The circus came to Laredo twice when I was a boy.
The first time, in 1957, it was the Clyde Beatty Circus. It was thrilling for a boy to watch the crew put up the Big Top on the vacant lot a block from my house. The small army of workers who suddenly appeared in a convoy of trucks on Garfield Street that must have come from some foreign land. At eight years old, I was still too young to want to run away with them, but the Clyde Beatty Circus crew was my first glimpse of circus people, the closest thing there was to gypsies in 50s America.
That October evening my parents walked down the street with me to the tent for the three-ring circus. Unlike some people who’d bought over-sold tickets from the Jr. Chamber of Commerce, the Clouse’s got in. We laughed at the clowns, oohed at the high-wire artists, and ahed at the lion tamer with only his whip, chair, and revolver between him and a Christian martyr’s gory death.
An unforgettable childhood memory.
The second circus in Laredo happened nine years later, in March 1966 when I was sixteen. That circus was the Timothy Leary trial.
It was unforgettable, too.
By then I was a junior at J. W. Nixon High School. I knew perfectly well who Leary was, and so did the friends I was hanging out with in Hector Torres’ converted garage bedroom. You didn’t have to be a news nerd to see that we were headed toward adulthood on a path that would have to make it through more than just tuition payments, college calculus, and a war in Vietnam. We’d have to find our way around or through psychedelics. The social and grooming difficulties of long hair surprised us a couple of years later.
During Timothy Leary’s nationally reported dope trial that spring, it was as though Laredo wasn’t just another town next to a river on the map, one of those places way far away from where ‘Things Happen.’ If not a fly-over place, then a drive-through town. As far as the world was concerned, Laredo was just a dot on a gas station road map.
The Leary trial put Laredo on the map.
The world had come to town.
There had been headliner arrests at the Laredo end of the old International Bridge before. The biggest arrest of all was the one that never happened, when all of America waited in January and February of 1920 for the convicted World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Jack Johnson, to surrender there. When he changed his mind and went to Tijuana instead, the celebrity of that honor ended up going to San Diego.
Morton Sobell of the Rosenberg spy ring was expelled from his hideout in Mexico and arrested at the bridge in 1950. Gus Hall, Chairman of the Communist Party of the USA and four-time candidate for President, was extradited from Mexico in 1951 and arrested at the same spot. In 1960 a small-time California pimp and Mann Act convict was deported from Mexico and arrested mid-span. When he hit the headlines in 1969, we’d know him as Charles Manson.
Heck, Allen Ginsberg had included among the best minds of his generation destroyed in Howl a mention of those “who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,” and that was ten years earlier.
Lawrence Schiller
Timothy Leary (right) walks down Salinas Avenue with Richard Alpert (later known as Babba Ram Dass) while both were in Laredo for Leary’s trial for marijuana possession.
But the Timothy Leary bust was on a different scale. Leary, a shamelessly self-promoting mountebank, never ducked when the spotlight found him.
His once-promising career as a serious academic met its Waterloo poolside in Cuernavaca in the summer of 1960. It was there that the vacationing psychologist was turned on to Mexican ‘magic mushrooms,’ and tripped on pajaritos, the Psilocybe mexicana. Like Helen’s face, a trip that launched a thousand trips. Professor Leary went from ‘shrooms to still-legal LSD, and it wasn’t long before he became the iconic ‘Timothy Leary’ of American 60s legend, cartoon character, jester, high priest, messiah, evangelist, and proselytizer of the psychedelic experience, a one-man “turn on, tune in, drop out” PR machine.
By the time Leary was arrested in Laredo on December 22 1965, he’d been fired from Harvard for neglecting to show up for scheduled classes, expelled from his experiment in communal living in a large house near Boston, as well as deported from Mexico, Domenica, and Antigua. He’d been divorced after a brief third marriage to a European fashion model and was hanging out with a crowd of weirdos, space cadets, groupies, and runaways in an upstate-New York 64-room mansion owned by the acid-head heir of the Gulf Oil fortune. The compound known as Millbrook pretended to be a ‘lab’ for investigating the psychological and spiritual effects of LSD. This was not an enviable CV.
