Inasmuch as you can’t be here, either trust me as to determination of the undercurrent of this article, or cut free from our teamwork in distrust. Heinlein Hollywood is not Heinlein Washington, but he can have an observer there if he will … .
I can cease to be a powerful factor in the National Defense scheme if the article is not acceptable scientifically, and I don’t mean by science the extrapolation of curves … . If you can’t build me up to a position of real influence from the level I’ve reached, and the radical but sound attitude you have educated into me, you will lose the only tool you have in the Armed Services. Be goddamned clever.5
Almost as soon as they got home, it became impossible to keep Leslyn’s drinking a secret. Robert emptied her caches of liquor into the sink as he found them6—and thought she was getting back to battery. But one evening when Ginny Gerstenfeld was up at the house for dinner, she went into the kitchen after groceries had been delivered to see if she could help put things away. She found Leslyn “swigging liquor directly from the bottle”7—she hadn’t even taken the time to put the whiskey in a glass.
After struggling with her basic impulse to ignore—not her business!—Ginny took Robert aside and told him about it. He was embarrassed that she had seen it, but he must also have been at least a little relieved, not to have to cover up the problem—and not to have to bear the burden of the secret by himself. The strain of trying to cope, he later said, was making him a little crazy, and his friendships suffered because of it.8 Heinlein searched the house and found stashes of liquor hidden in unlikely places.9 He dumped them down the drain again, just as he had done in 1946, but more would appear magically: since she didn’t drive, Leslyn had an account at the local grocery store in Laurel Canyon and could have more delivered at any time. He couldn’t cut her off without virtually imprisoning her in the house (and letting the grocer know they were having a family fight over it), neither of which he was willing to do).10
Robert became convinced Leslyn was just one of those persons who could take adversity just fine but were overwhelmed by success. 11 What Robert knew at the time was that Leslyn had been in psychological crisis for some time already, her family mostly lost to her, and the props of her personality removed one by one over the years. She had been happiest as the acknowledged éminence grise of Heinlein-the-political-operator; she had been comfortably functional as the mentor of a budding writer and then a society of writers—a role that diminished as Heinlein turned more to his editor for such feedback, but returned with the advent of the postwar writing factory. Once both Robert and Vida could no longer be seen as in some sense her “protégés,” Leslyn was just out of the picture—had, in fact, no “picture” to be in. Without family or any satisfying personal role, she was cut adrift, with nothing to lose. She followed her father down the neck of a bottle.
With Ginny Gerstenfeld providing backbone and helping him keep the house in order, Heinlein insisted Leslyn get help from someone if she wouldn’t take help from him. He got her to a psychiatrist Grace (“Cats”) Dugan Sang had recommended, Dr. David Harold Fink. Fink had gained a national reputation when he published a series of self-help books starting with Release from Nervous Tension in 1943 and Be Your Real Self in 1950. In 1947, however, he was in private practice; Cats Sang ran into him when she moved to Fallbrook with Henry Sang.
The treatment was not successful.
There is a joke in the psychological profession: how many therapists (psychologists, psychiatrists) does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: Only one—but the lightbulb has to want to change.
Leslyn did not want to change. She broke up the united home front that April by ordering Ginny out of her house, setting that particular bridge on fire. Predictably, this drove Robert and Ginny together. Ginny wrote to him their first unequivocal love letter:
My beloved.
Oh, my darling, how much I miss you already—not waking with you today and not seeing you and hearing your sweet voice—
I said “goodnight” yesterday because I felt as if I were going into a dark tunnel—the end, where? Who knows? And I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to take it either. When I returned to you, I told you that it was because I couldn’t live without you and that is truer now than it was then, if that’s possible.
I love you so very much, and I want to see you happy. If anything would accomplish that, I’d do it, but I do want to be near you. I need you in a way I’ve never needed anyone or anything in my life before. I’m just beating my head against the brick wall of forces that hold us apart. Oh, Lord, if only we lived in the Stone Age when only the things that were vital mattered to anyone.
My heart is crying for you—I want most desperately to be with you tonight, my love—
Your Ginny 12
Over the last year, Ginny’s thoughts had been turning more and more to Robert. Her own engagement had evaporated after the war, and none of the boys she met at UCLA had sparked any lasting interest. Most of them, of course, were much younger than she—by ten years or more—and uninterestingly callow. There were a certain number of older students, getting their degree, as she was, on the GI Bill, but there were no sparks. 13
Robert, on the other hand, was almost ten years older than she—handsome, compatible, and (most important) funny when he had the time and energy for it. But the reality overwhelmed her practical side. She was especially vulnerable, too, at that time, because the fits of lassitude she had been struggling with since Washington, D.C., were becoming alarmingly more frequent. She went to a doctor and was diagnosed with thyroid deficiency, for which she had to take daily medication. 14 Physically and emotionally she was at a low point, and the loss of the family solidarity knocked the props out from under her. The intensity of Ginny’s abrupt fall into love was startling to her.
