New York Times June 3, 2001

A Portrait of John Forbes Nash Jr.'s Shattered Brilliance

By NINA DARNTON

PRINCETON, N.J. -- ON a fine spring day, with the Princeton campus in fragrant, pastel bloom, John Forbes Nash Jr., winner of the 1994 Nobel in economic science, is making his daily rounds. He spends the morning at home, working on computations for an article he is hoping to publish. About noon, he stops in at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he eats lunch and talks shop with some colleagues at the math table. Finally, in the late afternoon, he enters his campus office at Fine Hall, the mathematics building, where he is meeting a reporter for an interview.

He has come a long way from the time when, known as "The Phantom of Fine Hall," his feet bare, his hair long and dirty, his teeth worn down to stumps, he haunted this building in a bizarre caricature of an academic life, corralling students, ranting about religious prophecies, finding empty classrooms and scrawling formulas on the blackboards.

The remarkable journey of the boy genius who sank into paranoid schizophrenia for 30 years and then emerged to win the Nobel Prize for work completed before his breakdown is the subject of "A Beautiful Mind," a film being directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe as Mr. Nash and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Alicia.

The title is taken from a 1998 biography of Mr. Nash by Sylvia Nasar, a former reporter for The New York Times, but the filmmakers are quick to point out that the movie is not a literal biography. Instead, they say, they used Mr. Nash's story as inspiration for a broader attempt to depict the process and ravages of mental illness and to find a visual analogy for it.

"The film uses the architecture of Nash's life in the broadest possible sense," said Akiva Goldsman, the screenwriter. "We hit landmarks — genius, marriage, Nobel prize, illness — and that became the frame on which to hang dramatic anecdotes that I'd like to believe are true to the spirit of John and Alicia's lives. It is certainly not factual and never pretends to be. Most of the things that happen in the movie didn't happen in John's life."

Mr. Howard and his partner in Imagine Entertainment, the producer Brian Grazer, had long been interested in developing a film about mental illness; they had shepherded two previous projects on the subject to the script stage. But they felt that they had never solved the inherent dramatic problem of the material: how to take the mystery of the human mind and make it visually and dramatically compelling; how to create images for things that are intellectual and potentially static and at the same time present a human story that transcends these obstacles.

Mr. Goldsman's script met the challenge with strong characterizations and a powerful love story at its center. It also employs twists and surprises. Most important, it tries to present mental illness in a way that doesn't allow viewers to keep it at arms' length; the aim is to draw them into the experience from Mr. Nash's point of view.

Mr. Howard's interest in mental illness began with a childhood trauma. When he was an 8-year-old star on "The Andy Griffith Show" in the early 1960's, he witnessed the sudden mental collapse of a guest actor while the camera was rolling. "He was sitting in a chair, doing his dialogue," Mr. Howard said on the set at St. Marks Church in the East Village during a recent break from shooting. "Within a few moments he wasn't making sense, and by the time people realized he needed help, he was on the floor in the fetal position. It was one of the most extraordinary, intense, terrifying things I ever witnessed."

For Mr. Grazer, the lure of the project was the chance to explore the connection between madness and genius and, ultimately, to present a story of human survival and triumph. But the triumph is not of the usual Hollywood variety; here, it is subtle and complex. "The triumph isn't that he beat schizophrenia, because he didn't," Mr. Grazer said. "The triumph isn't that he won the Nobel — it's a great thing, but it isn't the singular triumph. The triumph is that his mind, his soul, his spirit, his intelligence, all of that survived against the will of the madness of schizophrenia. He was still able to engage."

The principals involved in the film express a respect for Mr. Nash and his wife bordering on awe. It's easy to see why. The story of his rapid ascent and devastating decline is the stuff of classical tragedy. At his height, he was brilliant, handsome, arrogant, a luminous star in Princton's renowned mathematics department. At his lowest point, deeply delusional, he was repeatedly hospitalized against his will. Finally, living with Alicia, who had divorced him in desperation and then took him in when, with no place to go, he begged her to protect him, he spent his days wandering the streets of Princeton, impoverished, paranoid, laughed at by the neighborhood children, sheltered not only by Alicia but also by the mathematical community.

"She was unemployed, on welfare, raising their kid, nonetheless still young and beautiful and hoping to pick up her life again," said Ms. Nasar, who, though not involved with the film, occasionally visits the set at locations throughout New York and New Jersey. "But she could not bear to turn him away, so she took him in. And this is a big part of this script, and I think that's right. Because that's why this guy survived, because people like that usually don't survive." The Nashes, who never remarried, have remained together.

Mr. Nash's behavior seemed odd right from the beginning. To his colleagues in Princeton's elite graduate program in 1948, the personality of this loner was more an indication of brilliance than of potential madness. He entered Princeton with a one- line recommendation from his college adviser: "This man is a genius." Within 14 months, he had produced the Nash Equilibrium, the paper on game theory that won him the Nobel in economic science almost half a century later. (He shared the prize with John C. Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten.) Yet, according to Ms. Nasar, Mr. Nash's reputation rests not just on game theory but also on his work in pure mathematics, for which there is no Nobel Prize. "What he won the Nobel for is the most trivial thing he ever did," one mathematician told her.

He was drawn to problems that other mathematicians thought unsolvable and in some cases actually solved them. "He just went ahead and did it," Ms. Nasar said, "and to have that kind of inner certainty is a little crazy. It's also a certain level of genius."

Although Mr. Goldsman had never met Mr. Nash before he wrote the script, the character he created after reading "A Beautiful Mind" is surprisingly similar to the John Nash whom Ms. Nasar came to know. "The kind of mono-dimensional involvement in mathematics, the dry sense of humor, this incredible self- confidence which could at times appear to be arrogance, the complete focus on things and ideas instead of people, the social isolation — all this is reflected in the script," she said.

But only a hint of all that is reflected in a conversation with the John Nash of today. At 72, Mr. Nash is still handsome but thinner and more delicate-looking than he appears in photographs as a youth. He gives an impression of sweetness, even innocence, far from the brash, competitive young man described in the book. He speaks softly and articulately, answering questions in a straightforward way. He is willing to talk about his years of mental illness but admits that his memory is limited.

His memory is sufficient, however, to cast some light into the obscure corridors of a schizophrenic's mind. He rationally explains his system of delusions like an interpreter from a distant planet. He also tries to explain the process of his recovery. In the early, florid years of his illness, he says, he was hospitalized, under supervision and taking medication. He responded in the sense that his symptoms abated, he says, but it was not until years later, in the late 1980's, when the illness slowly and mysteriously began to retreat without medication, that he began to make real progress.

"Before, I was behaving rationally for short periods and I was renouncing my delusions, but I always went back to them," he said. "It's only by a gradual process that I escaped from them more philosophically, like escaping from a cult."

It would seem that these observations would be useful to Russell Crowe, who has the difficult job of portraying Mr. Nash from the time he entered Princeton at 19 through his deterioration and eventual recovery in his 60's. But Mr. Crowe has refrained from interviewing Mr. Nash, although he did run into him on the set one day and observed him informally, engaging him in a short chat and offering him a cup of tea.

Mr. Crowe has tried to immerse himself in the character in other ways: he examined what few early photographs of Mr. Nash exist, and he listened to taped interviews with Mr. Nash and with patients with similar disorders. He relied heavily on Ms. Nasar's biography. "She wrote that his way of speaking was `ornamental and Olympian,' for example," he said. "I tended to grab onto lines like that."

Although he has not visited any mental hospitals to observe schizophrenic patients, he said, he believes that such a field trip would be unnecessary under his present circumstances. "I'm staying in New York City," he says. "I go for a walk every Sunday and I do my research."

At first glance, Mr. Crowe's brash Aussie persona seems incompatible with the gentle, polite and soft-spoken John Nash of today. Intelligent, thoughtful, witty and articulate, Mr. Crowe is also abrupt, impatient and self-confident to the point of arrogance. He tries to control the conversation by both asking and answering his own questions — a job he does very well. His manner, however, is not so far from that of the young John Nash, the cocky, overbearing mathematical star Ms. Nasar describes.

Mr. Crowe says bridging the chasm between the elderly Mr. Nash we see today and the youthful one he portrays is one of his major challenges. Comparing this role to his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Jeffrey S. Wigand, the tobacco industry whistle-blower in "The Insider," Mr. Crowe notes that with Mr. Wigand, whose story took place only a few years before the making of the film, he had a model on which to base his character.

"I had so much evidence staring me in the face," he said. "Wigand was slightly overweight, he had hair of this shape, he parted it this way, he always wore glasses like this, this is how his hands moved when he talked. I couldn't step away from that."

But John Nash is different. "We don't have footage of Nash as a young man. We don't know what his voice sounded like before medicine and illness and old age. I've had to assume so much of the physicality as a younger man that if I zero in on him too much as he is now, I will be playing him post disease, and post 30 years of trauma."

So, like Mr. Goldsman and Mr. Howard, Mr. Crowe is using Mr. Nash as an inspiration rather than a template. Noticing that Mr. Nash has beautiful, graceful hands, for example, Mr. Crowe let his own nails grow and concentrated on the way his character uses his fingers. For him, the physicality of the disease is grounded in Mr. Nash's hands.

In the end, it may be that the artists who take inspiration from someone's life come as close to getting it right as the historians who document it. As Mr. Goldsman said, referring to the liberties he took in writing the screenplay: "There's a tendency to think that's an audacious thing to do. It's really a humble thing to do. How do you tell the truth about a life?"

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), June 09, 2001

Answers

This is very similar to my story except for the Nobel part

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), June 09, 2001.

Interesting. About twenty years ago I became acquainted with Nash's son (a Rutgers math grad student a few years older than myself) through a mutual friend, but I'd long ago lost touch with both of them.

-- David L (bumpkin@dnet.net), June 09, 2001.

David, are you a mathematician?

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), June 10, 2001.

A strange book review can be found here.

http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/nashbio.htm

-- dandelion (golden@pleurisy.plant), June 10, 2001.

Dandelion--

Strange indeed. And very, very long. I couldn't read it all at this late hour. I'm no expert, but the reviewer seems to think Nash's schizophrenia was caused by his pressure-packed math faculty environment. Isn't that type of pschiatric insight 50 years out of date? Hasn't shizophrenia been determined to be a biochemical disease?

The description of Nash's wacked out state reminded me of a long forgotten character where I once worked. "Sardine Harry" was a mathematician, lost in his inner world, who walked down hallways in a skulking, furtive manner staying close to the wall, seemingly afraid of human contamination. Maybe he was on to something.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.copm), June 10, 2001.

David, are you a mathematician?

Not in the strict sense, but I can count very rapidly. 8^) I didn't pursue an advanced degree in math, although my answer above might have suggested that I had.

I recall now that Nash's son entered the graduate program in math without having an undergraduate degree. He had studied math on his own, and I understand he was better prepared than most of his peers.

-- David L (bumpkin@dnet.net), June 10, 2001.