Will Smith tried to fix his broken heart by tripping on ayahuasca — 14 times.
In his new book “Will” (Penguin Press), out Tuesday, Smith recalls how, after splitting from wife Jada Pinkett Smith in 2011, he sought out a shaman to give him the psychotropic tea and lead him through the visions it produces.
An hour after drinking it, he writes, “I was floating deep in outer space … I was trillions of light years away from earth.”
During his trip, he sensed an “unseeable woman” — who he came to call “Mother” — behind him. “I can tell she’ll never leave me,” he writes.
Then Smith reached a conclusion that would be a bad trip for his Hollywood handlers, management team and maybe even his estranged wife: “If I’m this beautiful, I don’t need #1 movies to feel good about myself. If I’m this beautiful, I don’t need hit records to feel worthy of love. If I’m this beautiful, I don’t need Jada or anyone else to validate me.”
He ended up tripping 13 more times, with “Mother” visiting him during eight of them.
The temporary split from Jada came after her 40th birthday. Smith put together a three-day blowout — the idea for it appeared to him in a (non-psychedelic) vision three years before — in Santa Fe, NM. He created a documentary about his wife’s family, complete with audio recordings from her beloved late grandmother. He hired Jada’s favorite artists to do custom paintings. There were golf outings and hikes, and a lavish dinner reached via a 20-foot-long archway filled with photos of Jada.
After the meal, a screen lifted to reveal the night’s surprise performer: Mary J. Blige.
“I was the perfect husband,” Smith, 53, writes.
But afterward, Jada said nothing about it. “Not a ‘thank you,’ not an ‘I loved it,'” Smith writes. Instead, she took a long shower, then told him to cancel the rest of the weekend’s plans.
When he balked, she yelled, “CANCEL IT NOW!” and called the party “the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life.”
They didn’t speak the rest of the trip, or on the plane home to Los Angeles, or even for a few days later.
Smith writes that he finally told his wife, “I retire. I retire from trying to make you happy … I quit — you go do you, and I’m-a go do me.”
He adds that they “didn’t want a divorce,” but needed time apart, writing that the act of fulfilling each other’s needs was a “vampiric relational model.”
So Smith went on a spiritual journey: traveling to Trinidad to relax, then meeting with counselor Michaela Boehm, who specializes, he writes, in tantric sexuality.
Her first question to Smith: “What would make you happy?”
“I would have a harem,” Smith writes about telling her.
She asked him who would be in his harem and he was stunned into silence. But Boehm was not having it. She told him, “Look, you are Will Effin’ Smith. You are one of the richest, most beloved people on earth. If you can’t have the life that you want, the rest of us are screwed.”
He decided to play along and began by naming Halle Berry and ballerina Misty Copeland. Not content with just two names, she opened her laptop and “showed [Smith] videos and TED Talks of the most dynamic and talented women from across he globe.”
They came up with 25 women for his harem, though Smith doesn’t name them all in the book.
The couple eventually got back together and resorted to a less monogamous relationship — as Jada’s “entanglement” with singer August Alsina was revealed in 2020.
In a GQ story last month, Smith made it clear that Jada was not the only one in their relationship to have had an affair.
