The ‘Genius Award’ Winners : Five Southern Californians Ponder What They’ll Do With Their MacArthur Fellowships

The good news reached them all in different ways. Ed Hutchins was in a meeting of the Navy’s Future Technologies Group in San Diego when somebody handed him a message that said that “the Mikado Foundation” had called. Not being a big fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, Hutchins didn’t rush out to return the call--until his wife broke into the meeting with another message and the correct name.

The note waiting for John Benton when he arrived at his hotel in Paris said for him to call “the MacArthur Clinique.” Benton, like most American academics, is perfectly familiar with the name and purpose of the MacArthur Foundation, but the “Clinique” part threw him. “I spent the next few hours, until it was morning in Chicago, trying to think why else they might be calling me.”

Woodworker Sam Maloof’s wife, who picks up the telephone at their Alta Loma home because he’s usually up to his elbows in sawdust, listened in on the short conversation and came into his workshop with tears in her eyes. “I said to her: ‘I just can’t believe it, Freda. Why me?’ And she said: ‘Because you deserve it,’ which I thought was really nice.”

The news that finally came that June day to Hutchins, Benton, Maloof and two other Southern Californians--Jared Diamond and Shing-Tung Yau--was that they were part of the latest group of 25 MacArthur Foundation fellows, recipients of what the media--but definitely not the foundation--call the “Genius Awards.” Once or twice a year since 1981, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, endowed with the fortune that the late John D. made in the insurance business, has reached out and rewarded people who didn’t even know they were being considered--because the nomination and selection process is kept secret. Along with 16 other men and four women across the country, the five fellows from this area have each been given, for the next five years, tax-free stipends of between $24,000 to $60,000 a year (in general, the older the recipient, the more he or she receives), with no strings attached. Maloof will receive $60,000 a year; Benton, $51,200; Yau, $37,600; Hutchins, $38,400, and Diamond, $46,400.

The MacArthur Fellowships are known for the wide range of talents they encourage, and this year’s crop is especially eclectic. It includes two modern-dance choreographers, Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham; the founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, Robert Hayes; a Russian-born political activist, Valery Chalidze; a poet, John Ashbery ; a pioneer off-Broadway producer, Ellen Stewart ; the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, and an expert on underwater archeology in the Caribbean, J. Richard Steffy.

Diversity also marks the new fellows from Southern California. They are definitely not five people whose paths would be likely to cross. Maloof, 69, is a craftsman whose works are treasured by those lucky enough to own them; he has been making and selling his famous rocking chairs and other pieces of furniture for almost 40 years. Benton, 54, is a professor of medieval history at Caltech who doesn’t believe in living in the past; he thinks he caught the foundation’s eye when he used space cameras at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to examine ancient manuscripts. Diamond, 47, is an expert on bird life and ecology in New Guinea and other islands; he also advises countries on where to build nature preserves. Yau, 36, is a mathematician who specializes in expanding the usefulness of differential geometry. Hutchins, also 36, combines anthropology and cognitive science to demonstrate that primitive cultures use the same logic and reasoning as civilized ones.

But they also have several things in common. Except for Maloof--who has done his share of teaching around the world--they all currently have university connections. Benton’s MacArthur Fellowship is the fourth awarded to a Caltech faculty member since 1981; Diamond is a professor of physiology at UCLA, and Hutchins and Yau are on the UC San Diego faculty. They have all broken theoretical or practical ground, expanding the scope of their areas with healthy bouts of fieldwork or experimentation. And all five seem to be content and successful in their chosen fields--not the sort of recipients whose lives would be drastically changed by a sudden windfall.

The stated purpose of a MacArthur Fellowship is to provide “a period of greater freedom from financial and institutional constraints during which you may devote yourself more fully to your own creative endeavors.” All five men have now had several months to consider just what that might mean in their particular cases.

In his handsome house in the middle of a lemon grove, surrounded by the homes of his two children and cushioned by seven acres of breathing space from the hustle of Alta Loma’s current growth spurt, Sam Maloof is still surprised by his good fortune. “What the money does for me is to provide that security blanket I never really sought but occasionally worried about,” says the first visual artist to be recognized by the foundation. “Luckily, we’ve always been able to live the kind of low-key life we want. Our house is large, but I built it room by room as I could afford to, buying the lumber as I went along. I’ve always had enough work to keep me going, but there have been times when the end of the month came and I gulped and realized that I had to finish a piece of furniture to pay a bill. I used to wonder what would happen if I ever got sick and couldn’t work; now I can worry about something else. What I thought I might do, at least for the first year, is bank the money and with the interest give a tax-free gift to someone like a young woodworker whose family isn’t able to help out. Also, I give lots of lectures, many for groups that really can’t afford to pay my fee or transportation. I’d like to be able to donate it back to them; it would make me feel really good.”

As the most visible of the new fellows, Maloof has been besieged by print and TV journalists ever since the announcement. He bears it all with good grace. “You’ll really know you’ve gone into the supermarket culture,” the gentle craftsman was told, “when People calls for an interview.” To which Maloof replied, “They’re coming tomorrow.”

