22

PICKING UP WHERE HE LEFT OFF

On New Year’s Day of 1969 the power went off in the middle of a winter storm. In an all-electric house, no power means no cooking, no heat—and no water, since the pumps from the spring are electric. Ginny built a big fire in the living room fireplace, and they moved into that one room for the duration. Robert was vexed because he had just started the new Allen Drury novel, Preserve and Protect, and couldn’t stand to put it down. Five straight hours of reading by electric lantern exhausted all the batteries.1

The outage was fortunately not more than a day—this time. Next time they could move into the guest house, which had a propane tank for heating and cooking. “The cats won’t like it, but we don’t expect to consult them.”2

In February Fred Pohl forwarded to them a cabled request for Robert to serve as an honored guest at a film festival late in March, in Rio de Janeiro. They would be screening Destination Moon as part of a tribute to George Pal. If he would give a speech introducing the film, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture would pick up the tab.3 There are certainly worse things in life, in the middle of a Northern California winter, than an expense-paid trip to Rio.

Ginny figures it’s a shopping trip. I pointed out that they had not offered to pay her expenses. She sez, “What’s that got to do with it? Let’s spend it before it inflates.” So she’s going. (I figure my tab comes out of my taxes anyhow, by way of the Alliance for Progress.)4

The weather continued to improve, and they held a big housewarming party on March 7. They invited Rex and Kathleen, as well as local friends they had made over the last two or three years—the McHenrys;5 Dr. Calkins and Lionel Lenox, senior and junior (who had all three been with them at Christmas dinner); Dr. and Mrs. Richard Bronson;6 Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kessell (their local lawyer who had been so helpful with all the legal matters in the house-building); Mr. and Mrs. Donald Clark and the Head of Special Collections and Archives at the university, Rita Berner; the Page Smiths7 and Mr. and Mrs. Joel Schaefer.8 They invited Frank and Beverly Herbert down from Seattle (where he was still a working journalist, Dune not yet earning enough for him to quit his day job). And Blassingame and his wife, Peggy, as informal guests of honor. This was, after all, “the house that Lurton built” by providing a steady stream of advances and royalty checks to pay the workmen.

Two weeks later Robert and Ginny were flying down to Rio on an all-expense-paid junket and on a plane full of science-fiction colleagues and celebrities such as Roman Polanski, for the “II festival internacional do film rio de janeiro.”9

They were given diplomatic courtesies and entertained at formal receptions in various embassies, all in Rio’s end-of-summer oppressive heat and humidity. Amid the floor-length gowns and Ginny’s formal white gloves, there was a sprinkling of the British “mod” fashion given a South American twist: see-through blouses and micro-mini skirts, often worn with nothing at all underneath.10 The festival viewings were held at the theater in the French embassy, and they also got to take in all the other films, new and old, at the festival (Robert recommended The Lion in Winter 11).

At one of the embassy parties, Roman Polanski found Heinlein and introduced him to his wife, the stunningly beautiful Sharon Tate. She had been filming in Europe but had taken a break to join her husband at the festival. Ginny was off, circulating, as she usually did. Karma balanced: She had Dorothy Lamour (from the Destination Moon wrap party in 1950—see chapter 3 supra), and he had Sharon Tate in 1969.

At the festival, all the attention was on Pal, but Heinlein wanted to commemorate Irving Pichel’s role in Destination Moon in his talk on March 28. He titled it after something Pichel had said to him once: “Creativity Is Indivisible.”12 Destination Moon worked, he said, because Pal had done with Pichel what Pichel had done with him: pick his man and let him work without interference. Pichel was able to craft a coherent filmic “vision” because of Pal’s creative work in producing—in picking the right man and letting him do the job.

