Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  On January 5, 1934, one of the doctors told him the results of the tests were negative. “Few pus cells, no organisms.” Heinlein knew immediately that something was wrong: the specimens were mostly pus, and the two reports the doctors had read were identical in wording. He talked the lab clerk into letting him see the actual results: the urethral smear report was “Many pus cells, no gonococci found.” The doctor had not even read the report correctly. Nor was there any report for the petri bowl sample he had given for TB involvement in the infection. On that, the doctor had apparently just made it up.

  Heinlein asked for a reevaluation, and two days later the doctor blew up at him again, ordering him to stay away from the G.U. clinic. On January 9, he was placed on sick-in-quarters status—outpatient status, essentially chucked out without ever receiving any treatment at all for the urethritis. He took up residence with Leslyn at the War Mothers’ National Memorial Home outside the hospital, where the matron turned off the heat—in Denver, in the middle of winter—at 9:30 P.M. “I nearly died,” Leslyn said.30

  Grimly Heinlein started documenting the events for a future naval board of inquiry. He wrote a letter to one of the doctors, placing his request for examination on record—the equivalent of asking for written orders. The doctor’s reply admitted that the TB test had never been done, though there had been two reports. Heinlein again asked for permission to see a private specialist. On January 20 his new attending physician, a Captain Smith,31 gave him the name of a Denver G.U. specialist—Dr. Howard32—and Heinlein made an appointment the same day.

  This was a definite change: Dr. Howard listened attentively to his history. Even before examining him, he knew what was wrong: bladder cysts. He had Heinlein on the operating table within ten minutes. It was as simple as that. Dr. Howard’s report to the Navy on Heinlein’s case that same day notes tersely: “EXAMINATION: Cysto-urethascopic showed prostatic urethra filled by large sub-mucous cysts. These were fulgurated.”33 Heinlein was as well as he could be by May.

  Heinlein was to have medical problems all his life with his genitourinary tract, not all related to this incident. But now he at least knew how to go about dealing with the problems as they arose. When the Chief of Medical Services at Fitzsimmons sent him a stern note—not quite an order—saying he wanted him back in the hospital to check up on the “bladder condition,” Heinlein returned the note with a polite endorsement. “I do not desire to return to Fitzsimmons General Hospital for treatment for my bladder condition. I am perfectly contented with the treatment being administered by an outside specialist.”34 No further issue was made of the matter.

  As Heinlein’s strength returned, he needed to get out and around. One day at the Denver Athletic Club when he was judging a fencing match, he met Robert Cornog, a young engineer working on Boulder Dam and about to apply for graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley; they found they had the same birthday, five years apart (Cornog was born in 1912)—and both had joined the American Rocket Society. They became friendly thereafter.35

  In addition to the more usual kinds of social life, Robert and Leslyn found special social interests in Denver. Undoubtedly the McConville/Elysia nudist group in Los Angeles provided him and Leslyn with an introduction to John and Alice Garrison, the leaders of the local (Denver) group of nudists just as they were in the process of organizing a local nudist association, the Colorado Sunshine Club. Couples were preferred at nudist associations, to cut down on publicity-attracting hanky-panky. Heinlein could continue his fresh-air regimen, though the Colorado Sunshine Club was at that time an “unlanded” group that met in private homes, since they did not have a ranch or retreat to go to. In any case, in the dead of winter, naked outdoor activities were out of the question in Denver.

  Heinlein had an unpleasant and depressing fact to face: between the tuberculosis and the damage done by the infection and bladder cysts, it was just a matter of time before a medical review board would force him into early retirement, medical. On March 22, 1934, he received an order from the Navy Department instructing him to report “for examination for retirement.”36 It was small comfort that the Navy awarded him a medal for Expert Rifleman and Expert Pistol Shot ten days later. On April 20, 1934, he reported as ordered. The process began.

  The career he had worked toward for half his life was over before it was well begun. He could get a job of some kind, even in the middle of the Great Depression; he was a trained engineer with a background in aeronautical engineering, and trained engineers were always in demand, even without a degree. But punching a time clock didn’t appeal to him: his father had done that all his life, and it hadn’t gotten him anywhere at all.

  What he did not know—could not know—is that his naval career had already made an important impact. His friend Robert N. S. Clark wrote him and Leslyn after World War II: “[T]he Navy suffered a loss of some magnitude when Bob was retired from the Active List.” Clark praised Heinlein’s keen intellect and command personality. “I always think of him as a perfect model for a Naval officer.”37

  While the paperwork for his forced retirement ground on, Heinlein learned that a Colorado silver mine with proved ore was available, and there might be a financial backer if he would do the legwork.38 The old Colorado silver mines had been closed after the Panic of 1893 and the repeal of the Coinage Act of 1873, when the price of silver fell below the level at which the mines could be worked economically. But the price of silver was rising again. Mining engineering was a little out of his experience, but a base in mechanical engineering could be applied very broadly to any technical engineering subject. Heinlein could pick it up. It would be a lot of hard work, learning a new business—but it could also pay off in a major way.

  Heinlein had not been back to Kansas City in years, but Senator Reed talked him up all the time: he was the first and only one of Reed’s appointments to the military academies actually to graduate and serve.39 And his father’s long-standing involvement in Democratic Party politics in Kansas City might be helpful, as well. He located a financial backer in a blind arrangement with a lawyer40—that is, the lawyer represented someone with investment funds, whom he would not identify to Heinlein.

  Heinlein never admitted it, but he could not have been unaware of the likelihood he would be expected to front for a Pendergast investment. That might not be such a bad thing. Tom (T. J.) Pendergast had uses for honest men, too: several official functionaries in his organization were well known for probity and honesty, and this was the environment in which Harry S. Truman had been flourishing since 1923 as an outstandingly honest Eastern District Judge of Jackson County, Missouri.41

  After the end of Prohibition, when rum-running could no longer be done profitably, Tom Pendergast had begun taking the machine investments legitimate. He had a strong incentive to keep an investment such as this at arm’s length—hence a blind arrangement through the lawyer, 100 percent separated from anything that might smell, either politically or by virtue of racketeering. If this was to be a Pendergast investment, it would be a silent partner arrangement—a straight money arrangement, with Heinlein two states away.

  These considerations may help explain why Heinlein violated the cardinal rule of business start-ups and used his own money: he invested his dwindling savings in the initial investigation, traveling to the Sophie and Shively Lodes near Denver 42 and having his own assays made of the ore.

  The ore was rich; on the numbers, it could be made to pay a very large profit, so there was initially some question about why it wasn’t making money already. Heinlein found the current operation desperately underfinanced: the mines would need new equipment, retimbering, a blacksmith shop, a truck … drifting a new tunnel through to the right-of-way—“the overhead stuff before you start collecting cash profits.”43 With his engineering expertise and the money he could bring in, things looked promising, so he set up a bond-andlease arrangement.44 Then in May 1934 he returned to Kansas City to get the money matters settled.

  He was feeli
ng relatively strong, and he took the opportunity to catch up on friends and family. His family killed the fatted calf to welcome him and Leslyn: they were given the best room the house had to offer, the best bed, and the best electric fan. Robert was allowed to sleep as late as he could. Leslyn would make breakfast for him separate from the rest of the family, and clear up later. Leslyn was very well liked by the rest of the family.

  They were still in Kansas City on his twenty-seventh birthday, in the middle of an extended heat wave. Summers in Missouri are always hot and sticky, with daytime temperatures over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity over 90 percent. The summer of 1934 set records with three months of temperatures near 120 degrees, cooling—sometimes, late at night—to a hundred degrees. There was no letup, no rain except one brief shower in July. He hurt his mother deeply one day by remarking that the room was like the Black Hole of Calcutta. He hadn’t meant to be offensive; it was just a general remark, more about the weather than about the room in his parents’ house. But tempers fray in the heat, and his father took offense—and never forgot it45 (and Robert was always, like his family, hypersensitive about implied criticism of his own hospitality). Trying to change a tire one afternoon, Robert stood up too fast and keeled over in a dead faint.46 He was not even close to being well yet. The mountains in Colorado would be cooler.

