Margaret Mellon Hitchcock

Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, the energetic scion of a storied wealthy family who funded Timothy Leary’s psychedelic adventures — and famously helped him find the spot to do so, at her brothers’ estate in Millbrook, N.Y. — died on April 9 2024 at her home in Tucson, Ariz. She was 90. The cause was a stroke, said her daughter Sophia Bowart. Ms. Hitchcock had been suffering from endometrial cancer. Peggy Hitchcock heard that Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were looking for research subjects while at Harvard, and she volunteered to try the then-legal experimental drug. Along with her brothers Billy and Tommy, Peggy made their Millbrook estate in upper New York available to Leary and Alpert (aka Ram Dass) after Alpert was kicked out of Harvard for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student. Peggy's mother Margaret Mellon (1901–1998) was married to Alexander Laughlin Jr. on 6/21/1924. Attending the wedding were both sitting Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon and Miss Alice Denniston Laughlin. Margaret Mellon Hitchcock, the third of five children, was born on June 29, 1933, in Manhattan into a family of great privilege. Her mother, Margaret (Mellon) Hitchcock, was a daughter of William Larimer Mellon, a founder of Gulf Oil. Her father, Thomas Hitchcock Jr., was a World War I fighter pilot, polo star and stockbroker. Known as Tommy, he served as a lieutenant colonel in World War II and died when his plane crashed during a training exercise in England. Peggy was 11 at the time and her father’s favorite, She attended the Brearley School in Manhattan, Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., and Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Hitchcock married, and divorced, Louis Scarrone, a doctor. as the Millbrook scene disintegrated into chaos. Ms. Hitchcock had begun a romance with Walter Bowart, a counterculture journalist, and moved with him to Arizona. They married in 1970 and divorced in 1980. Mr. Bowart was a founder of The East Village Other, a newspaper, and died in 2008. Ms. Hitchcock’s third marriage, to Larry Weisman, a lawyer, ended in divorce. Her fourth marriage, to Allan Bayer, a doctor and saxophonist, was by all accounts a happy one. Mr. Bayer died in 2007. In 1989, Ms. Hitchcock met the Dalai Lama in Santa Monica, Calif., and her life took another turn. She became a Buddhist and a supporter of Tibet House in Manhattan, and she opened an Arizona outpost, the Arizona Friends of Tibet, where the Dalai Lama came to teach a few times. In addition to her daughter Sophia and her brother Billy, Ms. Hitchcock is survived by another daughter, Nuria Bowart; her stepsons, Wolfe and Wythe Bowart; her sister, Louise Stephaich; and three grandchildren. Her brother Tommy Hitchcock and a half brother, Alexander Laughlin, both died last year in 2023,