To Narc on One’s Self: The Head Cases of Timothy Leary and Philip K. Dick

Discussed:

Timothy Leary: A Biography, by Robert Greenfield. 2006
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. 1971
A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. 1977
A Scanner Darkly, (Movie) by Richard Linklater. 2006
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, by Lawrence Sutin. 1986

Time has been quite cruel to Timothy Leary’s best known prescription: that the mass indulgence of hallucinogens would result in a liberating transformation of American society. The “mystic vision” behind this bad notion actually belonged to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, but Leary was seen as the “perfect person for the job” of advancing the alchemist’s agenda -- initially through the dosing of famous artists, poets, intellectuals and musicians. Whatever value may lie in consciousness alteration among society’s vanguard, the more wide-spread the experiment became, the more terrible its public costs, the more Leary seemed to deny that it had all gone horribly wrong. The crimes of the Manson family should have been a sickening wake-up call, and if there is a flicker of vitality still left in the original proposition that some intrinsic and transcendent wisdom lies in the imbibing of psychedelics, the news that right-wing harpy Ann Coulter (a shrew so shrill even conservatives have tired of her) remains a wistful Deadhead might prove sobering.

Robert Greenfield’s 600+ page biography of Leary reveals a charismatic and talented Irish huckster who anti-heroically refused to sober up. Though he initially approached psychedelics with scientific skepticism and hopes for psychiatric use, the mystic vision imparted by Ginsberg took deep hold and propelled him from F. Scott Fitzgerald wanna-be to Acid King to pseudo-Revolutionary fugitive, before winding up as a Hollywood Squares style B-list celebrity with a penchant for fringe science. One of the oddest kinks in this declension, a turning point in Greenfield’s biography, is when Leary, behind bars and looking at rotting the rest of his life in prison, named names in the drug movement he had built. To show the depths of his penitence he penned articles for the conservative flagship The National Review, in which he lambasted the druggie music and wayward morals of his friend John Lennon (and Bob Dylan) while also attempting to lure his devoted ex-wife into arrest. Bummer.

Why did Leary flip and fink? Perhaps there was some residual effect from the stupendous amounts of all the acid, brain damage that lent a certain plasticity to his character, or maybe it was an addiction to a more common and insidious drug: fame. Leary behind bars was forgotten as the world moved on, a fate too grating to endure for an egomaniac, especially if all that was to be sacrificed were past principles and allies. Ratting out his friends, associates and lawyers would both place him back in the public eye and speed his release, and it seemed to have worked okay. Credit the man with dancing fast enough to avoid his “karma”.

A noteworthy side effect of this episode is the way Leary’s fall from grace came to symbolize the death of the sixties for so many. When a grand vision with utopian promise grabs a sizable chunk of culture then sputters out into betrayal and self-parody, it remains with the burned romantics, writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Philip K. Dick, to best chronicle the aftermath. Both men were masters of writing a certain style of drug addled jive, prose that crackled with wild energy and potential violence while teetering between complete paranoia and high comedy. Thompson, in his best known book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas captures both the triumph of the counter-culture in full bloom and its quick collapse:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . .

And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The human cost of that “broke and rolled back” was vicious in lives, health, and hope. Even as early as 1971, Thompson bemoaned the “fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip”:

He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a though to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. . . What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

It was among the terror of those “grim meat hook realities” that Philip K. Dick (PKD) often lived and wrote, combining, in his later novels, the sweaty dregs of the drug culture with the All-American horror of H. P. Lovecraft. In his A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist, Bob Arctor, covertly works as a narcotics agent in a bleakly futuristic Orange County California. Coupled with an array of high-tech surveillance gear, Arctor’s growing intake of the schizophrenia-inducing drug “Substance D” is driving him to narc on himself. Arctor is a burned out divorcée living with other thirty-something bachelor freaks in a drug den of a suburban house, a setting inspired by PKD’s own shattered home in Marin County of the early seventies. PKD, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin, was near broke and addicted to amphetamines. He suffered from bouts of agoraphobia and kept an open house policy for teenage hippies and dealers. During roughly the same time, an exiled Tim Leary was enjoying the life of a coked-up ski bum in Switzerland, haunting through force of celebrity and charm, the chalets of dubious aristocrats in a dance of mutual scams.

