Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  “I shot off the starting pistol,” my father said.

  Frank Herbert was pleased with the way that David Lynch was directing the project. “David understands the essence of my book,” Dad said. “He’s translated my swashbuckler to the language of film.”

  He said that half a dozen people recognized him on the plane coming home, and he suspected it would get worse after the movie came out. This comment was based not only on the general publicity but on the fact that he might do an Alfred Hitchcock–style cameo appearance in the movie. Some people were suggesting that he shave off his beard to protect his privacy. To this he replied, steadfastly, “No way. It’s my trademark.”

  He also said there was continued strong interest from Paramount Pictures about doing The White Plague as a movie, and that he’d been on the telephone with his film agent, Ned Brown, about that recently.

  On Monday, April 11, Clyde Taylor called from New York with fantastic news. He said Berkley Books wanted to publish The Garbage Chronicles. After listening to an account of their offer, which he thought was satisfactory, I told him to accept.

  The following Saturday we arrived in Port Townsend just before noon. The new Hood Canal floating bridge was completed and open, making the trip a lot easier and saving at least an hour of travel time.

  That afternoon my father and I discussed our collaboration, the book about America. He had some intriguing ideas, and showed enthusiasm for a number of my suggestions. He also said to me, “You’ll establish your name as a novelist. In fact, from what I’ve been hearing out of New York, you already have.”

  Margaux ran around getting into things all day, with my mother and the rest of us saying, constantly, “No, no!” Finally, Mom quipped, “I’ve always wanted the kids to call me Nanna, but I’m afraid this one is going to think my name is Nono.”

  The following morning I arose before dawn and went up to Dad’s loft study, where I typed a couple of pages of America notes from the previous day’s discussion. He had a big Olympia typewriter on a side table, in addition to the computer and printer, which were set up on the desk.

  Dad came upstairs just as I was finishing. He wore a blue terrycloth robe, with the script initials “F H” embroidered in gold on the pocket. His blond hair was wet and slicked back, from swimming. “I thought I heard my typewriter going,” he said.

  My father scanned the notes, then slapped them down on the desk and said, “Good. I’ll add to them later. You want some orange juice?”

  “Sure.”

  We squeezed half a dozen oranges in his big manual press on the kitchen counter, poured the juice in glasses and drank quickly, before the vitamin C dissipated.

  “I did forty laps this morning,” he said. “About average.”

  For him, perhaps, but not for most sixty-two-year-old men.

  He gave me a cast list for the movie, showing a number of names we hadn’t discussed before, including Dean Stockwell, Francesca Annis and Dino De Laurentiis’ wife, Silvana Mangano, who had been a renowned beauty in her youth. Dad said he and Mom were getting a percentage on sales of movie tickets, and a different percentage on toys, dolls, coloring books and other products.

  Emerging from the master bedroom, Mom joined the conversation. She had ideas for a fuzzy stuffed worm and a breakfast cereal called Melange. (After the precious spice of Dune.)

  “I’m taking your mother to the movies next year,” Dad added. “Our movie.”

  She beamed.

  We were getting ready to leave for home, when Margaux slipped into Mom’s office and flipped on her electric typewriter. Dad got pretty mad about this, and yelled at Julie and Kim for not keeping a better watch on their little sister.

  Later that month my mother telephoned me at work while I was assembling a vegetarian sandwich on my desktop. She said excitedly that Sidney’s Comet had just received a rave review from Publishers Weekly, a prestigious literary publication.

  This was a total surprise to me, as my book hadn’t been published yet. Scheduled for June, I had been told it might be out as early as May. Mom said they must have reviewed an advanced reading copy of the book and said it was a significant step in my new career.

  “We’re very proud of you,” she said.

  Dad got on the line and said something kind of corny, that I liked anyway. “That’s my boy.”