They had a very good time on the trip. They had ample sightseeing and shopping time and were speaking “tourist Portuguese” in a matter of days.13 Aside from a bizarre incident with Harry Harrison trying to have a scuffle with Robert and crashing an embassy party,14 only one other thing marred the trip: Ginny banged her head getting into a taxi one day and knocked herself out briefly. She seemed to get over it, with only a small cut on the outside of her right eye, but soon she began to experience a ringing in the ears—tinnitus—that would not go away.15

They flew back to New York, planning to spend time with friends there and do a little business, but Heinlein caught a bad case of flu and was bedridden in the Tuscany hotel. Ginny decided to cancel all their plans and get him home to Santa Cruz as soon as possible.16 She had a thirty-five-year reunion coming up at Packer next April; they could come back then and do what they had failed to take in this year.17

The big trees of Santa Cruz were soothing after Rio, though the accumulated mail was not. The mail on Stranger was now a significant portion of the total, and it tended to be different from the regular run of fan mail, repetitive in its own way, but sometimes spiked with the unexpected—such as an article in an academic literary magazine, The CEA Critic, by Willis McNelly, Ph.D.,18 at Cal State, Fullerton, “Linguistic Relativity in Middle High Martian.” McNelly talked about the Whorfian19 underpinnings of the hypothetical Martian language of Stranger in a Strange Land that was both playful and serious. The article pleased Heinlein very much—“so much so that there is danger of taking myself seriously … [sic] but not too much danger so long as I remain married to my Best Friend & Severest Critic. ‘Cut to the chase!’ is her motto, and she keeps me reminded.”20

But McNelly’s article was anything but typical of the Stranger fan mail. And now Heinlein was starting to receive thanks and congratulations on his political writing in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. There was a slow resurgence of interest in classic American individualist political philosophy. The radical fringe of this new libertarianism tended to anarchist theory, and he couldn’t quite go along with that:

I miss being an utter anarchist only by a very narrow margin21—i.e., a misgiving about the possibility of maintaining a complex society capable of mass production without a certain amount of sheer force, both internal and external. (I’m still searching for the libertarian philosopher who can explain convincingly how this can be done—I haven’t quite given up hope.)22

In a sense, he was too individualist even for these confessed radical individualists, and some of that had leaked over into his portrayal of lunar society in the first part of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Ginny offered to take over all the correspondence, to give him time to write. At first he was reluctant23—but the alternative was to do it himself (in which case he might never be able to write any new fiction at all) or quit answering mail from strangers (which stuck in his craw). Ginny took it all over—business correspondence, fan mail, management of their finances (which she had been doing for nearly ten years by that time), and gradually, with decreasing amounts of oversight and participation on his part, the management of the business aspects of the writing, which left Heinlein free to do the writing aspects of the writing.

By the beginning of June 1969 he was wandering around with a glazed expression and bumping into things. Ginny told Willis McNelly that he was at the “horrid stage” of generating a story.24 But he got no further than nine pages of outline notes dated June 18, 1969, for a novella aimed at Playboy—four years, two months, and five days since he had put “The End” to his last writing project. Possibly he was inhibited by the prospect of another trip that would have to be made in July.

The next Apollo mission, Apollo 11, was to land a man on the Moon, and Heinlein wanted to be there at Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969. “I am going to see that shoot,” he told Blassingame. “I’ve waited a lifetime for the first trip to the Moon and I am not going to miss it.”25

But neither research nor pull could get them a room anywhere within a hundred miles of the launch site: And he would pay anything at all—anything!—for a reservation the night before the launch.26 But he could not even get press credentials. He could go back to writing his “2-part serial intended for Playboy—Intended length ca. 30,000 words.”27

Over the last eight years while he was out of the game, a sort of amorphous “movement” had started to show up in magazine science fiction, called—mostly by detractors—“The New Wave.” The individual writers lumped together in this way—Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, others—denied there was anything like a “movement” going on. There were publishers now that were sometimes willing to publish experimental writing—refreshing in a genre that could get pretty hidebound with formula. Most readers, most of the time, Heinlein had long since concluded,28 don’t want experimentation—don’t want fresh, new material at all. They want more of what they had been getting all along—“mixture as before.” It was his biggest problem writing particularly those children’s books for Scribner. Heinlein was naturally sympathetic to experimentation; it kept the field fresh and growing—and a great deal of the new stuff was clearly trying out different storytelling conventions than the somewhat stale magazine story formulas that had dominated SF for decades.

Unfortunately, a lot of it just wasn’t very good experimentation; too much of it was simply recapitulating the Modernist prosodic experiments made in the 1920s and 1930s—stuff that had by and large been abandoned because it made the reading harder work for the reader. On the other hand, some of science fiction’s readers wanted to enshrine Campbell-era story conventions, and that wasn’t the way to go, either.

Although Heinlein rarely discussed his process with the story that became I Will Fear No Evil, he seems to have been acutely aware of these developments. It was as if he was working on crafting a New Wave kind of story that worked as story—the kind of thing for fiction that Frank Lloyd Wright had done with the Bauhaus when he designed Fallingwater in 1935: Let a “washed-up” old-timer show the young turks how it ought to be done …

This new story he was working out had a foot in both worlds. He took two of the hoariest clichés in science fiction—the mad scientist and the brain transplant—and turned the ideas upside down and inside out and shook until something interesting fell out.

The immediate inspiration for this story came out of an article he saw in Parade magazine in 1968, about rare blood types and an astonishing one-man operation of volunteer rare-blood donors, the National Rare Blood Club.29 He had clipped it at the time and found his thoughts returning to the issues it covered.

Heart transplants were in the news then, so I extrapolated and did a brain transplant story and used blood matching as a gimmick, with this Club, as a minor plot gimmick.30

We now have endless complications of identity, money, his-her marital status (she was married), sex complications (cf. Thorne Smith’s Turnabout—and stay well clear of it!) as this new body is horny as hell—for men—and his old brain is still horny—for women—and he-she is AC-DC as Noel Coward … [sic] and he of he-she is terribly intrigued by female libido.31

Matching up an old man’s brain and a young woman’s body gave him a story about that other hot topic in the editorial pages, the “generation gap.” So in an odd way it was echoing in story form his real-life dialogue with the field of science fiction—the old man learning from the new kids on the block, even as he teaches …

He was able to start outlining the story by June 18, 1969, and start writing “A Dirty Old Man” two days later. But he crossed out that working title and penciled in the pun “Now I Lay Me—.” On June 24, he changed the title to a more explicitly Biblical quotation: I Will Fear No Evil, which continues “for thou art with me.”

His female protagonist, Eunice Branca, was to be racially ambiguous, so he took clippings from two magazines—a sunny blonde and a stunning black woman, and posted them on the ledge over his typewriter, alternating looking at them, so he wouldn’t unconsciously drift into racially stereotyped language.

Heinlein had always said he had a tough time getting started until he could hear the characters talking in his head, and then it took off on its own. This one took off and dragged him along with it: The character(s), it appeared, had no intention of confining themselves to a novella: The story kept unfolding and unfolding. The theme of what a modern young woman—the body—had to teach a ninety-year-old man—the brain—and conversely, what age and life experience could give to youth and beauty—ran away with the story, and it came to be about both kinds of life-wisdom, with the ironic twist that the transplanted brain goes slowly insane as it acquires this wisdom: The brain accepted Eunice’s life experience, even while the Eunice body rejected the brain.

But there was another reason that contributed to this story running away with itself: Heinlein was not working purely within the conventions of science fiction, and not recapitulating the high modernist experiments either. He had always followed current general fiction, including the experimental writing that was occasionally published. Heinlein never made reference to Ada or Ardor, published that year, 1969, but Nabokov was clearly on Heinlein’s radar (because of Lolita, 1955, 1958, which was referenced periodically in Heinlein’s correspondence). A number of story figures in Ada or Ardor are suggestive—the merging of the incestuous couple into Vaniada and the extended meditation on death. Perhaps Ada or Ardor helped kick off Heinlein’s train of thought.

Heinlein did not like to take long breaks once he got a piece under way, but this time it couldn’t be helped: Exactly a week after his sixty-second birthday, his mother was having her ninetieth, on Bastille Day. On July 12 he stopped writing, 60,000 words into his 30,000-word story,32 and flew with Ginny south to Arcadia, an eastern suburb of Los Angeles, where Bam was living with MJ and Andy Lermer.

