Though, as a practical matter, he would not—could not—have left Leslyn when exhaustion from constant overwork and the loss of most of her family apparently kicked off this crisis back in 1944. Nor could he have known at that time that it was not one more instance of the passing instabilities that had blown over for the last eight years. Bill Corson had seen Leslyn a few days earlier at dinner and confirmed Heinlein’s judgment: “If it will be of any help to you … and to help you past any last-minute doubts, hear this now: the Piglet is not improving. At all. The ailment is in full spate.”9
That assurance did help. As the hearing came closer and the opportunities to back out dwindled away, he was in a state of increasing anxiety: “[When I got your letter] I was in a terrific state of emotion and I had to know, I just had to know, whether or not there was any reasonable prospect that Leslyn had pulled up her socks. Your statement … settled my mind.”10
At 9 A.M. on September 22, 1947, the hearing went forward before Judge Alfred Pannessa in Department Sixteen of the Los Angeles Superior Court, and fifteen minutes later the “Interlocutory Judgment of Divorce” was issued, uncontested. 11
That must have relieved enormous tension.
And now that the moment was upon them, both Robert and Ginny had second thoughts about going off together. Ginny said, “I believe we were in truth shocked at ourselves.”12 But the worst danger was now over, and discretion—and absence—would get them through the next year. Not even the $8,500 Leslyn had realized from the sale of the house would pay for detectives to trail him around the country. Whether planned or not—Ginny later remarked, “We got the trailer for anonymity”13—the course he took was cautious and discreet: living in a trailer, they would leave no trail of documents behind them—no registering at hotels as “Mr. and Mrs. Heinlein”—and the risk of exposure would be reasonably small.
Ginny’s life was packed up and in Bekins storage; she had not registered for the fall semester at UCLA, and classes had started without her. But as to casting her lot with Robert, she had no real doubt. This was not “like” her, she knew—but if she was going to be with Robert, she had to be with him. If she just let him wander away, there was no point to any of the mess.14 She was ready to go.
They left within a day or two of the hearing, 15 driving across the desert and over into Arizona’s central mountain country in one day’s drive. In late September, the summer weather among Arizona’s Ponderosa pine-covered mountains was just beginning to go crisp, but Heinlein was there not so much for the weather as for Mars Hill, Percival Lowell’s personal observatory in Flagstaff. He picked up copies of one of Lowell’s original sketches of Mars, both hemispheres, showing plains and deserts and canals.16
He felt so invigorated that he set up his typewriter. He had not been able to work at all for the last month, and it had been even longer since he had written any science fiction. He had a gimmick story in mind, about a construction worker on the Moon—a union guy like many he had known, who complained about the job but could be counted on when the chips were down. The gimmick he had in mind was a little too rough for the slicks: sealing a pressure leak by sitting on it—which might kill a skinny guy but leave a fat man alive. “Easy Job” he wrote over a five-day stretch, finishing on October 1. A letter from Lurton Blassingame reached him a few days later:
What in the world has happened to you? You were going like a gasolinesoaked fire for a time, but since your separation, there has been almost no copy from you. I do hope you have not become discouraged, nor that you are ill.17
Heinlein had more story ideas to work up, but he had to do something about the backlog of correspondence that was stacking up. Ginny took shorthand dictation and then typed drafts he could correct by hand.18 This continued for a while, and it was a help—though perhaps it was a little too much help. Heinlein tended to get carried away when he was dictating (and come to his senses five thousand words later). They fiddled around with their routine and settled on his roughing out a reply on the typewriter, which he could correct by hand. Ginny would then copy in “smooth” final. 19 It must have been helpful for Ginny to have something to do: once the observatory was exhausted as entertainment, there was very little for her to do in Flagstaff.
The weather was cooling down, so they picked up one day and moved a few hours’ drive south to Tombstone, Arizona, where there was more sightseeing. Heinlein had been in Yuma before, but Tombstone was something else: the city fathers had set aside the old part of the town as an Old West exhibit, built around the legendary O.K. Corral.20
Ginny kept herself occupied: She knew he was in pain and also that he had to work through it on his own. When he wasn’t staring off into space, nursing his private pain—or, better, generating another story—or working, he could be very affectionate and astonishingly whimsical for such a serious and substantial person. Each day she got breakfast for him, and he always came back to the trailer with a “Ticky hum,” a little rhyme with perfect scansion he sang to her, always to the same tune, but different words each day, sometimes holding his pajama top up and acting the part of a little boy performing for his elders, or a little girl curtsying. He teased her about not taking these Ticky hums down in musical notation and preserving them for posterity.21 It was a habit he kept up for the rest of his life.22
While Ginny climbed Tombstone’s Boot Hill and took in the other local attractions, Robert set up his typewriter again. He wrote outdoors whenever he could, since the interior space of the trailer was only four feet wide and seven feet long. Using the pull-down table he had installed blocked the kitchen sink and butane stove, and there wasn’t anyplace else to sit.
One of Heinlein’s perennial topics of discussion with Bill Corson was finding someplace out of the fallout patterns for first strikes on the coastal cities. The subject had come up again in their most recent exchange of letters, and Corson had reminded him to keep an eye out for suitable locations.23 It might have been that correspondence that gave Heinlein an idea for a short-short written in Tombstone, “On the Slopes of Vesuvius.”
Rocket Ship Galileo came out on October 13, and Alice Dalgliesh at Scribner’s had approved his rough outline for a second book. He planned to write his space cadet story over the winter,24 once they got settled, but something she had said when she visited with Robert and Leslyn in Los Angeles the year before had evidently stuck with him, for what he wrote next was a complete change of direction for him.
Alice Dalgliesh had written children’s books herself, since 1924, and an autobiographical story, The Silver Pencil (1944), had been a runner-up for the Newbery Medal. She remarked that there were many more writers for boys than for girls. Heinlein’s agenda in doing these juvenile books was for girls as well as boys. He saw no reason he couldn’t write a girls’ book25—writers always have to put on a persona and write through that persona. He would just put on the persona of a teenaged girl. “Miss D[algliesh] told R[obert] once that she wished she had an author who could turn out a girls’ juvenile each year just as regularly as R[obert] did; he told her that he would try one—and she just laughed at him.”26
At the time Heinlein had just filed the idea away, but it was a challenge he could not resist—“difficult but fun,” he said of it.27 “Poor Daddy,” written in October 1947, turned out an ice-skating story: perhaps the “Mother” character was a portrait of Ginny as she was now—startlingly, straightforwardly multicompetent—and Puddin’ an imaginative portrait of Ginny as she might have been as a teenager. Heinlein himself would be “Poor Daddy,” euchred into taking up ice-dancing to keep up with his wife as a preventative for jealousy. His agent thought the story lightweight but charming.28 Ideas for several others had popped into Heinlein’s head while he was doing it, and he thought one day he might have enough stories to make a collection, possibly using a female pen name.29
As soon as he finished that story, Heinlein moved on to the next item on his agenda. At one of the kamikaze think tank meetings in 1944, L. Ron Hubbard had casually nam
ed a dust devil that hung around the Heinleins’ apartment in downtown Philadelphia, and Robert had dashed off an idea note at the time. Over four days in October 1947 he worked up a story he called “Our Fair City,” about a progressive journalist making friends with a sentient (and very cooperative) dust devil named Kitten, and using her to ridicule Philadelphia’s (thinly disguised) corrupt political machine out of office. 30
“‘Our Fair City’ amused me,” Blassingame wrote back when Heinlein mailed it off, “but reactions to this type of fantasy vary widely so I’m not absolutely sure a check will result. Here’s hoping.”31
Rocket Ship Galileo was already making waves, only a couple of weeks after its publication date: Heinlein’s mother reported that she had got the last copy in the local Bullock’s; his sister-in-law Dorothy (Clare’s wife) wrote that the books were flying off the shelves in Cincinnati—and the bookseller urged her to tell him to write another one immediately “for it’s exactly the kind of book all the boys want to read.”32 Irving Crump, the fiction editor at the Scouting magazine Boys’ Life, wrote asking for stories with the same kind of scientific or technical background as in Rocket Ship Galileo.33 That was confirmation that he was in the right groove to get his “propaganda message” across to young people.
