Here is what I wrote to a friend recently about Timothy Leary and the Mad Men of Millbrook (edited slightly).
I just finished reading Ted Druch’s book. I enjoyed reading it and think you probably would too. It tells pretty much the same story that Art Kleps told in Millbrook but from someone else’s viewpoint. Early on while reading it, I was turned off by Druch’s anti-philosophy philosophy, where humor seems to be the highest and maybe only value. Have you watched Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm? The way I felt about this book at first reminds me of how I feel about that. It is entertaining and wonderfully funny at times, but I still don’t like Larry David’s worldview. I feel the same way about Woody Allen. I guess it’s a secular Jewish worldview. Serious claims about the meaning of life are all bullshit. Just enjoy the pleasures of life while they last. It will all end in nothingness. But as I read on, I enjoyed more and more Ted Druch’s zest for life, and his descriptions of the personalities involved. Bill Haines and Art were allies more than I realized from Art’s version, with Tim Leary and Billy Hitchcock being very influential but less central to the day to day life of the place. Around fifty people in those early stages of wanting to drop acid at every opportunity, and in a place where everybody believed in the spiritual value of it, even Ted Druch, in spite of himself. By the end, I was wishing it would go on longer, not because it was too short or incomplete, but because it was describing a time and state of mind that were so much fun.