In fact, this became a long and worthwhile interruption: Lee Atwood (who had hosted them so sumptuously in 1968) invited them to the Apollo 11 launch as his personal guests.

The sudden, unlooked-for prospect of it really coming to pass put Heinlein into a very strange emotional state. He watched with a sense of unreality as it took all four of the wives plus another miscellaneous relative to light the ninety candles on the cake simultaneously—

… at times during that whole period I had a dream-like quality to the effect that well, I’m going to wake up and discover that tomorrow morning I have to take a plane to Florida because it’s about to happen.… it was not only a tremendous spiritual experience, but also, it still had a dream-like quality, I’d dreamt so long.… [sic]33

This is how Robert Heinlein was, overwhelmed.

After Bam’s birthday party on the fourteenth, they flew out to Orlando with Atwood and his stepsons in Atwood’s private jet. They were ferried like royalty to a motel in Coco Beach.

They were taken to a quick succession of parties—first, one for the astronauts before they had to buckle down to the pre-liftoff checks, and then to a party of their science-fiction colleagues, where they talked with Hank and Barbie Stine and with Arthur C. Clarke and his wife, Connie. Then on to a dinner party, where Ginny finally got to meet Barry Goldwater in person.

The viewing stands, on the morning of July 16, 1969, were four miles away from the launch pad—and, in fact, it wasn’t practical to get much closer anyway: The Saturn V was so gigantic that close up you couldn’t take in the top of it.

There were more than a million people there, most coming on foot from the surrounding area. The traffic was snarled—the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King’s immediate successor as leader of the civil rights movement, was conducting a small march of the Poor People’s Campaign, to protest the money being spent on space exploration. Of course, not investing in growth is the best and easiest way to keep people poor—and the poor segment of the population growing. But this is not a truth Rev. Abernathy was ready to hear.

It became almost impossible to move. Heinlein almost didn’t notice.

He recognized the feeling in the crowded VIP stands: It was the feeling you get in a midnight Christmas church service or at a Bar Mitzvah or such.34 Politicians, engineers, everyone (even the Reverend Abernathy, who got caught up in the spirit of the thing), were welded into a spiritual community here.

When he was in high school, Heinlein had made a $10 bet that man would be on the Moon before his fortieth birthday. He had missed it by a full generation—he should look up the boy, if he were still alive, and pay him that sawbuck.35

It was worth the wait.

As 9:30 A.M. approached, the zero hour and minute, there was the familiar tension that any rocket launch inspires. It was not real—it could not be; it was his living dream …

… and yet it was real, it was as real as could be. The rumble in the ground, the rumble in the air, the smoke, the flame, the seeing that enormous big thing lift up and go up in the sky and know it was going to the moon.…

You know, when that thing went off, there was a dead silence. There was over a million people there, absolute dead silence. And then, spontaneous cheering. Cheering that rumbled over miles, just like the rocket did. And then, separation. The same thing, dead silence … [sic] and then this rumbling of cheering, all over the place.

… There was just nothing like it. The whole crowd was euphoric. Somebody would step on your feet and you’d smile, you’d step on somebody else’s feet, and they’d smile. It had a dream-like quality, and yet it wasn’t a dream.…

I don’t know if seeing God is an appropriate comparison, but I do feel as if—not as if—I know that seeing the first moon ship take off is the greatest spiritual experience I’ve undergone in my life.36

It was in orbit around the Earth before they got back to the motel for lunch. That afternoon, Atwood’s jet took them to Miami, and they caught a commercial flight to New Orleans, where Heinlein was interviewed for the New Orleans States-Item:

On a stay in the Crescent City this week, world-renowned science fiction writer Robert Heinlein had this to say: “The human race has passed from adolescence to manhood. July 16, the day of the moon launch, was New Year’s Day of the Year 1.37

It was a message he was to repeat many times, in many places.

