8 August 2025

The Acid Queen

The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (An Excerpt)
By: Susannah Cahalan

MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV

For better or worse, many people know the name Timothy Leary. Far fewer, however, have even heard of his partner, Rosemary Woodruff Leary. The two were married from 1967 to 1972, during a time when Leary, as one contemporary put it, “could sneeze and make headlines.” Rosemary became his right-hand woman: she helped him write speeches, edited his books, sewed his clothes, and safeguarded his archives. She even helped him escape from prison—an act that forced her to live on the run for twenty-four years.

Rosemary was an extraordinary woman who believed deeply in the healing and transformative power of LSD. A key figure in the counterculture, she worked tirelessly behind the scenes to democratize access to psychedelics and to preserve both her husband’s legacy and that of the broader psychedelic underground. And yet her contributions have been largely ignored, suppressed, or forgotten.

I’m so grateful to MAPS for giving me the opportunity to share a piece of Rosemary’s story. Below is an excerpt from The Acid Queen, which traces the early stages of her psychedelic journey—beginning with her first experience with LSD at age twenty-five and her chance encounter with a brilliant, charming professor who would change the course of history.

Rosemary crashed at the Chelsea Hotel, then briefly moved to a fisherman’s cottage in South Street Seaport before finally landing in a Greenwich Village townhouse apartment off Fifth Avenue with a working fireplace. Finally, a room of her own.
She made unapologetic use of that room, fully embracing the sexual revolution. “I have trouble relating to anyone I’m not sleeping with,” she said. There was Kenneth Karpe, a jazz promoter consumed with get-rich-quick schemes, a doctor named Vincent, and a rumored dalliance with the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio.

Sometimes she and her best friend, Susan Firestone, a fellow divorcée, attracted the same men. After Susan ended a brief affair with a married lawyer, she introduced him to Rosemary at a party. Perhaps feeling insecure about being compared with Susan, who was a college graduate, Rosemary bragged that she was related to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who shared her mother’s maiden name, and jumped into bed with the lawyer that night.

Rosemary’s brother, Gary, recalls a vivid encounter during one of Rosemary’s visits to the family’s new house in California. As he was driving around town after a party, his headlights startled a couple passionately kissing, their bodies slamming against each other. Gary recognized his older friend Don, a James Dean–type cement truck driver whom he idolized. That’s how he does it! Gary thought. And then the woman turned to face the headlights. He realized he was ogling his sister.

While enjoying the exhilarating tremors of the youthquake, Rosemary also experienced its aftershocks. She obtained an illegal abortion, which she only discussed in a self-reported medical history she wrote two decades later. Two friends remember her describing it as “botched.” Otherwise, Rosemary did not mention it. A revealing absence.

Through a few wives of her jazz musician friends, Rosemary heard about the artist and scientist psychonauts of the nineteenth century, who investigated the potentials of their minds by experimenting with various substances—hashish, cocaine, opium, and nitrous oxide. She read about their direct encounters with the mystical and the characteristics they shared, as outlined by psychologist William James: ineffability, transience, intuitive knowing, and passivity. Waking life was, for James, “but one special type of consciousness.” Rosemary already had learned from her flash of second sight at age eight that there were many others.

Rosemary as a beatnik, credit to Gary Woodruff.

She also embraced the legend of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian spiritualist who communed with ghosts and co-founded the mystical Theosophical Society. A world traveler, a circus performer, and a noted trickster, Blavatsky introduced an ancient “secret doctrine” that united all mystical belief systems. The Theosophical Society believed in the power of thought—that there are invisible spirit worlds, astral planes, telepathic projections, where energy is exchanged and emotions vibrate at higher or lower frequencies.

Rosemary also admired the Belgian-French opera singer and explorer Alexandra David-Néel, who disguised herself as a peasant to become the first Western woman to visit Lhasa, Tibet’s “forbidden city.” Like Rosemary, David-Néel harbored grand ambitions as a child. “Ever since I was five years old, a tiny precocious child of Paris, I wished to move out of the narrow limits in which, like all children my age, I was then kept,” David-Néel wrote.

