Mr. Feynman’s Day Off : The late Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman had a passion for the bongos, mischief and physics. Now the first marriage of the genius turned folk hero has become an unlikely love story from star-director Matthew Broderick.

Physicist Richard P. Feynman was just 24 when the U.S. government recruited him to help invent the atomic bomb. A graduate of Princeton, where he received his doctorate in 1942, Feynman was already a star in the science community, which was dazzled by his intuitive grasp of the complex outer reaches of physics. Skilled at feats of mental arithmetic that left his colleagues scratching their heads, Feynman seemed to do physics by ear.

“Just as you and I know there’s a chair here, Richard knew the laws of physics and how things worked with a total, deep understanding,” recalls his sister, Joan Feynman, who is also a scientist. “I remember him once talking about electromagnetic waves coming through the room--it had a reality for him that it doesn’t have for most people.”

Feynman--the subject of “Infinity,” a film starring Matthew Broderick as Feynman and directed by Broderick in his directorial debut, and scheduled for release in July--had many talents in addition to his daunting ability as a scientist.

An inspired teacher, Feynman lectured in an eccentric style that was equal parts homespun philosopher, stand-up comic and theoretical physicist. Arriving in Pasadena to teach at Caltech in 1950, he attracted a devoted following and was to reign as Southern California’s resident genius until 1988, when he died of cancer at the age of 69.

(He was, in fact, the subject of “Genius,” a best-selling biography by James Gleick that was published in 1992, as well as this year’s “No Ordinary Genius,” a book by Christopher Sykes.)

Feynman was an enthusiastic bongo player, dancer, prankster, gambler and locksmith and a womanizer of major repute, as well as an amateur artist of considerable talent--a book of his drawings will be published next year in Australia. He spoke Portuguese, could decipher Mayan hieroglyphics and wrote two best-selling books--”Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (1985) and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (1988). The books, collections of stories of the odd adventures that seemed to blossom everywhere he went, are evocative of Will Rogers in their simple wisdom and indomitable optimism.

A cantankerous intellect of a peculiarly American sort, Feynman was rejected by the draft board as mentally incompetent and was resolutely apolitical--he was, however, open to everything. He spent several afternoons a week for most of the ‘60s fiddling with mathematical equations at a back table in a topless bar in Pasadena, and he poked around at Esalen during that heady decade. He experimented with sensory deprivation tanks with Dr. John Lilly, and at the time of his death Feynman was working his way through bureaucratic red tape so he could visit Tuva, a tiny village in a remote region of Asia. Why did he want to go there? Because it was a place he knew nothing about and Feynman was a man with a burning desire to know .

As a child, when a teacher confessed that he had made up a story he told the class, Feynman was so upset by the sudden unreliability of all he had learned that he started to cry. From the start, he clearly had a deep regard for reality.

Feynman played a key role in uncovering the cause of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and was introduced to a mainstream audience that year and in 1988, when he was the subject of two documentaries made by the BBC that aired on PBS. He won quite a few new fans at that point, many of whom probably had no interest whatsoever in science. Graced with the rough-hewn charm of a hustler, Feynman came across on camera as an intensely charismatic man.

Charming though he was, Feynman’s crowning achievement will remain the flurry of work he did in the early ‘60s, often referred to as “the great cleanup,” that led to his winning a Nobel Prize in 1965.

Using a revolutionary methodology known as “Feynman diagrams” (which look like nothing more than zigzag sketches to the untrained eye), he recast almost the whole of quantum mechanics and electrodynamics from his own point of view. Feynman’s lifelong love affair with science revolved around a search for general principles flexible enough to be adapted to anything in the world, and he came amazingly close to the mark with this spate of work.

A colleague once described him as “an advanced life form pretending to be human to spare your feelings,” but Feynman insisted that there was nothing magical in his abilities, that excelling in physics was simply a matter of maintaining the right attitude, focusing on observable reality, asking the right questions and being willing to try unconventional solutions. Feynman was a merciless skeptic who believed that doubt was the essence of knowing, and he considered phoniness and self-deception to be cardinal sins.

“When I was a child and I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, I wasn’t upset,” he once said. “Rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night.”

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An entirely different side of Feynman will be illuminated in “Infinity,” which was written by Matthew Broderick’s mother, Patricia Broderick. The film focuses on a brief period in Feynman’s life--the years from 1941 to 1945--when he married his first wife. Arlene Greenbaum, played in the film by Patricia Arquette, died of tuberculosis shortly before the first atomic bomb test in July, 1945.

“Infinity” is essentially a love story that unfolds against the backdrop of America’s race to beat Germany to the bomb, and though it might seem odd to present Feynman’s life as a love story, it is actually quite appropriate. Interviewed for The Times shortly before his death, Feynman was asked what he was most proud of in his life, and he replied: “That I was able to love my first wife with as deep a love as I was able to.”

Says Matthew Broderick of his approach to Feynman’s life: “The obvious way to structure a film about Feynman would be to open with the Challenger disaster: The crazy old genius comes along and figures everything out, then he drifts into a reverie along the lines of ‘A long time ago I met a girl.. . .’ We didn’t do that, because we want this to be an intimate movie and thought focusing on one period of his life that includes the invention of the bomb and the death of his first wife was enough.

“We considered using little documentary moments in the film and still haven’t completely discounted that idea,” adds Broderick of the film, which was budgeted at $5 million and is still being shopped for U.S. distribution. “But the longer we’ve worked on it, the more intimate it’s become. This is not a documentary--it would cost a fortune to do a feature-length documentary of Feynman with any factual accuracy.”

