A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  When she realized Nash was not alone, she began shrieking and crying and threatening until finally she had cried herself out and Nash drove her home. Alicia, meanwhile, white-faced, left.

  The next day, Nash went into Arthur Mattuck’s office, told him the story, grabbed his head with both hands, and moaned, genuinely pained, over and over, “My perfect little world is ruined, my perfect little world is ruined.”

  Eleanor called Alicia and told her that she was stealing another woman’s man. She told her about John David. She told her that Nash was planning to marry her and that she, Alicia, was wasting her time. Alicia invited Eleanor to her apartment for a meeting. Eleanor came; Alicia was waiting with a bottle of red wine. “She tried to get me drunk,” Eleanor recalled. “She wanted to see what I was like. We talked about John.”11

  And, having met her, and realizing that Eleanor was an LPN, that she was practically thirty, that the affair had been going on for nearly three years, Alicia concluded that it wasn’t going anywhere. She was not shocked. Men had mistresses, they even had children by them, but they married women of their own class. Of that she felt quite confident. Eleanor had called her up to complain. Alicia was pleased. She took it as a sign that, as her friend Emma said, “she was beginning to matter.”12

  Nash was due for a sabbatical the following year. He had won one of the new Sloan Fellowships, prestigious three-year research grants that would let the recipients spend at least one year away from teaching and, for that matter, away from Cambridge.13 He could go-where he liked. He was, perhaps unreasonably, still worried about the draft, as he had confided to Tucker in a letter a year earlier.14 He decided to spend that year at the Institute for Advanced Study.15 He was beginning to think seriously about various problems in quantum theory and thought that a year at the institute might stimulate his thinking.

  Alicia meanwhile complained in a letter to Joyce that February that she was “just vegetating.” She mentioned a vague desire (which she did not say was connected with Nash) “to get a job in New York instead of staying on at the Institute [MIT] to attend graduate school.”16

  At the end of the spring term, Nash took Alicia to the math department picnic in Boston. The picnics were always held during reading week and often on the commons. Wiener came, as did all the graduate students. It was an unusually warm day, and Nash was in high spirits. Nash did something curious that engraved itself on the memories of another instructor, Nesmith Ankeny and his wife, Barbara. It was, of course, Nash’s notion of a joke. He wished to show everyone that he was the master of this gorgeous young woman, and that she was his slave. At one point, late in the afternoon, he threw Alicia to the ground and placed his foot on her neck.17

  But despite this display of machismo and possessiveness, Nash left Cambridge in June without suggesting marriage or even that she move to New York.

  Indeed, at the start of that summer, in June, another friend of Alicia’s described Alicia as being in Cambridge and “in an unbelievable state of depression, due to a certain instructor at MIT.”18

  28

  Seattle Summer 1956

  NASH LEFT CAMBRIDGE for Seattle in mid-June with the light heart of a man making a temporary escape from a tangle of personal and professional dilemmas.1 Travel always lifted his spirits and this trip was no exception. The month-long summer institute at the University of Washington was exactly what he wanted. A top-notch crowd of mathematicians working in differential geometry would he there: Ambrose, Bott, Singer, as well as Louis Nirenberg and Hassler Whitney. Nash expected that his embedding work would make him one of the centers of attention. And he was looking forward to hearing Busemann’s seminar on the state of Soviet mathematics because everyone knew that the Russians were doing great things, but the authorities were no longer allowing even abstracts of their mathematics articles to be translated into English.

  The signal event of the summer institute turned out to be the surprise announcement, within a day or two of the start of the meetings, of Milnor’s proof of the existence of exotic spheres.2 For the mathematicians gathered there, it had the same electrifying effect as the announcement of a solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles of Princeton University four decades later. It stole Nash’s thunder.

  Nash reacted to the news of Milnor’s triumph with a display of adolescent petulance.3 The mathematicians were all camping out in a student dormitory and eating their meals in the cafeteria. Nash protested by grabbing gigantic portions. Once he demolished a pile of bread. Another time, he threw a glass of milk at a cashier. And on one occasion, during a sailboat outing, he got into a shoving match with another mathematician.

  Nash didn’t immediately recognize Amasa Forrester, who looked like a shaggy bespectacled bear with the hint of a double chin, a haphazardly shaven face, and glasses, and who even walked like a bear with a slightly forward-leaning gait, when the latter buttonholed him after a talk.4 Forrester had to remind Nash that they’d been at Princeton together, Forrester having been a first-year graduate student during Nash’s final year. After they starting talking, however, Nash remembered Forrester as a Steenrod student who was always holding court in the Fine Hall common room, waving a water pistol around.

  Despite his somewhat unprepossessing appearance, Forrester had interesting things to say. He was fast, aggressive, and seemed to know everything about everything that came up in their conversation. Forrester explained some of the details of Milnor’s work to Nash. They also talked, then and later, about Nash’s embedding papers, which Forrester appeared to know quite well.

  Forrester invited Nash to come to see his living quarters, moored on Lake Union, between Lake Washington and Puget Sound in downtown Seattle.

  To Nash, Forrester was “a different sort.”5 He would later refer to Forrester, who went by the name Amasa, in the same terms that he used when he compared Thorson and Bricker to the Beatles —“young,” “colorful,” “amusing,” and “attractive” — someone who made him feel like “the girls who love the Beatles so wildly.”

  There was much to draw them together. Forrester, who had just turned thirty, was as brash and brilliant as Nash.6 He’d had a stellar graduate-school career. Steenrod, who was on his dissertation committee, had given him spectacular references. He was disorganized and sloppy but he had a photographic memory and wide-ranging interests. He hadn’t done much since arriving in Seattle in 1954 and, indeed, hadn’t been able to publish his dissertation because it turned out to contain a substantive flaw, but he was still full of enthusiasm, or at least so it seemed to Nash. He shared Nash’s predilection for insult and one-upmanship — at Princeton he’d been referred to as King of the Common Room for that reason — and was given to sweeping judgments of the kind Nash admired. Once, for example, when a listener tried to question him after a talk, he responded by claiming, “It’s easier to predict what mathematicians will be talking about fifty years from now than what they’ll be interested in next year.”7 His obvious eccentricity made him seem like a kindred spirit. This was a young man who had once managed to get himself permanently banned from the dining rooms of the Graduate College by Sir Hugh Taylor, the dean, for having deliberately broken dishes and crockery in the breakfast room. And his relationship with his mother was fodder for all kinds of stories. Former friends recall that a family record of worldly success and an overbearing mother both weighed heavily on him. Arthur Mattuck, who was at Princeton with Forrester, recalled: “’Amasy, Amasy, Amasy!’ his mother would say. ’Oh, mom, you know how much I love you,’ Amasa would coo back in a falsetto.”8

  Forrester was also openly homosexual. It’s unlikely that his graduate-school professors or Sir Hugh were aware of this, but “he was fairly open about his homosexuality at Princeton and everybody at the Graduate College knew,” said John Isbell, a professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a fellow graduate student at Princeton.9 Initially, Forrester had been quite circumspect with his colleagues at the University of Washington, but by the
time Nash ran into him — perhaps because things were beginning to loosen up even in Seattle — he had concluded that he no longer had to pretend to be what he was not. Robert Vaught, a retired logician at the University of California at Berkeley, shared a house with Forrester during their first year as instructors in Seattle. He recalled:

  It wasn’t that he “discovered” his homosexuality then. It was very difficult for homosexuals then. In those days people thought the best thing to do was to get rid of it by some act of will. He sort of decided that he had to be a homosexual. Sometime during his third year in Seattle he bought himself a houseboat — there was a far-out group living on the waterfront — and gradually he began to let people know about his homosexuality.10

  Nash always found the people who could give him what he needed. Forrester was the kind of smart, verbal, quick-witted man Nash was frequently attracted to. Forrester was also emotionally available. Under his eccentric, sometimes brash and loud exterior, Forrester was an exceptionally sweet man. “Kind and gentle, much loved by his students,” was the description given by Albert Nijenhuis, another of Forrester’s colleagues.11 Forrester also had an unusual capacity for connecting with troubled individuals. When Vaught, who, as a student, had endured repeated hospitalizations for episodes of mania and depression, first came to Seattle, Forrester was amazingly kind. Vaught recalled: “He was a very fine man. I was a manic-depressive long before lithium came along. He was very helpful to me. Amasa encouraged me to find a psychiatrist in Seattle. I could talk to him.”12 In his first year at Seattle, Forrester “adopted” a mentally ill graduate student — a computer genius who had suffered some kind of psychotic breakdown — and tried to care for him, recalled John Walter, a mathematician at the University of Illinois who shared the house with Vaught and Forrester. “It was one of his projects.”13

  It would have been obvious to Forrester that Nash, arrogant and aloof as he might appear, would respond to his sympathetic interest. “Amasa was pretty sharp. He would have seen through the veil,” said Walter.14

  Nash and Forrester hardly had much time to spend together; Nash was in Seattle only a month. Although Nash referred to Forrester, either by name or simply by the letter F, in letters until the early 1970s, there is no evidence to suggest that Nash and Forrester corresponded regularly or saw much of each other in subsequent years. Forrester stayed very much on Nash’s mind, however. Eleven years later, on a pilgrimage that took him to Los Angeles and San Francisco, Nash spent nearly a month in Seattle.15

  Forrester was still living in his houseboat with dozens of cats for company and was by then almost entirely cut off from his former mathematical friends.16 He had never lived up to his early promise, had been denied tenure, and had left the University of Washington in 1961. He worked briefly at Boeing and later at the giant Atomic Energy Commission plant in Hanford, Washington, before dropping out of the mathematical community in the mid-1970s. Later, he made his living tutoring and, on one occasion, acting as a live-in tutor for some children on a ranch. Nijenhuis, who ran into him a final time at a mathematics congress in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1974, recalled that Forrester had told him that he’d worked as a goatherd. For years he would drop by the mathematics and physics library, looking progressively more seedy and disheveled. He died in 1991. This once-promising mathematician did not even merit an obituary in the Seattle Times. If, for Nash, Forrester’s was the road not taken, one would have to argue that Nash, on this occasion, was perceptive about human beings.

  Nash knew immediately that something was wrong when someone fetched him from the dormitory. The Nashes communicated exclusively by letter and postcard. A long-distance telephone call indicated that something was amiss.17

  John Sr. was on the line. He sounded unnaturally grave. Nash’s first thought was that he was calling with some bad news about his mother or sister, but he heard anger rather than sorrow or anxiety in his father’s voice.

  Eleanor Stier had contacted them and revealed the existence of their grandson, John Sr. said. The shock was enormous.

  “Don’t come home,” John Sr. told him sternly. “Go right to Boston and make this right. Marry the girl.”

  Nash was too stunned to argue. The secret he was so anxious to keep from his parents was out. There was nothing to be done now. He agreed not to come to Roanoke. In a postcard dated July 12, he wrote his parents that he was “thinking of going back to BeanTown.”18

  Nash did go back to Boston in mid-July and stayed for two weeks. He spent most of his time either with Bricker or working in his office late nights.19 He turned to Bricker for advice on what to do about Eleanor. She had hired a lawyer. She wanted regular child support payments. The attorney, Nash found out, was threatening to go to the university. Nash, as Bricker recalled in 1997, was inclined to refuse to pay.

  Bricker, as usual, found himself in the middle. Eleanor had been calling him regularly. She was devastated by Nash’s abandonment and bitter over his refusal to support their son. Bricker remonstrated with Nash. “He didn’t want to pay child support. I told him, This is terrible. This is your son. If nothing else, do it for your own future. If the university got wind of this it’ll ruin your career. You owe it to her.”20 Nash, to Bricker’s surprise, agreed to pay.

  29

  Death and Marriage 1956-57

  ALTHOUGH NASH WAS TO SPEND the year at the Institute for Advanced Study, he decided to live in New York instead of Princeton.1 Within a day or two of coming to the city in late August, he found an unfurnished apartment on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village just south of Washington Square Park, a street lined with jazz clubs, Italian cafés, and secondhand book shops. The apartment was a typical railroad flat, small, dingy, and suffused with smells of his neighbors’ cooking. Nash bought a few pieces of used furniture from a local junk dealer and sent his parents a postcard proclaiming a sentiment that they would be sure to approve, namely, that he’d rather save money than live luxuriously.2

  But his reasons for choosing a five-story walk-up in downtown New York over a spartan flat on Einstein Drive in quasirural Princeton were more romantic than practical. The towering scale of the city, with its frenetic rhythms, ever-present crowds, and round-the-clock activity — “the wild electric beauty of New York”3— seemed wonderful to him, always had, from the first time Shapley and Shubik had invited him, when all three were living in the Graduate College at Princeton, to come up for a weekend. After he’d moved to Boston, he had seized every opportunity to return, sometimes staying with the Minskys,4 just to reexperience that sensation of simultaneous connectedness and anonymity. The bohemian enclave around Washington Square had long been a magnet for those who were sexually and spiritually unconventional, and Nash too was attracted to its crooked streets, Old World charm, and implied promise of freedom.

  If the decision to move to Bleecker Street meant that Nash was toying with adopting a different sort of life from the one he had hitherto imagined for himself, it was not to be. John Sr. and Virginia announced that they too were coming to New York.5 John Sr. had some business to transact for the Appalachian. Nash feared that they would confront him again on the subject of Eleanor. But the Nashes were even more preoccupied with the precarious state of John Sr.’s health at that moment. When Nash met them at the McAlpin Hotel, a few blocks from Penn Station, he tried to demonstrate that he was a loyal son by urging his father, several times in the course of the evening, to consult a specialist in New York. He told his father he ought to consider an operation.6 It was the last time Nash saw his father.

  In early September, John Sr. suffered a massive heart attack.7 Virginia had a difficult time reaching Nash, who had no telephone. By the time she got a message to him, his father was already dead. Thereafter, he would think of fall as a season of “misfortunes.”8

  John Sr., who was sixty-four at the time of his death, had been ill on and off all year. That Easter Sunday he had been feeling too unwell to go to Martha and Charlie’s house for dinner (Martha had married in the
spring of 1954). And in late summer when he and Virginia were in New York, he suffered from a spell of weakness and nausea in the hotel.9 The news of his father’s death shocked Nash. He couldn’t fathom its suddenness, its finality. He was convinced that the death had not been inevitable, might have been prevented if only John Sr. had gotten better medical care, if only …10

  Nash rushed to Bluefield to attend the funeral, which was held at Christ Episcopal Church on September 14, two days after John Sr. died.11

  There was no outpouring of grief, no sign that Nash’s unnatural calm was shaken.12 But the death of his father produced another fissure in the foundation of Nash’s “perfect little world.” The loss of a parent before one has really stepped fully into one’s own adult life in the same role is a one-two punch — losing the father and having to step into the father’s shoes.

  There was, for starters, a newfound sense of responsibility for Virginia’s welfare. It may not have signified much in practical terms, given that Martha lived in Roanoke and, as the female offspring, would have been expected to look after Virginia, but emotionally Nash was now in the hot seat. Suddenly, his mother’s wishes regarding him, in particular her intense desire that he adopt what she regarded as a “normal” life — that is, that he marry — weighed more heavily on him than at any time since he had left home for college.

  For Nash this dilemma — and it was a dilemma, as his father’s shoes were not exactly the ones that he felt prepared to step into — was compounded by the particular circumstances of the summer. Nash’s misbehavior with regard to Eleanor and John David lay between him and Virginia. The thought that he had hastened his father’s death must have occurred to him. Or, if it didn’t — and this is certainly possible given Nash’s inability to imagine how his actions affected other people — the thought surely occurred to Virginia, who may have communicated it, indirectly or directly, to Nash. Virginia was not just grief-stricken but deeply angry. She wrote Eleanor a letter accusing her of causing her husband’s death. It is quite possible that she said something similar to her son, or implied as much.13