Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Hubbard was unable to write. He had exaggerated his injuries—if he could no longer be the most impressive person in the room, he would settle for being the most damaged—but his ulcer was real enough, and his medication had left him impotent and depressed. It combined to reveal a strain of weakness that he had previously been able to conceal, as de Camp wrote to Asimov: “He always was that way. . . . What the war did was to wear him down to where he no longer bothers with the act.”

  Heinlein saw Hubbard, unquestioningly, as a wounded veteran, and he was forgiving of him, even when he snuck alcohol—which Heinlein was trying to keep from Leslyn—into the house. He recalled later, “I . . . spent weeks in ’45 and early ’46 trying to take care of him, trying to keep him out of trouble. I could keep him on an even keel only when I was with him constantly.”

  Yet he still thought highly of Hubbard as a writer, crediting him with the discovery of a plot formula, “the man who learned better,” that he had used unconsciously throughout his career. There was talk of Hubbard revising For Us, the Living, and Heinlein put him together with his friend John Arwine to organize scientists against the bomb. Nothing ever came of it, and Hubbard returned to the hospital.

  Heinlein worked diligently on his articles about atomic weapons, but he was unable to get them published, despite the efforts of his agent, Lurton Blassingame, whom he had hired on Hubbard’s recommendation. Blassingame wanted him to return to fiction, agreeing with Hubbard that he was “wasted on pulp,” and Campbell was asking for stories. But at the very moment that the bomb was pushing science fiction into the mainstream—and Campbell hoped to take the magazine to the next level—Heinlein had concluded that he could no longer write for Astounding.

  The conflict revolved around the rights to his work, which had been a point of contention for years. After the war, Heinlein wanted to obtain the releases to “Blowups Happen” and “Solution Unsatisfactory” to promote his rocket project, but Campbell dodged the request, prompting Doña to demand, “What do you mean by saying that he has never been refused rights when you just refused them?” Heinlein threatened to go directly to Henry Ralston, the vice president of Street & Smith, and the ultimatum worked—but only for those two stories.

  Early in 1946, Heinlein asked for a release of all ancillary rights. Campbell handled it poorly, showing their correspondence to Ralston, and he seemed unwilling to challenge his superiors. Heinlein was told that the firm wouldn’t transfer any rights without a definite offer on the table, which meant that he couldn’t shop his stories to the movies. This bothered him more than any personal issue, and Campbell—whom Heinlein called “a supreme scissorbill,” an old term of labor slang for someone who was overly sympathetic to management—failed to understand this. Heinlein wrote to de Camp, “I hardly expect to sell to him again.”

  In the meantime, it occurred to Heinlein that he could earn money and reach a wider audience with a juvenile novel for boys. He conceived The Young Atomic Engineers and the Conquest of the Moon as a successor to the Horatio Alger and Tom Swift books that he had loved growing up, with an emphasis on the values of hard work and education, and he set certain rules for himself: “Never write down to them. Do not simplify the vocabulary nor the intellectual concepts. . . . No real love interest and female characters should be only walk-ons.”

  Above all else, he wanted to escape the pulps. Will Jenkins had told him that any story that was written well enough could be sold to the slicks, and Heinlein set his sights on The Saturday Evening Post. Like Campbell, he still believed that science fiction—which he preferred to call “speculative fiction”—could change the world: “The market is there, created by the war. . . . I can satisfy my itch to preach and propagandize, reach a bigger audience and make some dinero.”

  Throughout the summer, Heinlein worked on “The Green Hills of Earth,” which he had once seen as his “swan song” for Campbell, who had even mentioned it in the magazine. Instead, it was bought by the Post. The sale was a milestone for the entire genre—Asimov was filled with “miserable envy” when he heard about it—but Heinlein was sorry that he hadn’t sent it to his old friend: “I deeply regret that it should have worked out with hurt feelings, for John nursed me along a lot at the beginning.” Even better, his juvenile novel, which would be retitled Rocket Ship Galileo, was acquired for hardcover by Alice Dalgliesh at Scribner.

