Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The trip to Laguna had postponed their housing problem, but now they had to face it. The small town of the prewar years could not accommodate the wartime population boom: all housing was gone. All hotel rooms were filled. Overcrowding had become so critical that there was now a city ordinance limiting hotel stays to a maximum of five days, for the duration, until the wartime jobs went away and the city’s industrial Okies went back where they came from. The Heinleins circulated the word that they were back and reconciled themselves to moving every few days.

  Heinlein set up his typewriter wherever there was a table. Once he made arrangements with his sister Mary Jean to receive their mail, he dashed off update letters to the three people most closely involved in his rocket project: John Arwine, who was functioning as a kind of senior adviser; John Kean, who was working up industrial contractors from the other side of the country ; and Cal Laning, his mole inside the Navy bureaucracy. Cal gave him the welcomed negative assurance that the project Heinlein had proposed in his August 14 memo had at least not yet been killed.36

  As people got the word they were back, their combined business-andsocial life picked up again. The business part took priority: Heinlein had decided that working as a political operator again was more important than writing for market—not partisan politics per se, but as a way to get some actual facts about atomics injected into the national political process. They had dinner with Robert and Susie Clifton on September 17, to get a sense of the new political landscape in Southern California. Susie Clifton—the model for the Sacramento lobbyist and political operator he had put into “Magic, Inc.”37—had continued plugging away at Democratic politics during the war and was now a major party operator in the state. There would be strings attached to getting back into California politics, but Heinlein had worked his way up to the county and state committees by 1938, positions of some influence; the potential power might well be worth the effort and expense. Heinlein expressed cautious enthusiasm for the prospect, and the Cliftons put him to work right away: they gave him the job of convincing Bette Davis to stop obstructing a local resolution for internationalization of the bomb, in the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions. “Here in town,” he said dryly, “my cursory knowledge of such things is enough to make me a local expert. One thing leads to another.”38

  When Cornog came out to Pasadena, he and the Heinleins met for dinner at the home of Jack Parsons. Parsons’s GALCIT projects had gone over to the newly formed (1944) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he had formed Aerojet to work on rocket-assisted takeoff for the new jets that the Army Air Force was developing. But Aerojet had just been acquired by General Tire, and Parsons was at loose ends. The timing was perfect to rope him into the Moon rocket project.

  Parsons’s personal life was a little messy: during the war, he had gotten involved with Aleister Crowley’s new religion, Thelema, and his occult magick-working group, the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). His first wife, Helen, had run off with the head of the local chapter of the OTO, but Parsons didn’t seem much disturbed by that fact: he had taken up with Helen’s eighteen-year-old sister, Sara Northrup, a vivacious blonde he would introduce casually as “Betty.”39 Nevertheless, Parsons, almost completely self-taught, was an original creative thinker—one of the founding geniuses of American rocketry in the generation after Robert Goddard’s pioneering work.

  The Navy’s plan to set up a guided missile research center at Point Mugu brought Buddy Scoles to Southern California, too, and he wanted to help.40 Heinlein put Cal Laning in touch with Scoles.

  Laning was arranging to have a Navy edition printed of the Army’s Smyth Report on the technology of atomics—issued just two weeks after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped—but he had sent copies of the historic first edition to Heinlein in Philadelphia. What with the move, they had gone astray. Laning had already resent one to the Laurel Canyon address, and he sent another, care of Heinlein’s sister Mary Jean, who was providing them an accommodation address. This copy was inscribed to Heinlein:

  Received from Manhattan Publicity about 15 August First Edition! For Lt. R. A. Heinlein in appreciation of assistance to this office on radar development and general “anti-Kamikaze” technical advice.

  /s/ C. B. Laning41

  Even with the stress of overcommitment and having to move every few days, Heinlein found things about Hollywood that were still right. He wrote encouragingly to Henry Sang, who intended to follow them to Southern California. After warning Sang of the changes he would find from the glowing descriptions quoted above, Heinlein went on:

  Now for the pleasant aspects of Hollywood: The place really hasn’t changed much. People stroll and loaf on the Boulevard. Breakfast is served from nine till noon. The whole joint has a small town honkytonk air, a little more crowded but not much. No one seems to be in a hurry. Sports clothes are normal dress and a housewife shopping in a sun suit is a common sight. But I have almost wrecked the car once or twice over the prevalence of midriffs. Midriffs on sunsuits we are used to but have you ever seen a formal afternoon dress which was a midriff style? The woods are full of them. The women here are clean, bare, and usually pretty, frequently beautiful, just as I remembered it. Special selection has definitely resulted in a much higher level of pulchritude and they let one take a good look at it, bless their well scrubbed little hearts.

  I just took time out to stare out the window at royal palms, fig trees, pepper trees, deodars, and eucalypti. The sun is brighter, despite the smog, than I ever saw it in Filthydelphia. It is good and the war boom did not ruin it.42

  As the end of September approached, it became obvious that Paxton (their unwanted tenant) was not going to vacate their house in Laurel Canyon. He would have to be evicted—forcibly if necessary. They had Sam Kamens, their lawyer, institute eviction proceedings. Within a few days, the lawyers worked out an agreement for him to vacate on November 10—too late, unless the winter rains held off, to do any serious exterior repairs this year.

