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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Robert continued with other considerations, and interrupted C[ronkite] again and again.

  Stover added (at 123):

  What makes this exchange interesting is that it dramatically reverses all the usual cliches about these two men. While the media critics dub Cronkite the great “liberal” commentator of the TV airwaves, critics of Heinlein attack him for being illiberal, sexist, and antifeminist.

  49. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 01/10/86.

  50. Frank M. Robinson, letter to RAH, 07/25/69.

  51. Statement by Robert A. Heinlein, “26 July 1969.” This statement was apparently not circulated or published anywhere at the time, but was incorporated in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.

  52. Robert Heinlein, taped interview with Frank M. Robinson, Tape 1, Side 1 (p. 1 of transcript, crossing over to 2).

  53. Heinlein’s opus card records: “resumed writing reading MS + notes in prep to resume writing on Ms 28 July 1969, 1250.” The meaning of “1250” is obscure—perhaps the time at which he began the review of his previous work, i.e., ten minutes before 1:00 P.M.

  54. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/28/69; Grumbles from the Grave, 178.

  55. SDS = Students for a Democratic Society, a radical left-wing student organization, sponsor of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, a prominent manifesto of the New Left through the 1960s until SDS disbanded after their 1969 convention.

  56. RAH, letter to Frank M. Robinson, 09/18/69.

  57. RAH, letter to Frank M. Robinson, 09/27/69.

  58. Undated letter, apparently a personal postscript or addendum by Heinlein to a multigraphed status letter sent to Ted Carnell in 1971.

  59. RAH, letter to Rita Bottoms, 09/10/73.

  60. See, e.g., RAH, letter to Ted Carnell, 11/14/62:

  If the audience does not laugh, the fault always lies with the clown. This is an axiom that writers should never forget. We are in the clown business, first and foremost, and if, in our pride, we forget this even for a moment, the results are disastrous—to the clown. Not to the audience.

  61. RAH, letter to Paul Kantner, 09/18/69. Kantner later remembered the incident with a somewhat different slant:

  During an interview for David Gans’ Grateful Dead Hour a couple of months ago, [Paul] Kantner [of Jefferson Airplane] told me this story: “When I was making Blows Against The Empire, I wrote a letter to Heinlein because I got his address. He lived down in Santa Cruz, in Bonnie Doon, actually, where my first girlfriend lived, so I thought ‘well, this is propitious.’ And I sent him a letter asking permission to use some of his words and some of his concepts out of his novels in Blows Against The Empire. He wrote me back saying, ‘My god, this is staggering’—something like that—‘you people have been ripping off my ideas and words for like 30 or 40 years and you’re the first person who’s ever had the decency to ask for permission.’ And he said, ‘P.S. Oh by the way my gardener says he went to high school with Marty Balin, who is your lead singer right now, and sends his best.’ That was a cute letter.”

  http://www.metafilter.com/48658/Specialization-is-for-Insects. Accessed by Bill Mullins 05/26/06 and reaccessed by the author 07/11/11.

  62. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 2, Side A (October 21, 1988).

  63. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Locus (July 1988).

  64. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 2, Side A (October 21, 1988). A joint task force of National Park rangers, California Highway Patrol, and the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office had raided two ranches to which members of the “Manson Family” had moved after Manson’s arrest in August 1969—before the connection between the Tate and LaBianca murders had been publicly announced.

  65. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Jane and Pete Sencenbaugh, 12/06/69.

  66. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Poul and Karen Anderson, 12/06/69.

  67. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lucy and Bill Corson, 12/07/69.

  68. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Art and Lucky Herzberger, 12/08/69.

  69. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/12/69, the relevant portion of which is quoted in Grumbles from the Grave.

  70. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lucy and Bill Corson, 12/07/69.

  71. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Poul and Karen Anderson, 12/06/69.

  72. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/04/69.

