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Why Some Award Winners Just Say No to the Honors

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me for a member.

--Groucho Marx

Trygve Haavelmo’s reaction to having won this year’s Nobel Prize in economics? Neighbors said the Norwegian probably went for a walk in the forest.

While other Nobel winners were popping Champagne last week as the awards were announced, Haavelmo, 77, seemed less than thrilled over winning the $455,000 award. “I don’t like the idea of such prizes,” he said.

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Colleagues of his at the University of Oslo said he has in the past privately voiced disdain for academic prizes.

His reaction puts him in the league of playwright Edward Albee, who, while deciding to accept the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, nevertheless described it as “an honor in decline.”

In 1940, fellow playwright William Saroyan had gone him one further, declining to accept the award at all. In 1926, author Sinclair Lewis did likewise.

What would lead someone to reject recognition that most people can only regard as an impossible dream?

“It occurs to me that someone could take the position that he has constantly been evaluated by the standards of others,” said Gerald Davison, chairman of the psychology department at USC. “Once that person has reached a high level of achievement, he or she might consider even a distinguished award as unnecessary.”

Also, Davison continued, “another dimension might have to do with the politics of an award. Some people might feel that even if you could judge merit perfectly, politics and personal dislikes might enter in.”

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Perhaps this was on the mind of George C. Scott in 1971 when he won the Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the movie “Patton.”

Before the nominations, Scott had said he would refuse an Oscar should it be awarded him. He contended the method of nominating and voting made the prize meaningless.

When his name was announced as the winner, producer Frank McCarthy accepted the statuette. “You notice I didn’t accept for him,” McCarthy said later, “or say thanks for him.”

Two years later, Marlon Brando, whose name was announced as best actor for his role in “The Godfather,” sent an American Indian spokeswoman to the stage to announce his rejection of the Oscar.

“Marlon Brando regretfully cannot accept this award because of the treatment of American Indians in the motion picture industry, on TV, in the movie reruns and the recent happenings at Wounded Knee,” said Sacheen Littlefeather, referring to a confrontation between American Indians and federal officials in South Dakota.

In 1985, two actors went unrecognized in the Emmy Awards ceremonies because they had been granted their wishes that they not be nominated.

Martin Sheen, who starred in “The Atlanta Child Murders,” asked that his name be withdrawn from consideration because he didn’t believe that actors should compete against each other for awards. The same reason was given by Bill Cosby of “The Cosby Show.”

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When Saroyan refused the Pulitzer for his play, “The Time of Your Life,” he said he was opposed in principle to awards in the arts. “Such awards vitiate and embarrass art at its very source,” he responded.

Dr. Milton Greenblatt, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, indicated he could understand reactions such as those: “Many people of distinction disdain public competitions. They don’t want to be seen as sports figures. They don’t want to hold a finger in the air and say, ‘I’m No. 1.’ ”

Also, Greenblatt said, the winner of a prestigious award such as the Nobel, “may feel that the difference between him as a winner and the losers may be so intangible as to amount to nothing. Some may, in fact, have built on the work of others.”

Certainly the biggie from an international standpoint is the Nobel Prize--recognition given annually in six fields. It was made possible by the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred B. Nobel, who died in 1896 and left the major portion of his fortune for the establishment of the award.

Although Haavelmo has given no indication he won’t accept his 1989 Nobel, there have been those who have refused that prize, as well as other prestigious awards.

French writer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, after winning the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, turned it down on the grounds that he wanted to remain unbiased in East-West cultural conflicts.

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Sartre later explained: “A writer who takes political, social or literary positions should act only with the means which are his--that is, the written word. All distinctions which he might receive expose his readers to a pressure which I do not believe desirable.”

Boris Pasternak was awarded the 1958 prize in literature for his poems and his novel, “Doctor Zhivago,” about life in the Soviet Union after the revolution. The Soviets forced Pasternak to decline the prize.

In 1970, the Soviet author Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn was named the Nobel laureate in literature. Solzhenitsyn, whose works are banned in the Soviet Union, at first said he hoped to go to Stockholm to accept the award. Although he did not decline the award, he eventually decided against the trip for fear the Kremlin would prevent him from returning home.

In a surprise decision by the Nobel committee in 1973, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese peace negotiator Le Duc Tho were awarded the Peace Prize.

Tho forfeited his share of the prize money, saying he found it impossible to accept the prize until there was genuine peace.

When novelist Sinclair Lewis declined the Pulitzer for his novel, “Arrowsmith,” one of his reasons was that he had been recommended by the Pulitzer jury five years earlier for “Main Street,” but the recommendation was overruled by the trustees of Columbia University. (In 1930, Lewis won, and accepted, the Nobel in literature.)

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Although the response wasn’t for a prize as such, the ultimate who-needs-it? goes, of course, to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

He informed the 1884 Republican National Convention, which was assembling to choose a presidential nominee: “I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected.”

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