Heinlein didn’t really have “plans”—the only thing on his agenda was a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras in February, if feasible, and possibly after that, on to New York to see the Campbells and Arwine and his other East Coast friends. Willy Ley was not among the friends he would be seeing: over the last year Ley had found himself on the horns of a very unpleasant dilemma and had made, by Heinlein’s lights, the wrong choice. Shortly after the V-2 firing in June 1946, he had mentioned to Heinlein that Wernher von Braun, his former underling in the German Rocket Society, had been captured along with the V-2s and German rocket engineers and was now, as Cal Laning reported in October 1947, was going to be working on the American rocket program. “I only hope that the U.S. Army will not suddenly find him [von Braun] ‘charming’ in addition to being useful,” Ley told Heinlein.34 But that is just what happened. Ley had rapidly discovered that if he wanted to stay in the loop with rocket development, he had to find some way to work with von Braun, which dismayed him—but turned Heinlein’s stomach : von Braun was not merely a member of the Nazi Party, he was an SS officer. This friction caused Heinlein’s friendship with Ley to cool; Ley stopped answering Heinlein’s letters and spoke angrily of him to John Campbell as “self-righteous.” On Heinlein’s part: “I’m sad about the whole thing—but I really can’t stomach Nazis—and I can’t sponsor a man who condones them. I’m not sore at Willy, I am just out of touch, don’t know what goes on there, and no longer feel sure of him.”35
Heinlein was ready now to write his next boys’ book for Scribner’s, the space cadet story, which he was thinking of calling Hayworth Hall. He needed to settle in one place for a while—which meant they should move now rather than put it off. Winters get icy in the high deserts. His cash reserves were dwindling, and that put limits on what he could do until some of the stories he had written over the past summer sold.
Leslyn had been telling people that he was getting out of science fiction entirely, which was not quite true. Bill Corson viewed the prospect with alarm: “No one writes such good stf and it sells swell. Why do you do this thing? Desist.”36
Heinlein might be able to squeeze by through the winter even without a sale. He must have run a complex minimax calculation, balancing his cash reserves against the destinations he could reach in the Sun Belt. He came up with Dallas-Fort Worth as his solution.
Late in October, they drove across half of Arizona and all of New Mexico and into Texas. They pulled into Fort Worth two days after leaving Tombstone and found a trailer park for four dollars a week with a shared bath. Heinlein set up his typewriter and began writing again. He had another idea for the Post—an entirely earthbound science-fiction story with a nicely ironic twist: an agorophobe—a rocket pilot traumatized by an accident in space—had to overcome his fear of open spaces in order to rescue a kitten on the window ledge of an apartment building.
