Film Review: My Psychedelic Love Story
Joanna Harcourt-Smith in My Psychedelic Love Story by Errol Morris, 2020
This fascinating story of one woman’s seven year involvement with the celebrated guru of psychedelics, Timothy Leary is, on the surface, an unlikely subject for one of the best documentarians of such weighty films as The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line. But it was after seeing his film Wormwood, about the CIA’s covert experiments with LSD, that Joanna reached out to Morris to tell her story in an effort to discover whether there was involvement with the CIA, which was using her as a pawn in their efforts to extradite Leary back to the US. Nixon was waging a ferocious war on drugs and Leary was one of the best known proponents of psychedelics for personal transformation and was fully embraced by rock musicians, artists, poets, writers, hippies and liberal socialites as a cult figure. Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
Leary, was a charismatic and brilliant scholar and philosopher who had worked at Harvard for 10 years until his tenure was ended by an arrest for marijuana possession. He was in and out of jail multiple times, including being broken out by the Weather Underground. When he met the 26 year old Joanna Harcourt-Smith, he was 52 and had just gotten out of jail. Harcourt-Smith, born of a wealthy family in Switzerland, was part of the European jet-set society and something of a party girl. She had an arguably terrible childhood and adolescence which included parental neglect and manipulation, and sexual abuse. When she told her mother that the chauffer had sexually molested her, the reply was “Good chauffeurs are to find”. When she was told about her Jewish background, her Catholic-practicing mother, told her in no uncertain terms to never reveal that to anyone.
The young Joanna had plenty of baggage to unload and meeting the infamous guru old enough to be her father was irresistible. He promised to rescue her from: “a way out of the decadent aristocratic game, the limbo of Jet Set desperados” She became an ardent convert. They were both involved in a lot of crazy schemes and when they got together it became a whirlwind of daily tripping and passionate love, as well as terrifying international escapes and arrests from the authorities in places like Kabul, Beirut, Austria and Switzerland. It was heady stuff for the young Joanna and involved some of her own social connections
like Michel Hauchard, a dodgy billionaire, who owned the rights to Leary’s writing and introduced the two. He then proceeded to bail them out financially when called upon. They were both good at getting others to help them. She claims she never had any money, but things always got taken care of. It seems to be the case. Hauchard provided a beautiful Avenue Foche apartment for years. Their affair ended after Leary turned government informant, was considered a traitor to the cause and they were put in witness protection. One night after an argument Leary bolted without a word. And that was the end of that. It must be said that Leary was a serial monogamist, and was married 6 times, not including legally to Harcourt-Smith.
There was so much that happened during those 7 years that sounds almost impossible. But her story telling is always engaging, believable and very touching. The notion that she was a pawn is never really fleshed out, but never ruled out by any of the details. Harcourt-Smith is an ideal subject for the intimacy of Morris’s style which allows the subject to look directly into the interviewer’s eyes. She is attractive, lively, funny and never boring. Hard to imagine that she died of breast cancer shortly after the film was finished. But she got to see it and was very happy about it.
Available on Showtime
Belle McIntyre