In A Scanner Darkly, one of the more psychotic characters, in order to burn the luckless protagonist Arctor, impersonates him on the phone and signs off with “Tune in, turn on and good-bye,” a stunt seemingly calculated to call down the wrath of the straights. Leary’s most famous phrase, of course, was “Tune in, turn on and drop out” and the last clause was already a tacit admission that the initial flush of psychedelic potential had failed to radically transform America . . . that the drug culture should simply “drop out” and either go into internal exile or live parasitically off of the straights. Funny how touchy straight society got on that score.

Leary was a fan of PKD’s sci-fi, and through a bit of druggie synchronicity, the guru manqué has a connection to the current movie version of A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater. Leary’s archivist through-out the sixties was Michael Horowitz, the father of the Hollywood actress Winona Ryder, who co-stars as in A Scanner Darkly. (Ryder regarded Leary as her godfather and has written a foreword to one of Leary’s latest biographies.) Horowitz, as archivist and friend, was put in a terrible bind when Leary started collaborating with the Feds in prison. He agonized over whether to surrender Leary’s files as Leary requested and was dismayed by the personal pressure to turn over incriminating letters. The New York Times reported that with the archives seized, the FBI hoped “they would be able to solve every drug case of the 1960s”. While the high aspirations and naiveté of the Feds were comical, the resulting paranoia among the drug culture was very real. The flood of undercover agents that hit the streets at the end of the Nixon administration, and the tactic of dealers to turn in the competition, were part of the reason that narcs were an obsession of both Thompson and PKD. The idea that the necessary intimacy of drug use could be contaminated by the subterfuge of a cop was the ultimate buzz-kill, the recession of that “high and beautiful wave,” and Leary’s betrayal helped to show how hollow the whole show was to begin with.

Called in front of a grand jury in 1975, Winona’s Dad refused to testify, befuddling the prosecuting attorney by maintaining that archivists possesses the same privileged confidentiality that is bestowed upon priests, spouses and attorneys. A clever tact, he escaped without indictment, and decades later, his daughter, in a PKD derived movie, would play a narc that plots to drive another narc insane in an elaborate plot to bust a drug manufacturer. That schizoid mirroring and fear/fascination with undercover cops was not just a literary trope for PKD. According to Sutin, in February of 1973, despite his still occasional use of cannibinoids, Dick wrote to the Justice Department offering up A Scanner Darkly as part of the fight against drugs.  Throughout the seventies he corresponded with the FBI to let them know that despite the appreciation of his novels by left-wing and even French literary critics, he, PKD, was a patriot.

Of all the many films that have been based on PKD’s works, Linklater’s is the closest in spirit and tone to such schizoid deliberations. The book, despite its thin veneer of sci-fi, was an obvious cri de coeur emanating from the sixties hangover. Stripped of its proper temporal context, Linklater’s film recalibrates much of Philip Dick’s horror and anguish as comedy, substituting gritty poverty and the bitterly-earned paranoia of the early seventies for nineties style slacker wit. In Southern California of the early seventies, it was possible that a bunch of edgy hippies and drug dealers might actually know someone, or have connections to, radical terrorist groups like the Weather Underground.  Similar connections between psychedelic slackers and today’s radical terrorism are hard to imagine, and the film characters efforts to make them stretch into silliness.

Imagining the future through science fiction was a shared fixation of Leary and Dick, one with flippant optimism and the other with tendentious horror. Their idiosyncratic approaches as futurists provided downright, well . . . . trippy codas to their lives. Leary briefly flirted with the idea of cheating death and getting a glimpse of tomorrow. Intrigued by cryogenic preservation, Leary, on his deathbed, talked of having a sketchy cryonic corporation sever and freeze his head for future re-animation. Owing to a lack of trust with said corporation, Leary backed out and passed away in front of cameras and surrounded by friends. Dick, who popularized the existential dilemmas of androids, died in 1982 but recently served as a model for a highly-detailed robotic head, a showcase for the work of Hanson Robotics Inc, complete with an “artificial-intelligence-driven personality”. The construct was designed to simulate a conversation with the dead author, but alas, David Hanson, the builder, misplaced the head on an airplane in December of last year and it has yet to reappear. Given such material, one’s tempted to ponder the bizarreness of it all, perhaps even by drifting into one of PKD’s parallel realms, a dark future in which the frosty noggin of Timothy Leary and the android cephalos of PKD bullshit each other on the nature of reality.

