Laura Archera Huxley, 96; Self-help Author

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.

Laura Archera Huxley, show n w ith her

husband, Aldous Huxley, had a long interest in
exploring the w ays the mind influences the
body. (Family Photo)

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.

TOOLBOX
Resize
E-m ail

Print
Reprints

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
PDF generated automatically by the HTML to PDF API of PDFmyURL

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.
CONTINUED
2007 The Washington Post Company

PDF generated automatically by the HTML to PDF API of PDFmyURL

Next >

Page 2 of 2

< Back

Laura Archera Huxley, 96; Self-help Author

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.

Laura Archera Huxley, show n w ith her

husband, Aldous Huxley, had a long interest in
exploring the w ays the mind influences the
body. (Family Photo)
TOOLBOX
Resize

Print

She also attended the Curtis Institute of Music in

E-m ail
Reprints
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
W eb page converted to PDF w ith the PDFmyURL PDF creation API!

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."
< Back 1
2007 The Washington Post Company

W eb page converted to PDF w ith the PDFmyURL PDF creation API!