Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

As the Patrick Henry campaign wound down in June 1958, Ginny became ill: She was testing positive for dysentery again—several organisms. Robert recovered from his bronchitis and was only a little “nervy” from exhaustion—which meant a return of his recurrent insomnia. They tried to rest, not going out, not entertaining anyone. Morale was not good.1 Robert had done virtually no writing for more than a month, and the correspondence and business details piled up. Korshak made an absurd offer to let him purchase Shasta’s stock and the printing plates for the three Future History books for $4,000, just about what one of the books had earned in royalties. Heinlein wanted to be shut of Shasta, but not that badly.2 Korshak was still selling secondary rights he didn’t own, despite serious efforts by Blassingame to call a halt to his villainous business practices. In mid-June 1958, Heinlein bluntly told Korshak and his remaining business partner in Shasta, T. E. Dikty,3 that he held off legal proceedings only because he did not want to appear harsh—“But my forbearance has been ill paid; there have been many annoyances in the mean time”: illegal sales continuing even after they had been caught and warned off, a “contra-accounting” scheme that resulted in Robert’s royalties being diverted—

And now, to top off all these, I learn (as usual, by accident, through subscribing to a British magazine [probably Ted Carnell’s New Worlds]) that the SFBC of England is offering as its July/August 1958 selection something called a “Robert Heinlein Omnibus” published by Sidgwick & Jackson and offered at the preposterous price of 5s. 6d or $.75! I don’t know what it contains; you haven’t told me about it[.]4

Shasta was keeping all the monies they got by selling rights they didn’t even own.

International news continued depressing. Sputnik 3 went up, and the press was silent about it. Heinlein fretted about the implications of this news blackout: “… when Russia put up Sputnik #3, the giant one, I followed the papers and the news very closely because I wished to see it.” He had even gone downtown to look at the wire services feeds directly, but found no coverage at all.

… did the word go out quietly from the White House (Adams, maybe5) to play it down, pay little attention to it, sweep it under the rug … don’t get the peepul stirred up … I find it downright chilling that that thing should be going by overhead, with all that it implies about the future, and no real news about it in the papers.6

There was too much that was not being talked about, that ought to be shouted from the rooftops: Russian submarines were spotted in offshore international waters almost daily, and nothing was being done about them, nothing at all.7 Earlier Heinlein had expressed his opinion of the administration’s response succinctly, to Alice Dalgliesh: “I can’t figure out whether Mr. Eisenhower is senile or simply stupid and irresolute.”8

Heinlein was also disturbed, he told Hermann Deutsch, by the silence on the issue of the unknown number of American prisoners being held by China.

I’ve heard figures running from four to over three thousand. There are some nasty rumors going around that a great many of our soldiers officially listed as “missing in action” in Korea are actually prisoners in China … and that the administration would rather not hear any more about it because they do not intend to do anything about it.9

When Captain Eugene R. Guild (U.S. Army, Retired) formed a lobbying organization to keep the Korean War POWs alive as a public issue, Robert and Ginny contributed generously to Fighting Homefolks of Fighting Men and repeated their gifts year after year.

On July 11, 1958, Heinlein sat down at the typewriter and banged out in one long session a 4,500-word story aimed at Playboy. He had been fascinated by the “circle in time” gimmick for a long time, and he apparently had the odd but original idea to combine it with some topical material—that 1947 nonsense song “I’m My Own Grandpa”10 (that was, in fact, one of the titles he considered for the story), and possibly also the gender-reassignment surgery Christine Jorgensen had made world headlines with in 1952.

Heinlein started out with a natural hermaphrodite, a rare but legitimate medical condition in which a child is born with both sets of sex organs, and gender assignment is largely a matter of choice on the parents’ part anyway. Heinlein has his hermaphrodite raised as a girl and impregnated by a time-traveling male version of herself, later on in her/his personal timeline—giving birth to himself (only one set of genes to draw on), and since the male would have to be able to travel back in time, he could put himself into a foundling hospital, too. The time paradox was expressed in a single character, and it was a neat reversal on the old “you can’t kill your own grandfather” time paradox. The him/her personal timeline is an Ouroboros snake, swallowing itself perpetually. He initially titled it “The World Snake,” but changed it as he spent the next two days cutting and revising it, to something his character said in one of the last, pathetic lines of the story: “All You Zombies” (Zombies were big that year). Playboy promptly rejected it, the editor saying the implied sex made him queasy.11 It circulated for a while to the stag magazines, but without any takers. In November, editor Robert Mills picked it up for F&SF (A. P. White—“Anthony Boucher”—had retired earlier that year).

