The dying notes of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” lead into Radio One’s 12:30 p.m. news as Simon Mitton walks into the DAMTP and a car with its window down and radio turned up parks in front of the building on the other side of the cobbled courtyard. The news report is full of peace protesters at Greenham Common, British troops in the troubled city of Beirut, and the biggest Christmas film ever, E.T., but Mitton has other astronomical thoughts on his mind. He is visiting Stephen Hawking to discuss the imminent publication of the professor’s new book for Cambridge University Press, The Very Early Universe. Unexpectedly, however, after talking through the latest details of the book over tea and biscuits, the two of them fall into a discussion about something altogether different—a popular cosmology book, which Stephen has been mulling over for some time.
For almost as long as he had known him, Mitton had been intimating to Hawking that he should attempt a cosmology book aimed at the popular market. Hawking had displayed little interest in the idea, but by late 1982 he had come to recognize that such a
project might provide the answer to his looming financial difficulties, and he decided to revive the idea. The two of them had enjoyed a fruitful publishing relationship for many years, and, despite the problems over Superspace and Supergravity, Hawking’s first thought was to approach Cambridge University Press with the proposal. Mitton’s original intention was for Hawking to attempt a book on the origin and evolution of the Universe. Cambridge University Press had enjoyed a long tradition of publishing popular science books written by eminent scientists, such as Arthur Eddington and Fred Hoyle, whose titles had sold well. A popular book by Stephen Hawking would, he believed, neatly follow on from these.
According to Mitton, Hawking laid things on the line immediately. He wanted a lot of money for this book. Mitton had always known him to be a tough negotiator; that was clear from the fracas over the cover for Superspace and Supergravity. When it came to financial matters he was prepared for some intransigence, but in the event even Mitton was surprised by Hawking’s suggestions. At their first organized meeting to discuss the book, Hawking opened the conversation by explaining his financial situation, making it clear that he wanted to earn enough money to continue financing Lucy’s education and to offset the costs of nursing. He was obviously unable to provide any form of life insurance to protect the family in the event of his death or complete incapacitation, so if he was going to spend a considerable amount of his valuable time away from research writing a popular book, he expected an appropriate reward.
Mitton is philosophical about the whole matter, pointing out that Hawking was showing remarkable loyalty toward Cambridge University by staying there. There is absolutely no doubt that he could have commanded a huge salary from any university in the world. A number of colleges in the USA would have offered him six-
figure sums simply for the prestige accompanying his international fame, not to mention the enormous kudos of cashing in on the important breakthroughs he would almost certainly make in the near future. The fact that he remained in Cambridge for a fraction of the salary he could command elsewhere is, Mitton believes, a great credit to him. The simple fact is that the Hawkings loved Cambridge. They had lived there for nearly two decades, and Stephen had spent practically all of his academic life at the university. The DAMTP is, without doubt, one of the best theoretical physics departments in the world, and he would have left it only as a last resort.
In the early eighties, Simon Mitton’s office was based in the same courtyard as the DAMTP on Silver Street, so the two of them had plenty of opportunity to talk about the proposed project. One afternoon Hawking went to see him with the rough draft of a section of the proposed book. Mitton knew the commercial market as well as any publisher. In fact he was by that time author of several successful popular science books himself. He had a very clear idea of the type of book the general public would want and which would earn Hawking the sort of money he was after. After looking through the section Hawking had shown him, he came to the conclusion that it was far too technical and highbrow for the general reader. “It’s like baked beans,” he told Hawking. “The blander the flavor, the broader the market. There simply isn’t a commercial niche for specialist books like this, Stephen.”
Hawking went away and thought about Mitton’s comments; Mitton went to the Cambridge University Press Syndicate to see what they thought of the idea. The two men met up again shortly afterward. Mitton had the encouraging news that the Syndicate had accepted the idea of the book with glee and had handed over to him all negotiations. Hawking, for his part, had done a little editing of the section he had written earlier. Mitton sat back and flicked
through the manuscript as Hawking remained motionless in his wheelchair on the other side of the room, patiently awaiting his opinion. Finally, Mitton put the typescript down on his desk and looked across at him.
“It’s still far too technical, Stephen,” he said at last. Then smiling, he made the now famous statement: “Look at it this way, Steve—every equation will halve your sales.”
Hawking looked surprised. Then, smiling, he said, “Why do you say that?”
“Well,” replied Mitton, “when people look at a book in a shop, they just flick through it to decide if they want to read it. You’ve got equations on practically every page. When they look at this, they’ll say, ‘This book’s got sums in it,’ and put it back on the shelf.”
Hawking took Mitton’s point. Over a cup of tea the two of them began to talk money. Mitton suggested an advance, to which Hawking smiled and made a faintly disparaging reply. Mitton knew this was going to be tough. By the end of the afternoon Hawking had talked Mitton into a £10,000 advance, by far the biggest Cambridge University Press had ever offered anyone. The percentage royalties on both the hardback and the paperback were also excellent. The next morning Mitton sent a contract over to Hawking’s office. He never heard from him on the matter again.
Early in 1983, as Stephen Hawking and Simon Mitton sat in an office on Silver Street, Cambridge, discussing over tea the idea of doing a popular book, three thousand miles away a tall, bearded man in his early thirties passed by a newsstand on Fifth Avenue. Stopping briefly to scan the titles, he picked up a copy of the New York Times, paid for it, and walked on. Arriving at his office a few blocks away, he sat down at his desk; he had a few moments to spare before his lunch appointment with a literary agent at a local restaurant. Peter Guzzardi opened the paper and the magazine fell
out on to the desk. There, on the front cover, a picture of a man in a wheelchair was staring back at him. Discarding the rest of the newspaper, Guzzardi quickly turned to the cover article, “The Universe and Dr. Hawking,” and began to read.
