There’s Truth in ‘Infinity’

As one of the last remaining blood relatives of Richard Phillips Feynman, I have perhaps a different perspective regarding the Matthew Broderick-Patricia Broderick film about the noted scientist, “Infinity,” due for release next spring.

In Kristine McKenna’s article (“Mr. Feynman’s Day Off,” Calendar, Nov. 27), Ralph Leighton was quoted as saying, “Patricia refused to take suggestions from people who knew Richard.”

This was certainly not my experience. Once she heard that I was a first cousin of Feynman (his mother and my father were brother and sister), and that I had spent my early summers in Far Rockaway at my grandmother’s hotel where, growing up, most of the cousins worked at one time or another, not only did Patsy eagerly solicit my input but she and Matthew invited me to spend many hours discussing the characters and possible relevant locations.

At one point they even sent me a script, requesting that I tape a few pages on an audiocassette so that the actress playing Arlene (Richie’s first wife) could pattern her accent after my own. Although they had requested input from another first cousin, Frances Lewine (who works in the CNN Washington bureau), and Richie’s sister, Joan Feynman Hirschberg Ruzmianken, neither cared to cooperate at that time. The script of “Infinity” was deliberately intended to cover only a very small portion of Richie’s life, but it is a poignant and deeply moving part that touched him probably more than anything else ever did, either before or after Arlene’s death. Those who object to the narrowness of this viewpoint can always write their own versions, and probably will.

The only major correction I made to the script was in reference to Richie’s mother, my Aunt Tutti (so-called by the family because her given name, Lucille, was the same as my mother’s), whose speech pattern as written was too colloquial. Aunt Tutti was a cultivated, carefully educated woman whose English was flawless. As a matter of fact, she taught this language to foreign students. She was also a very wise woman who learned early on how to cope with the wayward eccentricities of the two most important people in her life--her husband and her son.

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Richie’s father, my Uncle Mel, was a handsome man whose good looks Richie inherited, along with his passion for knowledge, a fey high-pitched giggle and a hearty appreciation of the female form. In middle life, Mel sought respite from his mundane job as a uniform salesman by taking art lessons. Commuting from Far Rockaway to Manhattan, Mel stayed in town late two nights a week to attend art school, in particular a life class. On those nights, since my family lived in Manhattan, Mel used to have dinner with us. It was on one of these occasions that he revealed some of his sketches.

Although the daughter of show business parents, I was still a somewhat naive adolescent and remarked on the fact that the lady models appeared to be nude. I asked my uncle if this were really so. “Of course,” he leered playfully, “why do you think I became an artist?”

The apple does not fall far from the tree. After Arlene died, my main role in Richie’s life was to provide him access to the backstage environs of the Broadway musicals on which I served as press agent. Among these was the original production of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” which contained a chorus line of some of the most beautiful girls imaginable.

They paraded topless backstage, much to the delight of Richie. Within three or four days he had managed to date every one of them, so when his son, Carl, now says, “If my father had been alive there’s no way he would have let this film be made,” I can only respond that Carl did not really know his father, for if he did, he would realize that nothing--absolutely nothing--would have delighted Cousin Richie more than all the hoopla attending a gala film premiere to which he would of course have been invited, and where he would rub shoulders with some of the most attractive and glamorous ladies in the entertainment world.