The next day they went on to Houston for an overnight research stop. CBS television had asked him to be on hand the following day at their remote facility in Downey, California, for color commentary when the lunar lander touched down in Mare Tranquillitatis. CBS had platoons of astronomers and specialists of every sort on hand. Among the luminaries they had gathered together in Downey—and a like crowd in New York—was Robert “RNS” Clark, Heinlein’s closest friend on the Lexington,38 now working with North American Rockwell. Clark told Heinlein:

Our brief reunion, under such interesting circumstances, brought back wonderful memories. I was proud to be associated with my old friend Bob Heinlein—the good shipmate over all these years—who had the savviness and the gumption to make radical predictions about space exploration.39

Heinlein was in his element for the entire forty-one and a half hours, through “Eagle has landed” and the incredible moment of “One small step”—televised! For all the hundreds of science-fiction stories about a landing on the Moon, nobody had thought it would be televised and broadcast live back to Earth.40 A staggering one billion human beings gathered around televisions and radios over the entire planet—until Eagle lifted and Apollo broke out of lunar orbit. “Robert was euphoric at the time,” Ginny later recalled.41 At intervals CBS arranged to have everyone fed; Robert and Ginny got a three-hour nap at one point, then back on the air.

The Downey stage facilities were fairly basic—no complicated backgrounds to match to Walter Cronkite’s anchor desk in New York, which he was sharing for much of the time with Arthur C. Clarke (who had certainly earned a front-row seat) as the main “color commentator.” Asimov and Bradbury also appeared as commentators.

Robert envied Clarke his ease and composure on camera.42 Cronkite was obviously charged up and a little manic. Ginny told Lucy and Bill Corson about the event:

Bob says he [Cronkite] never comes to a complete stop, ending every sentence with an—“and,” and then continuing. The camera cuts to someone he’s asked a question of, and Walter goes right on and answers it, leaving the answeree with a mouthful of teeth. He even talks during prayers, etc. Great talker.43

But Heinlein’s politician reflexes were back online: He rearranged his three-by-five cards of notes44 and must have studied the coverage the way a platform speaker sizes up his crowd. He countered Cronkite’s manic style by taking a slow and deliberate approach, making Cronkite slow down to his speed.

When Heinlein’s time on camera with Cronkite came, at 8:29 P.M.,45 July 20, 1969, Cronkite mentioned the “science-fiction quality” of the pictures coming in from the Moon—and how much like Robert’s imagined Moon landing twenty years earlier, in Destination Moon. Robert appeared calm and composed—certainly more than he felt! The main point was that this was a glorious, inspiring first step—but it was literally “one small step”—a first step.

“This is a great day,” he told Cronkite.

“This is the first day!…” This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. This is … today is New Year’s Day of the Year One. If we don’t change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race … this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation … from infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we’re going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars: we’re going to spread. I don’t know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have … I’m an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it’s utterly inevitable: We’re going to spread through the entire universe.46

On several occasions, he ignored Cronkite’s interruptions and continued speaking, to the secret delight of the CBS studio crew. “[H]e did cut across Walter Cronkite’s bow a number of times…” Ginny told friends when they got home. “But he was darned well going to have his say … The CBS people were cheering about him cutting Walter out!”47 At one point, Heinlein ticked off another index-card point and remarked that designers and engineers could achieve even greater performance by designing the Apollo equipment for an all-female crew—a suggestion that appears to have shocked Cronkite. “Women in space!! Never!”48 Cronkite continued to splutter and Heinlein pressed the momentary advantage, unperturbed. Cronkite must have realized how he would come off and gotten his prejudices under control enough to let Heinlein’s continued remarks pass without objection. When Heinlein’s segment was over and the camera went back to Cronkite, the crew in Downey broke into spontaneous applause. “I think they had never seen anyone who could flap Cronkite before.”49 But it might have been a futile gesture. It was Heinlein’s impression that they had simply junked the entirety of the taped interview with him, without airing any of it. Only a small portion of the appearance was recorded in the memorial book CBS published of the coverage.

