When Cary Grant was not shooting a film, he went to the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills every Saturday morning in 1959, using the back entrance to avoid being seen. In a small, beige-colored room modestly furnished with easy chairs, a sofa, and a phonograph player, he received five Sandoz LSD pills and a glass of water. Once the mind-altering drug took hold, the Hollywood icon started crying as Dr. Mortimer Hartman guided him through a psychic minefield: his traumatic childhood years in Bristol. The Hollywood icon learned that these painful memories could be repressed for a while, but they could not simply be willed away. LSD was therapeutic in the sense that it enabled him to reframe his traumatic experiences. After many tears, Grant’s catharsis would often culminate in feelings of ecstasy as Hartman played selections from Rachmaninoff and Chopin on the phonograph player. After the LSD psychotherapy session ended, Grant would be driven home by his driver, and as he watched the afternoon traffic go by his car window, he felt serene.
From 1958 to 1962, Grant had over 100 LSD sessions, and he credited LSD and Hartman with “saving his life.” Grant’s intense LSD psychotherapy sessions of 1959 provide a template for Edward J. Delaney’s 2022 novel The Acrobat—a new addition to the rather obscure genre of the LSD novel. LSD novels typically feature a protagonist who discovers mind-altering drugs that provide revelations and facilitate self-discovery, but these substances also inevitably steer the protagonist into serious conflict with the values and institutions of mainstream society. Once the conflict ensues, the psychedelic hero/heroine inevitably has to renegotiate their relationship with a repressive society that often questions the protagonist’s sanity. In other words, the trip ends and the transformed hero/heroine has to deal with “reality.” The most famous LSD novel is undoubtedly Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), but there have been several others that explore similar terrain: James Fadiman’s The Other Side of Haight (2001) and, most recently, T. C. Boyle’s Outside Looking In (2019), which examines the background to the scandal surrounding the Harvard Psilocybin Project of 1963.
As well as being historically interesting, Delaney’s novel is topical because it sheds light on the current “psychedelics renaissance” of the past 15 years. As psychedelics begin to gain medical respectability and FDA approval, Delaney’s novel asks the contemporary reader, Can we learn something from Cary Grant’s cathartic trips?