Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

On January 6, 1970, the Heinleins attended a special dinner given by the chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, Dean McHenry, and his wife Jane, in honor of Robert’s old EPIC cronies, Judge Robert and Susie Clifton. The next morning, Robert told Ginny he had not felt well during the night. He had a chill and was shaking so badly he was afraid he would bite right through the glass thermometer.1

Ginny put him back to bed and talked their local GP, Dr. Calciano, into making a house call, since Robert wasn’t up to the fifteen-mile trip into town. Before Dr. Calciano got there (after his regular office hours), Robert had another serious chill, shaking alarmingly for half an hour.

Dr. Calciano did not examine Robert, but concluded he had some kind of “unknown virus” and prescribed Darvon for the abdominal pain and Bonine for the nausea. Robert would get better on his own in a few days, the doctor assured Ginny.

But he didn’t improve, and in fact was barely lucid for days at a stretch. Ginny fretted—and called Dr. Calciano every day for instructions and her daily brush-off.

On January 8, the San Francisco Herald-Examiner published an unbylined piece on the front page, claiming that the Tate-LaBianca murders committed last August were directly inspired by Stranger in a Strange Land. “Manson’s Blueprint?” the headline screamed. “Claim Tate Suspect Used Science Fiction Plot.”

A few days later, the same story, slightly revised, went out over the UPI wire services, copyrighted by Robert Gilette, a science writer for the Herald-Examiner:

This was a bandwagon everybody in the press saw was worth jumping on. Playboy immediately wanted a comment on the Manson issue to print with the interview.

Robert was in no shape to make any comment at all (though later he was “very incensed about it”2), and, besides, he had made it clear at the time of the interview that he did not, as a matter of policy, comment publicly on his own work—ever. Ginny wrote a “furious letter”3 to Blassingame:

Will you also please tell Mr. [Hugh] Hefner that the only reason Robert agreed to be interviewed was not publicity for himself, but the offer of a forum to boost the space program. Publication of this interview in an early issue might have helped. As it is, the space program is in ruins, and Hefner is attempting to make something of what might have been by the use of Stranger and the Manson case. We will not go along with this. He has not bought himself a tame rabbit by that contribution to the Ed White Memorial Fund. He can take his [magazine] and stuff it, having first folded it until it is all corners. Under no condition will we make any public statement about the Manson case and Stranger. We consider Mr. Hefner’s suggestion very much out of line and an invasion of our privacy. It’s not a matter of reluctance to discuss Robert’s work, but a downright refusal to do so, which has been a policy of his for a very long time.4

Frank Robinson recalled, “Hefner then personally pulled the article from Playboy, where it had been previously announced. Heinlein sent back their check but A. C. Spectorsky, titular editor at the time, returned the check to him.”5

On January 19, Ginny finally had enough of Dr. Calciano’s long-distance brush-offs. By that time Heinlein was very ill indeed. “He couldn’t even keep water down,” Ginny later remembered. “I had been in touch with the doctor, and finally called him and told him that in my opinion, Robert belonged in the hospital, that the so-called ‘unknown virus’ had not gone away, and to please send an ambulance.”6 They went to the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. Dr. Calciano went off on a ski trip, leaving Heinlein’s care in the hands of a substitute doctor he designated.7

On that same day, Time magazine ran an article based on the UPI story, titled “A Martian Model”:

… Most madmen invent their own worlds. If the charges against Charles Manson, accused along with five members of his self-styled “family” of killing Sharon Tate and six other people, are true, Manson showed no powers of invention at all. In the weeks since his indictment, those connected with the case have discovered that he may have murdered by the book. The book is Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, an imaginative science-fiction novel long popular among hippies.…

According to one of the attorneys in the case, Manson was compiling a Martian-style list of enemies to be murdered.8

The attorney the Time piece mentions in the last paragraph was probably Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, an assistant prosecutor. The lead prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, investigated the claim, he later said, but decided it was worthless.9 The bullet points of similarities listed between Manson and Stranger in both the UPI press release and the Time piece don’t match up to the book very well—and sometimes don’t even match up to the factual foundation Bugliosi was laying for the Manson Family trial. The book Bugliosi wrote, Helter-Skelter (1974), does not even contain an index reference for Heinlein or Stranger.

