Leary’s exlover’s wild trip
Documentary leaves unsolved mystery of whether she betrayed LSD guru to CIA
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.”