Around this time my father, almost sixty-four years old, began talking about buying a new Porsche. I vowed to myself I would never get in such a vehicle with him, for obvious reasons. Recently he had gotten a ticket for going more than sixty miles an hour on city streets.
He also made arrangements to rent a nice apartment near the Strand in the Los Angeles area (Manhattan Beach), so that he could work on the two screenplays near Hollywood and be around many of the people who were putting the finishing touches on the Dune movie. He had the Hollywood bug, and even spoke of directing a film one day.
But above all, he had fallen completely in love with the Putnam book representative, Theresa Shackelford, who lived in the Los Angeles area. He wanted to spend more time with her, with the object of marriage. She was now twenty-eight years old.
My father was emerging into his second youth, desperately attempting to grab another chance at life. He fell in love with a young woman, wanted to drive fast cars and climb mountains. He and Theresa took skin diving lessons and Dad developed a liking for popular music, especially the songs of Engelbert Humperdinck.
One day my father asked Penny, “When you were so in love with Ron after meeting him, did you have butterflies in your stomach and hear bells ringing?”
“That was a long time ago,” Penny said. “I don’t remember.”
“Well that’s the way I feel now,” Dad said.
In early September 1984, I helped Dad move some of his things out of Xanadu into a big yellow Ryder rental truck, which he was having driven to California. He would accompany the truck, driving his Mercedes coupe. It was an interesting scene, watching this famous man do once more what we had done so many times in my youth when we were poor, packing boxes “with a shoehorn” and moving. He still had his remarkable strength and endurance, and hardly broke a sweat as he ran in and out of the house carrying heavy boxes and other articles. He was planning to keep both the Port Townsend and Hawaii houses. While he was in California he wanted me to go to Port Townsend once a week to pick up his mail, handling what I could myself and sending the rest to him.
All during 1984, the Dune movie was advertised as the greatest film production of all time, and perhaps the most expensive. Comparisons were drawn between it and Gone with the Wind, and there was a great deal of secrecy about who was playing the lead role of Paul Atreides—Kyle MacLachlan. When the actor was interviewed on television, his back was to the camera. It was one of the most coveted screen roles in years. His Seattle phone number, known only to a few people, was 547-DUNE.
It may have been the most heavily promoted movie in history. Months before the film came out, toys and other novelty items were made available, in addition to Avalon Hill’s Dune board game, which had been out for years. There were toy sandworms and Paul Atreides dolls, Dune weapons, obsidian paperweights with House Atreides gold hawks on them, tee-shirts, posters, games, soundtrack record albums and tapes, calendars, puzzles and mazes. Merchandisers had to pay Universal Studios as much as $100,000 apiece for the rights to produce spinoff products.
A mind-boggling assortment of spinoff books appeared as well, plus reissued Frank Herbert books. Almost everything he had ever published went back into print or had its press run increased. Most of the books were published by Berkley/Putnam. In addition to reprints and special boxed sets of all the books in the Dune series they came out with The Art of Dune, The Dune Storybook, Dune Activity Book, Dune Coloring Book, Dune Coloring & Activity Book, Dune Cut-Out Activity Book, Dune Pop-Up Panorama Book, a book about the movie production entitled The Making of Dune, and a speculative compendium about the worlds of Dune, entitled The Dune Encyclopedia. Every envelope and parcel mailed by Berkley/Putnam during the year was stamped, in red letters, The Year of Dune.
Universal Studios established a Dune fan club, and in only a few weeks had several thousand members. Under arrangement with Lifetime Learning Systems, Universal also developed The World of Dune teaching kit, which was given to four thousand middle and high school teachers in the United States and Canada. Waldenbooks came out with a contest, “The World of Dune Sweepstakes.” The winner received a trip to Los Angeles and a dinner with Frank Herbert. Waldenbooks also produced and distributed interviews of Frank Herbert and David Lynch on cassette tape.
The film’s budget was variously quoted between forty and sixty million dollars, production numbers that were, at the time, astronomical. Universal Studios had a promotional budget of an additional eight million dollars. They announced the movie would be released just before Christmas 1984, timed to obtain the most attention for Academy Award nominations.
Promoters, eager to take advantage of Christmas shoppers and follow in the footsteps of Star Wars merchandising (which had brought in three billion dollars in revenues in addition to movie ticket sales), tried to promote Dune in the same manner, with toys, coloring books and the like aimed at children and teenagers. Frank Herbert did not object to the merchandising, saying the investors needed to do it in order to maximize their profits, and the movie might never have been made without the prospect of such additional earnings.
But from the beginning I had my doubts about this approach. I knew from fan mail that young people read the Dune books, but they were a decided minority. The books were far too intellectual for most people in that age group. As weeks passed many fans were put off by glitzy, misdirected promotions, and sales on the novelty items were slow.
In the midst of all this, Dad signed on to do a Pacific Bell television commercial, which would run during prime time and special events, including the Super Bowl. In the commercial, Frank Herbert stood in front of an alien backdrop, looking rather different without his beard from the way his fans were accustomed to seeing him. He spoke of a subject he knew very well—the future.
Around September, when Dad was leaving for California, he was telling people he liked what he had seen of the film. When asked about it, he frequently kissed his fingertips and exclaimed, “They’re capturing the essence of my book, doing it just right!”
His contract with Dino De Laurentiis didn’t allow him to publicly criticize the film, but Dad always said if he didn’t like it he would remain silent. He really did like it and was extremely excited. He predicted that it would be a cult movie, and in the innovative hands of David Lynch felt it would be a breakthrough film as well, exploring ground that had never before been covered on film.
In early December, Dad took his new love, Theresa Shackelford, to a world premiere of the movie at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. President and Mrs. Reagan were among more than one thousand in attendance. Also present were stars of the movie, including Kyle MacLachlan, Dean Stockwell, and Francesca Annis. The building had been decorated to look like the Palace of Arrakeen on the planet Dune, and it housed an enthusiastic audience. After the movie one woman kept saying, “Wow! Wow! Oh, wow!” A state dinner at the White House followed, at which the President and Mrs. Reagan told Dad they had enjoyed the movie.
The Group Health premiere would be held the following week in Seattle. Dad would come up by himself from Los Angeles and would escort his favorite aunt, Peggy Rowntree, to the event.
Dad was given fifty tickets for his friends and family, and I coordinated the guest list, making doubly certain that each invitee would attend before mailing out tickets. This was on top of all the Man of Two Worlds work, our Hawaii trip preparations, the handling of Dad’s voluminous paperwork (including the accumulation of data needed for his 1984 taxes) and the preparation of my own taxes—all of which had to be done before we could leave in early January.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 11, 1984, Jan and I picked up Penny and her husband Ron at the airport, then met Dad in his hotel suite at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle. My brother and his gay lover were already there when we arrived. Dad looked natty in his thirty-five-year-old tuxedo, with a ruffled white shirt and a black bow tie. Gold cufflinks glimmered at the sleeves.
I took
him aside and we discussed a number of his pressing income tax and legal matters. We spoke of Man of Two Worlds as well, and Dad said we might create a “mushy” monster in the story, perhaps a “dragon that runs away when kids throw rocks at it.”
At 5:00 P.M., all of us walked across the street to a Dune reception at the Rainier Bank Tower. The reception was held on the fortieth floor, which afforded a panoramic view of Seattle and Elliott Bay. Guests were dressed in tuxedos and jewel-bedecked evening gowns. The hors d’oeuvres and wines were first-class. Mayor Royer of Seattle was present, along with a number of other notables, including mountain climber Jim Whittaker.
At 7:00, the family members and V.I.P.s were taken in three limousines to the King Cinema a mile away. Powerful spotlights stood in front of the theater, crisscrossing beams of light through the night sky. We filed into a reserved loge area and sat in big, soft seats. A murmuring air of anticipation filled the theater, as everyone wondered how close the movie would come to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece.
At 7:30, Dad walked down to the stage in front of the curtained screen and spoke to a full house, introducing the movie. He said it had been a long time in the making, and gave a brief history of earlier attempts, including mention of Jodorowsky’s plan for a fourteen-hour epic and a subsequent screenplay that would have made an incest movie about Paul and his mother. Upon learning of the incest concept, the audience gasped. All along, Dad had been correct in asserting that his fans would never tolerate anything like that.
When he spoke poignantly about Mom and the reasons for the Group Health benefit, including her initial efforts in setting it up shortly before her death, his voice broke and he could hardly speak. He closed by saying, “This is for Bev,” then stood there looking very lonely and sad. The audience gave him a standing ovation, and then, head down to conceal his tears, he walked back to his seat.
The curtain went up, the lights dimmed, and Toto’s magnificent soundtrack filled our ears. It was a wide screen, best for this particular film, and soon I found myself immersed into the story. The desert scenes were spectacular, bringing to mind an alien Lawrence of Arabia. The atmosphere in the Palace of Arrakeen was Shakespearean, with dark, mysterious rooms and corridors and scheming, plotting characters. When Paul rode the giant sandworm, chills ran down my spine. The audience clapped and cheered when Alia stabbed the Baron Harkonnen with a gom jabbar needle and thrust him into the jaws of a sandworm—a slight variation from the book, in which he slumped over in his suspensors, dead from the gom jabbar.
When the film finished and the lights went back on, I looked at my father, who was in my row two seats away. He was staring at the screen, transfixed, eyes open wide and face almost expressionless. An empty box of popcorn lay at his feet.
For nearly an hour, Dad signed movie programs and books until his hand ached and he could do no more. He said he had forgotten to bring along the wristband that gave him additional strength for marathon signings.
A short while later, in an interview on national television, Dad mentioned the novel we were writing together. The interviewer asked him if I was really a good writer or if Frank Herbert was only doing something to help his son. Dad’s eyebrows arched at the rude inquiry, and he responded, “The acorn didn’t fall far from the oak tree.”
Forbes magazine said Dune might become the first billion-dollar movie, far surpassing the revenues of any other motion picture in history. Dad thought this was entirely possible. Based upon book sales, he said the movie had a built-in audience of fifty million people, and many of them would want to see it over and over, just as they read and reread the book. In the opening weeks, as expected, crowds lined up to purchase tickets.
Going along with the movie, book sales skyrocketed, and the paperback edition of Dune reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. “It’s highly unusual for this to happen nearly twenty years after publication,” Dad told me. In honor of the occasion, his publisher had the list from the newspaper enlarged and framed for him. For the week of January 6, 1985, it showed Dune number one, ahead of novels by Danielle Steel and Stephen King.
Chapter 42
Bridge Over Troubled Water
MOM’S CEREMONY would be held at Kawaloa on February 7, 1985, the first anniversary of her passing. While we found a cruise ship to take us there late in January, there were no return voyages until June. As a consequence, Jan and I made arrangements to live in the house at Kawaloa through June, taking our children with us and putting them in public school for that time. We had high hopes of making an adventure out of it and that it would be an alternate cultural encounter for my children—somewhat like experiences I’d had in Mexico in the 1950s.
In mid-January 1985, before boarding the ship in San Francisco, Jan and I drove further south to Manhattan Beach near Los Angeles to visit my father. He had asked me to bring a typewriter to him, and I assumed he meant his vintage 1970 Olympia electric. It turned out to be the wrong one. He wanted the tiny portable he had used in London to work on the screenplay of “Flash Gordon” for Dino De Laurentiis.
This time, after a moment’s displeasure, he forgot about my perceived failure and nothing more was said about it. But it reminded me of a plethora of other small failings that I, my siblings or my children had committed before his eyes, not performing according to his exacting standards. It was frustrating for me, trying to please this man. I was thirty-seven, but around him I often felt like a small child, unable to meet my father’s expectations.
It made me think about something that hadn’t occurred to me, and I made new notes for my journal, notes that would help me to better understand myself. In recent years, as I strove to become a writer, I had been asking my father questions not only about writing but about science and math and history and any number of things, much as a curious child might do. I hadn’t asked nearly as many questions when I had been small, since he had not been available for me. Now that he was available and we had dramatically improved our relationship, I was doing a lot of catching up.
For a brief time, we met his auburn-haired girlfriend, Theresa. Shy and intellectual, she seemed quite nice and paid special attention to Margaux. Then she left for an appointment.
Bookshelves lined many walls of the apartment, and it had a large, cheerful kitchen, filled with state-of-the-art cooking devices. In his loft office, a little nook reached by climbing a separate stairway, Dad proudly showed me an extensive assortment of new camera gear he had purchased for the Himalayas trip the following year. We spoke again of making the trip together, and looked forward to it.
Having gone as far as I could on Man of Two Worlds, I gave him a complete copy of the manuscript, as much as I had written thus far. He said he would get busy on it after completing a screenplay for “The Santaroga Barrier.”
“I have a Harold Lloyd chase scene in the screenplay,” he said, “where the person chased doesn’t know he’s being chased.”
I also had with me his uncompleted manuscript of Circle Times, a historically accurate story about Northwest Salish Indians, a project he had abandoned in the 1970s. Having read it carefully, I had a number of suggestions I thought might improve the pacing and organization of the story, and he liked my ideas. We made plans to collaborate on the book when time allowed.
“First I’m going to write ‘Dune 7,’” he said.
“Another one?”
He smiled and said, “I can’t seem to let go of the series.”
I asked him how the Dune movie was doing, and he said it was setting box office records overseas. The results were not as clear in the United States, he added. I asked him what he meant, but he didn’t seem anxious to talk about it.
On a file cabinet in his office were the framed list of bestsellers and the Dune movie clapboard he had used ceremoniously to begin the filming in March 1983. The board had written on it:
DUNE…Slate 1, Take 1
I gave him an autographed copy of my latest paperback novel, The Garbage Chronicles. Just as he oft
en wrote messages from father to son in the books he gave me, I now reversed it, with a message from the son to the father.
On January 20, 1985, Jan, Margaux and I boarded the S.S. Independence in San Francisco. Julie and Kim were flying to Hawaii separately, because of conflicting schedules. In the ship’s lounge we saw Dad in the Pacific Bell commercial, during a break in the Superbowl game.
“Pop-Pop!” Margaux squealed.
Upon arriving in Honolulu, Jan and Margaux flew a Royal Hawaiian Air Service Cessna to Maui, while I chartered a thirty-two-foot sailboat. It was more than thirty miles to Molokai, the first landfall. We sailed in moderate winds at first but the wind died down and we had to motor. Unfortunately the boat motored at only two or two and a half knots. It was painfully slow! We proceeded in this way all night, and instead of anchoring at Molokai as planned we made directly for Lahaina on the island of Maui. I alternated at the helm with the skipper, and we slept in shifts.
When we were out in the Big Water, I asked the skipper where the lifeboat was, thinking he must have an inflatable raft stowed somewhere. To my surprise, he said rather casually, “I thought about it, but never got around to it.”
“Oh,” I said, in a small voice. How ironic my situation was, taking this route because I thought it was safer! The boat had a ship-to-shore radio, flares and lifejackets, but on the radio I heard a Coast Guard report of another boat taking on water in its number-one hold.
It was a clear night and the blackest sky I had ever seen. Stars glimmered along the horizon to the south, and to the west where the sun had set was a bright star or planet. There were shooting stars and luminous, iridescent flying fish.
As morning broke, we passed the island of Lanai and the vast Dole pineapple fields. A porpoise swam alongside the starboard bow, and in the Auau Channel approaching the Maui town of Lahaina we saw a dozen humpback whales. It was impressive watching them flop their monstrous black tails and blow water through their spouts.
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