“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

by Richard Phillips Feynman

  There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top, and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I’d sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I’d draw one of the dancing girls or one of the customers, just to practice.

  My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to this place. She said, “The Englishmen have clubs they go to.” So it was something like my club.

  There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn’t like them much. They were these fluorescent colors on black velvet—kind of ugly—a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted.

  Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would come over with my free 7-Up. I’d watch the girls dance, do a little physics, prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I’d watch the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner knew I didn’t want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good relationship. His name was Gianonni.

  The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, “Gianonni tells me you made that picture.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. I’d like to commission a drawing.”

  “All right; what would you like?”

  “I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head.”

  “Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this drawing is for.”

  “I want it for my business establishment.”

  “What kind of business establishment?”

  “It’s for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses—get the idea?”

  “Yeah, I get the idea.” I didn’t want to draw a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man’s head, so I tried to talk him out of it. “How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the girls feel? The men come in there and you get ’em all excited with this picture. Is that the way you want ’em to treat the girls?”

  He’s not convinced.

  “Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you’re claiming it’s a massage parlor.”

  “OK, OK,” he says; “You’re right. I’ve gotta change it. What I want is a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas.”

  “OK,” I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude toreador girl in the first place!

  Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman—a senator, perhaps. Since she’s a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what’s going to happen next, and she’s sort of resigned to it.

  I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for the models was already eighty dollars. I didn’t care about the money; I liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging him: she’s wearing a kind of toga that covers one breast—the other one was nude—and I got the expression of resignation on her face just right.

  I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the massage parlor when Gianonni told me that the guy had been arrested and was in jail. So I asked the girls at the topless restaurant if they knew any good massage parlors around Pasadena that would like to hang my drawing in the lobby.

  They gave me names and locations of places in and around Pasadena and told me things like “When you go to the Such-and-such massage parlor, ask for Frank—he’s a pretty good guy. If he’s not there, don’t go in.” Or “Don’t talk to Eddie. Eddie would never understand the value of a drawing.”

  The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.

  Just before I went to the first place on my list, I thought to myself, “You know, before I go anywhere else, I oughta check at the place he used to have. Maybe it’s still open, and perhaps the new manager wants my drawing.” I went over there and knocked on the door. It opened a little bit, and I saw a girl’s eye. “Do we know you?” she asked.

  “No, you don’t, but how would you like to have a drawing that would be appropriate for your entrance hall?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve already contracted an artist to make a drawing for us, and he’s working on it.”

  “I’m the artist,” I said, “and your drawing is ready!”

  It turns out that the guy, as he was going to jail, told his wife about our arrangement. So I went in and showed them the drawing.

  The guy’s wife and his sister, who were now running the place, were not entirely pleased with it; they wanted the girls to see it. I hung it up on the wall, there in the lobby, and all the girls came out from the various rooms in the back and started to make comments.

  One girl said she didn’t like the expression on the slave girl’s face. “She doesn’t look happy,” she said. “She should be smiling.”

  I said to her, “Tell me—while you’re massaging a guy, and he’s not lookin’ at you, are you smiling?”

  “Oh, no!” she said. “I feel exactly like she looks! But it’s not right to put it in the picture.”

  I left it with them, but after a week of worrying about it back and forth, they decided they didn’t want it. It turned out that the real reason that they didn’t want it was the one nude breast. I tried to explain that my drawing was a tone-down of the original request, but they said they had different ideas about it than the guy did. I thought the irony of people running such an establishment being prissy about one nude breast was amusing, and I took the drawing home.

  My businessman friend Dudley Wright saw the drawing and I told him the story about it. He said, “You oughta triple its price. With art, nobody is really sure of its value, so people often think, ‘If the price is higher, it must be more valuable!’ ”

  I said, “You’re crazy!” but, just for fun, I bought a twenty-dollar frame and mounted the drawing so it would be ready for the next customer.

  Some guy from the weather forecasting business saw the drawing I had given Gianonni and asked if I had others. I invited him and his wife to my “studio” downstairs in my home, and they asked about the newly framed drawing. “That one is two hundred dollars.” (I had multiplied sixty by three and added twenty for the frame.) The next day they came back and bought it. So the massage parlor drawing ended up in the office of a weather forecaster.

  One day there was a police raid on Gianonni’s, and some of the dancers were arrested. Someone wanted to stop Gianonni from putting on topless dancing shows, and Gianonni didn’t want to stop. So there was a big court case about it; it was in all the local papers.

  Gianonni went around to all the customers and asked them if they would testify in support of him. Everybody had an excuse: “I run a day camp, and if the parents see that I’m going to this place, they won’t send their kids to my camp …”

  Or, “I’m in the such-and-such business, and if it’s publicized that I come down here, we’ll los
e customers.”

  I think to myself, “I’m the only free man in here. I haven’t any excuse! I like this place, and I’d like to see it continue. I don’t see anything wrong with topless dancing.” So I said to Gianonni, “Yes, I’ll be glad to testify.”

  In court the big question was, is topless dancing acceptable to the community—do community standards allow it?

  The lawyer from the defense tried to make me into an expert on community standards. He asked me if I went into other bars.

  “Yes.”

  “And how many times per week would you typically go to Gianonni’s?”

  “Five, six times a week.” (That got into the papers: The Caltech professor of physics goes to see topless dancing six times a week.)

  “What sections of the community were represented at Gianonni’s?”

  “Nearly every section: there were guys from the real estate business, a guy from the city governing board, workmen from the gas station, guys from engineering firms, a professor of physics”

  “So would you say that topless entertainment is acceptable to the community, given that so many sections of it are watching it and enjoying it?”

  “I need to know what you mean by ‘acceptable to the community.’ Nothing is accepted by everybody, so what percentage of the community must accept something in order for it to be ‘acceptable to the community’?”

  The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can decide that “acceptable to the community” means accepted by 50% of the community.

  In spite of the fact that I made them be precise, I had no precise numbers as evidence, so I said, “I believe that topless dancing is accepted by more than 50% of the community, and is therefore acceptable to the community.”

  Gianonni temporarily lost the case, and his, or another one very similar to it, went ultimately to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, his place stayed open, and I got still more free 7-Ups.

  Around that time there were some attempts to develop an interest in art at Caltech. Somebody contributed the money to convert an old plant sciences building into some art studios. Equipment and supplies were bought and provided for the students, and they hired an artist from South Africa to coordinate and support the art activities around Caltech.

  Various people came in to teach classes. I got Jerry Zorthian to teach a drawing class, and some guy came in to teach lithography, which I tried to learn.

  The South African artist came over to my house one time to look at my drawings. He said he thought it would be fun to have a one-man show. This time I was cheating: If I hadn’t been a professor at Caltech, they would have never thought my pictures were worth it.

  “Some of my better drawings have been sold, and I feel uncomfortable calling the people,” I said.

  “You don’t have to worry, Mr. Feynman,” he reassured me. “You won’t have to call them up. We will make all the arrangements and operate the exhibit officially and correctly.”

  I gave him a list of people who had bought my drawings, and they soon received a telephone call from him: “We understand that you have an Ofey.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “We are planning to have an exhibition of Ofeys, and we’re wondering if you would consider lending it to us.” Of course they were delighted.

  The exhibition was held in the basement of the Athenaeum, the Caltech faculty club. Everything was like the real thing: All the pictures had titles, and those that had been taken on consignment from their owners had due recognition: “Lent by Mr. Gianonni,” for instance.

  One drawing was a portrait of the beautiful blonde model from the art class, which I had originally intended to be a study of shading: I put a light at the level of her legs a bit to the side and pointed it upwards. As she sat, I tried to draw the shadows as they were—her nose cast its shadow rather unnaturally across her face—so they wouldn’t look so bad. I drew her torso as well, so you could also see her breasts and the shadows they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called it “Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium.” The message I intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part.

  A prominent industrial designer named Henry Dreyfuss invited various people to a reception at his home after the exhibition—the woman who had contributed money to support the arts, the president of Caltech and his wife, and so on.

  One of these art-lovers came over and started up a conversation with me: “Tell me, Professor Feynman, do you draw from photographs or from models?”

