The sum of a man

Publish date: 2022-02-18
Biography booksOn Sunday John Nash basked in adulation as A Beautiful Mind, the film based on his life, collected the Oscar for best picture. But his reputation has recently taken a battering: he's been called an anti-semite, an adulterer and a lousy father. So what is the truth about the mathematical genius who recovered from decades of schizophrenia to win a Nobel prize? Sylvia Nasar, his biographer, knows better than most

It was a beautiful night at the Oscars for A Beautiful Mind, the Ron Howard movie starring Russell Crowe as a mathematical genius John Nash who triumphed over three decades of schizophrenia to win a Nobel prize. After what the New York Times called the "dirtiest Oscar campaign in recent memory", the romantic drama inspired by my 1998 biography took all but one of the most glittering prizes for which it had been nominated - best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best supporting actress.

It was also a beautiful night for the man portrayed by Russell Crowe. In recent weeks, Nash, 73, who lives near Princeton, New Jersey, had become the target of a smear campaign by critics of the film who argued that, in contrast to Crowe's sympathetic character, the real man was no hero. Distorting and even inventing "facts" supposedly in the book, reporters and reviewers at major news organisations called Nash everything from an adulterer to an anti-semite. But the attacks also spurred those of us who know Nash and the facts of his life to correct the record. After spending a day and a half interviewing Nash and his family, veteran CBS correspondent Mike Wallace told Larry King: "One of the most obvious ways to go after [the film] is to try to call John Nash an anti-semite, raging homosexual, bad father. He is none of those things."

Last night's triumph was a vindication not only for the film-makers but for the film's subject. Nash, wearing black tie and sitting with his wife Alicia, looked both pleased and slightly bemused as winner after winner saluted him. This morning on the phone, talking from his room at the St Regis in Los Angeles, Nash remarked that there were some similarities between the Oscar and the Nobel prize, namely that both involved academies and "a lot of politics". How will it affect his life? "I'm going to sign autographs now," he said, "I haven't been signing any autographs since 1994."

It never ceases to amaze me that Nash and I are now friends. During the three years I worked on the biography, he refused to grant me a formal interview, saying that he was adopting "a position of Swiss neutrality". But he was not averse to chatting informally when we met on social occasions and did not discourage his family and friends from cooperating; after the book was published, he invited me to a party. It's been incredible for me to witness his getting his life back bit by bit. Among other things, we went together to the first Broadway play Nash had seen (Amy's View with Judi Dench).

Listening to him this morning, I once again felt astonished at the way the remarkable third act of Nash's life has continued to unfold. It is almost impossible to believe that 10 or 15 years ago this witty man with his air of boyish innocence was so sick that he was haunting the Princeton campus in mismatched plaids and red high-top sneakers, scribbling weird but witty messages on blackboards (I agree with Harvard! There is a brain flat!?). Or that when I first learned about his life, as an economics reporter for the New York Times, more than a year before he won the Nobel, he was still afraid to look anyone in the eye, his front teeth rotted.

Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, he had fallen, not from a stepladder, but from a star. Nash was just 20, with movie-star looks and an Olympian manner, when he burst on to the mathematical scene in 1947. Within 14 months of his arrival at Princeton, he had invented a revolutionary theory of human conflict and cooperation that would eventually win him a Nobel prize. By 30, his stunning achievements in pure mathematics and his flamboyant behaviour made him a celebrity in the world of mathematics. Like the actor who plays him in the movie, Nash was "a bad boy, but a great one", according to a fellow mathematician. One rival said he was, "Obnoxious. Immature. A brat. What redeemed him was a keen logical beautiful mind."

Contrary to widespread references to Nash's "numerous homosexual liaisons", he was not gay. While he had several emotionally intense relationships with other men when he was in his early 20s, I never interviewed anyone who claimed, much less provided evidence, that Nash ever had sex with another man. True, Nash was arrested in a police trap in a public lavatory in Santa Monica in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy hysteria. The military think-tank where he was a consultant, stripped him of his top-secret security clearance and fired him, ignoring Nash's flat denial and saying it "didn't really matter whether the cops were telling the truth or not". The charge - indecent exposure - was dropped.

Various newspapers have alluded to "Nash's adultery". As a young instructor at MIT, Nash did have an affair with a nurse five years his senior and had a child with her. The book makes clear, however, that his affair with the mother of his older son was over by the time he married Alicia Larde. Entertainment Weekly's assertion that Nash was "a lousy father" is also false. While it's true that Nash behaved irresponsibly toward his elder son, who as a consequence spent several years in foster care, Nash always acknowledged his fatherhood and tried to stay in touch with his son, even during his long illness. Since his recovery, they have formed a close relationship. For many years, moreover, Nash has cared for his younger son who has suffered from schizophrenia for more than 25 years, and who has always lived with Nash and his wife. Indeed, Nash's chief reason for allowing Ron Howard's movie was the opportunity to provide at last for Alicia and his two adult sons.

The actual story of Nash's miraculous triumph over schizophrenia is much more convoluted than the screen version, but the film's depiction of his disease and re-emergence is substantially true. In many ways, Nash's illness was a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia. Some of his peers were convinced that the early stages of the illness manifested themselves in graduate school, but the full-blown symptoms did not erupt until he was 30, just as he was about to be promoted to full professor at MIT. He told the chairman of a rival department that he wouldn't be able to accept an offer because: "I am scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica."

The most damaging charge during the Oscar campaign was that of bigotry. The New York Post, quoting a letter written by Nash in 1967, called him a "rabid anti-semite". Here are the facts: In his 20s, Nash's most ardent champions in the mathematics community were Norbert Wiener, Solomon Lefschetz, and Norman Levinson, all victims of the anti-semitism. The letter the Post quotes was written eight years after Nash was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia - at a time when he not only blamed his illness on Jews and the state of Israel, but also believed himself to be Job, a slave in chains, and a messiah living, not in his mother's home in Roanoke, Virginia, but in hell, refugee camps, bomb shelters and prisons. These were signs of paranoid delusions.

Like so many people who suffer from schizophrenia, Nash did not believe that he was sick. As his illness deepened in the early 60s, he accused Alicia of wanting to lock him away, and eventually made plans to return to Europe without her. Exhausted and depressed, struggling to raise her son, Alicia obtained a divorce in 1963. Nonetheless, she continued to see him, visited him when he was again hospitalised, and rallied support for him.

Nash never stopped pining for Alicia, and she never really let him go. After his mother's death in 1970, when he had no one else in the world to turn to, he wrote to Alicia and begged her to shelter him. Astonishingly, she agreed. She took his own declared needs - for safety, freedom, friendship - literally. "That's what you need," she said later. "Being taken care of and not too much pressure."

Powerful new drugs such as clozapine played no role in Nash's recovery. Another kind of chemistry apparently did, however. Like fewer than one in 10 individuals who suffer from chronic schizophrenia for decades, Nash "emerged from irrational thinking ultimately without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging", as he later put it. In the movie, Russell Crowe's Nash says that he went on "a diet of the mind". People who suffer from the illness say they too struggle consciously against their delusions. "Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking," Nash has said. Like love, willpower alone isn't enough to cure schizophrenia. But psychiatrists, sufferers and their families alike agree that few recover as completely as Nash - or manage to live successfully with the illness - without a strong desire to reconnect with the everyday world of reality.

Even today, Nash sometimes finds himself slipping into the old mode of thought. Sometimes he even hears the old voices. But now, he is able to ignore them. "It's like a continuous process rather than waking up from a dream," he has said. Nash never returned to teaching, but he began doing mathematics again. After he won the Nobel prize in 1994, Princeton gave him an office and a research stipend, and, recently the National Science Foundation awarded him a research grant. Other laureates fly first class, make investments, or start charities with their prize money. For Nash, the most prized emoluments are simpler: spending a couple of bucks on a cup of coffee at Starbucks, getting a driver's license, and, most important, providing for his family once more. This once self-involved man has remarried the woman who saved him, cares for the son who is ill, and expresses hope that his story "helps to reduce the stigma against people with mental illness".

"A second take!" he quipped before kissing Alicia again for the camera at their wedding last year. "Just like a movie."

· A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Naser is published by Faber.

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