Tuxedo Park

by Jennet Conant

  Praise for Tuxedo Park

  “An examination of the remarkable role of the shadowy but powerful ‘amateur scientist’ whose intellect and energy spurred critical scientific research that shortened and helped win WWII. . . . Remarkable and remarkably told, as if F. Scott Fitzgerald had penned Batman.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “By the time you are finished, you are prepared to bestow on Alfred Lee Loomis the title of Most Interesting Man I Never Knew Anything About. . . . Loomis and Conant are just right for each other.”

  —Alex Beam, The New York Times Book Review

  “[Conant’s] group portrait offers a healthy reminder of how much good science depends on community and collaboration, not solitary genius.”

  —The New Yorker

  “An eccentric, fabulously wealthy scientist performs groundbreaking experiments on the nature of time in his stone castle and, after hosting a sumptuous feast for his colleagues and friends, forces his guests to participate in brain-wave experiments while hypnotized. Something out of H. G. Wells or Mary Shelley? No, a real scene from the life of Alfred Lee Loomis, the extraordinary American financier, scientist, and philanthropist who played a pivotal role in the development of radar and the creation of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Jennet Conant . . . has written a fascinating biography of this unusual and impressive figure.”

  —Richard Di Dio, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A must-read for fans of World War II history, and it will captivate students of science and technology.”

  —Otis Port, Business Week

  “More than a vivid biography of Alfred Lee Loomis, this is a bright and intelligent portrait of a season of science in America that changed history.”

  —Library Journal

  “Like the character of Loomis himself, this is a fabric woven of many strands—financial genius, brilliant inventiveness, a passion for science, human traits and appetites—each essential to the emergent pattern. . . . Thanks to Conant’s efforts, the tapestry is at last on display.”

  —Fred Bortz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “This is a very good book. . . . Once you start it, you will have a hard time putting it down.”

  —Jeremy Bernstein, The Washington Times

  “In Tuxedo Park, Conant has indeed written a fascinating tale.”

  —Jules Wagman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Alfred Loomis has remained deep in the shadows of history until now. . . . Riveting.”

  —Joseph Losos, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “It’s a tale that sounds more like an Ian Fleming creation than truth: An eccentric tycoon brings the world’s brightest minds to a private enclave, where they develop inventions that alter world history. . . . Conant praises the financier-turned-scientist’s work and . . . also captures a tarnished image of Loomis the man. . . . Conant resurrects the explosive contributions of a man who harbored little interest in being remembered.”

  —Stuart Wade, Austin American Statesman

  “No one man won World War II for us, but none exceeded Alfred Loomis’s contribution. He was critical to crucial developments, everything from radar to the atomic bomb. He put into victory his genius, his energy, and his Wall Street fortune. Author Jennet Conant put all of her considerable talents into this biography, which is as superb as the subject.”

  —Stephen E. Ambrose

  “Alfred Lee Loomis, who lived among the swells in a gated Tuxedo Park, hated F.D.R., rarely communicated with his wife and three sons, stole his best friend’s wife, and with icy disdain helped drive an aide to take his own life. Yet the Allies may not have won World War II without this man whom history forgot. As Jennet Conant’s heart-thumping book recounts, Loomis was a public-spirited citizen with the brilliance and ability to galvanize the scientific community to invent first the potent weapon that came to be called radar to spare London from bombs and to destroy U-2 boats, and later contributed to the making of the atom bomb. Long after you race to the end, this heroic story will linger in memory.”

  —Ken Auletta

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  MAP OF TUXEDO PARK

  PREFACE

  1 THE PATRON

  2 BRED IN THE BONE

  3 THE POWER BROKER

  4 PALACE OF SCIENCE

  5 CASH ON THE BARREL

  6 RESTLESS ENERGY

  7 THE BIG MACHINE

  8 ECHOES OF WAR

  9 PRECIOUS CARGO

  10 THE BLITZ

  11 MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

  12 LAST OF THE GREAT AMATEURS

  EPILOGUE

  Alfred L. Loomis’ Scientific Publications

  Author’s Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  Index

  For Steve and John

  To advance scientific knowledge, pick a man of genius, give him money, and let him alone.

  —James B. Conant

  You don’t know what life really is

  Till you’ve been to Tuxedo Park!