  I had an appointment one morning [July 10, 1934] with a lawyer to sign the papers for the new silent partner. When I showed up, bright and cheerful, ready to sign and walk out with a certified check, the lawyer looked sour.

  “What’s the matter?” says I.

  “What’s the matter?” he says. “Don’t you read the papers? They machine-gunned Johnny last night.”47

  “Johnny,” it turned out, was Johnny Lazia. Heinlein undoubtedly knew Lazia slightly, or at the very least knew of him, though he hadn’t had dealings with him: Lazia was on the seamier side of the Pendergast business—an outright gangster often mentioned in connection with Chicago’s Al Capone, who had just been sent to prison for tax evasion. In 1926, while Heinlein was on his Youngster cruise, Lazia had forced Tom Pendergast’s man Ross out of control of the Ninth Ward—Kansas City’s “Little Italy”—and struck a deal with T.J.: he would keep the Chicago mob out of Kansas City, and T.J. would give him a share in Kansas City’s gambling, racketeering, and liquor—as well as a say in the hiring of Kansas City’s police forces. He even had an office at the police headquarters.48 He also controlled sales of marijuana and heroin in the jazz clubs around 18th and Vine. Johnny Lazia was effectively the crime boss of Kansas City, his domain taking up where T.J.’s milder graft and corruption ended.

  Over the years, Lazia had developed a close, personal relationship with T. J. Pendergast. When the machine started to go legitimate after Prohibition, much of Lazia’s black market in liquor evaporated, and he probably needed the silver mines to soak up some of the profits. Lazia and his wife had been machine-gunned getting out of a car at 3 A.M. that day, outside the Plaza Central Hotel. Two unknown assailants had been waiting in the dark. He had many enemies.

  Heinlein had exhausted his savings: he was effectively destitute, except for his Navy pay.

  The medical retirement procedures ground inexorably on. The medical board found that he was “cured,” in the sense that he wasn’t shedding TB anymore and the existing germs were safely encysted—but he was permanently weakened by the scarring in his lungs; he would never be able to handle a full workload on a naval vessel again. Even if he were allowed to stay in the active Navy, he would have to be kept segregated from the other men, lest he become infectious again. The hearing voted to retire him as of August 1, 1934, “totally and permanently disabled.”49 A forced retirement is not a discharge: he would continue to be carried on the Navy’s rolls for the rest of his life.

  Heinlein decided to separate himself, make a clean break:

  After retirement I intentionally kept away from the Navy and became as civilian as possible, for I had seen sad, neurotic cases of retired officers who could not or would accept the change emotionally and who became mere zombies, living in the past. Retirement had come as a great disappointment to me; I had expected a lifetime Naval career and had hoped someday to fly my own flag. So I determined to let the dead past bury its dead and made for myself a new life.50

  His retirement pay would be calculated at two-thirds of his full-service pay, and that would keep him afloat in California, where he would return with Leslyn. He was comfortable in California; the climate is congenial for a lunger. It may have been Leslyn who suggested he could go back to school and take an advanced degree. Leslyn had her master’s degree: in a couple of years, he could take a doctorate—he could position himself right where the action was, in physics. Nobody in his family had gone to college: “Herr Professor Doktor Heinlein” must have sounded just fine to him.

  By the end of August, they were back in Los Angeles, ensconced in what is now West Hollywood, at 905 La Jolla, close to Santa Monica and Fairfax.51 Perhaps one of these was the house he later mentioned, that had its own live-in poltergeist, who/which picked up and dropped the end of the bed when he was in it.52 He did not have a lot of time to make the necessary arrangements to get into college.

