by Peter Janney
Mary had to have known that Jack was involved with Pam Turnure, although it is unlikely she knew what the Katers were up to when she allowed Pam to house-sit for several weeks. One evening in July 1958, while Mary was in Nevada, the Katers staked out Mary’s house and caught the senator leaving in the wee hours of the morning. “Hey, Senator!” Leonard Kater yelled. As Jack turned toward him, Kater snapped a picture. “How dare you take my picture!” Jack shouted indignantly. Florence Kater reportedly jumped out of the car and loudly proclaimed, “How dare you run for President under the guise of a good Christian!” She added, “I have a recording of your whoring. You are unfit to be the Catholic standard bearer for the presidency of this country!”8
Unaware of the Kater stakeout, her divorce finalized in August,9 Mary returned from Nevada in September to find her house under the couple’s surveillance. “Mary found herself drawn into a web of intrigue,” an anonymous friend of hers told Leo Damore in 1990. “Pam was living with her and seeing JFK on the sly. Mary knew about the relationship. She thought Jack stupid and reckless if he seriously had his sights set on the presidency. Half-amused though, the episode left a bit of a bad taste, not only for the violation of her house—and her trust—but to be identified in gossip with one of his betterknown sexual peccadilloes offended her sensibility.”10 As Mary’s long-term former boyfriend Bob Schwartz had made clear, “Mary wasn’t flamboyant. She was a private person in terms of protecting who she was. Her privacy was a way of being herself.”11
Florence Kater, however, was undeterred. She took her obsession with Kennedy’s philandering to the streets, attending political rallies with signs that displayed the image of Jack taken outside Mary’s house. She picketed former president Harry Truman’s house in Missouri while Kennedy was visiting, and she marched in front of the White House. Kater allegedly contacted more than thirty newspapers and magazines with her proof of the presidential aspirant’s wayward habits. As late as April 1963, she contacted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, but he refused to meet with her, though he likely seized on her revelations to add to Kennedy’s already growing file. For a time, the Washington Star pursued the Kater story before abruptly dropping it, threatened by a Kennedy family lawsuit. After five years, Florence Kater finally gave up her crusade. “I had told the truth but no one would listen to me,” she said. “The press wanted Kennedy to be President and that was that.”12
In spite of the travails of divorcing Cord, Mary set her sights on the future.
She longed to move forward in her new life; and brooding would play no part. She adjusted gracefully to life without Cord, who saw his sons on weekends and part of school vacations. As agreed in the divorce settlement, he would assume full charge of their education.
Still mired in grief over Michael’s death, she embarked on a period of deep exploration. Artist Ken Noland became Mary’s lover during this time; for the next two years, he was a significant presence. Noland later recalled that Michael’s death had been a “deep, dramatic event for her,” one that had “affected her balance—I think this one [her son Michael] was her favorite.”13 Her introspection during this time was as much artistic as it was personal. “Every real artist has to further themselves,” said her former lover Bob Schwartz, recalling Mary’s sense of commitment to herself. “She wasn’t interested in trivia, at any level or any sort. She never did anything that didn’t have a sense of totality about it.”14
Even in grief, that disposition seemed to pervade her entire being. During her time in Nevada, Mary visited with Anne and Jim Truitt at their home in San Francisco, where they had moved for Jim’s Newsweek posting. (The Truitts also visited Mary at Gus Bundy’s Divorce Ranch.)15 In 1958, Jim and Anne Truitt would name their second daughter Mary, in honor of their beloved friend. According to Jim Truitt, who had a keen interest in psychedelics and Eastern mystical traditions that embraced altered states of consciousness, it was during a visit in California that Mary had her first psychedelic experience. (It wasn’t known which hallucinogen she had been introduced to, but it was likely either LSD or psilocybin). “The depths of the colors would intrigue Mary,” Truitt later recalled, “because of her interest in that as an artist.”16 Just south of San Francisco, the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute was exploring the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens such as LSD and the peyote derivative psilocybin. The Beat Generation, an emerging cultural phenomenon in California’s Bay Area that counted Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, and Allen Ginsberg among its members, was at the vanguard of this mind-altering wonder.
