A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  By her senior year, Alicia was quite definite about wanting to pursue a career in science. “I wanted a career, so I wanted to study something definite,” she said.24 Carlos Larde, who was delighted by his daughter’s ambitions, wrote an eloquent and touching letter to Sister Raymond urging her to make every effort to help Alicia realize her dream of becoming a nuclear scientist by helping her gain admission to a first-rate technical university.25 Alicia was accepted at MIT, one of only seventeen women and two female physics majors in the class of 1955.26

  The Lardes were no less thrilled than Alicia. Carlos Larde, who had studied at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, particularly appreciated what an MIT degree would mean, but he drew the line at her going off to a virtually all-male engineering school on her own. Alicia’s mother, it was decided, would accompany Alicia in order to watch over and take care of her.27 Besides the natural protectiveness toward a precious daughter, the arrangement may have reflected a wish on the part of Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde to escape her ailing, difficult husband. Alicia’s friends at MIT were struck, later, by the fact that mother and daughter never referred to Carlos Larde and that he never came to visit.28 In any event, in the late summer of 1951, the two women rented a tiny furnished apartment in Boston29 not far from Beacon Street where John Nash had just found a room, across the river from MIT and not far from the Harvard Bridge.

  It was marvelous being an MIT coed in the early 1950s, an era famous for its celebration of mothers and dumb blondes, because the coeds were so special and had, as it were, the best of both worlds: it was serious, but there were lots of men. There were girls who wore cocktail dresses and high heels while dissecting rats in the lab.30 A date wasn’t going dancing and sipping Manhattans, it was going to a lecture and out to coffee afterward, or maybe having a boy take you to his parents’ house and showing you, through a telescope, everything Galileo had seen.

  Alicia was to tell her girlfriends that being there made her feel like a “Queen Bee.” It was also a chance to meet, finally, other women who didn’t think that having brains and ambitions was a major liability. “We were a self-selected group of fairly strong women,” said Joyce Davis, a native New Yorker and the only other female physics major in the class of 1955. “We had our own culture. It wasn’t normal American female culture, the ’you can’t be as good as the boys’ culture, which we were always trying to escape. And it wasn’t the MIT boys’ culture either.”31

  Alicia spent most of her time with the other coeds either at the dorm or on the campus. She studied with the other girls in the Cheney room, the coed lounge, ate breakfast and lunch with her friends at Pritchett lounge every day, and generally was up for whatever the girls felt like doing, whether it was playing basketball or organizing a charity fair.32 She attended a great many concerts and plays, thanks to the coeds’ wealthy patroness, a Mrs. McCormick, who showered them with tickets and even paid for them to take taxis across the Harvard Bridge in winter.

  MIT’s academic program was brutally demanding, especially for physics majors. Class schedules were heavy, spread over six days, and consisted mostly of required courses. All the girls lived in healthy fear of flunking out. Alicia, who had sailed through her science and math courses at Marymount on native ability, found that this was no longer enough. Much to her dismay, she had to struggle to maintain a C average (which was a respectable performance in those days before grade inflation turned a C into a subaverage mark). “You either had to buckle down or accept just getting by,” said Joyce, Alicia’s best friend. “Alicia never really buckled down.”33

  Alicia’s ambition survived her freshman year intact, despite a fair amount of teasing, especially in her chemistry class, from boys and instructors who were sure that she would not make the cut. In a letter to Joyce, in the summer of 1952, Alicia wrote:

  Dear Joyce,

  By this time you must be wondering whether I’m dead, dying or have mearly [sic] been kidnaped judging from the amount of communication you have received from me; the sad truth of course is my laziness. Except for one week that I went to Canada with Betty Sabin and her parents I have spent the Summer working as a sales girl in a small store (I hate to say 5 + 10) behind the ribbon counter; I have done all but strangled the customers with “our” fine products. But life hasn’t been all tears (I hate to think of my report card) we have fortunately moved to a new apartment half a block away from Kenmore Square. And so I will be able to walk home with you (the dorm is only about a block and ½ away).

