gained his breath and returned to his balloon.

"The worst that can happen," he said, his voice husky from the nitrous, "is that nothing happens, and at least that's, um, interesting. I'll just go, 'Oh, s.h.i.+t! Back to the Tibetan score card!' But yes, it's an experiment that I've been looking forward to for a long, long time. After all, it's the ultimate mystery."

TIMOTHY LEARY was fond of pointing out that the probable date of his conception was January 17, 1920: the day after the start of Prohibition-the official beginning of America's troubled attempts to regulate intoxicants and mind-altering substances in this century. Born in Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, on October 22, 1920, Leary was the only child of his Irish-American parents. His father, Timothy-also known as Tote-had been an officer at West Point and later became a fairly successful dentist who spent most of his earnings on alcohol. In 1934, when Timothy was thirteen, Tote got severely drunk one night and abandoned his family. Timothy would not see him again for twenty-three years. In the most recent (and best) of his autobiographies, Flashbacks (1983, Tarcher/Putnam), Leary wrote: "I have always felt warmth and respect for this distant male-man who special-delivered me. During the thirteen years we lived together he never stunted me with expectations." But his father also served as a "model of the loner," and for all his charming and gregarious ways, Leary would have trouble in his life maintaining intimate relations with family members-a problem that would not disappear until his last several years.

By contrast, Leary's mother, Abigail, was a beautiful but dour woman who was often disappointed by what she saw as her son's laxity and recklessness. In her own way, though, she also served as a model. In Flashbacks, Leary wrote: "I determined to seek women who were exactly the opposite to Abigail in temperament. Since then, I have always sought the wildest, funniest, most high-fas.h.i.+on, big-city girl in town."

For years, Leary seemed p.r.o.ne to the wayward life that his mother feared so much. He studied at Holy Cross College, West Point, and the University of Alabama and had serious problems at each establishment (in fact, he was more or less driven out of West Point for his role in a drunken spree), though he finally received a bachelor's degree during his Army service in World War II. Then his life seemed to take a turn. In 1944, while working as a clinical psychologist in Butler, Pennsylvania, Leary fell in love with and married a woman named Marianne. After the war, the couple moved to California's Bay Area, and had two children, Susan and Jack. It was at this point that Leary's career began to show some promise. In 1950, he earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, and over the next several years, along with a friend and fellow psychologist, Frank Barron, Leary conducted some research that yielded a remarkable discovery. He and Barron were interested in proving just how effective psychotherapy was. Instead, by testing a wide range of subjects over an extensive period they learned that one third of the patients who received therapy got better, one third got worse, and one third stayed the same. In essence, Leary and Barron proved that psychotherapy-at least in its conventional applications-couldn't really be proven to work. Leary wanted to discover what would work-what methods might provide people with a genuine healing moment or growth experience. He began exploring the idea of group therapy as a possible viable solution, and he also started developing a theory of existential-transactional a.n.a.lysis that was later popularized in psychiatrist Eric Berne's Games People Play.

By the mid-1950s, Leary was teaching at Berkeley and had been appointed director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation in Oakland. He had also produced a book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, which would enjoy wide-ranging praise and influence. But behind all the outward success, Leary's life was headed for a cataclysm. After the birth of Susan, in 1947, Timothy's wife, Marianne, went through a bad bout of postpartum depression, and became increasingly withdrawn from the world and, according to Timothy, from her husband and family. As time went along, both Marianne and Timothy began drinking heavily and fighting regularly. The source of their arguments was often the same: For two years, Leary had been conducting an affair with a friend's wife at a rented apartment on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue. The affair, combined with the drinking, the quarreling, and Marianne's depression, became increasingly painful for her.

On a Sat.u.r.day morning in October 1955-on Timothy Leary's thirty-fifth birthday-he awoke to find himself alone in bed. He stumbled around the house, groggy from a hangover, calling Marianne's name. A few minutes later he found her inside the family's car, in a closed garage, with the motor running and exhaust clouding around her. She was already cold to the touch. Leary called to his startled children, who were standing in the driveway, to run to the nearby firehouse for help, but it was too late. Marianne had withdrawn for the last time.

Leary's hair turned gray within a short time.

"He took a lot of the blame on himself," says Frank Barron, his research partner at the time. "After that, Tim was looking for things that would be more transformative, that would go deeper than therapy. He was looking, more or less, for answers."