For John Benton, who lives in Pasadena, the effects of his MacArthur prize have been both instant and long-range. “Since the first check arrived while I was in France doing research, I immediately began to eat better,” he says. “I also anticipated requests from my wife and four daughters by offering various small gifts. I’ll be able to get back to Europe much more often to research for manuscripts; another big change will be to make it easier for my wife to travel with me.” Benton, author of two major books on medieval England and France as well as hundreds of articles, is convinced that what made the MacArthur Foundation choose him was his use of digital image-processing techniques to study medieval manuscripts. “I thought that if a friend who worked in astronomy could enhance pictures of Mars, then, in theory, any picture could be enhanced. Bruce Murray, the director of JPL, arranged for me to use their vidicon camera to help read a faded and unintelligible passage in a 14th-Century manuscript. I’m sure the foundation liked the idea that a humanist historian was using space technology,” he says. As for other ways to spend the money: “I’m editing a collection of about 750 charters issued in 12th-Century France by the counts of Champagne, and this will make it possible to complete that job. I’ll probably do somewhat less teaching,” says the 20-year veteran of Caltech’s history department, “but I wouldn’t want a situation where I did no teaching at all.”

The publicity surrounding Shing-Tung Yau’s MacArthur Fellowship at least gave him the chance to reply to media reports that have troubled him. Yau, who received the Fields Medal from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw in 1982, is still bitter about two Los Angeles Times stories, one that described his work as having “no known practical applications” and another that implied that his work was not understood by his colleagues. “Some very well-known work of Albert Einstein isn’t understood by everybody, either,” Yau says. Yau, who was born in Kwantung, China, and got his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, says his current research at UC San Diego covers differential equations, topology and general relativity. “Basically, I work in geometry; also on nonlinear equations; also a little bit on mathematical physics. These are all related in many ways. What I hope is that some area --such as fluid dynamics--that once seemed so remote to me might be more accessible because of the fellowship. I also hope that my wife, who is a physicist, won’t have to work as hard as she does now and will be able to spend more time with our two children.”

A colleague of Edwin L. Hutchins Jr. told him that it might take him all of the first year of his fellowship to figure out what he was going to do with the other four. “The intention is to free me from the constraints I’ve been under,” Hutchins says. “But the problem is, I’ve been living under them so long they’ve become invisible.” He currently divides his time between UC San Diego’s Institute of Cognitive Science and the Navy’s Personnel Research and Development Center, where he designs computerized training systems to teach sailors how to run a steam propulsion plant, or how to navigate a ship. “Some people would be surprised at the degree of freedom I’ve had working for a Navy laboratory. . . . In a sense, getting this award is like a public declaration that it’s OK to trust me to do whatever I want to.” Like Benton, Hutchins thinks he knows what aspects of his work attracted the MacArthur scouts. “I wrote a book in 1980 about reasoning among the Trobriand Islanders, which demonstrated that the forms of logic that these technologically primitive people used were precisely the same as the forms that occur in our own argumentations. That has long-range consequences, because some people in the Third World have been denied access to political resources on the basis of the mistaken theory that because they are technologically primitive, they must also be mentally primitive and can’t be responsible for their own activities. Also I’m a yacht navigator by avocation, and I tried to come up with a reasonable computational account of how it is that a Micronesian navigator without any instruments can sail 500 miles and make landfall on a tiny island.”

Jared Diamond is no stranger to publicity. He led a famous 1981 expedition into the rain forests of western New Guinea and rediscovered the rare and colorful golden-crested bowerbird, which attracts females by building ornate arbors decorated with fruit and flowers. But Diamond did have a somewhat unusual reaction to the announcement of his MacArthur Fellowship. “After the initial elation,” the Bel-Air resident says, “I went into a period of deep depression. I had trouble sleeping, and I really felt quite depressed. I got over it quickly, in time to go off on a long-planned trip to Europe, but I really haven’t had much chance to think about what changes it might make in my life. I do know that it will give me much more time for creative work. I have several books in various stages of development that I’ll be able to devote more time to. I won’t have to scramble for small sums, those speaking and writing jobs of minor interest that I took for the money. Raising money is always a problem in the kind of scientific research that I do; the whole area of island biogeography, the distribution of the species, hasn’t had much support from governments or foundations. Now the funding is assured, which takes a load off my mind.” Diamond does plan one immediate purchase: “I have a single dictating machine that I drag back and forth from my home to my office at UCLA. Now I can get a second.”

Thinking of ways to spend five years’ worth of extra tax-free income might not seem like much of a problem to some people, but Diamond’s period of depression is not unusual. The stress of winning large amounts of money can be very difficult to handle, as case studies of lottery and football-pool winners suggest. So far, these five new MacArthur Fellows have exhibited their genius in circumstances largely of their own choosing or making. How they adjust to this surprising release from the normal preoccupations and pressures of their lives could very well be the subject for further study--perhaps even under a foundation grant.