In a tense voice, Dad told him to put it out. Nervously, the man dropped the lighted cigarette on the floor and crushed it out under his shoe. Ever since Mom’s brush with death, Dad had become fanatical against anyone smoking in his or my mother’s presence.
Returning from Europe, Dad found himself under pressure to complete a number of projects at once. One day he showed up at the door of his friend Bill Ransom and inquired, “Can you write like me?” He needed help with a short story for a project inspired by Harlan Ellison called Medea: Harlan’s World. My father’s story was slated for publication in Analog prior to the Ellison collection. Bill, a Pulitzer Prize nominee for poetry three years before, said he would try to help. He proceeded to write the first draft of the story, which they entitled “Songs of a Sentient Flute.” Dad edited the manuscript and typed the final draft, making additional changes as he did so.
Dad was also being pressed by Putnam to come up with a new science fiction novel, so he and Bill brainstormed and came up with a way of using the same concept for the short story and for the novel. They laid out “Songs of a Sentient Flute” with the idea of expanding it into a novel entitled The Jesus Incident, which would be a sequel to Destination: Void.
So, on the same day that they mailed “Songs of a Sentient Flute” to Analog, they also sent it to their agent Lurton Blassingame, in the form of a book proposal for The Jesus Incident. Putnam offered a substantial contract to publish the novel in hardcover, and Dad and Bill set to work on it.
Bill, who had many shared interests with my father, was only a couple of years older than I was. He had an intelligent, oval face and long black hair combed straight back. In the novel, he and my father alternated chapters, using a “leapfrogging” technique, after which they edited one another’s work. Their styles meshed so closely that even my mother, who knew her husband’s style better than anyone, could not identify the writer of particular sections. Despite strong egos the men did not clash, because of the high regard they held for one another. Mom often heard them laughing uproariously in the loft study as one or the other came up with a bon mot for the developing tale.
To a great extent the collaboration was a quid pro quo. Frank Herbert received assistance with a short story and a novel from an energetic, talented young writer, and in return Bill Ransom was given a rare opportunity to learn at the elbow of a master. Bill told me, “The key thing that I wanted to learn from Frank was how to maintain a story for a novel length, because working in poetry I’d always been focused on making things smaller.” Bill also felt he needed to learn a lot more about literary description, which was one of Dad’s strengths. One day upon looking at a passage written by his young collaborator, my father told him to rewrite it with more sensory detail. “Look, Bill,” he said, “we need to smell this guy, right in the armpits.”
Bill worked hard and learned quickly, but when The Jesus Incident was nearly complete a major crisis occurred. Ellison learned they were using the same planet and characters as in “Songs of a Sentient Flute,” and he got his book publisher (Phantasia Press) and the publisher of Analog involved. They told Dad and Bill to cease and desist, that they were using material they didn’t own. Dad made an emergency trip to New York City, where he met with his agent and the publishers involved. When he returned to Port Townsend, he was extremely upset and nervous. “We can’t use the planet, the characters or any of that,” he told Bill. “Harlan Ellison owns the rights to them.”
Thereafter they rewrote The Jesus Incident, changing the names of characters, locales, and other details. The racial background of one character was altered, but aside from that the basic characterizations were not changed. They rewrote problematical passages and tried to make the plot that they had already written fit. It took two weeks of nonstop rewriting, and they kept a professional typist working into the wee hours. The collaboration had ceased to be fun, and instead of heady, joking sessions, long periods went by without laughter. When at last they finished, little gaps were apparent in the story, and they weren’t particularly happy with it, especially with the way they had to end it. Nonetheless the book was accepted for publication, and sales were brisk.
While working with my father, Bill Ransom had an opportunity to watch the interaction between my parents over an extended period of time. They were physically passionate toward one another, he said, and often took breaks alone during the day. To Bill’s amusement they were open about the reason for this, and laughed about it. He enjoyed teasing them on the subject.
Bill also observed my parents as a writing team, in which Beverly, for a long time Frank’s reader, became the reader for the product of the Herbert-Ransom collaboration. “That was where she really shined,” Bill said, adding that her comments contained detailed reasons and suggestions, not just general statements. He saw the mountains of other work she did as well, including the financial management that she performed and the handling of voluminous correspondence that came in from fans, agents, publishers, and other writers. He noticed, too, how she screened calls and inquiries and kept people away from Dad, so that he could create, and how she coordinated all interviews and public appearances.
In a very real sense I was struggling to know my father, just as he was struggling to know me. We were trying to make up for lost time. We went on long walks together and I helped him around the farm, feeding poultry, tending to plantings, working in the shop. It had been a long and difficult road to this point in my father’s life—a road from tattered rental houses and unpaid bills to worldwide fame.
In the Old Testament it was said that the skin of Moses “shone” when he came down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. This phenomenon has been noticed as well about successful people at the heights of their careers. They glow. And so it was with my father at the pinnacle of his success.
Through it all, I still had dimensions of this man to discover. There were nooks and crannies in his marvelous mind and in his emotional makeup that I didn’t know existed. He was not as strong as I had always imagined. Dad was more vulnerable to comments from me than I thought he would be.