  —Chorus of a song from the musical Tuxedo by Henry J. Sayers, 1891

  Preface

  IF the phrase stranger than fiction ever described any series of events, it applies to the bizarre circumstances that surrounded the suicide of William Richards on January 30, 1940, on the eve of the publication of his novel, Brain Waves and Death. The book, which was written under a pseudonym, was a thinly veiled account of the legendary scientific laboratory owned by the millionaire Alfred Lee Loomis and the eccentric coterie of geniuses whose work he financed. Richards was an accomplished chemist and had for years enjoyed Loomis’ luxurious facilities in the exclusive enclave of Tuxedo Park, where his mansion was known to be a meeting place for the great names in science and finance. Richards, who was my great-uncle, came from a prominent Boston family and was painfully aware of his pedigreed seat in the country’s intellectual elite. His father, Theodore William Richards, was chairman of the Harvard Chemistry Department and a Nobel laureate. His sister, Grace Richards, was married to James B. Conant, who at the time was president of Harvard. In this rarefied company, it was not enough to be merely accomplished—anything less than extraordinary constituted a disappointment. Richards’ talents lay in music and art, but he was expected to strive for greatness in science. Before he turned forty, deciding he had fallen short of the mark, he killed himself. Within the Richards-Conant family, his suicide was regarded as a kind of weakness, a moral failure. It was not only a betrayal of his intellectual promise, but an embarrassing public expression of his private anguish. My grandfather used his influence to have the incident covered up, and it was never spoken of again.

  My father, Theodore Richards Conant, knew only that he had lost his favorite uncle to some terrible tragedy. The deep air of mystery that surrounded Richards’ death, and his fiction’s rich and foreboding scientific detail, always haunted my father. He saved a copy of the scandalous novel, which was published posthumously and quickly disappeared, along with an unpublished short story about a scientist working to create the first atomic bomb, which my grandfather confiscated on the grounds that it was too close to the truth to dare publish in those dangerous times. The silence my grandfather imposed served only to distort and enlarge the family myths about William Richards, and in my father’s boyish eyes, he became a heroic figure—rebellious, romantic, doomed.

  Years later, when I was growing up, my
father liked to tell lurid tales about Richards’ death. At funerals, usually held at the family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we would go hunt for his grave and that of his brother, who also committed suicide. My father always joked that every good Boston family should have a pew at St. Trinity’s, a plot at Mount Auburn’s, and a gurney at McLean’s (the local nuthouse). Once, when we were visiting 17 Quincy Street, the Harvard president’s house where he was raised, my father took me to an upstairs bedroom, pointed to the four-poster, and told me that this was where his uncle’s body had been found. He fed my fascination by telling me vivid, and wildly varying, accounts of what had happened. In one version, Richards had built an elaborate apparatus that he used to electrocute himself, and it was my horrified grandmother who discovered the corpse. Another time, he told my grandfather’s Harvard biographer that the contraption had been “rigged to an alarm clock that released a lethal dose of poison gas,” killing Richards exactly the same way the characters in his novel were finished off. Neither account was accurate, but the biographer believed him, and so did I.

  Over the years, I became enchanted with the stories and the extraordinary coincidence of his suicide, the approaching war, and the invention of the bomb. That my grandfather played a crucial role in the decision to build the first atomic bomb, and administered the Manhattan Project, only added to the mystery. How had Richards come to know so much about something as secret as nuclear fission? Did he know too much? Had he exposed more than he had imagined in his roman à clef about Loomis’ private laboratory? As I grew older, I pried open locked trunks stored in the basement of my grandparents’ country home in Hanover, New Hampshire, and pored over old letters and diaries, looking for clues. When my father gave a large cache of books and papers belonging to my grandfather to Harvard in the mid-1980s, I asked him not to hand over any of Richards’ letters. I was an adult, on the brink of a journalism career, and I knew with certainty that one day I would write about this strange chapter in my family’s history.

  At the same time, I knew it meant acknowledging the strain of manic depression that has been passed down through successive generations of the Richards and Conant families and has been the cause of so much tragedy and pain. I would also be acknowledging my own genetic vulnerability, and it was many years before I felt ready to do that. I also struggled with the problem of prying into what many of my grandfather’s friends and colleagues might regard as a dark corner of his illustrious career. James Conant was a very private, proud, and tidy man and placed a premium on appearances. He would have loathed seeing his family’s mess tipped onto the page. There were also gaping holes in the story. My grandmother was acutely aware that graduate students would one day paw her private papers, and she set about methodically destroying anything incriminatingly personal in the record, ripping pages out of diaries and burning most of her mother’s and brother’s letters.

  It was ironic, then, that I first looked into Alfred Loomis to help shed light on William Richards’ life. Few men of Loomis’ prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history. Most of the books I looked in for information about Loomis included only a few lines about him, at most a paragraph or two. He seemed to stand at the edge of important events, intimately involved and at the same time somehow overlooked. Yet here was a character who was at once familiar. Independently wealthy, iconoclastic, and aloof, Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize—financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, inventor, amateur, dilettante—a contradiction in terms. At a time when the world was a smaller place, and the men in positions of power all knew one another because of family connections, school ties, and club affiliations, Loomis knew everyone. He was the ultimate insider. Although he rose to become one of the most powerful figures in banking in the 1920s, and scooped his peers by pulling out of the market before the Crash of 1929 and rode out the Depression sitting on a mountain of cash, he was not satisfied with the lucre and laurels of Wall Street. He, too, by virtue of his background and education, felt obliged to strive for a kind of excellence that had nothing to do with the external trappings of success.

