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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  —of which there were a sufficiency. Heinlein might have considered letting the matter of the contractor he had fired in May fade away without further action if Montgomery hadn’t kept making threats:52 Gradually Robert realized the only practical solution was legal. But Heinlein did not move fast enough, and the People of the State of Colorado got there first:

  The contractor I fired has finally been indicted for embezzlement and larceny as bailee [on August 2, 1950] … I should have had him indicted sooner; he found and fleeced another victim in the mean time—and managed to kill a man through negligence in the bargain … I don’t want any trouble and won’t have any unless he looks me up and forces trouble on me. But I intend to protect my wife, my property, and myself. So I’m carrying a gun and being damned careful to pull the shades at night.53

  By a sudden stroke of luck, they had enough new cash in hand to get the framing of the house under way. “Your letter of 11 August arrived today,” Heinlein wrote Blassingame,

  and caused us much jubilation … an advance check on the NAL contract twice the size we had expected, news that you had sold “Roads” for TV, and news of the Kellogg show for Space Cadet. Ginny and I are agreed that you are the original miracle man.54

  On July 21, the advertising firm of Kenyon & Eckard picked up an option for their client, Rockhill Radio, on Space Cadet, to use as the basis for a television program (though the earliest scripts have a hero named “Chris Colby,” struck out and “Tom Corbett” penciled over it). Best of all, the advance and weekly royalties were for a license to use “space cadet” in their show’s title, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Heinlein didn’t have to do any writing at all. He ceded also the rights for exploitation—free money for a right that didn’t at that time have any value at all.

  Heinlein didn’t take the purchase of TV and radio rights seriously; there were (and still are) a hundred properties optioned for every one that gets made. But Kenyon & Eckard rapidly lined up Kellogg’s, the cereal manufacturer, as a sponsor, and the show was ready to begin airing on October 2, 1950—fifteen minutes, three times a week. Robert and Ginny never got to see the show, as they had no television reception.55 There was no television, Heinlein said, within a thousand miles of Colorado Springs.56 The money spent well: Fifty dollars a week was very significant money in 1950 and covered their living expenses while they worked on the house. Heinlein asked for copies of the scripts.57

  Heinlein was becoming a notable media figure in 1950 without stirring from his mountaintop in Colorado Springs. Ben Babb wrote with news about the national release of Destination Moon on August 15 (though it was showing in New York weeks earlier).58

  There was an undercurrent of excitement building that couldn’t entirely be accounted for by the $1.2 million publicity budget. Helen Gould, an influential film critic, summarized many developments happening at the same time in “Scientific Films Making a Comeback,” in The New York Times. Harry Bates’s “Farewell to the Master” had been picked up by Twentieth Century Fox to be filmed as The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Pal was working on When Worlds Collide, based on two Wylie-Balmer novels written in the 1930s.59

  Heinlein was too wrapped up in building even to consider trips for the premieres. As he began putting up the walls late in June 1950, Destination Moon premiered on Broadway, and Aviation Week ran a very complimentary review early in July.60 That seemed to set the tone for everything that followed. Virginia Fowler, his editor’s assistant at Scribner, wrote excitedly about the hoo-raw in Times Square after a large ad appeared in The New York Times that featured his name prominently: “A three story shell of a rocket ship is wrapped around the corner of the movie house, and emits a hollow roaring sound, broken at intervals by an equally hollow voice which booms in a voice of doom—‘Destination Moon’.”61

  Moreover, John Campbell told him, the theater’s doorman was costumed in an orange space suit—in 90-degree heat!62

  The frame of the Mesa Avenue house was in place by mid-August, and the roof went up. City services were in—electricity and water. He rushed the installation of the exterior walls so that they could move into the structure on August 28, 1950.

  The sales Heinlein had made in the spring began popping up to keep his name constantly before the public. The August issue of Boys’ Life carried the first installment of “Satellite Scout” (the condensed version of Farmer in the Sky) and Senior Prom (the new name for Calling All Girls), a magazine for teenaged girls, ran his new “Puddin’” story, “Cliff and the Calories.” Also in August, Shasta released The Man Who Sold the Moon, and Scribner brought out Farmer in the Sky. Short Stories magazine ran the Destination Moon novelette in its September issue, capitalizing on the movie’s first-run success. He was in boys’ and girls’ markets, books, pulps, and film, all at the same time. His postwar plan to break out of the pulp market was a complete success.

