A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  What was Nash’s reaction? Due to leave Santa Monica in another week or so anyway, he did not decamp immediately, though Best doesn’t remember whether he returned to the RAND building. “He left in a week or two weeks. Not helterskelter,” Best recalled. What was going through Nash’s mind in that interval? Was he angry? Depressed? Frightened? Was he thinking of approaching Williams or Mood with his version of events? Did he try to have RAND’s decision reversed? Generally, of course, people did not. Fearful of scandal and aware of the contempt with which any hint of homosexuality was viewed, people in Nash’s shoes were usually only too happy to slink away without a murmur of protest.

  In the end, Nash did what he had learned to do in less extreme circumstances. He acted, weirdly, as if nothing had happened. He played the role of observer of his own drama, as if it were all a game or some intriguing experiment in human behavior, focusing neither on the emotions of people around him nor on his own, but on moves and countermoves. In his first postcard home that September, he described — with remarkable detachment — another kind of storm: “The hurricane was a fascinating experience.”25 At some point he told his parents he’d had trouble with his RAND security clearance, blaming it on the fact that his mentor at MIT, Norman Levinson, was a former communist who had been hauled before HUAC that year.

  Meanwhile, the highly efficient RAND machinery ground on. Best said: “We withdrew his clearances and notified the Air Force of the charges that had been made.” RAND negotiated with the Santa Monica police, who wound up dropping the charge in return for RAND’s assurance that Nash had been fired and was leaving the state for good. According to Best, such deals were typical. In any case, the arrest did not make The Evening Outlook and any record of it has long since been expunged from police files and court records.

  Alexander Mood didn’t try to keep the arrest a secret — that was impossible given Nash’s sudden eviction from his office — but he concocted a cover story to the effect that Nash had simply been strolling in Palisades Park trying to solve a mathematical problem when he was picked up. “He told the officers he was just thinking and … they finally learned that what he had told them was true,” Mood said later.26 Most RAND employees learned nothing different. It was after all close to Nash’s normal departure date in any case. But his name was abruptly crossed off the list of consultants.27 Nash never bothered to deny the arrest.28 And Lloyd Shapley and others in the math division learned about it because Nash had called Shapley from the police station to bail him out.29 Shapley later told another mathematician that Nash had been playing some kind of game.30 In any case, with so many mathematicians shuttling back and forth between RAND, Princeton, and other universities, news of the arrest soon leaked back to Princeton and MIT,31 adding to Nash’s already considerable reputation for quirkiness, if not downright instability.

  Nobody protested his treatment. He was not the easiest person to sympathize with, and few people, even in the mathematical community, questioned the government’s attitude toward homosexuals. Homophobia was, after all, widespread in a society increasingly paranoid and fearful of nonconformity of any kind. Williams, true to form, used the incident in one of his homilies on managing mathematicians. In a memorandum to the mathematics division, written a year or two later, he asked the rhetorical question: “What can mathematicians do to hurt us?” One of his examples was alluded to only with a phrase — “He could get arrested for solicitation.” Williams’s punch line, however, was “the worst thing a mathematician could do to RAND is to leave.”32

  Although Nash appeared unscathed, the arrest was a turning point in his life. Aloof, ambitious, coolly indifferent to others as he often appeared, Nash was by no means a true loner. Living in a tolerant ivory tower, he had been lulled into believing that he could do as he liked. Now he learned, in a particularly brutal fashion, that the emotional connections he sought threatened to destroy all else that he valued — his freedom, his career, his reputation, success on society’s terms. Contradictory imperatives can engender tremendous fear. And fear can be subtly destructive.

  An individual’s vulnerability to schizophrenia, researchers now believe, lies in his genes. But psychological stresses are thought to be catalysts. Psychologist Irving I. Gottesman at the University of Virginia, whose studies of twins helped discredit the old Freudian theories of schizophrenia, puts it this way: “Each case is different, with a different mix of genetic and psychological factors. Certain events are definite stressors, but it’s not famine or war. It’s idiosyncratic. It’s things that get to the soul and self-identity and expectations of oneself.”33 Rather than a single trauma, a string of events from childhood through young adulthood produces strains that mount like straws on the proverbial camel’s back. “It’s things that build up, things that lead to a lot of brooding,” says Nikki Erlenmeyer-Kimling, a professor of genetics and development at Columbia University.34 Like the effects of the teasing he endured in childhood and adolescence, the damage from his arrest would only become apparent with time.