  Any satisfaction that he felt in his achievements was undermined by personal complications. In June, Leslyn had answered the door to find Ginny standing there with a suitcase—they had expected her to visit in the fall, but she had been demobilized in March. Her engagement had fallen apart, and Heinlein was as charmed by her as ever. In a letter that they both wrote to Ginny, he slipped in a typewritten card that Leslyn probably never saw: “I think about you all the time.”

  Leslyn’s drinking had grown worse. At home, Heinlein emptied the liquor into the sink, and after Ginny caught Leslyn swigging from a bottle, he searched for stashes of alcohol. They were both seeing a psychiatrist—Leslyn couldn’t drive, so he dropped her off at her appointments and waited until she was done—and after Ginny moved into the house, the nature of the situation became impossible to ignore. A friend recalled, “Leslyn slept in the studio whilst Bob and the femme fatale cavorted in the master bedroom. Ginny was a virgin, but she learned fast.”

  When Leslyn finally ordered Ginny to leave, it may have only hastened the outcome. In her first true love letter to Heinlein, Ginny wrote, “Oh, my darling, how much I miss you already—not waking with you today and not seeing you and hearing your sweet voice.” Left alone with Leslyn, who was confined to her room, Heinlein despaired. He couldn’t sleep, and he was feeling miserable himself: “During the past eighteen months there have been more times when I wanted to be dead than there were times when I wanted to go on living.”

  One day, Leslyn told Heinlein that she had tried to kill herself, in a gesture laden with symbolism, by handling the radioactive glass that they had received from Cornog. In fact, it was locked safely away, but the incident catalyzed something inside him that had been building for months. The couple made plans for a trip to Arizona, but Heinlein informed her abruptly that he intended to go off on his own. Leslyn moved in with her cousin, and Heinlein told his lawyer that he wanted a divorce. Their date of separation was given as June 20, 1947.

  Heinlein expressed regret over what had happened: “I was simply a man faced with a problem which he could not solve.” Leslyn, in turn, wrote to Jack Williamson, “Bob feels that I am entirely to blame, and perhaps he is right. But it has taken me some time to get used to the idea that fifteen years of habits and associations must be broken.” The timing was also significant. Ginny was available, and Heinlein had made his breakthrough sales to the Post and Scribner. Leslyn’s troubles had been holding him back, and he broke away from her as soon as he could.

  Moving with Ginny to Ojai, California, Heinlein reworked Beyond This Horizon for book publication, removing some of the elements that he had added for Campbell. In July, he wrote a letter to Asimov that failed to mention Leslyn, and Gertrude concluded that they had split up. Asimov didn’t believe her, but after de Camp confirmed it, he wrote to express sympathy over Heinlein’s domestic troubles. Heinlein replied that he didn’t have any. Asimov recalled, “I took it to mean that his marital problems had been solved by separation, so I said no more.”

  But his situation was still unresolved. Leslyn was telling others that he had been abusive, but she was also hinting at a reconciliation, and Heinlein realized that he had to stay in Los Angeles to make sure that she went through with the divorce. In the city, he kept away from his friends. He bought a caravan, the “Gopher Hole,” that was so small that he had to keep his books in the trunk of his car, and he moved into a trailer park in the San Fernando Valley.

  A divorce hearing occurred in September, but a year had to pass before he could remarry, and the uncertainty took its toll—he had failed to place anything new since leaving Leslyn.
In 1948, there were signs of a turnaround. Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis, proposed that they collaborate on a film about a voyage to the moon, and after seeing Campbell in New York, Heinlein went to Los Angeles. The partnership with Lang went nowhere—Heinlein distrusted his leftist politics—but he reached a more successful agreement with a producer named George Pal.

  Heinlein felt secure enough to ask Ginny to marry him, proposing that they live in Colorado Springs, which he had visited in his teens. After writing a “drop dead” file for the movie project, which recommended Jack Parsons as a technical advisor in case anything happened to him, he reunited with Ginny in Colorado. They decided to wed out of town, to avoid a local newspaper announcement, and were married just across the border in New Mexico on October 21, 1948.

  He had turned a corner. With his second juvenile, Space Cadet, Heinlein began to grasp that his works for younger readers were an ideal playground for his talents—he saw a technical education as a royal road to the stars, and these books, which were designed to inspire students to study science and engineering, amounted to the best propaganda imaginable. Nothing else that he ever wrote would so fully utilize his gifts or affect the future so profoundly.

