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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  By July 20,38 Point Barrow was as springlike as it was going to get. They arrived in time to see some of the local Inupiaq slaughter and skin a seal.

  They acquired Eskimo sunglasses as souvenirs—ivory with slits cut into them—together with some large pebbles from the shore. Heinlein distinguished himself by falling into the Arctic Ocean—up to his ankles, at any rate. Fifteen years later, he wrote of the experience: “No real danger, plenty of help around, and I was taken indoors quickly. But I am still trying to get warm all the way through.”39

  They went on to Seattle. Ginny flew back to Colorado Springs to open the house while Robert went on to Palo Alto to bring fresh news of Lynnie to Rex and make his way back home by way of a nudist resort near Las Vegas, where he could bake in the desert sun and be really warm for the first time in three months. He got home around the middle of August, after four and a half months.40

  Heinlein had several orders of business to attend to right away: E. E. “Doc” Smith had dedicated the Gnome hardcover publication of The Vortex Blasters to him, with an admiring inscription on Heinlein’s personal copy. Dedications are always flattering, but this gave Heinlein an opportunity to tell Smith just how big an influence he had been on him:

  Doc, there is no easy way for me to tell you how honored and moved I feel at the printed dedication and your inscription. Perhaps it would be better for me to acknowledge in writing what I have told you orally years ago: the enormous extent of my literary indebtedness to you. I have learned from many writers—from Verne and Wells and Campbell and Sinclair Lewis, et al.—but I have learned more from you than from any of the others and perhaps more than for all the others put together.…

  For the past twenty years I’ve been trying to emulate you and any really astute literary detective could trace down hundreds of things in my stories which derive from your ideas, style, moral standards, et endless cetera. Plagiarize you I never did, at least not consciously; learn from you I always have, in every paragraph, and I am proud to acknowledge the debt.41

  Lurton Blassingame was moving into that category, too—people he could unburden himself to and be confident their advice would be calm, balanced, and objective, and, even more important, impassioned in the right way.42

  And the current work was moving forward: “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth’” had already been picked up by The American Mercury but would require careful revision. He also needed to expand the “Inside InTourist” article—and collect The Man from Mars from his typist. It was time to see if he could remain a fiction writer at all on terms he could live with.

  15

  SCISSORBILL PARADISE

  They were “debriefed” a third time in Colorado Springs, by someone from the CIA who tried to swear them to silence about anything they had seen and heard. “This is nonsense,” Heinlein said, and handed back the secrecy form. Heinlein intended to tell anyone who would listen, as long as his breath held out. He had already been invited to speak to the Cadet Forum at the Air Force Academy—and Ginny got to be in some demand as an after-dinner speaker for her talks about the trip.1

  The American Mercury magazine, which was, regrettably, no longer so cutting-edge or chic as when H. L. Mencken had edited it in the 1920s and 1930s, immediately recognized the timeliness and potential importance of the “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth’” article. The editor, Shields ReMine, wanted to rush it into the October issue—at half its length as written. Heinlein reedited some of the editorial opinions ReMine had inserted and got the galleys off to Blassingame on the last day of August 1960.

  Both Robert and Ginny were reading proof on the typed manuscript for The Man from Mars, and both were in a state of exhaustion, but Heinlein decided to take time out to appear at the World Science Fiction Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Starship Troopers had won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of 1959—by what science-fiction historian Sam Moskowitz called “a decisive plurality.”2 “I had … been lured there by being told, just before the convention, and under seal of confidence, that I was due to receive a Hugo and wouldn’t I please show up!”3 Heinlein had become aware that a Hugo could mean substantial extra sales, if the publisher had time to put the announcement on book covers.4 When he appeared suddenly at the Pittcon awards banquet, he received a spontaneous ovation—very gratifying, and somewhat unexpected, since the mail and notices he had received on this book so far were overwhelmingly negative. “I’m not sorry I made the effort—” he continued. “It’s fun to get a Hugo and the Pittcon itself was fun. But I got there beat to the heels and should have been cremated at the end of it.”5

  The trip to Pittsburgh had a secondary benefit: He was able finally to meet Arthur George “Sarge” Smith in person—one of the older, wiser mentor-figures he so valued. They had been corresponding for a long time, and Heinlein considered Sarge Smith his best friend.6 This particular occasion was also particularly appropriate for this meeting, as he had dedicated Starship Troopers to Sarge Smith.

  Returning to Colorado Springs—he had let the euphoria of the convention trap him into agreeing to be guest of honor at the next year’s convention in Seattle—Robert and Ginny got the Man from Mars manuscript to Blassingame on September 15. It was obviously too long at 220,000 words and would have to be cut, “but even the extraneous material is so interesting,” Blassingame told him, “I would hate to see it go.”7

  Doubleday turned down The Man from Mars, and so did Scribner. When he found out it had been offered there, Heinlein instructed Blassingame explicitly not to offer anything to that house, ever again: Alice Dalgliesh had left Scribner, it was true—but Charles Scribner himself had participated in the shabby treatment given to the Patrick Henry campaign and to Starship Troopers, and to Heinlein personally. He no longer had any ambition to appear under the Scribner imprint.

  Putnam’s wanted The Man from Mars for their adult line and concurred that it was too long. Howard Cady, the line editor assigned to the book, began suggesting story points that could be cut or condensed. Heinlein initially misunderstood this discussion as a fundamental disagreement with the nature of the book. “We did not grok the whole last part of the book,” Cady had told him, “in which religion and love become so completely associated on a physical level.” Some of Cady’s other ideas were even more troublesome: Cady was enthusiastic about the book, Blassingame told Heinlein, but the combination of sex and religion would probably hurt sales—and the miracles were weak sellers, too.

  No sex. No religion—and none of the miracles that function as persuaders. That knocked the props out from the characters’ motivation and destroyed the story, turned it into a “non-alcoholic martini.”8 This was not censorship of taboo material, Cady went on to assure Heinlein, but an inability to connect with the story on an empathetic level.9

  Putnam’s had already been exploring ways to cut the risk, by making a very early release to the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club. An editor in the book club division insisted Putnam’s cut the book almost in half, to 125,000 words (still very large for a science-fiction novel at the time). Cady passed this along as his own idea.10

  The contract was signed on October 5, but Heinlein decided not to accept Putnam’s advance until they had an approved manuscript. He took the opportunity to express his appreciation for Blassingame’s effort in placing this very difficult property:

  Lurton, I do not think I have told you what a wonderful job I think you have done in placing this ms. I wrote the thing with my eye intentionally on the market with the other on the copy in this mill (yes, even when I disagreed with editors or producers). But I knew that I could never get away from slick hack work, slanted at a market, unless I cut loose and ignored the market … and I did want to write at least one story in which I spoke freely, ignoring length, taboos, etc.

  When I finished it and reread it, I did not see how in hell you could ever sell it, and neither did Ginny. But you did. Thank you.11

  The lawsuit against the producers of The Brain Eaters was coming down to the wi
re, with a trial scheduled in December 1960. In almost all legal actions, the lawyers for each side put comprehensive sets of questions—“interrogatories”—to each other, ostensibly to establish the facts. A few days after sending his attorney, Fendler, his draft answers to interrogatories, Heinlein received a phone call from Roger Corman, who introduced himself as the producer of The Brain Eaters. This direct contact between litigants was highly improper, but Corman explained that he had read The Puppet Masters for this suit and was impressed with Robert’s writing. If they could get this plagiarism suit settled quickly enough, he wanted to hire Robert to write a screenplay based on Jules Verne’s The Floating City—a five- or six-week job for $3,000.12

  Not tempted, Heinlein told Corman: That was about half what he would earn if he put the same effort into a boys’ book.

  The next day, Corman offered to mount a full production of The Puppet Masters—and maybe other Heinlein properties.

  Heinlein was not born yesterday. This series of unsolicited offers was essentially an admission by Corman that he didn’t have any real defense against the charge of piracy and was fishing for what it would take to get him to drop the suit entirely. Heinlein referred Corman to his lawyer and his agent, to see whether Corman could come up with some proposal that might actually tempt him. But the suit had essentially collapsed. By November Corman made him an offer he could live with: He had put together a co-development deal with an English film group to do a full screen version of both The Puppet Masters and “If This Goes On—.” The money end of the deal would be a complicated arrangement of cash and participation—$2,000 up front and an additional $2,000 in ninety days to secure the option on The Puppet Masters. An additional $6,000 would be deferred against revenues, secured by 15 percent of the net proceeds. In addition to this $10,000 (more than he had realized from Destination Moon), Corman would pay a $4,000 option on “If This Goes On—.”

  But it would mean a net loss: $2,000 to settle an infringement that had cost him a $10,000 sale of the same property.

  Heinlein could live with that. It was three days before the scheduled trial date: The lawyers would agree to a ninety-day continuance (which cost them nothing, as the action was expected to trail until April, anyway), by which time Corman either would or would not perform on the agreement, and they could talk about dismissing the action at that time. The settlement papers were executed on December 27, with Corman’s check in the lawyer’s hands. Fendler would get 50 percent of the proceeds—his contingent fee. But Heinlein’s $1,000 share of the first payment brought up a problem: What with the increasing foreign book contracts, and no expensive travel plans in mind, the cash was starting to mount up. Perhaps this is when Ginny started investing their surplus cash in stocks and bonds.

  Interest in Heinlein’s work had only increased recently, as a result of the publicity Starship Troopers was generating. On October 23, a radio program in New York City, Marion Selby’s “Young Book Reviewers” on WMCA, had a debate-like discussion of the theory of government he had put into Starship Troopers, with a panel of high school teenagers from Teaneck, New Jersey. Heinlein did not hear about it until much later, but it represented exactly the kind of “best use” that could be made of the book, in his opinion: to provoke discussion, let people—especially young people—figure out just what it was they believed and why …

  … and he was invited to join the Playboy Club as a charter member. In 1960, Playboy magazine was the height of cool, smart and trendsetting. The world had changed a great deal during his lifetime—and was changing still and would change even more. G. Harry Stine had seen in operation the Dean Drive that Campbell was pushing in Astounding/Analog and thought he had a mathematical model that might explain the apparent violation of Conservation of Mass-Energy. If it panned out, it might shake up physics and mechanics—overdue in Robert’s opinion. He was skeptical of miracles out of Astounding, he told Stine—but you never could tell.

  And Putnam’s finally came to a decision about the target length for The Man from Mars. Cutting to 175,000 words would be relatively easy, Heinlein had told them; 150,000 would be difficult but doable. Cutting to 125,000 words would be very difficult and would probably take him months of work—“and the patient would probably die on the table.”13 They finally agreed to the 150,000-word cut.

  Heinlein had not been able to work up any enthusiasm for either candidate in the 1960 presidential election. Vice President Nixon was—well, Richard Nixon. And he had no great expectations of John F. Kennedy, however bright he was (perhaps pro-fascist Joe Kennedy’s boy was not the likeliest candidate he would have picked). “We are fiddling, waiting the outcome of the election,” Heinlein told G. Harry Stine.

  If Kennedy gets in, I may just sit back and await the debacle while staying pleasantly drunk. Ginny feels about the same way—she is continuing Russian but neither of us can get really interested in anything, at least not until after 8 November.14

  And to his brother, after the election, he wrote:

  … the difference between Nixon and Kennedy was much too small to be important. The only reason I voted at all this time is because I will always stand up and be counted—make a choice, even if the choice is bad and difficult. But the only satisfaction I take in this election is that Eisenhower is through, thirty days from now.15

  Over the last several years, politics in America had been shifting around in a puzzling way. The people who were calling themselves “liberal” had taken on a bizarre kind of internationalist pseudo-pacifism, while he was finding liberals he could actually recognize, as he understood the term from his own liberal politics of the 1930s, billing themselves as conservatives and Republicans—including some New Dealers, such as Barry Goldwater.16 Robert was a determined pragmatic: When Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative came out in 1960, the Heinleins bought dozens of copies for friends and family. “Party no longer concerns me,” Heinlein told his brother. “I simply want a President strong enough to stand up to the Russians. I guess I am an ex-FDR-liberal, i.e., I am more libertarian than ever.”17 He reflected on his ambiguous position respecting political parties.

  Rex, I am not attempting to “make a conservative out of you.” In the first place, I do not consider myself to be a conservative; I am an individualist with strong libertarian views, but my approach to both domestic economy and to foreign affairs is pragmatic, not doctrinaire.…

  My approach is always pragmatic.… During the ’thirties I was an all-out New Dealer (even though I saw lots of things wrong with the New Deal). I am no longer a New Dealer without having changed my basic evaluations. Instead, circumstances have changed; the problems of the ’thirties are not the problems of the ’sixties … The central problem of today is no longer individual exploitation but national survival … [sic] and I don’t think we will solve it by increasing the minimum wage …18

  The first half of The Man from Mars was cut by January 2, 1961, and finished two weeks later. It was not going to be 150,000 words: He had cut it as much as he possibly could without damaging the story, and it was 160,083 words. He was geared up for battle: “I am tempted,” he said, “to type those eighty-three excess words on a postcard.”19

  But Howard Cady replied calmly that if that was the length of the book, that was the length at which they would publish it—and agreed that promotion should be oriented toward the mainstream market; Heinlein’s reputation would carry the SF readers’ market without any help from Putnam’s promotion department.

  Heinlein was hit almost immediately by a sling—or possibly an arrow—of outrageous fortune: Samuel M. Moskowitz, a fan-turning-pro usually referred to in the fan press as “SaM,” wrote that he had contracted for a series of biographical sketches of living science-fiction writers, and Heinlein’s was to be the first of this new series. Due in three weeks.20 Heinlein had enjoyed Moskowitz’s sketches of historical science-fiction figures as they came out but told Moskowitz he had “no slightest wish to be the central figure in a fan dance while I am still
alive.”21

  Nevertheless, it evidently was going to happen. “I would rather this article never appeared,” he told Moskowitz, “but since you have already contracted to write it, I would prefer for it to be accurate.”22 He wrote a long and detailed response to SaM’s questions, but he specifically withheld permission to quote from the letter: SaM could use the information to confirm or contradict any information he dug up from other sources, adding, “I wish to Christ that you would not discuss me, as a person, in print.”23

  In the meantime, The Man from Mars had moved from editing toward production—and marketing. In order to pitch it for a mainstream audience, Heinlein suggested they eliminate “Mars” from the title—or any obvious appeal to the science-fiction audience:

  The book is not science fiction even though I have made use of two of the common devices of science fiction (i.e., space travel and a future scene, ca. 1990). But space travel is no longer science fiction, not in 1961 when it is on every front page … The story belongs in the same category as Gulliver’s Travels and Pilgrim’s Progress—philosophical fantasy—rather than with the works of Jules Verne.24

  He suggested alternate titles: All Who Grok, The Grokking Work, The Fallen Caryatid, No Sparrow Shall Fall, or A Sparrow Falls.25 Cady agreed with the general idea but wanted a title that would play better. The Fallen Caryatid was the best of that particular lot, but wouldn’t entice a buyer in a bookstore.

  Cady had for years been collecting unused titles as they occurred to him. He suggested one of these, taken from the Bible (Exodus 2:22): A Stranger in a Strange Land. That name appealed, and in a telephone call on March 22, the final title was set without the initial article. This book was a make-or-break test for him, he had told Lurton Blassingame:

  The Man from Mars is an attempt on my part to break loose from a straitjacket, one of my own devising. I am tired of being known as a “leading writer of children’s books” and nothing else. True, those juveniles have paid well—car, house, and chattels all free and clear, much travel, money in the bank and a fairish amount in stocks, plus prospect of future royalties—I certainly shouldn’t kick and I am not kicking … but, like the too-successful whore: “Them stairs is killing me!”