The acid queen The psychedelic life and counterculture rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary

Timothy Leary's reign as the high priest of psychedelics was sustained by Rosemary Woodruff Leary, his talented and courageous wife. She styled his appearance, polished his writings, and oversaw the better days at their notorious acid commune in Millbrook, New York. In spite of her commitment to spiritual quests, Rosemary was dragged into the riskiest, darkest aspects of psychedelia as drug laws grew harsher, and Leary's flamboyance led to arrests and convictions. Most dramatically, Rosemary was key to Leary's infamous prison break, organized by the Weathermen, and escape to Algeria. On the run they broke up, leaving Rosemary to live precariously for two decades under assumed identities in France, Switzerland, Sicily, Colombia, and Cape Cod until she was finally able to clear her record. Calahan (The Great Pretender, 2019) brings this long-overlooked psychonaut into focus as a deeply inquisitive, mystical, and self-sacrificing individual, vividly setting the social and political context for each phase of her jaw-dropping, heart-wrenching story. Given renewed interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelics, Rosemary's extraordinary life offers an essential perspective on the history and properties of these complex substances.

This vibrant biography from journalist Cahalan, author of The Great Pretender, chronicles the life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935--2002), a prominent figure in the 1960s psychedelic movement and Timothy Leary's wife from 1967 through 1976. She was a high school dropout and two-time divorcée in 1965, when she met Timothy while visiting Millbrook, N.Y., where the former psychologist ran an "acid commune" studying psychedelic drugs. Fleeing an abusive relationship, Rosemary joined the Millbrook community and struck up a romance with Timothy, whose tendency to view women as free domestic laborers and sex objects put a strain on their relationship. Delving into Rosemary's many run-ins with the law, Cahalan describes how two drug-related deaths on the Southern California commune where Rosemary and Timothy lived in the late '60s resulted in police raids and Timothy's conviction on marijuana possession charges. He served only a fraction of his 20-year sentence, however, because Rosemary arranged for the Weather Underground to break him out in 1970. She spent most of the ensuing decades dodging American law enforcement by traveling throughout South America and the Caribbean until her outstanding warrants were expunged in the 1990s. Cahalan uses Rosemary's stranger than fiction story to offer a vivid portrait of how flower power cracked up in the '70s. It's an electric account of a remarkable life and the end of an era. (Apr.)

The sometimes blissed-out, always turbulent life of Timothy Leary's third wife. Rosemary Woodruff was a Midwesterner who, in the early 1960s, came to New York looking for adventure, working as a flight attendant and model and exploring the wonders of then-legal LSD and then-illegal marijuana. She met Timothy Leary and accepted his invitation to hang out at Millbrook, his psychedelic research commune. The rest is tangled history, as journalist Cahalan relates: Marrying Leary, she became a helpmeet and surrogate mother to a host of acid-stunned hipsters. Often undervalued--writes Cahalan, one eyewitness remarked, "As beautiful as she was, she wasn't the brightest star in the sky"--she receded into the background and, as Cahalan notes, "served as a footnote, an afterthought" in the Leary mythology. Nevertheless, Woodruff was busted along with her husband by none other than G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy, was busted again, and hard, in Texas and California, helped Leary escape from prison, fled with him to Algeria, and went underground for years, even as Leary, from whom she separated, made deals that got him out of jail and put him on the road, late in his career, to wealth and pop culture fame. Woodruff may have been a footnote, but she was self-aware of her role as a kind of lysergic sorcerer's apprentice; among papers Cahalan discovered after Woodruff's death in 2002 was a note reading, "The eyes of the audience must be on the assistant when the magician's hands are distorting reality." Cahalan's swift-moving biography is admiring but not uncritical, with an admonitory takeaway about both psychedelic drugs and the outlaw life: "If you are to engage with these substances, you must respect them enough to prepare yourself for both the light and the shadow." A well-wrought narrative that brings deserved attention to a lost figure in the counterculture. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.