A Precarious Genius

To recover rationality after being irrational, to recover a normal life, is a great thing,” declared John Nash, who awoke from a quarter-century of schizophrenic debilitation to accept the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. Nash’s life, set forth in the new biography, A Beautiful Mind, by journalist Sylvia Nasar, is a miracle of resurrection. Mindful of that fragile journey, Nash pondered, “But maybe it’s not such a great thing. Suppose you have an artist. He’s rational. But suppose he cannot paint. He can function normally. Is it really a cure? Is it really salvation?” Consider the tragedy of Michael Laudor, who recovered but was not saved.

Charismatic and brilliant, Laudor saw his daily struggle as a war of TV channels. There was the Suicide Channel, with its images of slit wrists, Nazis, himself falling out of a window, and then there was the Calm Station, a cabin in the Alps, green pastures, still waters, souls restored. Both occupied the screen simultaneously, and sometimes it was only with the greatest of efforts that he could relegate the extreme visions to a corner, reduced, as it were, to a picture-in-picture presence, with reality flickering in the middle. Once Laudor could count on his father Charles to get him through his troubles. When Laudor saw flames around him, Charles got his son to press his hand to the fire, dispelling the illusion. But Charles was gone; he died of prostate cancer in 1995.

It was Charles who led his son through the valley of the shadow of death, after Laudor recovered from his schizophrenic breakdowns to try to live in the real world. “The monkeys are eating my brain,” Michael had screamed on the day he was accepted to Yale Law School, the New York Post reported. But when he considered taking a job as a salesclerk at Macy’s incredibly busy store in New York City, his father immediately saw the dangers. Go to law school instead, his father advised him. The law school, Laudor told the New York Times in 1995, turned out to be “the most supportive mental-health-care facility that exists in America.” The Times story, documenting Laudor’s recovery from schizophrenia and his struggle to become a lawyer in a world prejudiced against mental illness, transformed his life. It led to a $600,000-plus advance from Scribner for writing his saga and $1.5 million for the movie rights from director Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. At one point, Brad Pitt considered playing the lead in the film, titled, like the proposed book, The Laws of Madness. Society seemed ready to proclaim Laudor a hero, another who overcame.

With the accruing fruits of pop-culture success, Laudor moved to the tranquil New York suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, to the River Edge apartment complex, with a view of the magnificent cliffs of the Palisades and the olive green waters of the Hudson. He lived with Caroline Costello, who had been deeply in love with him since their undergraduate years at Yale, and continued to love him in spite of his illness. They were ideal tenants. They were quiet neighbors. They were engaged to be married. She was talking to a rabbi about converting to Judaism, her lover’s faith. And she had become pregnant. Then, last Wednesday, Costello was stabbed more than 10 times with a chef’s knife.

Laudor was seen driving away from the apartment in Costello’s black Honda Civic, dropping it off in Binghamton, N.Y., to catch a bus to nearby Cornell University in Ithaca. There a campus police officer saw him, disheveled and spattered with blood. His hand bore marks that, authorities say, were consistent with defensive wounds found on Costello. A small scuffle broke out as Laudor resisted arrest, and an officer suffered a cut on her lip. In Ithaca, Laudor confessed to attacking Costello.

There had been omens. While neighbors said the only thing Laudor complained about was an annoying bout of colitis, Costello had reportedly told friends of graver worries. Despite his measure of fame, Laudor had not been able to find work teaching law. Friends say the finely calibrated, constantly adjusted medication he took may have ceased to be effective. Others speculate that the attempt to contain his life with enough lucidity to work on a manuscript due in August placed extreme pressure on the perfectionistic Laudor, perhaps to the extent that he stopped taking his medicine. A publishing insider who saw Laudor’s book proposal said it was written with “an almost mathematical use of language.” It was an intensely emotional tribute to his father, who Laudor believed saved his life. On the day of the attack, Laudor’s mother, perhaps worried by something Costello told her, phoned the Hastings police. She wanted them to drop by the apartment to check on her son and future daughter-in-law. They found Costello’s bloodied corpse.

“There is a notion in Judaism of tikkun olam,” Laudor told the Times in 1995, “to heal the world.” He felt it was his calling to redeem pariahs, to prove that those afflicted with mental illness could still serve. In the complicated psychochemistry of madness, his very determination may have led to his undoing.

–Reported by Charlotte Faltermayer/Hastings-on-Hudson, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York