RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/16/47.
RAH, letter to Willy Ley, 05/21/47.
The details of this situation were not mentioned in any correspondence.
RAH, letter to Sprague and Catherine de Camp, 05/03/47.
RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/16/47.
RAH, letter to Lloyd Biggle, 09/30/76.
The date and occasion is not recorded, but Heinlein’s own statement that he was blocked for about a month makes it roughly coincident with Ginny Gerstenfeld’s move to the Studio Club, and so this is a highly probable occasion for the exchange (which he found memorable enough to repeat on several occasions thereafter) to have taken place.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/28/89.
RAH, letter to Lloyd Biggle, 09/30/76.
RAH, letter to Dona and George Smith, 02/03/51.
The symmetry of this precipitate breakup with Heinlein’s precipitate proposal fifteen years earlier looks suspiciously story-like, too artful to be quite true, but, as Heinlein remarked elsewhere, “That’s the trouble with truth; it lacks the plausibility of fiction.” Heinlein habitually did make even life-altering decisions startlingly rapidly—a quality he valorized for his Homo novis superman characters in “Gulf” (written in 1949) and again in the television series pilot screenplay he derived from “Gulf,” The Adventure of the Man Who Wasn’t There, in 1963 and 1964.
It may not be clear why an admission of an attempt to commit suicide would prompt the separation and divorce (and Heinlein never recorded his reasons). Reading between the lines of later correspondence about the breakup, it may be that Heinlein saw himself as having, for three years, turned inward on his marriage, attempting to accommodate Leslyn’s evident depression and other psychological problems, trying without success to be the support and help she needed—and to be a shield for her, from outside demands. This is necessarily also a process of giving up the self, pushing one’s own needs to the side. This process, by its very nature, is a breaking of the mutual help pattern of a healthy marriage. The attempted suicide might have indicated to Heinlein that this was not a temporary situation from which they could recover and get back to a healthy pattern, but a new and permanent condition from which there was no possibility of recovery.
In any case, he must have seen some indication in that moment that a transition had happened in the pattern of their marriage, for which the only practical solution was a clean break.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series, Tape A, Side A (September 6, 2000); see also RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/09/47.
The evidence about when this incident and the consequent separation took place is contradictory. It is possible—though not likely—that it might have taken place very late in May (after the last mention in one of Robert’s letters of Leslyn being bedridden on May 22) or early in June, but the most likely time is mid-June. None of the events definitely consequent to the separation took place before about June 16—the date on which Heinlein withdrew $608.50 from their joint savings account—which argues for the mid-June date. However, a letter dated June 8, 1947, from Cal Laning to RAH indicating that Sprague de Camp had told him about the separation already, and Virginia Heinlein’s recollection that it took place while her final exams were going on or the semester was finishing up, suggests the earlier date—that is, in early June at the latest.
I have chosen to regard the Laning letter as casually misdated and probably intended to be dated June 28, 1947—and Virginia Heinlein’s recollection as referring to a two-week time period, rather than to a precise date on which both her move and her final exams were taking place.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 05/14/48.
Property Settlement Agreement dated 06/26/47, paragraph 6.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series Tape B, Side A (September [9?], 2000).
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 7, Side A (February [28?,] 2000).
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 08/14/48.
Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to Robert James, Ph.D., 06/02/2001.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 12, Side A (March [3?], 2000).
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series, Tape A, Side B (September 2000).
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/07/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/08/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/08/47.
This year’s fad was flying saucers—prompted probably by the Roswell flying saucer “crash” that had appeared in the New Mexico papers the day after Heinlein’s fortieth birthday.
RAH, Accession Notes dated 04/02/67 for the RAH Archive, UCSC.
Virginia Gerstenfeld, letter to RAH, 07/09/47.
Virginia Heinlein, IM with author, 12/16/2001.
Frank D. Morris, Collier’s, letter to RAH, 07/08/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/09/47.
Cal Laning, letter to RAH, 06/27/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/08/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/09/47.
See, for example, Virginia Gerstenfeld’s letter to RAH, 07/09/47. Over the years, much has been made of the presumed changes Ginny wrought in Robert Heinlein, particularly in terms of political orientation—highly exaggerated, in Robert’s opinion:
I got over my notions about economics slowly. Ginny did a great deal to reeducate me. But I was stubborn about it. The turning point was an article in US News and World Report: “The Final Truth About Pearl Harbor” [he means Admiral Theobald’s The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, published in U.S. News & World Report (with a slightly differently worded title) and then released as a book in 1954—six years after their marriage]. That shook me loose of any emotional attachment to FDR, which left me ripe for Goldwater and his The Conscience of a Conservative.
Perhaps I would have made the change on my own, without Ginny. But the question is moot. (RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86).
But Heinlein wrought changes in Ginny Gerstenfeld, as well, and this burst of domesticity is an indication. Ginny had never before thought of herself as a particularly “nurturing” type, but she found herself buying summer fruits and daydreaming about how she could prepare them for him, to comfort him with peaches. But she found also that she had become politically “activized” by him. Later, when she found a job (at a brassiere manufacturer), she was scandalized by the pay differences she found:
Baby, I was going to sit down and froth at the mouth about some things I’ve missed in my ivory tower—we made out the payroll at the office, and I discovered that those poor girls who make the bras can’t possibly manage to live on their salaries … . What do you suppose had happened to ILGWU? … As a matter of fact, I’m now in a frame of mind where I’d join a union if it would do them any good … . You’ve really opened my eyes, and with this experience, it adds up to a very permanent change. Oh, dear, there I go frothing anyway, but since it’s in a cause you approve of, I hope you’ll forgive it. (07/16/47)
They changed each other.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Third Series, Tape B, Side A (March 27, 2001); see also Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/28/89. Virginia Heinlein mentioned the social and legal risk involved in cohabiting illegally in several additional places, as well.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with author, Tape 9, Side A (March [3?], 2000). The context of the remark is that Miss Tarrant was notorious for bluepenciling any writing that was even faintly suggestive. She is said to have remarked once, however, that she could not so edit Heinlein because he had a native tinge of heresy and his writing was “bad clear through.” The Heinleins treasured the remark. Other writers tried to sneak off-color remarks through her defenses, the prize of which, passed around the small community of science fiction writers, was a reference to a (male) cat as a “ball-bearing mousetrap.” The story was “Rat Race” by Georg
e O. Smith, published in Astounding in August 1947.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 04/06/2000.
See, for example, Virginia Gerstenfeld, letter to RAH, 07/28/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/15/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/23/47.
RAH, letter to Judith and Dan Merril, 08/28/61.
RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 07/27/65, after Ellison rejected “No Bands Playing” for Dangerous Visions.
RAH, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” in Lloyd A. Eshbach, ed., Of Worlds Beyond (Reading, Pa.: Fantasy Press, 1947).
Heinlein made these points for the first time in the “Speculative Fiction” essay but repeated them many times and based the first half of his 1973 James Forrestal lecture on this thesis. The fullest statement of this argument is set out in the original draft of the lecture, which is printed in full in the nonfiction volumes of the Virginia Edition.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 7, Side B (February [28?], 2000).
Eric Temple Bell, letter to RAH, 10/14/47.
Allan Gray, letter to RAH, 11/10/47.
Willy Ley, letter to RAH, 07/26/47.
Cartmill’s marriage to Jeanne seems to have broken up while the Heinleins were in Philadelphia—probably in 1945, as the interlocutory decree was still in effect in 1947 per a mention in a May 21, 1947, letter to Willy Ley—and the stories the Heinleins got from friends about the divorce were vague and inconsistent. Cartmill had already become, as Heinlein later said in another context, a “mean drunk.” RAH, letter to Judith Klein, 12/01/79.
See, for example, Bill Corson’s letter to RAH, 09/17/47.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 02/07/2000.
Henry Sang, letter to RAH, 06/30/47.
Cal Laning, letter to RAH, 07/23/47.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 08/17/47.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 09/13/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 05/14/48.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 5 (February [29?], 2000).
Bill Corson, letter to RAH, 07/10/47.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 07/17/47.
RAH, letter to Virginia Gerstenfeld, 07/28/47.
RAH, “A Bathroom of Her Own,” Expanded Universe.
Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 08/14/47.
Complaint in divorce action filed by Zide, Kamens & Zide.
Leslyn Heinlein, letter to Jack Williamson, 08/18/47. This letter sounds sane, rational, and mature—and it is almost the only surviving document in her own voice from the period. But many of the cautions about scurrilous stories Leslyn was very indiscreetly retailing came after this letter to Jack Williamson, and in fact Cal Laning cautioned Heinlein, almost a month later, not to talk about his affairs because they came indirectly to him across the continent. Heinlein was able to point out that he was not talking—the misinformation Laning was getting was coming solely from Leslyn, whose stories were becoming less oriented.
Dr. Robert James, who has carefully researched and unearthed Leslyn Heinlein’s correspondence where recipients ultimately placed them in public archives, suggests Leslyn may have been cultivating Williamson in some special way, as her letters to him were unusually centered and oriented; in all her surviving correspondence, for example, Leslyn never admitted to a problem with alcohol—except once, to Jack Williamson, much later.
