5

ALIEN INVASIONS

Robert and Ginny Heinlein spent Labor Day (September 2, 1950) floating 12" × 12" glass bricks on oakum to close the clerestory windows between roof and exterior wall, which would make the house weatherproof. “I am still much badgered by bills, mechanics, unavoidable chores and such,” he wrote to Blassingame, “but I have a place to write and should now be able to resume writing without delay and be able to continue at it fairly steadily.”1

He had two books ready to write any time he could get away from building—but first he had to cut a cat door for the marmalade kitten Ginny had acquired (and named Pixie) just a couple of days after they moved in.2 She had conspired in her stealth cat-acquisition project with G. Harry Stine, a young fan in Colorado Springs. Stine was a hi-fi enthusiast, and Robert set him planning a state-of-the-art stereo system for the house, with concealed speakers and volume controls in every room.3 Stine was also a beginning writer, and Campbell had urged Heinlein to help him out with his writing. “I think quite well of Harry,” Heinlein wrote, “and think that he will make a good writer in time. He is intelligent, willing, and his shortcomings are the limitations of his years. I am giving him such help as I can.”4 (Ginny recalled that Stine ignored everything Heinlein tried to tell him—and sold his first story to Campbell later in 1950.)5

Designing and building your own home lets you customize it to your lifestyle. His and her bathrooms were built into the plan.

Ginny’s bath is not just a place with plumbing. Her sybaritic attitude toward baths matches that of the decadent days of the Roman Empire; her bath is her favorite living room and I designed it most carefully to her tastes.… I heated the tub itself, Japanese style, and brought a big picture window right down to the edge of the tub …

Ginny fills this tub to her chin (it is big enough for four people—six if they are well acquainted), surrounds herself with cigarettes, ash trays, drink, chewing gum, mail, book and book rack, magazines, puts on a stack of records or turns on FM (I piped sound in, with local controls), switches off the telephone—and stays there, happy as a frog, hours at a stretch, surrounded by cats.6

It was around the matter of Ginny’s baths that the Heinleins developed their own private form of telepathy: Ginny would settle into the water and train her mind on Robert to bring the cigarettes she had forgotten, and presently he would turn up with cigarettes and ashtray, almost without fail.7

His own bathroom was more austere, by comparison, and the pictures varied from time to time, from an aquatint of the Taj Mahal, to a waterproofed lithograph titled Medusa.

The place turned out not quite so inaccessible as Heinlein had planned: On one occasion, a fan from out of town—Curtis Casewit—decided to look around the house before knocking on the door and peeked into Ginny’s bathroom, startling her out of the tub with a shriek that brought Robert running in alarm.9

The telephone was the only flaw in an otherwise comfortable life. They had been given a four-party line—a technological affliction fortunately no longer common. A single telephone line is run to four (or more) different houses, so that any incoming call would ring in all the houses—a different ring tone for each party. You could not use the telephone when anyone else was on it—and more gossipy neighbors made a nosy habit of picking up the phone to listen in on other families’ conversations.

One evening, someone was calling every twenty minutes or so, trying to reach a neighbor who wasn’t home, for hours. Ginny could not get to sleep. Presently, Robert took the telephone and lay down on the bed next to her and began, calmly and methodically, going up the chain of command from operator to supervisor to department head, asking for a better grade of service—and being turned down, and going up the next step in the chain.

Somehow he was put in touch with the regional vice president for Mountain States Telephone, who was vacationing at Sun Valley. The man was outraged that anyone should call him at this ungodly hour—and Robert pleasantly agreed with him. That, he explained, was exactly the problem: Somebody else’s caller was keeping his wife awake. By the time he was finished, the man agreed to upgrade their service—a private line to be installed the next day.10

While they were smoothing out the bumps in their new life, the Heinleins also got to know some of their neighbors. Ginny had particularly taken to the nearest, Doc and Lucky Herzberger. Lucky was a lively blonde who rode show horses and kidded Ginny about her effete Central Park riding background. They received impromptu dinner invitations from the Herzbergers, and they learned to “dress for dinner” automatically, since they never knew what they would find—a cozy dinner en famille (Lucky’s signature hot dog dinner) or a carefully orchestrated “society” dinner for thirty.

