Leslyn found a house in Coronado (Voter Registration records show them at 521 Palm Avenue, a little less than a block north of Coronado High School). They acquired a dog—a mongrel with some basset hound in him—and Heinlein named him Nixie, after the butterfly-chasing mongrel he had owned as a teenager. “American brown democrats, both of them,” he said.1 Once, he accidentally locked Leslyn out of the house for about fifteen minutes. Leslyn was oddly distressed about it; locks seemed to bother her unusually.2 He shook it off; everybody has quirks. He was much more concerned about how little she ate, how thin she was. “He was always urging her to eat more,” Virginia Heinlein later recalled, “and tried to tempt her into doing that, unsuccessfully, usually. And he praised her cooking a lot, although that seemed to me rather ordinary. Nothing special.”3
At the end of the summer, Heinlein received his promotion from ensign to lieutenant j.g. and returned to Roper to take up the Gunnery Officer billet.
Immediately he ran into a serious problem: Roper was so small and light that she bounced around on the seas too much for his stomach; he was continuously seasick while they were at sea.
Seasickness is often treated as a comic malady, but it is no joke to the sufferers. The brief respites for shore leave were barely enough to keep him going, but as soon as they cast off, it was back to the rail.4 There were various remedies that were supposed to allay motion sickness in the days before Dramamine and Bonine—ginger and lemon drops, for example. Nothing helped.
And he couldn’t keep food down. He began to have acute stomach pains after meals and lost weight rapidly as he fought the queasiness and the clamminess and sweat—and tried to ignore the imperative signals coming from his brain’s vomiting-center.5 He finished out the gunnery season on December 15, 1932, with a score of 93 percent on Long Range Battle Practice, but he was a walking skeleton at that point and went into the U.S. Naval Hospital in San Diego the next day. X-rays found a spot on his lung: he had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis in the 1930s could still be a death sentence by slow wasting away. Before broad-spectrum antibiotics (and in the 1930s, medical orthodoxy still didn’t recognize the possibility of an “internal antiseptic,” even though penicillin was already on the market), the only thing the doctors could do was to make you comfortable and hope for a spontaneous cure.
It is not clear whether the seasickness caused the TB or simply masked it: the symptoms are virtually identical—loss of appetite, loss of weight, constant tiredness, clammy skin, and sweating. In healthy people, Mycobacterium tuberculosis can be present but inactive: the body’s natural defenses put shells—tubercles—around the infection sites. Under stress (thy name is seasickness!) the tubercles break down, and the bacteria spread every time the victim coughs. Robert’s brother Ivar had developed TB the year before and was being treated at the Fitzsimmons Army Hospital near Denver, Colorado. Robert developed fevers and a constant cough—and finally coughed up bloody sputum. By the time he was hospitalized, Robert was so weak that bed rest alone was not enough. Attending his brother Larry’s wedding to his second wife, Caryl Dart, on December 30, 1932, was out of the question.6 The U.S. Naval Hospital at San Diego was not set up to treat TB. All the armed services sent their consumption cases to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, where Ivar was already under treatment. They were still using the old mechanical treatments at Fitzsimmons. As weakened as Robert was, with secondary medical problems coming on, Fitzsimmons would be a death sentence for him—a slow, drawnout, and terrible death. He and Leslyn found a progressive sanatorium close to Los Angeles that was getting exceptional results from the new tuberculin treatments. When Dr. Francis Pottenger agreed to accept him as a patient, Heinlein petitioned the Navy to be allowed to pay for his own treatment.
On February 13, 1933, he was detached for a three-month sick leave and moved from San Pedro to Arcadia, California, where Leslyn had found a house close to the Pottenger Clinic in Monrovia. Dr. Pottenger’s X-rays showed cloudiness on the upper lobes of both lungs—more on the left than on the right—and scars on the left lower lobe.7
In 1932, the sanatorium cure was the gold standard for TB care, but that was really nothing more than rest in the fresh air, in a mild climate, and a reduction of physical stresses. Being away from Roper, being able to rest, and undergoing Dr. Pottenger’s tuberculin treatments brought about a rapid improvement. Soon Robert was moved to outpatient status, getting his bed rest at home in Arcadia and coming in periodically for tuberculin injections.8
Leslyn managed his daily regimen:
7:45 Temp & Pulse
8:00 Breakfast C.L.O.
8:30 Defecation
10:30 Milk or eggnog
10:30–11:30 Rest
11:30 Temp & Pulse
1:00 Lunch—C.L.O.
1:30–1:45 Air Bath
1:45–4:30 Nap period
4:30 Temp & Pulse
4:35 Milk or eggnog
6:00 Dinner C.L.O.
8:30 Temp & Pulse
9:30 Lights Out.9
He was not comatose, despite the long daily periods allocated to sleep: the backs of his temperature records have a pencil sketch for a “mechanical shoe blacker” and notations about people to write to. “Feel well for the first time in months,” he wrote to his brother on March 10, 1933. Heinlein was optimistic, even though he also had a recurrence of his nonspecific urethritis/ prostatitis that seemed to come on anytime his health was stressed.
While he was writing this letter—on March 10, 1933, at 1:54 P.M.10—the Long Beach earthquake struck. “This is the most exciting time,” he continued. “Another quake—a big one.” There had been a sharp foreshock just two days before.
Californians, whether native-born or imports, can become quite blasé about the relatively minor earthquakes that happen every day, but the big ones are a different matter. In a major quake, people freeze and ask themselves, “What was that?” It takes a few seconds, usually, to register that it’s an earthquake. At magnitudes over 4.0 there is often a low rumble from the earth, followed by cracking reports from buildings as their foundations shift or the building takes stress in its frames. It is common to see structural damage—cracks in buildings, sidewalks buckling, sinkholes opening up in soft earth or landfill. The Long Beach earthquake was rated 6.4 on the Richter scale, and even sixty miles away from the epicenter of the quake, “it scared the pants off me.”11
There were deaths—115 people were killed. Property damage to unreinforced masonry structures from Los Angeles to Laguna Beach was later estimated at $40 million in 1933 dollars. Aftershocks strong enough to be felt continued for two months.
In May, when Heinlein’s sick leave expired, the Commanding Officer of the San Diego Naval Hospital ordered him to appear in person for evaluation, though he was still confined to bed. Dr. Pottenger’s interim evaluation found his symptoms were decreasing on the tuberculin-and-bed-rest regimen. He formally recommended continuing the regimen, gradually decreasing bed rest and adding an exercise regimen. Reluctantly, after initially turning down Heinlein’s request for an extension of sick leave, the CO granted another three-month extension. 12
“I believe in Doctor Pottenger and feel sure that he will very rapidly get me well,” Robert wrote to his brother Ivar. 13 Pottenger was a good guy as well as a very competent doctor, charging patients according to their ability to pay. Some patients were paying as much as $1,000 a week for the same treatment others received free of charge.14 It evened out. That tended to give Heinlein personal confidence in the man as well as the doctor. It put him in mind of his own grandfather Lyle, who used to accept a side of bacon—or nothing, if circumstances warranted—for delivering a baby.15
Even though he remained confined to bed much of the time, Heinlein was getting stronger. He took up walking for exercise and was gradually able to add other activities—reading books, writing letters, and talking with Leslyn, who was more than supportive.
He and Leslyn belonged to one of the photo
graphy clubs in Southern California that from time to time hired nude models for their members to shoot. A wife’s chaperonage was considered sufficient to keep the men on their best behavior—but in the case of an open marriage like the Heinleins’, chaperonage might be a mere formality, and probably was: Leslyn noted that Robert was exercising his extramarital sex privileges within the first year of their marriage16—though it is hard to imagine how he could have managed much bed-hopping between TB and bouts of urethritis.
