Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  On Sunday, January 9, 1983, Dad called and told me angrily about an attempt by Chilton Books to assert an interest in the Dune movie, despite having waived all such rights when Putnam became the hardcover publisher of Dune. I asked him if there might be loopholes in the waiver, and he said there were none to his knowledge. “I’m going to put a Philadelphia lawyer in his place,” he said, referring to the attorney representing Chilton.

  My father said he was putting in long hours on the new novel, pressing to complete it as soon as possible. That morning, as usual, he rose before dawn and worked out on a rowing machine and exercycle. Then a quick shower and a light breakfast of toast and guava juice, which he took to his study. He took a large number of vitamins each day.*

  After writing for three hours, he helped Mom get ready for the day. He made her hot Cream of Wheat with sliced bananas on top, found books and knitting materials and art supplies and whatever else she needed, and by 9:30 he was back at his desk. He was using a Compaq word processor now instead of a typewriter, since it was much faster. Each night he put the computer away in a dry room, to prevent it from being damaged so quickly by salt air.

  My mother was sitting outside in the sun as he spoke, with a sketch pad on her lap, painting lush flowers from their garden.

  During this time, I performed the usual chores for my parents, involving insurance, maintaining their car, straightening out bank accounts and tracking down items that they could not locate in Hawaii. A number of telephone calls came in as well, from people looking for them. I played “moat dragon” by screening the inquiries, so that Mom and Dad would not be disturbed unnecessarily.

  In mid-January I spoke with my parents, with each of them on an extension phone. After listening to Dad for several minutes, I asked my mother what she had been doing to keep busy.

  “Checking up on your father,” she said with a chuckle. “It used to be easier when he wrote with a typewriter, but now he has a word processor and I have to listen carefully for the keys.”

  Dad laughed.

  “How are you feeling, Mom?” I asked.

  “Oh fine, fine.” She sounded cheerful, with a hint of the giggly little-girl cuteness she could exude at times.

  Dad spoke of a party they had been to, and how easy it was in Hawaii to eat and drink to excess and get too much sun. He suggested a book we might write together, in a year or so. It would be non-fiction, with a working title of Looking for America. The book would examine American myths, including reminiscences and comparisons…discussing how far off course we had drifted. I expressed interest, keeping in mind occasional discussions we’d had to do a humor book or cookbook together. Such discussions had petered out, but in retrospect I hadn’t pressed them, and my father had to be the busiest man on the planet.

  I learned later that Mom had been encouraging him to write a book with me. I discovered as well that she wanted to sell Xanadu, the Port Townsend house, and purchase a waterfront place on Mercer Island, near us. At her urging, they planned to begin looking for the house upon returning to the mainland. “I love the water,” she said.

  It was all part of a secret and well-thought-out plan she had, one that would become increasingly evident to all of us.

  In mid-February, after experiencing plot problems on my new novel, I was beginning to build up a head of steam. I was sitting at the typewriter when Mom called.

  “I called for nothing,” she said. “I was thinking about you guys, missing you.”

  We discussed Sidney’s Comet. She was anxious to see it in book form. I told her I received a color proof of the cover art several days earlier, and would make a copy for her. Publication was scheduled for June.

  Dad came on the line for a few moments, and said he was of Heretics of Dune out of a projected five hundred. This was only forty-six pages better than a month earlier, and he said he had run into plot problems, slowing him down. I learned later that Mom had not been feeling well in recent weeks, with nausea and loss of appetite, as well as abdominal pains from serious fluid accumulation in the peritoneal cavity. Dad had been required take her to the Hana Medical Clinic almost every day, and Dr. Howell, thinking her medications might be causing her discomfiture, reduced her medications. This, however, resulted in a severe loss of energy, and the medications were reinstituted. Dad didn’t tell me these things with Mom nearby, as she didn’t like him sharing too much detail about her condition, fearing it would make us worry.

  But the next day, a Monday, Dad phoned me at work and said, “I don’t want you to think this is a big medical emergency, Brian, but we may be back in three days.”