Heinlein could feel himself loosening up. He didn’t mention Ginny even to his closest friends, but she was very, very good for him. He summarized his improvements in a letter to Bill Corson:
I’ve gained 20 lbs, my sinuses are okay, and I sleep like a top without sleepy pills. I’ve had one drink in six months—and that with Scoles, to keep from hurting his feelings. I get up early and eat three meals at civilized hours. On the basis of the above alone, I know that the Great Change is what I needed. As to my morale, it is certainly as good as it has been for the past four years—what I have left now is heartache, loneliness, and sorrow that it turned out the way it did, instead of frustration, anger, exasperation, and hopelessness, combined with an agony of indecision. Since all the authorities maintain that what is biting me now passes with time, I have no reason to feel down-hearted no matter how sad I may be now.37
His agent agreed that “Broken Wings” was good enough for the slicks—“This is the best one you’ve done in some time. Congrats!”38 But the Post turned it down. Blassingame started offering it around to the other slick magazines. Heinlein hadn’t sold anything new since leaving Leslyn, except a couple of essays. Nobody seemed to want his fiction anymore. “My stuff lately seems to be too corny for slick and quite unsuited to pulp. I keep turning it out; some of it ought to sell someday.”39
He started working on Hayworth Hall, fiddling around with it for days, searching for that moment when it would just click and flow out of the fingers. But that wasn’t happening. He was not blocked. He always had a hard time getting started on a long job. Henry Sang wrote an understandingly sympathetic letter about his “difficulties” in taking his writing in new directions: “I know how catastrophic and hopeless such phases can seem to a creative mind.” Sang was confident that Robert’s success was inevitable, but cautioned that “changes in the pattern of one’s life can be harrowing and can exert curious and temporarily incurable retarding influences on one’s ability to express oneself.”40
The one thing he had sold post-Leslyn was articles, and Cal Laning was still trying to come up with another technical article for the slicks. He had given up on having Heinlein ghostwrite it and agreed to a joint byline. Heinlein offered him a deal: he would agree to another fifty-fifty split if Cal would advance him $75 a week during the actual writing—and if he actually needed to travel to D.C. for it, an advance for expenses. He just couldn’t afford to write pure speculative material at the moment.41
He also heard from Leslyn indirectly, through Sam Kamens. They had exchanged letters off and on over the summer, in some of which he opened up to her about his misery at the separation and divorce,42 but this was different—a business matter. She had left the Los Angeles area, too, and was now working at the Point Mugu Missile Range north of Los Angeles, which Buddy Scoles had helped set up after leaving the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia. The Heinleins seemed to have a knack for catching Scoles just before he moved on to something else: he was retiring from the Navy on November 1, 1947, with a tombstone promotion to Rear Admiral. Leslyn had used her personal friendship with Scoles to get an administrative job at Point Mugu and had moved to nearby Port Hueneme. She wrote offering to waive the support Robert was paying her—they both called it “alimony,” though it was not a court-ordered payment. She sounded much calmer now. Her letter to him was oriented, reasonable, and loving:
Dear Bob:
I am pleased that you and Sam [Kamens] agree with me that I should waive the payment of the $30 per month allowance, so long as I am employed, and am making more money than you are. If at any time you start making big money again and wish to send me the allowance, I shall bank it, so long as I am making a living wage.
Enclosed is a carbon copy of this letter, in case you wish to send one to Sam Kamens to keep with our other papers in regard to financial settlement.
I also wish you and Sam to know that I have opened a saving account in the Oxnard branch of the Security First-National Bank, and starting next payday I will be putting one Saving Bond every other payday in a safe deposit box in the Oxnard bank. Under my holographic will in the Hollywood bank and the way in which the bonds are made out, these savings you are also heir to.
Fondly, as ever,
Leslyn43
That was a definite improvement. He was cheered when Corson wrote that Leslyn seemed happy in Port Hueneme. It could not be anything more than a start toward normalizing their relationship: reconciliation was completely out of the question.
We remain as far apart in understanding as formerly, however—she sees nothing in the complaints I made but puritanical spite, masked as concern for her welfare, and overbearing bossyness. Well, perhaps she is right, but we will never agree. But I do miss her company like hell. It’s a funny thing, but even when we were most at odds, we enjoyed each others company more than almost anything on earth.44
This sentiment could not have appealed to Corson, who wrote implying that even this apparent stability when Leslyn first moved to Port Hueneme might have been a blip, rather than a long-term trend. He warned that Leslyn was sharing his letters with others, along with her own asides, “acid and witty.”
Dear Wobert,
Extensive survey of the Mugu area reveals considerable deterioration from even what you remember. Worse, by considerable, and sordid withal. Do not tease, torment and tantalize yourself over that which exists only in your mind—the person we remember fondly does not seem to be extant any more. Forgive my mentioning it?45
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 56