A Beautiful Mind (34 page)

As these initial intimate connections multiplied and became ever-present elements in his consciousness, Nash’s formerly solitary but coherent existence became at once richer and more discontinuous, separate and parallel existences that reflected an emerging adult but a fragmented and contradictory self. The others on whom he now depended occupied different compartments of his life and often, for long periods, knew nothing of one another or of the nature of the others’ relation to Nash. Only Nash was in the know. His life resembled a play in which successive scenes are acted by only two characters. One character is in all of them while the second changes from scene to scene. The second character seems no longer to exist when he disappears from the boards.

More than a decade later, when he was already ill, Nash himself provided a metaphor for his life during the MIT years, a metaphor that he couched in his first language, the language of mathematics:
B
squared -I- RTF = 0, a “very personal” equation Nash included in a 1968 postcard that begins, “Dear Mattuck, Thinking that you will understand this concept better than most I wish to explain …” The equation represents a three-dimensional hyperspace, which has a singularity at the origin, in four-dimensional space. Nash is the singularity, the special point, and the other variables are people who affected him — in this instance, men with whom he had friendships or relationships.
¹

Inevitably, the accretion of significant relationships with others brings with it demands for integration — the necessity of having to choose. Nash had little desire to choose one emotional connection over another. By not choosing, he could avoid, or at least minimize, both dependence and demands. To satisfy his own emotional needs for connectedness meant he inevitably made others look to him to satisfy theirs. Yet while he was preoccupied with the effect of others on him, he mostly ignored — indeed, seemed unable to grasp — his effect on others. He had in fact no more sense of “the Other” than does a very young child. He wished the others to be satisfied with his genius —“I thought I was such a great mathematician,” he was to say ruefully, looking back at this period — and, of course, to some extent they were satisfied. But when people inevitably wanted or needed more he found the strains unbearable.

22
A Special Friendship
Santa Monica, Summer 1952

Away from contact with a few special sorts of individuals I am lost, lost completely in the wilderness… so, so, so, it’s been a hard life in many ways.

— J
OHN
F
ORBES
N
ASH
, J
R
., 1965

A
FTER
J
OHN
N
ASH LOST EVERYTHING
— family, career, the ability to think about mathematics — he confided in a letter to his sister Martha that only three individuals in his life had ever brought him any real happiness: three “special sorts of individuals” with whom he had formed “special friendships.”
¹

Had Martha seen the Beatles’ film
A Hard Days Night?
“They seem very colorful and amusing,” he wrote. “Of course they are much younger like the sort of person I’ve mentioned… . I feel often as if I were similar to the girls that love the Beatles so wildly since they seem so attractive and amusing to me.”
²

Nash’s first loves were one-sided and unrequited. “Nash was always forming intense friendships with men that had a romantic quality,” Donald Newman observed in 1996. “He was very adolescent, always with the boys.”
³
Some were inclined to see Nash’s infatuations’ as “experiments,” or simple expressions of his immaturity — a view that he may well have held himself. “He played around with it because he liked to play around. He was very experimental, very try-outish,” said Newman in 1996. “Mostly he just kissed.”
⁴

Newman, who liked to joke about his past and future female conquests,
⁵
had firsthand knowledge because Nash was, for a time, infatuated with him — with predictable results. “He used to talk about how Donald looked all the time,” Mrs. Newman said in 1996.
⁶
Newman recalled: “He tried fiddling around with me. I was driving my car when he came on to me.” D.J. and Nash were cruising around in Newman’s white Thunderbird when Nash kissed him on the mouth. DJ . just laughed it off.
⁷

Nash’s first experience of mutual attraction — “special friendships,” as he called them — occurred in Santa Monica.
⁸
It was the very end of the summer of 1952,
after Milnor had moved out and Martha had flown back home. The encounter must have been fleeting, coming in the last days of August, just before he was due to leave for Boston, and very furtive. But it was nonetheless decisive because for the first time he found not rejection but reciprocity. Thus it was the first real step out of his extreme emotional isolation and the world of relationships that were purely imaginary, a first taste of intimacy, not entirely happy, no doubt, but suggestive of hitherto unsuspected satisfactions.

The only traces of Nash’s friendship with Ervin Thorson that remain are his description of him as a “special” friend in his 1965 letter and a series of elliptical references to “T” in letters in the late 1960s.
⁹
Few if any of Nash’s acquaintances met him; Martha recalled a friend of Nash’s who once spent the night on the couch of their Georgina Avenue apartment, but not his name.
¹⁰

Thorson, who died in 1992, was thirty years old in 1952.
¹¹
He was a native Californian of Scandinavian extraction. Nash described him to Martha as an aerospace engineer, but he may in fact have been an applied mathematician. He had been a meteorologist in the Army Air Corps during the war. Afterward, he earned a master’s degree in mathematics at UCLA and went to Douglas Aircraft in 1951, just a few years after Douglas had spun off its R&D division to form the RAND Corporation.
¹²
At that time, Douglas was mapping the future of interplanetary travel for the Pentagon, and Thorson, who eventually led a research team, was very likely involved in these efforts.
¹³
His great passion, conceived twenty years before the United States launched
Viking,
was the dream of exploring Mars, his sister Nelda Troutman recalled in 1997.

Thorson was, his sister said, “very high strung, not a social person at all, very bright, knew a lot, very very academic.”
¹⁴
Nash could easily have met him — given the close ties between Douglas and RAND, which was also heavily involved in studies of space exploration — at a talk or seminar, or perhaps even at one of the parties that John Williams, the head of RAND’s mathematics department, gave.

If Thorson, who never married, was a homosexual, his surviving sister did not know it.
¹⁵
With his family, at any rate, he was unusually closemouthed, not just about his work, which was highly classified, but about all aspects of his personal life.
¹⁶
Given the mounting pressure to root out homosexuals in the defense industry during the McCarthy era, Thorson would have had to practice great discretion in any case; his career at Douglas was to last for another fifteen years.
¹⁷
When he abruptly resigned from Douglas in 1968, he apparently did so at the age of forty-seven because he feared dying. Several of his colleagues had recently died of heart attacks and Thorson, who had some sort of mild heart condition, decided he couldn’t cope with the stress and overwork anymore. He moved back to his hometown of Pomona and became a virtual recluse except for an active involvement in the Lutheran church, living with his parents for the next twenty-five years until his death.

Whether Nash and Thorson saw each other again when Nash returned to Santa Monica for a third summer two years later or on one of his trips to Santa Monica during his illness in the early and mid-1960s is not known. But Nash continued to think of Thorson and to refer to him obliquely until at least 1968.

23
Eleanor

These mathematicians are very exclusive. They occupy a very high terrain, from which they look down on everyone else. That makes their relationships with women quite problematic.

— Z
IPPORAH
L
EVINSON
, 1995

N
ASH WAS BACK
in Boston in his old quarters by Labor Day. Number 407 Beacon Street was an imposing brick row house built before the turn of the century facing the Charles.
¹
Its current owner, Mrs. Austin Grant, was the widow of a Back Bay physician. She liked to point out her home’s opulent features to her lodgers, such as the carriage room where its original owners once waited for their horsedrawn carriages to be brought around. And she often bemoaned the neighborhood’s decline. “Don’t leave your bags on the street while you come in; they might not be there when you come out again,” she said to Nash the day he moved in.

Nash occupied one of the front bedrooms, a large, comfortably furnished room with a fireplace. Lindsay Russell, a young engineer who had recently graduated from MIT, lived next door. Mrs. Grant regularly took Russell aside to remark on Nash’s idiosyncrasies. Nash acquired a huge set of barbells and began lifting weights. When Nash made the dining-room chandelier, which hung directly below his bedroom, vibrate with his exertions, Mrs. Grant would say, “What does he think this is? A gymnasium?” Nash’s mail also received comment, particularly the postcards from his mother expressing the hope, as Russell recalled, that “in addition to the pursuit of mathematics and other intellectual pursuits, he would make friends and engage in social activities.”

With one single exception, however, Nash never had any visitors. Russell remembers once waking up in the middle of the night. There was a sound coming from Nash’s room. It was a giggle. The giggle of a woman.

The pretty, dark-haired nurse who admitted Nash to the hospital on the second Thursday in September was named Eleanor.
²
He was due to have some varicose veins removed
³
and seemed awfully nervous — and young, more like a student than a professor.
⁴
Eleanor knew his doctor to be a notorious incompetent.
⁵
And a drunk. She was curious how an MIT professor had wound up with a quack like that. Nash told her that he’d chosen the doctor at random by closing his eyes and running his
fingers down the list’ of physicians in the lobby. She felt, she recalled, rather protective of him.

Nash was on the ward for only a couple of days. Eleanor thought he was cute and sort of sweet, but when he left, she hardly expected to see him again. Somehow or other, they bumped into each other on the street not long afterward. It was a Saturday afternoon and Eleanor was on her way to meet a friend to buy herself a good winter coat. “I didn’t chase him. He chased me. He kept pestering me,” Eleanor recalled. “I wound up going shopping with him.”
⁶

They walked over to Jay’s Department Store together. Nash followed her up to the coat department, which was on the second floor. He kept staring at her, not saying much, waiting for her to choose a coat. She started to enjoy herself. “John was very attractive,” Eleanor recalled, laughing. “When I saw him, I thought he was something special.” She began pointing to the ones she wanted to try on, and with elaborate courtesy he held out each coat for her to slip into. She thought she liked a purple one best. Nash started clowning around. He pretended he was her tailor, flung himself on his knees before her, loudly made believe he was measuring her coat for alterations — and generally made a fool of himself. Embarrassed, Eleanor blushed, protested, and tried to hush him up. “Get up quick!” she whispered. Secretly, however, she was quite thrilled.

At twenty-nine, Eleanor was an attractive, hardworking, tenderhearted woman. A friend of Nash’s later described her as “dark and pretty, quite shy, a good person” of “ordinary intelligence,” with “simple manners” and “a very peculiar way of speaking.”
⁷
By that the friend meant that her accent was pure New England. Life hadn’t been very kind to her. She’d grown up in Jamaica Plain, a dreary blue-collar section of Boston.
⁸
She’d had a hardscrabble childhood, a harsh mother, and the burden, far too heavy for a young girl, of caring for a younger half-brother. She missed a great deal of school as a result. She was, on the whole, grateful to be able to take up a profession, practical nursing, that she enjoyed and that provided her with steady work. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Eleanor was eighteen. Her early experiences endowed her with a soft heart. She had a deep appreciation, which stayed with her all her life, for what it was like to be poor and vulnerable. It brought out a tenderness in her, toward patients, neighbors, other people’s children, and stray animals. She was the kind of woman who, later in life, would literally give coats to strangers and invite people who had nowhere else to stay into her home.
⁹

Shy and lacking confidence, Eleanor also tended to be suspicious and guarded, especially around men. She said, in an interview, “I wasn’t a bad girl. I didn’t run around with a lot of men. In fact, I was really good. I was a little afraid of men. I didn’t want to be involved with them sexually. I thought it was kind of disgusting.”
¹⁰
But Nash disarmed her from the start. Yes, he was an MIT professor, yes, he came from an upper-class sort of background, yes, he did top-secret work for the government. But he was also very young, five years Eleanor’s junior, and
there was a sweetness about him, a lack of guile. She sensed, moreover, that he was, if anything, less experienced than she was.