Cary Grant, congresswoman were tripping on acid years before Timothy Leary’s hippies

Turns out, it’s a longer, stranger trip.

While LSD is often associated with 1960s hippies and Timothy Leary, that’s not the whole story.

“The first era of global experimentation with consciousness-expanding substances took place much earlier than commonly thought, in the 1920s through the 1950s, rather than the 1960s and 1970s,” Benjamin Breen writes in his new book, “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science” (out Tuesday). “Put another way: Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era. They ended it.”

In this excerpt, Breen, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes of actor Cary Grant — who reportedly tripped on LSD 100 times — and Connecticut Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce experimenting with psychedelics well before hippies got trippy.

Throughout 1959, psychedelic therapy captured the public’s attention in a way it would not again until the 2020s. In April of that year, the newspaper columnist Joe Hyams published the first in a series of articles which revealed that Cary Grant, one of the world’s most bankable movie stars, was an enthusiastic user of LSD.

This was no mere recreational drug for the Hollywood icon. Cary Grant credited psychedelic therapy with a personal and professional breakthrough.

“All the sadness and vanities were torn away,” he told Hyams. “I was pleased with the hard core of the strength I found inside of me. I think I’ve always been a pretty fair actor. Now I know I’m going to be the best actor there is.” 

In the days after this article appeared, Hyams received a deluge of telephone calls and nearly eight hundred letters from readers. “Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD,” he remembered. “Every actor in town under analysis wanted it.”

As rival reporters jumped on the story, Grant’s friends confirmed that a transformation really had taken place. “The changes in him as a result of the treatment have been extraordinary,” the playwright Clifford Odets told one journalist. “He’s bloomed … why, he’s almost like a kid.”

In September 1959, a long profile entitled “The Curious Story Behind the New Cary Grant” appeared in Look magazine, reaching well over five million readers. Those readers learned from Grant’s doctor, Mortimer Hartman, that LSD was a “psychic energizer” that “intensifies memory and emotion a hundred times.” Hartman was a radiologist by profession.

But after being introduced to psychedelics by Betty Eisner and Sidney Cohen earlier in the decade, he decided to partner with a psychiatrist, Arthur Chandler, to open one of the world’s first psychiatric offices devoted entirely to psychedelic therapy. Unsurprisingly, given what Look described as Grant’s “state of euphoria about his self-discoveries” (which included a psychedelic vision in which “his mind seemed to leave his skull and visit outer space”), those clients now began flocking to Hartman’s Beverly Hills office. 

Even after Dr. Hartman’s license was suspended by the California Board of Medical Examiners in October 1961, Cary Grant continued his psychedelic therapy sessions. The actor began taking LSD under the supervision of Dr. Oscar Janiger of Beverly Hills, a close friend and colleague of Betty Eisner and Sidney Cohen who shared their belief that psychedelics could have a potentially revolutionary impact on society.

Janiger’s files contain a remarkable transcript of Cary Grant speaking into a dictation machine about the events of one LSD trip in Janiger’s office — the actor’s seventy-second — which took place as the astronaut John Glenn was being recovered from his orbital rocket flight. “He, in a way, is the product of the united thought-patterns and endeavors of so many scientifically-minded men,” Grant said into the tape recorder as the acid was kicking in that afternoon. “Perhaps of the united knowledge of all men up to its present evolution today.” Then he began pondering Hegelian dialectics (“everything creates its opposite and therefore, cyclicly, itself”). 

Another less public yet equally influential figure advocating for the benefits of psychedelic therapy was Clare Boothe Luce, former congresswoman, ambassador, and wife of publishing magnate Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life magazines. A glamorous Broadway playwright turned Republican member of Congress, Luce became the first woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to a major nation when President Eisenhower appointed her ambassador to Italy in 1953.

But throughout her adult life, Luce was dogged by a deep-seated depression that had been worsened by the 1944 death of her only child, Anne, in a freak car accident in Palo Alto. Tranquilizers and alcohol merely numbed her pain. 

Then, in 1958, Clare Boothe Luce met Sidney Cohen. Under his guidance, as well as that of the English writer Gerald Heard, she began LSD therapy. “For almost 58 years—all my conscious life,” she wrote in 1959, “I felt certain that I would be deserted, rejected, ‘let down,’ denied by everyone or anyone I came to love.” But her psychedelic experiences in the spring of 1959 had changed that, Luce believed. (Remarkably, during her very first acid trip, Luce received a telephone call from then vice president Richard Nixon, who was beginning to plan a presidential run against John F. Kennedy and counted Luce as one of his close friends. She decided it would be better to call him back.) 

Luce was the psychedelic patient from the 1950s whom we know the most about. Her trips were transcribed and annotated, and her activities were recorded almost daily by photographers, newspapers, and in the archives of fellow VIPs like Nixon, who kept a voluminous file on her. But though she was an exceptional figure, in other ways she was typical of the midcentury psychedelic patient: female, middle aged, white, and haunted by grief or trauma but not diagnosable with a psychiatric disorder—a “neurotic,” in the terminology of the age. And she was also typical in another way: she bought into the techno-utopian belief that she was living through an era of wonder drugs.

From the 1940s through to the end of the 1950s, millions still believed in the dream of atomic power so cheap it was free, of nuclear-powered airplanes and even cars. And in the same era, many of the same people believed that the synthetic drugs which had emerged in the same troubled era as the atom bomb could reshape society toward equally utopian goals. 

Excerpted from the book “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science“ by Benjamin Breen. Copyright © 2024 by Benjamin Breen. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.