Gnome Press had brought out a very disappointing-looking hardcover issue of Methuselah’s Children. Heinlein was very unsatisfied and told Greenberg so in very clear terms: “[T]he book looks and feels, in all respects, like a cheap reprint of a trade edition. In effect, that is just what it was—because you went almost immediately into your cheap book-club promotion on this book.”12

The last installment of Have Space Suit—Will Travel appeared in F&SF in October. Heinlein must have been generating a new book idea while recuperating from his amebic and bacterial infections, for he outlined and on October 14, 1958, began to write Podkayne Fries: Her Life and Times, with a female teenaged protagonist, and written in the first person—“unheard of in the genre.”13 Even aside from the aftereffects of dysentery, though, he found it unusually difficult: “Right at the moment I am having a hell of a time trying to start a novel. I find myself more and more out of sympathy with the spirit of the times, which makes it hard for me to write popular fiction.”14

Ginny had started to study the Russian language in an extension course offered by the local high school (with teachers from the University of Colorado).15 The students were mostly military men from one or another of the local military bases—twenty-one to start with.16 She worked hard at it, and strained her eyesight: Some of the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet have small tails distinguishing them from letters without the tails. Ginny had to get glasses to see the tails.

At some point Heinlein must have proposed to Ginny that they make their next trip inside the Soviet Union, to see Communism at firsthand, and from the inside. The USSR had an international travel agency, InTourist, which would allow them to book the trip.

Ginny cannot have been enthusiastic about this proposal, having no desire to be behind the Iron Curtain—but they had been in the buffer states on their most recent trip and nothing untoward had happened. Perhaps it was her Russian classes that tipped the balance in favor of going.

Early in November, Blassingame received a “heads-up” letter from Doubleday: A Robert Kent in Los Angeles had written to Heinlein’s publisher about a new cheapie film that had just come out from American International Pictures, The Brain Eaters, that seemed like a plagiarism of The Puppet Masters.

There was perennial interest in that property in Hollywood—Blassingame had recently received a couple of nibbles for options at $2,500 and $3,500, respectively, offers so low that they could be ignored. Ned Brown, on the other hand, was fielding a more serious offer: One of his clients, actor-turned-producer John Payne, had made a similar lowball offer to purchase the property, and Blassingame had set a $15,000 total value on it: $5,000 on signing, $5,000 when it went into production, and $5,000 on release.17 Payne was hesitating, but his hand was inching toward his checkbook.18 If this Brain Eaters was a real piracy, it might render the property valueless. Heinlein should see the picture and let Blassingame know what he thought—but it was not due to hit the Colorado Springs area until the end of December 1958.

Heinlein took Podkayne Fries off his agenda: A hundred pages into the manuscript, it just was not coming together for him. He must have been mulling over the intertangled notions of freedom and responsibility, duty and moral self-discipline and citizenship—subjects possibly suggested by the depressing reception of the Patrick Henry campaign, but also by his brother Larry’s promotion to the rank of brigadier general of the Army Reserves:19 Larry “did it the hard way … he took the long route, all the way from private to general officer.”20 Another story came to him: Starship Troopers. Later, Robert recognized the origin of the story in something his father had said when he was just five years old: “I just remembered where I got the basic thesis of S. Troopers. From my father—his conviction (1912) that only those who fought for their country were worthy to rule it.”21

In 1912 the country was in the middle of the militarism associated with the Progressive movement—a time and place in the culture that persisted all through Heinlein’s own upbringing, and of which the Civilian Military Training Corps Heinlein attended while he was in high school was a part. It was undoubtedly that connection that suggested a young man undergoing military training (and that, in turn, may have suggested Kipling’s “The ‘Eathen” [1896] as its basic story arc,22 which he may also have melded with a wartime novel by H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916): “Conscript soldiers are the ruin of war” [327]).

If the militarism of the Progressive Era was the starting point, the idea certainly underwent a great deal of reprocessing before the typewriter went clicking. Perhaps this aspect of Starship Troopers derives from another book that had influenced him highly in the past, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (the book of which For Us, the Living was a modernized retelling). Although Bellamy’s “industrial army” is officered by a strict meritocratic review, there is one great exception to this schema: The head, or general, of each guild is chosen by vote of the veterans of the guild.23 Certainly Bellamy interchanged military and civilian descriptions of the structure of the industrial army, and Heinlein’s story also mixes freely the civilian and the military in the makeup of his world. He made his far-future military 100 percent voluntary, to discourage the chaff, and turned it into a kind of Darwinian evolutionary filter.

I do not know that this system would result in a better government—nor do I know of any way to insure “knowledgeable” and “intelligent” voting. But I venture to guess that this fictional system would not produce results any worse than those of our present system. Not that I think it is even remotely likely that we would ever adopt such a system—24

Moreover, from the evidence that this was the story Heinlein did write and did complete, it must have had that ring of “relevance,” of engagement, he had been missing with the Podkayne story. He later explained some of his thinking in generating the story to colleague Theodore Sturgeon:

… I’ll state explicitly the theme of Starship Troopers: it is an inquiry into why men fight, investigated as a moral problem.… being a novelist, I tried to analyze it as a novelist. Why do men fight? What is the nature of force and violence, can it be morally used, and, if so, under what circumstances?.…

What I tried to do … was to find, by observation, a fundamental basis for human behavior—and I decided that the only basis which did not call for unproved assumptions was the question of survival vs. non-survival in the widest possible sense—i.e., I defined “moral” behavior as being survival behavior … [sic] for the individual, for the family, the tribe, the nation, the race.

