Cary Grant in the Psychiatrist's Chair

“Cary Grant said he had been born again. He said this publicly, in 1959, to journalist Joe Hyams. The LSD sessions, he said, had cured him of everything he had been.”

In the late 1950s, before the counterculture existed, before Timothy Leary had been fired from Harvard, before the word 'psychedelic' was widely known, there was a brief period in Los Angeles when LSD-assisted therapy was simply a promising psychiatric tool used by respectable clinicians on willing patients.

Cary Grant was one of those patients. He underwent LSD sessions with psychiatrist Mortimer Hartman, not experimentally, not recreationally, but in formal clinical psychotherapy, using the drug the way Osmond and Huxley had proposed it should be used: with preparation, with a qualified guide, with intention, in a proper setting. He went repeatedly. He found it transformative.

In 1959, he told journalist Joe Hyams exactly what had happened. The resulting article, published in This Week magazine under the headline 'Cary Grant's Bizarre Experiments', was one of the first mainstream accounts of LSD therapy. Grant described being reborn. He described crying for the first time in years. He described understanding, finally, why his four marriages had failed. He said the sessions had done for him what years of conventional therapy had not.

Huxley's Doors of Perception had created the conceptual framework for taking this kind of experience seriously, the argument that direct perceptual transformation was not hallucination but revelation, not pathology but insight. Grant's testimony was the famous-person evidence that the framework wasn't just intellectual fancy. Here was one of the most guarded men in Hollywood, describing a softening, an opening, a change that he was willing to put his name on in a national magazine.

The article was received with bewilderment more than scandal. The scandal would come later, when the counterculture made LSD a symbol of social disruption. In 1959, it was strange but not threatening, a movie star trying something odd in a psychiatrist's office and finding it useful. The small window when that was possible opened in 1953 with Huxley's book and closed around 1967 when Leary's public advocacy made any clinical framing politically untenable. Grant's sessions happened in the middle of that window, and his testimony is one of the documents that shows how different psychedelic history could have been.

Sources

• Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven (1987)
• Hyams, Joe. 'Cary Grant's Bizarre Experiments,' This Week magazine (1959)
• Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)