This Day in Film History (Cary Grant on LSD)

September 1, 1959—In the new issue of Look, movie fans found a much different Cary Grant than the debonair actor they’d seen on the big screen for the past quarter-century.

The durable leading man, promoting a new film that epitomized the droll comedy style he’d made deceptively easy-looking over the years, Operation Petticoat, also unburdened himself to journalist Laura Bergquist on his longtime feelings of inadequacy—and on how he’d turned his life around with the help of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, a hallucinogenic better known as LSD 25.

You can’t understand the shock of this revelation without keeping in mind this fact: Grant was one of Hollywood’s most notorious health nuts. 

George Cukor couldn’t understand why Grant turned down the role of alcoholic has-been actor Norman Maine opposite Judy Garland in A Star is Born. The actor said he was rejecting it because it was precisely one he was born to play, but I think he must have sensed that audiences might have felt it hard to accept him as unhealthy.

From his ability to perform all kinds of physical action (including running for his life away from a crop duster in that year’s North by Northwest) to his casting opposite much younger actresses (such as Sophia Loren the year before in Houseboat the year), the 55-year-old Grant’s versatility depended in no small measure on his continued vigor and youthful appearance.

So all of Tinseltown—in fact, all of America—sat up and took notice when Grant announced that money, beautiful women, and expensive houses couldn’t buy happiness.

(How many of my readers, having digested that last sentence, have now stopped in their tracks and remarked: “Well, they can’t hurt!”)

You know what gets me about Hollywood stars? Not how some will rant and rave about the horrors of “Amerika” while ignoring the far larger sins of real dictatorships.

No, I mean how they’ll deride whatever traditional religion they grew up with as irrational, superstitious or authoritarian, while taking up another mental worldview far more inane and/or restrictive. (Quick—where else in America are astrology and Scientology so well esconsed as in Hollywood?) 

And I’m talking about how a colony of body-worshippers could ingest so many foreign substances into their own. (Think of River Phoenix and Woody Harrelson, both world-class vegans—but hardly averse to mind-altering substances.)

Practically unique in Hollywood, Grant embraced both these contradictions.

What brought one of Hollywood’s most private stars not only to try this mysterious substance, but also to send the blood pressure of his publicist soaring by opening up about it in Eisenhower-era America?

* His parents’ marriage—so turbulent that it led their young son to seek escape at every Saturday matinee—still bothered him years later.

* When Archibald Leach (Grant’s real name) was aged nine, his father had his mother committed to a mental institution, telling Archie that she was away at a seaside resort. She remained away from the family for 20 years, and Grant didn’t learn the truth until he was in his thirties. He channeled all his guilt and self-hatred over his inability to protect her into what might be his most dramatic—and certainly most self-revealing—role: his Oscar-winning turn as a cockney drifter returning home to his dying mother, in None But the Lonely Heart (1944).

* Three unsuccessful marriages and who-knows-how-many affairs had left Hollywood’s epitome of the romantic leading man wondering what was wrong with him. (If some of his biographers are to be believed, another factor might have been involved: his bi- or homosexuality had to be concealed not just from the public but also from the women who shared his life.)

* Grant’s current wife (well, they were separated but not divorced yet), Betsy Drake, encouraged him to try LSD. Unorthodox healthy treatments were a specialty of hers—she’d rid Grant of his smoking addiction by hypnotizing him, and once she left Hollywood she became a psychotherapist—so he listened attentively when she told him about new experiments some doctors were trying.

Cary and Betsy, along with 110 other Californians, began participating in an LSD research study. Timothy Leary hadn’t become the Johnny Appleseed of Acid yet by urging users to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” 

But LSD (not yet illegal) was already becoming the drug of choice for Aldous Huxley (who extolled it in The Doors of Perception) and Anais Nin (who eventually warned about the heedlessness of those who hailed the drug as an instant cure for everything).

(Another user was playwright-congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce, wife of Time publisher Henry Luce. She was a conservative Republican. Do you want stronger proof that what our parents always told us—i.e., that drugs cause brain damage—was correct?)

LSD had become part of the treatment offered by Dr. Mortimer Hardman, who’d begun to advertise it while he was the partner of psychologist A. Wesley Medford. When Medford started to caution against the drug, Hardman—a cancer specialist and radiologist—hooked up with a psychiatrist, Arthur Chandler, and expanded his practice.

Grant underwent at least 70 LSD sessions while under Hardman’s care. 

Like his childhood days at the movies, these usually occurred on Saturdays, and like these youthful outings, he sought to transcend his troubled past and identity in these hours. They could last four or five hours—again, not entirely unlike his Saturday matinees, if he wanted to stick around for a double feature and newsreels.

The frequent practice of the time was to put patients like himself in a nice, cozy room, with some soothing classical music in the background, while blinders were placed over the eyes and maybe even airplugs put in place.

What Grant experienced in Hardman’s room was, by his various accounts, a revelation. It was certainly a gamut of emotions as described in his autobiography a couple of years later: 

“I passed through changing seas of horrifying and happy sights, through a montage of intense hate and love, a mosaic of past impressions assembling and reassembling; through terrifying depths of dark despair replaced by glorious heavenlike religious symbolisms.”

Mixed feelings about his parents were now replaced with deep gratitude, the actor said. He had learned to take responsibility for how his actions hurt women he loved. He was “through with sadness…close to happiness…rid of guilt complexes and fears.” 

Most of all, he had found “a tough inner core of strength,” leaving him feel he could now be “the best actor there is.”

Sounds to me like the same kind of justifications actors use today to explain how they’ve gotten into Scientology. Even when it’s not supposed to, it always ends up being about me, me, me! You gotta love the consistent narcissism of actors!

Peggy Lee is supposed to have remarked, "I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein and Cary Grant." One who certainly would have agreed with that sentiment was Esther Williams.

On a trip to Europe, sorting through the mess her life had become (IRS troubles, a rapscallion drunk of a husband, a panic attack), the swimmer-actress came across the Look interview with Grant. As soon as she could, she phoned the star, got some more details about Hardman’s program, and enrolled herself.

I’m not sure the results of Grant’s LSD use were that pleasant to those around him. (During her messy divorce from the actor, Dyan Cannon accused him of taking the stuff an average of once a week.)

But from that point on, the actor took great stock in the substance. He told friends it was “a chemical, not a drug” (oh, I see!). It led him to believe he was now ready for fatherhood—and he was as true as his word, becoming one for the first time at age 62 (and, by all accounts, a devoted one).

And he believed in the benefits of LSD enough that, even though he hadn’t seen Hardman in years, he left his doctor a bequest of $10,000 in his will.