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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Frank Robinson recalled, “Hefner then personally pulled the article from Playboy, where it had been previously announced. Heinlein sent back their check but A. C. Spectorsky, titular editor at the time, returned the check to him.”5

  On January 19, Ginny finally had enough of Dr. Calciano’s long-distance brush-offs. By that time Heinlein was very ill indeed. “He couldn’t even keep water down,” Ginny later remembered. “I had been in touch with the doctor, and finally called him and told him that in my opinion, Robert belonged in the hospital, that the so-called ‘unknown virus’ had not gone away, and to please send an ambulance.”6 They went to the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. Dr. Calciano went off on a ski trip, leaving Heinlein’s care in the hands of a substitute doctor he designated.7

  On that same day, Time magazine ran an article based on the UPI story, titled “A Martian Model”:

  … Most madmen invent their own worlds. If the charges against Charles Manson, accused along with five members of his self-styled “family” of killing Sharon Tate and six other people, are true, Manson showed no powers of invention at all. In the weeks since his indictment, those connected with the case have discovered that he may have murdered by the book. The book is Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, an imaginative science-fiction novel long popular among hippies.…

  According to one of the attorneys in the case, Manson was compiling a Martian-style list of enemies to be murdered.8

  The attorney the Time piece mentions in the last paragraph was probably Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, an assistant prosecutor. The lead prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, investigated the claim, he later said, but decided it was worthless.9 The bullet points of similarities listed between Manson and Stranger in both the UPI press release and the Time piece don’t match up to the book very well—and sometimes don’t even match up to the factual foundation Bugliosi was laying for the Manson Family trial. The book Bugliosi wrote, Helter-Skelter (1974), does not even contain an index reference for Heinlein or Stranger.

  Kay’s description in his own book (cowritten with Ed Sanders), The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (1972) sounds like a thirdhand retelling of plot elements from a book he had never read himself. He characterizes Stranger as: “The story of a power-hungry telepathic Martian roaming the earth with a harem and a quenchless sexual thirst while proselytizing for a new religious movement.”10

  Heinlein did not see the Time article, or the clippings their friends sent them of the Herald-Examiner article and the UPI press release: When he was not unconscious, he was delirious, and the doctors—none of whom Ginny had ever seen before—would not tell her anything.11 She had to reserve her energy for arguing them into installing an IV drip to relieve obvious dehydration.

  On January 23, after a week of tests, Dr. Calciano came back and told her they concluded he had pneumonia—because his temperature was quite high. This startled Ginny, because he had not displayed any respiratory distress. It was seventeen days after onset; he had not eaten anything since then, or had any liquid in almost as long.12

  This pushed Ginny over the edge. Robert’s brother Rex Heinlein had urged her to get Robert out of the deathtrap there and get him to the Stanford Medical facility.13 When one of the Dominican doctors suggested he might be better off at Stanford Medical Center, Ginny called an ambulance herself and rode with him to Stanford, forty miles away, not even stopping to close the house or grab a toothbrush.14 Mr. Kessel, their local lawyer, told them they had an excellent lawsuit against Dr. Calciano (and in fact, Ginny later said that Dr. Calciano was sued by another patient for a similar treatment).15 Ginny was holding herself together with Valium,16 and “[Robert] was out of his head at the time, so I had to decide for him.”17

  At Stanford, he was admitted as a staff patient18 with Dr. Anderson as his primary care physician.19 Dr. Anderson and his colleagues were shocked at Robert’s condition.20 They got him settled in and started their own battery of tests. The next morning, Rex took Ginny back to Santa Cruz to pick up her car, which was still in the parking lot at Dominican Hospital, to pick up a traveling kit of clothes and so forth, and to put the house in mothballs and kennel the cats with the vet. She stayed with Rex and Kathleen while Robert was at Stanford.

