My Psychedelic Love Story

 Joanne Harcourt-Smith was a promiscuous, ravishing party-girl before she met Timothy Leary in 1974.  Leary, the guru of the LSD human potential movement, was on the lam, hiding out at posh hotels in Switzerland.  Harcourt-Smith wanted to meet the fugitive -- some years earlier, when she was pregnant, she had heard the Moody Blues Song "Timothy Leary is Dead" and been fascinated by it. (She knew everything about sex but nothing about the "facts of life" -- her mother's only admonition to her when she was sexually active as a teenager was to "not get syphilis.") Leary offered her a Tarot card reading during their first encounter -- she drew the Destiny card first, then, Prudence ("I'll pass on that," she demurred) and, the Tower.  This array of cards persuaded her that she was destined to be "bonded" to Leary for all time -- this is her odd locution.  She was his girlfriend until 1977 when after a  "terrible fight", he absconded -- by that time, they were living together in an FBI Witness Protection program in Santa Fe. (To save himself, Leary had turned "snitch" and was acting as government informer against his former disciples.)  Joanne Harcourt-Smith (JHS) was distraught at losing Leary, but used her vast wealth to retreat to the Caribbean where she voyaged between islands for a few seasons until she had recovered sufficiently to begin the rest of her life, apparently as a sort of New Age celebrity back in Santa Fe.  She died on October 11, 2020 at 74 and Errol Morris' entertaining documentary about her love affair with Leary was, apparently, shot while she was in the final stages of her cancer.  Notwithstanding her obvious frailty, JHC dominates Morris with her witty, sometimes scabrous, anecdotes and his Interrogatron camera device is obviously in love with her.  She's fantastically articulate, speaking in a strangely mechanical voice with  almost computer-like pronunciation of words, flawless elocution that doesn't seem quite human -- it's not clear what she would regard as her first language or, even, whether that concept would have any meaning to her.  She was raised in Paris and the French Riviera, but obviously speaks perfect, grammatically impeccable English and, apparently, several other languages as well. (Newspaper accounts describe her as an English citizen; her stepfather was Hungarian, her mother, apparently a Polish Jew, and she lived for significant periods of her life in German-speaking countries..)  When she discloses that she had trouble adapting to the wide open spaces around Santa Fe, she notes: "I never went camping.  I'm a Parisian.")  About a third of the way through the interview -- and that's the entire format for My Psychedelic Love Story- -- Morris asks her when she first discovered that she could effortlessly manipulate men.  She pauses since there is, in fact, no point in her life that she can reliably recall when she wasn't able to get men to do exactly what she wanted -- she settles for a moment when she was about five when a tutor molested her, an experience, that she blithely says, was not "wholly disagreeable."  JHS has a toothy and perfect smile and is tremendously engaging -- she obviously has a mellowing impact of Morris.  A couple of times when she obviously lies, Morris contents himself with exclaiming "Oh come on, Joanne!" but he doesn't confront her and, presumably finds her as whimsically engaging and effortlessly charming as the film's viewers do.  

A lot of what JHS says is pretty questionable and, like everyone else on earth, she labors to present herself in the best possible light.  However, she's happy to admit to casual promiscuity and says that she was never pleased with herself unless she could count up to eight admirers at a time -- "Not that I was having sex with all of them," she says, but, of course, some of them were lucky enough to enjoy her favors and the others she kept on a short leash.  When Leary was imprisoned (in fact for most of their liaison) she kept up her busy sexual schedule, keeping her "husband", as she called him, closely apprised of her adventures.  She doesn't even bother to apologize for these peccadillos but seems to regard them as intrinsic to the mid seventies Jet Set of which she was a member -- she was a star of Lebanese TV when she was fifteen and notes that she "was having lots of sex then."  She parleyed  her beauty into encounters with the rich and famous -- with her sometimes boyfriend, Dennis Merino, she partied with the Rolling Stones and, then, tried to engineer a meeting between presidential candidate George McGovern and Keith Richards; the Stones offered to play free concerts to support McGovern run for the presidency.  There are shots of her with Andy Warhol, of course, and Mick Jagger and various other luminaries of the era.  When she and Leary were extradited from Kabul, they went first class from Frankfurt (they were planning to escape in Paris and so the plane was diverted) to San Francisco, guzzling champagne the whole time with the famous German playboy, Gunter Sachs, then the husband of Brigitte Bardot.  For the first third of her life, she enjoyed celebrity and vast wealth of a kind unimaginable to most people.  Then, she began her fateful relationship with Timothy Leary, the subject of most of the movie.  Her chronicle of wild days and nights with Leary takes on a disturbing aspect.  JHS has come to believe that she was manipulated into meeting Leary, seducing him, and, then, luring him into a trap in Afghanistan so that he could be captured and held hostage by "Nixon and Governor Reagan" until he could be coerced into appearing in public as representative of the federal government's  war on drugs.  Ultimately, JHS concludes that her erstwhile boyfriend, Dennis Merino, whom she describes as a kind of James Bond villain was, in fact, what he told her that he was -- a CIA operative and that he ultimately pulled the marionette strings on her life.  (Merino died, perhaps was assassinated, at a wild party thrown by the Turkish playboy, Adnan Kashoggi.)  Despite these dark averments, JHS, always quick to assert her agency and independence, says that she sought out Morris and asked him to make the documentary on the strength of his disturbing and horrific Wormwood, a long-form, half-dozen episode about  CIA experimentation with LSD in the fifties and the destructive effect that this had on a man who determined (or, perhaps, fantasied) that the government had, in fact, killed his father in the drug trials -- the drug, it is hypothesized in Wormwood, was tested by the CIA as a brain-washing agent.  My Psychedelic Love Story is frothier and far less dark than Wormwood -- it plays, in fact, like an Audrey Hepburn movie with the madcap JHS in the ingenue role as Acid Queen.  But there is a distinct conspiratorial edge to the movie and it surmises that Leary was, in fact, coopted by the Feds through what JHS says was her "Mata Hari sex spy" contrivances.  