Kay’s description in his own book (cowritten with Ed Sanders), The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (1972) sounds like a thirdhand retelling of plot elements from a book he had never read himself. He characterizes Stranger as: “The story of a power-hungry telepathic Martian roaming the earth with a harem and a quenchless sexual thirst while proselytizing for a new religious movement.”10

Heinlein did not see the Time article, or the clippings their friends sent them of the Herald-Examiner article and the UPI press release: When he was not unconscious, he was delirious, and the doctors—none of whom Ginny had ever seen before—would not tell her anything.11 She had to reserve her energy for arguing them into installing an IV drip to relieve obvious dehydration.

On January 23, after a week of tests, Dr. Calciano came back and told her they concluded he had pneumonia—because his temperature was quite high. This startled Ginny, because he had not displayed any respiratory distress. It was seventeen days after onset; he had not eaten anything since then, or had any liquid in almost as long.12

This pushed Ginny over the edge. Robert’s brother Rex Heinlein had urged her to get Robert out of the deathtrap there and get him to the Stanford Medical facility.13 When one of the Dominican doctors suggested he might be better off at Stanford Medical Center, Ginny called an ambulance herself and rode with him to Stanford, forty miles away, not even stopping to close the house or grab a toothbrush.14 Mr. Kessel, their local lawyer, told them they had an excellent lawsuit against Dr. Calciano (and in fact, Ginny later said that Dr. Calciano was sued by another patient for a similar treatment).15 Ginny was holding herself together with Valium,16 and “[Robert] was out of his head at the time, so I had to decide for him.”17

At Stanford, he was admitted as a staff patient18 with Dr. Anderson as his primary care physician.19 Dr. Anderson and his colleagues were shocked at Robert’s condition.20 They got him settled in and started their own battery of tests. The next morning, Rex took Ginny back to Santa Cruz to pick up her car, which was still in the parking lot at Dominican Hospital, to pick up a traveling kit of clothes and so forth, and to put the house in mothballs and kennel the cats with the vet. She stayed with Rex and Kathleen while Robert was at Stanford.

When she got back to the hospital that morning, it was the chief of surgery, Dr. Harry Oberhelman, who told her Robert had an advanced case of peritonitis, a major infection in his bowels. It had started out with a hole in his intestines—a “perforated diverticulum.” By now, however, it had been untreated for seventeen days (in a hospital!), and his chills and fever were caused by flourishing bacterial infections—septicaemia—and consequent blood poisoning—toxaemia. Bluntly, he was dying.

He was so weak, and his system was so compromised, that they couldn’t operate until the infection was under control. They started him on massive doses of the antibiotic Kanamycin, and scheduled exploratory surgery for the following Monday, two days later.

Heinlein came to twice during this time. The first time, he was under restraint with tubes going into him, and a mask being placed over his face. He recognized this: It was his description of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith in the book he had just finished—a very odd coincidence. And then he went away, unconscious again. The second time, he woke up while being wheeled into surgery and muzzily recited to himself the last scene of the book.

A writer is far gone when he identifies with a fictional scene—especially when it is factual in essence at that time. I was briefly lucid; I knew where I was, who I was, and what was about to happen.…

… in that lucid time just before surgery I feared no evil; I was simply happy to be privileged to die aware of what was going on … [sic] and much intrigued by the odd parallel with the ending of my last story. I do not hold any certainty of personal survival—at most a vague hope because I am so acutely interested in all of this strange world.21

They split him open from sternum to pubic arch, plus cross flaps for access.22 More than a foot of colon—probably where the perforation had developed originally—was just gone, tatters of rotting flesh. Dr. Oberhelman performed a left colectomy,23 removed eighteen inches of intestine, and sewed (resectioned) the ends together. During the course of the operation, Heinlein received blood transfusions collected from five anonymous donors. Since Robert had an uncommon blood type (universal recipient—Ginny had the even rarer universal donor type), it was almost certain that his life had been saved by the efforts of the National Rare Blood Club he had come across while researching I Will Fear No Evil.

