Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  There is also the fact that Hawking suffers from an early-onset form of ALS, which has made a dramatic contribution to his chances of survival. “Juvenile-onset is diagnosed in the teenage years, and I don’t know enough about his course to say. But it’s probably something similar to juvenile-onset disorder, which is something that progresses very, very, very slowly,” Professor Cluskey remarks. “I have patients in my clinic who were diagnosed in their teens and are still alive in their 40s, 50s, or 60s. But not having ever examined him or taken a history, it’s a little hard for me to say.” In conclusion, when asked what Hawking’s case might mean for other ALS sufferers, Professor Cluskey says: “It’s just an incredible, incredible example of the variability of the disease—and the hope for patients who have it that they could also live a long life. Unfortunately, it’s a small percentage of people for whom that actually happens.”29

  Hawking, as we have shown, is invariably sanguine about the reasons for his amazing survival, but it has prompted him to give a lot of thought to the controversial issue of assisted suicide, something about which he understandably has strong sentiments. He has said that he did once try to end his own life. “I briefly tried to commit suicide by not breathing. However, the reflex to breathe was too strong.”30 This was during one of the bleakest times of his life, when he was hospitalized in Geneva in 1985 and around the same time Jane was given the option of switching off his life support. Managing to state his views on his own death and have another dig at religion, he has remarked: “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”31

  He is clear that if he lives long enough to decide if he wants to continue with his own life or not, it would be a decision he feels would be his alone: “We don’t let animals suffer, so why humans?” he has questioned, before adding: “There must be safeguards that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressured into it or have it done without their knowledge or consent.”32

  In 2012, media outlets in the United States and in Britain proclaimed the news that Hawking was a frequenter of strip clubs and lap-dance venues (shades of Richard Feynman!). It began with a reported visit to Stringfellow’s in Central London, where, like many celebrities, Hawking and his entourage became regulars. Peter Stringfellow has been a Hawking fan for many years. As long ago as 1994, when asked by one journalist who he most admired, he replied: “Stephen Hawking. I’d love to be incredibly intellectual—yet he’s a man who lives within his brain and still manages to feel the overwhelming power of sex. Isn’t he the answer to people who attack the sexual side of our humanness? They’re all charging at windmills, you know. It’s there.”33 Stringfellow got to meet his hero in 2012 in his London club: “I went and introduced myself and said, ‘Mr. Hawking, it’s an honor to meet you. If you could spare a minute or two, I’d love to chat with you about the Universe.’ Then I paused for a bit and joked, ‘Or would you rather look at the girls?’ There was silence for a moment, and then he answered, ‘The girls.’”34

  Soon, the stories multiplied. According to The Huffington Post: “Stephen Hawking may be confined to a wheelchair, but that doesn’t seem to keep him from making the rounds. The celebrated astrophysicist is a regular at a sex club in California, according to media reports.

  “The 70-year-old, almost completely paralyzed by a neurological disorder known as motor neuron disease, frequents a San Bernardino ‘swinger’s club’ called Freedom Acres. A member of the club is reported to have said: ‘I have seen Stephen Hawking at the club more than a handful of times. He arrives with an entourage of nurses and assistants. Last time I saw him, he was in the back “play area” lying on a bed fully clothed with two naked women gyrating all over him.’”35

  Many people may find the very notion of strip bars and swingers’ clubs distasteful, but there is no denying the fact that millions of men around the world visit these places every day. Peter Stringfellow makes a perfectly valid point when he says that anyone who might be shocked that someone like Stephen Hawking could be interested in sex is “charging at windmills” (even if he did mean “tilting at windmills”!). Why should Hawking be any different from the huge numbers of men who visit sex clubs? The answer lies within a collection of misconceptions. The first is that only the fit and able-bodied may have a sexual appetite. The second is that men of Hawking’s intellect (and particularly a cosmologist who should be singularly focused on solving the mysteries of the Universe) don’t have an interest in sex. And, thirdly, that someone of his age (seventy at the time) shouldn’t be interested in swingers’ clubs. In Hawking’s case it’s a triple whammy.

  In spite of Stephen Hawking’s fame, misconceptions about him abound. Many people think he is American because of the accent of his computerized voice. Although he notes: “It’s slightly robotic, but it has become my trademark, and I wouldn’t change it for a more natural voice with a British accent. I’m told that children who need a computer voice want one like mine.”36

  However, there are some who should know better. When he was in Washington in 2009 to receive his Medal of Freedom, Hawking was particularly aggrieved by a comment from a Republican opponent of health-care reform in the United States who tried to disparage the British National Health Service model by saying: “If Stephen Hawking had been British, he’d be dead by now!” Hawking, a great supporter of the NHS, proudly British, and no friend of the Republicans, responded angrily that he was of course British and that “. . . the National Health Service has taken great care of me for over forty years. I have received excellent medical attention in Britain. I believe in universal health care.”37

  Another misconception about Hawking is that many people think he was born disabled. They do not realize that he was a healthy young man until struck down by ALS at the age of twenty-one. Because of this, they are often very surprised to learn that he has fathered three children. And, in spite of the fact that there have been broadcast at least half a dozen TV documentaries about Hawking and there are now several more books about him, we still encounter people (who have had the benefit of a normal education) who claim to not know who Stephen Hawking is!

  All this, though, has been changed by the film The Theory of Everything, directed by James Marsh and starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, which earned Redmayne a best-actor Oscar for his incredible portrayal of the film’s hero.

  Based upon Jane Hawking’s warts-and-all memoir Music to Move the Stars, published in 1999 (a book later revised and tempered dramatically into Travelling to Infinity, published eight years later), the film was some seven years in the making from concept to screen.

  Much of that time was spent gaining Jane’s permission to make the movie and gathering the funding from what must have been a skeptical film industry. It’s not difficult to imagine the peregrinations the producers, Anthony McCarten (who also wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay) and Lisa Bruce, must have been forced to follow in trying to make the story of the mute, paralyzed cosmologist “sexy,” even though it is so clearly “sexy” (at least according to that ridiculous perversion of the definition now in common usage). But they did indeed succeed in overcoming resistance and went on to make a fabulous film that was nominated for five Academy Awards (winning one), along with five Critics’ Choice Awards, and a clutch of Golden Globes and Screen Actor’s Guild Awards nominations.

  The arc of the movie takes us from Stephen’s arrival in Cambridge and meeting Jane at a college party, through his early work, the initial success of the Hawkings’ marriage, and—as his condition worsens—how the family disintegrated, with Jane and Stephen parting to begin new lives with their respective future partners, Jonathan Hellyer-Jones and Elaine Mason. It was a tremendously ambitious project, but pulled off with
great panache.

  Initially, Eddie Redmayne was quite terrified of the task ahead. He had been a student at Cambridge and had often seen Hawking from afar, motoring around the city in his wheelchair; but of course he had never dreamt that one day he would win the Oscar for portraying Hawking in a Hollywood movie. “With it [the role] came high stakes, so it was a mixture of a dream and utter fear,” the actor has said of getting the part.38 Redmayne spent several months studying every aspect of Hawking: “I tried to read literally everything I could get my hands on. It became hilarious, because I would get 40 pages in, and I was like—‘Eddie, none of these words make any sense to you.’” Subsequently, he worked with a trained physicist from Imperial College London and a choreographer, Alexandra Reynolds, who taught him how to move and pose correctly to create a facsimile of Hawking that is uncanny in its accuracy. “We put what we knew into picking up a pen, drinking, walking, existing,” says Reynolds. She’d pose questions to him like “What’s happening in your pelvis? Are you holding your head right?”39

  Before shooting started, Eddie Redmayne met Hawking at the Centre for Mathematical Studies, but he found it an embarrassing experience, claiming that he “. . . made a complete fool of himself. There were these long pauses and I was nervous and I have a hatred of silence anyway, and so I basically just started spewing forth information about Stephen Hawking to Stephen Hawking for 45 minutes and it was genuinely pretty tragic. Eventually I calmed down and he was just looking at me and going ‘Really? You’re going to tell me about myself? I do know all this, I do live it.’”40

  Elsewhere, Redmayne has said, “He [Hawking] has a real force of charisma and humor and incisive wit and a sense of mischief. I describe him as a ‘lord of misrule.’ Even though it’s difficult for him to communicate, he’s absolutely in charge of a room.”

  By the time of their meeting, Stephen was using a muscle in his right cheek to control the cursor of his communication device, slowing conversation even more than when he was at least capable of using a mouse-type device to move the cursor. “[We] exchanged maybe eight or nine sentences in three hours,” the actor explained. But even then there was opportunity for the self-deprecating Redmayne to feel a little humiliated. He remarked to Hawking that they had birthdays close to each other in January and they were both Capricorns. “[Stephen] looked at me and then he looked at his screen and spent about 10 minutes responding. And then in his iconic voice he said: ‘I am an astronomer, not an astrologer.’”41

  Felicity Jones, who plays Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything, prepared for her role in a different, but no less demanding, way so that she could successfully capture the nuances and subtlety to portray Jane so well. “Meeting her made my job so much easier,” Jones has said. “It’s not a situation where you go in there and ask really personal questions. You are gently trying to get to know each other. I had tea with her and then we had dinner. Jane showed me slides of her and Stephen when they first met, and she brought down her wedding dress. Sometimes I’d feel quite disingenuous because I’d be chatting away to her and watching how she’d be picking up a cup of tea or moving her foot—trying to absorb as much as possible. In some ways you’re a detective—trying to find clues. I had such an empathy for her. I really enjoyed playing her. I liked her eccentricity. Stephen and Jane can seem rather English but actually there’s something incredibly Bohemian and carefree and reckless about them.”42

  One of the producers, Lisa Bruce, has said the film was “. . . not made for brainiacs or scientists. The team wanted a general audience to leave the picture with more of an understanding of science.”43 In this they have succeeded. The movie has received great critical acclaim and has been a hit at the box office. There have been some who have quibbled over details of the science, and there is no doubt that the film only shows the rosy aspects of the characters involved. We see none of Hawking’s dark side, elements of his character described elsewhere in this book. Although Redmayne looks almost identical to Stephen Hawking, thanks to makeup and choreographic coaching, some of the cast are far too attractive compared to their real-life counterparts and some of the timeline has little connection with the true chronology. The most glaring of these contractions is the way Stephen’s life-saving tracheostomy appears to have been conducted in the mid-70s, ten years too early in his life.