Heinlein allowed none of this emotional disturbance to show to the outside world. In a contemporary letter to the Kuttners, he chats about his ongoing DIY, getting the house back in shape, with no intimation of trouble:
We’ve been redecorating throughout and now the house is so goddam clean that we are thinking of moving out. Kitchen in royal blue and butter yellow—whee! bedroom in white and royal blue; studio in ivory; enormous green rug in L.R., with rust colored drapes. You wouldn’t recognize the joint. I think we’ve chased the ghosts out and hope you will be happier in the place next time you stay with us, than you were in ’42. Leslyn has made and planted hands and charms of other sorts through the house, especially one against a thing that keeps trying to come up the basement steps. I’ve put a mirror on that door, which is good in itself; if the hand and the mirror don’t work, I shall try garlic flowers, knife-drawn lines, and dripping water. 15
By May, Leslyn was more or less confined to bed at the doctor’s orders and in a state of mind that could only be called psychotic, much of the time. Robert tried to keep things going, doing the housework himself and turning down all invitations for them. He kept up a front to friends:
I am beginning to be afraid that Leslyn used up her reserve during the war. Her health may be permanently impaired—no endurance and no resistance to infection. Me—I’m a little older and a little slower, but I am in much better health than at the end of the war. Even my sinuses don’t bother me much now. There’s a dance in the old gal yet, Archie. 16
Nevertheless, he was miserable and irritated, so worked up he often couldn’t sleep, and on a merry-go-round he could not get off: the writing business was bustling, and he had a hard deadline of the end of May to have the final version of the article for Cal Laning.17 A letter written two months earlier to his close friend John Arwine illustrates Heinlein’s state of mind during this entire period:
During the past eighteen months there have been more times when I wanted to be dead than there were times when I wanted to go on living … . I think I have discovered that I can manage somehow to endure anything that happens to me. I may be mistaken—there may come a morning when I will slit my wrists, or I may turn my face to the
wall and quit answering anything that is addressed to me. But I don’t think so; I think I can stick it out somehow … .
Leslyn’s troubles have paralleled mine and in some ways have been worse. I shan’t discuss them, except to say that we heterodyne each other, my troubles make her troubles worse and vice versa. Each of us would do almost anything to make the other happy; the results have been quite the opposite. Both of us have been in such a stew that we have not been able to give the other support and calmness in time of trouble. Each of us knows it and regrets it; our intentions are good but our performance falls short of our intentions.18
But the work, too, was often frustrating: when the editors at Collier’s expressed interest in the article he and Laning had cowritten, Heinlein was not in charge of the negotiations, even though he had to work at the writing to get it done by their deadline of May 29. Laning showed no sympathy or understanding of the mind of the public—but Laning was the man on the spot, and the negotiations were in his hands.
Heinlein had another spate of stories appearing: “Columbus Was a Dope” had gone to the pulps at fire-sale rates and appeared in the May issue of Startling Stories. That one had missed on every slick market. The mystery story he had written for Charteris in 1946 appeared in the May Popular Detective, slightly cleaned up. Rogers Terrill, the editor at Argosy, wanted to buy a story based on a dream Heinlein had one night about California flooding after an earthquake, “Water Is for Washing”—but wanted some minor revisions. 19
And Heinlein sold a fourth story to the Post, “Little Boy Lost.” In a letter acknowledging the sale to the Post’s fiction editor, Stuart Rose, he tested the water for a broader range of fiction:
I’m a bit afraid of being typed for “space opera” only. Would you care to see a business romance with an engineering-firm background—or a whodunit—or boy-meets-girl in a political campaign—or a domestic comedy on ice skates—or even sea, air, or western. I have background experience for any of these.
I can do fantasy—but Wilbur Schramm is tough competition. That guy is good!
I can do speculative science-fiction of any sort, as well as space stories—for example, an industrial atomic-power story.
There is an unlimited supply of 4- to 5,000 word shorts with a space-travel background, for example a disaster incident in a military spaceship of the U.N. peace patrol. How long will the market hold up?
Can you stand a tragic novel about World War III? Or a short story about a man who tries to out-guess a rocket bomb attack on the United States?
And he probed also for receptivity to longer fiction:
I would like to do a serial about the opening of space travel. Title: “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” The background story would be the same, at an earlier period, as my Luna-City stories; the story would be of D. D. Harriman, the first great entrepreneur of space travel. It would be concerned mainly with the financial and promotional aspects of the first Moon trip, rather than with the physical adventure. This is, I believe, a fairly novel approach to the space-travel story, and concerns what is, in fact, the real hitch in opening up the solar system—money, the huge initial investment and the wildcat nature of the risk. Does it sound like a serial—or, possibly, a novella?20
The Post editors did not express enthusiasm. Heinlein puzzled over this and asked his agent what he could do to keep his slicks audience. Blassingame forwarded a comment he had received21 recommending Heinlein get personal coaching from Thomas Uzzell. Uzzell had been the fiction editor at Collier’s and dealt with technique, plot, and “literary psychology” in his 1923 book Narrative Technique, the standard textbook for story technique. Blassingame thought he might get something by a quick look through Narrative Technique, but he didn’t see any particular need for personal coaching.
