The new received wisdom is that Cary Grant was the ultimate Captain Trips — the guy who inspired Timothy Leary to look into LSD, and in so doing became a prime influencer and seminal counter-culture figure. Not actually but, you know, in a roundabout, cosmic-linkage, one-thing-leads-to-the-next-thing way.
“Turn off your mind, relax and float upstream…it is not dying, it is being”…that’s Cary! Okay, I might be pushing the connection a bit, but if you’ve ever been “experienced”, you wouldn’t be far off the mark to regard Cary Grant as your brother, your father…the guy holding your hand.
Sounds far-fetched, right? But a Xan Brooks Guardian piece about Mark Kidel‘s Becoming Cary Grant, which will screen at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival, more or less makes that claim.
Brooks describes the doc, which he’s apparently seen, as an exploration of “Grant’s adventures in psychedelia.” The doc reports that the famously debonair actor dropped LSD 100 times between 1958 and 1961. Wade into that. Not 10, 20 or 50 but 100 sessions.