7

OUT AND ABOUT

Some months back, Stan Mullen, a local Colorado Springs science-fiction colleague, had shared a historical curiosity over dinner, when the conversation turned to what Heinlein would write about for his next boys’ book for Scribner:1 a China clipper had set sail from its home port, Boston, in the nineteenth century and come back, years later, with a former cabin boy commanding the ship as its captain.2 A story grew around the idea in January 19533—imagining a future for space technology in which starships could be as out of touch as were nineteenth-century whaling ships. Heinlein decided the boy had lied to get into space in the first place—and the ending would necessarily be the decision to take his punishment and live with the consequences as an adult.

There were problems to be cleared, though, before he could begin writing Starman Jones. Shasta was already trying to sell paperback rights for the third Future History book, even though Heinlein had so far refused to sign the contract for it. Even Blassingame’s patience had run out; he found out Shasta’s own attorneys were disgusted with them, since Korshak was ignoring their recommendations. Also, it developed, the Grosset & Dunlap contract Fantasy Press had placed for Beyond This Horizon was throwing a monkey wrench into the negotiations with NAL for paperback rights.

But not everything was in turmoil: Rockhill Radio found a partial sponsor for the Tom Corbett TV show and might be able to go back into production. Even with Jack and Blanche Williamson in for an overnight visit—welcomed houseguests—Heinlein was able to write an introduction for editor Sam Mines who was assembling an anthology for his magazine, The Best from Startling Stories. Mines could use any boost Heinlein’s name might be able to give: SF was booming in 1953, with more than forty new magazine titles on the newsstands—stiff competition. Later in the year, A. P. White (“Anthony Boucher”) and Mick McComas gave Mines’s anthology a good review in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—and promptly asked for a Heinlein piece they could use for their own annual anthology. Heinlein felt he had to decline: It would stir up animosity with both John Campbell and H. L. Gold:

For strictly personal reasons (not business) I will never let either one of them know that I think your book [F & SF] outclasses theirs. For me, it would be too much like telling a fond parent that his child is homely and stupid—or that the child next door is prettier and brighter.… Which makes me look like a heel [but] I wish to avoid even the suggestion of choosing between friends—

(If your magazine actually were a stinker and you were both financially insecure in consequence, I could easily be persuaded. I would prevaricate or lie for a friend gladly.…)4

Heinlein was able to start Starman Jones on February 2, 1953, and finish up on February 28, averaging twenty-three hundred words a day and working without an outline, even through distractions: Mick and Annette McComas visited in Colorado Springs for a day in the middle of the month.5 And John Campbell was writing distracting letters about his break with Hubbard’s Dianetics project, saying Hubbard was a “first rate mystic” but an “erratic investigator.”6

On the day Heinlein wrote “The End” on his draft manuscript, principal photography of Project Moonbase wrapped at the RKO studios in Los Angeles.

With the boys’ book finished and the TV series out of the way, Heinlein set arbitration with Shasta in motion, dealt with a proposal from Gnome Press for another collection of novellas (that ultimately never went anywhere), and scheduled another hospital stay for the middle of March, for the last of the series of reconstructive plastic surgeries that would take care of the botched wartime hemorrhoid operation.

But things kept coming up all month, and he kept putting off the surgery. Rip van Ronkel wrote saying he had hired a lawyer to sue Pal for collection, and that set off a round of investigation as to whether he should join the suit. Rex was promoted to full colonel. The student newspaper from Heinlein’s old high school, Central High in Kansas City, contacted him for a long-distance interview … there was simply no way he could take time out to recuperate from surgery now. It had to wait until the first week in April.

Leslyn somehow heard about his planned operation and incorporated it into another round of poison-pen letters that went out to as many of Heinlein’s colleagues and friends as she could reach in 1952 and 1953. Heinlein asked friends to send him any such letters they received from Leslyn and began collecting a file of them, in case he should have to defend the lawsuit she threatened.7

John Campbell wrote psychologizing his hospital stay as a workaholic in need of a vacation. “Slow down a bit, don’t have so much pleasure on pure effort, and you’ll have less flu, and fewer visits to the hospital. The net result will be greater total effort-output.”8

Robert was a little exasperated:—H. L. Gold had made similar comments, psychoanalyzing his “bottomry” and enough was too much. He wrote firmly to Campbell:

Now about your long-distance diagnosis of my “troubles”—in the first place I practically don’t have any, being solvent, happy, and in excellent health. I’ve merely been busy from having my time wasted by a Hollywood producer who has no sense of clock or calendar … This was further complicated by flu—but it was the first time I had been ill in four years.…