  He couldn’t get into his first choice, Cal Tech, or indeed into any university graduate school because he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. The Naval Academy did not issue degrees when Heinlein graduated. In 1933, as a Depression cost-cutting measure, the Navy commissioned only the top half of the graduating class, letting the rest go with a year’s pay. In order to make the midshipmen they did not commission competitive, the Class of ’33 was issued degrees in engineering. Suddenly, the Naval Academy was in competition with other schools. It had to upgrade its curriculum.

  But that didn’t help with Heinlein’s immediate problem. Given time, he might have been able to talk the Naval Academy into issuing a retroactive degree, but the semester was starting now. He set inquiries in motion with the Naval Academy and went for his second choice, the University of California, Los Angeles.53

  Without a degree, he could not actually enroll at UCLA. Instead, he must have arranged privately with the professors to sit in on classes in both the physics and mathematics departments—in atomic physics, advanced chemistry, upper-atmosphere physics, and optics. This could not, strictly speaking, be called “auditing” the courses, as auditing is a process normally mediated by the university’s administration, and he was still a nonperson so far as they were concerned.54 Leslyn gave him a scholar’s gift to get started—a briefcase for his course work.55

  There was some interesting material in the courses—and some good and bad teaching. The atomic physics course was concerned with determining the mass of the electron. Heinlein noted that one experimental run did not agree with what theory predicted, so the instructor threw out the results. This is standard pedagogy—science teaching—but bad for doing science. “Had he [the teacher] forgotten the other runs, the ‘good’ ones, we might have jumped ten years ahead in atomic physics. But he didn’t, because he knew, from theory, that the run was a ‘bad’ one.”56 But Heinlein kept his opinion to himself. His professor in the optics class he did approve of—Dr. Joseph Kaplan’s teaching he considered “inspiring.” Kaplan was a “born teacher.”57 Otherwise, he complained in a letter to Dick Mandelkorn (one of “his” Plebes who was now working at MIT) that the atmosphere at UCLA was “stultifying.”58

  Early in the semester, Heinlein became ill and stopped attending classes for a while, fearing he could have a tubercular relapse at any time. After several “white nights” of the insomnia he started suffering while in the hospital, he was running a slight temperature in the afternoons.59 Trying to attend classes and be alert after three or four nights of no sleep in a row was no good. Stress can bring on a tubercular relapse, and he had to be careful for the benefit of others as well as himself. Heinlein had already trained himself into some protective habits he was to keep for the rest of his life—
always taking out a handkerchief and covering his mouth, for example, when he had to cough. He kept well hydrated and napped whenever he felt tired.

  It was probably when he was in bed for a couple of days, to get the fever down (and sleep, if possible), that he took the opportunity to reevaluate his decision. Graduate school might not be possible without a bachelor’s degree from the Naval Academy—and it was questionable in any case how much of his “undergraduate” transcript UCLA would accept, since the Naval Academy was not highly regarded as an institution of higher learning.

  It could take years—and a great deal of money—to recapitulate the course work necessary to meet UCLA’s requirements for an undergraduate degree—not practical. He would have to change direction—again. His second choice of careers had fizzled.

  14

  BAPTISM OF FIRE

  Just before Heinlein’s transfer to Fitzsimmons in August 1933, the Santa Monica Democratic Club had asked Upton Sinclair, the famous muckraker journalist who lived in Pasadena, to draft a reform platform for them and run for governor as a Democrat against Republican incumbent Frank Merriam. 1 This was an extremely odd thing for them to do, because Sinclair had run for governor twice before, in 1926 and 1930, as the Socialist Party candidate for governor of California.

  But the move from socialist back to Democrat (his original registration, thirty years earlier)2 was not an unmanageable obstacle for either Sinclair or the Democrats: liberals in the United States had for more than fifty years looked to their socialist radical wing as a source of strategic ideas and as the purest statement of their goals. Marx’s class-warfare tradition had taken root in Europe, but class-conflict socialism was never acceptable in the United States, and in fact, Sinclair specifically repudiated Marxist/communist socialism in issue after issue of his campaign newspaper, agreeing with his friend H. G. Wells’s broader, more theoretical view of communism and socialism: