Genes, Girls, and Gamow

by James D. Watson

  Also calming my nerves was the requirement that I soon prepare a manuscript for the April meeting on macromolecules in Israel. Between such writing moments, Crick, Orgel, and I kept coming back to RNA’s role in protein synthesis. Francis would not give up his bizarre idea of a year ago that small RNA adaptor molecules were somehow involved in reading the genetic code. Leslie and I, however, continued to think this scheme was too off-the-wall to consider unless physical evidence for RNA adaptors was somehow found. But we had to admit that we saw no obvious way to generate hydrophobic cavities along the surfaces of stacked bases that could distinguish between the amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine.

  That Linda and I were now so often together having afternoon tea at The Whim or Copper Kettle did not go unnoticed. To my surprise, I learned from Alfred that rumors were flying that a Watson-Pauling affair was on. When I told Linda about our “affair,” she was instantly pleased and amused by not having returned to Cambridge unnoticed, seeing no reason to deny others the satisfaction of their gossip. Soon we were onto concocting a plan for escalating the rumor by jointly hosting a big, stylish evening party. Those unexpectedly receiving such invitations at short notice would be bound to wonder whether we were using the occasion to announce our engagement.

  Mariette Robertson punting on the River Cam in Cambridge, spring 1956

  More than a week passed before we finally moved into action. Our belief that only Alfred’s tall-ceilinged rooms at King’s would be grand enough was complicated by the fact that, several days before, Alfred had left for three weeks in Amsterdam to follow up experiments started before a friend moved there to a professorship. Believing, however, that he would not be unduly upset, we soon got our hands on some 100 appropriate stiff white cards. On them, Linda stylishly inscribed:

  Jim Watson and Linda Pauling

  Invite You to a Party

  In Alfred Tissières’ Gibbs Building Rooms

  King’s College

  Saturday, 18 February 1956

  9 p.m. onward

  Anxious to get at least several with-it, unattached girls to give our party panache as well as academic respectability, Linda had popped out to Girton. She couldn’t dig up Julia but did find her close friend Janet Stewart, who, inexplicably, did not know when Julia would return. Fortunately Janet promised to make an appearance and bring with her several lively friends to make the evening one in which Francis would enjoy displaying his conversational skills. Although we had invited all the academic bigwigs who might know who Linda and I were, we remained uncertain until the last moment how many would show. There was also the question of whether Alfred actually knew how big the party in his rooms would be. Frightened by the last-minute possibility of not being able to get into locked rooms, Don Caspar got reassurance from higher-ups at King’s that they would not blow the whistle.

  Not unexpectedly, the first guest to arrive precisely at nine was Freddie Gutfreund, always eager to talk enzyme kinetics that I never wanted to understand. Soon we had the first married couple when Roy Markham and wife Margaret entered, coming early enough to insure that they might not be victims of our incompetence in not buying enough wine. Some 30 guests were on hand half an hour later when Cambridge’s big chemist, Alex Todd, arrived with his wife Allison. Linda and I, knowing the moment of the evening had arrived, fondly put our arms around each other to give the Todds the message that the party was what they thought it was for. Standing upright, inches above the rest of us, Alex personally knew what it was like to have a Nobel Prize–winning father-in-law. His wife’s father, Sir Henry Dale, had discovered how acetylcholine carries signals from nerve cells to muscle cells. Worried that the Todds might quickly not find the occasion worth many minutes, I began to relax when they stayed contented for at least 45 minutes. Another sign of the party’s success was the arrival of Alfred’s friends, Noel and Gabby Annan. Not only was Noel to be the new Provost at King’s, he had already attracted much attention from his recent biography of Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s father. His and Gabby’s ebullient presence gave the evening its necessary King’s verve.

