“My Darling, I cannot live without your love. I have loved life but have lived through you. The children will grow up wondering about their mother. I love them so much and please tell them that. Please be good to them. They are so dear.”
With those words, Marianne Leary took her life. Nine-year-old Susan Leary and seven-year-old Jack Leary lost their mother. It was Timothy Leary’s thirty-fifth birthday. October 21, 1955. His first wife had just killed herself.
For two years prior to Marianne’s death, Leary had been carrying on an affair with a project manager at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital named Mary Della Cioppa. Her nickname was Delsey. While Marianne and Timothy never discussed the affair, the dalliance was an open secret among their cocktail party crowd—a crowd that Leary had dubbed the International Sporting House Set. As sophisticated and enlightened as this may sound through the gauzy romantic light of history, there was no such veil over the situation for Marianne. Since young adulthood, Marianne had demonstrated a weakness for alcohol. Tim—with more than a trace of defensiveness—retold a story of Marianne falling down drunk outside the swank St. Moritz Hotel in New York City on their honeymoon. Now, as her husband’s afternoon trysts with Delsey at his rented apartment on Telegraph Avenue became the fodder for cruel party gossip, Marianne relied more and more on alcohol to soften the sting. She had also begun seeing a psychiatrist and taking tranquilizers.
However, none of the therapy or stupor-inducing booze and pills could bury the fact that Marianne Leary was losing her husband. The couple had already agreed to a period of informal separation during which Marianne planned to take the kids to Switzerland. She had always felt eclipsed by Tim’s outsize personality, charisma, and professional accomplishments, and the trip to Switzerland was meant to give her an opportunity to assert her independence away from him.
But they both knew the real score. The marriage was ending.
Tim and Marianne had spent the evening before his 35th birthday at a martini-fueled cocktail party with the International Sporting House Set. After they returned home, spun out on booze and at frayed ends, Delsey had stopped by the Leary house to quickly wish Tim a happy birthday before she boarded a plane to Reno for the weekend. Marianne saw the couple outside and stumbled out the door to intervene. It was a hideous situation for all involved. Leary shushed Marianne from the driveway and tried to send her back inside. Marianne began protesting but lost her footing and tumbled down a long flight of wooden stairs. To Delsey’s horror, Tim was unfazed by his wife’s fall. Perhaps recalling other such drunken falls, Tim assured Delsey that Marianne would be all right.
While Delsey had seen the couple’s discordant escapades up close many times, this was ugliness at a new level. She extracted herself from the situation as quickly as possible and drove off to the airport. Meanwhile, Tim shambled back inside, his steps heavy with booze and the scorn of two women.
According to Leary, he tried to make temporary amends with his wife. Nobody will ever know what truly transpired between the couple that evening in the privacy of their home. Either way, the outcome is the same.
When Tim awoke the next morning, Marianne was gone. She had written her note, then made her way out to the garage, started the car and waited for the noxious fumes to end her life.
Tim rolled out of bed and started searching through the house calling his wife’s name. No reply. As Tim’s search continued without success, he grew more frantic. His yells got louder, and Susan and Jack were stirred awake. Tim made his way out to the driveway. The garage door—always left open—was now closed. He heard the car running inside. Tim pulled open the heavy redwood door just as Jack rushed in beside him. Together, father and son discovered Marianne’s body. Tim sent Susan to call an ambulance, but the trip to the hospital was a formality. Nothing could be done for Marianne. As they loaded her body into the ambulance the dissipating clouds of exhaust floated into the Berkeley morning.
Within a year of Marianne’s death, Tim and Delsey were married. Another year later, they were divorced. Tim made a promise to Delsey not to discuss their marriage publicly, and he kept that promise throughout his life. The best insights into their short-lived, ill-conceived, and often violent relationship come from Delsey: “When we were married, we had a big fight one morning and I ran out of the house. We both had to go to work and he chased me all over the hills and found me and I was fighting him in the car and I hit him on the nose and broke it and he never got it fixed. So the shape of his nose is my handiwork.” Their relationship steadily disintegrated, “He was trying to make me into Marianne and the very thing that attracted him to me in the first place was that I was unlike her.”
Leary’s romantic relationships were exploding in the most dramatic, tragic ways. His professional life as Director of Psychology Research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital was wavering too. The flow of grant money was starting to trickle out due, in part, to Leary’s neglect of his duties there. His reputation as a golden boy, the hit of the party, the charismatic captain of the ship, was turning green with tarnish. It was time for Tim to perform the disappearing act he would eventually perfect.