LSD and other hallucinogens had been in use as psychiatric aids among the fashionable in Hollywood since the mid- to late 1950s. A number of actors, writers, musicians, and directors—people like André Previn, Aldous Huxley, Anaïs Nin, Esther Williams, Betsy Drake, Sidney Lumet, and playwright Clare Booth Luce, among them—explored the regions of their consciousness, encouraging others to partake. Luce, for her part, convinced her husband, Time publisher Henry Luce, to experiment with her, as well as very possibly one other notables who will be discussed later. Actor Cary Grant was so convinced of the positive impact of LSD in his life that Look magazine published an article about it in 1959.17
If Jim Truitt was correct that Mary first experimented with psychedelics in California in 1958, then it very well could have been the legendary captain Alfred M. Hubbard who first introduced her to such exploration. A former World War II OS agent who later built a fortune as a uranium entrepreneur,
Hubbard was often referred to as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” Hubbard himself first used the drug in 1951. He would later claim to have witnessed his own conception, saying, “It was the deepest mystical experience I’ve ever seen.” Hubbard befriended people like psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley long before Timothy Leary came upon the scene. It was Hubbard who first asserted that LSD could be enormously therapeutic, given its propensity for the inducement of transcendental mystical experiences. On his own, Hubbard administered the drug to a number of alcoholics, many of whom reportedly emerged from the experience to successfully claim a life of sobriety, at least for a while. Hubbard’s early success with LSD’s therapeutic possibilities moved him to set up three treatment centers in Canada in 1958, one of which reportedly attempted to treat Ethel Kennedy, wife of Robert F. Kennedy, for incipient alcoholism. She was allegedly a patient of Dr. Ross MacLean, a close associate of Hubbard’s.18
Hubbard’s vast network of business contacts, as well as his personal wealth, enabled him to procure a huge supply of LSD and to distribute it at his own expense. (He would find out years later that the CIA was monitoring him.) Hubbard wanted nothing in return; his motivation appears to have been to give humanity a new point of view. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Hubbard traveled across Europe and the United States dispensing LSD to anyone who wanted to try it. According to one account, he “turned on thousands of people from all walks of life—policemen, statesmen, captains of industry, church figures, scientists.”19
Mary might also have associated with Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who began conducting psychedelic sessions with prominent literary and artistic avant-garde figures in the mid-1950s. Janiger, also a devotee of Captain Hubbard’s, had experienced his own personal transformation with psychedelics, which had, in turn, fueled his professional interest in using them in his clinical practice. Of Hubbard’s visits, Janiger once memorably remarked, “We waited for him like the little old lady on the prairie waiting for a copy of the Sears Roebuck catalogue.”20
Allen Dulles and his CIA coterie had tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Captain Al Hubbard in the early 1950s. Hubbard wanted no part. “They [the CIA] lied so much, cheated so much. I don’t like ‘em,” Hubbard told Janiger in 1978. He was furious about how the CIA had exploited LSD. He told Janiger, “The CIA work stinks. They were misusing it. I tried to tell them how to use it, but even when they were killing people, you couldn’t tell them a goddamn thing.”21 In addition to the CIA, the U.S Army, and Britain’s MI6 all had a keen interes
t in using LSD and other hallucinogens for chemical warfare, in what they hoped would be “mind control.”