Heinlein grumbled about the dinner dress at first. His formal wear was all heavy serge fabric with the severe Navy cut. Ginny took him to a good tailor and got him outfitted with lighter, tropical-weight evening wear. After that he delighted in dressing for dinner whenever possible.11

Heinlein’s start on The Puppet Masters was delayed by a very strange crisis: He got a letter from Sam Kamens, his lawyer-friend in Los Angeles, dated September 18, 1950, saying that Cats Sang (Mrs. Henry Sang)—his friend from Philadelphia during World War II—was trying to reach Leslyn’s cousin, Marian Beard. Over the summer, starting on July Fourth, Leslyn was in the hospital following a series of strokes.12 The most recent one had put her in a very bad way, and Cats was trying to locate Leslyn’s only surviving relative. The doctors gave Leslyn only a week to live and Cats was trying to assure that the body would not be shipped to Heinlein in Colorado Springs. That mystified him:

I can see from Cats’ note that she felt that she was acting in my best interests. I appreciate the good thoughts. However I did not see it that way from what information was available to me … She [Leslyn] married Mocabee in November 1949—why in the world would anyone ship Mrs. Mocabee’s body to me? And who would do so? Mr. Mocabee?13

Further complicating matters, Cats had contacted Heinlein’s mother before reaching Sam Kamens, so the non-event continued to reverberate through his family and acquaintances in Southern California.14

On October 1, 1950, Heinlein was finally able to settle into the writing of his flying saucer book, The Puppet Masters. It went very rapidly—100,000 words of draft in about five weeks. It was turning out a very timely book.

During World War II, pilots had reported seeing unidentifiable “foo fighters” in the sky. For the last year or so, since 1947, flying saucers and strange blue lights in the sky had attained almost the status of a craze, particularly in the late-summer “silly season.”15 The media were making their own kind of “alien invasion” story: Alger Hiss’s first trial in July of 1949 (which had ended, in a hung jury, on Heinlein’s forty-second birthday), was the start of a period when Congress, the FBI, and the newspapers, too, were doing their best to whip up hysteria about “Communist infiltrators.” Hiss, just convicted of spying for Stalin, had been a very high official in the State Department (he was with Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference five years earlier). There were, in fact, Communist spies working at the highest levels of the U.S. government. This was a genuine—and a very serious—problem, which needed to be dealt with forthrightly, and so far as Heinlein was concerned, the hysteria was only getting in the way of the real job:

Spies have had access to top secret information, and loyal men are being prevented from working where they can do the most good through ‘guilt by association’ and other methods having roughly the scientific accuracy of witch smelling. It’s ridiculous!16

The arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in August that year (very minor cogs in the Soviet espionage network) showed very plainly that even unsuspected neighbors might be aliens in disguise, working to enslave you.17

Even some of his old liberal friends had drifted away from the Jeffersonian eternal-vigilance-is-the-price-of-liberty that was the core of Heinlein’s values.18 Perhaps the drift had been there all along, and it took a touchstone issue like this Hiss-Rosenberg thing to cast the erosion into sharp relief.19

It was not just some drift in some of his friends: He could see evidence everywhere he looked. Since the war, there were too many bleeding hearts—some of them in very unexpected places. Earlier in the year he had let John Arwine have it with both barrels, over trying to salvage a Communist:

I can’t go along with your thesis that your friend is a brand to be snatched from the burning. Dammit, John, anybody who hasn’t got the horse sense to see the stupidity, the asininity and the contradictions of Communism by April 1950, is not a brand to be snatched from the burning no matter what other talents he may possess. He’s too damn stupid, quit wasting your time. Don’t take that as advice, but simply as emotional blow-off.20

With The Puppet Masters, Heinlein was “in tune with the Zeitgeist.” It was worth the effort to create his “thinly-disguised allegory, a diatribe against totalitarianism in all its forms.”21

He couldn’t do anything about the state of the culture. What he could do was to keep putting solid American liberal values before his readers, children and adults—“love of personal freedom and an almost religious respect for the dignity of the individual.”22

Horace Gold, who was editing a new SF magazine, Galaxy, had sent him the first two issues to entice him into letting Galaxy have “Pandora’s Box,” the predictions article Cosmopolitan had commissioned, then abandoned. At first, Heinlein tried to talk Gold out of it: That one had been written for an audience of clubwomen and would look hopelessly naïve in a science-fiction magazine. It would be an embarrassment.23

But Gold knew what he wanted and thought Heinlein was high-hatting him—sneering at Galaxy. He had “heard” from unidentified sources that Heinlein would not sell except to the slicks anymore.24 No, Blassingame—then Heinlein himself—assured Gold, just the opposite: He wanted his debut in Galaxy to show him at top of form.25

Gold was firm: The field was changing in ways Heinlein might not see; and a predictions article written for a general audience was exactly right for Galaxy in 1950.26

It was a mystery to Heinlein, but “the customer is always right.” “Pandora’s Box” went to Gold “as is.”

