THE ACID QUEEN

The sometimes blissed-out, always turbulent life of Timothy Leary’s third wife.

Rosemary Woodruff was a Midwesterner who, in the early 1960s, came to New York looking for adventure, working as a flight attendant and model and exploring the wonders of then-legal LSD and then-illegal marijuana. She met Timothy Leary and accepted his invitation to hang out at Millbrook, his psychedelic research commune. The rest is tangled history, as journalist Cahalan relates: Marrying Leary, she became a helpmeet and surrogate mother to a host of acid-stunned hipsters. Often undervalued—writes Cahalan, one eyewitness remarked, “As beautiful as she was, she wasn’t the brightest star in the sky”—she receded into the background and, as Cahalan notes, “served as a footnote, an afterthought” in the Leary mythology. Nevertheless, Woodruff was busted along with her husband by none other than G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy, was busted again, and hard, in Texas and California, helped Leary escape from prison, fled with him to Algeria, and went underground for years, even as Leary, from whom she separated, made deals that got him out of jail and put him on the road, late in his career, to wealth and pop culture fame. Woodruff may have been a footnote, but she was self-aware of her role as a kind of lysergic sorcerer’s apprentice; among papers Cahalan discovered after Woodruff’s death in 2002 was a note reading, “The eyes of the audience must be on the assistant when the magician’s hands are distorting reality.” Cahalan’s swift-moving biography is admiring but not uncritical, with an admonitory takeaway about both psychedelic drugs and the outlaw life: “If you are to engage with these substances, you must respect them enough to prepare yourself for both the light and the shadow.”

A well-wrought narrative that brings deserved attention to a lost figure in the counterculture.