Washington - Sylvia Nasar lay awake many nights in the mid-1990s worrying whether any anxiety caused by the biography she was writing about the Princeton mathematician John Nash would make him lapse back into the schizophrenic episodes that ravaged so many years of his life. But the 1998 publication of the book “A Beautiful Mind”, and the Oscar-winning movie of the same name, instead became part of the long-running story of Nash's miraculous turnaround.
In this “third act,” as Nasar calls it, Nash overcame mental illness, rebuilt his life and ultimately became an international celebrity known not just for Russell Crowe's portrayal of him in the 2001 movie, but also for his outsize contributions to mathematics and economics, which had won him the 1994 Nobel Prize. Not featured in the film, and lesser known to the outside world, was how he experienced day-to-day life, relishing the little things while caring for his son John Charles Martin Nash, known as Johnny, who also suffers from schizophrenia.
Nash and his wife, Alicia, died on Saturday in a car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike.
On Monday afternoon, I talked with Nasar about their unexpected deaths and also about Nash's life, his role in the evolving history of economics, mental illness and the strong reactions to her book and the movie.
“Nash's story is one for the ages, and I think it had these extreme lows and extreme highs. It was a very romantic and dramatic story with a lot of tragedy,” she told me. “It shouldn't have ended the way it did, but it's not the end that's going to be remembered.” What will be remembered, she said, “is the fact that he made all these great contributions and survived this terrible illness to have a third act in life.”
We began our conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed, by discussing Nash's turnaround.
Zach Goldfarb: In the most recent edition of your book, you discuss how Nash's story has the qualities of a Greek myth and a Shakespearean tragedy. His death with his wife this weekend seems, if anything, to underscore that. How do you see this in the arc of their lives?
Sylvia Nasar: The ending was senseless because it was completely random. But very few lives have a third act, and it was the third act to me that made this story so unique. Most biographies of geniuses are of a meteoric rise and then the gradual or sudden fall, but Nash's third act, starting with aging out of schizophrenia and the Nobel, was 20 years long.
ZG: How did he spend the last 21 years since he won the Nobel?
SN: The first time I saw him was a few months after he won the Nobel, and he was going to a game theory conference in Israel. He was surrounded by other mathematicians, and he looked like someone who had been mentally ill. His clothes were mismatched. His front teeth were rotted down to the gums. He didn't make eye contact. But, over time, he got his teeth fixed. He started wearing nice clothes that Alicia could afford to buy him. He got used to being around people.
He and Alicia spent a lot of their time taking care of their son, Johnny, and doing the things that are so ordinary that the rest of us don't think about them. Once I asked him what difference the Nobel Prize money made, and he literally said, “Well, now I can go into Starbucks and buy a $2 cup of coffee. I couldn't do that when I was poor.” He got a driver's licence. He had lunch most days with other mathematicians, reintegrating into the one community that mattered to him most.
ZG: Most people may be aware of John Nash's mental illness but may not know his and Alicia's son also suffered from schizophrenia.
SN: Johnny was very, very bright, but at 15, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He never graduated from high school, never graduated from college, but he was talented mathematically, not a genius like his father but very, very good. He managed to get a PhD, and this was 10 years into his illness, but he was never able to work, and he really never has responded to any of the available drugs, which of course are better than what was available when his father got sick.
The first thought that I had when I got the news (of the car accident) was, “Oh my God, what's going to happen to Johnny now?” There was a very close family friend who really has been very helpful. Alicia has cousins who have been very helpful. But they were really his main human connection.
ZG: Let's talk a little about John Nash the mathematician. Why were his findings quite so revelatory?
SN: Game theory was invented by John von Neumann in the 1930s as a way of thinking about strategic behavior, but von Neumann's theory concerned zero-sum games, where either the participants had absolutely no common interests or their interests were totally congruent. In real life, especially in economics, neither of those situations are really found often in nature, not even between countries who are at war. What Nash did with was to show that in a situation where there are multiple players — even if they were not collaborating explicitly — there was an equilibrium: Players were able to do the best they could do, given what the others were doing.
ZG: Moving back to the movie, what was your reaction to the way the film discussed schizophrenia and mental illness?
SN: What was the genius of the movie, and this was a completely different narrative arc of the biography, was to let you see the world through Nash's eyes in the first half of the movie and then pull the rug out from under the audience in the second half. Putting the audience in the shoes of someone who couldn't distinguish reality — and in a way that sparked empathy and sympathy and understanding, rather than revulsion — was extraordinary.
I think that is why the movie translated so well to so many disparate countries and cultures. It was as big a hit in India and China as in Argentina and Mexico because severe mental illnesses are a problem everywhere, and finding a way to talk about them is very difficult. These families often suffer in silence because there's no easy way to do talk about it.
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