The national news seemed to parallel Heinlein’s medical conditions. Franklin Roosevelt had won the 1932 presidential election, when the national economy seemed to be circling the drain. Heinlein had voted for him (and against the Republican incumbent, President Hoover).17 President Roosevelt was already shaping up: as soon as he took office in March 1933, he closed every bank in the country for ten days, to stop the slow hemorrhage of money being withdrawn from the banking system. He also called Congress into special session to enact his new “alphabet soup” of government agencies that would become the backbone of his New Deal: WPA (Works Progress Administration), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), NRA (National Recovery Administration), and PWA (Public Works Administration). At the very least, he was willing to try drastic solutions, and that put him streets ahead of anybody else on the American political landscape.
Heinlein found the Agriculture Adjustment Act that went into effect in May 1933 particularly offensive: the government was going to pay farmers not to raise crops, and to plow under ten million acres of cotton fields already planted—and to slaughter farrows and pregnant sows. Heinlein understood the logic—overproduction had to be dealt with somehow (and the bill had come to Roosevelt for signature after spring planting had begun)18—but he found it offensive nonetheless.19
Heinlein was not the only American who found the farrow slaughter program offensive. It was grotesque enough to generate a series of jokes:
Under Socialism, if you own two cows, you give one to your neighbor; under Communism, you give both cows to the government and the government gives you back some of the milk; under Fascism, you keep the cows but give the milk to the government, which sells some of it back to you.
And under the New Deal, you shoot both cows and milk the government. 20
There was personal news that spring: in May, when The Century of Progress World’s Fair opened in Chicago, the sensation of the show was not the exhibits or the architecture, but Heinlein’s old friend and lust object from Greenwood Grammar School, Sally Rand. Talkies had ended her budding film career in 1928—sound cameras were not lisp-friendly—and she had wound up in Chicago, dancing with a stage revue. When its run ended, she had put together a specialty act that involved a body stocking and two large (seven-foot) pink ostrich feather fans she had found at a secondhand shop. When she performed outside the gates of the fair, the attendees were convinced she was dancing nude beneath the screen of the feathers—a sensation! Her shows were packed, and fans insisted she transcended burlesque: Sally Rand’s fan dance was Art. Completely predictably, detractors became indignant, and Sally and other dancers at the fair were brought up on obscenity charges. The press had a field day. A local judge dismissed the case, and the fan dance went on.
Now that Heinlein was up and around, he and Leslyn visited the Elysian Fields nudist camp that had been set up that May near Topanga Canyon. Heinlein had never forgotten the exhilarating feeling he had experienced as a small child, of running naked in Swope Park while playing Tarzan.21 German immigrants had brought the nudist lifestyle to the U.S., and after a decade of litigation, “naturist” resorts could make a go of it so long as they maintained a very low profile and did not provoke their local jurisdictions.
Elysian Fields was one of the first nudist resorts in the West—and became a leader in the movement later that year when Fox film director Bryan Foy shot a film of Elysian Fields, Elysia (Valley of the Nude), which was shown around the country—discreetly without acting or directing credits. Judge Joseph B. David’s ruling in the Sally Rand obscenity matter, quoted in the film, fixes the date of filming at around July 20, 1933. The film stresses the health benefits of fresh air and sunshine, and these are elements of the sanatorium cure for tuberculosis. No doubt Heinlein had his mind on his health management.
Heinlein’s extended leave was expiring in August. Dr. Pottenger thought he was well on the way to recovery: “I would say that your lesion is quiescent and approaching an arrestment at the present time.”22 He recommended a convalescent regime for the next few months, leading to a resumption of “light duty” in the late fall of 1933, continuing 12–14 hours a day of bed rest over the crucial next two to three years. “Your future should be good. There has been no destruction of lung tissue; consequently you should have a good working capacity.” Eventually.
Heinlein reported back to the Naval Hospital in San Diego on August 20 and was immediately readmitted as a patient. Now he was strong enough to be transferred. Leslyn found a room in downtown Denver at the War Mothers’ National Memorial Home while Robert reported in to Fitzsimmons, as ordered, on September 2, 1933.
