I have now read three biographies of Stephen Hawking:
Hawking, Jane. Music to Move the Stars: A Life with Stephen. London: Macmillan, 1999.
Larsen, Kristine. Stephen Hawking: A Biography. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.
White, Michael, and John Gribbin. Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science. NY: Plume, 1992.
The first, by Hawking's former wife, is extremely detailed and includes the texts of letters written by her to her family members. The second is by a woman who is also a physicist and who based much of her book on interviews with Hawking and others. They all agree on the chronology and the facts.
• In the spring of 1974, Stephen Hawking was awarded a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholarship to support one year of advanced study at Caltech in Pasadena. The scholarship was available only to scholars working at Caltech and was not available to scholars working at Berkeley. The scholarship was, in fact, the Hawkings’ source of support for the 1974-75 school year.
• Stephen and Jane Hawking and their children arrived in Los Angeles at 6:00 P.M. on Monday, August 26, 1974.
• They moved into a house on South Wilson Avenue in Pasadena, where a graduate student, Bernard, was assigned to help Stephen physically.
• The Caltech campus was extensively equipped with ramps so that Stephen could get from place to place in his wheelchair. He was given an office at Caltech, which delighted him because it was air-conditioned and he found the heat in California a little oppressive at first.
• Stephen was frustrated because his speech had deteriorated to the point where it was extremely difficult for him to make himself understood to people who were not accustomed to his difficulties (he would not receive his first speech synthesizer for another ten years, following a bout of pneumonia and an emergency tracheotomy). Generally Bernard or another “translator” who was familiar with his speech patterns would accompany him (often it was Jane herself). This casts doubts on the assertion that Stephen would deliver impromptu lectures on bigfoot (or any other subject); he was somewhat sensitive about his increasing disability in speech.
• Letters from the Pasadena house by Jane confirm that Stephen Hawking was living in Pasadena and working at Caltech on the following dates:
• 30 August 1974
• 22 September 1974
• 25 October 1974
• 30 November 1974
• 14 January 1975
• 27 January 1975
• February 1975
• April 1975
• 20 June 1975
• 20 August 1975 (just before the family returned to Cambridge, England).
• During the 1974-75 school year, Stephen worked constantly at Caltech with a number of scholars, especially pairing with Kip Thorne in the study of the dynamics of black holes. He also became friends with Richard Feynman, among others, and he and Jane were frequent guests and hosts in gatherings of the Caltech faculty. He made a few side trips (he and the family, for example, went to Disneyland; in April of 1975 he returned to Cambridge for a brief visit and went on to Rome to receive a medal from the Pope for his achievement in science, returning to Caltech afterward), but he did not spend any substantial time at Berkeley.