RIP Judy Balaban: Early LSD Experimenter and Chronicler, and Human Rights Champion

"Her father was head of Paramount, she was one of Grace Kelly’s bridesmaids, and she shared an LSD experience with Cary Grant," ran the obituary in the Hollywood Reporter for Judy Balaban, who died on October 19 at the age of 91.  

Balaban was Hollywood Royalty in more ways than one: a member of the prominent Balaban family, she dated Montgomery Clift for six months in the 1950s when she was 18, and was married to Kelly's agent Jay Kanter—who made his client Marlon Brando best man at their wedding—when she was the youngest of six bridesmaids at Kelly's wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Balaban later married actors Tony Franciosa and Don Quine.

A 2010 article Balaban co-wrote with author and documentary filmmaker Cari Beauchamp for Vanity Fair documents the experiences of a group of Hollywood heavyweights who took LSD therapeutically in the late 1950s, among them Cary Grant and Balaban herself. 

Setting the stage for the article, she and Beauchamp wrote that at the time, "Almost everyone smoked carton-loads of regular cigarettes, but a 'joint' was a body part or a lower-class dive. If people were 'doing lines,' you’d have guessed they were writing screenplay dialogue or song lyrics. And if you mentioned 'acid,' you’d mean citrus juice or a stomach problem. Nobody in Hollywood—or almost anywhere else in the United States—had ever heard of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide. Timothy Leary wouldn’t even pop his first mushroom until 1960. So it was very out of character that against this background a group of more than 100 Hollywood-establishment types began ingesting little azure pills that resembled cake decorations as an adjunct to psychotherapy." 

Balaban relates in the article that she didn’t know much about LSD when she started taking it, but, she laughingly says, “I figured if it was good enough for Cary Grant, it was good enough for me!” 

Grant and Drake in "Room for One More" (1952)

Grant was married at the time to his third wife Betsy Drake, an actress and screenwriter who appeared in pictures with Grant and co-wrote his movie "Houseboat," co-starring Sophia Loren. Drake studied hypnosis and, "at Cary’s urging, helped both of them to stop smoking, but when he asked her to do the same for his drinking, she agreed to banish only hard liquor and not the wine and beer she enjoyed."

After her husband fell for Loren and their marriage began to fall apart, Drake confided in her friend Sallie Brophy, a stage and television actress who had suffered from depression since childhood. Brophy told Betsy that she was trying "a new kind of therapy with a wonder drug that had the power to break through to the subconscious." She introduced Drake to her therapist Mortimer Hartman who, like LA-based psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, was able to procure supplies of LSD for therapeutic purposes from its manufacturer, the Swiss pharmaceutical film Sandoz. 

Others who had experimented with LSD in therapeutic settings at the time were authors Aldous Huxley and Anaïs Nin, and Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright and former American ambassador to Italy, who "in turn encouraged her husband, Time publisher Henry Luce, to try LSD. He was impressed and several very positive articles about the drug’s potential ran in his magazine in the late 50s and early 60s, calling it 'an invaluable weapon to psychiatrists'.” 

The first time she tried LSD at Dr. Hartman's office, Drake re-experienced her own birth in a session lasted several hours and was given a Seconal to bring her down from the trip. Interviewed 50 years later for the Vanity Fair story, Drake said her memories of her experiences under LSD "are still crystal-clear, the revelations still vivid." The unconscious, she says, “is like a vast ocean. You don’t know where you are going to go. There is no past, present, and future—all time is now. The amazing thing about the drug is the things you see. The palm trees look different. Everything looks different, and it teaches you so much.” 

Once a week for several months, Drake returned to Hartman’s office for sessions with LSD. Because it was mandated that patients not drive themselves home, friends such as Judy Balaban picked her up. 

Judy with Franciosa and their children.

Judy had two young daughters, but "she was troubled by the sense that her life had become perfunctory, and she felt unconnected to her children." Like Drake, Judy relived her birth on LSD and often felt during therapy as if she had left her body and “fused” with the universe. “You experienced this otherworld consciousness and became part of what I imagined was ‘the infinite mind of man.’” 

Balaban wrote, “What I had with Cary and Betsy was a kind of soul-baringness that the culture didn’t start to deal with until years later. We continued to have that even when our lives went off in different directions.” When the actor Patrick O’Neal asked Judy about LSD during a dinner party at Oscar Levant’s house, she started to explain, but Oscar interrupted with his own pithy summation: “Patrick, you don’t get it. Judy was taking LSD for exactly the opposite reason you and I take stuff. She is trying to find out about things. You and I are trying to obliterate them.” 

Other actress who tried LSD at the time and described their experiences in Balaban and Beauchamp's Vanity Fair article include Polly Bergen (who played a mother that provides pot brownies to her daughter experiencing cancer on Desperate Housewives), and Esther Williams (who revisited the death of her brother with healing effects while on LSD). 

Not all the experiences were entirely positive. Balaban’s last experience with LSD turned dysphoric, and she felt like she couldn't return to her body. Hartman merely said, ‘I don’t know where you are, kid …you’re on your own!’" Actress Marion Marshall had "a frightening session where she was convinced a huge black-widow spider was going to attack her." Hartman suggested ending the session but she insisted on continuing, saying, “it turned into the best session I ever had. I faced my fears, whatever they were. It was like the death experience that people describe; all of a sudden everything was white and wonderful.” With the bizarre incident last week of an off-duty pilot trying psilocybin on his own for the first time 48 hours before he tried to stop a flight in mid air, it's time to examine closely how we legalize the therapeutic or recreational use of psychedelics.  

Judy Balaban and her third husband Don Quine launched the Professional Karate Association in 1974 and ran it through the mid-1980s. She authored the 1989 book, The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and Six Intimate Friends. A champion for civil rights, she served on the board of directors for the ACLU of Southern California for decades. Her cousin Bob Balaban, who played a medical marijuana doctor on TV's Entourage, introduced her when she picked up ACLU's Ramona Ripston Liberty, Justice & Equality Award award in 2019, listing some of her accomplishments: She spearheaded the first entertainment community fundraiser for Martin Luther King, Jr.; organized the Western states for the March on Washington; registered Black voters in the South; worked with Sen. Jacob Javits to stop a filibuster that would have killed the Civil Rights Act; served on the Fair Employment Practices commission and was a founding member of the Constitutional Rights Foundation; and served 10 years on the California state Contracting Licensing Board, appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown. Not a bad record for an acidhead.