  73. Rita Bottoms, handwritten note to Donald T. Clark, 12/10/69; incorporated into Donald T. Clark, letter to RAH, dated 01/06/70. Rita Bottoms desk file.

  23. Trouble, With a Capital “P”

  1. “History of Robert’s illnesses,” Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00.

  2. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 2, Side A (October 1988?).

  3. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/17/89.

  4. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/16/70.

  5. Frank M. Robinson, e-mail to the author, 09/12/05.

  6. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Coleman, 03/17/71.

  7. “History of Robert’s illnesses,” Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00.

  8. Time magazine, unbylined, “A Martian Model,” (January 19, 1970): 44–45.

  9. “In an interview almost twenty years later, he [Bugliosi] said that he had seriously considered the allegations, investigated them, and then dismissed them,” Leon Stover, “The Heinlein-Manson Hoax,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 2 (January 1998): 2.

  10. Steven Kay, Ed Sanders, The Family, 27.

  11. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Violet Markham, 02/27/71.

  12. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00; Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 2, Side A (October 1988?).

  13. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00.

  14. This incident was retold several times in Virginia Heinlein’s correspondence and in interviews; in some of the tellings, Dr. Calciano suggested Stanford Medical Center; in others it was a doctor at Dominican Hospital. At one point in the Stover interview of October 1988, and also in the “History of Robert’s Illnesses” written for the author, she implies she made the decision on her own.

  15. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Coleman, 03/17/71. Mrs. Heinlein never specifically identified which “Dr. Calciano” she meant, but she might have meant Dr. Anthony J. Calciano, a cardiology and internal medicine specialist who began practicing in 1965 and is still in 2012 practicing at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. It has not proved possible to trace Dr. Calciano’s malpractice history—not unusual, as nondisclosure agreements are typically part of settlement negotiations.

  16. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lucy and Bill Corson, 08/20/71; Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lucy and Bill Corson, 08/30/71.

  17. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 01/20/00.

  18. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00.

  19. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Coleman, 03/17/71.

  20. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Violet Markham, 02/27/71; Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/28/69.

  21. RAH, letter to Mrs. Thomas V. (Rita) Bottoms, 09/10/73.

  22. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dr. (Lloyd) Biggle, 03/12/77.

  23. Dr. Harry Oberhelman, e-mail to Francesco Spreafico, 04/05/01.

  24. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Coleman, 03/17/71.

  25. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dr. (Lloyd) Biggle, 03/12/77.

  26. RAH, letter to Robert Bloch, 10/11/71. Heinlein probably meant “durable power of attorney,” as an ordinary general power of attorney ceases to be effective if the grantor ceases to be able to handle his own affairs, whereas the language which creates a durable power of attorney survives the grantor’s incapacity.

  27. RAH, letter to Mary Collin, 07/08/62.

  28. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 09/26/01.

  29. Karen Serassio anecdote, undated, but after 1977.

  30. Virginia Heinlein, letter
to Lurton Blassingame, 02/12/70; Grumbles from the Grave, 180.

  31. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 2, Side A (October 21, 1988).

  32. RAH, letter to Robert Bloch, 10/11/71.

  33. The time of Dr. Nourse’s trip was not fixed in the correspondence, but must have been in February or early March 1970. Heinlein memorialized it in a letter to L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp, 06/04/70:

  Alan Nourse did the most wonderful thing for us in taking the trouble to make a trip just to look me over, talk to my doctors, read my chart, then talk to Ginny and explain it all to her. It gave her morale a great boost when she needed it badly—which in turn gave my morale a shot in the arm.

  34. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 01/20/00.

  35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00.

  36. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/14/99.

  37. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Violet Markham, 02/27/71.

  38. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Jan Lister, 05/21/70.

  39. RAH, letter to Nancy and Temple Fielding, 06/05/70.

  40. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/31/70.

  41. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 2, Side A (October 1988?).

  42. RAH, letter to Miss Hewey, 12/13/71.

  43. Walter Minton, letter to RAH, 04/07/70.

  44. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Walter Minton, 04/13/70.

  45. RAH, letter to Robert Bloch, 06/04/70.

  46. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Walter Minton, 08/13/70.

  47. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 07/05/00.

  48. Per Timothy J. Hamilton, Share Water Bed, letter to RAH, 08/22/70.

  49. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/20/70. Perhaps she is referring to the review by James Gunn in the Kansas City Times (the morning edition of the KC Star) on that date, “Heinlein Rocket Veers Off Course,” in which Gunn remarks of Stranger (rather than I Will Fear No Evil): “His treatment of sex, though liberated and nonpornographic, reads like a youngster trying to demonstrate his freedom from a Victorian upbringing.”

  50. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/14/99.

  51. RAH, letter to Mary Jean and Andy Lermer, 02/26/71.

  52. This bedside table, together with the high bed, came into the possession of the Heinlein Society after Mrs. Heinlein’s death and was sold at auction in 2013.

  53. Don Ellis (1934–78) was a jazz trumpeter, band leader, composer, and drummer best remembered for his film scores for The French Connection (1971) and The Seven Ups (1973).

  54. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 1, Side B (October 1988?).

  55. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lucy and Bill Corson, 08/30/71; in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 1, Side B, she says she suggested “The Green Hills of Earth.”

  56. RAH, letter to Pete Sencenbaugh, 10/01/71.

  24. Da Capo al Fine

  1. Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to the author, 10/11/00.

  2. RAH, letter to Tim Zell, 01/20/72. This letter was somewhat edited by Virginia Heinlein for the end of Grumbles from the Grave and published as from “a Reader”—possibly to assure the material would be received as a general philosophical comment, rather than as specifically addressed to Zell’s neopagan Church of All Worlds.

  3. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 05/28/00.

  4. Ultimately, NASA decided against the unmanned Grand Tour, and the book was revised to a general survey of the solar system. The introduction was very tightly tied to the NASA Grand Tour, so Little, Brown dropped the Foreword, and it was eventually published as the last item of the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.

  5. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side B.

  6. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/14/99.

  7. One of the earliest critical works about Cabell took its title from these sections of verse disguised and scattered through Cabell’s prose, Cabellian Harmonics by Warren A. McNeill (1928). It is probably worth noting, as well, that verse inclusions in prose works can be read as a marker for Northrop Frye’s Anatomy genre.

  8. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dorace Trottier, 11/05/72.

  9. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dorace Trottier, 11/05/72.

  10. Cdr. Walter, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/01/72.

  11. Neither Capt. Mitchell nor Arthur C. Clarke made the cruise.

  12. “Notes: Offshore View of Apollo 17 Liftoff,” The New York Times Section X, Travel (11/19/72): 19.

  13. Isaac Asimov, In Joy Still Felt, 621.

  14. Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov, 358.

  15. RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74.

  16. Virginia Heinlein, IM with Ron Harrison, undated but February 2000.

  17. “Thanatosphere” is a neologism coined by Mailer—a spherical shell around the Earth, something like a second atmosphere, comprised of the souls of the dead. Mike Lennon of the Norman Mailer Society provides the information that Mailer discusses the concept first, without using the term, in A Fire on the Moon (1970) at 109 and coined the term in a Christian Science Monitor article on January 3, 1973. Mailer also coined the term “factoid.”

  18. Quoted in Tom Buckley, “Caribbean Cruise Attempts to Seek Meaning of Apollo,” The New York Times (12/12/72): 53.

  19. Quoted in Tom Buckley, “Caribbean Cruise Attempts to Seek Meaning of Apollo,” The New York Times (12/12/72): 53.

  20. RAH, letter to Nancy and Temple Fielding, 01/28/73.

  21. Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov, 358.

