Winona Ryder and JFK: Spectral Resonances of Heathers and Mermaids, 1987-1999

 

The Winona Ryder moment comprising the late 1980s and early 1990s – years which saw the actress achieve teen stardom and household name recognition through a series of quirky outsider roles in high-profile releases including Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990) – produced two especially intriguing movies, Heathers (1988) and Mermaids (1990), which carry major social and ethno-political subtextual and intertextual currents enhanced by Ryder’s unusual family background.

Born Winona Horowitz in 1971, Ryder is the daughter of antiquarian bookseller Michael Horowitz, who worked for decades with LSD guru Timothy Leary as his archivist. Ryder’s mother, video producer Cynthia Palmer, is co-editor with her husband of the books Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women’s Writings on the Drug Experience (1982) and Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1999). In addition to Leary, who served as Winona’s godfather, the Horowitz family’s friends and associates included poet and hallucinogenic drug promoter Allen Ginsberg and paranoid science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Ryder moved with her parents to a California commune when she was seven and enjoyed an unconventional upbringing [1]. “My parents were so cool,” she later remembered [2], elaborating on another occasion:

I grew up in San Francisco around drag queens, openly gay couples and feminists. I never differentiated. They were all just wonderful people. My parents were hippies, so we eventually moved into a commune where free love and nudity were an everyday occurrence. [3]

Whether by design or coincidence, Ryder’s persona, as established in the first decade or so of her career, is inextricable from legacies of the sixties, notwithstanding her more salient status as an icon of Generation X – itself the biological and formative product of the sixties and the countercultural period extending into the seventies. “When telephoned to ask how she would like to have her name appear on the credits [of the 1986 film Lucas], she suggested Ryder as her father’s Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels album was playing the background,” according to her IMDb biography [4]. Even in minor ways, as in her role as a cab driver who cruises around Los Angeles listening to old psychedelic rock in Night on Earth (1991), her life onscreen has frequently served to keep the Kennedy-Johnson years, if not front-and-center, then smoldering in the back of the viewer’s mind.

The actress’s earliest role to engage with these associations in a major way is Beth Carr, a young woman whose brother has been sent to Vietnam in Ernest Thompson’s 1969 (1988). One of the least remarkable films of the definitive period for the establishment of Ryder’s archetypal screen persona, it is most significant in the present context for this passage from Beth’s slightly strange high school graduation speech:

There’s something wrong in America. I don’t know what it is, but I’m scared. There’s something wrong when everybody’s mad at everybody else. There’s something wrong when we don’t understand what our country’s doing. When we were little kids and too young to understand, John Kennedy said, “Ask what you can do for your country.” And whom are we supposed to ask now – President Nixon? Does he know? Does he care? A few weeks ago, down at Barton State, there was a fight about the war in Vietnam, and this boy fell against me, bleeding. And now, like Lady Macbeth, I can’t seem to get the blood off.

The reference to Macbeth, an inappropriate analogy for Beth’s anecdote about the brutalized student, is more interesting in its occurrence a few lines after the mention of President Kennedy, whose assassination was likened to the murder of King Duncan in Shakespeare’s play by more than one observer inclined to believe in a conspiracy. (See “Temple Macbeth Israel: Shakespeare, Polanski, Capote, and the Kennedy Assassinations”.)

A similar moment of ostensibly simple but arguably provocative dialogue occurs in Square Dance (1987), in which Ryder portrays Gemma Dillard, a Texas farm girl with a “Monroe forehead”. Believing her father to have died fighting in Vietnam, Gemma has been raised by her grandfather but later decides to try living with her estranged mother and a man named King in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Finally returning to the farm, Gemma hands her grandfather a King Edward cigar box and says, “Ain’t nothin’ missin’ but a one-way ticket to Dallas” – a line potentially suggesting an esoteric joke given that Edward “Ted” Kennedy was the only Kennedy brother still living.