  In the meantime, the stress was taking its toll on Leslyn: she was obviously worn out, her heath deteriorating. Since they were having to live in hotels anyway, they decided to make it count. “On Sunday we move to Murrieta Hot Springs Hotel, Murrieta, California,” Heinlein notified his former boss at NAES, John Kean, who was also working on the rocketry project,

  where we expect to remain a month to six weeks (depending on our tenant) and where we expect to soak up some sunshine and rest. It is a resort hotel, with mineral spring, swimming massage, and desert sunshine. Leslyn needs it badly and I can use some myself. Leslyn has been quite sick this week, nervous indigestion, throwing up steadily, and down to 78 lbs. in weight. Our bastardly tenant was simply the last straw which keeled her over.43

  They had come across the resort in 1941, looking for a weekend getaway. Leslyn had called it “an old haunt of my childhood, which is just the sort of health resort we are looking for.”44 Now the season was over, the rates were reasonable, and the half-desert there still had good weather this late in the year.

  Packing up for the trip to Riverside County, Heinlein pulled out the piece of Trinitite Cornog had given him and tried to find out if it would fog a photographic plate. It was very radioactive: the rubber band that held it to the plate fluoresced bright green. He stored it away in its metal box, very carefully.45

  The spa was just exactly what they needed. They both studied the new material they had to master and tried to reclaim their equanimity:

  We sun bathe, we take the baths, we walk, and we sleep. Leslyn has acquired a fine all-over mahogany tan and has gained six pounds. I am tanning somewhat more slowly but feel more nearly well than I have for four years. Sinusitis, acquired in Filthydelphia, still plagues me, but I hope to bake it out. 46

  His typewriter was his constant companion, and the R & R allowed him time to think and catch up with friends and family, still very widely dispersed. John Arwine made Lieutenant Commander. Robert’s oldest brother, Larry, had been one of the
four Army people who had constituted the entire U.S. occupying force in Japan for about three weeks 47 (he had, in fact, been the first American ashore on the island of Honshu); their younger brother, Clare, had been sent to Japan to be part of the military government there, until the original plans were called off, and his ship was sent to Korea instead.

  Heinlein’s Moon rocket proposal was winding its way up the Navy’s bureaucratic hierarchy, Cal Laning tracking its slow progress. Heinlein’s part in the initial contact-making was done, and now the circle of people available to work on that and related projects continued to grow. Laning had gotten in touch with Jerry Voorhis, who was about to introduce an internationalization bill into the House, and Willy Ley.

  On his trips to Southern California, when he wasn’t staying with the Heinleins, Ley had always stayed with his friend Fritz Lang, who now was talking about doing a Moon rocket picture. Ley put him in touch with the Heinleins. But Robert Heinlein’s goals had shifted somewhat from the big rocket project he had discussed with Cal and Willy and others in Philadelphia, and he needed to articulate it for them.

  The change of intention is this: Leslyn and I feel that the present crisis, in re atomics, is so critical that nothing else is of comparable importance. It is my carefully considered opinion that the United States will probably be destroyed as a nation, with a loss of life in excess of fifty million, within the next ten years, unless present trends are drastically changed. Since we believe this, we intend to spend as long as necessary in political action primarily. I will probably do little if any writing not directed toward politics, one way or another.48

  Changing present trends, even with all the resources he could muster, was a tall order, and the odds, he knew, were against being able to do it—rapidly enough to matter, anyway.

  The political situation did not occupy his mind completely; lately he had been corresponding with Armand Coign, a reader—not an organized fan hooked in with Forrest Ackerman’s crowd—who had written him a couple of searching, philosophical letters about “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” Heinlein found the correspondence helped keep him oriented to what was important, building his life strategy from the ground up.

  I don’t know the explanations of this world, but, to my mind, blind chance and materialism are nonsense. As for myself, I think that I have lived a very long time and I do not think that any catastrophe, not even the destruction of my body, can destroy me. I expect to go on. For what, I do not know, but I have a great zest for living and a feeling of kinship for everything that grows or moves.

  My inner, basic evaluations, quite beyond logic and not subject to verbal defense, classify some things as good and some as bad. I want to fight and strive for what I feel is good. This is translated into overt action, for which I am never certain; nevertheless, I do not stay my hand. I do what seems best and hope that my moral judgment proves to be correct … . This globe is not big enough both for me and for creatures who will not grant to others equal rights. In the long run (a few thousand years, perhaps,) one or the other of us has got to go … . The people of good sense and good will have got to be awakened to the nature and urgency of the crisis or the custard heads and the bloody-minded will most certainly lead us to our doom.49

  A year later, he told Coign his task at hand lay with the immediate and practical necessities: “Although a ‘mystic’ by nature, I conceive my immediate task to be with much more mundane matters. I have certain small bricks to lay in a great wall which I did not design and will not now see completed.”50

  And each persuasive article he churned out for popular consumption was a brick in the overall design.

  Murrieta Hot Springs proved conducive to work: Heinlein made good progress on his atomics articles. By the end of September, he had finished the first of a series, “Man in the Moon,” and he started another article about how to prepare for atomic war.51 As he got back into the swing of writing, and the demobilization commenced, his friends were beginning to move around. Jack Williamson and the Kuttners were expected for long visits soon. As soon as the Heinleins got back into the house, it would fill up—with Henry Sang and his fiancée, among others. They were finally able to pay forward the Campbells’ hospitality to them in 1942.

  They particularly looked forward to seeing L. Ron Hubbard and his wife, Polly. They had always met Hubbard on the East Coast (he had a permanent address at the Explorers Club); Polly apparently preferred to stay behind in Seattle. Now Hubbard was about to be medically retired in December and told Heinlein he and Polly wanted to move to Hollywood.52 Hubbard had recently been hospitalized on the East Coast with an ulcer and other war-related complaints, but now he was in Southern California on temporary duty—and was coming to spend a few days at the spa with Robert and Leslyn.

  Leslyn, Robert said, had an affair with Hubbard;53 this is the most likely time for it to have taken place. Robert’s regard for Hubbard—and Hubbard’s for him—was not affected in the least.

  This was a very profitable visit; when Hubbard heard that Heinlein was looking around for an agent, not one of the homegrown science-fiction boys, he was able to recommend Lurton Blassingame, a prestigious New York agent. Blassingame, a former (Hollywood) writer himself, who had started his agency in 1929,54 agreed to take Heinlein on as a client, based on the commercial viability of his prewar science fiction. He agreed with Hubbard’s assessment that Heinlein was “wasted on pulp.”55

  The first project Blassingame was given to handle was the article Heinlein had just completed, the first of his “world-saver” articles, “Man in the Moon.”

  Hubbard was with them at Murrieta Hot Springs on October 21 when they got word that Paxton had vacated the house early and they could take possession.

  27

  SETTLING IN

  The house was an absolute mess, and in the necessary cleaning up and clearing out, they found more damage than they had known about. Paxton had left his dog in the house rather than taking it outside to do its business. There were corners soaked with urine and other stains. The floor had to be sanded back to the wood and refinished. Some of their personal items were missing, and some of the packing cases they had left in the garage had developed dry rot.

  Repairs would make quite a dent in their nest egg of war bonds—the small amount they had managed to accumulate since Skipper died. Heinlein heard that Buckminster Fuller was going into the housing business; he had designed a “Dymaxion” House, to be built using aircraft manufacturing methods. It was supposed to cost just about what a Cadillac would cost. Heinlein placed an order for a Dymaxion; they could raze Quintus Teal’s old place at 8777 Lookout Mountain and live like human beings in a modern house—the Model-T version of a modern house, at any rate.1

  Even before unpacking the household goods, they set up Heinlein’s work area and made a second desk in the studio for Hubbard, using packing boxes and an old door. They both had to get to work churning out pay copy. Although Leslyn’s health had begun to improve, she was still suffering from exhaustion. Her doctor ordered her confined to bed. First she had placed wards around the house to protect against the ghosts the Kuttners had noticed in 1942—“especially one against a thing that keeps trying to come up the basement steps.”2 To keep her occupied once her magical work was done, Heinlein asked her to take over the correspondence. She could answer most of the letters longhand, from her bed.

  Henry Sang and his intended/significant other, Grace Dugan (called “Cats”), showed up, as promised. Heinlein encouraged Sang to try commercial writing: “The guy can write and should be a fine addition to us typewriter bums. I always feel a glow of wellbeing when I entice a working man into giving up and becoming a consumer.”3

  They cobbled together another makeshift desk for the studio. The five of them figured out arrangements to keep out of each other’s way—a rule of silence in the working studio, for example, with a 25¢ fine to enforce it. They ran the food arrangements on the Navy’s wardroom plan, with Henry Sang acting as mess treasu
rer. It worked, after a fashion—and Heinlein was glad he was able to offer hospitality in this housing crisis, to pay forward the kindness John Campbell had shown, taking him and Leslyn in when they came east in 1942.

  We will probably have more house guests from time to time for several months; five more of our friends face immediate eviction—they may land on us. Fortunately the somewhat anarchistic arrangements of Squalid Manor is suited to accommodating an indefinite number of civilized people.4

  However, some of the people he had invited from the East Coast could not be accommodated even under these circumstances. Heinlein asked Campbell to tell Ted Sturgeon, who was going through a rough time, that they had no space at all at the moment. Sturgeon was offended—not because the invitation had been withdrawn, but because Heinlein had not had the cojones to write to Sturgeon personally and do his own social dirty work.5 Heinlein apologized: “You are perfectly correct,” he told Sturgeon. “I was wrong, and I most humbly ask your forgiveness … . I mention these things not as a true defense but in hopes that you will be tolerant of my failure and believe that I was rude through negligence rather than intention.”6 Sturgeon was forgiving, telling Heinlein it’s best to get these things into the open air rather than allow them to fester.7