Physicist Richard Feynman, one of a handful of the most intelligent people who ever lived, was more than just another prolifically fertile brainiac. To be a well-rounded human was a priority for him, and in the area of his love life he achieved notable success. One of the world’s best-kept secrets, and one that would surprise a lot of macho men, if they were capable of absorbing a new idea in the first place, is the amount of nookie harvested by poets, physicists, and other supposedly non-virile specimens.
Feynman studied the science of picking up women in coffeeshops and bars. His numerous affairs with the wives of colleagues and grad students scandalized the academic world. In later life his interest in the visual arts grew, and he learned to draw quite passably, but emphasized to friends what a handy gimmick the sketchbook was for getting women to take their clothes off.
There was true love in Feynman’s life, and her name was Arline. Much of his heartless hounddogging seems to have been in reaction to Arline’s early and tragic death. Here’s how it went. The very young couple put off marriage so he could finish college and grad school, but when Arline came down with tuberculosis, Feynman was determined to marry her as soon as possible. They weren’t even supposed to kiss, because of the danger of contagion, and pregnancy would have been a disaster for her. When Feynman was called to New Mexico to help invent the atomic bomb, the kids were even more determined to marry, even though both families objected.
Probably the strongest resistance came from Feynman’s mother. His biography (Genius, by James Gleick) quotes from the letter she wrote, the gist of which was: Richard didn’t have enough money, and his parents would definitely not finance them. Worry and concern about Arline would compromise Richard’s ability to do his job. He would be laden with all the burdens of marriage to an invalid, while “not getting any of the pleasures of marriage.” Being the husband of a TB victim would make Richard a social outcast. “I was surprised to learn that such a marriage is not unlawful,” Feynman’s mother added. “It ought to be.” The subtext was clear: Arline was taking advantage of the innocent, idealistic, romantic young son.
The sweethearts celebrated their wedding, witnessed by two strangers, in a city office. With Arline his legal wife, Feynman was able to move her to a hospital near Los Alamos. They exchanged letters all week, indulging in puzzles and silliness that drove the Army censors crazy, and on weekends Feynman would borrow a car or hitchhike into town. Arline’s knowledge that there were women at Los Alamos made her very nervous, and after months of celibate companionship she insisted that the marriage be consummated. “I really think we’d both feel happier and better dear if we released our desires.” The biography doesn’t note how many times the pair were intimate; that may have been the only time, since Arline was after all a hospital inpatient. As her condition worsened, Feynman wrote desperately to any doctors he heard of who were rumored to have a hint of a cure. Then there was a brief giddy time when it appeared that Arline might be expecting a child – with the medical men insisting that if it were so, the only possible choice would be to “interrupt” the pregnancy. Then she died. Then the Los Alamos project came to fruition, and with the bitter irony: the only thing Feynman had fathered was the worst instrument of death that mankind had ever known.
Feynman’s mother had a change of heart and looked for reconciliation. “I’m proud and glad you married her and did what you could to make her short life happy.”
Two years after Arline died, Feynman wrote Arline a last, long letter, found among his papers after his own death. “I will always love you,” it said. “I want you to love me and care for me… I want to do little projects with you … you were the ‘idea-woman’ and general instigator of all our wild adventures.” He recalled her anxiety over her inability to be a real wife to him. Feynman assured her in this imaginary conversation, “You can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in the way of my loving anyone else…” He noted the stark truth that spelled itself out like an elegant equation: “I love my wife. My wife is dead.”
“Please excuse my not mailing this,” the sad postscript said, “but I don’t know your new address.” This letter, and maybe others like it, were of course part of a therapeutic process, a necessary step for any bereaved person. But along with the decision to get on with his life, there seems to have been a decision, conscious or unconscious, to armor himself against the possibility of another intense and potentially painful attachment.
Eventually he got back into the mating game, but it was a new, cynical and callous Richard Feynman who chased skirts almost obsessively. “He had worked out a kind of “all’s fair” approach to sexual morality and argued that he was using women as they sought to use him,” says biographer Gleick. “Love seemed mostly a myth – a species of self-delusion, or rationalization, or a gambit employed by women in search of husbands.” There was an ill-considered second marriage to a totally incompatible woman, who sued Feynman for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, including excessive bongo drum playing and doing math in bed.
As he juggled a harem of women, the great physicist’s life soon became a nightmare of angry phone calls, abortions, demands for cash, and various sordid scenes. One of his dates received an anonymous note: “Dirty Dick, Filthy Fucking Feynman dates you. He will never marry you. Tell him he made you pregnant. You’ll make a quick $300-$500.” He was often accused of being an inconsiderate lover, and one woman told him that must be why his roster had such a turnover rate – it didn’t take long for any woman to have enough of him. Some men are like that – they know that “making love” can, in some cases, literally make love. And for whatever reason, love is the last thing they want to create, either in themselves or in their partners. So they fuck.
Feynman went on vacation with the wife of a colleague who demanded $1,250 as compensation for the pleasure of her company, or possibly blackmail. Or maybe she paid the fare and he promised to pay her back. You never know, with these things. But it’s all so daytime TV, like one of those shows where the people yell and curse at each other and the stupid sound track bleep-bleep-bleeps like a backhoe on a construction site.
Of course there were other things going on in Feynman’s life too. He was an enthusiastic percussionist and collector of exotic rhythm instruments. One of his hobbies was safecracking, and another was conceptualizing the field of nanotechnology, way back in 1959. He was a terrific professor, and his lectures are available in several media formats. He is renowned for (among many other accomplishments) his Feynman diagrams, which illustrate in visual form some pretty obscure stuff that few people even know exists. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics.
Eventually he went to Switzerland and met an English girl in a blue bikini. He wanted to bring her to the U.S. to be his “housekeeper,” but a concerned friend warned him how much trouble one could land in, importing a woman for immoral purposes, so he got someone else to sponsor her instead. After some hesitation, he did end up hitch up with this lady. They had two children and remained married for many years until he died.
Richard Feynman knew he was terminally ill with cancer. His last ambition was to go to Tannu Tuva to hear the Throat Singers and other indigenous musicians, but since this was an Iron Curtain country, bureaucratic red tape held up the project until it was too late.
Whatever else Feynman did or didn’t do in his life, and however anyone may feel about it, his greatest achievement was to blow the whistle on the O-rings. Remember the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986? Killed seven people including the first Teacher in Space? Working with fellow scientists to figure out what happened, Feynman discovered that the rubber O-rings were responsible. Large matters of engineering safety and corporate ethics were behind this, and he ruined any chance of a cover-up by announcing his findings on live TV during a Rogers Commission meeting. Because he was already under a death sentence, any revenge that could be taken on him was moot, but still it was a brave and true action.
photo courtesy of kandinski, used under this Creative Commons license