Still I do intend to slow down and relax. I have spent five years scratching to make up for having been cleaned out financially. I have now recovered the lost ground and then some; I can do pretty much as I please.9

By late March, Alice Dalgliesh had reviewed Starman Jones and told Blassingame she wanted some changes. Her complaint was that the Montgomery character, who nearly beat the boy the first time he met him, was too pulp-villainish. She thought it would be more believable if the conflict built up over a period of weeks or months. The last chapter she also thought a little rushed.10

Heinlein was not convinced that the changes Miss Dalgliesh wanted were either necessary or desirable. In a letter to Blassingame,11 he explained that trying to accommodate a slow buildup of a bad home situation might have been right for Huckleberry Finn, but these juveniles had a much smaller scale. That kind of slowdown would destroy the balance and pacing of the first half of the book (and add probably fifteen or twenty thousand words to it—too large for a juvenile publisher at the time). In the second place, the portrait of Montgomery was the only one in the book “drawn from life”: It was a portrait of the contractor who had threatened Heinlein’s life while he was building the house, three years earlier—a mean one, at the very least, and a true-to-life Ozark type.

In any case, the end of the story was in the next-to-last chapter.

The real issue is the one in which a man must decide whether or not he is morally justified in lying to get around a basically unfair situation. I kicked that one around quite a bit both with Dr. Hendrix and with Mr. Walther. In my opinion it is almost unanswerable.… Was Max morally justified in lying his way into the space merchant service? I don’t know, I really don’t know—but my sympathies were with Max.

I don’t much like handing kids ready-made answers in any case.12

The day before he went into the hospital in April, Robert’s brother Larry proposed the men in the family club together and give their parents a “circle tour” of the United States, to visit everyone in their now widely-dispersed family. Since Robert was in the hospital, Larry, Ivar, and Clare would underwrite the trip: Robert and Ginny could pitch in when he had recovered enough to be able to contribute.

The last time Heinlein was in the hospital, he had frightened the staff by getting up immediately after the surgery, before the anesthesia had completely worn off, and locking himself in a bathroom. He was better behaved this time: “I distinguished myself by kissing the operating nurse—twice!”13

While he was recovering, Carey McWilliams, the editor of The Nation, wrote asking for a list of his six favorite recent SF novels. He sent his reply on a postcard, and it was published, along with similar replies from Anthony Boucher, Kurt Vonnegut, and H. L. Gold, as a sidebar to an article about Ray Bradbury:

The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester)

Player Piano (Kurt Vonnegut)

What Mad Universe (Fredric Brown)

Pebble in the Sky (Isaac Asimov)

Rogue Queen (L. Sprague de Camp)

1984 (George Orwell)

Dalgliesh informed him Scribner had ordered a special second printing of The Rolling Stones to handle the demand. Since they seemed to be selling everything they printed, that worked to Heinlein’s advantage. His short stories were not faring so well. “Project Nightmare” had been rejected by every prestige magazine and finally went, at “firesale rates” to bottom-of-the-barrel Amazing Stories where it appeared in the April 1953 issue, Amazing’s twenty-seventh-anniversary issue.14

On May 1, as the arbitration action against Shasta began to ramp up, Erle Korshak visited Lurton Blassingame in his office in New York and apologized for the trouble, pledging better behavior in future. Blassingame professionally was inclined to go along for the sake of peace and uninterrupted author royalties—but he noted dryly in his report to Heinlein that Korshak showed signs of reverting to type even before the conversation was over.15

While Heinlein was still recuperating from his surgery—and coming up with a new story—they got word from Rockhill Radio that a second partial sponsor had been found for the Tom Corbett TV show: The International Shoe Company of St. Louis was willing to pick up every other Saturday.

Robert and Ginny got a call from a local doctor they didn’t know, Dr. Howes. He invited them to come visit his home that night while A. E. van Vogt was in Colorado Springs coming down from a big Dianetics conference in Denver. Dianetics “auditing” was still enjoying status as a craze among SF fans, and van Vogt had been one of Ron Hubbard’s early “converts,” rising to prominence in the Los Angeles organization. They found a surprising number of the old Korzybski/General Semantics crowd there, but also another friend and colleague, Robert Moore Williams, who Robert thought had a touch of genius as a science-fiction and fantasy writer: “I think you are one of the dozen sensitive and imaginative artists in the field,” he had written to Williams years earlier.16

Dr. Howes turned out to have an Sc.D in physics, rather than an M.D. There were no science-fiction fans at the gathering, but a number of people Ginny later characterized as “very odd.”17 The setup looked like a doctor’s (medical doctor’s) waiting room. People disappeared for a while into the back rooms, and then reappeared after being audited by Dr. Howes. When van Vogt finally appeared, he spoke briefly with Robert and Ginny and told them that Dr. Howes was the only Dianetics “Clear” in the world.

Van Vogt himself Heinlein found rather less “nervy” than he was before the war, more self-assured18—much the same results John Campbell had reported of Ron Hubbard—as a result of his exposure to Dianetics.

He is peddling Ron’s newest twist, “Scientology” (sic!) but tends to disparage Ron himself—which same seems to be true of the whole group, i.e., Ron is a jerk, Ron is a nut—but nevertheless he is the prophet of the One True Faith.

Me, I smiled, I did not argue, I asked questions—I listened to horse manure with a straight face.19

Robert Moore Williams went home with the Heinleins for more shop talk. He had been through the Dianetics mill himself a couple of years before, and thought it based on hypnotism—“powerful and exceeding dangerous.”20 Robert had kept his promise to Ginny not to take up Dianetics for five years. “I never have been exactly sold on Dianetics,” he told Campbell—

—not that I was “agin” it; I just tried to keep an open mind until I had enough data, data which was impossible to gather here. Ron’s book certainly was not adequate basis for judgment. I think you probably realize now that Ron’s book was so poorly written from a standpoint of scientific method as to be (although interesting) impossible to evaluate. But I was very pleased to see the orthodox psychiatrists and most especially the psychoanalysts given the hot foot. Whether or not Ron was right, the orthodox practitioners are most certainly wrong …21

Such events as he had just attended offered very little attraction for him.

And in any case, he had other matters to attend to. He pulled the old manuscript for The Man from Mars out of his files for another attempt to write through his block, after he replied to Rip van Ronkel that he would join in a suit against George Pal. He was shocked and distressed by van Ronkel’s news that their agent, Lou Schor, had obtained—and later sold—a 10 percent interest in the action on Destination Moon, points gross: Schor could not possibly have bought the interest in the production—he was hard up at the time and borrowing money himself. Nor could he have earned that in any legitimate way; it was clearly a conflict of interest and unethical conduct for an agent.22

But there was little that could be done about it—and as Irving Pichel pointed out, it was Rathvon who had the money—and Rathvon, in a perfectly legal arrangement with Pal, had no duty to them. Moreover, what Pal had done was something approaching “standard practice” in the industry. Hard on them, but there was nothing for them to enforce—and the amount in controversy might not be enough to justify the expenses of a lawsuit. Pichel felt sure they would see something from Pal eventually, even without suing.

Pichel was gradually being “frozen out” of the Hollywood filmmaking community, for his liberal activities in the 1930s, before he began directing. Fortunately, he had been offered a professorship at UCLA in the wake of his successful biopic, Martin Luther, for a German production company. Pichel was a casualty of the Hollywood blacklists—a clear warning to Robert, who had “then-liberal-now-subversive” politics in his own past.

Nor was the arbitration with Shasta going well. Doubleday would pick up the contract for the third Future History book, Blassingame told him, only if Shasta could be gotten entirely out of the picture. Blassingame had retained a new lawyer, and Heinlein was shocked that the lawyer thought their case “iffy” on the merits and that they ought to settle.

Heinlein instructed Blassingame to drop the negotiations with Doubleday while he figured out what to do about Shasta. He had originally wanted just to rescind the contract and walk away. His own lawyer in Colorado Springs thought he would probably be able to make that stick. But it was becoming clear that the simplest way to unblock the secondary (paperback) sales was to give in.

On June 17 he executed the contract with Shasta for the third Future History book, about a Second American Revolution against the American theocracy Mark Twain had predicted,23 the human race then picking up where it had left off in its journey out to the stars. Korshak came to Colorado Springs for a personal visit, and they all went out to dinner at a hotel—Ginny not wanting Korshak in their home.24 Korshak convinced Heinlein that he was capable of turning a new leaf—which Heinlein was willing to believe, since it only worked in Korshak’s best interests. And the new contract had termination provisions he considered adequate.

The new Shasta book gave an excuse to put The Man from Mars away; the writing was not going well: Fifteen thousand words into his manuscript, “I am as confused as the characters,” he told Irving Pichel. “But that is a standard complaint at this stage. Perhaps I can work it out.”25 His local friend and SF writer–colleague Stan Mullen gave him a “pep talk” about the project, so he went back to work on it for a short time,26 even though something about it was evidently not quite right, and he ground to a halt again.

He went to work on the Shasta book revisions.

