SKIDDOO

Last week I published a few posts regarding the testing of LSD as a weapon by the CIA and the Special Forces on the US Army in a village in France and then the subsequent cover up which involved the Swiss Sandoz Laboratory. I then published a propaganda filom by the US Army from the 50's documenting their "research".

One point that was brought up in the subsequent discussion, was that once the US Government started to mess with research on psychedelic drugs and their possible miltary use, it was impossible to keep them out of the hands of the general public.

The leaks from the research was the main way that the entire "psychedelic 60's" experience  happened. For better or worse, and I happen to think it was for the better, the course of the social history of America was changed. It undeniably affected music and the arts.

I remember reading Cary Grants autobiography, where I picked up a great piece of advice which stood me well years later. "A man over 40 should let his his picture be taken before noon!"  In his autobiography, Grant freely talked about his use of LSD in an innocent way. This was before hippies, the late 50's. Even Groucho Marx was an acid head. Just read his collected letters in the National Library, The Groucho Papers.

If you ever want to get a glimpse of the effect LSD had on mainstream America, you should get ahold of the 1967 Otto Preminger musical comedy, Skiddoo. You wanna see Jackie Gleason tripping? Go ahead.

Groucho played a character in the movie who was both supremely good and evil...he lived on a sailboat with tie dyed sails in the middle of San Francisco Bay and was god. You do have to put up with Carol Channing singing and dancing.......

Cary Grant was the first mainstream celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs. Whereas novelist Aldous Huxley's famous 1954 treatise The Doors of Perception recounted his remarkable experiences with mescaline, Huxley was hardly mainstream - a darling of intellectual circles to be sure, but a far cry from a matinee idol. Grant was one of the biggest stars Hollywood had to offer when he jumped headlong into Huxley's Heaven and Hell. His endorsement of subconscious exploration, arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted. Grant on the other hand was the fantasy of countless Midwestern women. He convinced wholesome movie starlets like Esther Williams and Dyan Cannon to blow their minds. When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn't Cary's favorite recipe or "the problem with youth today." Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world.

Discuss.....