Heinlein did not go home that Christmas, and used the time principally to refocus his priorities. He was invited to Westport, Connecticut, again, where he did some life-modeling for an artist-friend.23 He had modeled, for one reason or another, for years (“artist’s model” is on his pre-Academy list of miscellaneous jobs he had held). That year (1928), he mentioned modeling for Coca-Cola ads (though none of these ads have been identified).24
His first priority was to raise his class standing and particularly his standing in Executive. True to his resolve, he had not another demerit. His class standing for the last year was 44 out of 243, but his four-year average Order of General Merit was twentieth in his class, and that was the number that counted. His numbers in all the subjects were mostly on the border between grades of B and A. Interestingly, he did not stand particularly high in English (90th in the class), though his marks in engineering and aeronautics put him back into the top 10 percent of his class.
He was promoted to Midshipman 1PO (Petty Officer, First Class) on January 29, 1929. Now he would carry the regimental flag. The comments for the graduates’ portraits in The Lucky Bag must already have been written by that time, as his rating is still shown there as 2PO. In his graduate portrait, he begins to look familiar—an obviously handsome young man, but with a narrower jaw than we are accustomed to seeing.
It was the custom for roommates to write the tribute to each other, to appear as captions to the photo portraits on facing pages in their graduating Lucky Bag; Heinlein’s write-up of his roommate, Seraphin Bach Perreault, is the first surviving sample of his writing for public consumption:
Perry may be expected to do the unexpected. No known rules appear to govern his conduct. His friends are often surprised, occasionally shocked, but frequently amused at his actions. He was born in Kansas of French and Scottish parents and educated in the public schools of Kansas City. A month spent at the Citizens Military Training Camp at Leavenworth resulted in military ambitions and an appointment to Annapolis. While here he has been a sport-a-season man, four years a member of varsity squads. An unsuspected tendency towards the non-regulation kept him from stripes.
Superficially a social recluse, rarely seen at hops, Perry has been a constant source of wonder to his roommate because of his ability to keep from six to ten girls interested at once. He has entirely too big a heart to be restricted to one. In spite of his weakness for the ladies, he has the enviable record of never having given away a pin or miniature. His undoubted ability, his willingness to work, and his cheerful disposition should stand him in good stead in the fleet.25
By comparison to the sometimes empurpled prose of the class history in The Lucky Bag, Heinlein’s writing is already clear, direct, relatively unornamented—serviceable. Perry’s prose portrait of Heinlein reveals a glimpse of the person:
The stellar rise of our Bob has been exemplified by his promotion from the “boy general” to 2 P.O. But this indicates little of his true self. Starring for the course of four years is by no means a trifle, and his prowess as a fencer is established for he was the recipient of the 1927 epee medal. He does have uncanny ability to do those things which to others seem impossible.
Oftentimes Bob has stumbled into the room, cheeks aglow, eyes flashing, and in a quavering voice would say, “Well, boys, I’ve reformed. I’m in love again.” Then just as night follows day or ebb follows flood he would resume his previous ways. “Repentance oft I swore—but was I sober when I swore?”
Memories of the cruise give to us our fondest dreams, but Bob disagrees. Too many teas and receptions aboard to suit him. Instead, he would rather stay below and study engineering. Moonlight canoe rides and cruises in an admiral’s barge, chaperoned by a coxswain, are not included in his aversion to life afloat.
We hope Bob will stay in the Navy, for if he goes in the construction corps, as he threatens, some of us will probably crash in the planes he will design. “I consider any plane which I design a success if it rises high enough to crash.”
Very Wet Stuff of him.
Heinlein’s small circle of friends was diminishing even further; Elwood “Woody” Teague left the Academy in August 1928 to take up a career in the stock market, and John S. “Whitey” Arwine discovered an unsuspected heart murmur and was let go in the spring of 1929. The end of the 1920s was thoroughly modern and buzzing on a caffeine high, and there were many things a bright young man might do rather than hide himself away in a ship. In the jubilee year of the lightbulb, Henry Ford sponsored a celebration in Edison’s honor. Philip Francis Nowlan introduced the first science-fiction comic strip, Buck Rogers. The dirigible airship Graf Zeppelin circled the world. The postwar economic depression was long over, and the stock market was soaring.
But the Naval Academy was not a complete backwater: the Fox Film Corporation had arranged to film an Army-Navy football rivalry film—Salute!—on the U.S. Naval Academy campus that spring (despite the discontinuation of the Army-Navy game). Director John Ford brought popular star George O’Brien as the Army cadet hero, and the entire USC football team to play the Army and Navy teams. This film launched the film careers of two Trojan football players, Ward Bond and Marion Morrison (better known by his stage name, John Wayne). In 1929 films began to talk. The film was released in a silent version and a talking version—neither to great success.
Heinlein had migrated into fire control as his area of specialization, and his overnight trip to the naval shipyards in Norfolk, Virginia, in May of that year26 may have been a practicum for advanced instruction.
