A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  Nash, however, was talking about returning to France. He contacted Jean Leray, who was visiting at the Institute for Advanced Study, asking Leray to invite him once more to the College de France.18 This time Alicia, much alarmed, intervened. She asked Donald Spencer — the mathematician at Princeton who had helped Nash work out the final version of his paper on algebraic varieties in 1950 and 1951 — to write to Leray to ask that Leray discourage Nash from going to France again so soon. “Her advice is not to invite John to France at the present time since she feels it will only stir him up again… . If this job [with Oskar Morgenstern materializes it will have a quieting effect on her husband. She feels that remaining in Princeton for a time might possibly bring him back to mathematical work.”19

  By now, Nash had been in the grip of unremitting psychotic illness for nearly two years. It had transformed him. The change in Nash’s appearance and manner made it surprising that his old friends from the mathematics department recognized him at all. The man who walked up and down the main street of Princeton in the stifling summer of 1960 was clearly disturbed. He would go into restaurants with bare feet. With dark hair to his shoulders and a bushy black beard, he had a fixed expression, a dead gaze. Women, especially, found him frightening. He looked no one in the eye.

  Nash spent most of his time hanging around the university, including Fine Hall. Most days he wore a smocklike Russian peasant garment.20 He seemed, as one graduate student at the time remembered, to “talk to the squirrels.” He carried around a notebook, a scrapbook entitled ABSOLUTE ZERO in which he pasted all sorts of things, presumably a reference to the rock-bottom temperature at which all activity ceases.21 He was fascinated by bright colors.

  He was often in the common room where he “liked to spectate, to watch people playing Kriegspiel, and to make cryptic little remarks.”22 On one occasion, when William Feller was standing nearby, for example, Nash said, to no one in particular: “What would we do with an overweight Hungarian?”23^ On another, “What do Spain and the Sinai have in common?” (This was after Israel’s takeover of the Sinai.) He answered his own question, “They both start with S.”24

  Everyone around Fine knew who he was, of course. The senior faculty tended to avoid him, and the Fine Hall secretaries were slightly afraid of him, as his size and strange manner gave him a somewhat threatening air. On one occasion, Nash disquieted the formidable Agnes Henry, the departmental secretary, by asking her for the sharpest pair of scissors she possessed.25 Henry was taken aback and consulted Al Tucker about what to do. Tucker, who was walking with a cane at that time and would hardly have been Nash’s match, said, “Well, give it to him and if there’s trouble I’ll handle it.” Nash grabbed the scissors, walked over to a phone book that was lying out, and cut out the cover, a map of the Princeton area in primary colors. He pasted it in his notebook.

  He found a few graduate students to talk to. Burton Randol, then a first-year mathematics graduate student, recalled: “I wasn’t bothered by his strangeness and I wasn’t afraid of him physically. I was willing to have conversations with him. In some sense we enjoyed each other.”26 He and Nash would take long, rambling walks around Princeton, and Randol particularly recalled Nash’s wry sense of humor, which he remembered as “intentional, self-referential, and self-deprecating. He knew he was crazy and he made little jokes about it.”

  He referred to himself, obliquely and usually in the third person, as one Johann von Nassau, a mysterious figure whose name was curiously similar to John von Neumann’s and suggested a connection with Nassau Street, the main street of Princeton, as well as Nassau Hall, the main building on the university campus. He talked, in rather lofty terms, of world peace and world government, making it clear he was in touch with these ideas on some very grand scale — though he rarely, if ever, alluded to his actual experiences in Paris and Geneva.

  The job with Morgenstern fell through. As Danskin recalled, Nash refused to fill out the necessary W-2 forms, claiming that he was a citizen of Liechtenstein and not subject to taxes.

  I got him a job in the economic research group by calling Oskar Morgenstern. Oskar said fine. I got an application. It called for his social security number and asked whether he was a citizen of the U.S. He wouldn’t cooperate, so he didn’t get the job.27

  Whether this was why the contract was canceled in early December, or whether by then it was obvious that Nash was far too sick to work, is unclear.

