VENT POST
The Hager biography of Linus Pauling:
Pauling was not the only sought-after young professor. Another was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the young American physicist Pauling had met in Munich. In 1928, Millikan talked Oppenheimer into teaching physics for part of the year at Caltech, the remaining time to be spent at Berkeley, much like Pauling's new deal.
Oppenheimer made an immediate impression in Pasadena. Thin, almost frail in appearance, with strikingly large, wide-set eyes and a head of thick, dark hair, he was attractive as well as brilliant. Although raised in New York, he seemed exotically European, Bohemian, poetic, chain-smoking, prone to exotic literary and philosophical references. His only shortcoming seemed to be that he was a dismal lecturer, mumbling, scattering cigarette ashes, talking over the heads of his listeners, and packing the blackboard with cramped, barely readable equations. Despite that, he soon attracted a devoted band of acolytes, some of the West Coast's finest students, who were able to cut through the obscurity to the essentials of the new physics and who began following him on his annual trek between Pasadena and Berkeley. He was pursued, too, by scandalous rumors (which he seemed disinclined to squelch), hints of free love—perhaps homosexuality—and radical politics.
Pauling and Ava Helen found him witty, attractive, and a welcome antidote to the deadly dullness of most Caltech faculty members. They were all the same age, all young and brilliant, and all on the way up. The Paulings and the young physicist quickly became close friends. They shared dinners and jokes, talked about European physics, and gossiped about Caltech and Berkeley professors. Oppenheimer came to Pauling for advice on how to become a better lecturer, and Pauling sought him out to talk about quantum mechanics. The two of them began to consider mounting a joint attack on the chemical bond, with Oppenheimer working on the mathematics and Pauling providing the chemical insights.
Perhaps they became too close too fast. Something began to seem odd to Pauling. Oppenheimer not only adopted some of Pauling's lecturing style; he began wearing an old fedora around campus, much like one that Pauling wore. He started to give Pauling gifts, sometimes little ones, a favorite ring on one occasion, and on another, a magnificently extravagant one, Oppenheimer's large boyhood mineral collection, the crystal treasury that had first spurred Oppenheimer's interest in science, a thousand fine specimens, including some fine calcites in which Pauling took special interest. Then there were the poems Oppenheimer gave Pauling, verse that Pauling found both obscure and. troubling, mixing classical allusions with lines about mineralogy, Dante, and pederasty. Pauling had never had a friendship like this.
Neither had Ava Helen. She enjoyed Oppenheimer enormously, took pleasure in talking with him and flirting a little with him, as she did with almost everybody on social occasions. Perhaps she flirted a little more than usual, for Oppenheimer was unusually intriguing. Perhaps he felt her interest went beyond a casual friendship. It all went a little too far, in any case, when Oppenheimer approached her one day in 1929 when Pauling was at work and proffered a clumsy invitation to join him on a tryst in Mexico. Surprised and flattered, Ava Helen told him no, of course not, she was married and took it seriously. That night, she reported the whole thing to Pauling. "I think she was somewhat pleased with herself as a femme fatale," Pauling said. Perhaps she was a little too pleased. Pauling cut off his relationship with Oppenheimer, ending any chance of collaboration on the chemical bond and initiating a coolness between the two men that would last the rest of their lives.
Years later, Ava Helen told her husband, "You know, I don't think Oppenheimer was in love with me. I think he was in love with you." After mulling it over, Pauling concluded that she might be right.
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