In the summer of 1958, attempting to put two marriages and an increasingly uncomfortable social and professional life behind him, Tim whisked Jack and Susan away to Spain. His plan was to write his next psychology book, a follow-up to his renowned Interpersonal Diagnosis, and also work on a novel. The family started out living in a rented villa in Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol in Spain. By January, 1959, they had moved to a hotel, then into an apartment. By day, Tim sweated with little success over piles of statistics, numerical indices, and test scores. He was trying to wrangle the mass of information he had gathered in Berkeley into a coherent statement about the failings of the current psychotherapeutic model. Meanwhile, Susan and Jack attended school. Tim had attempted to lighten the kids’ situation by buying Jack a puppy. But the puppy (as puppies do) defecated all over their little apartment. The kids were increasingly subjected to Tim’s darkening moods.
Susan and Jack were also subjected to the strange, gloomy physical confines of the apartment itself. As Tim described it, the apartment was “tunneled into the rock at the foot of Calle San Miguel” and was a “cave with oozing stone walls. The beds were always damp.”
Mentally, spiritually, and physically, Tim was falling apart. In addition to clear-cut clinical depression, his body had started turning against him. As Tim describes it, “There the break-through-break-down started. It began in the head. One morning my scalp began to itch. By noon it was unbearable. Each hair root was a burning rod of sensation. My hair was a cap of fire. I ran down the beach and cut my feet on rocks to keep from ripping my fingers through my scalp. By evening, my face began to swell and huge water blisters erupted from my cheeks. A young Danish doctor came, injected me with a huge needle, and gave me sleeping pills. . . . In the morning I was blind—eyes shut tight by swollen tissue and caked with dried pus. I felt my way to the bathroom, lit a candle, and pried open one eye before the mirror. . . . In the oblong glass I saw the twisted, tormented face of an insane stranger.”
In a 1953 exchange between two figures who would play important roles in Leary’s psychedelic future, Aldous Huxley wrote to Dr. Humphry Osmond, “Disease, mescaline, emotional shock, aesthetic experience and mystical enlightenment have the power, each in its different way and in varying degrees, to inhibit the functions of the normal self and its ordinary brain activity, thus permitting the ‘other world’ to rise in consciousness.” While mescaline was not yet a part of his vocabulary, Tim certainly believed that the “disease” he was suffering provided access to the “other world,” ultimately raising his consciousness. “By the time I wrenched back to the room. . . . I was weak and trembling. I slumped in the chair for the rest of the dark night, wrapped in a Burberry mackintosh.
“I died. I let go. I surrendered.”
At this point, Leary describes a massive transformation taking place, a sloughing away of his old values, ambitions, drives, and guilt. The transformation continues to the point that Leary describes his entire identity melting away. Later in his career, Tim would translate the Tibetan Book of the Dead into psychedelic terms and come to view it as a guidebook to the “other world” of consciousness travels that often led to the sort of ego disintegration that he was currently experiencing. But in Spain, Tim had no such guidebook. He was on his own. “With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social self were gone. I was a thirty-eight-year-old male animal with two cubs. High, completely free.”
By morning, Tim understood that he had undergone a radically life-altering experience. In his words, it was “the first of some four hundred death-rebirth trips I have experienced since 1958.” Not only was he mentally altered, but his physical crisis was now abating too. The swelling in his face and extremities was subsiding. When he looked in the mirror, he once again recognized the face looking back at him. In many ways, it was the same old Tim. But it was Tim on a new mission. “I found a pen and paper. I wrote three letters. One to my employers, telling them that I was not returning to my job. A second to my insurance agent to cash in my policies. And a third long manuscript to a colleague, spelling out certain revelations about the new psychology, the limiting artifactual nature of the mind, the unfolding possibilities of mind-free consciousness, the liberating effect of the ancient rebirth process that comes only through death of the mind.” His illness had, at least momentarily, emptied him of his past, and radically altered his perspective on the future.
Two years later, Leary would take his first dose of hallucinogens in the form of seven psychedelic mushrooms. By that time he would be employed as a lecturer at Harvard. That dose of psychedelics would pick up where this first “death-rebirth trip” had left him, and Dr. Leary was on his way to becoming the Timothy Leary the world would come to know.