Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  This was profoundly shocking to Heinlein. He knew instantly that there was only one chance for both of them—only one way to break the spiral: he told her she needed to call their lawyer, Sam Kamens, and get a divorce, on any terms she cared to name.33 She could cash in the war bonds to live on, and he would take the cash in their savings account. That would give them each about $600—that should be enough to hold them both until they could work out something. He agreed to pay $40 a month in an informal “alimony” until she got settled.34 He would need the car, but since she didn’t drive, that shouldn’t matter much to her.

  Heinlein forced himself to get on with it. He packed a bag, took his typewriter and some papers from his studio, and left.35 On June 16, he closed down their joint checking account and paid the outstanding bills. A few days later, he made it official: the date of separation they listed in Leslyn’s Complaint for Divorce was June 20, 1947.

  His month of Uzzell-induced inactivity meant that he had no fiction out in circulation and therefore no immediate prospects of a sale (with the exception of the Collier’s payment, due sometime within the month—which would have to be split with Laning). He would have to crank out something as soon as he could get settled, but his mind kept going round and around his own failure to be what Leslyn needed. The grief and guilt took him and stayed. More than a year later, he was still mourning:

  [T]his is my beloved Piglet who has nursed me, and whom I have nursed, my partner and staunch right hand in many a difficult venture, my confidant, the wife of my bosom, the creature that I cared for more than anything else in the world, of whom I was proud, whose goodness I admired, an honest gentleman among Philip Wylie’s Moms.36

  Sam Kamens worked out the provisions for a settlement agreement that was ready for execution on June 24. Because there were no children, and it was not a complex estate, they could agree on a clean division, almost to walk away with what they each had in their hands at the moment: they had already divided the cash assets evenly and agreed to make no claim on what the other had in his or her possession or might earn in future. Leslyn got the house and all its contents, except Robert’s working papers. That was a very considerable “bump” to her: the house had appreciated in value since they had bought it for $3,000 in 1935; she had already moved out and put it on the market for $10,000. In return, she agreed to give up any further claim on the literary estate—practical, in the short term, since the slicks sales had stopped and the royalties from reprints were so minor then that the bookkeeping involved in splitting them fifty-fifty would be more than the income would justify (and in any case, Street & Smith’s stranglehold on the reprint rights meant Heinlein couldn’t exploit them properly anyway). They informally agreed for Robert to continue the “alimony” Leslyn was receiving, even though the settlement document specified that they released each other from alimony—among other possible claims.37

  The day he signed the papers, Heinlein found a secretarial service on the corner of Fairfax and Santa Monica Boulevards, in what is now West Hollywood, that would receive and forward mail for him, and notified his agent of the change of address. He told Blassingame Leslyn could be reached through Kamens.

  There were endless details to take care of, and the necessary work helped keep him busy. They hadn’t told anybody yet, and they didn’t know what people’s reactions would be. Heinlein found a hotel and worked out what to do next. One day he called Ginny at the Studio Club and cashed in the favor she owed him: he asked her to help him move things out of the house before it was sold.

  They went together up to the Lookout Mountain house. Leslyn was not there. Robert took his business files and working reference books, and his desk and some other small furniture, and boxes and boxes of personal items, most of which went immediately into storage at the local Bekins. Then Ginny accompanied him to Arcadia, where his mother was living with Andy and Mary Jean Lermer, and stayed in the car while he went in to tell his family. That was very hard for him.38

  He spent several days sorting through the personal papers he had accumulated. Sack after sack of letters—almost his entire personal history in California politics, and correspondence with family and friends that did not bear on his business—he had Ginny burn in the hotel’s incinerator, patiently feeding them a piece at a time to avoid choking the fire.39

  Leslyn had started talking about the separation and divorce—she had, he later discovered, been bad-mouthing him to friends for months before the separation, portraying him as evil and psychotic, abusive to her.40 He began receiving letters from people back east: apparently Sprague de Camp had gotten all up and down the eastern seaboard spreading the word.

  Ginny suggested that he had nothing to gain by talking about it; it would only lead to situations in which he felt called upon to explain himself—and that could only lead to recriminations and self-justification. Better to say nothing than to be drawn into that.41

  Heinlein realized at once that what was wise was also the most practical thing for him to do.

  Robert and Ginny were out driving in the Valley on one occasion when he had to duck into a drugstore. Ginny spied a largish bottle of cologne—King’s Men—and bought it for him. Robert scolded her for spending money on something like that, but he used it, and he kept the bottle quietly hidden away when the cologne was all but gone .42

  Ginny put her practical problem solving to work on his other big problem. He couldn’t get up enough concentration to get anything done, between having to move every few days (city ordinances limited hotel stays to about five days at a time) and having sympathetic friends drop in unexpectedly. 43 The situation would be the same anywhere he went in the city. Ginny found a ranch outside Ojai, seventy-five miles north of Los Angeles in Ventura County, that rented rooms—Rancho Amelia. After dumping more boxes in storage, they went up to Ojai and got him installed there in a private room, where he could set up his typewriter and work in peace. He left Los Angeles quietly, on Sunday, July 6, the day before his fortieth birthday, not mentioning the departure to his friends.

  Installed in his room, he put Ginny on a bus back to Los Angeles Sunday night. He had missed his childhood bet that humanity would be on the Moon before his fortieth birthday—but July 7, 1947, was nevertheless an important transition for him. “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” he wrote to Ginny that night. “Also, Life Begins at Forty.”

  The first hitch of my life gone, the second starting auspiciously. With Ginny’s help I intend to make it a better job than the first. Thank you for loving me, my dear. Thank you for worrying about me and helping me and most especially for putting new life into me and making me young again. Thanks for the birthday cards and your cheery smile and for the watch … and most of all for your sweet, indominatable spirit. It’s a new borning on a bright new morning and you have made it.44

  It was quiet in Ojai. As soon as he met his fellow residents and the staff, he knew he would enjoy the place.

  The social atmosphere of this blessed valley is so fraternal, so Arcadian, that Ventura seems by contrast one of the seven ports of sin.

  Nevertheless I would take Port Saïd with Ginny, rather than Carcassonne without.45

  The only defect was that he couldn’t get a post office box there and had to take his mail c/o General Delivery, Ojai. If he stayed there any length of time, he would have to make better arrangements. He found a decentish restaurant for lunches and dinners, in a bowling alley, which suited him just fine.46 He could sit back and watch the undemanding spectacle of life on the hoof, knowing that he had to get back to work. He had to generate stories, and he also had a big rewrite job to do on “Beyond This Horizon,” before that serial could be published in book form. He was not looking forward to that task.

  The major publishers were understandably timid about taking on science-fiction lines—they had no experience at all marketing science fiction and were reluctant to invest in developing the expertise for what might, after all, turn out to be the fad of a season.47 But there
were some small presses devoted to science fiction and fantasy, run mostly by science-fiction fans. Lloyd Eshbach had founded Fantasy Press in 1946 to reprint in hardcover the best of the magazine science fiction, and he wanted Beyond This Horizon for his line. They had signed the contract early in April,48 and the small advance had been spent. It was time to make the revisions.

  The serial had been written under the wire in the last days of the prewar peace, and there were a lot of changes Heinlein wanted to make, reworking inelegancies, removing or changing some of the elements that were in there for John Campbell’s amusement, and adding enough material to smooth out some of the transitions. It would be a complete rewrite, with the torture of retyping the whole manuscript. He had developed some speed at touch-typing, but his accuracy—or lack thereof—made it a slow and tedious process.

  Ginny volunteered to put her professional clerical experience to work for him again and smooth-type the revisions on Beyond This Horizon .49 At a high school rummage sale she had picked up an old Underwood portable typewriter for her classwork at UCLA,50 and her evenings were free. He was delighted—it would save many days’ agony and let him get back to producing fresh copy. He gave her his marked-up manuscript, and she took it back to Hollywood with her.

  The months-long drought in his professional life came to an end then: the day after his fortieth birthday, Collier’s finally bought “A Spaceship Navy” for $1,25051: ten times his Navy retired pay for one month. That was just about twice the word rate paid by the Post. “But, so help me, it aint worth it!” he told Ginny.

  I’ve made as much money in less time writing pulp—this thing was a chronic headache.

  Nevertheless, I gotta make dough. 52

  Laning was depressed over the editing: they had taken out a lot of the factual material and left in all the sensational and dramatic stuff Heinlein had introduced to try to liven it up. Laning was afraid that his reputation would be damaged rather than enhanced,53 though he was already talking about another collaborative article, on aviation applications of radar.

  The $562.50 that was Heinlein’s half of the fee (after Blassingame’s 10 percent commission and 50 percent to Laning) went into his operating fund. Now he could consider something he and Ginny had talked about in the weeks he had been living in motels: he could buy a low-end house trailer and be able to move freely about the country—with Ginny;54 they could live together without the restrictions hotels and boardinghouses imposed on them. His initial calculations were not encouraging:

  This situation won’t improve any by the middle of next month, except by squeezing money out of this typewriter, for it costs me a minimum of $4 a day to live, $2 rent, $2 meals, which is almost exactly my income after alimony, leaving nothing for weekends, cleaning, haircuts, etc. But it is enough to get me a trailer, even if I hit a dry stretch—which I have no intention of doing. And now I’ll close, resisting the temptation to start another page, for I have three hours more work ahead of me.

  My deepest love, my sweet!

  Bob55

  Ginny had more faith in him than he did: she was already buying dishes and small appliances for the trailer.56

  Whither he went, she made it clear to him, she would go—like Ruth. This was a major decision on Ginny’s part: it meant giving up her plans to obtain a doctorate at UCLA; but more than that, it meant becoming a Bad Girl. Good Girls—and Ginny Gerstenfeld’s mother had trained her into a very good girl—did not shack up with married men, and that was what the trailer meant. Moving in with a man-not-your-husband was an irrevocable watershed : sex was one thing; living together quite another .57 Nevertheless, this was what she wanted. She was in love with Heinlein and wanted to marry him as soon as it was possible to do so. She had cleared all her personal emotional hurdles; she was committed.

