Rich Hotel Heiress + Ketamine = ?
Another trust fund kid falls down the k-hole
On left, Marcia Moore models in a photo for a yoga book from the 1970s. On right, a detail from the cover of Astrology: The Divine Science by Marcia Moore and Mark Douglas. See photo credits below.
The following is an excerpt from p. 191-194 of Chapter 4, “Mystical Medicine, Wicked Weapon: A Both/And Approach to Ketamine” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
[This excerpt is the first in a three-part series exploring the strange story of Marcia Moore, the Sheraton hotel heiress. The second and third parts of the series are also available. This excerpt is continued from last week’s.]
Marcia Moore was born in 1928 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[i] Her family originally settled in Massachusetts in the 1600s and had an extensive history of involvement with the Unitarian Church as well as various popular occultist figures from the nineteenth century.[ii]
Marcia’s father Robert Moore was, like Lilly’s father, immensely successful in business. Most readers are probably familiar with the brand he cofounded in the 1930s, Sheraton Hotels. He and his cofounder Ernest Henderson established the hotel chain when most of the country was suffering through the hardships of the Great Depression.
Robert Moore and Ernest Henderson had attended Harvard together and subsequently went into the world of finance. When the stock markets crashed in 1929, the two of them cunningly managed to profit from the fiasco. Soon thereafter, they took advantage of President Franklin Roosevelt’s bank holiday to acquire a hotel for a fraction of its real value.[iii] Thus, Sheraton Hotels was born. A few years later, they became one of the first hotel companies to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.[iv]
Marcia’s father Robert Moore cofounded Sheraton Hotels in the 1930s.
In addition to his work in the private sector, Robert Moore also fought in World War I and later, during World War II, developed an audio recorder and a navigational device that became standard equipment in the US military.[v] His enormous success in the private sector and his work with the military gave the family considerable wealth as Marcia grew up. As she matured, she was able to pursue her own interests with ease. As one anonymous journalist more bluntly explained, Moore was an “heiress to the Boston blue-blood fortune of Sheraton Hotel” whose “wealth allowed her to indulge herself.”[vi]
When the Moore family wanted to acquire a vacation home, they picked a property that had formerly been a fishing club attended by petroleum tycoons and presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, and William Taft. In the sixties, Sheraton was acquired by ITT for roughly $200 million. Robert Moore gave much of the money to his family through trust funds. Through her adult life, Marcia received $16,800 each year from her family’s trust fund. Though the number may seem modest now, its value in the ‘60s and early ‘70s would translate to a six-figure number today.[vii]
While her wealth shielded her from many of life’s potential problems, it also produced problems of its own. Chief among them, perhaps, was the ceaseless tension it created between Marcia’s family and her motley series of lovers, most of whom came from less privileged backgrounds than she. At least two of her husbands (out of four) seem to have actually targeted Marcia precisely because of her wealth.
Marcia received money regularly through her family’s trust fund.
For those readers wondering what any of this has to do with ketamine, the connection is, in a nutshell, as follows. Marcia developed a taste for ketamine in the 1970s and her fourth and final husband, Howard Alltounian, was an anesthesiologist with easy access to it. What little evidence there is suggests that he used this to his advantage to manipulate and ultimately murder Marcia in an attempt to cash in on her net worth. Before her death, Marcia and Howard published a book that has since become an underground classic among ketamine enthusiasts. And the creepiest part of all—years later, Howard confessed to a girlfriend that he killed Marcia with ketamine.
Marcia’s story contains within it several themes which have become more or less central to ketamine culture, as we will see. Before we get to that, however, we must examine her life just a bit further. While Alltounian was integral to Marcia’s life (and death), he was not the first husband to manipulate her in an effort to get at the money they knew she had. That dubious distinction goes to Mark Douglas, her third husband. Both Douglas and Alltounian managed to manipulate Moore by playing on her interest in the occult, which she had developed as a child and further nurtured with her first two husbands.
In 1947, at the age of nineteen, Marcia married her first husband, Simons Roof. As an heiress to the Sheraton fortune, Marcia was something of a celebrity, and their engagement was covered in Boston-area newspapers.[viii] Roof was a graduate of the University of North Carolina who later studied humanistic psychology and taught esoteric studies. Together they had three children, and as a family they lived for a period in India. While in India, Marcia studied various spiritual traditions.
In April, 1976, Marcia and another friend visited the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
In addition to deepening her already strong interest in spirituality and the occult, Marcia’s time in India also sparked her career as a writer. When she penned a short piece describing her time there, Robert Moore passed it along to his friend Edward Bernays, the infamous father of modern propaganda.[ix] Bernays was impressed with the piece and, through her dad, encouraged Marcia to write more. And in the following years, she did indeed write more—a lot more—but rather than push war and cigarettes like Bernays, her work promoted yoga and, eventually, ketamine.
In 1961, Marcia and Simons divorced. The following year Moore married Louis Acker, but the marriage did not last long. By this point Moore had embarked on a career as an astrologist and yoga teacher. In 1965, she married Mark Douglas. In typical fashion, Marcia had met Mark and, within hours, invited him to stay with her; their marriage was only a few weeks later.[x] She was well known among her friends and family to fall quickly for men of questionable character.
Marcia’s marriage to Mark brought a dark turn to her life, and it foreshadowed many of the issues which she would face again with her fourth and final husband. Despite an incredibly strained relationship with his ex-wife and rumors that he owed tens of thousands of dollars to the mafia, Marcia became quickly enthralled with Mark.[xi] Before long, however, their relationship, too, became strained.
