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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

b. Rare blood or not, the hospital blood bank refuses to accept blood from me; I’m too old.

  This caused me to write a magnum opus in lyric form. Title: “Dust Thou Art, to Dust Returneth—”

  Poor old Wobert,

  He’s just mud;

  They don’t want his body,

  They won’t take his blood!

  (Compadre, doesn’t the pity-of-it-all getcha? Right there? No, a little lower down.)45

  He didn’t get to surgery that summer. Both Robert and Ginny were in the swimming pool one day in June 1970, when Robert had an itch on his shoulder and asked Ginny to look at it. Nothing was visible then, but the next morning there was a red patch that looked like poison oak or poison ivy.

  They were lucky to have an extremely able allergist-dermatologist locally, Dr. Holbert, who had been practicing from an iron lung for twenty-two years. It was not poison oak, he ruled. By the next day, the rash was developed enough to identify it: shingles.

  Herpes zoster, the virus which causes shingles, is the same virus that causes chicken pox and causes similar red wales and scabby sores. It stays permanently in the nerve cells—usually from a childhood infection with chicken pox—and can flare up whenever you undergo bodily stress. Robert’s attack was intercostal—in a band around the ribcage—on the right side and affected the use of his right arm. The pain was severe, topping even Robert’s high threshhold: He said it felt like a blowtorch applied to his bare skin.46

  The infection spread uncontrollably, and a week after the first sign, Robert’s temperature spiked. Alarmed, Ginny went into overdrive. Dr. Holbert couldn’t admit his patients to the hospital, because he couldn’t attend them (the main reason he had switched specializations from surgery to dermatology). And in any case, Ginny did not want Robert going back to Dominican. She called Dr. Oberhelman at Stanford and got permission to readmit him there.

  The temperature, they discovered right away, was not caused by the shingles: He had also picked up a systemic infection of Staphylococcus aureus. Golden staph is one of those very hard-to-control bacterial infections that are a doctor’s despair. They put him immediately into “reverse isolation,” requiring everyone who came in to see him to gown up in scrubs (in the June heat!) and sterilize their hands going into and out of the room.

  Robert’s immune system was compromised already, and the Staph infection hit him harder than the shingles. Again he could not eat and so lost weight and strength for the ten days they struggled to control the infection. The antibiotics did help with the shingles—the skin part of it, anyway. Gallstone surgery was out of the question for the moment.

  By the time he got back home, the first installment of I Will Fear No Evil was appearing in Galaxy’s July number. He was too weak even to pick at the galleys from Putnam’s. Ginny finished up the front matter and all the exacting details that go into making a book.

  The painkillers seemed to take all Robert’s energy. If left to his own desires, he would stay in bed all day every day, moaning occasionally.47 Ginny chivvied him out of bed, and they played games eight hours a day, sitting at the dining room table, for months, from July to December—Acey-Deucey, the Navy man’s dice game, and Robert taught her how to play Cribbage, the navy man’s card game. For variety they played Scrabble. As with the last bout of recuperation, Ginny handled the writing business and financial affairs, answering fan mail. The new form letter Robert had designed in the spring seemed too cold and impersonal for her, and she found herself adding long handwritten PS’s—which defeated the purpose of the multigraphed form letter.

  By August Robert was strong enough and oriented enough to cooperate on his own, and Ginny began taking him out with her on short errands that wouldn’t tax his strength too much. The scabs had fallen off from the shingles, leaving not-too-prominent red spots—but unremitting pain.

  It was about this time that a manufacturer in Hollywood sent him a complimentary water bed, “a child of your imagination,” referring to the mentions of water beds (and “flotation beds” and “hydraulic beds” and “tank beds”) in Stranger in a Strange Land, adding “Your prophecy is enriching man kind’s mental state 100 yrs.”48 Unfortunately, the house’s flooring wasn’t engineered to take a ton of water in a four-foot-by-six-foot footprint, so the water bed had to stay in its shipping carton.

