“Use the mails,” he said. “Maybe you can send it to Lurton Blassingame after I look it over. He’s still active and involved with young writers.”
The ferry lines were terrible that evening, and it took us five hours to get home.
By late August 1980, the first draft of the Dune screenplay written by Rudolph Wurlitzer was in front of my father. Dad was not at all pleased with it and said Wurlitzer had oversimplified the story, almost turning it into a “juvenile.” Too many key scenes were missing, he said. It rubbed him too that the screenplay omitted Dune’s baliset, the stringed instrument used by Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. My father wanted the film to be the first to introduce an entirely new musical instrument.
Two more drafts would follow.
Just before their departure for Hawaii, my parents visited us at our Mercer Island home. They mentioned two going-away parties given for them recently in Port Townsend, one a highbrow affair at the Farm House Restaurant and the other a chili feed at a friend’s house. It amused Mom to have close friends on both ends of the social scale, from gourmets to chili-eaters. Dad said that the computer book written with Max Barnard, Without Me You’re Nothing, was essentially complete, just one of many projects he had taken care of before leaving Port Townsend. “I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” he said.
My parents kept changing their minds about whether or not they would sell Xanadu, the Port Townsend house. Initially it was to be six months in Xanadu and six in Kawaloa. A short while later they thought full-time in Hawaii might be better. Then, when Dune series royalties and a big movie advance poured in they came up with the three-residence idea—Hawaii, Port Townsend and London or Paris. Now they told us they had changed their minds once more and decided to sell the Port Townsend house after all. This was a blow to me, though I couldn’t say it was entirely unexpected.
It made the move seem so final.
Dad also said the Caladan, only a year old, wouldn’t be a suitable sailboat for Hawaii, with its fin keel and large expanses of glass. Consequently he was listing it for sale with a Seattle yacht broker.
Mom was pretty worried about whether we were going to be able to visit them in Hawaii, since I couldn’t fly, and she emphasized how much she wanted us to live there. She checked with three cruise ship lines about trips between the mainland and Hawaii and found that all were either unsafe or no longer operating.
Dad gave me a floppy Hawaiian hat, and with misty eyes said he wanted us to get together for Christmas in Hawaii, maybe around January 6. That was Twelfth Night, the date we had celebrated Christmas several times in my childhood. I reminded him I couldn’t fly.
“You’ll have to bite the bullet and do it,” he said. And he spoke of how safe flying in Hawaii was, how Royal Hawaiian Air Service, which flew between the islands, had never experienced a fatal accident.
My mother spoke of the beauty of Hawaii, made more breathtaking when seen from the air. She described Royal Hawaiian flights over cliff faces with waterfalls pouring down them, vast stretches of water between the islands and spectacular sunrises. Hana Airport was a swath of runway at the edge of a jungle.
A week went by before I was able to continue my journal entries, since I was too upset to write. I finally made the entries on Sunday, September 6, while we sat in the car in yet another ferry line. This time Jan, the kids and I were coming back from the Port Townsend house. We had picked up some vegetables and a couple of boxes of canned goods my mother and father had left for us. We slept in the house Saturday in sleeping bags. Xanadu was not entirely empty, but may as well have been for the lack of life in it. They left some basic furniture groupings in the main rooms so that it would look better for realtors to show to buyers.
They also arranged for a caretaker for the property, a friend named Doug Sandau, and while we were there he was getting moved into the apartment downstairs. He slept on a mattress on the floor during our visit. Nice fellow, and conscientious about details.
All the wonderful Dune paintings that had been on the south wall of the living room were gone, having been placed in storage. They were in a top-secret facility on Elliot Avenue West in Seattle, an unobtrusive, rather rundown-appearing building with no sign, used by local art museums to house the works of renowned painters.
Dad’s loft study was almost bare except for an electric typewriter, so that he could write if he came back to visit before the property was sold. The pool was drained. Xanadu seemed so dark and cold. It was still special in and of itself, but it was the people who had illuminated it. I couldn’t hold back the tears.
Jan wanted to see the wine room, where Dad and I had always gone to make the wine selections. It was empty except for a few bottles of ordinary wine.
Saturday night we ate at the Sea Galley Restaurant on the bay in Port Townsend, and had to wait more than an hour for a table because crowds were in town to visit Port Townsend’s third annual Wooden Boat Show. When the public address system announced, “Herbert, table of four,” many people we didn’t know turned their heads to look at us.
We left early Sunday morning because it was too difficult remaining in the empty house. Cartoons and notes were still on the kitchen bulletin board, and there was a note under the door from a couple who visited on August 31, unaware my parents had flown to Hawaii two days before that.
As we rode the ferry across Hood Canal that Sunday morning, I looked east at the half-missing Hood Canal floating bridge. When that was closed by a storm in February 1979, it hastened my parents’ feelings of isolation in Port Townsend. Thereafter a three-to five-hour multiple ferry and driving trip to Seattle was required—twice the normal length of time.
Julie piped up from the backseat, “I wanna see Nanna and Grandpa again. We used to visit them all the time.”
