From conception to best-seller list, A Brief History of Time took over five years. During the same period, Hawking had continued his research and administration of the DAMTP. In 1984, long before the first draft had been completed, Hawking went on a lecture tour of China. The itinerary for the trip would have been strenuous for an able-bodied man, but he insisted on cramming in as much as possible during the visit. He motored along the Great Wall in his wheelchair, saw the sights of Peking, and gave talks to packed auditoriums in several cities. Dennis Sciama said that he believed the trip took a lot out of Hawking and has even suggested that it helped precipitate his subsequent illness in Switzerland less than a year later.

However, there were other exertions along the way. In the early summer of 1985, Hawking undertook a lecture tour of the world. One of the most important stopovers was at Fermilab, in Chicago. At the core of the cosmology group at Fermilab were three larger-than-life characters, Mike Turner, David Schramm, and Edward Kolb, who have perhaps contributed as much to legend and

anecdote surrounding the global cosmology fraternity as they have hard science.

Mike Turner is a tall handsome Californian with a voice indistinguishable from Harrison Ford’s. His office at Fermilab, where he spends most of his working life, is filled with toys and gadgets. Hanging from the ceiling are inflatable airliners and UFOs. The walls are plastered with postcards from friends around the world, humorous messages, and wacky pictures, the floor littered with books and boxes of scientific papers. One wall is taken up by a blackboard covered in the hieroglyphs of physics; another opens onto a view of the lakes and woods surrounding the massive concrete columns of the central building which splay at the bottom and converge at the top to form an inverted V.

Edward Kolb, known as “Rocky” because of his penchant for fighting, is a cosmologist from Los Alamos who joined the cosmology group at the same time as Turner in the early eighties. He and Turner became great friends and gained a reputation as a comic duo at Fermilab, forever playing practical jokes and initiating mischief. Their lectures were invariably witty, entertaining occasions, Turner’s often featuring brightly colored cartoons of Darth Vader to illustrate his ideas.

The cosmology group was set up by David Schramm, who was chairman of the astronomy department of the University of Chicago, a close friend of Hawking, and a formidable personality on the international cosmology scene.

Hawking arrived at Fermilab to give a technical lecture to a large group of physicists from around the globe and promptly discovered that there was neither elevator nor ramp to enable him to reach the lecture theater in the basement. Turner recalls how he and Kolb were escorting Hawking into the building when the horrifying thought suddenly struck them: how were they to get Stephen to the stage? They looked at each other and, without saying a word,

Turner lifted Hawking’s featherweight body into his arms and Kolb grabbed the wheelchair. Halfway down the aisle of the lecture theater, Turner became aware that the entire audience was watching agog as they struggled to the stage, and suddenly remembered how Hawking hated to have attention drawn to his disabilities. In the event Stephen said nothing about the incident, realizing, he mentioned later, that there was absolutely no alternative.

Next day he gave a public lecture in Chicago, receiving a rock star’s reception. The standing-room-only audience packed the auditorium, and a number of people had to be turned away. He was recognized everywhere he went, and people stopped him on the street to express their interest in what he was doing. The title of his lecture was “The Direction of Time.” To a startled audience he declared that, at some point in the distant future, the Universe would begin to contract back to a singularity and that during this collapse time would reverse—everything that had ever happened during the expansion phase would be reenacted but backward.

There were many who opposed Hawking’s ideas, including his close friend Don Page. Indeed, Hawking himself knew that he was venturing into wild country. After the visit the two of them wrote opposing papers, published in the same issue of the scientific journal Physical Review. Hawking’s paper led off the pair and concluded by saying that Page had some interesting arguments on the subject and that he may well be right. Eighteen months later, in December 1986, Hawking returned to Chicago to deliver a talk which announced that he had been wrong in 1985 and now proclaimed the opposing view to be correct: time would not go into reverse as the Universe contracted.

By this time Hawking and Guzzardi were tidying up the manuscript for A Brief History of Time, which Al Zuckerman was selling to foreign publishers, and Hawking himself had grown accustomed to his computer-generated voice synthesizer. A Cambridge computer

engineer named David Mason had designed and built a portable version of the device operated by a minicomputer that could be attached to Hawking’s wheelchair. Now his voice could go with him everywhere he went. He began to deliver lectures with the new machine in 1986. Suddenly, audiences could fully understand what he was saying, and although the voice did not produce sentences with the Home Counties accent Hawking would have preferred, what he had to say was so much clearer now that he no longer needed to use an interpreter.

Attending a Hawking lecture is, initially, a very odd experience. An assistant wheels him on to the stage, his voice synthesizer is plugged into the public address system, and the computer disks containing the text of his talk are inserted into the computer perched on the arm of his wheelchair. To the audience, Hawking looks totally passive, immobile but for facial expression, the tiny, imperceptible movements of his fingers operating the computer. He lifts his eyebrows and smiles at appropriate points; his eyes glint in the stage lights as his head lolls onto his chest. Standing in the wings are two nurses and a small group of research students, always ready to come to his assistance if needed. After an introduction by the organizer, and when the applause dies down, a disembodied voice suddenly bursts into the room from the PA speakers: “In this lecture, I would like to discuss . . . .” The preprogrammed disks can hold a little under half an hour of his lecture, so that at a predesignated point in the talk he has to announce to the audience that he is reloading his computer and will continue in a few moments.

