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From the late 1930s to the early 1960s, the name of Cary Grant was synonymous with the debonair leading man of Hollywood’s golden age. Coming up through the studio system, Grant starred in some of the most successful films of the Silver Screen era, such as Bringing Up Baby, Arsenic and Old Lace and An Affair to Remember. While Grant may have been world-famous as an actor, it’s less well-known that he spent several years undergoing controversial psychotherapy using the newly discovered hallucinogen LSD. According to Cary Grant, LSD helped him achieve some measure of healing after a lifetime of trauma, but it seems he took a lot of it along the way.
Cary Grant’s Journey With LSD: Context and Motivation
The man the world would know as Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, in 1904. According to many of the people who knew him as a boy, he was a scruffy and unpredictable lad who always seemed to be in some kind of trouble. He allegedly ran a local petty shoplifting ring with other boys, and he was expelled from school after getting caught in the girls’ changing room when he was 11 years old. After unsuccessfully trying to run away and become a cabin boy on a tramp steamer, he fell in with a troupe of traveling vaudeville performers and basically drifted across the Atlantic to America, where he moved from stage to screen and then on to stardom.
It wasn’t all high jinks and smooth sailing for the future box office royal. Grant was born into extreme poverty to a father who was a clothes presser and a mother with serious mental health issues. His older brother James died in childhood, and the family eventually disintegrated. When Grant was still a child, his father had his mother committed to an insane asylum and told young Archie she had died. Grant didn’t discover the truth until 1938, when he was able to visit her in the hospital.
The Troubled Personal Life of Cary Grant
Cary Grant didn’t have an easy adulthood, either. He was married in 1934 and divorced in 1935, then married again from 1942-1945 and then again from 1949-1962. His fourth marriage ran from 1965-1968. His last marriage lasted from 1981 until his death in 1985. His first marriage ended with accusations of domestic violence, but the case never led to criminal charges for Grant.
It’s telling that Cary Grant operated under a stage name his whole adult life. According to him, the Cary Grant persona was largely a fiction, somebody he pretended to be in public but a character he had little to no personal connection to. According to an interview he gave once:
“He’s a completely made-up character, and I’m playing a part. It’s a part I’ve been playing a long time, but no way am I really Cary Grant. A friend told me once, ‘I always wanted to be Cary Grant.’ And I said, ‘So did I.’ In my mind’s eye, I’m just a vaudevillian named Archie Leach.”
The LSD Sessions and Their Profound Impact on Grant
By the late 1950s, Grant had starred in more than 60 movies, generally earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per film. He was rich, he was famous and he was miserable. He admitted in an unpublished memoir that he’d never been able to form attachments with other people and that none of his success in Hollywood made up for how alone he felt. Other notes from his private papers reveal Cary Grant’s mental health was fragile, and he was dealing with what might today be diagnosed as depression, as well as a serious case of impostor syndrome, where he felt like he didn’t deserve the special status he had as a movie star.
Sometime around 1958, Grant began seeing a therapist named Mortimer Hartman, who was a strong advocate for using LSD in therapy. This wasn’t an entirely new idea, since LSD was first synthesized in 1938 and tested for its effects on the brain in 1943, but it was in the 1950s that the term “psychedelic” was coined for its hallucinogenic effects. The first wave of therapists to try it out seem to have used it to speed up the therapeutic process by compressing the work of multiple talk therapy sessions into a single drug trip. Around the time Grant started using it, LSD was being prescribed for alcoholism, repressed trauma and schizophrenia. Cary Grant’s addiction history at that point included years of heavy drinking, making him a promising candidate for the treatment.
While the science of LSD therapy is spotty, Grant seemed to take to it right away. Over the 10 or so years he worked with Hartman, the actor may have taken LSD more than 100 times. He described the drug’s effect as being complementary to talk therapy. The way he put it, Freudian psychoanalysis worked on the intellect, but LSD achieved a similar effect on the emotions. By the middle of the 1960s, Grant had publicly advocated for greater acceptance of LSD in mental health.
Public Reaction, Stigma and Grant’s Advocacy for Mental Health
LSD was part of the great cultural explosion of the 1960s. Going from an obscure therapeutic to a counter-cultural mainstay, LSD wound up heavily associated with the hippie freak-out culture of Timothy Leary and the Merry Pranksters. This attachment brought an inevitable stigma to LSD, as did the largely apocryphal stories about unnamed hippies who took acid and jumped out of windows or young mothers who put their babies in the oven instead of the bread while on an LSD trip. Little of this was actually true, but it added a layer of public shame to any association with LSD.
Grant gradually got quieter about his use of LSD, but he continued to advocate for better emotional health therapy. He also apparently remained grateful to Dr. Hartman, even leaving him $10,000 in his will. Of the controlled acid trips he went on in Dr. Hartman’s office, Grant would later claim he had felt “truly, deeply and honestly happy,” but also that “taking LSD was an utterly foolish thing to do, but I was a self-opinionated boor, hiding all kinds of layers and defenses, hypocrisy and vanity.”
Legacy and Lessons From Cary Grant’s Psychedelic Experience
Cary Grant used LSD as part of his recovery from a lifetime of trauma and depression, always under the watchful eye of a trained therapist. While he eventually grew out of this phase of his life, he never lost his concern for how people in need were getting mental health services. If you think you could use someone to talk to about drug use or mental health issues, the compassionate team at FHE Health has the same attitude toward wellness as Cary Grant: that you deserve to be listened to. Contact us today for a confidential consultation.
