Stephen Hawking (43 page)

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STEPHEN HAWKING:
SUPERSTAR

T
he audience of 1,500 music lovers gathered at the Aspen music festival in Colorado burst into spontaneous applause as the master of ceremonies, Professor Stephen Hawking, appeared on stage beneath the enormous white canopy covering the outdoor stage. Aspen is a favorite watering hole of the American scientific community and a frequent venue for meetings of the world's foremost physicists. The music festival is patronized by many of those scientists, including Stephen
Hawking, and his first announcement of that evening was to introduce one of his all-time favorite pieces, the
Siegfried Idyll
by Wagner, the composer he had played loudly in his postgraduate rooms in Cambridge in 1963, a short time after learning he was suffering from a life-threatening disease. This occasion could not have been more different. Now lauded as the most famous scientist of his generation, he had been specially invited to introduce the pieces for the concert, and as soon as he appeared on the stage in his wheelchair and his synthesized voice boomed out across the audience, he was recognized. But the symbolism went further.

“This is the
Siegfried Idyll
,” he announced,
¹
“which Wagner wrote in 1870 to be performed on Christmas morning outside the bedroom of his new wife. I am here with my fiancée Elaine and we will be married in September, so I think this piece is rather appropriate.”

By the time of this concert in August 1995, the world had known for some time that Stephen Hawking's marriage to his wife of a quarter of a century, Jane, was over. Indeed, the decree absolute had arrived at their separate homes earlier that summer, a couple of months before the planned wedding date, and the press was already hungry for anything it could discover about the forthcoming event.

For Stephen Hawking, the 1990s had become a decade of even greater achievement than earlier years, but this success was largely outside of science and many would argue that his potency as a top-flight physicist had begun to wane at the end of the 1980s and that his life was now dominated instead by public activities. The 1980s had been the decade during which he had reached a global audience with his best-selling
book and his television appearances; the nineties were the years when he became a household name, a public figure comfortably discussed in the same breath as other icons of popular culture—Hollywood stars, television celebrities, world leaders, and pop stars.

But this was only one facet of Hawking's growing fame. He seemed to have gained a greater self-confidence from the incredible and unexpected success of his book, and he capitalized on it rapaciously. Stephen Hawking has always been a great self-publicist and a very determined man. He had written
A Brief History of Time
with the simple intention of making enough money to pay for the health care he needed; his success had far exceeded his wildest expectations. But he is of course a very quick learner and soon adapted to the great wave of acclaim that swept over him at the end of the 1980s. Ironically, this accomplishment, one that had precipitated the single most important change in his life, is not something he now sees as his greatest achievement. He has said that he is not “proud” of the success of the book but is merely “pleased” by it.
²

During the early 1990s Hawking set about adding to his literary canon with a collection of other books. First came the book-of-the-film-of-the-book—
The Companion to
A Brief History of Time
, which was based on the script of the Errol Morris film
A Brief History of Time
broadcast in 1992, a production that was itself partly based on Hawking's original book. Next came a collection of essays called
Black Holes and Baby Universes
, which contained a mixture of separate short pieces covering a range of subjects from technical lectures to descriptions of the author's personal life and views on religion and philosophy. Some time later, in 1996, a completely
new version of
A Brief History of Time
appeared, called
The Illustrated A Brief History of Time
. This was not merely an illustrated version of the 1988 original but a very different book, which, although based on the original manuscript, was far more accessible. To date, this has sold an estimated 100,000 copies in hardback.

But by far the most significant commercial addition to Hawking's literary canon was the publication, late in 2001, of
The Universe in a Nutshell
. In this book, Hawking considered many of the themes he had covered in
A Brief History of Time
but attempted to deal with them in clearer terms aimed squarely at a lay audience.

The responses to this book were mixed. It certainly did well in the marketplace (although not in quite the same league as
A Brief History of Time
). Many found
The Universe in a Nutshell
far more approachable than Hawking's earlier work, yet some found little merit in it. The
Guardian
's reviewer, Jon Turney, declared “
The Universe in a Nutshell
is more episodic than
A Brief History of Time
, but is mainly a commentary on the same ideas.”
³

The fact that the early 1990s saw the start of a Hawking industry (of which the original version of this book was a significant part) should come as no surprise. The man had become an international celebrity and his personal life was as fascinating to the general public as his work had been for many years to the scientifically inclined. And Hawking was quick to place himself at the very center of this process. But at the same time there was a noticeable iciness toward journalists and writers on the part of many of his friends and students, who began to resent the intrusion of fame into the equation. And is not difficult to see why.

Hawking himself had fallen into a trap of his own making, ensnared by his own success. On the one hand, he wanted to exploit his fame and success, but on the other he genuinely did not want it to interfere with his work. So began a difficult juggling act—keeping up a public persona, keeping the books flowing, but at the same time maintaining his position at the cutting edge of his field.

Hawking may appear to possess superhuman abilities as a scientist and as a survivor, but he could not keep all the balls in the air at once, and many of those who know him and work with him would admit that his scientific work has indeed suffered and that Stephen Hawking no longer leads but follows closely behind other less famous innovators.

Hawking knew early on that he could use
A Brief History of Time
as a stepping stone rather than leaving it as an end in itself. From the moment the book reached a global audience, he rightly exploited the phenomenon he had created and was determined to gain as much as he could from it. This manifested itself in a number of ways. Some of the things Hawking has done with his fame are purely selfish, others are totally altruistic, and some he has done simply for fun.