His fourth of his five wives was Rosemary Woodruff, a New York model who’d gone on a weekend lark up to Millbrook for a trip. Rosemary and her friend Charles Jaeger were in the Ford station wagon with Leary and his two children when customs officials found the marihuana seeds and stems that got them arrested three days before Christmas 1965.
As they planned family Christmas dinners and tried to remember which gifts were still hidden unwrapped in closets, Americans awoke on Christmas Eve to read the headline, “Fired Harvard Prof Leary LSD Guru Busted at Mexican Border.”
Lawrence Schiller
Timothy Leary and his daughter Susan in Laredo during a break in the trial.
With the cash from the trust funds of the New York coupon clippers he’d turned on, bail was raised and the five were released. Charges were dropped against everyone but Leary and his 18-year-old daughter Susan. She was the only one who was actually “in possession.” Customs Agent Miss Helen Loftis in a strip search that night found a snuff box holding a few grams of marihuana and two roaches in her underwear.
The trial began in Laredo on March 4th.
Timothy Leary tells his version of events. Slow down so you don’t miss the “colorful Texan oaths.”
[His Laredo lawyer] was not optimistic about the long-range prospects. Rosemary and Jack would walk free. He was sure the grand jury couldn’t indict them. Susan, because of her age, would get probation, and her record would be expunged when she reached the age of twenty-one. But I was in trouble. The US Attorney in Houston was flying down a crew of of prosecutors and investigators. Obviously it was a big case for them. The way they were encouraging publicity suggested that they wanted to make an example of me. I had to realize that people down here in South Texas were a bit more conservative than the people up around Harvard. The federal judge for this circuit was an old tiger named Connally [Ben, brother of ex-Governor John Connally], notoriously tough on Northerners coming through Laredo with marihuana. It would be hard to get a sympathetic jury in a small town like this. Best thing was to make a deal. “You might end up doing four months’ jail time with probation. A lot depends on a repentant attitude in cases of this sort.”
“Repentant?” I said indignantly. “What does that mean?”
“Oh, you make public statements denouncing drugs.”
“For a pinch of marihuana that wasn’t actually mine? Four months in the slammer. Probation. No way! This whole thing is a set-up and a frame. I’m going to fight it.”
The lawyer dropped his head and studied his lap. “I must tell you that the case against you is non-existent. The contraband belonged to Rosemary and was in Susan’s possession. You have nothing to do with it legally. You obviously didn’t know the stuff was in the car because you wouldn’t have crossed the border to Customs. Right? All you have to do is tell the truth and you’ll walk free.”
“But then Susan and Rosemary would take the fall.”
“The court isn’t going to hit them hard. Susan’s a minor. And Rosemary’s a poor confused misguided girl under your influence. I she cries and promises the judge to be good in the future, I’ll get her off with probation.”
“But I’m not some criminal looking for loopholes. I’d feel immoral, like I was copping out.”
The lawyer let loose a string of colorful Texan oaths, invoking rattle snakes’ genitals and lizards’ eliminative organs. “Every time I hear a client talk about moral principles I know I’m going to lose the case and not get paid enough for the headaches. You don’t understand how much trouble you could get into. If you take responsibility for the contraband, there’s no way we can keep you out of jail.”
“What about appeals? I’ll take this to the Supreme Court. Everyone knows the marihuana law is an unconstitutional tax statute. Marihuana’s not a narcotic. We’ll get that Mickey Mouse statute thrown out.”
“I know. I’ve heard several hundred people sitting in that very chair say the same thing. And they all come around in the end and make a deal. …You can probably stay out of jail during the review process on appeal bond, but you’ll still be a convicted criminal. If you do anything they don’t like —get arrested again, say something publicly that displeases them— your bail can be revoked and you’ll be in prison while your case works its way up the courts. If you fight the charges, then you’ll get hit with all three felony counts. They add up to a lot of prison time.”
“How much?”
“Let’s see. …you’re talking a mandatory minimum of ten years, and if they’re really mad at you, as I gather they are, up to fifty years. Plus a $50,000 fine.”
“I could go to prison for life for $10 of marihuana that wasn’t my own?”
