For his inventions, Mani was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers. Like Xerox, Northrop, too, gave him stock options, which appreciated extravagantly from $2 to $100 just a year. “I had never had money anyway. So I thought why not take a risk by investing the newly acquired money in stocks, bonds, properties, buildings and homes,” he says.

His gamble paid off. Mani’s investments appreciated so much that by 1985 he had already bought six houses in the Los Angeles area. “The idea why I invested so heavily in houses was that my childhood poverty and mud house still haunted me. I didn’t want to be poor and live in a mud house again.”
As his money multiplied, Mani retired at the age of 55 to enjoy “the fruits of my labor” and became a global jet-setter. He had enough money to indulge his unfulfilled desires. His jet-setting ways continued for a decade when he hopped from one corner of the globe to the other. Mani flew where his fancy took him, having girlfriends from America to Sweden to Russia. Asked why he didn’t marry, he says, “Well, I could have married that Bengali girl in my youth. It didn’t work out. Then I got married to my work. Science is a lonely pursuit that often makes a wife feel like a widow.”

However, the bachelor physicist went on to date some of the most beautiful women of Hollywood. “For a year, I dated the famous Eva Gabor whose sister Zsa Zsa was married to Conrad Hilton. At that time, Eva was at the peak of her fame because of the popular Green Acres slapstick comedy serial. She introduced me to Gregory Peck, Neil Diamond. Then I dated Roberta Collins and later Catherine Oxenberg of Dynasty fame. But Eva was the one I was very passionate about. We often talked about marriage…she was already married seven times,” he laughs.

No less majestic is his current Bel Air mansion overlooking a golf course. Each of the rooms is adorned with Louis XIV furnishings. Walking inside, he says, “The late Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Shirley Maclaine were my neighbors. Janet Jackson lived here once, as did Elvis Presley’s wife Priscilla. To escape from the hustle and bustle, I have a home in Santa Monica too, overlooking the pacific.” 

Everyday Manida, as native Bengalis address him, receives scores of letters from the beneficiaries of his munificence under his Kolkata-based Mani Bhaumik Educational Foundation. His biography in Bengali—Manikanchan—was a big hit. “I still feel the pain of my childhood struggles. So in 1999 I started this foundation that currently gives full scholarship to 67 underprivileged but very bright college students from rural Bengal to study medicine, engineering and science.

—Excerpted from California Dreams by Gurmukh Singh

December 2006