In all, the Lexington was rocked by seventeen separate explosions. As fire began spreading throughout the vessel, the ship started listing to port. At 1247 hours, gasoline vapor that had accumulated from leaking fuel tanks belowdecks ignited. The huge explosion that followed proved to be the killing blow. As the Lexington’s commanding officer, Captain Frederick C. Sherman, would later write in his report, “From this point on, the ship was doomed.”
At 1630 hours as the fires burned out of control, the Lexington came to a dead stop in the water. Admiral Fitch directed the USS Morris to come alongside, and personnel began disembarking from the Lexington by going down lines onto the deck of the destroyer. At 1707 hours, Admiral Fitch issued the order to abandon ship. Crew members went hand over hand down lines into life rafts. In accordance with naval tradition, Admiral Fitch and Captain Sherman were the last to leave the bridge. Both officers were then taken by whaleboat to the USS Minneapolis.
As Sherman would later write, “The picture of the burning and doomed ship was a magnificent but sad sight. The ship and crew had performed gloriously and it seemed too bad that she had to perish in her hour of victory.” In all, 216 crewmen on the USS Lexington were killed in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Miraculously, 2,375 men, A. O. Stanley Jr. among them, survived.
In his son’s words, “My father must have seen the most horrible warfare imaginable. There were nearly three thousand men on this huge aircraft carrier loaded with high explosives and high-octane petrol and the Japanese were dropping bombs on it and firing torpedoes at it and crew members were being burned and blown to bits.
“It just fucked with his head and he became a lifelong alcoholic. The worst kind of alcoholic I ever saw in my life. I don’t know if he was in the water after the Lexington was hit because he would never talk about it. Never. Not a word. After the war ended, he transferred into the Naval Reserve and attended a meeting every Tuesday night for the next twenty years or so and then retired with a double pension—the Navy and the United States government—and he managed to drink it all up every day.
“He was magnificently dwarfed by his own father. My father was twenty percent smarter than me, but my grandfather was more than twenty percent smarter than him. He had one of the most awesome minds I’ve ever known in my entire life. My experience of my grandfather was as an old man and I loved him. He had the greatest stories and all the greatest books and he could quote something and then tell me where to find that quote, and he was right every time. He didn’t believe in much government regulation but he really believed in the common man.”
As his father was still working as a government clerk while going to law school at night during the heart of the Depression, Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on January 19, 1935. As he would later note, “My name is not Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the leaden sobriquet I was saddled with at birth. That was my grandfather and my father’s name. My dad suffered the awful brand ‘Junior,’ the poor bastard, and I have never considered that I am a ‘third’ anything.
“I so resented the media claiming I was playing on my grandfather’s ‘famous’ name that I had it legally changed by court order in 1967 to simply ‘Owsley Stanley,’ which is all I was ever called during my early life anyway. I hated ‘Gus’ like poison—the usual nickname for ‘Augustus’—and to this day, I do not understand why anyone would saddle one of their children with someone else’s name plus a number.”
By then, the epic generational battle between the son and grandson of a man who had been authentic bluegrass political royalty was already raging as fiercely as the fires that had destroyed the USS Lexington during the Battle of the Coral Sea.
2
Growing Up Absurd
Whatever marital problems A. O. Stanley Jr. and his wife might have been having before he enlisted in the Navy and went off to fight in the Pacific seem to have only been made worse by his extended tour of duty overseas. In 1943, Lella Stanley decided to separate from her husband. She then ended their ten-year marriage by divorcing him. With both her eight-year-old son Augustus and his six-year-old brother in tow, she moved to Los Angeles, where her sister lived. In later years, what Owsley would remember best about his mother was that she loved to play the violin and piano while singing in the key of C. Never as musically talented as her, he took violin lessons but was unable to “quite get the knack” of the instrument. Although he also liked to sing as a boy, he left the choir after his voice changed.
An extraordinarily gifted but difficult child who while living in Virginia had been raised in great part by “black nannies whom we always treated very well,” Owsley had somehow managed to teach himself to read at the age of two and a half by studying comic books.
As he later told Bruce Eisner, “I didn’t recognize letters; I read more or less like the Chinese would.… The word itself was like a picture. It had a shape, the shape was composed of the strokes; the strokes, of course, were the letters. I didn’t know a letter could be interpreted separately. It took me a long time to learn to use the dictionary successfully because I couldn’t make any sense out of a sequence for the alphabet. It was just a bunch of strokes.”
At school, Owsley was neither a willing nor a cooperative student. “I didn’t like the bullshit,” he would later say. “I wanted to learn and read things and do other interesting stuff, and they wanted me to play ring-around-the-rosie in sixth grade. I thought recess was my time off and I should be able to do what I wanted, read or make drawings, rather than run around the yard. So I got into a lot of trouble.”
When he was eleven years old, his mother decided she could no longer cope with her firstborn son and sent him back East to live with his father. By then, A. O. Stanley Jr. was married to his second wife, the former Callie Mullen Reese of Fredericksburg, Virginia. She had brought to the marriage a daughter, who was now eleven years old, and a son, who was nine. Owsley treated his stepbrother “like dog shit. I was the older one but he was too close to me in age and I had no real relationship with him at all. I was getting dumped on and so I then dumped it all on him.”
To instill some discipline in his own son and alleviate the growing tension in his home, Owsley’s father placed him in Charlotte Hall Military Academy. Located in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, about forty miles from where his father and stepmother were now living in Alexandria, Virginia, the school had been established in 1774 by England’s Queen Charlotte “to provide for the liberal and pious education of youth to better fit them for the discharge of their duties for the British Empire.”
One of the oldest educational institutions in the United States, Charlotte Hall comprised several colonial-style buildings scattered across more than three hundred acres of rolling land. Decked out in full military uniforms replete with Sam Browne belts, the all-male student body was so small that a typical graduating class consisted of just twenty-four members.
The only lasting lesson that Owsley seems to have learned at Charlotte Hall was imparted to him by his boxing coach. In what was then considered an unorthodox practice, the coach would not allow his team to eat breakfast on the day of a match. An hour before their bouts began, each member of the team was given a steak without any salt on it to eat but was not allowed to drink water.
“The result was, of course, was that it was digested and all that energy was circulating around our system, all the fat and protein and everything else was all in our blood. There was nothing left in our gut so we could take pounding on our gut, no worries, and we had an enormous amount of power and endurance. It worked!” Throughout his adult life, Owsley would adhere so strictly to an all-meat diet that it soon became one of his defining characteristics. At Charlotte Hall, he also acquired the nickname that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Because of his hairy chest, he became known as Bear.
Although the headmaster of Charlotte Hall would later describe Owsley as “almost like a brainchild, a wunderkinder, tremendously interested in science,” he also remembered him as being willful and wild. “I was to
ssed out of the military academy not because I was a poor student. I was one of the top students in the school. I was tossed out because of this rogue, get-high nature of mine. I managed to smuggle some kind of alcohol into that school for every single student, and the entire student body was blasted out of their minds at this sort of homecoming weekend. I kind of stumbled down the stairs and got caught.”
While there is no knowing how he obtained enough alcohol to get the entire student body at Charlotte Hall Military Academy drunk, Owsley was then in ninth grade and so small in stature that it seems doubtful he could have purchased it legally. Although it is impossible to know whether he had stolen all this liquor from his father, Owsley did get himself expelled by providing his fellow students with the substance that had already permanently altered his relationship with his father.
After returning home to live with his father and stepmother, Owsley began attending Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, where he often ate at the same table in the cafeteria as Shirley MacLaine, the well-known actress, who was then a year ahead of him at the school. In 1950, when he was fifteen years old, Owsley accepted what must have been a proposal that his father had offered him and allowed himself to be admitted as a voluntary patient at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Southeastern Washington, DC. That he was willing to do so speaks volumes about how intolerable his living situation must have become at home.
Designed in part by the social activist Dorothea Dix, what was then known as the Government Hospital for the Insane had opened its doors in January 1855. Located on more than 350 acres on a plateau in the nation’s capital, the institution helped develop standards of care for mentally ill patients in state hospitals throughout America. At its peak during the mid-1940s, 7,450 patients were housed in the hospital’s 130 buildings.
After the world-renowned poet Ezra Pound had been brought back from Italy in 1945 and charged with treason for having called for the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt while also espousing anti-Semitic views during radio broadcasts made for the Axis powers during World War II, he was also confined in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. When Pound was finally released from the institution after having spent twelve years there, he was asked his opinion of his native country. Pound’s succinct response was “All America is an insane asylum.”
Despite the dark and distinctly foreboding nature of some of the older parts of the institution, Owsley seems to have felt far more content during his fifteen-month stay at St. Elizabeth’s than he had ever been in his father’s home. “I don’t know if I was having a nervous breakdown. I was just a neurotic kid. My mother died a few months into the experience. She was washing her car and collapsed and died of a heart attack. But it was there that I sorted out my guilt problems about everything, and I came out of it pretty clear.
“They didn’t do much of anything to me there because with neurotics, it was therapy. But the talking didn’t work. It wasn’t until they gave me a therapist who used hypnosis and psychodrama in this little room with a stage and colored lights that things started to change for me. The hypnosis was interesting because I learned the tricks of self-hypnosis. Going to sleep is a little like hypnosis. If you do something with your mind, you can go to sleep in about a minute. And I can do that. I can sleep anywhere at any time.”
Although “it totally freaked out the staff,” Owsley soon discovered that he could use a bedspring to pry open doors, thereby enabling him to leave the institution whenever he liked. “If I did something bad, they would send me to the top ward, and I’d work my way back down to the bottom again. But all along, I knew that not only could I walk up to the admissions clerk and say, ‘I’m tired of being here, turn me loose,’ but I could also go for a walk at night because I could let myself in and out. I didn’t do that a lot, but I could.”
