Psychedelic Refugee: The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run by Rosemary Woodruff Leary (review)

Rosemary Woodruff Leary's unpublished memoir, now published as 'Psychedelic Refugee,' recounts her life at the center of the 1960s counterculture and psychedelic movement, overshadowed by her famous husband Timothy Leary. The memoir, assembled from fragmented drafts by editor David F. Phillips, portrays her as a strong catalyst who enabled Timothy Leary's fame and legal battles, while enduring financial strain, notoriety, and the end of their marriage. After helping him escape prison, she lived 23 years on the run under an assumed name until 1994, while Leary regained celebrity status. The work provides insight into a key but eclipsed female figure in psychedelic history.

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Reviewed by: Psychedelic Refugee: The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run by Rosemary Woodruff Leary Devin R. Lander (bio) Psychedelic Refugee: The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run By Rosemary Woodruff Leary, edited by David F. Phillips. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2021. 252 pages. $19.99 paperback. For scholars of the counterculture of the 1960s or the history of psychedelics in the United States, Rosemary Woodruff Leary's unpublished memoir has been a kind of semi-lost Holy Grail; people knew of its existence, but few had seen it. That changed in 2016 when the New York Public Library (NYPL) acquired Woodruff Leary's papers and the various incomplete drafts and notes that made up her memoir, which had the working title The Magician's Daughter (Woodruff Leary's father was an amateur magician). But these bits and pieces were only parts of the complete memoir which has now been published as Psychedelic Refugee. As Woodruff Leary's friend and editor, attorney David F. Phillips, outlines in his introductory chapter, the assembling and combining of drafts from a variety of sources including the NYPL archive, published accounts, and digital files saved on a former partner's computer was a long and painstaking process. Over the decades that Woodruff Leary worked on the memoir (from at least 1971 to her death in 2002), and many different suggestions from many different friends and potential editors helped to add to the overall confusion of the manuscript and the author's disillusion with the possibility of its completion. The very fact that Phillips was able to put all the disjointed and sometimes nonchronological material together into a cohesive memoir is a triumph in and of itself, and it makes Psychedelic Refugee very much a product of collaboration between memoirist and editor. Phillips annotates the memoir liberally, filling in blanks where they exist, defining terms, and including brief biographies of even the most obscure characters in Woodruff Leary's life. As such, this is a valuable resource for historians working on the period covered (the 1960s to 1990s) as well as for those specifically interested in the American counterculture and psychedelic history. Woodruff Leary was at the center of the explosion of both in the 1960s. Psychedelic Refugee is also an important resource as it provides insight into the life of a key figure in the history of the era: Rosemary Woodruff Leary herself. Like many women associated with the psychedelic counterculture, Woodruff Leary's story had been eclipsed by her more well-known husband (Timothy Leary) and their various, sometimes notorious, acquaintances (including Richard Alpert [a.k.a. Ram Dass], Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, the Grateful Dead, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono). However, what Psychedelic [End Page 439] Refugee portrays is the story of a strong woman who was a catalyst in many ways, who enabled Timothy Leary to function at the center of a vortex of fame and legal persecution. The story is a complex one, as was Woodruff Leary's relationship with the mercurial and narcissistic Leary. The continued legal pressures, the lack of money, heightened notoriety and the constant presence of psychedelic substances made for a volatile mixture that led to the end of the Learys' marriage. Meanwhile, Woodruff Leary's involvement in helping to break Timothy Leary out of prison culminated in her twenty-three years on the run. Rosemary was a muse, secretary, wife, enabler, fixer, coauthor, lover, and friend to Timothy Leary; but in the end, she was the one forced to live in the shadows while he underwent a return to celebrity after "naming names" and receiving a reduced prison sentence in the 1970s. By the time of his death in 1996, Leary was once again a darling of the Hollywood set and his Hollywood Hills home was a salon of sorts for various actors, musicians, computer programmers, and hangers on. Rosemary Woodruff Leary, meanwhile, lived humbly under an assumed name until 1994, when she once again reemerged. Though she remained in contact with Leary until his death and was named as a beneficiary in his will, the...