By the end of the 1950s, Leary had quit his posts at Berkeley and the Kaiser Foundation, and moved with his two children to the southern coast of Spain. Though he was working on a new ma.n.u.script, The Existential Transaction, he was, by his own description, in a "black depression," and felt at a loss about both his past and his future. In January 1959, in Torremolinos, he later wrote that he went through his first thorough breakdown and breakthrough. One afternoon, he suddenly fell into a strange feverish illness. His face grew so swollen with water blisters that his eyelids were forced shut and encrusted with a dried pus. Over the next few days, the disease got worse: His hands became paralyzed and he couldn't walk. One night, he sat awake for hours in the darkness of his hotel room, and after a while, he began to smell his own decay. In his book High Priest, he described it as his first death: "I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home. My ident.i.ty. The guilts. The wants.

"With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social life were gone. I was a thirty-eight-year-old male animal with two cubs. High, completely free."

The next morning, the illness had abated. Timothy Leary was about to be reborn.

IN THE SPRING of 1959, Leary was living with his children in Florence, Italy, when Frank Barron, his old friend, paid a visit. Barron brought with him two bits of information. First, during a recent research trip to Mexico, he had located some of the rare "sacred mushrooms" that had been alleged to provide hallucinations and visions to ancient Aztec priests, and the holy men of various Indian tribes in Latin America. Back at his home in Berkeley, Barron had eaten the mushrooms-and had a full-blown, William Blake-quality mystical experience. He thought that perhaps these mushrooms might be the elusive means to psychological metamorphosis that he and Leary had been seeking for years. Leary was put off by his friend's story, and, as he later wrote, "warned him against the possibility of losing his scientific credibility if he babbled this way among our colleagues."

Barron's other news was more mundane but of greater appeal to Leary: The director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, Professor David McClelland, was on sabbatical in Florence and would probably be willing to interview Leary for a teaching post. Leary visited McClelland the next day and explained his emerging theories of existential psychology. McClelland listened and read Leary's ma.n.u.script on the subject, then said: "What you're suggesting . . . is a drastic change in the role of the scientist, teacher, and therapist. Instead of processing subjects, students, and patients by uniform and recognized standards, we should take an egalitarian or information-exchange approach. Is that it?" Leary said, yes, that's what he had in mind. McClelland hired him on the spot. "There's no question," he said, "that what you're advocating is going to be the future of American psychology. You're spelling out front-line tactics. You're just what we need to shake things up at Harvard."

Leary began his career at the Harvard Center for Personality Research in early 1960. That summer, he took his children on vacation to Cuernavaca, Mexico. Life, for the first time in several years, felt rewarding. Things were good at Harvard. Leary was enjoying his research and teachings, and was also enjoying the esteem of his colleagues. One day, an anthropologist friend stopped by the villa where Leary was staying. The friend-like Barron-had been seeking the region's legendary sacred mushrooms, and asked if Leary would be willing to try some. Leary was reminded of Barron's statement-that perhaps mushrooms could be the key to the sort of psychological transformation they had been searching for-and his curiosity got the better of him. A week later, he found himself staring into a bowl of ugly, foul-smelling black mushrooms. Reluctantly, he chewed on one, washed back its terrible taste with some beer, and waited for the much-touted visions to come. They came, hard and beautiful-and in the next few hours, Leary's life changed powerfully and irrevocably. "I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries. . . . " he wrote in Flashbacks. "Mystics come back raving about higher levels of perception where one sees realities a hundred times more beautiful and meaningful than the rea.s.suringly familiar scripts of normal life. . . . We discover abruptly that we have been programmed all these years, that everything we accept as reality is just social fabrication."

Leary decided that mushrooms could be the tool to reprogram the brain. If used under the right kind of supervision, he thought, they could free an individual from painful self-conceptions and stultifying social archetypes, and might prove the means to the transformation of human personality and behavior, for as far as individuals were willing to go. It took some work, but Leary persuaded Harvard to allow him to order a supply of psilocybin-the synthesized equivalent of the active ingredient in the magic mushrooms-from the Swiss firm Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Leary also joined forces with Barron, who had been invited by McClelland to spend a year teaching at Harvard, to help him devise and administer what would become known as the "Harvard Drug Research Program." In that strange and unlikely moment in educational and psychological history, the seeds of a movement were born that would transfigure not just Leary's life, but the social dynamics of modern America for years and years to come.

LEARY, OF COURSE, was not the first psychologist or modern philosopher to explore the potential effect of psychedelics-which is the term that had been given to thought-altering hallucinogenic drugs. The respected British author Aldous Huxley had already written two volumes on the subject, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and h.e.l.l, and other philosophers and psychiatrists, including Gerald Heard, Sidney Cohen, and Oscar Janiger (the latter's Los Angeles practice included such renowned patients as Cary Grant and Anais Nin) had been working toward various modes of psychedelic therapy and had achieved some notable results in treating conditions such as neurosis and alcoholism. More notoriously, the CIA and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps had conducted covert research using powerful hallucinogens with the aim of brainwas.h.i.+ng foreign and domestic enemies or driving them insane. But three factors set Leary's work apart. One was the incorporation of his transactional a.n.a.lysis theories into the overall experimental model: Therapists would not administer drugs to patients and then sit by and note their reactions but would, in fact, engage in the drug state along with the subjects. Another element was Leary's implementation of an environmental condition that became known as "set and setting": If you prepared the drug taker with the proper mindset and provided rea.s.suring surroundings, then you increased the likelihood that the person might achieve a significant opportunity for a healthy psychological reorganization. But the final component that set Leary apart from all other psychedelic researchers was simply Leary himself-his intense charisma, confidence, pa.s.sion, anger, and indomitability. He was a man set ablaze by his calling-and though that fieriness would sometimes lead him into a kind of living purgatory, it also emblazoned him as a real force in modern history.

For the first two years, things went well with Leary's Harvard experiments. Along with Barron and other researchers, Leary administered varying doses of psilocybin to several dozen subjects, including graduate students. He also gave the drug to prisoners and divinity students, with noteworthy results: The prisoners' recidivism rate was cut dramatically, and the divinity students, for the first time in their lives, had what they described as true spiritual experiences. In addition, Leary made two important contacts outside the university: Aldous Huxley and poet Allen Ginsberg (the latter had given the Beat literary movement its most exciting moment with his revolutionary poem "Howl"). With Huxley, Leary probed into the metaphysical fine points of the psilocybin mind state and debated whether psychedelics should remain the property of a small, select group of poets, artists, philosophers, and doctors, who would take the insights they learned from the drug and use them for the benefit of humanity and psychology. With Ginsberg, though, Leary settled the debate. Like Huxley, Ginsberg was convinced that it was indeed a keen idea to share the drug with writers and artists-and in fact arranged for Leary to do so with Robert Lowell, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, and Jack Kerouac, among others. But Ginsberg also believed in what became known as "the egalitarian ideal": If psychedelics had any real hope of enriching humankind, then they should be shared with more than just an aristocracy of intellectuals and aesthetes. Leary came to agree-fervently. Psychedelics, he believed, could be a way of empowering people to inquire into and trans.m.u.te their own minds, and he suspected that probably the people who were most open to such an experience, who could benefit from it the most, were the young.

In the fall of 1961, Frank Barron returned to his job at Berkeley, and Leary found a new chief ally: a good-humored and ambitious a.s.sistant professor named Richard Alpert, who had a penchant for fine clothes, valuable antiques, and high living. From the beginning, Alpert and Leary shared a special bond. "I had never met a mind like Tim's," says Alpert. "He was like a breath of fresh air because he was raising questions from philosophical points of view. I was absolutely charmed by that. And there was a way in which our kind of symbiosis worked-our chemistry of the Jewish and the Irish, or the responsible, grounded, solid person and the wild, creative spirit. I thought that I was at Harvard by shrewd politicking rather than by intellect, therefore I didn't expect anything creative to come out of me. And then I found that Timothy was freeing me from a whole set of values."

But for some others at Harvard, it seemed as though Tim might be freeing up just a few too many values. Some professors began to complain that Leary and Alpert's drug project was attracting too many graduate students, therefore detracting from the potential of other research agendas. Beyond that, some found the whole thing too unsavory-the very idea of giving students drugs that apparently took them out of reality, under the auspices of the university. Also, McClelland was growing uncomfortable with what was seen as the increasingly "religious" overtones of the enterprise. Leary, Alpert, and others began touting once obscure Eastern sacred texts, such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Zen Buddhist scripture. What was Leary doing, McClelland wanted to know, advancing the values of societies that had been backward for hundreds of years?

At the insistence of several professors, McClelland scheduled an open meeting in the spring of 1962 to debate the merits of continuing the drug project. The day before the event, McClelland called Alpert into his office. " 'd.i.c.k, we can't save Timothy,' " Alpert recalls McClelland saying. " 'He's too outrageous. But we can save you. So just shut up at tomorrow's meeting.' " Alpert gave McClelland's advice some thought. "Being a Harvard professor," he says, "gives you a lot of keys to the kingdom, to play the way you want to play. Society is honoring you with that role."

The meeting turned out to be more like a prosecution session than a discussion. Two professors in particular, Herbert Kellman and Brendan Maher, tore into Leary with a vitriol rarely seen at Harvard meetings. They insisted that if he was to continue his project, he would have to surrender the drugs to the university's control and only administer them in the environment of a mental hospital. To Leary, it would mean retreating to the medical standard of the doctor as authority and the subject as lab rat-the same model that Leary had sworn to bring down. "Timothy was blown away by all the vehemence and vindictiveness," Alpert says. "He was, for once, speechless. At the end there was a silence in the room. And at that moment, I stood up and said, 'I would like to answer on behalf of our project.' I looked at Dave McClelland, and Dave just shrugged, and that was the beginning of the process that would result in our end at Harvard."

In 1963, in a move that made front-page news across the nation, Timothy Leary was "relieved" of his teaching duties and Richard Alpert was dismissed for having shared psilocybin with an undergraduate. (At the time Alpert and Leary were reported to be the only professors to be fired from the university in this century.) "I remember being at that press conference," says Alpert, "surrounded by people who saw me as a loser, but in my heart, I knew we'd won."

Leary also wasn't distressed at the idea that his Harvard career was finished. He had, in fact, found a new pa.s.sion. In the spring of 1962, a British philosophy student named Michael Hollingshead paid a visit to Leary and had brought with him an ominous gift. Hollingshead-who died a few years ago-is perhaps the shadiest, most mysterious figure in Leary's entire story. Alpert describes him as "a scoundrel-manipulative and immoral," and others have characterized him in even darker terms. But it was Hollingshead who first brought a jar of powdered sugar laced with LSD-an intensely psychedelic solution (in fact, the most potent chemical ever developed) whose psychoactive properties had been accidentally discovered in the 1940s by a Swiss scientist, Dr. Albert Hoffman-into Leary's home, and taunted Tim by ridiculing psilocybin as "just pretty colors," compared to the extraordinary power of LSD. Leary resisted the bait at first, as he had with the magic mushrooms, but one weekend he finally caved in. "It took about a half hour to hit," he later wrote. "And it came suddenly and irresistibly. Tumbling and spinning, down soft fibrous avenues of light that were emitted from some central point. Merged with its pulsing ray I could look out and see the entire cosmic drama. Past and future . . . My previous psychedelic sessions had opened up sensory awareness, pushed consciousness out to the membranes. . . . But LSD was something different. It was the most shattering experience of my life."

Hollingshead would come and go in Leary's life, sometimes valued, often reviled. But Hollingshead's gift, the LSD . . . that was a gift that stayed.

DESPITE THEIR FALL from Harvard, Leary and Alpert intended to continue their research into psychedelics, now focused primarily on the far more potent drug, LSD. They tried setting up a research community in Mexico, but the bad publicity of their troubles in the States resulted in their expulsion from that country. They made other attempts in a sequence of Caribbean islands and countries, with the same results. Then, in the fall of 1963, a friend and benefactor, Peggy Hitchc.o.c.k, helped provide them with a sixty-four-room mansion that sat on a sprawling estate two hours up the Hudson River from Manhattan-a place called Millbrook. From 1963 to early 1967, Millbrook would serve as a philosophic-hedonistic retreat for the curious, the hip, and the defiant. Jazz musicians lived there, poets, authors, and painters visited, journalists scouted the halls; and actors and actresses flocked to the weekend parties. Some came for visions, some for the hope of an orgy, some to illuminate the voids in their souls. All of them left with an experience they never forgot.

This was a time of immense change in America's cultural and political terrain. It was, on one hand, an epoch of great dread and violence: the b.l.o.o.d.y civil rights battles, the a.s.sa.s.sination of President John F. Kennedy, and the rising anger over the war in Vietnam made it plain that America had quickly become a place of high risks. At the same time, youth culture was beginning to create for itself a sense of ident.i.ty and empowerment that was unprecedented. The new music coming from Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Motown and Southern soul artists, and San Francis...o...b..nds like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane only deepened the idea that an emerging generation was trying to live by its own rules and integrity, and was feeling increasingly cut off from the conventions and privileges of the dominant mainstream culture. More and more, drugs were becoming a part of youth's sense of empowerment-a means of staking out a consciousness apart from that of the "straight world," a way of partic.i.p.ating in private, forbidden experiences.