On this occasion, Williamson took the opportunity to invite Heinlein to drop by if he happened to be in the neighborhood of Williamson’s family ranch in Pep, New Mexico (Jack Williamson, letter to RAH, 10/08/47).
30. Also on the Road … (pages 433–447)
RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 09/18/47.
RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 09/18/47.
RAH, letter to E. E. Smith, 03/13/56.
RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 09/18/47.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/28/89.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 09/13/47.
The list of appearances and references in the media is taken from Cal Laning’s letter to RAH, 08/30/47.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 09/13/47.
Bill Corson, letter to RAH, 09/20/47.
RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 10/03/47.
Los Angeles County Records, Book 1835, page 297, dated-stamped Sep 22 1947.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/28/89.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/17/89.
For Ginny’s attitudes at the time, see, for example, Virginia Gerstenfeld’s letter to RAH, 08/26/48.
The date on which Robert and Ginny left Los Angeles was not recorded, but they must have reached Flagstaff, Arizona, by no later than September 25, 1947, as that is the date on which Heinlein started his next story, “Gentlemen, Be Seated.”
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 11/07/99.
Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 10/03/47.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/29/89.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 10, Side B (March [2?], 2000).
Tombstone City-Marshall Virgil Earp and his two brothers, Wyatt and Morgan, together with friend “Doc” Holliday, had a shoot-out with the “Clanton gang”—local bullies they had been harassing—in 1881. The event had been mythologized by Bat Masterson in his 1907 memoirs, and a highly fictionalized biography of Wyatt Earp in 1928 had put the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” firmly into the mythology of the American West.
Virginia Heinlein, IM with author, 08/24/01; see also Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 04/19/89.
At one point in an IM with the author (12/06/2001), Virginia Heinlein tried to recall one of the Ticky hums for illustrative purposes and came up with a fragment that must have dated from after 1966, as it referenced the deer on Bonny Doon Road, where Robert and Ginny would live from 1966 to 1987.
See, for example, Bill Corson’s letter to RAH, 09/20/47.
As early as his letter to Virginia Fowler, Alice Dalgliesh’s assistant, dated 06/29/47, RAH was planning to write the book in the fall of 1947, but he had not started it as late as mid-October.
RAH, second set of Accession Notes, 11/05/68, for Opus 59, “Poor Daddy.”
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 11/07/99; see also Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 7, Side B (March [3?], 2000), and RAH’s Accession Notes for Opus. 59, “Poor Daddy.”
RAH, Accession Notes for Opus 59, “Poor Daddy.”
Lurton Blassingame, postcard to RAH acknowledging receipt of the story, 11/14/47.
RAH, second set of Accession Notes, dated 11/05/68, for Opus 59, “Poor Daddy.”
In some sense, “Our Fair City” may be regarded as the remote ancestor of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, since both use the device of a practical-joke-playing nonorganic intelligence.
Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 12/08/47.
Dorothy Heinlein, letter to RAH, 11/20/47.
Irving Crump, letter to RAH, 10/22/47.
Willy Ley, letter to RAH, 08/28/46.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 05/01/46. This letter may be misdated by a year (i.e., 1947), as this date in 1946 is bracketed by correspondence to and from Willy Ley about a proposed trip to Southern California.
Both the information about Leslyn and the quotation from Bill Corson letter to RAH, 11/10/47.
RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 12/01/47.
Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 11/06/47.
RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 12/01/47.
Henry Sang, letter to RAH, 12/19/47.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 10/26/47.
Almost none of Leslyn’s letters to Heinlein were preserved, and we know of them and their contents only by passing mentions in letters to others. The single exception is quoted infra. Probably they were later moved to a special file Heinlein maintained for her poison-pen letters through about 1953, which file was apparently destroyed when he moved from Colorado back to California in 1967—fourteen years after the la
st spate of poison-pen letters—and needed to reduce the amount of business and personal material being moved across country.
The destruction of Leslyn’s personal voice in Heinlein’s files, and the subsequent failure to preserve her own records—on top of Heinlein’s friends maintaining a discreet silence in public commentary, to avoid offending Heinlein—has all but obliterated any direct view of Leslyn. For several years, Virginia Heinlein also refused to discuss Leslyn until it became clear that her own memories of Leslyn, and the things Heinlein had told her, were the only historical sources available. She obliged the author and Robert James, Ph.D., by filling in whatever historical lacunae she could, always with the appropriate caution that the source might be prejudiced. Her recollections, properly vetted for consistency with facts derived from other sources, have been an invaluable help.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 76