by Peter Byrne
The summer of 1982 was the nadir of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. To control inflation brought about by high energy costs, and the Reagan administration’s military spending spree, the Federal Reserve contracted the money supply, causing interest rates to shoot upwards of 20 percent. The recession was long and deep and lethal to the luxury travel business.
As the principal owner of Key Travel, Everett could not walk away from the firm, which had not done well even in better times. Strapped for ready money, in 1979, he had refinanced the McLean house, taking out $57,000 in cash at 11.5 percent interest. During the next year, he loaned Key Travel $140,000. Nonetheless, the company fell behind on payroll withholding taxes, sinking ever deeper into debt.
Hugh Jr., Sara, Nancy, Everett, circa 1979.
Everett was in serious financial trouble: he had first and second mortgages on his McLean house. He had to meet substantial monthly payments on his condominium in the Virgin Islands. He had car loans for his collection of used luxury cars: a Lincoln Continental, Cadillac Seville, and Mercedes Benz. Plus, he had to pay a high rate of interest on substantial loans he had taken from DBS to finance Key Travel. And he had his hedonistic lifestyle to maintain.
He had considerable assets: In mid 1981, counting his AMS stock, he held over a half million dollars in securities. He owned a $75,000 insurance policy, and a $135,000 annuity for Nancy. But he did not want to liquidate the family’s nest-egg, so, beset by Key Travel’s bottomless deficit, he borrowed another $80,000 from DBS. When he failed to pay back DBS in June, as agreed, the debt rolled over to December at 16 percent interest.
Reisler says that Everett became obsessed by his problems with Key Travel; seldom showing up for work at DBS. As lost hours could not be billed, the company was on the verge of stopping his salary. Family financial records show that by early 1982 he was liquidating the AMS stock, pumping the cash into Key.
Trying to calculate a way out of the financial mess, he invented complicated accounting programs for his Radio-Shack computer, to no avail. As of June 1979, his computerized spreadsheets showed that he owned $651,000 in stocks ($495,000 in AMS stock alone). But, three years later, his stock holdings totaled $160,000, due to a falling market and selling off almost all of the AMS stock even as it was plummeting in price. By July, 1982 his once-sizeable AMS holding had shrunk to a mere $36,750. His net worth was diminishing at a fantastic pace, and his expenses were rising during the unrelenting recession. Key Travel became a black hole, valued at zero.11
Everett at home, circa 1981.
One night in early May, Everett sat at the dining room table, furiously writing code for a financial software program he called “Winning Mortgage.” It was designed to automatically calculate mortgage payments after varying the principal and interest amounts and length of payment periods. He thought it would appeal to people losing their jobs who were in danger of foreclosure, such as the air traffic controllers who had recently been fired en masse by Reagan. He was, according to Reisler, inventing a framework for a user-friendly interface of a type that appeared in the marketplace many years later. In the dead of night, the near-bankrupt scientist laid out an advertising campaign for the software to appear in the Washington Post, “the business section not the LIBERAL rest of the paper.” In addition to helping people in danger of foreclosure, the program would facilitate investors preying on foreclosures. He wrote in large letters on a yellow sheet:
WANT TO FORECLOSE.!!
THINK OF THE FUN!
Remember SNIDELY WHIPLASH
Remember UNCLE TOM
Remember J. R. !!!?
Don’t you wish you were ONE OF THEM? Join in the FUN OF FORECLOSURE!!
Think of what you are MISSING!
Want to get Promoted? Catch your BOSS in a Flagrant error!
The WORLD will be using WINNING MORTGAGE
CAN YOU AFFORD TO BE WITHOUT IT
One afternoon a few days later, Nancy told Mark that Liz was “sleeping” on the bathroom floor. Mark found her unconscious, clutching an empty bottle of sleeping pills. Paramedics rushed her to the hospital; she was revived by doctors moments after her heart stopped. When Mark returned home from the hospital that evening, Everett was reading his favorite magazine, Newsweek. He looked up and said, “I didn’t know she was so sad.”
On the evening of July 18, Mark was doing dishes in the kitchen. Nancy and Liz were out of town visiting cousins. Hugh took the trouble to chat pleasantly with his son about music and poker, which was unusual as they generally passed each other by like wraiths. Leaving the house a bit later, Mark glimpsed his father lying in exactly the opposite of his usual position on the couch as he watched the television news. It seemed odd to him, but he was in a hurry and continued on his way out the door.
The next morning, when Mark arose, the house seemed quiet, too quiet. Glancing into his parent’s bedroom, he saw Everett fully clothed in his dark suit lying sideways on the bed, feet almost touching the floor. Mark shook him and yelled at him to wake up. Frantic, he called 911. The operator talked him through CPR. But it was far too late—Everett’s body was cold and stiff.
