Observations placeholder
Grant, Cary - Gloria Powell, National Police Gazette, December 1967 on Cary’s LSD use
Identifier
025824
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The National Police Gazette ran a profile on Cary Grant in 1967, written in the first person by a woman who feigned confusion about Grant's drug use and the way it was consumed.
A description of the experience
Gloria Powell, National Police Gazette, December 1967
I had lunch with Cary Grant and I shall report everything that you would like to know about him. I saw him at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York.
Cary Grant, well over six feet tall, was deeply tanned and well groomed ... Years ago he even played in a tennis tournament but recently he found that he was devoted to swimming and yoga ...
Mentally, Cary Grant is not to be found wanting ... I have even heard it said that Cary Grant goes to a well-known Hollywood psychiatrist ... I asked Cary Grant squarely whether or not this was so ...
"Psychiatrists," he said, "... are only headshrinkers ... I will tell you that for about five years I have been glad to use LSD."
As a rule LSD is administered intravenously by a physician and produces "wild" dreams, as the saying goes, dreams that the patients follow as if they were on a screen in Technicolor and Cinemascope. While under the influence of the drug, they generally talk of their sensations and above all of their desires, not in the physical sense.
Those who have tried it, including Cary Grant, maintain that nowhere on earth are there colors as fantastic as those seen during these sessions. All this seems bewildering to me; I know nothing about drugs; and I asked him why he submitted to sessions of that sort ...
Cary Grant explained to me that he began to take LSD "because I felt I did not have all the happiness that human life can give an individual. What's wrong with looking for happiness? Each of us has different procedures and methods, but that is always what we are looking for. I honestly think that by means of LSD I got to know myself better, my possibilities and my limits; and as a result greater happiness."
On that subject, I reminded him what Mae West said, "I am very close to Cary, but I just can not understand why he keeps on with those crazy experiments, taking a drug to find himself. He ought to come up and see me now and then, and I'm sure I could quiet him down."
Cary Grant broke out into a loud laugh and said, "Mae always had a great sense of humor ... and she's right from her point of view. Everybody is right, as long as he doesn't impose his own ideas on other people and leaves them full liberty to act and behave."