IF the phrase stranger than fiction ever described any series of events, it applies to the bizarre circumstances that surrounded the suicide of William Richards on January 30, 1940, on the eve of the publication of his novel, Brain Waves and Death. The book, which was written under a pseudonym, was a thinly veiled account of the legendary scientific laboratory owned by the millionaire Alfred Lee Loomis and the eccentric coterie of geniuses whose work he financed. Richards was an accomplished chemist and had for years enjoyed Loomis’ luxurious facilities in the exclusive enclave of Tuxedo Park, where his mansion was known to be a meeting place for the great names in science and finance. Richards, who was my great-uncle, came from a prominent Boston family and was painfully aware of his pedigreed seat in the country’s intellectual elite. His father, Theodore William Richards, was chairman of the Harvard Chemistry Department and a Nobel laureate. His sister, Grace Richards, was married to James B. Conant, who at the time was president of Harvard. In this rarefied company, it was not enough to be merely accomplished—anything less than extraordinary constituted a disappointment. Richards’ talents lay in music and art, but he was expected to strive for greatness in science. Before he turned forty, deciding he had fallen short of the mark, he killed himself. Within the Richards-Conant family, his suicide was regarded as a kind of weakness, a moral failure. It was not only a betrayal of his intellectual promise, but an embarrassing public expression of his private anguish. My grandfather used his influence to have the incident covered up, and it was never spoken of again.
My father, Theodore Richards Conant, knew only that he had lost his favorite uncle to some terrible tragedy. The deep air of mystery that surrounded Richards’ death, and his fiction’s rich and foreboding scientific detail, always haunted my father. He saved a copy of the scandalous novel, which was published posthumously and quickly disappeared, along with an unpublished short story about a scientist working to create the first atomic bomb, which my grandfather confiscated on the grounds that it was too close to the truth to dare publish in those dangerous times. The silence my grandfather imposed served only to distort and enlarge the family myths about William Richards, and in my father’s boyish eyes, he became a heroic figure—rebellious, romantic, doomed.
Years later, when I was growing up, my father liked to tell lurid tales about Richards’ death. At funerals, usually held at the family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we would go hunt for his grave and that of his brother, who also committed suicide. My father always joked that every good Boston family should have a pew at St. Trinity’s, a plot at Mount Auburn’s, and a gurney at McLean’s (the local nuthouse). Once, when we were visiting 17 Quincy Street, the Harvard president’s house where he was raised, my father took me to an upstairs bedroom, pointed to the four-poster, and told me that this was where his uncle’s body had been found. He fed my fascination by telling me vivid, and wildly varying, accounts of what had happened. In one version, Richards had built an elaborate apparatus that he used to electrocute himself, and it was my horrified grandmother who discovered the corpse. Another time, he told my grandfather’s Harvard biographer that the contraption had been “rigged to an alarm clock that released a lethal dose of poison gas,” killing Richards exactly the same way the characters in his novel were finished off. Neither account was accurate, but the biographer believed him, and so did I.
Over the years, I became enchanted with the stories and the extraordinary coincidence of his suicide, the approaching war, and the invention of the bomb. That my grandfather played a crucial role in the decision to build the first atomic bomb, and administered the Manhattan Project, only added to the mystery. How had Richards come to know so much about something as secret as nuclear fission? Did he know too much? Had he exposed more than he had imagined in his roman à clef about Loomis’ private laboratory? As I grew older, I pried open locked trunks stored in the basement of my grandparents’ country home in Hanover, New Hampshire, and pored over old letters and diaries, looking for clues. When my father gave a large cache of books and papers belonging to my grandfather to Harvard in the mid-1980s, I asked him not to hand over any of Richards’ letters. I was an adult, on the brink of a journalism career, and I knew with certainty that one day I would write about this strange chapter in my family’s history.
At the same time, I knew it meant acknowledging the strain of manic depression that has been passed down through successive generations of the Richards and Conant families and has been the cause of so much tragedy and pain. I would also be acknowledging my own genetic vulnerability, and it was many years before I felt ready to do that. I also struggled with the problem of prying into what many of my grandfather’s friends and colleagues might regard as a dark corner of his illustrious career. James Conant was a very private, proud, and tidy man and placed a premium on appearances. He would have loathed seeing his family’s mess tipped onto the page. There were also gaping holes in the story. My grandmother was acutely aware that graduate students would one day paw her private papers, and she set about methodically destroying anything incriminatingly personal in the record, ripping pages out of diaries and burning most of her mother’s and brother’s letters.
It was ironic, then, that I first looked into Alfred Loomis to help shed light on William Richards’ life. Few men of Loomis’ prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history. Most of the books I looked in for information about Loomis included only a few lines about him, at most a paragraph or two. He seemed to stand at the edge of important events, intimately involved and at the same time somehow overlooked. Yet here was a character who was at once familiar. Independently wealthy, iconoclastic, and aloof, Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize—financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, inventor, amateur, dilettante—a contradiction in terms. At a time when the world was a smaller place, and the men in positions of power all knew one another because of family connections, school ties, and club affiliations, Loomis knew everyone. He was the ultimate insider. Although he rose to become one of the most powerful figures in banking in the 1920s, and scooped his peers by pulling out of the market before the Crash of 1929 and rode out the Depression sitting on a mountain of cash, he was not satisfied with the lucre and laurels of Wall Street. He, too, by virtue of his background and education, felt obliged to strive for a kind of excellence that had nothing to do with the external trappings of success.
Loomis had the foresight to know that science would soon become a dominating force, and he used his immense fortune to attract a gifted group of young physicists to his private laboratory and endow pioneering research that pushed at the frontiers of knowledge. He created a scientific idyll in the cloistered fiefdom of Tuxedo Park, and in his belief in invention and experimentalism, he prepared the way for a series of scientific developments that would not only change the course of the war, but ultimately transform the modern world. For more than a decade, William Richards was part of Loomis’ brilliant circle at Tuxedo Park, and in his fiction, he captured that twilight period between the wars when the last of the gentleman scientists engaged in pure research, before the demands of the real world called them to action. In the intersection of their lives, I glimpsed a story of real interest, authentically American, with the stature of history. And in the recurring mental illness that ravaged Loomis’ family, and resulted in a bitter divorce that drove him into seclusion, I recognized a parallel story that helped me make peace with my own peculiar legacy.