  By now you must be beginning to believe the malicious rumors that I bribe my English teachers; not to mention the grammar and the spelling is atrocious (get me!). My report card was the same as last term with the unhappy exception of a B in English; my cum. is still above 3 though; .02 above that is. I’m unhappy that we won’t be in the same section this year but c’est la vie! I wanted to take French instead of German in order to make my life easier but I’m not sure I can because of my hope for a Ph.D. in physics … remember all I was going to study this summer? Well, I’ve gotten to page 17 of the Physics book and that’s all; I am however many movies wiser.

  Give my regards to your mother and answer soon (do as I say not as I do).34

  A profile, a look, a voice can capture a heart in no time at all. Alicia gave away hers in the space of a single calculus lecture. She was sitting, her best friend Joyce beside her, in the front row of M351, Advanced Calculus for Engineers, a course required of all physics majors. John Nash arrived late wearing a haughty and bored expression. Without so much as a glance or a word to the assembled, he closed all the windows, flipped open his copy of Hildebrand, and embarked on a lackluster exposition of the properties of ordinary differential equations.

  It was mid-September, Indian summer weather, and as Nash droned on, the room got quite hot. First one, then several students interrupted Nash to complain and to ask that he let them open the windows. Nash, who had obviously shut the windows to prevent any outside noise distracting anyone, ignored them. “He was so wrapped up in himself that he wouldn’t pay attention to what we wanted. His attitude plainly said, ’Shut up and take notes,’ ” Joyce recalled.35 At that point, Alicia jumped up from her seat, ran over to the windows in her high heels, and opened them one after another, each time with a toss of her head. On her way back to her seat, she looked straight at Nash, as if daring him to reverse her action. He did not.

  Joyce thought Nash an indifferent lecturer and insensitive besides. “He presented the material but that was it. He was sort of cold.” Joyce transferred out of the section after the first class, but Alicia surprised her by staying. “She thought he looked like Rock Hudson,” said Joyce.

  To see Nash through Alicia’s eyes during their first encounters as student and professor conveys much about the elementary force that was to bind her to him. In MIT’s intellectual hierarchy — where “mathematics was the highest thing,” as Joyce was to say — Nash was the closest thing to royalty.36 It was his good looks, however, that made Alicia’s heart beat faster. “A genius with a penis. Isn’t that what we all want?” an actress once quipped, and the quip captures the combination of brains, status, and sex appeal that made Nash so irresistible. Herta Newman, Donald’s wife, said the same thing in less bald terms: “He was going to be famous. He was also cute.”37 Emma Duchane, a physics major two years behind Alicia at MIT, said, “Alicia thought he was gorgeous. She thought he had beautiful legs.”38 Nash wasn’t scruffy like many of the mathematicians. He was always neatly combed, pressed, and shined. His haughty manner and cool indifference only confirmed his desirability. His name, two monosyllables that advertised his Anglo-Saxon ancestry, added to his appeal. “He was very, very good-looking,” Alicia later said. “Very intelligent. It was a little bit of a hero worship thing.”39

  Nash took no notice of her, but Alicia was quite prepared to woo him. All that year, she would seek him out. “Come with me to the music library, Joyce,” or, “Come with me to Walker Memorial. I want to see Nash.”40
“She set her cap for him,” Joyce recalled. “She had a campaign going.”

  Her grades suffered. She got two Ds and for the first time in her MIT career her grade point average slipped below a C. The following April, Joyce wrote to her parents: “Alicia is still not doing to [sic] well since she is in LOVE. She goes around with a faraway expression on her face.”41

  When the calculus course was over, Alicia got a job in Nash’s favorite haunt, the music library. It is a measure of her lovesickness that she found it a far more interesting place to work than Lincoln Laboratories, where she also had a job. “Work here isn’t very stimulating; what I do mostly is count ’tracks’ seen thru a microscope,” she wrote to Joyce during the summer. “I only work 15 hrs a week here but what tires me out is the overtime; I keep seeing the little monsters every time I close my eyes. Music library proves more interesting, so far several strange boys have tried to pick me up.”42

  Alicia was still playing the field, but with less enthusiasm than her letter to Joyce implied: “A few more weeks now and I expect to be seeing ’blondie’ again. It seems peculiar but I feel so indifferent about him now.”