He’d had a heart attack and passed out on the bed, dying soon after. His right coronary artery was stuffed with ruptured plaque, which was the immediate cause of death. His heart was abnormally enlarged, probably due to high blood pressure and stress. He suffered from severe arterial sclerosis. His prostate gland was chronically inflamed. And, at the time of death, he was legally drunk.12
As the paramedics carted Everett away in a black body bag, Mark sat at the living room table leafing through his dad’s Newsweek, thinking that he did not remember ever having touched his father in life.
That night, after Nancy and Liz returned, shocked and sad, the three of them slept together in the parents’ bed, seeking comfort.
There was a cremation. There was a memorial service and a eulogy delivered by Neil Killilea, but his closest friends, Reisler, Pugh, and Lucas were all out of town, vacationing. The Washington Post ran an obituary praising his work in operations research and physics. Nancy kept his ashes in an urn inside a filing cabinet in the dining room for a few years. Then, one day, in accordance with his express wishes, she tossed the cremains into a garbage can. He was gone, but a record of his life—his achievements and his failures and his secrets—remained behind.
Everett, in his foyer, circa 1982.
Among Everett’s basement papers were notes that he had made after the American Institute of Physics asked him to prioritize his top five scientific capabilities.13 At the bottom of the list, he put “servomechanisms.” Followed by “operations research.” Skill number three was “relativity and gravity.” Two was “decision game theory.” And at the top of the list, in pride of first place: “quantum mechanics.”
37 Aftermath
Self-awareness, reason and imagination disrupt the ‘harmony’ which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence.
Erich Fromm, 19551
Not long after Everett died, Nancy wrote a note to Mark explaining that he could not have saved his father. She and Liz had recently watched a PBS program, Heart Attack, and learned that within minutes irreparable brain damage occurs: “You wouldn’t want to save anyone after the 1st 4 minutes any way,” she wrote.2 Everett was a “victim of his addictions.” Of his death: “I think he knew it was inevitable, but he also wanted to spare us any worry over it. I hope these thoughts may set your mind at rest about some aspects of Hugh’s way of leaving.”
In the days and weeks and months following her husband�
�s sudden passing, Nancy had her hands full figuring out his convoluted financial affairs. Reisler forgave the large debt to DBS in return for most of Everett’s stock in the firm. Between the annuity, income from what was left of the stock portfolio, sale of family land in Vermont, and monthly social security checks, Nancy did not have to work. She was able to pay the mortgage, donate small sums to charity, and take bird-watching vacations with her friends. She met regularly for tea and bridge with a social circle of widows and ex-wives of Lambda men, who found her to be bubbly and fun-loving. She hiked, gardened, went to music concerts, puttered around the house, and did her best to monitor and preserve Everett’s scientific legacy.
Six months after he died, she bought P. C. W. Davies’ The Accidental Universe (1982). Davies has long been a subtle proponent of a quasi-religious “anthropic” principle in physics, i.e. the concept that the concatenation of physical constants shaping our universe are so improbably precise and finely-tuned that reality must have been designed by an intelligent being. Nancy marked where Davies explained that her husband’s theory, if true, destroyed the anthropic argument for the existence of a God. Everett, a committed atheist, would have been delighted to have performed this service to philosophy.3
Nancy enjoyed watching science shows on PBS. Upon learning the measure for entropy—S=k log W—she scribbled it constantly in her journals, accompanied by such comments as, “order tends to vanish, but not all – Probability too low – evolution = simple to complex step by step or stratified complexity – biology dependent on S=k log W.” Like her husband, she looked for hidden information in the law that all things decay.
Misner, Nancy, Wheeler review transcript of Everett-Misner tape, 1991.
Over the years, she slowly went through Everett’s papers and belongings. She transcribed the post-Austin tape recording and showed it to Misner and Wheeler for technical corrections. In 1991, Scientific American ran an article on quantum cosmology, featuring pioneers in the field, including Schrödinger, Wheeler, DeWitt, George Gamow, Stephen Hawking, and Everett. She found a photograph of her husband as an unbearded, perky young man for the magazine. She also corresponded with several science writers who approached her with biographical proposals—but none of their projects panned out.
In the early 1990s, Nancy shipped a small, incomplete collection of papers and letters to the American Institute of Physics for archiving. But most of Everett’s papers remained boxed and unexamined until 2007.
Becoming close to an Episcopalian congregation, she dated a church-going man, 20 years her senior. When the relationship soured, she sought to dispel her pain and depression through stream of consciousness journaling. Fortunately, she found another older man to love, and he was a kind person, solicitous of her well-being.
Liz was gang-raped one night by a group of black men she met at an ATM machine while she was drunk. Traumatized, she started talking like a racist, Southern cracker. Then, in 1987, she married a convicted drug-dealer while he was in prison. Alcoholism and drug use pulled her toward the abyss. She could not hold a job. Nancy regularly wrote checks to cover her health insurance and to buy groceries.
Liz and the bad-news husband moved to Hawaii. They hopped from island to island, apartment to apartment, bad scene to bad scene. She did temporary clerical work, when she wasn’t too drunk or stoned to type or file. Sadly, changing geography was not enough to alter the course of her disease. She was constantly in and out of mental hospitals and rehab centers and 12-step groups. She’d put together a few months of sobriety, and then relapse, each relapse more painful and harder to dig out of than the one preceding—she lived in a hellish feedback loop of addiction, anxiety, depression, and self-loathing.
After knocking around Northern Virginia for several years, taking college classes, playing music, waiting tables, substitute teaching, pumping gas, Mark packed up everything he owned and drove to Los Angeles, hoping to make a new life for himself as a songwriter and rock singer. He called himself “E,” shorthand for “M.E.,” Liz’s affectionate nickname for him. With his tiny band, Eels, he began churning out albums. Shy and reclusive in his private life, on stage E is for Entertainer. By the early 1990s, he was touring the world, performing in major concert halls. His scratchy, melancholy voice conveys the wry humor of his original songs, thrilling fans who hear reflected in his music their own fears and insecurities and smallish hopes.
Liz was E’s most enthusiastic fan. Like many a troubled American teenager Liz had spent countless hours listening to Neil Young’s album, “After the Gold rush.” But M.E. was her soul mate; his music soothed her.
She wrote to him,
People just don’t understand that it has nothing to do with whether things are going good or bad in your life. You just feel like shit, regardless. It’s a real drag that I guess you should be able to relate to, having such a great career and all, and feeling like shit too. I don’t think even Mom understands it…. But, like you, I’m willing to check out anything that will shed some light on things, like childhood therapy stuff.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is when you were home and Mom said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be anybody but myself,’ and we both said that we’d rather be ANYbody than ourselves. I don’t know anyone else that feels that way, short of the people I met in the booby hatch who all think that everybody’s got their shit together but them. Anyhow I’ve had that ‘feeling of worthlessness’ shit for ages.4
As adults, Liz and Mark each spent a lot of time in therapy, trying to find and fill the holes in the emotional life of their childhood.
Nancy explained to Mark in the spring of 1996,
Hugh III – as a family man – was very very very reserved – with all of us – He had a great sense of humor and enjoyed people, but I would not say he was warm and giving in a relaxed way. He didn’t hate or dislike any of us! He tried to show support in his way – He was supportive of your career – the bands et al.
It may have seemed that he didn’t care about you in a disciplining sort of way – He did not agree about setting limits et al – He was dead set against prohibitions of one’s freedoms.
I heard a definition of a liberal the other day as one who was so wishy-washy they didn’t know how to say NO to their kids. I cringed! I knew how – but no one was listening. So I didn’t do it right.
Anyway,—I don’t know any better than you – but its my belief that Hugh was happy to have you aboard. But in those years he was overly wound up in running companies, or getting someone else to run it for him, or setting up a company for his girlfriend, just sort of enjoying his good fortune so early on – that’s why ‘success’ is scary. He felt he deserved to dine out and eat overly rich food, wine, etc.5
Nancy explained why she had stopped going to church for many years,
so it couldn’t be used as an excuse for our breaking up. Sundays he’d ‘work’ many a wkend at the office … Anyway – one has to work at making a family work – and we didn’t cooperate or communicate too well along those lines … we had a strange family situation – tho seemingly normal on the outside. We were a mismatch in that we each needed someone stronger to bring the other out. But we shared many interests (Well – there must be some)!6
Ten weeks later, on July 11, in Hawaii, a few days after her 39th birthday, Liz succeeded in killing herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
She left a note, that read, in part:
Funeral requests: I prefer no church stuff. Please burn me and DON’T FILE ME Please sprinkle me in some nice body of water … or the garbage, maybe that way I’ll end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w/Daddy.7
Nancy penned a eulogy for her daughter:
Liz, Jan. 1996.
Liz, thank you for sharing with us your sense of humor (some say it could be wicked), your style, your wit, your steadfast loyalty, your caring for others and your indomitable spirit, sometimes while suffering cruel affliction. …
Your father having been a theoretical physicist
who wrote of a parallel universe, and your grandmother – a poet who wrote of interstellar space, perhaps it was natural for you to think of other worlds more peaceful.
Liz, you have fought so bravely with such patience. We regret we could not help you more.
Peace be with you, til we meet again.
Two years later, Nancy was diagnosed with lung cancer, attributed to breathing her husband’s second-hand smoke. Mark nursed her at home in McLean during her final days of pain. He asked her a lot of questions, including if she and Everett had ever considering divorcing? She said, “Oh, no. Never. He was so unique and such an original thinker. There was something about him I knew I’d never find in anyone else.” Star-crossed as lovers, they were always friends.
Nancy and Mark, Feb. 1997.
Nancy died on Armistice Day, Everett’s birthday.
Crushed, Mark organized her funeral, making a remembrance book of photographs celebrating her love of the outdoors. The last photograph in the album was of a teenage Liz, looking sweet and sane. He sold the house, and moved the boxes stuffed with the record of his parent’s and grandparent’s and sister’s lives into the basement of his modest home in the hills of Los Angeles.