My parents returned to Port Townsend in mid-November. At long last, Dad was working nonstop on Sandworm of Dune, his working title for the long-awaited fourth book in the series. He was in an intense creative phase where he wouldn’t answer letters with the exception of the most important until the project was complete.
Chapter 25
Old Dreams, New Dreams
ON THE first Saturday in 1980 in the icy month of January, Jan and I delivered a case of Beaujolais Nouveau wine to Dad, having picked it up for him at a wine shop in Seattle.
At dinner that evening, Dad said that he and Mom had decided to buy a vacation cottage in Hawaii to winter there, on one of the small outer islands along the sixteen-hundred-mile chain. “Something simple on the water,” he said. “Bev can’t stand the cold here in the winter.”
My mother’s preference for warm weather had been mentioned before, especially since losing weight and the insulation of her fatty tissue. She kept saying she felt much better when the weather was warm. I was worried about the availability of medical services for her in remote regions, but said nothing of this since the subject of her health was so uncomfortable to me. And inside I felt a gnawing terror of a different nature, a feeling I’d experienced on occasion that forces were at work trying to make me fly, against my will. I hadn’t flown in more than ten years. Now it was a deep-seated fear ingrained in my psyche, and my parents were talking about living at least part of each year on a remote Pacific island. What if they decided to live there year-round?
I asked if all the islands had electricity so that Dad could operate his electric typewriter and the custom computer he was having built, or if he intended to go back to using a small manual typewriter. He wasn’t certain about the availability of electricity, but went on to talk about setting up solar panels and windmills to generate power, and maybe even a simple system of extracting hydrogen from sea water.
It didn’t sound very simple to me.
On Monday, January 14, 1980, Jan and I met my parents at Hugo’s Rotisserie, a fine Seattle restaurant in the Hyatt House Hotel near SeaTac Airport. Both of them looked elegant and manicured—Mom in a beautiful new green blouse (one of her best colors, according to a color consultant) and Dad with his salt-and-pepper beard freshly trimmed.
They were scheduled to fly to Hawaii the next morning to spend two weeks looking for property. Terrible storms had been ravaging the islands the past week, and Dad quipped, “This is always the best time to look at a piece of property—when it’s at its worst.”
He had selected a rather unusual title for the computer book he was writing with Max Barnard, an idea that was indicative of my father’s sense of humor: Without Me You’re Nothing. This was Frank Herbert’s philosophical comment about the secondary importance of the computer in relation to the human, and brought to mind the Butlerian Jihad of Dune that opposed computers and certain other thinking machines, under the commandment, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
The Hawaii-bound travelers seemed a little nervous. At the salad bar, Dad was passing out plates to all of us in line, and I guess he lost count, because he tried to hand one to a stranger. Later he knocked over my Creme de Menthe. Mom tried to rest her arms on a chair that had no armrests.
They returned in two weeks. On the first Sunday in February, Dad delivered a speech at Tacoma Community College. He spoke to a packed auditorium about ecology and a wide variety of subjects, and told the audience about my first book sale. He was mobbed afterward by people wanting to talk with him. In a reversal of the usual roles they played, Mom drove him to Tacoma in her BMW.
That evening my parents told us they had made a $425,000 offer on a piece of unimproved Maui waterfront—five acres in the beautiful, remote area of Hana. This was a region of cattle ranches and tropical jungle, separated from the more populated side of Maui by a fifty-mile long chuckhole-infested stretch of the notorious Hana Highway, with more than six hundred turns! Most of the locals did not want the road improved, to keep developers and tourists out. The narrow route ran along cliff faces with sheer drop-offs to the ocean hundreds of feet below, crossing more than fifty bridges and many waterfalls.
The property owner had been asking for $550,000, but the piece had been on the market a while and the realtor thought they were making a good offer.
“I always dicker,” Dad said, a carryover from the times we lived in Mexico in the 1950s. He went on to say that the property was too nice for a simple cottage. They had decided to live in Hawaii full-time and sell their Port Townsend home.
