By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Laura Archera Huxley, 96, the widow of writer Aldous Huxley who became a self-help author and founder of a humanitarian organization to transform the emotional lives of toddlers, teens and senior citizens, died Dec. 13 at her home in Hollywood Hills, Calif. She had cancer.
Mrs. Huxley, a violin prodigy in her native Italy, once performed at Carnegie Hall before giving up music to study health and nutrition. In the Los Angeles area, she became a lay therapist and lectured on the "human potential" movement, a precursor of New Age beliefs.
In 1956, she married Aldous Huxley, an English-born novelist and philosopher most remembered for the dystopian book "Brave New World" as well as his experimentation with LSD. She later spoke harshly of the 1960s counterculture and its recreational drug users, adding that they took "more in one day that Aldous took in his whole life."
Aldous Huxley died of cancer at 69, in 1963, the same year Laura Huxley came to prominence with her self-improvement book "You Are Not the Target," which was a bestseller.
The text contained what she called her "recipes for living and loving." She offered practical, if somewhat humorous, advice on how individuals can cope with change and chaos surrounding them. She advised readers to imagine attending their own funeral, visualize their favorite flower and, to much shock at the time, dance naked to music.
She joked that the book, translated into Vietnamese during the war there, "became quite popular, especially during the air raids when people huddled in shelters would encouragingly say to each other, 'You are not the target.' "
In the 1970s, she became legal guardian of a 2-year-old, the granddaughter of a close friend. Her late-career parenthood, as well as a concern for the lonely and neglected, led her to start a nonprofit group, now called Children: Our Ultimate Investment, that she described as "dedicated to the nurturing and education of the possible human."
"Children are our ultimate investment and also very much the ultimate investment of the tobacco companies, the ultimate investment of the liquor companies and, for sure, of the gun companies," she told an interviewer.
In practice, the organization featured programs uniting the elderly with babies, based on the belief that both were emotionally needy and could benefit from a healing touch. Liability issues later ended this effort. "People are afraid to touch a child now," she said.
Mrs. Huxley also began a program for at-risk teenagers to visit toddlers in a day-care setting. This, she once said, gives the students "a chance to get out of school for two afternoons a week to play with toddlers, and they jump at it!"
Weeks into the life-skills program, she said, most of the teenagers realize they are emotionally unequipped to handle children for long periods and therefore are less inclined to repeat the cycle of young parenthood.
Children: Our Ultimate Investment has struggled to find funding in Los Angeles, where it now works with one high school. But the organization has started to flourish in England, where a board member started operations in 2001, because of government support.
In 2003, Mrs. Huxley received an honor from the Association of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health for outstanding contributions to the field.
Laura Archera Huxley, whose father was a stockbroker, was born Nov. 2, 1911, in Turin, Italy. She developed a talent for violin at age 10 and said she used her skills "as a way for me to leave home."
She studied music in Berlin and Paris and spent a dozen years as a concert violinist, including a 1937 performance of a Mozart concerto at Carnegie Hall.
She also attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in the late 1930s and remained in the United States during World War II, eventually settling in Southern California.
Her interest in psychotherapy, parapsychology and other forms of mind-opening techniques came about by accidental necessity, she said. She began to read up on alternative medicines after orthodox methods failed a good friend suffering from cancer.
"What was there to know, I found myself wondering, about constitutional differences?" she wrote in the reference book "Contemporary Authors." "How much does the mind influence the body -- and the body the mind? What about suggestion -- and autosuggestion -- and animal magnetism?"
In Hollywood, she found work as a film editor at RKO studios and also tried to pursue a career as a documentary film producer in the late 1940s. One project was about the Palio horse race in Siena, Italy, and she sought guidance from writer-director John Huston, who advised her to call Aldous Huxley, who had spent time in Italy and was living in the desert near Los Angeles.
She said Huxley welcomed her friendship, and they married a year after his first wife's death from cancer, in 1955. She said he proposed to her twice in obscure fashion, first asking, "Have you ever been tempted by marriage?" and then "Do you think it might be amusing to travel to Yuma and get married at the drive-in?"
She wrote a tender memoir of her life with Huxley called "This Timeless Moment" (1968) that tried to dispel the perception of him as a "cynical intellectual" from his "Brave New World" days.
Her other books included a self-help sequel, "Between Heaven and Earth" (1975), and "The Child of Your Dreams," (1987), about the formative moments of a young life. The second was co-authored with her nephew, Piero Ferrucci, a psychologist.
Survivors include Karen Pfeiffer, whom she raised, of Van Nuys, Calif.; and a granddaughter.
Laura Huxley was a devotee of yoga, the trampoline and natural foods. She wrote a book, scheduled for online publication, called "Let's Die Healthy."