  I Will Fear No Evil came off Putnam’s presses on September 3, exactly one year to the day after he had put “-30-” to the draft (though they would not generally issue the book until November). The Galaxy serialization was in its third installment, and the mail was already starting to come in on it.

  Heinlein was able to help a little with the writing business now, though insomnia and lack of appetite from the infections kept him at a very low level. He had another inquiry about The Door into Summer as a film property, and Reed Sherman was anxious to negotiate an extension to his option, even though his script was only half done. George Pal wanted to look at “The Roads Must Roll” as a film property. If Heinlein never wrote another word they could keep going for a while just on film options and royalties on the older books. Provided the medical expenses didn’t bankrupt them first. He still tired easily and had frequent bouts of post-herpetic pain that continued for months, until the nerve sheaths had completely regenerated. It is not uncommon for post-herpetic neuralgia to continue for a year—and there was a chance the pain would never go away. But he did gradually improve.

  While Robert’s health was improving, Ginny’s was declining. She was seeing an orthopedist now at Stanford Medical Center, about her feet. The bursitis that had plagued her since her basic training in World War II had gone from occasional twinges to continuous pain: She almost could not bear to stand on her feet or to walk. The orthopedist bound her feet tightly with adhesive tape into a kind of postmodern go-go boot. That helped ease the pain some, though it didn’t seem to improve the condition. By November, they were giving her cortisone injections directly into the heels—10 cc at a time, which is a massive amount of liquid to take by injection. The bruised feeling in the heels lasted about ten days, but the injections seemed to help, while they lasted.

  The reviews on I Will Fear No Evil were very mixed—a sign, he took it, that he had achieved his desired effect of shaking people up and challenging preconceptions. Some of the reviewers actually complained about a lack of graphic sex in the book, one calling him “the Victorian Mr. Heinlein.”49

  On the other hand, the book got glowing reviews in specialty publications for Women’s Lib (as the feminist movement was casually called at the time), flower children, and libertarians, so the reviews were a wash—and the book sold well: In fact, it went into a second printing even before release.

  They continued gradually to do more, a bit at a time, and by spring 1971 were able to entertain Violet Markham, the Hawaiian friend they had met shipboard in 1954, with a jaunt to San Francisco, taking her to the Playboy Club—quite daring and even in 1970 quite chic. A local bookseller in Santa Cruz held an open autograph party, and Robert signed books for two hours while it poured outside. Ginny watched over him like a hen with one chick: He had to tread a very careful line between being as active as his strength allowed and overdoing himself into a relapse.

  Now that the big book was out of the way, Ginny had time to do more business planning. Scribner had hung on to the rights to most of the juveniles for decades, without getting them issued in paperback, and now that Mac Talley had left NAL, the half-dozen Signet books (for which Robert owned the rights outright) had been allowed to go out of print.

  Ace had recently paid Scribner an enormous amount of money for a five-year paperback issue right—an illegal one, in Heinlein’s opinion, not permitted by the original contract—and Ginny and Blassingame had been able to leverage that to pressure Signet to reissue them or they would void the contract and take them somewhere else: Ace was very happy to pick up the additional paperback rights for their line, and the issue was so successful that Ginny actually had to defer some of the royalties in
to the next tax year. She blessed their new tax accountant, George Coleman, a specialist in writers, for keeping track of these matters—and Alan Nourse for referring him.

  They weren’t out of financial danger yet—but knowing they had extra money coming in next April took a load off Ginny’s mind. Robert no longer thought about such things unless forced to, even when he was healthy:50 He relied on Ginny’s judgment and abilities.

  Around Christmastime in 1970, Heinlein took to working regularly at his desk—a good milestone, suggesting he would be strong enough for surgery in a month or two. Ginny would have to have foot surgery, probably, too.

  The other cloud on their horizon was Robert’s mother: Bam had suffered a stroke and was not expected to make any real recovery. Robert’s sister Louise made a trip out from Albuquerque to Arcadia, to help out and take some of the responsibilities off Mary Jean and Andy Lermer, who had been caring for her for more than twenty years. The boys in the family had been covering Bam’s living expenses by quarterly whip-rounds, but when her Medicare coverage and insurance ran out, the expenses would go up drastically, and the Lermers could not shoulder the financial burden of a convalescent home for her. Her mind was not at all clear anymore; she required constant supervision for the rest of her life. Robert wrote to Mary Jean:

  Rex and I and Mother’s other children will always be in debt to you for this. Perhaps someday there will be circumstances in which we can repay in kind but in the meantime all I can do is to acknowledge that there is a deeper debt beyond money.51

  Rex and Larry were retired and on fixed incomes—and Clare was a college professor, limited, too, in what he could do to increase Bam’s financial support. With the sales of I Will Fear No Evil taking off—12,000 copies sold by the end of February of the initial print run of 13,500—and the new revenues from the Ace paperbacks coming in, Robert and Ginny were ready to pick up the slack when Bam’s Medicare and insurance coverage ran out.

  But she surprised them all: By mid-February, Bam was mentally oriented and mostly recovered from the worst effects of her stroke.

  Early in March 1971, Arthur C. Clarke came through the Bay Area on a lecture tour. On the 16th he had a lecture in Hayward and went home that evening with Dr. Barney and Mrs. Priscilla Oliver, who brought him to Bonny Doon the next day and were invited in for an impromptu lunch. Clarke spent three days with the Heinleins, which gave them as good a chance to get reacquainted as one can in such a short time.

  The weeks and months passed. Heinlein had extensive dental surgery done. Reed Sherman negotiated a permanent film option for The Door into Summer, so he wouldn’t have to keep extending it from year to year. Poul Anderson sent them a copy of his new book, Operation Chaos, with a pleasing dedication. The novelettes that made up the book had been appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for several years. The recent ones made the connection to Heinlein’s “Magic, Inc.” even plainer, and his redheaded witch heroine, also named Ginny, made the homage much more pointed—though, as Anderson pointed out, that was just a happy coincidence: The first couple of stories were actually written before the Andersons had met the Heinleins in person.

  By June 1971, two cancers were discovered in rough patches of skin on Heinlein’s face. He had a nose cauterization, and the next day the cancers were surgically removed. He had had good luck up to now, but he was nearly sixty-four years old and had to make another lifestyle change: He could go out in the sun only with a hat and long-sleeved shirts from now on.

  For Heinlein’s birthday festivities in 1971, the entire Nourse family came down from Seattle for a visit. Just four days later, John W. Campbell, Jr., died. This rock, this anchor, ridiculed and ignored for years, cut everyone in the SF community adrift by his sudden absence. He and Heinlein had not passed more than casual correspondence in many years.

  Heinlein gradually recovered the use of his right arm, and it became possible to contemplate some down time for Ginny. The cortisone shots weren’t helping Ginny anymore, and the Stanford clinics had finally come to a definite determination that nothing would help the calcification in her heels but surgery—and that would incapacitate her for three months, it was estimated, from surgery to full recovery. With help, Heinlein could fend more for himself now, and he decided to postpone his own surgery. Although getting and keeping help of any kind that far out in the country was always a problem, they were able to hire a housekeeper-cook and an exceptionally good outdoor handyman-gardener’s assistant at the same time—a minor miracle.

  Ginny went into Stanford Medical Center for a simultaneous operation on both heels, on July 23, 1971. She went home on crutches in a week. Heinlein made up the first of the “multicopied” general reports on their health they used in later years and sent them out to about thirty-five of their friends.

  Ginny was not a good patient. Initially, she occupied herself sewing and knitting. Their neighbors, Eve and Pete Agur, had been helping out with shopping and some minor errands, for which Ginny wanted to express appreciation with handmade needlework—placemats and napkins she hemmed herself. Left to her own judgment, she would overdo it and have to take more codeine, then when the pain subsided overdo it again. Robert designed—and Leif, their gardener-assistant, built—a bed table like a breakfast tray, able to hold the weight of a portable typewriter (though it sagged in the middle, even reinforced).52 She could plan the day’s meals for the housekeeper and the gardening for the day for Leif (plus another list for Robert). The accumulated mail she piled on the bed beside her.

  And, of course, no bed-office setup would be complete without a supply of kittens to randomize the papers.

  Heinlein had an entertaining new project to occupy himself: Don Ellis,53 a rock composer who had been commissioned to write a modern jazz-rock opera for the Hamburg Staatsoper, wanted the work to be based on a Heinlein story. Heinlein had always ranged as widely as possible in his writing, with more or less success in different fields. He would not pass up the chance to do an opera libretto. One of their local friends suggested “The Green Hills of Earth” as a likely property. He started work on the libretto on August 23, “The Green Hills of Earth: The Story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways,” and completed seven pages of verse libretto before running into a snag: Ellis didn’t want “The Green Hills of Earth.” He wanted The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

  This simply would not work: “It’s just too involved a story,” Ginny later told Leon Stover. “To cut it would ruin it.”54 But Ellis was adamant: He wanted The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress—or nothing.

  Nothing it would be, then. Heinlein refused to release the rights to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for this purpose. And that was that.55

  Heinlein had one last chore to do before he could have the gallstone/appendix/hernia operation he had been putting off for more than a year: Joe Sencenbaugh, son of their best friends in Colorado Springs, was in the Colorado University Engineering School now and asked for an interview-by-mail for the school’s magazine, Colorado Engineer. Heinlein was glad to help, but the questions Sencenbaugh sent him were really too broad for the size of the interview he had in mind and would take a skilled writer investing a lot of effort to get the answers into a form compact enough for the magazine’s scale.

  But this would be worth something post his mortem: This was an opportunity to start building an estate. Their new tax adviser had told them royalties usually tapered off to nothing five years after a writer’s death.

  Since I have no insurance and can get none, it is imperative that I create an estate in other ways—real estate, tax-exempt bonds, and—especially—copyrights and common-law rights which may be turned into copyrights … 56

  This surgery was scheduled for October 21—their wedding anniversary. Heinlein went into the hospital for prep on October 20. Afterward, he got up from bed without being pressured or cajoled, though he tired easily and slept a great deal during his recuperation. Dana Rohrabacher and David Nolan wrote on November 8, asking him to be present at an org
anizational meeting for a libertarian political party. Ginny declined for him: He was still too weak.

  By December 13, he felt up to writing letters.

  24

  DA CAPO AL FINE

  The “Da Capo” story had been on Heinlein’s professional agenda, in one form or another, for more than thirty years. In 1972, he wanted to put a grand cap on the Future History—close it off with the science-fiction version of the Solar myth, a return to Lazarus Long’s origins—which were, roughly speaking, Heinlein’s own.

  Ginny urged him to write up an embellished-dinner-table yarn about the Midshipman Who Was Too Lazy to Fail “… the most interesting story in the way of personal history that I had ever heard.”1 The tale—a modified version of the real-life story of his Annapolis classmate Delos Wait—was really “about” life wisdom that ran across the grain of the “received wisdom” of the culture, and that was a vein Heinlein had been working for decades.

  He had tried, before, to get across the most important thing, and it was always—always!—misread. He had just gotten an intriguing fan letter from one Tim Zell, who seemed to “get” that “Thou Art God” in Stranger was not a permission, but instead a token of ultimate personal responsibility. Heinlein wrote, rather carefully, that he was not hostile to Stranger spinoffs like Zell’s Church of All Worlds, as the canaille among the organized fans apparently had it. But he wanted to be explicit: Zell had lumped him together with Ayn Rand and Robert Rimmer, and these two were, he felt, different kinds of writers than he, who made their stories fit their propaganda purposes:

  I was asking questions.

  I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconception and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers.

  If I managed to shake him loose from some prejudice, preconception, or unexamined assumption, that was all I intended to do. A rational human being does not need answers, spoonfed to him on “faith,” he needs questions to worry over—serious ones. The quality of the answers then depends on him.…