Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Robert and Leslyn started hosting informal breakfasts Sunday midmornings for the workers in their district, to provide a neutral ground where all the different factions could come face-to-face. Differences might not actually be resolved, but these occasions could encourage people to realize that they had common ground politically when they had common ground socially, and that’s the first condition to resolving differences. Leslyn Heinlein recorded some thoughts about this process:

  … one of the most useful functions which Bob and I performed in our political activities was that of getting people together who were in basic agreement and didn’t know it. It is amazing how quickly methods of accomplishing a desired end can be worked out, once two people who have been busy hating each other’s guts get the idea that they want to accomplish the same end and have been fighting over how. When one can approach a problem agreed as to the end in view and the motives of the other, the differences can be discussed (instead of fought over) ad seriatum, unemotionally, and a solution satisfactory to both worked out, in most cases.36

  What worked for a congressional district would work for the larger sections in the Democratic Party. Heinlein was appointed to the state Democratic Central Committee and to the Veterans Division of the National Committee (after being elected to the Los Angeles County Central Committee) in 1936.37 They began following up Sunday breakfasts with Sunday afternoon teas for which Leslyn made butter cookies with one of the newly popular aluminum cookie presses (both the Heinleins loved gadgets of all kinds: Robert even had a set of glass balls with ice inside, so they could keep iced drinks cold without diluting them as the event wore on). There the members of different factions could communicate across the ideological divides. Nobody wins elections with tea and cookies, Heinlein pointed out, but the lesson of Sinclair’s defeat in 1934 was that defections in your own party can kill you deader than the opposition of your enemy. “Party harmony makes a fine hobby for anyone.”38

  Their teamwork was superb, and Robert relied on the support Leslyn gave him. They were working together very closely, and they planned their moves carefully by talking everything over at home. When, in public, Robert would suddenly stop in midsentence and grope for a word or be caught by a stammer about to become obvious, Leslyn could often complete his sentences; and when her attention was diverted, he could complete her sentences.39 They joked about the Heinlein group mind, and Robert was careful to explain that they were actually working as a team, even though most of the public attention was directed to him.40 And that was the way Leslyn wanted it: with the opposition focused on Robert, she could maneuver freely behind the scenes.41 They made a very effective team.

  But Robert noticed that some little things weren’t quite right with Leslyn anymore. They had been married for more than three years, living in each other’s laps for most of that time, and he knew she was changing in some way, not just revealing a new aspect of her personality. Nothing was really definite: unexplained irritations, maybe, and flashes of temper from time to time in private. 42

  Otherwise, things were fine. They were enjoying their political work—and Heinlein found that there were days at a time when he didn’t miss the Navy. He was finally getting over “swallowing the anchor.”43 Their biggest problem was that they were scraping by on Heinlein’s Navy pension and occasional income from sales jobs. Real estate didn’t work out for him. Sinclair’s loss in the 1934 election had put the established real-estate brokers back in business and eliminated the market niche he had hoped to exploit. And, at any rate, he found he had no talent for sales. He was even thinking about taking a correspondence course in architecture; he had some ideas about planning single-family housing—just jotted notes at this point, something to play with.44

  Leslyn wrote a piece for Rob Wagner’s Script magazine, “Communists Are Religious Fanatics.”45 The communists had faded a little into the background after the EPIC constitutional convention in May 1935, but by September 1935, Sinclair was convinced that the communists had co-opted the EPIC movement in California, and he thereafter distanced himself from EPIC, leaving Richard Otto (and the Heinleins) to struggle with the problem on their own.

  Pragmatically, Robert and Leslyn knew that the Democratic Party was rotten with communists. “Communists are not villains,” he said, but they were very much in the way and insofar as the success of the Democratic Party was concerned, they were divisive to a degree that could not be tolerated—part of the problem and not part of the solution.46 It was a continuing struggle—and an utterly necessary one, for the party’s strength in California was very new and could wither away, leaving the Republicans again in control, if the party were allowed to split. Heinlein was not a Popular Front liberal.

  For his efforts, he got on the Communist Party’s “better dead” list.

  Specifically, I have incurred the ire of any and all communist party members and/or party liners who have become aware of my existence. As a left wing but anti-communist politico a large number of them have become aware of my existence … . I once achieved the honor of being moved up to spot number four on the black list of the communist party in California. 47

  The dislike was mutual. Individual communists may not be villains, but Heinlein had the then common liberal’s abhorrence of communism as an active force in the world:

  Let me go on record that I regard communism as expressed by the U.S.S.R. and its friends here and elsewhere as a grisly horror, a tyranny maintained by force and terror, utterly subversive of human liberty, freedom of thought, and dignity. I regard it as Red fascism, distinguishable from black and brown fascism by differences of no importance to me nor to its victims.48

  So far as he was concerned, European fascism (Germany and Italy) and Soviet communism were identically evil.49

  The tension of the 1936 campaigns was relieved from time to time that year by visits to and from Sally Rand.50 After the Century of Progress exhibition finally closed in Chicago, she had taken her fan- and bubble-dance acts to the California Pacific Exposition in San Diego, by invitation. The Expo organization hoped she could help bolster attendance, which had begun to sag.

  She worked hard for the Exposition, though she was literally stoned on April 15, 1936: she was assaulted by rocks thrown from the crowd—for no apparent reason—that left her bleeding and with bruises under her left eye and on her thighs. But Sally Rand was a trouper: when not dancing, she gave wholesome interviews, attended church services, and toured San Diego and environs, playing the role of celebrity. She baked a cake for the Expo’s Palace of Better Housing, took part in a balloon blowing contest at the Zone, and gave open lectures to teachers and groups and teachers on “the art of the dance.”51

  The Expo had a competing act, nudist Rosita Royce, who trained white doves to perch strategically on her body. Sally Rand’s dance act was not nudism—it was art, she said. But she put on a nude show of her own at the 1936 Frontier Exposition in Fort Worth (and repeated it for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco).

  In 1936, Heinlein picked up a new book that enchanted him as no book had done since Cal Laning had talked him into reading Jurgen in 1929. Vincent McHugh’s Caleb Catlum’s America was about a redheaded boy-mandemigod who leads his family of free spirits and true Americans into a safe place of hiding in a land beyond a cave, until the corrupt and materialistic should pass and it was safe to emerge. The frame story was split up by three hundred pages of tall tales and improbabilities. It was a big and complex book, like nothing except, perhaps, Tristam Shandy, and he was enchanted with it. So was Leslyn. They used it as a touchstone, along with Charles G. Finney’s 1935 Circus of Dr. Lao, to measure the personal compatibility of any new acquaintance. If you liked both books, you were in with the Heinleins. 52

  After the elections that November,53 Heinlein finally saw the film H. G. Wells had just finished. Things to Come was a major cultural event; Wells himself was an international celebrity, and the film has the participation of major artists: Alexander Korda produ
ced it, and the score was written by the “advanced” composer Arthur Bliss.54

  Wells portrayed the old order destroying itself in the war everyone could sense was coming—was perhaps already under way, if the fighting between republicans and fascists in Spain was any indication—and a new, visionary order coming into being, led by Raymond Massey’s aviators of Wings Over the World. It was a documentary of the future, as stylish as Albert Speer’s designs for the sixth NSADP congress in Nuremberg the September before, grandly memorialized by Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will. Heinlein was delighted with Wells’s tale.55

  Britain was in the news. Like many Americans, Heinlein had been following the troubles of the House of Windsor. In December, the boy king Edward VII had been forced to abdicate because he wanted to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. On May 12, 1937, Heinlein tuned in to hear the new King’s international radio address on the evening of King George VII’s coronation and was deeply affected by the man’s halting tongue: “A corrected stammerer myself, I suffered with him during his first radio speech after becoming king—and triumphed with him at the enormous improvement in his later speeches.”56

  Ten days later, on May 22, 1937, his youngest brother, Jesse Clare, married Dorothy Martin, and Robert and Leslyn traveled back to Kansas City for the occasion, returning on June 20. Almost all of the Heinlein children were married now. Only baby Mary Jean, in high school, was still living at home in Kansas City.

  In August 1937, Heinlein resigned from the chairmanship of the 59th District Democratic Party organization. He had just finished working on Supervisor Ford’s (unsuccessful) campaign for the mayoralty of Los Angeles—and he had gotten enough experience running things in the background. More background work came along all the time, of course: the Los Angeles County Central Committee drafted him to chair the 59th Assembly District Committee he had just resigned from. He did not refuse the draft. Possibly he considered it was something he could do while he prepared for a bigger challenge: the time had come for him to run for office himself.

  16

  PARTY ANIMAL

  The 1938 elections were even more critical for the California Democratic Party than the 1936 elections had been. Frank Merriam’s reign as Governor-King-Log had disgusted even his reluctant supporters from the 1934 elections, and it was unlikely they would again “hold their nose and vote for Merriam.”1 The Democrats were running a former EPIC, Senator Culbert Olson, to oust Merriam; Olson’s campaign was managed by Hollywood actor-activist Melvyn Douglas, and it looked as though Olson had solid support. 2

  But they had to fill the Democratic slate. In the pre-Sinclair days, the extremely weak Democratic Party had often not run candidates in many elections; but now they were strong enough to do so, and do so they must. The party’s formal platform was still EPIC, and the shadow organization of EPIC clubs nominally controlled the Democratic Party: it was up to EPIC to do something about it.

  In 1938, the 59th Assembly District seat would be up for election. This district—Heinlein’s home district—was considered “safe” for the Republican incumbent, Charles W. Lyon, but Lyon had been targeted by EPIC as a particularly reactionary legislator who needed to be removed for the good of the state. EPIC News ranked his voting record among the worst in the California State Assembly—seventy-first out of eighty, with sixteen “good,” sixty-four “bad,” and twenty absences.3 But “good” and “bad” were a matter of definition; his Republican constituency liked Lyon, and the party leadership didn’t think any Democrat could win in that thoroughly Republican district that included conservative Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

  But nothing charges up an old socialist pol’s batteries like an action for the good of the state. Heinlein got the charge: he was going to replace Charlie Lyon and send him back to his Hollywood law practice.

  This was the largest and most demanding individual project he had ever taken on: he was going to work harder at this than he had ever worked in his life. And as to the important questions, Why him? Why now? …

  A seat in the California State Assembly would position him to help out with what H. G. Wells called that progressive task of “unusually clear-headed and obstinate individuals” in opposing “the egoist and the fool in man”; to resist “simplified formulae” and gain experience in handling human affairs. Ultimately, Wells continued, when the time is right, “They will reshape the general conceptions of economic, political and social life.”4 There could be no clearer statement of Robert Heinlein’s overarching political goals.

  Heinlein’s situation was somewhat complicated by family matters. His father, Rex, had been ill off and on for the last dozen years, but he had remained employed in the accounting department of International Harvester. In 1937, at the age of fifty-nine, Rex retired with a small pension. All the spirit seemed to have gone out of him. At first he was listless, but he spiraled down alarmingly into a state of acute depression. Initially, they thought it was senility setting in early, though early senility did not run in the family. The Veterans Administration doctors in Kansas were puzzled over his case and referred him to the veterans’ hospital in Los Angeles, where his condition was diagnosed as involutional melancholia—a very serious condition and one that required long-term care.

  Bam moved the family, by now reduced to just the two of them and Mary Jean (now aged eighteen years), out to Hollywood in 1938.5 There is no definite record of the move or the circumstances, but they may have stayed with Robert and Leslyn for at least a time. The Laurel Canyon house would have been crowded with three extra people. Since the family was giving up the house in Kansas City, Robert probably agreed at that time to take some of the extra storage—a trunk for his brother Rex.6 He could store it in the garage, with the accumulation of leftovers from his political activities.

  His father’s condition was very disturbing to Robert,7 though he tried not to show it to his family, to be a support. Rex Ivar had fallen off the edge of the world, he just wasn’t there anymore. Involutional melancholia is a psychotic depression that usually appears in late middle age—a period called the “involutional period of middle life” in the older literature: forty to fifty-five years old for women, fifty to sixty-five for men. In 1938, Rex Ivar was just in the middle of the male range. The disease classically includes preoccupation with death and loss; agitation; delusions of ill health, poverty, sin, and sometimes even of the nonexistence of the world (all themes that were to show up later in Robert’s writing).8 Robert thought it was brought on by his father’s sense of guilt over his part in Rose Betty’s death, twelve years earlier, preying on him all these years, perhaps masking the onset of the serious illness.9

  Rex Ivar was not senile—but in 1938 he might as well have been: involutional melancholia was something you just didn’t recover from. The mind died, and the body continued to function. Doctors had recently (1935 and 1937) been successful in bringing some involutional melancholics around with daily or weekly injections of sex hormones—estrogen for women and testosterone for men. But the therapy was very new and not yet widely available. The clinical trials were to continue through the early 1940s10—not the kind of thing that veterans’ hospitals usually engage in. Robert and Bam might not even have known about the trials at the time. For them, it was to be a long, slow, agonizing good-bye.

  And in the meantime, Heinlein resigned from the chairmanship of the Democratic district organization in preparation for the campaign—but he had promptly been drafted to run committees within the county and statewide party organization anyway. In a questionnaire he filled out for the Navy in January 1938, he listed himself as a member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee and the California State Central Democratic Committee. Leslyn was temporarily out of commission (presumably with chicken pox or something else equally debilitating and equally temporary) when he had to announce his candidacy,11 so he asked Roby Wentz to manage his campaign.

  Roby and his wife, Elma, had become close friends wi
th the Heinleins through EPIC politics. They had initially met early in 1935, when the Heinleins were thrown into direct contact with Upton Sinclair. Elma was then Sinclair’s personal secretary, so Heinlein wound up dealing with her quite a lot on the California constitution committee. She was a lot of fun—politically compatible, naturally—but she also shared some of Heinlein’s interest in occult and esoteric matters, with a different slant on the ideas that, judging by his passing mentions of her in correspondence over the years, Heinlein found refreshing. Roby had a B.A. from Stanford in English literature and worked as a a political journalist and screenwriter with a side interest in seismology that generated an occasional popular science article. He had also written occasionally for EPIC News.

  The Heinlein brain trust roughed out a platform that touched all the “hot buttons” of his constituency and put together a press release for his announcement on March 15, 1938—a timing that suggests that Heinlein was running as a Democrat and not as an EPIC. They had not timed the announcement to catch the EPIC News weekly publication cycle—and, in fact, EPIC News did not include him for three weeks in the “Straw Ballot” feature it ran for several issues before the paper was suspended in May 1938 due to lack of funds (its chronic condition—and now a fatal one). Heinlein first appears in the “Straw Ballot” on April 4, the only registered Democrat in the district.