By the end of the Downey coverage, on July 20, 1969, they had been up forty-one hours with only a brief nap. The Apollo capsule had a four-day trip back to Earth. They had one day and night in Los Angeles—and two parties that night—before returning to Santa Cruz.

Among the accumulation of mail they found a letter from a fellow SF writer, Frank M. Robinson, with six questions to kick off an interview for Playboy. Ginny wrote that Robert was involved in a new book and couldn’t.

He would have made the effort for Playboy, except that five of the six were questions about his colleagues, which he wouldn’t answer, or about his own stories, which he would not discuss either. But the Playboy editors came back with a new slant that made it doable: They wanted him to concentrate on the Moon landing and space in general, since an anti-space lobby was already ramping up.50

That was different. He was in the mood to take up the bully pulpit. He and Robinson settled on the date of August 9, two weeks away, for Robinson to come down from San Francisco to Santa Cruz with a Playboy staff photographer. On the same day (July 26), Heinlein composed an open statement to begin to counter the custard-heads—essentially a press release:

Anyone who honestly has the welfare of the human race on his mind should be pushing hard for us to go ahead with space exploration as fast as technology permits. Anyone who thinks we should “stop spending all that money” on space and spend it instead on such problems as pollution, poverty, etc., simply does not understand the situation.

… I am not at all certain that Mankind can solve on this planet the problems of population pressure, nationalism, pollution of atmosphere and water, destruction of natural resources—you name it. All of them add up to the simple statement that we are breeding ourselves to death. BUT PUT A FEW COLONIES OUT ELSEWHERE AND THE HUMAN RACE GOES ON.51

The interview with Robinson took two and a half days—coincidentally the very days on which Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, as well as Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, though the reportage of the gruesome “ritual” style of the murders had not hit Bonny Doon by the time the interview was concluded.

Robinson cooperated in keeping the interview on track, and the subject did allow Heinlein to develop some opinions that were not exactly politic: He was still steamed about Billy Graham’s arrogance in verbally slapping President Nixon’s wrist for saying the lunar landing was the greatest day in human history, and that provided the starting point for the interview:

I’m talking here about the people who have been against space travel all along and who didn’t believe in it and so forth. Now it’s done and they now look like the fools they are and I’m tired of being polite to them. Half a century of being treated like a madman for believing what was perfectly evident all along since the days of Sir Isaac Newton is long enough for politeness. They are, and were, fools, and I now say so.… [sic] except that false prophets never do shut up. Their smugness, their conceit, their vested interests and things that they are, their basic stupidity and lack of imagination won’t let them shut up. They are at a dead end and don’t know it.52

Robinson transcribed the eight cassette tapes of interview himself—28,000 words. Heinlein went back to work on I Will Fear No Evil53 but directed that the honorarium for the interview be sent directly to the Ed White Youth Center Memorial Fund in Seabrook, Texas (White was one of the astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 capsule fire in 1967).

The book reached the “gargantuan” stage—over six hundred pages of manuscript—and the characters were writing themselves without consulting him at all, which bemused him. In response to a query from Blassingame, Robert left Ginny a note:

Please tell him that I am anxious to learn what the new book is all about, too—especially the ending.

I seem to be translating Giles, Goat Boy [John Barth, 1965] into late Martian.54

He put “The End” to it on September 3, after struggling with the last chapter for days.

This time I am attempting the impossible, I am trying to bridge the “generation gap.” All I can say about it at this point is that anyone I failed to offend with Troopers and Stranger I will probably offend with this one. It is a 360° traverse of skunk spray. With any luck it will be condemned both by the SDS55 and the John Birch Society.56

I Will Fear No Evil had come out at 165,000 words—and it was so odd, so unlike anything he had ever done, that it was very difficult to cut. Part of the reason it had ballooned so uncontrollably might be that he had written his first postmodern novel, that plays with several metafictive levels of storytelling. The events might be “real” for the world of the fiction, or they might be a dream/hallucination/delirium of a dying man, wholly or in part—but there is no firm evidence as to where the delirium might take up. The operation itself might be a dream-fantasy. The metafictive levels interlocked in such complex and deliberately ambiguous ways that cutting around them was a difficult project. It was a pioneeering work guaranteed to be difficult, guaranteed to be rejected by anyone who wanted “more of the same” from him.

Three weeks after finishing it, Heinlein had made several brush-pen passes through the manuscript, eliminating excess qualifying phrases, tightening up the language, catching typos. He had cut twelve thousand words out of the story and hoped to get another twelve thousand out57 before he gave it to the typist in October, taking pass after pass through the manuscript. Anything that was going to be done on this one, had to be done now, as he wouldn’t be able to think about the book for a long while: The fortieth reunion of his class at the Naval Academy was coming up in October, and this he would not miss. Even 140,000 words was too much.58 “In my opinion,” he wrote later, “that novel is about 30,000 words too long.”59

Shaking up any entrenched intellectual position was a good thing in and of itself, and a worthy goal for any professional clown (as Heinlein sometimes referred to himself).60 In furtherance of this goal, he was glad to give permission to Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane rock group in nearby San Francisco to quote lines and passages from some of his novels in their lyrics.

I am pleased by your courtesy in asking permission. Bits and pieces from my stories have been used by many people around the country—names of groups, names of songs, parts of songs, names of churches, endless buttons, decals, etc.—and it is rare indeed for anyone to bother to ask my permission.

I would like to ask two things of you: a) When and if you do make such use of bits and pieces of my material I would like to have typed copies and (eventually) platter or tape. These items would wind up in the vault of the UCSC Library in the Robert A. Heinlein Special Collection, as the University of California is my archivist. I hope this is not too much trouble; the University Librarian seems to want everything.

Item b) is just for myself: I would enjoy having a Jefferson Airplane platter the jacket of which has been inscribed by all the members of the combo. I now own Surrealistic Pillow, Bless its Pointed Little Head, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, and Crown of Creation. I think you have several more titles; if you can lay hands on one for me, I will appreciate it. And please tell Miss Slick that even if I did not enjoy her singing (I do!), nevertheless she would be an asset to any group just through her smile.

Coincidence: Our college-student-gardener Gene Bradley tells me he knows Marty Balin.61

In the mail was a disturbing letter from a young woman in Inyo County—out by the Mojave Desert near Los Angeles—who asked him for help: She and her friends were being chased by police helicopters. It was a crazed letter—the margins filled with decorative drawn fancies—and yet there was something about this one …

Ginny’s instincts went into overdrive. “Honey, this is worse than the crazy fan mail,” she told him. “This is absolutely insane: Don’t have anything to do with it.”62

But he placed a call to the Inyo County Sheriff’s office and found that the bare outlines of the woman’s story—“Annette or Nanette or something”63—were accurate: The police were chasing down a group of young people, but in answer to Heinlein’s question, the sheriff’s office told him drugs were not the issue—and that was all they would say.64

The “Annette or Nanette or something” who wrote to him was probably Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme—a name that would later become chillingly familiar as the trial of Charles Manson and his “family” got under way the following year.

The cut manuscript of the new book went to his typist on October 17. Six days later, they left for the reunion in Annapolis.

The reunion itself was raucous, boisterous as only sixty-five-year-olds revisiting their youth can be. For Heinlein, the highlight of the experience was being able to carry a drink into Bancroft Hall. “Never thought I’d live to see the day that this would happen!” Ginny remembered him saying.65

After the reunion they were invited to Norfolk for a visit en famille with Commodore Trottier, the U.S. Naval attaché in Rio they had met at the film festival earlier in the year, with his wife Rebel, and Dorace, their daughter. From Norfolk they went to New York for a little miscellaneous business talk: The rumors of a new Heinlein book after four years were generating a lot of anticipation in the publishing world, and, Ned Brown had told Blassingame, in Hollywood as well.

From New York they flew to Houston, to the Manned Space Center, where George Trimble gave them a very special treat: They were taken to view a Moon rock, a sample of several pounds of gravel and dust sampled on the Moon and brought back to Earth by Apollo 11: “It was un-Earthly!” Ginny told Poul and Karen Anderson. “It had little inclusions or bubbles. I thought they looked silvery, Bob says they looked golden. Beautiful!”66

They were invited to a big party in honor of Sir Christopher and Lady Briggs, who were on their way to join Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mount Everest. The Heinleins stayed over in Houston. If the Moon rock had put them back into July’s dreamlike state, the party was more surreal yet. Sir Christopher had been knighted because he handled the protocol arrangements for Prince Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales in 1958, but the gentle knight and his lady paled into insignificance in the presence of their daughter, the Honorable Jane, a BOAC hostess dressed in glittering London Mod miniskirt and spangled blouse, neckline plunging to the waist and giving clear testimony she was not wearing a brassiere.67

Heinlein discovered that a goodly percentage of the women there were fans of his, and he rapidly collected an entourage of beautiful Texas blondes and spent the remainder of the party trailing clouds of glories. He and Ginny were introduced to astronaut Jim McDivitt, whom they found “very witty indeed.”68

They flew out to New Orleans the next morning and went to their usual hotel, the St. Charles, and were startled and outraged when the hotel required them to present identification before they would check them in—an impertinence virtually without precedent in the days before 1985, when the United States for the first time required citizens to carry identification. Robert and Ginny shook the dust of the St. Charles off their feet and taxied to the Ponchartrain instead, where they unpacked and settled in. This incident was so matter-of-course that it is not even mentioned in Ginny’s various descriptions of the trip, though Heinlein wrote about it to Blassingame.69

Ginny went out shopping—her first impulse any time she was in New Orleans—and Robert took an unexpected telephone call from Eberhardt Deutsch (Hermann Deutsch’s older brother, a distinguished lawyer), who had tracked them down at their hotel. “What are you doing there, young man?” he demanded of Heinlein.

When Ginny got back to the hotel, Robert told her to pack up again: Deutsch insisted they stay in his penthouse with him, complete with hot and cold running servants. He presented Robert with a gold-plated key to the penthouse and insisted they stay there whenever they were in New Orleans thereafter. Eberhardt Deutsch’s insistence was a hard thing to resist in any case, and they surrendered.

Getting back to Santa Cruz was like being dumped out of a warm bed and back into the cold realities. “Kids, I’m spoiled,” Ginny told the Corsons. “I hated to come back to doing my own dishes, even with a dishwasher, and as for cooking!”70 And the retyping of the manuscript, Heinlein found, had not even been started in the three weeks they had been gone. Their typist was sadistic, Blassingame told him.71

Xerox delivered a behemoth of a copying machine on Armistice Day—too big to fit in any room except the living room, which, even so, it overwhelmed—but no paper. There was a nationwide paper shortage that year, and their paper stocks were on back order. Heinlein had no manuscript and no paper to make the ten copies of a five-hundred-page manuscript the two agents were clamoring for. Ginny feared she would have to retype the manuscript herself.72 The rental fees on the copier were horrendous—

But they would not be driven into the poorhouse by it. The October royalty statements had arrived while they were away: The three existing editions of Stranger in a Strange Land had earned Heinlein in the last six months nearly $13,000 (nearly half a million copies). The new Berkley issue had sold out completely at a staggering $2.75 cover price.

When he began sending correspondence to the Archive at UC Santa Cruz, Heinlein became concerned about privacy issues. There were some pretty frank opinions expressed in some of his letters, particularly in his correspondence with Blassingame. And some of the people talked about unflatteringly were still alive, even thirty years later. The best interim solution to the problem seemed to be a restriction on public access to the correspondence. Rita Berner Bottoms (she had married Tom Bottoms earlier in 1969) drafted language for a restriction during their lifetimes.73

The first half of the I Will Fear No Evil manuscript came back from the typist a month later—very badly done, with far too many typos for a clean submission manuscript. He would have to make do with it, but Heinlein found a new typist and sent the rest of the book to her six days before Christmas 1969.