Operation Petticoat [1959]

Of all the actors, writers, musicians, and directors who passed through Chandler and Hartman’s portals, the most famous was Cary Grant. Grant took LSD more than sixty times, and although he was considered one of Hollywood’s most private stars, he found his enthusiasm for the drug hard to contain. It finally overflowed during the filming of the movie Operation Petticoat. The scene was appropriately bizarre. There was Grant sitting on the deck of the pink submarine that was Petticoat’s principal set. He had an aluminum sheet attached to his neck to facilitate his tan and he was chatting with two reporters, both of whom were prepared for the usual hour of teeth pulling that an interview with Grant required. But today Cary was totally relaxed, a condition he attributed to the insights he had achieved using an experimental mind drug called LSD. 
    “I have been born again,” he told the astonished reporters. “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.” 
    Although Grant, his lawyers, and MGM all tried to kill the story, it appeared in print on April 20,1959, and while it didn’t alter Grant’s popularity one iota, it was an enormous shot in the pocketbook for LSD therapists like Chandler and Hartman. Suddenly everyone in Hollywood wanted to be born again.

Whether it was Chandler and Hartman that Aldous Huxley had in mind when he dropped the following note to Humphrey Osmond is unclear, but they certainly fit the general description. “What frightful people there are in your profession,” Huxley had written. “We met two Beverly Hills psychiatrists the other day, who specialize in LSD therapy at $100 a shot—and, really, I have seldom met people of lower sensitivity, more vulgar mind! To think of people made vulnerable by LSD being exposed to such people is profoundly disturbing.”

Excerpt from Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens