Life Among the Nobelity : For Southland’s Laureates, the Thrill of Winning Comes in Small Ways

What becomes a Nobel laureate most? A new Porsche? A sailing yacht? How about a trip around the world?

Not quite.

A more modest and unusual legacy has awaited Southern California’s Nobel Prize winners--a small fraternity that gained one member this week when USC chemistry professor George A. Olah claimed the world’s top intellectual honor.

For the handful of local men who have won the prize, the greatest thrills have come in small ways--such as acquiring that new parking space closer to the lab, buying a long-enduring wife a new watch or putting money away for the kids.

They may be buffeted by demands for money, entreaties of friendship and speaking requests from around the world, but members of this rarefied company take greatest pride in how little their personal lives have changed. Their highest compliment for one another is that they are “mature” and that they have remained unsullied by the seductive allure of more wealth, power and acclaim.

Not long after Caltech chemist Rudolph Marcus returned from Stockholm in 1992 with the Nobel Prize for chemistry, for instance, a colleague saw him parking his car in a newly painted space not far from his office.

“Rudy said to me, ‘Well, the Nobel Prize has to be worth something, ‘ “ recalled Stephen Mayo, a Caltech assistant professor of biology.

Indeed, Marcus still walks to work most days from his home just off the Pasadena campus. He still drives a clunky 1978 Oldsmobile. And he reports proudly that when his wife, Laura, met King Carl Gustav XVI, she was wearing a homemade dress.

Most of his $1.2 million in winnings is invested, or in the bank. He notes, in fact, that the prize had lost 20% of its value by the time he received his check, because of a rapid devaluation of the Swedish krona.

Around the Caltech campus, Marcus remains so unchanged and so focused on his study of energy storage that one colleague quipped that he “must have spent his million dollars on a new sweater.”

Said Marcus: “It’s best if one doesn’t think too much about prizes and things. That puts the focus in the wrong place, which should be on your work . . . on a particular problem and how you should solve it.”

Nonetheless, he has been forced to hire a second secretary to handle the flood of speaking requests and other obligations. The oddest request he has encountered came from a murder mystery writer who wanted to use Marcus’ name for a book character.

“I didn’t see the point,” Marcus said.

The demands are so intense, at times, that Marcus has resolved to get better at saying “no.”

“The big question you have to answer is whether you want to turn into a traveling salesman, or whether to use your time to produce something valuable and something new,” Marcus said.

UCLA’s Donald Cram has much the same philosophy, loathing the tendency of some Nobel Prize winners to leave their scientific roots and wander off in other directions. He views the late Linus Pauling as something of a “fallen angel” for leaving the work that brought him a Nobel Prize in chemistry to promote, among other things, world peace and the curative values of vitamin C.

“I have looked on the Nobel Prize as an opportunity to do more of what I enjoy and what I am good at, and that is science,” said Cram, who received the honor in 1987 for his work in chemistry. “That is the central core of my life.”

The 75-year-old scientist--whose colorful bow ties and guitar concerts are legend at UCLA--said that most of the time it is easy to remain true to that central core.

It didn’t take him long, for instance, to reject a strange offer from a Korean newspaper association. The group wanted him to join a team of Nobel Prize winners to rewrite the Ten Commandments.

“Something just didn’t fit there,” Cram said, laughing.

Cram’s $180,000 prize was not as large as those of others in the last few years, partly because he shared the chemistry award with two others. Prizes also have increased substantially as the bequest of Alfred Nobel has become more valuable.

Not that Cram hasn’t put the money to good use. The professor this year bought a home overlooking Orange County’s Monarch Bay partly with his prize money. From there, he can see as far as the San Onofre coastline where he has surfed for 40 years.

But Cram insists that the prize’s value goes far beyond the money. He doesn’t have to teach classes anymore, he can more easily attract grants for his research, and new colleagues are lured from all over the world to join his research team.

“It has extended my scientific life,” Cram said. And Cram said the award has brought long-overdue recognition to his wife and longtime collaborator, Jane. Cram also used the award money to act on a long-delayed urge to buy his wife a gold watch, although he laughingly admits he sought out the best buy he could.

“I was raised in Vermont,” Cram said. “Money doesn’t circulate very frequently in New England.”

The area’s third and senior surviving laureate is 1983 physics prize winner William A. Fowler, who, like Marcus, lives within walking distance of the Caltech campus where he worked for many years.

Now a professor emeritus, he gave two-thirds of his award to two daughters and invested the rest.

By the time he was awarded the prize, he already had retired, and a bad back and other ailments have since caused him to give up the lecture circuit. But Fowler still likes to stay in the game.

His Nobel status allows him to keep an assistant on campus who comes to his Pasadena home each afternoon to retrieve and type his letters and to deliver the latest research papers.

The 83-year-old notes that a new field of nuclear study has opened up recently and that he still has a few ideas floating around.

“I’m still hoping to get a second one,” he said, chuckling. “You never know.”