Winona Ryder was THE Nineties It Girl. She ruled the hearts and minds of GenXers across the world (guilty) - and dated a string of A-list rock and movie stars - only to fall from grace in the hardest way at the dawn of the new millennium.
A fall that may well have been brought about in part by the predations of powerful men in Hollywood and beyond, I hasten to add. And maybe through earlier exposure to some of the usual suspects, the familiar rogue’s gallery of spooks and sex-pests.
Winona's had a certain look following her heyday. There's certainly an intensity in her eyes in a lot of pictures we've seen over the past twenty years, maybe even a cry for help.
She has admitted to a history of mental health issues, and that stereotypical crazy eye look - what the kids all call “Sanpaku eyes” - can be a symptom of chronic emotional distress and hypervigiliance associated with bipolar or schizoaffective disorders.
Mental illness and acting go together like peanut butter and jelly, but given Winona's remarkable and unlikely comeback in Stranger Things, it's worth diving into the waters in which this particular Siren swam in her early days…
Named after her hometown, Ryder was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents' friendship with Laura Huxley, writer Aldous Huxley's wife. Ryder's family friends were her godfather Timothy Leary, the Beat Movement poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick.
Having an MK-ULTRA superstar like Timothy Leary for a godfather is a huge red flag under any circumstances. Leary didn't seem to have a positive effect on people around him, given that his first wife and daughter both committed suicide, and there were any number of serious freakouts at his LSD commune in Millbrook.
Let's see what Dave McGowan had to say about the man:
Tim Leary was known for being a painfully obvious CIA asset and also had a home in Laurel Canyon.
Tim Leary and Charles Manson were both incarcerated in California Medical Facility-Vacaville at the same time in 1974 with Dr. Donald Lunde, who was appointed by judges or retained by lawyers, in some of the most infamous CIA-MK ULTRA-MIND CONTROL cases of the Twentieth Century.
Weirdly enough, Leary was married to Uma Thurman's mother Nena von Schlebrügge just before she married Robert Thurman (a noted Buddhist scholar). And then there's the odious NAMBLA activist Allen Ginsberg, just to make it all that much worse.
Continuing with Nonie's bio:
In 1978, when Ryder was seven years old, she and her family relocated to Rainbow, a commune near Elk, Mendocino County, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre plot of land. As the remote property had no electricity or television sets, Ryder began to devote her time to reading and became an avid fan of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger is no stranger to MK-ULTRA related concerns, but let's talk a bit about the Rainbow Family Commune, where Winona was raised.
The ’60s communards came to Albion Ridge as settlers looking for land. The ranch at Table Mountain was seen first from the air; Walter Schneider, formerly a Navy pilot, more recently of Timothy Leary’s Millbrook Estate in upstate New York, found it.
Together with his friend Duncan Ray, also of Millbrook, they bought it—120 acres for $50,000, paid for with Ray family money.
Ahh, so maybe these Rainbow folks were not so grassroots after all. The fact the commune was founded by a Navy pilot - and was a half-hour's drive from Fort Bragg - raises more of those red flags.
Don't forget the military was getting very weird in the Seventies, with the remote viewing programs and First Earth Army, and were at the forefront of the “trans movement."
But given what we know now about how a lot of sexual revolutionaries in some communes (such as the Children of God - which produced a lot of Winona's fellow GenX stars - among others) were working rather diligently to "liberate" very young children, I have to confess Winona's whole childhood arrangement makes me slightly nervous, if not nauseous.
You'll see exactly why by the end of this post.
Winona was upfront about her mental health struggles while promoting Girl, Interrupted, including a stint in a psychiatric ward in 1991. Although that could be the result of other stressors, her self-confessed insomnia throws up a big red flag when it comes to childhood sexual abuse.
As it happens, Winona's young life was not lacking in trauma of other varieties:
(Ryder says) she was so heavily bullied in her formative years that she feared for her own life. She was picked apart for her style, as she refused to conform to the preppy school's standards. Instead, she'd show up to class in hand-me-downs while rocking an angsty crew cut.
As she shared in a 2000 interview... her classmates weren't at all interested in accepting her unique style or her newfound fame. Instead, she was physically attacked by the girls at school. "They slammed my head into a locker," she told the magazine.
"I fell to the ground, and they started to kick the sh** out of me. I had to have stitches... The school kicked me out, not the bullies." She switched to homeschooling after the incident.
The “trauma haircut” and boyish dress are not unknown in sexual abuse survivors, a fact that is both well-observed and well-documented...