After having established his mastery of the system in which he now found himself, Owsley came to the somewhat stunning realization that none of this was his fault. “It was hard for me to break free because my parents were a couple of assholes. Neither one of them really wanted to be parents. They had no skills whatsoever at it. All I know is that I felt really shortchanged in parenting, and that caused me a lot of guilt. If you feel you can’t love someone whom you are universally told that you must love, you become very guilty. ‘What’s wrong with me? I can’t seem to love these people.’
“Any animal can have offspring, but that doesn’t have anything to do with their competency in managing their upbringing or anything else. It’s a happenstance of nature. Once I realized this, that freed me. It’s too bad I missed out on that loving parental care, but I learned that I couldn’t blame myself for it.”
After he was released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Owsley returned home to live with his father and stepmother and once again began attending Washington-Lee High School. “And then, the school system punished me by not allowing me to take a test and go back into the proper class. They set me a year behind, and by the time I was in eleventh grade, I’d had my fill of high school and all that bullshit.”
Despite having achieved the highest score on the achievement test in physics ever reported by the school, he had by then already been given a D in the subject by “an incompetent very senior female teacher who was only there because of tenure” for pointing out that she had contradicted the textbook.
Without having ever graduated from high school, Owsley was then admitted to the School of Engineering at the University of Virginia. Because he thought engineers actually made things and one of his great childhood heroes had always been Dr. Elias Huer, the genius who helped Buck Rogers in one of the comic strips Owsley had loved as a boy, “I picked engineering. But it was a bad choice because I really didn’t like things like surveying and heavy mechanical drawing. I hated slide rules so badly that this alone would have prevented me from ever working as an engineer.”
Founded in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, who himself had attended the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia was a publicly funded institution that in many ways more closely resembled an elite Ivy League college. Social life on its sprawling campus dotted with historically significant buildings that Jefferson had initially designed centered on a variety of powerful secret societies. These groups were then supplanted by numerous fraternities and other societies, to which about a third of the student body still belong.
Despite his somewhat impressive lineage, Owsley fit in no better at the University of Virginia than he had anywhere else. “I was the kind of guy who never took notes when I was in college. I would buy my textbooks, read them all through, and then sell them all back to the bookstore during the first week of the course at full price as if I’d changed classes. I had a scary kind of memory and never needed to look at them again. I never took notes but I was getting B-pluses and I had three-point-four average. My father wouldn’t support me when I went to college because I had not graduated from high school, and so I wasn’t able to do it for long.”
Dropping out of the University of Virginia after a year, Owsley returned home. At the age of eighteen, he had the classic 1950s confrontation with his father over what was then the ultimate symbol of adolescent rebellion—a motorcycle. “I was terrified of leaving home, yet I had to because my father was so controlling that he insisted he would not allow me to have a motorcycle. He said he would take my license, and I said, ‘You have nothing to do with my license. I’m eighteen!’ He said, ‘If you don’t follow my instructions, I don’t want you in my house. Get out!’
“He just said it in anger, but I grabbed my stuff and jumped in my car and drove to see my grandmother in Washington. She knew my father and I were diametrically opposed and had told me when I was younger that if I ever had any problems, I was welcome to come live with them. Which I did, and I never lived in my father’s house again.”
Twelve years later, in April 1965, Owsley showed up in Alexandria, Virginia, with Melissa Cargill, who was then
his girlfriend. Four miles from home, he called his father, but the two soon began to argue over the phone. After Owsley had informed his father that booze was far worse than drugs, A. O. Stanley Jr. told his son to wash his hands and then come back to talk to him.
Calling his son “emotionally unbalanced” while acknowledging that he also had “a brilliant mind,” A. O. Stanley Jr. told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, “We haven’t had a pleasant relationship. We’re not in accord with what he’s doing. His life is divorced from ours. He’s had two wives and a child by each and lives with another woman. When he came here with that floozy, I wouldn’t let him in.”
The two men then did not speak to one another again for five years. In what even now seems like an antebellum response to their falling out, Owsley would later say, “He had insulted Melissa by referring to her in speaking to me as a ‘hussy’—an antique Southern derogatory term taken to mean ‘common as dirt and lacking morals.’ I waited in vain for his apology. He wrote me when I was in jail and indicated he wished to repair the break. I did not bring up the insulting terminology and so far as I can remember, he never spoke negatively about her again.”
With his son having already become an authentic legend in the counterculture, A. O. Stanley Jr., who was then sixty-three years old and retired, announced in March 1968 that he intended to run in the Kentucky Democratic US senatorial primary by stating that “an old name with a new face might be attractive” to voters. One of fourteen candidates in the race, he garnered just 621 votes, thereby putting an end to his nascent political career.
Owsley Stanley’s stepmother died on May 26, 1978. Owsley Stanley’s father, who had attained the rank of commander in the Naval Reserve, passed away on September 4, 1979, at the age of seventy-five. Beneath a single stone at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, the two are interred together.
Bear Page 2