By the time Heinlein was ready to send out his most “adult” novel, The Puppet Masters (December 2, 1950), he was wrestling with an interesting request from the editor of Child Life, a magazine for very small children, to write stories that could take his audience down to the six-year-old level. The technical restrictions were even more difficult than those for the juveniles—800-word stories using a vocabulary of about 250 words. The payment for each individual story was small—only $30—but the secondary and reprint markets for these things could make up for the low initial sale. He worked out a possible plot for a serial and agreed to think about it.

In the meantime, he had to get all the writing done that he could, before Ginny was called up for the Korean War and he would need to take off to be her camp-follower. He shut his ears to the war news and pushed out another “Puddin’” short story for Senior Prom, “The Bulletin Board.”27

The same considerations were driving the house-building: He had to write the next boys’ book for Scribner in order to get enough money to hire the necessary trades—and of course that meant he was tied to the typewriter and could not build. “If I ever try to build a house again,” he told Blassingame, “I hope they lock me up first.”28

It initially looked as if he had succeeded too well at The Puppet Masters: It was too creepy. The Post passed on it, as did Collier’s, which had just bought its own alien invasion story, the science-fiction horror classic The Day of the Triffids by “John Wyndham”.

The readers for Doubleday downchecked The Puppet Masters as “squeamish” and said that “no woman would read it,”29 but Walter Bradbury, the editor at Doubleday, overruled them: It was hitting its target audience, if maybe a little rough. Bradbury asked for a little cutting, from 90,000 words to 75,000 words, and a little softening of the sexual titillation and the horror elements.30

In January 1951, Heinlein received a dozen scripts from the Tom Corbett show that had been airing since October and found they did not carry a credit for the book.31 He still had the option of trying to get a card on the show, but what he saw appalled him:32

The show is so moronic, the motivations and implied ethical standards so false that I can conceive of no circumstances under which I would want my name mentioned in connection with this show. I am satisfied to take my thirty pieces of silver and remain anonymous.33

When it came time to assemble the manuscripts and tearsheets for his second Future History collection for Shasta, The Green Hills of Earth and Other Stories, the line editor for this project, Ted Dikty, asked for some minor revisions for continuity—and some major revisions to bring “‘We Also Walk Dogs’” into the Future History (Korshak had simply listed it in the original contract).

Heinlein put his foot down: He was at the end of his rope with Korshak. Among other things, he could not get Korshak to answer routine business correspondence, and Korshak had recently added insult to injury: When Heinlein found out that Korshak had granted a Braille right instead of forwarding the request to him, as any normal publisher would have done, he became coldly furious.34 “This incident,” he wrote to Ditky, “typifies why it is so distasteful to do business with you people: you do not even have the grace to permit an author to perform his own acts of charity.”35

If he could manage it, Heinlein wanted out of the contract with Shasta. But he sent the manuscripts on January 15. He had elected, he told his agent, to try to achieve a more professional, arm’s-length relationship, rather than force an arbitration on the contract at this time.36

Shasta was not his only problem. He had expected royalties to start coming in from Destination Moon before Christmas, but no word came from Rathvon. Heinlein didn’t have any hard numbers to go on yet, but a rough calculation based on number of theaters times showings per day times average ticket price suggested the film must have broken even by now.

At the six-month mark, the initial release showed no signs of fading: Their $1.8 million baby was making a strong showing. Heinlein got a notification from George Pal Productions that they were up for an Oscar: The art director, Ernst Fegté, had submitted three scenes to the SFX (Special Effects) Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—“Take Off,” “Rescue,” and “Landing on the Moon.”

The prestige was tremendous—and exactly how many square feet of drywall would the honor get up?

Everybody involved with The Puppet Masters was acting somewhat “cracked.” Blassingame had submitted the book to Galaxy, since Gold’s rates were competitive. And Gold wanted it—and he didn’t want it—or something a little like it, perhaps. Heinlein could cope with the request to cut the story—sixty thousand words was about right for a pulp serial—and he knew he would have to cut some of the titillation for magazines, but Blassingame agreed the revisions Gold wanted were excessive. “In fact,” Heinlein wrote Blassingame,

… they amount to an order for an entirely new book, one bearing a vague relationship to the one in existence but requiring complete rewriting with new incidents, new complication, a vastly different plot and a different solution.37

Some of Gold’s criticisms might be addressed by the editing Walter Bradbury wanted done for Doubleday—tone down the horror and tone down the “prurience” (though the book scarcely ever rose above the level of titillation). Heinlein asked for some more specific guidance: What exactly was Doubleday looking for? Bradbury startled (and dismayed) him when he said, “You’ve got to remember your juvenile audience, and you’ve got to recall you’re writing for them.”38 This particular book could not possibly be reoriented to a juvenile audience: It was a horror story for adults, from the ground up. “I have caught myself neatly in a trap,” he told Ginny, “one of my own devising, by writing for juveniles and trying to write for adults at the same time and under the same name.”39

And then Leslyn surfaced again, with no sign of her supposed brush with death—though whether in some sense “recovered” was an open question.

