Timothy Liar
A biography
For all Leary’s notoriety, much of his life was secret. Flashbacks, the only one of Leary’s three autobiographies currently in print, is riddled with errors and outright fabrications. Because this is the first comprehensive biography of Leary, Greenfield rightly concentrates on rendering his subject’s extraordinary life accurately, following Leary through five marriages (including one to Nena von Schlebrugge, the gorgeous model mother of Uma Thurman, that failed to outlive the honeymoon); a succession of encounters, many of them sexual, with some of the brightest, most beautiful, young, rich, fabulous and fucked-up people of his era; at least a dozen arrests; and several lengthy penitentiary stays, including a stint in solitary confinement at Folsom Prison one cell over from Charles Manson.
Greenfield lays out clearly — I believe for the first time — the sequence of events that triggered Leary’s most perfidious act. After escaping from prison in San Luis Obispo, where he was serving 20 years for possession of a small amount of marijuana, he made his way to Algeria, which then had no extradition treaty with the U.S. He escaped the clutches of Black Panther Party minister of information and fellow exile Eldridge Cleaver, who put Leary and his third wife, Rosemary, under house arrest. Lured to Afghanistan, the Learys were captured by the CIA and flown back to the U.S. in chains. Fifty-three years old, facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, Leary cut a deal with his jailers. In the process, he snitched out the very lawyers who’d fought to keep him out of jail; the Weather Underground people who’d organized his prison break; the Laguna Beach–based dope-smuggling family, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who’d financed it; and even his now ex, Rosemary, who’d been forced to go underground. Few grownups swallowed Leary’s lame-ass excuse — that it wasn't really snitching because he’d told so many lies already, nobody in law enforcement should have believed anything he said.
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By 1976, when he got out of jail and moved to L.A., Leary was a pariah in what was left of the counterculture. He reinvented himself as a “standup philosopher,” even touring in a road-show debate with convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. (As assistant district attorney of Dutchess County, New York, Liddy had once busted Leary’s pop ashram at Millbrook, a gorgeous estate Leary and his comrades retreated to after they were fired from Harvard.)
Leary would live to see his daughter hang herself with a shoelace in prison (having shot her sleeping husband in the back of the head); this was followed by his son’s public denunciation of him as a traitorous dog. Despite events that would have destroyed a lesser — or less self-centered — man, Leary continued to preach his message of cheery optimism to a whole new generation of young people, many of whom joined him in a hillside aerie above Beverly Hills.
Dying of prostate cancer in 1996, he spent his final days working on a Web site that would extend his fame and teachings into cyberspace, and ingesting a daily pharmacopoeia of recreational and pain-reducing drugs that included Dilaudid, cocaine, many balloons of nitrous oxide, ketamine, DMT and marijuana cookies, while supporting a houseful of helpers, hangers-on and wisdom seekers with one outrageous and indefatigable hustle after another.
Greenfield originally met Leary in 1970 in Algiers, on assignment for Rolling Stone to write about Leary’s prison escape. The author says he “wasn’t impressed. None of what he said made any sense.” If Leary were alive today, he says, “he’d be doing infomercials.” But the way Leary died earned him the respect of his biographer.
In his book, Greenfield quotes Leary’s final interview. What is our purpose? asks the interviewer. “Our purpose is to shine the light on others,” Leary replies. “I have sought the light to use the light to be in space. Light is the language of the sun and the stars where we will meet again.” Two days later, Leary was on his deathbed when he woke up one last time and asked, “Why?” then answered, “Why not?” — asking and answering, as Doug Rushkoff later wrote in Esquire, “fifty times in fifty different voices. Clowning, loving, tragic, afraid.” Then, holding his stepson Zach’s hand, Leary said, “Beautiful,” and died.
For a decade, Greenfield has been wrestling with the meaning of Tim Leary’s existence — and he would be the last to say he’s got the man entirely figured out. “I kept saying to myself, ‘This is about his life.’ A book is not a life. It’s my trip through his life. This was one of those projects that you either finish or you die.” Fortunately for us, Greenberg has lived to tell the tale. At 600 pages, Timothy Leary is a genuine page turner, an epic tragedy and a cosmic farce.
TIMOTHY LEARY: A Biography | ?By ROBERT GREENFIELD | Harcourt | ?689 pages | $28 hardcover
Lewis MacAdams is writing a biography ?of Jann Wenner. Robert Greenfield reads ?from his book at Book Soup on Friday, June 9, at 7 p.m.
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