  Clyde Taylor called from New York that afternoon, and read the review to me. Then he mailed me a copy. It read, in part:

  The son of Frank Herbert has produced a fine first work, a carefully crafted social satire written with maturity, empathy and a dark wit…Herbert’s work is unusually inventive and original. He displays real talent.

  Two weeks later I received copies of the book in the mail, and began distributing signed copies to my family. On the title page, I crossed off my name and signed next to it, just as my father did. It had become a family tradition.

  My mother was driving the Mercedes coupe now, giving her a degree of independence. She did pretty well, except for one day toward the end of May 1983, when she hit a garden stake with a nail on it that gouged paint along the bottom of one of the car doors. I took information on the claim from her.

  On Thursday, June 2, Dad called to say a local bookstore wanted him to sign several boxes of his books for a special Frank Herbert display. He asked me to pick up the books and bring them to him. After work I picked up eleven boxes containing a mixture of his titles.

  The next day we arrived in Port Townsend at 5:30 P.M. It was cooler than it had been, around sixty degrees, and overcast. Only a few days before, the Pacific Northwest experienced record temperatures in the high eighties and low nineties.

  Mom was reading Dad’s just completed fifth Dune novel when we walked in. She was seated in one of the dark yellow recliner chairs in the sitting area adjacent to the kitchen, with manuscript pages spread out on the table beside her. She said it was great, that she couldn’t put it down. She felt each book in the series was better than the one before, with plots and characterizations that were even better than Dune.

  Dad said his newest, Heretics of Dune, was at least two hundred thousand words, and had gone beyond his earlier five-hundred-page manuscript projections. The words would probably be trimmed to 180,000 by Victoria Schochet, the freelance editor working on the project for Berkley/Putnam.*

  I went outside and brought the boxes of books into the basement, through the garage. Dad sat at a table and signed half the books, while I unpacked and repacked them. He signed each title page with a flourish, after first crossing out his printed name.

  During our meal, my mother said it was unusual that I was selling novels without first having sold short stories. I told her I had incorporated one of my short stories, “Earth Games,” into The Garbage Chronicles as a chapter.

  After dinner, I was pouring Grand Marnier for the adults, while Jan was helping Mom and Dad in the kitchen with the dinner dishes. Suddenly all hell broke loose. Margaux, a year and a half old, was in the living room, and had gotten into some Dune movie slides that Dad had brought back from Mexico City. She made finger marks on many of them, and Dad said these marks had acid in them and would never come out. He was furious, though he probably should not have left the slides on a coffee table with a toddler running around. He tried to blame Kim for not watching Margaux, when suddenly Jan erupted in tears and told my father it was as much his fault as anyone’s. She said it would be impossible to keep the baby out of their other things and that perhaps it would be better if we left right then and went home.

  Mom calmed Jan down, and Dad said he was sorry for blowing up.

  Several times afterward, though, he muttered, “She was walking on them! I can’t believe she was walking on them!” But gradually things settled down and we stayed.

  Children, my father’s bête noire.

  Dad put the Mexico slides in a projector, set up a screen and showed them to us. The pictures showed the Dune movie sets along with many of the production people. De Laurentiis a
nd Lynch were assembling a crew of nine hundred, along with thirty-nine principal actors and a cast of twenty thousand extras. There would be seventy-five sets and eight sound stages—and four exotic planets would be depicted. Some of the scenes would be filmed in one-hundred-and-twenty-degree desert heat. Dad said they would not be doing the famous banquet scene from his book due to time and budgetary constraints. He disagreed with this decision, but did not seem visibly upset by it.

  In a determined tone, Mom said she would go with him on the next movie trip, “come hell or high water,” as she felt she was missing out on all the fun. She swam almost an entire pool length before we arrived—the best she had done since returning to the mainland earlier in the year. I got the feeling she was highly motivated, the way she’d been when she first discovered she had lung cancer back in 1974. She had a warrior’s spirit.