These faintest hints of association between Winona Ryder and sixties skullduggery, synchronicities or not, receive a much more startling articulation in Heathers, released just a few months after 1969. Ryder plays Veronica Sawyer, a smart and socially ambitious high school student who still harbors some ambivalence about her tentative acceptance into the elite clique of the “Heathers” – Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Heather McNamera (Lisanne Falk), and Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty, who had appeared as Kathleen Kennedy in the 1985 miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times). Competing for Veronica’s allegiance is “dark horse prom contender” Jason “J.D.” Dean (Christian Slater), a motorcycle-riding rebel who embodies an alternative, shadow elite. The film’s themes and motifs of American history, Americana, mischief, and crime are established early on, with Veronica Sawyer’s lapsed friendship with Betty Finn (Renée Estevez) alluding to Mark Twain’s characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and Veronica at one point remarking that her “Bonnie and Clyde days” are behind her. More forcefully, Heathers emphasizes the mid-twentieth century, with Jason Dean’s name recalling archetypal self-destructive fifties bad boy James Dean and his signature role in Rebel without a Cause (1955), the use of the initials J.D. further reinforcing the association with juvenile delinquency, a rising concern of the time. References to Gilligan’s Island, Woodstock, hippie culture, and the space program (“you call me when the shuttle lands”), meanwhile, indicate a preoccupation with the sixties, as does the seemingly inconsequential put-down used by college partier Brad (Kent Stoddard) when he tells Veronica, “Save the speeches for Malcolm X”, a line establishing the story’s relevance to the political assassinations of the sixties. J.D., with Veronica’s naïve assistance, carries out a parallel series of murders to alter the social order at Westerburg High, also employing blackmail and intimidation to enforce his will. “No one can stop J.D. – not the FBI, the CIA, or the PTA,” Veronica confides to her diary.

Veronica’s father (William Cort) announces the theme of espionage in Heathers when he frets at breakfast, “Goddamn, won’t someone tell me why I read these spy novels?” “I been moved around all my life – Dallas, Baton Rouge, Vegas,” J.D. relates, listing cities evocative of organized crime and conspiracy, with multiple connections linking Jack Ruby’s Dallas scene with the Las Vegas CIA-mafia nexus, which in turn was connected with the government-sponsored activities of the anti-Castro Cubans in Louisiana and elsewhere [5]. Baton Rouge, too, was the home of CIA drug trafficker Barry Seal, whose early service in the Civil Air Patrol brought him into contact with David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald [6]. “The last time I saw my mom she was wavin’ from a library window in Texas,” J.D. later says, the details of Texas, a window, and a building filled with books calling to mind the Texas School Book Depository from which Oswald was alleged to have fired at Kennedy. Featured on the Heathers soundtrack, meanwhile, are two renditions of “Que Sera, Sera”, a song popularized in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), a thriller about a political assassination plot.

J.D.’s eccentric father (Kirk Scott) ostensibly makes his money in construction, but takes a special delight in demolitions and works out in an exercise room oddly furnished with little obelisks and Egyptian paraphernalia conjuring esoterica. Veronica’s introduction into this world makes some ironic symbolic sense, as her name, Veronica Sawyer, and that of her friend, Betty Finn, allude not only to Mark Twain’s characters, but to Archie Comics characters Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge, the latter being the daughter of millionaire industrialist Hiram Lodge, whose name in turn alludes to Hiram Abiff, revered in Freemasonry as the chief architect of Solomon’s Temple. Veronica, daughter of a builder, is thus fascinated by J.D., the son of a demolition man, who, taking somewhat after his father, dreams aloud of a vision of poetic death: “Push a button on the bomb and you and the lion die like one.”

Subtextually, Veronica, as a dark-haired and black-attired, socially ascendant factor ill-at-ease among the established elite, can be read as a Jewish character engaged in crypsis, infiltration, and subversion, with the Heathers and jocks targeted by her and J.D. standing for aspects of the hated and eclipsed gentile establishment in America. Veronica, who boasts of a “grand IQ”, longs for the status of the Heathers, but disapproves of their superficiality and nastiness, secretly longing for “a world without Heather”. Queen bitch Heather Chandler’s name potentially refers to the votive candles utilized in Christianity, hence to ethnoreligious exclusivity. Corroborating this interpretation is Chandler’s warning, “Nobody at Westerburg’s gonna let you play their reindeer games”, alluding to Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a character whose distinctive proboscis initially makes him a social outsider at Christmastime. “People love you, but I know you,” Veronica tells Heather Duke, whose name marks her as a member of a discredited aristocracy. Heather McNamera’s name, meanwhile, is possibly intended to call to mind Vietnam hawk Robert McNamera, US Secretary of Defense in the administrations of JFK and Lyndon Johnson, reinforcing the film’s sixties subtextual framework. Emphasizing the American political context of the murders, moreover, is J.D.’s determination to make Chandler “spew red, white, and blue” after he poisons her, faking her suicide – as is speculated to have been the case in the death of James Forrestal, who as Secretary of Defense under President Truman had opposed US support for the Zionist usurpation of Palestine. “Moby-Dick is dumped. The white whale drank some bad plankton and splashed through a coffee table,” as J.D. later puts it, indicating the racial motivation of the takedown of the previous elite. “Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling,” he memorably tells Veronica, whose social resentments temporarily commingle with his.

