Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

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  I haven’t anything which could properly be termed a religion. My thoughts on religious subjects are matters of intellectual rather than emotional conviction. The nearest thing to a religious feeling I have, and, I believe, strong enough to justify calling it religious feeling, has to do with the United States of America. It is not a reasoned evaluation but an overpowering emotion. The land itself as well as the people, its culture in the broadest most vulgar sense, its history and its customs. I have no children and few close friends. I have no God. The only thing which always inspires in me a feeling of something much bigger and more important than myself, which calls up in me a yearning for self-sacrifice, is this country of ours. I know it is not logical—I presume that a mature man’s attachments should be for a set of principles rather than for a particular group or a certain stretch of soil. But I don’t feel that way. The green hills of New Jersey, the brown wastes of New Mexico, or the limestone bluffs of Missouri—the mere thought of them chokes me up. That is one reason why I travel so much—to see it and feel it. Every rolling word of the Constitution, and the bright, sharp, brave phrases of the Bill of Rights—they get me where I live. Our own music, whether it’s Yankee Doodle, or the Missouri Waltz, or our own bugle calls—it gets me.

  ROBERT A. HEINLEIN,

  letter to John W. Campbell, Jr.

  January 20, 1942

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. Half Done, Well Begun

  2. Hooray for Hollywood!

  3. Hollywood Shuffle

  4. Rent or Buy or Build?

  5. Alien Invasions

  6. Reality Bites

  7. Out and About

  8. World Travelers

  9. Some Beginnings of Some Ends

  10. Vintage Season

  11. Going Off a Bit

  12. Waiting Out the End

  13. “My Own Stuff, My Own Way”

  14. The Workers’ Paradise

  15. Scissorbill Paradise

  16. Smoking Rubble

  17. Old World, New World, Old World

  18. Gold for Goldwater

  19. That Dinkum Thinkum

  20. House-building—Again!

  21. Stalled

  22. Picking Up Where He Left Off

  23. Trouble, With a Capital “P”

  24. Da Capo al Fine

  25. On to Other Things

  26. Mr. Science

  27. “I Vant Your Blood”

  28. “Human Vegetable”

  29. Traveling Road Show

  30. New Beginnings

  31. Entotic

  32. After 1984

  33. Last Act

  Appendix 1: After

  Appendix 2: “The Good Stuff”

  Notes

  Works of Robert A. Heinlein

  Index

  Photographs

  Also by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Learning Curve, the first volume of this biography, took Heinlein from his birth in 1907 through his naval career, destroyed by tuberculosis; a political career that ended in a personally disastrous political campaign; and a writing career that succeeded beyond anything he could imagine—only to be interrupted by the demands of engineering for World War II. After the war, his writing began to pick up again—but his fifteen-year marriage to Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein fell apart. After a year he was ready to remarry, a naval lieutenant he had met in Philadelphia during his war work.

  It was a period of ups and downs—Heinlein’s learning curve in the most literal sense. By 1948 he was coming to the crest of the curve, having learned better in many ways, with many more to come. But the core of his mind, formed as a radical liberal early in the twentieth century, held those values even as the world shifted around him. In particular, the leftward shift of American politics after World War II (among conservatives as well as liberals) put Heinlein in a widening gulf of values, increasingly at odds with both left and right. Heinlein engaged with his world, and his grappling was uncomfortable but necessary. Toward the end, as his personal fame grew, he became paradoxically almost invisible, and even his most approving readers reacted more to crude labels than to the actual content of his writing. More and more plainly he set out his message—“Again and again, what are the facts?”—and his readership grew into the millions, needing the affirmation of reason that includes the spiritual. The final products of his fertile imagination, dealing with taboos broken, men like gods, and a society, in Freud’s terms, polymorphous perverse, are in no real sense the product of a “conservative” or “rightist” mentality.

  By the time of his marriage to Virginia Gerstenfeld in 1948 (her first, his third), Robert Heinlein was halfway through his life, and he was essentially done with false starts. After the collapse of his marriage to Leslyn MacDonald, he had a long and painful creative dry spell, but he persevered and gradually discovered how to make his postwar “propaganda purposes” work, how to teach his fellow citizens (the current ones, as well as the teenagers who would move into responsible adulthood) how to live in, and how to take control of, their increasingly technology-dominated future. It was important work and satisfying, and for the new life he was building, at age forty, Virginia Heinlein was to become his perfect partner, in his writing business as well as in his life, steadily taking over the business aspects of his career so that he could concentrate on the art.

  New markets continued to open up for Heinlein, and, so gradually he was never really aware of it, he became more than a successful popular writer in the mold of Erle Stanley Gardner or Rex Stout: He became a culture-figure, a public moralist, something like the role H. G. Wells had filled in the 1920s, and Mark Twain before him—but in a public much less open to moralizing, much more open to an irony that shells out important truths in the guise of fictions.

  Although Heinlein died in 1988, his entire body of writing remains in print, selling even more widely than during his lifetime. Warren Buffett had not yet brought “value investing” back into currency at the time of Heinlein’s death, but value investing is exactly what Heinlein engaged in for the last forty years of his life—investing in us (often as irony cast upon the waters, which comes back sevenfold!).