Leslyn had written to them, direct to Mesa Avenue, late in 1950—“all sweetness and light to us”40—but it became clear that letters she sent to his friends and business associates were another matter: Doña Smith (the former Doña Campbell) mentioned receiving one and, at Heinlein’s request, sent it on to him in February 195141—a classic poison-pen letter in the venomous mode of Leslyn’s dead mother. Heinlein read it with amazement, mounting to alarm, changing to disgust. Disgust gave way to sorrow and then to an abyss of pity: His Leslyn, his Piglet, was finally and completely gone, the once-beloved body possessed by the untidy ghost of her mother.

I had hoped that time would eventually make me of little importance in her mind but apparently her hatred of me is even stronger than ever.…42

I married a sweet and intelligent girl back in 1932, twenty years ago. The first five years were happy on the whole, though I should have spotted the storm warnings. The second five years were kept pleasant in part only by difficult adjustments—and by the fact that we were too poor to give her much leeway—or much liquor. The third five years are better left undescribed. I learned to smile no matter what happened. After the war I tried very hard and with expense no object to get at the root of the trouble. I failed and became desperate and did many foolish things and estranged many of my friends. But once I was away from her I got well in a hurry, almost at once. I have often wondered to what extent my own acts or omissions contributed to her illness. “Not much” is my honest belief; I think it was latent in her, from her mother; I think it simply took a number of years for it to develop.43

Everyone was getting Leslyn’s poison-pen letters—friends and former friends, editors and publishers, even Lurton Blassingame. Heinlein had been through this cycle before, too many times, and knew there was no point even in entertaining hope: His best strategy was to make no reply at all.

Through experience with her and very similar experiences with her mother I have found that the only defense, poor as it is, is silence, complete silence, and a refusal to offer defense or explanation even when she manages to convince some third party … This last letter doesn’t look to me as if it could fool anybody—and yet I would venture a guess that she could be quite convincing in her more lucid moments.44

Nor was Leslyn the only source of confusion that spring. Not quite a year after L. Ron Hubbard’s book was published, Dianetics seemed to be generating a lot of attention in the world at large—but it also seemed to be imploding. Heinlein mildly characterized the troubles he was hearing about as “growing pains” in a letter to John Campbell on February 26, 1951, and Campbell reported back that the California organization had come under attack by Communists—focused on Sara Northrup Hubbard.45 It was hard to tell what was actually going on: The gossip Heinlein received from friends on both coasts was confusing. Heinlein was too busy to delve deeply into the issue in any case; spring was coming on, and he would soon be able to hire trades and get the interior of the house finished—always assuming the Army didn’t get all the skilled construction workers. The invasion of South Korea was almost a year old now, and yet, there was still no sign of a definite commitment on President Truman’s part or Congress’s—and thus still no telling when Ginny might be called up. As he got the major manuscripts done, Heinlein dealt with business matters that had accumulated, so he could go back to house-building.

Alice Dalgliesh was happy with Between Planets—mostly (though a little dubious about the ambiguous boy-meets-girl subplot that Heinlein had put in because he was actually getting more fan mail about these books from girls than from boys).46

Doubleday asked him to edit a science-fiction anthology for their line (science-fiction anthologies were selling better than novels at the time).47 Heinlein initially turned them down flat, but Blassingame persuaded him that the continuing exposure would be good for keeping up name recognition. Doubleday offered to have Fred and Judith (Merril) Pohl run down the rights, with Walter Bradbury overseeing the project. Reluctantly, Heinlein agreed, and that started a months-long cycle of reading and passing tearsheets back and forth with his other three editors and discussing the contents. By August 1951 the project was under way, and Heinlein’s main contact, Truman Talley, reported “The team play between Fred and Judy, Brad, and ourselves is going along without a hitch.”48

The previous summer, a deal had been negotiated with New American Library to take all of his books to paperback under the Signet imprint (Sixth Column to be retitled The Day After Tomorrow, since the pre–World War II reference in the title was no longer topical). Blassingame included the Shasta books with the deal, but with the advances and royalties paid directly to Heinlein. Heinlein then forwarded to Shasta their contractual share of the advances. It was a pain to do things in reverse—the author pay the publisher instead of the other way around—but he was already doing this with secondary rights for the stories they had under contract. It was the only practical way he could work out to reduce the free-for-all grabbing of his rights. “Shasta is entitled under contract to a percentage split in this matter; there Shasta’s interest ends, and I intend to keep it that way.”49

