[msb-alumni] Joanna Harcourt-Smith Dies at 74; Joined Leary in LSD-Fueled Affair died on October 11, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 17:16:11 -0500
BlankJoanna Harcourt-Smith Dies at 74; Joined Leary in LSD-Fueled Affair. By
Katharine Q.
Seelye.
For an adventurous globe-trotting time, she was by the side of the LSD guru
Timothy Leary,
only to be left traumatized by the experience.
Joanna Harcourt-Smith was a 26-year-old European socialite in Switzerland in
1972 when she
met Timothy Leary, the psychedelic Pied Piper to the flower children of the
1960s. He was
52 and a fugitive from justice, having escaped from prison in California, where
he was
serving a 10-year sentence on drug charges. Ms. Harcourt-Smith was instantly
enthralled --
not just by his canary yellow Porsche 911 Targa, but also by his mesmerizing
eyes and his
promise of psychological freedom.
"You are looking for a way out of the decadent aristocratic game, the limbo of
Jet Set
desperados," he told her. "I'll show you the way."
After weeks of LSD-fueled adventures, they headed for Afghanistan. But on
landing, they were
taken into custody by American agents and returned to the United States, where
Mr. Leary was
again imprisoned.
Ms. Harcourt-Smith stood by him and pressed for his release, which came three
and a half
years later.
By then they had both changed, and soon afterward they broke up. She was 30 and
ready to
start her life over.
Ms. Harcourt-Smith was 74 when she died on Oct. 11 at her home in Santa Fe,
N.M. Her
daughter, Lara Tambacopoulou, said the cause was breast cancer.
Ms. Harcourt-Smith may have been a footnote in Mr. Leary's event-filled life --
he was
married multiple times, though never officially to her, and she was not
mentioned in his
1996 obituary in The New York Times -- but he loomed large in hers, though she,
too, was
married multiple times.
It took her three decades to absorb and 'compost' her experience with him, as
she put it,
before she published her memoir, "Tripping the Bardo With Timothy Leary: My
Psychedelic Love
Story," in 2013.
"I followed him off that precipice, and my family, nationality and sanity were
fragmented
beyond recognition," she wrote.
A documentary based on her book is scheduled to air on Nov. 29 on Showtime. The
film is by
Errol Morris, acclaimed for "The Thin Blue Line" (1988) and "The Fog of War"
(2003).
Joanna Marysia Harcourt-Smith was born on Jan. 13, 1946, at the Palace Hotel in
St. Moritz.
Her mother, the immensely wealthy heiress Marysia (Ulam) Krauss Harcourt-Smith,
was playing
bridge there when she went into labor 10 weeks early. After 43 hours, she gave
birth to
Joanna, who weighed less than three pounds. Joanna's father, Cecil
Harcourt-Smith, a
commander in the Royal Navy, was not a presence in her childhood and died when
she was 10.
'Many times,' Ms. Harcourt-Smith wrote, 'my mother told me that I was a mistake
from the
moment I was conceived, never making it exactly clear whose mistake. Joanna
attended a
Catholic boarding school outside of Paris. (She was Jewish, but her mother, who
had lost
several relatives in the Holocaust, forbade her from saying so.) She was
sexually abused by
her mother's chauffeur, she said; she told her mother about it, but she didn't
believe her
and said to her, 'A good chauffeur is hard to find. As a young woman, Ms.
Harcourt-Smith
immersed herself in drugs and promiscuity, at one point joining the Rolling
Stones' circle.
Around the same time, Mr. Leary, the high priest of LSD, who was 26 years her
senior, was
urging people to 'turn on, tune in and drop out. A psychologist, he had been
fired in 1963
from Harvard, where undergraduates had shared in his stash of psychedelics,
though these
drugs were not illegal at the time. He also faced multiple outstanding
indictments, most on
minor drug charges, and was eventually imprisoned. His wife at the time,
Rosemary Woodruff
Leary, aided by the radical Weather Underground, helped orchestrate his escape
from the
California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo in 1970, and the two fled to
Algeria, where they
stayed with Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader. They made their way to
Switzerland,
where Ms. Harcourt-Smith sought him out. Mr. Leary's wife left him, and he and
Ms.
