She had this steely determination. I liked it. I found it very interesting. She always had some agenda, some goal. — EMMA DUCHANE, 1997
HAVING RETURNED TO Cambridge in an anxious, uneasy frame of mind that made the dull task of preparing his lectures even more impossible than usual, Nash escaped to the music library almost every afternoon.1 The library, on the first floor of Charles Hayden Memorial, had an impressive collection of classical recordings and soundproofed, private cubicles where one could sit and play records, surrounded by deep-blue walls that made one feel as if one were floating in water.2 Nash would go into one of these and listen to either Bach or Mozart for hours on end.
On his way into the library he would stop at the desk to exchange a few bantering remarks with the music librarians — a mode of interaction that kept people at a distance, much as in the games he liked to play. On one of the first afternoons, he was surprised to see a young woman who had been his student the previous year standing behind the librarian’s desk. He had encountered her in the library from time to time before, but now it seemed she was actually working there. She too had seemed a bit startled when she saw him come in, but had given him a sweet smile and had greeted him by name. When he walked away from her he felt her eyes following him.
• • •
There was only a handful of coeds at MIT at the time, and the twenty-one-year-old Alicia Larde glowed like a hothouse orchid in this otherwise drab, barrackslike environment. Delicate and feminine, with pale skin and dark eyes, she exuded both innocence and glamour, a fetching shyness as well as a definite sense of self-possession, polish, and elegance.3 Always perfectly groomed, she wore her short black hair like Elizabeth Taylor’s in Butterfield 8, was almost always seen in very full skirts cinched tightly around her tiny waist and very, very high heels.4 She carried herself like a little queen. The student newspaper, The Tech, once included a reference to her beautiful ankles in the annual feature on MIT coeds.5 She was bright, vivacious, playful, and talkative — occasionally sarcastic and often very sharp — popular with the “little boys,” as she called the male students, and mad about movies.6 Her origins were exotic. One of her friends described her as “an El Salvadoran princess with a sense of noblesse oblige.”7
• • •
The Lardes were, in fact, an aristocratic clan.8 Their origins, like those of all the families which composed Central America’s elite, were European, primarily French. Eloi Martin Larde, a wine grower in Champagne, escaped from France during the revolution and settled in Baton Rouge. His son Florentin Larde moved to Central America, first to Guatemala, and ultimately to San Salvador, where he, his wife, and son Jorge became hoteliers and, eventually, owners of a large cotton-growing hacienda.
The Larde men were handsome and the women exceptionally beautiful. A photograph of Alicia’s father, Carlos Larde Arthes, and his nine siblings, taken a few days after their mother’s death in 1911, might have been of the Romanovs. The family’s history had romantic overtones. Alicia’s uncle Enrique believed himself to be the bastard son of one of the Austrian Hapsburgs, Archduke Rudolf. Family legend also included a link with an aristocratic French family, the Bourdons.9 The Lardes, mostly doctors, professors, lawyers, and writers, belonged to the intelligentsia rather than the landed oligarchy that dominated El Salvador’s indigo and coffee economy. But they mingled with presidents and generals and, in Carlos Larde’s generation, were prominent in public life. They were well educated, spoke French and English as well as Spanish, and traveled widely. Their interests ran to artistic and literary subjects as well as science and philosophy.
Carlos Larde got his medical training in El Salvador but spent several years studying abroad, in America and France, among other places.10 His early career had been full of promise: He held a number of public posts, including that of head of El Salvador’s Red Cross and, before World War II, was chairman of a League of Nations committee. Once he served as El Salvador’s consul in San Francisco. His second wife, Alicia Lopez Harrison, came from a wealthy, socially prominent family; Alicia’s maternal grandmother was the wife of an English diplomat. Mrs. Larde was not only beautiful but also warm, a wonderful cook, a charming hostess, and a popular aunt with her nieces and nephews.11
Alicia, or Lichi, as her family called her, was born on New Year’s Day, 1933, in San Salvador. She was the second of Carlos and Alicia’s children. Her brother Rolando, five years older, was eventually confined to an institution. A half-brother from her father’s first marriage lived with them as well. Treated as an only child by her doting older parents, Lichi was by all accounts a lovely child, with blonde ringlets. She grew up, amidst aunts, uncles, cousins, and servants, in a lovely villa near the center of the capital.
