Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (4 page)

Despite her rising position in the Princeton social hierarchy when
Einstein left her behind in Newark, my mother was still very young, in her early twenties, and inexperienced in the ways of her newly adopted homeland. It is not surprising, therefore, that when she had doubts about Princeton's small-town hospital as a place in which to deliver her firstborn, she should have turned for advice to the British-born wife of one of her husband's colleagues, Elizabeth Mary Dixon Richardson Veblen. Oswald Veblen, nephew of the famed social critic Thorstein Veblen and one of the leading lights of Princeton's mathematics department before he joined the IAS faculty, was my father's American mentor. He was responsible for Princeton offering my father a one-term per year lectureship in mathematical physics in 1930–32 and, when the IAS was founded, pushed strongly and ultimately successfully for his young protégé's appointment as one of the founding five professors there.

Mrs. Veblen, a rather formidable grande dame with solid British tweeds and a clipped English accent to match the formality of her name, was herself childless, but she recommended that my mother put herself in the care of her own obstetrician-gynecologist, an elegant and expensive Manhattan physician with his own private hospital on Madison Avenue. And so it was that, when she went into labor, my mother was driven to New York, sitting on a pile of towels, to give birth at The Harbor, the name that appears on my birth certificate. By the time my birthplace was discovered to have been operating as an abortion mill and was permanently closed down, my mother, divorced and remarried and living in Washington, DC, with her new husband, was no longer under Elizabeth Veblen's tutelage and well on her way to becoming a grande dame in her own right.

My own globetrotting in the wake of my peripatetic parents began early. I was born on March 6, 1935; my US passport, issued on April 8 of that year (I had to have my own because the processing of my parents' applications for US citizenship had not yet been completed), bears a photograph of a virtually bald, pug-nosed infant, pudgy hands clasped in the classical manner of newborns. Inside are the entry stamps of Hungary, Austria, Germany, and France, dated from 1935 to 1938. During those first three years of my life I crossed the Atlantic eight times, making the annual round trip in the first-class cabins of such luxury ocean liners as the
Queen Mary
and the
Normandie.
Both of these ships, the true
queens of their day, came to unworthy ends. The
Queen Mary
became a tourist attraction in Long Beach, California, subjected to many changes of ownership and at least one bankruptcy. The
Normandie
, caught in New York Harbor when war broke out in Europe, was being converted into an American troopship when she caught fire, sank, and was ultimately scrapped.

Apparently my career as an enfant terrible also began early. According to my mother, when a ship's steward attempted to separate my one-year-old self from my parents to take me off to the ship's nursery, I bit him, hard. When I reappeared the next summer, a year older and with more teeth, he was heard to mutter, “Oh no, not her again.”

During these years, the clouds were darkening, both over Europe and over my parents' marriage. As Hitler consolidated his position in Germany and then embarked on his planned European expansion with the annexation of Austria in 1938, my father's letters, particularly those to his close friend the Hungarian physicist Rudolf Ortvay, grew increasingly pessimistic. “I don't believe that the catastrophe will be avoidable,”
⁸
he wrote in 1938 and added, presciently, “That the U.S.A. will end up again intervening on the side of England (when an English victory is not achievable otherwise) I find indubitable.”
⁹
A year later he wrote, “It is, for instance, a total misunderstanding of the U.S.A. to believe that it intervened in the World War [World War I] from such (imperialist) motives…I admit that the USA could be imperialist. I would not be surprised if in 20 years it would become so. But today it is not yet.”
¹⁰

This conviction that the United States alone could save the otherwise doomed European civilization from totalitarianism, whether the threat came from the right or the left, and avert the ushering in of a new Dark Ages stayed with my father throughout his life. Reinforced by the events of World War II and the Cold War that followed, it was a major motivation, along with a lively personal ambition, for his deep involvement in military matters. It also underlay his extremely hard-line ideas on US policy toward the Soviet Union, which included the possibility of preventive war on the latter. He made his feelings crystal clear in an interview with
Life
magazine: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?”
¹¹
This view sounds incredibly heartless and immoral today, but it should
be judged in the context of the times: “It was widely held, especially by liberal intellectuals, that the French and British governments had behaved in a cowardly and immoral fashion when they failed to march into Germany in 1936 to stop Hitler from remilitarizing the Rhineland…To them, the idea of forestalling a terrible catastrophe by a bold preventive action was neither insane nor criminal.”
¹²

Not long after my arrival, as Europe was descending into chaos, my parents' marriage also began to fall apart. Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father's first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him. My mother, accustomed to being the center of attention, didn't like playing second fiddle to anyone or anything, even when the competition was her spouse's supercreative mind. She began to pay more and more attention to a graduate student in physics who was a regular at the von Neumann soirees. His name was James Brown Horner Kuper, as befitted the scion of a well-to-do New York family of solid Dutch ancestry and impeccable social credentials. But she whimsically called him Desmond, after a favorite china dog, and the name stuck with him for the rest of his life.

The cracks began to show in the summer of 1936, when Mariette extended her visit with her parents in Budapest and Johnny returned to Princeton without her. In 1937 she spent much of a six-week Nevada residency, required for a divorce there, on horseback at The Ranch at Pyramid Lake, some thirty-five miles through the desert from Reno. The surprisingly intimate letters she wrote from the Riverside Hotel in that city to my father back in Princeton are remarkable partly for the vehemence of her negative reaction to the Reno of the 1930s: “I believe that hell is certainly very similar to this place. It is indescribable, everyone is constantly drunken and they lose their money like mad 5–6 hundred dollars a day, the roulette table stands in the hall just as a spittoon some other place.”

Aside from the availability of horses, the Ranch was apparently no better: “The place itself is terribly primitive…There is no telephone or telegraph,…mail once a day…[I]t is entirely crazy here…I believe I won't survive. I live in the midst of an Indian reservation there is a beautiful lake and the country is so divine that it is difficult to imagine.
But these horrible females it is impossible that there are so many kinds of women in the world…Riding is very beautiful but the evenings are deadly, imagine dinner at six and night goes until ten o'clock.”

Even more revealing is the fact that she addresses the husband she is in the process of divorcing as “Johnny Sweetheart,” and entreats him, “[D]o you love me a bit” and “If you have time love me a bit.” She ends one letter with “I have the howling blues” and signs the other “Million kisses.”
¹³

The ambivalence reflected in these letters persisted throughout Johnny and Mariette's lives, creating puzzlement and pain for the spouses they subsequently married. Desmond pretended not to notice, but my father's second wife, Klari, was haunted by the lively ghost of a legally terminated relationship. In her unpublished autobiography, she wrote, “This [a meeting of the two couples at a party] was definitely a crisis—a crisis which was followed by many other similar ones for many, many years. Gradually I did get used to them and learned how to handle the situation, but Johnny and Marietta never ceased playing the game of detached attachment or vice versa, which ever fit best.”
¹⁴

I don't believe my father ever really understood why my mother left him for an unremarkable graduate student, and neither did anyone else. In her manuscript, Klari vividly described the paradox of Johnny and Mariette: “They were a perfectly matched pair; gay and gregarious, intelligent and witty—frankly and openly enjoying all the luxuries they could easily afford—but, above all, both of them being intensely ambitious. It is a pity that these two, who remained deeply attached to each other many years beyond their divorce and their respective marriages—it is a pity that they could not overcome their difficulties and stay together. Even separately, they went a long way towards their clearly pinpointed goals, but heaven only knows what further heights they could have attained if they had only stuck it out together—and so speaks the second wife, the successor of Marietta.”
¹⁵

As for my father, he wrote in a letter to his close friend, the Polish physicist Stan Ulam, “I am sorry that things went this way—but at least I am not particularly responsible for it. I hope that your optimism is well founded—but since happiness is an eminently empyrical [
sic
] proposition, the only thing I can do, is to wait and see.”
¹⁶
Actually, he did nothing of the sort; by the time the divorce was final, he was already writing
intimate letters to Klara Dan, who became Mariette's successor. Klari, a noted beauty from the same Budapest Jewish haute bourgeoisie as my parents, hid a first-class brain behind her flirtatious manner. Though not yet thirty, she had already been married twice before, once to a dashing young man who was “an incurable gambler” and then to a banker eighteen years her senior, a “kind, gentle, attentive husband” who bored her to tears, she wrote. I have always felt certain that my father married her on the rebound, both to assuage the hurt caused by Mariette's desertion and to provide himself with a helpmeet who could manage the everyday details of life that eluded him.

Klari was trapped in Budapest for much of 1938 by an inconsistency between Hungarian and American law that threatened to leave her stateless, and therefore unable to leave Hungary, as war appeared imminent. Tensions between the couple ran high as the distance between Princeton and Budapest appeared insurmountable. They were finally able to marry and leave Europe together just before war broke out. But her profound insecurity and the constant demands for expressions of devotion that his letters were trying to respond to would haunt their relationship throughout their marriage. In one, he pleads, “Darling, we
will
win…and I will make you very, very, very happy! It
will
be a happy marriage,…and I will be able to reconquer you.”
¹⁷
In another he tries to reassure her and apologize at the same time: “You are frightened of life that has maltreated you,…you are terrified even of the breeze because you sense the storm behind it…I seared you, I bullied you, I hurt you!”
¹⁸
And, finally, his cry to her: “Please, please, give me a bit of faith…or at least ‘benevolent neutrality.’”
¹⁹

My father's lifelong desire to impose order and rationality on an inherently disorderly and irrational world was reflected in many of his handwritten letters to family and close friends. It was also, in the view of science historian Robert Leonard, one of the major motivators of von Neumann's return, after more than a decade, to the development of the theory of games. After publishing the paper containing the central tenet of game theory, the minimax theorem, in 1928, he had dropped the subject entirely until he began to discuss jointly developing the theory and its applications to economics with his friend the Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern in 1940. Their collaboration over numerous breakfasts
at the gentlemen-only Nassau Club in Princeton during the years 1940–43, while my father was deeply involved in military consulting and the development of the atomic bomb, culminated in the publication of the pathbreaking
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

Even in the midst of this enormous project, squeezed into spare moments snatched from the frenetic pace of his secret and often hair-raising wartime missions, my father's puckish sense of humor didn't desert him. Klari collected elephants, and she had hundreds of them, from one hewn out of a solid chunk of pink alabaster to the one I carved for her in a bar of Ivory soap. She insisted that she would have nothing to do with the
Theory of Games
unless it tipped its hat to her with a drawing of an elephant somewhere in its pages. So there, on page 64, illustrating an abstruse proof in set theory, is a collection of dots and curved lines that clearly traces out an elephant in full pursuit, trunk aloft and ears and tail flying.

One reason for my father's dogged commitment to getting the book done was his (and his coauthor's) profound dissatisfaction with the standard assumption of neoclassical economics, the dominant school of thought at the time, that individuals make “rational” economic decisions without taking into account what other people's responses are likely to be. This totally contradicted reality as he saw it. His own emphasis on social context and the characteristics of the multiple possible outcomes of the strategic “games” played by individuals, businesses, or nation-states in a wide range of human interactions is reflected in the title of John McDonald's book on game theory written for a general audience:
Strategy in Poker, Business, and War
(1950).