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Cary Grant Dropped Acid, In Controversial Therapy, To Deal With Personal Struggles

By K. Gitter

8 years ago

Cary Grant was coerced into dropping acid as part of a controversial therapy, to get over his issues with women: Actor dropped LSD 100 times because he struggled to ‘connect’ with females and had a fraught relationship with his mother

Actor Cary Grant (pictured in 1933) was coerced into dropping acid more than 100 times as part of a controversial therapy due to his inability to ‘connect’ with women and the fraught relationship he had with his mother, according to new Showtime documentary Becoming Cary Grant (Source: Daily Mail)

According to a new Showtime documentary, the actor was distraught over his inability to form relationships with women as well as the distant relationship he had with his mother.

When the actor was nine years old, his father told him that his mother, Elsie, had gone ‘to a resort’. At age 30, he learned that she had been committed to Bristol Lunatic Asylum in 1915 by her husband. A year later, in 1935, Grant freed his mother (Elsie pictured with two nurses from Bristol Lunatic Asylum) – (Source: Daily Mail)

In Becoming Cary Grant, filmmakers detail how the Hollywood star, who failed to achieve inner peace with hypnosis and yoga, claimed to find it with LSD.

  • Actor Cary Grant was introduced to Dr. Mortimer Hartman by wife Betsy Drake
  • Hartman was prescribing LSD, which his wife took ‘to cure herself of alcoholism’
  • Grant submitted to 100 LSD therapy sessions over the course of three years
  • He praised the drug in numerous interviews, saying: ‘At last I am close to happiness’
  • The therapy sessions were to treat his ‘lack of connection’ with women and anxious relationship with his mother
  • At age nine, Grant’s mother disappeared; the actor learned 20 years later that his father had committed her to a psychiatric hospital
Grant was introduced to Dr Mortimer Hartman, a physician in Beverly Hills, California, who was prescribing LSD by his third wife, Betsy Drake (left, pictured with Grant in 1952). Drake ‘took LSD to cure herself of alcoholism’  (Source: Daily Mail)

 

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