At the same time, Rosemary discovered an English translation of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text that had, in 1950, been reprinted with a new foreword by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. The I Ching, also called The Book of Changes, consists of sixty-four hexagrams based on the results of six throws of coins or yarrow sticks. Each throw corresponds to a broken or solid line. Some of these lines are moving, meaning that they are in the process of transforming into their opposite—a broken line into a solid one, or vice versa—resulting in an entirely new hexagram. The book, one of the oldest texts in human history, is a record of a moment in flux—a documentation of the invisible forces of chance and destiny. For Rosemary, the I Ching was indispensable: it was a way to make sense of a situation when she didn’t trust her own mind. She threw the coins before almost every single decision to come.

In 1959, Rosemary landed an uncredited role in the naval comedy of errors Operation Petticoat. The movie was a hit. Rosemary walked away with a little pocket change and four keepsake photographs, two with the actor Tony Curtis. Rosemary, in her Parisian striped shirt and hair tied back in a kerchief, looks like a wealthy woman on vacation in St. Tropez.

During publicity for Operation Petticoat, the superstar Cary Grant, one of the movie’s leads, went public for the first time about his use of an experimental mind drug called lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). He told a reporter that LSD saved his marriage—shocking his handlers and igniting a burning interest in his audience. Grant became an early proselytizer of LSD’s benefits to the masses.

LSD wasn’t illegal—not yet. Two decades earlier, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, in search of a novel respiratory and circulatory stimulant for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, synthesized the chemical LSD-25 from alkaloids found originally in ergot, a grain fungus, which can cause hallucinations and convulsions. Hofmann did not anticipate the full effects of his cold remedy until he accidentally ingested trace amounts of it five years after his discovery. The LSD age had begun.

By the mid-1950s, American psychiatrists had embraced LSD as one of a slew of new mind-changing medications. Sandoz branded LSD with the clunky name Delysid and marketed it as a psychotomimetic—a drug that mimicked madness. Researchers had near-total freedom in exploring its effects. The results were astonishing. For some, one trip was enough for lifelong change.

Analysts began using LSD to thin egos and release the subconscious. For women, it was used to thaw “frigidity”—a diagnosis applied to 40% of women in the 1950s. One male psychotherapist claimed it helped with their “castrating and unfeeling” natures.

LSD was also tested by the U.S. Army and CIA in secret MK-ULTRA experiments. Civilians and soldiers alike were dosed—often unknowingly. The experiments included combining LSD with sleep deprivation, electroshock, and psychological manipulation. In brothels in San Francisco, dosed men were secretly filmed. The CIA funded academic studies into psychedelics, whether researchers were aware of it or not.

Meanwhile, LSD spread through Hollywood via Dr. Oscar Janiger, who dosed more than 900 people, including Cary Grant. LSD remained a niche, expensive therapy tool—until it didn’t.

Susan Firestone suggested Rosemary try LSD. Susan had tripped with her boyfriend, painter Allen Atwell, at an experimental center in Millbrook, New York.

For Rosemary’s first time, they rearranged her apartment—candles lit, curtains drawn, a bouquet arranged. They created a shrine blending Eastern and Western religious symbols, inspired by the concept of “set and setting.”

Rosemary noticed the saltiness in her mouth, the flicker of candle flames syncing with her breath. She became hyper-aware of her body—its pulse, its patterns, the way tissue clenched and released. The awareness wasn’t entirely pleasant. It was intense. Then came a vision.

Rosemary modeling photo, credit to Gary Woodruff.

The Hindu goddess Kali—armed and militant, eyes upturned, crescent moons cradling the sun—danced upon lovers, flailing the abyss.

Mother.
Kali.
Generatrix.
A woman who destroys to create.

