A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  At twenty-nine, Eleanor was an attractive, hardworking, tenderhearted woman. A friend of Nash’s later described her as “dark and pretty, quite shy, a good person” of “ordinary intelligence,” with “simple manners” and “a very peculiar way of speaking.”7 By that the friend meant that her accent was pure New England. Life hadn’t been very kind to her. She’d grown up in Jamaica Plain, a dreary blue-collar section of Boston.8 She’d had a hardscrabble childhood, a harsh mother, and the burden, far too heavy for a young girl, of caring for a younger half-brother. She missed a great deal of school as a result. She was, on the whole, grateful to be able to take up a profession, practical nursing, that she enjoyed and that provided her with steady work. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Eleanor was eighteen. Her early experiences endowed her with a soft heart. She had a deep appreciation, which stayed with her all her life, for what it was like to be poor and vulnerable. It brought out a tenderness in her, toward patients, neighbors, other people’s children, and stray animals. She was the kind of woman who, later in life, would literally give coats to strangers and invite people who had nowhere else to stay into her home.9

  Shy and lacking confidence, Eleanor also tended to be suspicious and guarded, especially around men. She said, in an interview, “I wasn’t a bad girl. I didn’t run around with a lot of men. In fact, I was really good. I was a little afraid of men. I didn’t want to be involved with them sexually. I thought it was kind of disgusting.”10 But Nash disarmed her from the start. Yes, he was an MIT professor, yes, he came from an upper-class sort of background, yes, he did top-secret work for the government. But he was also very young, five years Eleanor’s junior, and there was a sweetness about him, a lack of guile. She sensed, moreover, that he was, if anything, less experienced than she was.

  After that Saturday afternoon, Nash took her out for cheap meals and drove her around in his beat-up car. He talked about himself, his work, the department, his friends — endlessly. He hardly asked her anything about herself, something that relieved rather than distressed her. She wasn’t eager to share the rather dispiriting details of her modest background, particularly as Nash hinted that his own ancestry was rather distinguished. He pressed her to let him come up to her apartment. She wouldn’t let him at first. She didn’t want to seem easy. But she finally agreed to go to his place. She found him eager, ardent, but not frightening.

  That Nash, who had preferred dancing with chairs to dancing with girls as an adolescent and who had given the pretty Ruth Hincks not so much as a real glance, progressed so swiftly and had so suddenly and at that particular moment found his way into a woman’s arms suggests either love at first sight or some resolution “to take the plunge.” The encounter with Thorson might have provided the impetus. Nash may have been looking to repeat a loving experience, or he may have been looking for confirmation of his own “masculinity.” On a number of occasions he asked Eleanor to provide him with steroids. “There were always big bottles of stuff around the places I worked as a nurse,” said Eleanor.11 Although she later said that she never acceded to Nash’s requests, she believed that “he delved into drugs” hoping that they “would make him more manly.”12 He wasn’t proving his interest in women to the world, however; he kept his liaison with Eleanor a deep dark secret for years, even while he displayed his infatuation with various men more or less in public.

  Caught up as he was with teaching, seminars, and work on his embedding problem that fall, Nash nonetheless managed to see Eleanor frequently. He confided in her. He enjoyed being alone with her. He liked going over to her place and having her cook him dinner. She cooked very well. She fussed over him. Most of all, she was womanly, full of warmth and artless affection. For Nash, who had never even known a woman other than his mother and sister, it was a novel experience.

  As for the gulf between their educations and social statuses, what more time-honored formula for romance and eventual marriage than Eliza Doolittle meets Professor Higgins? For Eleanor, Nash was a chance for a life she could not possibly have achieved on her own; for Nash, she was the prospect of retaining, to put it bluntly, the upper hand. It was a compelling fantasy and a highly practical arrangement rolled into one. And the same thing went for the difference in temperaments. Matches between egocentric and childish men and self-abnegating and maternal women abound in the history of genius. Nash was looking for emotional partners who were more interested in giving than receiving, and Eleanor, as her entire life testified, was very much that sort.

