ANITA HOFFMAN
I remember Tim in technicolor, circa 1967. Some evening event in the West Village. He was in a fringed white buckskin jacket. Tall, suntanned, handsome, larger than life. He was so glamorous! I totally mistrusted him and his followers (for that’s what they appeared to be). Although I loved the psychedelic experience, I mistrusted religions, incipient religions, even satirical religions, and the League for Spiritual Discovery appeared to me (from the outside) to be a budding cult around Timothy Leary. Simultaneously, Timothy Leary seemed to me to be the living embodiment of Valentine Michael Smith, the protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
A year before Abbie and I greeted Tim in his white fringe in the West Village, I had seen Leary perform in the theater on Second Avenue (which later became the Fillmore East), and I had been turned off. At that time he was performing in a series of programs that illuminated the world’s religions. I was twenty-four and went to the performance with two women friends who worked at The New Yorker magazine. On stage, to my amazement and horror, Tim appeared to be playing the role of Jesus Christ! I thought that was unconscionable (although I’m not Christian). What hubris to play the Divine! As I recall, the dramatization/lecture ended with Tim on the cross, arms outstretched. Shameless! Cult leader! Self-appointed guru!
During the late ’60s Abbie and I recognized Tim as another brilliant cocreator of the countercultural vision we all shared. But we yippies had our differences with Tim. We weren’t eager for people to drop out, we wanted them to drop in, to become involved in the world around them, to bring about social change. This included ending the senseless war in Vietnam and the arms race, and racism. It also included a vision of a free society based on love rather than greed, where everyone’s survival needs were sanely addressed.
Leary, no doubt, was increasingly mistrustful and critical of “the politicos” of the antiwar movement for their lack of humor, their dogmatism and puritan style (same criticisms we yippies felt, although we were ourselves “politicos” compared to the LSDers). I would define a “politico” as someone who cares about public issues and is willing to work in the world for social justice. In later years, Tim never failed to remind me that two weeks after agreeing to attend the Festival of Life in Chicago in l968, he pulled out, not wanting to influence young people to come to Chicago to be gassed and get their heads beaten by the Chicago police.
In Algeria in 1970 I finally got to know Tim a bit. I arrived there with a delegation of movement activists to celebrate Tim’s fiftieth birthday and show the world the friendly coalition among the Black Panthers, the yippies, allies of the Weather Underground, and Timothy and Rosemary Leary, iconic leaders of the counterculture. During the visit we only saw Tim on limited occasions (controlled by the Panthers), but those moments were intense.
Tim and several Black Panthers met us at the airport. We left the airport in two cars, Tim driving one. I was in his car, with Rosemary, Dharuba (a Black Panther), Jennifer Dohrn and Jonah Raskin. Dharuba, a member of the NY Panther 21, had escaped from the Tombs in Manhattan and found refuge with the Black Panther govement-in-exile in Algiers, led by Eldridge Cleaver. Jennifer, who worked as an organizer in a bra factory, was the younger sister of Bernadine Dohrn, the charismatic leader of the Weather Underground. Jonah was a writer, academic, and radical antiwar activist. It was late at night. We drove along dark deserted streets occasionally illuminated by a lightbulb. We got lost in the casbah. Suddenly a big rock smashed through the window near Jennifer, splashing chips of glass across the back seat. Jennifer was unhurt, but understandably shaken. I had been on the other side of the car and was unharmed. Tim seemed cool and clearheaded. We made a quick U-turn and managed to get away, eventually arriving at the tiny seaside village where Tim and Rosemary were staying.
The next morning the newly arrived Americans and Tim met for brunch at a small café by the water. That’s when I remember becoming acquainted with Tim. He was a charming Irishman, ebullient, sophisticated, filled with joie de vivre. We toasted Tim’s escape (from the men’s colony in San Luis Obispo with the help of the Weather Underground) and the next chapter of the adventure.
We also visited with Tim and Rosemary on the rooftop terrace of their small apartment. They were wearing djellabahs and looked very comfortable and fit. Rosemary showed us the passport photo she had used to travel incognito. Is it my imagination, or did Tim really show us a small silver flask which he said carried the world’s purist acid halfway around the world? I can see this in my mind’s eye, but I don’t know if it happened or I invented it because it seemed so appropriate. I therefore defer to Rosemary’s recollections of this event!
