A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  Alicia also was moved by the conviction that she had something more to offer Nash than physical shelter. She believed, perhaps somewhat wishfully, that living in an academic community among his own kind, without the threat of further hospitalization, would help him get well. She took Nash’s own assessment of his needs — for safety, freedom, and friendship — literally. In a letter to Martha written at Nash’s request in late 1968, when he was convinced that his mother and sister planned to hospitalize him again, Alicia had argued that hospitalization was unnecessary and harmful: “Much of his past hospitalization I now feel was a mistake and had no beneficial permanent effects, rather the opposite. If he is to make a lasting adjustment, I think this has to be done under normal conditions.”1

  In 1968, Alicia had attributed her change of heart not just to the fact that Nash had relapsed despite aggressive treatment but, more important, to her own experiences since her divorce, which gave her new insights into Nash’s plight. She wrote to Martha, “I feel that I now understand his difficulties much better than I ever did in the past, having experienced some of his type of problems personally.”2 Like many of those who tried to help Nash, Alicia was moved by a very personal and direct identification with his suffering.

  Alicia’s beauty and vulnerability, a mix made even more potent because of her history of personal tragedy, made it likely that someone would fall in love with her. Forty-something, a professor of mathematics, John Coleman Moore might have inhabited the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel rather than an office at Fine Hall. His dark good looks, formal manners, and custom-made suits distinguished him from the rather scruffy ranks of fellow mathematicians. And his command of French and intimate knowledge of his native New York and assorted European capitals lent him a sophisticated aura. A bachelor, Moore was also a ladies’ man.

  When they returned from their separate years in Paris, Moore, Nash, and Alicia sometimes had dinners à trois. But it wasn’t until after the Nashes’ divorce, in mid-1963, and after Moore, described by a former girlfriend as “rigid and prim,”3 suffered a devastating mental collapse of his own that the relationship turned romantic. Plagued by alcoholism and severe depression, Moore was hospitalized at a swank, psychoanalytically oriented hospital outside Philadelphia.4 During two and one-half lonely years in which Moore remained in the hospital, other than Donald Spencer and George Whitehead, his thesis adviser from MIT, Alicia was his only regular visitor. Whitehead, who ran into Alicia a few times there, recalled: “There were lots of people in P-town who didn’t come and see him. He was remarkably thankful for visitors.”5

  The friendship, born out of shared experiences and mutual sympathy, blossomed into romance.6 Moore returned to Princeton and his teaching duties in the summer of 1965, about the same time that Nash moved to Boston. He became Alicia’s regular escort at Princeton dinner parties, concerts, and the like. Whether it was a great love match, as her marriage to Nash had been, isn’t clear. Moore, for all his charm and kindness, had little of the sort of charisma that had attracted Alicia so wildly to Nash. She yearned for someone who could take care of her, though. And for some time it appeared that they would marry.

  At the time that Nash left Princeton, Alicia was still working at RCA. Her mother, who moved in with her after the death of her husband, kept house for Alicia as she had done in Cambridge years earlier. Mrs. Larde also helped take care of Johnny, who had grown into an extremely bright and altogether adorable boy, tall, sweet-faced, and still very blond.

  Things started to unravel when Alicia suddenly lost her job at RCA. The company’s space division had been periodically buffeted by contract cancellations and layoffs. Alicia, who was frequently absent, often late, or simply too depressed when she was at work to be effective, was particularly vulnerable.7 She found another job fairly quickly, but it didn’t last. She could not seem to get on her feet again. For a grim period that lasted several years, she drifted from job to job and was frequently unemployed, a fact to which she alluded obliquely in her letter to Martha. Alicia was determined to get a job that matched her educational credentials, but few aerospace companies were hiring female engineers in that era, and Alicia was turned down for more than thirty such positions. “There were times when I was going to interviews every day all day,” she later recalled. “But I never got any offers. It was very depressing.”8

  Things got so bad after her unemployment benefits ran out that she was forced to go on welfare and to use food stamps.9 Her hope of marrying Moore came to nothing. He backed away, finding the prospect of taking on a stepson as well as a wife “too much.”10 Her mother “held everything together,” as Alicia later said, but it was very hard.11

  Alicia and her mother were forced to give up the nice house they were sharing on Franklin Street in the heart of Princeton proper.12 Alicia found a tiny nineteenth-century frame house in Princeton Junction, long ago swathed in Insulbrick, to rent. It was in poor repair, but cheap and convenient for commuting, since it was literally across the road from the railroad station. Johnny, who was twelve by this time, was extremely unhappy over having to leave his school and friends. But Alicia had little choice.

  Nash moved to the Junction with her, contributing some of his small income from the trust left by Virginia to pay the rent and household expenses. Alicia referred to him as a “boarder,”13 but in fact they ate meals together and Nash spent a fair amount of time with Johnny, sometimes helping him with his homework or playing chess with him.14 Alicia had taught her son, who would later become a chess master, how to play.

  Nash was very withdrawn, very quiet. “He was not a troublemaker,” Odette recalled.15 Haphazardly dressed, his gray hair long, his expression blank, he would wander up and down Nassau Street. Teenagers would taunt him, planting themselves in his path, waving their arms, shouting rude things directly into his startled face.16 Alicia was a proud woman, always sensitive to appearances; her loyalty and compassion outweighed her concern for what others might think.

  She was patient. She bit her tongue. She made very few demands on Nash. Looking back, her gentle manner probably played a substantial role in his recovery.17 Had she threatened or pressured Nash, he very well might have wound up on the street. This point was made by Richard Keefe, a psychiatrist at Duke University. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which held that families of the mentally ill should “let it all out,” more recent research suggests that people with schizophrenia are no more able to tolerate the expression of strong emotion than patients recovering from a heart attack or cancer surgery.18

  Alicia is a scrupulously honest person. She says of the role she has played in protecting Nash simply, “Sometimes you don’t plan things. They just turn out that way.”19 She does see that it helped him, though, saying, “Did the way he was treated help him get better? Oh, I think so. He had his room and board, his basic needs taken care of, and not too much pressure. That’s what you need: being taken care of and not too much pressure.”

  In 1973, Alicia’s circumstances started to improve. She had filed a sex discrimination suit against Boeing, one of the companies that had turned her down for a job in the late 1960s.20 It was a feisty thing to do, and the suit, which eventually netted her a modest out-of-court settlement, helped boost her morale. She got a programming job at Con Edison in New York City, where her old college friend Joyce Davis was working.21 It wasn’t easy. She got up every morning at four-thirty to make the two-hour commute from Princeton Junction to Con Edison’s Gramercy Park headquarters in downtown Manhattan and came home well past eight every evening. She often felt frustrated by the work itself, her boss, Anna Bailey, another acquaintance from MIT, recalled. She felt that her brains and education weren’t being sufficiently recognized.22

  But now that she was making a good salary again, she was able to enroll Johnny in the Peddie School, a private preparatory school in Hightstown, about ten miles west of Princeton.23 Johnny, who had become moody and difficult at home, was nonetheless an excellent student. By the end of his sophomo
re year, when he won a Rensselaer Medal in a national competition, he had a 4.0 average.24 And he was showing a marked interest in and a talent for mathematics. “John talked to Johnny a lot about mathematics when he was growing up,” Alicia later recalled, adding, “If his father hadn’t been a mathematician, Johnny would have been a doctor or a lawyer.”25

  Johnny started hanging around the Fine Hall common room to play chess and go and talk mathematics with various graduate students. Amir Assadi remembered him as “gentle, a nice kid, a tiny bit awkward, like other mathematicians … until they find their context.”26 Johnny was obviously gifted. Assadi recalled that he was studying “very high-powered math books.” Sometimes father and son would come to Fine Hall together. Johnny didn’t seem embarrassed, but neither did he ever refer to his father when talking to the students. Assadi recalled, “He disappeared one day. When he came back he’d shaved his head and had become a born-again Christian.”

  In 1976, Solomon Leader was visiting his friend Harry Gonshor — the same Gonshor who had been part of Nash’s crowd at MIT, now a professor on the Princeton faculty — at the Carrier Clinic.27 As the orderly ushered Leader through the locked door of the ward, a tall, wild-eyed young man suddenly loomed before him. “Do you know who I am?” he shouted right into Leader’s face. “Do you want to be saved?” Leader noticed he was clutching a Bible. Afterward, Gonshor told him that the man was the son of John Nash.

  By the time Johnny was hospitalized at Carrier at his mother’s initiative, he had been truant for nearly a year.28 He had dropped all of his old friends. For many months, he had refused to leave his room. When his mother or grandmother tried to intervene, he lashed out at them. He had begun reading the Bible obsessively and talking about redemption and damnation.29 Soon he began hanging out with members of a small fundamentalist sect, the Way Ministry, and handing out leaflets and buttonholing strangers on street corners in Princeton.30

  It was not immediately obvious to Alicia or her mother that Johnny’s troubling behavior was anything more than an outburst of adolescent rebellion. In time it became clear that Johnny was hearing voices and that he believed that he was a great religious figure. When Alicia tried to get him into treatment, he ran away. He stayed away for weeks and Alicia had to go to the police for help in tracking him down and bringing him back. And then, when her son was in Carrier, Alicia learned that the thing she most dreaded, had dreaded all along, was true. Her brilliant son was suffering from the same illness as his father.31

  Johnny seemed to improve quickly after the first hospitalization. But he did not return to school for three years.32 Alicia never talked about him at work except when she was forced to ask for time off.33 She never told anyone at Con Edison that John Nash was living with her again. Like Virginia Nash a decade earlier, she treated her woes as her private sorrow. She tried to cope with Johnny’s refusal to take medication, his constant running away, his periodic need for hospitalization, and the terrible drain on her slender resources without giving in to her own depression. “You sacrifice so much, you put so much into it, and then it all goes,” she said later.34

  As the trouble with Johnny overwhelmed her, Alicia turned to her friend Gaby Borel for support. Gaby accompanied Alicia on visits to Carrier, and later to Trenton Psychiatric, talked with her on the telephone, and invited the Nashes to dinner.35 Moore confirms this: “Gaby is the closest female friend Alicia has around here. Gaby is very good. Nobody else was around consistently.”36

  Gaby’s tribute to Alicia’s stoicism holds true to this day: “At first, you cannot tell anything about her. You do not realize who she is. She has put a sort of shield around herself. But she is a very brave and faithful woman.”37

  In 1977, John David Stier made a cameo appearance in Nash’s life.38 Father and son had been in touch by letter at least since 1971, John David’s senior year in high school. Nash had become quite concerned about his son’s college plans, and Alicia had written Arthur Mattuck to ask him to advise John David.39 John David enrolled at Bunker Hill Community College and supported himself by working as an orderly.40 Four years later, he applied to a number of four-year schools, was offered several scholarships, and in 1976 transferred to Amherst, one of the most elite liberal arts colleges in the country.

  That fall Norton Starr, a professor of mathematics at Amherst, hired a student to do some yard work for him.41 Afterward, Starr invited him into the house for a cold drink. As they chatted, the young man learned that Starr had done his Ph.D. at MIT. Had he known a mathematician there named John Nash? Only by sight and reputation, Starr replied. “He’s my father,” the young man said. Starr looked at him searchingly. He looked at the young man again. “My God, you do look just like him,” he said. Shortly afterward, John David drove down to Princeton to visit his father. Alicia was friendly. He met his brother, Johnny, for the first time.

  • • •

  The following Christmas, Johnny came up to Boston to stay with Eleanor and John David. Eleanor welcomed him warmly, cooked him nice meals, fussed over him. He came without a winter coat, so Eleanor bought him a down jacket. Johnny was well-behaved around his older brother, but could turn nasty when he was alone with her. At the end of the holiday, Eleanor recalled, “he didn’t want to let John go. So John took him back to school with him.”42

  The reunion between Nash and John Stier did not lead to a lasting reconciliation. “It just sort of petered out,” John Stier recalled. His father was more interested in talking about his own problems than his son’s. “When I asked him for advice, he’d answer with something about Nixon,” he said.43 Nash’s confidences were unsettling. Nash had some idea that his son, having attained his majority, would play “an essential and significant personal role in my personal long-awaited ’gay liberation.’ ”44 He had waited a long time, as he said at the time, to “tell him about my life and problems and life history.” Eleanor Stier recalled that he did so.45 John David eventually stopped returning his father’s calls. The two would not meet again for seventeen years. “I haven’t always wanted to have contact with him,” John David said. “Having a mentally ill father was rather disturbing.”

  More often than commonly realized, schizophrenia can be an episodic illness, especially in the years following its initial onset. Periods of acute psychosis may be interspersed with periods of relative calm in which symptoms diminish dramatically either as a result of treatment or spontaneously.46 This was the pattern for Johnny.

  In 1979, on the first day of the fall semester at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Kenneth Fields, the chairman of the mathematics department, was asked to talk with a freshman who had made a pest of himself at the math orientation session, questioning everything and protesting that the presentation was not rigorous enough.47 “I don’t need to take calculus,” the young man said when he arrived in Fields’s office. “I’m going to major in math.” Since Rider rarely attracted students with an interest or background in mathematics, Fields was intrigued. Quizzing the student as they walked around the campus, he quickly concluded that no mathematics course at Rider was advanced enough for this young man and offered to tutor him personally. “By the way, what’s your name?” he finally asked. “John Nash,” the student replied. Seeing Fields’s look of astonishment, he added, “You may have heard of my father. He solved the embedding theorem.” For Fields, who had been an undergraduate at MIT in the 1960s and was familiar with the Nash legend, it was an amazing moment.

  Fields proceeded to meet with Johnny weekly. Johnny took a while to buckle down, but he was soon plowing through difficult texts in linear algebra, advanced calculus, and differential geometry. “It was obvious that he was a real mathematician,” said Fields. He was also bright and friendly, a fundamentalist Christian who made friends with other religious, intellectually precocious students. He talked to Fields, who has several relatives who suffer from schizophrenia, about his mental illness. Occasionally he would do a riff on extraterrestrials, and on one occasion he threatened a hist
ory professor. By and large, said Fields, Johnny’s symptoms seemed to be under control. He got straight As and won an academic prize in his sophomore year.

  Fields soon concluded that Johnny was wasting his time at Rider and belonged in a Ph.D. program. In 1981, despite his lack of a high school or college diploma, Johnny was accepted at Rutgers University with a full scholarship. Once there, he breezed through his qualifying examinations. From time to time he would threaten to drop out of school and Fields would get frantic calls from Alicia begging him to talk to Johnny. When Fields did, Johnny would answer, “Why do I have to do anything? My father doesn’t have to do anything. My mother supports him. Why can’t she support me?” But he didn’t drop out. He succeeded brilliantly.

  Melvyn Nathanson, then a professor of mathematics at Rutgers, liked to assign what he called simple versions of unsolved classical problems in his graduate course on number theory.48 “I gave one the first week,” he recalled. “Johnny came back with the solution the following week. I gave another one that week and a week later he had that solution too. It was extraordinary.” Johnny wrote a joint paper with Nathanson that became the first chapter of his dissertation.49 He then wrote a second paper on his own, which Nathanson called “beautiful” and which also became part of the thesis.50 His third paper was an important generalization of a theorem proved by Paul Erdos in the 1930s for a special case of so-called B sequences.51 Neither Erdos nor anyone else had succeeded in proving that the theorem held for other sequences, and Johnny’s successful attack on the problem would generate a flurry of papers by other number theorists.

  When Johnny got his Ph.D. from Rutgers in 1985, said Nathanson, he seemed poised for a long and productive career as a first-rate research mathematician. An offer of a one-year instructorship at Marshall University in West Virginia seemed like the first of the usual steps that eventually carry new mathematics Ph.D.’s to tenured positions somewhere in academia. While Johnny was in graduate school, Alicia Larde returned to El Salvador for good and Alicia Nash moved to a job as a computer programmer at New Jersey Transit in Newark.52 Things seemed rather hopeful.