You know Harry Hamlin for several things. He’s a veteran actor who was particularly revered for his turn in Mad Men, and he’s also the husband of former Real Housewife and model Lisa Rinna.
You also may or may not know that Harry and Lisa have a podcast together called Let’s Not Talk About the Husband. Occasionally, the celebrity pair are dropping real-deal bombshells about their personal lives in conversation — like when Lisa revealed that she threatened to kill Harry while experiencing postpartum depression.
During the Dec. 5 episode of the show, Harry revealed that he was once forced to smoke PCP while in jail in 1970 — well before he became famous. As he explained to Lisa, he was arrested after being caught holding pills that were given to him by members of his fraternity while attending Berkeley.
He said the upperclassmen asked him to bring the pills to a fellow fraternity house at USC in Los Angeles. “They didn’t want the pills, so I had to take them back,” he recalled. Harry attempted to smuggle the pills onto a plane in his guitar case — which, naturally, led to his being arrested.
Harry ended up working some shared connections with the prison warden — who, as it turned out, had a brother that taught acting at Berkeley — to mostly escape trouble. (Must be nice!) But he did have to spend a brief time in jail, which is how he was unwittingly forced to smoke PCP.
Harry said that a fellow inmate insisted that he take a hit of a joint, and he eventually relented without knowing that the joint was laced with PCP. “In jail, I was forced to smoke PCP,” he said, later explaining that “Somebody had brought in a little sack of rolling tobacco that was soaked in PCP…so they were smoking it and there was no odor. But they were high as kites.”
And somewhat unsurprisingly, he did not enjoy the experience of accidentally smoking PCP. “I was so stoned because they forced me to take three or four hits of it and I was completely messed up after I had that,” he admitted.
Wowzers. You can check out the entire episode here.