In point of fact, the CIA’s top secret Special Operations Division at the Army’s Fort Detrick, Maryland, facility had, in one experiment, used a cropduster airplane in 1951 to douse the entire town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France with an aerosol of highly potent LSD. That event had caused mass hysteria, affecting close to seven hundred people for several days. With hundreds of people gripped by terror in acute psychosis, wildly hallucinating, the town became a veritable insane asylum. Four people committed suicide before the trauma subsided.22
One CIA chemical warfare expert who was responsible, Frank Olson, realized he had made “a terrible mistake.” He was so disturbed by the project, he blundered further by sharing his consternation with several colleagues. Olson soon realized that the Agency had surreptitiously dosed him with LSD as well, ostensibly to see how much greater a security risk he might become. Days later, Olson started to unravel. Agency personnel attempted to move him out of his hotel room at the Statler Hotel in New York late one night so they could secretly, under the cover of darkness, transport him for commitment to the CIA-affiliated sanitarium Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. Frank Olson became unruly and uncooperative, and was finally thrown out of his tenth-floor hotel window, in what would for years be disguised as a suicide.23
According to one source, Captain Al Hubbard was immediately convinced the CIA had used LSD to destabilize Olson in 1953. He also suspected there had been a murder, not a suicide. Fifty-six years later, in his 2009 book A Terrible Mistake, journalist Hank Albarelli confirmed Hubbard’s suspicions about this event, masterfully exposing the CIA’s murder of Frank Olson—along with a myriad of details about the CIA’s vast, illegal drug experiments.24
When the CIA found that they couldn’t recruit Hubbard, they started keeping tabs on him. Hubbard’s legendary purchases of LSD from Sandoz, a global pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, were being monitored. The CIA had “an agreement” whereby Sandoz would keep the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apprised of all purchases.25
On his own, and long before Timothy Leary’s ascent at Harvard in the early 1960s, Captain Al Hubbard was instrumental in paving the “psychedelic highway” for those who sought out the experience. Exactly what impact he may have had on Mary Meyer isn’t known. Anne Chamberlin, who had been in a position to shed light on Mary’s exploration with psychedelics up until the end of 2011 when she [Chamberlin] died, vehemently declined to be interviewed.
Robert Budd, another painter who was part of the Washington Color School to which Mary belonged, recalled seeing her in the company of artist Ken Noland between 1958 and 1959. “She was a beautiful, beautiful [Budd’s emphasis] woman,” Budd remembered. “We were all part of a group that used to hang out at Charlie Byrd’s Showboat Lounge on Eighteenth Street and Columbia Road. We’d meet upstairs and talk about art and music. The jazz musicians would join us between sets. Marijuana had also arrived on the scene.”26 Budd recalled that a number of artists in the Washington Color School were intensely committed to self-exploration. In the late 1950s, a group of them—including Budd himself, Mary Meyer, and Ken Noland—took weekly train trips to Philadelphia to have therapeutic bodywork sessions with Dr. Charles I. Oller, a highly respected practitioner of orgonomy—a therapeutic technique developed in the 1940s by Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a former protégé of Sigmund Freud. In the 1920s, Reich had been part of Freud’s inner circle—some called him “Freud’s pet”—but he eventually broke with Freud. Like any paradigm challenger, Reich was both acclaimed and ostracized.
Orgonomy, sometimes referred to as “orgone therapy,” attempted to break down what Reich termed “character armor,” those unique configurations in the human psychic structure and body that blocked the free-flowing movement of what he termed “orgone energy,” what Chinese Oriental medicine called “chi.” Charged with living energy, the sexual orgasm was the mechanism for the release of this “orgonotic charge,” which, after discharge, built up again in an ongoing cycle of “charge-tension-discharge-release.” If life’s traumatic events precipitated the development of character armor, there would be, Reich believed, an inadequate release in the orgasm function, thereby leading to rigidities in character and muscular tensions in the body, which eventually created maladaptive character states, such as becoming masochistic, sadistic, reactionary, submissive, or hateful. Orgonomic therapy sought to restore the free flow of orgone energy, not only resulting in a more complete, deeply satisfying sexual orgasm, but also yielding a more fully integrated, healthy, and happy individual.
Orgonomy represented a radical departure from conventional psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy. Patients started a session by lying face up on a platform-like bed in their underwear. There, they were encouraged to deepen and to slow their breath and to allow whatever emotional expression was in their awareness to come into their being without talking about it. In the safety of the therapist’s office, patients gradually surrendered to the experience of feeling their bodily and emotional awareness. Those with traumatic memories might be eventually encouraged to express themselves with fits of kicking and pounding, giving voice to screaming rage, as well as intense terror and deep sadness. The result was often not only catharsis, but, also, over a period of time, the diminution of the fear of feeling itself, thereby restoring the capacity for living more deeply. Mary Meyer’s foray into orgonomy lasted only a few months, but it demonstrated once again her pioneering spirit and commitment to self-examination and personal evolution. It also evidenced the deep pain she continued to experience at the death of her son.
