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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  They met Sanger for lunch in Waikiki. Her energy at age seventy-seven was astonishing: She was planning to open family planning clinics in India that year, and in Italy—right in the Pope’s teeth.6 She also must have had the constitution of an ox: She had brandy after brandy all afternoon. Ginny stopped drinking relatively early (she didn’t much care for brandy), but Heinlein got spliffed matching her drink for drink.7 “It was a little like meeting Santa Claus or some other semi-mythical creature,” Heinlein told Alice Dalgliesh, who also knew Sanger.8

  Dalgliesh’s initial reaction to Have Space Suit—Will Travel was very enthusiastic (though she bizarrely thought it must be a “spoof” of some kind), but by now she was moving on to pettifogging details. One request for an edit he had to think about—over a very rough Pacific crossing: three typhoons and into the eye of Tropical Storm Nina to succor a Greek freighter in distress. Coming out was even rougher: The ship rolled over 43 degrees. Thanks to Bonamine, the new motion-sickness drug, he weathered the crisis without an attack of seasickness (never a problem for Ginny).

  Dalgliesh wanted him to soften the scene where Kip stamps on a Wormface skull. Ultimately he decided not to make the revision, explaining

  The United States is today in the greatest peril in its history and I do not think we have better than an even chance of living, as a nation, through the next five years—and I am convinced that our present terrible peril has been brought on in large measure by weak-stomached ladies of both sexes, tender-minded creatures who fear fighting more than they fear slavery. This boy is fighting bare-handed against a truly evil creature, not only for his own life but for the life of a small female of his own species. He fights in terror and in great physical repugnance—but he fights, he is heroic.

  I don’t want to reduce that scene to cardboard. It is honest the way it is. Alice, the time is very short, we may have lost already, and I don’t ever want to pull my punches again.9

  They arrived in Yokohama days late and decided to stay in Japan and fly to join the ship later, in Hong Kong. General Smith, a longtime friend and the commander of the U.S. Forces in Japan, put a car and driver at their disposal while they were there. The special treatment they received might also have been a compliment to Robert’s brother, Larry, who had been one of the first Americans in Japan at the end of World War II. While they were there, General Smith invited them as the only civilian guests at an elaborate military staff dinner party—a true Lucullan feast, with pheasants roasted whole and put back into their feathers, and a piéce monté ice-cream dessert in the shape of Mt. Fuji, which the waiters flamed and put in eruption.

  It was almost a shame to fly to Hong Kong, which was crowded with refugees fleeing Indonesia.10 While in a Hong Kong night club, Robert and Ginny essayed a tango—a dance he particularly loved—and were congratulated by a ship’s officer—the chief mate—of a British freighter in port. Robert stood him a drink, and one thing led to another. He brought his captain over, and on being assured that Ginny was broad-minded, the captain brought over their “dates,” a couple of working girls, and they had a party. They had no language in common, but somehow managed to piece together the girls’ story—swimming across the Kowloon Strait to get out of Communist China. When the officers found out who Robert was, they treated him and Ginny to champagne, which flattered his ego: Nobody on the President Monroe read science fiction, so he had “passed” without being recognized.11

  The next morning he visited the freighter at their request, for tea and to autograph their first (British) editions of his books in their ship’s library.

  They arrived in Singapore late on Christmas (after Heinlein played Santa Claus in traditional red, fur-lined suit for the children on board the S.S. President Monroe). “The Santa Claus suit I’m to wear,” he had told Lurton Blassingame a few days earlier, “encloses me completely—mask, beard, stocking cap, and heavy suit—in this weather. I have Santaclaustrophobia.”12 But Ginny said, “He did it beautifully.”13

  They were astonished the next day when the doorman at Raffles greeted them by name, as if the three years since they had been there last never were (unfortunately, they did not get the incomparable Foo as their floor boy this time).

  They had a blissful five days in Singapore. They were immediately invited by the ever-generous Hos to their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Bearing as their hostess gift a basketful of orchids which Heinlein said “looked like something fit for a gangster’s funeral,” they arrived at a large, formal Chinese banquet. “The room held its breath when we sat down, to see whether we could handle chopsticks. We both picked them up and used them like old hands, so there was a sigh of relief around the room—we weren’t barbarians after all.”14

  Next was a flight to Bangkok. They wanted to go on to Angkor Wat, but the flights were all oversold, so they extended their stay in Thailand. The water at their hotel was so bad—directly out of the klongs without any kind of filtration at all—that they bought bottled water and bathed together in that, soaping themselves with one bottle and rinse-showering with the next several. On New Year’s Eve, the President Monroe sailed up the west coast of the Malay peninsula to Penang and then made a leisurely way to Bombay. From there, they were to fly to Delhi and proceed by hired car to Agra.

  They saw hundreds of people—possibly thousands—sleeping on the streets in Bombay. We have become inured—somewhat—to the homeless, but in 1958, this was shocking and disgusting to an American’s sensibilities.15

  Even the Taj was a letdown for them: The famous reflecting pool was filled with green slime, and the Arabic inscriptions inlaid into the marble were unexpected and unsettling.16

  The next leg of the trip—to Karachi, through the Suez Canal and up to Naples by way of Port Said and Alexandria—did not leave much of an impression by comparison to India. They left the ship in Naples because Robert had arranged to meet Cal Laning there while the President Monroe went on to Marseilles. They did make some planned side trips: Robert particularly loved Florence. They arrived just at sundown, and it was dark by the time they checked in. Robert was reluctant to tackle a new city at night, but Ginny dragged him into the narrow streets, and they were soon lost—

  —and turned a corner into a square and I was staring right straight at the Cellini’s Perseus and not so much as a velvet rope to keep me from walking right up to it and touching it—which I did, feeling breathless!

  And right next to it the Rape of the Sabines. Not copies—the real thing.

  Ginny soon had a crowd of the locals around them giving directions in a macaronic mix of Latin and French cognates, since none of them spoke English.

  No matter, we got a personally guided tour and ate dinner with them all … and by the time the evening was over she was talking a bastard, uninflected Italiano but with excellent accent. This is why I will go anywhere without a guide; I’m married to one.17

  In Vienna they danced to “The Beautiful Blue Danube” waltz where it was invented, so gracefully that the local dancers cleared the floor to watch them.18

  Ginny succumbed to a bladder infection—not incapacitating, but not very comfortable, even with morphine and Demerol. They were more than ready to rejoin the ship in Genoa on February 4 for passage back to New York, where they stayed with the Blassingames and saw My Fair Lady. Dalgliesh asked Ginny to come along to a story conference. Have Space Suit was already in production, but Dalgliesh was still trying to get Robert to soften it: She objected to the very last scene, where Kip throws a malted milk into the face of a jerk who had been heckling him. She must have thought Ginny would support her objection, but Ginny told her bluntly she didn’t see anything wrong with it: It was a good ending for the book—it certainly showed the boy’s character change in the most graphic possible way.19

  The book stayed “as is.”

  Ginny’s bladder infection wasn’t getting any better. Robert had business to attend to—instituting the suit against Shasta—but he put her on a DC7 bound for Colorado Springs. “Crashed
in Kansas,” she wired him from the Biltmore on February 28, “came in by dog sled love. Ginny.”

  Blassingame had received an inquiry for The Puppet Masters from a Hollywood lawyer—but he wanted rights for a one-hour television show of the book, which both Heinlein and Blassingame doubted could reasonably be made. Blassingame turned this offer down by setting the option price too high for television, but about right for a film option: $7,500.

  Heinlein also made a “promotional” stop at a fan meeting of the Eastern Science Fiction Association in Newark, New Jersey, in February 1958, where he had a chance to meet with Sprague de Camp, Willy Ley, and Cyril Kornbluth. Kornbluth took the opportunity to stir up bad blood: When he congratulated Robert on winning a Hugo Award for Double Star, Heinlein did not know anything about it—did not even know it had been nominated.20 Kornbluth said, “What? You mean Ackerman didn’t give it to you?!?”21 This was just mischief-making on Kornbluth’s part, as it appears that no one had accepted the award for him and it simply took more than six months for the statuette to get to Heinlein. But it added fuel to Heinlein’s resentment of Ackerman that would never be set straight in his lifetime.

  From New York Heinlein took a train to Washington, D.C.,22 and then flew to Chicago for a conference with a lawyer about the suit against Shasta—the only option he could see to get them to stop selling rights out from under him they didn’t own. The attorney—who also represented the Chicago Tribune and therefore had some expertise on publishing issues—was doubtful about the clear-cutness of some of the contract issues, and that took some of the wind out of Heinlein’s sails. “So I am resigned to continuing this guerilla warfare indefinitely, without going to law, unless some change occurs which strengthens my position.”23

  The visit was capped off with a case of the end-of-winter cold going around Chicago. He was glad to fly back to Colorado Springs early in March 1958, and he recuperated while Ginny recuperated also from a case of flu. Damon Knight wrote that Cyril Kornbluth had suddenly dropped dead, after shoveling snow out of his driveway, on March 21, 1958. Knight was soliciting contributions for Kornbluth’s widow, who was virtually penniless. Robert made out a check automatically—then stopped Ginny from sending it. He was essentially a stranger to Kornbluth’s family, and he had no idea whether they would be willing to accept charity from a stranger. He contacted the artist Ed Emshwiller, who was in a better position to know the Kornbluths and their situation, and sent the check to him instead, to forward it if it seemed appropriate. A note of condolences went to Mary Kornbluth directly. A year later, Emshwiller wrote saying that he had given her the check.24

  Around the end of March 1958, Heinlein took out the Man from Mars manuscript that had crashed on at least three previous occasions. The manuscript was about 54,000 words long, and he had gotten his characters out of the clutches of the government, but the story had just stopped moving for him the last time he had worked on it, in 1955. At the time, he told Blassingame, “Ginny says that it cannot be salvaged, and I necessarily use her as a touchstone. Still worse, I suspect that she is right; I was never truly happy with it, despite a strong and novel theme.”25 He gave the manuscript a new title, The Heretic, prepared to write through his block with the story.26

  On the morning of April 5, 1958, Ginny broke a house rule and woke him early. He normally worked late into the night when everything was quiet enough to develop perfect concentration, which meant he often did not rise until noon or later. This morning Ginny was grim, but wouldn’t say what was wrong. He had never been a morning person and wasn’t good for anything until his second cup of coffee anyway.27 He bathed and dressed and sat down at the table Ginny had rolled out laden with his morning bacon and eggs. She put down before him the local newspaper, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, turned to a full-page ad, and waited for him to finish reading.

  A “Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy” wanted to wallpaper the White House with petitions for a unilateral halt to American nuclear testing. He started a slow burn as he finished the ad. That day, he described his reaction to Lurton Blassingame.

  Ginny and I read it and felt sick. I’ve hardly stopped shaking all day. In beautifully persuasive language this committee proposes that we simply surrender to the sort of “disarmament” that the Kremlin has proposed ever since the end of World War II. It reminds me of the Oxford Oath and the “You Can Do Business With Hitler” and the Munich “Peace in Our Time” sell-out of the ’thirties. Can’t those bloody fools see that there is no point in rely[ing] on the “honor” of the Butcher of Budapest? Don’t they know that lambs don’t sign vegetarian treaties with lions? Can’t they figure out that if warfare is limited to old-fashioned “humane” weapons then 170,000,000 are certain to lose against a combine of over a billion?

  Apparently not.28

  At the very least, these proposals would concede the entire ground for negotiations to the Soviets and cripple the United States’ negotiating position—to say nothing of the misery and despair the whole human race would be plunged into if Stalin’s successors were not prevented from reenacting Budapest in hundreds of cities all over the world.

  “And what are we going to do about it?” Ginny demanded.29

  There was only one thing you could do: it was time to ante up—your lives, your fortunes, your sacred honor, one per customer. He went into his study30 and worked up the text of a short call to arms—a full-page ad of their own for the Gazette-Telegraph:

  WHO ARE THE HEIRS OF PATRICK HENRY? STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!

  Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

  —Patrick Henry31

  In about 2,200 words, Heinlein laid out the meaning of the SANE ad in its historical context, showing how the ad reflected the Stalinist line.

  This follows the pattern of a much-used and highly-refined Communist tactic: plan ahead to soften up the free world on some major point, package the propaganda to appeal to Americans with warm hearts and soft heads, time the release carefully, then let the suckers carry the ball while the known Communists stay under cover.…

  These proposals are not a road to world peace, they are abject surrender to tyranny. If we fall for them, then in weeks or months or a few years at most, Old Glory will be hauled down for the last time and the whole planet will be ruled by the Butchers of Budapest.

  There is no solution, Heinlein said, except the hard one of supporting the liberal values America stands for in world history—freedom as against tyranny, a choice offered again to each generation: It would mean decades of weary, unremitting work, and higher taxes, but “The risks … can be reduced only by making the free world so strong that the evil pragmatists of Communism cannot afford to murder us.” He continued, urging anyone not in Colorado Springs to start a local chapter of a “Patrick Henry League”:

  You are a free citizen, you need no permission, nor any charter from us. Run an ad—quote or copy this one if you like. Dig down in the sock to pay for it, or pass the hat, or both—but sound the call in your own home town, mail copies of your ad out of town, and get some more letters started toward Washington.

  And let us hear from you!

  And it concluded with a form letter addressed to the president.

  Even in a local paper a full page is expensive. But money was not the only cost of this act: “You do realize,” Ginny said to Robert, “if we run this ad we’re going to lose half our friends in town?”32

  They went to the newspaper office in downtown Colorado Springs. The advertising manager hesitated when she saw the piece and sent them to talk to the editor, Robert LeFevre, who read through the copy line by line, nodding pleased agreement until he got to the last lines, the part about gladly paying higher taxes, and his smile evaporated instantly. That sentence—not so very different from President John F. Kennedy’s “pay any price, bear any burden” speech just a few ye
ars later—marks Heinlein’s political stance in 1958 as solidly, centrist American liberal, in the progressive tradition. Robert LeFevre, who was later to become a well-known libertarian pacifist, would not print “Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry” as editorial content (few libertarians will go along with higher taxes under any circumstances—a view conservatives of many stripes share with them). They went back to the display advertising office, where they scheduled three insertions, on April 12 and 13 and again on April 18.

  As the ad was set into type, Robert and Ginny had several proofs pulled and sent them out to their closest friends and acquaintances, asking for donations of two dollars to defray the expenses of the ad there and in the Colorado College newspaper. H. L. Gold wrote back, remarking about the ad’s tone. Heinlein explained:

  You say you envy our “certainty”—but we have no such certainty. What we do have is resoluteness. Certainty is impossible to a logical man—but a logical man must behave in a crisis as if his calculated risk were indeed a certainty … 33

  What they had, instead of certainty, was style.

  They rented one of the new, first-generation commercial photocopiers from 3M—a two-paper process in pink and white that faded after a few years—and set up a campaign office in their living room. They mailed out copies of the ad to almost their entire personal and professional address lists (Heinlein would not send them out to any military personnel on active duty). Money they would accept, of course, but what they were looking for was people who would set up core campaigns in their own locales. As in all grassroots campaigns, local organizers are pearls beyond price—