"John Nash really is a beautiful mind...sometimes a difficult man...and my friend."

That's what Sylvia Nasar told me recently. She is a Columbia University faculty member who literally wrote the book on John Nash, the Nobel laureate whose descent into madness and return to life, love and accomplishment was such a compelling story it became 2001's most honored movie. She named the book "A Beautiful Mind" because that was the succinct recommendation of John Nash's undergraduate teachers at Carnegie-Mellon University to the people at Princeton who would finish his academic training. And while her work was strictly nonfiction, it was such a compelling story that Ron Howard decided to make it a movie.

The actual John Nash story is really even more complex and compelling than the film, as I found out when I called Nasar and interviewed her about the man she came to know. John Nash is a much more difficult and complicated man. Always every bit as arrogant as Russell Crowe portrayed him on film, he was one of those few people who'd earned the right to be a touch arrogant. In his early 20s, he pioneered the game theory which is the foundation of so much of today's economic and public policy thinking. Nasar told me that "Alan Greenspan unquestionably depends on Nash's work for a lot of his decision making...and Al Gore is another of his most devoted apostles." It's all in a 23 page doctoral dissertation that Nasar told me his Princeton mathematics colleagues still regard as "the most elegant piece of work they have ever seen."

Then the story really gets interesting. Nash went mad just as he and his incredibly devoted wife Alicia were expecting their first child. He descended into almost two and a half decades of mad fantasies, in which he alternately believed the world was hopelessly lost, and was just waiting for him to take charge and establish a global government based on his own visions. He'd also alternate periods of continued productive work in mathematical theory, with deluded side trips into numerology. He'd haunt the Princeton campus almost like a wraith. This much we know from the film. What we do NOT get from the film, but you do get from the franker and more detailed book, is the seamier side of John Nash's period of insanity. It was punctuated with sexual dalliances with both men and women, and with outbursts of political venom laced with religious bigotry and anti-Semitism. You won't get that from the movie, but Nasar says her friend doesn't want it hidden...because, in Nash's own words, "it just shows how deluded you can be when you're suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. No man in his RIGHT mind would think such things, and I do not think them today."

The film does capture, though, the most important aspects of Nash's story. Through a combination of continued support and devotion from his wife (who deserves a Nobel of her own for persistence and courage), medical science and sheer force of will, Nash emerged from his fog of madness, regained his sanity, his family, and his career. And he built a new legion of devoted friends, including Nasar, who has not only brought Nash's story to print (and helped Ron Howard bring it to the screen), but has edited his scholarly works for re-publication. Today he's once again at the top of his field. Nasar told me he's just recently gotten a major new National Science Foundation grant for his latest research in the realm of mathematical theory. At age 74, eight years past his Nobel, he's healthy and happy. And the notoriety from his story's translation into a film that has grossed $150 million and counting? Nasar told me he's handling it happily. "He very much enjoyed the film, and thought both Russell Crowe and Ron Howard did an outstanding job. And that's an accomplishment; John tends to prefer action films."

Beautiful mind, Oscar winning movie, compelling story. And there's one thing that came clear to me in the course of doing this segment for broadcast; sometimes the truth IS even more compelling and dramatic than anything a screenwriter can come up with.

Still to come this spring...another creative vision of a darker kind, from the man who first won fame with a one man show about "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll." And a recent conversation with a man who says he has proof that Hillary was right...that it really was a "right wing conspiracy," though not such a vast one.

'Till next time...