  Nash was also writing all sorts of letters to people. When he heard that Martin Shubik was applying game theory to the theory of money, he sent Shubik a Richie Rich comic book.28 He sent Paul Zweifel, his friend from Carnegie, postcards in care of the French charge d’affaires at the French embassy in Washington.29

  Nash was also making a great many telephone calls, usually, as Martha recalled, using fictitious names. Ed Nelson recalled, “I did my part by talking to John on the telephone during those years.30 He used to call me a lot.” And Armand Borel recalled: “I got unending phone calls from Nash. Harish-Chandra also often got calls. It was unending. It was all nonsense. Numerology. Dates. World affairs. This was really painful. It was very often.”31

  Nash’s bizarre behavior was attracting the attention of university officials. Danskin recalled:

  He was irritating the president of the university. He was talking about something that was going on in the Gaza Strip. He was playing hopscotch on campus. Goheen’s secretary called me. He wasn’t threatening anyone, but he was behaving crazily. He would go into the offices. The young women would be frightened. At my house, he’d play with my stereo and screw it up. He frightened people. But he was the gentlest person imaginable.32

  Alicia was beside herself. She had become quite depressed. Members of the folk-dancing group remember her sad expression, her showing them pictures of her baby, and her sadness at being separated from her son. She began seeing a psychiatrist at the Princeton Hospital, Phillip Ehrlich, who urged her to have her husband hospitalized, against his will if necessary. He recommended a nearby state hospital.33 Odette recalled, in 1995: “It was awful that such a strong and handsome man should be locked up. Alicia had some guilt trips. We talked it over, back and forth. The doctors advised her. She didn’t understand. It was very painful.”34 Alicia had initially asked John Danskin to commit Nash. Danskin refused. She then turned to Virginia and Martha.

  A day or two before the police picked Nash up, Nash showed up on campus covered with scratches. “Johann von Nassau has been a bad boy,” he said, visibly terrified. “They’re going to come and get me now.”35

  40

  Tower of Silence Trenton State Hospital, 1961

  Reposing in the midst of the most beautiful scenery in the valley of the Delaware, combining all the influences which human art and skill can command to bless, soothe, and restore the wandering intellects that are gathered in its bosom.

  — First annual report of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, 1848

  I’m as if left to rot in a “Tower of Silence,” with anti-Promethean vultures gnawing away at my vitals.

  — JOHN NASH, 1967

  AT THE END OF JANUARY, ten months after Nash’s return from Paris, a much-aged Virginia Nash and her daughter Martha boarded a train in Roanoke and traveled north all day, arriving in Princeton in the late afternoon.1 The last time they had made this trip together was a decade earlier, to attend Johnny’s graduation, and the contrast between that trip and the present one was much on their minds. As they disembarked, tearful and weary, John Milnor, now a full professor in the Princeton mathematics department, was waiting for them. It was nearly dark and already snowing lightly. After a few awkward exchanges, Milnor showed them his car, turned over the keys, and gave them directions to West Trenton.

  Martha took the wheel and the two women drove in silence down Route 1, the car slipping and sliding on the thin layer of slick ice that now covered the road. They were almost thankful for the distraction. They dreaded what lay ahead. Johnny was already at the Trenton State
Hospital. He had been picked up earlier in the day by the police, taken first to Princeton Hospital, a small general hospital, and then transported by ambulance to Trenton State. Now they were going down to talk to the doctors, sign the necessary forms, and, if possible, see Johnny. They would see Alicia, at whose apartment they were staying, afterward.

  Full of doubt and self-reproach, they felt they had little choice but to accede to another commitment. Whatever hope they had that Johnny’s settling in Princeton, in familiar surroundings and among old mathematical acquaintances, would bring about some improvement in his condition had been shattered weeks before. Alicia’s telephone calls had become increasingly frantic. The psychiatrist whom Alicia had been in touch with had tried, without success, to convince Johnny to go into the hospital on his own. Johnny had been dead set against the idea. Finally, the three women had agreed among themselves that there was no other way. He would have to go.

