The Acid Queen: Rosemary Woodruff Leary, the Invisible Woman of Western Psychedelia

They wrote to each other in code.

Timothy Leary, the high priest of acid, had sent her letters every single day he sat in California state prison—sentenced to a near lifetime for a handful of marijuana. THE BRIEF was the escape. LAND DEEDS were the documents needed to skip town. ARIES was the code name for their lawyer who had connected them to political radicals who would help smuggle them out of the country.

During their final meeting, Timothy and Rosemary firmed up the details of his prison escape.

“I can be free,” Timothy said.

“On appeal, the lawyers….” Rosemary responded, urging patience— even now.

“No,” Timothy said. “If you do what I tell you, you can free me.”

“My help could amount to human sacrifice.”

“Stay here then. And divorce me.”

“Divorce you? What about the operation and our child?”

“You can have that in Europe, France, Switzerland, anywhere.

“Just do what I tell you. It’ll be fine.”

“Yes, but will I be?”

Her question hung in the air, unanswered. After their meeting, Rosemary bought a blond bouffant wig, orange‑pink lipstick, a skirt suit, and stockings. Her new name, Sylvia E. McGaffin, came from a dead baby’s birth certificate.

She sent him one last message via telegram, giving the go‑ahead, using her fertility surgery as a code word for the prison break.

This was her signature magic trick—making herself disappear.

*

Rosemary Woodruff Leary is everywhere and nowhere. There’s a good chance you’ve seen her face dozens of times without ever registering her existence. In one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century, Yoko Ono and John Lennon sing “Give Peace a Chance” in a hotel room bed in flowing white robes protesting the Vietnam War.

If you allow the eye to wander, you will notice—perhaps for the first time—a striking brunette in the foreground. She sits beside the silver‑haired Timothy Leary, who smiles wide, clapping, fully consumed by the moment.

Unlike her husband, Rosemary stares straight at the camera—at you, the viewer—lips pursed together in a knowing grin, enigmatic and unruffled. She appears to exist outside the scene, commenting on it, an appropriate look for a woman who stood unnoticed on the edge of the world stage.

Her name hit the newspapers in 1965, after her first arrest with the fired Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, at the Mexico border. The media didn’t know what to do with the thirty‑year‑old, so they dubbed her “the Woodruff woman.” When she married Leary in 1967, she became “the perfect love” to her husband; “the former administrative assistant” to the media; and earth goddess—nurturing, sensual, and otherworldly—to his followers.

Two years later she remade herself once again into a one‑named media heroine—Rosemary, the acid queen— who championed her husband’s causes as he languished behind bars. For the sake of her perfect love she became a fugitive forced to face the limits of her freedom and her marriage.

Fading into obscurity at the end of her life, she served as a footnote, an afterthought, in order to preserve the legacy of her ex‑husband, who changed the world with his still infamous slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Timothy Leary and his supporters have dictated most of what has been written about Rosemary since. The vast majority of takes liken her to a beautiful accessory, an expensive leather bag that completes an outfit. But the contradictions abound.

She was more political than her husband, some have argued, driving him insane enough with jealousy to escape prison and land in the arms of revolutionaries. To others, she was a whore who “hadn’t worn a bra in years,” as one recent book alleged, merely “the broad in [Leary’s] bed,” as a male contemporary described her. “As beautiful as she was, she wasn’t the brightest star in the sky,” another male memoirist wrote.

She had two possible parts to play in the Leary saga: advocate or interchangeable woman. As time passed, and fewer people recognized the name Timothy Leary, the world settled on the latter. When Rosemary died in 2002, few people outside the insular psychedelic underground bothered to distinguish her from the four other women in Leary’s life.

Consequently, Rosemary offers us an unfamiliar kind of hero’s journey. She was the perfect hippie who was a generation older than the baby boomers. She was muse and protégée; worshipper and defier.

While she was ambitious, she chose to sublimate her own greatness by shaping a mythology that didn’t have room for her in it. She was an escape artist whose primary creation was herself. She was a woman who tasted fame and found it both repulsive and intoxicating and who desperately wanted to be seen while hiding from even her closest friends.

She was a person betrayed who returned to her betrayer, a woman of great integrity who also happened to be a criminal, a fugitive whose bravery helped preserve a key part of American history. Hardly anyone knew—or still knows—the debt owed to the woman behind the so‑called psychedelic guru, whom the government viewed as a threat to democracy.

The thread of her self‑sacrifice entangles itself with the upper echelons of modern American culture and politics, including three U.S. presidents. These are just the flashiest waves in the Rosemary butterfly effect, but there are quieter reverberations across a universe of interconnected figures, some of whom continue to shape our realities, especially for people who use and study mind‑altering drugs.

Members of the psychedelic movement, who know of Rosemary’s work behind the scenes, call her a pioneer, whose unacknowledged sacrifice helped safeguard an underground movement. Her devotion to psychedelics—despite risk of imprisonment and ostracism—is especially relevant today. A topic that was once verboten is now top of mind for PTSD sufferers, open‑minded psychiatrists, and Silicon Valley tech companies that want to patent the experience.

To many, psychedelics are medicine—chemicals that can be used to heal or hack the psyche. But Rosemary’s perspective, rare in the male‑dominated 1960s milieu, illuminates our ongoing attraction to mind‑altering chemicals that extends far beyond the clinical. She believed that these substances, which have been in use for thousands of years, provided connection to the great cosmic mysteries.

This ineffability calls us, as it did Rosemary, though fully succumbing to that call requires a level of sacrifice. At almost every pivotal point in her biography, Rosemary ran—from home, from reality, from her husbands, from the law, from her past—and at each step she made herself anew. As Rosemary herself said, “I’ve lived the same type of life as everyone else, just in more exotic places.”

Whether this is true or not, who among us cannot, at some point in our lives, relate to the driving desire to bury, or even destroy, the person we once were? Or are.

Rosemary reveals the very human cost of the pursuit of such transcendence. No net will catch us when we choose to leap into the void.

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From The Acid Queen by Susannah Cahalan, to be published on April 22, 2025 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Susannah Cahalan.