  When she got back to the hospital that morning, it was the chief of surgery, Dr. Harry Oberhelman, who told her Robert had an advanced case of peritonitis, a major infection in his bowels. It had started out with a hole in his intestines—a “perforated diverticulum.” By now, however, it had been untreated for seventeen days (in a hospital!), and his chills and fever were caused by flourishing bacterial infections—septicaemia—and consequent blood poisoning—toxaemia. Bluntly, he was dying.

  He was so weak, and his system was so compromised, that they couldn’t operate until the infection was under control. They started him on massive doses of the antibiotic Kanamycin, and scheduled exploratory surgery for the following Monday, two days later.

  Heinlein came to twice during this time. The first time, he was under restraint with tubes going into him, and a mask being placed over his face. He recognized this: It was his description of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith in the book he had just finished—a very odd coincidence. And then he went away, unconscious again. The second time, he woke up while being wheeled into surgery and muzzily recited to himself the last scene of the book.

  A writer is far gone when he identifies with a fictional scene—especially when it is factual in essence at that time. I was briefly lucid; I knew where I was, who I was, and what was about to happen.…

  … in that lucid time just before surgery I feared no evil; I was simply happy to be privileged to die aware of what was going on … [sic] and much intrigued by the odd parallel with the ending of my last story. I do not hold any certainty of personal survival—at most a vague hope because I am so acutely interested in all of this strange world.21

  They split him open from sternum to pubic arch, plus cross flaps for access.22 More than a foot of colon—probably where the perforation had developed originally—was just gone, tatters of rotting flesh. Dr. Oberhelman performed a left colectomy,23 removed eighteen inches of intestine, and sewed (resectioned) the ends together. During the course of the operation, Heinlein received blood transfusions collected from five anonymous donors. Since Robert had an uncommon blood type (universal recipient—Ginny had the even rarer universal donor type), it was almost certain that his life had been saved by the efforts of the National Rare Blood Club he had come across while researching I Will Fear No Evil.

  While Heinlein was still in recovery, their primary care physician, Dr. Anderson, took Ginny aside to tell her Robert would need special nursing care, more than the usual floor nurses could provide—round-the-clock nursing care on top of the operation and two hospitalizations … this last big royalty distribution was gone already. “I told him to order anything necessary,” Ginny later told a friend. “Round the clock special duty nurses cost in the neighborhood of $900 a week”24—a staggering amount in 1969.

  Heinlein gained consciousness—sort of—and began visibly to improve. The incision looked huge, but it was gradually healing up, and his front would eventually look, Robert said, like a road map of New Jersey.25 On January 30, they removed the surgical drain tube. He was lucid enough the next day to give Ginny an unlimited power of attorney, to make all medical decisions for him, as well as business decisions.26

  And then he lapsed back into a mental state that looked lucid only part of the time. Ginny had not had time for her usual careful grooming in several weeks by that time, and the roots of her hair were coming in white. For several years, she had been tinting it with henna for Robert’s benefit.27 It was time to let that vanity go; she was fifty-four years old, and she had gray hair, and that was that. She let the roots grow out white, and Robert did not recognize this white-haired woman who was in his room.28 He teased her about this for years, saying,

  “When I wo
ke up, they told me this woman is my wife. My wife has red hair. This impostor’s hair is white!”

  After listening to Robert carrying on in this vein for a while, Ginny turned to him and smugly pointed out: “I may not be your wife, but I still have your power of attorney.”29

  Ginny tried to get him to eat something. On February 3, a week after the operation, he finally managed to get a morsel down—and it promptly came up again. This was not according to plan—and in fact he didn’t look right at all: The antibiotic had induced uremia, and his kidney function shut down. The doctors changed antibiotics (manufacture of Kanamycin was discontinued later that year), and Heinlein began improving rapidly. Six days later, he was able to eat some cereal without becoming nauseous, and that was a triumph.