  And this time it wouldn’t be to a private hospital. As Martha recalled in 1995: “At first, we had thought that thirty days at McLean would straighten him out. By then we knew there were no short-term answers. We were concerned that John’s illness would eat into Mother’s capital and that she couldn’t afford a private hospital.”2

  In the moonlight and freshly fallen snow, the gray stone building, with its white marble dome and tall columns, set atop a gentle wooded slope, looked reassuringly solid and respectable. Institutions like the Trenton State Hospital owed their existence to the same mid-nineteenth-century reform movements that opposed slavery and advanced women’s suffrage.3 Many, in fact, owed their existence to the efforts of Dorothea Dix, a fiery, single-minded Unitarian who made the appalling plight of the insane — condemned to almshouses, prisons, and the streets — her life’s crusade.4 When she was old, ill, and penniless, Dix lived on the ground floor of Trenton’s administration building in an apartment set aside for her by the trustees of Trenton State until her death in 1887.

  Like all such institutions, Trenton hardly evolved as its founder anticipated. In particular, it was soon overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people who sought — or whose families sought on their behalf — shelter there. During World War II, Trenton State, long since expanded from a single large building into a large complex, had an average of four thousand patients.5 The census dropped sharply after the war, but was rising rapidly in the late 1950s. By 1961, there were nearly twenty-five hundred patients, ten times as many as at a private hospital like McLean. Staffing was minimal, and consisted mostly of young foreign residents. The six hundred patients in the so-called West hospital, for example, were cared for by six psychiatrists; the five hundred chronic patients in the annex — predominantly senile or epileptic — were cared for by just one doctor. The presence of a large number of chronic patients obscured the fact that most patients who came to Trenton stayed a relatively short time, perhaps three months.

  “You really were not close to patients,” said Dr. Peter Baumecker, who worked at both the hospital’s insulin unit and the rehabilitation ward during Nash’s stay. The poorest and sickest patients wound up at Trenton. “I remember very few patients specifically,” Baumecker said. “There was one patient who gouged out the eye of another. There was another patient who’d lost his eye when the police beat him up after he’d killed his father. But that was very exceptional.”6

  “There were good wards and bad wards. Trenton was not as plush as other places. As a matter of fact, Trenton was pretty crummy,” recalled Baumecker in 1995. “But I remember a lot of warmth, a lot of caring. We helped an awful lot of people.”7

  Later Nash would recall, with great bitterness, the fact that he was assigned a serial number at Trenton, as if he were an inmate of a prison.8 To occupy a room shared by thirty or forty others, to be forced to wear clothes that are not your own, to have no place, not even a locker, for your things, even your own soap or shaving cream, is an experience that few people can imagine. Yet this is how Nash — a man who craved, because of his nature and the nature of his illness, solitude and mobility — lived for the next six months, surrounded by strangers. If he had dreaded military duty, what must this have been like for him?

  Nash would have been brought to Payton One, the men’s admitting ward, on the ground floor of Payton, off to the right of the main administration building. Baumecker was in charge of admissions then and conducted the initial interview. “Nash was my patient,” said Baumecker. “He didn’t like me because my name started with a B’ He had something against the letter B.”9

  The admission interview took place in a small admitting room that had a cot, a couple of chairs, a desk, and a small window. Baumecker asked Nash the usual questions, such as “Do you hear voices?” He tried to find out whether Nash had delusions and whether they were elaborate. He watched his expressions to see whether the emotions he showed were appropriate to what he was saying. The hijacking of a Portuguese ocean liner, the Santa Maria, off Caracas that week — and the subsequent efforts of the hijackers, who turned out to be anti-Salazar rebels, to obtain asylum in Brazil — was, it seemed, very much on Nash’s mind; he had his own private theory about it.10

  The following morning, Nash’s “case” was presented to the staff, and he was interviewed in the dormitory before a group of residents. That was when the preliminary diagnosis was reached, treatment was decided upon, and he was assigned a psychiatrist.

