In 1965, the Heinleins left Colorado Springs. Ginny thought that her health problems, which Campbell had casually suggested were “psychogenic,” were caused by the high altitude, and they moved to the college town of Santa Cruz, California, bringing them into contact for the first time with the counterculture. Heinlein dismissed it as “a parasitic excrescence to the ‘square’ culture,” and although he had sampled marijuana in his youth, he called LSD “as much of a failure as other drugs in producing any results of any value other than to the user.” But the hippies embraced Stranger in a Strange Land, which saw a spike in sales in the late sixties.
It was a vindication of the risks that he had taken, and he would never submit to the control of editors again. Since he had no children, his newfound prominence seemed like his best chance to affect the future, although he had mixed feelings about being seen as a guru. In Stranger in a Strange Land, he had coined the term “grok” to describe a form of empathy so deep that it was inexpressible, but in practice, he was wary of misinterpretation. His most famous novel was taken as a statement about free love, but he wrote to one reader, “If a male and a female each loves the other, it is almost a certainty that they will also feel physically attracted—in which case, if they choose to do something about it, the safest arrangement is contractual marriage.”
ON APRIL 22, 1953, ASIMOV HAD LUNCH AT HOWARD JOHNSON’S WITH A WOMAN HE HAD MET AT Boston University, who invited along a girlfriend. As usual, Asimov flirted shamelessly, and he was startled when the second girl calmly parried him “innuendo for innuendo.” After he dropped his friend off at her next appointment, the woman he had just met asked him to drive her home to Cambridge. He agreed. When they got to her place, she invited him up.
“What it amounts to is that she then seduced me,” Asimov later wrote. It was a sexual awakening of the kind that Heinlein had experienced as a young man on the train with Mary Briggs—except that it had happened to Asimov in his thirties. In the aftermath, he was eager to make up for lost time. One day, Pohl met him at a hotel near Boston Common, where Asimov “looked around, grinning, and volunteered that this was the place where he used to take his girlfriends.” And when he informed a woman at a party that he didn’t drink or smoke, she asked, “Well, what the hell do you do?” Asimov replied, “I fuck an awful lot, ma’am.”
His extramarital activities made him more confident, but he wasn’t about to leave Gertrude, who had given birth to their first child, David, on August 20, 1951. Asimov was working hard, taking on nonfiction projects and following Heinlein into juveniles with a series about the space ranger David “Lucky” Starr, whom he named after his son. His status was less clear with Campbell, who bounced two submissions, in his first rejections in nine years. Asimov recalled, “I was having a stronger and stronger impulse to stay away from him, but the ties of love, and the memory of all he had done for me, kept me from ever breaking with him.”
His first three novels, which had been written with minimal input from Campbell, had felt like a retreat from his best work, but he was slowly coming into his own. When Horace Gold suggested that he write a mystery about a detective with a robot partner, the result was The Caves of Steel, which Asimov set in an underground city that reflected his own preference for enclosed spaces. It was a major advance, and he followed it with The End of Eternity, his single best novel, as well as a secret repudiation of the Foundation series—it described a similar organization of scientists as a collection of “psychopaths.” Campbell turned it down.
After Pohl closed his literary agency, Asimov was left without representation, and he didn’t particularly think that he needed it. On May 25, 1954, however, he spent the evening with the Heinleins, whom he hadn’t seen in years, and Lurton Blassingame. At one point, Heinlein—who was one day away from his confrontation with Campbell—quietly confided that his income under Blassingame had quintupled. Asimov was tempted, but fate intervened at dinner, when the agent’s wife took one of the shrimp from his plate and ate it. He always regarded his food as his special property, and he decided then and there that he would never sign with Blassingame.
In 1955, Gertrude gave birth to their daughter Robyn—Asimov called her “Robbie,” like his most famous robot, although he said that this was just a coincidence—and he was promoted to an associate professorship at Boston University. Yet cracks in their marriage were showing. Gertrude frequently mentioned divorce—they often quarreled over money in front of friends—and he hated that she smoked. Asimov began to think of their life together as a failure: “In all those years I had not made her happy and I didn’t see how I could make her happy in the future.”
He channeled this dissatisfaction into his work. In 1956, they moved to West Newton, Massachusetts, where Asimov decorated his office with images of rocket ships and stickers that read “Genius at Work” and “Great Lover.” He wrote to Heinlein, “Gertrude complains that she doesn’t lay eyes on any part of me but the back of my neck when I’m typing.” Elsewhere, he confessed that he was “miserably unhappy” whenever he wasn’t writing: “I like it in the attic room with the wallpaper. I’ve been all over the galaxy. What’s left to see?”
Asimov was still selling stories to Campbell, but an exchange about race—to be explored later—had left him deeply uncomfortable, and he was looking for alternative markets. The editor Robert Lowndes agreed to his terms: “I would write one for him, just as though I were writing it for Astounding. In return, if he liked it, I would expect him to pay the Astounding rate of four cents a word.” Asimov rewarded Lowndes with “The Last Question,” in which he proposed an unforgettable solution to the problem of a dying universe. It became his favorite of his own short stories, and he no longer cared where it appeared.
As he worked on science books for teenagers and articles for Astounding, he began to realize that he could support himself with writing and public speaking alone. His relationship with the director of the medical school had degenerated, and he finally proposed that he remain on the faculty without teaching or taking a salary—although he insisted on keeping his title, knowing that losing it would disappoint both his father and Campbell, who loved having a professor among his writers.
This departure coincided with a break in his career. Campbell rejected “The Ugly Little Boy,” which became one of Asimov’s personal favorites, and his own interests were changing, particularly after Sputnik: “I berated myself for spending too much time on science fiction when I had the talent to be a great science writer.” He shifted his focus to nonfiction, and as one book followed another, he began to effectively define the emerging genre of popular science.
And his life was about to change in other ways. On May 1, 1959, Asimov attended a dinner of the Mystery Writers Association, where he shared a table with a woman with an elfin face, glasses, and a tiny chin. Years before, they had met at a convention, where she had asked him for an autograph. Asimov, who was suffering from gallstones, had felt terrible. “What’s your name?”
“Janet Jeppson.” She spelled it. When he asked her what she did, just to make conversation, Janet—who had studied at Stanford and New York University Medical School—told him that she was a psychiatrist.
Asimov handed the book back. “Good. Let’s get on the couch together.”
He had said it reflexively—he certainly wasn’t in an amorous mood—but the line, as well as his unpleasant appearance, had left a bad impression. That night, however, the dinner passed enjoyably, and when it was over, Asimov turned to Janet. “There’s no need to end the evening, I hope.”
Janet, who was thirty-two and unmarried, was surprised. “Wouldn’t you rather stay with your friends here?”
“At the moment, you’re my only friend,” Asimov said. They went back to her apartment, where they talked past midnight. Afterward, they exchanged letters, and he called her whenever he was in New York.
He had grown closer to his other editors, but he still crossed paths with his old mentor. At the World Science Fiction Co
nvention in Detroit in 1959, Asimov was heading to breakfast when he ran into Campbell and Peg, who told him, “I am glad to see that at least one other person keeps sensible hours.”
Asimov had been up all night, “telling jokes and laughing and pinching the girls,” but he didn’t want to disillusion her. “I always do, Peg.”
Yet he was also more aware of Campbell’s shortcomings. He once told the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “Suppose you meet a man who asks you what your field of endeavor is and you tell him that you are the world’s greatest living vertebrate paleontologist, which is, of course, what you are. And suppose that, on hearing this, the man you meet fixes you with a glittering eye and proceeds to lecture you for five hours on vertebrate paleontology, getting all his facts wrong, yet somehow leaving you unable to argue them. You will then have met Campbell.”
Asimov wrote occasional articles for Astounding, but he was growing confident in his ability to do good work on his own. His skills and personality—his memory, his dislike of travel, his preference for enclosed spaces, and his ability to rewrite material from other sources—all combined to make him exceptionally productive, and he began to dream of publishing one hundred books. When he mentioned this to Gertrude, she objected, “You’ll regret all the years you wasted just so that you could write a hundred books, and it will be too late.”
“But for me, the essence of life is writing,” Asimov replied. “In fact, if I do manage to publish a hundred books, and if I then die, my last words are likely to be, ‘Only a hundred!’ ”
His writing also affected his relationship with his children. As a toddler, David would bring a toy typewriter up to the attic and pretend to work, but as he grew older, he didn’t care for his father’s books: “They just sound too much like you.” David had trouble getting along with other kids—his parents consulted psychiatrists and neurologists—and after he was sent to boarding school in New Haven, Connecticut, Asimov channeled his paternal impulses toward a series of younger protégés, including Harlan Ellison. Even Robyn, whom he adored, sensed that his loyalties were divided. She asked him one day, “Suppose someone said you had to choose either me or writing? Which would it be?”
“Why, I would choose you, dear,” Asimov said. But he had hesitated, and she saw it.
As Heinlein broke through to the counterculture, Asimov was becoming a celebrity in the mainstream. He began to affect glasses with black frames and bushy sideburns, growing the face that he would wear for the rest of his life, and when he met John Updike, the novelist just grinned: “Say, Asimov, how do you manage to write all those books?” Asimov was still beloved by fans, and he mastered an informal style that made readers feel that he was confiding in them. At a time when the genre was expanding, he made it seem as close and intimate as it had been in the thirties.
But there was also a less attractive side to his fame. He was still pinching women’s bottoms, prompting a friend’s wife to snap, “God, Asimov, why do you always do that? It is extremely painful and besides, don’t you realize, it’s very degrading.” Yet he did nothing to change his behavior. Before the World Science Fiction Convention in 1962, he was invited by Earl Kemp, the chairman, to deliver a talk on “The Positive Power of Posterior Pinching.” Kemp said cheerfully, “We would, naturally, furnish some suitable posteriors for demonstration purposes.” Asimov declined, but he added, “Of course, I could be persuaded to do so on very short notice, even after the convention began, if the posteriors in question were of particularly compelling interest.”
And it wasn’t just a joke. In his younger days, Judith Merril said, Asimov had been known as “the man with a hundred hands. . . . When it went, occasionally, beyond purely social enjoyability, there seemed no way to clue him in.” Decades later, Asimov wrote in the parody The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, “The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched.” And Harlan Ellison remembered, “Whenever we walked up the stairs with a young woman, I made sure to walk behind her so Isaac wouldn’t grab her tush. He didn’t mean anything by it—times were different—but that was Isaac.”
Asimov also had the habit of “hugging all the young ladies” at his editors’ offices, prompting Tim Seldes of Doubleday to tell him affectionately, “All you want to do is kiss the girls and make collect calls. You’re welcome to that, Asimov.” At another publisher, the women found excuses to leave the building whenever he was scheduled to visit, while the editor Cele Goldsmith said that he chased her around a desk. Asimov thought that it was generally agreed that he was “harmless,” and that his attentions toward fans were usually welcome: “I kiss each young woman who wants an autograph and have found, to my delight, that they tend to cooperate enthusiastically in that particular activity.” An attendee at a convention in the late fifties recalled with wonder, “Asimov . . . instead of shaking my date’s hand, shook her left breast.”
