The 1964 wedding of Vogue cover girl Nena von Schlebrügge to LSD prophet Timothy Leary was meant to be the counterculture’s crowning ceremony, a union of beauty and acid-fueled mysticism inside a 64-room Hudson Valley mansion. The film crew forgot to capture the vows, the guests were immaculately stoned, and the marriage collapsed before the footage could be edited. But that spectacular failure was merely the first act in a six-decade saga that would see the Swedish-born model escape the wreckage of the psychedelic movement, marry a defrocked Tibetan monk, and quietly build the institutional backbone of Tibetan Buddhism in America.
Born in Mexico City in 1941 to a German baron who refused Nazi service and a Swedish mother who posed 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 for a famous sculptor, Nena was plucked from a Stockholm schoolyard at 14 by photographer Norman Parkinson. By 17, she was crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, her face plastered on New York buses selling Winston cigarettes, her image captured by Avedon, Stern, and Newton. Yet the girl behind the glamour found her true tribe in Greenwich Village, among poets like Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, asking the metaphysical questions that high fashion could never answer.
It was that restless search that led her to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she first encountered Leary, a Harvard psychologist she dismissed as boring and overweight. Two years later, at Millbrook, the Mellon heirs’ estate turned psychedelic laboratory, the chemistry changed. Under the influence of LSD, Leary saw in her a Valkyrie, and she, in turn, fell under his spell.
Their December 1964 wedding was a collision of tribes, with jazz titan Charles Mingus playing piano alone and a guest list that mixed Hitchcocks, fashion models, and Leary’s own teenage daughter, fresh from jail.
The honeymoon in the East soured quickly, with Leary suffering a breakdown under the influence of acid. The marriage ended in divorce before Nena turned 25, just as Leary’s life spiraled into arrests, prison breaks, and international manhunts. She stepped off the carousel in time, but her escape came in the most improbable form: a one-eyed, soot-blackened former monk named Robert Thurman, who had shown up at Millbrook to convince Leary to take fewer drugs.
Thurman was a New York patrician who had been expelled from Phillips Exeter for trying to join Castro’s army, had lost an eye changing a flat tire, and had become the first Westerner ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He gave up his vows to marry Nena in 1967, and their friends voted them the couple least likely to succeed. They spent the next 59 years proving everyone wrong, building a leaking geodesic-domed house in the Catskills with their own hands, raising four children, including a daughter named Uma Karuna Thurman, born in 1970.
Nena retired from modeling at 25, trained as a psychotherapist, and then, when the Dalai Lama asked Robert to build an institution to safeguard Tibetan culture, she became the engine that made Tibet House US actually function. From 1991, she served as managing director, launching the annual Carnegie Hall benefit with Philip Glass and the Christie’s auction that became fixtures of New York’s spiritual celebrity season. When a philanthropist handed over a 320-acre estate in the Catskills, Nena became head contractor, spending six years building Menla, a Tibetan healing center named after the Medicine Buddha.
The strangest windfall of all came when she was handed the estate, which she described as winning the lottery without buying a ticket. Her daughter Uma became the avenging bride of 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Bill and the cool center of Pulp Fiction, and her granddaughter Maya Hawke carried the von Schlebrügge face into a fourth generation of photography. The long partnership with Robert endured until June 16, 2026, when the 84-year-old scholar finished his morning prayers and keeled over with a single gasp, dying at the foot of a maple tree Nena had seen in a vision.
The Dalai Lama wrote to console his widow, praising Bob’s meaningful life and legacy. But to read Nena as a supporting player in other people’s legends is to miss the point entirely. She walked through the most powerful myth-making engines of the 20th century, high fashion, psychedelia, celebrity, Hollywood, organized spirituality, and was flattened by none of them into a cliché.
She was the face that sold cigarettes and the bride at the acid wedding and the mother on the Darwinian sofa, but she was never only any of those things.
What she leaves behind is not the iconography but the institutions: the slice of Tibet in the Catskills, the concerts, the spa, the patient machinery of cultural preservation. And the plain durable proposition that a life can be reinvented from the ground up more than once without ever losing its center. Most people offered the ride quietly close the door.
Nena got on the skateboard.