While Heinlein was still in recovery, their primary care physician, Dr. Anderson, took Ginny aside to tell her Robert would need special nursing care, more than the usual floor nurses could provide—round-the-clock nursing care on top of the operation and two hospitalizations … this last big royalty distribution was gone already. “I told him to order anything necessary,” Ginny later told a friend. “Round the clock special duty nurses cost in the neighborhood of $900 a week”24—a staggering amount in 1969.

Heinlein gained consciousness—sort of—and began visibly to improve. The incision looked huge, but it was gradually healing up, and his front would eventually look, Robert said, like a road map of New Jersey.25 On January 30, they removed the surgical drain tube. He was lucid enough the next day to give Ginny an unlimited power of attorney, to make all medical decisions for him, as well as business decisions.26

And then he lapsed back into a mental state that looked lucid only part of the time. Ginny had not had time for her usual careful grooming in several weeks by that time, and the roots of her hair were coming in white. For several years, she had been tinting it with henna for Robert’s benefit.27 It was time to let that vanity go; she was fifty-four years old, and she had gray hair, and that was that. She let the roots grow out white, and Robert did not recognize this white-haired woman who was in his room.28 He teased her about this for years, saying,

“When I woke up, they told me this woman is my wife. My wife has red hair. This impostor’s hair is white!”

After listening to Robert carrying on in this vein for a while, Ginny turned to him and smugly pointed out: “I may not be your wife, but I still have your power of attorney.”29

Ginny tried to get him to eat something. On February 3, a week after the operation, he finally managed to get a morsel down—and it promptly came up again. This was not according to plan—and in fact he didn’t look right at all: The antibiotic had induced uremia, and his kidney function shut down. The doctors changed antibiotics (manufacture of Kanamycin was discontinued later that year), and Heinlein began improving rapidly. Six days later, he was able to eat some cereal without becoming nauseous, and that was a triumph.

It was also a rarity: During February, anything he was able to wrestle down, more than a bite at a time, came right back up. He could not even keep water down: Only the IV was keeping him alive. But he was “present” for longer periods now, and Ginny was sometimes able to get away for brief periods, to round up the mail and keep the business affairs going. She answered the mail by his bedside, while he was dozing.

Ginny had completed the gargantuan job of copying and hand-collating all the copies of the new manuscript and mailed them off back in January. Blassingame found I Will Fear No Evil intriguing and unusual and was shopping it around for serial and trade issue. It was closer to a mainstream novel, Ginny thought, than anything like conventional science fiction,30 but Galaxy magazine picked up the serial rights.

One day, collecting the mail and tidying Robert’s desk, she discovered a notecard he had written early in January: “I do not want any editor to cut this story because they don’t know how it’s put together. Any cutting that’s done on it I want to do it myself.”31 So it could only go to publishing houses that would agree—in writing—not to make changes or cuts. “Stubborn certainly,” Heinlein later wrote, “and no doubt stupid at times—but I won’t be a trained seal for anybody, at any price.”32

When Robert was awake and becoming alert, Ginny took him out in a wheelchair for a change of scenery, which meant girl-watching. Miniskirts were pleasantly abundant. Gradually his concentration improved, and when he felt up to reading she brought him a new book: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

Ginny was extremely grateful at the time—and Robert was grateful later, when he understood it—when Dr. Alan Nourse flew down from Seattle33 and went over all the surgical and postsurgical care records with the physicians. He then interpreted it for Ginny in layman’s language. He could not have survived at all, Nourse told her, if he didn’t have the constitution of an ox to start with.

Robert’s improvement was gradual, but over the weeks, it did become visible. On February 26, he kept down a small serving of breakfast eggs. But that was it. Five days later—eight weeks and six days since it had started—he had lost forty-two pounds; his weight was down to 132 pounds. But the doctors said that if he would feed himself, he could go home.