However, Heinlein did not yet understand that Shasta could not be reined in: Korshak was already selling secondary rights without telling him or paying for them, and he had just sold an anthology right to SF editor Don Wollheim for “Life-Line.”50

This was not a problem unique to Shasta, though Korshak was by far the worst offender of whom Heinlein had experience—an unacceptable degree of casualness about other peoples’ property rights seemed endemic among the fan press publishers: Fantasy Press’s agent, Abe Klein, had negotiated a reprint sale of Beyond This Horizon to Grosset & Dunlap, with an introduction by Groff Conklin, without even telling Heinlein about it. Heinlein did not like either side of this deal. In the first place, Fantasy Press did not have the contractual right to make a secondary sale of the book;51 in the second place, he thought Grosset & Dunlap’s “SF Classic” line of books flimsy and unattractive.52

And in the third place, he had avoided being associated with Groff Conklin since the Crown anthology. Immediately after the war, Conklin was just a little too willing to tolerate and even justify Stalin for Heinlein’s taste.53 When Conklin wanted another story for a new anthology—“Columbus Was a Dope”—they had a little frank conversation on the subject and cleared the air. It appeared that Conklin had modified his uncritical political positions, and Heinlein felt he could now work with Conklin. “I may be mistaken,” he wrote to his agent, “but I propose to give him the benefit of the doubt. Just the same, these soft heads have put this country in danger much more than the outright Russian agents.”54

A smart man learns from experience; a wise man learns from the experience of others. As of 1951, Heinlein learned he was still only “smart” when it came to management of his business affairs. Tom Corbett had already spun off comic books and a newspaper strip as of April 1951, and the merchandising rights to the “Space Cadet” name he had essentially given away began coining money for the show’s producers as their space suits and ray guns became what Newsweek magazine called “a national craze.”55 Over the summer, Blassingame reported: “I also heard that the space suit[s] are selling madly; the police had to be invoked to save a Los Angeles store the day they went on sale there and the kids were lined up for blocks.” He concluded ruefully: “Too bad we didn’t hold on to these rights or demand a lot more cash for them.”56

Heinlein had already shrugged it off philosophically:

As to the commercial rights, money is a relative thing. I can remember once being terribly hard up for fifty cents—stranded, broke, and hungry. I remember another occasion when I hocked my (sacred!) Annapolis class ring for seven dollars. At the time the money they paid me for the commercial rights was ransom money which got me out of a most unpleasant hole. I don’t regret it for myself but it may not have been fair to you in the long run.57

Blassingame kept delivering royalties and advances, and construction on the house moved along. At one point in May 1950, though, H. L. Gold was weeks late with his payment for the Puppet Masters serial, and the finances became “iffy.” A few weeks later, the squeeze had become critical:

H.L. Gold’s delay in paying off on Puppet Masters is becoming quite embarrassing—if he does not get the money to me by this coming Friday the 25th, I’ll probably have to let my mechanics go (and God knows when I’ll be able to get them back!). This housebuilding game is wonderful—just like pouring money into the sea.58

Blassingame wired them $500 out of the blue, which Heinlein later concluded had been a loan, or advance, out of pocket. It was a good risk, though: Three days later, the prestige general-fiction magazine Blue Book took the serial rights for Between Planets, which they would retitle “Planets in Combat” when it came out in September and October.

In May 1951, John Campbell resigned from the Dianetics organizations. His “explanations” were hard to follow: When the subject came up in letters, it sounded as though he was accusing Hubbard of ideological impurity or counter-revolutionary tendencies or something.59 Isaac Asimov undoubtedly put his finger on an important factor in the split, in a witticism widely quoted at the time and repeated often since: “I knew Campbell, and I knew Hubbard, and no movement can have two Messiahs.”60

The science-fiction field was expanding explosively in 1951—radio, television, comic books—and Heinlein was contacted by a woman who wanted to adapt Red Planet as a stage play for the Tenth National Play Competition sponsored by Seattle Junior Programs, Inc. It was not a medium he had much interest in himself, but he wished Minta Meier good luck with the contest as he granted and then next year renewed rights for her one-hour-and-forty-minute adaptation.61

In the meantime, Shasta had been too quiet. Korshak had again refused to let Heinlein see corrected proofs, and on June 26, 1951 (just a week after Heinlein had sold a radio right for “Green Hills” for the Dimension X program), a delivery man showed up on the Heinleins’ doorstep with eleven cartons of advance-order copies of The Green Hills of Earth and Other Stories for him to autograph—shipping charges COD. Heinlein refused delivery: He was not contractually obligated to pay Shasta’s shipping charges.62 A month later, the cartons came back, shipping prepaid this time, both ways. He looked the books over before starting to sign them and found Shasta had changed the order of the stories and had not made some of the proofreading corrections. Even more embarrassing, they had dumped the introduction L. Sprague de Camp had written and substituted a new one written by Mark Reinsberg. That angered him more than any wrong done directly to him. Reinsberg was a friend, too,63 so there was nothing wrong about that—but it was a slap in de Camp’s face. Heinlein wrote to de Camp:

