A Beautiful Mind (51 page)

Alfred H. Stanton had been charged by McLean’s trustees in 1954 to modernize McLean.
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Before Stanton arrived in the early 1950s, as Kahne recalled, “The nurses were spending all their time classifying fur coats and writing thank you letters.” Moreover, patients spent most of the day lying in bed as if they were suffering from some physical ailment. Stanton hired a large number of nurses and psychiatrists, expanded the medical residency program, instituted an intensive psychotherapy program, and organized social, educational, and work activities.

McLean’s treatment philosophy boiled down to the notion that “it was impossible to be social and crazy at the same time.”
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The staff was dedicated to encouraging all new patients, no matter what the diagnosis, to relate. Along with this “milieu” therapy, as it was called, intensive, five-day-a-week psychoanalysis was the main mode of treatment.
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Nobody thought of Thorazine as anything but an initial aid in preparing the way for psychotherapy. “Stanton’s attitudes harked back to early days of ’moral treatment’ of patients,” said Kahne, “which included having expectations of them and having staff become close to patients. The idea was to involve patients in decision-making and to abolish some of the hierarchy of medical institutions.”

Stanton was a student of Harry Stack Sullivan, a leading American disciple of Freud, and had helped run Chestnut Lodge, a private hospital outside Washington, D.C., where psychoanalysis was being used to treat psychotic disorders. He also put an end to the use of lobotomies and shock therapies at McLean. “Freudianism was pretty strong at McLean,” said Brenner. “It was the dawn of psychopharmacology. We were desperately creating cures in all good faith.”
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•  •  •

“Our knowledge of schizophrenia was negligible,” Fagi remembered sadlv. “I was a dope. All he needed was a good shrink and support and everything would be over soon. Everyone at MIT pretended that Nash was going to recover in a flash. At McLean they would cure him with advanced therapy. Norbert was the only one who sensed the tragedy. He expressed his heartfelt sympathy. ’It’s very difficult,’ he said to Virginia. She was tearful, shaken, trying to keep herself in check. She wanted to know as much as possible. Wiener’s eyes filled up with tears.”
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Isadore Singer and Alicia came to visit Nash one evening. There was no one else in the large, rectangular common room. Singer recalled the scene:

We were the only visitors. Robert Lowell, the poet, walked in, manic as hell. He sees this very pregnant woman. He looks at her and starts quoting the begat sequences in the Bible. Then he started spinning quotes with the word anointed. He decided to lecture us on the meaning of anointed in all the ways it was used in the King James version of the Bible. In the end I decided that every word in the English language was a personal friend of his. Nash was very quiet and almost not moving. He wasn’t even listening. He was totally withdrawn. Mrs. Nash was sitting there, pregnant as hell. I focused mostly on the wife and the coming child. I’ve had that picture in my mind for years. “It’s all over for him,” I thought.’
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Perhaps it was the Thorazine, perhaps the confinement, perhaps the overwhelming desire to regain his liberty, but Nash’s acute psychosis disappeared within a matter of weeks.
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On the ward, he behaved like a model patient — quietly, politely, tolerantly — and was soon granted all sorts of privileges, including the freedom to walk around McLean’s grounds without supervision.’
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In his therapy sessions, he stopped talking about going to Europe to form a world government and no longer referred to himself as the leader of the peace movement. He made no threats of any kind, except divorce. He readily agreed, if asked, that he had written a great many crazy letters, had made a nuisance of himself to the university authorities, had otherwise behaved in bizarre ways. He denied emphatically that he was experiencing any hallucinations. The two young residents who were assigned to him — Egbert Mueller, a highly regarded German psychoanalyst, and Jacqueline Gauthier, a more junior French-Canadian — noted that his symptoms had all but “disappeared,” although privately they agreed that he was likely merely concealing them.
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This was so. In his heart, Nash felt that he was a political prisoner and he was determined to escape his jailers as quickly as possible. With the help of other patients, he quickly figured out the rules of the game. If a patient wished to leave, the law placed the burden of proof on the hospital. Nash’s psychiatrists would have had to show convincingly that he was likely to harm himself or someone else. In practice, a patient who was hallucinating or was obviously delusional wouldn’t
stand much chance of getting out. (Later, he would take the position, with respect to his younger son, that it was quite possible for a so-called schizophrenic to control both his delusions and his behavior.)
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He hired a lawyer, Bernard E. Bradley, to petition for his release.
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Bradley worked in the public defender’s office at the time, but Nash, who was hardly destitute, was likely his private client. At Nash’s suggestion, Bradley hired A. Warren Stearns, a prominent Boston psychiatrist, to examine him and to support his petition for release. Stearns was a prominent researcher as well as a major figure in state mental health and prison policy.
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He had, at various points in his long career, been dean of Tufts medical school, director of prisons for the state of Massachusetts, and associate mental health commissioner. At the time Nash had Bradley contact him, he was founder and head of Tufts’s sociology department. His views on crime anticipated those of James Q. Wilson: He held that most crimes were committed by a small slice of the population, namely, young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three. His book on the subject,
The Personality of Criminals,
was considered a classic. Stearns had been involved in all sorts of famous criminal cases, including that of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Stearns went to visit Nash twice, once on May 14 when he was able to see Nash for only a few minutes and a second time, a few days later, when the two men talked for some time. Nash neither spoke of any delusions nor admitted to hallucinations. “I couldn’t say he’s psychotic,” Stearns wrote to Bradley. “He was straightforward and frank and of course is anxious to get out.”
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Around May 20, ten days before the second, forty-day, phase of Nash’s commitment was due to expire, Stearns went back a third time to study the commitment papers and the record of Nash’s hospital stay.
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He talked with Mueller and Gauthier, who — in spite of their conviction that Nash was merely concealing his delusions — admitted that they “doubted Nash was committable” any longer.
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“I still do not know what is the matter with him,” Stearns, who was being paid one hundred dollars for rendering his opinion, wrote to Bradley on May 20.
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He added, however, “I certainly recommend his discharge.”
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Mueller and Gauthier nonetheless recommended that Nash remain in the hospital. At that point, Alicia told them she was unwilling to sign another petition for commitment although she agreed to make arrangements for her husband to be treated by a psychiatrist after his release from McLean.
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Accordingly, on May 28, after fifty days of incarceration, just over one week after the birth of his son, Nash was once again a free man.

37
Mad Hatter’s Tea
May — June 1959

A
FTER
N
ASH WAS COMMITTED,
Alicia couldn’t face staying at the West Medford house by herself, and in any case, the lease was due to expire May 1. Alicia telephoned Emma and asked whether they might live together.
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“One day Alicia just called me up and said she wanted to share an apartment with me,” Emma recalled. At first Emma was reluctant because she was afraid Alicia would insist on their finding an expensive place, but then it occurred to her that they might rent a house owned by their mutual friend Margaret Hughes. So, on May 1, Alicia and Emma moved into a tiny saltbox at 18½ Tremont Street, in Cambridge, halfway between MIT and Harvard.

Alicia indulged in no tears, hysteria, or unnecessary confidences. She accepted what help she could get. She had very little faith that anyone would come to her aid. She was well aware that everyone, including close friends like Arthur Mattuck, considered Nash her responsibility. She defended herself against criticism of her decision to commit Nash, but only when pressed, as, for example, by Gertrude Moser, who, after visiting Nash at McLean, began to doubt that he was insane and demanded that Alicia justify her decision to have Nash locked up. For a young woman whose husband was in a lunatic asylum, threatening to hurt her, to divorce her, and to take their money and run off to Europe, she maintained a remarkable calm. The apparently flighty young woman who had, in the throes of lovesickness, sat in the science fiction section of the library, hoping her idol would come in, had reserves of strength that she would need to draw on the rest of her life.

Another young woman might have thrown up her hands and gone home to her parents. But Alicia told herself that John’s mind and career could be saved. She focused on the crisis at hand as best she could and put herself in the capable hands of Emma and Fagi Levinson. Her ability to focus on her own agenda, her iron self-control, sense of entitlement, deep conviction that her own future depended on this man — and perhaps also the combined energy, optimism, and ignorance of youth — all came to her aid in this very dark hour. All her attention was focused on a single task — not the task of giving birth, but that of saving John Nash.

“She never talked about the baby, only about Nash,” Emma recalled. “She
regarded the pregnancy as a problem. Just a danger to Nash. She was worried that it would interfere with her ability to take care of [him].”

There was no waiting nursery, no layette, no dog-eared copy of Dr. Spock’s new best-selling baby manual sitting on the night table. Alicia had no time or attention for such things. She wished for the pregnancy to end, but she had not looked beyond it. She had vaguely assumed that her mother would come and help her, but hadn’t bothered to make the arrangements. Nor had she asked Virginia to come again. She barely paid any attention at all, in fact. Even after the baby kept her awake nights with its vigorous kicks, she never talked about it.

Emma recalled, “The observation period [with Nash at McLean] was coming to an end. The psychiatrists were telling Alicia that the crisis was precipitated by her pregnancy. She asked her doctor to induce her labor. He wouldn’t.”

On May 20, when Alicia’s labor began, Nash was still in McLean and she was still living with Emma at 18½ Tremont Street. The pains began in her lower back. Eventually she crawled into bed. Emma was there. The two of them couldn’t decide whether the labor had started. Later when her sister was about to give birth, Emma would buy an obstetrics textbook and discover that back labor was in fact quite common. But at that moment, the two MIT women were in the dark about such things. Finally, when the pains became more insistent and closer together, either she or Alicia telephoned Fagi, who confirmed that, yes, indeed, it sounded like labor and said she would jump into her car right away and drive over. She did and, after taking one look at Alicia, who was by now looking quite scared, told her to get into the car and they’d drive to the hospital immediately.

Alicia gave birth to a baby boy that night. He weighed nearly nine pounds and was 21.5 inches long. She did not give the baby a name. She felt that the naming would have to wait until his father was well enough to help choose one. As it happened, the baby remained nameless for nearly a year.

Alicia had still to bear Nash’s anger. The day after the birth, Nash came to the Boston Lying-in Hospital to visit his wife and new son, having gotten permission to leave McLean for the evening. Although Fagi Levinson does not remember doing so, one imagines that it was she who arranged this. Another friend came to see Alicia halfway through Nash’s visit. Alicia was lying in bed, looking tiny and wan. Nash was sitting beside her. Her dinner tray was on the table next to the bed. At some point, Nash carefully took the napkin, stood up, and went over to a sign on the wall with the name of the hospital on it and covered up the “In” in the hospital’s name so that it read “Boston Lying Hospital.” The visitor recalled, “The implication was that it was Alicia who was lying. She observed what he was doing. I made no comment. I certainly didn’t want the situation to escalate into speech.”
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Nash’s sense of humor had in no way deserted him. On the afternoon of his release one week later, Nash went directly to the mathematics common room. He strolled in, greeted everyone, and said he’d come straight from McLean. “It was a wonderful place,” he told the graduate students and professors who were sipping tea. “They had everything but one: freedom!”
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A day or two later, Nash was back in the department. He carefully posted hand-printed notices in the hallways announcing a “coming out party.” The notices read: “All the people who are important in my life are invited! YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” Over the following week, he went around to everyone’s office and asked each member of the department if he were coming. If the person said “Yes,” he asked them “Why?”
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He referred to the party as a “Mad Hatter’s Tea,” and he asked people to dress up in costumes.
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Whether the event was his idea or Alicia’s isn’t clear. Fagi Levinson, Norman’s wife, thought that Alicia — who was home with a week-old baby — had organized it for the purpose of thanking all of those who had visited Nash in McLean.
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One graduate student, who said he went to New York that weekend to avoid it, remembered that it was held at Mattuck’s apartment. Mattuck doesn’t remember it at all. Very likely, it took place at 18½ Tremont Street. Fagi remembered it as a “big party.”