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By Root 511 0

Lick Observatory astronomer William Wright, a connection that first put Grace in contact with Mount Wilson's most eligible bachelor while she was still married. When Wright visited Mount Wilson to carry out some observations in the summer of 1920, he took along his wife and sister-in-law, who stayed in a visitors' cottage on top of the mountain. Going over to a small library tucked away in the laboratory building one day to borrow some books, the two women came across Hubble. Years after Hubble's death, swept up in the nostalgic haze that colored most of her writings about her husband, Grace recalled that moment: “He was standing at the laboratory window, looking at a plate of Orion. This should not have seemed unusual, an astronomer examining a plate against the light. But if the astronomer looked like an Olympian, tall, strong, and beautiful, with the shoulders of the Hermes of Praxiteles, and the benign serenity, it became unusual. There was a sense of power, channeled and directed in an adventure that had nothing to do with personal ambition and its anxieties and lack of peace. There was a hard concentrated effort and yet detachment. The power was controlled.”

By 1922 Hubble and Grace, who was now widowed, renewed their acquaintance and the couple, soon smitten, began a discreet courtship. She, more than anyone else, came to see Hubble's gentler side, his spontaneous and hearty laugh whenever someone surprised him or made an original remark. A reserved man not prone to idle chatter, he could still display a dry wit at moments. After Hubble had made the rounds of New York nightclubs one evening with a friend, his companion finally collapsed and said, “I've got to turn in. How can you stay up this way?” To which Hubble replied, “Do you think you can stay up later than an astronomer?”

Hubble wooed Grace with gifts of books and by reading to her and her parents when visiting the family's Los Angeles home. On February 26, 1924, they were married in a private Catholic ceremony (Grace's faith), with none of Hubble's family members in attendance. After honeymooning at her family's cottage, set on six scenic acres near Pebble Beach, in Carmel, they toured Europe.

Edwin and Grace Hubble on their wedding day in 1924

(Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,

San Marino, California)

With their fondness for outdoor pursuits—riding, hiking, and fishing—and their stylish outfits, the Hubbles would have felt right at home in the countryside of aristocratic England. In California, they liked to mingle with the elite of Hollywood society rather than astronomers: writers, directors, and actors, such as Helen Hayes, George Arliss, and Charlie Chaplin. Given Hubble's fervent Anglophilia, they also hung out with members of Hollywood's long-established British colony, which at one point included the noted authors Aldous Huxley and H. G. Wells.

The Hubbles were a highly compatible match, as they both enjoyed the ways of high society (Grace grew up being chauffeured about in one of her family's two Cadillacs; Edwin got his suits and shirts custom-made in London) and always maintained a polite reserve; as one acquaintance noted, “A stranger could drop raspberry soufflé on the rug without hearing a murmur.” Those who observed their interactions called the couple's relationship “quite out of the common.” Given Edwin's astute powers of observation—he had a remarkable eye for detail—Grace said she “was Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.”

As soon as Hubble returned in May from his three-month honeymoon—the very evening of his arrival, in fact—he was back on the mountain applying those Sherlockian skills to his study of the spiral nebulae. Throughout the remaining months of 1924 he found even more variables, tracking the ups and downs of each luminosity with care. It was plodding work. A dozen of the thirty-six variables he ultimately found in Andromeda turned out to be Cepheids, their cycles ranging from eighteen to fifty days. He did even better when he started studying M33, a striking face-on spiral in the Triangulum constellation,