“Coventry” didn’t need any substantial revisions; nor did “Misfit.” But the cornerstone of the book, “If This Goes On—,” was too dated, too pulpish to fit with the others. Heinlein added a subplot about John Lyle’s discovery of the founding documents of the first American Revolution, got rid of his pulp heroine, introduced a more “realistic” sex interest for Lyle, and in general added more than twenty thousand words, bringing it up to fifty-five thousand words. He also allowed his revolutionaries an effective doubt about the idea of brainwashing the electorate, even though their motives were pure. Now he evidently felt it belonged in the same universe as “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”

Shasta wasn’t thrilled with his suggested title for the book, A Hymn Before Battle, and neither was NAL. Heinlein suggested other titles—Revolt in Paradise or Revolt in 3000 A.D.—and they didn’t fly, either. Somehow, between the two of them, Ted Dikty, the editor for Shasta, settled with Truman Talley at NAL on Revolt in 2100—a title Robert could not understand at all, since there was nothing in the book that took place in 2100 A.D.

The summer resort rush was in full swing in July, making writing difficult, between the houseguests and visitors. Heinlein had three sets of houseguests expected within a three-week period—the McComases, his old high school principal, Otto DuBach (who was spending his retirement traveling around visiting people he had known earlier), and his parents on their circle tour of family. They were coming in later than scheduled, since they had doubled back for a second visit with Rex in D.C., where he was teaching electronics at West Point.

Their new schedule was particularly inconvenient as Heinlein also had a deadline of July 31 to revise some stories for a new collection for Fantasy Press, Assignment in Eternity.

Heinlein gave a large garden party for his Colorado Springs friends and acquaintances (including visitors Mick and Annette McComas)27 on the Fourth of July that year, and he wired the garden for sound and laid in a fully-stocked bar for the occasion, with champagne and brandy and lemons for Ginny’s favorite cocktail, the French 75.

Robert’s father and mother arrived in the middle of July, and Mr. Dubach joined them on the 27th. They also invited T. O. Johnston, another Centralian who was working as publicity director at the nearby Broadmoor resort-hotel, and a photo duly commemorating the reunion appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph on July 30. Ginny was not in this photograph: She was suffering from an attack of poison ivy at the time. On a side trip to Seven Falls, Robert was recognized—a local celebrity!—by the boy parking his car. He was secretly pleased that this happened in front of his parents;28 he always felt his father regarded his writing career as not quite something a gentleman would do: Rex and Larry were the “good sons.” He was the black sheep.29

Heinlein’s father’s disposition had not improved by being nearly catatonic for more than fifteen years.30 He and Bam bickered continuously—very unpleasant in the confines of the small house. In particular, Rex wanted Bam to see about getting an old-age pension from the government. Of course, she was not eligible for it: She had never been employed by anyone who might give a pension—or Social Security for that matter.

But Dad nagged her about it so continuously and painfully while they were here that Ginny and I decided to take action at once. We are now sending them (and have been since the month of July) $40 a month, made out to Mother and somewhat jokingly referred to as “Mother’s Old Age Pension.” …31

The others could chip in if they wished; Robert and Ginny didn’t want to cut anyone out.

Robert’s parents finally left on the first or second of August, and he and Ginny breathed a sigh of relief as they passed them on to Louise in Albuquerque. His father’s bread-and-butter note dated August 5 was rather salty.32

Over the summer, Seaman had found a distributor for the film made from the TV show pilot Heinlein had written, Project Moonbase, and the movie was released by the Lippert organization in August 1953,33 to unfavorable reviews. The Hollywood Reporter covered it on August 28, 1953:

Project Moonbase makes a pitch for the juvenile science-fiction market, but its complete ineptitude will make it an object for derision even from the Saturday matinee kid audience. A depressing combination of inane story, atrocious acting and amateurish direction, this Lippert release will have trouble getting bookings in the most product-starved situations.34

Bad news from Hollywood (even if not entirely unexpected) was met by good news oveseas—and at home. Blassingame’s effective work lining up foreign editions of the juveniles was no longer being siphoned off by building. They had briefly considered using their hard-won expertise to build another home to rent out, but joining the landlord class did not appeal.35 Heinlein has said that he conceived the idea of a trip around the world and convinced Ginny, around the middle of June, by being stubborn—but not too stubborn. “I am going around the world. You are going with me because I need to keep you in sight where I can watch you and keep you out of trouble.”36 Within a few days of his parents’ leaving, Heinlein had told Blassingame about the trip; by August 19, Ginny wrote for both of them to the Department of the Navy seeking permission to travel internationally.