After the talk he invites the audience to ask questions but warns that the responses will take some time for him to program into his computer. “During this time,” he says, “please talk among yourselves, read newspapers, relax.” The answers can take up to ten minutes to come back. A spokesman announces that Professor Hawking is now ready to reply, and the audience falls silent. There

is no possibility of any interaction between the questioner and Hawking: the answer is accepted and the next person is already up and ready with another question. Sometimes Hawking’s answer is a simple “Yes” or “No,” a response that comes quickly. Sometimes, just for fun, he has been known to deliberately wait five minutes before responding with a monosyllabic reply. The audience loved it and burst into spontaneous laughter. On more than one occasion he has been known to wait five minutes, only to ask for the questioner to repeat the question. As he has grown older, Hawking’s innate sense of mischief has not diminished in the slightest.

In December 1990 he was invited to deliver a public lecture at a symposium held in Brighton. The venue was a huge complex of auditoriums called the Brighton Conference Center. Unfortunately for the delegates, the complex had to be shared with the rock group Status Quo performing in one of the main halls. Between five and seven o’clock, the intense concentration of audiences in various rooms and theaters around the building was broken by the band sound checking in the Main Hall.

Interspersed with talk of worm holes and neutron star astrophysics came the thump, thump, thump of a bass drum and the yells of roadies bellowing down microphones, “One, two; one, two; testing, testing; one, two. . . .”

On the evening before Hawking’s talk, he was expected at an unofficial meeting in his hotel room at 8:30. At the appointed time, a small group of journalists and friends arrived, were let in, and sat down to wait for him. Twenty minutes later, Hawking’s mother Isobel walked in, looking surprised to find them there.

“Where’s Stephen?” one of the journalists asked. “He was supposed to be here at 8:30.”

“Stephen? He’s gone to see Status Quo,” Isobel replied.

A group of Hawking’s students had wanted to see the band and had sent a representative to find out if there were any remaining

tickets. Hearing that the concert had sold out months ago, the student had told the organizers that Stephen Hawking was next door and really wanted to see Status Quo. Within five minutes he was handed a few complimentary tickets. According to one of his students, Hawking thoroughly enjoyed himself and stayed throughout the whole concert.

After the publication of A Brief History of Time, there was a subtle shift of atmosphere at the DAMTP in Cambridge. There were incessant requests for interviews from newspapers and magazines from around the world. On several occasions over the next two years, a television crew took over the building to make a documentary about the life of the man who had become the most famous scientist in the world. The same stories appeared over and over again in a variety of languages, all telling of his courage in overcoming a crippling disease to become a scientific giant as well as a media hero. Journalist after journalist visited the cluttered office in Silver Street to spend an inspiring hour with the public’s latest hero. Returning to their offices, they wrote about the drab paint work at the DAMTP, the scruffy assistants, the ever-present nurses, and the Marilyn Monroe poster pinned to the back of Hawking’s office door.

Despite the countless thousands of words written about him, very little new information about the man appeared in the pages of the world’s press. The details of ALS and the succession of awards and honors bestowed upon him were trotted out time and again, but Hawking was determined to maintain a degree of privacy amid the whirlpool of hype.

In the United States, ABC profiled Hawking in its 20/20 series, while in Britain a new documentary appeared called Master of the Universe, which won a Royal Television Society award in 1990. In the film, Hawking was shown bowling along the streets of

Cambridge and in one shot was seen entering the main entrance of King’s College. The autumn after the program was televised, the admissions officer at King’s was astonished to find a huge increase in the number of applications to study mathematics at the college. The television audience had obviously assumed that Professor Hawking taught and worked at King’s College. In fact, he simply used a route through the grounds of King’s as a convenient shortcut for his wheelchair on the way to the DAMTP. But King’s did not disabuse the bright young mathematicians suddenly eager for places at the college.

Hawking enjoyed the adulation and celebrity. He continued to travel around the world. The invitations to give public lectures were becoming overwhelming, and he could have spent his whole time delivering them unless he carefully selected the ones he would attend and those he could not. In Japan he was received as an idol, getting the sort of reception usually reserved for heads of state or internationally famous rock stars. Hundreds queued to hear him speak in lecture theaters throughout the country.

Back in Cambridge, the volume of mail Hawking received daily had long since become too much for him to handle personally. A research assistant and his secretary were given the responsibility of sifting through the piles of invitations, letters, documents, and professional correspondence. For some years he had been receiving “crank mail,” a drawback of the job and experienced by many other famous scientists throughout the world, especially physicists. However, by the late eighties Hawking was beginning to receive an inordinate quantity of bizarre letters spanning the entire spectrum of eccentricity. Correspondents ranged from amateur physicists in country villages proposing ridiculous solutions to cosmological questions, to religious extremists criticizing what they saw as the intrusion of science into sacred areas. Before long, a “cranks file” was set up at the DAMTP where the best examples of the genre

were kept for entertainment value; the rest were put in the wastepaper bin.