  She continued this letter a few weeks later:

  I am writing in the music library now (obviously). Something funny {?} happened to me here the other day. A boy I know came to talk to me while one of the ones I am out “gunning” for was sitting out there; or so I thought. In order to seem attractive to the one out there I began pouring on the “charm” on my little friend; then in my loudest possible voice I announced my working hours in the ML; they must have heard me over the radio. Well, the persecuted one seemed to be getting the idea while I became bolder and bolder. Finally he came over. Then, boy, was I mortified. The moral of the story is “wear glasses.” Needless to say he wasn’t the “one.”

  Nash, of course, was at RAND most of that summer.

  When Nash started coming around the library again that fall, Alicia engaged him in conversation and studied him as minutely as any fan studies his or her favorite star. She found out that he played chess. She found out that he was a science fiction fan. She made it her business to learn chess and, in addition to her job in the library, she took to sitting in the science library near the science fiction collection. “My activities besides the music library include the science library where I read science fiction (John likes it),” she wrote to Joyce.

  Despite Alicia Larde’s crush, which seemed to have erased the earnest student of science, she was playing a serious game. Her romantic dreams of becoming a famous scientist herself hadn’t survived the harsh reality test provided by MIT. As she put it later, “I was no Einstein.”43 Pragmatically, she recognized that marriage to an illustrious man might also satisfy her ambitions. Nash seemed to fit the bill. “John could give her a lot of things she didn’t have” observed John Moore, a mathematician who fell in love with Alicia some years later.44 Sadly, the romantic girl whose favorite song was “Lady of Spain” would most agonizingly disappear in just a few years.

  27

  The Courtship

  NASH STARTED to make occasional references to “the music librarian” in his conversations with Mattuck.1 He was at a crossroads. The dangers of his sexual experiments had become suddenly, devastatingly obvious. Marriage was a possible answer and he had, at his most frightened, almost convinced himself that he would marry Eleanor. Now that he was back in Boston and seeing her again, however, he could not bring himself to take any practical steps in that direction. Alicia came along at the right moment.

  Moreover, Nash liked what he saw. The son of a beautiful mother would be drawn by the classical symmetry of Alicia’s features and the slenderness of her frame. Alicia’s aristocratic lineage and social ease appealed to his own sense of superiority. The effect of her intelligence on him should not be underestimated. Nash was easily bored. He found her interesting company, liked the fact that she set her own compass, and was amused by her flashes of sarcasm and irreverence.

  It was part of Nash’s genius to choose a woman who would prove so essential to his survival. He took her willingness to pursue him, to make every effort, not merely as flattery, to which he was no less immune than the next man, but as a sign that she was prepared to take him as he was. He saw her determination to have him as a real key to her character, suggesting that she knew what she was getting and expected nothing more.

  They shared a good deal. Both were close to their mothers. Both had emotionally distant but intellectually stimulating fathers. Both had grown up in households where intellectual achievement and social status, rather than emotional intimacy, were the coin of the realm. Both, on account of their intellectual precocity, had somewhat delayed adolescences. Both felt that they were, in different ways, outsiders and compensated for this by seeking status for themselves. There was a coolness, a calculation, that guided their actions.

  Nonetheless, the progress of the courtship was slow. Nash finally asked Alicia out during the spring. In July 1955 she wrote to Joyce that they were seeing each other “on and off.”2 She said that he had introduced her to his parents some three weeks earlier. But she made it clear that they were not sexually intimate. The significance of his having introduced her to his parents, given his mother’s chronic concern over Nash’s social life, wasn’t clear. Alicia, who must have taken it as a hopeful sign, did not admit to taking it that way.