After that it was passports, visas, inoculations that sometimes left him queasy and almost always incapacitated Ginny for a day or more, and wardrobe and luggage. Robert was dismayed by Ginny’s idea of the proper amount of luggage for a six-month trip: “I notice that she is planning to wear a different evening dress every night however, and she has bought me a white tuxedo. I think she has herself mixed up with the Duchess of Windsor—probably progressive delusions. I’ll lead her home on a leash.”37 Also significant was the ever-problematical matter of travel arrangements. Most of the initial struggle fell to Ginny—only natural and entirely appropriate, since it was two of her crotchets that were making it so complicated:

… Ginny is opposed to flying, an attitude she picked up from too many years testing airplane materials, and she did not want to go too close to the Iron Curtain. That last is regrettable, as my next older brother [Rex] is in Zurich and my eldest brother [Larry] is in Heidelberg. But I hope to see them next year, maybe, and catch a little European culture out of bottles.38

Heinlein probably intended from the first to get a travel book out of the experience (not just general background that might go into anything). He helped with the arrangements between writing sessions, but a multitude of obstacles came up: American President Lines cheerfully returned their deposit, telling them their world tours were fully booked up two years in advance. Their travel agent, Mrs. Feyock, showed them how to book each leg of their trip independently—which gave them a lot of freedom to stop and explore, not bound by the schedule of a package tour. It was a project only possible because travel agents at that time were paid on a commission basis by the hotels and transport agencies they booked.

But the problem they could not overcome, singly or working together, was transportation for the last leg of their trip: There simply was no available transportation of any sort from New Zealand to anywhere on the North American continent. Robert and Ginny decided to keep their stay in New Zealand open-ended while they worked out arrangements on the spot. As late as October 24, when Robert gave Blassingame their schedule, he noted they had no fixed schedule after arriving in Singapore on January 29, 1954.

Heinlein mounted a full-scale attack on his piled-up backlog of work to make the trip financially possible. The major task was his annual boys’ book for Scribner, which had to be finished by the time they were scheduled to leave. He had a “Swiftian fantasy” in mind this time—an animal story with a science-fiction twist, in which nothing is as it seems. Casting it as a thinly disguised science–fantasy would let him play “fast and loose with scientific orthodoxy.”39 An overgrown alien pet turns a village upside down and then embroils the entire Terran Federation in a conflict that could turn into interstellar war.

He started writing The Star Lummox on August 26 and promptly ran into a snag: It was too static, with not enough action or conflict. Ginny came up with a fresh way of starting the story, jumping directly into action and conflict, and that unblocked his progress. He was able, even with interruptions, to finish the entire seventy-five-thousand-word book by September 26 and invite his local lawyer over to dinner to check on the authenticity of the courtroom scene.

The Star Lummox started out a romp, but turned out to be his last visualization of the peaceful world-state ideal of his socialist youth. By 1953, America itself was becoming an empire, and not without growing pains. Pundits in the current-events magazines solemnly discussed the transformation of the American democracy on the world stage, and some of this very adult agonizing over the fate of democracy Heinlein poured into his Swiftian animal story.

When the manuscript for The Star Lummox was professionally typed, he turned it over to Blassingame, along with an itinerary and full Power of Attorney to use for any business decisions necessary while they were out of the country. He also forwarded copies of their wills and had the instruction added to contact Blassingame in case of emergency. Lucky Herzberger’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Knowles, had volunteered to house-sit and take care of Pixie, so he wouldn’t have to be kenneled.

One last item was included in his instructions to Blassingame:

You may possibly hear from a Dr. Phineas Bernstein of this city, telling you that he expects to have an “article” ready for delivery about such-and-such a date—in which case get in touch with us by fastest means. We have instituted proceedings to adopt a child; the “article” will be a baby.40

The Heinleins shipped half their luggage ahead to their port of embarcation, New Orleans, but at the last minute they received a wire saying that the Gulf Shipper would be delayed an additional three days, so they canceled their airline reservations and booked a Pullman car instead, for a leisurely two-day train trip by way of Fort Worth. Even though the railway station was cold the evening of November 12, a crowd of friends came to see them off—including most of the staff of the travel agency (a world trip was an exciting project for them), and they received parting gifts of candy and Ginny’s favorite green cymbidium orchids. They arrived in New Orleans on Sunday morning, and “We began to dig our graves with our teeth, wide and deep, a process likely to continue for 40,000 miles.”41

Two days of genteel carousing in New Orleans nightclubs capped off their five months’ of exhausting work. When they boarded the Gulf Shipper on the morning of November 17, 1953, and she warped away from the dock around ten o’clock in the morning, they were ready to collapse. Heinlein mustered the energy to follow from the deck the afternoon’s cautious progress out of the ever-changing Mississippi Delta under the direction of a special pilot whose sole duty it was to get the freighter out into the Gulf of Mexico—a process like something out of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

Then they went to bed.