Howelings
KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER
Joanna Leary says goodbye to Peter Anderson
“Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story” by Joanna Harcourt Smith (published Nov. 26) tells the true story of Joanna Leary’s psychedelic experience from the 20th century to the present day.
Well, not quite the present day. The most recent part of her story actually impacted Key West, and Howelings has it for our readers this week.
We spoke by phone with Joanna this month at her home in Santa Fe, where she was enjoying the aftermath of an evening of dancing following the local premier of “Dying to Know,” a new film about Timothy (LSD) Leary and his Harvard ally, Richard (Ram Das) Alpert. “It was great fun,” she told us.
Joanna Harcourt-Smith was considered by Timothy Leary to be the smartest woman in Europe while also being known by the world’s press as the British jet-set “hippie heiress and scapegoat” for being his lover and voice to the outside world while he was in prison for three-and-a-half years in the early 1970s.
“Tripping the Bardo” is an extraordinary eyewitness account of those years, from the Rolling Stones and Andy Warhol to the relentless FBI harassment of the political left. In the words of Joanna herself, it is a story that “unfolded on the back of my childhood, a massive piece of my life’s narrative that I suspect in subtler but equally important ways a piece of history for most of those who will read this book.”
It is a book filled with sexual abuse, starting with her mother’s chauffeur when she was 11; a grandfather that killed her grandmother and got away with it; plus lots of aimless drinking, drug use and money spending— but all told with an honesty and integrity that lifts it far from hell and closer to heaven.
It was Sir Peter Anderson, Secretary General of the Conch Republic, on the other hand, who said, regarding Joanna Leary, “One must have the courage to act on one’s good ideas and so it was that when I met Joanna, Timothy Leary’s former wife, I would marry her.”
Peter met Joanna at the mansion of Barbara Marx Hubbard in Rock Creek Park at the heart of Washington, D.C., at a party whose guests included Newt Gingrich and the special guest was Joanna herself.
“I was introduced to her in the library, an oak-paneled room with a huge, walk-in fireplace,” he told Konk Life just before his death earlier this year. “She held out a glass of scotch and was radiant, electrically beautiful. She captured my heart in an instant. We looked at each other and my world changed. I was never to be the same again. She leaned her unbelievable face into mine and said, ‘Are you rich?’
“I replied, ‘I’m the richest man I know.’ It took her days to realize that I had no money.”
“We sat together during and after dinner and from that day to this we have been family to each other, like one,” he told Konk Life. “I loved her with all my heart. It was all I could do.” Her life was a dreadful mess at that point, but then so was his. “My ex-wife claimed all my assets and my dreams were in tatters. So when Joanna and I went to Tahiti and then spent the next 3½ years gallivanting around the world, my purpose was to serve her life with unrelenting love in the face of every evil.”
Their wedding in Reno, Nevada, was witnessed by Timothy Leary and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who happened to be on a lecture tour together. The marriage ultimately ended when, in Sir Peter’s words, “Joanna decided she did in fact want to live and take care of her own life. So, she left me for rehab.”
But they loved each other forever, she insists, as was proven right up to the hours of Peter’s passing.
This is how Joanna put it in our phone conversation:
“Peter and I broke up in 1984 as lovers but the last thing he said to me before he died was, ‘We need to make a signal from the next life. I have to let you know I never left you and never will.’ Peter was a beautiful being. Judith [also Peter’s ex-wife] was remarkable. Two days before he died, she and I had deep conversations about dying. She put the speakerphone by his bed so I could say things I wanted to say. Then Judith asked me to tell him it would be OK to go. It was absolutely tender and sublime, doing something right. I told him I loved him and that it was all right for him to go. It was OK by his wife and their daughter Mikaela. Judith heard me say he was a good man, that he’d lived a good life, that it’s OK to go now.”
Regarding Judith, Joanna added, “I love that we loved the same person. Peter was very faithful in love. ‘If you give your love, never take it back,’ he said.”
Joanna concluded her account with this: “He was my best friend. So much heart. And Key West was just the right place for him. He got it immediately.
“We spent a lot of time together in the Caribbean. Peter was such an American, yet Key West was the perfect mix of the sailor and the pirate for him.
“And he did make it his own state.
“Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story” by Joanna Harcourt-Smith is available from Amazon.com for $16.60.”
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