  I’ve been making slight progress with JFN but can’t tell just yet if it’s significant. I don’t think he’s really too interested but more or less can take me or leave me. About 3 weeks ago I met his parents who’d come up to visit him for a week. I’ve been seeing him on and off and last Saturday we went to the beach together — I had fun.3

  Alicia hinted at one reason why Nash remained lukewarm: “He still thinks I’m too innocent but has now condescended to accept me as is and just let my ’sweet innocent little self develop.”

  And in her own mind, Alicia was still playing the field, though it was clear that she was distracting herself and hoping in the process to pique Nash’s interest.

  I’ve picked up a few admirers this summer including that Junior that Marolyn was talking about. I keep refusing dates with him but he doesn’t seem to get the idea and just follows me around, so far he has written a couple of cute poems that I’m keeping as suveniers [sic]. I realize that I’m sounding quite egocentric with all this but not much else has been happening.

  Whether because of preoccupation with Nash or simply because of a waning interest in physics, Alicia failed to graduate with her class. She had to stay on to make up a number of courses. But the shock of not graduating on time, and the unpleasant business of having to admit this to her father, did little to refocus her attention on her studies. She says in the letter to Joyce that she is making up M39 but that “so far I’m up to page 10 in Hildebrand.”

  Nash and Alicia saw more of each other in the fall. He took her to a math party. Then another. And out to the Newmans’ house or to Marvin Minsky’s. “Let’s go Minskify,” he would say to a group.4 Sometimes they double-dated with one of Alicia’s friends. On those occasions, he almost ignored her once they had arrived and the introductions were made, going off to join the circle of men talking about mathematics. Sometimes Alicia would stand at the edge of the circle listening to Nash say things like “Who are the great geniuses: Wiener, Levinson, and me. But I think maybe I’m the best.” Other times she found herself among mathematicians’ wives talking about their children. There was no flirtation, no going off in a corner to hold hands, but in fact the relationship was more intoxicating for those reasons. The other women treated her with the deference accorded to the genius consort, which made Alicia feel rather smug. As for Nash, he could not help but be aware that the other men, impressed and surprised, envied him this adoring, gorgeous creature.

  Other times they would go out for lunch, usually with someone else. Bricker often joined them, and also Emma Duchane. Bricker recalled Alicia as “very bright” and “quite sarcastic.�
�5 Emma recalled, “She was not deferential at all. She never stopped talking.”6

  True, Nash was not especially nice to Alicia. Among other things, he called her unflattering nicknames, including “Leech,” a nasty play on her childhood nickname, Lichi.7 He never paid for her meals, dividing every restaurant check down to the penny. “He was not infatuated with her,” Emma recalled in 1996. “He was infatuated with himself.”8

  To Nash, Alicia was part of the background, charming and decorative. He treated her the way other mathematicians treated their women. But Alicia wasn’t looking for companionship either. Later Emma said: “We wanted intellectual thrills. When my boyfriend told me e to the pi times / equals negative 1, I was thrilled. I felt the absolute joy of the idea.”9 Nash was no less fun to be with than the other mathematicians.

  A February 1956 letter from Alicia to a friend doesn’t mention Nash at all. But at the end of that month Alicia’s mother would move to Washington (Carlos Larde had gotten a position at Glendale Hospital in Maryland), a move that Alicia anticipated with some glee.

  It was probably sometime that spring that Nash and Alicia began sleeping together, at the end of those evenings in company where they barely exchanged three words. Nash was still involved with both Bricker and Eleanor. Indeed, he may have continued, even at this late date, to think of Eleanor as his likely wife. Alicia and John were in bed one evening when his doorbell rang.10 John answered the door. It was not Arthur Mattuck, who sometimes dropped by unannounced. It was Eleanor, indeed, an angry and shaken Eleanor. She said nothing but walked right past Nash into the apartment. She acted as if she’d come to talk things out with him.