Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  It is a sad business and I deeply regret that it should have worked out with hurt feelings, for John nursed me along a lot at the beginning. I owe him a debt which cannot be cleared up with money—it stays on the books … . I should have gotten an agent long ago, and avoided direct business dealings with friends.50

  But John Campbell was a friend, and a writer, after all. It was impossible to argue with the rate per word that the Post could offer and Astounding could not. In addition, this sale implied that Campbell’s decade-long editorial struggle for the acceptance of science fiction was coming to fruition.

  In the middle of all this, Ginny Gerstenfeld mysteriously dropped out of their lives. Leslyn had quit skating entirely after a bad fall, and Robert had to cut back on his own lessons when he was working, though he was continuing to make progress skating.

  Heinlein worried about Gerstenfeld and told her so. She had not wanted to bother him with her personal crisis, she told him in a letter, but her father was ill and her mother was worried about making ends meet, so Gerstenfeld had given her mother all her savings and pulled back all her expenses, even dropping out of skating. If anything should happen to her father, she told Heinlein early in November, she would have to return to New York to take care of him.

  Leslyn has asked me not to worry you with my troubles and I’ve tried, but you have a knack for getting at what’s worrying me, and the only way I can comply with her wishes in this matter is apparently to stay away from you and to avoid talking to you.

  I love you very dearly, and would do anything to make you happy, but I don’t see how I can keep you from worrying about my troubles when you find them out and from trying to do things for me. I really don’t blame Leslyn for being annoyed about that, because I would be too, if I were in her place. So, it seems to me that the only solution is to stay away.51

  Heinlein’s response is not recorded. In any case, he had a lot of condolences to write that November: the 1946 elections were a Republican landslide. Jerry Voorhis was caught in the avalanche and turned out of his seat by Richard Nixon.

  A deadlocked struggle between a Democratic President and a Republican Congress could be absolutely fatal to the prospects for world peace. Heinlein began floating the idea that President Truman could gain the strategic long-term control of the situation for the party by a gambit—resigning now in favor of Senator Vandenberg (after appointing him Secretary of State, to make him eligible for the succession) and gearing up to take back the presidency in 1948. Two years of deadlock, followed by four years of new isolationism, would just about finish the country.

  Susie Clifton had just run one of the few successful Democrat campaigns in the country, getting Helen Gahagan Douglas elected to the House. Heinlein congratulated her on her victory and outlined his idea in more detail on the day after the election:

  1. Moral Reason—to achieve democracy in fact.52

  Truman had not been elected—and the Republican landslide showed that the voters would have gone Republican if they could. The Constitution didn’t have any mechanism comparable to the “vote of confidence” in British practice that could force a general election to avoid the deadlocks the United States had experienced in 1918–20 and 1930–32, “and are now about to have again.”

  2. Practical Reason on the Level of Statesmanship—to achieve a functioning government in a period of crisis … .

  There were enough angry Republicans to block any proposal that came from the State Department of a Democratic administration.

  3. Practical Reason on the level of Partisan Politics—to permit the possibility of the election of a Democratic Administration in 1948.

  If Truman remained in office, the Democrats would be blamed for everything that went wrong until the next election. They would have handed the Republicans a perfect campaign argument.

  The Democrats had nothing to lose, Heinlein argued, and much to gain.

  There is one more factor, hard to classify—Mr. Truman has the unique opportunity of being in a position to pick the Republican candidate for president in 1948. If we are to have a Republican president, would it not be much better for it to be Mr. Vandenberg (in the Atomic Age!) than Taft, Dewey, Bricker, or Warren!53

  Susie Clifton forwarded his letter to Representative Douglas, who wrote him a polite thank-you—but it was a strategy too bold and too risky for the practical politicians: “I can only say that, if the people we should have to appeal to were objective, far-sighted, and sensitive to public thinking, your plan might be taken seriously!”54

  He began circulating a bit of doggerel in letters:

  “Brave New World”

  Consider, when you’re blown to bits

  By robot plane and atom bomb,

  Opinions of those demi-wits

  From Willie Hearst to Good old Mom:

  “We’re safe behind our oceans here,

  From Panama to icy Baffin;

  We’re safe and sovereign, never fear.”

  Cute? Why, Pal, we’ll both die laughin! 55

  Of the half-dozen world-saver articles Heinlein had written, only one and a half were picked up: “Why Buy a Stone Axe” sold to Facts Magazine and was scheduled for the July 1946 issue, and half of “Man in the Moon” appeared in the January 1947 issue of Elks Magazine. However, the current run of luck chez Heinlein in the fall of 1946 continued excellent: the Post also bought Vida Jameson’s first submitted story—and scheduled it for the same issue as Heinlein’s.

  Three months of effort—and Mother Heinlein’s Double-Whammy Coaching Course is vindicated again!