  The arrest preceded the onset of Nash’s illness by more than four years. Stories of other mathematicians who were caught up in the meanness and bigotry of those times illustrate how disequilibrating being harassed and humiliated can be. J. C. C. McKinsey committed suicide in 1953 within two years of being fired by RAND.35 Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who cracked the Nazi submarine code, was arrested, tried, and convicted under Britain’s anti-homosexual statutes in 1952; he committed suicide in the summer of 1954 by taking a bite of a cyanide-laced apple in his laboratory.36 Others, less well known, less obviously brutalized, had breakdowns that led to their giving up mathematics and living on the margins of society.

  The biggest shock to Nash may not have been the arrest itself, but the subsequent expulsion from RAND. His initial reaction after Best confronted him suggests that he simply assumed Williams would overlook the incident. He was after all, one of RAND’s resident geniuses. But like McKinsey, Turing, and others, Nash learned that life was more precarious, and he was more vulnerable, than he had previously imagined — a dangerous lesson.

  26

  Alicia

  She had this steely determination. I liked it. I found it very interesting. She always had some agenda, some goal.

  — EMMA DUCHANE, 1997

  HAVING RETURNED TO Cambridge in an anxious, uneasy frame of mind that made the dull task of preparing his lectures even more impossible than usual, Nash escaped to the music library almost every afternoon.1 The library, on the first floor of Charles Hayden Memorial, had an impressive collection of classical recordings and soundproofed, private cubicles where one could sit and play records, surrounded by deep-blue walls that made one feel as if one were floating in water.2 Nash would go into one of these and listen to either Bach or Mozart for hours on end.

  On his way into the library he would stop at the desk to exchange a few bantering remarks with the music librarians — a mode of interaction that kept people at a distance, much as in the games he liked to play. On one of the first afternoons, he was surprised to see a young woman who had been his student the previous year standing behind the librarian’s desk. He had encountered her in the library from time to time before, but now it seemed she was actually working there. She too had seemed a bit startled when she saw him come in, but had given him a sweet smile and had greeted him by name. When he walked away from her he felt her eyes following him.

  There was only a handful of coeds at MIT at the time, and the twenty-one-year-old Alicia Larde glowed like a hothouse orchid in this otherwise drab, barrackslike environment. Delicate and feminine, with pale skin and dark eyes, she exuded both innocence and glamour, a fetching shyness as well as a definite sense of self-possession, polish, and elegance.3 Always perfectly groomed, she wore her short black hair like Elizabeth Taylor’s in Butterfield 8, was almost always seen in very full skirts cinched tightly around her tiny waist and very, very high heels.4 She carried herself like a little queen. The student newspaper, Th
e Tech, once included a reference to her beautiful ankles in the annual feature on MIT coeds.5 She was bright, vivacious, playful, and talkative — occasionally sarcastic and often very sharp — popular with the “little boys,” as she called the male students, and mad about movies.6 Her origins were exotic. One of her friends described her as “an El Salvadoran princess with a sense of noblesse oblige.”7

  The Lardes were, in fact, an aristocratic clan.8 Their origins, like those of all the families which composed Central America’s elite, were European, primarily French. Eloi Martin Larde, a wine grower in Champagne, escaped from France during the revolution and settled in Baton Rouge. His son Florentin Larde moved to Central America, first to Guatemala, and ultimately to San Salvador, where he, his wife, and son Jorge became hoteliers and, eventually, owners of a large cotton-growing hacienda.

  The Larde men were handsome and the women exceptionally beautiful. A photograph of Alicia’s father, Carlos Larde Arthes, and his nine siblings, taken a few days after their mother’s death in 1911, might have been of the Romanovs. The family’s history had romantic overtones. Alicia’s uncle Enrique believed himself to be the bastard son of one of the Austrian Hapsburgs, Archduke Rudolf. Family legend also included a link with an aristocratic French family, the Bourdons.9 The Lardes, mostly doctors, professors, lawyers, and writers, belonged to the intelligentsia rather than the landed oligarchy that dominated El Salvador’s indigo and coffee economy. But they mingled with presidents and generals and, in Carlos Larde’s generation, were prominent in public life. They were well educated, spoke French and English as well as Spanish, and traveled widely. Their interests ran to artistic and literary subjects as well as science and philosophy.

  Carlos Larde got his medical training in El Salvador but spent several years studying abroad, in America and France, among other places.10 His early career had been full of promise: He held a number of public posts, including that of head of El Salvador’s Red Cross and, before World War II, was chairman of a League of Nations committee. Once he served as El Salvador’s consul in San Francisco. His second wife, Alicia Lopez Harrison, came from a wealthy, socially prominent family; Alicia’s maternal grandmother was the wife of an English diplomat. Mrs. Larde was not only beautiful but also warm, a wonderful cook, a charming hostess, and a popular aunt with her nieces and nephews.11

  Alicia, or Lichi, as her family called her, was born on New Year’s Day, 1933, in San Salvador. She was the second of Carlos and Alicia’s children. Her brother Rolando, five years older, was eventually confined to an institution. A half-brother from her father’s first marriage lived with them as well. Treated as an only child by her doting older parents, Lichi was by all accounts a lovely child, with blonde ringlets. She grew up, amidst aunts, uncles, cousins, and servants, in a lovely villa near the center of the capital.

  The idyll ended abruptly a year before the end of World War II, when Alicia was eleven. In 1944, in.the midst of a yearlong popular insurrection against dictator Hernandez Martinez,12 Alicia’s uncle Enrique had suddenly left for Atlanta with his wife and five young children one night, in the middle of bomb blasts, in a station wagon draped with a white sheet to signal their civilian status. Carlos Larde followed him not long afterward, leaving his wife, daughter, and two sons behind temporarily. He joined his brother in Atlanta, but then moved on to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico, where he obtained a position as a staff doctor at a veterans’ hospital. Some weeks later, Mrs. Larde and Alicia joined him, after making the long journey by train through Mexico and stopping in Atlanta to visit Enrique and his family.13

  What motivated Carlos Larde to follow his brother to the United States at age forty-six isn’t entirely clear. Possibly he feared the outbreak of a full-scale civil war. Possibly he saw a chance to revive his medical career, having apparently suffered a series of professional setbacks. But very likely a major reason for emigrating — and the one given Alicia by her parents — was his health. Carlos Larde was suffering from a number of increasingly debilitating physical ailments, among them a severe stomach ulcer, and working as a doctor in the United States would give him access to top-notch medical care. Whatever the reason, the move turned out to be permanent. Enrique went back to El Salvador after a few years, but Carlos Larde was to remain in this country until his death in 1962. Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde stayed for another decade after her husband’s death.

  Hot, dank, slightly seedy, Biloxi lay sprawled on that shallow, murky stretch of the gulf between Mobile and New Orleans, among its barrier islands and river mouths.14 It was known for shrimp fishing, illegal gambling, and being a favorite wintering place for Chicago mobsters. Rationing made day-to-day life difficult. Carlos was often exhausted and ill and Alicia’s mother was plainly distressed by their new surroundings and terribly homesick. Later, the mother of a friend of Alicia’s would describe Mrs. Larde as a “very sad, very stoical person.” Alicia learned English quickly and easily but suffered pangs of dislocation and isolation on top of the ordinary anxieties of early adolescence. It was not a happy time. For consolation, she turned to schoolwork and the movies.

  The Lardes did not stay in Biloxi for long. Less than a year after the war ended, they followed Enrique’s family to New York, where Enrique took a job as an interpreter at the United Nations. Once again, Alicia and her mother lived with Enrique’s family until Carlos found a position at the Pollak Hospital for Chest Diseases in Jersey City and a house for them to live in. Alicia commuted to Prospect High School, a Catholic school in Brooklyn.

