Santa Monica, Summer 1952
Away from contact with a few special sorts of individuals I am lost, lost completely in the wilderness . . . so, so, so, it’s been a hard life in many ways. — JOHN FORBES NASH, JR., 1965
AFTER JOHN NASH LOST EVERYTHING—family, career, the ability to think about mathematics — he confided in a letter to his sister Martha that only three individuals in his life had ever brought him any real happiness: three “special sorts of individuals” with whom he had formed “special friendships.”1
Had Martha seen the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night? “They seem very colorful and amusing,” he wrote. “Of course they are much younger like the sort of person I’ve mentioned. . . . I feel often as if I were similar to the girls that love the Beatles so wildly since they seem so attractive and amusing to me.”2
Nash’s first loves were one-sided and unrequited. “Nash was always forming intense friendships with men that had a romantic quality,” Donald Newman observed in 1996. “He was very adolescent, always with the boys.”3 Some were inclined to see Nash’s infatuations’ as “experiments,” or simple expressions of his immaturity — a view that he may well have held himself. “He played around with it because he liked to play around. He was very experimental, very try-outish,” said Newman in 1996. “Mostly he just kissed.”4
Newman, who liked to joke about his past and future female conquests,5 had firsthand knowledge because Nash was, for a time, infatuated with him — with predictable results. “He used to talk about how Donald looked all the time,” Mrs. Newman said in 1996.6 Newman recalled: “He tried fiddling around with me. I was driving my car when he came on to me.” D.J. and Nash were cruising around in Newman’s white Thunderbird when Nash kissed him on the mouth. D.J. just laughed it off.7
• • •
Nash’s first experience of mutual attraction — “special friendships,” as he called them — occurred in Santa Monica.8 It was the very end of the summer of 1952, after Milnor had moved out and Martha had flown back home. The encounter must have been fleeting, coming in the last days of August, just before he was due to leave for Boston, and very furtive. But it was nonetheless decisive because for the first time he found not rejection but reciprocity. Thus it was the first real step out of his extreme emotional isolation and the world of relationships that were purely imaginary, a first taste of intimacy, not entirely happy, no doubt, but suggestive of hitherto unsuspected satisfactions.
The only traces of Nash’s friendship with Ervin Thorson that remain are his description of him as a “special” friend in his 1965 letter and a series of elliptical references to “T” in letters in the late 1960s.9 Few if any of Nash’s acquaintances met him; Martha recalled a friend of Nash’s who once spent the night on the couch of their Georgina Avenue apartment, but not his name.10
Thorson, who died in 1992, was thirty years old in 1952.11 He was a native Californian of Scandinavian extraction. Nash described him to Martha as an aerospace engineer, but he may in fact have been an applied mathematician. He had been a meteorologist in the Army Air Corps during the war. Afterward, he earned a master’s degree in mathematics at UCLA and went to Douglas Aircraft in 1951, just a few years after Douglas had spun off its R&D division to form the RAND Corporation.12 At that time, Douglas was mapping the future of interplanetary travel for the Pentagon, and Thorson, who eventually led a research team, was very likely involved in these efforts.13 His great passion, conceived twenty years before the United States launched Viking, was the dream of exploring Mars, his sister Nelda Troutman recalled in 1997.
Thorson was, his sister said, “very high strung, not a social person at all, very bright, knew a lot, very very academic.”14 Nash could easily have met him — given the close ties between Douglas and RAND, which was also heavily involved in studies of space exploration — at a talk or seminar, or perhaps even at one of the parties that John Williams, the head of RAND’s mathematics department, gave.
If Thorson, who never married, was a homosexual, his surviving sister did not know it.15 With his family, at any rate, he was unusually closemouthed, not just about his work, which was highly classified, but about all aspects of his personal life.16 Given the mounting pressure to root out homosexuals in the defense industry during the McCarthy era, Thorson would have had to practice great discretion in any case; his career at Douglas was to last for another fifteen years.17 When he abruptly resigned from Douglas in 1968, he apparently did so at the age of forty-seven because he feared dying. Several of his colleagues had recently died of heart attacks and Thorson, who had some sort of mild heart condition, decided he couldn’t cope with the stress and overwork anymore. He moved back to his hometown of Pomona and became a virtual recluse except for an active involvement in the Lutheran church, living with his parents for the next twenty-five years until his death.
Whether Nash and Thorson saw each other again when Nash returned to Santa Monica for a third summer two years later or on one of his trips to Santa Monica during his illness in the early and mid-1960s is not known. But Nash continued to think of Thorson and to refer to him obliquely until at least 1968.