Category Archives: Biography

The Other Side of Feynman

26 Thursday Apr 2018

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“Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her, and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war…

As Feynman says, anyone who has been happily married once cannot long remain single, and so yesterday we were discussing his new problem, this time again a girl in New Mexico with whom he is desperately in love. This time the problem is not tuberculosis, but the girl is a Catholic. You can imagine all the troubles this raises, and if there is one thing Feynman could not do to save his soul, it is to become a Catholic himself. So we talked and talked and sent the sun down the sky and went on talking in the darkness. At the end of it, Feynman was no nearer to the solution of his problems, but it must have done him good to get them off his chest. I think that he will marry the girl and that it will be a success, but far be it from me to give advice to anybody on such a subject. […]

I came to the conclusion that he is an exceptionally well-balanced person, whose opinions are always his own and not other people’s. He is very good at getting on with people, and as we came West, he altered his voice and expressions unconsciously to fit his surroundings, until he was saying ‘I don’t know noth’n’ like the rest of them.

Feynman’s young lady turned him down when he arrived in Albuquerque, having attached herself in his absence to somebody else. He stayed there for only five days to make sure, then left her for good and spent the rest of the summer enjoying himself with horses in New Mexico and Nevada.”

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Pulled from two letters by Freeman Dyson, now 94, written in 1948 and just published in the new book Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters. (I lifted the title from this Nautilus article, which excerpts some of the book.)

Image courtesy: Jim Britt

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The Man Who Most Believed in Himself

19 Monday Mar 2018

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“[Franklin] Roosevelt faced formidable challenges as president, but he never doubted that he would cope with them, for he believed that he belonged in the White House. He had sat on Grover Cleveland’s knee, cast his first vote for Uncle Teddy, and seen Woodrow Wilson at close range; but the office seemed peculiarly his almost as a birthright. As Richard Neustadt has observed: ‘Roosevelt, almost alone among our Presidents, had no conception of the office to live up to; he was it. His image of the office was himself-in-office.’ He loved the majesty of the position, relished its powers, and rejoiced in the opportunity it offered for achievement. ‘The essence of Roosevelt’s Presidency,’ Clinton Rossiter has written, ‘was his airy eagerness to meet the age head on. Thanks to his flair for drama, he acted as if never in all history had there been times like our own.’

A Washington reporter noted in 1933: ‘No signs of care are visible to his main visitors or at the press conferences. He is amiable, urbane and apparently untroubled. He appears to have a singularly fortunate faculty for not becoming flustered. Those who talk with him informally in the evenings report that he busies himself with his stamp collection, discussing in an illuminating fashion the affairs of state while he waves his shears in the air.’ Even after Roosevelt had gone through the trials of two terms of office, Time reported: ‘He has one priceless attribute: a knack of locking up his and the world’s worries in some secret mental compartment, and then enjoying himself to the top of his bent. This quality of survival, of physical toughness, of champagne ebullience is one key to the big man. Another key is this: no one has ever heard him admit that he cannot walk.”

__________

Pulled from William E. Leuchtenburg’s essay “The First Modern President,” which you’ll find in The American President or Fred I. Greenstein’s great collection Leadership in the Modern Presidency.

In context, that last sentence really does it. (Neustadt’s quote above is pulled from Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, for my money one of the most entertaining reads on the art of Presidential leadership.)

Image: ScienceSource

Orwell Reflects on His School Days

30 Thursday Nov 2017

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“It was about a year after I hit Johnny Hale in the face that I left St Cyprian’s for ever. It was the end of a winter term. With a sense of coming out from darkness into sunlight I put on my Old Boy’s tie as we dressed for the journey. I well remember the feeling of emancipation, as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an amulet against Flip’s voice and Sambo’s cane. I was escaping from bondage. It was not that I expected, or even intended, to be any more successful at a public school than I had been at St Cyprian’s. But still, I was escaping. I knew that at a public school there would be more privacy, more neglect, more chance to be idle and self-indulgent and degenerate. For years I had been resolved — unconsciously at first, but consciously later on — that when once my scholarship was won I would ‘slack off’ and cram no longer. This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work…

I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood out look. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child’s mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child’s vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would St Cyprian’s appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was in 1915? What should I think of Sambo and Flip, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would no more be frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas — though of this I am not certain — I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now…

I have never been back to St Cyprian’s. Reunions, old boys’ dinners and such-like leave me something more than cold, even when my memories are friendly. I have never even been down to Eton, where I was relatively happy, though I did once pass through it in 1933 and noted with interest that nothing seemed to have changed, except that the shops now sold radios. As for St Cyprian’s, for years I loathed its very name so deeply that I could not view it with enough detachment to see the significance of the things that happened to me there… And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown… Now, however, the place is out of my system for good. Its magic works no longer, and I have not even enough animosity left to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the story of the school being burnt down was true.”

__________

Pulled from the ending of George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” first published in 1952 in the Partisan Review. It’s thought he wrote the essay a few years prior, sometime in early 1947, just before he started working on Nineteen Eighty-Four. There’s a lot of gold in the essay, but I especially like that understated, forgiving note on which he ends.

There’s more like this:

Teddy on How Private Secrets Cripple Leaders

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

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“Traps were set for more than one of us, and if we had walked into these traps our public careers would have ended… A man can of course hold public office, and many a man does hold public office, and lead a public career of a sort, even if there are other men who possess secrets about him which he cannot afford to have divulged. But no man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character. Nor will clean conduct by itself enable a man to render good service. I have always been fond of Josh Billings’s remark that ‘it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.’ There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey. He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.”

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From Part III (“Practical Politics”) of Theodore Roosevelt’s Autobiography.

More like this:

The Bookends to Cary Grant’s Surprising Memoir

30 Sunday Jul 2017

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“I was born in the provincial city of Bristol, England, but have avidly frequented the brightest capitals of the world ever since, and now keep a permanent residence in the so-called, through misnamed, glamour capital of Hollywood.

I had no sisters, was separated from my mother when I was nine years old, was stammeringly shy in the presence of girls; yet have married three times and found myself making love on the screen — in public, mind you, in front of millions of people— to such fascinating women as Ingrid Bergman, Doris Day, Mae West, Irene Dunne, Deborah Kerr, Eva Marie Saint, Sophia Loren, Marlene Dietrich and Grace Kelly.

I was an only child… My father made no more than a modest living and we had little money. Yet today I am considered, except among the wealthy, to be wealthy. I received only a sketchy education by most scholastic standards, lacked confidence and the courage to enjoy life, but on the screen seem to have successfully epitomized an informed, capable and happy man. A series of contradictions too evident to be coincidental. Perhaps the original circumstances caused, created and provoked all the others. Perhaps they can all be reconciled into one complete life, my own, as I recall each step that led to each next step and look back on the path of my life from this older and, I trust, more mature viewpoint…

Regardless of a professed rationalization that I became an actor in order to travel, I probably chose my profession because I was seeking approval, adulation, admiration and affection: each a degree of love. Perhaps no child ever feels the recipient of enough love to satisfy him or her. Oh, how we secretly yearn for it, yet openly defend against it.

—

I have made over 60 pictures and lived in Hollywood for more than 30 years. Thirty years spent in the stimulating company of hard-working, excitable, dedicated, loving, serious, honest, good people. Casts and crews. I recognize and respect them. I know their faults and their insecurities. I hope they know and forgive mine. Thirty years ago my hair was black and wavy. Today it’s gray and bristly. But today people in cars, stopped alongside me at a traffic light, smile at me!

I feel fine. Alone. But fine. My mother is quite elderly. My wives have divorced me, and I await a woman with the best qualities of each. I will endow her with those qualities because they will be in my own point of view.

As a philosopher once said, ‘You cannot judge the day until the night.’ Since it is for me evening, or at least teatime, I can now look back and assess the day. It’s been a glorious adventure up to here — even the saddest parts — and I look forward to seeing the rest of the film. Just as I did in 1932 when I sat in that Paramount Studio office. I took up the pen and wrote for the first time ‘Cary Grant.’ And that’s who, it seems, I am. Well, as some profound fellow said, ‘I’d be a nut to go through all that again, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.'”

__________

Selections from Cary Grant’s short self-published autobiography, Archie Leach. He did find that woman, by the way.

Go on:

Barbarian Days

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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“Things changed after that between me and Mark… I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology — in finding a cure — but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. ‘The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,’ Mark told me. ‘I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit — in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.’ Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.”

__________

From the eighth chapter (“Against Dereliction”) of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

The chapter opens with Conrad, writing in The Mirror of the Sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by too much adulation.”

Keep going:

Yoni

20 Saturday May 2017

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“Yoni loathed war and fighting. To kill horrified him… Because he had to fight to save his nation’s life, he made himself into a great fighting man. But he knew, as all men of sense know, that war today is an empty and dangerous lunacy, not a practical political technique. He was philosopher enough to understand this truth… and he was man enough to know… that if he had to, he would die fighting for the Return and for peace. So consecrated, he flew off to Entebbe, and to his great hour.

Like one of Michelangelo’s unfinished sketches in stone, his letters are a work of rough suggestive art. The mysterious figure only half-emerges from the native rock. And yet the figure is there. When we close the book, we know nothing of Yoni’s secret exploits, little of his magic with women, little of his terrific labors in his army assignments, little of his intense family relationships. Yet we know the man; all we have to know, and all we will know. He inspires and ennobles us, and he gives us hope. That is enough. That is the best art can do.

Shelley wrote of the dead Keats that his soul

… like a star
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

I wanted to close this introduction by applying those words to Yoni. But I cannot. I see him in my mind’s eye shaking his head, with a grin and a deprecatory farewell wave. And I hear his last words, like a distant marching song on the wind, יהיה בסדר — ‘It’ll be okay.'”

__________

The closing to Herman Wouk’s introduction to The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu.

An American Brother

07 Friday Apr 2017

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“Cheese, I say to George A., borrowing the camera.

So, you see, he’s happy when I snap him and sticking it to the cameraman a little. I can take it, though. The truth is, when it comes to us, I want to crush him in the dust, but when it comes to anybody else, to the whole outside, other world, I want George A. to win. I want that for us both. And on this day I still feel no less sure of him than of myself.

In the photo you can tell the boy’s an athlete of some kind. Six-foot-seven and 210 or 215, he’s lean-waisted, broad across the shoulders and chest, more man than boy, though there’s still a spindly coltish something in his legs that marks him at the tremble point. From hoisting those heavy cans all summer, he has thick, good arms as ‘good’ was then, in a more casual time… George A.’s proud of the body he’s achieved. In the way his arms fall at his sides, there’s a tad of the gunslinger pose. He’s like someone with a new suit he paid a lot of money for and doesn’t want to wrinkle in the wearing, or a cherry car he parks at the far edge of the lot to ward off dings.

I thought my brother was the best-looking boy I ever knew, among the best-looking I ever saw. As I study this old photo, though, I think perhaps it isn’t Gable that I’m searching for, but those clean-cut all-American boys on lawns and beaches, posing for the camera with their girls and paste-waxed cars, before they went away to World War II. George A.’s smile extends a friendly confidence like theirs, but a little further back, I see something that’s prepared for disappointment, and it strikes me that George A., too, this day in 1975, is going off to war, an inward war no less real. It will last twenty-five years and the rest of his short life, and George A. won’t return from it.  This picture is the last glimpse I’ll ever have of him, which I guess is why I kept it and put it out in every place I ever lived in.”

__________

Pulled from David Payne’s memoir about growing up in North Carolina, published last year, Barefoot to Avalon.

Earlier in the book, he offers this description of his brother, referenced above, “He reminded me of young Clark Gable, only the confidence in Gable that flirted with conceit and smugness was in George A. nuanced, sly and sweet.” You can see David Payne talk to Charlie Rose, a longtime family friend of the Paynes, here.

Or go on:

Thankful for the Waves

30 Tuesday Aug 2016

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Laird Hamilton 3

“Water always finds the path of least resistance. It flows. You never see square turns on a river. There’s always a curvature. I think life’s like that, too… So you could say that I believe in things being predestined. How could I not? When I think of my life, I feel as though I’ve always been given the absolute right circumstances to help create who I am. If I hadn’t grown up in Hawaii… surrounded by the era’s greatest surfers throughout my childhood, I don’t know where I would have ended up. And I don’t want to know. I’m grateful for all of the twists and turns of fate that have brought me here.

My spiritual beliefs have helped me walk the path that I knew I needed to be on. I’ve been reading the Bible since I was 16, when I first discovered it (through a girl I was dating — how else?). I’ve always found something golden and truthful in its pages. […]

I believe that our imagination is our connection to higher knowledge. It’s the most formidable tool that we have, an amazing source of inspiration. And then, of course, there’s the world we live in, which is no slouch in that area, either. What we’ve been given here is precious: majestic in its smallest details and its grandest spectacles. Anytime you feel like you’re in danger of forgetting that, I recommend taking a good look at a 50-foot wave. Anyone who can be around something that powerful and not feel humbled has some serious analyzing to do. You can’t deny the spritual world when you’re staring into its eyes.”

__________

From part three of Laird Hamilton’s Force of Nature: Body, Body, Soul, and of Course, Surfing.

Photo credit: lairdhamilton.com

Lose Your Fear in the Ring

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

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“Fighters are the most exposed athletes in the world. During a fight, the crowd observes every twitch and movement. Still, spectators rarely see fear in a quality fighter. ‘That,’ says [boxing trainer Cus] D’Amato, ‘is because the fighter has mastered his emotions to the extent that he can conceal and control them.’ But whatever a fighter says, the fear is there. It never goes away. He just learns to live with it. ‘And the truth is,’ D’Amato continues, ‘fear is an aspect to a fighter. It makes him move faster, be quicker and more alert. Heroes and cowards feel exactly the same fear. Heroes just react to it differently. On the morning of a fight, a boxer wakes up and says, “How can I fight? I didn’t sleep at all last night.” What he has to realize is, the other guy didn’t sleep either. Later, as the fighter walks toward the ring, his feet want to walk in the opposite direction. He’s asking himself how he got into this mess. He climbs the stairs into the ring, and it’s like going to the guillotine. Maybe he looks at the other fighter, and sees by the way he’s loosening up that his opponent is experienced, strong, very confident. Then when the opponent takes off his robe, he’s got big bulging muscles. What the fighter has to realize,’ concludes D’Amato, ‘is that he’s got exactly the same effect on his opponent, only he doesn’t know it. And when the bell rings, instead of facing a monster built up by the imagination, he’s simply up against another fighter.'”

__________

Pulled from a section on Cus D’Amato in Thomas Hauser’s The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing.

D’Amato was the trainer behind legends like Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson, who he adopted at sixteen when Tyson’s mother died. When D’Amato passed away, Tyson discussed his old trainer:

[D’Amato] didn’t know me. He told me with no hesitation that I was going to be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time… If it weren’t for that old, Italian white guy, I would’ve been a bum. Cus D’Amato was a physical person like I am. He was impulsive and impetuous like me. If somebody upset him, he would just go after them — even at 75… the psychologists would’ve had a field day with him.

He’s simply up against another fighter… It applies to a lot of life.

Move along:

Photo courtesy of Irish Mirror

Red Auerbach’s Victory Cigars

06 Monday Jun 2016

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Red Auerbach and Bill Russell

“[Red Auerbach] was a master at handling people — a master psychologist.

Time and again you hear Celtics describing Red as ‘a player’s coach.’ To the world outside his own huddles and locker room he was… a boisterous dynamo who peered at you through cigar smoke after his troops had impaled yours.

But not with his own players. He supported them. He had their backs. They knew it, so they did everything to please him. He emphasized people far more than X’s and O’s.

‘Red Auerbach convinced his players that he loved them,’ said Earl Lloyd, the NBA’s first African-American player. ‘So all they wanted to do was please him.’

Former NBA coach Hubie Brown remembered what worked so well: ‘[Red] had a relentless fast break, pressure defense and Bill Russell in the back that allowed him to play this style. They were also very organized in their play sets. Then, I feel he had the ability to motivate them individually, because it is extremely difficult to maintain excellence. It comes down to that ability to maintain excellence. He knew how to push the right button on each guy to get him to be subservient to the team.’ […]

The 1960-61 squad may have been the Celtics’ finest under Auerbach. The team went 57-22 and, amazingly, had six scorers averaging between 15 and 21 points a game without one finishing in the top 10.

‘In any good coach is the ability to communicate,’ Auerbach explained. ‘In other words, a lot of coaches know their X’s and O’s, but the players must absorb it. Team was important. We didn’t care who the starting five was. The sixth-man concept was my idea.’ […]

Auerbach could be a taskmaster in practice. Sure, the Celtics were knee-deep in talent, but they also worked harder than other teams…

Bill Russell and Red Auerbach

As the Celtics’ routinely whipped the opposition, Red would frequently sit back and enjoy the end of the game — with a cigar. Hence, the ‘victory cigar.’

‘It all boils down to this,’ Auerbach said. ‘I used to hate these college coaches or any coach that was 25 points ahead with three minutes left to go, and they’re up pacing and they’re yelling and coaching because they’re on TV, and they want their picture on, and they get recognition. To me, the game was over. The day’s work is done. Worry about the next game.

‘So I would light a cigar and sit on the bench and just watch it. The game was over, for all intents and purposes. I didn’t want to rub anything in or show anybody what a great coach I was when I was 25 points ahead. Why? I gotta win by 30? What the hell difference does it make?

‘The commissioner [Maurice Podoloff] said you can’t smoke the cigars on the bench. But there were guys smoking cigarettes on the bench. I said, “What is this, an airplane — you can smoke cigarettes but not cigars?” No way. I wouldn’t do it.’ […]

On April 28, 1966, Auerbach, who earlier in the season had announced he’d be retiring, coached his last official game. Appropriately, it was a Game 7, at Boston Garden, against Los Angeles. Russell had 25 points and 32 rebounds, enough to offset Jerry West’s 36 points, and the Celtics narrowly won, 95-93.

Red’s victory cigar was knocked from his mouth by the surging crowd. He lit up another in the dressing room and Russell pointed to Auerbach, saying, ‘There is the man. This is his team. He puts it together. He makes us win.'”

__________

Pulled from Ken Shouler, who has written portions of Total Basketball: The Ultimate Basketball Encyclopedia. You can read more in John Feinstein’s book with Auerbach, Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game.

Auerbach won 9 championships in 10 years, a record that’s only surpassed by Phil Jackson, who won 11 in 20 years. He was the first coach to implement team defense strategies and fast breaks as an offensive weapon. Auerbach also spurred other innovations: he drafted the first African-American, Chuck Cooper, in 1950 and fielded the first all black starting five in 1964.

… knee-deep in talent, but they also worked harder…

(Photos courtesy: SNCA, Boston Sports, Rompedas)

Red Auerbach