  Linda had hopes that Victor Rothschild might come by briefly and, gallantly, flirt. But from Peter we learned that Victor and Tess were otherwise engaged. Earlier, Peter had gone to Merton Hall to borrow a top hat and opera cloak dating from Victor’s less full-bodied youth. There he bumped into Sarah, a daughter from Victor’s first marriage, and told her that accepting our invitation would be worth the trouble of dressing up. But there seemed little chance that she would join us now. Before Peter walked in with Mariette on his arm, neither Linda nor I knew whom he would come with. Knowing that Mariette would not like to come alone to face her rival, Leslie and Alice were to bring her if that proved necessary. But Julia was not part of the evening; Peter’s quiet, relaxed grip on Mariette’s hand identified a couple accepting each other. Handsome in black tie, Peter’s often outpouring of verbal charm was absent, replaced by almost sentimental concern about where he and his Cambridge friends’ lives were going.

  When the Girton contingent came in en masse led by Janet, Peter, with Mariette at his side, had the sense not to throw his arms around them. Instead, he pulled aside the male friend of Janet’s, someone he obviously knew, who was reading international law. I moved towards Janet’s elegantly draped fullness, hoping that her evening ahead might still have a measure of uncertainty. But much too fast, Gidon Gottlieb, her long blond-haired companion, moved to join us. Sensing that I was not the aesthete whose ideas move easily between French and English, I was only mildly annoyed some minutes later when John Kendrew took me aside to say that I was needed to bring Don Caspar back to life.

  Don was now dead drunk from too many refills of red wine poured down to compensate for the continuing strain of not finding an attractive woman to share his thoughts with. Leaving John and Gidon to look at Janet’s intelligently filled gown, I found Don on the floor of the wine-bottle-strewn larder. Quickly, I brought him outside to the grass. There, he lost more of his evening’s imbibings, an earlier whack of which had not yet adequately been removed from the hallway floor. So relieved, Don determinedly groped his way upstairs, seeking out a beer chaser that he assured me would get him back into shape. Then he promised to start clearing away the abandoned wine glasses now in evidence as midnight approached and guests began leaving.

  With the party now thinned enough for easy conversation, I gravitated with Linda back to Janet and Gidon, whose father, he let drop, was the agent in Paris for the French Rothschild family’s philanthropy in Israel. I was also using beer to give my stomach a less-empty feeling with Linda achieving this same end with glasses of cold water. Relieved that the party had definitely clicked and that later postmortems would not embarrass us, we turned our attention to the mystery of Julia’s absence. Peter was not one who easily lost hold of a pretty girl. So we began to suspect that Julia had not even briefly been back in Girton this term. With Janet possibly knowing more than she wanted to reveal past midnight, I suggested that I come out to Girton after Sunday lunch was over. Janet’s serious smile let me know I might be needed.

  Cambridge (England): February 1956

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, on Sunday, February 19, I cycled out to Girton, anticipating the astutely regal Janet Stewart and her explanation of Julia Lewis’s disappearance. I hoped there might be less between her and Gidon Gottlieb than was conveyed by the way he made last night’s shared thoughts into virtually beatific moments. Momentarily disappointed by finding him again at her side, I soon had to admit he had reason to be there. Julia was indeed in bad trouble. Janet immediately confessed that last night she had been holding back vital information. The party was not the place for a bombshell, which, as late as last night, she hoped need not explode. Several weeks before, Julia had let her know she was not at Girton because she was several months’ pregnant. Morning sickness had hit, and her shape would soon publicly reveal the same message. Fearing from the start that Peter was the father, my
stomach sank when Janet went on to say that Julia had been with no one else over the fall.

  When Peter had learned he was to be a father, he clearly panicked. This was not the right time for him to get married. To start with, he could not afford a wife and child. All his current monies as a research student came from his parents, and he did not want to think about getting more under these circumstances. More to the point, even if he had his Ph.D. and was earning money, Julia was not the girl he wanted to jump into marriage with. He could never be as emotionally close to her as he once had been to the petite, blond au pair Nina. And he was still fond of Mariette Robertson—though not as much as she was of him. Moreover, he knew that he could not stop chasing new girls, to whom he would put on his Pauling charm and see where it led.

  Immediately he heard of the news, Peter told Julia not to have the baby, offering to find the appropriate medical help. But Julia would hear nothing of this, despite several long telephone calls to her by an increasingly desperate Peter. With her holiday in Paris over, Mariette was by now on his side whenever he beckoned. Unlike Julia, who almost knew him best from excursions in the Mercedes roadster, Mariette had seen his moods go up and down many times without apparent reason. And her affection did not arise from unrealistic expectations as to what he or his family was like.

  On the night of the party, Janet still thought the worst might not happen, but a new phone call this morning had just told that nothing she or I might now do could undo what had already passed. Julia’s family, from Christmas on, knowing of her condition, was increasingly desperate to make Peter accept his fate. Several days earlier Julia’s brother had come to Girton and told its Mistress why Julia had not returned for classes. She, in turn, scheduled an emergency appointment with the Master of Peterhouse, the college to which Peter was attached and that had let him live in the hostel across Trumpington Road from its main buildings.

  Succinctly apprised of what Peter had not done, Peterhouse’s Master, not seeing the need for further consultation, sent notice to Peter that he should immediately come to his study. There Peter was told that he was being sent down (expelled) and should leave his college rooms as soon as possible. If Peter had made Julia an honest woman earlier, the Master said, the embarrassment of the situation might have been glossed over, and as a married student Peter would have been allowed to remain in Cambridge. Now his Cavendish days were over and Peter—and most likely Mariette as well—knew this when they made their striking entrance into Alfred Tissières’s rooms for Linda’s and my party. Knowing that he was to “go down” forever, Peter wanted to be remembered for a last display of bravado. This was why he had gone to Merton Hall and told Victor Rothschild cryptically that the occasion demanded that he be seen in the 1930s dress appropriate for Victor’s first days as the 27-year-old third Baron Rothschild.

  Returning from Girton, feeling sick from my new knowledge and fearful of what was to happen next, I knew that even if Peter had entrusted me earlier with his disquieting news, its tragic course would have still followed. No one could have convinced Julia that charm and family fame do not by themselves make a good marriage. Although Julia had to know that the massive Mercedes and the Porsche were soon to go across the Atlantic as toys for a rich wife-entitled brother, Peter nonetheless had given her life zing. With him, she felt more than a scholarly and fragilely pretty daughter of an upright Midlands family, dedicated to hard work and respectable behavior.

  As a Peterhouse Fellow, John Kendrew knew what was up by the time of our party but could spill the beans only when we saw each other just before Monday morning coffee. There had been nothing John could do to slow down the brusque way in which Peter was exiled from Peter-house, and hence the university. Even if Peter’s past three and a half years at Peterhouse had been paragons of virtuous behavior, the gravity of his current indiscretion left them no other course. Peter had been in and out of trouble for more minor infractions than the various college tutors wanted to remember. While they couldn’t deny their American was likable, and added much to the college’s general ambiance, no one was surprised that Peter had not instinctively done the right thing by his Girton girl. The time had come for purging from Peterhouse’s midst its latest unfortunate example of youth hell-bent on pleasures of the flesh.

  Peter now had to react to two crises, not one. Besides facing up to what to do about Julia, there was now the problem of what to do about his career. John came to his rescue by saying that he thought Peter might be able to transfer to the Royal Institution (RI) in London, with John continuing as his supervisor. Sir Lawrence Bragg had unsuccessfully urged John to move there when he became its director and would likely see Peter’s arrival as a way to bring John’s intellect into greater contact with the RI. And although Sir Lawrence superficially looked unbending, deep down he was compassionate and would not like to see Linus’s son’s life ruined.

  Bragg’s agreement to Peter’s transference to the RI was conditional upon Peter making Julia an honest woman as quickly as possible. In fact, Peter needed no such threats once it was clear that a baby, borne as much from his loins as Julia’s, was going to be born. During all of January until the awful Friday, February 17, Peter kept hoping against increasing reason that Julia would accept the lunacy of pinning her and a child’s future on an up-and-down charmer able to find some attractive feature in almost any woman he came close to.

  Linda, though initially angry with Peter for not taking precautions when he was with Julia, saw no alternative to a quickly arranged civil wedding witnessed by as few family and friends as possible. Realistically, like most of us close to Peter, she did not have high hopes for what would happen afterwards. But there was always the possibility that Peter would become more responsible after some of his freedom was taken away by the give-and-take restrictions of married life. Mariette, by then totally distraught, saw no happiness ahead for either Peter or herself. Staying alone at the Orgels’ flat looking after their baby became an unbearable ordeal. Mariette knew Peter too well and too lovingly ever to have shotgunned him like Julia had done. But she had to reflect that Peter was virtually predestined for the shotgun. Would he have ever willingly commited himself to a monogamous institution that he was inherently unsuited for? To let out steam, Mariette biked back to central Cambridge whenever Alice was home. There she found an ever-decreasing number of acquaintances who could bear any more Pauling family gossip. But knowing how hard it was still for me to get Christa out of my mind, I was always there to listen.

  The now-inevitable civil marriage ceremony took place in Cambridge’s Register Office on Castle Hill. Julia, dressed well but not in white, was given away by her father. John took the best man’s role hoping to show that Peter was still valued by those who mattered. My role was to take Mariette out to lunch—to make sure that she did not ferret out the wedding site and make a scene. After the marriage there was a small luncheon, dominated by Julia’s immediate family.

  In retrospect, Peter and Julia should have gone off quietly, but John thought a small evening party at his Tennis Court Road house might let the occasion end less inherently sad. Its outcome, however, was just the opposite. Word that free, copious champagne might flow from 9 p.m. onwards led to a continuous influx of uninvited spivvish drinking companions from Peter’s past party moments. They soon outnumbered those with faces aware of what had happened today. John, possibly wishing to black out the origins of the evening, became unabashedly woozy and increasingly amorous toward Linda, herself not sure of the role she should be playing. Quite definitely she was not a bridesmaid.

  All too soon, John’s alcohol supply was gone, leading to a general exodus in search elsewhere for more of the drink that had made Tennis Court Road the evening’s place to be. With the small drawing room now quiet enough for actual conversation, no one knew what was left to say. The time had come for Peter and Julia to leave. Peter put on a broad smile and Julia a harassed, uncertain one and to quiet applause they went out to the Porsche that he had parked outside.
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  Cambridge (England), Israel, and Egypt: March–April 1956

  LINDA PAULING’S LIFE, in a much less dramatic way, also became subject to someone else’s whim. With no apparent purpose, no job, no school paper to write, nor boyfriend to come to grips with, she admitted being at loose ends. But now she very much hoped that the Home Office did not see her this way. To her shock, one of its civil servants had given her a summons to appear before the Magistrates’ Court on a charge of being an illegal alien. At first she couldn’t believe that she had done anything wrong. Lots of her Cambridge American acquaintances were using small bits of parental money to let them pursue minor academic objectives and feel more special than their compatriots living stateside in Eisenhower’s America. No one had told them to go home.

  The American way of smiling away transgressions of silly laws was not now to work for Linda. To her horror, she found that English laws were there to be obeyed. At first, she was reassured that most Cambridge Justices of the Peace were prominent Cambridge women, often the wives of senior professors. So she was not prepared for the clipped voice of early-sixtyish Lady Adrian telling her that ignorance of the laws was never an excuse. A college graduate, she must have read the block of printed words in her passport stating the conditions under which she could stay in the U.K. and the length of time she could do so. Linda’s halting answer—that she thought she had a month more before she had to go to the police station on St. Andrew’s Street to renew her permit—got her nowhere. When they asked how she might finance a further stay in Cambridge, she admitted dependence on her parents who sent bank drafts to cover her needs. And asked when and for how much their last draft was, Linda knew there was trouble ahead. Getting a letter from her parents pledging further money might take more than time to get, and even such help might not do the trick. Without pausing to reflect on her next words, Lady Adrian fined Linda £5 and gave her two weeks to leave England.