"Everyone wants to be CARY GRANT – even I want to be Cary Grant ," the Hollywood icon, born Archie Leach, confessed. But within the happy-go-lucky soul of the superstar lurked a darkness that was unlocked when he took an experimental form of LSD!
Coming from an impoverished background in England the persona Archibald Leach created of "Cary Grant" was a fraud and he knew it.
But everyone always wanted to be with suave debonair Cary Grant not the reality of the cockney layabout.
Grant wearied of wearing the mask – not only to the world but himself.
Deeply troubled, the star recounted in his autobiography, how at the urging of then-wife actress Betsy Drake he sought experimental psychotherapy after conventional methods had failed .
In the late 1950s before Timothy Leary’s acid fueled hippie era, Lyseric Acid 025 aka LSD was legal and regularly dispensed by therapists to help psychologically disturbed patients.
LSD was capable of causing paradigm shifts of consciousness in incredibly low doses, under supervision, and the I Married a Male War Bride star was willing to try anything to ease his torment.
In a specially prepared therapy room, Grant would put the white pill under his tongue and wait for his trip to begin.
As the colors bent time and space, darkness melded into light, Grant saw beyond a strait-jacketed three-dimensional reality into a pharmacological vision of perceived truth.
Grant ultimately took 60 trips under the medical supervision of of Dr. Mortimer Hartmann and Dr. Oscar Janiger.
"All my life, I’ve been searching for peace of mind," Grant confessed in 1959.
"I’d explored yoga and hypnotism and made several attempts at mysticism. Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment."
"I have been born again. I have been through a psychiatric experience which has completely changed me. I was horrendous. I had to face things about myself which I never admitted, which I didn’t know were there.
"Now I know that I hurt every woman I ever loved.
"I was an utter fake, a self-opinionated bore, a know-all who knew very little. I found I was hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities. I had to get rid of them layer by layer.
"The moment when your conscious meets your subconscious is a hell of a wrench.
"With me there came a day when I saw the light."
The USDA banned LSD in the United States 1966 stating "hallucinogenic effects of this drug can produce profound adverse reactions, such as acute panic reactions, psychotic crises, and "flashbacks", especially in users ill-equipped to deal with such trauma."
Soon after ceasing LSD therapy, Cary Grant divorced wife Betsy Drake.
–DICK SIEGEL in New York
Special to the National Enquirer