The idyll ended abruptly a year before the end of World War II, when Alicia was eleven. In 1944, in the midst of a yearlong popular insurrection against dictator Hernandez Martinez,12 Alicia’s uncle Enrique had suddenly left for Atlanta with his wife and five young children one night, in the middle of bomb blasts, in a station wagon draped with a white sheet to signal their civilian status. Carlos Larde followed him not long afterward, leaving his wife, daughter, and two sons behind temporarily. He joined his brother in Atlanta, but then moved on to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico, where he obtained a position as a staff doctor at a veterans’ hospital. Some weeks later, Mrs. Larde and Alicia joined him, after making the long journey by train through Mexico and stopping in Atlanta to visit Enrique and his family.13
What motivated Carlos Larde to follow his brother to the United States at age forty-six isn’t entirely clear. Possibly he feared the outbreak of a full-scale civil war. Possibly he saw a chance to revive his medical career, having apparently suffered a series of professional setbacks. But very likely a major reason for emigrating — and the one given Alicia by her parents — was his health. Carlos Larde was suffering from a number of increasingly debilitating physical ailments, among them a severe stomach ulcer, and working as a doctor in the United States would give him access to top-notch medical care. Whatever the reason, the move turned out to be permanent. Enrique went back to El Salvador after a few years, but Carlos Larde was to remain in this country until his death in 1962. Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde stayed for another decade after her husband’s death.
Hot, dank, slightly seedy, Biloxi lay sprawled on that shallow, murky stretch of the gulf between Mobile and New Orleans, among its barrier islands and river mouths.14 It was known for shrimp fishing, illegal gambling, and being a favorite wintering place for Chicago mobsters. Rationing made day-to-day life difficult. Carlos was often exhausted and ill and Alicia’s mother was plainly distressed by their new surroundings and terribly homesick. Later, the mother of a friend of Alicia’s would describe Mrs. Larde as a “very sad, very stoical person.” Alicia learned English quickly and easily but suffered pangs of dislocation and isolation on top of the ordinary anxieties of early adolescence. It was not a happy time. For consolation, she turned to schoolwork and the movies.
The Lardes did not stay in Biloxi for long. Less than a year after the war ended, they followed Enrique’s family to New York, where Enrique took a job as an interpreter at the United Nations. Once again, Alicia and her mother lived with Enrique’s family until Carlos found a position at the Pollak Hospital for Chest Diseases in Jersey City and a house for them to live in. Alicia commuted to Prospect High School, a Catholic school in Brooklyn.
• • •
Alicia wasn’t to stay trapped in the lower-middle-class environs of Prospect High for long. At the beginning of her sophomore year, the Lardes enrolled her at the Marymount School, an exclusive Catholic girls’ school in New York.
Marymount, which was operated by one of the oldest European orders, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, occupied three adjacent Beaux Arts mansions, on the southeast corner of Eighty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Central Park. It was another world. The student body, mostly day pupils from the surrounding Upper East Side, were from New York’s Catholic elite.15 Many of the girls were daughters of celebrities like Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Gleason, Paul Whiteman, and Pablo Casals. Alicia’s best friends there included the daughter of an Italian count. Tuition was several times what most private universities charged at the time, easily equivalent, once inflation is taken into account, to $15,000 today. Admission was based strictly on families’ social standing; the El Salvadoran ambassador wrote Alicia’s letter of reference, attesting to the Larde family’s social position.16
The school’s atmosphere, appropriately to girls being groomed to become “wives of Catholic leaders,” was cosmopolitan and cultured.17 The girls’ uniforms included stylish blazers and black high heels. Parents insisted that the school “keep up the social end of things.” Alicia took riding and tennis lessons in Central Park, played basketball, helped out on plays and musicals, and went to parties. She went to her senior prom, and afterward to the Stork Club, with her friend Chicky Gallagher’s brother.18
She looked, on graduation day, just like the other girls, only more beautiful, wrapped in the same white tulle and cradling the same three dozen long-stemmed roses, like a debutante before a coming-out ball. Much, however, separated Alicia from her wealthy schoolmates. Outwardly she was gay, charming, unruffled, and compliant, but her appearance veiled a keen intelligence, an outsider’s ambition, and what a future friend called steely determination. Self-controlled and reluctant to confide her real feelings to anyone, a legacy of her Latin upbringing, she hid a great deal from view. As a woman who got to know Alicia several years later said, “You have to keep the times in mind. Women dissembled then. Alicia behaved like a fifties ditz, but that doesn’t mean she was one. She was flirtatious but she was saying quite serious things. She always had some agenda, some goal.”19
As a child, she’d dreamed of becoming a modern-day Marie Curie.20 Alicia was twelve years old when she huddled with her father near the radio in their Biloxi apartment and listened with him to the broadcast about Hiroshima.21 It was for her, as for so many scientifically inclined youngsters, a defining moment. Within weeks, the Japanese surrender and the War Department’s revelation of the three hidden “atomic” cities in the southwestern desert turned anonymous men like Oppenheimer and Teller into public heroes. Instantly, the image of the “nuclear physicist” seized the popular imagination the same way that “rocket scientist” did after Sputnik. Alicia, already showing signs of her father’s talent and interest in scientific subjects, knew what she wanted to be. “The world was physics. It was what kids with a talent for, and interest in, math and science aspired to,” a fellow physics major at MIT said in 1997. “To Carlos Larde it was the top, and it was for Alicia too.”22
Her aptitude for mathematics and science had long been evident and became more so at Marymount. By the late 1940s, the school was already something more than a fancy finishing school. It had always had an exceptionally well-trained faculty, lay and religious, but during Alicia’s tenure the school was run by a forceful young Irish graduate of the London School of Economics — Sister Raymond — who was not only an ardent Keynesian, but a gifted educator determined to raise the educational standards of the place. Sister Raymond improved the caliber of students by introducing scholarships and gave more intellectual heft to the school’s curriculum by adding serious science and mathematics courses. Alicia had a choice between a classical education emphasizing the arts and languages and one focusing on science and mathematics. She was one of the few girls who chose the latter and, as a consequence, took biology, chemistry, and physics as well as three years’ worth of mathematics, often in tiny classes of two or three girls. Sister Raymond recalled her as a gifted and willing student: “Very intelligent. Not too pushy. Very very interested in her studies.”23
By her senior year, Alicia was quite definite about wanting to pursue a career in science. “I wanted a career, so I wanted to study something definite,” she said.24 Carlos Larde, who was delighted by his daughter’s ambitions, wrote an eloquent and touching letter to Sister Raymond urging her to make every effort to help Alicia realize her dream of becoming a nuclear scientist by helping her gain admission to a first-rate technical university.25 Alicia was accepted at MIT, one of only seventeen women and two female physics majors in the class of 1955.26
The Lardes were no less thrilled than Alicia. Carlos Larde, who had studied at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, particularly appreciated what an MIT degree would mean, but he drew the line at her going off to a virtually all-male engineering school on her own. Alicia’s mother, it was decided, would accompany Alicia in order to watch over and take care of her.27 Besides the natural protectiveness toward a precious daughter, the arrangement may have reflected a wish on the part of Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde to escape her ailing, difficult husband. Alicia’s friends at MIT were struck, later, by the fact that mother and daughter never referred to Carlos Larde and that he never came to visit.28 In any event, in the late summer of 1951, the two women rented a tiny furnished apartment in Boston29 not far from Beacon Street where John Nash had just found a room, across the river from MIT and not far from the Harvard Bridge.
• • •
It was marvelous being an MIT coed in the early 1950s, an era famous for its celebration of mothers and dumb blondes, because the coeds were so special and had, as it were, the best of both worlds: it was serious, but there were lots of men. There were girls who wore cocktail dresses and high heels while dissecting rats in the lab.30 A date wasn’t going dancing and sipping Manhattans, it was going to a lecture and out to coffee afterward, or maybe having a boy take you to his parents’ house and showing you, through a telescope, everything Galileo had seen.
Alicia was to tell her girlfriends that being there made her feel like a “Queen Bee.” It was also a chance to meet, finally, other women who didn’t think that having brains and ambitions was a major liability. “We were a self-selected group of fairly strong women,” said Joyce Davis, a native New Yorker and the only other female physics major in the class of 1955. “We had our own culture. It wasn’t normal American female culture, the ‘you can’t be as good as the boys’ culture, which we were always trying to escape. And it wasn’t the MIT boys’ culture either.”31
Alicia spent most of her time with the other coeds either at the dorm or on the campus. She studied with the other girls in the Cheney room, the coed lounge, ate breakfast and lunch with her friends at Pritchett lounge every day, and generally was up for whatever the girls felt like doing, whether it was playing basketball or organizing a charity fair.32 She attended a great many concerts and plays, thanks to the coeds’ wealthy patroness, a Mrs. McCormick, who showered them with tickets and even paid for them to take taxis across the Harvard Bridge in winter.
MIT’s academic program was brutally demanding, especially for physics majors. Class schedules were heavy, spread over six days, and consisted mostly of required courses. All the girls lived in healthy fear of flunking out. Alicia, who had sailed through her science and math courses at Marymount on native ability, found that this was no longer enough. Much to her dismay, she had to struggle to maintain a C average (which was a respectable performance in those days before grade inflation turned a C into a subaverage mark). “You either had to buckle down or accept just getting by,” said Joyce, Alicia’s best friend. “Alicia never really buckled down.”33
Alicia’s ambition survived her freshman year intact, despite a fair amount of teasing, especially in her chemistry class, from boys and instructors who were sure that she would not make the cut. In a letter to Joyce, in the summer of 1952, Alicia wrote:
Dear Joyce,
By this time you must be wondering whether I’m dead, dying or have mearly [sic] been kidnaped judging from the amount of communication you have received from me; the sad truth of course is my laziness. Except for one week that I went to Canada with Betty Sabin and her parents I have spent the Summer working as a sales girl in a small store (I hate to say 5 + 10) behind the ribbon counter; I have done all but strangled the customers with “our” fine products. But life hasn’t been all tears (I hate to think of my report card) we have fortunately moved to a new apartment half a block away from Ken-more Square. And so I will be able to walk home with you (the dorm is only about a block and 1/2 away).
By now you must be beginning to believe the malicious rumors that I bribe my English teachers; not to mention the grammar and the spelling is atrocious (get me!). My report card was the same as last term with the unhappy exception of a B in English; my cum. is still above 3 though; .02 above that is. I’m unhappy that we won’t be in the same section this year but c’est la vie! I wanted to take French instead of German in order to make my life easier but I’m not sure I can because of my hope for a Ph.D. in physics . . . remember all I was going to study this summer? Well, I’ve gotten to page 17 of the Physics book and that’s all; I am however many movies wiser.
Give my regards to your mother and answer soon (do as I say not as I do).34
A profile, a look, a voice can capture a heart in no time at all. Alicia gave away hers in the space of a single calculus lecture. She was sitting, her best friend Joyce beside her, in the front row of M351, Advanced Calculus for Engineers, a course required of all physics majors. John Nash arrived late wearing a haughty and bored expression. Without so much as a glance or a word to the assembled, he closed all the windows, flipped open his copy of Hildebrand, and embarked on a lackluster exposition of the properties of ordinary differential equations.
It was mid-September, Indian summer weather, and as Nash droned on, the room got quite hot. First one, then several students interrupted Nash to complain and to ask that he let them open the windows. Nash, who had obviously shut the windows to prevent any outside noise distracting anyone, ignored them. “He was so wrapped up in himself that he wouldn’t pay attention to what we wanted. His attitude plainly said, ‘Shut up and take notes,’ ” Joyce recalled.35 At that point, Alicia jumped up from her seat, ran over to the windows in her high heels, and opened them one after another, each time with a toss of her head. On her way back to her seat, she looked straight at Nash, as if daring him to reverse her action. He did not.
Joyce thought Nash an indifferent lecturer and insensitive besides. “He presented the material but that was it. He was sort of cold.” Joyce transferred out of the section after the first class, but Alicia surprised her by staying. “She thought he looked like Rock Hudson,” said Joyce.
• • •
To see Nash through Alicia’s eyes during their first encounters as student and professor conveys much about the elementary force that was to bind her to him. In MIT’s intellectual hierarchy — where “mathematics was the highest thing,” as Joyce was to say — Nash was the closest thing to royalty.36 It was his good looks, however, that made Alicia’s heart beat faster. “A genius with a penis. Isn’t that what we all want?” an actress once quipped, and the quip captures the combination of brains, status, and sex appeal that made Nash so irresistible. Herta Newman, Donald’s wife, said the same thing in less bald terms: “He was going to be famous. He was also cute.”37 Emma Duchane, a physics major two years behind Alicia at MIT, said, “Alicia thought he was gorgeous. She thought he had beautiful legs.”38 Nash wasn’t scruffy like many of the mathematicians. He was always neatly combed, pressed, and shined. His haughty manner and cool indifference only confirmed his desirability. His name, two monosyllables that advertised his Anglo-Saxon ancestry, added to his appeal. “He was very, very good-looking,” Alicia later said. “Very intelligent. It was a little bit of a hero worship thing.”39
Nash took no notice of her, but Alicia was quite prepared to woo him. All that year, she would seek him out. “Come with me to the music library, Joyce,” or, “Come with me to Walker Memorial. I want to see Nash.”40 “She set her cap for him,” Joyce recalled. “She had a campaign going.”
Her grades suffered. She got two Ds and for the first time in her MIT career her grade point average slipped below a C. The following April, Joyce wrote to her parents: “Alicia is still not doing to [sic] well since she is in LOVE. She goes around with a faraway expression on her face.”41
When the calculus course was over, Alicia got a job in Nash’s favorite haunt, the music library. It is a measure of her lovesickness that she found it a far more interesting place to work than Lincoln Laboratories, where she also had a job. “Work here isn’t very stimulating; what I do mostly is count ‘tracks’ seen thru a microscope,” she wrote to Joyce during the summer. “I only work 15 hrs a week here but what tires me out is the overtime; I keep seeing the little monsters every time I close my eyes. Music library proves more interesting, so far several strange boys have tried to pick me up.”42
Alicia was still playing the field, but with less enthusiasm than her letter to Joyce implied: “A few more weeks now and I expect to be seeing ‘blondie’ again. It seems peculiar but I feel so indifferent about him now.”
She continued this letter a few weeks later:
I am writing in the music library now (obviously). Something funny {?} happened to me here the other day. A boy I know came to talk to me while one of the ones I am out “gunning” for was sitting out there; or so I thought. In order to seem attractive to the one out there I began pouring on the “charm” on my little friend; then in my loudest possible voice I announced my working hours in the ML; they must have heard me over the radio. Well, the persecuted one seemed to be getting the idea while I became bolder and bolder. Finally he came over. Then, boy, was I mortified. The moral of the story is “wear glasses.” Needless to say he wasn’t the “one.”
Nash, of course, was at RAND most of that summer.
When Nash started coming around the library again that fall, Alicia engaged him in conversation and studied him as minutely as any fan studies his or her favorite star. She found out that he played chess. She found out that he was a science fiction fan. She made it her business to learn chess and, in addition to her job in the library, she took to sitting in the science library near the science fiction collection. “My activities besides the music library include the science library where I read science fiction (John likes it),” she wrote to Joyce.
Despite Alicia Larde’s crush, which seemed to have erased the earnest student of science, she was playing a serious game. Her romantic dreams of becoming a famous scientist herself hadn’t survived the harsh reality test provided by MIT. As she put it later, “I was no Einstein.”43 Pragmatically, she recognized that marriage to an illustrious man might also satisfy her ambitions. Nash seemed to fit the bill. “John could give her a lot of things she didn’t have,” observed John Moore, a mathematician who fell in love with Alicia some years later.44 Sadly, the romantic girl whose favorite song was “Lady of Spain” would most agonizingly disappear in just a few years.