Frank Herbert spent quality time with his other grandchildren, including a writing session with Kim, then twelve, critiquing stories she had written on a word processor at school. Margaux, only two, was too young for a heart-to-heart conversation, but she and her grandfather developed a close mutual affection. Initially he asked her to call him Panona, which had been my mother’s request of Julie and Kim in the 1970s. Just as that name had not stuck in the earlier attempt, it failed again, as Margaux misunderstood and referred to him as “Banana.”
“No!” we would all exclaim, breaking up with laughter. “Panona!” She couldn’t quite get it, and finally we encouraged her to call him “Grandpa.” This evolved in her young mind, and Margaux settled on calling him “Pop Pop,” which he loved. Every time we went to see Pop Pop, she became very excited and often took him drawings and colorings she had done. He particularly liked her depiction of a spaceship filled with aliens, which he put up on the kitchen bulletin board.
Based on our outline for Man of Two Worlds, G. P. Putnam’s Sons made a substantial offer, which we accepted and split evenly. With this, another of the promises my father made to my mother was on track. However, since Dad was busy providing technical advice and promotional assistance on the Dune movie (scheduled for release in December 1984), and on the writing of screenplays for two of his other works in which producers had expressed recent interest (The Santaroga Barrier and Soul Catcher), I was left with the task of doing most of the work on our book during 1984. Dad thought we might be able to begin work on the project without distractions in the spring of 1985, with completion expected by the end of that summer.
On the same day that our Putnam offer came in, I received an offer from another publisher, Arbor House, to publish Sudanna, Sudanna in hardcover. A third publisher, Berkley Books, was making an offer on the paperback rights for this book. My agent, Clyde Taylor, said, in an understatement, “This is your day.” He also said my first United States hardcover contract was a breakthrough for me, a real boost to my career. I told Clyde to go ahead and accept the offers.
A few weeks later, I received and accepted offers from W. H. Allen to publish Sudanna, Sudanna in the United Kingdom, in hardcover and paperback.
In the spring of 1984, Jan and I spent every other weekend in Port Townsend, and she helped me with the accounts. A local bookkeeper had been selected, but her duties were limited to balancing the books monthly. Plenty of other work remained. Sometimes we handled things without asking Dad. On other occasions we accumulated items and asked him if he wanted to attend such and such a conference, or if he wanted to donate to particular causes, or if he wanted to deliver a speech in San Francisco, and the like. Occasionally he asked me to send signed copies of Dune or other Frank Herbert titles to people unsolicited, as a way of thanking them for favors.
Much of the time, if I asked him for financial information or the location of certain needed documentation, his eyes would glaze over and he would stiffen, unable to respond. He seemed to be wishing he were somewhere far away, or that I would just take care of it for him without asking. One weekend before leaving Port Townsend I told him it was necessary to transfer $100,000 between his accounts the following week. He made the withdrawals correctly, but two months later I found two cashier’s checks for $50,000 apiece in a pile of papers he had delayed giving me. In his grief, other important documents were constantly misplaced as well, papers that had been sent to him by publishers, accountants, lawyers, and banks.
I also found a large Alaskan gold nugget in the bottom of a file drawer, which I made sure he put into his safety deposit box. In the glove box of his car, he had an envelope containing thousands of dollars in cash. And visiting the safety deposit box with him, I found thousands more in cash. I suggested that he deposit a lot of that cash to one of his bank accounts, which he did.
Prior to my involvement in my father’s financial affairs, he had incurred a heavy debt load, with many items purchased on an installment basis, including motor vehicles, computer equipment, clothing and other articles. His credit cards were all at or near their limits. He owed a substantial amount of money on the Hana property and had refinanced the Port Townsend place in order to pay for construction at Hana. He had lines of credit at banks, which he dipped into frequently whenever he got in the hole and needed cash. He owed money to the Internal Revenue Service.
Frequently we heard him make insulting remarks about the IRS, which had hounded him throughout his writing career. My father had only paid lip service to financial planning without ever really understanding it, and now his tax problems were bigger than ever. As fast as money came in, he spent it on the heavy debt load, especially for ongoing construction at Hana. This left him behind on tax payments to the IRS, and caused him to write the sixth Dune book—Chapterhouse: Dune—at least two years sooner than he would have done otherwise.
While it is true that these books were the most lucrative of any that he wrote, it is not true that he didn’t want to write Dune sequels, and that he only did so because he was forced to do so. He loved the Dune universe, and enjoyed exploring the many dimensions of the fantastic realm he had created. The classic first novel in the series had been complex and multi-layered, and in the sequels—particularly God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune—he went on intellectual excursions through some of the layers, particularly those of religion, history, politics, and philosophy.
But he wanted to complete other projects in between the Dune books, other science fiction stories and novels in other genres. In 1972 he had published a mainstream novel, Soul Catcher. It was a story that touched a special chord in his heart, and he had been intending to write more about the Native American’s mystical view of the universe. He told Bill Ransom he was looking for another “Soul Catcher-like story.”