I told him I had been reading his books, and that I thought Dune was more smoothly written, more polished, than The Dragon in the Sea, a book written a decade before Dune. I was talking about style, having noticed a certain choppiness in the earlier work when it was laid down beside the later one, with its beautiful, poetic prose. He was obviously hurt at my remark, for he said, simply, “Dragon is one of my favorite stories.” Of course he would feel this way, for it had been his first book sale. And it was a fine book, a well-told story.
Another time we were outside on the patio, preparing the fire pit for a pig we were going to roast. It was a cool day, and he wore a sheepskin vest to cut the chill. As I looked at my bearded father in his vest I was struck with the similarities between him and Ernest Hemingway. Beyond beards and sheepskin vests, both were great writers and outdoorsmen. Both had more than a little machismo. I kidded Dad about his vest, asking him if he was “playing Hemingway.” He seemed displeased by the observation, and didn’t laugh.
Rather awkwardly, rather late, I was learning how not to hurt my father’s feelings. I also received advice from my mother, who was pleased with the improving relationship. “It’s not too late for you to be close,” she told me.
In 1978, Berkley published a trade paperback, The Illustrated Dune, with a dozen illustrations by John Schoenherr, the artist who had done such a wonderful job on Dune subjects. A Dune calendar was printed with the same artwork.
Dad had intended to end the Dune series with Children of Dune, which he saw as the completion of a cycle. But the characters and settings he had created would not die. His trilogy became so popular that requests for more Dune books poured in from fans, and all the editors involved, domestic and foreign, were asking for more as well. In considering the prospect of a fourth book, it occurred to Frank Herbert that the universe of Dune was a canvas and that he might resume the series on the planet Dune three th
ousand five hundred years later. This would require a new set of characters, but they would be linked genetically with people in the past….
He began reviewing the first three books in the series, making notes as thoughts occurred to him. New file folders sprang up around him like mushrooms, and he started writing more about a most unusual character from Children of Dune, Leto II, a noble human of the Atreides family who was evolving into a sandworm…
That year I began collecting wine labels from the dinners with my parents, soaking labels off bottles at home and drying them out. On the backs of the labels, I made brief notations of the events in the family—a few highlights. When we ate at my parents’ home, we invariably had Dad’s special Caesar salad dressing, which he prepared with great care and divided among the hungry diners. It was so good that no matter how much he prepared there never seemed to be enough.
After many years of being dependent upon Dad and taxis for transportation, Mom obtained a driver’s license and her own car—a sporty new light green BMW. At the age of fifty-one. She loved the independence it gave her, but Dad wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic. He worried about her constantly and missed her terribly whenever she was away.
When Jan’s father, Ray Blanquie, died that year, my mother came from Port Townsend to drive Jan to the airport for a flight to the funeral in California. Entering our kitchen, Mom found Jan at the table going through photographs of her father.
“Oh no,” Mom said, “don’t look at those.” Gently, she put the pictures away.
At the airport, Mom took Jan to a restaurant, where they shared a meal. Mom said not to worry about anything on this end, that she would stay with me and the kids.
Jan was looking out on the tarmac, thinking of her father, and my mother remarked gently, “When you lose somebody, you have to gather your skirts and go on.”
In February 1979, Dino De Laurentiis made his second deal with my father for the rights to film Dune, after having let the first option lapse. Dad said it was the second-highest price ever paid for the screen rights to a book, behind only the amount paid to Peter Benchley for The Deep. Again, Dad was retained to write the screenplay.
That month a ferocious storm with hundred-mile-per-hour winds hit the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, causing half of it to sink. Because of this we had to ride substitute ferries, and it took us at least three-and-a-half to four hours to get to Port Townsend, almost twice as long as previously. A new bridge was in the planning stages, but would take time to complete.
Shortly after the bridge went down, my parents caught a flight to New York City, where they met with some of the top figures in the New York publishing world. They were excited to hear that Dad was working on a fourth book in the Dune series, a book he thought he would name Sandworm of Dune. Then my parents flew to Paris and afterward to London, where they met with Dino De Laurentiis to discuss the Dune movie production.
Upon returning from Europe, Mom prepared a Mexican dinner for us, served with a Chateau Beychevelle red Bordeaux wine. They had a new Dune painting on the wall, recently purchased from the artist John Schoenherr. Now they owned ten of these paintings and were negotiating to purchase three more.
In my mother’s post-cancer treatment program she was continuing to swim laps of the pool and was taking half-mile walks two or three times a week. She was trying to lose weight so that her heart, damaged by radiation treatments, would not have to work so hard. For some time, however, Mom had been suffering in the cold, damp climate of the Pacific Northwest. She had been talking with Dad about finding a second home in a warmer climate where they could spend the winters. With the millions of dollars received from the movie (if it met revenue projections) Dad hoped to buy that second home for her.
He was receiving huge book royalties every April and October for past book sales, and higher advances for each book he wrote. But too frequently he received an advance on a book and then spent it before actually completing the writing. Despite my mother’s counseling, Dad was always spending money impulsively, putting them behind in their cash flow. One of the expense outlays involved a forty-four-foot sailboat, which Dad named “Caladan,” after the planet in the Dune universe where Paul Muad’Dib was born. The Ghanima, his smaller sailboat, was sold.
Dad was also putting money into the design and construction of a new 10.5-million-byte computer system, tailored to his needs by a young Port Townsend computer expert, Max Barnard. Dad and Max were talking about patenting the system and writing a computer book together.
Around this time I was feeling pretty discouraged about my own writing. I’d written two humor books and a novel, none of which were accepted by publishers. I was considering writing short stories, but one day I mentioned to Dad that I had a number of “funny files” that might be worked into humor books. One was a collection of classic comeback lines from history, and the other was a folder full of amusing insurance claims. Dad, with his interest in history, suggested that I proceed with the comeback lines book. I did so.
I was also beginning to keep a full-fledged journal. Previously, my documentation of family events had involved only sketchy notations made on the backs of wine labels. Now I began asking my mother about genealogical matters, which I combined with current events and personal observations. As these notes accumulated I had too much information to fit on the backs of small pieces of paper.
My creative writing was not selling, but I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Where once I had been the life of the party, the drunkest, funniest one present, I wasn’t drinking much at all anymore. The more I wrote, especially in my journal, the less I drank—and the less I blamed my father for any of the woes of my life.
With the assistance of journal entries, I was coming to the realization that no matter our backgrounds, no matter the troubles we endure, each of us has to grow up one day, accepting responsibility for our own lives, not blaming others. When we attempt to transfer fault to others it frequently amounts to making excuses for our failures, thus creating the likelihood of future failures. Thus if we do not succeed, we can always say it wasn’t our fault.
That fall my father and I regularly sailed the Caladan on the cold blue waters of Port Townsend Bay. Frequently we brought along my daughters, eleven-year-old Julie and seven-year-old Kim. With his competitive nature, Dad often raced other boats, and usually won. After sailing, we would go to nearby wooded areas in search of chanterelle mushrooms. For our evening meal, Mom would brown the mushrooms in butter with a dash of nutmeg and would serve them with pork roast or other dishes.
Dad was completing the Dune screenplay, and liked to read it to us in the evenings. Jan and I would sit in deep leather armchairs by a glass-fronted bookcase containing copies of his books, while he sat on a black leather couch, leaning forward over script pages spread across a glass coffee table. Mom sat in her favorite orange naugahyde chair nearby, clicking her knitting needles as she listened to him. Occasionally she would make comments or offer suggestions.
On Sunday mornings, Mom prepared sumptuous breakfasts of blueberry pancakes for us. They were served with real Vermont maple syrup, one of many items my parents purchased by mail order.
Located as they were in a rather remote area, they had mail order catalogs from all over the world, and were constantly ordering things—kitchen items, seeds, gourmet foods, clothing, and much more. They kept the catalogs stacked on a bookshelf and on the bottom shelf of a table—in a reading area just off the kitchen. Mom enjoyed shopping by mail, but Dad was a fanatic about it, to the extent that he would never throw away old catalogs out of for fear he might need them one day. The only time Mom could ever throw away catalogs was when Dad wasn’t around.
Some weeks before, I had mailed a manuscript about comeback lines to Price/Stern/Sloan, a publisher in Los Angeles. I didn’t know how they would feel about it, but I wasn’t sitting around waiting for an answer. My attentions were focused on a new science fiction novel, which I entitled Sidney’s Comet. It was about a society of over-indul
gence, a new angle on a previous unpublished novel I had written. In the new version I was postulating a world that had no more room for garbage, nuclear wastes or even the burial of human bodies. I’d been reading about a new technology of electromagnetic mass drivers, through which capsules of material might be launched from a planet into space. A wild scenario was forming in my mind, as I envisioned all the garbage coming back at earth like an avenging angel, in a fiery garbage comet that threatened to wipe out the planet.
In October, Chuck Gates of Price/Stern/Sloan called to say he wanted to publish my humor manuscript under the title Classic Comebacks. It was my first book sale! Dad told me he would look over the contract when it came in. We made arrangements to celebrate my book sale and his fifty-ninth birthday at the same time.
He went on to say that we had other reasons for celebration. Mom had received a checkup which produced good news. Through her exercise program and diet she had lost ten pounds, while substantially increasing her heart and lung functions. They still weren’t what they had been before the onset of cancer and never would be, but Mom had survived the disease for more than five years, defying odds that were 95 percent against her.
“She’s a miracle cure,” Dad said.
“Thank God!” I said.
Dad said he always asked doctors for their first names, and afterward he refused to refer to them as “doctor,” using the first name instead. It prevented them from being condescending, he thought, and was a psychological method of making the doctors reveal medical details they might not otherwise tell a patient.
“Call your doctor Jim,” my father said. He thought this might be a good title for something, and I agreed it did have a certain ring to it.
They left for Europe a week later. In London, they met Dino De Laurentiis and the new Dune director, Ridley Scott, whose suspense-filled science fiction/horror movie, Alien, had recently been released. Scott said he liked eight of the scenes from Dad’s screenplay, and said that a number of new scenes would be needed.
Dreamer of Dune Page 31