  All of us had seen Sidney’s Comet next to Dad’s books in bookstores. Both Mom and Jan were always rearranging our books, making sure they were neat and moving them up to eye level…displaying them more prominently. Jan mentioned receiving a telephone call in January, from a science fiction writer wanting to reach Dad. She said the fellow was rude, couldn’t wait to get past her. “He was abrupt with me,” Jan said, “treated me like a bump. So the next time I saw his books in a store, I moved them to the back and put Herbert books in front of them.”

  “Revenge of the Bump,” I said.

  “What a title!” Dad exclaimed.

  While I was running an errand with my mother the next day, she quipped that she was married to Imhotep the Pyramid Builder, with all of the construction projects he had going on all the time. I thought back on my father’s life. His Vashon Island, Washington, house hadn’t been completed. Neither had a home remodel in Cloverdale, California. A houseboat project turned into a near disaster, financially and otherwise, as it strained relations with two of his closest friends. Then Dad purchased the Port Townsend place, and building activity reached new heights for him. He was forever giving me tours of the property and pointing out the changes he had in mind. Frank Herbert enjoyed showing visitors around, be they friends, family members or interviewers. He was always looking toward the future, toward what he hoped to build soon. No matter how much he completed, there was always more to come. And this was appropriate, I imagine, since he was a man of the future.

  Now Kawaloa on far-off Maui was in a category of its own, way beyond anything he had attempted previously. And once it was built, what then? He wasn’t only like Imhotep, I told Mom. He was like William Randolph Hearst, another powerful man who always had construction projects going on around him. My father liked the ongoing activity as a creative outlet when he had finished writing for the day.

  “I hadn’t thought of it quite that way,” she said, “but I think you’re absolutely right.” As I turned onto the gravel road, I saw her nodding her head. She glanced at me, said, “You’ve become very observant, Brian.”

  “I figured him out with my journal.”

  “Good,” she said. “And I suppose you’ve figured me out that way, too?”

  “I’m still working on you,” I replied, with a laugh.

  My parents planned to spend their thirty-seventh wedding anniversary together in Mexico City, and were flying there on June 17. We got together with them the night before in Seattle.

  Mom had been working hard on her conditioning program, improving her cardiovascular system to the maximum it could be. Doctors were concerned about the altitude of Mexico City and the terrible air pollution there, but she pressed to go. Finally they relented. They were absolutely amazed at how well she was doing, considering the damage they knew had been done to her heart from radiation treatment to cure lung cancer. She could swim two laps of the pool now, and almost half a lap underwater.

  Universal Pictures was paying for the trip and for visits to the movie set by leading film distributors. The studio was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, Dad said, for all the people they were bringing to Mexico City.

  My parents’ trip to Mexico this time differed markedly from an earlier excursion in 1955–56, when we were poor and had to return to the U.S. nearly penniless in a hearse with bald tires, our family car.

  After the return of my parents from Mexico in early July 1983, we picked them up at the Red Lion Inn in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue and took them to dinner at a French restaurant. Mom looked good but admitted feeling a little tired. Dad said she was continuing to improve. He put his arm around her at the table and said, “She swam laps at our hotel, at eight thousand feet!”

  Mexico City was at 7,350 feet, but I said nothing. I knew what he was saying, that she had done well with her exercises at altitude, where the air was thinner and exertion more difficult. Not to mention the pollution.

  “And she’s up to four laps at home now!” he said.

  “Four and a half,” Mom said, proudly.

  Two big parties had been given while they were in Mexico City, and they met many cast members. My parents sensed charisma in the handsome young actor playing Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), and thought he’d have to be on the alert for groupies. They saw three and a half hours of the first prints of film, called “rushes.” Filming was 60 percent done, and should be completed around September. The editing, scoring, special effects and other finishing touches would take quite a bit of time after that, and the production staff thought it might be released to the public no earlier than June 1984.

  Dad tossed around some staggering eight-figure numbers in terms of income he expected to receive from the film, and said he wanted to use a small portion of it, “a few million” to set up a foundation for the “study of social systems,” with the goal of setting the American bureaucracy on a new course.

  He said he had been plotting the sixth book in the Dune series for several days, while I was around 60 percent through my new novel, Sudanna, Sudanna. I had been working on it since February.

  At least once a week, Mom and Dad came south from Port Townsend to look for a house in the Seattle area, hoping to find that waterfront piece on Mercer Island. They found a house that my mother loved, only a few blocks from our place on Mercer Island. A sprawling single-level home with Japanese architecture and landscaping, it featured a fine view of Lake Washington, but was not waterfront. They submitted an offer, and on the day it went in, Mom told Jan how much she hoped they could get that house. But my father had his own price in mind, substantially lower than the asking price. He “lowballed” the place, making such a bargain basement offer that it angered the sellers and the deal fell apart.

  When Jan told me about this, about how much my mother wanted that house, I blew up. Jan had been going around with them looking for real estate for weeks, helping in every way possible. Now, after all the trouble, Dad had blown the deal. I called him and expressed my displeasure in no uncertain terms.

  He didn’t have much to say, but somehow after I hung up it resulted in Mom crying about the whole thing. I don’t know how much I contributed to the upset, and how much of her unhappiness was from losing the house. In any event Dad called me back and we had a less emotional conversation.

  “I’m not totally lost in a maze,” he said to me.

  I found this comment somewhat perplexing, and thought about it afterward without coming up with an answer. Only later, much later, would I realize what was truly going on. Mom was convinced she was dying, and wanted to be certain Dad had a home near Jan and me, so that we could care for him. The year before she had expressed concern to Jan so poignantly: “I worry most about Frank. We’ve always been like one person. When I go, what will happen to him?”

  After her poor medical diagnosis she began formulating a plan, assuring herself that the members of her family would be taken care of if she was not around. The Mercer Island house was part of it. In a related part of the plan, she was encouraging him to write a book with me, perhaps more than one, so he would be kept busy and wouldn’t have time to get depressed.

 
; A place to live near loved ones and work to keep him busy. Other pieces of her plan would emerge soon.

  Dad’s comment about not being “totally lost in a maze” came because he knew exactly what she was doing. If he purchased property near us, it seemed tantamount to an admission on his part that Mom was not going to make it. So he lowballed the place and lost it. I think Dad would have found something wrong with any house on Mercer Island.

  He was also extremely hesitant to sell the Port Townsend farm. He had put too much work into Xanadu, too much love. It fulfilled some of his most closely held lifelong dreams. Frank Herbert could not have a farm on a Mercer Island lot—it was a highly suburbanized area, with comparatively small pieces of property and neighbors that would not understand ducks running around and roosters crowing at the break of dawn.

  Chapter 35

  My Mother’s Plan

  IN LATE July 1983, Frank Herbert told me that he typed one hundred rough-draft pages on “Dune 6” (as yet unnamed) in just four days. (I didn’t dare ask, but I had seen some of his rough drafts done single space.) In contrast, it had taken me six months to write 152 rough-draft pages of Sudanna, Sudanna, double-spaced. He said he normally spent six hundred to eight hundred hours on a completed novel.

  His contract on “Dune 6” was in the stratosphere, providing him with even more money than the astounding figure he had received for “Dune 5,” Heretics of Dune.

  Around this time Jan and I went to a dinner dance with my parents, where the entertainment was a small combo that played music ranging from the 1940s to modern, popular selections. Mom and I had one slow dance together. While a little short of breath, she was laughing like a schoolgirl when I led her back to the table.

  The following month, Mom decided she wanted to start a newsletter, reviewing Seattle restaurants as well as restaurants from their travels. She planned to call it “BAH,” using her own initials, and wanted Jan and me to eat at restaurants and provide her with reports. I suggested the use of a form for the criticisms, an idea she liked. Dad and I offered to help edit the newsletter, while Jan said she would be the “Chief Eater.” Mom said we were the only people, along with Dad, that she was telling about the idea.