Within minutes he was hooked. The article described the amazing story of the crippled Cambridge scientist, Stephen Hawking, who had revolutionized cosmology and had, for the past twenty years, successfully overcome the devastating symptoms of a wasting neurological disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. By the time he had finished the article, he knew he had stumbled upon a great story, and being a senior editor at Bantam Books he was in a perfect position to do something about it. With the enormous possibilities opened up by his discovery already racing around in his mind, he stuffed the magazine into his bag and headed off for lunch.
Peter Guzzardi’s appointment was with the agent Al Zuckerman, who was president of a large agency named Writer’s House based in New York City. Over dessert Guzzardi mentioned what he had just been reading about Stephen Hawking. Zuckerman had read the same article and was already on the case. He had recently heard through a mutual friend, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Daniel Freedman, that Hawking was working on a book. He had then contacted his own brother-in-law, who just happened to be a physicist himself, about the project.
By the time of his lunch engagement with Peter Guzzardi, Zuckerman had already decided to get in touch with Hawking to establish the state of play. Seeing the human story behind the discoveries and believing that such a book could be hugely successful, he wanted to be involved. Before they left the restaurant, Peter Guzzardi made it very clear that, if Zuckerman were to meet Hawking and discover that he had not already signed to another publisher, he was sure Bantam would like to know about it. On the
sidewalk the two men shook hands and went back to their respective offices.
Six months passed before Peter Guzzardi heard another thing from Al Zuckerman, but the agent had not been idle in the meantime. He had succeeded in contacting Hawking on the point of signing a contract with Cambridge University Press (CUP). He had cut it fine—a few days later the deal would have gone through, and Zuckerman would have had little incentive to get involved. Although CUP would undoubtedly have made a very good job of producing Hawking’s book, they probably would not have been the right publisher for it. Hawking wanted to sell his book in vast numbers, tapping the popular market; as a highly prestigious academic publisher, CUP is simply not geared up for that area of the business.
Dennis Sciama recalled how he met Hawking on a train around the time of CUP’s offer and discovered that his former student was working on a popular book.
“You’re doing it with CUP?” he asked.
“Oh no,” Hawking replied with a mischievous grin. “I want to make some money with this one.”
Zuckerman managed to persuade Hawking not to sign the contract before giving him a chance to see what he could do. They agreed that if he was unsuccessful in placing the book, then Hawking could always fall back on the offer from CUP, but Zuckerman had a very strong feeling that he could get more than £10,000 in advance and hook one of the big trade publishers. Hawking drafted a proposal for the book and produced a sample section of around a hundred pages, and Zuckerman contacted a number of publishers, including Bantam, in the States. He had decided at the beginning that he would go for a deal with an American publishing company first and secure contracts for publication in other countries at a later date.
Peter Guzzardi received the proposal early in 1984 and presented it to the next scheduled editorial meeting. He took with him the New York Times article that had attracted his interest in the first place and showed it to his colleagues. They immediately saw the potential of the proposal and needed little persuading that the idea was a good one. By the end of the meeting they had agreed to make a serious bid for the rights.
Despite Bantam’s obvious interest, Zuckerman decided to hold an auction for the book. The whole thing was conducted over the phone. He sent out the package Hawking had put together to a collection of major publishers and told them that if they were interested in the book they had to make an offer by a certain prearranged date. Interested parties then contacted him with their offers and were told if there was a rival offer that bettered their own. They then had the choice of upping their offer or dropping out of the bidding. Toward the end of the auction day, two rivaling publishers were left to compete over the contract: Norton and Bantam. Norton had recently published Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the autobiographical reveries of the Nobel Prize-winning Caltech professor Richard Feynman and were very keen on the Hawking proposal. The Feynman book had done exceptionally well. To them the market potential of a popular book by Hawking was obvious.
As evening approached and the two companies upped their bids further, Bantam decided to take the plunge and make a final, some may have thought hugely risky, offer. Hurried telephone calls flashed between offices and hastily arranged meetings were held to decide what should be done. Finally, Guzzardi was given the go-ahead to make his final bid. He offered a $250,000 advance for the United States and Canada and a very favorable deal on hardback and paperback royalties. As the sun set over the ragged skyline, tense minutes turned into a nail-biting half-hour in Guzzardi’s office in Manhattan. He really wanted this book.
Finally the phone rang. Guzzardi grabbed for it. Norton had not matched the offer. Subject to Hawking’s approval of a submitted letter outlining what they would do in terms of rewrites and promotional technique, the book was theirs.
Author and agent obviously had little doubt of the book’s worth and the salability of the Hawking name—remarkably cool behavior, on Hawking’s part, for a man who, for all his fame and earning potential abroad, was in reality in a rather delicate financial state. Peter Guzzardi accepted the conditions and wrote to Hawking with his ideas. Hawking obviously approved, for the contract was signed a short time later. Guzzardi says that one of the things he believes clinched the deal was his suggestion that the book should be on sale at every airport in America. Hawking loved the idea. The fact that his book was with one of the world’s biggest publishers gave him a real thrill.
Guzzardi first met Hawking after a conference at Fermilab, the high-energy physics research establishment just outside Chicago. He remembers that Hawking was very tired after delivering his talk but was still very receptive and enthusiastic about the project. Recalling his first impressions of Hawking, he said, “The man has a formidable presence. He came across as a very powerful personality.”
By this time Hawking’s lectures were always delivered via an interpreter, usually a research assistant who would handle the slide projector and present Hawking’s prescripted lecture. The same interpreter acted for Guzzardi when he met Hawking after the talk. “It was a bit like listening to someone speaking in a foreign language,” Guzzardi recalls. “You pick up a sort of rhythm, without actually understanding what he’s saying.”
Although Hawking was very happy to discuss the book even at the end of a tiring day, Guzzardi sensed that some of his assistants were less than enthusiastic about the whole thing. He feels they resented the idea that their professor’s work was being popularized
and that attempts to reinterpret his theories in layman’s language for public consumption would somehow devalue them. According to Guzzardi, this was an attitude Hawking did not share with his students; on the contrary, he was very much in favor of communicating his theories to a general audience. Before A Brief History of Time, Hawking had shown great interest in delivering public lectures about his work and had, Guzzardi feels, a definite sense of mission about public awareness of cosmology.
After the first meeting, an exchange of letters between Cambridge and New York began in which suggestions and countersuggestions were made about passages in the growing manuscript. Throughout the long gestation period of the project, Guzzardi sought advice from other scientists and expert communicators to help him understand Hawking’s ideas, feeding back his digested version of their remarks to steer Hawking further in the direction in which he had said he wanted to go—toward a bestseller. Considering Hawking’s commitments to the DAMTP, his busy schedule of talks and lectures around the world, and his family responsibilities, work on the book progressed well. But despite all their efforts it was to take a further eighteen months before Hawking and Guzzardi succeeded in knocking the manuscript into shape and preparing it for publication.
There have been suggestions that at one stage Bantam wanted the book ghostwritten by a successful science writer but that Hawking totally rejected the idea. Such notions are completely unfounded. At no time was such a suggestion made by Guzzardi. In fact, it had been Al Zuckerman who had initially proposed the idea:
I read the manuscript and thought it was very interesting, and that I could certainly find a publisher for it, but that it would not be readily comprehensible to the lay reader. . . . I thought at that time that we should bring in a professional writer to help put the ideas across in language which would be more easily under
stood. Hawking refused; he wanted the book to be all his. And he is a very strong-minded man.1
In his role as editor, Guzzardi tried to put himself in the position of the average man in the street buying and attempting to read the book. He tried to convey this to Hawking during their transatlantic correspondence, with remarks like “I’m sorry Professor Hawking, I just don’t understand this!” Zuckerman has said of Guzzardi’s efforts:
I would guess that, for every page of text, Peter wrote two to three pages of editorial letters, all in an attempt to get Hawking to elaborate on ideas that his mind jumps over, but other people wouldn’t understand.2
“I was persistent,” Guzzardi says, “and kept on until Hawking made me understand things. He may have thought I was a little thick, but I risked it and kept on plugging away until I saw what he was talking about.” According to Guzzardi, Hawking was perfectly amiable about the whole thing and showed great patience with him. In his typically modest way, he also claims that Hawking gave him too much credit in the book’s acknowledgments. “I did,” he points out, “what any normal intelligent person would do and persevered until I understood what was going on.”
Kitty Ferguson, in her book Stephen Hawking: A Quest for the Theory of Everything, has suggested that because of his condition Hawking’s use of few words in his explanations meant that in lectures and seminars he would often jump from thought to thought, wrongly assuming that others could see the connection. Without careful editing, this could obviously present serious problems in a supposedly popular science book.
For Peter Guzzardi the responsibility of editing A Brief History of Time was a very exciting experience. He realized before the contract
was even signed that Hawking was the man to write the definitive work on the theory of the origin and evolution of the Universe. It was he who had done the seminal work on many of the new ideas at the heart of the subject. Who could have been more suited to the task? The manuscript was from the horse’s mouth. Guzzardi is from the school of thought that proposes Hawking as the Einstein of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although he is not himself a scientist, through their collaboration on the book he undoubtedly grew to know Hawking and his way of thinking very well. His understanding of the man is very different to the way his students and professional associates understand him, but perhaps equal in depth.
To many Hawking is not the hero the public seems to have made him. There are those who suggest that he is melodramatic at conferences, that he is pretentious and showy, that his constant questioning is affected and deliberately argumentative.
The physicist and popular writer Paul Davies has pointed out that there can be few things more intimidating than for Hawking to come crashing through the doors of a lecture theater five minutes after an inexperienced speaker has begun to talk. Even worse are the occasions when he decides to leave before the end of a lecture and goes careering along the aisle, accelerating his motorized wheelchair straight toward the swing doors at the back of the room. But Davies admits:
Often, it is simply that Stephen is hungry or has remembered that he must phone someone urgently. His lateness is always unintentional and not done to intimidate, but fortunately it hasn’t happened to me—yet!
There are those who do not view Hawking’s antics and celebrity so kindly. One theorist has been quoted as saying, “He’s working on the same things everybody else is. He just receives a lot of attention because of his condition.”3
Do Hawking’s critics have a point, or are such statements simply sour grapes over the hype surrounding him? Hawking’s own opinion on people comparing him with Einstein is typically brash: “You shouldn’t believe everything you read,” he says with an ambiguous smile.4
Finishing the first draft took up most of 1984. It was the year a bomb planted in the Grand Hotel in Brighton nearly killed the British Cabinet, and the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her own bodyguards in the garden of her New Delhi home.
As the months passed and Hawking juggled his commitments, the manuscript grew and the stack of correspondence with his editor expanded apace. In the world at large, a baboon’s heart was transplanted into a fifteen-day-old baby, Bishop Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize, and toward the close of the year Ronald Reagan was reelected as U.S. president.
The first draft of the manuscript was completed by Christmas, and work on rewrites began in the New Year. The exchange of letters between Hawking in Cambridge and Guzzardi in Manhattan became even more frenetic as the deadline approached.
The trade press got wind of the book soon after Christmas 1984 but appeared to be nonplussed by seemingly misplaced enthusiasm at Bantam:
Is it the imminence of spring, or is the new enthusiasm we detect genuine? Everywhere we hear the sound of feet jumping up and down in sheer elation over some pet project. At Bantam, Peter Guzzardi is jumping for joy over the acquisition of Stephen Hawking’s From the Big Bang to Black Holes. . . . Paying what Guzzardi calls “significant six figures, definitely above $100,000,” Bantam has plans to publish the book in hardcover “sometime in 1986.” . . . “It’s a great book to have,” enthuses Peter. “Hawking is on the cutting edge of what we know about the cosmos. This whole business of the unified field theory, the conjunction of
relativity with quantum mechanics, is comparable to the search for the Holy Grail.”5
The mid-eighties were indeed a time of growing optimism. As the major nations of the world dragged themselves out of recession, markets began to expand and all sectors of business were on the up. It was the era of the yuppie. The “city slicker” emerged metamorphosed from the post-hippy hibernation of the seventies, cast off the clinging remnants of introspection and integrity, and jumped into a Porsche 911 convertible.
Newly elected right-wing governments were in power in the major industrialized nations and you could almost smell the odor of growing confidence in the spring air. Life was good; no one had noticed the swelling bass note of overexpansion and downturn. Share prices in champagne and designer labels rocketed, and big publishing deals became part of the norm.
In July 1985, Hawking decided to spend some time at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research in Geneva. There he could continue with his fundamental research and also allow himself time to devote to what he described to friends as “a popular book.” He rented an apartment in the city where he was looked after by a full-time nurse and his research assistant at the time, a French Canadian named Raymond Laflamme. Jane, in the meantime, had decided to tour Germany to visit friends. The couple planned to meet up in Bayreuth to attend the Wagner Festival in August, after Stephen had completed the rewrites for the book.
One evening at the beginning of August, Hawking retired to bed late after a long day making corrections to the manuscript. His nurse helped him into bed and sat down to relax in an adjoining room. After finishing a magazine article, she would begin her routine of checking her patient every half-hour throughout the night. Around 3 a. m. the nurse walked into Hawking’s room to find him
awake and having problems breathing. His face had turned violet, and he was making a gurgling sound in his throat. She immediately alerted Laflamme, and an ambulance was called.
Hawking was rushed to the Cantonal Hospital in Geneva, where he was immediately put on a ventilator. Legend has it that it was thanks to television that the doctor in charge of receiving the crippled scientist at the hospital saved Hawking’s life. Shortly before Hawking had become one of his patients, he just happened to watch a TV program about a Cambridge physicist who suffered from ALS. Knowing Hawking’s condition, he knew which drugs he could and could not give to his patient. A doctor who had not been fortunate enough to catch the program may well have killed him unintentionally.
Hawking was rushed to intensive care, and the authorities at CERN were notified. The division leader, Dr. Maurice Jacob, arrived at the hospital before dawn and was informed that things were touch and go. It was thought that Hawking had suffered a blockage in his windpipe and was suspected of having contracted pneumonia. ALS sufferers are more susceptible to the disease than others; in many cases it proves to be fatal. Maurice Jacob and his staff immediately tried to contact Jane, but it proved no easy matter. She was traveling from city to city and had left a series of telephone numbers with Stephen’s nurse. The problem was that no one was absolutely sure of her schedule. Frantic calls were made to various private numbers in Germany, until she was finally tracked down at a friend’s house near Bonn.
Jane arrived at the Cantonal Hospital to find her husband in a very bad way. He was on a life support machine but out of immediate danger. However, in the opinion of the doctors, he would have little hope of survival without a tracheostomy operation. Stephen was unable to breathe through his mouth or nose and would suffocate if he were taken off the ventilator that stood beside his hospi-
tal bed. The operation involved slicing in to the windpipe and implanting a breathing device in his neck, just above collar level. Jane was told that the operation was essential to save her husband’s life, but there was a major snag. If they went ahead, he would never be able to speak or make any vocal sound again.
What was she to do? The decision could come only from her. Although Stephen had hardly been capable of speech for many years, with only his family and close friends able to understand him, there was now the prospect of total loss of communication. His voice may have been difficult to understand, but it was still speech. There was, she knew, a technique for recovering some speech after a tracheostomy, but that was a possibility only if the patient was reasonably fit. The doctors around her were staggered that a man in Hawking’s state could still be traveling the world, but there would be no chance of his regaining any form of speech in his physical condition. Could she take the decision to go ahead with it and condemn her husband to silence?
The future looked very, very bleak. We didn’t know how we were going to be able to survive—or if he was going to survive. It was my decision for him to have a tracheostomy. But I have sometimes thought, what have I done? What sort of life have I let him in for?6
After the operation Hawking remained in the Swiss hospital for another two weeks. An air ambulance then returned him to Cambridge, where he was admitted to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. The plane flew in to Marshall’s Airport, where he was met by doctors and escorted to the intensive care unit at the hospital.
That evening the senior nurse of the medical unit at Addenbrooke’s was quoted in the Cambridge Evening News as saying, “He is going into intensive care. We are not sure of his condition and he needs to be assessed.”7 In the event, he was to spend a
further few weeks in the hospital in Cambridge before he was allowed home to West Road.
In many respects, Hawking had been lucky once again. He had survived by the skin of his teeth. Many ALS sufferers die from pneumonia initiated by their condition. When he caught the infection he just happened to be in one of the most medically advanced countries in the world; he was received at the hospital by a doctor who had recently seen him on TV and knew of his condition; and he had the support of an intelligent, caring wife. However, one of the most serendipitous facts of all is that, if he had contracted pneumonia two years earlier, things would have been far worse.
In August 1985 the writing of what would become the bestselling A Brief History of Time was almost complete. Peter Guzzardi had, of course, been notified immediately that Stephen had fallen ill and had continued editing the manuscript while Hawking was recovering in the hospital. The family had received some money from the advance and could just about cope financially with the immediate crisis. The problem for Jane, however, was what would happen in the long term. After the tracheostomy, Stephen would need round-the-clock nursing. The best the National Health Service could offer was seven hours’ nursing help a week in the Hawkings’ home, plus two hours’ help with bathing. They would have to pay for private nursing. The advance from the book would not last long, and there was absolutely no certainty about its eventual success. To Jane there seemed little long-term hope. How were they to survive if he could never work again?
There were few possibilities. She would willingly have left her own career and devoted herself full-time to looking after her husband, but she was not a qualified nurse, and in any case, who would then provide for the family? The alternative was the dreaded thought of Stephen in a nursing home, unable to work, slipping into gradual decline and eventual death. “There were days when I felt
sometimes I could not go on because I didn’t know how to cope,”8 Jane has said of that period.
It was obvious they would have to find financial support from somewhere. Jane wrote letter after letter to charitable organizations around the world and called upon the help of family friends in approaching institutions that might be interested in assisting them. Help arrived from an American foundation aware of Hawking’s work and international reputation, which agreed to pay £50,000 a year toward the costs of nursing. Shortly afterward several other charitable organizations on both sides of the Atlantic followed suit with smaller donations. Jane feels bitter about the whole affair. She resents the fact that, after paying a lifetime of contributions to the National Health Service, they were offered such meager help when the need arose. She is very aware that if her husband had been an unknown physics teacher he would now be living out his final days in a residential home. “Think of the waste of talent,”9 she has said of the situation.
The very month in which the Hawkings received the offer of financial support, a computer expert living in California, Walt Woltosz, sent Stephen a program he had written called Equalizer. It was compatible with the computers he used at home and in the office and enabled him to select words on a screen from a menu of 3,000. He could move from word to word by squeezing a switch held in his hand. Tiny movements of his fingers were enough to operate the device and move a cursor to the desired word. When a sentence had been built up, it could be sent to a voice synthesizer that then spoke for him. Certain key sentences were pre-programmed into the computer to speed up the process, and with a little practice Hawking found he could manage about ten words a minute. “It was a bit slow,” he has said, “but then I think slowly, so it suited me quite well.”10
Hawking’s new computer-generated voice completely transformed his life. He could now communicate better than he could before the operation, and he no longer needed the help of an interpreter when lecturing or simply conversing with people. Since the tracheostomy, his only means of communication had been by blinking his eyes, spelling out words written on a card held in front of him. The voice synthesizer has a definite accent, variously described as American or Scandinavian. Because there is a degree of intonation on certain words, it doesn’t sound too much like a robot— something Hawking would have hated. He really wishes that the synthesizer could produce a British accent, and he often greets people with, “Hello, please excuse my American accent.” However, he can change the program and alter the accent. On special occasions he likes to use one with a Scottish burr, which is perhaps the closest he can get to his natural voice. Timothy Hawking thinks his father’s new voice suits him. Of all the family he is the one who can least remember Stephen’s real voice, as he was only six at the time of the operation in Switzerland, and there had been very little voice left for many years before then.
With his new voice and a degree of financial security, a few weeks after leaving the hospital Hawking was able to resume work on the manuscript. In collaboration with Peter Guzzardi and taking on board suggestions quietly solicited from other readers, they decided to scrap a number of sections and rewrite some others. Hawking wanted to add a mathematical appendix, which would list the equations forbidden in the text, but Guzzardi vetoed the idea. “It would terrify people!” he said.
As the two men worked on the manuscript and the publicity machine at Bantam began to get into gear for publication in the spring of 1988, Al Zuckerman was not idle. Having sold the rights for America and Canada, he was keen to find buyers for the rest of the world. Publishers in Germany and Italy both offered advances
of $30,000 without even seeing the manuscript, and there was growing interest from Japan, Scandinavia, France, and Spain. To his surprise he even received offers from Korea, China, and Turkey and two from Russia—a country to which he had never before managed to sell a book. “I had two offers from publishers in Moscow,” he told the Bookseller. “They don’t compete—they both made the same offer.”11 It seemed everyone wanted to get in on the action.
Global interest in Stephen Hawking’s book was exceeding Zuckerman’s most optimistic dreams. Only in one major country did he encounter a problem: Britain.
British publishers were the most sceptical I encountered. When I showed the earlier version in the UK, Dent offered £15,000 and there were other offers of £5,000 and £10,000. I didn’t think they were serious enough, so I withdrew.12
For the meantime, there was no U.K. publisher for a book by a British author that had been taken in almost every other country in the world.
No further progress was made until the American Booksellers Association convention in 1987. Mark Barty-King of Bantam UK had heard of the book through company connections. Bumping into Zuckerman at the convention, he asked him if he could read the manuscript. After reading it, he arranged to meet Zuckerman to declare an interest in the book. Zuckerman told him that he wanted £75,000 for the U.K. rights. Barty-King suddenly lost his enthusiasm:
£75,000 [at that time] seemed an outrageous advance for what was a difficult book, although a very distinguished one. Whether he tried it out on other people I don’t know, but eventually we decided we could come up with £30,000. He said he had to try other publishers; we said, “If you do, we want the floor.”13
Penguin, Collins, Century Hutchinson, and others all failed to meet the floor of £30,000. Zuckerman returned to Bantam UK and accepted their offer.
Even then Mark Barty-King’s final decision was touch and go. The evening before he presented the idea to the scheduled editorial meeting, he sat down to do some sums. As usual he began to calculate projected sales. Hardback: home 3,000 copies, stock 2,000, export 500; trade paperback: 10,000 copies, stock 10,000, export 3,000; Australia and New Zealand: 3,000. The calculations didn’t add up. Finally he added £5,000 for serial rights within the U.K. and he could just about justify the acquisition. He took it to the meeting and, against all advice from his colleagues, forced it through. The company would not make a penny from this book, he was convinced of that. However, on the plus side, a prestigious book such as this could only enhance their profile as publishers of “serious” books and, if they did not actually lose money from the deal, it would be worth taking the risk.
It was not until he met Hawking in person at the Frankfurt Book Fair the autumn before publication that Mark Barty-King began to get an inkling of the man’s enormous presence:
It’s only when you meet him that you realize how extraordinary he is. What in particular comes as such a surprise, after all he has been through, is that you get such a strong impression of his sense of humour.14
After signing up the book, he told a journalist:
It’s a book by one of the greatest minds of our time, discussing the elemental subject of who we are and where we come from. It is a lucid and very personal book, one which I personally found quite difficult to read because of the subject-matter, but one which I considered to have enormous appeal.15
In Frankfurt, Hawking delivered a short talk to the gathered publishers in a library hired for the occasion. He described his life as well as the philosophy and motivations behind the book. According to Guzzardi, they were enthralled. In the lead-up to publication in the USA, Guzzardi had a series of meetings with Bantam’s director of marketing to discuss exactly how they would approach the promotion of the book.
Years earlier, when Simon Mitton learned that Hawking had signed to a major trade publisher, he had given Hawking a piece of friendly advice. “Do be careful if you’re dealing with those people, Stephen,” he had said. “Do ensure that you are quite certain that, if the aim is to make money and sell lots and lots of books, you don’t mind the marketing techniques.”
“What do you mean?” Hawking had asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it past them to market it as ‘Aren’t cripples marvelous?’ You’ve got to go into it with your eyes open. If you don’t mind that approach, OK.”
In the event, Mitton’s advice was unfounded. Guzzardi had no intention of promoting the book in the way Mitton had feared:
We could have gone two ways. We could have Bantamized it—planes over Manhattan with sky-writing, T-shirts, etc., or we could go classy, tasteful, the quality-rap. The author is prestigious, we thought. Put marketing muscle into it, but do it tastefully. That was the alternative, and that’s what we decided to do.
Less than a month before publication, Hawking received a surprising phone call from his agent Al Zuckerman. Peter Guzzardi, who had seen the book through from the beginning, had told him that he had been offered his own imprint at Crown and was leaving Bantam. The final stages of carrying the book through promotion and the nervy early sales period would be handed over to a new editor. One of the last decisions Guzzardi made about the book was
the final choice of title. Hawking thought that A Brief History of Time might come across as a little too frivolous and had misgivings about the word “brief.” It was Peter Guzzardi who managed to convince him that it was a brilliant title, succinct but definitive. According to Guzzardi, what finally convinced Hawking was when he remarked that the word “brief” in the title made him smile. “Stephen saw the point immediately,” says Guzzardi, “he likes to make people smile.”
When handed the portfolio for this strange, difficult book, A Brief History of Time, the new editor at Bantam got cold feet. The new editor’s first decision was to reduce the book’s first print run drastically—to 40,000.
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes hit stores all over America in the early spring of 1988. The launch party took place at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where a banquet was held in the author’s honor and Hawking gave a short speech to promote the book. According to the other guests, after a long day of celebrations and seemingly endless introductions and meetings, Hawking was still full of energy and in a party mood.
The gathering moved to the embankment overlooking the East River. Stephen was in fine form. The years of work on A Brief History of Time were finally over, and the book was in the shops and would, it was hoped, do well. Friends remember how he wheeled around from guest to guest in very high spirits. There was a definite buzz of excitement in the air. It was a clear night, the stars shone brightly over the river, and the city lights were reflected in a spectrum of colored points in the water. Glasses were continually refilled, and although Hawking himself can drink very little alcohol and has no real sense of taste, by all accounts he seemed intoxicated by the atmosphere. There were some anxious moments, however. One friend recalled that both Jane and
Stephen’s nurse were terrified that in his excitement he would roll his wheelchair into the river.
Late in the evening a small group of close friends and family returned to the hotel. As they passed through the lobby, Stephen noticed a dance going on in a ballroom nearby. Insisting that it was too early to go to bed, he wheeled himself off in the direction of the music, intent on crashing the party. His friends were dragged along and persuaded to join in, and Hawking ended the celebrations in the early hours, whirring around the dance floor with the band playing on long after the original party had ended.
Bantam carried through their plan of a low-key launch for the book. There were no prearranged window displays or huge posters of the author. Prelaunch indicators from sales reps were encouraging but confused. Shops were keen to take the book but did not know quite where to put it or what to do with it. Then, days after publication, near-disaster struck. An editor at Bantam, looking through a copy from the first print run, noticed that two of the pictures were in the wrong place. There was instant panic. The 40,000-copy print run was already in the shops. Sales staff hurriedly began to phone the larger bookshops.
“We’ve made a mistake,” they said. “We’ll have to recall all your copies.” To their amazement, there were no unsold copies left. Shops all over America had already filled in reorder forms for more. According to executives at Bantam, this was the first sign that they were on to something really big. Wasting no time, a reprint of the corrected version was ordered immediately and rushed to retailers as quickly as possible. Much to Bantam’s delight, Time magazine ran a large article about Hawking in the month of publication, and favorable reviews began to appear in quality newspapers and magazines across the States. Within weeks of publication, A Brief History of Time entered the best-seller list and climbed effortlessly to the top.
Suddenly, window displays appeared in bookshops all along Fifth Avenue, and posters of Stephen Hawking were put up over shelves packed with his book in shops all over America.
The cover of the American edition of the book shows Hawking sitting in his wheelchair against a backdrop of stars. He looks very stern and is staring at the camera, almost frowning. Hawking has said that he was always unhappy with this picture but that he had no say in its use. Some of his friends and family thought that the picture did not really express his true character and lacked humor.
One book reviewer took exception to Bantam’s putting a photograph of the author in a wheelchair on the front cover, declaring it to be exploitative, a cynical commercial move on the part of the publisher to get the most mileage possible from their crippled author.
Peter Guzzardi was deeply offended by the suggestion. “It was obvious the reviewer didn’t know Stephen, to think that he could be exploited,” he said. “No one could exploit Stephen Hawking. He is quite capable of looking after himself.”
“I think the reasoning behind that guy’s comments was pathetic,” Guzzardi recalled with disgust on another occasion. “It was a triumph for a man in Hawking’s physical condition to be on the cover of his own book. It’s inspiring.”
By the summer of 1988, Stephen Hawking’s “difficult” book had stayed in the best-seller list for four months and had sold over a half a million copies in America. He was very rapidly becoming a household name. The publishing phenomenon of the year hit the national news—and every airport bookstall in the country.
In Chicago a Stephen Hawking fan club was hurriedly organized and started selling Hawking T-shirts. Among the “science set,” he began to achieve the status and commercial trappings of a rock star in schools and colleges from L.A. to Pittsburgh. The schoolboy who
had been a devoted fan of Bertrand Russell was now, some thirty years later, himself a schoolboys’ hero.
June 1988 saw the British publication of A Brief History of Time. It immediately followed the same pattern of instant success it had enjoyed in America. Bookshops sold out every copy within days. A few days after publication, one of us (M.W.) searched every bookshop in Oxford and London and could not find a single copy left on sale. Weeks later he tracked down a copy—the last remaining in the bookshop at the World Trade Center in New York.
British sales reps were reporting overwhelming interest from retailers the length of the country. Waterstone’s in Edinburgh wrote to the publisher to say that they wanted to mount a window display and were planning to order 100 copies of the book. But despite the obvious interest the book was generating, the British publisher was slow to appreciate the scale of its success. Mark Barty-King at Bantam UK had decided to increase the first print run from 5,000 to 8,000, but these were sold by the end of their first day in the shops. Once again an immediate reprint was ordered. By the beginning of 1991, A Brief History of Time had gone to twenty reprints in Britain and was still selling an average of 5,000 copies a month in hardback. The book was leaving the bookshelves faster than the printers could produce new copies. The buyer for W. H. Smith was quoted as saying, “Demand for the book had completely outstripped what we were expecting. It has almost become a cult book.”16
Reviews appeared in publications ranging from Nature to the Daily Mail, all of them favorable. Interview after interview appeared in newspapers and magazines. Hawking was becoming such a celebrity that he had to pick which journalists he would talk to.
“It was interesting to see the interviews he went for,” said Wendy Tury at Transworld. “He wanted to do the Sunday Mirror, for instance.”17
Hawking’s attitude was that he wanted to reach the broadest audience possible. He wanted plumbers and butchers to read his book as well as doctors, lawyers, and science students:
I am pleased a book on science competes with the memoirs of pop stars. Maybe there is still hope for the human race. I am very pleased for it to reach the general public, not just academics. It is important that we all have some idea of what science is about because it plays such a big role in modern society.18
Entering the Sunday Times best-seller list within two weeks of publication, it rapidly reached number one, where it remained unchallenged throughout the summer. The book had already broken many records and indeed went on to break them all—staying on the list in Britain for a staggering 234 weeks, and notching up British sales in excess of 600,000 in hardback before Hawking’s publisher Bantam decided to paperback the book in 1995.
People began to stop Hawking on the street and proclaim their deepest admiration. Timothy was said to be embarrassed by such incidents, but Stephen reveled in it. One reviewer compared A Brief History of Time to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.* Family and friends were horrified, but Hawking took it as a compliment—a clear sign that he had succeeded in reaching his target audience.
Reviewers and commentators seemed bemused by the book’s success. John Maddox, the editor of Nature, wrote toward the end of 1988:
Those who worry about the supposed public ignorance of science must surely be comforted to know that in the United States there are now in circulation 600,000 copies of Professor Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time.
Curiously, among roughly a score of people I have questioned during a visit to California (not all of them scientists), I found none who did not know of the book, three who owned a copy and none who had yet read it. This seems odd for a volume of only 198 pages whose author’s estimate of the reading-time can be inferred from his statement that 1,000 calories of nutriment will be required to capture its information content, roughly half a day.
Indeed, there is a strange embarrassment about the book. People say it is a “cult” book, or describe Professor Hawking as a cult figure. In California, well used to the coming and going of gurus differing in persuasions and persuasiveness, this explanation may seem natural. But even California cannot have absorbed all 600,000 copies.19
In August 1988, Simon Jenkins of the Sunday Times wrote:
I am all but mystified. Throughout this summer, a book by a 46-year-old Cambridge mathematics professor on the problem of equating relativity theory with quantum mechanics has been on the British non-fiction best-seller list. For the past month it has been top. Michael Jackson and Pablo Picasso have been toppled. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time has notched up five reprints and 50,000 copies in hardback. This is blockbuster territory. 20
Everyone, including many of the people who put it on the bestseller list, seemed startled by the book’s cosmopolitan appeal. It was obvious that Hawking had indeed managed to achieve the accolade of having plumbers and butchers buying his book. There were simply not enough science students in the world to account for the sales figures. One writer recounted a story about a scientist who stopped at a garage in America and began to chat to the service attendant. When the attendant discovered the driver was a scientist, he asked, “Do you know Professor Hawking? He’s my hero.”21 Suddenly everyone was a Hawking fan, and everyone had a pet theory as to how the book had become such a remarkable success.
So what is the secret of its success? It is a question still being asked years after A Brief History of Time took up residence on the best-seller list.
In April 1991, nearly three years after its British publication, a tiny article appeared in the gossipy “Weasel” section of the Independent magazine that questioned how many people had actually read the book:
That brilliant man Mr. Bernard Levin has admitted in his Times column that he is unable to get beyond page 29 of A Brief History of Time by Professor Stephen Hawking. This raises a question: if the brilliant Mr. Levin can only get as far as page 29, how is the average punter likely to fare as he embarks on the quest for knowledge about the origins of the universe?
Yet the fact remains that this slim scientific treatise priced by Bantam at £14.99 has sold 500,000 copies in this country alone, and that come July it will have been in the best-sellers list for three whole years. Understandably, the publishers have no plans to issue a paperback edition.
How does one explain the extraordinary success of a book that so few of its purchasers are able to understand? Amateur psychiatrists point to the author’s condition. He is a victim of motor neuron disease who was given up by his doctors years ago. Yet, against all the odds, he wrote his book. It is a heroic tale, but is it enough to explain the book’s success?
I do not think so. Nor will it do to say that readers hope to discover the truth about the origins of the world in which they live. The word will have got round by now that there is no easy answer. The mystery of the book’s success is by now almost as baffling and fascinating as the mystery of the origins of the universe. I am prepared to offer a small prize (say £14.99) to any reader who can provide an explanation that is at all convincing.22
The article provoked a flood of letters, including one from Hawking’s mother, Isobel, published the following week, in which she wrote:
Sir: I have to declare an interest, as I am the mother of Professor Stephen Hawking, but I have given some thought to the reasons for the success of A Brief
History of Time . . . a success which surprised Stephen himself. I believe the reasons to be complex, but shall attempt to simplify them—as I see them.
The book is well written, which makes it pleasurable to read. The ideas are difficult, not the language. It is totally non-pompous; at no time does he talk down to his readers. He believes that his ideas are accessible to any interested person. It is controversial; plenty of people oppose his conclusions on one level or another, but it stirs thought.
Certainly his fight against illness has contributed to the book’s popularity, but Stephen had come a long way before the book was even thought of. He did not collect his academic and other distinctions because of motor neuron disease.
I do not claim to understand the book myself, though I did read it to the end before coming to this conclusion. I think my age and type of mental training have something to do with my non-comprehension. Without wishing to doubt the brilliance of Mr. Levin’s intellect, I should hesitate to assume from his non-comprehension that most people share it.”23
Isobel Hawking’s last point seems to have got to the root of the matter perfectly. While some would consider the classical “Oxbridge arts” education the perfect foundation for later identification as an “intellectual,” there are other forms of education that, as we rush headlong toward the twenty-first century, may be more appropriate for the “intellectuals” of the future. Ask any scientist about the prejudices of the scientifically untrained. Such people make themselves known at any normal dinner party. The sociable scientist has a surfeit of sorry tales of how the uninitiated protect their own ignorance with Levinesque belittlement, almost reveling in the fact that they don’t understand scientific matters. It is often easier to make a joke of things you do not wish to admit to than to be honest and confront them. In Britain, especially, this xenophobia is nurtured by the vestiges of Victorian images of the scientist as little more than a workman dirtying his hands in a laboratory, messing around with chemicals and bizarre-looking instruments.
Among the other replies to the “Weasel” piece was another letter that neatly exposed such misplaced intellectual snobbery:
Sir: You are mistaken in thinking that few of the purchasers of A Brief History of Time are able to understand the work. It is only those who, like Bernard Levin, have had a limited education who have this problem.
My 17-year-old son, a physics A Level student, found the book very easy to understand and wished that Stephen Hawking had written in greater depth. This is a boy who never reads a novel and usually buys only the Sun. He would himself claim the £14.99 offered by the Weasel to those who could explain the popularity of Hawking’s book, but he is hardly capable of constructing a letter.
This bears out the theory . . . that there are different sorts of intelligence. Just as there are philistine scientists there is an arts intelligentsia that is mathematically and scientifically illiterate. Never mind Shakespeare: perhaps schools should be teaching concepts that help one to understand the very basis of the nature of the Universe.24
Despite such forthright opinions, a great many people believe that A Brief History of Time has turned out to be the book to be seen with in the eighties and nineties. Soon after publication several articles appeared in which the writer commented on the fact that friends and colleagues were in competition to see how far they had managed to get through it. Both the writers of this book have compared notes on the comments of our nonscientist friends (and sometimes scientifically trained ones too) who claim over dinner that they are trying it “a page a day” or that they are “three pages further on than my next-door neighbor.” Even Simon Jenkins, who displays a continuing high regard for Hawking and his book, waded in with:
Hawking is, I am sure, benefiting from “wisdom by association.” Buying a book is a step more virtuous than merely reading a review of it, but need not involve reading it. On the coffee-table or by the loo, a book is the intellectual equivalent of a spare Gucci label stitched on a handbag or an alligator on a T-shirt.25
Others have claimed that A Brief History of Time has sold so well because it has been latched on to by a lost generation of post-yuppie Greens who see it as a symbol of new-age wisdom, that it somehow takes on semireligious importance in their minds. Of course, Hawking finds such notions hilarious.
So what do Hawking’s colleagues think of his book? If the truth be told, many have not read it, claiming that they hardly see it as a beach read. Among those who have, there are a variety of opinions. A number have drawn the conclusion that Hawking did not go far enough and that the book should have been twice the length, but that perhaps is the professional in them talking.
Some like it; others do not. More than one physicist has said that he felt Hawking was wrong to integrate accepted and established scientific conclusions with his own controversial speculations without informing the lay reader of any distinction between the two. Others believe that Hawking’s insistence on including potted biographies of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein at the end of the book is pretentious—that it implies that the author thought the name “Hawking” would be the next in line in any future A Brief History of Time. This last view seems at odds with the man’s own opinion of the media hype surrounding his status. For he would claim it is they, not he, who have made such proclamations. Others would argue that he has every right to think of himself in the same light as this illustrious triumvirate.
Whatever the reason for the book’s amazing success, it has far outstripped the wildest expectations of the publishers who signed it up, the agent who saw its commercial value, and, most of all, the writer and editor who created it.
The final story of its cosmopolitan appeal must be reserved for a tale from the Russian physicist Andrei Linde. Soon after the book’s publication, he was flying across America for a conference and happened, not unusually, to be seated next to a businessman. Some way
into the flight he glanced across and noticed that the man was reading Hawking’s book. Without having been introduced and before the usual small talk, they struck up a conversation about it.
“What do you think of it?” Linde asked.
“Fascinating,” said the businessman. “I can’t put it down.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” the scientist replied. “I found it quite heavy going in places and didn’t fully understand some parts.”
At which point the businessman closed the book on his lap, leaned across with a compassionate smile, and said, “Let me explain. . . .”