Indeed it would, as Feynman was present at an awful lot of history. Swirling around Feynman are huge social issues such as the morality of science in the nuclear age, the anti-Semitism of American academia in the 1930s, the Red Scare of the ‘50s and the devastating effect it had on the scientific community, and the judgment of the U.S. government that led to the Challenger disaster.

Feynman publicly chastised the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for overstating what it could do in an effort to get funding, telling officials, “You can’t put public relations before reality in the realm of science.”

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Feynman was born in 1918 in Far Rockaway, N.Y., and began to learn mathematics from his father, a salesman for a company that manufactured uniforms, when he was a toddler.

As a schoolboy he taught himself calculus and set up his own laboratory to accommodate an obsession with problem-solving that ranged from finding solutions to hypothetical conundrums to fixing radios and typewriters.

After graduating from high school, he earned a bachelor of science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then went on to receive a doctorate at Princeton, where he studied with theoretical physicist John Wheeler. Wheeler suggested to the government that Feynman be invited to participate in the Manhattan Project. Feynman went, and he proved himself indispensable.

“There are two kinds of genius,” observed physicist Hans Bethe, who worked with Feynman at Los Alamos, N.M. “The ordinary kind does great things, but lets other scientists feel they could do the same if only they worked hard enough. The other kind performs magic. A magician does things that nobody else could ever do and that seem completely unexpected. And that’s Feynman.”

Before leaving for Los Alamos in 1942, Feynman married Arlene Greenbaum, who was ill with tuberculosis and was to spend the duration of their marriage in a sanitarium in Albuquerque. She died in June, 1945, about a month before the crowning achievement of the Manhattan Project--the detonation of the first atomic bomb--at Alamogordo, N.M.

Feynman often boasted that he was the only man reckless enough to watch the first atomic bomb test with the naked eye; oddly enough (for a man with such an open mind), he always refused to entertain the possibility that the presence of the two unusual cancers in his system that killed him might have had anything to do with that day at Alamogordo.

Many of the Los Alamos scientists were thrown into a philosophical crisis by their success in creating the atomic bomb--Manhattan Project Director J. Robert Oppenheimer, in particular, was profoundly aggrieved by what science had unleashed on the world. Feynman, too, went through a period of despair in the years after the war, which he spent teaching at Cornell University.

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In 1949, Feynman left Cornell and spent a year in Brazil teaching physics, and in 1950 he arrived at Caltech, where he was to spend the rest of his working life.

A brief, ill-fated marriage in 1952 was followed by a third, enduring marriage in 1960 to Gweneth Howarth, with whom he had two children, Carl and Michelle, who were 26 and 20 when he died. It was they who sold the rights to this very rich and complex life to Patricia and Matthew Broderick; they did it hoping for the best--but aware of the risks involved.

“We sold the rights to my father’s books long before the script was written, knowing we’d have no control over how he was depicted on screen,” Carl Feynman says of the film, which was shot on location in Los Angeles, New Mexico, New York and New Jersey from July through September. “They never solicited my input as far as trying to remain true to who my father was, and I still haven’t seen the script.

“I do know that Patricia Broderick grew up in the same neighborhood as my father and that she put in lots of stuff she remembered from when she was there--we’ll see if the film turns out to be his story or her story.

“Regardless if it’s good or bad,” he adds, “if my father had been alive there’s no way he would have let this film be made.”

Says Michelle Feynman, an aspiring actress who has a small part in “Infinity”:

“Having read the script, I’d say they’re allowing themselves a fair amount of poetic license in their interpretation of him--they have to, though, because many of the people who knew him aren’t around anymore.”

This is the first script written by Patricia Broderick, who counters that “you can’t tell the literal truth in a film, because you don’t have the time. However, I allowed myself very little poetic license in the portrait of Feynman I created. I studied footage and met his friends and relatives--and fortunately, I spent each August in the early ‘30s with an aunt who lived in Far Rockaway, so I have a good feeling for the world he grew up in.

“I also understood very well what Arlene was like because she and I are both artists,” continues Broderick, who is a painter, as was Arlene Feynman. “And, oddly enough, my very best friend died at the same age Arlene died. I wanted to remember my friend, so I created a character that combined elements of both of them. I tried to give Arlene some of the qualities of my friend, Janet, who had a wonderful sense of humor as, I gather, Arlene did. The people who knew Arlene don’t seem to have any objection to this, although I’m sure some people will.”

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Among those who do object is Ralph Leighton, Feynman’s best friend and the co-writer of his two books.

“Patricia refused to take suggestions from people who knew Richard and seems to think that because she came from the same neighborhood where he grew up, she didn’t need any further preparation,” says Leighton, who administrates the Friends of Tuva Club, an offbeat organization with a membership of about 750 that is devoted to preserving the memory of Richard Feynman and increasing awareness of Tuva. “If Feynman had come from Staten Island, Patricia Broderick would never have written a film about him.

“I care about preserving Richard’s memory, but it’s not for his sake, because he wouldn’t give a damn. I think people should get to know who he really was because he was such an extraordinary man.”

That’s the one point everyone seems to agree on.

“Everyone who had contact with Feynman seems to have a story to tell, and the stories tend to be eccentric--at least they seem eccentric to the people telling them,” Matthew Broderick says. “Feynman was extremely eccentric within the scientific community, but put him in show business and he wouldn’t seem strange.

“His eccentricity isn’t what drew me to his story. He had a remarkably fresh way of looking at everything--he pretty much discounted whatever he was told and always insisted on looking for himself and coming to his own conclusions.

“I also found the story of his first marriage profoundly moving--he married Arlene over the objections of his friends and family, knowing she was going to die. And, finally, Feynman was on the front lines of so much of the history of this century. However you look at it, it was a remarkable life.”