  “I always draw directly from a posed model.”

  “Well, how did you get Madame Curie to pose for you?”

  Around that time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a similar idea to the one I had, that artists are far away from an understanding of science. My idea was that artists don’t understand the underlying generality and beauty of nature and her laws (and therefore cannot portray this in their art). The museum’s idea was that artists should know more about technology: they should become more familiar with machines and other applications of science.

  The art museum organized a scheme in which they would get some of the really good artists of the day to go to various companies which volunteered some time and money to the project. The artists would visit these companies and snoop around until they saw something interesting that they could use in their work. The museum thought it might help if someone who knew something about technology could be a sort of liaison with the artists from time to time as they visited the companies. Since they knew I was fairly good at explaining things to people and I wasn’t a complete jackass when it came to art (actually, I think they knew I was trying to learn to draw)—at any rate, they asked me if I would do that, and I agreed.

  It was lots of fun visiting the companies with the artists. What typically happened was, some guy would show us a tube that discharged sparks in beautiful blue, twisting patterns. The artists would get all excited and ask me how they could use it in an exhibit. What were the necessary conditions to make it work?

  The artists were very interesting people. Some of them were absolute fakes: they would claim to be an artist, and everybody agreed they were an artist, but when you’d sit and talk to them, they’d make no sense whatsoever! One guy in particular, the biggest faker, always dressed funny; he had a big black bowler hat. He would answer your questions in an incomprehensible way, and when you’d try to find out more about what he said by asking him about some of the words he used, off we’d be in another direction! The only thing he contributed, ultimately, to the exhibit for art and technology was a portrait of himself.

  Other artists I talked to would say things that made no sense at first, but they would go to great lengths to explain their ideas to me. One time I went somewhere, as a part of this scheme, with Robert Irwin. It was a two-day trip, and after a great effort of discussing back and forth, I finally understood what he was trying to explain to me, and I thought it was quite interesting and wonderful.

  Then there were the artists who had absolutely no idea about the real world. They thought that scientists were some kind of grand magicians who could make anything, and would say things like, “I want to make a picture in three dimensions where the figure is suspended in space and it glows and flickers.” They made up the world they wanted, and had no idea what was reasonable or unreasonable to make.

  Finally there was an exhibit, and I was asked to be on a panel which judged the works of art. Although there was some good stuff that was inspired by the artists’ visiting the companies, I thought that most of the good works of art were things that were turned in at the last minute out of desperation, and didn’t really have anything to do with technology. All of the other members of the panel disagreed, and I found myself in some difficulty. I’m no good at criticizing art, and I shouldn’t have been on the panel
in the first place.

  There was a guy there at the county art museum named Maurice Tuchman who really knew what he was talking about when it came to art. He knew that I had had this one-man show at Caltech. He said, “You know, you’re never going to draw again.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous! Why should I never.”

  “Because you’ve had a one-man show, and you’re only an amateur.”

  Although I did draw after that, I never worked as hard, with the same energy and intensity, as I did before. I never sold a drawing after that, either. He was a smart fella, and I learned a lot from him. I could have learned a lot more, if I weren’t so stubborn!

  Is Electricity Fire?

  In the early fifties I suffered temporarily from a disease of middle age: I used to give philosophical talks about science—how science satisfies curiosity, how it gives you a new world view, how it gives man the ability to do things, how it gives him power—and the question is, in view of the recent development of the atomic bomb, is it a good idea to give man that much power? I also thought about the relation of science and religion, and it was about this time when I was invited to a conference in New York that was going to discuss “the ethics of equality.”

  There had already been a conference among the older people, somewhere on Long Island, and this year they decided to have some younger people come in and discuss the position papers they had worked out in the other conference.

  Before I got there, they sent around a list of “books you might find interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read, and we will store them in the library so that others may read them.”

  So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first page: I haven’t read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy—I hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven’t read a single one. I found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven’t read any of the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books there, like Thomas Jefferson On Freedom, or something like that, and there were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by Schrodinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, My Later Years and Schrodinger, What Is Life—different from what I had read. So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn’t be in this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.