On Christmas Day 1992, he appeared on Radio 4's
Desert Island Discs
. He revealed little about his life that was not already known but he came across well, portraying his charm and charisma despite the mechanical sound of his voice. He talked about the ways in which he dealt with his illness and how he had succeeded in his varied career despite the affliction of ALS, hinting that in some respects it had helped him by allowing him to focus on his thoughts without the distraction of administration and playing a practical role in his domestic
life. His choice of music was a fairly predictable confection that included Beethoven, Brahms, his beloved Wagner, and the Beatles.

The following spring, Hawking was approached by BT (British Telecommunications) to star in a new set of commercials being produced for them by Saatchi and Saatchi (ironically, the company that had created the winning publicity campaigns for a Tory party that Hawking absolutely detests). The message was built around the theme of the importance of communicating, even when it is very difficult to do so, and the 90-second ads showed Hawking in various impressive locations with his voice-over stating how important the ability to communicate is to humanity and how talking had been the means by which everything had been achieved in history, thereby implying that we should all invest more in the benefits to be gained from talking to others on the telephone. BT has never disclosed how much Hawking was paid for his services, but they have been happy to repeat the message that Stephen was tailor-made for the job. “Hawking is a perfect example of someone who lives to communicate. He acts as a very powerful metaphor for BT.”
⁴

Although he made a significant sum from these advertisements, far more important for Hawking was the exposure they afforded him. Although he constantly claims that he is not a media animal and resents the intrusion of publicity into his life and the demands it entails, he loves the attention he gets from appearing on millions of television screens. Among the many paradoxes that make up Stephen Hawking, one is the fact that he simultaneously shuns and courts the attention of the media, especially television and film. He genuinely feels
that the crescendo of celebrity that followed the success of
A Brief History of Time
has damaged what, at the core of his being, is most important to him—his scientific work; but at the same time his not-inconsiderable ego propels him into more activities that will heighten his profile and take him away from the DAMTP. It was known in media circles that Hawking was desperately keen to acquire his own television show, and the BT adverts were an important stepping stone in this direction. In the autumn of 1997, almost five years after those ads, he achieved his dream when a new series,
Stephen Hawking's Universe
, was broadcast for the first time. If fame was his motivation for doing the series of ads, then it worked, because for a surprising number of people in Britain, Hawking is the man from the BT ads first, the author of
A Brief History of Time
second, and one of the world's leading physicists third. For a depressingly large number, he is only the first of these.

In the summer of 1995, riding on the crest of this new wave of fame, Hawking accepted an invitation to deliver a lecture at the Royal Albert Hall. By doing this he was again following in the footsteps of the scientist with whom he is most frequently identified—Albert Einstein. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, Einstein gave a public lecture at the Albert Hall in London when he lived in England briefly during 1933. Hawking's was the best-attended public physics lecture delivered in Britain since that occasion, easily filling the 5,000-seat arena; on the pavements outside, scalpers sold tickets for the event at inflated prices to fans who had not managed to obtain them through official means. In typical fashion, Hawking decided to end the lecture on a controversial note similar to the way he ended his best-selling book, by discussing the question of
God's role in the mechanisms that govern the universe. He concluded, “God still has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

Although Hawking could have made a fortune from the lecture, and indeed could command almost any price to conduct a public lecture tour anywhere in the world, he provided his services for the Albert Hall event free and only agreed to be involved because the proceeds were given over to a charity concerned with motor neuron disease. And indeed, Hawking's greatest redeeming quality since the success of his literary career has been the fact that as his fame has soared, he has exploited it as much to help others as to help himself.

Throughout the 1990s, Hawking has made every effort to help charities he believes in to gain publicity by association with his name. Quite naturally, he is most keen to help charities dealing with physical disability and in particular motor neuron disease. He has been vociferous in his efforts. Writing to
The Times
in March 1994, he attacked the establishment by saying that disabled people

. . . face great obstacles when they want to take part in any normal activities like going to the theatre or cinema, or eating in restaurants. As I know only too well, very few London theatres and cinemas have wheelchair places. If there were such discrimination against blacks or women there would be a public outcry.
⁵

But although he has endorsed national campaigns and protests, he has also worked on a local level, pushing the Cambridge Council into providing local residents with better
access to theaters, museums, libraries, and other public places and generally helping to raise awareness of the special needs of physically handicapped people.

He also firmly believes that the technology now available to him through the money he has earned as an author should be made available to other seriously disabled people via the NHS and claims that reliance upon charity (and in his case good fortune) is “simply not good enough.” To help the plight of others who have been paralyzed either through accidents or diseases such as ALS, Hawking has spearheaded several campaigns to generate funds. Part of this effort involved his endorsing an exhibition of the potential future technology associated with disability, called
Speak to Me
, based at the Science Museum in London. Merely having Hawking's name associated with the exhibition and having him open it guaranteed its success, attracting the interest of the media and a public who would normally not be drawn to so esoteric an exhibition.

Shortly afterward, he went on to support a charity called Aspire (Appeal for the Professor of Disability and Technology), whose aim was to create a seat at University College London devoted entirely to research into technology to be used by the disabled. Hawking said of the project:

The scope is enormous. There are over six million disabled people in this country, some very disabled like me, and a large proportion of these can be helped. Disabled people are people first and disabled second. They should not be condemned to a lifetime sentence of solitary confinement without the power to move them or communicate with the outside world.
⁶