Heinlein was doubtful about this kind of coaching in any case. He was getting the kind of coaching he needed from Blassingame and from Leslyn’s story sense.
Each of you have a sympathetic understanding of what I’m trying to accomplish and try to help me do it, instead of trying to get me to do something entirely different .22
And he doubted he could use any tricks Uzzell could teach him about conventional plotting—he just didn’t use conventional plots:
My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it, I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him .23
But he got a copy of the book anyway, since he had gotten good use of Jack Woodford’s Trial and Error book when he first thought of commercial writing. But he put it aside until he got off deadline with the Laning collaboration, which Collier’s had definitely bought.
The Collier’s editor had been vague about what he wanted, which made revision a maddening process. The strain was starting to get to him.
Leslyn, I am sorry to say, is sick again. I am chief cook and bottle washer and am rushed to death. I wonder when this rat race will let up. There have been times since V-J day when I thought I was losing my mind .24
He was able to handle it at all only because Ginny came over periodically and pitched in to help. The rift in April apparently was resolved somehow.25 He even managed time to write a chatty letter to the de Camps:
I have been neglecting you kids or palming off postcards on you in exchange for nice chatty letters. This time I will do quite a bit better through the courtesy of Ginny Gerstenfeld. I have got a boiler shop running this weekend. Some vet[eran] students from UCL A are working around the house repairing, doing odd jobs, and gardening, and Ginny is enabling me to turn out an enormous stack of mail by means of her shorthand, a talent I didn’t know she had. When I finish dictating, she will get to work at my machine, and I will go outside where I am engaged in the most enormous and improbable venture in engineering—to wit, putting in an irrigation system to cover completely two city lots. The whole house has been in a turmoil for weeks as we have been repairing and redecorating the entire joint and rebuilding the entire garden. While I carried on simultaneously four separate literary ventures. I tell you this that you may understand why my personal correspondence has been so damned sloppy.26
Heinlein finished the revision of the article for Collier’s with four days to spare. On Lurton Blassingame’s recommendation, he had arranged for a Hollywood agent, Lou Schor, to handle two potential projects for radio. Schor wanted to capitalize on his new association with a Post writer and had his publicist run a puff story in the May 27 issue of The Hollywood Reporter—a common ploy in the entertainment industry to make self-promoting announcements and create buzz.
Hollywood was a tiny and inbred community, even more so then than it is now. Heinlein’s motion picture agent in Hollywood was H. N. “Swanny” (or sometimes “Swanie”) Swanson—an affiliate of Lurton Blassingame’s literary agency. Swanson became very angry when he saw the story. He had been representing Heinlein on a handshake basis. Now he sent over a boilerplate seven-year contract that seemed to assume Heinlein was going to be a staff writer of some kind for a studio, either movie or television. This conflict Heinlein absolutely did not need. Between his own health crises and Leslyn’s he was constantly on edge. The work he could do was the only thing holding him together, letting him push through it.
His deadine for Collier’s completed, Heinlein picked up Uzzell’s book and read through it carefully. Narrative Technique was very different from Woodford’s practical guide to writing to market. Uzzell’s directions for developing a commercial story followed commercial formula patterns, and Heinlein’s mind simply did not work that way. He found himself locking up when he tried to follow Uzzell’s advice .27 “That book durn near ruined me! It brought on the only really dry period I have ever had. I could plot—but I could not write a story.”28 After a month of dithering, he ven
ted his frustrations on Ginny as he helped her move to downtown Hollywood.29
Ginny had become disgusted with the couple she was keeping house for, and in any case her expenses were outrunning her income. She had decided that she couldn’t afford to stay in school for the summer session this year; she would have to get a real job. She found a residential hotel for women—actresses—in downtown Hollywood. Robert had a car; she asked him to help her move her books and clothes and typewriter.30
One of the things Robert most valued about Ginny was the utterly serious, deadpan way she treated any problem—but particularly one of his problems. This time, she cut right to the heart of the matter: “‘Plot,’” she said, “is something dreamed up by professors of English to explain what born storytellers do without thinking about it.”31 He was a born storyteller, she told him. Throw the book away: it had nothing to teach him.
And he did toss the book in the trash can (something he almost never did: books were sacred) and tried to put it out of his mind.
Late in May, Leslyn’s state of mind changed again; now she seemed almost placid and contented. But there was a cold and impenetrable cruelty to her. She told him she had tried to commit suicide—she later said, by rubbing herself with radioactive glass, though the piece of Trinitite that Cornog had given him was stored in a safe and buried under the woodpile. 32 Confined to her bed all month, she could not have gotten to it at all.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 53