109 East Palace by Jennet Conant Read Free Book Online Page B

appeal.
    His style was to be the tormented genius, and his spare frame and angular face reflected his ascetic character, as if his desire to engage every moment fully and completely were consuming his inner resources. He had been a delicate child, and when he pushed himself too hard, he became almost skeletal, resembling a fifteenth-century portrait of a saint with eyes peering out of a hollowed face. There was something terribly vulnerable about him—a certain innocence, an idealized view of life that was only saved from being adolescent by the sheer force of his intellect—that touched both sexes. His students all adored him, and he inspired the kind of devoted following which led some jealous colleagues to sneer that it was more a cult of personality, that Oppenheimer was the high priest of his own posse. He was trailed everywhere by a tight, talented group of graduate students, the stars of their class, and Greene learned to easily identify them by their pompous attempts to imitate Oppenheimer’s elegant speech, gestures, and highbrow allusions. She sometimes had the impression that Oppie was conscious of his ability to enthrall. It was no accident that people wanted to help him and would go to extraordinary lengths to earn his approbation.
    Greene, who had graduated from Berkeley the previous year and still wore her long, blond hair loose on her shoulders like a schoolgirl, found him “unbelievably charming and gracious,” His voice was one of the most mesmerizing things about him. When he singled her out for attention, he was “so warm and enveloping,” he made her feel like the most pleasing guest at the party. “When he came into a room, my most characteristic memory of him is [his] coming across to shake your hand, with a slight tilt and a marvelous smile,” she said. “And what secretary wasn’t going to be absolutely overwhelmed by somebody who, in the middle of a letter—we all smoked in those days—whipped his lighter out of his pocket and lighted your cigarette while you were taking dictation and he was talking.”
    Compared to Ernest Lawrence, Oppenheimer was a person of enormous culture and education. Lawrence was celebrated for his invention of the cyclotron, the powerful atom smasher, but was proletarian in his pursuits outside of physics. Oppie was from a wealthy New York family, wore good suits, and tooled around campus in a Packard roadster he nicknamed “Garuda,” in honor of the Sanskrit messenger to the gods. He spoke six languages, quoted poetry in the course of everyday conversation, and could be snobbish about music and art. “Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were acceptable,” noted his protégé, Robert Serber. “Ditto the Impressionists.” He had fierce opinions when it came to food and wine. “Martinis had to be strong. Coffee had to be black…. Steak had to be rare,” listed the British physicist Rudolf Peierls. Once, Oppenheimer took Peierls and a group of graduate students out to a steak restaurant for dinner. He proceeded to order his entrée rare, and this was echoed by everyone in turn until the last student at the table requested his, “Well done.” Oppie looked at him for a moment and said, “Why don’t you have fish?”
    He spent a great deal of time cultivating people and interests that had nothing to do with science, and even Greene could not help being struck by the wide variety of his correspondence. One of the first things he asked her to do was take down a letter to a San Francisco museum to which he was planning to give a painting by Van Gogh, which he had inherited from his father. He had pronounced the artist’s name in the guttural German style with lots of breath—“Van Gaaaccchhh”—which was beyond her, and in the end he had had to spell it. “The people he thought about, wrote about, and talked to, he had such a wonderful feeling for, that you really wanted to be part of whatever he was doing,” she said. “It was very hard to resist him.”
    His