Chapter 41

This Is for Bev

DURING 1984, we had a number of conferences about Man of Two Worlds. After making an outline we agreed upon a division of labor in which Dad would write some chapters and I would write others. In the end, however, he couldn’t find the time to do the writing that year, so eventually I went back and wrote his chapters as well.

On my lunch hour at work one day, I wrote around eight hundred words longhand. That evening Dad came to my house, and he wanted to see what I had produced. It was too rough to give him, so I sat on the family room couch with his old Olympia portable typewriter atop a drawing board on my lap, while he sat to my left, waiting and reading each page as I completed it. I had carbon paper in the machine (so that we each could have a copy) and pecked at the keys. I knew my typing speed was nowhere near his, but it didn’t bother me. Once Kim interrupted me, and Dad told her to leave me alone while I was writing.

A few days passed. One day in May, Dad was in a limousine, and on impulse he told the driver to stop at a drug store. Dad went inside and got shaving equipment and shaved off his beard in the car. Jan and I did not know about it yet and were scheduled to meet him at the Ajax Cafe in Hadlock, near Port Townsend. At first we didn’t recognize him as he sat at the table, giggling to himself. Then I noticed something familiar about “that man over there”—the eyes and hair, and the shape of the face. He had a belly laugh over this, and it was pretty funny. But without his luxuriant, distinguished beard he looked older, and smaller. More like a man and less like the myth he had created around himself.

When he went on the road without his beard, to conventions and the like, he had fun playing tricks on people he had known for years. Often they didn’t recognize him at all, until they heard his deep, resonant voice, or until he laughed in the wonderful way only my father could laugh. Arthur C. Clarke mailed him two tickets to the world premiere of 2010, held at a theater in Westwood, near Los Angeles. In the restroom, Dad saw Ray Bradbury, and said, “Hi, Ray.” Bradbury responded dispassionately, “Oh, hello.”

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Dad said, with an impish smile.

Bradbury leaned close, then closer. He looked at the eyes, combining them with the characteristic timbre and cadence of the voice. “Frank?” he said. “Are you Frank Herbert?”

Early in June, Dad caught a morning flight from Port Townsend to Seattle. I picked him up and drove him across the Evergreen Point floating bridge to Group Health Hospital in Redmond, where he checked in for surgery on the mole on his back. Then I returned to work.

At noon I brought him grilled chicken breasts, pasta salad and Italian fish and chips from Osteria Mitchelli in Seattle, a restaurant he liked. As I did this I thought of all the times he had gone out and obtained goodies for Mom while she was in hospital. Now I was doing for him what he had done for her—setting things up with the nurses, having them refrigerate what was left and warming it in the microwave when he wanted it.

Dad made the nurse give him each of his vital signs, and this seemed to irritate her. Most patients were content to let the medical staff do their thing, but not my father! He wanted to know what they were doing each step of the way.

When I arrived at the hospital at noon the following day to help him check out, he was pacing the hallway by his room, champing at the bit to get going. He said the growth on his back, now removed, had been a tumor, but thankfully it was benign, confirmed by a biopsy. Dad was elated. “Benign is the most beautiful word in the English language,” he said. My father was right, and I thought of the ugly sound of its antonym, malignant.

He underwent a complete medical checkup, and the results were good. I had been noticing, however, that his head frequently shook from side to side. It was involuntary and almost imperceptible, a condition I first began to notice in 1977 at his mother’s funeral. I assumed it was just fatigue.

One Thursday when Jan was still in Paris, Dad needed me to come up to Port Townsend to help him with a number of banking tasks that could only be done when the bank was open. It was on short notice, but after making arrangements at work, I picked up my daughters and we all drove to Port Townsend for a long weekend.

The next morning, Dad went into Port Townsend with me, and we did the banking and ran a number of errands. He was cheerful and obviously well-liked by shop owners and people he saw on the street. He even held a door open for two teetering old ladies. On the way home, however, he drove the city streets like a madman, passing one car at the crest of a hill and then tailgating a pickup truck while beeping his horn at the driver for going too slowly.

On a cool, rainy afternoon that year, Dad was driving his Mercedes coupe through Port Townsend, when he saw an old woman pulling a heavy cart of groceries up a hill. He stopped and assisted her, loading her things into the trunk and helping her into the front seat. She was wet and shivering. While carrying her groceries into her tiny, cluttered house, he asked why she didn’t ride the bus, since it ran close to where she lived. She said she barely had enough money for groceries. It was cold in her house, and he learned that her heating oil tank was empty. The next day, Dad put money into a bank account for her, so that she could always afford to ride the bus. He also made arrangements with the local heating oil company to pay the bills for her and for other needy people in the area, so that they would not freeze during the winters. He did it all anonymously.

One Sunday morning in July, after I had been working on Dad’s accounts far into the night, he popped his head into the guest bedroom where I was sleeping and woke me. It was early, and I was groggy.

“Do you want to go to breakfast with me and Kyle MacLachlan?” he asked.

I knew he was referring to the young actor who was playing the lead role of Paul Atreides in the Dune movie.

“No,” I said, and I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Julie did accompany her grandfather, and it was thrilling for her. They ate at a pancake restaurant in Port Townsend, and she returned with a movie poster signed by both the actor and her grandfather. Dad gave other signed posters to the rest of us.

We were scheduled to hold the service for Mom in Hawaii on the first anniversary of her death, the following February. The delay was primarily due to my inability to fly, making it necessary for me to find a ship for the passage. This was not an easy task, due to a downturn in the number of cruise ships that were operating. When Dad heard about my difficulties he said he would have a doctor fill me with tranquilizers and pour me on a plane. He tried to encourage me to take a fear of flying course, but I declined. In an attempt to avoid a discussion of the subject, I said I didn’t feel like hurrying from one place to another. I said Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury did not like to fly either, but were pretty good science fiction writers.

“I fly, and I’m a better writer than both of them,” Dad said.

After trying many travel agents unsuccessfully, Jan found a cruise line with a ship that could take me, and she made reservations.

Toward the end of the summer, I left my lucrative insurance agency job to work for my father, receiving a salary from him for the first time. Dad also made arrangements with Penny and Ron to make them caretakers of the Port Townsend property, which Dad planned to keep. They would wrap up affairs in California and move north early in 1985. Frank Herbert was drawing his family close around him, as Beverly wanted.

Around this time, he was in close contact with the renowned mountain climber Jim Whittaker, who lived in Port Townsend and had been the first American to climb Mount Everest, back in 1963. Dad wanted to go on an expedition to the Himalayas in the spring of 1986 before the monsoon season, doing a documentary film on the trip. He intended to fly to Kathmandu, capital of Nepal. In Kathmandu he would visit the Old Royal Palace and a number of nearby Buddhist temples, including the spectacular Taleju temple. The Gurkha regiments of the British Indian Army came from that part of the world, he said, troops that had been of special interest to him for years.

Dad fixed dinner in Port Townsend for Whittaker, and together they drafted a letter to Nawang Gombu in India, a man only five feet tall who had been Whittaker’s sherpa guide in the 1963 Everest assault. On the very first ascent of Everest, by Sir Edmund Hillary of Great Britain in 1953, Gombu had been a seventeen-year-old porter. In 1955, Gombu reached the top of the mountain for the second time, the first person to accomplish the ascent twice. He was also a nephew of Tenzing Norgay, the famous sherpa guide who reached the top of the mountain at the same time as Hillary.

For my father’s purposes, Gombu, now forty-eight, appeared to be a fine choice. Gombu responded positively, and they made plans to make a nineteen-day, two-hundred-mile trek in the Everest Base Camp region on the Nepal side of the mountain. From Kathmandu they would fly to the town of Namche Bazaar, at an elevation of 11,300 feet. From there, accompanied by porters, they would hike to the lakeside village of Gokyo at 15,720 feet and then up to the top of Gokyo Ridge at 18,000 feet, for a 360 degree panoramic view of the upper Gokyo Valley, the massive Ngozumpa Glacier and three mountain peaks rising between 25,990 and 27,826 feet. They would ascend afterward to Gokyo. A climb to Chola Pass at 17,783 feet would follow, and then across the high, scenic pasture of Dzonglha. Toward the end of the trek they would climb to the highest point, the top of upper Kala Pattar at 18,450 feet, from which point they would be able to see the South Col of Everest.