  1

  HALF DONE, WELL BEGUN

  “I cried at the altar, and Ginny cried when we got outside and, all in all, it was quite kosher.”1

  October 21, 1948, was a beautiful, crisp fall day in Raton, New Mexico, just over the Colorado border. Snow gleamed on the distant mountaintops. Robert and Virginia Heinlein were finally married.

  They had settled in Colorado Springs until the divorce from Leslyn was finalized, and they both struggled through the tumult of deciding on this new commitment, discovering that they both wanted this new life together.

  Ginny, whose entire life had been spent in big cities, fell in love with that clean, mountain resort town,2 and
they began putting down roots. Their social life had been somewhat constrained by the need to keep a low profile—which is also why they went out of state for the wedding. Now, with the holidays coming on, in addition to working with a local radio station they joined a figure-skating club.3 Ginny, a national ice-skating semifinalist, was asked to star as a featured performer in the Broadmoor resort hotel’s Christmas-week Symphony on Ice program—an ice-dancing version of The Nutcracker.

  Heinlein was sleeping well for the first time in years, his only health problem being a persistent sinusitis. Even his ex-wife Leslyn—now a long-distance problem—seemed to be straightening out after a very messy period of her life. Six months earlier, she had lost her job at Point Mugu—“compulsory resignation because of refusal to do work the way her boss wanted her to do it,” their mutual friend Bill Corson wrote after talking with Buddy Scoles4—“complicated to unknown extent by liquor.”5 And then she disappeared. Not even their lawyer—Sam Kamens represented both Robert and Leslyn in the divorce action—had heard from her in more than a year. By September, Heinlein learned from friends, Leslyn had turned up in a sanatarium in Long Beach, “taking the cure.” Her own letter to Robert had kindled hopes she would make a full recovery, since she had joined Alcoholics Anonymous.6

  Reconnecting with friends after his period of self-imposed isolation, Heinlein wrote long letters telling them about the marriage to Ginny, glossing over the timing. He had strict personal rules about telling the truth, always, but sometimes telling the truth selectively helped your friends maintain your privacy—and other peoples’ illusions, if necessary.

  He had no illusions about getting back to work, especially now that he knew he could rely on Ginny as a helpmeet even with the writing, as Leslyn had been before the dark days (though in her own, different way). Heinlein was uncomfortably aware that the bank balance was dwindling away: Four months of unpaid labor on the screenplay for Destination Moon in the spring and summer of 1948 had put a severe crimp in their finances. He would not let Ginny go back to work. Heinlein’s Navy pension and a small but steady trickle of reprint requests for his prewar stories almost covered current expenses. The script could potentially put them in the clear. George Pal was shopping the project around Hollywood (though without getting even a nibble of interest).

  In the fall of 1948, Heinlein had three books in print: his second juvenile for Scribner, Space Cadet, came out in August—and the first, Rocket Ship Galileo, was still selling briskly. Fantasy Press issued the revised Beyond This Horizon. In five or six months they would have royalty payments that would cover next year’s taxes and living expenses; he could feel reasonably confident that he wouldn’t dip back into poverty, as they had in Fort Worth at Christmastime a year earlier. Gnome Press, another of the new, small specialty publishing houses, wanted to publish Sixth Column under the Heinlein name instead of the Anson MacDonald pseudonym it had borne when published in Astounding Science-Fiction. John Campbell, Heinlein thought, ought at least to have a coauthor credit, since it had been written from Campbell’s (verbal) outline. He wrote to Campbell, and to Lurton Blassingame, asking what sort of fee and credit split would be appropriate. But Campbell did not want either money or credit.7

  In the meantime, other speculative ventures were falling into his lap—two in one week recently: an offer to do continuity for a science-fiction newspaper comic strip8 and a request from the A&S Lyons Hollywood agency to develop a science-fiction radio show, with him as the host.9 Heinlein asked his cowriter of the Destination Moon script, Alford “Rip” van Ronkel, about the agency’s reputation. It was a genuine offer, van Ronkel told him.10 Heinlein was skeptical: He knew he had a good “radio voice”—better on radio than it sounded naturally—but felt he was not “celebrity” enough to carry such a show (though if they wanted to pay him—a thousand dollars a week was about right—he would put his objections aside).11

  The regular writing was moving along: After thinking about it for a while, Heinlein had come up with a good idea for the scouting story that Boys’ Life had been asking for. He originally intended “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” as a short story12 about the first interplanetary Triple Eagle Scout, though it grew uncontrollably in the telling; by early November he had written twenty-five thousand words and struggled through multiple drafts with colored pencils, to cut it to nine thousand words. This produced a manuscript that looked, he said, like “modernist wallpaper.”13

  His professional life was flourishing, just as the demands of his personal life escalated: When Ginny was in Washington, D.C., during the war, she had been diagnosed with thyroid deficiency. In the fall of 1948 her medications were adjusted, and Robert was helping her keep to her medication schedule. “She takes a grain and a half a day and is repulsively energetic, unless she happens to forget to take her pills. I have posted a chart and award her gold stars for taking her pills.”14 Nobody else would recognize and validate that small-girl part of her personality—but Heinlein had quite a lot of small boy in his own makeup, which he rarely showed to anyone but her.

  As she regained her full energy, Ginny took on the task of getting Robert’s health in order. He had been sick the entire time she had known him, and when he was in Los Angeles working on the script for Destination Moon, his right leg began to bother him. Dr. King, the Los Angeles orthopedist he saw, had him doing stretching and strengthening exercises with orthopedic devices, to improve a postural imbalance he had picked up from fencing.15 As their financial crisis eased, Ginny devoted more time and resources to the housekeeping and meal budget, stretching her talent and skills to make his meals sophisticated, flavorful, and sustaining. Robert had grown up on the heavy and undistinguished cooking of the Midwest: Vegetables that were not boiled to a limp mess and beefsteak rare and à point—not gray and overdone and tough—were new to him.16

  But her program was derailed almost before it began. The doctor Heinlein was consulting about his sinusitis tested him for allergies. He tested positive for—well, nearly everything: “Seems I’m allergic to milk (ice cream, cheese, cream soups), corn (but not corn liquor), and lettuce. Why lettuce? Why not spinach? Ginny is beside herself trying to figure out how to feed me.”17 Heinlein took it in stride: “Me, I don’t worry—anything is worthwhile to get the full use of my schnozzle again—and a little dieting will help my waist line. Ginny is such a swell cook that I have a strong disposition to over-eat.”18

  As they settled into their new life together, they began to take up their political interests, as well. They had moved to Colorado Springs too late in the year to register to vote: For the first time in Ginny’s adult life, she would not be able to vote in a presidential election (Robert had filed an absentee ballot in California).19 There was a good chance that President Truman might lose to Republican Tom Dewey (neither Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond nor Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party stood any real chance in this election—but they both weakened Truman’s support).

  Robert had come to respect Truman’s strength of character—particularly after his handling of the Democratic Party’s racism at the nominating convention that summer:

  What I do like is the fact that Truman stood up to the southern “gentlemen” white racists and told them to go pee up a rope, and most especially the fact that the convention backed him up on it. If the convention had pussyfooted on civil rights I would have been strongly tempted to vote the vegetarian ticket. But it didn’t … this was a time to stand up and be counted, and the count came out on the side of human decency, which made me happy and proud.20

  Ginny was less enthusiastic about Truman.21

  On election night, Robert stationed himself by the radio and stayed awake, tallying the overnight results as they came in. In the morning, he told her with great satisfaction that Truman had won—much in advance of the official count.

  With the elections out of the way, Heinlein returned to the problem of his annual boys’ book for Scribner. He had intended to build a story around undersea agriculture—a family
of sea-farmers, since his editor, Alice Dalgliesh, wanted a prominent girl character this time. She had found his outline notes for Ocean Rancher “thrilling”22—but he needed to get in more suit-diving to finish off his background research. Ginny put her foot down: She had almost lost him last year.23 Ocean Rancher was out.

  Heinlein always had a hard time coming up with ideas for these boys’ books. He had to invent something adventurous that boys would be interested in, without needing excessive background explanations. And it was always a problem to get the boys out from under the thumbs of their adult “protectors,” because adventures were what they were being protected from.24 Targeted at a general readership, these boys’ books could not use the genre conventions of the science-fiction magazines—but he could use ordinary science.

  His approach to the science-fiction juvenile was evolving. When he wrote Rocket Ship Galileo in 1946, the form of the juvenile was dominated by the Tom Swift/Motor Boys formula. Space Cadet, in 1948, was built around a group of teenagers, and so is still fairly close to the formula. His third book, however, would depart further.

  His core idea came out of a story he remembered that Jack Williamson had cowritten with Miles J. Breuer in 1930, “The Birth of a New Republic”—“A very, very solid piece of work, one of my favorites, and miles ahead of the stuff … of the period.”25 A story began coming together in his mind, about a revolution on Mars against a distant Earth colonial authority. He wrote up a synopsis of the story as an outline-proposal and sent it to Alice Dalgliesh, by way of Lurton Blassingame.26

  That November he wrote a story of a woman on a space station overcoming male chauvinism, “Delilah and the Space Rigger,” aimed at The Saturday Evening Post (which found it too “technical”). Ginny suggested another story idea to work on while “Delilah” started on the rounds of other slicks:27 In Space Cadet he had mentioned several iconic heroes-of-the-Space-Patrol. She suggested he write the story of Dahlquist, who stopped a military coup at the cost of his own life. During the first two weeks of December 1948, this turned into “The Long Watch”—a “downbeat” story, since the hero dies at the end, but it showed what had inspired those boys about the story: “The narrator is a hero in the mold that Heinlein perfected,” Andre Norton later wrote of this story. “That is, he’s an ordinary guy who must decide to do the extraordinary because of his belief in the American system of government.”28 Ginny cried when she typed it for submission—and every time she had to retype it.29 Eventually, she said, her tears rusted out her typewriter.30