  Nash thought about introducing Eleanor to his mathematical friends and about taking her around to one of the department parties. But he decided against it. The fact that nobody at MIT knew that Eleanor existed made the affair even more delicious.

  By election day in early November, Eleanor strongly suspected that she was pregnant. On Thanksgiving, when she invited Nash to come to her place, she was absolutely certain, having missed a second period by then.

  Nash seemed, oddly enough, more pleased than panicked.13 He seemed proud of fathering a child. In fact, he made it clear that he found the notion of progeny quite attractive. (Later, when such things became fashionable, he talked about joining a sperm bank for geniuses in California.)14 He hoped that the baby would be a boy. He wanted the baby to be called John. He did not, however, say anything about marriage, Eleanor’s future, or, for that matter, how she and the baby would manage.

  Eleanor hardly knew what to make of his reaction. She had hoped, of course, that he would see the pregnancy as a crisis to be solved by an offer of marriage. When this was not forthcoming, she did her best to hide her disappointment from him. She comforted herself with the thought that he was, after all, a remarkable young man. She told herself that, of course, he loved her and would do the right thing “in the end.” In any case, she found that the idea of having a baby made her feel quite sentimental. The subject of an abortion — illegal but available if one had the money — never came up.

  Before long, however, the relationship between the lovers lost its playful and lighthearted quality. That winter, Eleanor was often tense and tired. She fretted a great deal about the symptoms of pregnancy and the long hours at the hospital. Nash’s mind was, more often than not, elsewhere. Soon, he and Eleanor were engaged in a tug of war that occasionally turned quite ugly.

  When Eleanor irritated him with her complaints, Nash would needle her. He called her stupid and ignorant. He made fun of her pronunciation. He reminded her that she was five years older. Mostly, however, he made fun of her desire to marry him. An MIT professor, he would say, needed a woman who was his intellectual equal. “He was always putting me down,” she recalled. “He was always making me feel inferior.”15

  She, in turn, began to resent what she called his superior airs and lack of sensitivity. Their evenings together frequently degenerated into nasty spats. Eleanor, a friend of Nash’s later reported, once complained that Nash had pushed her down a flight of stairs.16

  But there were also tender moments — when, for example, Nash told her that he liked the way she looked with her big belly — and Eleanor’s feelings about Nash were, on the whole, loving. She was convinced that he loved her and would do right by the baby, whom he seemed to be looking forward to with great eagerness. She still recalled that period of their relationship as “beautiful.”17 She excused his cruelty by telling herself that it was occasional, that “he didn’t know how to live.” She put it down to his having achieved extraordinary success at too young an age. “That can be overwhelming,” she later said.18

  In the late spring when she could no longer work, Eleanor moved into a home for unwed mothers. Around that time, Nash finally introduced her to one of his friends from MIT, a graduate student.19 Eleanor took this as an encouraging sign.

  John David Stier was born on June 19, 1953, six days after Nash’s twenty-fifth birthday. Nash rushed to the hospital and was greatly excited when Eleanor presented him with their son.20 He stayed as long as the nurses would let him and came back at ever
y opportunity. But he did not offer to put his name on his son’s birth certificate,21 and he did not offer to pay for the baby’s delivery.22

  Mother and son came home to an apartment Nash had moved to on Park Drive. It wasn’t a happy homecoming. Nash wouldn’t buy any baby clothes, Eleanor recalled. “He didn’t want us to stay,” she said years later. Eleanor finally managed to find a live-in position with an employer who would let her keep her infant with her.23 Despite the employer’s insistence on “no male visitors,” Nash came over frequently. “He wanted to be around him all the time,” Eleanor recalled.24 But he still did not offer to marry Eleanor or to support her, although his professor’s salary and frugal habits surely would have made that possible.