Sprague, I see that Korshak (a man always full of little surprises) has substituted an introduction by an ex-fan named Mark Reinsberg in The Green Hills of Earth for the wonderful introduction you wrote. Can you tell me what happened? Korshak never tells me anything; he just goes ahead and does things—the fait accompli is his Standard Operating Procedure and he rarely answers my letters.…

His infinite variety in thinking up new ways to be an unbearable jerk continues to amaze me. They range from “selling” rights of mine not controlled by Shasta to long-distance phone calls in the middle of the night. His latest stunt is to refuse to honor author’s corrections over proof. Grrr!64

Blassingame just wanted to clean up the immediate mess: He suggested that Heinlein sign the books, send them back to Shasta, and start an arbitration when he was next in New York. Business was booming, and that’s where Heinlein’s time and attention should be going:65 The Post wanted another Heinlein story; the Doubleday anthology was shaping up after a time-consuming but rewarding round of reading and correspondence about its contents; and foreign rights and anthology reprint requests were coming in steadily. Martin Greenberg had recently requested “Columbus Was a Dope,” too, for a Gnome Press anthology—the same story Groff Conklin had wanted. Heinlein was a little mystified at the demand for that story: “The story was slanted for the general magazines and intended for the public rather than the regular readers of science fiction … it will seem like pretty thin beer to the jaded appetites of the s-f afficianados [sic].”66 If all Greenberg wanted was the drawing power of Heinlein’s name on his contents list, Heinlein was not inclined to cooperate: He told Blassingame to offer it under the “Lyle Monroe” name. If it somehow turned out Greenberg wanted the story, Blassingame could give him the Heinlein name gratis: “I’m often wrong; if he believes in the story … I’ll back him with my own name.”67 Heinlein was wrong—or at least Greenberg so convinced him: “Columbus Was a Dope” appeared in the Gnome Press anthology Travelers in Space later that year. The many mansions of science fiction had added several new tracts of public housing since the war, and Heinlein’s fluff-for-John-Q.-Public was not merely accepted, but had become part of the way science fiction presented itself to the public.

Now that the house was done, they had had their first house guests (a very unsuccessful visit from Bill and Lucy Corson early in August 195168). The house-building had drawn local attention. The Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph sent a stringer, Dorothy Shanahan, to get an extensive interview with both of them, and ran an article that went on for pages, heavily illustrated with photographs, mostly of Ginny and her proud possession of a “push-button” home. The built-ins and amenities were sources of gushing wonder, as was the sound system G. Harry Stine had helped build into every room in the house, with independent controls in each room. Shanahan seemed particularly fascinated by Ginny’s dining table on wheels.69

The article appeared on September 30, 1951, as they were ramping up for their first real opportunity to entertain in their new home: They hosted a wedding reception of G. Harry Stine and Barbara Kauth, his college sweetheart, before the newlyweds had to take off for New Mexico and Hank’s brand-new job as a rocket engineer at White Sands.70

It might have been the newspaper article that brought the Heinlein house to the attention of Popular Mechanics. In November 1951 PM sent their Western editor (and photographer) Tom Stimson (who had written their very flattering coverage of Destination Moon in 1950), to do a similar piece. Stimson’s article appeared in the June 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics.

The Stimson interview had been a welcomed break from the Martian Mowgli story, which had gone sour on Robert after he got an introduction on paper.71 He put it aside and cranked out an idea that had been tickling in the back of his mind since Robert Cornog had loaned him a copy of Cycles in 1949—a book on cycles of all kinds—sunspots, cicadas, economic cycles, women’s hemlines, and so forth.72 A number of unrelated cycles were scheduled to peak—or trough—simultaneously in 1952.73 “The Year of the Jackpot” would be topical, if a little depressing, since he imagined a rather permanent bottoming-out of all humanity’s cycles while everyone around his protagonist goes nuts.

It seemed like a timely idea,74 but the story bounced around a few times until Blassingame offered it to Galaxy in October 1951. Gold wanted it—but he asked for so many and so substantial revisions that it would have essentially required Heinlein to write a new story (the happy ending Gold wanted was particularly problematical). Heinlein told him “no” on the revisions, adding privately to Blassingame: “Gold is such a fusser and tinkerer that I believe that sales to him are worth while only on a take-it-or-leave-it-basis—and I think he will buy on that basis.”75 And if not … Street & Smith had just changed its policy to buy only serial rights. Campbell was an editor he knew he could work with.