Moore felt that “ketamine was a gift from Venus.”
Mark manipulated Marcia in numerous ways. By the time of their marriage, Marcia had already established a reputation for herself as a yoga teacher and esoteric writer. Mark took advantage of this and pressured Marcia to churn out book after book about yoga, astrology, and the like. He forced her to stay inside and write, at times literally dragging her away from her friends and back to the typewriter. He also physically beat Marcia and made threats to the safety of her family.[xii]
Despite the number of books which purport to be co-authored by the two of them, Marcia did essentially all of the actual writing. Mark helped brainstorm a bit here and there and put together the publishing deals, and in return he insisted on co-author credit.[xiii] It was just one of several ways he tried to capitalize on Marcia’s reputation and wealth.
Toward the end of their relationship, Mark managed to steal a rather large amount of property and assets from Marcia. Eventually she figured out he was no good for her and abruptly left him one night, carrying with her the few remaining assets she could access.[xiv] With that, Marcia’s marriage to Mark was effectively over, though it took some time for them to work through the divorce. Unfortunately, however, Marcia’s trouble with men was far from over. And by the next time she got married, Marcia had discovered what was perhaps the true love of her life: ketamine.
Moore’s first ketamine experience left a deep and lasting impression on her.
It was in the period after her separation from Mark that Marcia encountered ketamine for the first time. In 1974, a friend told her about the work of John Lilly.[xv] A couple of years later, in April, 1976, Marcia and another friend visited the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It was this friend who actually introduced Marcia to ketamine, shortly after their visit to Esalen. The friend said she had used the drug more than two hundred times, and had guided others through approximately as many trips on it.[xvi]
Marcia wrote later that the ketamine itself was obtained from a “young man with long hair” who went by the name Rama and made occasional visits to Mexico to procure the drug.[xvii]
Marcia received her first dose intramuscularly. Evidently, she had not learned to avoid combining ketamine and alcohol, for she had a glass of wine shortly beforehand. “In less than two minutes,” she remembered, “the rush began.” Initially the feeling reminded her of nitrous oxide. However, the ketamine got her much higher than she had ever been from the gas. She wrote that during the experience she lost “distinctions between subject and object.” After peaking, she recalled thinking, “oh dear, I have completely blown my mind. Now my friends will have to deal with a zombie.”[xviii]
She soon met someone who offered her unlimited access to ketamine and, within months, they were married.
However, she was then struck with the notion that “ketamine was a gift from Venus.” She felt that the substance “had actually been brought, or manifested, from another, higher plane as a gift of grace to help relieve the present human plight.”[xix] Such intensely conflicting feelings—that she had “blown her mind” and become a “zombie” versus received “a gift of grace” which would uplift humanity—are not unusual for ketamine.
The experience left a deep and lasting impression on Moore. The following year, she met someone who offered her unlimited access to ketamine and, within months, they were married. His name was Howard Alltounian and he was an anesthesiologist from Seattle, Washington.
[Join me next week for more on Moore.]
Endnotes
[i] “Marcia S. Moore…”
[ii] DiSomma and DiSomma, Dematerialized, 55, 57.
[iii] Ibid., 64-66.
[iv] Despite an abundance of claims that Sheraton itself was the first hotel chain listed on the NYSE, none of them have proper citation, and a quick surf of the web reveals that it was Hilton who in fact was the first hotel company listed on the NYSE. According to Joseph and Marina DiSomma, the Moores and the Hiltons were acquainted and the latter had even consulted with the former about their shared industry. See “Hilton History”; DiSomma and DiSomma, 53.
[v] DiSomma and DiSomma, 62; “Robert L. Moore...”
[vi] “Author says sister’s...”
[vii] On the Moores’ vacation home, see DiSomma and DiSomma, 68. On the Sheraton acquisition, see ibid., 158-159. On Marcia’s trust fund, see Rule, A Rage to…, 253.
[viii] DiSomma and DiSomma, 89-90.
[ix] Ibid., 114-115.
[x] Ibid., 154.
[xi] Ibid., 154-155.
[xii] Ibid., 164-166.
[xiii] Ibid., 157
[xiv] Ibid., 166.
[xv] Ibid., 200.
[xvi] Moore and Alltounian, 11.
[xvii] Ibid., 12.
[xviii] Ibid., 13 and 15.
[xix] Ibid., 15.
Sources
“Author says sister’s death may be work of witches or bizarre cult.” United Press International, Mar 26, 1981.
DiSomma, Joseph and Marina DiSomma. Dematerialized: The Mysterious Disappearance of Marcia Moore. Post Hill Press, New York: NY. 2021.
“Marcia S. Moore Collection.” Concord Library. https://concordlibrary.org/special-collections/fin_aids/Moore
Moore, Marcia and Howard Alltounian. Journeys into the Bright World. Para Research, Inc. 1978.
“Robert L. Moore, Co-Founder of Sheraton Hotels, Dies.” The Associated Press, Apr 24, 1986.
Rule, Ann. Rage to Kill and Other True Cases: Ann Rule’s Crime Files, Vol. 6. Pocket Star Books, New York, NY. 1999. Print.
Photo credits
Photo of Marcia Moore from Suza Norton at https://suzaji.com/2014/05/16/more-cosmic-ojai-trivia/
Detail of Astrology: The Divine Science from photo of cover by luongo4hty at https://www.ebay.com/itm/204062888486
Click here to order your copy of Drugism.
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