  5

  ALIEN INVASIONS

  Robert and Ginny Heinlein spent Labor Day (September 2, 1950) floating 12" × 12" glass bricks on oakum to close the clerestory windows between roof and exterior wall, which would make the house weatherproof. “I am still much badgered by bills, mechanics, unavoidable chores and such,” he wrote to Blassingame, “but I have a place to write and should now be able to resume writing without delay and be able to continue at it fairly steadily.”1

  He had two books ready to write any time he could get away from building—but first he had to cut a cat door for the marmalade kitten Ginny had acquired (and named Pixie) just a couple of days after they moved in.2 She had conspired in her stealth cat-acquisition project with G. Harry Stine, a young fan in Colorado Springs. Stine was a hi-fi enthusiast, and Robert set him planning a state-of-the-art stereo system for the house, with concealed speakers and volume controls in every room.3 Stine was also a beginning writer, and Campbell had urged Heinlein to help him out with his writing. “I think quite well of Harry,” Heinlein wrote, “and think that he will make a good writer in time. He is intelligent, willing, and his shortcomings are the limitations of his years. I am giving him such help as I can.”4 (Ginny recalled that Stine ignored everything Heinlein tried to tell him—and sold his first story to Campbell later in 1950.)5

  Designing and building your own home lets you customize it to your lifestyle. His and her bathrooms were built into the plan.

  Ginny’s bath is not just a place with plumbing. Her sybaritic attitude toward baths matches that of the decadent days of the Roman Empire; her bath is her favorite living room and I designed it most carefully to her tastes.… I heated the tub itself, Japanese style, and brought a big picture window right down to the edge of the tub …

  Ginny fills this tub to her chin (it is big enough for four people—six if they are well acquainted), surrounds herself with cigarettes, ash trays, drink, chewing gum, mail, book and book rack, magazines, puts on a stack of records or turns on FM (I piped sound in, with local controls), switches off the telephone—and stays there, happy as a frog, hours at a stretch, surrounded by cats.6

  It was around the matter of Ginny’s baths that the Heinleins developed their own private form of telepathy: Ginny would settle into the water and train her mind on Robert to bring the cigarettes she had forgotten, and presently he would turn up with cigarettes and ashtray, almost without fail.7

  His own bathroom was more austere, by comparison, and the pictures varied from time to time, from an aquatint of the Taj Mahal, to a waterproofed lithograph titled Medusa.

  The place turned out not quite so inaccessible as Heinlein had planned: On one occasion, a fan from out of town—Curtis Casewit—decided to look around the house before knocking on the door and peeked into Ginny’s bathroom, startling her out of the tub with a shriek that brought Robert running in alarm.9

  The telephone was the only flaw in an otherwise comfortable life. They had been given a four-party line—a technological affliction fortunately no longer common. A single telephone line is run to four (or more) different houses, so that any incoming call wou
ld ring in all the houses—a different ring tone for each party. You could not use the telephone when anyone else was on it—and more gossipy neighbors made a nosy habit of picking up the phone to listen in on other families’ conversations.

  One evening, someone was calling every twenty minutes or so, trying to reach a neighbor who wasn’t home, for hours. Ginny could not get to sleep. Presently, Robert took the telephone and lay down on the bed next to her and began, calmly and methodically, going up the chain of command from operator to supervisor to department head, asking for a better grade of service—and being turned down, and going up the next step in the chain.

  Somehow he was put in touch with the regional vice president for Mountain States Telephone, who was vacationing at Sun Valley. The man was outraged that anyone should call him at this ungodly hour—and Robert pleasantly agreed with him. That, he explained, was exactly the problem: Somebody else’s caller was keeping his wife awake. By the time he was finished, the man agreed to upgrade their service—a private line to be installed the next day.10

  While they were smoothing out the bumps in their new life, the Heinleins also got to know some of their neighbors. Ginny had particularly taken to the nearest, Doc and Lucky Herzberger. Lucky was a lively blonde who rode show horses and kidded Ginny about her effete Central Park riding background. They received impromptu dinner invitations from the Herzbergers, and they learned to “dress for dinner” automatically, since they never knew what they would find—a cozy dinner en famille (Lucky’s signature hot dog dinner) or a carefully orchestrated “society” dinner for thirty.

