Cary Grant and the Acid Cure: Hollywood’s Most Unlikely LSD Advocate
- U I Team
- Feb 26, 2023
- 5 min read
When we think of the ever-poised Cary Grant, that velvet-voiced paragon of charm and refinement, we picture him dodging crop dusters in North by Northwest, or suavely trading banter with Katharine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn alike. What we don’t picture (at least not immediately) is Cary Grant, eyes closed, lying on a therapist’s couch in Beverly Hills while deep in the throes of a psychedelic acid trip.
But perhaps we should.
Between 1958 and 1961, the man once called “the best and most important actor in the history of cinema” reportedly took LSD more than 100 times. Not at parties or in smoky clubs, but in clinical sessions under the guidance of a physician. Not out of rebellion or hedonism, but in search of peace, healing, and self-understanding. In fact, long before Timothy Leary became the high priest of psychedelic culture, Cary Grant was already an evangelist for what he called “a beneficial cleansing.”
The Accidental Discovery of LSD
To understand how Cary Grant became a poster boy for psychedelics, we have to start further back—specifically, in 1938, in a Swiss lab. That’s when chemist Albert Hofmann, working for pharmaceutical giant Sandoz Laboratories, first synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) while tinkering with ergot, a fungus found on rye. At first, Hofmann set the compound aside. It wasn’t until April 19, 1943, now celebrated as “Bicycle Day,” that Hofmann ingested a larger dose and took a fateful bike ride through Basel—while hallucinating vividly. He described “extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours.” LSD’s effects were real, powerful, and at that point, utterly unexplored.
Project MK-Ultra: LSD Meets the CIA
By the early 1950s, word of LSD’s psychological effects had reached the US intelligence community. The CIA, keen to find mind control techniques in the Cold War climate, launched Project MK-Ultra—a covert programme involving drugs, hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and unethical experiments on often-unwitting subjects. LSD was tested as a truth serum, a brainwashing agent, and a psychological weapon. But the results were inconsistent and unpredictable. The CIA quietly distanced itself from the substance.
Yet while the military-industrial complex walked away, the medical and psychiatric world was just warming up.
Beverly Hills, LSD, and Dr. Hartman
Enter Dr. Mortimer Hartman, a radiologist and psychotherapist in Beverly Hills who believed that LSD, used responsibly, could unlock repressed trauma and help patients achieve emotional breakthroughs. With a nod from Sandoz Laboratories (who still legally produced LSD at the time), Hartman began using it to treat the neuroses of the Hollywood elite—people he affectionately called “garden variety neurotics.”
Hartman himself took LSD dozens of times to understand its effects and soon partnered with psychiatrist Arthur Chandler to open a practice offering supervised “LSD therapy.” The treatment quickly became the latest fad among the rich and famous—including one of Hartman’s most high-profile converts, Cary Grant.
Grant’s Stardom, and His Inner Turmoil
By the late 1950s, Cary Grant was arguably at the peak of his career. Films like An Affair to Remember, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest had cemented his place in the pantheon of golden-age Hollywood legends. But off-screen, his life was far from glamorous.
Grant had already been through three failed marriages, including his tumultuous union with actress Betsy Drake. Drake herself had started undergoing LSD therapy with Hartman and, impressed with the results, introduced her husband to the treatment.
At 55 years old, Grant took his first dose of LSD-25, beginning what would become a series of more than 100 sessions over three years. These weren’t casual encounters with psychedelia—they were guided, intentional, and deeply introspective.
Haunted by the Past
Grant had long felt haunted by his childhood. Born Archibald Leach in 1904 in Bristol, England, his early life was marked by loss and abandonment. When he was 11, his mother simply vanished. He was told she’d gone on holiday. In truth, she had been committed to a psychiatric asylum by his father—without young Archie’s knowledge. It would be 19 years before he discovered the truth and reunited with her.
To compound the trauma, his father soon left him behind to start a new family. Grant was raised by emotionally distant grandparents, burying his confusion and hurt beneath layers of charm, wit, and polish.
These buried traumas, he believed, were the source of his lifelong difficulty with intimacy and his pattern of fleeting relationships. LSD, Hartman told him, would bring these wounds into the light.
Epiphanies on Acid
Grant didn’t just take LSD—he believed in it.
He described his sessions as revelatory:
“When I broke through, I felt an immeasurably beneficial cleansing of so many needless fears and guilts. I lost all the tension that I’d been crippling myself with.”
He spoke openly in interviews about realising he had been punishing women in his life because of his unresolved resentment toward his mother:
“I was hurting my mother through my relationships with other women. I was punishing them for what she had done to me.”
Each five-hour session brought new insights. According to Grant, the therapy allowed him to shed the slick exterior of Cary Grant and finally confront Archibald Leach. In his words:
“The protection of that façade was both an advantage and a disadvantage; an advantage because it brought me enormous success, a disadvantage for how it limited me in my personal relationships.”
He later wrote,
“Use your love to exhaust your hate… The result of it all is rebirth.”
Hollywood’s First Acid Evangelist
In 1960, Grant gave a now-famous interview to Look magazine, describing his LSD experience in glowing terms. The next year, he approached Good Housekeeping, eager to tell an even more mainstream audience. He wasn’t just a satisfied patient—he was a public advocate.
The Good Housekeeping article praised him for “courageously permitting himself to be one of the subjects of a psychiatric experiment that eventually may become an important tool in psychotherapy.” It was, in many ways, a daring act: few men of his stature would so openly endorse what most Americans still saw as a fringe or suspicious treatment.
For several years, Grant championed LSD in interviews, saying it had made him “truly, deeply, and honestly happy.” It wasn’t until the drug was criminalised and public sentiment turned against psychedelics that his advocacy waned.
A Mixed Legacy
Grant’s fourth wife, actress Dyan Cannon, later claimed that he tried to pressure her into taking LSD as well, referring to him as an “apostle of LSD.” Their marriage lasted only a few years, but it did produce his only child, Jennifer Grant. Despite their divorce, Grant was reportedly a devoted father, cherishing time with his daughter.
In 1981, at the age of 77, Grant married for the fifth and final time, to 30-year-old actress Barbara Harris. The two remained together until Grant’s death in 1986. Friends noted that he seemed calmer, more peaceful, and happier in his later years—perhaps evidence that he had, in fact, found the clarity and peace of mind he once searched for in the depths of his subconscious.
And In The End...
Cary Grant’s foray into psychedelic therapy remains one of the most curious and compelling footnotes in Hollywood history. That one of cinema’s most impeccably groomed and buttoned-up stars would so willingly dive into the unpredictable world of acid trips is surprising enough. That he would then speak so candidly—and repeatedly—about it to the press is even more so.
Yet perhaps it was just another expression of Grant’s lifelong quest: to reconcile the polished star with the abandoned boy inside. LSD, for him, wasn’t a party drug. It was a key. A tool. A mirror.
And in his own words, it gave him “rebirth.”