Just as the assassination of JFK marked the opening of the sixties as a period culturally and politically distinct from the fifties, with the Beatles arriving a few months later, the death of Heather Chandler sparks a cultural transformation at Westerburg High, with subsequent events constituting a rough recapitulation of the sixties as a “time for troubled youth”. The faculty’s resident “hippie”, Pauline Fleming (Penelope Milford), asserts herself as a force in the culture of the school, declaring, “We must revel in this revealing moment”, and initiates the students into a vaguely Aquarian or New Age system of thinking she dubs “The New Happiness”. “The Westerburg suicides were tough on all of us, but we shared the pain of losing three very popular souls,” Fleming says during a video presentation, narrating footage of a hand-holding ceremony culminating in a “burst of cleansing synchronicity”. Veronica, dismissively branded by her mother (Jennifer Rhodes) as “Little Miss Voice of a Generation”, objects to her and her classmates being “experimented on like guinea pigs”, echoing revelations of the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Making the parallels explicit at the film’s climax, J.D. imagines Westerburg High as a microcosm pyrotechnically obliterated in a “Woodstock for the eighties” because “the school was society.”

Indicators of the societal erosion and stealth Judaization effected by J.D. and Veronica are a new toleration of homosexuality and misfits generally and the replacement of religion as a cultural bond with mass entertainment media, visualized by a scene in which church congregants wear 3D glasses in the pews. Heathers loosely constitutes an allegory about the American trajectory – which is why the aversion of catastrophe at the film’s climax fails to convince or to satisfy. In the documentary Swatch Dogs and Diet Coke Heads (2001), Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters reveals that New World Pictures rejected an alternate ending in which Veronica herself detonates the bomb that brings down the school.

Ryder, as revealed in Swatch Dogs and Diet Coke Heads, was also in favor of a Heathers sequel, which Waters opposed. Offering ideas, however, Waters has suggested that a hypothetical Heathers 2 might involve J.D., who is “really an agent for the government”, in a presidential assassination scenario. Interestingly, it was based on the strength of Heathers that Tim Burton decided to tap Waters to write Batman Returns (1992) [7], which more than one reviewer has characterized as anti-Semitic in its depiction of the Penguin. Ryder, for her part, has characterized Waters as a “genius” [8] and again played one of his characters when she starred as Death Nell in Waters’s Sex and Death 101 (2007).

Ryder further developed her artistic and literary goth girl cachet, established in Lucas (1986) and bolstered by Beetlejuice (1988), with the underrated Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990), a film which also enhances Ryder’s subtle Judaic resonance through her starring role as black-clad Dinky Bossetti, an adopted misfit of mysterious origins. Despised as the town troublemaker and nuisance, Dinky has a soft spot for fellow rejects and maintains an “ark” where she nurtures outcast animals in need of her help.

In Mermaids (1990), however, released a mere two months after Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, Ryder’s screen persona is made explicitly Jewish. Based on a novel by Patty Dann and directed by Richard Benjamin – whose previous directorial efforts include the revelatory comedy The Money Pit (1986) and whose body of work as an actor includes films like Goodbye, Columbus (1969) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), which are overtly concerned with problems of American Jewish identity – Mermaids is set in the autumn of 1963 and features Ryder as Charlotte Flax, a self-hating Jewish teenager who longs to be Catholic. Like Gemma Dillard and Dinky Bossetti, Charlotte has never known her father, her morally loose mother Rachel (Cher) being a character worthy of the 1971 hit “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves”. Moving with her two daughters to a new town whenever an involvement with a man gets too complicated, Rachel is an inveterate wandering Jew who, though irreligious, retains a decidedly secular sense of ethnic identity and revels in her perpetual outsider status in Christian communities. “Charlotte, we’re Jewish,” she enjoys reminding her daughter the would-be nun, who has a photo of President Kennedy pasted to her wall over a miniature Nativity scene.