  Dr. Howell wanted Group Health Hospital in Redmond (near Seattle) to monitor her blood condition and other vital signs to see how her body chemistry was reacting to medication. They had to balance it carefully. The doctor was checking with his mainland counterparts on this, and a flight was being arranged.

  My father wanted me to pick them up at SeaTac Airport on Thursday, February twenty-fourth, and said they needed to stay with us. But he was rattled, and called me before knowing the flight schedule. I was worried about him, knowing how difficult it was for him to be pulled out of the middle of a book.

  I heard my mother’s voice in the background, rather a high tone, and Dad paused to listen to her. “I’ll be right back,” he said to me. The receiver thumped as he set it down.

  Presently Dad returned, saying Mom got a shot from Dr. Howell and was complaining that her thigh hurt. I heard her say something about not wanting to climb the stairs to the bedrooms in our house. She might stay in the hospital, Dad said, and he would stay with us. My mother was unhappy, too, about having to leave Kawaloa.

  Afterward Jan and I spoke about how unfortunate it was that they had chosen to live in such a remote part of the world, with Mom needing so much medical care. Hana was good for my mother’s soul, but the decision to live there had been emotional, not thought out well.

  I didn’t sleep well that night, and learned in the morning that Jan and I had said separate prayers for Mom.

  On the evening of the twenty-fourth, we drove Mom straight to Group Health Hospital in Redmond. I had a color proof of the Sidney’s Comet cover in the car, and showed it to them. It depicted a fiery orange and yellow comet against a starry backdrop of space. It was a comet composed of Earth’s own jettisoned garbage, coming back to destroy the planet.

  We checked Mom into the hospital. She had been experiencing abdominal pains, and according to tests performed in Hawaii had minor fluid accumulations in her abdomen and liver. One of the nurses asked her to list all the medications she was on, and Mom rattled off four or five.

  Dad went with her to X-ray, made sure the phone in her room was hooked up, and explained details of her condition to the nurses and a doctor. It took over two hours, and we did not arrive home until nearly 1:30 A.M.

  On the drive to our house, Dad said the Dune movie should be completed by 1984, but perhaps not until late in the year. He said the dispute with Chilton over movie rights had been settled out of court, with Dad paying 37.5 percent and Putnam the balance. The problem was a clause in the contract that gave Chilton “three-dimensional reproduction rights.” Dad asked what it meant at the time and recalled being told that it referred to movie promotional items, such as pop-up books and tee-shirts. The Chilton lawyers used this clause, in my father’s words, “to harass the movie production,” and he thought they might have to be paid around seventy-five thousand dollars under the settlement agreement.

  We discussed the America book we were going to do. He spoke passionately about the blunders of existing governmental systems. Whenever he started talking about politics, he had a lot to say. Millions of readers knew this from the Dune sequels in particular, where the characters spoke at length about power and politics, didactically at times. Frank Herbert was, after all, a teacher.

  He was a staunch believer in America and in democracy, but his active mind envisioned any number of improvements that might be made to the sys
tem. One of them involved what he called a “national jury democracy” or “national town meeting,” in which governmental power would be taken away from politicians and bureaucrats, in favor of the citizenry. The U.S. House and Senate, and similar state institutions, would be eliminated entirely, with their veto power transferred to the electorate. Under a nationwide “jury” system linked by computer, the electorate would be given the power to veto any decision, any policy made by their leaders. It didn’t matter what governors or even the president of the United States said. The people would have a direct voice in everything.

  My father went on to say that he wanted to remove entrenched functionaries, that the American bureaucracy needed to be radically overhauled. In an incredulous tone he told the story of a Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who had been ensconced in his position for more than four decades. Like many others, he could not be fired. Incredibly, the bureaucrat referred to members of the U.S. House and Senate as “transients.”

  The morning after our brainstorming session, a Friday, Dad was up at dawn, on his way to the hospital to see Mom. She spent the day traveling between Redmond and Seattle by cabulance, for the various tests she needed. Her abdomen had flattened out, and she was feeling better. He’d gone to a department store at noon, skipping lunch, and bought her a warm robe.

  At our house that evening Dad talked about his childhood and what he knew of Mom’s, and frequently his eyes misted over. But he kept on, as if trying to recapture halcyon, simpler times.

  Dad, Julie and I visited Mom that evening. She looked nice in the new light blue robe he had given her. On the way home, Dad gave us ominous news. He said she had “cardiomyopathy” and “pneumonitis,” linked to the radiation treatments of 1974, with only 60 to 65 percent of her normal heart and lung functions remaining. Most of the right side of her heart had collapsed. She would be checking out of the hospital soon, and he was arranging for her to have oxygen at home when she slept. A home-unit would convert ambient air to 95 percent pure oxygen. Since the heart produces oxygen for the body, he explained, Mom needed more oxygen to supplement the loss of function. He thought the best they could hope for was for the heart to remain stable, or eventually the condition would kill her.

  “There are no guarantees in this life,” he told me.

  “At least Mom has had a better life than many people,” I said.

  He thought for a moment, then said, in a determined voice, “It’s not over yet.”

  On Saturday, February 26, 1983, Frank Herbert woke up at around 4:00 in the morning and telephoned the hospital to check on his wife. She’d had a good night’s sleep, according to the nurse on duty.

  When I saw him later that morning, he had a one inch gash on top of his forehead. He had been sleeping in our carriage house room under a low overhang, and whacked his head when he sat up too quickly.

  Dad and I went to see Mom at around 11:00 A.M. On the way, he said Mom’s best hope might lie in ongoing research into the body’s immune system. If certain problems could be resolved, she might be able to receive a heart transplant. Up to that time, only a few hundred transplants had taken place in the entire world, and many of the patients had died when their immune systems did not accept the new organ or when other complications set in, such as pneumonia.

  Dad said he had to do all of the cooking now, as Mom did not have the energy. He was feeling pretty tired himself, suffering his usual jet lag on top of everything else. He brought his manuscript along, but hadn’t been able to touch it. “I’m too wrung out to write,” he said.

  At our house that evening, Dad was showing Kim and me how to prepare one of his favorite meals, Oyster Sauce Beef. He took a call from his film agent, Ned Brown, in the midst of this and told him how Mom was doing. In some detail, they discussed a complete waiver that was being signed by Chilton Books, at the conclusion of which my father said, “Righto. They’ll hold me blameless for everything and will never sue me, even if I urinate on them.”

  Later at the hospital, Mom asked about the cut on Dad’s head, which she hadn’t noticed previously because of the effects of her medication.

  “It’s not serious,” he responded. “Just a little hole.”

  Dad sat with Mom on the bed. He was a little too clumsy for her this time, however, with his arm around her shoulder so that it hurt her neck, and leaning against her so that she had trouble breathing. With a girlish giggle, she dispatched him to his chair.

  When we were about to leave, Dad leaned close to Mom and held her hand, telling her he loved her and adding, “I wish you were with me.”

  “Why?” she asked, looking at the cut on his forehead. “Then I’d have a hole in my head, too!”

  On the drive home Dad said his income had doubled in a short period of time, but mentioned what I had heard before, that they were still having a great deal of trouble keeping up with expenses. I offered to loan him thirty or forty thousand dollars, if that would help, but he said that would hardly touch his financial obligations.

  “I’ll keep your offer in mind,” he said, “but I think I can pry something loose from my publishers.”

  During the next week, Dad stayed with us most nights, but at least half the time he slept at the hospital near Mom, in a waiting room or on a cot they set up for him.

  Jan and I visited Mom every day. To outward appearances she seemed too healthy to be in the hospital, and I was hopeful for her. She told me Dad was always making sure she had everything, and if anything was lacking or slow in arriving, he went in search of a nurse. He even monitored the medications she was receiving, and asked doctors and nurses to explain the purpose of each one, and the dosages. “Sometimes he orders the nurses around,” Mom said with a smile, “as if he were a doctor.”

  Just before we checked Mom out of the hospital in early March, Dad told me the doctors only gave her two years to live. “I think she’ll live longer,” he added in a resolute tone. “She’s fooled the experts before.”

  I was shaking, and he comforted me.

  A few days later the telephone rang at my office, and I answered with my name.

  To this she replied, “Hello, Brian Herbert.” She sounded surprisingly good, and it comforted me. She was in Port Townsend, and said Dad had been interviewed that morning by The New York Times. She had been to her doctor in Port Townsend, giving blood for a sample he needed.

  I asked what else she had been doing during the week.

  “Just giving blood,” she said. “I’ve been paying bills.”

  “Are you swimming?” I inquired.

  “Starting again,” she said. “Your father is helping me.”

  Among Dad’s many ideas in recent years he had mentioned the possibility of setting up a family compound near Issaquah, just east of Seattle. But Mom had her own input, which differed. They spent a day in the middle of March with a realtor, looking at houses on Mercer Island and in nearby Bellevue. They wanted a rambler due to Mom’s exertion problem. No stairs. Jan went with them, and told me afterward that Mom had trouble breathing under the slightest exertion. They didn’t find a house that they liked.

  That evening, we went to dinner at a gourmet restaurant on Mercer Island, and I noticed the breathing noises my mother was making, too. I held her arm and walked with her from the car to the table. She seemed so delicate and small, but she was cheerful and smiled at me frequently. At the table, I helped her out of her elegant, long black coat. She wore a lavender Missoni dress and a pearl necklace with matching earrings. A gold Swiss watch adorned her left wrist.

  I told Dad that for a couple of weeks I had been worrying about books I had in New York in search of publishers, The Garbage Chronicles and The Client’s Survival Manual. I was quick to add that I was at work on a new novel, Sudanna, Sudanna, and this pleased him.

  On Monday, March 28, 1983, Dad was scheduled to fly to Mexico City to operate the clapboard for the first scene of the Dune movie. Mom had planned to go, but her doctors felt that the altitude there (7,350 feet) and severe air p
ollution could make it difficult for her to breathe. Consequently, she would remain home. Deeply disappointed at not being able to be with him on such a momentous occasion, she was grouchy the whole week that he was gone.

  Jan shifted her school schedule around to be with Mom, and arrived in Port Townsend just before Dad left. He explained my mother’s dietary needs to Jan, and her exercise program, with this caution, “You have to stay with her every second in the pool.”

  A strong swimmer, Jan told him not to worry.

  Max Von Sydow, José Ferrer, Jurgen Prochnow, Linda Hunt and Sting would be in the cast, and they had a new actor for the leading role of Paul Atreides, Kyle MacLachlan, a recent graduate of the University of Washington acting school. He had played Shakespearean parts, including Octavius Caesar and Romeo, and when discovered by a Dune casting agent was playing in The Empty Space Theatre’s production of Tartuffe in Seattle. MacLachlan, signed to a multi-picture deal for more stories in the Dune series, had been a fan of Dune since reading it at the age of twelve or thirteen. Remarkably, he had sometimes fantasized about playing the part of Paul. Two screen tests were required before he won the coveted role—one in Los Angeles and the second in Mexico City.

  I spoke with Dad on the telephone early in April after he arrived home. He was not feeling well, having contracted what he termed “mal de la pais,” meaning “the ill of the country.” He was euphoric nonetheless, saying that the movie production was going extremely well. He said he had dined with Sian Phillips, Richard Jordan, José Ferrer and other members of the cast.

  The filming was taking place at Churubusco Studios, near the site of the 1968 Olympic Games. Dad got to keep the clapboard from the very first take of the first scene, after he clicked it to start the cameras rolling. Later the film crew would shoot desert scenes in the Samalayucca Desert of northern Mexico.