Comments

[John]

Makes you wonder who is sitting in their living room talking to PKD's head, and what PKD's head thinks of it all.

[missVolare]

Having just reread Sutin's bio and PKDs "Scanner" plus acquaintance w/other mentioned parties, it seems that period of Dick's life was mirroring the nat'l zeitgeist ala Elvis, Nixonian drugwars, and an actual increase in drug availability (see GB 41 and CIA).

"...Throughout the seventies he corresponded with the FBI to let them know that despite the appreciation of his novels by left-wing and even French literary critics, he, PKD, was a patriot."

He also corresponded with various nat'l security agencies because he had experienced a 'break-in' and was determined to expose the guilty party. His increasing speed usage had led him to devise paranoic fantasms and some perhaps genuine agents (Phillip aka Jim Barris) were part of the chaos.

"...In Southern California of the early seventies, it was possible that a bunch of edgy hippies and drug dealers might actually know someone, or have connections to, radical terrorist groups like the Weather Underground. Similar connections between psychedelic slackers and today’s radical terrorism are hard to imagine, and the film characters efforts to make them stretch into silliness."

Umm, i would like to point out that up in this neck of the woods we've had some ELF bombings supposedly tied to Rainbow gathering folks and some of the more DMT-damaged show denizens. So that assumption sounds too broad to me.

The head meme is very apropos but i have doubt about the veracity...

[appidydafoo]

"a dark future in which the frosty noggin of Timothy Leary and the android cephalos of PKD bullshit each other on the nature of reality."

Why would that warrant pondering? Based on your tone of derision towards wholesale drug experimentation throughout the article I fail to see why you have any respect for either of these individuals? Or would it only be interesting in this scenario, detatched from their previous worldly states of imperfection and persecution could you really feel completely secure to indulge in the interplay of their mental faculties?

"The idea that the necessary intimacy of drug use could be contaminated by the subterfuge of a cop was the ultimate buzz-kill, the recession of that “high and beautiful wave,” and Leary’s betrayal helped to show how hollow the whole show was to begin with."

You do know HST blew his brains out? Riffing on his work to make such an entirely baseless and shallow observation is in rather poor taste.

Leary HST and PKD are dead, the naturally ocurring mind altering chemical agents still exist and humans are still baseless monkeys killing other monkeys over pieces of the ground. Leary may have cracked in the end, but to sit here and crucify him in hindsight is outrageous. What would you have done? What would you do now if you were geting assraped by draconian legislation for doing something to your body and your body alone? It's especially easy to crucify Leary, and you use that mythos to great effect here. It's simply pathetic that the conclusions you draw are so inherently divergent and you only fault Leary, as if he was spawned and cultivated in a vacuum of his egomania.

[daksya]

The crimes of the Manson family should have been a sickening wake-up call, and if there is a flicker of vitality still left in the original proposition that some intrinsic and transcendent wisdom lies in the imbibing of psychedelics, the news that right-wing harpy Ann Coulter (a shrew so shrill even conservatives have tired of her) remains a wistful Deadhead might prove sobering.

a)Ann Coulter claims to have not indulged in drugs.
b)Millions consumed psychedelics. Why should a singular case of the Manson family change anything?
c)Seems you missed the reporting on this recent controlled study.

[Alan Koenig]

appidydafoo:

"Why would that warrant pondering?"

Why? A sense of play, fun or dreamy speculation. Take four hits and call me in the morning.

" You do know HST blew his brains out? Riffing on his work to make such an entirely baseless and shallow observation is in rather poor taste."

I'm very aware that HST committed suicide. But that doesn't change the fact that Thompson loathed Leary. If you could, please explain to me why this is any way poor taste to mention. Please refer to pages 178-179 in your copy of "Fear and Loathing" for his take on Leary. Also there's this quote:
"Hunter S. Thompson said that he (Leary) was ‘not just wrong, but a treacherous creep and a horrible goddamn person."

http://www.ihaveamericasurrounded.com/book.htm

"Leary may have cracked in the end, but to sit here and crucify him in hindsight is outrageous. What would you have done? What would you do now if you were geting assraped by draconian legislation for doing something to your body and your body alone?"