And Kim said, “When I go to Hawaii, I’m gonna wear my ‘mula’ (she meant muumuu) dress. Julie, are you gonna wear Nanna’s mula dress that she gave you? She’d like that.”
Julie grew very quiet.
A week later I spoke with my parents by telephone and learned they were living in a rented house midway between Hana town and their property, and would stay there until January, when the contractors expected to complete their twenty-four-hundred-square-foot caretaker’s house. The plan was that they would move into the caretaker’s house, and from there supervise construction of the main house.
Dad said his new Mercedes coupe wasn’t working out in Hana, because of extremely rough road conditions. Each day they had to drive over ruts, potholes and washboard areas that would probably never be repaired, since the locals liked the road that way. He wished he had brought a four-wheel-drive Jeep instead, and asked if I could locate a new one for him and have it shipped. I agreed to do so.
The worst bumps and sections of road around Hana had names for them, and he spoke of the most notorious stretch of roadway, known as the “Molokai Washboard,” which had a surface like an old washboard. It was between his house and town. “It’ll shake your eyeballs out,” he said.
On the first of October, I mailed my just-completed three-hundred-page manuscript of Sidney’s Comet to Dad, with this note: “I’m very tired, but I have a feeling I’m not finished yet! It seems there’s no end to pages that need correcting…”
Later that month my father returned the manuscript with a note written on a yellow sheet of paper that had been wrinkled by typing strikes from other sheets on top of it. I recognized this as a sheet placed beneath another to prevent striking the platen too hard, thus avoiding indentations on the platen. His note said, “These pages…22–27…show how editing tightens the story. Go now and do likewise.”* These six pages were closely edited, while others had fewer notations on them.
I spoke with Mom shortly before the November 1980 presidential election. She said that she and Dad had been arguing about politics, since she held a high opinion of Ronald Reagan, while Dad loathed him. Recently my father had purchased what he called a “voice stress analyze
r,” a little handheld device that when activated could supposedly tell when a person was lying. He had been pointing it at the television during Reagan’s speeches, and periodically Dad would exclaim, “Reagan’s lying again! Bev, come in here and look at this meter!”
A while later, Mom wrote to me on her new stationery, with “Kawaloa” printed on it in large letters beside a drawing of the house.
While my parents were in Hawaii, the Dune movie project came unraveled again. As Harlan Ellison reported in the June 1985 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the third draft of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s screenplay included an incestuous relationship between Paul and Jessica. As Ellison put it, “Have you ever heard Frank Herbert bellow with rage?”
I heard it on a number of occasions, including this one. Dad said that he wasn’t interested in any variation of this theme, including one in which Alia—Paul’s sister, as Dad wrote Dune—becomes his daughter as well.
Appalled, Frank Herbert told Dino De Laurentiis that Dune fans would never tolerate an incestuous relationship between their beloved characters, and De Laurentiis agreed. To make matters worse, director Ridley Scott, who had spent months in the early stages of production, now had to leave for another film he was under contract to direct, Blade Runner. Once again, the long-awaited film version of the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Dune, had no director and no screenplay.
In mid-December, I mailed a satirical science fiction short story to my father for his opinion. Called “Earth Games,” it was about an alien world where Earth people were kept prisoner and forced to perform games with hot-rod automobiles. Those games strongly resembled rush-hour commute times in any major city, when drivers competed for lane space and made unfriendly gestures at one another. A slight difference: these cars had machine guns on the fenders and cannons on the rooftops.
As before, I could not telephone my parents before noon, since Dad wrote in the mornings. Now I had to calculate the difference in time zones, since it was three hours earlier in Hawaii than in Seattle. During phone conversations with my mother, at all hours of the afternoon or evening, she invariably said Dad was writing in another room—and she could hear the rapid machine rhythm of his electric typewriter. This time, however, I heard Dad playing his harmonica in the background, a happy sound I hadn’t heard in a long while.
She said Dad was setting aside the custom computer system he had been designing and building with Max Barnard. The technology was changing too rapidly, Dad thought, and he was considering the purchase of a stock computer and printer. He planned to study available systems upon returning to the mainland.
In those conversations across the Pacific, I realized how much the Hana area reminded my parents of rural Mexico. They described tropical, verdant colors, and the relaxed work ethic of the dark-skinned natives, in which tasks were often put off for another day.
And I realized something else as well. My father, a most imperfect man, had done an absolutely perfect thing for the woman he loved. The construction he undertook at Kawaloa was his gallant effort to save her life, or at the very least to make what remained of it pleasurable.
Book III
Kawaloa
Chapter 28
First Class
From this cup I drank as deeply as any man should do, and was sated with it.
—T. E. Lawrence
IN MID-JANUARY 1981, Dad and Mom called, one on each line from Kawaloa. Because of the underwater telephone cable between Hawaii and the mainland, their voices sounded as if they were coming from the insides of coffee cans, and I heard static. They spoke sadly of my first cousin Matt Larson and a hiking companion, who had lost their lives on Mount Hood in Oregon that winter.
Recently my parents had shipped their ’80 Mercedes coupe to me from Hawaii, for safekeeping. They wanted me to take care of a number of maintenance items on it. Several boxes were also being sent to us “for baby-sitting,” as my mother put it. They had packed the trans-ocean container hastily in Port Townsend, and had things they would never use in the tropics, including tire chains, snowshoes, ski poles, wool-lined boots and even a goodly amount of fishing equipment they couldn’t use since fishing was done differently in Hawaii, using long poles or spear guns. Brass and metal items were coming back as well, including rifles, to protect them from the moist, corrosive salt air of Kawaloa. In addition, they were experiencing problems with some articles of wood furniture that were warping from moisture in the air. The jeep I had shipped to them was running well, but was too drafty for Mom. They were thinking of trading it in on a more enclosed vehicle, such as a Chevrolet Blazer or Ford Bronco.
Then they said something heartening. Xanadu had been listed for sale for several months without offers, largely because of a depressed economy in the area. They had decided not to sell the property after all. It would be one of their “bases of operation,” as my father put it. He had also decided to keep the sailboat Caladan.
Judging from all of this, taking the wrong car and other things to Hawaii, as well as their indecision about keeping Xanadu and the sailboat, it was clear they were making decisions emotionally, without adequate planning. It made me wonder if my mother might be even more ill than they were letting on, if she had received bad medical news that we hadn’t been told about yet. Everything they did was in a big rush, a desperate surging this way and that.
But every time I asked how Mom was feeling, she or my father said, “fine” or “great” or “much improved.” She had survived inoperable lung cancer since 1974. This was nothing less than a triumph of human spirit. She had fought the disease, refusing to succumb to it. My parents spoke of wanting a swimming pool for her at Kawaloa, so that she could resume her exercise regime. She missed the laps in the pool in Port Townsend.
They were living in the caretaker’s house, though it was not quite complete, and mentioned difficulties with the main house plans. Dad had obtained bids based upon his architect’s drawings, and found construction would cost millions more than he wanted to spend. Beyond that he felt the house was more suited to the Pacific Northwest, where the architect lived.
In researching homes that were best suited to the Hana area, he contacted entertainers Jim Nabors and Richard Pryor and a number of other locals, all of whom were kind enough to show my father through their homes. He determined that the best and most cost-effective dwelling to build was a pole-house, where the structure sits up off the ground on a heavy piling foundation. The house would have a manually operated louver system in the walls, a feature that would permit outside air to circulate inside, cooling the home. In outward appearance it would most resemble the Nabors’ home.
Dad drew up his own plans, and had them transformed to blueprint form by a structural engineer. The site was on a hillside, which presented difficulties in making the home accessible to a heart patient. He tried to place most of the areas Mom needed to reach every day on one level, including the swimming pool, the main living areas and the master bedroom. He didn’t want her to have to climb stairs. Additionally, since Dad was acquainted with marine architecture, he would incorporate a number of boat features into the design.
The main house had to go in before the pool could be begun. At first Dad wanted to utilize wind power from constant trade winds to heat the pool, but he opted instead to heat it with solar panels. These panels would be factory-built, and not the unique beer-can variety he had designed for Port Townsend.
While he was explaining this to me, something came up with the contractors and he had to leave the telephone. Mom stayed on and told me about Hana. It was the most beautiful place she had ever seen.
In ensuing weeks we had numerous telephone conversations, discussing family business and personal matters that they wanted me to handle for them, and the other day-to-day activities of our lives. In one conversation, Mom said a neighbor gave a party and she won a Smith-field ham. As she spoke to me she was gazing out upon three palm trees below the house, and said a lovely, warm breeze had been blowing all day. “I’v
e been painting,” she said. “Flowers, the sea, cattle in the fields…This is an artist’s paradise. I only wish I had more talent.”
Early in the morning of April 11, 1981, a Saturday, we brought boxes and packages of my parents’ things to them in Port Townsend, stuff shipped back from Hawaii. A number of fishing poles were in aluminum tubes, and some of the boxes were quite heavy, being full of brass and steel items. The weather was brisk, in the forties but feeling colder from the wind.
Mom and Dad looked tan but tired. They had been back only a few days, and still hadn’t adjusted to the change of climate. He had been trying to write, but didn’t have the energy to go full steam.
After lunch my father and I played Hearts at the dining room table, while Mom and Jan sat in the living room, talking.
“One thing was sent back here that should have remained in Hawaii,” my mother said. “Me.” She wore a heavy sweater, and was curled up in a lounge chair with an orange and brown Afghan blanket over her. “Look outside,” she said.
Dad and I glanced up from our card game. Hail was coming down!
She spoke about how much warmer it was at Kawaloa, with warm trade winds blowing. They planned to return to Port Townsend a little later the following year, in May, staying through October or November. Dad needed two hundred days of residency on the mainland because of extremely high state income taxes in Hawaii, yet another detail he had overlooked in the rush to move there. By spending that amount of time away from Hawaii, his income would not be taxed under Hawaiian law.
They said the caretaker’s house was finished on their property and was very comfortable. Ground was just being broken for the main house.
Dreamer of Dune Page 34