Meanwhile, academic accolades and public acknowledgments of his scientific work kept coming. As early as 1985, long before the publication of A Brief History of Time, his portrait, commissioned by the trustees of the gallery, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London. In the late eighties alone he received five more honorary degrees and seven international awards. In 1988 he shared the Israeli Wolf Foundation Prize in physics with Roger Penrose for their work on black holes.

In January he traveled to Israel to receive the prize and a cash award of $100,000 at a ceremony at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament in Jerusalem, attended by the Israeli president and other political and scientific figures from around the world. The award did not pass without controversy. Jewish legislators boycotted the event, claiming that Hawking’s theories went against a tenet of Judaism that neither time nor objects existed before God created the Universe. Despite the protests, Hawking himself was pleased with the award, and in a typically double-edged comment he told the press, “I am very pleased. It shows that British science is still good, despite the government cuts.”¹

In 1989 the Queen again honored him when he was included in the Honors List for the second time. This time he was made a companion of honor, one of the nation’s top honors, and attended a reception at Buckingham Palace the following summer to receive the award from the Queen. During the week when he officially became a companion of honor, he received a very rare accolade when Cambridge University made him an honorary doctor of science. Only in very special cases do academics receive honorary doctorates from their own universities. The award was presented by Prince Philip, chancellor of the university, at a special ceremony in Cambridge. Hundreds of people lined the streets and applauded as

Hawking wheeled along King’s Parade in the procession of dignitaries, arriving at the Senate House to the accompaniment of the choirs of King’s and St. John’s Colleges and the Cambridge University Brass Ensemble.

To complete an astonishing week, on the Saturday evening, as the sun set over the spires and towers of a Cambridge basking in the summer warmth, the strains of Bach, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Handel could be heard as the Cambridge Camerata performed a special concert in Hawking’s honor at the Senate House in the center of the city. That night there was not a dry eye in the house, according to the local newspaper covering the event. As a special favor, the orchestra played Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” one of Hawking’s favorite pieces. As the applause for the musicians died down, Stephen wheeled up to the stage, turned and thanked the audience through his voice synthesizer, receiving a standing ovation from his friends and family and members of the public there to honor the man who had achieved so much against all odds. According to one journalist:

There were tears rolling down the cheeks of men and women as a tribute to his courage, as well as the exceptional brain that has continued to advance knowledge of time and space in spite of the ravages of a crippling disease.²

Another journalist told him at a reception after the concert that A Brief History of Time had received more inquiries from readers of the “News” book page of his paper than any other book.

With Hawking’s enhanced status as a world-famous scientist and writer, his campaigning for the rights of the disabled stepped up a gear. In 1989 a project was set up in Cambridge to create a special hostel for handicapped students at the university. It was called the Shaftesbury “Bridget’s” Appeal in memory of Bridget Spufford, the disabled daughter of a Cambridge history lecturer who had been

unable to find a single university in the country equipped for her needs. Bridget Spufford had died in May 1989, and her mother, Margaret, had managed to solicit the help of Hawking who had willingly agreed to be a patron of the charity.

The Hawking name carried weight, and an appeal to raise £600,000 was launched in a blaze of local publicity. Hawking went on record as declaring that the attitude of the university toward the handicapped was appalling, stating that they were flouting the law by ignoring an act of Parliament dating back to 1970, which made it illegal not to provide appropriate access to disabled persons. He spoke of his own situation and how the university had ignored his special needs throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate years, installing a ramp at the DAMTP only under duress and after a long battle when he achieved the status of reader. The situation was so bad in Cambridge, he revealed, that the National Bureau for Handicapped Students advised people with serious disabilities not to consider Cambridge because of inadequate accommodations.

Hawking also helped to establish a dormitory for handicapped students at Bristol University, which upon completion was named Hawking House. On a filing cabinet in his office at the DAMTP stands an abstract sculpture presented to him for his help in getting the dormitory built.

By 1989 royalties from A Brief History of Time had begun to flood in, and with global sales in the millions it was obvious that Hawking no longer needed the financial support of charities to enable him to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle, provide for the education of his children, and pay for his round-the-clock nursing. He gratefully acknowledged his enormous debt to the foundations that had saved his life. But as A Brief History of Time gradually became what seemed to be a permanent feature on the best-seller

list, unexpected storm clouds of controversy began to gather over a particular passage in the book.

In Chapter 8, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe,” Hawking refers to the events surrounding the formulation of the cosmological theory of inflation, which we described in Chapter 11. He picks up the story in 1981, on a visit to Moscow, where the Russian physicist Andrei Linde told him of his latest work on inflation. Linde had written a paper on the subject, but Hawking had pointed out a major flaw in the theory that subsequently took the Russian cosmologist several months to sort out before the rewritten version was ready for submission to a journal.

