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Aware of Einstein's dislike for publicity, his California hosts tried to dispense with an official welcome, as in New York, but to no avail. Upon docking in San Diego on New Year's Eve, the German visitors had to endure four hours of speeches, presentations, tours, and a radio talk. Only after all the hoopla had ceased were Einstein and Elsa finally taken northward by car, eventually settling into a small Pasadena bungalow specially renovated and furnished for their stay. While shunning many public events over their two-month visit, the Einsteins enjoyed a steady round of private engagements. Over the ensuing weeks, they hosted a dinner for the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (with Einstein briefly playing the violin for his guest), visited a Hollywood studio, had dinner at the home of film comedian Charlie Chaplin, and motored out to Palm Springs for a four-day holiday. They did put up with the glare of the celebrity spotlight on one special occasion. The couple, he decked out in tuxedo and she in full-length evening gown, attended the premiere of Chaplin's latest movie, City Lights, where Einstein laughed like a little boy. There was a simple reason for this exceptional night on the town: Chaplin, instantly recognizable throughout the world, was Elsa's matinee idol. “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you,” Chaplin told Einstein as they walked into the theater to shouts and clapping that night.

Einstein's days, though, were solely devoted to research, with visits to either Caltech or Mount Wilson's Pasadena headquarters for talks and consultations with fellow scientists. For his convenience, he had a small army of chauffeurs at his beck and call, including Grace Hubble. When driving Einstein to an engagement one day, he turned to her and said, “Your husband's work is beautiful—and he has a beautiful spirit.” Einstein had been given a room at Mount Wilson's main offices right across from Hubble's. The observatory made every attempt to shelter him from the press and allow him maximum time to interact with his colleagues, even keeping the doors locked at the headquarters and issuing keys. Hale, though, stayed away from all the partying. “I have kept completely out of the Einstein excitement,” he told a friend, “and have not seen him at all until he dropped into my lab the other day, fortunately with no reporter. He is very simple and agreeable and greatly dislikes all the newspaper notoriety. But as the town is swarming with reporters, several of them sent out here for the occasion by eastern papers, he cannot escape entirely.”

Einstein and his wife, Elsa, with Charlie Chaplin at the premiere

of Chaplin's film City Lights, January 1931 (Copyright Jewish

Chronicle Ltd/HIP/The Image Works)

That was certainly the case on January 29, 1931, when a carefully orchestrated expedition was arranged for Einstein. That morning the world's premier physicist and Hubble, its foremost astronomer, settled into the plush leather seats of a sleek Pierce-Arrow touring car and traveled, along with a number of other observatory staffers, up to the site of Hubble's astronomical triumphs—the sprawling telescope complex atop Mount Wilson. Despite warnings from his doctor to avoid high elevations, Einstein was eager to make the trek, so he could view up close the machinery that had had such a direct bearing on his theoretical investigations.

This event was considered so noteworthy that a young filmmaker named Frank Capra, still three years away from his first Academy Award for the screwball comedy It Happened One Night, came along to document Einstein's every move on the mountain that day. Clambering with a few others into an open steel box, operated by cables, Einstein was first carried to the top of the 150-foot-high tower telescope, used exclusively for the study of the Sun. After admiring the view of southern California and duly photographed in the cold, stiff breeze, he again went aboard the miniature elevator