Back in the late 1950s, Frank Herbert had attempted to depart from science fiction so that he could write mainstream stories. He did this despite the success of Dragon in the Sea, but could not accomplish the shift. Now, despite the phenomenal success of Dune and its sequels—and even of The White Plague—he longed for other pastures. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy science fiction. In fact, he often said he loved the “elbow room for the imagination” that the genre provided, and the Dune universe was the most challenging of all. But he wanted to stretch, longed to try new things. Frank Herbert was a risk-taker, an adventurer at heart.
On a visit to Port Townsend several weeks later, at the end of March, I found my father still working on Chapterhouse: Dune. It was taking longer than expected. “I’ve been polishing it,” he said, “making it primo.” He paused, and his eyes misted over. “For Bev.”
Around that time, I was reading a book about Alexander the Great. Dad mentioned a number of interesting facts about him, including a unique method Alexander had for timing the charges of his troops. Apparently Alexander learned of a chemical that could change a red rag to blue in thirty minutes, and he ordered that such chemically treated rags be placed on certain spear tops.
“Really?” I said. “I never heard about that.”
“Yeah. It was the beginning of Alexander’s Ragtime Band!” He turned as deep a shade of purple as I’ve ever seen on him, and exploded into gleeful laughter. He got me pretty good on that one.
A short while later he completed Chapterhouse: Dune and mailed it to New York. A twelve-day, eight-city national book tour followed, for the new hardcover edition of Heretics of Dune. This book, like others before it, would rocket onto bestseller lists. A hardcover reissue of Dune appeared on bookshelves at the same time, and enjoyed brisk sales.
Dad took a copy of the work I had done on Man of Two Worlds with him on the tour and reviewed it in hotel rooms, making pencil notations in the margins. During the tour, his forehead was still scaly and blotchy from sunburn and medication, and he had to wear heavy makeup during interviews.
When he asked a mainland doctor to check this condition, shortly after returning to Port Townsend, he neglect
ed to ask about the big mole on his back, first noticed by Jan. He’d had them before, and wasn’t overly concerned about this one. It’s “probably benign,” he assured us. But he was procrastinating on a biopsy, which would determine for certain how dangerous it was. Disturbed by this, Penny, Jan and I pressed him to get it taken care of quickly. No one could force my father to do anything however, except my mother. Dad said medical attention for the mole, or “benign tumor” as he called it, would have to wait until after the book tour.
Los Angeles was one of the cities on the tour, where he was met at the airport by a limousine and driver, and escorted to public appearances by a young woman who was the Putnam book representative for the area.
In mid-April, Dad saw a three-and-a-half-hour rough-cut version of the Dune movie at Universal Studios in Universal City, California. It was a private showing in Screening Room #1. This was part of a four-hour, fifty-minute film David Lynch had made, and the producers were ordering more cuts, to get it down to a little over two hours. Dad was not overly concerned about this, and when he returned home told me he was pleased with the production, that director David Lynch had created a “visual feast,” capturing the book remarkably well. Even more vividly than Dad had imagined when he wrote it. “I hear my dialogue all through it,” he said.
Dad also said Putnam wanted us to do a joint book tour on Man of Two Worlds sometime in late 1985 or early 1986, when the book was published.
While I was still grieving for my mother, I had lunch with Dad in an Italian restaurant in Seattle late in April 1984. He was just back from a triumphant Heretics of Dune book tour, and I was happy for him. He had worked hard to achieve such success. We were at a small window table, in the Capitol Hill district of the city. A street wound up the hillside outside our window, with cars rolling by. Dad’s forehead was raw and scaly, worse in appearance than before, and he said he expected to be taking the skin medication for another two weeks.
We spoke of religion, and agreed that it seemed ridiculous for so many religious systems to contend that they had the “one and only” path to God. This was, of course, one of the subjects covered in an appendix of Dune, where the C.E.T. (Commission of Ecumenical Translators) was said to have held a meeting among representatives of the major religions, at which they set a common goal: “We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions. That weapon—the claim to possession of the one and only revelation.”
Without a title yet, I had in mind a story about the terrible things religions could make people do to one another, purportedly in the name of God. In the beginning of the tale, God would announce his location on a planet far across the universe and would invite people to come and visit him—for an unexplained purpose. The competing religions would then race for God, stopping at nothing, including murder, to get there first.
“There’s your title!” he exclaimed. “The Race for God!”
He was right. It was a good title. I added it to a file full of notes that I hoped to work on soon. We discussed two other story ideas, one of mine and one of his, with thoughts about collaborating on them some day, after the completion of Man of Two Worlds.
He said he was impressed with the work I had done on our collaboration, especially descriptive passages of the alien planet Dreenor and its people, through whose imagination the entire universe was sustained. He wanted to include those passages as I had written them, without revision.
Dad fell silent for a long while, then cleared his throat. Nervously, he told me he had fallen in love with the Putnam book representative he had met in Los Angeles while on his Heretics tour. “I hope you aren’t going to be upset about this,” he said, “but she’s only twenty-seven. She’s an old twenty-seven, though.” He added that this was in reference to her maturity, not to the way she looked, and didn’t reveal her name.
From across the table, I noticed my father’s eyes gave him the appearance of a guilt-consumed child looking painfully at an adult, fearful of impending punishment. He seemed to be waiting for my criticism.
Dad was sixty-three years old. He was approximately thirty-six years older than she was, which happened to be my age. I was, to say the least, shocked.
Trying to hide my feelings for his sake, I said, “You’re not really that far apart in age, Dad. If we accept the fact of genetic memory that you’ve written about in Dune, you’re five million and sixty-three years old, while she’s five million and twenty-seven.”
This pleased him exceedingly, and he beamed from ear to ear. Soon I heard the story repeated back to me by other members of the family.
He admitted that the young woman was not responding to his advances, though she seemed to like him. He thought it might take time, and then added that there were two other women of interest in his life, both of whom were in their mid-forties. Until now, I had not given much thought to the idea of him remarrying.
My father described an unusual experience during his last flight from Los Angeles to Seattle. On the plane, he was recalling the young book representative, thinking of the way she moved her hands and touched his arm. Somehow he was convinced he was picking these memories up as bits of data from her brain, what metaphysical philosophers called “petite perception.” Simultaneously, he received messages from my mother in which she told him, “It’s all right. She’s the one. You’re still alive, Frank! Live your life!”*
I looked away as he spoke, trying to keep my composure. Presently I looked back at him and smiled, reassuringly. “Then it’s all right,” I said.
As days passed, however, I became angry with my father about his love interests, and so did Jan. We said nothing to him about it, but it seemed to us that he hadn’t waited long enough, hadn’t spent enough time grieving. But when my mother passed away, we were beginning to realize, a terrible feeling of loneliness came over Frank Herbert. He had lost his lifelong companion, his reason for living, his true best friend. We tried to empathize, but it was not easy, for a lot of reasons.
Dad seemed terribly fragile, helpless and lonely. He was vulnerable. He telephoned me constantly, and it seemed that he needed to hear someone’s voice all the time. This wasn’t at all like a writer, perhaps, who should have been accustomed to cloistering himself in his study. In becoming a writer myself, however, I began to realize what he must have been feeling. When my mother lived with him, he could confine himself for hours without speaking to her, feeling great serenity because he knew she was there, just outside his door. It became quite different when someone was not physically nearby, not waiting to give him love and reassurance.
I knew he had been dependent upon my mother, so I expected him to be very low about her death. Since he always kept guns around we worried about suicide, and about a serious disease overtaking him, brought on by stress. Medical studies showed that losing a spouse was the number-one creator of stress. But Dad had always been a strong man, and I expected him to bounce back. I thought his writing would carry him far into old age, but it wasn’t working out the way I had expected. He didn’t seem to have his heart in it any more.
Howie Hansen, with his Native American perspective, later said, “Frank was a genius, and Bev was equal to but different from him. She had more power than he had. He was only a shell after she died.”
At times, Dad’s telephoning drove me crazy. He called me at all hours for minor things, pulling me out of my writing, shattering my concentration. He had a speed dialer on his telephone, with my name on it. While I considered this a compliment, since he depended on me so much, there was a definite downside. If someone in my household was on the line, and my two oldest daughters did talk on the phone a lot, he contacted the operator and put through an emergency call. (“Call waiting” service was not available from the phone company at the time.) None of his calls were emergencies, not even close. He needed paper products from a store in Seattle. Would we pick them up and bring them to Port Townsend? Or, had we seen a certain politician talking on television? That guy was dangerous, and we s
houldn’t think of voting for him in November.
An ingenious man, my father developed a habit of calling me at 5:30 A.M., when he knew no one would be on the line. One morning, Jan answered the phone, then woke me up. I stumbled downstairs in my bathrobe, half asleep.
“Hullo,” I said.
A dial tone greeted me. When I finally got through to Dad forty-five minutes later, he told me he hung up to take a call on his other line from an East Coast reporter who wanted to interview him.
When I asked him what he was calling me about, he went into a plot point about Man of Two Worlds, and asked my opinion. I wasn’t sure why this conversation couldn’t have occurred at a more civil hour, but I gave him my thoughts about the story question, not mentioning something else that was on my mind. Afterward, I returned to bed, but couldn’t go back to sleep. All that day I was too tired to write, and could only muddle through my insurance agency tasks.
Since Dad gave me very little story copy that he had written during the year, I could only presume that he wrote material and subsequently threw it away. He probably rose early to work on Man of Two Worlds, ran into distractions and then could not proceed. At one point, he told me that I might have to write the entire book myself, with him adding “finishing touches.”
Dad still hadn’t gone in to get the mole on his back removed, and the skin condition on his face could be more serious than he was letting on. It was becoming obvious that he had neglected his own health while caring for Mom’s. Whenever we visited him, we brought along homemade soups, pasta dishes, desserts and other foods that we knew he liked. We stocked his freezer with them, so whenever he was alone he could at least know people who loved him had prepared something for his table. Gradually the scaliness on his face cleared, and he began to look much better. But he was more nervous than ever, constantly in a state of hyperactivity.
Dreamer of Dune Page 48