\n"}\n\nIn the early 1960s, the Synanon house became quite the fashionable \nhang-out for Hollywood\u2019s more cerebral celebrities. Guest speakers in \n1963 alone included Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, legendary sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, and the original host of the Tonight Show,\n Steve Allen. Other visitors included Leonard Nimoy, Jane Fonda, \nCharlton Heston, and Milton Berle, among dozens of other curious stars. \nSynanon had some pretty cool parties, thanks to the fact that so many \njazz musicians were around trying to kick their habit.
\nBut\n it wasn\u2019t just the Hollywood elite and L.A. musicians lining up to get a\n peek at the exciting things happening in Santa Monica. Others who \ncouldn\u2019t resist poking their heads in for a look at the program included\n counterculture drug aficionado Tim Leary, futurist Buckminster Fuller, \nand labor activist Cesar Chavez.
\nPoliticians also came knocking. \nSenator Thomas Dodd from Connecticut claimed in 1962 that, \u201cThere is \nindeed a miracle on the beach at Santa Monica.\u201d Jerry Brown Jr., the \ncurrent governor of California, even visited Synanon while with his \nfather in the mid-60s.
\n\n\nBy\n October of that year, only a few months after the death of his wife, \nDederich\u2019s policies became even more extreme and controlling. He \ndeclared that married Synanites should split up and find new partners. \nHe started by breaking up his own daughter\u2019s marriage. About 600 couples\n were divorced by the following year.
\nAt the same time that \nSynanon was becoming increasingly militant and strange, it was enjoying \nsubstantial support from American businesses as a charitable \norganization. As Richard Ofshe notes in his 1980 paper The Social Development of the Synanon Cult,\n there were 20,000 businesses and organizations giving to or interacting\n with Synanon by the late 1970s, \u201cincluding one out of five corporations\n in the Fortune 500 who were listed either as donating or as doing \nbusiness with the organization.\u201d
\n\nThe most famous incidence of the organization\u2019s violence\u2014and the one \nthat Americans old enough to remember may recall\u2014was a planned attack by\n Synanon on a Los Angeles lawyer. It\u2019s remembered largely due to the \nbizarre choice of weapon: a rattlesnake.
From LA, naturally.
\n