The words I hadn’t wanted to hear.
But the place sounded incredible. As we sipped my mother’s favorite Puligny-Montrachet wine, we talked about selling our Mercer Island home and moving to Hawaii ourselves, and about the education available there for Julie and Kim. Maybe Bruce and Penny and the rest of the family could move there, too. Jan and Mom were ready to go even before the property deal closed!
Dad said they had consulted a number of doctors, and with the impairment of Mom’s lung capacity from radiation treatment they were sure that a tropical climate would be more beneficial to her than the colder Northwest weather.
“My lungs feel clear when it’s warm,” she said.
I showed Dad my new book contract on Classic Comebacks. He suggested several changes, including the addition of a clause stipulating Price/Stern/Sloan had to publish the book no later than October 31, 1981. Otherwise, he said, they could just hold on to the rights and delay publication indefinitely. He also had me cross off a sentence that enabled the publisher to copyright the book in their name, requiring instead that they copyright in my name. That gave me more control, he explained, and made it easier for me to go to a different publisher in the future if the book went out of print. They weren’t paying an advance, and I would receive royalties based upon actual sales. But Dad said the contract wasn’t bad for a first book.
Two weeks after our dinner my parents announced that they had reached agreement to purchase the Hawaii land for $500,000, a substantial sum for that year and for the extremely remote location of the property. At my house, Dad unrolled a set of plans for the new house that they wanted to build.
“I researched old records,” Mom said, “and found a map showing our property. It’s five miles from Hana town, in an area that used to be called ‘Kawaloa.’ That means ‘a nice long time’ in Hawaiian. Isn’t that nice? I think we’ll spend a nice long time there. It’s a magical place, unlike anything I’ve ever seen!”
I nodded, and thought how mysterious it all sounded. I studied the house plans, and a grand production it was, with a huge sunken living room and custom-made, curved couches forming a conversation ring around a round coffee table—all looking out on the sea and the “Big Island” of Hawaii, with the volcano Mauna Kea visible. There would be a large writing wing for my father, with an extensive library adjacent, a wine cellar and a darkroom. A Japanese motif would be evident throughout, with shoji screens and artwork. Electricity would be generated with rooftop solar panels and a separate windmill structure.
Botanical gardens would surround the home, with covered decks, a swimming pool, coconut and lauhala trees, stone walkways, lava walls, Polynesian sculptures and a carp pond with a fountain. One area would be designated as a vegetable garden, and there would be a potting shed.
Kawaloa was not only a perfect spot for Mom, he said, but an ideal place for him to hide from the legions of people clamoring to reach him. He’d gone to Port Townsend in 1973 for much the same reason, with fame pursuing him. But now he was far more famous—and as before, too many people knew where he lived. He had millions of fans, and many of them had placed him on a godlike pedestal, a myth-status that troubled my father.
They said they were listing the Port Townsend house for sale soon. I felt energy and excitement around them, from the changes they were setting in motion. It was romantic, charming, and heartwarming, with joy and sadness intermingled. They were off on a S
outh Seas adventure such as my father might have written, or perhaps my mother, given the inclination.
In large part, of course, he was repaying Mom for the sacrifices she had made for him when she gave up her own promising career as a creative writer in order to work and support him while he wrote. Despite this and their excitement, I was deeply troubled. With my fear of flying, their move to an island in the Pacific would effectively isolate them from me. Unfortunately this was occurring not long after I had become close to my complex, enigmatic father—after I had begun to understand him better.
In Port Townsend in early March 1980, Mom and Dad showed us revised plans of their Hawaii dream house, and color slides Dad had taken of the land and the nearby Hawaiian scenery. The property was situated at the edge of a lush tropical jungle, and there were breathtaking vistas of aquamarine water, framed in black lava along the island shores.
Many Hollywood personalities owned property at Hana, including Carol Burnett, Richard Pryor, Jim Nabors, George Harrison and Bill Dana (“Jose Jimenez”). Hana was also the secluded paradise where aviator Charles Lindbergh chose to spend the last days of his life, when he knew he was dying. Lindbergh, a man obsessed with privacy since the tragic kidnapping and murder of his baby son, owned a beautiful, isolated piece of property several miles past my parents’ place, toward Kaupo Gap. During his final days, he needed to stay close to medical personnel, and rented a small house at Pu’uiki between Hana town and Kawaloa. There he worked on his memoirs.
So my father was not the first famous person to seek refuge from fame in the Hana area. But this, of course, was not his primary purpose in going there.
Later that month, Dad opened a bottle of 1973 Piper Heidsieck champagne with us and toasted Victor Temkin, the Berkley Publishing Company president who had been instrumental in paying Dad a huge advance for “Dune 4,” Sandworm of Dune. Dad said it was a package deal with a future non-Dune science fiction book, and said he had to work fast. “Victor’s nervous about paying all that money up front.”
During our second bottle of champagne, a Taittinger, I told him Sandworm of Dune sounded “Ozzie,” and he said he’d been told by publishers and editors that he had an Oz situation in hand, where the reading public was clamoring for the next book before it was written. He had plans for even more Dune novels in the works. This book sale made it possible for them to begin construction on the Hawaii house without first selling the Port Townsend place.
By the spring of 1980, construction of a caretaker’s house at Kawaloa was underway on the upper side of the property, which sloped down from the Hana Highway toward the sea. This was Phase I. Under the next phase to be begun later that year they would live in the caretaker’s house while the main house was built a little lower on the land, but still well away from the water.
Each time we got together with my parents I recorded the events of our lives in my journal, and committed to paper a plethora of details they were relating to me about their early years together, their childhoods and our ancestors. This chronicle was becoming a growing, living force, demanding my undivided attention. I became obsessed with it, and before retiring to bed in the evening, I would scribble rough notes on odd sheets of paper, for fleshing out when I had the time. The sooner I got it all written down the better, I realized, when memories were fresh.
As I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, the events of the day kept flowing through my mind, scrabbling to remain. I found myself unable to drift off until I had converted them to detailed notes. In a sense, I was becoming a prisoner of my journal, and in ensuing days when I was finally able to convert my notes to narrative I felt wrung out. Often-times this was as much from the emotion of the events as from the writing chore. But I was driven to keep up, fascinated by what I was learning about the esoteric world in which my parents lived, a world I shared at times and heard stories about at other times.
I was intrigued by something else as well, by the insights my journal gave me to my inner being. It helped me to understand myself as I never had before. It became a tool for relieving stress and depression, for better analyzing situations, for removing the emotional component from decision-making and replacing it with reason. Written words, if carefully laid down, represented the civilized ideal of reason. They were instruments of analytical, organized thought.
I told my journal my innermost secrets. It became a living entity, a comforting presence in times of need, someone to talk to who wouldn’t laugh at me and wouldn’t tell others what a fool I was. My journal did not begin at the beginning; it grew from the inside-out. I had a love-hate relationship with it.
On the morning of Sunday, March 2, 1980, I saw Mom in a long white robe, standing in the living room by the sliding glass doors on the west side of the house, gazing out at the duck pond. Sunlight glinted off the water, and she said, “It’s beautiful here. I’m going to miss it.”
In the middle of April, Mom and Dad made a quick four-day trip to Hawaii to check the progress of construction on the caretaker’s house. They stayed in the elegant Hotel Hana Maui, and met my brother, Bruce, there.
Around that time, I sold a second humor book to Chuck Gates at Price/Stern/Sloan, a collection of authentic and bizarre insurance claims entitled Incredible Insurance Claims. The book would be published in late 1981 or early 1982, while my other book, Classic Comebacks, would be published in the spring of 1981.
On April 26, 1980, a Saturday, we arrived in Port Townsend at 7: 15 P.M. Dad barbecued filet mignon in the kamado Japanese cooker and made an exquisite Caesar salad—served with a Clos Duval Cabernet Sauvignon. We celebrated my second book sale. They said they traded Mom’s BMW (and a Volkswagen that we had given to them) for a small 1980 Mercedes coupe, which they were going to ship to Hawaii.
Mom spoke again of her hopes for a boy Herbert baby to carry on the family name, and of her long-standing desire for Bruce to get married. She was losing hope that he ever would, and commented, “I’m afraid he’s running with the boys from San Francisco.” This was a suspicion only and a reference to the gay community there, one of the most politically active in the world. I said nothing.
Shortly after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May 1980, we spent the weekend with my parents. At the conclusion of a Friday evening dinner, Dad said to me, “Let’s talk story.” Dutifully I followed him up to his writing loft, carrying my Sidney’s Comet manuscript in a gray-and-white box under my arm. He reviewed my work, which I hoped was now complete at almost 250 typed pages. He read and scanned rapidly, pausing occasionally to speak about certain sections, making numerous suggestions.
As he spoke, I scribbled notes on sheets of newsprint. Since Dad worked in the newspaper business during many of the years when I grew up, newsprint was a common sight in our household. Many of Dad’s manuscripts, typed on newsprint, bore further evidence of his journalism career—the number “-30-” on the bottom of the last page. This was a coded instruction from copy editors to typesetters, confirming that a news story had ended at that point.
The following day, a Saturday, was drizzly in Port Townsend. In the living room, Dad and I worked on my novel. He said it was good through the first hundred pages, but after that it lapsed too frequently into narrative, somewhat like an expanded outline. He thought I should expand the book, fleshing out many of the narrative passages into action and conflict among the characters.
Just past lunch, an architect brought the Hana house plans over and we reviewed them. They were for the main house, not yet under construction. Dad wanted to change the graceful shape of the living room, but Mom and Jan convinced him otherwise.
When the architect left we continued the writing session, and Dad spoke about plot—the importance of keeping a story rolling so that the reader wants to turn the next page. Then he took me upstairs to his writing loft and went over two hundred pages of Sandworm of Dune with me in detail to show how a plot and suspense should be set up.
Afterward Jan and I treated Mom and Dad to dinner at Lido by the Sea, a r
estaurant near the city marina. I was rather depressed after the writing session. After so much work on my book, I thought it was close to being done. It would take me three days to recover, during which time I didn’t work on the manuscript at all. Then, determined, I set to work on it again, in every spare moment of time I had.
Chapter 26
The Apprenticeship of Number One Son
WHEN MY father began to discuss my writing with me, he took great pains to say that no one could teach another person how to write. It was a craft best learned in the performance, he said, by placing the seat of one’s pants on a chair for long periods of time with some sort of writing instrument before him. It wasn’t as glamorous a profession as people believed.
A writer was similar to a carpenter in his estimation; they were just different jobs. The writer even had a toolbox, except his was full of words. “A carpenter carps and an author auths,” he quipped.
He thought he might counsel me, working with my basic writing style to make it more clear, more organized. And then he intended to get out of my way. “I can’t write for you,” he said. “You must put in the long hours yourself.”
Frank Herbert could write at tremendous speed. Hellstrom’s Hive, an eighty-five-thousand-word novel, was written in seven weeks, and during that period he corrected two sets of proofs on other novels of his that were about to be published. On one of his Dune sequels, he produced six hundred single-spaced pages of scenes, notes and characterizations in just a month and a half! He let it flow, overwriting, knowing he would cut the material way back later. To produce a one-hundred-thousand-word novel, he said he often wrote two hundred thousand words.
Once when I said I was going to leave some items out of a story, saving them for another work, my father shook his head and cautioned, “Never hold anything back. Put it all into your story. Don’t worry that you won’t have enough left for next time. It’ll be there when you need it.”
Dreamer of Dune Page 32