Zale Parry, Aquatic Hollywood Star and Early Acid Tripper, Dies at 93

Zale Parry, a depth-defying scuba diver and underwater stuntwoman whose reverence for the oceanic world was deepened by tripping out on LSD in a research study that included Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, died on July 20 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 93.

Her granddaughter, Katherine Maloney, confirmed the death.

Once called the “prettiest thing underwater,” Ms. Parry was among the first women to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, an achievement that led to a career in Hollywood, including doubling for Sophia Loren in the 1957 film “Boy on a Dolphin” and co-starring with Lloyd Bridges on the television show “Sea Hunt.”

Above water, she participated in an LSD study conducted by Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist who administered doses of the psychedelic drug to more than 900 subjects in Los Angeles, many of them up-and-coming actors. During her two dozen trips, Ms. Parry painted kaleidoscopic scenes of nature and water.

She credited LSD “with helping her to appreciate the intricacies and interconnectedness and beauty of life in the ‘underwater world,’” LA Weekly noted in 1998, calling Ms. Parry both an “accomplished pioneer diver” and “something of an acid queen.”

The path to those roles began in 1951, when she was a secretary at Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, Calif. A colleague set her up with an engineer there named Parry Bivens, thinking that they would make a good match because they already had the name Parry in common.

Mr. Bivens was a polymath and had many hobbies outside of work, including scuba-diving and taking psychedelic drugs. He introduced her to both, and they courted in the water.

On dates, Mr. Bivens taught Ms. Parry to scuba-dive off Catalina Island. In the evenings, she read books on the science of diving, including the dangers of nitrogen narcosis, a state of altered consciousness that can impair the judgment of deep-sea divers. Soon, she was hooked.

“To be underwater and breathe there was remarkable — a wish to behold,” Ms. Parry said in the 2007 book “Diving Pioneers and Innovators: A Series of In-Depth Interviews,” by the diver Bret Gilliam. “Jumping into the ocean in those early days was sheer bliss.”

During the summer of 1954, Ms. Parry, Mr. Bivens and several other divers set off one Sunday afternoon to test a new mouthpiece valve. Ms. Parry offered to be the guinea pig. Everyone hoped she could set a record.

Three miles offshore, with the Coast Guard monitoring, she jumped in the water and headed down. She kept going, and going, until she reached the bottom, where she found an empty can of Schlitz beer.

The depth — 209 feet — was a world record for a female diver.

Press coverage of the feat made her a celebrity. She appeared on the Groucho Marx game show “You Bet Your Life.” Sports Illustrated put her on the cover of its May 23, 1955, issue with the headline “Zale Parry, Girl Skin Diver.”

Hollywood also took notice.

Ms. Parry joined the doblockentary TV show “Kingdom of the Sea,” appearing in segments on water safety. On “Sea Hunt,” she played a damsel in distress onscreen; offscreen she tutored Mr. Bridges on diving techniques.

The series “gave Bridges his signature role as Mike Nelson, diver detective,” Mr. Gilliam wrote. “And Zale became the block symbol that everyone wanted to give CPR to.”

Ms. Parry appeared in several other TV shows in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including “Peter Gunn, Wagon Train” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” along with the films “Underwater Warrior” (1958) and “The Miracle” (1959).

“When liquid dramas come along,” Ms. Parry told United Press International, “I’m in business.”

Few people knew that she and Mr. Bivens, whom she married in 1955, were also dropping acid.

Before LSD became illegal in the mid-1960s, Mr. Bivens ordered it through the mail from a pharmaceutical company. He introduced Dr. Janiger to the drug, and they created a “consciousness clan,” as they called it, that included Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and Anaïs Nin.

After taking LSD during Dr. Janiger’s study, Ms. Parry volunteered to babysit other participants in case they had bad trips. She never used drugs again.

Decades later, she recounted her experiences with LSD to her godson, Thomas Tillman.

“She described colors becoming almost impossibly vivid and ordinary thoughts unfolding into ideas she never would have expected,” he said in an email. “She laughed a little while trying to explain it, admitting that even after all those years it was still difficult to put into words.”

Rosalia Parry was born on March, 19, 1933, in Milwaukee, to Genevieve (Czarnecki) Parry and Eugene Parry, a bookkeeper. She grew up near Pewaukee Lake, about 20 miles west of the city.

“By the time I was 8, I was skin diving without a face mask or fins,” she said in Mr. Gilliam’s book. “I followed the turtles when they appeared and watched the nasty muskrats swim away after they left their calling card on the top step of the pier ladder.”

When Zale, as she was called, was 14, she joined a traveling aquatic show, performing in synchronized swimming routines during summer breaks from high school.

After graduating in 1951, she went to California on vacation and never moved back.

Soon, she met Mr. Bivens. They quickly became underwater and intellectual partners.

“His mental and physical library of technical information, on everything from cybernetics to cryogenetics to Einstein to quantum physics to psychopharmacology, was extensive,” Ms. Parry said in Mr. Gilliam’s book. “Parry was ahead of his own future.”

In addition to diving (and tripping) together, they founded Scientific Underwater Research Enterprises, a company that tested and developed diving equipment, including a portable recompression chamber, used to treat divers for disorders like decompression sickness.

“Back in her day, diving was for hairy-chested men,” Eric Hanauer, a diving historian, said in an interview. “But she did everything the guys did and a lot more. As far as the United States is concerned, Zale was the first feminine superstar of diving.”

Mr. Bivens died in 1963. Ms. Parry married Robert Neuman, a pilot, later that year. The marriage ended in divorce.

In addition to her granddaughter, she is survived by a daughter, Margaret Bivens; two sisters, Valerie Brady and Mary Louise Slutts; and two brothers, Joseph Parry and Jack Parry.

Reporters often asked Ms. Parry if she was scared of sharks.

“A shark will only attack a flailing object on top of the water,” she told The Lincoln Heights Bulletin-News, a Los Angeles newspaper, in 1960. “It looks like so much garbage to him.”

She did fear spear fishermen.

“Some of those guys swim around spearing anything that moves,” she said.

Still, there were some harrowing moments, especially during her stunt work.

“I was almost killed once in Florida when another actor was supposed to exchange air hoses with me,” Ms. Parry told U.P.I. “In the middle of the scene, I found myself breathing water along with the air.”

She motioned to the cameraman that she couldn’t breathe and needed to surface.

“They thought I was acting and made me finish the scene,” she said. “It almost finished me.”