Harcourt-Smith began an intense romantic odyssey that lasted from 1972 to 1977.
Switzerland
did not want to harbor the fugitive Mr. Leary, whom President Richard M. Nixon
had called
'the most dangerous man in America,' and did not extend his asylum there. So he
and Ms.
Harcourt-Smith hit the road, first to Vienna, then to Beirut. An informant
tipped off the
authorities about their travel plans, and when they landed in Kabul,
Afghanistan, they were
rerouted to the United States. Ms. Harcourt-Smith was not charged with anything
but insisted
on staying with Mr. Leary and was held as a useful asset until they arrived in
California,
where she spent the next three and a half years trying to free him from prison.
All the
while she was a confounding figure. 'Neither the counterculture nor the
prosecutors and
prison system knew what to make of her,' Michael Horowitz, Mr. Leary's
archivist, said in a
2017 interview. 'Her outspoken, upper-class European manner put people off,' he
said. 'She
had an edge and knew how to get her way. Tim empowered her, and she in turn was
tremendously
loyal to him, dedicated to getting him out -- whatever it took. Alienating many
in the
counterculture was the fallout from that. As a condition of Mr. Leary's
release, he and Ms.
Harcourt-Smith agreed to become federal informants. Mr. Leary's followers were
outraged and
blamed her for their guru's becoming a traitor to the cause. The poet Allen
Ginsberg branded
her 'a C.I.A. sex provocateur. Ms. Harcourt-Smith always insisted that their
becoming
informants was not her idea; rather, she said, it was Mr. Leary who told her to
tell the
government that he was ready to cooperate. She felt she was being scapegoated.
In any case,
Mr. Leary was released in 1976. Anger at the pair was so great that the
government put them
in the witness protection program for their own safety, and they lived for a
time outside
Santa Fe, N.M., under the aliases James and Nora Joyce. But by then they were
wearing on
each other. His years in solitary confinement had damaged him, she wrote. They
were both
alcoholics and fought all the time before splitting up. Ms. Harcourt-Smith
moved to the
Caribbean and lived on a sailboat for a few years. She stopped drinking and
taking drugs in
1983 and settled again in Santa Fe, where she began life anew. 'I felt like a
child who grew
up in the forest,' she said in a radio interview with Susun Weed, an herbal
health expert.
'I had to relearn everything,' she said, adding: 'I had so much shame and guilt
that I could
barely write. In the late 1980s she began to reconcile with her daughter, whom
she had not
seen for 15 years, from the time her daughter was 5. Ms. Tambacopoulou said in
a phone
interview that her mother had been 'extremely traumatized' by her experience
with Mr. Leary,
'but we were both absolutely determined not to let the events of her life
destroy us. Over
time, they found peace with each other. In 2006 Ms. Harcourt-Smith and Jose
Luis Gomez
Soler, a mystic from Spain, founded a website, futureprimitive.org, and she
began hosting a
podcast in which she interviewed authors and innovators. She and Mr. Soler
married in 2009.
In addition to Ms. Tambacopoulou, Ms. Harcourt-Smith is survived by her
husband; two sons,
Alexis d'Amecourt and Marlon Gobel; and three grandchildren. 'She grew and
transformed
enormously over the course of her life and became an inspiration to many in her
later
years,' her friend Cynthia Jurs, a Buddhist teacher in Santa Fe, said in an
email, adding,
'I would love for people to know who she became, not who she was.
Other related posts:
- » [msb-alumni] Joanna Harcourt-Smith Dies at 74; Joined Leary in LSD-Fueled Affair died on October 11, 2020 - Steve