  Not everyone was happy with the end results. Elaine Mason was absent from the premiere, perhaps because, although she was not written out of the story as his nurse, her relatively short marriage to Hawking was not even mentioned in the film. Stephen’s sisters, Mary and Philippa, who have always had a rather brittle relationship with Jane, did not show up and came out publicly against the film, claiming it represented their parents, Frank and Isobel, in an unflattering light.

  But Stephen and Jane were delighted with A Theory of Everything. Each of them appeared on set more than once, and they and the children, along with Jane’s husband, Jonathan Hellyer-Jones, all presented a united front supporting the filmmakers and appearing at the premiere. Stephen has said of the film: “I thought Eddie Redmayne portrayed me very well in The Theory of Everything movie. He spent time with ALS sufferers so he could be authentic. At times, I thought he was me. Seeing the film has given me the opportunity to reflect on my life. Although I’m severely disabled, I have been successful in my scientific work. I travel widely and have been to Antarctica and Easter Island, down in a submarine and up on a zero-gravity flight. One day I hope to go into space. I’ve been privileged to gain some understanding of the way the Universe operates through my work. But it would be an empty universe indeed without the people that I love.”44

  Taking the advice of his doctors, Stephen himself was unable to attend the Oscar Awards ceremony in Hollywood, which must have been a great disappointment for a man so fond of the glamorous world of entertainment, who revels in being in the spotlight. When Eddie Redmayne won the award for best actor, Hawking rushed to congratulate him, posting on Facebook: “Congratulations to Eddie Redmayne for winning an Oscar for playing me in The Theory of Everything movie. Well done, Eddie, I’m very proud of you.”45

  So beneath the hyperbole and the media gloss, who is the real Stephen Hawking? He is a force to be reckoned with, of that there is little doubt. His strength of personality is formidable—given his physical condition, how else could he have survived and achieved greatness in more than one arena? He can be ruthless; he drives a hard bargain with life and approaches it head-on. He finds it difficult to compromise; his force of will can sometimes work against him. Many people find him abrasive, but on the other hand he is famous for his sense of humor. He has many close friends and admirers and has proved himself to be a loving and affectionate father. It is impossible to know the man’s inner thoughts, so intimately linked as he is to machines, a set of cold devices enabling him to move, speak, and breathe. His face is, if anything, more expressive than most because, aside from his gift for succinct language, it is just about our only window into his mind. A major part of Stephen Hawking is his work, but so few of us can understand it except in the vaguest pictorial terms. His attempt to communicate his understanding to the world at large through his best-selling book has succeeded. Of course, a great many copies of A Brief History of Time have hardly been opened, left to adorn bookshelves as fashion accessories; but despite this, there are many—perhaps millions—who have learned more about the Universe we live in through reading his words. He has achieved astounding success by awakening a skeptical public and an even more skeptical media to the beauty of science, a subject at the heart of our society and the future of civilization. The popularization of science has seen a new renaissance, thanks in large measure to his efforts, and indeed there is now a recognized “Hawking factor” in science publishing.

  Beyond all this, running deeper than his hugely successful writing career, beyond even his scientific achievements, there remains the human triumph of his very survival, the strength of his spirit in accomplishing more than most of us dream a
bout. Some claim that Stephen Hawking has made it only because of the unfortunate circumstances in which he has found himself, but such glibness denies the very essence of humanity. Others crumble under far less strain. It is the Stephen Hawkings of this world who soar, no matter what befalls them. To those intent upon destroying legends and denigrating achievement, he has a typically modest but perfectly accurate response. It would stand equally well as his own epitaph and as a philosophy of life for all of us to follow: “One has to be grown up enough to realize that life is not fair. You just have to do the best you can in the situation you are in.”46

  NOTES

  Quotations without sources are from interviews with the author.

  1. THE DAY GALILEO DIED

  1.S. W. Hawking, A Short History (privately produced pamphlet).

  2.Michael Church, “Games with the cosmos.” Independent (June 6, 1988).

  3.Hawking, A Short History.

  4.Church, “Games with the cosmos.”

  5.Albanian, May 1958.

  3. GOING UP

  1.Hawking, A Short History.

  2.Ibid.

  4. DOCTORS AND DOCTORATES

  1.Hawking, A Short History.

  2.Tony Osman, “A master of the Universe.” Sunday Times Magazine (June 19, 1988).

  3.S. W. Hawking, My Experience with ALS (privately produced pamphlet).

  4.Ibid.

  5.Ibid.

  6.Ibid.

  7.Ibid.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Bryan Appleyard, “Master of the Universe: Will Stephen Hawking live to find the secret?” Express News, San Antonio, Texas (July 3, 1988).