Now this thesis may or may not be true, but it is the theme of the book, explicitly stated over and over again—and every part, every incident, in the story merely explores some corollary or consequence of the basic theorem. Is conscription permissible morally? No, because moral decisions cannot be determined by law, by committee, by group—to fight or not to fight is a personal, moral decision.…

Let me state the theme of my story: the central theme of the story is John XV 13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The story starts with a boy, a child, a spoiled son of the extreme right, one who is utterly incapable of conceiving this ideal. The story ends when he is perhaps only two or three years older, but fully matured, a lined and tempered adult wholly dedicated to that simple, selfless proposition.26

The story came together along the same basic lines as Space Cadet: a high school graduate going into the army and coming of age as he comes to understand the emotional and moral meaning of the theme—why people would fight and die to protect their homes. Presumably to clarify the individualist nature of the moral theme, Heinlein made the antagonists soulless hive-creatures, representing the forces of totalitarian collectivism that were threatening to overwhelm the free world. Later he said:

Starship Troopers describes a libertarian, democratic, almost idyllic utopia—but under wartime conditions and told through the eyes of a young, inexperienced man who has to form his own philosophy under those conditions.27

And the philosophy of life his high-school-aged hero develops in the crucible of war is embodied in lines one of the characters quotes to Johnny Rico, from the fourth stanza of “The Star Spangled Banner”:28 “Oh! thus be it ever, when free men shall stand/Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!”

Space Cadet had been about the military in peacetime and played itself out in the sanitized “social service” aspect of the military—as had much of Heinlein’s own service. But this book was set in the military in time of war, and required a more realistic picture of what the military means.

He started writing Shoulder the Sky (the title a reference to Atlas holding up the sky)29 on November 8, 1958. He used all the skill he had at his command to make the violence of the combat in the opening chapter nauseatingly real, but his protagonist likable and “identifiable.” This forced his young readers to entertain two mutually contradictory self-pictures in their minds—a “nice” guy who wreaked incredible violence in the best of causes—the strongest possible argument against namby-pamby pacifism he could mount.

Some people were not going to want to hear these things. Alice Dalgliesh was not going to want to hear these things.30 But these were things that needed to be said in the intellectual and moral climate of 1958:

Why have I written a book which I judge ahead of its time is likely to displease quite a few people?

I could answer that almost everything I have ever written does not please most people and that answer would be true. But not sufficient.

I wrote this book because it is in tune with the times, although not with popular beliefs. It has something important to say about war, about juvenile delinquency, about the civic responsibility of the citizen, about education, about a young man’s proper role—his duty—in his social group. What I am saying to my young reader is: “Look, son, this is not an easy world; this is a grim and dangerous world—and it is quite likely to kill you. But you have a free choice: you can go to your death fat, dumb, and happy and never understanding what is happening to you right up to the time the bombs fall … [sic] or you can grow up, face up to your harsh responsibilities, look death in the face and defy it, and thereby enjoy the austere but very real and deeply satisfying rewards of being a man. But the choice is yours, and neither your mother, nor your teacher, nor the state can in any wise release you of it.”

I could have written this as an essay—and no teen-ager would ever bother to read it. Instead I cast it into the form of an adventure story in the belief that many would read it, and some would understand it and profit by it.…

As such, the story is timeless; I dolled it up with futuristic gadgets and strange planets simply to flavor it for the kids. And, as such, it is most timely—for this is exactly what our boys in high school face.… What has happened to our boys in a single generation? I am not sure—but the results terrify me.31

In the writing, the title had changed from Shoulder the Sky to the more descriptive and catchy Sky Soldier and then to Starside Soldier. He finished the 60,000-word draft at 5:20 A.M. on November 22 and left it on the kitchen counter for Ginny to first-read. When he woke up, he found a note from her: “Darling—I read the end—you will be pleased to know I cried—maybe others won’t; but I did. I’m at Lucky’s. Call me. All my love, T.”32 That ending was a good stroke—his protagonist’s life choices validated by his father, creating a wholeness to the boy’s life. He was about to make another combat drop—and the implication was that neither Johnny Rico nor his father would survive it, though Heinlein had not written that in explicitly.

What he had been explicit about, however, was that the boy was a Filipino. He had sprinkled the early part of the book with a lot of Spanish names, but mentioned close to the end that Tagalog was the boy’s milk-language. Perhaps because his editor had not noticed when he put in a Negro hero (in Tunnel in the Sky, 1955), Heinlein felt the need to be more explicit about this Asian hero (the first in science fiction).33

He spent a couple of weeks cutting and polishing the manuscript and sent it to a professional typist early in December—which gave him a little time free to deal with the possible filmed plagiarism of The Puppet Masters.

Over the 1958–59 holidays, almost two months into its national release, The Brain Eaters reached Colorado Springs, and Heinlein saw it on January 2, 1959. There really couldn’t be any doubt about it: “I counted too many identities of ‘gimmicks’ as well as the basic plot to be in any doubt in my mind about it.”34 Even worse, the production was very low quality, and they had ripped the guts out of the book, turning it into a hack weird-menace shudder-pulp story. “[T]he whole thing was done in such atrocious bad taste and with such wild illogic that the useless use of sex hardly stood out.”35

On top of the continuing runaround he was getting from Jack Seaman’s successors over the profits (if any) from Project Moonbase, Blassingame was now telling him The Brain Eaters would kill the option-purchase deal they had been negotiating for The Puppet Masters. He would have to sue American International—just as soon as Blassingame could find the right lawyer to handle it.

Heinlein sent the clean retype of what was now titled Starship Soldier to Blassingame and, simultaneously, to Scribner, on January 10 and braced himself. He had done this one, he told Blassingame, as he had done Citizen of the Galaxy two years ago—written what was essentially an adult novel, but one his kids should find interesting.36 Blassingame liked it—it gave him a bang, he said, though it also sagged in places, bogging down in the middle with the lecturing.37

The reaction from Dalgliesh, however, was a flat rejection. This was not adventure, she said, it was social commentary and the boys wouldn’t want it at all.38 He should put it away for a year, she told him: Perhaps he would feel differently about it after he had cooled down. She also enclosed a lengthy personal letter of rebuttal: “Having bounced the book,” Heinlein told Blassingame, “she now seems to want to continue the argument: she sent me a quite unnecessary (and snide!) letter, raising points better not raised over a manuscript she has returned. But I’m damned if I’ll fight with her.”39

Dalgliesh had made one useful suggestion, though: He could try marketing it as an adult serial40 … but Doubleday passed it up as too juvenile (though admirably loaded with technique),41 and a week later John Campbell passed it up for Astounding. Again it was too juvenile.

So it was too “adult” for the juvenile house and too “juvenile” for the adult publishers.

That February, Heinlein made a loan to Ben Babb’s wife Betty Jane (Ben had been sick for a long time already, and they were in desperate straits). The “loan” (Robert and Ginny knew quite well it was a gift) was inconsiderable, and they were glad to be able to help. She had done the right thing in coming to him, Heinlein assured Betty Jane Babb—but he also cautioned her about keeping this kind of secret from her husband. It was the kind of thing that could be soul-destroying:

A lot of wives … think they are being “faithful” as long as they don’t take a roll in the hay with some other male, no matter what they do to kill the spirit of the man they promised to cherish. They never get it through their silly heads that a mere roll in the hay could be no more important than a bad case of hangnails—certainly no worse than a bad cold—if they paid attention to the essence of the contract, “to love and cherish” come what may—buck him up and keep him going, somehow, against an unfriendly world.

That is what marriage is all about—sex is at most a minor aspect of it: a partnership between two people, in which each places the other’s welfare as the paramount value in a shifting and uncertain world … There have been more than a few honest and loyal wives who have hit the streets to support sick husbands—and let us now have a moment of silence in honor of their gallant souls.42

Immediately after receiving Dalgliesh’s rejection of Starship Soldier, Heinlein had tried to reply and found himself in the same round of write-and-tear-up-drafts that had made him jittery and insomniac after Citizen of the Galaxy. He had finally reached a draft of a letter he—and Ginny—could live with, explaining the points of his own experience and thinking that had gone into the book—and showing how Starship Soldier fit into the juvenile series he had been doing for the last twelve years. Something in that long letter43 apparently reached Dalgliesh in some fashion: She asked Blassingame to return the manuscript so she could reconsider it.

In the meantime, Heinlein tried a “backchannel” letter to an acquaintance in the Scribner editorial board (identified in the correspondence only as “George” and “McM”) asking for an opinion as to why it had been rejected so summarily and suggested that he might be able to use the input to salvage the book for Scribner.44 A week later he heard back from George saying that he believed rejecting the book was the appropriate thing for Scribner to do: The story was weak, the didactic approach was weak, and it would not do his reputation any good. Couple those considerations to the objections certain to be raised by librarians—“and I don’t think it’s appropriate.”45

Blassingame put it on the open market, and Fantasy & Science Fiction picked up the serial rights, requesting a condensation of the book to 20,000 words. The editor, Bob Mills, was jittery about it. Alfred Bester had talked Mills into letting him read the manuscript and wrote Heinlein a long letter first complimenting him on a crisply told story, but voicing his concern and Mills’s about the direction it was taking: He warned Robert not to fall into the jingoism trap Kipling had got himself into that “makes his name odious today as a thinker (but never as a writer)” and suggested a rebuttal story or two.46

To Bester, Robert made a temperate reply: He and Mills certainly were free to say whatever they wished in print, “But I may not like what you have to say and I certainly will not answer it.” He abhorred personal arguments and had never—and would never—write anything for publication, or say anything in public “knocking my colleagues or their works.”47

But if they were that jittery over it, they shouldn’t even be considering it: Heinlein told Blassingame to withdraw the book from F&SF and get the manuscript back.