  One wound up in Trenton if one had no money or insurance, or was too sick for a private institution to handle. The decision to commit Nash to an overcrowded, underfunded, and understaffed state institution seems puzzling in retrospect. Alicia had at least some insurance coverage through her position at RCA, and Virginia, although by now worried that her son’s treatment would eat into her capital, was surely able to pay for some private care. Martha and Virginia certainly had their misgivings: “We went down to talk to them, to beg them to put a red flag on the case and pay special attention to John. It was the only state hospital that John ever stayed in.”11

  John Danskin recalled:

  I had heard he was in Trenton. I called his family and said, for God’s sake, do something. I drove down to Trenton State. I wanted to find out what the hell happened. I was shocked. It wasn’t brutal but he was being treated rather roughly. The attendant kept calling him Johnny.

  I told the people there: “This is the legendary John Nash.” He was all right too. He gave me no sign at all of being out of his mind. I kept thinking, my God, these shrinks! Who’s going to figure out what’s wrong with a genius? I resented them.12

  News that Nash had been committed to a state hospital spread quickly around Princeton. One person deeply disturbed by the notion that a genius like Nash was incarcerated at a state hospital, notorious for its overcrowding and aggressive medical treatments — including drugs, electroshock, and insulin coma therapy — was Robert Winters.13 Winters, a Harvard-trained economist who happened to be the business manager of the physics department at the time, was friendly with both Al Tucker and Don Spencer. Winters contacted Joseph Tobin, the Institute for Advanced Study’s psychiatric consultant and director of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute in Hopewell, which is a few miles from Princeton, calling him in late January to say, “It is in the national interest that everything possible be done to bring Professor Nash back to his original productive self.”14 Tobin suggested that Winters contact Harold Magee, Trenton’s medical director at the time. Winters did so and won an assurance from Magee, as he later wrote to Tobin, that “there would be a thorough study of Dr. Nash’s condition before any treatment was started at the state hospital.”15

  In truth, this was too much to expect. As Seymour Krim, a beat writer in New York, wrote in 1959 in his essay “The Insanity Bit” about his own experiences in mental hospitals, that work “in a flip factory is determined by mathematics; you must find the common denominator of categorization and treatment in order to handle the battalions of miscellaneous humanity that are marched past your desk with high trumpets blowing i
n their minds.”16

  Very soon after that assurance was given, or perhaps even before, Nash was transferred from Payton to Dix One, the insulin unit.17 Ehrlich, the psychiatrist at Princeton Hospital who had recommended Trenton, was convinced that Nash would benefit from the treatments available at Trenton.18 Whether Alicia, Virginia, or Martha gave explicit consent for insulin coma therapy is not clear. “I don’t remember whether the family had to give further permissions beyond the commitment,” Baumecker recalled. “In those days you could do just about anything without asking anybody.”19 Martha recalled that she was consulted: “That was a drastic decision. We were extra wary of anything that might affect his mental abilities. We discussed this with doctors.”20

  The insulin unit was the most elite unit within Trenton State Hospital.21 The unit had two separate wards — one with twenty-two male beds, the other with twenty-two female beds.22 Danskin later described it as looking like “the inside of the Lincoln Tunnel.”23 Its chief had the eye and ear of the hospital’s directors. It had the most doctors, the best nurses, the nicest furnishings. Only patients who were young and in good health were sent there. Patients on the insulin unit had special diets, special treatment, special recreation. “All the best of what the hospital had to offer was showered on them,” said Robert Garber, who was a staff psychiatrist at Trenton in the early 1940s and later president of the American Psychiatric Association. He said, “The insulin patients got a hell of a lot of TLC. In the family’s eyes, insulin had great appeal. Patients’ relatives were overwhelmed.”24