Wacky

"You must have a hole in your head."
"I do. I drilled one in there myself."

So might have gone a conversation with the subject of an obituary that describes the subject as "wacky." I have never seen the word "wacky" in any obituary headline. There is always a first.

But the word wacky didn't stay there. It only appeared in an early print edition of the NYT when the passing of Amanda Fielding was introduced by the headline:

"Amanda Fielding, 82, Wacky Countess Who Adored  Psychedelic Drugs, Dies"

The online version of the obituary comes under the more sedate headline:

Amanda Fielding, Eccentric Countess Who Backed Psychedelic Meds, Dies at 82

A note at the end of the online obit tells us the obituary first appeared in the print edition with the "Wacky" headline. 

Amanda didn't have to drill a hole in her head to earn either the "wacky" or the "eccentric" adjectives. She talked openly about her long-term relationship with a pigeon. ("We were twin souls, she once said, "a pair of lovers completely inseparable.") 

The NYT obit writer Michael S. Rosenwald tells us that "in the mid 1960s, Amanda fell in love with Bart Huges, a handsome Dutch scientist who was a proponent of trepanning (the medieval practice of drilling a hole in your head to increase blood flow) and LSD, the powerful hallucinogenic drug made from lysergic acid diethylamide.

Amanda told The London Standard in 2024, "I had the choice of going ahead with the love affair and taking LSD every day in big doses, or not being with him. So I took the LSD."

There is edited YouTube footage of Amanda drilling a hole in her head and the result of the 1½ pints of blood that flowed out from the wound. The drilling certainly did increase blood flow—out of the skull.

The full procedure was filmed in 1970 and billed as a short documentary "Heartbeat in the Brain." It was shown at the Suydam Gallery in New York and even reviewed by Anthony Haden-Guest for New York magazine, who presumably watched the whole film, while others in the audience fainted. I guess you had to be there.

But Amanda survived the procedure. Several of her lovers also had the procedure performed on themselves. (It seems there is nothing one won't do for love.) Two of her less than flattering nicknames were: Lady Mindbender and Countess Crackpot.

While Amanda later in life might have been well off, her life didn't start out with many comforts. Her father was an artist who adored beauty, but didn't make much of a living at it. Her mother's name is mentioned, but there is no description of the life she lead. Heating and electricity were considered luxuries.

In 1995 Amanda married James Charteris, Earl of Wemyss and March, which granted her the title of Countess of Wemyss and March.

For all her eccentricities and use of hallucinogenic drugs, Amanda was considered ahead of her time in the belief that these potent drugs could help people with depression and other mental ailments.

Mr. Rosenwald tells us Amanda eventually created a "pharmaceutical company that is developing fast-acting psychedelic medicines for commercial use. The company was sold this month to Atai Life Sciences—a company backed by the billionaire Peter Thiel—in a deal valued at $390 million."

For all of Amanda's outward nuttiness, she lived to be 82, and passed away from liver cancer, and not a "bad trip."

At the end, she seems quite ordinary, survived by her husband the Earl of Wemyss and March, James Charteris, two sons from a prior relationship with Joseph Mellen, the writer, two stepchildren, four grandchildren and one step-granddaughter. 

Holiday dinners at moated Beckley Park had to be a hoot.

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