By October 1951, the first two installments of The Puppet Masters were out. Heinlein was appalled at how much editorial fiddling Gold had done with it—he had gone through the manuscript like a steamroller: “Gold turns out to be a copy messer-upper; there is hardly a paragraph which he has not ‘improved’—and I am fit to be tied.”76 Heinlein was particularly agitated about the wholesale destruction of his carefully built-up prosodic effects. He didn’t have high style going for him, he wrote to Gold; all he had to give the consumer was his “voice,” his effects, “as calculated as a whore’s sighs—and it is my whole stock in trade.”

A word misused on p. 10 and again on 73 does not have its intended effect until it is again used on p. 213—and then damn it! somebody comes along with a blue pencil and takes it out as unnecessary on 10! It was unnecessary on 10, but it wasn’t 10 I was shooting at; it was 213.… I am aiming at certain built-up emotional effects and I don’t want the style to be noticed as such.77

Gold acknowledged that his editing was obtrusive here. Perhaps he was distracted by Galaxy’s change of ownership over the summer—in any case it wouldn’t happen again. He restored the language for the third installment—thereby, of course, compounding the mess.78

Now that the foreword to the Doubleday anthology (Tomorrow, the Stars)79 was turned in and “Year of the Jackpot” was sold, Heinlein had a little time. Ben Babb had come up with an angle that might rescue their Abbott and Costello treatment, reslanting it to the new comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. It wouldn’t require any substantial commitment of time; Heinlein took a few days off and went to Denver to record a radio program at the KOA radio station for the kids’ book review show Dalgliesh had recommended to him, Carnival of Books.80 Its host, Miss Ruth Harshaw, had arranged for four boys to talk about his latest juvenile. The boys made a fine panel, and the experience was undoubtedly enhanced when Miss Harshaw said her favorite was Red Planet.81 Thereafter he made opportunities to appear on Carnival of Books whenever he could manage it.

A TV adaptation of “Ordeal in Space” (Heinlein’s Future History story about an agoraphobe who cures himself by rescuing a kitten on a ledge) aired on CBS’s Out There program on November 4, 1951.82 The adaptation was made by “Edward Waldo,” which might have been a pseudonym of Theodore “Ted” Sturgeon, whose family name (and his birth name) was Waldo. Rod Steiger appeared in this episode. Over the summer of 1951, just before the Green Hills of Earth books arrived on Heinlein’s doorstep, Sturgeon was involved in setting up a “writers cooperative,” Tomorrow Is Yours, Inc., to provide content for a television series under development.83 The producer wanted the best of science fiction, and Heinlein was one of the first fourteen writer-members Sturgeon asked to participate. Heinlein looked over Sturgeon’s prospectus and noticed some flaws in the setup. He did not think the contract was salvageable and wrote a detailed analysis—and then a shorter, “fluff” letter to let Sturgeon down easy that he wasn’t going to be participating. He gave both letters to his agent and let him make the decision which to send.84 Blassingame opted to send the longer letter, on the theory that Sturgeon could get some practical use out of the analysis.85

Heinlein was writing a new story, about using psychics—telepaths, clairvoyants, telekinetics—as weapons of war, but it got away from him. He finally wrestled “Nightmare Race” to a close at 14,000 words and struggled to cut it to a more saleable length.86 In a month he went from 56 pages to 34, to 31 and finally to 28 pages, changing the title to “Project Nightmare”—and the first editor who saw it (Knox Burger at Collier’s) said it was frantic and read as if it had been cut too much.87 (Also, the war scare with the Soviet Union was passé.) None of the slicks, then none of the reputable magazines would take it. In 1951 Heinlein was still laboring under the impression that science-fiction magazines would not be interested in material written for a general audience.88 The story was never offered to Campbell, for example—who in any case did not develop an interest in psionics until years later. Howard Browne purchased it for Fantastic, the new sister magazine for Amazing, but Fantastic ceased publication and it wound up at Amazing, where it was published in the April–May 1953 combined issue.89

Ginny noted thoughtfully that he had spent more time on those two stories—“The Year of the Jackpot” and “Project Nightmare”—than he had on any of his books and earned only a fraction as much.90 Heinlein realized she was right and took the conclusion as his own:

… purely from the standpoint of economics a novel with a slow, steady sale is more rewarding in the long run than a large number of short stories later gathered as a book. On the other hand, literary reputation is more enhanced by short stories widely anthologized. But the collection [Opus] #87 [Green Hills of Earth] cumulatively represents more than two years of hard work while this one novel [Between Planets] represents less than 2 months work. I have concluded that I need novels to eat on and shorts for display purposes.91

For nearly a year they had been “eating on” the royalties from Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. That November, the Kellogg’s company held an executive conference at the nearby Broadmoor resort:

… Kenyon & Eckhardt, the adv agency which has Space Cadet from Rockhill Radio, is presenting a supercolossal (!) spread of the TV show, etc., to them. I am helping out with exhibits and some sort of a talk. An odd sort of a clambake but I will do my best to be helpful.92

It would also be a chance to see special screenings of some Tom Corbett episodes on kinescope. He saw nothing that caused him to change his position.