The standards of care were much lower at Fitzsimmons, and the environment was more stressful than at Dr. Pottenger’s sanatorium. The previous week, Ivar had been the first of four to get pneumothorax, and he told Robert a grisly story: a new doctor had been assigned to perform pneumothorax, and he had accidentally killed one of the patients after Ivar’s procedure.23
Part of the treatment for tuberculosis in the 1930s involved artificial pneumothorax—a needle put in the space between the ribs and the wall of the lung to pump the cavity there full of air, collapsing the lung so that it could rest and heal up. It was not a traumatic procedure—usually only a prick as the needle goes in—and it was over in a few minutes, but it had to be done often. The air would gradually be absorbed in the body over a few days. Private TB patients would go two or three times a week to be pumped up again, so that the lung would be immobilized. At Fitzsimmons it was once a week, on Friday mornings.
Artificial pneumothorax is not normally dangerous, but if the needle goes in just a little too far and then somehow forces an air bubble into a blood vessel, the air bubble (embolus) can travel through the bloodstream to the heart and cause a “vapor lock” embolism. That’s just what happened to the patient after Ivar. The heart convulses, blood flow stops. Everyone—especially the young doctor—was shaken up, but the next patient calmly hopped up on the table—and died, too. The last of that group calmly took his place on the table and refused a new doctor. This time it went perfectly.
Now, Ivar pointed out, the fourth patient was certainly brave, but he wasn’t the bravest of the four, after all: an autopsy showed that the third patient, Josephs, had not died from an embolism: he had died of fright. He had been so terrified that he literally killed himself, but he went ahead anyway, and that was bravery.24
Heinlein agreed. It was one of those stories he took out every so often and turned it over in his mind.
Robert did not thrive at Fitzsimmons. Leslyn visited almost every day, but fundamentally hospitals are often not good places to get well in. It wasn’t just the TB: starting in October 1933 he had a series of minor colds and, toward the end of November, a severe case of influenza. He was not able to get to his sister Louise’s wedding to Wilfred “Bud” Bacchus that October in Kansas City.
The nurses refused to bring his meals to him when he was too weak to get out of bed—would not even see him but simply sent word that he was to get up if he wanted a meal. He was weakening, unable to enjoy the end of Prohibition in December by going out and getting drunk with the rest of the country.
About ten days after the flu cleared up, his nonspecific urethritis came back, and he developed an unpleasant inflammation. This time, it was stronger than ever, with a pussy discharge and a continuous low-grade fever. The Army doctors were so sure it was gonorrhea that they didn’t even bother to do the test.25
Heinlein was sure he did not have gonorrhea
. He continued to weaken. He was worse off, if possible, than when he had checked in to Dr. Pottenger’s. In an Army hospital, Leslyn, a civilian and a woman, was helpless as his condition deteriorated through not being able to move enough. Heinlein recalled this period, years later:
Bothered by bed sores and with every joint aching no matter what position I twisted into, I thought often of the Sybaritic comfort of floating in blood-warm water at night in Panama [at Fort Clayton]—and wished that it could be done for bed patients … and eventually figured out how to do it, all details, long before I was well enough to make working drawings.26
That is, he engineered the modern conception of the water bed27 as a thought exercise while he was sick.28 He couldn’t do any real engineering in his condition; he wasn’t even really all there. If he did not improve, he might actually die within a few weeks—not from the tuberculosis, but from his organs shutting down because of the infection. The doctors ignored his attempt to tell them about his history of nonspecific urethritis. One went further, telling him to shut up and go away until he had more significant symptoms to report. He even dressed Heinlein down in public for going to the G.U. [Gastrointestinal and Urology] clinic.29
The Army doctors at Fitzsimmons were prepared just to let him die, but he wasn’t quite ready for that. He made a pest of himself, forcing the issue and getting a prostate smear and test for TB involvement in the urethral infection on December 26. He followed the progress of the lab work anxiously, but it was not reported until ten days later. The infection continued to grow worse; the orders given by the doctors became confusingly contradictory—and he was also reprimanded for reading in the lavatory.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 20
