Words of wisdom from the voice of experience

“People in Marin need to know that drugs really screw you up.”  Those words sound obvious to the point of banality unless you know the context in which they’re spoken.  The speaker is Kathryn Keats, a talented composer and performer who spent the last 20 years in hiding for fear that her former partner and lover would, in his words, leave her “dismembered and hanging from the trees.”  It’s a horrific story of fear and insanity, but what makes it relevant beyond one woman’s terrible luck in joining her life with a psychopath is the drug connection:

She wasn’t yet 18 when she moved to New York in the mid-1970s, landing a part in “Let My People Come,” a lurid off-Broadway show that billed itself as “a sexual musical” and included nudity, simulated intercourse, X-rated songs and a lot of offstage drug use.

That’s where she met Ford, the show’s long-haired and handsome musical director, 13 years older, a powerful and charismatic personality.

It didn’t take long for her to fall under his spell and for her to move in with him in Philadelphia when they weren’t on the road, touring with the show for the next five years.

“Ken was a great musician,” she says, even now. “All we did was write music together.”

And do drugs.

Keats was alarmed when Ford began showing psychotic symptoms, hearing voices, seeing spirits in the shadows on the walls, a schizophrenic splitting into multiple personalities.

Angry and paranoid, he turned on her, beating and sexually abusing her.

“None of this probably would have happened if there hadn’t been so much drug use,” she said, remembering those free-wheeling hippie days. “People in Marin need to know that drugs really screw you up. And they really get you in trouble when you’re a teenager, which I was when I met Ken. I was 17.”

You can read the rest of this tragic tale here, along with the happy ending — Ford died, freeing her from the prison of fear.