Ginny bundled him into the car and drove the forty miles very carefully. They were coming to a cold house with no food, but it was a welcomed homecoming: “… He cried as we entered the canyon and said, ‘I never thought I’d see it again.’”34

Ginny got him to bed, with blankets and hot water bottles nearby, and drove downtown to buy fresh supplies. She also bought some small, colorful, transparent plastic boxes. She had a plan: He could keep down a mouthful at a time, so they would go with that. She made his favorite foods and placed bite-sized bits in the plastic boxes, which she kept by his bedside, along with rich eggnog made with ice cream. Every ten minutes or so, Ginny would require him to eat a bite or so.

It worked: He gained back half a pound within a few days, five pounds by the end of the first week. But it was not until nearly the end of May that he could muster enough interest in food to ask for second helpings of anything. The only real downside of the program was that it kept her tied to his bedside as thoroughly as the hospital had.35 Between this and keeping the business going, it was the hardest-working period of her life.36 She stayed up nights to answer the business mail and the fan mail, keep the books, and prepare the income taxes.

By the beginning of June 1970, Heinlein was up and around for most of the day and enjoying the scenery again. When she was able to get a gardener’s assistant, Ginny started repairing some of the neglect and made special flower plantings for the view out Robert’s bedroom window. He began combining his trips to Palo Alto with visits to the dentist to repair some of the damage done by extended severe malnutrition. His weight was back up to 160 pounds, and he swam every day in the pool he kept heated to blood-temperature. He also picked up some light correspondence on his own and started studying Yiddish, working from Leo Rosten’s delightful The Joys of Yiddish.

It wasn’t over: The doctors had found a large gallstone, and he had the removal operation to look forward to, and his original (1966) hernia repair to finish with a separate operation,37 but the doctors were optimistic about scheduling these surgeries in the near future: He was clearly on the mend. “So toward the end of this year, I should have a bright new Robert, all patched up and repaired and in need of a paint job. What color shall I use?”38

His mind was still not as sharp as usual for him—but it was sharp enough to participate in business again. He realized how messy his estate would have been if he had died in January and executed a temporary will on June 1, taking their new accountant’s advice to set up living trusts and move some of their investment assets into Keogh plans. The trusts bypassed the expense and delay of probate and gave Ginny permanent direct control over the business aspects of the writing. The Keogh provided an income when he was no longer generating new books.

… this hooptydo has changed my attitude and pace; from now on we do what pleases Ginny and me. I have had printed a checkoff form for fan letters to be used Procrustean Bed style on 99% of the mail—unless a letter is really charming … No more speaking engagements for any reason whatsoever. No more help with theses, term papers, dissertations, no more visitors whom we are not truly eager to see. Et cetera. In the past ten years people have been whittling away at my life—and I have at last realized that I have no obligation to give any of these golden days to anyone but friends. I realized in the hospital that, had I died in February, none of these things that people want me to do would have been done—so I’m treating it as a rebirth and intend to live life to the fullest and not get bogged down in donkey work that I don’t want to do, and no one has any real right to demand of me.…

… I’ll write a story occasionally and we’ll spend the rest of our time gardening, traveling, playing with the cats. I find I don’t like being a “public figure” and I’m putting a stop to it.39

The arrangements for this last book had been settled while he was still mostly non compos mentis. Galaxy was prepared to issue the book without cutting, in five installments, which pleased Robert.40 Putnam’s wanted it for trade issue. Ginny recalled: “I stalled off the contract as long as possible, but he wasn’t up to doing any cutting, so I finally signed the contract myself by power of attorney.”41 Robert confirmed to Ginny what she had found on that notecard: He didn’t want any editor to try cutting it who might not understand how the story was put together—and she was prepared to insist on this.

Walter Minton made only two editorial notes to Heinlein, and both would involve fiddling with the text. First, the middle sagged so badly that his editorial readers found themselves skipping over parts—especially the sections of interior dialogue; and, second, they had trouble taking the end as credible. Minton himself thought—as Robert had—that the amalgamated Joan-Eunice character was going insane (though he tried to keep the other possibilities open),42 but none of the readers read it that way.43

Heinlein worked at editing the master copy, but found he couldn’t effectively edit it; he was only able to cut a few words from each page.44

And he lost two pounds while he was fussing over the manuscript. Ginny put her foot down: Regression was not an option.

Minton had already scheduled I Will Fear No Evil for a fall 1970 release and was reluctant to pull it from his lineup and move in anything else. He offered more than double the negotiated advance—a staggering forty thousand dollars (at a time when the highest advances for science fiction books were five thousand dollars)—if Ginny would allow one of his staff editors to cut the book.

That was a very tempting offer: With forty thousand dollars in hand, they could liquidate the hospital bills and use the big Stranger royalties to pay for the follow-up and the two new surgeries …

But Minton had as much as told them already that his editors didn’t understand the book. Robert’s wishes were very clear on this point: He couldn’t cut it himself, and he didn’t want an editor to cut it. It was either publish it as written or withdraw it and find a publisher who would. Money is money, but money was not the last word.

Minton paid out the smaller advance—still a sizeable advance in 1970—and had the book set up in type as is, including the notice Robert requested for the National Rare Blood Club—the very least he could do to “pay it forward.” Robert requested a set of galleys in June, to see if he could edit it before he went back in for surgery. His sense of humor had returned with his energy:

So I have been tidying my affairs lately … In the course of it I attempted to do two things: leave my cadaver to Stanford medical school and replace the many units of blood that I had been given in January, February and March. (I had paid for the blood of course but there still remains the moral obligation to pay back the blood tissue itself, especially as I am a “rare blood” type—us vampires have our protocols.)

a. Stanford refused my body. Seems their morgue is overcrowded and they are having to keep the overflow in the Coca-Cola machine.

b. Rare blood or not, the hospital blood bank refuses to accept blood from me; I’m too old.

This caused me to write a magnum opus in lyric form. Title: “Dust Thou Art, to Dust Returneth—”

Poor old Wobert,

He’s just mud;

They don’t want his body,

They won’t take his blood!

(Compadre, doesn’t the pity-of-it-all getcha? Right there? No, a little lower down.)45

He didn’t get to surgery that summer. Both Robert and Ginny were in the swimming pool one day in June 1970, when Robert had an itch on his shoulder and asked Ginny to look at it. Nothing was visible then, but the next morning there was a red patch that looked like poison oak or poison ivy.

They were lucky to have an extremely able allergist-dermatologist locally, Dr. Holbert, who had been practicing from an iron lung for twenty-two years. It was not poison oak, he ruled. By the next day, the rash was developed enough to identify it: shingles.

Herpes zoster, the virus which causes shingles, is the same virus that causes chicken pox and causes similar red wales and scabby sores. It stays permanently in the nerve cells—usually from a childhood infection with chicken pox—and can flare up whenever you undergo bodily stress. Robert’s attack was intercostal—in a band around the ribcage—on the right side and affected the use of his right arm. The pain was severe, topping even Robert’s high threshhold: He said it felt like a blowtorch applied to his bare skin.46

The infection spread uncontrollably, and a week after the first sign, Robert’s temperature spiked. Alarmed, Ginny went into overdrive. Dr. Holbert couldn’t admit his patients to the hospital, because he couldn’t attend them (the main reason he had switched specializations from surgery to dermatology). And in any case, Ginny did not want Robert going back to Dominican. She called Dr. Oberhelman at Stanford and got permission to readmit him there.

The temperature, they discovered right away, was not caused by the shingles: He had also picked up a systemic infection of Staphylococcus aureus. Golden staph is one of those very hard-to-control bacterial infections that are a doctor’s despair. They put him immediately into “reverse isolation,” requiring everyone who came in to see him to gown up in scrubs (in the June heat!) and sterilize their hands going into and out of the room.

