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Maynard's stint with Leary at Millbrook is one of the most controversial aspects of his career and perhaps one reason why MF felt the need to authorize the MF Horn biography as being the "official" version of his life. In the bio, Leary and Millbrook get just a brief mention without a lot of details. To fill in some of those details, Maynard and Leary apparently met on the West Coast in the mid-1950s when Dr. Leary, who had earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1950, was director of psychiatric research for the Kaiser Family Foundation and Maynard was making the transition from studio musician to bandleader. By the late 1950s, both men had moved to the East Coast. Maynard was at the helm of the so-called Roulette band, while Leary, whose 1957 book The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality was well-regarded, was a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University. The two men maintained their friendship; Leary would visit Maynard and Flo about once a month in their Riverdale apartment in New York and enjoyed going down to Birdland to hear the band, while Maynard and Flo would hang out at Leary's apartment in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, whenever the band played Beantown or other nearby venues in New England. In the early 1960s, both men experienced drastic changes in their lives. Leary's Harvard Psilocybin Project showed great promise in helping criminals and alcoholics, but the controversy surrounding his advocacy of LSD (then a legal drug) ended up in Leary getting booted from Harvard in 1963 along with his associate, Richard Alpert. Meanwhile, Maynard was facing the loss of his Roulette contract and dwindling gigs, largely because of the "invasion" of British rock bands. Millbrook came about when a couple of heirs to to Mellon family fortune offered the New York mansion to Leary as a place for him to conduct further research. When Maynard had to give up the Riverdale apartment, Leary invited him to live at Millbrook, where MF and his family occupied the mansion's gatehouse. Thus, in his own way, Leary was at least partly responsible for the Roulette band lasting as long as it did. The rise and fall and eventual demise of Millbrook over the next several years is well-documented in other sources, including the aforementioned Robert Greenfield Leary biography. Like Richard Alpert (who would eventually become Ram Dass), Maynard went to India, where he evidently experienced a spiritual rejuvenation that allowed him to continue his career. The English band would come about shortly afterwards, and you know the rest of the story. For more on both the positive and negative aspects of Leary's life, this Wikipedia article pretty much sums things up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary

Thnks, mike2 and stmichrick, who wrote: If you say Leary contributed to the longevity of the Roulette period band I will count it as a positive contribution by him, however indirect.
My apologies, I should have explained what I meant. Maynard's relationship with Roulette ended on a sour note in 1962 when MF wouldn't fix up Roulette owner Morris Levy with singer Irene Kral. Levy also owned Birdland and terminated Maynard's relationship with that club as well. Thus, Maynard had no recording contract and had lost a major gig (his band used to play at Birdland some three months a year). Levy may even have contractually prevented Maynard from recording for a couple of years even as the Roulette albums Maynard '63, Maynard '64, and a few others were released, all of which were carved out from the last sessions in 1962 (if you have the original vinyl albums of some of these releases, you can see that the personnel list is taken directly from the W2 forms the musicians filled out. Thus, Willie Maiden is William R. Maiden, Mike Abene is Michael J. Abene, and my favorite, Lanny Morgan is Lansford Morgan). In 1963, Leary's invitation to Maynard to move into Millbrook's gatehouse allowed MF to pour whatever money he saved by moving out of the expensive Riverdale apartment back into the band, which by this time was floundering financially. Maynard also rehearsed the band in the gatehouse, thus saving on studio fees. There's a poignant moment in the MF Horn bio as Maynard recalls that daughter Lisa, then 5 years old, could nap even as as the band played in the same room. Thus, Leary's generosity allowed the MF band to continue on until 1964, when the two Cameo albums and the Mainstream album Color Him Wild were recorded with the remnants of the so-called Roulette band. I saw the band live during this time several weeks before the latter album was recorded: Superb! Sadly, the December 12, 1964 issue of downbeat (the magazine was biweekly back then) carried the official news that Maynard was breaking up the big band for financial reasons and would be working with a sextet and recording studio albums. Maynard was still residing at Millbrook for 1964's Blues Roar and 1965's The Maynard Ferguson Sextet, the last two Mainstream albums. This forum's littlebigband has written about seeing the sextet in Western Massachusetts in the summer of 1966 for a gig that had Maynard flying in from Millbrook. 1966's Ridin' High was apparently a lame attempt to cash in on Maynard's ongoing association with Leary (I always wondered if Leary himself wrote the crytpic liner notes for the album). The Millbrook scene was over by 1967, the year that Maynard started his overseas odyssey. As for Leary, say what you want about him, he was a Maynard fan. In the MF Horn bio, MF fondly recalls Leary acting as band boy for the night during a Maynard gig at the Apollo Theatre and really getting into it.