San Francisco Chronicle

Leary’s exlover’s wild trip

Documentar­y leaves unsolved mystery of whether she betrayed LSD guru to CIA

- By Bob Strauss

In “My Psychedeli­c Love Story,” the late Joanna HarcourtSm­ith recounts her fascinatin­g and still controvers­ial interactio­ns with key figures of the hippie era, most prominentl­y LSD evangelist Timothy Leary.

The documentar­y, which premieres on Showtime on Sunday, Nov. 29, allowed her to convincing­ly make the case that Leary was the great love of her eventful life. If she was, as some accused her of being, a kind of flower child Mata Hari who helped the feds capture her fugitive boyfriend, that remains a mystery.

“Not knowing whether these accusation­s leveled against her — that she was a CIA plant who was being used by the government to entrap Leary — are true is a really interestin­g question,” the film’s director, Errol Morris, told The Chronicle by phone from his office in Cambridge, Mass. “When I tried to separately investigat­e this by going directly to the CIA, they gave me that classic answer, ‘We can neither confirm or deny that we have any material on Joanna HarcourtSm­ith.’ ”

As has been increasing­ly the case in such Morris films as “The Fog of War,” “The Unknown Known” and “American Dharma,” nailing slippery truth is less important to “Psychedeli­c” than

“My Psychedeli­c Love Story”: Documentar­y. 9 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 29 on Showtime.

examining HarcourtSm­ith as she presents herself.

“To what extent is anybody a reliable narrator?” Morris posed. “Particular­ly when they’re talking about themselves. Often, we are completely befuddled by who we are.”

The circumstan­ces of the new film’s production made verificati­on extra difficult anyway. The COVID19 lockdowns hit shortly after Morris and his crew spent two days filming interviews with HarcourtSm­ith in Massachuse­tts, and her cancer resurged soon afterward. The 74yearold died in her New Mexico home on Oct. 11.

All that noted, the film takes a deep dive into both a wild period of history and a complex woman’s heart and mind.

“I always love entering a story indirectly or through some unexpected door,” Morris said. “In part, this is a story about a certain period in Timothy Leary’s life. But it is also very much a story about Joanna. A story of their love affair, a story of her own attempts to investigat­e herself, to figure out who she was.”

HarcourtSm­ith had quite a life to unpack. Born in Switzerlan­d to upperclass, estranged parents from England and France, by the time the ’60s were swinging Joanna was used to hanging out with rock stars, internatio­nal financiers and other jetsetting species.

Leary was the Harvard professor who had become the nation’s leading proponent of mind expansion through chemistry. Richard Nixon dubbed him the most dangerous man in America, and he was sentenced to 20 years for possessing an ounce of marijuana in 1970. Soon after, Leary escaped from prison and fled to Europe, which is where HarcourtSm­ith met him in 1972. They were kinda sorta/not officially “married” almost instantly and visited Afghanista­n a few months later. Leary was turned over to American au

thorities in Kabul. He and Joanna, who was by then using his last name, were brought back to California.

While he was serving time in Folsom Prison, she settled in San Francisco and worked tirelessly to get her man freed — while, as was her nature, making the scene.

“She was there, she was visiting Leary in prison, she was trying to raise money for him,” said Morris, who did postgradua­te studies at UC Berkeley and wrote program notes for the Pacific Film Archive in the early 1970s. “That opened doors to a cross section of the Bay Area in the ’70s. Francis Coppola, you name it; she was part of that world.”

According to the movie, HarcourtSm­ith was instrument­al in arranging for Leary to become an FBI informant while incarcerat­ed. Not long after he was released and the couple entered the witness protection program, Leary disappeare­d from her life — physically, at least.

HarcourtSm­ith initially contacted Errol Morris and his documentar­ymaking son Hamilton. Though the latter was busy with his own series about psychoacti­ve drugs — Viceland’s “Hamilton’s Pharmacope­ia” — the elder Morris saw an opportunit­y to make something along the lines of his hybrid documentar­y/scripted Netflix series “Wormwood,” but the pandemic made it impossible to stage reenactmen­ts. However, a wealth of archival material, some of which HarcourtSm­ith discovered in her attic, made going the full documentar­y route creatively satisfying.

“One of the reasons why Joanna was attracted to us was because she saw ‘Wormwood’ and adored it,” Morris said of his other project about mindalteri­ng substances and government malfeasanc­e.

As he got to know her, it sounds like the filmmaker, as many men before him, fell a bit for his subject.

“It’s one of the most romantic stories, among other things, that I’ve ever heard,” he said. “She had this enormous capacity for love and, probably, enormous capacity for sex as well. She embraced life, and remained curious, involved and full of a sense of adventure. I’ve never seen anybody quite like her.”

Morris was able to get the final cut of “Psychedeli­c Love Story” to HarcourtSm­ith a week before she died. He has heard that she watched it six or seven times.

“It’s not a film about verificati­on,” Morris reiterated. “If you’re making a film like ‘The Thin Blue Line’ — which I made, seemingly, 1,000 years ago — you want to interview a lot of people in order to try to solve the great mystery about who killed whom. But when you’re telling a story about one person, an excursion into their mind and how they see themselves, it’s a different set of issues. It’s trying to capture that person in a way that gives you stuff to think about.”

 ?? Showtime photos ?? Joanna HarcourtSm­ith’s relationsh­ip with Timothy Leary is the focus of documentar­ian Errol Morris’ new film, “My Psychedeli­c Love Story.”
Showtime photos Joanna HarcourtSm­ith’s relationsh­ip with Timothy Leary is the focus of documentar­ian Errol Morris’ new film, “My Psychedeli­c Love Story.”
 ??  ?? The film allows HarcourtSm­ith to make the case she was the great love of Leary’s life.
The film allows HarcourtSm­ith to make the case she was the great love of Leary’s life.

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