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By Root 2287 0

old, the daughter of a jeweler in a town called Ripponden. She had worked as a librarian for a salary of three pounds weekly and then as a yarn tester at a cotton mill before deciding life in the backwaters of Yorkshire was too dull. She let Feynman know that she had two current boyfriends, a semiprofessional miler from Zurich, always in training, and a German optician from Saarbrücken. He immediately invited her to come to California and work for him. He needed a maid, he said. He would sponsor her with the immigration authorities and pay her twenty dollars a week. It seemed to her that he was not behaving like a forty-year-old; nor like other Americans she had met. She said she would consider it, and an unusual courtship began.

“I’ve decided to stay here after all,” she wrote him that fall. One of the boyfriends, Johann, had decided to marry her—out of jealousy, she suspected—

so you see what a good turn you did for me… . we talked for hours and hours, planning our life together. We shall probably start married life living in one room… . Were you really expecting me to come? … You’ll just have to get married again, or find a nice solid middle-aged housekeeper so people won’t gossip.

His love affairs were going badly, meanwhile. That same week a letter arrived from the other woman, making it clear that their relationship was over. She demanded money—five hundred dollars—“I will be frank, the chances of your getting it all back within a year are nil.” She had asked for money before, saying that she needed it for an abortion, but now she said that that had been a ruse. His money had actually gone for furniture and house painting.

You were too much of the “playboy.” But I was both embarrassed & intrigued by the effects that your girl friends had on you when they called you in my presence. Sometimes you left the phone, shaking & foaming at the mouth… . I recognized a baseness in you and was frightened that you took my love and affection for you cheaply, and so I wanted to compensate against that horrible feeling.

She knew too much about the women he had been seeing since his divorce. She named four of them and described an anonymous note that had come addressed to “Occupant”:

Dirty Dick, Filthy Fucking Feynman dates you. He will never marry you. Tell him he has made you pregnant. You’ll make a quick $300–$500.

She had been devastated by nasty physicist-gossip she had overheard about Feynman and his women, Feynman and “the pox.” He should get married, she said.

The baseness you talk of is due to the fact you aren’t married. You try to sublimate your desires by attending Burlesque Shows, Night Clubs, etc. These are fun for the healthy, but only an escape for the dissatisfied. I know this, because last year you were content in Rio, & as a result produced Beta Decay… .

Find yourself a real companion, someone you can really love & respect. Then capture love whilst it is fresh & spontaneous… .

At some point she had walked off with the gold medal he had received with the Einstein Award. She still had it, she reminded him.

Feynman implored Gweneth Howarth to reconsider. By November, as it happened, she and Johann were no longer on speaking terms and she had begun the immigration paperwork through the United States Consulate in Zurich. He consulted a lawyer, who warned that there were dangers in transporting women for immoral purposes and advised him to find a third-party employer; a Caltech friend, Matthew Sands, agreed to lend his name on the required documents. Feynman calculated fares (more than a year’s salary for a Yorkshire librarian, she noticed): $394.10 to Los Angeles; or $290.10 to New York and then $79.04 including tax for a bus from New York to Los Angeles.

She was excited but unsure. “You’ll write & tell me if you decide to get married again, or if there is any other reason why I should not come?” She wanted him to realize she had other possibilities—Armando, whom she met skiing, or a fellow who had been watching her at language class (“he walked part of the way home with me … I’d like it to be a