February 15, 2007 - mlive.com
Comedian recalls family life with drugs in 1960s
By Mark Wedel
Remember the '60s? If you can, the stale joke goes, you weren't there.
But Vanessa Hollingshead does remember. She was only 5 when she innocently ate a sugarcube at what was Ground Zero for the psychedelic movement, Timothy Leary's Millbrook Mansion, in Millbrook, NY.
The sugarcube was laced with LSD. ``I didn't know what was going on,'' Hollingshead said from her apartment in New York City. She knew she was with Alex, Flo Ferguson's son, bouncing on a trampoline inside the mansion. And that's the most concrete memory of that moment.
Hollingshead is a comedian who will be at the Laughing Post Friday and Saturday. She's had appearances on Comedy Central's ``Comedy Central Presents,'' ``Tough Crowd'' and ``Premium Blend,'' toured from Europe to Australia, and is working on filming a one-woman show. She toured the Middle East -- Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan -- to perform for the troops in 2003.
But that all gets set aside when she's asked, did your father really introduce LSD to Timothy Leary?
She's the daughter of Michael Hollingshead, who came to the U.S. from England to work for the Institute for British American Cultural Exchange in 1960. He was friends with writer Aldous Huxley, with whom Hollingshead developed an interest in a then-legal, but experimental drug LSD.
Her father ordered a gram of the drug from Switzerland and mixed it into icing, ending up with ``5,000 hits of LSD in a mayonnaise jar,'' Hollingshead said.
Dad ``was incredibly charismatic and charming, but a raging alcoholic,'' she said. ``Leary was experimenting with mushrooms, and my dad was like, you gotta try this stuff, it's way stronger than the mushrooms. Timothy Leary took one look at my dad and assessed him as a sociopath, which is what my father was.''
Her father gave a hit to Flo (wife of jazz musician Maynard) Ferguson, who then persuaded Leary to try it. After that, the two men became partners who held LSD ``sessions'' with academics. Soon they were attracting the rich and famous, including Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger.
It was a chaotic time for Hollingshead, who remembers her father talking of acid starting a ``bloodless revolution,'' rumors of the CIA manipulating the household, and actual government helicopters buzzing the house. As the U.S. government turned up the heat on acid, her father eventually fled back to England, where he was arrested for possessing two joints. His trial there didn't go well -- he was his own lawyer, and he was on acid in court, she said -- and he was jailed for two years. (He ended up dying in Bolivia in 1984 from too much alcohol and cocaine, she said.)
Hollingshead (who refuses to give her age, but admits that she was born in the '60s) then lived with her mother, who was an amphetamine user, in squalid conditions in a rough part of New York City.
``Now, kids in this era were not quite being well taken care of,'' she said. ``I felt like I was their parent most of the time. Fending for myself, having to outsmart everybody because I felt like I was in survival mode.''
It's no wonder to her why she got into entertainment, she said. ``I'd do anything to get that attention and get that love,'' she said. ``Dad, can you stop drinking a little bit and notice your daughter?''
As a teen, she kept in touch with her father. She felt close to him, but she couldn't stand his ``Jekyll and Hyde'' moments and his ``hot temper combined with way too much vodka.'' Hollingshead graduated early at 15, as a way to impress her father. She then studied Shakespearean acting.
She lived in New York City, temping in the days and acting in ``humiliating'' plays. She found she could make her acting friends laugh, so she tried stand-up.
``I just knew, the second I hit the stage with a microphone, that this was my place, this was where I belonged,'' she said.
When Hollingshead began doing stand-up in the '80s, her material came straight from her childhood.
She recited the jokes: ``My dad did so much acid, LSD, psilocybin, blue blotter, purple haze, that we used to go on family trips together without ever leaving home. I don't have childhood memories; I have flashbacks. And you should've seen the vacation pictures from our living room.''
But Hollingshead has expanded her topics in the past 20 years. She is working on filming ``An American Anglomaniac,'' a stage show of her New Yorker's view of the British, French, Russian and Middle Eastern world.
``The one thing I try to do is speak from my heart, make everything true, and not be one of these edgy, attractive women who come out on stage looking good and talking about outrageous s---,'' she said. If Hollingshead sounds edgy, it's just the New York attitude. She said, jokingly, ``I don't have road rage, I have rage rage. I came out of the womb angry.''
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