When Pohl questioned his actions, Asimov replied, “It’s like the old saying. You get slapped a lot, but you get laid a lot, too.” At times, he seemed to sense that he had crossed a line, writing to the author Mildred Clingerman to apologize for his “unbearable convention manners.” But if his treatment of women was often inexcusable, or worse, it did little to diminish the affection in which he was held by other men, or his position as an ambassador for the genre. He wrote the novelization of the movie Fantastic Voyage—passing on the chance, to his regret, to meet Raquel Welch—and was interviewed on camera for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Arthur C. Clarke was writing with Stanley Kubrick, although his footage never made it into the finished cut.
He was no longer close to Campbell, but he remained conscious of his debt. At a convention where the editor was the guest of honor, Randall Garrett, with whom Asimov had reconciled, said of the Three Laws of Robotics, “Isaac says John made them up and John says Isaac did, and I say they’re both right. The laws were invented in symbiotic cooperation.” Asimov agreed, and a few years later, when the Foundation trilogy won a special Hugo Award as the best series of all time, he simply said in his speech, “I would like to thank Mr. John W. Campbell, Jr., who had at least as much to do with the Foundation series as I had.”
Asimov’s stature continued to grow—he was even briefly investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a communist spy, although no evidence for the allegations ever materialized. But it was his work as a science writer that provided his wealth and fame, and he depended on his reputation for rationality. When Robyn told him one night that she had seen a flying saucer, Asimov went outdoors, where he was horrified to see a metal disk hanging in the sky. After it turned out to be the Goodyear blimp, he was unspeakably relieved. Robyn remembered, “He nearly had a heart attack. He thought he saw his career going down the drain.”
His own father was proud of him, and he loved to show off his son’s books, although he wouldn’t let anyone touch them. When his parents retired to Florida in 1968, Asimov, who refused to fly, had the feeling that he would never see his father again, and he never did. Judah Asimov died on August 4, 1969.
Gertrude and Robyn were in Europe, and David was away at school. Asimov—who had spent his life trying to live up to his father’s example, approaching each day as if he were still at the candy store—didn’t want to bother them, so he drove alone to New York for the funeral.
On August 11, Asimov was feeling miserable when he got a call from Janet Jeppson, who agreed to join him for lunch. They went afterward to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, where they paused before the grave of Emerson, who had written over a century earlier, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore.”
Two months later, Asimov, who was not yet fifty, published his hundredth book.
IN MARCH 1969, HEINLEIN FLEW WITH GINNY TO A FILM FESTIVAL IN RIO DE JANEIRO, WHERE HE met the director Roman Polanski. Later that year, he attended the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, which he called “the greatest spiritual
experience I’ve undergone in my life,” telling the anchorman Walter Cronkite, “This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race. . . . Today is New Year’s Day of the Year One.”
It was a moment in which reality and science fiction seemed close enough to touch. Asimov and Pohl participated in a television panel moderated by Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone, and Analog sent a press representative to Florida. One man who wasn’t alive to see it was Willy Ley, who had spent his life dreaming of rockets, but died three weeks too soon. Campbell attended his funeral, filled with regret over the fact that they had never reconciled over dianetics.
The editor himself watched the moon landing at home. Campbell called it “the greatest show ever staged,” observing that no writer had ever predicted that it would be televised, and told readers, “There’s [a] considerable sense of fulfillment for someone who, like myself, has been discussing, considering, imagining, and visualizing this event for some forty years.”
On July 24, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins returned to Earth. The following day, as the papers carried coverage of the splashdown, Charles Manson ordered three of his followers to rob Gary Hinman, a California drug dealer, whom they stabbed to death. On August 9, the actress Sharon Tate—who was married to Roman Polanski—was killed by the Manson Family, along with four other victims. She was eight months pregnant.
Two months later, Heinlein received a letter from a woman named “Annette or Nanette or something,” who claimed that police helicopters were chasing her friends. Ginny was alarmed by its tone, and she warned her husband to be careful: “Honey, this is worse than the crazy fan mail. This is absolutely insane. Don’t have anything to do with it.” It was evidently from Catherine “Gypsy” Share, a member of the Manson Family who used the alias Manon Minette.
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