Immediately drawn to Rachel as the only available Jewess in town after she relocates the Flaxes to the fictional Eastport, Massachusetts, is shoe salesman Lou Landsky (Bob Hoskins), who develops a fatherly rapport with Rachel’s daughters. At stake in Mermaids is the viability of the nomad existence Rachel has enjoyed until now, with Landsky offering her a permanent sense of home and of a new American security and acceptance through capitalism and smiles. Unavoidably – particularly given the historical setting and Hoskins’s previous roles as gangsters in The Long Good Friday (1980), The Cotton Club (1984), and Mona Lisa (1986) – Landsky’s name brings to mind mafia kingpin and Zionist operative Meyer Lansky, whose status as “Chairman of the Board” of the National Crime Syndicate and connections in the world of intelligence make him a key figure of interest in the JFK assassination.

Charlotte’s history class is watching a film on the origins of Thanksgiving as a teacher tearfully enters the room to deliver the news that the president has been shot – ironically, just at the moment that the documentary’s narrator announces a time of rejoicing, giving the president’s death an equivocal value. Initially distraught, Charlotte wanders the town alone as children, oblivious of the political ramifications of the day’s events, play outside as usual, prompting Charlotte to reflect, “It feels like there isn’t a single adult left on the entire planet”, which is to say that an old authority has fallen away and that a world of more expansive possibilities is taking shape. Finding her crush, Joe (Michael Schoeffling), in a convent’s belltower, Charlotte shares the first passionate kiss of her life, so that for her, the major significance of the day the president died is that she has “turned into a fallen woman overnight.” Still affecting Catholicism, Charlotte nevertheless appears to be arriving at a new awareness by the end of the year when she abruptly remarks, “I wish I’d known Anne Frank”, as if some stirrings of ethnic identification are taking place and perhaps also a questioning of her previous assimilationism. As in Heathers, assassination is linked with social transformation, sexual revolution, and Jewish ascendancy, and with the dawning of 1964 Charlotte will lose both her virginity and her crucifix pendant. The somber mood of television news coverage switches quickly enough to puff reportage on European nightlife, with the sixties soon to be in full swing.

Mermaids novelist Patty Dann, it may be worth noting with reference to these considerations, is the daughter of Michael Dann, who as a programming executive at CBS in the sixties worked under network chief William S. Paley, who had headed the Psychological Warfare branch of the Office of War Information during the Second World War, lent the services of CBS News to Allen Dulles’s CIA, and curated the network’s coverage of the JFK assassination through his CBS News Executive Committee [9]. “The question between the program people and the censor came down to what could we get away with,” Michael Dann once explained of sitcom content at CBS, hinting at the cultural gulf separating the American television audience from the ethnic outsiders responsible for their entertainment: “Every single script and every single episode became a crisis.” [10]

Echoing the Anne Frank line in Mermaids, Ryder recorded a 1995 audiobook version of the Frank Diary, a rather inspired piece of voice casting given that Ryder plays a young writer or diarist in more than one of her films. Decades later, after starring in the HBO miniseries adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2020), Ryder became more strident about her Jewish identity, claiming “her biggest childhood fear was that someone would knock on the door and drag them off to be murdered” like relatives on her father’s side who “died in the camps”. Ryder says the subject fascinated her as a student and that she “used to spend a lot of time in the library doing research on the Holocaust.” [11]

“She doesn’t go out much these days, she says,” Michael Hirschorn writes in a 1992 profile of Ryder, who by that time had become one of the top stars in Hollywood, because the actress “gets ‘very paranoid.’” [12] Anxieties of Ryder’s busy professional schedule and protracted breakup with Johnny Depp in the early nineties finally resulted in Ryder checking herself into a psychiatric ward for a week [13], but the actress continued to flourish professionally, accumulating praise in prestige pictures like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), The House of the Spirits (1993), and Little Women (1994) while also cementing her status as an icon of Generation X with her role in Reality Bites (1994).

The mid-nineties also saw the release of the revolting women’s picture How to Make an American Quilt (1995), another Ryder vehicle about the legacies of the counterculture. Here she plays a directionless young woman with the “weird hippie name” Finn (“like, on a fish?”). The child of sixties free-lovers who went their separate ways, Finn has difficulty committing to decisions and suffers from a vague sense of identity, which, in conjunction with her fishy name, lends her some affinity with Charlotte Flax from Mermaids. Overhanging her relationship with her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney) is the poor model of Finn’s “flake” mother (Kate Capshaw), who, like Rachel Flax, is known to move casually from man to man. “Do you have any idea how crazy you’ve made me?” Finn confronts her in an emotional moment of intergenerational significance. “The imprint’s been made; I’m a mess.”

Burnishing her conspiratorial aura, Ryder briefly dated X-Files star David Duchovny in 1996 [14], but that same year she turned down the offer to star opposite Mel Gibson in Richard Donner’s MKULTRA-themed thriller Conspiracy Theory (1997), which would have made an especially intriguing entry for her résumé [15]. 1996 also purports to have been the year Gibson called Ryder an “oven dodger” at a Hollywood party [16]. Instead of Conspiracy Theory, Ryder opted to appear in the even sillier Alien Resurrection (1997) as an android who “accessed the mainframe” and reveals to heroine Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) that, “Every dirty little covert op the government ever dreamed of is in there.”

Finally, the sixties assassinations haunt Girl, Interrupted (1999), a temporal straggler in the broken line of Ryder-JFK connections, with the actress portraying Susanna Kaysen, the psychologically damaged daughter of the Jewish economist Carl Kaysen, who had served as an advisor to President Kennedy. Set in 1967 and 1968, the film includes glimpses of an RFK campaign sign in a psychiatrist’s yard, a JFK portrait in a guidance counselor’s office, and a television broadcast about the murder of MLK. Georgina (Clea DuVall), one of the patients living in a psychiatric hospital with Susanna, at one point threatens the protagonist: “My father is the head of the CIA and he could have you dead in minutes!” Georgina is a pathological liar, so that viewers are likely to dismiss the claim as angry bluster; but, given the sum of odd associations dotting the Ryder cinematic universe, the line arguably carries a more sinister current. Girl, Interrupted, as with Heathers, also features the thematically skullduggery-undergirded “Que Sera, Sera” on the soundtrack.

One is tempted to wonder about the extent to which Ryder and her family are conscious of the strangely meaningful affinities linking several of her films in view of her father’s countercultural involvements. Michael Horowitz founded the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, devoted to the history of drug experiences, in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in collaboration with “a fellow consciousness explorer”, Robert Barker, whom he says he met by chance after the Rolling Stones’ infamous December 1969 concert at Altamont:

Walking back to the cars parked a few miles away in the darkness, fires burning here and there, made for an apocalyptic setting and a bad re-entry from the LSD many of us had taken in the sunshine when the concert began hours earlier. I couldn’t find the car nor my friends I’d gone with and was looking around for a ride. […]

Yes, the euphoria of the Summer of Love was receding in the face of the government’s covert offensive. Altamont mirrored the darkness and paranoia that was escalating with the war, the assassinations, Nixon’s election, the Manson murders, the increasingly brutal suppression of the anti-war movement, Black uprising and student rebellion.

“Over time we amassed the largest library in the world on the subject, and hosted drug discoverers and scholars like Albert Hofmann, Gordon Wasson, Richard Schultes, Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna,” Horowitz relates, explaining, “This was the setting the Leary Archives would fit into.” [17] Wasson and McKenna, both ethnobotanists, are particularly intriguing associates. The former, the figure who popularized magic mushrooms, was financed by the CIA [18], and McKenna, a psychedelic mystic, curiously disclosed the following during a 1994 discussion of his work:

[…] in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then, uh, they recruited me and said, “You know, with a mouth like yours there’s a place for you in our organization.” And, you know, I’ve worked in deep background positions about which […] the less said the better. And then, you know, about fifteen years ago they shifted me into public relations and I’ve been there, uh, to the present. [19]

Horowitz and Barker met Timothy Leary’s wife Rosemary at the Om Orgy, a Leary benefit event where Ginsberg spoke, and she granted the pair access to her husband’s archives, after which Horowitz was enlisted to perform various editorial and secretarial functions for the imprisoned professor [20]. He remained in touch with Leary even after the latter’s “escape” to Algiers, which, Horowitz acknowledges, “was crawling with CIA agents and their informants” [21]. Leary himself, in the words of former East Village Other editor W.H. Bowart, was merely “a cast-off CIA asset”. “I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people,” Bowart claims he was told by Leary [22]. Could Horowitz, who would go on to work with Leary for decades and had access to his papers, have remained entirely unaware of such a remarkable provenance?

Then, too, there is the Horowitz family’s friendship with Allen Ginsberg, whose activities during the sixties included such interesting episodes as being accused of spying by Vietnamese Buddhists in 1963 [23]; introducing himself to Robert F. Kennedy not long before his official announcement of his presidential run and attempting to convince him to add a “friendly and tender-hearted” attitude toward marijuana to his platform [24]; and traveling to Cuba, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, where he sought “young people on the other side of the Cold War’s Iron Curtain that found Ginsberg’s challenge to authority appealing” [25] – none of which is to suggest that Michael Horowitz is a spy or that he worked for the CIA. Even so, one is prompted to wonder:

How much did Michael Horowitz know? How much does Winona Ryder know? What, to borrow a line from Heathers, is Ryder’s damage, exactly?

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winona_Ryder#Early_life

[2] Rader, Dotson. “I Didn’t Understand the World”. Parade (July 2, 2000), p. 10.

[3] https://archive.is/C9u7j

[4] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000213/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

[5] Maier, Thomas. “Inside the CIA’s Plot to Kill Fidel Castro – with Mafia Help”. Politico (February 24, 2018): https://archive.is/dvtCf

[6] https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKseal.htm

[7] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0914058/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

[8] Hirschorn, Michael. “Like All Cool Chicks of Our Time” (November 1992): https://archive.is/Hfd2t

[9] DiEugenio, James. “Why CBS Covered Up the JFK Assassination, Part 1”. Kennedys and King (May 14, 2016): https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/why-cbs-covered-up-the-jfk-assassination

[10] Dann, Michael. “Foreword” to Schneider, Alfred R. The Gatekeeper: My Thirty Years as a TV Censor. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002, p. x.

[11] Jean, Celia. “Winona Ryder Opens up about the Childhood Trauma the Holocaust Gave Her”. The Jerusalem Post (July 13, 2020): https://archive.is/r1ISs

[12] Hirschorn, Michael. “Like All Cool Chicks of Our Time” (November 1992): https://archive.is/Hfd2t

[13] Conant, Jennet. “Winona Ryder: Mining Her Memories to Play a Troubled Soul”. The New York Times (November 14, 1999): https://archive.is/wip/9KFjS

[14] Cook, Cynthia. “Winona Ryder’s Boyfriend History: Everyone She’s Dated, Including Johnny Depp, Matt Damon, and More”. Hollywood Life (May 26, 2022): https://archive.is/wip/9bUkx

[15] Climans, Kyle. “Quirky Facts about Winona Ryder, the Nymph of the 90s”. Factinate (retrieved August 6, 2020): https://web.archive.org/web/20200806004607/https://www.factinate.com/people/winona-ryder-facts/

[16] Cost, Ben. “Mel Gibson Responds to Winona Ryder’s Jewish ‘Oven Dodger’ Accusations”. New York Post (June 23, 2020): https://archive.is/ldP6j

[17] Rein, Lisa. “Acid Bodhisattva: The History of the Timothy Leary Archives during His Prison and Exile Years, 1970-1976 (Part One)”. Timothy Leary Archives (November 23, 2015): https://archive.is/YuDKo

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Gordon_Wasson

[19] Irvin, Jan. “New MKULTRA Discovery: Terence McKenna Admitted That He Was a “Deep Background” and “PR” Agent (CIA or FBI)”. Logos Media (August 23, 2013): https://logosmedia.com/McKenna-Agent

[20] Rein, Lisa. “Acid Bodhisattva: The History of the Timothy Leary Archives during His Prison and Exile Years, 1970-1976 (Part One)”. Timothy Leary Archives (November 23, 2015): https://archive.is/YuDKo

[21] Rein, Lisa. “Acid Bodhisattva: The History of the Timothy Leary Archives during His Prison and Exile Years, 1970-1976 (Part Two)”. Timothy Leary Archives (June 20, 2016): https://archive.ph/wip/CkRhX

[22] Bowart, W.H. “Timothy Leary and the CIA”. The Constantine Report (August 19, 2009): https://archive.is/9NOwE

[23] “Buddhists Find a Beatnik ‘Spy’”. The New York Times (June 6, 1963): https://archive.is/g00tg

[24] Margolick, David. “The Day Robert Kennedy Met Allen Ginsberg: ‘Have You Ever Smoked Pot?’”. The Guardian (May 27, 2018): https://archive.is/VmjmR

[25] Jacobs, Ron. “Allen Ginsberg Takes a Trip”. CounterPunch (January 18, 2019): https://archive.is/wip/qSZ5z