It was shortly after he arrived at Berkeley, in August 1929, that Oppenheimer met Lawrence, who was still living at the Faculty Club.
Their personalities were more complementary than similar. On the surface, the two seemed to have little in common. In contrast to Lawrence’s solidly midwestern and Lutheran upbringing, Oppenheimer was a Jew and a graduate of Manhattan’s elite Ethical Culture School. Oppie had gone on to study at Harvard, Cambridge, and Göttingen, where he received his Ph.D. in physics at the age of twenty-three.
Possessed of famously bohemian tastes, Oppenheimer favored exotic cuisines: a spicy Indonesian dish often served to guests, Nasi Goreng, was rendered as “nasty gory” by Lawrence, who knew to avoid it. Oppie was also an accomplished linguist. (While a postdoc in Leiden, he had given his seminars in Dutch.) But Oppenheimer’s fondness for classical allusions and obscure, convoluted metaphors was sometimes irritatingly evident, even in casual conversations with friends.30 His nervous mannerisms—including the constant flicking of his fingers, stained with nicotine from chain-smoking, when he performed calculations at the chalkboard—stood in contrast to Lawrence’s usually detached Olympian calm.
Like Lawrence the son of first-generation immigrants, Oppenheimer was far better off financially. Carl Lawrence had earned $3,000 a year as head of the Northern Normal and Industrial School in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and died without a pension. Julius Oppenheimer owned a successful textile-importing firm in New York City. The Oppenheimer family lived in a spacious Riverside Drive apartment overlooking the Hudson River and spent vacations at a rambling white summer home on Long Island Sound. Ernest had sold aluminum cookware door-to-door to help pay for college. At the same age, Oppie had his own twenty-eight-foot sloop, which he christened with an appropriately esoteric name: Trimethy, the abbreviation of a particular chemical compound.31
Despite having between them what Oppenheimer called “the distance of different temperaments,” the two men quickly became close friends. While still bachelors living at the Faculty Club, Lawrence and Oppenheimer double-dated together, spending Thanksgivings at Yosemite and going horseback riding on weekends around the Berkeley hills. Oppie originally thought Ernest’s jodhpurs and English saddle a curious affectation—until he realized that, growing up in South Dakota, Lawrence looked upon horses as draft animals. For Ernest, it was a way of distancing himself from his roots.32
Oppenheimer introduced Lawrence to impressionism; Oppie’s mother, Ella, was a Paris-trained painter who maintained a studio in Manhattan. The art on the walls at the Riverside Drive apartment included a Renoir, drawings by Picasso and Vuillard, a Rembrandt etching, and van Gogh’s Enclosed Field with Rising Sun.33 Oppie likewise broadened Ernest’s horizons in classical music. Tellingly, Lawrence favored Beethoven’s popular symphonies—the Fifth and the Pastoral—while Oppie preferred the composer’s more complex and moodier later work. The String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor was a particular favorite.
Oppenheimer—who, as an adolescent, had seen a succession of psychiatrists for “dementia praecox” and had at least once contemplated suicide—found Ernest’s “unbelievable vitality and love of life” his friend’s most endearing trait: “His interest was so primarily active, instrumental and mine just the opposite.”34
Lawrence’s practical nature, simple tastes, and driving ambition served as an antidote to Oppie’s whimsical otherworldliness.35 (“The kind of person I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance,” Oppenheimer once confided to college friends.)36 Oppie later claimed to have learned of the 1929 stock market crash some six months after it happened, while on a walk with Lawrence.37
The differences between them were evident in their attitudes toward material possessions. Lawrence drove a 1927 Reo Flying Cloud, a flashy red coupe with rumble seats which he bought while at Yale in eager anticipation of the move to California. Ernest treated the car lovingly and kept it regularly tuned, washed, and waxed.38 Oppenheimer arrived in Berkeley driving a battered tan Chrysler roadster that he and his younger brother, Frank, had nearly flipped and later run up the steps of a courthouse on the route west. By the time they reached California, Oppie’s right arm was in a sling, and his clothes showed holes from the battery acid that had spilled when the car almost turned over. (It is unclear who was the worse driver. “That he was worried was evident by the fact that when I drove up to the edge of the Grand Canyon he yelled ‘STOP!’” Frank later wrote of his brother and the trip.)39
Despite their disparate natures, a bond based on mutual affection and respect gradually formed between Oppenheimer and Lawrence. For Ernest, an inveterate tinkerer, Oppie seemed the perfect counterpart. “His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory,” Oppenheimer’s adviser at Harvard had warned Cambridge.40 But to friends at other universities, Oppie quietly boasted that Berkeley, which Lawrence had described as a “Mecca” of physics, was actually a “desert” where a young theorist like himself could make a mark.41
When Oppenheimer had to return to New York in 1931 to care for his ailing mother, he asked Lawrence to look after his “fatherless theoretical children.” Ernest sent roses to the dying woman’s bedside.42 Later, when Oppie was visiting Harvard, Lawrence sent him frequent updates on the progress being made with the cyclotrons. “I know you are having a good time, but hurry back,” Ernest implored.43
Settling into Berkeley, Oppenheimer rented the bottom floor of a rambling Craftsman-style house set amid redwoods in the hills above campus. His rooms afforded “a view of the cities and of the most beautiful harbor in the world,” he wrote Frank, who was then studying at the Cavendish.44 Oppie’s simple flat on Shasta Road soon became the scene of riotous parties, fueled by the host’s trademark 4:1 frozen martinis, served in glasses whose rims were dipped in lime juice and honey. Latecomers were amused to find those who would become the