The lawyer looked down at his papers unhappily. “It’s terrible, I know. All I can do is get you the best deal possible. This system is pretty set in its ways. I wouldn’t advise you to fight it.”
I wasn’t going to submit passively to the role of scapegoat, the Harvard psychologist who got in that trouble over drugs. …I resolved to fight this case in the courts of the land, to mobilize legal teams, to devise courtroom tactics, to file appeals, motions, briefs, depositions, to speak in defense of the right of American citizens to manage their own bodies and brains.
The fatal word in this naive program was “fight.”
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The trial took five days. When the jury left for deliberation, Leary and Susan headed to the door for a breath of fresh air.
One of his Laredo lawyers, either Tom Goodwin or John Fitzgibbon, glanced at his watch and shook his head.
“Not enough time. It will take them five minutes to elect a jury chairman, five minutes to pour the coffee, one minute to vote, and three minutes to notify the bailiff. They’ll be back with a verdict in a quarter of an hour.”
The verdict of guilty on all counts was returned right on time. Justice was swift and certain, if not fair.
Judge Connally sentenced Leary that afternoon to 30 years imprisonment.
Oh, and a psychiatric exam for the ex-psychologist.
Leary never served a day of that sentence. Out on bail during appeals, his conviction on the marihuana tax count was reversed by the US Supreme Court in the fall of 1968 and the law itself was declared unconstitutional. But by then he’d run for Governor against Ronald Reagan with a campaign song called “Come Together” written by John Lennon and been arrested in California for marihuana possession again. It was from the men’s prison in San Luis Obispo that Leary escaped and spent the several years on the lam in Switzerland, Algeria, and Cuba. Eventually he was captured and repatriated from Afghanistan and incarcerated in the more secure Folsom Prison. Governor Jerry Brown pardoned him in the mid-70s.
While Laredo was abuzz with conversations about how handsome Timothy Leary was and the courtroom drama, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were rehearsing a new song tentatively and blasphemously named “Mark 1.” Lennon had written most of it during the two months of daily acid tripping in London between Leary’s bust and the trial in Laredo.
Its now instantly recognizable drone of the first verse began, “Turn off your mind relax and float downstream.” The phrase came verbatim from page 14 of Timothy Leary’s 1964 book, The Psychedelic Experience. The rest of the lyrics were not exactly plagiarized, although certainly very close to the book’s admonitory style. It would have been accurate to credit the song to “Lennon-McCartney-Leary.”
It was recorded with producer George Martin and the rest of the Beatles at Abbey Road Studios in April. Renamed “Tomorrow Never Knows,” it was released as the final track on the Beatles’ Revolver album in August.
While the Beatles were taking rock in new directions, Timothy Leary was back at the LSD lab at Millbrook with Rosemary and the children. But after the Christmas bust and March conviction, Leary’s life for the next 15 years would never be far from police and the courts.
He’d not taken his lawyer’s advice in Laredo, and his naive impulse to fight was, as he said, “fatal.” The lyrics of another 1966 Top-40 song sum up Timothy Leary’s situation: “I fought the law and the law won.”It has been repeated many times that “Tomorrow Never Knows” is the most effective evocation of a LSD experience ever recorded. That landmark LSD song and The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” were both recorded during the Leary trial.
Listening to them on the radio that summer in Laredo, the two songs blew one sixteen-year-old boy’s mind. All through the winter and the subsequent Summer of Love, he thought that the psychedelic experience just might lead to some elusive state of “peace, love, and happiness” with maybe some spiritual enlightenment along the way.
Years later, John Lennon reminisced about “Tomorrow Never Knows:”
“I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, all that shit. We were going through the whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I destroyed my ego and I didn’t believe I could do anything, and I let people do and say what they wanted, and I was nothing.”
Looking back at the time of the Leary trial in Laredo, it’s clear that the mantra of “Turn off your mind relax and float downstream” wouldn’t lead to an enlightened nirvana after all.
Not for Leary, not for Lennon, not for the boy.
But fifty-four years ago, it sounded very cool.
If only it still did.
Sources:
Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: a personal and cultural history of an era: an autobiography,
pp. 237-39.
The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology 2000, John Lennon, p. 180.
