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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  On July 13, 1949, more writers arrived. The L. Sprague de Camps came visiting with their sons Rusty and Lyman. Fellow Navy man Cal Laning was to arrive the next day. Robert’s brother Rex wanted to pay them a visit to see the set and also to work out what they were going to do for their parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary coming up in November—and Ron Hubbard wrote that he had been hired to oversee a Moom Pitcher17 and would be joining them in Hollywood shortly. “We have had an endless stream of visiting firemen…” Heinlein wrote to Campbell. “[S]uch social matters plus the continuing matter of making a motion picture have kept me jumping and made it impossible, thus far, to get any real work done.18

  They threw a cocktail party for the de Camps and introduced Sprague around to such Hollywood royalty as they had access to, including someone de Camp particularly wanted to meet, rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons.19

  Cal Laning was a less high-maintenance guest, and one who turned out useful as well: On the day Robert took him to the studio to see the preparations, the team was stuck finding some excuse to get the characters out of the spaceship and onto the lunar surface, to make a plausible scene transition. Laning suggested radar failure, and voila.20

  Ginny and Laning went to lunch together one day while Heinlein was showing Laning’s two daughters around the Destination Moon set, and, knowing how close he and Robert were, she mentioned, casually, that they had lived together before marriage. Later, when she mentioned the conversation to Heinlein, “Robert was extremely annoyed with me that I had told Cal that we had lived together … and I never again mentioned the matter to anyone. I don’t think Robert ever did.”21

  Amid the visits, he continued to be a working writer: On July 17, “The Long Watch” sold to American Legion Magazine. That did not, however, mean that things ran smoothly in Hollywood; some time in July, Pal conveyed another piece of unpleasant news: Rathvon had insisted Pal hire a screenwriter to punch up the script—make it more “commercial.” It would take a complete rewrite. Pal tried to reassure Heinlein, saying that he had worked with James O’Hanlon in the past and Robert would find him a thoroughgoing professional. Robert did not find this reassuring at all: “Professional” of Hollywood writers often meant the writer would do what he was told and not make trouble, rather than fight for the right story. Heinlein listened with horror as Pal talked about turning Destination Moon into a musical comedy.22

  Soon thereafter, O’Hanlon phoned Heinlein and asked for a story conference. He had six weeks to turn in his rewrite. Robert invited him over to the apartment. O’Hanlon started out asking about this “science-fiction business,” which he seemed to think he could learn to work after half an hour’s conversation. As he left, O’Hanlon told Robert, “You guys can write about gadgets, I will write about people.”23 Ginny Heinlein was present at the time. “It was a very unsatisfactory session,” she later said, “… Robert was fit to be tied!”24

  To give him a break from the tension, Ginny arranged for a weekend getaway in Ojai, revisiting Armelda’s Farm, where they had stayed in 1947, and talked him into doing another book for Scribner, in spite of the row over Red Planet.25

  Heinlein also had an order of sorts from Boys’ Life: Irving Crump, the editor, had liked “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” so well that he asked for a serial. Heinlein had been collecting ideas for a 20,000-word novelette about a pioneer Scout on another planet, with the intriguing twist that he would actually have to create his own soil in order to farm it. Ginny suggested that, as his last boys’ book was set on Mars, this should be the next step farther out—Jupiter.26 He realized that he could make the novelette idea work also as a book, and that it was worthwhile to cultivate Scribner, even after the aggravating and drawn-out fight over social philosophy in Red Planet. “… [D]espite recent and current headaches, Scribner’s has treated me well,”27 he told his agent. He sent a proposal and outline for a four-part serial to Crump and received a positive reply before the end of July. He planned a 40,000-word draft which he would cut to 20,000 for Crump, then add 20,000 or more words to expand it to book-length for Scribner.28

  He and Ginny both worked on the background for this one, calculating orbits and transit times for his new Mayflower and for an effect he intended to use—all the Jovian satellites lining up—and calculating the load for the artificial greenhouse effect that would support the terraforming project. Ginny worked on the ecology and agronomics aspects, including a unique one-page instruction of how to turn sterile rock into fertile soil. Into this story Heinlein worked a favorite theme: the human rationale for frontier-seeking, its background a grand recapitulation of the settlement of the New World four hundred years earlier. Without an expanding frontier, Malthus’s depressing economic equations guaranteed resource wars. Serious realities—just the kind of thing his writer’s sense told Heinlein that boys hungered for. “Kids want tough books, chewy books—not pap.”29

  Some of the material he had in mind was darker than usual. He asked Ginny’s opinion about killing off one of his characters. Remembering Little Women and the death of Beth, Ginny ruled it should probably pass.30 “After all, death is part of life.”31 Heinlein was able to finish the book under the working title Ganymede,32 in a month, on September 10, 1949. He set aside the cutting for later, since he now had other projects to get into shape. Bill Corson suggested a better title for this opus: “Farm in the Sky,”33 and that gave Heinlein his book title: Farmer in the Sky.

  Cosmopolitan approached him to do an article predicting what the future would be like in fifty years, and they were backing up the proposal with a small expense account. He also had to prepare the manuscript for Waldo & Magic, Inc. for Doubleday. With no access to his files, which were in storage in Colorado, he had to use tearsheets from old pulps.

  He also wanted to write a glowing review of the new Willy Ley/Chesley Bonestell book, The Conquest of Space. Blassingame told him the magazines had already handed out assignments, except the pulp Thrilling Wonder Stories, which didn’t pay for book reviews. It was against Robert’s principles to write for-free-gratis, but he wanted to publicize Willy Ley’s books, and the opportunity to push Chesley Bonestell at the same time was irresistible. Heinlein wrote about six hundred words for Thrilling Wonder and then wrote a more substantial thousand-word review pitched toward The Saturday Review of Literature.

  Then James O’Hanlon turned in his rewrite of the Destination Moon script. It was a disaster.34 O’Hanlon had, as expected, loaded it up with stale gags,35 but he had also converted Cargraves, the driving force of the Moon landing project, into “a spoiled cry baby who blows his top and gives up at failure.”36 He had also enlarged the cast and sets in other ways, increasing the cost of the production, and added a beauty-contest-winning millionairess.37 O’Hanlon had also come up with a new ending, about straightening the ship up for takeoff (which he was later to recycle into his Conquest of Space script for Pal38).

  Even worse, this new script was subtly loaded up with Stalinist fellow-traveler propaganda: speech after irrelevant speech extolling man’s glorious collective future in space, even including “the unselfish cooperation of big and little brother,” a year after Orwell’s 1984 had been published. The Comintern party line hadn’t caught up to the obsolescence of one of its favorite terms. Heinlein restricted his written critique to just the dramatic mess the story had become, completely unsalvageable. To a friend in New York, he wrote:

  I am not yet sure just what sort of a picture we are going to get, i.e., whether it will be a picture of some stature and scientific plausibility or a wild sort of Buck Rogers job. I am making the usual discovery that, in Hollywood, a writer sits well below the salt.39

  If the film was going to turn into a travesty, there was no point in hanging around. His contract would be up on the last day of September, and as things stood, he was not inclined to renew. They might as well pack up and leave.

  He turned down an invitation to the Children’s Books and Art Fair in Coronado, California, for
September 30, as they might no longer be in the area by then40—but did go to speak to a local group of about sixty children’s librarians in the third week of September. He found to his surprise that he was not merely a guest speaker, but the featured speaker: “It developed that what they really wanted to hear about was space travel.… This turned out to be a purely ‘Heinlein’ meeting. It startled me a little.”41 He rose to the occasion. “You talked so easily and so to the point,” the organizing librarian wrote, thanking him, “that it was a worthwhile occasion for all of us.”42

  That experience may have warmed him up a little, and it also gave him a direct impression of the potential audience of librarians—a parallax view to Miss Dalgliesh’s sense of his market for these boys’ books. It may also have helped him get a sense of proportion about the disaster that was developing at the studio—reminding him that he still had a career.