  Heinlein might have been somewhat less committed at this stage. The risks were considerable, and they weighed on his mind. When the divorce was granted, the court would issue an “interlocutory decree,” but until the final decree of divorce (the “decree nisi”) came through, a year after the hearing, he was still legally married to Leslyn. “Cohabitation”—living together out of wedlock—was illegal everywhere in the United States, and being discovered cohabiting could land both of them in jail.

  It could also mean that the divorce might be invalidated—or some ridiculous penalties thrown at him. It could also mean the end of his new career writing books for boys, since Scribner’s would not want to be associated with someone who wound up in the papers labeled a “notorious adulterer.” Sophisticated people might let it pass, but there was enough prudery in the children’s book business that Scribner’s could invoke a morals clause in his contract—a clause nullifying the contract if Heinlein were found engaged in any of several activities considered unsavory—and that would be that. And that would be just the first of the dominoes to fall: his name would no longer be an asset to the Post and Collier’s and the other high-paying slick magazines. He would be forced back into pulp writing—and he might have to take on a new set of pseudonyms there, too. Katie Tarrant, John Campbell’s very Catholic editorial assistant, already thought he was “bad clear through.”58 Campbell might not stand up to pressure from Ralston or the business office.

  There were serious risks involved if worst came to worst—but the worstcase scenario hardly ever came to pass if the parties used normal discretion. In the meantime, friends relayed to him some of Leslyn’s loose talk about having him followed by detectives, and that was nerve-racking enough to keep him cautious about making his relations with Ginny conspicuous, even in Ojai. When Ginny came up from Hollywood on the weekends, Robert paid for a room for her—in another building, since his own building was fully occupied (Armelda, the owner-manager, wouldn’t tolerate any hanky-panky, no matter how much she liked Robert!)—and Robert joked that Ginny came up to see the new litter of kittens more than to see him.

  But one thing he could do: he began signing himself “Robert,” the name by which Ginny called him. “Bob” was for his previous life, his life with Leslyn. Some of his friends continued to address him as Bob, and he did not insist they make the change, using the “Bob” sign-off to them well into the 1980s.

  Robert’s relationship with Ginny progressed into the “pet name” stage—he told her about his mother calling him her “little stove” when he was a baby. He called her Ticky and developed a stick-figure caricature of her with triangular dress and cats formed out of backwards S’s, resulting in hundreds of “Ticky pictures” over the years. Himself he called “Wuzzums”—a little different from the “Pig” and “Bear” routine he and Leslyn had used.

  Heinlein forced himself to sit down at the typewriter every day, but often as not, he would get himself into an emotional tailspin over Leslyn and get nothing productive done. Ginny spent her evenings at the Studio Club for the next month, retyping Beyond This Horizon on one of the deal tables that came with her room. The table was a little too high, so she piled a couple of telephone books on her wooden chair and sat on them, high enough to reach the keys comfortably. The typing was not as much a chore as trying to read Heinlein’s handwritten corrections.59 Looking at his chicken scratches gave her a headache—and the phone books wrecked her back—but she persevered, taking another batch home with her each weekend. 60

  Ginny lucked into a stenographer’s job at a brassiere factory—five days a week, without the usual half-day on Saturday, so it would allow them to spend more time together. She complained that it was dull. To amuse her, Heinlein wrote her a story that enchanted her:

  Once upon a time there was, in a specially favored city, a little girl named Ticky. This she was called because she was busy like a ticking clock, all day long. Tick, tick, tick went her heels; tick tick tick went her knitting needles ; and, most especially, tick tick tick went her mind. Her hair was the color of flame in the bon fires, her eyes were the changing green of the sea when sunshine plays down through it to the sands and the sea flowers. Her nose had not yet
made up its mind what it would be and her mouth was shaped like a question mark. She greeted the world as a child greets a laden Christmas tree and there was no badness in her anywhere.

  “Mother,” asked Ticky one morning when the sun was bright and time was slow and sleepy and the pigeons were discussing new spring outfits, “can I eat my lunch in the cutter? Can I, please? Can I?”

  “‘May I,’ Ticky,” her mother said automatically. “Yes, I suppose you may, but do be careful and so forth and so forth—” So Ticky took four potatoes, fat Idahoes that would roast well, and some celery left over from dinner, and a tomato, and two cupcakes, and a bit of cold broiled ham, and some butter. Then she thought about it and took some more butter.

  She met her special chum in the vacant lot across the street and down the block and they got busy. Now this vacant lot backed onto another street where the children were not so favored. There was a little boy who lived on the fourth floor there. First he leaned on his back porch railing and watched. Then he came down and hung on the fence and watched. Then he came near them and stood on one foot and watched. “Whatcha doin?” he asked. As if anyone couldn’t see! For Ticky was buttering a potato—first you push it from the ends, to break it, burning your fingers. Then you lick your fingers. Then you drop the butter in. Then you—

  “Try it,” said Ticky, “and—”

  (catch this same space tomorrow for more adventures of Ticky)

  Ticky