After the war, Szilard sometimes visited Trude’s family in New York: a bumptious free spirit who appeared at holidays, asked about their lives and problems, dispensed advice, sometimes stashed a suitcase of papers in their closets, and then disappeared. Trude’s family treated her long and intimate friendship lightly, and her sister Frances’s husband, Efraim Racker, called Leo his “brother-not-in-law.”12 Outwardly, Leo and Trude seemed to be good friends, and, privately, a strong dependence had evolved.
In 1946, Szilard’s illustrious work in nuclear physics was cut short by disputes with Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. But he stayed on in Chicago, maintaining a long-distance relationship with Trude by telephone and letter. He depended on her to collect clippings and other historical documents about him, to visit his father in New York, and to concur in the opinions he held about his own health. He and Trude took vacations together in the Rockies and planned other trips—not taken—to Hollywood and Bermuda.13 Szilard recounted his dreams with Trude and interpreted hers. At the same time, while prizing his freedom, Szilard could be “terribly lonely,” according to Victor Weisskopf, a longtime friend of both Leo’s and Trude’s. During some visits to Chicago, Weisskopf avoided staying at the Quadrangle Club because he “wanted to sleep” but knew that Szilard “only wanted to sit up talking, in the lobby or in my room.”14
Unhappy with Chicago’s climate and uneasy about the fitful progress he was making in biology, Szilard craved a permanent appointment at the University of Colorado’s new biophysics department and negotiated for months with its director, geneticist Theodore Puck. The two had first met at the University of Chicago, and in 1948, when Puck left to found the new department, he had invited Szilard to Denver as a visiting lecturer. This prospect coincided with Trude’s move from New York to Denver, in April 1950, to teach public health at the University of Colorado’s Medical School. Beginning in November 1950, Szilard visited Trude regularly in Denver, and for weeks at a time, through the next spring and summer, when he came to town to lecture, he often stayed at Trude’s apartment— the first time in their twenty-one-year friendship that they spent more than a few days together.
Friends and relatives who visited them in those days remembered Trude and Leo as a study in contrasts: she bustling about, picking up and rearranging her papers and knickknacks, puttering in the kitchen, and tending the phonograph as it played and replayed Mozart; he sitting in an armchair, reading the newspapers, scribbling on a pad, or fluttering his eyelids in a trance that led him in and out of sleep. Szilard enjoyed the Mozart when Trude played it and appreciated the attention she gave him, at least for a while.15
“Trude complained that Leo never stayed long because he said there was no comfortable chair,” recalled Dr. Gertrude Hausmann, her medical-school classmate in Vienna and a close friend in Denver. But when a friend at the medical school gave Trude a big armchair, Leo still made his visits brief. For him it was more than the chair that made him uncomfortable. It was the whole situation and his cozy place in it.16
Trude was delighted to have Leo around but also felt uneasy because of her friends’ and neighbors’ conservative attitudes about marriage. “It was a small community, and we were seen together a lot,” Trude recalled in a 1978 interview. “It was not like now, where it’s more accepted not to be married.” During the summer of 1951, Trude became embarrassed that one of her students had seen her and Leo staying together at a cabin in Estes Park, and that fall, with humorous discomfort, Szilard told a friend in Chicago that Trude might lose her university job because his visits to her Denver apartment contributed to her “moral turpitude.”17
Despite the jokes, Szilard felt uneasy about their new intimacy for another reason: It threatened his notions of freedom and privacy. Before accepting the visiting lectureship, he considered Trude his only confidant and routinely sent her newspaper clips and photographs for “the family collection,”18 He called her several hours a week and wrote to her every few days—sometimes twice a day. But Szilard discovered that being together for a week or two at a time in Denver was much more demanding than dashing off notes from planes or hotel rooms and chatting at bedtime on the telephone.
Szilard was uneasy about his career as well: His writing and research and conversations on biology stretched from consulting at the Conservation Foundation in New York to working in the laboratory in Chicago to lecturing in Denver. He became depressed and uneasy about his work and his future in February 1951 when a “snag” blocked a promising research appointment at the Rockefeller Institute.19 “I do not believe that the atmosphere in which one can conduct serious science can last much longer,” he complained from Chicago in April 1951, already sensing that his colleague Novick would be leaving. “What next I do not know, unfortunately.”20
Trude tried to comfort Leo and urged him to visit a psychoanalyst, as she had done for years. But he resisted, only complaining from afar that his “soul” was not “in order.”21 They were together in Colorado all summer in 1951, and during that time, after conversations that bared Szilard’s need for freedom with Trude’s for love and attention, they finally agreed to wed.22 But once Szilard had accepted the idea, he delayed setting a date. In Denver that fall, he and Trude once got as far as the waiting room of a justice of the peace, but Leo grew fidgety and walked out. Finally, on October 10, Szilard and Trude checked into the King’s Crown Hotel in New York and from there visited her brother-in-law, Efraim Racker, a physician, for the required blood tests. On Saturday, October 13, Leo and Trude appeared before a city clerk and in a quick civil ceremony were married.23
No relatives were there, no celebration or honeymoon followed, and only one telegram marked the occasion: From girlfriends Trude had known from Vienna, it read “HOW IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER NIGHT?” Their reference was to the question asked at the seder during the Jewish Passover. Trude’s friends had in mind that the only difference this night was that she and Leo were officially married.24
Friends and relatives had trouble understanding the long-term, longdistance relationship that had persisted between Leo and Trude, with its crosscurrents of freedom and dependence. Szilard had resisted marriage to the day he took the vow, and during that weekend he suffered fresh anxieties. The couple spent their wedding night at the King’s Crown Hotel. On Sunday, Trude returned to Denver; and on Monday, Leo visited the New York City marriage-license bureau, retrieved a copy of their certificate, and mailed it to Trude. “Enclosed a photostat, congratulations!” he penned in a curt letter. As always, he addressed her “Dear Ch” and signed with a cryptic “Yours, L.”25
On the Tuesday after their marriage, Szilard wrote Trude again, this time about wedding announcements they planned to mail sometime in early November, “if we so decide.” As a precaution against further delays, the announcement gave no date; it simply read:
Leo knew that Trude planned a party for her friends but made it clear the celebration should be held “before I come to Denver or after I have left.”26
On Thursday, Szilard flew to Chicago and the next day met Anderson’s query at the physics table, which only made him more anxious about his new status. On Friday, Szilard was back in New York for a conference on World Population Problems and Birth Control at the New York Academy of Sciences. In Chicago again by Sunday evening, Szilard complained in a letter to Trude that he was upset after just a week of wedlock. His “ego” was “very rebellious,” he reported. That week he had already inquired “in detail” about divorce procedures in several states. “But then I lost all hope of ‘freedom’ and I felt terrible; almost incapable to work at the lab., absent-minded, sweats, and high pulse rate. This has been going on for three days.” He worried anew about sending the wedding announcements and complained that he found it impossible to work in Chicago or Denver. Again he shunned Trude’s repeated suggestion that week to see a psychoanalyst.27
Szilard and Trude struggled with his anxieties by phone and by letter, he insisting on self-help effor
ts and aggressive distractions (he called them “constructions” or “constitutionals”) to improve his attitude, she urging analysis by a marriage counselor or psychiatrist. Only his side of their correspondence survives, but it is pained by both apologies and anger. He is not “mad” at her, did not want to “punish” her, worries often about their shared and separate problems.28 “How things will continue in the end depends on you,” he wrote. “In the meantime, I do not want to talk about it.”29 Trude, also self-absorbed and anxious, became annoyed with Leo’s stubborn, almost childish need for independence. Szilard enjoyed chatting with the children of his friends and associates and praised the “terrible and inexorable logic of the child” while sometimes thinking and talking as impulsively as they do. His host in Denver, Theodore Puck, found Szilard’s rapid and impertinent ideas disruptive to the routines of the biophysics laboratory. “Leo’s real problem,” Trude once told Puck, “is that he doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.” At times, Leo thought the same of Trude.30
Forsaking his work in Chicago early in 1952, yet unable to secure a full-time post that would allow them to live together in Denver, Szilard migrated to New York, where he felt most “at home” living in the King’s Crown Hotel.31 From there he accepted historian Max Lerner’s invitation to lecture at Brandeis University and also began part-time work as a consultant to industrialist Abram Spanel, president of the International Latex Corporation, and often stayed at his mansion in Princeton.
Lerner saw Szilard as “painfully and profoundly lonely” in the first years of his marriage and tried to engage him in a circle of friends around New York City and Long Island that included socialite Kitty Lehman. During lively dinner parties at her Long Island estate, Szilard’s moods and manners were erratic. One minute he was silly and winsome, the next, sullen and withdrawn. “Had dinner with Kitty L. and Co. (at a restaurant),” Szilard wrote Trude from New York, “they drank a little much (me not at all) and afterwards she put her arms around me and said: ‘Poor Leo, all your friends are drunk.’” Lehman liked the quip that Hungarians are really superintelligent Martians and, in one mock-serious presentation after a dinner at her Park Avenue apartment, dubbed Szilard an “honorary mortal.”32
Szilard’s alienation from human contact betrayed his own struggles between independence and intimacy, between the mind and the heart. In one impatient letter to Trude he complained that she was “too involved to really understand what is the matter with me” and should merely listen to learn “what I can do and what I cannot do.” You “could have spared yourself a lot if you had listened more closely last summer and autumn,” when they decided to marry.33 He visited Trude in Denver for brief holidays, clearly cared about her well-being, and shared his thoughts with her in hasty notes and telephone calls. But in the first three years of his marriage, Szilard’s immediate “family” became Abram and Margaret Spanel, whom he had first met through physicist Edward Condon.34
Abe Spanel was a self-made millionaire, a Russian-Jewish immigrant with a knack for business and a flair for posing original solutions to the world’s ills, often in editorial advertisements he ran in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. Like Szilard, Spanel was impulsive, often mixing practical detail and pure whimsy. They also shared an interest in patents, with Spanel urging Szilard to file applications for just about any idea that came to mind.35 Spanel and Szilard even looked alike: both short and round, both paying lip service to diets as they nibbled and noshed with gusto. For a while, Szilard kept a notebook in his vest pocket and at day’s end tallied the calories that each had consumed. Totaling these amounts, he then divided by two and declared that number to be their ideal diet. Weight watching with Spanel also led Szilard to design (and patent) a pencil-shaped pocket calorie counter. Frequently, the two men met for lunch in Manhattan, and they rode together by train to Princeton, where Szilard spent many nights and weekends in Spanel’s Greek Revival–style twenty-one-room mansion, Drumthwacket, since 1981 the New Jersey governor’s official residence.
Spanel and Szilard chatted constantly about world affairs and in the fall of 1952 even dabbled in a political crisis; impulsively the two men flew to La Paz trying to prevent nationalization of the tin mines. There to visit Spanel’s good friend Enrique de Lozada, Bolivia’s ambassador to Washington, they called on government officials and labor leaders, lunched with the president, and met mine owners and diplomats. On his first and only trip to South America, Szilard found La Paz “unbelievably beautifully situated,” the Indians “very friendly,” the Bolivians “very bright and educated.” For a few days he and Spanel had to share a room at the Hotel Sucre, and “feeling a little inhibited about snoring,” Szilard did not sleep well. Although he also became winded in the high altitude and suffered nosebleeds, he found the whole adventure “refreshing.”36 At breakfast in the hotel Szilard encountered John and Leona Marshall, his former Manhattan Project colleagues whose wedding he had attended during the war.
“Good morning,” Szilard said casually, as if the three old friends met there often.
“What brings you to La Paz?” John Marshall asked.
“Just traveling,” Szilard said in a mildly conspiratorial tone, and later added that his purpose was to “buy fabric” for a coat.37 Despite the many meetings with all participants in the dispute, Spanel and Szilard had no influence on the situation, and Bolivia’s tin mines were nationalized on October 30, 1952.
In Princeton, Szilard also relished the company of Spanel’s vivacious wife, Margaret, and spent many evenings with her before the living-room fireplace at Drumthwacket, talking out the “inner conflict” of his own marriage. Although Szilard had rejected psychoanalysis, in these rambling, soulful conversations he became unusually confessional as he probed the nature of personal attachments and struggled to understand his own longdistance relationship with Trude. Yet while he was finding some personal comfort living at Drumthwacket, he still had trouble empathizing with Trude’s loneliness. In July 1952, Szilard wrote her that “it is sad that you feel bad and that in addition to all the real troubles you also plague yourself with chimeras.”38 While still living at the Spanels’ more than a year later, Szilard advised Trude that “to invite somebody over every evening is nice, but it is not a solution for your problem (to live alone) because when you need it most the initiative is lacking to arrange it. It is too bad that you always get so irritated about Princeton (and also very silly).”39
Except for the private conversations with Margaret Spanel, Szilard refused to discuss his personal affairs or even reveal that he was married. During one of the Spanels’ festive Sunday lunches in the large, sunny dining room, Szilard fell silent and tried to ignore the conversation. Charlotte Howell, the wife of a Princeton English professor, was seated at Szilard’s right, and the more she tried to engage him, the more he resisted.
“You are monumentally quiet, Dr. Szilard,” she told him, but he continued to eat and said nothing. When the conversation spun from Asian culture to marriage and to Abe Spanel’s essay “The Plea for Monogamy,” Mrs. Howell looked again to Szilard.
“How do you feel about monogamy?” she asked him directly.
Now unable to avoid her question, he kept his face in the plate and answered. “Madam,” he declared, “I am against rationing in any form,” and scraped a forkful of food.
At another lunch, Szilard met Dr. William and Louise Welch; she was high priestess of the Gurdjieff Movement, a religious group devoted to a Russian-Greek mystic whom many considered a pretentious fraud. Szilard was quiet, even sullen, and clearly annoyed by the guest couple’s conceit and their boasts about attaining physical perfection through yoga. After lunch, in the living room for coffee, Szilard entered to find Dr. Welch sipping his cup while seated in the lotus position by the fireplace. Welch looked up from the floor, eyed Szilard’s girth, and said loudly:
“I bet you can’t do this, Dr. Szilard.”
Glowering, Szilard stared down at Welch. “There are those w
ho think the important thing about the Buddha is the way he sat,” said Szilard. “There are others who think the important thing about the Buddha is the way he thought.”40
When he wished to be, however, Szilard was engaging and lively. “You were so interested in fishing and the country,” one luncheon guest at the Spanels’ reminded Szilard years later.41 And when Szilard’s longtime friends Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann (both Princeton residents) came to lunch, the three Hungarians delighted in a conversation so brisk that no one could complete a sentence before his thought was augmented by another’s idea, round and round in bursts of intelligent agitation.
Along with the rousing conversations, Drumthwacket could also be a menacing place for Szilard. One fall day in 1954, with a hurricane predicted, Szilard and Abe Spanel took a midafternoon train from New York in order to be home before the storm struck. After dinner that night, Margaret Spanel produced a copy of A High Wind in Jamaica, a Richard Hughes novel with a suspenseful account of a hurricane. Seated by a blazing fire, she began to read aloud about the tense calm before the storm, and when glancing up at a dramatic pause, she noticed pain and fear in Szilard’s face. He seemed pale and so frightened that she stopped reading.42
In less dramatic settings, too, Szilard suffered anxiety and gloom during the 1950s, including a spell of self-diagnosed “psychological depression” and a “psychosomatic” rash on his face.43 In the fall of 1954, Szilard complained about double vision and began wearing a black eye patch.44 Then his back and shoulder ached, and an uncertain ailment even led him to consider hospital treatment. For the first time in his life, Szilard drafted a will.45
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