Though unreal, it felt true. “Before my first psychedelic experience, I didn’t have the feeling of belonging anywhere, even not in my own body,” Rosemary said. “I always felt I was alien.”

But this was part of her journey back home.
“And it was only the beginning.”

By 1964, she had lost her stewardess job—an inevitable outcome for an occupation with mandatory retirement before age thirty-two. Over the years that Rosemary worked in the airline business, six stewardesses had killed themselves after being fired for aging out, one despairing about being “old and useless.”

Rosemary, however, did not see herself as useless. Instead, she felt underutilized and bored—tired of her friends, New York City, and the person she had become.

So Rosemary repeated a long-established pattern and put her future in the hands of yet another man who wasn’t worthy of it. Allen Eager, a genius like the others—who had mastered the tenor sax and played alongside Charlie Parker and Stan Getz—was even more “wounded than the rest,” she wrote. Allen became Rosemary’s new project.
Like Susana’s boyfriend, Allen Eager had visited the experimental center in Millbrook through his ex-girlfriend, the oil heiress Peggy Hitchcock. Hitchcock had also dated the center’s lead researcher, the psychologist Timothy Leary, who, after being fired from Harvard, continued studying the effects of psychedelics on cohabitation, creativity, and attachment.

Allen had joined one experiment conducted in a stone chalet bowling alley, where a group took acid at regular intervals for two weeks. There he had learned the hard lesson of the diminishing returns of upping dosages. Everyone hated one another by its conclusion.

But when Allen invited Rosemary to join him for a weekend visit to the acid commune in the woods, Rosemary said yes.

In January 1965, Rosemary wandered the fifty-plus-room mansion, smoking a joint, in search of a session—in which a dozen or so people dropped acid simultaneously with a guide. She found one and settled in next to a stranger, whom she watched devolve from a man into a baby. As she held him in her arms, he became an ovum in her womb.
Tellingly, the one article Rosemary had clipped out a month after her first visit to Millbrook came from its lone female voice, Lisa Bieberman. The article, “Psychedelics: Who Says You Can’t?,” published in The Realist in February 1965, promoted a responsible, open-borders approach to psychedelics. Bieberman’s mission—the true democratization of psychedelic use for all—would stay with Rosemary long after Bieberman grew disenchanted, leaving the movement behind to become a Quaker.

The second time she visited Millbrook, on May 1, 1965, Rosemary packed a bottle of sweet woodruff–infused German wine and a heavily underlined book by the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. There’s something perfectly orchestrated about bringing a text about the limits of communication and perception—key quotation: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”—to a house dedicated to testing them. She was sending a signal. A book like that was a mating call for a certain type of man. Perhaps she even suspected she’d see that man that night.

Rosemary as a stewardess, credit to Gary Woodruff.

Timothy Leary spotted Rosemary as she walked into the estate with a group of friends. She wore tight bell-bottoms and a button-down shirt tied at the waist, exposing a strip of creamy skin. His knees buckled. It wasn’t merely her physical beauty but her shoes—her high-top tennis shoes. He had worn the same ones back at Harvard with his tweed suits. When he spotted the Wittgenstein book poking out of her bag, he joked that she was an undercover narc—the Feds had nailed his taste in women. Hook, line, and sinker.

Timothy waited for Rosemary to notice him. She walked over, held up her bottle of sweet wine, and asked if he had an opener. He brought her into Millbrook’s cluttered kitchen, past its walk-in freezer, and rifled through drawers until he found a corkscrew.
“You are the kindest man in the world,” she said. “I’d like to come back.”

“Anytime,” Timothy replied. And he meant it—the sooner the better.

But Rosemary didn’t take him up on his offer. She had a boyfriend, and despite his clear interest (and hers), she knew that Timothy was married. She didn’t need him. Not yet.
Rosemary returned to New York and tried to forget the instant connection she shared with the alluring silver-haired psychologist who was about to become the martyred star of the emerging psychedelic movement.