Cary Grant

Cary Grant was the most famous patient associated with the Los Angeles LSD-therapy scene, and his 1959 public account became a turning point in the drug’s passage from clinical treatment into popular culture. After more than sixty sessions, he described himself as “born again”; the interview transformed a private therapeutic experience into an unusually visible testimonial, drawing a surge of national interest in LSD therapy and LSD itself.

Identity and Introduction

Grant entered the account not simply as a patient but as a public figure whose established image sharpened the contrast in his testimony. The book characterizes him as a reserved and proper Englishman, making his willingness to describe psychological change in intimate terms especially striking. His celebrity gave those claims a reach that clinical reports could not readily match: a discussion of therapeutic sessions became material for syndicated gossip and national publicity.

The surrounding Los Angeles practice was eclectic in clientele and purpose. Sidney Cohen, Betty Eisner, and Oscar Janiger incorporated LSD into weekly therapeutic sessions, gradually increasing doses as treatment proceeded. Their patients included neurotics, alcoholics, and people with minor personality disorders, as well as hundreds of painters, composers, and writers who hoped that access to the subconscious might open a route to creativity. Grant was identified as the best-known of the celebrity patients associated with this therapeutic world. The account does not assign his sessions to one particular practitioner, but places his experience amid a growing public fascination with the work of Cohen, Eisner, Janiger, and other therapists.

Therapy and Self-Description

In a 1959 interview with syndicated gossip columnist Joe Hyams, Grant said that the experience had stripped away sadness, vanity, and ego. He connected that change to his profession: “A man is a better actor without ego, because he has truth in him.” He also described a new standard of conduct, saying that he could no longer behave untruthfully toward other people or toward himself. The account presents these statements as Grant’s own interpretation of treatment, not as an independently established measure of its effects.

His claims reached beyond acting. Grant said that he was no longer lonely and was happy, and attributed an improvement in his relationships with women to overcoming what he called his narcissism. He added, “Young women have never before been so attracted to me.” The remark joined a report of emotional relief to a claim about renewed romantic attention: in Grant’s telling, the therapy changed both how he experienced himself and how he believed others responded to him. His description of being “born again” condensed that account of personal change into a memorable public phrase.

Publicity and Consequences

The interview received extensive national attention and helped produce a sudden rise in interest in LSD therapy—and in LSD more generally. Hyams received more than eight hundred letters from readers seeking to find out how they could obtain it. The response reached medical practices as well: psychiatrists called Hyams to complain that their patients were now asking for LSD. Grant’s testimony thus had consequences beyond his own account, turning celebrity disclosure into a source of pressure on clinicians and a channel through which demand spread.

The episode also exposed how quickly the boundaries around therapeutic use were loosening. By 1959, LSD was appearing outside laboratories and formal research settings; therapists and researchers in Los Angeles and New York were holding sessions in their homes for friends and colleagues, in circumstances that could be difficult to distinguish from parties. Grant’s interview did not by itself account for every such use, but it belonged to the same shift: a drug discussed as treatment was becoming a subject of public appetite.

Narrative and Cultural Significance

The book treats Grant’s publicity as one possible marker of the cultural change later associated with the 1960s, beginning before Timothy Leary became notorious for promoting LSD beyond therapy and research. The movement outward had already begun in Los Angeles, where therapeutic practice, celebrity testimony, and national coverage carried LSD beyond the laboratory. Grant’s fame made the movement legible: the drug’s public story could now be told through a familiar actor’s account of ego, loneliness, work, and intimacy.

His testimony also sits beside an unresolved tension in the period’s therapeutic enthusiasm. The Los Angeles practitioners reported improvements among many patients, but the broader claims for psycholytic therapy had few, if any, controlled attempts at replication. Grant’s account was influential because it was vivid and widely heard, not because celebrity testimony settled the clinical question. Its importance lies in that distinction: a personal report could function simultaneously as an account of treatment and as publicity powerful enough to alter what patients asked for and what the public imagined LSD might do.