  The rights dispute with Astounding had finally been resolved, and Heinlein wanted to thank Campbell by doing a story for him. The editor was into ham radio—he would later write articles on the subject for hobbyist journals—and they used it to discuss a new idea. A few months earlier, the magazine had printed a letter from a fan claiming to review an issue from a year in the future. One of the nonexistent stories was “Gulf,” by Heinlein’s pseudonym Anson MacDonald, and he proposed that if they persuaded the other writers to play along, they could do it for real.

  Campbell loved the notion, and Heinlein set to work. The title “Gulf” could mean almost anything, and when Heinlein turned to Ginny for suggestions, she proposed a plot about a “Martian Mowgli,” a human orphan raised by aliens on Mars. Heinlein drafted the first and last chapters and asked Campbell for feedback on potential endings: “Another solution is for him to become a messiah, either tragically unsuccessful, or dramatically successful.”

  The editor was intrigued, but it seemed too large for one story. Heinlein set it aside, and when he asked Ginny what else she had in mind, she reminded him of the discussion that had ensued when he asked, “What makes a superman?” She had replied, “They think better.” In the meantime, a publisher wanted to put out the Future History in hardcover, and Heinlein began work on “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” which would serve as a keystone for the entire series.

  Another figure resurfaced in February 1949, when Heinlein received a note from Hubbard, with whom he had sporadically corresponded. Hubbard, who was living in Savannah, Georgia, wrote to ask for a loan of fifty dollars, which he needed to get to a pension hearing: “If you don’t say yes, you haven’t offended. But if you do, I’ll name my next hero after you.”

  Heinlein sent the money, telling him that Ginny had taken it out of her grocery budget: “She won’t turn down a shipmate. As for me, it’s partly because I remember you floating around out there in that salt water with your ribs caved in.” He added that he knew that he could rely on Hubbard in a pinch, which was more than he could say for some of his other friends.

  On March 3, Hubbard repaid the money, adding an extra dollar. Heinlein returned it: “No son of a bitch is going to pay me interest on a personal loan and get away with it.” In response, Hubbard thanked him, saying he was hard at work on the project—a book on psychology—that he had described the year before: “If it drives you nuts, don’t sue. You were warned!”

  WHEN THE WAR ENDED IN 1945, HUBBARD HAD BEEN UNDERGOING TREATMENT AT OAK KNOLL Naval Hospital, but it was often on an outpatient basis. When he wasn’t there, he usually headed for Los Angeles, rather than to Washington, where Polly was living with their two children. On one such visit, he turned up at Jack Parsons’s huge house on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, wearing dark glasses and carrying a cane, in the company of the artist Lou Goldstone. Parsons was a fan of Hubbard’s fiction, and he invited the writer to move in.

  The mansion had three floors and eleven bedrooms—as well as a temple for the Ordo Templi Orientis—and Parsons rented all of it out, specifying in an advertisement for prospective tenants, “Must not believe in God.” Hubbard fit in at once. Seated in the kitchen, he showed off scars on his chest that he claimed were from arrows in the South American rain forest, and he was overheard saying that the best way to make money would be to start a religion—although the legend that Heinlein bet him that he couldn’t is undoubtedly apocryphal.

  Hubbard also left a more personal mark on the house. After his wife left him for another occultist, Parsons had taken up with her half sister Sara Northrup. Sara was eighteen and beautiful, and Parsons encouraged her to sleep with other men, including Hubbard, who later claimed that he awoke after a drunken party with her at his side. Parsons sometimes seemed jealous, but he wrote warmly of Hubbard to Aleister Crowley: “Although he has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. . . . I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in mind.”

  On December 5, Hubbard was mustered out for good. Instead of returning to his family, he went back to the mansion in Pasadena—he was searching for answers, and the ones that Parsons offered seemed as promising as any. Robert Cornog was living there as well, and Heinlein sometimes came by to visit. Hubbard also resumed his affair with Sara, who was seen entwined with him at the house “like a starfish on a clam.” One morning, while Hubbard and Parsons were fencing, Sara grabbed a sword and lunged at Hubbard’s face. Hubbard, who wasn’t wearing a mask, was startled, but he fended her off, rapping her on the end of the nose.

  Parsons was obsessed with creating a moonchild, the infant Antichrist mentioned by Crowley in The Book of the Law, which required summoning a woman to give birth in the role of the Whore of Babylon. Hubbard was enthusiastic about the project. He later referred to Crowley as “my very good friend,” and although they never met, they both modeled themselves after Sir Richard Francis Burton, whom the occultist called “the perfect pioneer of spiritual and physical adventure.” Hubbard always had to be the best in the room at everything, and magic, which lent itself to his talents, was no exception. Before long, he was acting as if he had fallen into one of his Unknown stories, which always ended with the hero’s transformation.

  The ritual known as the Babalon Working began at nine at night on January 4, 1946, with Parsons and Hubbard preparing magical weapons and talismans, and it continued for eleven days. One evening, Hubbard claimed that he felt something knock a candle out of his hand in the kitchen. Parsons wrote, “He called us, and we observed a brownish yellow light about seven feet high. . . . I banished [it] with a magical sword, and it disappeared. [Hubbard’s] right arm was paralyzed for the rest of the night.” The next day, Hubbard allegedly had an astral vision of one of Parsons’s old enemies, which he drove away with a fusillade of throwing knives.

  Three days later, Parsons and Hubbard went to the Mojave Desert, at the rocket engineer’s favorite place for meditation, at a point where two enormous power lines intersected. Feeling all the tension leave his body, Parsons said to Hubbard, “It is done.” On their return to the mansion, they found a woman named Marjorie Cameron, who Parsons later said had been in a car crash and no longer remembered who she was. In fact, Cameron—a remarkable personality in her own right—had simply been curious about the house, and she had asked a friend to drop her off.

  The two men also signed an agreement for a business, Allied Enterprises, that would engage in activities of a “varied and elastic nature,” with the participants dividing all proceeds, including any income from Hubbard’s writings. Parsons contributed twenty thousand dollars, which amounted to most of his savings, while Hubbard added twelve hundred, and Sara, the third partner, put up nothing. As one possible venture, they discussed buying y
achts on the East Coast to resell, and Hubbard left to look into the market at the end of February.

  When Hubbard returned, he announced that he had experienced a mystical vision, and they commenced the second half of the moonchild ritual. As music filled the room, Hubbard, dressed in white, and Parsons, in black, prepared the altar. At the exact moment that they smashed an idol of Pan, the roof of the guesthouse caught fire. The following night, Cameron joined the proceedings, naked beneath a crimson robe. As she and Parsons had sex, Hubbard chanted, perspiring, “The lust is hers, the passion yours. Consider thou the Beast raping.”

  Parsons felt it had been a success, but when he informed Crowley of their efforts, the occultist replied deflatingly, “I thought I had a most morbid imagination, as good as any man’s, but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea of what you can possibly mean.” Crowley wrote to Karl Germer, the head of the O.T.O. in America, “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.”

  Around this time, Hubbard drafted a document known as the “Affirmations,” a series of notes that he evidently hoped to use to hypnotize himself with a dictating machine. The pages have been variously dated, but several entries point to the period when he was active with Parsons, of whom he wrote:

  Any distaste I may have for Jack Parsons originated in a psychic experiment. Such distaste is foolish. He is my friend and comrade-in-arms. . . . I have only friendship for Jack Parsons. . . . Jack is also an adept. You love and respect him as a friend. He cannot take offense at what you do. You will not wrong him because you love him.

  Hubbard’s fears that he would hurt his friend were far from unfounded. At the end of April, he took ten thousand dollars from their pooled funds and went to Florida with Sara, allegedly to buy a yacht. In reality, he had something else in mind. He had written to the chief of naval personnel for permission to travel to South America and China, and he had excited Leslyn’s nephews over a venture involving “China, knives, guns,” which irritated Heinlein: “I don’t understand Ron’s current activities. . . . As near as I can tell at a distance he seems to be off on some sort of a Big Operator tear, instead of straightening out and getting reestablished in his profession.”