Robert’s immune system was compromised already, and the Staph infection hit him harder than the shingles. Again he could not eat and so lost weight and strength for the ten days they struggled to control the infection. The antibiotics did help with the shingles—the skin part of it, anyway. Gallstone surgery was out of the question for the moment.

By the time he got back home, the first installment of I Will Fear No Evil was appearing in Galaxy’s July number. He was too weak even to pick at the galleys from Putnam’s. Ginny finished up the front matter and all the exacting details that go into making a book.

The painkillers seemed to take all Robert’s energy. If left to his own desires, he would stay in bed all day every day, moaning occasionally.47 Ginny chivvied him out of bed, and they played games eight hours a day, sitting at the dining room table, for months, from July to December—Acey-Deucey, the Navy man’s dice game, and Robert taught her how to play Cribbage, the navy man’s card game. For variety they played Scrabble. As with the last bout of recuperation, Ginny handled the writing business and financial affairs, answering fan mail. The new form letter Robert had designed in the spring seemed too cold and impersonal for her, and she found herself adding long handwritten PS’s—which defeated the purpose of the multigraphed form letter.

By August Robert was strong enough and oriented enough to cooperate on his own, and Ginny began taking him out with her on short errands that wouldn’t tax his strength too much. The scabs had fallen off from the shingles, leaving not-too-prominent red spots—but unremitting pain.

It was about this time that a manufacturer in Hollywood sent him a complimentary water bed, “a child of your imagination,” referring to the mentions of water beds (and “flotation beds” and “hydraulic beds” and “tank beds”) in Stranger in a Strange Land, adding “Your prophecy is enriching man kind’s mental state 100 yrs.”48 Unfortunately, the house’s flooring wasn’t engineered to take a ton of water in a four-foot-by-six-foot footprint, so the water bed had to stay in its shipping carton.

I Will Fear No Evil came off Putnam’s presses on September 3, exactly one year to the day after he had put “-30-” to the draft (though they would not generally issue the book until November). The Galaxy serialization was in its third installment, and the mail was already starting to come in on it.

Heinlein was able to help a little with the writing business now, though insomnia and lack of appetite from the infections kept him at a very low level. He had another inquiry about The Door into Summer as a film property, and Reed Sherman was anxious to negotiate an extension to his option, even though his script was only half done. George Pal wanted to look at “The Roads Must Roll” as a film property. If Heinlein never wrote another word they could keep going for a while just on film options and royalties on the older books. Provided the medical expenses didn’t bankrupt them first. He still tired easily and had frequent bouts of post-herpetic pain that continued for months, until the nerve sheaths had completely regenerated. It is not uncommon for post-herpetic neuralgia to continue for a year—and there was a chance the pain would never go away. But he did gradually improve.

While Robert’s health was improving, Ginny’s was declining. She was seeing an orthopedist now at Stanford Medical Center, about her feet. The bursitis that had plagued her since her basic training in World War II had gone from occasional twinges to continuous pain: She almost could not bear to stand on her feet or to walk. The orthopedist bound her feet tightly with adhesive tape into a kind of postmodern go-go boot. That helped ease the pain some, though it didn’t seem to improve the condition. By November, they were giving her cortisone injections directly into the heels—10 cc at a time, which is a massive amount of liquid to take by injection. The bruised feeling in the heels lasted about ten days, but the injections seemed to help, while they lasted.

The reviews on I Will Fear No Evil were very mixed—a sign, he took it, that he had achieved his desired effect of shaking people up and challenging preconceptions. Some of the reviewers actually complained about a lack of graphic sex in the book, one calling him “the Victorian Mr. Heinlein.”49

On the other hand, the book got glowing reviews in specialty publications for Women’s Lib (as the feminist movement was casually called at the time), flower children, and libertarians, so the reviews were a wash—and the book sold well: In fact, it went into a second printing even before release.

They continued gradually to do more, a bit at a time, and by spring 1971 were able to entertain Violet Markham, the Hawaiian friend they had met shipboard in 1954, with a jaunt to San Francisco, taking her to the Playboy Club—quite daring and even in 1970 quite chic. A local bookseller in Santa Cruz held an open autograph party, and Robert signed books for two hours while it poured outside. Ginny watched over him like a hen with one chick: He had to tread a very careful line between being as active as his strength allowed and overdoing himself into a relapse.

Now that the big book was out of the way, Ginny had time to do more business planning. Scribner had hung on to the rights to most of the juveniles for decades, without getting them issued in paperback, and now that Mac Talley had left NAL, the half-dozen Signet books (for which Robert owned the rights outright) had been allowed to go out of print.

Ace had recently paid Scribner an enormous amount of money for a five-year paperback issue right—an illegal one, in Heinlein’s opinion, not permitted by the original contract—and Ginny and Blassingame had been able to leverage that to pressure Signet to reissue them or they would void the contract and take them somewhere else: Ace was very happy to pick up the additional paperback rights for their line, and the issue was so successful that Ginny actually had to defer some of the royalties into the next tax year. She blessed their new tax accountant, George Coleman, a specialist in writers, for keeping track of these matters—and Alan Nourse for referring him.

They weren’t out of financial danger yet—but knowing they had extra money coming in next April took a load off Ginny’s mind. Robert no longer thought about such things unless forced to, even when he was healthy:50 He relied on Ginny’s judgment and abilities.

Around Christmastime in 1970, Heinlein took to working regularly at his desk—a good milestone, suggesting he would be strong enough for surgery in a month or two. Ginny would have to have foot surgery, probably, too.

The other cloud on their horizon was Robert’s mother: Bam had suffered a stroke and was not expected to make any real recovery. Robert’s sister Louise made a trip out from Albuquerque to Arcadia, to help out and take some of the responsibilities off Mary Jean and Andy Lermer, who had been caring for her for more than twenty years. The boys in the family had been covering Bam’s living expenses by quarterly whip-rounds, but when her Medicare coverage and insurance ran out, the expenses would go up drastically, and the Lermers could not shoulder the financial burden of a convalescent home for her. Her mind was not at all clear anymore; she required constant supervision for the rest of her life. Robert wrote to Mary Jean:

Rex and I and Mother’s other children will always be in debt to you for this. Perhaps someday there will be circumstances in which we can repay in kind but in the meantime all I can do is to acknowledge that there is a deeper debt beyond money.51

Rex and Larry were retired and on fixed incomes—and Clare was a college professor, limited, too, in what he could do to increase Bam’s financial support. With the sales of I Will Fear No Evil taking off—12,000 copies sold by the end of February of the initial print run of 13,500—and the new revenues from the Ace paperbacks coming in, Robert and Ginny were ready to pick up the slack when Bam’s Medicare and insurance coverage ran out.

But she surprised them all: By mid-February, Bam was mentally oriented and mostly recovered from the worst effects of her stroke.

Early in March 1971, Arthur C. Clarke came through the Bay Area on a lecture tour. On the 16th he had a lecture in Hayward and went home that evening with Dr. Barney and Mrs. Priscilla Oliver, who brought him to Bonny Doon the next day and were invited in for an impromptu lunch. Clarke spent three days with the Heinleins, which gave them as good a chance to get reacquainted as one can in such a short time.

The weeks and months passed. Heinlein had extensive dental surgery done. Reed Sherman negotiated a permanent film option for The Door into Summer, so he wouldn’t have to keep extending it from year to year. Poul Anderson sent them a copy of his new book, Operation Chaos, with a pleasing dedication. The novelettes that made up the book had been appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for several years. The recent ones made the connection to Heinlein’s “Magic, Inc.” even plainer, and his redheaded witch heroine, also named Ginny, made the homage much more pointed—though, as Anderson pointed out, that was just a happy coincidence: The first couple of stories were actually written before the Andersons had met the Heinleins in person.

By June 1971, two cancers were discovered in rough patches of skin on Heinlein’s face. He had a nose cauterization, and the next day the cancers were surgically removed. He had had good luck up to now, but he was nearly sixty-four years old and had to make another lifestyle change: He could go out in the sun only with a hat and long-sleeved shirts from now on.

For Heinlein’s birthday festivities in 1971, the entire Nourse family came down from Seattle for a visit. Just four days later, John W. Campbell, Jr., died. This rock, this anchor, ridiculed and ignored for years, cut everyone in the SF community adrift by his sudden absence. He and Heinlein had not passed more than casual correspondence in many years.

Heinlein gradually recovered the use of his right arm, and it became possible to contemplate some down time for Ginny. The cortisone shots weren’t helping Ginny anymore, and the Stanford clinics had finally come to a definite determination that nothing would help the calcification in her heels but surgery—and that would incapacitate her for three months, it was estimated, from surgery to full recovery. With help, Heinlein could fend more for himself now, and he decided to postpone his own surgery. Although getting and keeping help of any kind that far out in the country was always a problem, they were able to hire a housekeeper-cook and an exceptionally good outdoor handyman-gardener’s assistant at the same time—a minor miracle.

Ginny went into Stanford Medical Center for a simultaneous operation on both heels, on July 23, 1971. She went home on crutches in a week. Heinlein made up the first of the “multicopied” general reports on their health they used in later years and sent them out to about thirty-five of their friends.

Ginny was not a good patient. Initially, she occupied herself sewing and knitting. Their neighbors, Eve and Pete Agur, had been helping out with shopping and some minor errands, for which Ginny wanted to express appreciation with handmade needlework—placemats and napkins she hemmed herself. Left to her own judgment, she would overdo it and have to take more codeine, then when the pain subsided overdo it again. Robert designed—and Leif, their gardener-assistant, built—a bed table like a breakfast tray, able to hold the weight of a portable typewriter (though it sagged in the middle, even reinforced).52 She could plan the day’s meals for the housekeeper and the gardening for the day for Leif (plus another list for Robert). The accumulated mail she piled on the bed beside her.

And, of course, no bed-office setup would be complete without a supply of kittens to randomize the papers.

Heinlein had an entertaining new project to occupy himself: Don Ellis,53 a rock composer who had been commissioned to write a modern jazz-rock opera for the Hamburg Staatsoper, wanted the work to be based on a Heinlein story. Heinlein had always ranged as widely as possible in his writing, with more or less success in different fields. He would not pass up the chance to do an opera libretto. One of their local friends suggested “The Green Hills of Earth” as a likely property. He started work on the libretto on August 23, “The Green Hills of Earth: The Story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways,” and completed seven pages of verse libretto before running into a snag: Ellis didn’t want “The Green Hills of Earth.” He wanted The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

This simply would not work: “It’s just too involved a story,” Ginny later told Leon Stover. “To cut it would ruin it.”54 But Ellis was adamant: He wanted The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress—or nothing.

Nothing it would be, then. Heinlein refused to release the rights to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for this purpose. And that was that.55

Heinlein had one last chore to do before he could have the gallstone/appendix/hernia operation he had been putting off for more than a year: Joe Sencenbaugh, son of their best friends in Colorado Springs, was in the Colorado University Engineering School now and asked for an interview-by-mail for the school’s magazine, Colorado Engineer. Heinlein was glad to help, but the questions Sencenbaugh sent him were really too broad for the size of the interview he had in mind and would take a skilled writer investing a lot of effort to get the answers into a form compact enough for the magazine’s scale.

But this would be worth something post his mortem: This was an opportunity to start building an estate. Their new tax adviser had told them royalties usually tapered off to nothing five years after a writer’s death.

Since I have no insurance and can get none, it is imperative that I create an estate in other ways—real estate, tax-exempt bonds, and—especially—copyrights and common-law rights which may be turned into copyrights … 56

This surgery was scheduled for October 21—their wedding anniversary. Heinlein went into the hospital for prep on October 20. Afterward, he got up from bed without being pressured or cajoled, though he tired easily and slept a great deal during his recuperation. Dana Rohrabacher and David Nolan wrote on November 8, asking him to be present at an organizational meeting for a libertarian political party. Ginny declined for him: He was still too weak.

By December 13, he felt up to writing letters.