It's not the end I fault Leary for, it's the middle. Specifically, the middle of the Greenfield biography in which Leary betrays his prinicples, narcs on his friends, conspires against his loyal ex-wife, and disses John Lennon. Major uncool, dude.
If you don't like my conclusions based on this ratfink behavior, you are free to draw your own. I suggest chapters 38-43 in the Greenfield bio. Peace out.

daksya:

"a)Ann Coulter claims to have not indulged in drugs."

Yes, 67 (roughly, by her count) Dead shows and she remains pure as the driven snow. Remarkable. With such ironclad discipline it's no wonder the Right is winning. However, in David Brock's "Blinded By The Right", her ex-friend claims she snorted cocaine in New York City bars. I guess NY bars are just more seductive than Dead shows, or maybe stockbrokers have better coke than hippies.

" b)Millions consumed psychedelics. Why should a singular case of the Manson family change anything?"

The central proposition that Leary and Ginsberg put forward was that there would be a great raising of human consciousness through the mass indulgence in hallucinogens. That peace, love and harmony would be advanced through drug experiences. I think you know the story. The Manson family showed that you could drop Acid and still be a psycho killer, hell it might even make you more of a psycho killer, depending on nuerochemical and psychological context.

"c)Seems you missed the reporting on this recent controlled study."

I did not see this study nor am I denying that many millions of people have had profound spiritual experiences while on hallucinogens. What I'm contesting is that these experiences lead to a shared "raising in consciousness" which entails more peace, socialism and vegan burritos. Many American soldiers fighting in Iraq have dropped Acid or ecstacy (and I hear rumors of major ecstacy rings within the American military in Iraq), but that doesn't stop them from being soldiers. Does it? Are these people spiritually malformed? Did the drugs not do what they were supposed to?

[appidydafoo]

Why? A sense of play, fun or dreamy speculation. Take four hits and call me in the morning.

Pfft, got ya beat there. The question was rhetorical, the answer was typical. It seems like an insincere dichotomy to hold these men on one hand as the myths and legends they are and ponder this pseudofuture in a playful manner while quantifying and dispensing your derision towards various other aspects of their lives.

Specifically, the middle of the Greenfield biography in which Leary betrays his prinicples, narcs on his friends, conspires against his loyal ex-wife, and disses John Lennon. Major uncool, dude.

I agree, that's totally shitty. Where we seem to differ is in Leary bearing the load of all the extraneous circumstances surrounding his negative behavior. As I said before, what would you do based on that position? On one hand yes, you could posit that his ego wouldn't let him rot alone in jail - and on the other hand, what basic human would take "the higher path" and succumb to being blocked off in a cell for the rest of their life - all in the name of a nebulous drug culture that was a double edged sword for Learys character from the beginning?

Can you imagine the FBI and other intel agencies having that much dirt on you and squeezing you like a tic? There comes a point in everyones life when you realize you have to play within the system to survive, I'd imagine Leary had been very fortunate until that point.

What I'm contesting is that these experiences lead to a shared "raising in consciousness" which entails more peace, socialism and vegan burritos.

The marines produces individuals who turn very violent and psychotic later in life - would you posit that due to this fact the entire purpose of the marines is based on lies and false promises? You could say the same thing about football, organized religion, whatever. I find it fascinating that individuals will spend so much time deconstructing those who promote expanding the fields of our minds; when we our constantly surrounded and assaulted by those who seek to shunt their boundaries and condemn radical processes. Seek your fight on other battlegrounds, my friend.

[daksya]

The central proposition that Leary and Ginsberg put forward was that there would be a great raising of human consciousness through the mass indulgence in hallucinogens.

They have certainly presented a caricature i.e. lick this tab and become Buddha, but very few psychonauts will deny that context matters and that the results of trips depend on the synergy of the interactors (drug & subject).

What I'm contesting is that these experiences lead to a shared "raising in consciousness" which entails more peace, socialism and vegan burritos.

In present circumstances, this is indeed a very remote outcome, but the potential exists. The impression I got from your write-up is that you were denying any benefit, by citing the Manson case. The situation calls for a careful study of psychedelics, not their ostracism. I would say that the transition towards the integration of psychedelics in society involves, first, Huxley's approach, followed by a tempered version of Leary's.

[Alan Koenig]

appidydafoo:

“It seems like an insincere dichotomy to hold these men on one hand as the myths and legends they are and ponder this pseudofuture in a playful manner while quantifying and dispensing your derision towards various other aspects of their lives.”

I’m a fan of PKD’s stories and did one of my bachelor’s theses on “Faith of our Fathers.” In life he had his troubles: the man had a lot of love to give and was very generous, but for long periods he was deeply batshit and unhealthy. I don’t think that impacts the value of most of his work, which was as insightful as it was speculative. My speculation was a nod of appreciation not derision, and I trust that most readers have sussed that out.

appidydafoo:
“I find it fascinating that individuals will spend so much time deconstructing those who promote expanding the fields of our minds; when we our constantly surrounded and assaulted by those who seek to shunt their boundaries and condemn radical processes. Seek your fight on other battlegrounds, my friend.”

In terms of spiritual disciplines, practices and rituals I’m pretty libertarian, but let’s be honest. There’s a lot of crap out there that has consistently failed to make human beings into better human beings. Since at least the ancient Greeks, societies have judged philosophies by how well their originators and adherents practice them and I don’t see Leary’s shtick holding up too well. He was a man who studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and various forms of mysticism. He did lots of Yoga and dropped obscene amounts of acid. He claimed that this was the path to enlightenment and he was enlightened. Yet, he also said the following in a 1971 political communiqué:

“To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act. . . Listen, the hour is late. Total war is upon us. Fight to live or you’ll die . . . I am armed and should be considered dangerous to anyone who threatens by life or my freedom.”

Not exactly “flower power”, right? His good friend Robert Anton Wilson said that that letter was “the dumbest thing he ever wrote,” while his dear buddy/colleague Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) noted “One more thing we do not need is one more nut with a gun.”

Leary went even further than that. While driving around with federal agents in order to pinpoint one of the safe-houses where the Weather Underground hid him, Leary had his then wife, Joanna, smuggle him a gun. According to both Greenfield and biographer John Higgs (http://www.ihaveamericasurrounded.com/book.htm) he came very close to murdering the two agents from the back seat of their squad car. How much “enlightenment” does it take to get to that position? Was he acting according to the dictates of his philosophy or his higher consciousness when he requested the gun from his wife?

I could supply dozens of anecdotes of Leary idiocy, cognitive and moral, but let's just throw in this one from the late eighties. In a Vanity Fair article with a Helmut Newton photo spread showing Leary living the Hollywood highlife, Leary meditated thusly on LSD and the philosophic life:

“(LSD had become) an enormous luxury I just can’t afford now. My wife Barbara is very attuned into the exquisite beauty of the surroundings . . . And so every time we’ve taken LSD, the next morning she decides we have to move to a more expansive house.” Laughing, he added, “That’s one of the unreported side effects of LSD we never recognized – it doubles your rent.”

Hmmm, just another guru with a taste for big houses? If, after reading these examples, or the many more in the Greenfield biography, you still believe that this is a man with “an expanded consciousness” or evidence of “radical processes” then there’s nothing I can do to help you. You need to find a battleground before you can fight, friend. The allegedly enlightened life of Leary ain’t it.

[JMT]

Alan, a brilliant mini-essay, well done. On our roadtrip we had the audiobook of Minority Report and other stories, and it struck me that PKD's paranoia was both a proof and a disproof of what the drug culture hoped for: new creativity, but one in which the atmo is generally a nightmare rather than a dream.

[appidydafoo]

If, after reading these examples, or the many more in the Greenfield biography, you still believe that this is a man with “an expanded consciousness” or evidence of “radical processes” then there’s nothing I can do to help you.

Never said I did, one way or another. You don't need to help me, I was merely confused as to why these individuals were looked upon with such scorn by yourself in this piece.