It was during this time of strange possibilities (and the fear of strange possibilities) that LSD began to become the subject of a frenzied social concern. Despite the best efforts of such qualified experts as Frank Barron and Oscar Janiger, LSD was seen as a major threat to the nation's young, and therefore to America's future. Newspaper and television reports were full of sensationalistic accounts of kids trying to fly off buildings or ending up in emergency rooms, howling at the horrors of their own newly found psychoses. The level of hysteria drove Leary nuts. "[B]ooze casualties were epidemic," he wrote in Flashbacks, "so the jaded press paid no attention to the misadventures of one drunk. Their att.i.tude was different with psychedelic drugs. Only one out of every thousand LSD users reported a negative experience, yet the press dug up a thousand lurid stories of bark-eating Princeton grads."

Nevertheless, for some in the psychiatric community, Leary had become part of the problem. By the nature of his flamboyance and his disdain for the medical model, they felt he had singlehandedly given psychedelics a bad name, and that he was endangering the chance for further valid research. "It was easy," says Frank Barron, "for Tim to say, 'There are people who are going to have psychoses under these circ.u.mstances; if they have that within them they should let it out.' These are brave words, but Tim and I had plush training in psychology. We had personal a.n.a.lysis. We were well prepared. But if you have an adolescent in the middle of an ident.i.ty crisis and you give him LSD, he can be really shaken. And I think that's where some of the more serious casualties occurred."

Indeed, Leary became indelibly identified with what Time magazine termed the "LSD Epidemic," and he was under fire from several quarters. When he appeared before the 1966 Senate hearings on LSD, he was held up to sustained ridicule by Senator Ted Kennedy. It was then, Leary realized, that-before much longer-LSD would be declared illegal and its users would be criminalized. At the same time, things in his personal life were going through momentous change. In late 1964, he married Nena von Schelbrugge. By the time the couple returned from their honeymoon a few months later, both the marriage and Millbrook were in trouble. Leary felt that Alpert had let the place get out of hand. The two friends argued over various grievances-including Leary's apparent discomfort with Alpert's h.o.m.os.e.xuality-and Alpert ended up cast out from Millbrook and, for a time, from Leary's life. (Alpert went on to change his name to Baba Ram Da.s.s and became one of America's most respected teachers of Eastern disciplines. In time, the rift between him and Leary healed, but they were never again the fast partners they'd once been.) Then, in the summer of 1965, Leary became close to a woman named Rosemary Woodruff, whom he eventually married in late 1967. The romance with Rosemary would prove to be perhaps the most meaningful of Leary's life, but it would also prove to be the one most beset by difficulties. During the week following Christmas 1965, Tim and Rosemary shut down Millbrook for the season and set out, along with Leary's children, in a station wagon, bound for a Mexico vacation. The couple had thoughts of changing their lives: Rosemary had hopes that perhaps they would have a child of their own, and Timothy entertained notions of returning to his studies and writings. At the Mexican border, however, they were denied entrance, and as they attempted to reenter America near Laredo, they were ordered out of the car. They were searched and a matron found a silver box with marijuana in Susan Leary's possession; she was then eighteen. Leary didn't hesitate. "I'll take responsibility for the marijuana," he said. The consequences of that moment reverberated through Leary's life for years. He was arrested for violating the marijuana laws in one of the most conservative jurisdictions in the nation. When his lawyer advised him to repent before the judge, Leary said he didn't know what the word meant. Eventually, he was given a thirty-year sentence and a $30,000 fine-the longest sentence ever imposed for possession of marijuana. Susan got five years. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction because Leary had been tried under antiquated tax-violation laws. The Laredo prosecutor simply retried Leary for illegal possession and sentenced him to ten years.

Timothy Leary quickly became a national symbol for both sides of the drug-law dispute, and he did his best to rise to the occasion with wit and grace, but also with a certain recklessness. While free during his appeal of the Laredo conviction, he gave lectures and interviews around the country about drugs. He was invited as an honored guest to the Gathering of the Tribes festival, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and he and Rosemary sang and clapped along at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's recording session for "Give Peace a Chance." He also recorded his own alb.u.m of chants with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Stephen Stills, and John Sebastian as sidemen. It all made for heady days and high nights, but it also made Leary the most obvious target for the country's rising mood of anger about drugs. President Richard Nixon told the American people that Timothy Leary was "the most dangerous man alive," and the directive couldn't be more plain: Both Leary and his philosophies should be brought down.

And, more or less, that's what happened. Back in New York, a local a.s.sistant district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy organized a raid on Millbrook. The charges were soon dismissed, but another raid followed-and those charges stuck. The raids had the desired effect of finis.h.i.+ng Millbrook for good. Leary moved Rosemary and his family to Laguna Beach, California, but the day after Christmas 1968, he was arrested again for marijuana possession, this time along with Rosemary and his son Jack