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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Seaman worked out a deal satisfactory to all concerned: His company, Clarinda Pictures, set up a new company for the series, Planet Pictures, and all the contracts were drawn and executed by September 23, 1952. Seaman was finally ready to work on the scripts in October. Rather optimistically, Heinlein thought, Seaman wanted to push out the first thirteen or fourteen scripts in one week, with the pilot turned into a M.O.W.59 They would break for an overnight visit from Robert’s brother Rex, followed immediately by Blassingame’s visit, then resume work around the twenty-first of October. “For a guy who prefers to be a bum I sure get myself tied up. But I’ll bet I’m the first writer to get an elk-hunting trip specifically written into a Hollywood contract (Ginny takes a dim view of all of this.)”60 They also got a pregnancy exception written into the penalty clause.

  Seaman duly arrived early in the morning of October 5, and they started to work on the lineup. He came with a list of story ideas they had worked out together. For some of them—a few—there were story development notes. They had decided on a framing situation for The World Beyond. Heinlein wrote a short, three-page hook, which he called a “patterned opening.” Each episode would begin in a futuristic schoolhouse, with a lecturer who would tell his class the story we would see this week, as an incident out of their history. As he lectured, the teleplay story would start.

  But Seaman never actually did work out the contractual deals for the original stories (Ginny said that Robert called Seaman a “walking writer,” who talked out his ideas pacing,61 and then Robert did the actual writing). Heinlein worked up his idea for the pilot—tentatively titled “Ring Around the Moon”—into a M.O.W. script, about a woman-and-man team of pilots marooned on the Moon and marrying to preserve the proprieties—an idea that seemed much more “reasonable” in 1952. Seaman gradually, one by one, replaced the original stories with workups of Heinlein’s older stories, until the final lineup was:

  Pilot—“Ring Around the Moon”

  1. “‘It’s Great to be Back’”

  2. “Space Jockey”

  3. “The Black Pits of Luna”

  4. “The Long Watch”

  5. “Ordeal in Space”

  6. “Delilah and the Space Rigger”

  7. “Project Nightmare”

  8. “Life-Line”

  9. “Requiem”

  10. “‘And He Built a Crooked House’”

  11. “‘We Also Walk Dogs’”

  12. “Misfit”

  13. “Home, Sweet Home”

  Of the thirteen episodes that fulfilled the original contract, “Home Sweet Home” was the only Seaman-Heinlein collaboration as to story, and it existed only as seven pages of a more-or-less-completely-developed story idea. In any case, all the scripts were to bear the name of the writing partnership—Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Seaman—no matter who did what part of the actual work. “Home, Sweet Home” and another original story, “The Tourist,” were removed from the lineup as too expensive to produce.62

  This arrangement worked out well for Heinlein in a financial sense, since he didn’t have to split the story fee, but it contributed to a growing frustration with Seaman’s working methods. He was pleasant to work with, but he seemed to have no concept of time or deadlines, his own or Heinlein’s, and the delays pushed Heinlein’s other writing commitments farther and farther behind schedule.63 Of the month Seaman had committed to be there—the second month Robert had set aside to work on The World Beyond—his working days totalled only eleven, and the scripts he started were never done properly before he turned them over to Robert to finish.64 Heinlein finished the pilot script and turned it over to Planet Pictures to fulfill the secondary contract. Rex came and left, and then Blassingame arrived.

  Ginny had been able to obtain a hunting license for Blassingame, and Heinlein found them a “native guide,” Floyd Woodings. Together they packed by horse into the mountains near Gunnison, Colorado, so far that they outdistanced all other hunters, to the 10,500-foot level near the Continental Divide—“magnificent, rugged country, flaming with autumn colors.”65

  Above the timberline it was already winter. They had a very rough camp, sleeping on the frozen ground. One memorable morning, Heinlein finished making the coffee, poured himself a cup, turned away to pick up his plate, and turned back to find a rime of ice on top of the coffee.66

  Blassingame did get his elk—a magnificent, 1,200-pound specimen of Royal Elk, with a rack of 12 points on a span of 42 inches. They skinned and butchered it on the ground and packed it out, meat and trophy, using all four horses—which meant Heinlein hiked out leading two of the horses, fording icy mountain streams on foot. Heinlein assured Blassingame that despite the discomforts, “Nevertheless I had one hell of a time and would not have missed it for worlds.”67 Blassingame looked at it as “one of the high moments of my life.”68

  The full writing schedule for The World Beyond resumed immediately. Seaman was due back in November, and again on December 5, and theoretically they would have the first thirteen scripts finished by December 22.

  The first broadcast of Heinlein’s “This I Believe” piece took place on CBS radio on December 1, 1952. Willy Ley and Jack Seaman both arrived on December 5 (Ley had been attached as a technical advisor to the production of The World Beyond).69

  Ginny was already Christmas shopping and mailing off packages. By now it was clear that her pregnancy alert after they came back from the National Parks trip was a false alarm. More consultations with doctors, and they did find

  … a minor malfunction that might have been corrected with estimated 25% success through prosthesia involving a laparotomy for her … [sic] I did not like those odds for her as she was then 36 when we pinned it down—and I was too old for a legal adoption—so we accepted the situation.70

  As soon as he got the World Beyond work out of the way, Heinlein had to start on his next boys’ book for Scribner. Dalgliesh cautioned him to not be too definite about the boy’s age in this next one: They had lost a portion of their usual army base sales for The Rolling Stones because the twins were sixteen, rather than eighteen.71

  The actual filming of the World Beyond pilot M.O.W. was to commence by the end of December, at the Hal Roach studios in Hollywood.72 Seaman was short of cash, and Heinlein made him a personal loan of one thousand dollars, to be paid back out of the proceeds of their collaboration.73

  On December 20, Seaman informed him by phone that the producer agreed that the contract had been fulfilled. Utterly predictably, they had changed the title for the pilot to Project Moonbase and decided to cut it loose from the television series. They had Heinlein write a voice-over introduction and enough new material to bring it up to 63 minutes.74 He sent the last TV script on Christmas Eve—and started immediately on the Scribner book, without a story to tell.

  He idled while waiting for inspiration, fiddling around with the relatively undemanding make-work of correspondence. Sprague de Camp, who was gathering materials for his Science Fiction Handbook, had asked about Destination Moon, but he also raised a question about one of Heinlein’s five rules for writing, articulated in his 1947 article, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” which were becoming somewhat famous in the science-fiction community—advice to the beginning writer:

  1. You must write.

  2. You must finish what you start.

  3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.

  4. You must put it on the market.

  5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

  The rule about not rewriting, de Camp thought, needed some clarification. His own practice, Heinlein explained, was to combine the functions, cleaning up the manuscript by cutting surplusage, adding:

  I do a certain amount of true rewriting these days (other than rewriting to editorial order, which is always admissible)—but I still do damned little and I would never advise a beginner to rewrite. He can learn more by starting a brand-new story and doing his best on it.75

  There
was a lot of promiscuous kissing at the New Year’s Eve party that year, and Heinlein caught a case of flu—his first real illness in four years.76 But he also got an idea for his next Scribner book.

  7

  OUT AND ABOUT

  Some months back, Stan Mullen, a local Colorado Springs science-fiction colleague, had shared a historical curiosity over dinner, when the conversation turned to what Heinlein would write about for his next boys’ book for Scribner:1 a China clipper had set sail from its home port, Boston, in the nineteenth century and come back, years later, with a former cabin boy commanding the ship as its captain.2 A story grew around the idea in January 19533—imagining a future for space technology in which starships could be as out of touch as were nineteenth-century whaling ships. Heinlein decided the boy had lied to get into space in the first place—and the ending would necessarily be the decision to take his punishment and live with the consequences as an adult.

  There were problems to be cleared, though, before he could begin writing Starman Jones. Shasta was already trying to sell paperback rights for the third Future History book, even though Heinlein had so far refused to sign the contract for it. Even Blassingame’s patience had run out; he found out Shasta’s own attorneys were disgusted with them, since Korshak was ignoring their recommendations. Also, it developed, the Grosset & Dunlap contract Fantasy Press had placed for Beyond This Horizon was throwing a monkey wrench into the negotiations with NAL for paperback rights.

  But not everything was in turmoil: Rockhill Radio found a partial sponsor for the Tom Corbett TV show and might be able to go back into production. Even with Jack and Blanche Williamson in for an overnight visit—welcomed houseguests—Heinlein was able to write an introduction for editor Sam Mines who was assembling an anthology for his magazine, The Best from Startling Stories. Mines could use any boost Heinlein’s name might be able to give: SF was booming in 1953, with more than forty new magazine titles on the newsstands—stiff competition. Later in the year, A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”) and Mick McComas gave Mines’s anthology a good review in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—and promptly asked for a Heinlein piece they could use for their own annual anthology. Heinlein felt he had to decline: It would stir up animosity with both John Campbell and H. L. Gold:

  For strictly personal reasons (not business) I will never let either one of them know that I think your book [F & SF] outclasses theirs. For me, it would be too much like telling a fond parent that his child is homely and stupid—or that the child next door is prettier and brighter.… Which makes me look like a heel [but] I wish to avoid even the suggestion of choosing between friends—

  (If your magazine actually were a stinker and you were both financially insecure in consequence, I could easily be persuaded. I would prevaricate or lie for a friend gladly.…)4

  Heinlein was able to start Starman Jones on February 2, 1953, and finish up on February 28, averaging twenty-three hundred words a day and working without an outline, even through distractions: Mick and Annette McComas visited in Colorado Springs for a day in the middle of the month.5 And John Campbell was writing distracting letters about his break with Hubbard’s Dianetics project, saying Hubbard was a “first rate mystic” but an “erratic investigator.”6

  On the day Heinlein wrote “The End” on his draft manuscript, principal photography of Project Moonbase wrapped at the RKO studios in Los Angeles.

  With the boys’ book finished and the TV series out of the way, Heinlein set arbitration with Shasta in motion, dealt with a proposal from Gnome Press for another collection of novellas (that ultimately never went anywhere), and scheduled another hospital stay for the middle of March, for the last of the series of reconstructive plastic surgeries that would take care of the botched wartime hemorrhoid operation.

  But things kept coming up all month, and he kept putting off the surgery. Rip van Ronkel wrote saying he had hired a lawyer to sue Pal for collection, and that set off a round of investigation as to whether he should join the suit. Rex was promoted to full colonel. The student newspaper from Heinlein’s old high school, Central High in Kansas City, contacted him for a long-distance interview … there was simply no way he could take time out to recuperate from surgery now. It had to wait until the first week in April.

  Leslyn somehow heard about his planned operation and incorporated it into another round of poison-pen letters that went out to as many of Heinlein’s colleagues and friends as she could reach in 1952 and 1953. Heinlein asked friends to send him any such letters they received from Leslyn and began collecting a file of them, in case he should have to defend the lawsuit she threatened.7

  John Campbell wrote psychologizing his hospital stay as a workaholic in need of a vacation. “Slow down a bit, don’t have so much pleasure on pure effort, and you’ll have less flu, and fewer visits to the hospital. The net result will be greater total effort-output.”8

  Robert was a little exasperated:—H. L. Gold had made similar comments, psychoanalyzing his “bottomry” and enough was too much. He wrote firmly to Campbell:

  Now about your long-distance diagnosis of my “troubles”—in the first place I practically don’t have any, being solvent, happy, and in excellent health. I’ve merely been busy from having my time wasted by a Hollywood producer who has no sense of clock or calendar … This was further complicated by flu—but it was the first time I had been ill in four years.…

  Still I do intend to slow down and relax. I have spent five years scratching to make up for having been cleaned out financially. I have now recovered the lost ground and then some; I can do pretty much as I please.9

  By late March, Alice Dalgliesh had reviewed Starman Jones and told Blassingame she wanted some changes. Her complaint was that the Montgomery character, who nearly beat the boy the first time he met him, was too pulp-villainish. She thought it would be more believable if the conflict built up over a period of weeks or months. The last chapter she also thought a little rushed.10

  Heinlein was not convinced that the changes Miss Dalgliesh wanted were either necessary or desirable. In a letter to Blassingame,11 he explained that trying to accommodate a slow buildup of a bad home situation might have been right for Huckleberry Finn, but these juveniles had a much smaller scale. That kind of slowdown would destroy the balance and pacing of the first half of the book (and add probably fifteen or twenty thousand words to it—too large for a juvenile publisher at the time). In the second place, the portrait of Montgomery was the only one in the book “drawn from life”: It was a portrait of the contractor who had threatened Heinlein’s life while he was building the house, three years earlier—a mean one, at the very least, and a true-to-life Ozark type.

  In any case, the end of the story was in the next-to-last chapter.

  The real issue is the one in which a man must decide whether or not he is morally justified in lying to get around a basically unfair situation. I kicked that one around quite a bit both with Dr. Hendrix and with Mr. Walther. In my opinion it is almost unanswerable.… Was Max morally justified in lying his way into the space merchant service? I don’t know, I really don’t know—but my sympathies were with Max.

  I don’t much like handing kids ready-made answers in any case.12

  The day before he went into the hospital in April, Robert’s brother Larry proposed the men in the family club together and give their parents a “circle tour” of the United States, to visit everyone in their now widely-dispersed family. Since Robert was in the hospital, Larry, Ivar, and Clare would underwrite the trip: Robert and Ginny could pitch in when he had recovered enough to be able to contribute.

  The last time Heinlein was in the hospital, he had frightened the staff by getting up immediately after the surgery, before the anesthesia had completely worn off, and locking himself in a bathroom. He was better behaved this time: “I distinguished myself by kissing the operating nurse—twice!”13

  While he was recovering, Carey McWilliams, the editor of The Nation, wrote asking for a l
ist of his six favorite recent SF novels. He sent his reply on a postcard, and it was published, along with similar replies from Anthony Boucher, Kurt Vonnegut, and H. L. Gold, as a sidebar to an article about Ray Bradbury:

  The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester)

  Player Piano (Kurt Vonnegut)

  What Mad Universe (Fredric Brown)

  Pebble in the Sky (Isaac Asimov)

  Rogue Queen (L. Sprague de Camp)

  1984 (George Orwell)

  Dalgliesh informed him Scribner had ordered a special second printing of The Rolling Stones to handle the demand. Since they seemed to be selling everything they printed, that worked to Heinlein’s advantage. His short stories were not faring so well. “Project Nightmare” had been rejected by every prestige magazine and finally went, at “firesale rates” to bottom-of-the-barrel Amazing Stories where it appeared in the April 1953 issue, Amazing’s twenty-seventh-anniversary issue.14

  On May 1, as the arbitration action against Shasta began to ramp up, Erle Korshak visited Lurton Blassingame in his office in New York and apologized for the trouble, pledging better behavior in future. Blassingame professionally was inclined to go along for the sake of peace and uninterrupted author royalties—but he noted dryly in his report to Heinlein that Korshak showed signs of reverting to type even before the conversation was over.15

  While Heinlein was still recuperating from his surgery—and coming up with a new story—they got word from Rockhill Radio that a second partial sponsor had been found for the Tom Corbett TV show: The International Shoe Company of St. Louis was willing to pick up every other Saturday.

  Robert and Ginny got a call from a local doctor they didn’t know, Dr. Howes. He invited them to come visit his home that night while A. E. van Vogt was in Colorado Springs coming down from a big Dianetics conference in Denver. Dianetics “auditing” was still enjoying status as a craze among SF fans, and van Vogt had been one of Ron Hubbard’s early “converts,” rising to prominence in the Los Angeles organization. They found a surprising number of the old Korzybski/General Semantics crowd there, but also another friend and colleague, Robert Moore Williams, who Robert thought had a touch of genius as a science-fiction and fantasy writer: “I think you are one of the dozen sensitive and imaginative artists in the field,” he had written to Williams years earlier.16