A few days later we celebrated Tim’s fiftieth birthday with a large cake that Jonah and I traveled to Algiers to pick up. It was the only time any of us were let out alone. Most of the time we were kept under guard at the apartment of Eldridge Cleaver’s mistress.
The day following the birthday celebration, or very soon thereafter, Tim, Jennifer, and DC, head of Panther security, left on a trip to Lebanon and Syria. It was a political trip. While they were gone I revolted against Cleaver’s dictatorial rule, but was surprised to find I had no allies among the obedient lefties I was traveling with. So I escaped by climbing out of a window and talking my way out at customs at the airport. (Since the Panthers were guests of the Algerians, and I was a guest of the Panthers, the Algerian government wanted the Panthers’ approval to let me leave. But at that point they didn’t know I was gone.) I got the next flight to Paris, where I joined Abbie. I didn’t see Tim again for twenty years.
We next spoke in 1987 when he learned through a mutual friend that I had just moved back to Los Angeles. He called to tell me that he had heard about my actions in Algeria after he returned from the tour of Arab countries, and that he applauded them. I had the impression he’d been waiting a long time to tell me that. And it was very moving for me, because when this happened (in 1970) I had no allies or believers in my account, except for Abbie, but that’s another story.
In the ’90s, after Barbara left him, Tim and I gradually became friends and spent a lot of time together. We shared a common interest in the computer revolution and the growing cyberculture. Tim was extremely social. He went out as much as he could and also had wonderful gatherings at his house in Beverly Hills on Sunday afternoons. Over time his various friends got to know one other.
Some of the Hollywood parties I went to with him were deadly (as such things can be for a showbiz outsider like myself) but he usually enjoyed himself. At one moribund party, a trio played music but only one straggly young couple was dancing in the downstairs parlor. Most of the celebrated, rich, or powerful were upstairs with the hosts. Tim and I were nursing white wine at a small cocktail table downstairs when suddenly Tim got up, stepped onto the dance floor and began dancing with vigor, raising his arms, turning, leaping into the air. A few people on the sidelines stared at the old geezer’s jumping around. I thought he was roaring drunk and was mortified. Then Mario Van Peebles started dancing, then one couple, then another . . . and the room came to life again. Still, being a complete introvert, I was embarrassed . . . until one day I realized this was my favorite image of Tim: dancing with Dionysian abandon at the age of seventy-four!
My favorite times with Tim were just sitting alone with him outside on his patio beneath the stars, or in his study late at night listening to Billie Holiday or James Joyce. He’d sit at his Mac, writing; I’d stretch out on the nearby couch and read. From time to time he’d take a break, we’d talk, smoke, get something to eat.
We certainly argued our share, about ideas and words. Once he was genuinely horrified when I used the expression “bring people together.” I was horrified that he was horrified, but he seemed to loathe anything that reminded him of movements or the left.
Over the years I became increasingly interested in strange phenomena such as UFOs and crop circles, but I could not bring this up for discussion with Tim after the first few occasions because he became furious and asked me not to speak of such things. He wouldn’t allow me to question him about his objections, but the implication was that this area of experience is unscientific, crackpot, etc. And he was always a scientist, among other things. Although he himself (during the prison period) had once been passionately interested in space exploration, I don’t think he had any interest in this weird stuff, and probably didn’t want to be associated with it in any way. There is enough strangeness, perhaps, already associated with him or his presence in American culture.
He was a real stickler for precise meanings of words and was ever alert to nonverbal elements of communication: “You’re waving your hands.” “You’re frowning.” Hmmm. Wasn’t just me. Other friends heard these observations, too. He once told me I should tell jokes. (I’m sure he was right.) I replied that I didn’t know any jokes, so he gave me one. He loved to tell jokes and was really good at it. He was, in short, a delightful person whom I dearly loved.
One afternoon in the study he described his capture in Afghanistan, his trip back to the United States under federal custody, and his subsequent imprisonment in a high-security prison. He said he was held in maximum security after his return (he had, after all, escaped from one federal facility). The guards led him down and down and down to the lowest level of the prison pit, which was several stories beneath the ground. Charles Manson was incarcerated somewhere in this vicinity. Timothy was placed in solitary, in a small, black cell. He didn’t know how long he would have to remain there.
I asked him breathlessly, “What did you do?”
“I laughed,” he said.