Morris shoots the interview from, at least, four vantage points, uses vintage rock and roll, and intercuts the narrative with elaborate montage sequences featuring Tarot cards in giant close-ups, psychedelically manipulated landscapes, ominous images of hotel and city skylines, as well as dozens of shots from various versions of Alice in Wonderland, suggesting JHS, the Acid Queen, was like Alice fallen into a surreal world of drug-induced visions.  Leary is featured in old interviews and documentary footage including one scene shown repeatedly in which he is grinning maniacally while being dragged in handcuffs from a cop car to a jail entrance.  Leary thought of himself as the reincarnation of Aleistar Crowley and so there are many shots of the Great Beast himself in satanic regalia -- there also images from what appear to be underground films by Kenneth Anger and many shots of celebrities and movie stars cavorting with the fantastically beautiful waif-like JHS,  The big closeups of JHS are set against a mosaic of exotic footage, cut very quickly together, montages of esoteric imagery and manipulated colorized documentary footage.  The actual interview takes place in what seems to be a Western-style house, all timber and wood like a hunting lodge in which the tiny JHS sits alone in a huge gloomy room.  

There's a sort of revelation at the end.  It turns out that Leary recorded many hours of tape for JHS whom he seems to  have genuinely loved but been more than a little afraid of.  For a time the tapes were lost and JHS, for some inexplicable reason, never really listened to them when she received the recordings -- they were interviews between Leary and a shrink at the prison where he was confined. We see the old woman listening to this tape and grinning; the words trigger more memories in her.  Ultimately, she comes to believe that Leary's cooperation with the authorities was, in effect, the result of torture.  The Feds kept him in solitary confinement next to Charley Manson and seem to have threatened to dose him with so much acid that he would never be able to recover any semblance of sanity.  In his interview with the earnest G-Man on the evils of drugs, Leary seems not wholly enthusiastic and, in fact, appears to be playing some sort of sinister joke on the cop.  Of course, JHS has to justify Leary's complicity with the Feds because she was herself coopted as an informant and, in fact, used her famous sex appeal to lure a number of victims to their dooms.  There is one very poignant scene where she recounts how she was asked to lead the cops to a Weatherman safe-house in Oregon -- the place where Leary hid out when he was sprung from jail in 1974 and, then, a fugitive before ultimately making it to Switzerland.  For just one moment, JHS can't manipulate Morris and she shows genuine shame -- apparently, she showed the cops where the safe-house was located (and presumably aided in several arrests) although when asked about this, she merely puts her head down, and says that "(she) can't remember" if they found the hide-out.  

A subtext in the film is the sinister power of people with great wealth.  JHS says that her stepfather, who married both her grandmother and, then, later her mother, was a "bad guy" -- he persuaded harried Jews to put money into Swiss bank accounts during the Hitler years.  Then, he told the Nazis where to find his clients and appropriated the money for his own purposes.  Her grandfather described all "little girls as being Messalinas", referring to the famously dissolute Roman empress, apparently as an excuse for molesting them.  "These people commit the most abominable crimes," JHS tells us.  "They are absolutely horrible."  JHS says that her mother, an enthusiastic convert to Catholicism, treated "(her) like Hitler treated the Jews."  She claims that 77 of her  relatives died in concentration camps;. But, then, later, inconsistently, she describes her great love for her mother -- this doesn't ring false to me:  we can love those who hate us and have even harmed us.  When a chauffeur raped her when she was a child, she complained to her mother.  Her mother said:  "You're making it up."  When the child persisted in her accusation, JHS recalls her mother saying:  "Well, a good chauffeur is very hard to find" and, then, refusing to do anything about the event.  "Do you think she was jealous of your relationship with the man?" Leary asks.  "Maybe," she replies, "although she was interested in men who were ambassadors, presidents -- she was one of Mussolini's lovers."  Leary is very charismatic but he doesn't come close to JHS's cunning and wiles.  She would have swallowed him alive if he hadn't made his escape after three years of his relationship with her.