One thing new this year was the news that the Naval Academy would be eligible for the Rhodes Scholarship for the first time, starting the next year. Heinlein was to be considered for the first Rhodes Scholarship given at the Naval Academy.
The Rhodes Scholarships are the legacy of Cecil John Rhodes, a nineteenth-century British statesman and colonial pioneer, particularly of South Africa, who left the bulk of his estate, when he died in 1902, to establish scholarships sending colonials overseas to Oxford for two years (with the possibility of renewal for a third year), where they would get breadth and develop their abilities.
The terms of Rhodes’s will specified that the scholarship trust should seek out scholars of exceptional ability, without regard to need, race, or religion, but “not … merely bookworms”: the selection criteria included literary and scholastic attainments; qualities of maturity, truthfulness, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness, and fellowship; athletic attainments, or at least physical vigor demonstrated by a fondness for outdoor activities; and moral vigor, as shown by involvement in public duties. In 1929 each state nominated its own candidates for the scholarships, after a series of interviews. The entire process usually involved about three hundred applications for the thirty-two available scholarships. The selection would be made at a meeting of the selection committee in early December, six months after graduation.
Heinlein never recorded his thinking about the Rhodes Scholarship—in fact, he never mentioned it at all, and all that is known about the matter is in his naval records. But it is easy to see the opportunity it might represent for Heinlein to get back on track for astronomy. Astronomy was a kind of intellectual intoxication for him.
There was very little real astronomy done in the Navy in 1929—but there was the U.S. Naval Observatory, a very prestigious billet, even though most of the astronomical work done there had to do with standards of weight and length measurement. Still, modern physics and modern astronomy—in fact, all of twentieth-century science—had started at the Academy in the 1870s. Albert Michelson was in the news again in 1929, announcing a new series of measurements of the speed of light—the same experiments he had started right there on the banks of the Severn fifty years earier. Ironically, Heinlein’s astronomy textbook that year, The Elements of Astronomy by E. A. Fath, was incredibly out-of-date, even though it had been published just three years earlier, in 1926. It discussed the luminiferous
ether—a concept already all but completely discarded—but did not even mention Einstein’s Special Relativity or the Michelson-Morley experiments:
I find it sardonically amusing that I was required to study Fath’s book at the school where Michelson graduated in 1873, and to recite from Fath’s book a few feet—less than a hundred yards—from the spot where Michelson performed his first famous experiment in 1878.27
Heinlein asked the Superintendent of the Academy to apply on his behalf for the first Rhodes Scholarship to be given at the Academy. It was a good gamble: it would be two years of fully paid study at Oxford, and after that, he could credibly apply to the Naval Observatory or for some other mathematical or astronomical job.
He had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
There was some doubt as to whether Heinlein should apply from Missouri, his state of residence, or from Maryland, the location of the Academy—or from wherever he was stationed. It would have to be finalized when he received his first billet. In extremely formal language the Superintendent drafted a letter postdated to 1 August 1929, when the selection process for the 1930 scholarships would commence, recommending him to the selection committee of whatever state Heinlein would ultimately apply from:
Dear Sir:
Robert Anson Heinlein has been selected to represent the United States Naval Academy in the competition for a Rhodes Scholarship from the State of _______________________.
/s/ S. S. Robinson
Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy,
Superintendent.
Secretary, Committee of Selection,
State of _____________________28
What Heinlein had going for him was that the selection committee in the U.S. favored institutions that had never had a successful candidate before. What he had going against him was that his academic credentials were not absolutely top-notch. He stood fifth in academics in his class, though the disciplinary actions brought his overall standing down to twentieth. And the Naval Academy was not well regarded at that time as an academic institution—it didn’t even issue a graduating degree in engineering, though the Rhodes selection committee waived the formal requirement of a bachelor’s degree in this case.
And then June Week and graduation was upon him. June Week encompassed a number of arcane rituals at the Academy: on the last day of classes, the Firsts would go about with uniforms in deliberate disarray and hold a mock funeral for their academic career at the foot of the statue of Tecumseh in the forecourt of Bancroft Hall. The last athletics of the year were a series of Army-Navy competitions, with the cadets of West Point coming to the Annapolis campus for lacrosse, track, and baseball competitions that in 1929 drew “the largest crowds ever assembled on Navy fields.”29
Heinlein elected to cut the formal social events—the Ring Dance and the graduation ceremony itself—and left for Kansas City by train on June 3, to spend some time with family and friends before reporting to his first billet on the USS Lexington at San Pedro Naval Station. He was assigned a Navy service number, 0-62624, on graduation, the first of any official identifiers for him, since Missouri did not keep vital statistics in that time before Social Security.
Before he left, he and Gus Gray and Barrett Laning made a pact: if any of them were killed, they would visit at least one of the others from the astral plane, or whatever lay beyond death. That way, they would have personal proof of life after death. That was a major point of The Quest, and it would continue after the Naval Academy—though Heinlein thought Laning was more serious about The Quest than he was.30
Heinlein was still on a train headed for Kansas City on Thursday, June 6, 1929—the last day as midshipmen for the Class of 1929, concluding with the actual graduation ceremonies. His name was listed alphabetically among the rest of the midshipmen graduating as ensigns.
Commissioning and assignment of first billet followed within a week. Most—205 of the 240—were to be commissioned ensigns in regular line. Heinlein received his commission dated June 6. Nineteen of his classmates were commissioned Second Lieutenants of Marines and four others were commissioned to the Supply Corps. Eleven were disqualified because of physical defects and would not receive commissions. Instead, they would resign. Heinlein’s eyesight was still holding up. He had escaped his brother’s fate.
9
FRYING PAN AND FIRE
Leaving the campus early in June Week, Heinlein cut himself off from the social activities of his class—partly because of the expense, to be sure, but possibly also because of the gush of sentimental fellow-feeling.
At this stage, Heinlein was part of the way into any personal goals he might have set for himself going into the Naval Academy: he had succeeded in bootstrapping a career for himself on very little money. With hard work and a little luck—always luck!—he might get the Rhodes Scholarship, and that would open up more possibilities for him.
Back in Annapolis, immediately following the graduation ceremony which took place on Thursday, June 6, the graduating midshipmen traditionally gathered in Tecumseh Court and tossed their white caps into the air to celebrate their release—a ceremony immediately followed by a number of weddings at the chapel in the Yard, far the most important of all the social events.
Instead of celebrating release and freedom—and marriage!—Heinlein went directly to work. From Kansas City he would travel to San Pedro, California, to report by June 23 to his billet, the USS Lexington. That could only have been exciting: these new aircraft carriers were the high tech of the 1920s—as close as you could get to living science fiction in 1929.
On the train home, Heinlein noticed a pretty twenty-year-old with a major bust, definitely interesting—and interested.1 Mary Briggs was engaged to be married—she was, in fact, meeting her fiancé in St. Louis. But as that Friday evening came on she surprised Heinlein by seizing an opportunity for a kiss, and that kiss was an unmistakable invitation. Late that night, he decided to risk it: he dropped down to Lower Berth 7 and hesitantly parted the curtain. She was waiting for him, excited and happy, and things moved faster than he was quite prepared for. There was no seduction, no elaborate protestations of “love,” no having to talk her into bed. They fell into sex without even thinking about the condoms he was carrying.
Heinlein was completely unprepared for this. She was the first woman he had ever known, he said, who was a mature human being—“with warmth and depth and outflowing matur[ity,] years and years beyond her contemporaries.” 2 She made him feel inexperienced and clumsy, as if sex without complications and concessions to Victorian notions of propriety and hypocrisy was a completely new thing to him—as, indeed, it was, an undiscovered territory opening up before him.
This changed everything. Suddenly he saw all the girls he had slept with before as “unfinished human beings, usually narcissistic.”3 He was frankly overwhelmed. Decades later, he told her: “Mary, you put a mark on me that never wore off … to the benefit of every girl or woman I ever knew thereafter, in or out of bed. You oriented me, in major and important respects.”4
He had missed the formal graduation on Thursday, but his real graduation—into adulthood—happened on Friday, June 7, 1929. From Mary Briggs, Heinlein got the adult vision, of sex as more than a dance of seduction, of reflexes and the mechanics of mucous membranes in friction. She was exactly the tonic Robert Heinlein needed at that moment in his life.
He came to stay with her at her home in East St. Louis that weekend. The sex was wonderful by itself, but he was half—more than half—in love with her. “If you had said to me ‘I’m not going to marry him’—well, I suspect that we would have married before I ever left East St. Louis.”5 But they both had appointments to keep, and they did separate.
This relationship was a true enlightenment for him, and he kept changing internally. In releasing himself from the sexual rules and mores of his upbringing, he liberated himself from all the Bible Belt Christianity he disbelieved but had nonetheless held on to since childhood. This may be the first moment that Robert Heinlein ce
ased to be just another bright young man in search of a career like so many other bright young men in 1929.
Kansas City had changed. Tom Pendergast had removed his main rival, Joe Shannon, by kicking him upstairs, to the U.S. House of Representatives. The campaign was starting up as Heinlein got into town, and Tom Pendergast and his seven hundred “Joe Doakes” precinct captains were finally in complete control of Kansas City. Senator Reed, now retired, made a big fuss over him—the first (and last!) of his appointments to the military academies ever to graduate—and Robert was treated to an adult’s introduction to the wide-open nightlife of Kansas City. Heinlein was in his element. “I was spoiled by Kansas City under the Pendergast machine,” he later remarked: “The Merchant’s Lunch at the Chesterfield Club included five strippers to the buff. Very nice buff, too.”6
Heinlein didn’t spend all his time with the machine hangers-on. At some time, probably during this period, he must have looked into joining the Masons—one of his friends at the Academy had him about talked into it—but decided his interest in the matter had faded.7 Heinlein family life seems not to have occupied his thoughts in 1929. Things must have been very different with so many of the children away, and his older brothers in the Army. He spent much of his leave away from home.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 13