I don’t know whether he [Mills] got cold feet on his own, and then called in Alfie Bester and suggested that Alfie write a rebuttal, or whether it was the other way around—cold feet contracted from Alfie after he let Alfie read it. It doesn’t really matter which was cause and which was effect; the end result was that he asked Alfie to write a rebuttal to my story and asked me if I would mind if he introduced my story with a statement that he, the editor, totally disagreed with it.

Well, I do mind, on both points. It is all right for the umpire to wear a plain blue suit, but when he puts on the other team’s uniform and tells the cash customers that he is agin me from scratch, that is another matter entirely—and when I find that the umpire is coaching the opposition against me, then I know I’m in the wrong ball park.48

Shortly after Miss Dalgliesh had bounced Starship Soldier the first time, Heinlein had received an inquiry from a Hollywood-based television producer, Tom Swicegood, who was the president of Pine-Key Productions. He and his partner, Jim Doherty, were working on a half-hour SF series for fall 1959, Crater Base One, and wanted one or more Heinlein stories for the series.49 Things run in cycles, especially in television, and this season another production company, Ziv-TV, had another half-hour space show in collaboration with Ivan Tors, Men Into Space—about the colonization and settlement of the Moon50 (with newcomer Angie Dickinson in the pilot, which aired in September 1959).

Heinlein was cautiously interested: He had been badly burned twice by Hollywood. But the series “bible” he found encouraging.51 In the Producer’s Notes section of the bible he found among the instructions to writers:

CRATER BASE ONE is a new kind of television format. It is not a detective story in a moon setting. Nor is it a hide-and-seek cowboy story which is doctored up by placing the hero inside a space suit and sending him off to “get the bad guys.” Rather, CRATER BASE ONE is the story of intelligent pioneers in a very hostile world, living only in the minds of men with imagination.

We need adult stories, the key to which is characterization. A believable, interesting character is far and away the best approach to what we want. Two-dimensional characters are for kid shows.

Any comparison between CRATER BASE ONE and shows like FLASH GORDON, CAPTAIN VIDEO, etc., is absolutely not desired … [sic] Our stories, sets, costumes, and other details are to be handled with realistic honesty throughout.52

The background was thoughtfully worked out, Heinlein thought—tangled international jurisdictions over the Moon base seemed to be the key issue in the series53—but he found the pilot script frankly incompetent: Not only was it dull, lacking in dramatic values, but it didn’t make any coherent use of the series premises. It was hard to believe that it had come from the same shop as the bible.54

Swicegood’s initial proposal to Heinlein was for an outline of a story from him, five to ten pages—for which he was to be paid a flat fee plus residuals.55 Unfortunately, the sample contracts Swicegood sent him would require him to join the Screen Writers Guild. The Authors Guild used to have reciprocity with the SWG, but Heinlein didn’t know if that was still the case—and he thought it absurd to have to join a union just to work on the series. And in any case he didn’t like the “closed shop” aspect of the thing.

Writing is not bricklaying and I am of the opinion that my grocer should be as free to write anything he wants to write and to sell it in any market as I am—even though I am a dues-paid-up member of my guild and he is not, i.e., I don’t own the writing trade and I don’t think anyone, or any group, should be allowed to own it, or any part of it, or to require anyone to pay a fee nor to submit to a set of rules in order to compete with me or my colleagues in the market. Writing, like speech, is a basic freedom … [sic] and not merely my way of making a living.56

Swicegood suggested they pay him for one story, and he could see how it worked out: He would in any case have been paid for the work.57 Heinlein forwarded the contract to Lurton Blassingame (his relationship with Ned Brown he thought was coming to an end) for review. He decided instead to do the work “on spec” and suggested a dozen technically trained SF writers who could be approached for a series like this.58

Heinlein never did produce an outline (a conventional stage of television series writing). Probably the process of thinking in visual screens so the story could be translated into a script—so that he could then write a narrative story—was too cumbersome, and he was preoccupied in March 1959 with assembling a collection for Gnome Press of miscellaneous, more-or-less science-fiction stories he had written since taking up writing again after the war, The Menace from Earth.59 But on April 11, 1959, before going off to Las Vegas for the World Congress of Flight,60 he mailed a twenty-eight-page script to Swicegood that reused one of his own titles, “Nothing Ever Happens On the Moon.” This original story had nothing in common with the Boy Scout novelette he had written ten years earlier; instead, it had a funding committee VIP trapped on the Moon during a destructive quake, a scenario that would give plenty of room for exposition of the complicated situation in the Crater Base One bible.61

After the Las Vegas trip, Blassingame found a suitable lawyer to institute Heinlein’s plagiarism suit against the producers of The Brain Eaters: Harold A. Fendler, Esq., of the Fendler & Lerner Beverly Hills law firm, wrote to Blassingame on April 24, 1959, that they had seen The Brain Eaters in the company of Ned Brown, still Heinlein’s Hollywood agent. “We were all of the unanimous opinion that a copyright infringement exists and that suit should be filed,” Fendler told Blassingame.62

While waiting for the Pine-Key notes on his draft script, Heinlein did some professional writing for Ginny: Their one year of Russian class was coming to an end. But one year of Russian language study is not enough to become proficient. Russian is very difficult to learn as a second language, with verbs that change roots in the middle of conjugations, and—never mind the jawbreaking consonant clusters!—sounds that don’t exist in English. Ginny asked Robert to write up a petition to the University to provide an extra year of instruction. It was successful. She also hired a tutor—an elderly (female) White Russian refugee—and continued with additional lessons daily.