  Heinlein grumbled about the dinner dress at first. His formal wear was all heavy serge fabric with the severe Navy cut. Ginny took him to a good tailor and got him outfitted with lighter, tropical-weight evening wear. After that he delighted in dressing for dinner whenever possible.11

  Heinlein’s start on The Puppet Masters was delayed by a very strange crisis: He got a letter from Sam Kamens, his lawyer-friend in Los Angeles, dated September 18, 1950, saying that Cats Sang (Mrs. Henry Sang)—his friend from Philadelphia during World War II—was trying to reach Leslyn’s cousin, Marian Beard. Over the summer, starting on July Fourth, Leslyn was in the hospital following a series of strokes.12 The most recent one had put her in a very bad way, and Cats was trying to locate Leslyn’s only surviving relative. The doctors gave Leslyn only a week to live and Cats was trying to assure that the body would not be shipped to Heinlein in Colorado Springs. That mystified him:

  I can see from Cats’ note that she felt that she was acting in my best interests. I appreciate the good thoughts. However I did not see it that way from what information was available to me … She [Leslyn] married Mocabee in November 1949—why in the world would anyone ship Mrs. Mocabee’s body to me? And who would do so? Mr. Mocabee?13

  Further complicating matters, Cats had contacted Heinlein’s mother before reaching Sam Kamens, so the non-event continued to reverberate through his family and acquaintances in Southern California.14

  On October 1, 1950, Heinlein was finally able to settle into the writing of his flying saucer book, The Puppet Masters. It went very rapidly—100,000 words of draft in about five weeks. It was turning out a very timely book.

  During World War II, pilots had reported seeing unidentifiable “foo fighters” in the sky. For the last year or so, since 1947, flying saucers and strange blue lights in the sky had attained almost the status of a craze, particularly in the late-summer “silly season.”15 The media were making their own kind of “alien invasion” story: Alger Hiss’s first trial in July of 1949 (which had ended, in a hung jury, on Heinlein’s forty-second birthday), was the start of a period when Congress, the FBI, and the newspapers, too, were doing their best to whip up hysteria about “Communist infiltrators.” Hiss, just convicted of spying for Stalin, had been a very high official in the State Department (he was with Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference five years earlier). There were, in fact, Communist spies working at the highest levels of the U.S. government. This was a genuine—and a very serious—problem, which needed to be dealt with forthrightly, and so far as Heinlein was concerned, the hysteria was only getting in the way of the real job:

  Spies have had access to top secret information, and loyal men are being prevented from working where they can do the most good through ‘guilt by association’ and other methods having roughly the scientific accuracy of witch smelling. It’s ridiculous!16

  The arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in August that year (very minor cogs in the Soviet espionage network) showed very plainly that even unsuspected neighbors might be aliens in disguise, working to enslave you.17

  Even some of his old liberal friends had drifted away from the Jeffersonian eternal-vigilance-is-the-price-of-liberty that was the core of Heinlein’s values.18 Perhaps the drift had been there all along, and it took a touchstone issue like this Hiss-Rosenberg thing to cast the erosion into sharp relief.19

  It was not just some drift in some of his friends: He could see evidence everywhere he looked. Since the war, there were too many bleeding hearts—some of them in very unexpected places. Earlier in the year he had let John Arwine have it with both barrels, over trying to salvage a Communist:

  I can’t go along with your thesis that your friend is a brand to be snatched from the burning. Dammit, John, anybody who hasn’t got the horse sense to see the stupidity, the asininity and the contradictions of Communism by April 1950, is not a brand to be snatched from the burning no matter what other talents he may possess. He’s too damn stupid, quit wasting your time. Don’t take that as advice, but simply as emotional blow-off.20

  With The Puppet Masters, Heinlein was “in tune with the Zeitgeist.” It was worth the effort to create his “thinly-disguised allegory, a diatribe against totalitarianism in all its forms.”21

  He couldn’t do anything about the state of the culture. What he could do was to keep putting solid American liberal values before his readers, children and adults—“love of personal freedom and an almost religious respect for the dignity of the individual.”22

  Horace Gold, who was editing a new SF magazine, Galaxy, had sent him the first two issues to entice him into letting Galaxy have “Pandora’s Box,” the predictions article Cosmopolitan had commissioned, then abandoned. At first, Heinlein tried to talk Gold out of it: That one had been written for an audience of clubwomen and would look hopelessly naïve in a science-fiction magazine. It would be an embarrassment.23

  But Gold knew what he wanted and thought Heinlein was high-hatting him—sneering at Galaxy. He had “heard” from unidentified sources that Heinlein would not sell except to the slicks anymore.24 No, Blassingame—then Heinlein himself—assured Gold, just the opposite: He wanted his debut in Galaxy to show him at top of form.25

  Gold was firm: The field was changing in ways Heinlein might not see; and a predictions article written for a general audience was exactly right for Galaxy in 1950.26

  It was a mystery to Heinlein, but “the customer is always right.” “Pandora’s Box” went to Gold “as is.”

  By the time Heinlein was ready to send out his most “adult” novel, The Puppet Masters (December 2, 1950), he was wrestling with an interesting request from the editor of Child Life, a magazine for very small children, to write stories that could take his audience down to the six-year-old level. The technical restrictions were even more difficult than those for the juveniles—800-word stories using a vocabulary of about 250 words. The payment for each individual story was small—only $30—but the secondary and reprint markets for these things could make up for the low initial sale. He worked out a possible plot for a serial and agreed to think about it.

  In the meantime, he had to get all the writing done that he could, before Ginny was called up for the Korean War and he would need to take off to be her camp-follower. He shut his ears to the war news and pushed out another “Puddin’” short story for Senior Prom, “The Bulletin Board.”27

  The same considerat
ions were driving the house-building: He had to write the next boys’ book for Scribner in order to get enough money to hire the necessary trades—and of course that meant he was tied to the typewriter and could not build. “If I ever try to build a house again,” he told Blassingame, “I hope they lock me up first.”28

  It initially looked as if he had succeeded too well at The Puppet Masters: It was too creepy. The Post passed on it, as did Collier’s, which had just bought its own alien invasion story, the science-fiction horror classic The Day of the Triffids by “John Wyndham”.

  The readers for Doubleday downchecked The Puppet Masters as “squeamish” and said that “no woman would read it,”29 but Walter Bradbury, the editor at Doubleday, overruled them: It was hitting its target audience, if maybe a little rough. Bradbury asked for a little cutting, from 90,000 words to 75,000 words, and a little softening of the sexual titillation and the horror elements.30

  In January 1951, Heinlein received a dozen scripts from the Tom Corbett show that had been airing since October and found they did not carry a credit for the book.31 He still had the option of trying to get a card on the show, but what he saw appalled him:32

  The show is so moronic, the motivations and implied ethical standards so false that I can conceive of no circumstances under which I would want my name mentioned in connection with this show. I am satisfied to take my thirty pieces of silver and remain anonymous.33

  When it came time to assemble the manuscripts and tearsheets for his second Future History collection for Shasta, The Green Hills of Earth and Other Stories, the line editor for this project, Ted Dikty, asked for some minor revisions for continuity—and some major revisions to bring “‘We Also Walk Dogs’” into the Future History (Korshak had simply listed it in the original contract).

  Heinlein put his foot down: He was at the end of his rope with Korshak. Among other things, he could not get Korshak to answer routine business correspondence, and Korshak had recently added insult to injury: When Heinlein found out that Korshak had granted a Braille right instead of forwarding the request to him, as any normal publisher would have done, he became coldly furious.34 “This incident,” he wrote to Ditky, “typifies why it is so distasteful to do business with you people: you do not even have the grace to permit an author to perform his own acts of charity.”35