  (Honest to goodness, I think Leslyn is probably the best story doctor on either coast. Her instinct is almost unerring.)56

  Heinlein started on a third story for the Post in November. Willy Ley was visiting until November 18, and he and Lang were over at all times of day or night. Ley always stimulated Heinlein, whose writing was fresher and easier after a visit from Ley57—but he couldn’t get any work done until a day or so after Ley left town. The story he wanted to write was based on a couple he knew who were never satisfied with where they were, so always moved around. “‘It’s Great to Be Back!’” sold to the Post like clockwork. He had written it at what seemed its natural length, then had to cut it drastically to fit into the Post’s six-thousand-word limit for fiction. “It was a little like getting one of Billy Rose’s show girls into one of my dresses to get it down to 6000 words,” Leslyn wrote Lurton Blassingame about the revision. 58

  Alice Dalgliesh, his editor at Scribner’s, wrote telling him that the Junior Literary Guild had picked up Rocket Ship Galileo as a 1947 selection, on a split-royalty deal. That would add another ten thousand copies to the edition when it came out, at a net to him of ten cents a copy. He revised the book slightly in January 1947, after Scribner’s readers gave him notes on the book’s pacing.

  The Post knew it had something special on its hands in “Green Hills of Earth” and planned to do some unusual promotion: the story was advertised with half-page ads in major daily newspapers around the country on the eve of pub lication—“TONIGHT YOU VISIT MARS!” with a halftone cut of Fred Ludekens’s spectacular illustration of the story. 59 The Post was also going to feature the story—and its artwork!—in its weekly four-sheet Keeping Posted, and for that biographical material was needed. William Holt, the editor at the Post, noticed that Jameson and Heinlein had the same address and queried as to who was the pseudonym and who the real person. Heinlein put on his best company manner, to amuse them, when he replied:

  When I received your letter of January 7th I felt an overwhelming impulse to throw myself on your mercy and report as follow: “Gentlemen, you have me. I confess that Vida Jameson is simply one of my pen names, as are Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardiner, and Clarence Buddington Kelland.”

  Yes, it is a surprising coincidence. My wife’s favorite theory is that 8777 is the address of a girl’s school and that little Robert and little Vida were winners of honorable mention in the annual literary contest, whi
ch caused my wife, as headmistress, to submit their efforts to Dr. Franklin’s distinguished journal. Bill Corson, another member of the Mañana Literary Society (more about the society later), points out that there is no such person as Heinlein in the first place, it being merely the name the members of the society give to the “Plotto” machine they own jointly. My own favorite theory is that 8777 is the mail-drop of a Communist cabal engaged in a conspiracy to gain a monopoly over The Saturday Evening Post and then destroy it, by suddenly withdrawing its support.

  Their home, he explained, was the West Coast headquarters of the Mañana Literary Society, and the editors should not be surprised to find more manuscripts bearing that address:

  In truth, Miss Jameson and I are not even collaborators. I have always had an ambition to help young lady authors by assisting them in gaining experience which would permit them to write true confession stories, but I have encountered an amazing amount of awfully stuffy resistance. The fact behind the coincidence is that two of the several writers whom my wife coaches, to wit, myself and Vida, happened to hit the Post at about the same time and at a time when Vida is living with us because of the well-known housing shortage.

  It’s a darn good thing, incidentally, that my first sale to the Post antedated Vida’s by a couple of weeks, or I would have gone into a permanent decline. I’ve been a professional writer for a good many years; Vida has been one for a matter of weeks—and made her very first sale to the top magazine market. I am delighted that the kid sold to the Post, but, if, after plugging away for years, I had been beaten out in attaining this market, even by a matter of days, by a youngster and a beginner, I would have blown my top. I might even have taken a job.60

  He went on, making an effort to charm them at the Post:

  We both wish to thank you for letting us know that our stories are to appear in the February 8th issue. We plan to have a small, tasteful neon sign constructed, demountable so that it may be mounted fore and aft atop the family automobile when out driving and then shifted to the front porch when we are home, and reading: SEE FEB 8TH SAT EVE POST. I like to get fat checks but I just love to see my name in print. Would a psychiatrist make anything nasty out of that fact?

  Jameson’s story, “The Thirteenth Trunk,” was picked up by ABC for radio broadcast just before the February 8 issue of the Post came out. Leslyn, who had been acting as agent for Heinlein’s world-saver articles as they came back from Lurton Blassingame, expected interest to pick up, and that would give her greater entrée for the material she was now handling for Bill Corson, Henry Sang—even a short story by Jack Parsons. She was sending the most likely of these directly to Blassingame, keeping the others in circulation to lower-paying markets.

  Ron Hubbard wrote a letter that December from New York, on Hotel Belvedere stationery, “heartily and affectionately” congratulating Heinlein for “finally [going] conservative” and cracking “that citadel of reactionism,” The Saturday Evening Post. His brief note, simultaneously self-deprecating and roguish, closes with the wry observation that he knows he’s in “the Heinlein doghouse” and therefore he expects no reply.61 The reference to being in the Heinlein doghouse was serious. Before leaving Southern California with Sara/Betty, L. Ron Hubbard had burned—or at least severely damaged—his bridges with the Heinleins, and Robert felt morally compelled to drop him—not for the psychological instability and irresponsibility that seemed to have seized him, or for “broken dishes, plaster, etc. I can go on forgiving and excusing a wounded veteran indefinitely,”62 Heinlein wrote in a series of notes attached to Hubbard’s letter in Heinlein’s files—or even the divorce he was trying to obtain from his wife, Polly. But Hubbard had caused trouble with Leslyn’s sister by getting their nephews all worked up about a mysterious “China venture,” with frills that left them all aghast:

  No, it was enticing a boy, a son of another veteran, to whom I had been left in locis parentis. When my sister-in-law [Keith] called me—China—knives—guns—etc—your goose was cooked with me.

  As a wounded veteran I am still obligated toward you and will help you if I find you down and out, but I no longer trust you. You may show this letter to anyone you wish.

  I think a lot of those ribbons on your chest, even if Polly doesn’t. You’re an authentic hero, even though a phony gentleman. I’ll give you money to get you out of a jam but I don’t want you in my house. 63

  That was a bad situation, no doubt about it—messy and getting messier, Leslyn said:

  Ron is a very sad case of post-war breakdown. The details are too complex and too personal to be bruited about by letter. Suffice it to say that although Bob and I feel as if the Hubbard we knew had been possessed by some entity out of one of the more horrid Unk[nown Worlds] stories, we do not feel that Polly has helped the situation one bit. Ron is a very volatile personality—when he was around us he was a very different person from what he has become under the influence of his latest Man-Eating Tigress.64

  Sprague and Catherine de Camp disagreed about Hubbard’s personality deficiencies being a recent acquisition. “I don’t think he’s a case of post-war breakdown at all,” Sprague de Camp wrote in reply:

  I think he always was that way, but when he wanted to make a good impression or get something out of somebody he put on a first-class charm act. What the war did was to wear him down to the point where he no longer bothers to put on the act.

  I saw the other side of his character before the war and decided then that he was not to be trusted. You told me that you’d heard of his fascist leanings and were agreeably surprised to learn that he wasn’t that way at all, but was a fine upstanding liberal. But I’d heard him give quasi-fascist harangues on the slimy iniquity of all politicians, and remembered the similar sentiments in Final Blackout. How do you know he was putting on an act for me, and revealing his true nature for you, and not the other way round? Because he wanted to conciliate the Heinleins whom he knew to have strong political convictions? Personally, however, I doubt if such an opportunist can have firm political convictions, fascist or otherwise.65

  The news concerning the Hubbards’ divorce was somewhat confused by Laning’s creative social information passed among their set. “Cal is an excellent Naval Officer and a brilliant scientist,” Leslyn wrote the de Camps after a particularly incorrect version of the Ron-and-Polly-Hubbard divorce situation, “but as a reporter, he’d make a fine fiction writer. His nearest and dearest have long ago learned to discount Cal’s friendly exaggerations in social and personal reports.66

  29

  SEPARATION. ANXIETY.

  That January of 1947, Vida Jameson was finally able to find a place that suited her, and the Heinleins were again without houseguests. It was a pleasure for them to have the house back, to be sure, but perhaps not the best thing for Leslyn to be too much by herself after Vida left. Cal Laning finally stopped his months-long dithering and in January proposed a collaborative article about a naval space fleet—“A Spaceship Navy” or “A Spaceship Corps.”

  As “The Green Hills of Earth” hit the newsstands just before February 7, telegrams and letters began pouring in, congratulations and also awe and delight. His fan mail abruptly increased to new levels, and Ben Hibbs, the editor at the Post, wrote saying that this story attracted more reader mail than any other story they had ever published.1 The praise made an ironic counterpoint to Leslyn’s renewed irritability and depression. She was also drinking again.

  Heinlein arranged a long vacation trip for the two of them in February, to the desert. From Twentynine Palms, where they could sunbathe on the hotel’s patio in the nude, Heinlein wrote once to Ginny Gerstenfeld, a note on the hotel’s stationery. Leslyn added a postscript: “This is practically the first place we’ve ever found which is not on a railroad, truck route or airline. It’s so quiet I’m almost asleep. More later. Love—Leslyn.”2 They wandered around without itinerary for most of two weeks. Robert wrote to Ginny again from Blythe, telling her about the local rodeo they had attended—not
a tourist affair, but a benefit for an injured local boy. Leslyn enclosed another handwritten postscript, also signed “Love,” but Robert tucked into the envelope something Leslyn might not have seen—a three-by-five-inch index card on which was typed one line: “I think about you all the time.”3

  But work called, and they had to return to Los Angeles eventually. Scribner’s and the Literary Guild didn’t like the second title Heinlein had given Young Atomic Engineers ; the next set of revisions on the article with Cal needed to be done; and he had to correct a misprint in the Post’s biography of him (he had been described as a naval aviator, which wasn’t true). Heinlein really needed the release of exercise. He had been ordered by his doctor to take up horseback riding—no excuses!—but that was almost impossible to arrange in Laurel Canyon. He compromised with the doctor by throwing himself back into skating.4

  The writing on the collaborative article with Cal Laning went along somewhat bumpily in March and into April because there wasn’t as much technical data as Heinlein thought was needed to support the claims they wanted to make. Laning now was chivying him along, playing on Heinlein’s sense of duty to the cause: