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Psychedelic Refugee: The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run
A memoir by one of the original female psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s
• Shares Rosemary’s early experimentation with psychedelics in the 1950s, her development through the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, and her involvement, at first exciting but then heartbreaking, with Dr. Timothy Leary
• Describes her LSD trips with Leary, their time at the famous Millbrook estate, their experiences as fugitives abroad, including their captivity by the Black Panthers in Algeria, and Rosemary’s years on the run after she and Timothy separated
One of the original female psychedelic pioneers, Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935-2002) began her psychedelic journey long before her relationship with Dr. Timothy Leary. In the 1950s, she moved to New York City where she became part of the city’s most advanced music, art, and literary circles and expanded her consciousness with psilocybin mushrooms and peyote. In 1964 she met two former Harvard professors who were experimenting with LSD, Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, who invited her to join them at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York. Once at Millbrook, Rosemary went on to become the wife--and accomplice--of the man Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America.”
In this intimate memoir, Rosemary describes her LSD experiences and insights, her decades as a fugitive hiding both abroad and underground in America, and her encounters with many leaders of the cultural and psychedelic milieu of the 1960s. Compiled from Rosemary’s own letters and autobiographical writings archived among her papers at the New York Public Library, the memoir details Rosemary’s imprisonment for contempt of court, the Millbrook raid by G. Gordon Liddy, the tours with Timothy before his own arrest and imprisonment, and their time in exile following his sensational escape from a California prison. She describes their surreal and frightening captivity by the Black Panther Party in Algeria and their experiences as fugitives in Switzerland. She recounts her adventures and fears as a fugitive on five continents after her separation from Timothy in 1971.
While most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time.
• Shares Rosemary’s early experimentation with psychedelics in the 1950s, her development through the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, and her involvement, at first exciting but then heartbreaking, with Dr. Timothy Leary
• Describes her LSD trips with Leary, their time at the famous Millbrook estate, their experiences as fugitives abroad, including their captivity by the Black Panthers in Algeria, and Rosemary’s years on the run after she and Timothy separated
One of the original female psychedelic pioneers, Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935-2002) began her psychedelic journey long before her relationship with Dr. Timothy Leary. In the 1950s, she moved to New York City where she became part of the city’s most advanced music, art, and literary circles and expanded her consciousness with psilocybin mushrooms and peyote. In 1964 she met two former Harvard professors who were experimenting with LSD, Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, who invited her to join them at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York. Once at Millbrook, Rosemary went on to become the wife--and accomplice--of the man Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America.”
In this intimate memoir, Rosemary describes her LSD experiences and insights, her decades as a fugitive hiding both abroad and underground in America, and her encounters with many leaders of the cultural and psychedelic milieu of the 1960s. Compiled from Rosemary’s own letters and autobiographical writings archived among her papers at the New York Public Library, the memoir details Rosemary’s imprisonment for contempt of court, the Millbrook raid by G. Gordon Liddy, the tours with Timothy before his own arrest and imprisonment, and their time in exile following his sensational escape from a California prison. She describes their surreal and frightening captivity by the Black Panther Party in Algeria and their experiences as fugitives in Switzerland. She recounts her adventures and fears as a fugitive on five continents after her separation from Timothy in 1971.
While most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time.
352 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 2021
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March 21, 2026
In Rosemary Woodruff Leary’s life, a vagabond and often anguished period (beginning in 1970) ensued from her role in the escape of her notorious husband, Timothy, from a U.S. federal-prison. An underground network arranged relocation of the two to Algeria, where they were rather grudgingly given asylum (and then ‘house arrest’!) by fugitive high-ranking members of the Black Panthers. What followed their escape from that ultimately led to a breakdown of Rosemary & Tim’s marriage by 1971, and to some 23-years of fugitive life for her on four continents. (In early 1974 the national youth-culture, rock-fan magazine Rolling Stone ran a letter she’d written belatedly declaring her independence from Tim.)
Rosemary Woodruff, born into poor circumstances in Missouri in 1935, grew up inquisitive, good-hearted, imaginative, loving nature & music, and poised to explore a larger world. Beyond being naturally perspicacious, she became a lifelong autodidact. Her first marriage, at 17, was ultimately abusive; she left it. She had the looks to earn income as a model, TV-commercial actress, and bit-part player. Later, she was a ‘beatnik airline stewardess’. In New York City, she lived in the milieu of jazz greats John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus — and paired-up with one musician (an alcoholic, and sometimes junkie, who despite that did turn her on to the sacred peyote). She soon realized that living around alcohol & opiates wasn’t a healthy path. When she and a woman friend tried LSD, she was impressed by the positive effects and possibilities she felt.
Partly due to Harvard nixing his contract renewal in 1963, sensationalist publicity cast Tim Leary into the role of renegade. Heirs of the Mellon fortune, who liked what Tim was about & what he was trying to do, offered him the option to relocate his dedicated psychedelic-research group to the sprawling rural Millbrook estate, in New York, with its 64-room mansion. Leary, who met Rosemary in 1965, invited her to visit. Open-ended, contemplative LSD research was continuing there, where psychedelics (not yet illegal) were viewed as a gateway to both spiritual experience & increased creativity. The group also explored non-drug methods of expanding consciousness
Rosemary (soon Tim’s S.O.) became a co-presenter of seminars, a light-show artist, a session guide, and co-editor of Leary’s manuscripts — hence, an all round central figure. An ever-increasing stream of people visited Millbrook. To keep order & harmonize life, the Millbrook group arrived at ground rules, ethics & agreements for residents.
Everything I’ve read about Leary leaves the impression that Tim favored an unstructured psychedelic session, for himself and for others; give someone some LSD in calm surroundings and see what happens. By contrast, Rosemary’s description of her participation in an all-night indigenous-American peyote ceremony reveals her canny, quiet appreciation for its harmonizing, healing simplicity, its convergence in unaffected reverence and deeply felt gratitude.
At any rate, before long Millbrook had attracted and was providing temporary accommodations to a sizeable number of musicians, artists, writers, film-makers & producers. The many, varied personalities & personal issues, in combination with the drugs, eventually led to an unpredictable & at times turbulent scene.
The Millbrook episode came to an end, with more scandal & disrepute accumulating around Tim. Yet, increasingly, he felt destined to further propagate the psychedelic experience. Now, coming across ever more insouciant & glib in the media, he exulted in the public role of LSD Prometheus. He, Rosemary & principal colleagues relocated into Mexico, but soon had trouble with authorities there. Apparently abetted by the cooperation of the Mexicans, U.S. authorities were able to jail Tim, Rosemary, and Tim's two teenage kids, arresting them a little north of the border. After that conviction for marijuana possession was overturned, he was arrested again, this time sentenced to 10 years for possession of pot (based on two joints-worth of evidence); a subsequent court action doubled the sentence to 20 years.
Supporters organized his escape from the minimum-security California Men's Colony West, and the two had soon made it to Algeria. Convicted in absentia for her involvement in the escape, a five-year sentence was dispensed to Rosemary, while five years were tacked onto Tim’s sentence for escaping.
To avoid prison, after her split from Tim, Rosemary traveled widely & used pseudonyms. Her impressions and take-aways from psychedelics and Millbrook life are interesting. Her inner strength was exceptional. Consider: in the mid-70s, she had to carry on despite her sense of betrayal when Timothy, after being extradited back to California, snitched on her & others who had enabled his 1970 prison escape, in exchange for early release from his re-incarceration. The story of her perseverance & determination to live life outside of prison walls, and with a positive attitude, is engaging. The posthumous book has been pieced together from chapters, memoirs, and other writings of Rosemary’s, and the editor did a careful & admirable job with that difficult task. Thankfully, Rosemary was articulate & a well-read story teller, a poet at times.
Rosemary Woodruff, born into poor circumstances in Missouri in 1935, grew up inquisitive, good-hearted, imaginative, loving nature & music, and poised to explore a larger world. Beyond being naturally perspicacious, she became a lifelong autodidact. Her first marriage, at 17, was ultimately abusive; she left it. She had the looks to earn income as a model, TV-commercial actress, and bit-part player. Later, she was a ‘beatnik airline stewardess’. In New York City, she lived in the milieu of jazz greats John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus — and paired-up with one musician (an alcoholic, and sometimes junkie, who despite that did turn her on to the sacred peyote). She soon realized that living around alcohol & opiates wasn’t a healthy path. When she and a woman friend tried LSD, she was impressed by the positive effects and possibilities she felt.
