OK, Tom and Exapno, it’s a good thing that I wasn’t drinking anything there.
Some cursory searching on Feynman and Howard Hughes at least indicates that other have had the idea that he might be this person. I can’t imagine HH with gun toting body guards, but then I don’t know much about him aside from the movie w/ diCaprio and some docutainment here and there. I don’t think he went full metal batshit until the 60’s so he should have at least been capable of some carousing.
Sinatra was married to Ava Gardner at the time, and she was either in Hollywood or stepping out on him or both at the time. So that fits, even if it requires Feynman not to have known Sinatra and Gardner were married, which is possible.
Or maybe “John” wasn’t really all that big, or maybe even real, and Feynman was just storytelling.
No question that he went through a rolodex of Hollywood beauties through the 50s. I don’t think he went around the country moving from nightclub to casino, though. He wasn’t that much of a drinker either. Nor was he married.
One big objection is that he had directed several movies, starting in the 1920s. Unless that was a joke of Feynman’s, picturing him as an inept amateur photographer is impossible. Allowing jokes and codes and opposites is the way that anti-Stratfordians justify Shakespeare not writing Shakespeare. Once started, you can prove anything that way.
Its Vegas. Here’s JFK with the Rat Pack, and you think that Feynman is a superstar worth remembering ? The Rat Pack , Sinatra , Dean , Martin Sammy Davis Jr, AND JFK’s brother in law…
So here’s a picture of Sinatra and JFK… IN LAS VEGAS. Which is the more auspicious, flashy, and big, John Big ?
I suspect the pool of “celebrities” could be far too wide to ever be able to work this out. It could be any big business high roller, gangster, whatever. “Celebrity” is a vague term.
You waited four years to answer with a picture and post that literally have nothing to do with Feynman or with my post?
How ineffably sad.
Sad is right. I was hoping someone had finally worked out the answer.
The real answer would likely be disappointing though. They reveal the name of JOHN BIG…and it’s some guy we never heard of. Like Mark Felt.
While none of the precise anecdotes overlap, it seems clear from Jagdish Mehra’s The Beat of a Different Drum (OUP, 1994, p401-2) that it was George Hearst, the eldest son of William Randolph Hearst. The timeframe was around March 1958, a couple of years after Feynman’s divorce. (And Hearst was to divorce his own wife a few months later.)
The footnotes give an interview with Al Hibbs as the source.