Cary Grant’s image as a reserved and proper Englishman. “I’ve had my
ego stripped away. A man is a better actor without ego, because he has
truth in him. Now I cannot behave untruthfully toward anyone, and
certainly not to myself.” From the sound of it, LSD had turned Cary Grant
into an American.
“I’m no longer lonely and I am a happy man,” Grant declared. He said
the experience had allowed him to overcome his narcissism, greatly
improving not only his acting but his relationships with women: “Young
women have never before been so attracted to me.”
Not surprisingly, Grant’s interview, which received boatloads of
national publicity, created a surge in demand for LSD therapy, and for
just plain LSD. Hyams received more than eight hundred letters from
readers eager to know how they might obtain it: “Psychiatrists called,
complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD.”
If the period we call “the 1960s” actually began sometime in the 1950s,
the fad for LSD therapy that Cary Grant unleashed in 1959 is one good
place to mark a shift in the cultural breeze. Years before Timothy Leary
became notorious for promoting LSD outside a therapeutic or research
context, the drug had already begun “escaping from the lab” in Los
Angeles and receiving fervent national press attention. By 1959, LSD was
showing up on the street in some places. Several therapists and
researchers in Los Angeles and New York began holding LSD “sessions”
in their homes for friends and colleagues, though exactly how these
sessions could be distinguished from parties is difficult to say. At least in
Los Angeles, the premise of “doing research” had become tenuous at best.
As one of these putative researchers would later write, “LSD became for
us an intellectual fun drug.”
Sidney Cohen, who by now was the dean of LSD researchers in Los
Angeles, scrupulously avoided this scene and began to have second
thoughts about the drug, or at least about the way it was now being used
and discussed. According to his biographer, the historian Steven Novak,
Cohen was made uncomfortable by the cultishness and aura of religiosity
and magic that now wreathed LSD. Sounding a theme that would crop up
repeatedly in the history of psychedelic research, Cohen struggled with
the tension between the spiritual import of the LSD experience (and the
mystical inclinations it brought out in its clinical practitioners) and the
ethos of science to which he was devoted. He remained deeply
frankie
(Frankie)
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