The book's author Susannah Cahalan became interested in "mind opening" and psychedelics after her brain disorder autoimmune encephalitis was misdiagnosed as mental illness, spawning her bestselling book, Brain on Fire.
Cahalan appeared by Zoom at a recent event in Berkeley, CA sponsored by the Women's Visionary Congress, a group that highlights psychedelic women who "often disappeared behind there more famous and florid male partners." She drew on Rosemary’s autobiography Psychedelic Refugee and her archives at the New York public library (where there are 400 boxes in Timothy's archives and only 25 for Rosemary, largely redacted FBI files).
Rosemary Woodruff, Cahalan writes, had her first mystical experience in 1943, the summer after her eighth birthday. Walking alone near her home, "she felt a tingling sensation rise up from her spine. The trees crackled with energy. She had plugged herself into the electrical grid, and the whole world flickered in confirmation of her sudden second sight: everyone and everything were connected. It happened for a second, a nanosecond, but that shining moment of divine union would stay with her....Other realms called. She longed to return to that blissful state."
The statuesque beauty worked as a model and a stewardess, professions in which "uppers" were regularly handed out to young women to keep the slim and active. In 1959, she had a small role in the film "Operation Petticoat" starring Tony Curtis and Cary Grant. During publicity for for the film, Grant went public for the first time about his use of LSD, telling a reporter that it saved his marriage to Betsy Drake (who lead him to try it).
Living a Bohemian life in New York City, Rosemary dated jazz musicians and downed diet pills by day and marijuana at night. She "learned to find pleasure in the sensation of her heart beating in her ears when she smoked cannabis in jazz clubs. And how to portion out correct dosing of the hash fudge she baked from Alice B. Toklas’s famous 1954 cookbook. Like a growing number of Americans, Rosemary was joining an emerging drug subculture, not for medical or spiritual use, but for pleasure, identification, and belonging," Cahalan writes. A peyote experience made he realize she needed to leave her junkie boyfriend, packing her bags and leaving him the next day.
According to Cahalan, Rosemary’s favorite Aldous Huxley work was not Doors of Perception but his lesser-known novel The Genius and the Goddess, about a woman married to a Great Man who finds her worth through sex. “I subscribed to ‘the genius and the goddess paradigm,’ ” Rosemary said. “I wanted genius men, and it was part of my heritage to be submerged, like the Jungian view of woman as reflective.”
Connecting with Timothy at Millbrook, her honeymoon was brief as their marriage entered its "police harassment" phase, resulting in Leary's imprisonment in 1970 when Rosemary too became a target of police surveillance and harassment, even as she helped engineer his escape from prison. You can catch a glimpse of her sitting just below John Lennon in the 1969 video to "Give Peace a Chance"; she is named in the lyrics. (Petula Clark recently said she also sang on the song that day, not knowing it was being recorded.)
After a falling out with Eldridge Cleaver and another arrest in Algeria, Timothy and Rosemary separated in Switzerland and she lived underground for 24 years, working for a time at an inn on Martha's Vineyard under a false name. The story goes that she came back to US by waterskiing off coast of Florida in a bikini. It is true, Cahalan says, there were waterskis in the drug-smuggling boat she rode in on. One wonders what would have happened to that boat today, as the death toll from the Trump administration's undeclared war on suspected smuggling boats reached 76 this week.
Rosemary died in 2002; her last words were, "I understand now." She believed in the transformative power of psychedelics, saying, “There are truths more fundamental and significant than the lies (laws?) of men intoxicated with power." Cahalan, who spent five years working on The Acid Queen and "loved every minute," encouraged her audience to focus research efforts on women in psychedelics, mentioning Peggy Hitchcock, the patroness of Millbrook.