Partly due to Harvard nixing his contract renewal in 1963, sensationalist publicity cast Tim Leary into the role of renegade. Heirs of the Mellon fortune, who liked what Tim was about & what he was trying to do, offered him the option to relocate his dedicated psychedelic-research group to the sprawling rural Millbrook estate, in New York, with its 64-room mansion. Leary, who met Rosemary in 1965, invited her to visit. Open-ended, contemplative LSD research was continuing there, where psychedelics (not yet illegal) were viewed as a gateway to both spiritual experience & increased creativity. The group also explored non-drug methods of expanding consciousness
Rosemary (soon Tim’s S.O.) became a co-presenter of seminars, a light-show artist, a session guide, and co-editor of Leary’s manuscripts — hence, an all round central figure. An ever-increasing stream of people visited Millbrook. To keep order & harmonize life, the Millbrook group arrived at ground rules, ethics & agreements for residents.
Everything I’ve read about Leary leaves the impression that Tim favored an unstructured psychedelic session, for himself and for others; give someone some LSD in calm surroundings and see what happens. By contrast, Rosemary’s description of her participation in an all-night indigenous-American peyote ceremony reveals her canny, quiet appreciation for its harmonizing, healing simplicity, its convergence in unaffected reverence and deeply felt gratitude.
At any rate, before long Millbrook had attracted and was providing temporary accommodations to a sizeable number of musicians, artists, writers, film-makers & producers. The many, varied personalities & personal issues, in combination with the drugs, eventually led to an unpredictable & at times turbulent scene.
The Millbrook episode came to an end, with more scandal & disrepute accumulating around Tim. Yet, increasingly, he felt destined to further propagate the psychedelic experience. Now, coming across ever more insouciant & glib in the media, he exulted in the public role of LSD Prometheus. He, Rosemary & principal colleagues relocated into Mexico, but soon had trouble with authorities there. Apparently abetted by the cooperation of the Mexicans, U.S. authorities were able to jail Tim, Rosemary, and Tim's two teenage kids, arresting them a little north of the border. After that conviction for marijuana possession was overturned, he was arrested again, this time sentenced to 10 years for possession of pot (based on two joints-worth of evidence); a subsequent court action doubled the sentence to 20 years.
Supporters organized his escape from the minimum-security California Men's Colony West, and the two had soon made it to Algeria. Convicted in absentia for her involvement in the escape, a five-year sentence was dispensed to Rosemary, while five years were tacked onto Tim’s sentence for escaping.
To avoid prison, after her split from Tim, Rosemary traveled widely & used pseudonyms. Her impressions and take-aways from psychedelics and Millbrook life are interesting. Her inner strength was exceptional. Consider: in the mid-70s, she had to carry on despite her sense of betrayal when Timothy, after being extradited back to California, snitched on her & others who had enabled his 1970 prison escape, in exchange for early release from his re-incarceration. The story of her perseverance & determination to live life outside of prison walls, and with a positive attitude, is engaging. The posthumous book has been pieced together from chapters, memoirs, and other writings of Rosemary’s, and the editor did a careful & admirable job with that difficult task. Thankfully, Rosemary was articulate & a well-read story teller, a poet at times.
March 7, 2021
My thanks to Inner Traditions/Park House Press for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Psychedelic Refugee’ by Rosemary Woodruff Leary and edited by David F. Phillips. Its subtitle is: ‘The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run.’
Phillips provides a good summary of this memoir: “While most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time. Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935–2002) was one of the great female psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s. She met Dr. Timothy Leary in 1964, becoming his psychonaut partner at the Millbrook estate and later his wife. After Timothy’s prison break in 1970, Rosemary fled with him to Algeria, beginning a years-long fugitive journey across four continents and nearly 25 years underground.”
In his Editor’s Introduction, Phillips writes about his process of rescuing Rosemary’s memoirs, which at her death were left unfinished and somewhat fragmentary and also the rules that he followed editing them. He was clear that he wasn’t writing a biography and instead used copious footnotes to annotate Rosemary’s words.
Her written manuscript ended in 1972 with the remaining thirty years either unwritten or lost. However, Phillips found the transcript of an extensive 1997 interview with Rosemary by author Robert Greenfield in the archives containing her papers and included this with Greenfield’s approval to round out the memoirs.
‘Psychedelic Refugee’ is very stream-of-consciousness and I felt that it conveyed a real sense of Rosemary’s voice throughout. As the text was deliberately left unpolished it had a rawness and authenticity that made it a highly engaging reading experience.
I was a teenager in the 1960s and by my late teens I considered myself part of the counter culture. So many of the people and events in this book were familiar to me. It was a memorable time to live through.
I felt that Rosemary, who was close to the heart of it, presented a fascinating first hand account especially of what life was like with such a notorious figure as Leary. I was especially interested to read of her involvement with the occult, this included her desire to use the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot as a framework for her memoirs.
Phillips provides a good summary of this memoir: “While most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time. Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935–2002) was one of the great female psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s. She met Dr. Timothy Leary in 1964, becoming his psychonaut partner at the Millbrook estate and later his wife. After Timothy’s prison break in 1970, Rosemary fled with him to Algeria, beginning a years-long fugitive journey across four continents and nearly 25 years underground.”
In his Editor’s Introduction, Phillips writes about his process of rescuing Rosemary’s memoirs, which at her death were left unfinished and somewhat fragmentary and also the rules that he followed editing them. He was clear that he wasn’t writing a biography and instead used copious footnotes to annotate Rosemary’s words.
Her written manuscript ended in 1972 with the remaining thirty years either unwritten or lost. However, Phillips found the transcript of an extensive 1997 interview with Rosemary by author Robert Greenfield in the archives containing her papers and included this with Greenfield’s approval to round out the memoirs.
‘Psychedelic Refugee’ is very stream-of-consciousness and I felt that it conveyed a real sense of Rosemary’s voice throughout. As the text was deliberately left unpolished it had a rawness and authenticity that made it a highly engaging reading experience.
I was a teenager in the 1960s and by my late teens I considered myself part of the counter culture. So many of the people and events in this book were familiar to me. It was a memorable time to live through.
I felt that Rosemary, who was close to the heart of it, presented a fascinating first hand account especially of what life was like with such a notorious figure as Leary. I was especially interested to read of her involvement with the occult, this included her desire to use the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot as a framework for her memoirs.
December 20, 2020
Psychedelic Refugee by Rosemary Woodruff Leary is a fascinating document of both the 1960s and the aftermath filtered through the lens of an amazing woman.
While this is a memoir in the sense that the words are indeed Leary's, this is more like going through well-ordered archives. Most of the book is fairly coherent as a story of her life but even then the editor had to help put the remaining pieces of what she had written into a form readers might find interesting.
If you lived this period you will relate to much of what she talks about even though most of us experimented on a much smaller level. Reading this made me dig out my old weathered copy of The Psychedelic Experience and remember (as best I could) those days of thinking the world might actually be malleable in a positive direction. Now, well, I am just short of giving up on such hopes, nothing positive will be noticeable during what is left of my lifetime.
I will warn some readers. This is not a polished memoir that Leary had the opportunity to edit until publication, this is in some ways a recovered document (collection of documents). So if you read memoirs for entertainment and want an easy narrative to follow, this may disappoint you. That said, if you are genuinely interested in the period and in the people, this is like reading primary documents in an archive. You will gain a great deal of insight and there is plenty to enjoy if you don't mind the work.
I would most highly recommend this to people who either remember those times and want a deeper understanding or those who are truly interested in the period. For general readers of memoirs, this may be more hit or miss since it is more disjointed than what you may be used to. But it is well worth the time if you have the interest.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
While this is a memoir in the sense that the words are indeed Leary's, this is more like going through well-ordered archives. Most of the book is fairly coherent as a story of her life but even then the editor had to help put the remaining pieces of what she had written into a form readers might find interesting.
If you lived this period you will relate to much of what she talks about even though most of us experimented on a much smaller level. Reading this made me dig out my old weathered copy of The Psychedelic Experience and remember (as best I could) those days of thinking the world might actually be malleable in a positive direction. Now, well, I am just short of giving up on such hopes, nothing positive will be noticeable during what is left of my lifetime.
I will warn some readers. This is not a polished memoir that Leary had the opportunity to edit until publication, this is in some ways a recovered document (collection of documents). So if you read memoirs for entertainment and want an easy narrative to follow, this may disappoint you. That said, if you are genuinely interested in the period and in the people, this is like reading primary documents in an archive. You will gain a great deal of insight and there is plenty to enjoy if you don't mind the work.
I would most highly recommend this to people who either remember those times and want a deeper understanding or those who are truly interested in the period. For general readers of memoirs, this may be more hit or miss since it is more disjointed than what you may be used to. But it is well worth the time if you have the interest.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
July 24, 2022
Such a fascinating person, and a hero in the movement. This is definitely 60's experimental Burroughs- inspired writing.
May 27, 2025
Audiobook - fascinating content. So interesting to hear of her experiences in her own words. Disjointed - clearly wasn’t a finished work, so the editor adds a lot. Narration was a mechanical, also mispronounced words. But the content is interesting. Looking forward to reading the new biography to fill in gaps.
September 27, 2024
Dope. Dope af.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews