Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Leslyn had been working with her brother-in-law’s boss to get them out, sending money (she later estimated it at about $5,000 altogether). A survivor, Peter Wygle, later said:

  The Gripsholm incident was infamous among the prisoners, for access to the rescue ship was controlled by a small group of rich Americans; many women and children were left behind, as apparently bribes controlled who got on the boat to escape.54

  The Lyle-Heinlein family about 1905. BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Aunt Anna; Rex Ivar Heinlein (senior) with Rex Ivar Heinlein (junior) in arms; Bam Lyle Heinlein. FRONT ROW: Thelma; Rose Adelia Woods Lyle (seated); Lawrence Lyle Heinlein; Grandfather Alva Evans Lyle; Park Lyle. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  The first known photograph of Robert Heinlein, probably taken in front of Grandfather Lyle’s house in Butler, Missouri, 1907. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  The Heinlein children, 1910 or 1911: Larry (tallest), Rex Ivar (middle), Louise, and Robert (seated). Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Bobby Heinlein’s graduation portrait, 1924—“one of the nicest, sweetest boys in his graduation class” according to classmate Alice Marie. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Alice McBee about the time she and Heinlein became engaged, 1927. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Elinor Curry, Heinlein’s first wife, in high school. Her name is misspelled in the caption and text.

  Heinlein in midshipman whites with his parents at Rex’s graduation, 1927. Permission to reproduce this photo (provided from Bam Heinlein’s effects) by Andrew Lermer, on behalf of the entire Heinlein family.

  Ensign Bob, about 1930. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Leslyn as Wood Sprite, a professional actress résumé photo about 1928–1930. Courtesy of Colin Hubbard, M.D., and Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Robert and Leslyn’s formal wedding group portrait, March 28, 1932. Courtesy of Colin Hubbard, M.D., and Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Robert and Leslyn’s wedding portrait. Courtesy of Colin Hubbard, M.D., and Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  The newly married ensign and wife in Ensenada, California, 1932. Courtesy of Colin Hubbard, M.D., and Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Playing fashionable croquet in the summer of 1934. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Sally Rand publicity photo inscribed to Bob and Leslyn. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Heinlein playing chess, 1936 or 1937. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Cleve Cartmill, about 1947. Heinlein may have taken the photo himself. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson discussing a writerly problem in the Manana Literary Society, about 1940. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Glamour Bob—a studio photo taken by Bill Corson in 1940. This photo was used on book jackets through the 1950s. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Heinlein in his new writing study, 1940. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Heinlein captured in a hall conference with his boss, Henry Sang, in the Plastics and Adhesives section of the Naval Air Experimental Station, about 1943. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld in Washington, D.C., 1943, age twenty-seven, when she was working for BuAer. This may be one of the photographs taken by skating buddy Fred Fleischman while he was working for Edward Steichen doing war photography, but the photographer is not identified. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Virginia Gerstenfeld at NAES, 1944. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  “Killer Cal” Laning showing the results of his unexpectedly aggressive and unexpectedly successful command of his ship Hutchins at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944. Courtesy of Jillian Giornelli and Judith Laning for the Estate of Cal Laning

  L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein interviewed for the Naval Air Experimental Station magazine, Wind Scoops, in 1945. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  John Arwine in the Merchant Marines, about 1945. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Robert Heinlein in 1945 immediately after leaving the Naval Air Experimental Station. He has been sick and overworked, and his condition shows in this picture. CouRtesy of RobeRt A. and ViRginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Ginny Gerstenfeld in Los Angeles, 1946. “Ice fairy Virginia, First in the Dance!” The photo may have been by Heinlein; the caption certainly was. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Heinlein in Ojai while waiting for his divorce to be heard in 1947. The photographer was not identified, but Virginia Gerstenfeld may have taken this picture. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Robert and Virginia Gerstenfeld probably on one of Ginny’s weekend visits to Ojai in July or August 1947. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Robert Heinlein and Virginia Gerstenfeld, probably in the San Fernando Valley in September 1947. Heinlein lives in a trailer park while refurbishing his “piano box in a former life” house trailer in order to leave Los Angeles. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Willy Ley and Doofus, 1945 or 1946. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  Heinlein in front of his and Ginny’s first house in Colorado Springs (rented 1948), where they lived while he wrote Red Planet. They kept the house until he went to Hollywood to make Destination Moon. Courtesy of Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

  The money Leslyn and Mark Hubbard’s boss raised apparently bought Keith and the boys onto Gripsholm.

  The entire trip, from Goa to the Philippines to Port Elizabeth and Rio to New York, took seventy days. Leslyn went to New York City that January of 1944 to take charge of them, only to find out that the Red Cross had lost track of them entirely. They had come thousands of miles only to be lost in New York City. Leslyn was frantic.

  But Keith and the boys had been put up in a cheap hotel room—and in a few days were relocated to a better hotel by Mark Hubbard’s employer.55 Leslyn gathered them in and took them back to Philadelphia while Robert was recuperating.

  Robert was not doing well: the surgery had left him “with no rectum to speak of,”56 and he had a third operation coming up in the new year. In the meantime, he could not sit up at all, though, paradoxically, he could stand or lie down. Keith’s boys were entertaining but exhausting—a little too much for the sickroom, so they were shipped off to stay with the Campbells in New Jersey for a while. “I am a bloody mess,” Heinlein said of himself, “and disgusted with myself.”57

  Even in his weakened condition, he was able to keep up with a few aspects of his war work—morale-building letters to a British soldier, his friend and colleague Ted Carnell. He had begun submitting stories to Carnell’s project for a British science-fiction magazine in 1940, and their casual correspondence developed into a friendship (even though Carnell’s project collapsed and he had to return his purchases). Carnell had gone into the British army, and Robert and Leslyn helped out by keeping his subscriptions to Astounding and Unknown current. On the last day of 1943, Heinlein began his recovery by writing to Carnell:

  You are being especially honored, sir. I am sitting up and typing in your honor—the first time I have sat up in two months. No, nothing very serious. I have been reasonably comfortable; I have been able to stand up and walk; I have been able to lie down; I have been able to dine regally, reclining Roman banquet style. But I have not been able to sit.58

  Keith and Leslyn were night and day opposites. Keith took an instant dislike to Bill Corson, for example, and this made entertaining him on his every-other-weekend trips awkward
.59 When Keith expressed approval of their friend John Arwine, Robert wrote to Arwine: “I think that for the first time in history the two MacDonald sisters have decided that they both like the same man. There may be some hairpulling.”60 Keith was weak from the long imprisonment, and she was ill for months. The winter weather in “Filthydelphia” bothered her. Sometime in the fall—the date is nowhere recorded—she collected the boys and went back to the milder weather of Laguna Beach, California—really too close to her mother for anyone’s comfort, but …

  Skipper is just as much of an old harridan as ever, but I crack the whip over her pretty drastically. If she gets out of hand or bothers Keith too much, she gets a sharp note from my lawyer with a reminder of the source of her support. 61

  From the evidence of later events, traced back to this time of the war, Leslyn must have been in multiple spiritual crises, with no help in sight. She had always been thin, but her weight dropped to eighty-five pounds, and she continued to push herself into overwork.62 Normally, she would have turned to Robert, and he would have done whatever it took to jolly her out of it—if she would let him. But overwork and illness had taken its toll on him, too: Robert had no extra strength to lend her this time. The relatively minor problems began to tip over her psychological balance, like a stack of dominoes. She began to sleep ten to twelve hours a day. Robert’s own psychological balance was none too good; Bill Corson’s frequent teasing of Leslyn about her sleeping habits provoked another explosion:

  You’ve nagged her about her need for sleep for a good many years now. I should have shut you up about it before this. Don’t ever mention it again … .

  We are very fond of you but, God damn it—quit treating us as if we were your parents!63

  When she and Robert were true partners—in politics and in the writing—Leslyn appeared satisfied, more or less, with the power-behind-the-throne role she built for herself, as a political operator (she had continued with political work of her own even after Robert “retired” from politics) and as a story doctor for Robert and for the other working writers in the Mañana Literary Society. She had a congenial social role: the brilliant, knowledgeable authority on story structure.

  But once Robert turned to Campbell to work out the stories he was selling to Astounding, her role in the process began to wane. Effectively, she became an outsider—just in time for her family to fall into danger.

  Her father had known the solution: there was warmth in the bottle with the dimples.

  24

  KEEPING ON—

  Robert’s third and final operation of this series took place on January 24, 1944—“expensive, damnably painful, and the whole business an embarrassing indignity.”1 The operation left him weak, and he had to wear an enormous dressing Bill Corson said looked like a diaper.2 But he was able to sit up for twenty minutes at a time, using a rubber ring. “I’ve lost twenty pounds,” he wrote to John Arwine, “and am just beginning to be able to scratch my head without resting between strokes.”3

  The doctors told him he could look forward to gradual improvement—if he kept to his bed. This, he would not do: he was ready, he said, to go back to work by the end of the first week in February.

  This episode convinced him, finally, to give up the idea of trying to get into combat:

  I have no desire to be shot at nor to be killed; even more I do not wish to sleep in foxholes, contract malaria, be wounded painfully and lie in the mud, stand midwatches, freeze to death on the forecastle, go eighty hours without sleep, or do any of the other horridly uncomfortable things that constitute the romantic pageant of war. I’m simply going to be bored to distraction and worked to a rag doing things I don’t want to do in a town I hate. I know I am damned lucky and I shall try to remember every hour that guys who don’t like it any better than I would are doing all those things and dying at the end of it. But I think you will understand that I had to try in every possible way to join up with the rest in order to be able to live with myself. And that my motivation was composed in equal parts of patriotism, compassion, and sinful pride, and that I never could get the elements sorted out in my own mind.

  I think it was getting flu even more than the surgery that convinced me that I was a dead letter for combat purposes. I had just completed a series of cold shots. They did not protect me. I now realize that I would almost certainly fold up physically if any real strain were put on me … simply be a handicap to any combat outfit, a man who would have to be hospitalized, without being wounded, at the earliest opportunity, probably with another attack of TB.4

  Leslyn, too, was distracted and overworked; she also had been down with the flu that winter and had lost ten pounds she could ill afford to lose. But interest in her new work helped sustain her: in September 1943, she had been promoted from the factory- and quality-inspection work she had been doing for two years into personnel management for the six-hundred-man machine shop and was doing effective work:

  They like her and trust her on first contact and her reputation spread ahead of her. She was a fine inspector but she [is] ideally suited to this work both by training and experience—and by temperament. In the first place she has a highly developed feeling for simple justice and a fine subtle mind which can deal with the complications of social relationships, get them sorted out, and make people happy. She has the union shop stewards pitching on her side. She loves her work but it is harder than inspecting … . Her deep earnestness about her job and her determination to give her full strength and ability to winning the war makes me very proud.5

  Heinlein resumed working early in February,6 conserving his health most carefully:

  I go to bed right after supper, come hell or high water, every night but Saturday. I am watching my diet and have gained six pounds since leaving the hospital. My temperature stays normal and I feel better each week. I am determined not to fold up again while the war is on and I plan to do so, not through sheer nerve (That didn’t work!) but through caution. My life is pretty dull but pretty healthy.7

  The combination of boredom and overwork was debilitating, and he had been contemplating doing some writing again. He was of two minds about it8: Isaac Asimov had continued to write for Astounding, producing stories in his Foundation series and contributing occasionally to the local Naval Air Experimental Station (NAES) bulletin, Air Scoop. Heinlein’s dilemma was that if he had enough energy left over to write stories, some poor naval aviator downed in the South Pacific could probably use the extra effort he could put in, to help keep him out of the drink.

  But, on the other hand, if Heinlein went nuts, that poor aviator wouldn’t get the benefit of any of his efforts, stringing beads in a loony bin. He had queried Campbell about doing a review of Willy Ley’s new book, Rockets: A Prelude to Space Travel.9 Campbell gave him the go-ahead. “I sure would like to do that 60,000 word novel,” Heinlein wrote Campbell,

  but I see little prospect of it at the present time. It would have been nice to have done it while laid up—if I had been sick in any other way! But one must sit down to type for any length of time and sitting down is still somewhat of a chore. But I certainly would like to get back to writing … . This long sickness has completely bollixed up our plans—and bank account! 10

  The war news was both encouraging and frustrating. U.S. forces invaded Europe at Normandy on June 6, 1944, and opened the European front that had been needed for a very long time. The day after the invasion of Normandy, Isaac Asimov, Sprague de Camp, and Heinlein were interviewed for an article in Air Scoop that stressed the creative thinking that science-fiction writers brought to the war effort. The article appeared in August. By the time Heinlein’s enthusiastic review of Willy Ley’s Rockets: A Prelude to Space Travel appeared in the July 1944 issue of Astounding, the German army began putting rockets to practical, immediate use, launching their new V-1 buzz-bomb rockets (the Vergeltungswaffe, or “vengeance” weapon) across the channel at Britain. The reportage in newspapers and radio went around the world, and everyone was suddenly aware t
hat science was at war. The Norden bombsight, radar, and, above all, the Manhattan Engineer District were still out of the public eye.

  On July 20, 1944, a “Conspiracy of the Generals” was launched in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. He escaped with only minor injuries, more convinced than ever he was protected by a lucky star. He set in motion purges that killed twenty thousand people in the German army, including Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s best hope of reversing the war in Germany’s favor. Hitler was determined to carry the war to victory or the destruction of Germany itself.