Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  Jane arrived at the Cantonal Hospital to find her husband in a very bad way. He was on a life-support machine but at least was out of immediate danger. However, in the opinion of the doctors, he would have little hope of survival without a tracheostomy operation. Stephen was unable to breathe through his mouth or nose and would suffocate if he were taken off the ventilator that stood beside his hospital bed. The operation involved slicing into the windpipe and implanting a breathing device in his neck, just above collar level. Jane was told that the operation was essential to save her husband’s life, but there was a major snag. If they went ahead, he would never be able to speak or make any vocal sound again.

  What was she to do? The decision could come only from her. Although Stephen had hardly been capable of speech for many years, with only his family and close friends able to understand him, there was now the prospect of total loss of communication. His voice may have been difficult to understand, but it was still speech. There was, she knew, a technique for recovering some speech after a tracheostomy, but that was a possibility only if the patient was reasonably fit. The doctors around her were staggered that a man in Hawking’s state could still be traveling the world, but there would be no chance of his regaining any form of speech in his physical condition. Could she take the decision to go ahead with it and condemn her husband to silence?

  The future looked very, very bleak. We didn’t know how we were going to be able to survive—or if he was going to survive. It was my decision for him to have a tracheostomy. But I have sometimes thought, what have I done? What sort of life have I let him in for?6

  After the operation, Hawking remained in the Swiss hospital for another two weeks. An air ambulance then returned him to Cambridge, where he was admitted to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. The plane flew in to Marshall’s Airport, where he was met by doctors and escorted to the intensive care unit at the hospital.

  That evening the senior nurse of the medical unit at Addenbrooke’s was quoted in the Cambridge Evening News as saying, “He is going into intensive care. We are not sure of his condition and he needs to be assessed.”7 In the event, he was to spend a further few weeks in the hospital in Cambridge before he was allowed home to West Road.

  In many respects, Hawking had been lucky once again. He had survived by the skin of his teeth. Many ALS sufferers die from pneumonia initiated by their condition. When he caught the infection, he just happened to be in one of the most medically advanced countries in the world; he was received at the hospital by a doctor who had recently seen him on TV and knew of his condition; and he had the support of an intelligent, caring wife. However, one of the most serendipitous facts of all is that, if he had contracted pneumonia two years earlier, things would have been far worse.

  In August 1985, the writing of what would become the best-selling A Brief History of Time was almost complete. Peter Guzzardi had, of course, been notified immediately that Stephen had fallen ill and had continued editing the manuscript while Hawking was recovering in the hospital. The family had received some money from the advance and could just about cope financially with the immediate crisis. The problem for Jane, however, was what would happen in the long term. After the tracheostomy, Stephen would need around-the-clock nursing. The best the National Health Service could offer was seven hours’ nursing help a week in the Hawkings’ home, plus two hours’ help with bathing. They would have to pay for private nursing. The advance from the book would not last long, and there was absolutely no certainty about its eventual success. To Jane there seemed little long-term hope. How were they to survive if he could never work again?

  There were few possibilities. She would willingly have left her own career and devoted herself full-time to looking after her husband, but she was not a qualified nurse; and, in any case, who would then provide for the family? The alternative was the dreaded thought of Stephen in a nursing home, unable to work, slipping into gradual decline and eventual death. “There were days when I felt sometimes I could not go on because I didn’t know how to cope,”8 Jane has said of that period.

  It was obvious they would have to find financial support from somewhere. Jane wrote letter after letter to charitable organizations around the world and called upon the help of family friends in approaching institutions that might be interested in assisting them. Help arrived from an American foundation aware of Hawking’s work and international reputation, which agreed to pay £50,000 a year toward the costs of nursing. Shortly afterward, several other charitable organizations on both sides of the Atlantic followed suit with smaller donations. Jane feels bitter about the whole affair. She resents the fact that, after paying a lifetime of contributions to the National Health Service, they were offered such meager help when the need arose. She is very aware that if her husband had been an unknown physics teacher, he would now be living out his final days in a residential home. “Think of the waste of talent,”9 she has said of the situation.

  The very month in which the Hawkings received the offer of financial support, a computer expert living in California, Walt Woltosz, sent Stephen a program he had written called Equalizer. It was compatible with the computers he used at home and in the office and enabled him to select words on a screen from a menu of three thousand. He could move from word to word by squeezing a switch held in his hand. Tiny movements of his fingers were enough to operate the device and move a cursor to the desired word. When a sentence had been built up, it could be sent to a voice synthesizer that then spoke for him. Certain key sentences were pre-programmed into the computer to speed up the process, and with a little practice Hawking found he could manage about ten words a minute. “It was a bit slow,” he has said, “but then I think slowly, so it suited me quite well.”10

  Hawking’s new computer-generated voice completely transformed his life. He could now communicate better than he could before the operation, and he no longer needed the help of an interpreter when lecturing or simply conversing with people. In the time since the tracheostomy, his only means of communication had been by blinking his eyes, spelling out words written on a card held in front of him. The voice synthesizer has a definite accent, variously described as American or Scandinavian. Because there is a degree of intonation on certain words, it doesn’t sound too much like a robot—something Hawking would have hated. He really wishes that the synthesizer could produce a British accent, and he often greets people with “Hello, please excuse my American accent.” However, he can change the program and alter the accent. On special occasions he likes to use one with a Scottish burr, which is perhaps the closest he can get to his natural voice. Timothy Hawking thinks his father’s new voice suits him. Of all the family, he is the one who can least remember Stephen’s real voice, as he was only six at the time of the operation in Switzerland, and there had been very little voice left for many years before then.

  With his new voice and a degree of financial security, a few weeks after leaving the hospital Hawking was able to resume work on the manuscript. In collaboration with Peter Guzzardi and taking on board suggestions quietly solicited from other readers, they decided to scrap a number of sections and rewrite some others. Hawking wanted to add a mathematical appendix, which would list the equations forbidden in the text, but Guzzardi vetoed the idea. “It would terrify people!” he said.

  As the two men worked on the manuscript and the publicity machine at Bantam began to get into gear for publication in the spring of 1988, Al Zuckerman was not idle. Having sold the rights for America and Canada, he was keen to find buyers for the rest of the world. Publishers in Germany and Italy both offered advances of $30,000 without even seeing the manuscript, and there was growing interest from Japan, Scandinavia, France, and Spain. To his surprise, he even received offers from Korea, China, and Turkey and two from Russia—a country to which he had never before managed to sell a book. “I had two offers from publishers in Moscow,” he told the Bookseller. “They don’t compete—they both made the same offer.”11 It seemed everyone wanted to get in on the
action.

  Global interest in Stephen Hawking’s book was exceeding Zuckerman’s most optimistic dreams. Only in one major country did he encounter a problem: Britain.

  British publishers were the most skeptical I encountered. When I showed the earlier version in the UK, Dent offered £15,000 and there were other offers of £5,000 and £10,000. I didn’t think they were serious enough, so I withdrew.12

  For the meantime, there was no U.K. publisher for a book by a British author that had been taken in almost every other country in the world.

  No further progress was made until the American Booksellers Association convention in 1987. Mark Barty-King of Bantam UK had heard of the book through company connections. Bumping into Zuckerman at the convention, he asked him if he could read the manuscript. After reading it, he arranged to meet Zuckerman to declare an interest in the book. Zuckerman told him that he wanted £75,000 for the U.K. rights. Barty-King suddenly lost his enthusiasm:

  £75,000 [at that time] seemed an outrageous advance for what was a difficult book, although a very distinguished one. Whether he tried it out on other people I don’t know, but eventually we decided we could come up with £30,000. He said he had to try other publishers; we said, “If you do, we want the floor.”13

  Penguin, Collins, Century Hutchinson, and others all failed to meet the floor of £30,000. Zuckerman returned to Bantam UK and accepted their offer.

  Even then Mark Barty-King’s final decision was touch and go. The evening before he presented the idea at the scheduled editorial meeting, he sat down to do some sums. As usual he began to calculate projected sales. Hardback: home 3,000 copies, stock 2,000, export 500; trade paperback: 10,000 copies, stock 10,000, export 3,000; Australia and New Zealand: 3,000. The calculations didn’t add up. Finally he added £5,000 for serial rights within the U.K. and he could just about justify the acquisition. He took it to the meeting and, against all advice from his colleagues, forced it through. The company would not make a penny from this book, he was convinced of that. However, on the plus side, a prestigious book such as this could only enhance their profile as publishers of “serious” books and, if they did not actually lose money from the deal, it would be worth taking the risk.

  It was not until he met Hawking in person at the Frankfurt Book Fair the autumn before publication that Mark Barty-King began to get an inkling of the man’s enormous presence:

  It’s only when you meet him that you realize how extraordinary he is. What in particular comes as such a surprise, after all he has been through, is that you get such a strong impression of his sense of humor.14

  After signing up the book, he told a journalist:

  It’s a book by one of the greatest minds of our time, discussing the elemental subject of who we are and where we come from. It is a lucid and very personal book, one which I personally found quite difficult to read because of the subject-matter, but one which I considered to have enormous appeal.15

  In Frankfurt, Hawking delivered a short talk to the gathered publishers in a library rented for the occasion. He described his life as well as the philosophy and motivations behind the book. According to Guzzardi, they were enthralled. In the lead-up to publication in the United States, Guzzardi had a series of meetings with Bantam’s director of marketing to discuss exactly how they would approach the promotion of the book.

  Years earlier, when Simon Mitton learned that Hawking had signed to a major trade publisher, he had given Hawking a piece of friendly advice. “Do be careful if you’re dealing with those people, Stephen,” he had said. “Do ensure that you are quite certain that, if the aim is to make money and sell lots and lots of books, you don’t mind the marketing techniques.”

  “What do you mean?” Hawking had asked.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it past them to market it as ‘Aren’t cripples marvelous?’ You’ve got to go into it with your eyes open. If you don’t mind that approach, okay.”

  In the event, Mitton’s advice was unfounded. Guzzardi had no intention of promoting the book in the way Mitton had feared:

  We could have gone two ways. We could have Bantamized it—planes over Manhattan with sky-writing, T-shirts, etc., or we could go classy, tasteful, the quality-rap. The author is prestigious, we thought. Put marketing muscle into it, but do it tastefully. That was the alternative, and that’s what we decided to do.

  Less than a month before publication, Hawking received a surprising phone call from his agent Al Zuckerman. Peter Guzzardi, who had seen the book through from the beginning, had told him that he had been offered his own imprint at Crown and was leaving Bantam. The final stages of carrying the book through promotion and the nervy early sales period would be handed over to a new editor. One of the last decisions Guzzardi made about the book was the final choice of title. Hawking thought that A Brief History of Time might come across as a little too frivolous and had misgivings about the word “brief.” It was Peter Guzzardi who managed to convince him that it was a brilliant title, succinct but definitive. According to Guzzardi, what finally convinced Hawking was when he remarked that the word “brief” in the title made him smile. “Stephen saw the point immediately,” says Guzzardi, “he likes to make people smile.”

  When handed the portfolio for this strange, difficult book, A Brief History of Time, the new editor at Bantam got cold feet. The new editor’s first decision was to reduce the book’s first print run drastically—to 40,000.

  A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes hit stores all over America in the early spring of 1988. The launch party took place at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where a banquet was held in the author’s honor and Hawking gave a short speech to promote the book. According to the other guests, after a long day of celebrations and seemingly endless introductions and meetings, Hawking was still full of energy and in a party mood.

  The gathering moved to the embankment overlooking the East River. Stephen was in fine form. The years of work on A Brief History of Time were finally over, and the book was in the shops and would, it was hoped, do well. Friends remember how he wheeled around from guest to guest in very high spirits. There was a definite buzz of excitement in the air. It was a clear night, the stars shone brightly over the river, and the city lights were reflected in a spectrum of colored points in the water. Glasses were continually refilled, and although Hawking himself can drink very little alcohol and has no real sense of taste, by all accounts he seemed intoxicated by the atmosphere. There were some anxious moments, however. One friend recalled that both Jane and Stephen’s nurse were terrified that in his excitement he would roll his wheelchair into the river.

  Late in the evening a small group of close friends and family returned to the hotel. As they passed through the lobby, Stephen noticed a dance going on in a ballroom nearby. Insisting that it was too early to go to bed, he wheeled himself off in the direction of the music, intent on crashing the party. His friends were dragged along and persuaded to join in, and Hawking ended the celebrations in the early hours, whirring around the dance floor with the band playing on long after the original party had ended.

  Bantam carried through their plan of a low-key launch for the book. There were no prearranged window displays or huge posters of the author. Prelaunch indicators from sales reps were encouraging but confused. Shops were keen to take the book but did not know quite where to put it or what to do with it. Then, days after publication, near-disaster struck. An editor at Bantam, looking through a copy from the first print run, noticed that two of the pictures were in the wrong place. There was instant panic. The 40,000-copy print run was already in the shops. Sales staff hurriedly began to phone the larger bookshops.

  “We’ve made a mistake,” they said. “We’ll have to recall all your copies.” To their amazement, there were no unsold copies left. Shops all over America had already filled in reorder forms for more. According to executives at Bantam, this was the first sign that they were on to something really big. Wasting no time, a reprint of the corre
cted version was ordered immediately and rushed to retailers as quickly as possible. Much to Bantam’s delight, Time magazine ran a large article about Hawking in the month of publication, and favorable reviews began to appear in quality newspapers and magazines across the States. Within weeks of publication, A Brief History of Time entered the best-seller list and climbed effortlessly to the top.

  Suddenly, window displays appeared in bookshops all along Fifth Avenue, and posters of Stephen Hawking were put up over shelves packed with his book in shops all over America.

  The cover of the American edition of the book shows Hawking sitting in his wheelchair against a backdrop of stars. He looks very stern and is staring at the camera, almost frowning. Hawking has said that he was always unhappy with this picture but that he had no say in its use. Some of his friends and family thought that the picture did not really express his true character and lacked humor.

  One book reviewer took exception to Bantam’s putting a photograph of the author in a wheelchair on the front cover, declaring it to be exploitative, a cynical commercial move on the part of the publisher to get the most mileage possible from their crippled author.

  Peter Guzzardi was deeply offended by the suggestion. “It was obvious the reviewer didn’t know Stephen, to think that he could be exploited,” he said. “No one could exploit Stephen Hawking. He is quite capable of looking after himself.”