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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Designing this house gave him a chance to put some of his labor-saving ideas into practice. The house would be hermetically sealed—the first of its kind in the Colorado Springs area. Everything that could be built in, was—no chairs or no standing lamps to collect debris and have to be swept under. Things that absolutely could not be built-in, like the dining room table, he put on casters. The rolling table could be moved easily onto the terrace for dining alfresco. He designed in a curtained gateway for the table, directly into the kitchen, so that Ginny could load even the most formal dinner in the kitchen and then roll it into the dining room.

  He wanted as much automation as he could cram into the house, including a dish-washing machine (which he called a “robot dishwasher”): Ginny’s kitchen would not only have a magnificent view, but it would take only a fraction of the maintenance effort a conventional kitchen required. He applied time and motion analysis, already in use in modern factories, to domestic architecture—and planned a separate garage that could be finished later for children.11

  It frustrated him that he could not use any modern materials or methods—even though they were out in “the country.”12 Antiquated and featherbedding building codes forced him to work with methods and materials thousands of years old—literally: He wound up using Vitruvian bricklaying technique at one point, where he hadn’t wanted masonry at all.13

  Their Cheyenne Boulevard rental continued to be their headquarters until construction was finished, but it was run-down and infested with mice. They plugged up the mouseholes in the baseboards—after endowing the current residents with enough food to tide them over until they got out of the house. If they had a cat, it would not have been a problem, but Robert put his foot down: No cat until the new house was ready.

  While waiting for the lot purchase to finalize, Heinlein threw himself into the last of the writing work he would be able to do for a while. Street & Smith suddenly withdrew its objections to paperback sales for some of the stories they had tied up, and Heinlein registered a number of reassignments of rights to his stories. Blassingame had been working on a paperback deal, and finally having the stories under Heinlein’s direct control helped smooth the way.

  On March 1, Rogers Terrill rejected the Destination Moon novelization—after assuring him that the story was virtually pre-sold. The novelization had the film’s sober, matter-of-fact style—whereas Terrill wanted another “Green Hills of Earth.” Blassingame told Heinlein he was handling it better than anyone had a right to expect—and Collier’s might be interested in the novelization, if they could get it in print in time for the movie’s premiere. The long lead-times the national magazines needed were closing the windows of opportunity. Heinlein had counted on the sale to keep them afloat a while longer, as they spent the script fee on building.14

  He had one story ready to write; as soon as he turned the basic design over to the architect, he could sit down and write his second “girls’” story, “Mother and the Balanced Diet,” about a teenage girl nick-named “Puddin’.” By the time he finished it in early April, he retitled it “Cliff and the Calories (A New Puddin’ Story)”. The story was inspired by a stupendous meal they had experienced at the Christmas Tree Inn, in Arizona, on the way in to Hollywood. He asked permission of the owner, Mrs. Douglas—his “Mrs. Santa Claus”—to include her and the restaurant in the story.15 Puddin’s father, like Heinlein, has a wide spread of food allergies, but he found the meal worth every itch and sniffle.

  Heinlein had several other urgent matters to deal with: Alice Dalgliesh had forwarded Clifford Geary’s scratchboard illustrations for Farmer in the Sky. If he couldn’t be illustrated by his first choice, Hubert Rogers, Heinlein thought Clifford Geary was turning out a very good substitute. “Ginny’s first remark on seeing them was, ‘gee, that man is clever!’—a sentiment which I echo.”16 Dalgliesh had also asked for some biographical information, and he hardly knew how to answer: “I’ve never done anything particularly interesting,” he wrote her—quite seriously. He had a hard time imagining what kind of personal—as opposed to professional—data librarians might find interesting about him—that he could safely write about: military service before the war—not likely; socialist political activity, even less so. “I get tongue-tied and self-conscious over these personal details,” he wrote, after sketching out the bare facts of his life. “I don’t exactly see why the readers want to know such things about writers anyhow.” He listed “talking” as one of his hobbies—“The last I do too much of.”17

  Meanwhile, Ben Babb had prepared a glorious tabloid-sized press book for Destination Moon.18 Very impressive—but they were also talking about moving the premiere to August, to allow them more time to ramp up publicity. The two secret pre-screenings Babb had arranged in the sticks were uniformly positive: There were no negative comment cards at all, and 95 percent of the suburbanites attending the surprise showing said they would recommend it to their friends.19 Word of mouth would work for them.

  Heinlein had been corresponding since the previous summer with John Campbell and with L. Ron Hubbard about Hubbard’s big psychology project and the book Hubbard was writing about it.20 Campbell sent Heinlein a preprint of Hubbard’s 16,000-word introductory paper, “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science,” which he would be running as a straight “science” article in Astounding. It was full of intriguing ideas, Heinlein thought, but he wanted to see the entire chain of Hubbard’s reasoning before he commented on it. Hubbard’s book, Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health, was due out in mid-April; he would wait for the full exposition.21

  By the time the article appeared in the May 1950 issue of Astounding, Hubbard and Sara Northrup Hubbard had a baby girl, Alexis Valerie Hubbard. The Heinleins sent a silver spoon as a birth-gift. Sara thanked them, saying it was better than being born with one.22 Shortly thereafter, Hubbard’s book on Dianetics came out. He sent them an advance copy, and Ginny read it first, since Heinlein was slaving over a hot drafting board. Ginny was, as Robert said, “firmly of the ‘leave your mind alone’ school of psychiatry,”23 and it disturbed her. She made Robert promise he would not do anything public with it for five years. By that time, any furor it raised would have a chance to cool off.24 Mystified, Robert agreed; he didn’t have time to study it then, anyway—and he wouldn’t do anything with it in any case until he felt he thoroughly understood it. “I tried lying down on the couch and asking myself questions,” he wrote to SF colleague Robert Bloch, who was curious about the “ronetics” project, “but nobody answered. I guess I’ll have to wait a few years.”25 John Campbell confidently—and somewhat chillingly—told him:

  I can tell you, Bob, that you’re inevitably going to have to take up dianetics; it’s inescapable for a man of your mental bent. For one thing, you won’t be fully, consciously aware of the methods you are already using in writing until you have actually explored your own mind, to find what those techniques you use are.26

  Heinlein responded frankly:

  I am interested in dianetics because you tell me that it is important and that I should be interested, but in my “case,” if that is what we are to call it, I don’t know what it is that we might be looking for … Maybe I need dianetics but I don’t know why and I can’t tell from the book what it is I am supposed to get out of it.27

  Otherwise, trying to be an amateur architect as well as a professional writer was keeping him fully occupied. Irving Crump, the editor at Boys’ Life, liked Farmer in the Sky, but not the title. After a little back-and-forth, he agreed to one of the alternative titles Heinlein suggested, “Satellite Scout.” But Crump had trouble breaking “Satellite Scout” into installments and wanted yet another rewrite to put cliff-hanger endings into the second and third episodes of four altogether. Heinlein suggested instead dropping several thousand words of ecology and agronomy science exposition and collapsing the story into three episodes.28 That satisfied Crump, who offered $250 each for three episodes, even though he had ordered and received a four-episode
story—$750 for more than six weeks of work.29

  Disgusted, Heinlein told Blassingame to accept that offer, since he needed the cash for house-building—but Crump was now up against his own deadlines: Blassingame should use this fact to leverage the purchase price back up to $1,000.30 “I don’t care whether he gets sore or not,” Heinlein told his agent. “[T]his is my swan song with Crump; sales to him are not worth the trouble and worry. Don’t get yourself in bad with him; blame it all on me.”31 But there would be more Boys’ Life sales: Crump told Heinlein he wanted to see his next boys’ book, too.

  Blassingame was conducting discussions with New American Library, a major new paperback house that wanted to get into science fiction in a big way and were angling for Heinlein’s whole body of work. They suggested they would be interested in seeing a follow-on to Donald Keyhoe’s 1949 article in True magazine claiming that the UFOs people had been spotting obsessively for the last couple of years were alien spacecraft—an alien invasion story which the editors suggested two ways of developing. Doubleday, Blassingame suggested, would probably take a book based on either approach, as they liked “Gulf.” Heinlein had already made notes for an alien invasion story. He combined his notes with the editors’ suggestions and put it in the back of his mind to marinate.32

  At the moment, Heinlein was trying to come up with a new boys’ book: It always depended on finding some way to separate the boys from their parents or guardians so they could have adventures. “How about a story just the opposite of Space Cadet—” Heinlein wrote in his outline notes for Between Planets. “—a boy caught up in an interplanetary war?.… Don feels lost and left out; these other boys are getting ready for war; he is running away from it.”33 He worked up a complicated gimmick that involved dual citizenship and a spaceship in transit when a colonial revolt breaks out.34

  There were other matters to deal with, so he put the boys’ book on temporary hold until he got the Abbott and Costello treatment off to Ben Babb for final approval. If it was okay, Babb could walk it over to their Hollywood agent, Ned Brown. Then Heinlein turned again to the increasingly irritating Forrest J. Ackerman.

  Ackerman had been nagging Heinlein for years to let him represent him as an agent instead of Blassingame, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to turn him down politely. Now Ackerman was trying to talk Howard Browne into buying serial rights for “The Man Who Sold the Moon” for Amazing Stories or for the new Fantastic. That story was tied up by contract with Shasta for another two years—which Heinlein would have told Ackerman if he had simply asked. Ackerman was trying to market a property whose availability status he did not know.

  This was just exactly why Robert would not consent to have Ackerman represent him in any fashion. “I wouldn’t let Ackerman negotiate on my behalf for a latch key to Hell,” he told Blassingame. “I’d be afraid he would louse it up.”35 He wrote gently to Ackerman, thanking him for the tip, but telling him the story was tied up, and he couldn’t authorize Ackerman to represent him without firing his existing agents.36

  Bits of this and bits of that started to come together in Heinlein’s mind about the alien invasion story idea the NAL editors had tossed his way—including a real incident, one he and Ginny had probably seen in a Movietone newsreel while they were in Hollywood, about boys in Iowa faking a flying saucer crash and charging tourists to see the fake. Heinlein’s twist was that the fake was a real saucer landing masquerading as a faked crash, and the tourists were taken over by alien slugs that ran them like meat puppets …

  He talked out the story to Ginny, and she didn’t like it at all:37 It was a shudder-pulp horror story, the way he told it—far beneath his present status as a writer for the prestige magazines. But Heinlein must have known the idea was ripe for the time. He had to raise more money for the house, so he took time out to write the book.

  They found a local architect and a contractor for the house and began construction on May 1, 1950. Then, on May 7, Heinlein fired the architect (he never in his correspondence specified why, though at one point he refers to the architect as “incompetent”38), and took over all the preparatory drafting work himself.39 Heinlein knew at least something about all the trades involved, and there were advantages to being able to oversee construction of one’s own design. He began seeing a lot of the contractor, Albert L. Montgomery. Heinlein thought Montgomery was a blowhard and low-life—

  I have seen him fly into a rage and get into a fist fight (at the age of 47!) because a plumber “answered him back.” I have heard him naively boast of his crooked financial deals. He has never been known to pay any attention to traffic laws and he shoots deer out of season.40

  —but he was available and his fee was “reasonable.”

  The plumber’s charges in particular looked fishy; he could not possibly be laying as much pipe as he was billing them for—at least twice as many linear feet as the specs called for. But the contractor’s instructions had the same inflated figures.41 Montgomery was covering the plumber’s peculations, and some of his own as well—he had built a casting floor for his own use, charging it to the cost of their foundation. Heinlein spent the entirety of one hot early summer day in the sun digging up the plumbing connections and measuring the actual piping installed.42

  On May 19, Heinlein fired Montgomery, terminating his contract as of the end of that day. He wanted both the plumber and the contractor off the property. The plumber Heinlein was willing to see the backside of; when the final bill was presented, he would simply pay for what was actually installed, no matter what the guy claimed. But the contractor was another matter. Montgomery threatened to kill him. Heinlein began wearing a pistol on his hip everywhere he went, “Hopalong Cassidy style.”

  Fantastic, isn’t it? But he [Montgomery] keeps a gun, and he hates my guts—and he is, in my opinion, sufficiently emotionally unstable to use it. It’s either be prepared to protect myself, or let him run me out of town. For a peaceable guy who pays his bills on time, I seem to get into the goddamdest messes.43

  There were broader concerns in the background that spring. International tensions were escalating alarmingly, and there was a good chance the United States would be going to war again. Ginny’s appointment as lieutenant in the Naval Reserve came through on April 25—the form commission typically referring to “he” and “him” throughout.

  Ginny came within a whisper of being recalled to active duty for the Korean War … [sic] but they still had no use for me. I planned to be a camp follower whereever they sent her … [sic] then when she was again released to inactive, I planned to join the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Colorado Springs American Legion Post. Petition, then make a stink over being turned down, that is.44

  Ginny’s father suddenly passed away in Brooklyn—not a bad way to go, so far as Heinlein was concerned, “still taking care of his patients on a Friday, then dropped dead on getting out bed the next day…”45 Robert talked it out with Ginny, letting her give herself permission not to go back to Brooklyn and attend to the sad details herself.

  Late in June 1950, the Korean War started. Laborers became scarce, and prices on materials began to skyrocket, increasing as much as 60 percent in one month. Heinlein laid in as much building material as he could afford—and that ate up the last of the Destination Moon money. Blassingame came to the rescue with another clutch of foreign book contracts—French this time, for Librairie Hachette.

  Heinlein needed every new market Blassingame could come up with: Forrest Ackerman seemed determined to spoil the Hollywood market for him. About the time Ginny’s father passed away, Ackerman wrote saying he had given “Universe,” “Common Sense,” and Beyond This Horizon to a producer he knew at Columbia Pictures, bypassing Ned Brown entirely.

  Heinlein had to put a stop to this muddying of the already extremely murky waters in Hollywood. He wrote as strong and clear a cease-and-desist letter as he could manage while still remaining cordial:

  As you know, I have an agent in Hollywood, Ned Brown of Creative
Artists Corporation, and an agent in New York, Lurton Blassingame. They completely cover the matter of representing me. You are not authorized to present my works to potential markets, and in my letter of 16 April 1950 I told you not to do so. Please withdraw any you may have presented at once and notify me. Please tell me what properties and what persons were involved.…

  For old friendship’s sake I have tried to temper my refusals [but you] now put me in the position of being forced to class you as a special case to whom I will never pay a bonus under any circumstances. Kindly desist from any efforts on my behalf.46

  Ackerman thought he was overreacting,47 but Heinlein watched the negative ripples from Ackerman’s interference continue to widen out: Kendall F. Crossen, whom Heinlein had not known was involved in the deal with Ackerman, got in a huff and told Columbia that Robert would not sell to them, now or in the future. Apparently Crossen was acting as a development consultant for various television and radio entities including NBC (and had been involved earlier in their purchase of “The Green Hills of Earth” for the radio adaptation that aired on June 19).48 It took months of patient correspondence with Crossen to get him talked down off his high horse.

  Heinlein could not stop the house-building once started; he had to get the grading done before the pumice-concrete foundation could be laid. His overtures to the Donelans—his next-door neighbors whose driveway encroached onto his lot—had been met with flat refusals to move the driveway. He told the Donelans that he had hoped to arrive at a resolution on a “fair and neighborly basis,”49 but he had waited as long as he could.50 The neighbor’s son hired a lawyer to argue that they had a right to the easement by precedent and by right of adverse possession. But Heinlein knew hot air when it blew over him: He revved up his backhoe and graded the driveway out of existence,51 then put up a strong fence on the property line—the last resort for manufacturing good neighbors out of common thieves—