In the meantime, the day after arriving back from Moscow, Hawking had set off for Philadelphia to collect an award from the Franklin Institute, after which he was invited to deliver a seminar. He recounts the story thus:

I spent most of the seminar talking about the problems of the inflationary model, just as in Moscow, but at the end I mentioned Linde’s idea of slow symmetry-breaking and my corrections to it. In the audience was a young assistant professor from the University of Pennsylvania, Paul Steinhardt. He talked to me afterward about inflation. The following February, he sent me a paper by himself and a student, Andreas Albrecht, in which they proposed something very similar to Linde’s idea of slow symmetry-breaking. He later told me he didn’t remember me describing Linde’s ideas and he had seen Linde’s paper only when they had nearly finished their own.³

When Steinhardt discovered what Hawking had written about him he was understandably furious. The potential damage to his career was immeasurable. At the time, Steinhardt was a junior professor, while Hawking was Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, and widely acknowledged as one of the most eminent physicists in the world. The whole incident was reminiscent of the conflict, early in the eighteenth century, between the relatively unknown mathemati-

cian Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton over who had invented the calculus. However, the inclusion of this passage in Hawking’s bestselling book was not the beginning of the story. The arguments had started back in 1982 after a physics workshop organized by Hawking in Cambridge.

Mike Turner and John Barrow, who had been at the workshop, showed Hawking their draft summary of the meeting and suggested that some remarks about the Linde and Albrecht-Steinhardt discovery of “new inflation” could be included. Hawking took exception to the proposed cocredit. Instead of confronting Steinhardt or Albrecht directly, he suggested to Turner and Barrow that they either delete their names or add a reference to a Hawking-Moss paper, crediting it with codiscovery of “new inflation.”

Hawking’s reasons for taking this attitude were, first, that he claimed (incorrectly) that the Steinhardt-Albrecht paper had appeared in print a full six months after Linde’s, and, second, that he had discussed Linde’s theory at a seminar a few months earlier, a seminar which Steinhardt and Albrecht had been to as well. Angered by Hawking’s attitude, Turner and Barrow alerted Steinhardt and Albrecht to the conflict and simultaneously decided, at a risk to themselves, not to follow through with Hawking’s request.

Steinhardt wrote to Hawking explaining his position and sent him notebooks and letters that verified that his work had already been under way before Hawking’s talk the previous October. He also stated quite categorically that he had, in any case, no recollection of Hawking mentioning Linde’s ideas at the seminar. Most of all, Steinhardt was incensed by the fact that Hawking had gone behind their backs and that if he had doubts about the validity of their work he should have raised the matter openly. He realized that Hawking was causing this dispute not so much to promote his own interests as to support his friend Linde, but this did not in any way excuse his behavior.

Hawking wrote back to Steinhardt to say that he had meant nothing by his remarks to Turner and Barrow and that he fully accepted that the Albrecht-Steinhardt work was independent of Linde’s. He even concluded his letter with a friendly wish that they might work together on future projects, making it clear that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.

This was in 1982, before Hawking had begun to write A Brief History of Time. It came as quite a surprise, therefore, when in 1988, with Hawking’s book on the best-sellers’ list, Steinhardt was informed of the offending passage. By then Steinhardt had heard rumors that Hawking had mentioned the controversy in private conversations over the years and had evidently not let the matter lie as he had implied in his letter to Steinhardt in 1982. However, it was the circumstances in which Steinhardt discovered Hawking’s continued pursuit of the matter that really caused offense. Steinhardt had requested some information on obtaining a National Science Foundation grant, and it was the funding officer who pointed out the offending section in Hawking’s book. Needless to say, there was no further discussion of National Science Foundation grants on that occasion.

Steinhardt had to defend his reputation. Hawking’s behavior was now having a potentially seriously damaging effect on his career. He decided to substantiate his claims about the Drexel seminar by going through his old notes and obtaining independent verification. Instead, he stumbled upon something much more useful—a videotape of the 1981 seminar. Copying the tape with independent witnesses at every stage, he sent a copy to Hawking in Cambridge and a copy to Bantam in New York, by express mail. Several months passed before Hawking responded to Steinhardt’s challenge. This time he wrote to say that the offending text in A Brief History of Time would be changed in the next edition and that the publishers had drafted a press release to announce the change. However, he

neither apologized to Steinhardt for the damage his actions had caused nor suggested that his original version had been in any way wrong. It was only after several of Hawking’s colleagues around the world began to make it clear they thought he was wrong that he relented.

Chief among Steinhardt’s supporters was Mike Turner at Fermilab. He found himself in a very awkward position over the whole affair. He was friendly with both men but saw Hawking’s actions as unjust. Finally, at a meeting in Santa Barbara in 1988, Hawking encountered Turner and asked, “Are you ever going to speak to me again?” Still angry over the incident, Turner suggested that Hawking could do more to salve the wounds he had caused. In an effort to lay the matter to rest Hawking wrote a letter to Physics Today, which was published in the February 1990 issue, in which he said he was sure that the two teams had been working independently on new inflation and that he was sorry if his account of the incident had been misinterpreted by the readers of his book.

As far as both parties are concerned, the matter is now closed, but Hawking’s behavior on this occasion was patently wrong. The darker aspect of his famous stubbornness had overridden fairness. Steinhardt is still smarting from the incident, which has undoubtedly and quite wrongly damaged his career and caused him totally unnecessary emotional distress. However, as evidenced by the Leibniz-Newton conflict, such disagreements and wrangles are far from uncommon in the history of science. Characters like Hawking do keep the world of science alive and energized by their ideas and imaginations, but the less creative aspects of such strong personalities can sometimes head off at personal tangents with an intensity parallel to their more creative contributions.

Within weeks of A Brief History of Time entering the American best-seller list, the film rights for the book were snapped up. An ex-

ABC news producer by the name of Gordon Freedman was quick to see the potential of Hawking’s book as a film. He also happened to share the same agent as Hawking, Al Zuckerman. Freedman and Zuckerman did a deal and the film rights were sold.

The problem for Freedman was what he was then going to do with the acquisition. He did not want to make a straight documentary of Hawking’s life and work—there had been too many of these already, and they had covered the ground quite effectively. On the other hand, he felt there was plenty of scope in the ideas described in the book to produce a film that explored the more esoteric aspects of Hawking’s work as well as getting across the essential human interest angle. A series of coincidences then occurred which eventually led to a viable project.

Freedman went to Anglia Television in Britain. Anglia is based in Norwich, which is close enough to Cambridge for Hawking to be considered a local celebrity. Only a matter of weeks earlier an Anglia TV producer, David Hickman, had approached the commissioning editors with the idea of making a film about Stephen Hawking. Rival broadcasters at BBC East, also based in Norwich, had made the award-winning Master of the Universe, and Hickman thought that they should make a program that tackled the subject in a different way from that of the BBC team. Stirred by the offer from Freedman in the States and by Hickman’s proposal, Anglia became interested in the concept and agreed to take on the Freedman project with Hickman as producer and Gordon Freedman as executive producer.

A year passed, during which the producers worked out how they would raise the finances for their project. The original concept was a large-budget TV special, a “Super-Horizon,”* as Hickman described it. For that they would need big bucks. After lunch in

London with Caroline Thomson, then commissioning editor of science programs at Channel 4, the network expressed interest in the project but could not foot the entire bill. At this point Freedman decided to try the big broadcasters in the States. Instead of approaching them directly, he went first to Steven Spielberg’s company, Amblin Entertainment, in Los Angeles.

Spielberg had been following Hawking’s work for many years and, with an eye on the commercial worth of the project, was immediately interested in the idea of helping to increase public awareness of what Hawking was trying to say in A Brief History of Time. Spielberg is another of those who sees Hawking as the late twentieth century’s answer to Albert Einstein and has felt a deep fascination with things extraterrestrial from a very early age. It was Spielberg’s involvement that really brought the scheme into high profile and secured the essential finances needed to bring the project to fruition.

Spielberg and Hawking actually met early in 1990 on the Universal lot at Amblin Studios in Los Angeles, where they posed together for photographers and chatted for over ninety minutes in the Californian sunshine. Expressing a mutual admiration, they apparently got on very well. Hawking had enjoyed E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He even suggested jokingly that their film should be called Back to the Future 4. For his part, Spielberg had been greatly taken by A Brief History of Time. According to one journalist, observers at the meeting reported that it was Hawking who was the center of attention—quite a feat in Hollywood, where Spielberg is perceived as a demigod.

In the same month Freedman had contacted Amblin, a filmmaker by the name of Errol Morris had approached them with an idea for a new film. Morris had written and directed the critically successful and controversial The Thin Blue Line, a film about an alleged cop-killer who was wrongly imprisoned after an incident in Dallas.

Morris’s idea was to make a film about the mystery surrounding what had happened to Einstein’s brain after his death. When the Hawking proposal turned up, Spielberg suggested that Morris might like to look at the idea with a view to directing the project.

Morris had been aware of Hawking’s work since his student days, when he had studied philosophy of science at Princeton and had attended lectures given by the eminent American physicist John Wheeler, who had first applied the term “black hole” in an astronomical context. David Hickman has suggested that Morris was also interested in the project because, at a certain level, he saw parallels between Randall Adams, the protagonist in The Thin Blue Line, and Stephen Hawking. Adams was trapped in a situation that was entirely out of his control, caught up in a web of events over which he had little influence. In the same way Hawking, trapped in a crippled body, is physically ensnared but has mentally transcended this barrier to achieve greatness. Morris is inherently fascinated by such themes and uses them as a jumping-off point for his iconoclastic movies.

By the end of 1989, with Spielberg’s involvement, NBC in America had become interested. The president of the Entertainment Division of the network was a great admirer of The Thin Blue Line and was sold on the idea almost immediately. NBC eventually became the film’s major financial contributor. With the interest of two networks under his belt, Freedman then decided to try Japanese television. The idea of a TV special about Hawking backed by Spielberg was very appealing to the Japanese, and Tokyo Broadcasting took very little convincing. The project now had the funding it needed. Between the three networks, the producers had a budget of three million dollars. They could effectively make the film they wanted.

Errol Morris’s approach was to build the film around a series of interviews, recording much more footage than is used in the final

version. Cutting this interview material to perhaps half its original length, he then began to construct visual images around what remained. In the first stage of the project, researchers drew up a list of Hawking’s friends, family, and colleagues from around the world who they thought might be interested in taking part in the project. However, they were soon surprised to discover that there were many people who did not want to be in the film.

Hickman believes there is some resistance to media people in Cambridge. Like Peter Guzzardi, he felt that some of Hawking’s students—as well as more senior colleagues—resented the idea of serious scientific work being oversimplified. He also detected that, despite the runaway success of A Brief History of Time, there was a definite closing of ranks in certain quarters at the suggestion of a commercial film being made around Hawking’s ideas.

“Cambridge University is a very tight community,” he said. “There are numerous rivalries, jealousies, animosities. Despite the fact that the interviews were totally unscripted (they could talk about what they had for breakfast if they wanted), there was an undoubted feeling that we were a News of the World on screen.”

Fortunately for the producers, however, there were plenty more interested participants than those suffering from delusions that they were being coerced into something slightly unsavory.

In January 1990, sound stages at Elstree Studios were block booked for two weeks. The first people to move in were the set designers. Morris had the idea that he would give the designer the name of an interviewee and a rough idea of his or her relationship with Hawking, and the designer would then go away and create individual sets for each interviewee to be filmed in. Sometimes the set had absolutely no relevance to the subject; for other interviews it matched the topic of the interview.

As the interviews were unscripted, Morris would often say to the interviewee, “Look, I don’t really know how to start this interview.

Why don’t you just tell me some stories?” He has what he calls the two-minute rule: “If you give people two minutes, they’ll show you how crazy they are.”

For A Brief History of Time they conducted over thirty interviews in thirteen days at Elstree, using thirty-three different sets. Interviewees included Dennis Sciama, Dr. Robert Berman, Isobel Hawking, friends from school and undergraduate days, and co-workers at the DAMTP such as Gary Gibbons. However, star billing was reserved for Stephen Hawking himself.

The most important set at Elstree during the fortnight of filming was a reconstruction of Hawking’s office at the DAMTP. No effort was spared in re-creating the room in intimate detail. Even Hawking was bemused by Morris’s attention to minutiae.

“I’m surprised they went to all that trouble because most people wouldn’t have known if it had been different,”⁴ he said.

Morris had wondered about Hawking’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe. Hawking smiled and explained that he had very much enjoyed Some Like It Hot, and ever since his family and friends had insisted on buying him Marilyn merchandise at every opportunity: posters from Lucy and his secretary, a Marilyn bag from Timothy, and a towel from Jane. “I suppose you could say she was a model of the Universe,”⁵ he had joked.

Morris had also decided to have built a reproduction of Hawking’s wheelchair, accurate to the last detail of the license plate, for when he could not make a shoot. Using “macro-filming” techniques, he could get extreme close-ups of the chrome work and leather, filling the screen as an image to accompany an interview on voice-over. According to Hickman, Hawking’s childhood home at 14 Hillside Road was filmed almost brick by brick.

Hawking himself was shot against a blue screen so that his image could be projected on to any backdrop the director chose. The original intention was to have Hawking narrate relevant parts of the

film using his voice synthesizer. However, it soon became clear that the harshness of the voice was irritating after a while when used as a voice-over. Consequently, Morris decided against the idea and the viewer hears Hawking’s voice only when he is actually talking to camera. The use of blue-screen filming gives the director enormous flexibility. “I can place Stephen Hawking where he belongs, in a mental landscape rather than a real one,”⁶ Morris has said.

What the viewer does not see, however, are astronauts falling into black holes or other such science documentary cliches. As Hickman points out, “No one has seen a black hole—they are theoretical objects as far as we know. The subject matter of this film lies in the realms of the imagination.”

With a three-million-dollar budget, Hickman, Freedman, and Morris could call on the very best people in the business to handle design, lighting, cinematography, sound production, and other essential technical support. The background staff responsible for transforming Morris’s ideas into a viable product had impeccable credentials; between them they had worked on over a dozen major Hollywood films, including Edward Scissorhands, Batman II, American Gigolo, and Wild at Heart. The American composer Philip Glass was commissioned to write the film score, his polyrhythmic electronic music acting as a perfect complement to Morris’s visual acrobatics.

Hickman says that the film is really about God and time and not so much about scientific investigation or Hawking’s disabilities:

We are far more interested in the concepts Stephen has tried to portray in his book than in producing a straight science documentary asking questions like “What is the future of cosmology?” The most exciting thing about cosmology is the fact that it interfaces metaphysics and conventional science. It’s very interesting that Stephen has attracted a lot of attention over the religious aspects of his work, as well as the fact that he is close to a number of physicists with deep theological concerns, such as Don Page.

On the days when Hawking was called upon for shooting he traveled to Elstree with his team of nurses and aides in the specially converted VW van he acquired soon after receiving the cash award that came with the Wolf Prize. On the set, a reverent hush regularly descended on the crew and technicians. Hawking, despite his disabilities, commands a powerful presence that surprises most people on their first meeting. Seated in his wheelchair he would spend hours under the studio lights, silently observing the frenzy of activity around him as the camera zoomed in for a close-up, or makeup people dabbed rouge on his cheeks between takes.

The filming of A Brief History of Time was completed in spring 1990, but Morris’s filmmaking technique is labor intensive during the editing stage of a project. This took up the rest of 1990 and the early part of 1991, and the film was finally to hit cinemas in America and Europe in the spring of 1992. The intention was to show the movie in selected theaters for a short period and then for it to be networked internationally by the broadcasters who financed the project, NBC in the States, Tokyo Broadcasting in Japan, and Channel 4 in the U.K. It was then sold to other broadcasters around the world and destined ultimately to appear in the stores as a video.

While the movie project was in the editing stage, during the summer of 1990, the seemingly unthinkable happened. Shock-horror headlines appeared in a number of national newspapers announcing the sad fact that Stephen and Jane Hawking had separated after twenty-five years of marriage.

In fact, the two of them had been growing apart for a number of years. As Hawking’s career reached new heights of fame and success, the awards and medals piling up along with honors from all parts of the world, Jane had felt increasingly isolated. She had begun to accompany Stephen on foreign trips far less frequently, and as she no longer had the responsibility of nursing her husband,

she had started to turn her attention toward her own interests—her work, her garden, her books, and an increasingly active involvement in one of the best choirs in Cambridge.

The academic community in Cambridge was shocked by the news. For as long as anyone could remember, Stephen had taken great pains to promote the role Jane had played in his life and, despite their disagreements, to outsiders their marriage was a model of security. For weeks friends and colleagues were plagued by newspaper reporters who had staked out the Hawkings’ home on West Road in an attempt to get a scoop and dig the dirt on the marriage breakup. Hawking was a world-famous figure, and in the minds of the Sunday rag editors there was the macabre twist of Stephen’s disability to mix into a page-page splash.

Thankfully, the gutter press never succeeded in finding the angle they wanted. In Cambridge the scientific community closed ranks, and family friends, if they knew any details about why the couple had parted, were saying nothing. Gradually, however, stories began to emerge. There were rumors of extramarital relations developing over a number of years long before their marriage had reached crisis point; but those who knew the couple well regarded as far more significant tales of increased tensions between Stephen and Jane over the old religious arguments. Their disagreements had been swept under the carpet for many years, but with the writing of A Brief History of Time, it appears that the wounds had been reopened.

Through his work, Hawking’s early agnosticism had become more overtly atheistic, and with his no-boundary theory he had effectively dispensed with the notion of God altogether. Yet, ironically, Jane’s deeply held religious convictions had been one of the strengths which had enabled her to cope so well with the burden imposed by Stephen’s increasing disability. However, the couple had lived with religious disunity for most of their married life, so that on its own was certainly insufficient reason to separate.

As reported in a number of newspaper articles, the break came when Stephen left Jane to move into a flat to live with the nurse who had looked after him for a number of years, Elaine Mason. According to reports, as Stephen and Jane had drifted apart, he and Elaine had grown closer. For a number of years it was Elaine rather than Jane who had accompanied him on his foreign travels and with whom he spent much of his working life. The situation was complicated by the fact that Elaine was married to David Mason, the computer engineer who had adapted Hawking’s computer so that it could be fitted to his wheelchair. The couple had two children, and in fact David Mason and Hawking had met at the gates of the primary school that both Timothy and the Mason boys had attended. It was through this initial contact, and Hawking’s request for a chair-mounted computer, that Mason had been able to start his own computer business and Elaine Mason had later become one of Stephen’s team of nurses.

Jane had cared for her husband for over twenty-five years, sacrificing many of her own personal hopes and ambitions along the way, but as fame and international success had begun to take over his life, and their paths diverged, it appeared that they no longer needed each other. Some commentators have tried to place the blame on Stephen, but many others believe that such views are wide of the mark. In any marriage breakup, blame is not a word to use lightly. Certainly, Jane has devoted most of her life to Stephen, almost single-handedly taking care of him when he was a little-known physicist struggling to overcome disability and develop his career. However, things change; many married couples grow apart from each other. A number of friends feel that Stephen should not be blamed for leaving the woman who had done so much for him. It is an insult to Jane’s dedication and commitment for others to place the past like a yoke around his neck.

Like all breakups, theirs caused a great deal of sadness. The Hawking children took the news particularly badly. Robert, then

twenty-three, had graduated in physics from Cambridge the previous year and was already embarking on postgraduate work; Lucy, nearly twenty, was at Oxford University studying modern languages. The two of them, though naturally upset, were old enough to accept the situation and were developing their own lives away from home, carving out their own independence. The separation hit the youngest, Timothy, the hardest. Then barely eleven, he was too young to understand fully the reasons why his father had left their home on West Road.

There is little doubt that the trauma of separation had affected Stephen as much as any of those involved, and reporters claimed that the famous Hawking smile was now rarely seen. Others pointed out that, at the time, he was displaying great emotional swings. He could be outwardly very happy for a while, smiling and joking with his colleagues and students, and then fall into a depression, casting a mournful shadow over the atmosphere at the DAMTP.

It is important to remember that, although a great many people go through similar emotional upheavals, the vast majority of them have a number of advantages over Stephen Hawking. There are ways in which their emotions can be diverted and released; ineffectual as these methods often prove to be, they were not available to him at all. He could not scream and shout, go for a run, or indulge in a drinking binge; he could not smoke himself stupid or even speak to friends with ease. And although it was he who made the break, the pain was undoubtedly still there.

Many people who claim to know Stephen Hawking have been overprotective toward him, especially since the announcement of the separation. This attitude is misguided and is usually shown by people who turn out not to know him at all well. Close friends know that Hawking needs nobody to protect him—he is perfectly capable of looking after himself. The same people who try to protect Stephen

also make the mistake of attempting to imbue him with feelings and emotions different from those of the rest of us, almost as if, because of his highly tuned intellect, he did not share the same dreams, hopes, and passions that the rest of humanity experiences.

One of his closest friends, David Schramm, knew Hawking for over twenty years and had little patience with those who try to create an image of Stephen as in any way emotionally different from others. He never pulled any punches when it comes to his friend’s personal life. He once introduced Hawking at a talk he gave in Chicago, by saying, “. . . [A]s evidenced by the fact that his youngest son Timothy is less than half the age of the disease, clearly not all of Stephen is paralyzed!” Apparently half the audience was shocked speechless, but Hawking loved it.

Schramm believes that people are scared to face the fact that, in emotional terms, Stephen Hawking is a normal man. Because of the power of his intellect as well as the singular nature of his physical condition, they convince themselves that he does not feel the same way as others. Stephen loves the company of women, he enjoys flirting, and he appreciates physical beauty: why else would he have a poster of Marilyn Monroe in his office? Probably not for her intellect. Hawking’s relationship with Elaine Mason is not one based on pity or other such feeble foundations. According to Schramm, who has spent a lot of time with the couple, there is a genuine love between them.

Hawking refuses to talk publicly about his private life and makes that a stipulation of any interview these days. The journalists, for their part, continue to speculate on the causes and outcomes of the split. Jane, for her own reasons, has until recently remained equally tight lipped on the matter (see Chapter 18). She turned down repeated requests from the producers to take part in the film of A Brief History of Time and agreed to participate in interviews only with journalists she knows personally.

Until some time after their separation, pictures of Jane and the children still decorated Hawking’s office at the DAMTP, but the split was without doubt an acrimonious one. Friends claimed that Jane spoke bitterly about it. She was now under no obligation, as one acquaintance put it, to “promote the greater glory of Stephen Hawking.”⁷ Only a year earlier, Jane had told a reporter that 1989 had been the year when everything had fallen into place for them, when they had reached a new high point in their lives:

For me the fulfilment stems very much from the fact that we have been able to keep going, that we have been able to remain a united family. The awards were like the sugar frosting on the cake. I wouldn’t say that is what makes all the blackness worth while. I don’t think I am ever going to reconcile in my mind the swings of the pendulum that we have experienced in this house—really from the depth of a black hole to all the glittering prizes.⁸

She explained to another journalist that her role was no longer to look after a sick man but “simply to tell him that he’s not God.”⁹ Perhaps in such statements as this the murmurings of deep-rooted resentments and disquiet can be detected. Yet in the concluding scene of the BBC’s Master of the Universe program we see Stephen and Jane looking down on a sleeping Timothy in their house on West Road while Hawking’s computer voice declares, “I have a beautiful family, I am successful in my work, and I have written a best-seller. One really can’t ask for more.”¹⁰

Hawking’s children have always known that their father can be a difficult man to live with at times. In the late eighties, Lucy, in the Master of the Universe documentary, said:

I’m not as stubborn as him. I don’t think I would want to be that stubborn. I don’t think I have quite his strength of mind, which means he will do what he wants to do at any cost to anybody else.¹¹

Such stubbornness was to hold him in good stead as his personal life began to crumble and the pressures of global fame started to impinge seriously upon him. While Hawking was reaching the pinnacle of his success outside science, new complications began to affect him as he made the transition from celebrity to icon.