When the tutor found out who Robert was, she told him she was sure she had read “The Man Who Sold the Moon” in Russian.63 The Soviet Union did not subscribe to any international copyright convention and it might well be that they pirated his stuff ad lib. He would have to look into that when he got to Moscow. The Russians had a reputation of paying up when caught with their hand in the till—so long as it was paid and used locally.64

In June, Heinlein assembled another short-story collection for Gnome, of more-or-less fantasy stories, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.65 Both Menace from Earth and Unpleasant Profession were better printed and bound, and both sold promptly to paperback houses, which was getting to be where the money was, though with some unusual contract provisions: Menace was brought out in several different versions, with differing numbers of the stories in the various paperback issues, and Unpleasant Profession became part of a series of “number times something” paperback titles Gold Medal was bringing out. His became 6xH for “Six times Heinlein.” And with “The Menace from Earth” and “All You Zombies—” in print he was more or less up to date, (“Zombies” had just been published in F&SF, in April 1959) all his stories collected between boards, except for three very early stories that he hadn’t been able to do anything with over the years. The SF market was in the worst slump since the war.

In mid-June, Heinlein made a trip to Kansas City for a niece’s wedding and took the opportunity to visit the family homesteads and stomping grounds. The house on Cleveland his family had lived in before 1920 was vacant and about to be torn down. The other sites—churches and schools—were a little older, a little more worn, but still going. Someone had torn out the maple tree they had planted at the house on 36th Street. And of course he saw Swope Park. He even chartered an airplane (for the munificent sum of $24.00) and flew to see his grandfather’s house in Butler.

Swope Park must have brought back memories—perhaps of playing Tarzan in the nude there, at age five, and that may have led to recalling his adult fling, now nearly thirty years ago, with naturism. In June he began contacting some of the nudist/dude ranches around the country. He got back in touch with the Garrisons, who had founded an unlanded nudist association in Denver that Robert and his then-wife Leslyn had joined when he was hospitalized at Fitzsimmons in 1933 and 1934. Heinlein had put them into The Door into Summer. The Garrisons remembered him, of course, but had sold the Colorado Sunshine Club to the members the year before. It was called Mountain Air Ranch now.

Robert and Ginny made a reservation at the Lazy Bears Dude Ranch in Kemmling, Colorado, for two weeks in the middle of July and bought association memberships. They added subscription memberships to the national nudist organization, the American Sunbathing Association.

Things had loosened up a bit in the last twenty-five years, but it was still in 1959 necessary to be discreet. These resorts did not want to get a reputation as catering to roues and libertines and so discouraged singletons of either sex—but particularly men without their wives. Ginny knew Robert would be looking up these places whenever he traveled, and she was studying hard at Russian and couldn’t always get away. She wrote a handwritten blanket permission Robert could show the owners of these colonies and ranches, if she wasn’t with him:

Ginny accompanied him for the first weekend of their nude dude ranch mini-vacation. Robert rode and swam, lifted weights and bounced on a trampoline “in a gingerly middle-aged fashion” and even helped out with the ranch chores, digging postholes and so forth. He got a fine overall tan—and a “fancy collection of saddle sores”—and enjoyed himself immensely.67

Ginny never really became comfortable in skin with strangers (around the house was another matter).68 Nor did she find the experience particularly congenial: “I did not like such places, or the people I met there,” she later said succinctly.69 One weekend was enough for her. When she took her planned break for her Russian language class, she stayed in Colorado Springs and used the vacation from the vacation to study a little harder, to be prepared for their trip to the Soviet Union, less than a year away.

Swicegood and Doherty had been congratulating themselves on their good fortune in getting a story from Heinlein for Crater Base One. He was far ahead of them, Swicegood told him.70 But Heinlein’s script presented technical problems Swicegood had probably wanted to avoid. The story was quite good—but the way it was told was just too different from what the audience (and more importantly, what the sponsors) would expect to see:

It makes excellent reading, like just about all of your published material and letters, but … for half-hour (or any length) dramatic show, it would be sudden death! As you had it there were so many requirements for a television show that were entirely disregarded71 that the average editor would throw up his hands in despair, never even considering the slim possibility of scissors and paste.… However, I’ve gotten some damn good stories by offering my inept suggestions and having the authors come back at me with, “To hell with that foolishness! But—instead, suppose such and such,” etc. Sometimes it works.72

Not this time. Swicegood reworked the story and retitled it “Moonquake” for the second version of the script,73 cutting out most—but not enough—of the dialogue establishing the base’s conflict with the funding agency Earthside, and he discarded the original work-together-and-learn-better ending in favor of some foolery with a spaceship toppled in the quake (why this particular gimmick was so attractive to TV and film people was a mystery). The revised story was now inconsistent in terms of the characters’ motivations—there was, for example, no reason for his VIP to be there at all—and the ending had nothing logically to do with the setup. It was, Heinlein told Swicegood and Doherty, part horse and part cow, a chimera too mismatched to live. It would be better to junk the resulting mess and start over.74

Probably this was looking like more work than the project could justify. On the last day of July, Swicegood wrote his regrets:

I haven’t wanted to write this letter, but there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it. Your comments about putting the horse and the cow together are entirely correct—which unhappily leaves us little alternative other than to take your own advice and “DON’T!”75

Swicegood himself was already on to the next thing, an anthology series of true sea stories. Ultimately, Crater Base One was never produced.76 Apparently, Heinlein was never paid for his work, either.

Alice Dalgliesh’s “reconsideration” of Starship Soldier had no different results, but it hardly mattered. G. P. Putnam’s Sons wanted the book very badly. One of Putnam’s senior editors, Peter Israel, told the owner and managing editor of Putnam’s, Walter Minton, that a Heinlein juvenile had come on the market. Minton told him to grab it, sight unseen.77 Heinlein’s reputation in the children’s lit publishing industry was solid—though apparently, he was a profit without honor in his former home at Scribner: Miss Dalgliesh had told him once that his books had kept her department in the black for years—yet Charles Scribner himself had been involved in the rejection of this book and had voted to dump him—a discourtesy Heinlein felt deeply (and said so repeatedly).78

Peter Israel ducked the issue of whether it was a juvenile or an adult novel: He simply presented it as a “new book by Robert Heinlein” at a sales conference, saying, “Let’s let the readers decide who likes it.”79 They would bring it out by the Putnam’s Children’s Department, but design and promote it on their adult list.

They would publish it as-is, William McMorris, Heinlein’s line editor, told him,80 but they went over the manuscript practically line by line, rebalancing the text and working through alternative titles until they settled on Starship Troopers.81 McMorris’s suggestions for revisions were cogent, improving the story by adding, for example, another combat scene, and sending his hero down into one of the bugs’ tunnels.82 Heinlein added an entirely new section of 30,000 words before his final scene, with Johnny Rico in Officer Candidate School, bringing the total word count up to 90,000.

During the revision process for Starship Soldier, John Payne was talking about having Heinlein come out to Hollywood to script The Puppet Masters for a full production—and he accepted the price Heinlein had set for his services (based on a calculation of his earning power at home in Colorado Springs similar to that he had done in 1949).

“It’s a crying shame that some character could take the elements from The Puppet Masters and demolish the concept,” he wrote Heinlein.83 His bankers and loan sources refused to back any production with such a spoiler already out in public.84 Payne abandoned the project.

It wasn’t a total loss: Heinlein’s attorneys could now prove definite damages to Heinlein’s commercial property as a result of the Brain Eaters infringement.85 Payne offered to testify on their behalf86—but how much money they could pry out of American International was anybody’s guess.

Heinlein was invited to speak at an Air Force Association conference in Tampa in September 1959, which gave him an opportunity first to stay at The Floritans nudist resort in Tampa, and then go on to Cape Canaveral to see a static test of an Atlas launch vehicle. He came back to Colorado Springs by way of a business-pleasure stop in New Orleans to visit with the Item editors and Hermann Deutsch. Deutsch had introduced him to another science-fiction colleague whose fresh and original approach Robert particularly liked, Dan Galouye.87 “Most sci-fic has become formula-ridden and standardized. We need more new blood and new ideas, such as Dan provides.”88

Ginny had other matters on her mind. Robert had been handed a flyer on one of his recent travels—a Seattle-area character wanted to found an anti-Communist society named after an American soldier killed by the Communist Chinese. Ginny was immediately interested—so interested that she wanted to attend this organizing seminar at the Olympic Hotel on September 25, 1959. The organizer’s name was Robert Welch, and his project was the John Birch Society. His message fit right in with their recent charitable interest with Eugene Guilds and the Korean War MIAs, and Welch’s magazine, American Opinion, had some thoughtful material to offer. An observer named “Clise” who took extensive notes of the meeting described Heinlein as “an independent writer of philosophical fiction” whose “prime interest” was winning the release of American prisoners held in the Soviet Union.89

Single-issue politics often makes very strange bedfellows. As disconnected as Robert felt from his own party, anything was possible—any kind of ad hoc coalition of interests. The Heinleins also found Welch personally sociable—a pleasant drinking companion in the hotel bar.90 They would not offer to found chapters in their locale, but they did purchase several gift subscriptions to the magazine, and they contributed money to Welch’s anti-Communist effort (and later found he had enrolled them as members, which was not what they had in mind at all. They asked to be taken off his lists.).91

After a side trip to Camp Forestia, the Fraternity Snoqualmie nudist resort92 (Ginny not participating), they flew back from Seattle to Colorado Springs. Heinlein was in some discomfort, as he had an ulcerated molar. They were immediately snowed in—in September!—with forty inches of very wet snow, a four-day wait to get to the dentist, and many days afterward doped up and unable to work.

When he was finally able to concentrate, he fiddled around with a number of ideas. The steady stream of domestic anthology rights, and the foreign sales, individually smaller—a lot smaller—than his domestic sales, added up to a substantial income when combined with his domestic book contracts. In the last eighteen months Blassingame had placed a British contract for Revolt in 2100, Danish contracts for The Puppet Masters, Space Cadet, and “The Green Hills of Earth”; Finnish rights to “Ordeal in Space,” a Dutch right to “The Long Watch,” Italian rights for Red Planet and Revolt in 2100 again, and a Japanese contract for “They.” He was also negotiating a Japanese contract for Methuselah’s Children and a Portuguese sale of The Green Hills of Earth and Other Stories. Blassingame disclaimed any responsibility for that success: “Your foreign sales are ‘fabulous’ because of your stories—and subject matter,” he told Robert.93

Other friends and family were not doing so well. When Heinlein visited Kansas City, he had been brought back in contact with family members still living there, including “Bud” Heinlein, his brother Larry’s oldest boy with his first wife, Alice.94 Bud called Heinlein, late in October,95 wanting him to drop everything and come to Kansas City because he and his wife Donna were in desperate straits.

The problem seemed less the money than a complete unwillingness to come to grips with the situation. Heinlein made them a cash loan to take care of immediate expenses, “secured” by their furniture (actually a way of taking the storage problem off their hands, since they wanted to give up their jobs and move, to make a fresh start).96 When he got back to Colorado Springs, Heinlein supplemented the original loan with another and wrote a long and detailed letter of advice about how to reverse their downward financial spiral, advising them to pull back to the bedrock of their marriage partnership—the way he and Ginny had to economize the winter of 1947–48 while they were in Fort Worth97—and build from there.98 Bud’s response was to use his credit to get deeper in debt. Bud’s next letter was resentful and frankly offensive, threatening to punch Robert for making Donna unhappy to read his October 29 reply.99 And then, just a few days later, an abject apology.100 It was hard to believe these letters came from the same individual.101

Bud would flip from rage to despondency overnight. Robert recognized this was something that money would not solve, and it was the same kind of emotional black hole his relationship with Leslyn had become at the end. He gave Bud’s mother Alice a release of their furniture102 and wrote a firm and clear letter to Bud, detailing what course of action he needed to take, concluding:

One last word: Bud, I would not be going to this much agonizing trouble if I were not very fond of you and deeply concerned with the welfare of your entire family. I hope that you will take this letter calmly and be guided by it. But if you blow your stack instead, I can’t stop you. The most I can do is to try to help you in helping yourself. I can’t live your life for you.103

Probably Bud’s emotional situation was made worse by the agony the whole family was going through at the same time. Robert’s father had seemed to get better early in the year, gaining a little weight. But just weeks before his sixtieth wedding anniversary in November, Rex’s health was obviously declining, and he had only days to live. Bam wanted him buried in Kansas City, next to Rose Betty’s grave—and with military honors. Rex Ivar Heinlein’s service in the Spanish-American War had been the defining moment of his life, in his own mind. As the oldest son, Larry began making those arrangements.

Rex passed quietly on November 13. Robert flew to Kansas City immediately to finalize the funeral arrangements while Bam accompanied the coffin by train (a requirement of the railway). He signed for the entire funeral and burial arrangements as a package.

The service at the grave was short—the Methodist ritual. (I intended to say earlier that we used the 23rd Psalm and “In my Father’s House are many mansions—” at the chapel.) This was followed by the military part … [sic] and it was over.

I was particularly glad that Mother decided to use the military ceremony. I did not urge her to; none of us did so—she decided it herself. But we all know how proud Dad was (and rightly so) of his service to his country. It made me happy and proud—even though I was blinded by tears—that he had it.

The honor guard and bugler were supplied by my [Robert’s] old outfit, the 110th Engineers, doing their own proud. The riflemen were all master sergeants.104

Day is done

Gone the sun—

From the hill

From the lake

From the sky … [sic]

Rest in peace

Sol … [sic] dier Brave

God is nigh.

I couldn’t take it, of course—I can’t take hearing it even when it is not someone I love. It was all I could manage to remain at attention and not let my sobs be audible. But, hurt as it did, I am glad Mother decided to use it—for I know that it was done precisely as Dad wanted it … [sic] The full honors that are meet and proper for a man who loved his country and had served it proudly and honorably.105

Rex Ivar Heinlein’s long and sad struggle was over at last, and he was laid to a rest he could never achieve in life. It was appropriate he should be beside Rose Betty, for her accidental death thirty-three years earlier106 was as defining for his life as his military service had been.

Robert would never know if his father realized how much his example of strength had meant. He knew he had never been the son his father had wanted him to be; his brother Rex had won finally and for-ever on that count.107

“May the Lord make His face to shine upon thee and give thee peace.”108