  22. The New York Times (12/12/72): 53.

  23. The New York Times (12/12/72): 53; Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov, 358.

  24. Katherine Anne Porter, quoted in The New York Times (12/12/72): 53, based on interview conducted 12/08/72.

  25. The New York Times (12/12/73): 53.

  26. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Arthur C. Clarke, 01/22/73.

  27. Isaac Asimov, In Joy Still Felt, 624. Asimov has the date wrong, as the cruise was over by December 14.

  28. David Hartwell, acquiring editor of this biography, commented during the editing of this volume in 2011 that he was the science-fiction editor of Putnam’s at the time and he did not agree with this assessment but was ordered by Walter Minton not to suggest cuts.

  29. See, e.g., Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side B. Heinlein himself made similar remarks in contemporaneous correspondence with the author.

  30. RAH, letter to Tim Zell, 01/20/72.

  31. That Heinlein read and greatly admired Generation of Vipers is documented (in the first volume of this biography); that he read An Essay on Morals is presumed on the basis of some slight convergence of content.

  32. For a nineteenth-century example of the “genealogical” style of argument, see F. W. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887). The genealogical style of argument was devised as a counter to the then academically standard method of arguing from religious propositions as first principles. Gradually in most academic disciplines religious arguments went out of favor, but they were—and still are—very prominent in casual or popular settings, as the continuing “debate” over various forms of “creation science” demonstrate graphically.

  33. RAH, letter to Dorothea Faulkner, 12/28/68.

  34. RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 10/17/73.

  35. Tape-recording quoted with author comments in James D. Gifford, Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion (Citrus Heights, Calif.: NitroSyncretic Press, 2000), 69.

  36. RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 10/16/73.

  37. This powerful memory from Heinlein’s childhood was confirmed by David R. Bayard and Joel Davis, who researched the matter in 2011 and found that this story is likely based (at least in part) on an incident that took place in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on April 17, 1911. The report was also carried that date in the Kansas City Times (the morning edition of the Star) as “Fast Train Killed Three.” The fa
cts are not quite as Heinlein recalled them—it was an elderly woman and her daughter, and the man trying to help them was the baggage master of the station.

  The report of this incident may have been a matter of discussion among the adults, rather than something Heinlein experienced directly. He would have been three years old at the time.

  It is possible also that he conflated this with an incident that took place several years later in Chicago but which was reported in the Kansas City Star on September 3, 1919 as “Which a Father’s Duty? Should Tanner have lived for children or died with wife? Chicago Debates the Question While Paying Tribute to the Heroism of Husband at Grade Crossing.” This story not only has the thematic thrust of Heinlein’s recollection, its details are much closer to his story: a husband and wife crossing railroad tracks; the wife’s foot is caught in the tracks, and a flagman and the husband working together to free the woman as the train bore down on them, ultimately killing the husband and wife while the flagman was sideswiped by the train. This item was found by Bill Mullins in 2013 and published on the Heinlein Society’s NexusForum “Woman Killed by Train” thread.

  If either or both of these items were his source, Heinlein has added details of his own (the hobo, for example) and his own interpretation of the meaning of the incident. It made a good story—one of the best.

  38. RAH, “Channel Markers,” Analog (January 1974).

  39. Leon Stover, “The Forrestal Lecture,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 4 (January 1999): 5.

  40. RAH, letter to Cal and Mickey Laning, 10/16/73.

  41. RAH’s self-written profile for the 1974 Muster Notes, 61.

  42. RAH, letter to Hap, Rebel & Dori Trottier, 04/18/73.

  43. Heinlein and Klass did conduct the interview that was to provide the raw material for this profile, but for reasons Prof. Klass could not recall in 2004, when he was guest of honor at the NoreasCon World SF Convention in Boston (see remarks and quotations in “Textual Comparison of Three Versions of Robert Heinlein’s Forrestal Lecture,” ed. Bill Patterson, The Heinlein Journal, no. 15 (July 2004): 6, the profile was never written. Of this incident, Mrs. Heinlein told Leon Stover in 1988: