Russell Crowe, who played John Nash in the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind", said that Nash claimed he never smoked. But Crowe and I knew otherwise; Crowe had seen photos of Nash with a cigarette, and I saw and smelled the smoke when I was a Princeton grad student in the early 1980s.
I shared an office that was across the hall from the Fine Hall Common Room, where tea and cookies were served on weekday afternoons. Nash often paced up and down the hallway in front of my office, chain smoking cigarettes and flicking ashes into the ashtrays that were bolted to the walls.
While I was there, local laws changed and the university was forced to come up with a no smoking policy. After that, smoking was allowed only in the Common Room, but Nash continued to smoke in the hallway.
I phoned the officer in charge of smoking, and asked that either a "No Smoking" sign be posted or the ashtrays removed. After all, who would believe there was a no smoking rule, if there were still ashtrays affixed to the walls?
"There's a sign at the building entrance," she coughed back at me.
I, Nash, and the rest of the world hadn't noticed the small "SMOKING PERMITTED only in designated areas" sign hidden in an unlit alcove near one of the many entrances to Fine Hall.
"But people continue to smoke."
"That's not my problem," she rasped, hanging up. I suspected she was a smoker.
It must have been in one of my last years, after I'd been there long enough to know how to beat Princeton at its own game. By hook or by crook, I was going to stop John Nash from smoking outside my office.
I had overheard a faculty member mention that the department stationery was kept in the faculty mailroom --- the room behind the graduate secretary's desk, with a "FACULTY ONLY" sign at the entrance. When no one was looking I snuck in and stole one sheet of department letterhead. I was afraid that taking two sheets might double the penalty for my crime. At home, I cut the sheet in half, and on both the top and bottom halves typed:
"SMOKING IS PROHIBITED IN THE HALLWAY IN FRONT OF THE COMMON ROOM".
The next day I Scotch-taped a sign to each of the two sets of doors that led from the hallway to the Common Room. The top half with letterhead, the bottom half without. Pretty amateurish. Would it fool anyone? Or would I be expelled for improperly posting stolen paper?
With my office door ajar, I watched and waited. Nash, cigarette in hand, walked up to one of the notes. His eyes were so close to it that he had to move his head from side to side to read the words. Then he walked over to one of the ashtrays that was bolted to the wall. To drop his ashes? No, to put out his cigarette. I never again saw Nash smoke in the hallway.