  When a writer’s magazine asked him for five hundred words on science fiction as “The Historical Novel of the Future,” for their “Bookshop News” Department for February 1950,43 he was able to provide the first of a series of short, thoughtful, and useful “beginners guides” to recognizing and buying science fiction. The same article was published in March 1950 in Writer’s Digest under the title “Bet on the Future and Win!” Perhaps he found at that librarians’ meeting a real hunger for quality science fiction—and science—that was reflected in the similar articles he was to do over the next several years.

  3

  HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE

  Pal had decided to use veteran actor-turned-director Irving Pichel to direct Destination Moon as well as The Great Rupert.1 Rupert went into post-production, and Pichel phoned Heinlein to arrange for a sit-down talk.2

  Pichel was a tall, lean, distinguished-looking person with a head of startling, prematurely white hair. He was also, Robert quickly discovered, keenly intelligent, with a wry and ironic sense of humor. The way Pichel talked about it—the elements he wanted to keep as well as those he wanted to get rid of—showed Heinlein that Pichel understood what Destination Moon was supposed to be about.3 Directors almost always do the final version of a script, because the writers’ script has the story but not the organization and plan for actually shooting the film. Pichel junked most of O’Hanlon’s innovations and returned to the last Heinlein–van Ronkel script.

  Heinlein felt he could trust this director not to turn the movie into a travesty. Pichel, he told his editors at Scribner, “is largely responsible for getting it back on track and away from a Buck Rogers musical comedy trend.”4 He sent a note to Ned Brown—Rip van Ronkel’s Hollywood agent, who had agreed to represent Heinlein, too—saying he would accept a regular contract for technical direction. When his pre-production contract expired at the end of September, Heinlein told Lurton Blassingame:

  … I expect that a new one, until 1 December, will be signed if they will meet my terms. I think they will, as the production manager has suddenly discovered that I can save them money (as well as keeping the thing scientifically straight) at points where some of these other Hollywood characters were costing them money.5

  This decision prompted Heinlein into sudden, high gear. Willie Williams and Pat Morely were coming back to Hollywood in October for a month and would need their apartment. Robert and Ginny found another place to live for the interim, a furnished apartment on Hollywood Boulevard6—hideously expensive by their standards, but he had a little “new money” coming in, so they did not have to touch their building/purchase/baby fund nest egg.

  The Cosmopolitan prediction article went to contract, and Heinlein used the time while Pichel was rebuilding the script to start the research for the article, interviewing a wide range of sources, ranging from senior scientists like Fritz Zwicky at Aerojet in Pasadena, to his Aunt Anna, a longtime teacher of history.

  Production work at the studio did pick up again. Through October and into November the lunar sets were going up in Hollywood, and the location Pichel had selected for exteriors in Apple Valley (in the Mojave Desert near Victorville, about sixty miles northeast of Los Angeles), was being prepared. The production carpenters built a house—at the ridiculous cost of $40,000 (at a time when tract housing usually sold for around $5,000)—to film Cargraves’s domestic life.

  The art director, Ernst Fegté, had done something bizarre with the lunar crater: It looked like a dried-up mud flat, which was absolutely impossible for the airless, waterless lunar surface. Robert was horrified.7 Chesley Bonestell hated it. Everyone from the SF field he showed it to hated it. But this was one effect that stayed in. It was a perspectivizing trick, Pal explained to them: The painted backdrop for the set showed the crackles growing smaller in the “distance,” to give the impression of vast spaces. They would help the effect along by shooting some medium-distance scenes with midgets in specially built space suit costumes.8

  It was hard to argue with that logic, so Heinlein didn’t. Technical direction was as much a matter of compromise as of creativity. The space suits were a case in point: His original design, based on what he remembered of the high-altitude pressure suit project L. Sprague de Camp had taken over from him during the war,9 called for goldfish-bowl bubble helmets with 360-degree views. But glare from the overhead lighting would make those unfilmable with 1949 camera technology. They had compromised on a flat glass-plate front. The weightless scenes were even harder to work out and called for a complicated system of suspension wires painted the flat black of space. The whole set rotated on gymbals, but Robert figured out a dodge to make use of that very fact to conceal the suspension wires.

