The hippie heyday was not far off, yet no one knew for sure whether Huxley’s LSD ingestions were exercises in pure and applied pointlessness — or worse. Rob Chapman, a Mojo music magazine contributor, relates in his book how the psychedelic movement turned sour in California with the Manson family murders of 1969. However, bad magic had long been hatching beneath the palms. Forever Changes, the great 1967 album by the LA band Love, combined psychedelic mariachi riffs with allusions to blood transfusions and a sickness in the city. LA always had been a supermarket for far-out fads. Huxley called it “The City of Dreadful Joy”. Laura attributed her own undying concern – the rights of children – to the time of her first LSD experience in 1955. She was lying on a sofa next to Aldous when she was taken to a far continent of anxiety. A few days earlier, Laura had been in Tijuana. She remembered the Mexican scene: “There were 86 abandoned infants at an orphanage there, looked after by five nuns.” As Laura entered the psychedelic state, the image of unloved children invaded her with hallucinatory intensity. “I sobbed and sobbed until unable to breathe.” Fortunately, Aldous was on hand with a consoling bowl of soup. ” I became absolutely fascinated by the little pieces of vegetable”, Laura told me. LSD was not made illegal in the United States and Britain until 1966, eleven years later.
After her husband’s death, Laura Huxley returned to her native Turin whenever she could, and saw old friends. She never lost interest in children’s rights. In 1978 she founded Our Ultimate Investment, a slightly bizarre organisation devoted to the health and spiritual nurturing of the “unborn”. She published pamphlets on pre-natal yoga and on how to “bond with your baby in utero”. All very California.
Laura’s You Are Not the Target (1963), one of the earliest self-help books, was an admired bestseller in the Sixties. And her children’s book, Oneadayreason to be Happy (1986), is an eccentric delight. She wrote numerous other manuals for psychological and spiritual growth. The most popular were Between Heaven and Earth (1976) and What We May Be (1984).
In spite of her many years in Hollywood, Laura Huxley did not take herself too seriously and never lost her mischievous wit; she was a woman, I thought, of sterling virtues.
She died in Los Angeles 13 December 2007, aged 96.
Ian Thomson, 12 September 2015
(This is a longer version of a review which appeared in The Spectator on 12 September 2015.)