  It was also a rarity: During February, anything he was able to wrestle down, more than a bite at a time, came right back up. He could not even keep water down: Only the IV was keeping him alive. But he was “present” for longer periods now, and Ginny was sometimes able to get away for brief periods, to round up the mail and keep the business affairs going. She answered the mail by his bedside, while he was dozing.

  Ginny had completed the gargantuan job of copying and hand-collating all the copies of the new manuscript and mailed them off back in January. Blassingame found I Will Fear No Evil intriguing and unusual and was shopping it around for serial and trade issue. It was closer to a mainstream novel, Ginny thought, than anything like conventional science fiction,30 but Galaxy magazine picked up the serial rights.

  One day, collecting the mail and tidying Robert’s desk, she discovered a notecard he had written early in January: “I do not want any editor to cut this story because they don’t know how it’s put together. Any cutting that’s done on it I want to do it myself.”31 So it could only go to publishing houses that would agree—in writing—not to make changes or cuts. “Stubborn certainly,” Heinlein later wrote, “and no doubt stupid at times—but I won’t be a trained seal for anybody, at any price.”32

  When Robert was awake and becoming alert, Ginny took him out in a wheelchair for a change of scenery, which meant girl-watching. Miniskirts were pleasantly abundant. Gradually his concentration improved, and when he felt up to reading she brought him a new book: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

  Ginny was extremely grateful at the time—and Robert was grateful later, when he understood it—when Dr. Alan Nourse flew down from Seattle33 and went over all the surgical and postsurgical care records with the physicians. He then interpreted it for Ginny in layman’s language. He could not have survived at all, Nourse told her, if he didn’t have the constitution of an ox to start with.

  Robert’s improvement was gradual, but over the weeks, it did become visible. On February 26, he kept down a small serving of breakfast eggs. But that was it. Five days later—eight weeks and six days since it had started—he had lost forty-two pounds; his weight was down to 132 pounds. But the doctors said that if he would feed himself, he could go home.

  Ginny bundled him into the car and drove the forty miles very carefully. They were coming to a cold house with no food, but it was a welcomed homecoming: “… He cried as we entered the canyon and said, ‘I never thought I’d see it again.’”34

  Ginny got him to bed, with blankets and hot water bottles nearby, and drove downtown to buy fresh supplies. She also bought some small, colorful, transparent plastic boxes. She had a plan: He could keep down a mouthful at a time, so they would go with that. She made his favorite foods and placed bite-sized bits in the plastic boxes, which she kept by his bedside, along with rich eggnog made with ice cream. Every ten minutes or so, Ginny would require him to eat a bite or so.

  It worked: He gained back half a pound within a few days, five pounds by the end of the first week. But it was not until nearly the end of May that he could muster enough interest in food to ask for second helpings of anything. The only real downside of the program was that it kept her tied to his bedside as thoroughly as the hospital had.35 Between this and keeping the business going, it was the hardest-working period of her life.36 She stayed up nights to answer the business mail and the fan mail, keep the books, and prepare the income taxes.

  By the beginning of June 1970, Heinlein was up and around for most of the day and enjoying the scenery again. When she was able to get a gardener’s assistant, Ginny started repairing some of the neglect and made special flower plantings for the view out Robert’s bedroom window. He began combining his trips to Palo Alto with visits to the dentist to repair some of the damage done by extended severe malnutrition. His weight was back up to 160 pounds, and he swam every day in the pool he kept heated to blood-temperature. He also picked up some light correspondence on his own and started studying Yiddish, working from Leo Rosten’s delightful The Joys of Yiddish.

  It wasn’t over: The doctors had found a large gallstone, and he had the removal operation to look forward to, and his original (1966) hernia repair to finish with a separate operation,37 but the doctors were optimistic about scheduling these surgeries in the near future: He was clearly on the mend. “So toward the end of this year, I should have a bright new Robert, all patched up and repaired and in need of a paint job. What color shall I use?”38

  His mind was still not as sharp as usual for him—but it was sharp enough to participate in business again. He realized how messy his estate would have been if he had died in January and executed a temporary will on June 1, taking their new accountant’s advice to set up living trusts and move some of their investment assets into Keogh plans. The trusts bypassed the expense and delay of probate and gave Ginny permanent direct control over the business aspects of the writing. The Keogh provided an income when he was no longer generating new books.

  Heinlein also made changes in his lifestyle:

  … this hooptydo has changed my attitude and pace; from now on we do what pleases Ginny and me. I have had printed a checkoff form for fan letters to be used Procrustean Bed style on 99% of the mail—unless a letter is really charming … No more speaking engagements for any reason whatsoever. No more help with theses, term papers, dissertations, no more visitors whom we are not truly eager to see. Et cetera. In the past ten years people have been whittling away at my life—and I have at last realized that I have no obligation to give any of these golden days to anyone but friends. I realized in the hospital that, had I died in February, none of these things that people want me to do would have been done—so I’m treating it as a rebirth and intend to live life to the fullest and not get bogged down in donkey work that I don’t want to do, and no one has any real right to demand of me.…

  … I’ll write a story occasionally and we’ll spend the rest of our time gardening, traveling, playing with the cats. I find I don’t like being a “public figure” and I’m putting a stop to it.39

  The arrangements for this last book had been settled while he was still mostly non compos mentis. Galaxy was prepared to issue the book without cutting, in five installments, which pleased Robert.40 Putnam’s wanted it for trade issue. Ginny recalled: “I stalled off the contract as long as possible, but he wasn’t up to doing any cutting, so I finally signed the contract myself by power of attorney.”41 Robert confirmed to Ginny what she had found on that notecard: He didn’t want any editor to try cutting it who might not understand how the story was put together—and she was prepared to insist on this.

  Walter Minton made only two editorial notes to Heinlein, and both would involve fiddling with the text. First, the middle sagged so badly that his editorial readers found themselves skipping over parts—especially the sections of interior dialogue; and, second, they had trouble taking the end as credible. Minton himself thought—as Robert had—that the amalgamated Joan-Eunice character was going insane (though he tried to keep the other possibilities open),42 but none of the readers read it that way.43

  Heinlein worked at editing the master copy, but found he couldn’t effectively edit it; he was only able to cut a few words from each
page.44

  And he lost two pounds while he was fussing over the manuscript. Ginny put her foot down: Regression was not an option.

  Minton had already scheduled I Will Fear No Evil for a fall 1970 release and was reluctant to pull it from his lineup and move in anything else. He offered more than double the negotiated advance—a staggering forty thousand dollars (at a time when the highest advances for science fiction books were five thousand dollars)—if Ginny would allow one of his staff editors to cut the book.

  That was a very tempting offer: With forty thousand dollars in hand, they could liquidate the hospital bills and use the big Stranger royalties to pay for the follow-up and the two new surgeries …

  But Minton had as much as told them already that his editors didn’t understand the book. Robert’s wishes were very clear on this point: He couldn’t cut it himself, and he didn’t want an editor to cut it. It was either publish it as written or withdraw it and find a publisher who would. Money is money, but money was not the last word.

  Minton paid out the smaller advance—still a sizeable advance in 1970—and had the book set up in type as is, including the notice Robert requested for the National Rare Blood Club—the very least he could do to “pay it forward.” Robert requested a set of galleys in June, to see if he could edit it before he went back in for surgery. His sense of humor had returned with his energy:

  So I have been tidying my affairs lately … In the course of it I attempted to do two things: leave my cadaver to Stanford medical school and replace the many units of blood that I had been given in January, February and March. (I had paid for the blood of course but there still remains the moral obligation to pay back the blood tissue itself, especially as I am a “rare blood” type—us vampires have our protocols.)

  a. Stanford refused my body. Seems their morgue is overcrowded and they are having to keep the overflow in the Coca-Cola machine.