  “Suggestions” continued to come down from the front office—Rathvon fiddling at long distance, demanding pointless, and sometimes just moronic changes. Once when the staff discussion was inclining toward something impossible for ballistic reasons, Heinlein remembered that Pichel’s son was a rocket engineer and urged Pichel to phone him. Pichel did, and his son must have given him an earful about Heinlein’s reputation for technical accuracy in his writing, for after that, Heinlein’s word on technical points was final.10

  But until the actual shooting began, work at the studio was at most a part-time occupation for Heinlein—distracting enough that he couldn’t work up the concentration to cut his scouting novel set on Ganymede, Farmer in the Sky, from 60,000 words to 20,000 words,11 but leaving him with too much free time on his hands to just stay idle. He took a quick trip to Berkeley for a visit with Robert Cornog and to consult with him about Farmer in the Sky and the Cosmopolitan article.12 When he got back, he began accepting speaking engagements. An October 14, 1949, issue of The Eagle, the local John Adams High School newspaper, reported a radio interview with him and four ninth graders, for broadcast on the “Books … [sic] Bring Adventure” program in November.13

  Heinlein also devoted some thought to the additional spec screenplays he wanted to do while out in Hollywood. He and van Ronkel had talked about doing another science-fiction script, but van Ronkel was off trying to get directing work, and Heinlein had the impression that van Ronkel was upset with him for staying with the film after Pal had turned down van Ronkel to direct it.14 Ned Brown had suggested Heinlein do a script that made use of his ice-skating background—and he had also struck up a friendship with the PR man Rathvon had hired, Ben Babb (another Kansas Citian, though of a more recent vintage), and that was threatening to generate a comedy screenplay.

  By the beginning of November, Willie Williams and Pat Morely left again for the winter, and the Heinleins were able to move back into their efficiency apartment near the Paramount studios.

  Heinlein was able to pick up his correspondence again, writing a graceful note of congratulation to A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”) on the first issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which had come out in October. Blassingame sent a telegram saying that Cosmopolitan was cooling toward the prediction article and wanted to drop it. Heinlein was already irritated about the changeability of editors: He had put a considerable amount of backgr
ound work into the article.15 Blassingame sweet-talked the Cosmopolitan editors into keeping the assignment alive—but Heinlein told him, “[a]s for prophesies at the moment, I’m darned busy—please tell them that the immemorial rules of the fortune-tellers guild require that the palm be crossed with silver before the future is read. Check with any Gypsy.”16

  The studio had gone out of its way to be pleasant to the Hollywood press, which meant that Forrest Ackerman was at the studio frequently as production ramped up in October and November 1949.17 Pal palmed him off on Heinlein, and he often was asked to act as guide and host—not always a pleasant task. Ackerman seemed to be in an irritatingly lofty “science fiction c’est moi” frame of mind.

  Ackerman had, without telling Heinlein, given away a Spanish language right for two of Heinlein’s stories to a Mexican magazine he was agenting for, figuring it didn’t matter, since Mexico didn’t recognize U.S. copyright law—and the magazine didn’t pay for content anyway. It was for “the good of science fiction,” as defined by Forrest J. Ackerman—and therefore beyond objection. He handed Heinlein the August 1949 issue of Los Cuentos Fantasticos with “And He Built a Crooked House” translated as “La Casa Descabellada.” 18 Heinlein objected. He later described the confrontation: “He simply looked puzzled at the notion that the writer might not choose to assist and encourage literary piracy even in a country where it was legal.”19

  Ackerman would not be called back to planet Earth, and against such a lack of comprehension, it was impossible to make any progress at all. “I let it go telling him to knock it off!—where my stories were concerned, as I had already learned that it was useless to try to argue him out of his weird notions.”20 But it didn’t “take.” Ackerman continued shopping Heinlein’s books to Hollywood studios without telling him. As Heinlein already had a working Hollywood agent, this could only cause trouble. Ackerman had also started telling the local fans “I don’t think [Heinlein]’s very fond of fans” as an explanation of why he wasn’t showing up at the LASFS meetings.21 In fact, Heinlein’s schedule had been completely booked for months in advance.