  Alicia wasn’t to stay trapped in the lower-middle-class environs of Prospect High for long. At the beginning of her sophomore year, the Lardes enrolled her at the Marymount School, an exclusive Catholic girls’ school in New York.

  Marymount, which was operated by one of the oldest European orders, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, occupied three adjacent Beaux Arts mansions, on the southeast corner of Eighty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Central Park. It was another world. The student body, mostly day pupils from the surrounding Upper East Side, were from New York’s Catholic elite.15 Many of the girls were daughters of celebrities like Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Gleason, Paul Whiteman, and Pablo Casals. Alicia’s best friends there included the daughter of an Italian count. Tuition was several times what most private universities charged at the time, easily equivalent, once inflation is taken into account, to $15,000 today. Admission was based strictly on families’ social standing; the El Salvadoran ambassador wrote Alicia’s letter of reference, attesting to the Larde family’s social position.16

  The school’s atmosphere, appropriately to girls being groomed to become “wives of Catholic leaders,” was cosmopolitan and cultured.17 The girls’ uniforms included stylish blazers and black high heels. Parents insisted that the school “keep up the social end of things.” Alicia took riding and tennis lessons in Central Park, played basketball, helped out on plays and musicals, and went to parties. She went to her senior prom, and afterward to the Stork Club, with her friend Chicky Gallagher’s brother.18

  She looked, on graduation day, just like the other girls, only more beautiful, wrapped in the same white tulle and cradling the same three dozen long-stemmed roses, like a debutante before a coming-out ball. Much, however, separated Alicia from her wealthy schoolmates. Outwardly she was gay, charming, unruffled, and compliant, but her appearance veiled a keen intelligence, an outsider’s ambition, and what a future friend called steely determination. Self-controlled and reluctant to confide her real feelings to anyone, a legacy of her Latin upbringing, she hid a great deal from view. As a woman who got to know Alicia several years later said, “You have to keep the times in mind. Women dissembled then. Alicia behaved like a fifties ditz, but that doesn’t mean she was one. She was flirtatious but she was saying quite serious things. She always had some agenda, some goal.”19

  As a child, she’d dreamed of becoming a modern-day Marie Curie.20 Alicia was twelve years old
when she huddled with her father near the radio in their Biloxi apartment and listened with him to the broadcast about Hiroshima.21 It was for her, as for so many scientifically inclined youngsters, a defining moment. Within weeks, the Japanese surrender and the War Department’s revelation of the three hidden “atomic” cities in the southwestern desert turned anonymous men like Oppenheimer and Teller into public heroes. Instantly, the image of the “nuclear physicist” seized the popular imagination the same way that “rocket scientist” did after Sputnik. Alicia, already showing signs of her father’s talent and interest in scientific subjects, knew what she wanted to be. “The world was physics. It was what kids with a talent for, and interest in, math and science aspired to,” a fellow physics major at MIT said in 1997. “To Carlos Larde it was the top, and it was for Alicia too.”22

  Her aptitude for mathematics and science had long been evident and became more so at Marymount. By the late 1940s, the school was already something more than a fancy finishing school. It had always had an exceptionally well-trained faculty, lay and religious, but during Alicia’s tenure the school was run by a forceful young Irish graduate of the London School of Economics — Sister Raymond — who was not only an ardent Keynesian, but a gifted educator determined to raise the educational standards of the place. Sister Raymond improved the caliber of students by introducing scholarships and gave more intellectual heft to the school’s curriculum by adding serious science and mathematics courses. Alicia had a choice between a classical education emphasizing the arts and languages and one focusing on science and mathematics. She was one of the few girls who chose the latter and, as a consequence, took biology, chemistry, and physics as well as three years’ worth of mathematics, often in tiny classes of two or three girls. Sister Raymond recalled her as a gifted and willing student: “Very intelligent. Not too pushy. Very very interested in her studies.”23