There’s a lot of crap out there that has consistently failed to make human beings into better human beings.

Yeah, and I'd probably find myself quite bored and depressed if I devoted time to actually cataloguing and ranting against the most extreme and fringe elements within that sphere.

I'm going to posit the opposite: highlight and describe anything that has consistently succeeded in making human beings better human beings.

You won't find it, anywhere. You could name a few token examples from your life, but you'd be entirely wrong to extrapolate them across humanity, let alone with a metric of "consistency". Who is the one looking for the impossible now? :P

[Cromwell]

Alan, interesting essay … I also enjoyed the debate that followed.

Do you know any of these “Head Cases” personally? :P

BTW … I’m one acid trip away from being a Libertarian myself!

(forgive the pithy post … at work)

[Alan Koenig]

You don't need to help me, I was merely confused as to why these individuals were looked upon with such scorn by yourself in this piece.

I hold no scorn for PKD. I’ve enjoyed his writings and I don’t think that he pontificated enough with his VALIS weirdness to really be taken all that seriously. There are moments of courage in his often tragic life that I find admirable. Leary on the other hand, loudly proclaimed a “philosophy” he did not live up to, and as such, I believe is open to criticism.

I'm going to posit the opposite: highlight and describe anything that has consistently succeeded in making human beings better human beings.
You won't find it, anywhere. You could name a few token examples from your life, but you'd be entirely wrong to extrapolate them across humanity, let alone with a metric of "consistency". Who is the one looking for the impossible now? :P

Broadly (too broadly) I would hazard three things in a humble effort to improve humanity: love, moral imagination and the attempt of rationality. Love, well, what to say without being hopelessly vague. I think it helps us to be better human beings, or at least I hope it has me. I also think more of it in the world might help. Again, this may sound naïve, but I can’t help but think that some of the world’s worst conflicts show the triumph of rage and vengeance over love. Not exactly political science, but I trust you catch my drift.

Moral imagination is somewhat related. The ability to put yourself in another’s shoes seems to be a precondition for pluralism, tolerance, peaceful coexistence etc.

Rationality has it limits, as the Skeptics showed, and its languages are subtly and obviously biased, as the Deconstructionist determined, but what else is there? Even Deconstructionists, if pushed far enough about their practical politics, will argue for a “strategic essentialism”. I think David Hume made this point first, but I’m not really that smart. None of these things come easy, indeed they call for a continual effort to transcend our worst instincts, a kind of labor that’s nearly impossible, but even worse to do without. We must try. That’s what bothers me the most about Leary -- the All-American cheesy ease he brought to “enlightenment”. Love is not a mere ecstacy trip nor is enlightenment an acid tab. (And I can’t responsibly recommend “candy flipping”.) There are methodologies for pursuing these prescriptions to be found in many cultures and disciplines. It’s the consistency of practice that proves their worth. I hope.
.
(While honest, I find my responses above a bit squishy, and we have wandered far off topic. In order not to provoke the fearsome temper of our editor, S. Abbas Raza, I suggest that anyone interested in pursuing this conversation please do so via my email address: [email protected] Thank you.)

[joyoust]

I once knew Joanna. First, she was NEVER Leary's wife. As a self-proclaimed 'guru groupie', she made the trip to Switzerland, found him and attached herself to him. I found that Leary began to revise his books to delete all traces of Joanna.
Recently, she split (called herself 'wife')(called it a divorce) from John Lash, Jan Kerouac's former husband and the heir to Jack Kerouac's estate. She was NOT married to him either.
Joanna's mother, Mary' once said to Leary - 'Joanna has lived in a dream world all her life.' She claims to come from royal stock, and therefore had no skills to work. Joanna NEEDS to attach herself to famous people, who can give her status and a false sense of importance. She is now going by the name "heart mender". In my and other peoples experience with Joanna, she is a 'heart breaker', who eliminates and back-bites the very friends who have loved her, when she can no longer find any use for them. Joanna is adept at assuming the victim role. She is downright mean spirited and manipulative.
I have never spoken up about this woman and have (it took some time) forgiven her. However, I would never enter into another 'friendship' with her. The first experience was painful enough. It was a lesson and a wake-up call. And, I am far from being a victim. I became a winner.