Dad invited me to participate in the trek, with a caveat because of the altitude at which we would be climbing, “Get yourself in shape for this one.” He went on to talk about the dangers of altitude sickness—and of the many trekkers in the Himalayas who had died of this. It was especially important to acclimatize yourself to altitude, he said—and to ascend gradually and go back down at the first symptoms of illness. Many people disregarded warning signs, he said, and died as a result.

I wanted to go on the trip, and began thinking about how I might travel by surface to Asia. Even if I managed to get to Kathmandu by surface, and I wasn’t sure if I could do that, Dad planned to fly from there to Namche Bazaar, and there might be other connections by small plane. It all sounded perilous, but tremendously exciting. Late in 1985, just before the trip, he intended to live at an altitude of eight thousand feet in Switzerland for a month, to build up the hemoglobins in his blood.

And following the Everest Base Camp trek, perhaps a year later, Dad hoped to return to the Himalayas, becoming the oldest man to ever climb Mount Everest, at 29,028 feet.

Around this time my father, almost sixty-four years old, began talking about buying a new Porsche. I vowed to myself I would never get in such a vehicle with him, for obvious reasons. Recently he had gotten a ticket for going more than sixty miles an hour on city streets.

He also made arrangements to rent a nice apartment near the Strand in the Los Angeles area (Manhattan Beach), so that he could work on the two screenplays near Hollywood and be around many of the people who were putting the finishing touches on the Dune movie. He had the Hollywood bug, and even spoke of directing a film one day.

But above all, he had fallen completely in love with the Putnam book representative, Theresa Shackelford, who lived in the Los Angeles area. He wanted to spend more time with her, with the object of marriage. She was now twenty-eight years old.

My father was emerging into his second youth, desperately attempting to grab another chance at life. He fell in love with a young woman, wanted to drive fast cars and climb mountains. He and Theresa took skin diving lessons and Dad developed a liking for popular music, especially the songs of Engelbert Humperdinck.

One day my father asked Penny, “When you were so in love with Ron after meeting him, did you have butterflies in your stomach and hear bells ringing?”

“That was a long time ago,” Penny said. “I don’t remember.”

“Well that’s the way I feel now,” Dad said.

In early September 1984, I helped Dad move some of his things out of Xanadu into a big yellow Ryder rental truck, which he was having driven to California. He would accompany the truck, driving his Mercedes coupe. It was an interesting scene, watching this famous man do once more what we had done so many times in my youth when we were poor, packing boxes “with a shoehorn” and moving. He still had his remarkable strength and endurance, and hardly broke a sweat as he ran in and out of the house carrying heavy boxes and other articles. He was planning to keep both the Port Townsend and Hawaii houses. While he was in California he wanted me to go to Port Townsend once a week to pick up his mail, handling what I could myself and sending the rest to him.

All during 1984, the Dune movie was advertised as the greatest film production of all time, and perhaps the most expensive. Comparisons were drawn between it and Gone with the Wind, and there was a great deal of secrecy about who was playing the lead role of Paul Atreides—Kyle MacLachlan. When the actor was interviewed on television, his back was to the camera. It was one of the most coveted screen roles in years. His Seattle phone number, known only to a few people, was 547-DUNE.

It may have been the most heavily promoted movie in history. Months before the film came out, toys and other novelty items were made available, in addition to Avalon Hill’s Dune board game, which had been out for years. There were toy sandworms and Paul Atreides dolls, Dune weapons, obsidian paperweights with House Atreides gold hawks on them, tee-shirts, posters, games, soundtrack record albums and tapes, calendars, puzzles and mazes. Merchandisers had to pay Universal Studios as much as $100,000 apiece for the rights to produce spinoff products.

