“As we left Witherspoon, a wizardly teen appeared in Buddhist robes and began shouting in Vietnamese. We didn’t understand, but Madame Nhu did. Weeks earlier, several monks burned themselves to death protesting the Saigon government. Madame Nhu shrugged it off. She said all monks should be barbequed.
“So this student holds up a can labeled ‘GASOLINE’ then sits down in lotus posture and douses himself. Security began working their way in. Crowd ooohs and ahhs as the student strikes a match. The Princeton Marching Band played ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.’
“Madame Nhu and her entourage stood in horror. Student delivers his final prayer in Vietnamese, then slowly brings the match to his robe. It goes out. The gas can was filled with water. Student stands, then in his best Bronx accent shouts, ‘Well, folks, that’s show biz!’ Then he flees into the crowd.
“The whole event created an alumni uproar. How dare students embarrass the school! Two weeks later President Diem and his brother, Madame Nhu’s husband, were executed in Saigon while she was partying in Bel Air.”
Princeton was no political asylum. For Pickard, the contradictions persisted. While Mississippi governor Ross Barnett preached segregation to the Cliosophic Society, protesters dogged his steps and hounded him off campus. Leonard joined the chorus.
He lasted one semester at Princeton.
“Leonard thought he was such a genius that he could skip classes, do drugs, and still ace all his exams,” recalled a fellow psychonaut who would get caught up decades later in Pickard’s world.
In Leonard’s version, his short-lived Princeton experience derailed after he discovered wine, women, and song in nearby Greenwich Village—an easy fifty-mile bus trip from the New Jersey campus.
“This was before drugs appeared, when marijuana was only something rumored to be used by Puerto Rican musicians, and was not remotely a topic of interest,” he said. “No Beatles. No rock ‘n’ roll. MacDougal Street was some prescient omen of the future. The espresso houses, the Vanguard, Buddy Rich wailing away at the Metropole, Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. We’d follow Moondog10 around Manhattan.
“I saw Richard Pryor in his youngest days! I recall the entirely white audience laughing uproariously every time he said ‘mother-fucker,’ thinking it was outrageous or a joke, never realizing that it was just basic vernacular.”
Despite his outward appearance of straitlaced Southern privilege, Leonard evolved rather quickly into a rebel with no visible cause.
“No one had quite seen anything like it,” Pickard recalled. “So many people stepping out of line, discussing theology and philosophy, seeking explanations, exploring their place in life.”
During Thanksgiving week, 1964, he was arrested twice in Alabama for forgery.
“Dim recollection,” he said. “Something about a girl’s overdraft near Auburn. It was dismissed. None of these early brushes with the law required more than a few hours’ detention as matters cleared up.”
He spurned the bourgeois lifestyle and vowed to quit the middle class. His new role model was less Einstein and more Dean Moriarty, the bipolar protagonist of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.
“He decided to steal a car for a joy ride—a Pontiac GTO, I think,” said his fellow psychonaut.
Dan Pickard dimly recalls cousin Lennie phoning one day in January of 1965 with an offer he and his two older brothers couldn’t refuse.
“He called to ask us if we wanted a car. Well, yeah! We were kids,” said Dan. “But he never came through, and we never heard from him again.”
Instead of delivering the stolen GTO, Leonard got arrested in Newark by US Marshals for transporting a stolen vehicle over state lines. He clams up about what happened next. Even fifty years after the fact, he remains elusive, ducks his head, changes the subject. He will not discuss it.
But his peers will. His father stepped in and persuaded the court to grant Leonard probation, the first two years of which he was to serve under professional observation at the Institute of Living in Connecticut.
Officially a “residential psychiatric facility” located near the state capital of Hartford, the sanctuary had a dicey history. Constructed in 1823 for $12,000 and situated on thirty-five pristine acres,11 the Institute of Living was only the third psychiatric hospital ever built in the US. Originally dubbed the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane, the forty-bed facility underwent dozens of changes over the next two centuries. It became a lobotomy factory during the 1930s, a pioneer in electroshock therapy,12 and a favored refuge for hundreds of Catholic priests identified by the Church as pedophiles.
During his intake interview, Leonard struck a sour note.
“Young Leonard was dressed in a Navy-blue blazer and a rep tie,” recalled Pickard’s associate. “And when asked why he believed he was there, Leonard said that he had decided to make his time at the Institute a learning experience. Then he asked the intake psychiatrist, ‘How can I be of help to you?’”
Not true, protests Pickard.
“There’s nothing in the records but a little discussion of my father versus my aunt,” he said. “No typing or DSM13 categories; no mention of sociopathy. And no one at the Institute of Living would remember an eighteen-year-old from fifty years ago. . . .”
Nonetheless, maintained his associate, impudence got Leonard labeled a troublemaker: a narcissist, incapable of introspection. Right or wrong, the label stuck. The funny, quirky, brilliant kid that Mary Haney and Dan Pickard recalled growing up did a slow fade.
Over the next twenty years, Pickard lived life on the periphery, dropping in and out of communes, spending time in jail, haunting college campuses and entering into loose-knit social networks dedicated to psychedelics. He made no pretense about depending upon the kindness of strangers. He soaked up altruism and neuro-pharmacology wherever he found it.
While he was still in Connecticut, he audited classes and worked at the hospital that eventually acquired the Institute of Living.
“My first job was male aide at Hartford Hospital, then moved to psychiatric