Neither did the news about L. Ron Hubbard. The rumor mill was starting up again: Heinlein heard, for example, that Hubbard was paralyzed and hiding out somewhere in the Midwest. “I doubt very much the rumor about Ron being paralyzed,” he wrote to Robert Cornog. “I have heard from him a few times. He is living in Wichita and—by his statement—is doing some flying.”93 In fact, their mutual friend John Arwine had had a long, rambling phone call from Hubbard recently.94

And while the initial organization was imploding, Dianetics “auditing” was taking over science-fiction fandom, as a parlor game played like one of the old “Freuding” parties of the 1920s.95

Heinlein had no time to investigate or play parlor games with his head: By November 1951 it was time to start his annual boys’ book for Scribner, and he didn’t have even the glimmering of an idea. Heinlein asked Ginny what he should write about.

“Why don’t you write about a pair of mischievous twins,” she suggested, “always getting into trouble”96 (Ginny had always been fascinated by twins). Robert S. Richardson had written recently, wanting to see more of a minor character in Red Planet—the boy student-businessman at the school. Heinlein combined the two ideas and split the Red Planet boy into twins. He started on the story that would become The Rolling Stones, giving it a light, realistic treatment like a Post story—or a series of Post stories—following a middle-class (well, upper-middle-class) family on their grand tour of the Solar System.

Since he worked until very late at night, and Ginny got up very early, Heinlein had developed the habit of leaving the pages he had just finished on the kitchen counter for her before going to bed. Once Ginny had her OJ starter, she read the new pages, and later, Heinlein would collect any notes she had made for him.

Ginny was finally beginning to be comfortable in what she saw as her role in Robert’s process. She could give him a place to start, and that was what he mainly needed. Heinlein was more emphatic: He told her she had given him his “finish” as a professional writer, her marginal notes on his draft always carefully pinpointing stylistic or grammatical awkwardnesses, or lack of clarity in his expression.97 Heinlein formed a habit of asking her before each writing session what he ought to write about next—and almost always she would be able to come up with an idea he could use.

The book was turning into a comedy—not the kind of thing he felt most comfortable with—so he had to work hard on his family of seven intelligent, engaging people.98 His characters and situations came from many different sources: Having the boys sell bicycles in space was his own idea,99 as was the alien species of affectionate pets—flat cats, based on Ellis Butler Parker’s comic short story “Pigs Is Pigs.”100

Ginny dreamed up the red-headed twins; I provided the other characters; we both provided incident. I did not need to draw on the Gilbreths; I am one of seven children. Dr. Stone combined my mother and her father, an M.D. As to the baby who plays chess well at four, that’s myself in that aspect—my Grandfather, Dr. Lyle, was my playmate at that age; I played a better game of chess then than I do now. Children’s minds are just as competent as adults for abstract reasoning and they have less to distract them—the world has not yet crowded in.

Hazel combined my Aunt Bam, an old heller who died at 99 and was forever traveling, and my Aunt Anna, a professor of history, who is still living at 78, having retired at 76. She’s tough and she’s brilliant and she has a whim of iron.”101

Roger Stone, paterfamilias, sounds like Heinlein again, in his “Daddy” persona from the Puddin’ stories, who played straight man for everyone else.

He finished the draft of The Rolling Stones a couple of days before Christmas and found that his usual “tightening-up” edit—striking unnecessary phrases, surplus adjectives, and so forth—was almost not needed this time. The draft manuscript was so clean that, except for a few pages, it would not even have to be retyped.

There were several minor matters that needed attention before the end of the year. The payout from Destination Moon was nearly two months overdue. Unless one of the story sales came through, he would not have enough cash to pay his taxes. He might have to mortgage the house—a very unpleasant prospect, since it was essentially borrowing to pay current expenses. But he considered it because he was “anxious to get off the hook as soon as may be; I don’t like to owe money—it makes me feel mildly dishonest.”102

And there was another thing: Over the last few months, he had developed twinges and pains in his gut and his bottom. His health was otherwise good, but he feared this might be cancer. Exploratory surgery was scheduled at a cancer clinic early in January. He sent the Rolling Stones manuscript to Blassingame on December 31, 1951, and went into the hospital on New Year’s Day 1952. His surgery was the next day.