A mind-boggling assortment of spinoff books appeared as well, plus reissued Frank Herbert books. Almost everything he had ever published went back into print or had its press run increased. Most of the books were published by Berkley/Putnam. In addition to reprints and special boxed sets of all the books in the Dune series they came out with The Art of Dune, The Dune Storybook, Dune Activity Book, Dune Coloring Book, Dune Coloring & Activity Book, Dune Cut-Out Activity Book, Dune Pop-Up Panorama Book, a book about the movie production entitled The Making of Dune, and a speculative compendium about the worlds of Dune, entitled The Dune Encyclopedia. Every envelope and parcel mailed by Berkley/Putnam during the year was stamped, in red letters, The Year of Dune.

Universal Studios established a Dune fan club, and in only a few weeks had several thousand members. Under arrangement with Lifetime Learning Systems, Universal also developed The World of Dune teaching kit, which was given to four thousand middle and high school teachers in the United States and Canada. Waldenbooks came out with a contest, “The World of Dune Sweepstakes.” The winner received a trip to Los Angeles and a dinner with Frank Herbert. Waldenbooks also produced and distributed interviews of Frank Herbert and David Lynch on cassette tape.

The film’s budget was variously quoted between forty and sixty million dollars, production numbers that were, at the time, astronomical. Universal Studios had a promotional budget of an additional eight million dollars. They announced the movie would be released just before Christmas 1984, timed to obtain the most attention for Academy Award nominations.

Promoters, eager to take advantage of Christmas shoppers and follow in the footsteps of Star Wars merchandising (which had brought in three billion dollars in revenues in addition to movie ticket sales), tried to promote Dune in the same manner, with toys, coloring books and the like aimed at children and teenagers. Frank Herbert did not object to the merchandising, saying the investors needed to do it in order to maximize their profits, and the movie might never have been made without the prospect of such additional earnings.

But from the beginning I had my doubts about this approach. I knew from fan mail that young people read the Dune books, but they were a decided minority. The books were far too intellectual for most people in that age group. As weeks passed many fans were put off by glitzy, misdirected promotions, and sales on the novelty items were slow.

In the midst of all this, Dad signed on to do a Pacific Bell television commercial, which would run during prime time and special events, including the Super Bowl. In the commercial, Frank Herbert stood in front of an alien backdrop, looking rather different without his beard from the way his fans were accustomed to seeing him. He spoke of a subject he knew very well—the future.

Around September, when Dad was leaving for California, he was telling people he liked what he had seen of the film. When asked about it, he frequently kissed his fingertips and exclaimed, “They’re capturing the essence of my book, doing it just right!”

His contract with Dino De Laurentiis didn’t allow him to publicly criticize the film, but Dad always said if he didn’t like it he would remain silent. He really did like it and was extremely excited. He predicted that it would be a cult movie, and in the innovative hands of David Lynch felt it would be a breakthrough film as well, exploring ground that had never before been covered on film.

In early December, Dad took his new love, Theresa Shackelford, to a world premiere of the movie at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. President and Mrs. Reagan were among more than one thousand in attendance. Also present were stars of the movie, including Kyle MacLachlan, Dean Stockwell, and Francesca Annis. The building had been decorated to look like the Palace of Arrakeen on the planet Dune, and it housed an enthusiastic audience. After the movie one woman kept saying, “Wow! Wow! Oh, wow!” A state dinner at the White House followed, at which the President and Mrs. Reagan told Dad they had enjoyed the movie.

The Group Health premiere would be held the following week in Seattle. Dad would come up by himself from Los Angeles and would escort his favorite aunt, Peggy Rowntree, to the event.

Dad was given fifty tickets for his friends and family, and I coordinated the guest list, making doubly certain that each invitee would attend before mailing out tickets. This was on top of all the Man of Two Worlds work, our Hawaii trip preparations, the handling of Dad’s voluminous paperwork (including the accumulation of data needed for his 1984 taxes) and the preparation of my own taxes—all of which had to be done before we could leave in early January.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 11, 1984, Jan and I picked up Penny and her husband Ron at the airport, then met Dad in his hotel suite at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle. My brother and his gay lover were already there when we arrived. Dad looked natty in his thirty-five-year-old tuxedo, with a ruffled white shirt and a black bow tie. Gold cufflinks glimmered at the sleeves.

I took him aside and we discussed a number of his pressing income tax and legal matters. We spoke of Man of Two Worlds as well, and Dad said we might create a “mushy” monster in the story, perhaps a “dragon that runs away when kids throw rocks at it.”

At 5:00 P.M., all of us walked across the street to a Dune reception at the Rainier Bank Tower. The reception was held on the fortieth floor, which afforded a panoramic view of Seattle and Elliott Bay. Guests were dressed in tuxedos and jewel-bedecked evening gowns. The hors d’oeuvres and wines were first-class. Mayor Royer of Seattle was present, along with a number of other notables, including mountain climber Jim Whittaker.

At 7:00, the family members and V.I.P.s were taken in three limousines to the King Cinema a mile away. Powerful spotlights stood in front of the theater, crisscrossing beams of light through the night sky. We filed into a reserved loge area and sat in big, soft seats. A murmuring air of anticipation filled the theater, as everyone wondered how close the movie would come to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece.

At 7:30, Dad walked down to the stage in front of the curtained screen and spoke to a full house, introducing the movie. He said it had been a long time in the making, and gave a brief history of earlier attempts, including mention of Jodorowsky’s plan for a fourteen-hour epic and a subsequent screenplay that would have made an incest movie about Paul and his mother. Upon learning of the incest concept, the audience gasped. All along, Dad had been correct in asserting that his fans would never tolerate anything like that.

When he spoke poignantly about Mom and the reasons for the Group Health benefit, including her initial efforts in setting it up shortly before her death, his voice broke and he could hardly speak. He closed by saying, “This is for Bev,” then stood there looking very lonely and sad. The audience gave him a standing ovation, and then, head down to conceal his tears, he walked back to his seat.

The curtain went up, the lights dimmed, and Toto’s magnificent soundtrack filled our ears. It was a wide screen, best for this particular film, and soon I found myself immersed into the story. The desert scenes were spectacular, bringing to mind an alien Lawrence of Arabia. The atmosphere in the Palace of Arrakeen was Shakespearean, with dark, mysterious rooms and corridors and scheming, plotting characters. When Paul rode the giant sandworm, chills ran down my spine. The audience clapped and cheered when Alia stabbed the Baron Harkonnen with a gom jabbar needle and thrust him into the jaws of a sandworm—a slight variation from the book, in which he slumped over in his suspensors, dead from the gom jabbar.

When the film finished and the lights went back on, I looked at my father, who was in my row two seats away. He was staring at the screen, transfixed, eyes open wide and face almost expressionless. An empty box of popcorn lay at his feet.

For nearly an hour, Dad signed movie programs and books until his hand ached and he could do no more. He said he had forgotten to bring along the wristband that gave him additional strength for marathon signings.

A short while later, in an interview on national television, Dad mentioned the novel we were writing together. The interviewer asked him if I was really a good writer or if Frank Herbert was only doing something to help his son. Dad’s eyebrows arched at the rude inquiry, and he responded, “The acorn didn’t fall far from the oak tree.”

Forbes magazine said Dune might become the first billion-dollar movie, far surpassing the revenues of any other motion picture in history. Dad thought this was entirely possible. Based upon book sales, he said the movie had a built-in audience of fifty million people, and many of them would want to see it over and over, just as they read and reread the book. In the opening weeks, as expected, crowds lined up to purchase tickets.

Going along with the movie, book sales skyrocketed, and the paperback edition of Dune reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. “It’s highly unusual for this to happen nearly twenty years after publication,” Dad told me. In honor of the occasion, his publisher had the list from the newspaper enlarged and framed for him. For the week of January 6, 1985, it showed Dune number one, ahead of novels by Danielle Steel and Stephen King.