biological weapons specialist named Frank Olson in 1953; a few days
later, Olson supposedly jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor of
the Statler Hotel in New York. (Others believe Olson was pushed and that
the CIA’s admission, embarrassing as it was, was actually a cover-up for a
crime far more heinous.) It could be Olson whom Al Hubbard was
referring to when he said, “I tried to tell them how to use it, but even
when they were killing people, you couldn’t tell them a goddamned
thing.”
A regular stop on Hubbard’s visits to Los Angeles was the home of
Aldous and Laura Huxley. Huxley and Hubbard had formed the most
unlikely of friendships after Hubbard introduced the author to LSD—and
the Hubbard method—in 1955. The experience put the author’s 1953
mescaline trip in the shade. As Huxley wrote to Osmond in its aftermath,
“What came through the closed door was the realization . . . the direct,
total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and
fundamental cosmic fact.” The force of this insight seemed almost to
embarrass the writer in its baldness: “The words, of course, have a kind of
indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact
remains.”
Huxley immediately recognized the value of an ally as skilled in the
ways of the world as the man he liked to call “the good Captain.” As so
often seems to happen, the Man of Letters became smitten with the Man
of Action.
“What Babes in the Woods we literary gents and professional men
are!” Huxley wrote to Osmond about Hubbard. “The great World
occasionally requires your services, is mildly amused by mine, but its full
attention and deference are paid to Uranium and Big Business. So what
extraordinary luck that this representative of both these Higher Powers
should (a) have become so passionately interested in mescaline and (b)
be such a very nice man.”
Neither Huxley nor Hubbard was particularly dedicated to medicine or
science, so it’s not surprising that over time their primary interest would
drift from the treatment of individuals with psychological problems to a
desire to treat the whole of society. (This aspiration seems eventually to
infect everyone who works with psychedelics, touching scientists, too,
including ones as different in temperament as Timothy Leary and Roland
Griffiths.) But psychological research proceeds person by person and
frankie
(Frankie)
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