Princeton, 1960
THE OLIVE-GREEN MERCEDES 180 was still in the institute parking lot in Princeton. Nash had come straight there while Alicia and the baby went to Washington to stay with the Lardes.1 He hung around Princeton. In June, having heard that his sister had had a baby, Nash drove down to Roanoke to visit Martha in the hospital. She remembered being frightened by his appearance and concealing from him her son’s due date, June 13. “I was worried that he would put some meaning in it,” she recalled in 1995.2 Her recollection is that Nash stayed in Roanoke with Virginia for several weeks.
Alicia, meanwhile, was looking for work and had enlisted, among others, John Danskin — now married to Odette — to help her.3 Danskin was now teaching at Rutgers, and the newlyweds lived on the outskirts of Princeton. Alicia was apparently considering staying in Washington, presumably so that her parents could help with the baby. She was also thinking of moving back to New York. During the summer, Alicia stayed with her old MIT friend, Joyce Davis, by now living in Greenwich Village and working in the city, and interviewed for various computer programming jobs. As she told Joyce in a note she left at her apartment on the day that she returned to Washington, she got offers from IBM and also from Univac but was undecided over whether to accept them, saying, “Now I’ve got a real problem, work in NY or Wash?”4
Odette urged Alicia to move to Princeton.5 Nash was also in favor. Alicia thought that her husband would benefit from being around other mathematicians again and hoped that he would be able to find work in Princeton. The upshot was that Alicia turned down the offers to work in New York City and instead took a position with the Astro-Electronics Division of the Radio Corporation of America, which had a big research facility on Hightstown Road between Princeton and Hightstown.6 Alicia left John Charles in her mother’s care once more and rented a small apartment at 58 Spruce Street, on the corner of Walnut, about a mile from Palmer Square. Nash joined her there at the end of the summer.
• • •
Initially, at least, Princeton seemed to offer a respite after the anxious final months in Paris. Alicia and Nash were very much part of a crowd that had gathered around John Danskin and Odette in the charming enclave near the Delaware-Raritan Canal. Griggstown consisted at that time of Tornquist’s, a general store, and a few picturesque houses, including the former cider mill where the Danskins lived. It was especially beautiful in the summer, the air heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. Napthali Afriat, a game theorist who worked with Morgenstern at the time, lived there, as did Jean-Pierre Cauvin, a graduate student in French at Princeton, and a couple that worked at Rutgers, Agnes and Michael Sherman.7 The Danskins held frequent parties at which the Milnors, Ed Nelson and his wife, and Georg Kreisel, a logician, were also frequent visitors.8 The parties lasted long into the night, with Beethoven sonatas, a great deal of wine, barbecued steaks and shish kebab, nighttime swims in the canal, and bright conversation led by the convivial, cultivated, mercurial Danskin. Cauvin remembered John Nash very vividly.
He had a kind of childlike air and disposition, a gentleness, this very vulnerable quality, a kind of helplessness. It blew my mind that someone who gave this appearance of being so simple could be a genius. He was subdued and rather passive. He always spoke very softly and in a monotone. I don’t recall him ever initiating a conversation. He would respond to a question or remark after a little momentary hesitation. Alicia was very attentive to him.9
Alicia was learning to drive. Danskin and Milnor were both giving her lessons, with haphazard success.10 They invited her along to a Thursday-night folk dance group at Miss Fines’s School on Route 206 that Danskin and Milnor belonged to.11 “She was very pretty, very quiet. I remember her pulling out a photograph of a cute little boy,” said Elvira Leader.12 Her husband, Sol, danced with Alicia: “She was weightless,” he recalled.13
Danskin would bring the dancers home afterward. He remembered talking with Nash about mathematics. They’d been drinking by then. Danskin was trying to prove a theorem:
He immediately hit you with the hardest point. He was still very sharp. He understood what I was doing. I wanted to avoid the hard way and he caught me. Who in the hell would ask that? You would if you were proving it yourself, but he was just listening. And understanding.14
Danskin spearheaded an effort to find Nash a job. Danskin was doing some consulting work for Oskar Morgenstern and Morgenstern, it seemed, was willing to hire Nash as a consultant. That fall, Nash was given a one-year consulting contract, with a ceiling of two thousand dollars. Morgenstern indicated to the university that he was making the offer under “a small charitable pressure” but that he felt “Nash could contribute strongly to his program if he was able to pull out of his present mental depression and utilizes his faculties to their greatest extent.”15 The university balked, “fearing that the appointment might be based on human kindness, rather than on realistic, technical needs.”16 It was decided to review Nash’s performance after two months. The contract was dated October 21, 1960.17
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 chargé 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