Carolyn and I met Rosemary Sarah Woodruff Leary through our friend Nina Graboi, who will be the subject of a future profile.

Rosemary worked throughout her life to help educate people about the mystical experience, and she was instrumental in helping to orchestrate the cultural revolution of the Sixties. This she did at the expense of her personal freedom, which was compromised for a significant portion of her life.

Rosemary was born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 26, 1935. She left a conservative Baptist environment for New York City as a teenager in the Fifties, where she began hanging out with jazz musicians and Beat writers. Here she did some modeling work, some television commercials, and she mingled with the Beats and emerging counterculture. In 1965 psychologist Timothy Leary invited Rosemary to visit him at the Millbrook Estate in New York, which became a center for his controversial research into altered states of consciousness from 1963 to 1968. That visit began an association between Timothy and Rosemary that continued in various forms until Timothy’s death in 1996.

Timothy and Rosemary married in 1967, and Rosemary participated in Timothy’s staged events, helped with his books, and starred in film productions with him. She also became known for her remarkable and distinctive sense of style. Rosemary designed and made much of the clothing she and Timothy wore in the late 1960s, and her creations inspired the fashion of the era.

Because of their controversial work, the Learys and their circle became targets for criminal prosecutions, and a series of arrests for small amounts of cannabis profoundly changed Timothy and Rosemary’s life. One of Rosemary’s great contributions to the counterculture movement was her consistent refusal to cooperate with federal authorities. She received thirty days of solitary confinement for not testifying against her husband after G. Gordon Liddy raided Millbrook in 1966. During the 1970s she also refused an offer of amnesty from the FBI in exchange for providing names of others who had committed illegal acts in the name of freedom of consciousness. This selfless show of bravery was to define the course of her life.

In 1970 Rosemary worked to help orchestrate Timothy’s escape from prison, and with forged passports, they fled the country. However, the pressures on the exiles placed a strain on their marriage; they separated in 1971 and later divorced. Rosemary, a fugitive for her role in assisting Timothy’s escape, lived underground for 23 years in Afghanistan, Sicily, and in South and Central America. After her secret return to the United States she lived in relative seclusion on Cape Cod, in San Francisco, and elsewhere in California, using the name Sarah Woodruff. She remained a fugitive many years longer than Timothy, and the charges against her were not cleared until 1994.

In the last years of her life, Rosemary managed the trust that administered Timothy’s copyrights and archives. She also lectured to college students about the Counterculture Revolution, and her natural gifts as a raconteur made her lectures extremely popular. Rosemary was in the process of completing the final draft of her memoir at the time of her death.

I became close friends with Rosemary during the final years of her life, as she lived close to my home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The experience that I had with her while she was dying was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I was holding her hand, speaking to her, and with the exception of her eyes, everything else in the room dissolved into sparkling lights, just moments before she passed away. Rosemary died on February 7, 2002. Rosemary’s memoir Psychedelic Refugee: The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run was published by Park Street Press in 2021.

I interviewed Rosemary in 2001 at her home in Aptos, California. Rosemary was remarkably well read and extremely articulate. She was a very polite and considerate person, with a gentle soul and a sweet spirit. She was extremely pretty, and had an elegant sense of aesthetics. She also had a beautiful laugh, which I can still hear every time I think of her. Here are some excerpts from our conversation: David: What do you think happens to consciousness after the death of the body?

Rosemary: Transformation. More than that I can’t say, because I haven’t died yet. I want to believe in the continuation. I want to believe in that. I’d love to believe in reincarnation, but I keep coming up against the Holocaust, and it makes it very difficult for me.

David: How so?

Rosemary: Karmically, in terms of karmic retribution. Millions of people. It’s just very difficult for me to accept that, although I want to. I want to believe that we go on. I want to believe that I had conversations with Tim, and that Nina Graboi did come through a medium and visit us the other night.

David:Have you had felt like you’ve had contact with someone after they’ve died?

Rosemary: The only example I have is perhaps a story that I’ve already told you. I was thinking about my book, and what I wanted to do with it. Then, in the middle of the night, I had, what I thought was a brilliant idea, in how to describe myself in the book. Because people had complained that I write like a psychedelic travelogue, but I don’t really. I’m not very descriptive about myself. I said (deep inhale), well, I’ll use Tim’s writings about me in my book, as a sidebar or something. And the next morning I thought, that was Tim. (laughter) That’s absolutely Tim coming in.

David: Right, of course, he would say that.

Rosemary: Yes (laughter), yes. Use his writings in my book, of course.

David: Do you actually think that was really Tim?

Rosemary: Oh, I don’t know. I do know that while he was dying I felt him. I felt this inexplicable joyfulness that thrilled me, that thrills me even to remember it. I spoke to Ram Dass about it, and he’d suggested that he had felt similar things with dying people. But this was so thrilling, I couldn’t imagine that everyone in the room wasn’t experiencing it.

David: You mean when he was actually dying?

Rosemary: Yes, when he was dying. And it just made me so joyous, and it was (starts to cry)… I can’t say anything about it except that it was thrilling. It thrilled my entire body. It flooded my mind. It lifted my soul. It just was unbelievable.

by David Jay Brown