  His visits eventually resulted in Eleanor’s being fired.25 The simultaneous loss of her job and her living arrangements created an immediate crisis. With Nash still unwilling to care for her and the baby, Eleanor was finally forced to place John David in foster care.26

  Like some hapless heroine of a Victorian melodrama, Eleanor left her baby with a series of families, one in Rhode Island, another in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and, finally, at an orphanage whose sentimental name, the New England Home for Little Wanderers, only underscored the Dickensian realities into which she and her son were plunged.27 Founded during the Civil War, the home was on the southern outskirts of Boston, across the Charles River from the Veterans’ Hospital, a good hour by bus from her apartment in Brookline. Eleanor visited her son on Saturdays and Sundays. John Stier remembers standing in the stairwell landing there, peering out of the window, feeling a terrible loneliness and homesickness.28 Sometimes she brought him back to her apartment where she kept a large supply of toys and baby books.29

  Being separated from the baby nearly drove Eleanor mad. More than anything that had gone on before, it made her feel real bitterness toward Nash, who, she believed, left all the anguish and the worry to her and gave no sign that he understood, even remotely, what such a separation might mean for a mother or her child. “I should have been home to take care of him,” Eleanor said in 1995. “I worried. [Nash] never worried.”30

  • • •

  Yet the affair continued. They visited the baby, wherever he was, on Sundays. Eleanor came over to Nash’s apartment and cooked and, when he demanded it, cleaned for him. Nash also went around to her place for meals.31 He continued to oscillate between sweetness and outbursts of cruelty. He continued to keep his affair with Eleanor under wraps, told no one at first except Jack Bricker, who was enjoined to keep the secret. “He never told anyone about us,” said Eleanor, still unable to fathom his behavior.32 Most of the MIT mathematics community, in fact, did not learn of the existence of his first family until years later.

  When John David was a year old, Nash introduced Eleanor to another friend in the department, Arthur Mattuck, without, however, revealing the baby’s existence.33 He and Eleanor sometimes had Mattuck, who seemed to like Eleanor, over to dinner. They told Mattuck afterward that they always had a good laugh after he left because Mattuck never noticed all the baby things around the apartment. It was, to say the least, a strange state of affairs.

  Or was it? Eleanor was in love with Nash. “People told me never to see him again,” said she. “It’s better if you have a normal man. Not one who’s all puffed up by his own importance. One of my friends said that you didn’t see a thing in his face. It was like a dead person. I didn’t think so, though.”34 She mused many years later: “Did I love him? I wouldn’t have gone with someone I didn’t love. He was awkward. His awkwardness seemed standoffish. But … he could be very sweet. He was very attractive in a way. Love is foolish.”35

  As late as 1955 and 1956, after Nash introduced Mattuck to Eleanor, Eleanor’s attitude toward Nash was “adoring.” Mattuck recalled: “Eleanor realized Nash was a total egoist, but she was dazzled by his brilliance. He thought he was a genius. She was sleeping with one of the smartest men in America. Did he love her? She didn’t know. She didn’t ask. In those days, it wasn’t ‘Talk to me.’ If you slept with a man, you assumed he loved you.”36

  Eleanor also continued to hope that Nash would marry her, if only for the sake of their son. Nash wasn’t, she was sure, seeing another woman. Nash’s failure to disappear from her life, despite his tantrums and complaints about her, must have seemed to Eleanor powerful evidence that he did, after all, love her, and would ultimately come around. How else to explain her passivity — her unhappy acceptance, but acceptance nonetheless, of his refusal to pay for her and the baby’s support — until it was, as it were, too late, until a rival appeared on the scene? She might have threatened him with exposure, or with a lawsuit, but, because she believed he would marry her eventually, she feared alienating him and thus ruining her chances for good. It was only much later, in 1956, after Eleanor discovered that Nash was having an affair with an MIT physics student and concluded that he intended to marry the girl — possibly even before Nash himself reached that decision — that she took more aggressive action.

