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occasion by setting up a trust fund for the new baby. “Courtney is not the rags-to-riches rock-and-roll story,” says her father when we finally persuade him to meet with us at his horse ranch in northern California. He had insisted we meet in the center of town so he could size us up and ensure we weren’t working for Courtney before he would escort us to his home.
    This is a man who for years has been publicly vilified by his own daughter as a grotesque, anti-Semitic, drug-crazed pathological liar. But Courtney’s accusations pale beside his own oft-repeated and publicly leveled charge—that Courtney was somehow involved in the murder of her husband Kurt. What kind of father would say these things about his own child? we wanted to know the first time we met him, convinced that—no matter what the truth of his charges—we must be in the presence of an unpleasant opportunist. However, that was apparently the least of his sins.
    In 1995, before a TV audience of 25 million Americans, Courtney told Barbara Walters that this man had given her LSD when she was three as part of a bizarre eugenics experiment. “He was anti-Semitic, his father was anti-Semitic,” she claimed. “Three people testified that he gave me acid. He wanted to make a superior race, and by giving children acid you could do that.”
    So when we arrive for our first encounter with Hank Harrison, we are a little spooked, expecting to meet some kind of bizarre rock-and-roll Hitler. He hardly disabuses us of this notion as he begins burrowing into his boxes of old papers, photos and Grateful Dead memorabilia. “Check this out,” he says, handing over a yellowing envelope with a letter inside. At the bottom of the letter, just under the signature, is a large hand-drawn swastika. The sender’s name is unmistakable: “Charles Manson.” Case closed, we think. Reading the letter itself, however, soon causes us to reevaluate. It’s just a letter from Manson bad-mouthing the Dead’s music. “He sort of stalked us for a while,” explains Harrison. “But that was long before the murders and stuff, so nobody paid much attention.”
    As he continues to forage, we take in our surroundings. On the living room wall is a framed letter on White House stationery bearing the seal of the president of the United States. Sent a few months after Kurt’s death, it is a personal note from Bill Clinton commending Harrison for his work promoting suicide awareness and offering his best wishes to “you, Courtney and Frances Bean during this difficult time.” On another wall hangs a Chagall oil painting that Harrison bought with the proceeds from his 1971 biography, The Dead —the first book ever written about the band. Although it is still considered by many as the definitive account, the book caused a permanent estrangement between Harrison and the group after he revealed that they had dealt heroin to finance their early tours. Today, thanks to Courtney’s public statements, Harrison is more likely to be falsely described as a Dead “hanger-on” or “roadie” than as the band’s first manager.
    Eventually, Harrison apparently finds what he’s looking for: hundreds of pages of transcripts from the divorce proceedings initiated by his wife, Linda Carroll, when Courtney was five years old. Nowhere in the transcripts is there a single suggestion that Harrison ever gave his baby daughter LSD, as Courtney later charged. What is revealed, however, is that Linda feared he would abduct Courtney and take her to live with him in another country after she threatened divorce. The LSD story appears to be based on the suggestion that Courtney may have been given acid while she was left with a babysitter at a hippie commune, perhaps supplying a chemical explanation for her erratic behavior later on. (In 1995, when asked about the allegation that her father had given her acid, Courtney admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle, “I don’t know if it actually happened.”)