Dr. Schoenfeld's Visitors to Williams College: Timothy Leary 1969

If realtors now marketing the estate want to enliven their spiels about Williams College with colorful figures drawn from history to pass along interesting tales about those days of yore, they might mention Dr. Timothy Leary in quick passing.

He walked around the grounds once.

You can play prospective buyers Country Joe's 45 on a little turntable and sing along with the intro before you tell them the whole story:

"Have you heard the tale of Dr. Hip?
(He's a pip!)
Though the common cold might rule you
And the whooping cough might fool you
These are nothing for the famous Dr. Hip
(Doctor Hip!)


Dr. Schoenfeld at the time he was in residence at Farley Hall was also the Timothy Leary family's physician. When Dr. Leary came to the East Bay to run for governor of California which developed into a prolonged speaking engagement, the series now known as the Berkeley lectures 1969, Gene invited him up to Williams College. Gene recalled to me (7.14.11) that when he gave Timothy and Rosemary a tour of the grounds, they said the estate "reminded them of Millbrook."

That's what I mean about mentioning Tim Leary in passing. That's all there is about Tim Leary and Williams College because everything else having to do with him happened elsewhere.

Although in 1969, Dr. Schoenfeld served as a consulting editor for The Psychedelic Review and may have read the publication at his residence. I must remind the current reader that although Gene knew Dr. Leary, early on Dr. Schoenfeld found himself at growing odds with Leary's prosylitizing.

And as for the colorful anecdotes, try to work in this one. Paul Krassner recounted one of his typical big fuzzy tales from the era that he pinned to Dr. Schoenfeld, though that particular event occurred after Gene moved from Williams College, it can show that Gene was influenced by his proximity to theater people while on the estate:


"speaking of Gene Schoenfeld's pranks, when Tim Leary was in prison and supposedly revealing secrets, a press conference was held in Berkeley to denounce him; Gene came dressed in a kangaroo suit (it being a kangaroo court, y'see) and a cream pie he hoped to smush in Jerry Rubin's face, only it had Saran Wrap on it and with his kangaroo mittens he couldn't remove it and his plot was foiled (but if he had
used ALUMINUM foil...)"

For a real-life account of why Dr. Schoenfeld disguised himself in a kangaroo suit and boxing gloves, by all means read Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin (Harper-Collins, 2011), pp. 200-201.

Just try to imagine Dr. Hip in motion with a cream pie. But you don't have to imagine what the podium looked like, because here it is, with Leary's associates discussing their doubts about his credibility.


(from inkwell.vue.168 : Paul Krassner: Investigative satirist
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http://books.google.com/books?id=yNylsx9HD28C&printsec=frontcover&dq=harvard+club&hl=en&ei=xDcuTvOMNZCgsQP2tIgT&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAjgU#v=onepage&q=gene%20schoenfeld&f=false
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Dr Emiliano Lizardo and Williams College: John Lithgow Visits the Estate

Most of the "parties" I went to were more like "happenings" and those were the parties I enjoyed most. I admit I have been invited to a few, very few what I would call "Hollywood" parties and by friends who were well intentioned and thought I could fit in, but I never felt comfortable at "celebrity events". I could tell you about those few, and how I tip-toed around trying to avoid looking at or talking to anyone I might happen to recognize as a "famous person". If I were to sing songs, or engage in pleasantries, or try to be amusing, I would just embarrass myself. I simply cringe and shrink in such circumstances, and if the room is full of more than three people as it usually is at such gatherings I become tongue tied and just want to disappear into the wallpaper. So even if I had an invitation, which I did albeit very few, I usually wouldn't go to these things.

I'm just used to being around a different kind of person. The absolute most fun I had at a gathering where someone was going to become famous was in the Berkeley hills, where I was living at the time, and it was around Halloween in 1969. It had to have been Halloween, because some costumes were involved. I'd been enticed into walking up the hill to the party because someone had just returned from England, and I thought it might be an actor I knew. But it turned out to be a completely different actor just back from England. He seemed quite proper, you see. Dressed in a harris tweed sport coat and white Van Heusen shirt.

And he, a brother of someone on an extended visit there, was quite well educated I'd heard, from an unnamed Eastern school (as no one would admit to going to Harvard in Berkeley then, not after Timothy Leary and few would admit to Yale after those weird Milgram experiments had been published and written about again recently). So he'd attended some unidentified yet prestigious institution of higher learning, but I figured it was one of those two.

And one guy, who might have been part of the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, because the party was in their old rehearsal area, showed up with some real deer antlers roped to his belt and he was in conversation with this very proper brother of one of the people visiting there.

My lasting image, shot by the video camera of my memory, is this: The two men standing there, with drinks in their hands: one with antlers roped to his belt as a belt buckle of some kind and the other dressed in a Harris tweed sportscoat casually standing and chatting to him. And sometimes the guy with antlers leaned a little close, to speak over the music, and the guy in the sportscoat would put his hand on the antlers just to protect his abdomen. Once for a prolonged moment he actually held a small prong between his fingers as if to better anticipate a sudden move.

And then the music got a little better and everybody began dancing, including the guy with antlers on his belt and the guy in the sportcoat pranced a bit with someone else on the floor. So others of us start making antlers with our fingers to our heads and spinning.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Now that was a fun party, you see. No pretensions and everyone had fun.

Only later did I learn the guy in the sportscoat was becoming a famous actor on Broadway, and only years later did I finally see him in a film in which he played Dr. Emiliano Lizardo. And that was just beyond perfect, you see, given the location at the time I first met John Lithgow, which had a landlord who communed regularly with space beings by going into a trance and singing to them.

That was the strangest place I'd ever lived anywhere 'til then. Every one and every thing nearly every day was always a bit strange there. But that strangeness soon became an everyday thing. I think I'll concentrate on a wonderful movie yet to be made about the estate. John Lithgow can play Charles, the handyman found somewhere in the Arizona desert, who also communed with space beings between fixing plumbing problems on the estate, who would as he wrapped a pipe with teflon tape tell how he'd invented a carburetor for automobiles that reduced gasoline consumption to nil but that invention was stolen away from him by some secret government agency in collusion with an insidious industry. (The same one that controls the timing on traffic lights to make us use more petrol when we drive about? I would ask. He tilted his head absorbing what I had said, and I suspected he thought so.) And that movie, every single bit of it, would be drawn from real life.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_lithgow
Retrieved 7.1.11

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across Eight Dimensions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckaroo_Banzai
Retrieved 7.1.11