  Nash’s behavior is a bit more mysterious. Why did he keep coming around, even though he had reached the conclusion that Eleanor wasn’t good enough for him or his social circle? Perhaps he simply hadn’t made up his mind. In the late summer of 1954, for example, he was carrying a photograph of Eleanor and John David in his wallet, and he told at least one person, “This is the woman I plan to marry and our son.”37 Perhaps he felt that the decision to have the child was strictly Eleanor’s. Quite possibly, Eleanor’s passivity in the face of his own bad behavior might have signaled to him that she was content to be his mistress and resigned to living apart from her child. Perhaps each, by his or her actions, misled the other.

  Whether Nash ever intended to marry Eleanor is a matter of dispute. Arthur Mattuck believes he did, but that he was talked out of it by Bricker.38 Bricker’s recollection differs radically. He remembers having tried to persuade Nash but said that “Nash’s mind was made up.”39 We aren’t likely to learn which account is the more accurate. Perhaps both were, at different points in time. Nash didn’t marry Eleanor, despite his stated intentions on at least one occasion.

  One likely reason was Nash’s snobbery, the roots of which went back to his Bluefield upbringing. Not for him a wife, however adoring, who pronounced words incorrectly, whose manners were simple, and whose sense of social inferiority would have made it difficult for her to mingle comfortably with the other wives in the Cambridge mathematical community. Unconventional as he was, Nash’s obsession with class and surface propriety were as strong as his father’s. This certainly was Eleanor’s perception, and while that perception was no doubt colored by resentment, it seems accurate.

  It wasn’t only social snobbery, though. Nash didn’t believe that Eleanor was educated enough to be a good mother to his children. His own mother was a schoolteacher who devoted a great deal of time to seeing that her children spoke grammatically, after all. Moreover, he may simply have found Eleanor boring, a thesis that Arthur Mattuck put forward and that gains some credence from the fact that Nash ultimately married a young woman who never cooked but possessed a degree in physics and career ambitions. Eleanor said as much: “He wanted to marry a real intellectual girl. He wanted to marry somebody in the same capacity as he was.”40

  Whatever went through Nash’s mind regarding marriage in the four years that Eleanor was his mistress, he did at one point make a proposal that suggested that he had made up his mind he wouldn’t marry her.

  Nash suggested to Eleanor that she give John David up for adoption. He more or less told her openly that John David would be better off if she gave him up. “He wanted to have John adopted,” Eleanor later said bitterly. “ ’We’d always know where he was,’ he’d say.”41

  It was a cold-blooded suggestion, and it all but killed any remaining love Eleanor felt for Nash. One only hopes that among Nash’s considerations in putting it forward — apart from eliminating any financial responsibility he might face for his child, which pro
mpted Eleanor to say that Nash “wanted everything for nothing” — might have been a genuine belief that John David’s chances in life would be greater with some middle-class couple than with his single, working mother.

  “Everybody wanted him,” Eleanor recalled. “Some people even offered me a lot of money to let them have him. It was frightening. There were these wealthy people who were taking care of John David. They were going to move to California. If they’d gone to California, I would never have seen him again.”42

  For the first six years of John David’s life, during which time the little boy was shifted from home to home, father and son saw each other from time to time. One photograph, taken in what appears to be a city park, of the two-year-old with his long face framed by a woolen hat with funny flaps, standing tall like a little soldier, hand in hand with his sweet-faced, girlish-looking mother, bareheaded, wearing a trim woolen coat, smiling into the eyes of the camera held, no doubt, by her lover, evokes the flavor of these brief visits. “She shouldn’t have had a baby, she shouldn’t have been so gullible,” John Stier later said,43 but somehow, looking at the evidence of that scene, it is impossible for him, or anyone else, to deny the feeling that this little trio, out on a Sunday outing, was indeed a family in every sense but a legal one.