  Loomis had the foresight to know that science would soon become a dominating force, and he used his immense fortune to attract a gifted group of young physicists to his private laboratory and endow pioneering research that pushed at the frontiers of knowledge. He created a scientific idyll in the cloistered fiefdom of Tuxedo Park, and in his belief in invention and experimentalism, he prepared the way for a series of scientific developments that would not only change the course of the war, but ultimately transform the modern world. For more than a decade, William Richards was part of Loomis’ brilliant circle at Tuxedo Park, and in his fiction, he captured that twilight period between the wars when the last of the gentleman scientists engaged in pure research, before the demands of the real world called them to action. In the intersection of their lives, I glimpsed a story of real interest, authentically American, with the stature of history. And in the recurring mental illness that ravaged Loomis’ family, and resulted in a bitter divorce that drove him into seclusion, I recognized a parallel story that helped me make peace with my own peculiar legacy.

  Chapter 1

  THE PATRON

  Ward was smiling but that did not mean that he was amused. The smile was a velvet glove covering his iron determination to get under way without any lost motion.

  —WR, from Brain Waves and Death

  ON January 30, 1940, shortly after ten P.M., the superintendent of the building at 116 East 83rd Street noticed that a bottle of milk delivered that morning to one of his tenants had remained in front of the door all day. The young man who rented the three-room apartment had not said anything about going out of town. He was a conspicuous fellow, extremely tall—at least six feet four—and lean, with piercing blue eyes and a shock of dark hair. After knocking repeatedly and failing to get an answer, the superintendent notified the police.

  William T. Richards was found dead in the bathtub with his wrists slashed, blood from his wounds garlanding the walls of the bathroom. He was dressed in his pajamas, his head resting on a pillow. A razor blade lay by his hand. He was a former chemistry professor at Princeton University who was currently employed as a consultant at the Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He was thirty-nine years old. His personal papers mentioned a mother, Miriam Stuart Richards, living in Massachusetts, and the detective at the scene asked the Cambridge police to contact her. As The New York Times reported the following morning, William Richards was from a prominent Boston family, son of the late professor Theodore William Richards of Harvard, winner of a Nobel Prize in chemistry, and the brother of the former Grace (Patty) Thayer Richards, wife of the president of Harvard, James B. Conant.

  Although his death was clearly a suicide, everything possible was done to hush up the more unpleasant aspects of the event, and the Boston papers never published the details. Richards’ brother, Thayer, was immediately dispatched to New York, and he saw to it that most of what had transpired was concealed from his mother and sister. A suicide note that was found by the tub was destroyed, and its contents were never revealed. The Richards family was naturally concerned about its reputation, but there were also pressing concerns, of a rather delicate nature, that made it vitally important that Bill’s suicide be kept as quiet as possible. Miriam Richards, desperate to avoid any scandal, drafted a reassuring letter attempting to put the untimely death of her son in a better light, copies of which she sent out to important friends and relations. She explained that Bill had long been “nervously, seriously ill” and had never properly recovered from severe abdominal surgery several years earlier. She also supplied him with an end that left open the possibility that his death was accidental, writing that “Bill died of an overdose of a sleeping draught.” It is entirely possible that this is what she had been told.

  “William Theodore Richards was beyond any doubt
one of the most brilliant members of our class,” began his Harvard obituary, based on the fond reminiscences of his friends and scientific colleagues. He was interested in new scientific phenomena, the originality of his ideas leading him into experimental work. But he had the kind of restless, wide-ranging intelligence—he was a talented painter and musician and briefly considered playing the cello professionally—that made him, according to one friend, “a veritable Renaissance man.” He was a chemist at his father’s insistence, but his heart was not in it, and he found it difficult to force himself to undertake the routine proofs and laborious accumulation of data that would have given him more publishable material and more recognition in his field. He had “a mentality which could be called great,” wrote his classmate Leopold Mannes, a fellow scientist and musician, who speculated that Richards despaired of ever meeting the onerous demands he imposed on himself. “In his attitude towards life, towards science, towards music—of which he had an astounding knowledge and perception—and towards literature, he was a relentless perfectionist, and thus his own implacable judge. No human being could be expected fully to satisfy such standards.”

  Richards was a solitary man, confining his friends to a small, clever circle. He kept most of his contemporaries at bay with his caustic wit, which made quick work of any human frailty, whether at his own expense or someone else’s. With complete abandon, he would ruthlessly mimic anyone from Adolf Hitler to some sentimental woman who had been foolish enough to confide in him. To most, he seemed cordial, cold, and a bit superior, his moodiness exacerbated by periods of poor health and depression. He eventually quit his job at Princeton and moved to New York, where he worked part-time as a chemical consultant while devoting himself to an arduous course of psychotherapy. The Harvard memorial notes concluded that “after a brave struggle for ten years to overcome a serious neurosis, which in spite of treatment grew worse, Bill died by his own hand.”