In the opinion of Dr. Morton Herskowitz, a close colleague of Dr. Charles Oller’s, if Mary had gone to Oller for help with her grief over Michael’s death, Oller “could have helped her a great deal in three months of work, because she was amenable to it.” Upon viewing a picture of Mary Meyer taken in 1963, Dr. Herskowitz was impressed by “the energy and light in her eyes.” He knew his colleague Oller to be an exceptional, intuitive clinician. “Oller would have validated her feelings immediately,” continued Herskowitz. “With a woman of that caliber, I can imagine he would have accomplished a lot, even in a short period. Even though she was a free spirit already, to have gotten to the depths of her grief could have made a significant change in her. He would have worked on her breathing and softening of the eyes, it would have precipitated the deepest crying and expression of her grief. She would have felt very safe to feel almost anything with his guidance.”27
Ken Noland championed Reichian therapy and believed it “profoundly affected his art during the late 1950s.”28 However, Reichian therapists in general, and orgonomists in particular, were strongly opposed to the use of any recreational drugs. According to Robert Budd, Dr. Oller abruptly terminated working with Noland as a patient. Budd suspected that it was “because Noland was using LSD and recommending others do it as well. I always had a feeling that Noland had crossed the line, but I have no proof.”29 Noland himself initially denied that LSD had been a part of his life at that time, then several months later mentioned to Nina Burleigh that he had used LSD with Mary. Noland also vaguely recalled something about Mary visiting Timothy Leary at Harvard in the early 1960s.30 Eventually, Mary did undertake a more conventional course of psychotherapy during which, according to one friend, she “really started to work on herself,” though her experience with orgonomy had left an indelible impression.31
While Mary’s post-divorce activities focused on deepening self-exploration and healing, Jack Kennedy’s attention was on getting to the White House, albeit while mired in marital infidelity and personal unhappiness. Jack had long been attracted to Mary, but she wasn’t interested. “Mary had been aware of Jack’s womanizing since college,” a confidential source familiar with both of them told author Leo Damore in 1991. “She wasn’t interested in becoming another notch on Jack’s gun. She was a serious person of quality, not frivolity
. He had always been enamored by her, but she saw through his superficiality with women, and he knew it, though she always admitted to some remote attraction to him.”32 According to author Sally Bedell Smith, Cicely Angleton once witnessed a conversation between them.
“What does Kenneth Noland have that I don’t have?” Jack had asked Mary.
“Mystery,” she retorted.
“The President was duly taken aback,” Cicely remembered.33 The response may have made Mary all the more alluring.
Before Jack arrived at the White House, Mary had rebuffed all his pleas for her attention, save one. Sometime during the spring of 1959, Kenneth Noland recalled attending a cocktail party with Mary at the Bradlee house in Georgetown. Jack was there, apparently letting it be known that he would formally announce his candidacy for the presidency at the beginning of 1960.34 Noland remembered “a stirring” between the two at the party. “She was coming alive in a way Noland remembered from the early days of their own affair,” wrote Nina Burleigh. That summer, Mary rented a small cabin for two weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before joining Noland and his children on Long Island. Noland always suspected that she and Jack got together during that time, since the Hyannis Kennedy compound was less than an hour away.35 According to a confidential source who spoke to author Leo Damore, they did.
“Jack was distraught over his marriage to Jackie,” that source told Damore. “He was miserable. He wanted out in the worst way but he knew it would be political suicide. He visited with Mary because he knew he could talk with her. He trusted her. She was one of the few women he really respected, maybe the only one. Her independence always impressed him—she didn’t need or want anything from him.”36
“Mary didn’t mince words with him that day,” the source continued. “She told him he was crazy to be womanizing, that it would wreck his run for the presidency unless he got control. Jack admitted his problem but felt powerless to do anything about it. His physical health, medical difficulties were complicating things, too. At one point, Mary said he was almost in tears. He was so unhappy, and alone, she told me. Mary wasn’t about to get involved with him then, though she told me she held him tenderly that day.”37
