The situation was even worse than Corson implied: Henry and Cats Sang visited Leslyn after she moved to Hueneme and were alarmed by what they saw. They did not tell Heinlein at that time—not wanting to distress him any more—but they did talk it over with Bill Corson, who ultimately, when Heinlein was stronger, decided to pass the information along. Heinlein summed it up this way:
Liquor at all hours. Leslyn apparently ate no food at all the entire … weekend … nightclubs with Leslyn insisting on paying all checks. Strange little characters who would wander in, have a couple of drinks, and wander out, an apartment filthy and unfinished (plenty of furniture in storage and plenty of money with which to get it out, but no rugs on the floor), no food in the house, and a refrigerator used only for drinks. Sink filled with dirty dishes. Wash basin filled with dirty clothes soaking in cold water … .
There was just one bed and Henry and Cathy finally went to bed in it. Leslyn was to sleep on a chaise longue; however, Henry says that he heard her wandering around all night long mixing drinks, puttering, and that once he got up and found her sitting in a window seat with a drink in her hand, staring out doors. The next morning she greeted them merry and bright and chipper, drink in hand. Breakfast was powdered coffee made with lukewarm tap water. She either did not bother or was not equipped to boil water. The normal reaction would be to recoil in disgust.46
Telling Ginny about this, Robert added, “Well, I feel that, too, but mostly I am overwhelmed with sorrow.”47
Naturally, when Heinlein fretted, he could not concentrate on the novel for Scribner’s. He gave up even trying and cast around for something else to occupy him. He thought about working up the Moon rocket serial the Post had turned down, but there was bad news on that front, as well: “Little Boy Lost” (which the Post retitled “The Black Pits of Luna” for its January 10, 1948, appearance) would be the last of the science fiction the editors there wanted at the moment. Ben Hibbs, his editor at the Post, told him “politely but bluntly” that his stories “had not stood up in their doorbell reader surveys.” 48
The recent string of rejections by the slicks for stories like “Broken Wings” he found disturbing; those were specifically slanted to the slick markets .49 Heinlein took a short break: the Shrine Circus was in town at the beginning of December, and he and Ginny went to take in the event. The baby elephants took him right outside himself and made him smile.50
That trip to the circus must have been just the tonic Heinlein needed. He sat down again with Hayworth Hall and commenced the struggle again. He and Ginny spent three solid days calculating on big sheets of butcher paper some of the Hohmann transfer orbits he was writing about. They did the calculations independently and compared the results. Her calculations were more accurate, he found, than his own—no surprise: women had always made better “computers” than men.51
The writing went much more smoothly this time—for a while. He usually started to write these long projects with just the bare outline of the major events in mind, and the thematic relationships; the actual details were filled in as the characters developed and interacted. Once the characters were mentally fleshed out enough that he could hear them talking, he could begin to write52—and very often his notes “degenerated” from an idea to a plan to dialogue and by that time he would abandon the “outline” and just begin to write.
His characters this time were more lively than the trio of boys in Rocket Ship Galileo and correspondingly had a stronger “pull” on the story line. And they were simply not going to go where he had planned for them to go. He had initially intended to dramatize the space patrol concept—a kind of souped-up version of H. G. Wells’s “Wings Over the World” (from the prewar movie Things to Come) for the atomic age—by having his central character, Matt Dodson, be called on to bomb his own hometown.53 But as he got into it, that ending rang more and more false: as a practical matter, the Patrol would not ever put a cadet in that position, ever. It just wouldn’t work.
Nothing he tried seemed to work. Without that kicker, the story fell apart on him. That realization hit him and took him down, flat on his back. Ginny was alarmed:
… for about two weeks in the middle of that book [December 1947], Robert just lay on the sofa and moaned. I did not know what to do—or think … . It was the first time I had actually seen him at work on writing, and I did not make any very helpful suggestions—I just did not realize what he needed at that time.54
Heinlein remembered the event somewhat differently:
[A]fter I had written half of Space Cadet I lay on a couch for thirteen days and groaned, and snarled at Ginny for every suggestion she offered for the plot. At the end of that time I got up, put all of her suggestions together, stirred them and finished the book.55
Reconceiving a plot is not normally so traumatic a process for most writers—but Robert Heinlein was not “most writers.” His “just storytelling” was wound up in multiple dimensions, and all the elements were crafted to reinforce each other and have multiple facets that the reader might not consciously perceive but would sense nevertheless. Heinlein was trying to do something that looked superficially like formula but was much more complex and tightly woven, based on his idea of what boys wanted to read and how that fit into his propaganda purposes. It was not a simple matter of setting up a scene according to the formula and letting things proceed from there: the entire structure had to be taken apart, strand by strand, and fitted into a new pattern that had just as much complexity and thematic density as the original.
Winter had come on by that time, and Robert and Ginny were living more and more in the trailer, trying to economize as the money ran out. Ginny wanted to get a job as a secretary in downtown Fort Worth, but Robert put his foot down: married women did not take jobs that might take the bread from someone worse off than they were.56
But he should have let her get out of the trailer more: as it got colder and ice formed on the ground, Ginny bore up under the confinement, but small hardships became major annoyances. Cabin fever was setting in. One day, a sweetish, rotting odor spread through the trailer—a smell Heinlein recognized at once from his Midshipman’s days on Utah in 1926: there were potatoes rotting away in the tiny icebox; probably one had slipped into the drip pan that collected the melting ice. If they had been in a better mood, they might have laughed at it. But they were on their way to living on potato soup—unpleasant echoes of Heinlein’s infancy.
He went back to work on the book. He had to make this work.
One day she [Ginny] wanted to spend thirty cents—thirty lousy cents—and I wanted to know why?
She beat around the bush about it—Ginny becomes very inarticulate when she is upset, whereas I get still more verbose. This puts her at a great disadvantage in a family quarrel. Well, we had a hell of a row about it, one of the worst we have ever had. I could not see why she simply wanted to blow in—waste—the price of a supper for both of us when we were so low on money that we couldn’t even buy gasoline, hitch up and head south to warmer weather—and no prospects of any money coming in any time soon and no one in the whole wide world that we could turn to. I am afraid I was pretty brutal with her. For thirty cents.
I finally squeezed it out of her. She wanted it for bus fare … to go down town … to go window shopping … to mingle with the Christmas shoppers and look at the pretty things she couldn’t possibly buy … just to get away for a few hours from that 4 × 7-foot space, be by herself in a crowd of people, not to have to keep quiet so that I could work, or (worse still) listen to my nagging and bitching when I was stuck.
Thirty cents. I told her to go ahead, of course, once I knew what was troubling her, and Ginny had her day of “shopping.” It seemed to do her a lot of good and she never complained nor asked for anything again.57
Heinlein made it his business to see that she never had to ask again.
Christmas that year was very memorable. Their trailer lot had a pine sapling on it, about four feet high. Ginny made strings of popcorn and
cranberries and decorated the tree with bits of bread and bacon fat, to attract birds. It also attracted the neighborhood’s local mutt. He ate the bread bits off the tree, so Ginny give him larger bits of bread. Robert laughed and called him their “Broad-gauged Texas Bread-Wolfer.”58 They had acquired a family.
It got very cold. There was snow on the ground and no heat at all. Robert bundled up with every article of clothing he could get on, in layers, but his fingers would go numb, making it almost impossible to type. One morning, Ginny slipped on a patch of ice on the stair, coming out of the trailer with a glass pitcher in each hand. She landed on her tail in the ice and burst into tears, not because of the pain, but out of fear she had broken the pitchers, which they could not afford to replace. They were intact—not even nicked—and the pitchers didn’t matter in any case, but that kind of devotion was touching and irreplaceable.59
Presents were one of the few things for which Robert would let Ginny touch the savings she had put away from her work in Los Angeles. A wildly extravagant gift might well show how full and overflowing her heart was—but, of course, it could also be an implied criticism. Ginny found a way around the dilemma by making a gift herself. Robert liked long, loose dressing gowns that reached all the way down to the ankles—a Japanese style it was impossible to find in stores. She ordered Springmaid cotton fabric and a pattern, and sewed the robe herself, in yellow, with Springmaid girls all over it—and another in red cotton trimmed with the Springmaid fabric. She also made a little doll—a caricature of herself—out of a pair of the silk gloves she had worn as a little girl, with cardboard body in the shape of a Ticky picture, with cotton puffs for fuzzy slippers and a red, white, and blue ribbon. After he went to sleep on Christmas Eve, she arranged it in his Christmas stocking, peeking out over the top.
Heinlein had done a little sneaking around himself. On Christmas Eve, he found an excuse to go out and found a bottle of perfume for her that he could afford—$2.00 in a drugstore.
In the morning, Heinlein was overwhelmed by the robes—and by the Ticky doll, even more than the robes. After breakfast, he propped up the Ticky doll by his working setup (and kept it on his desk for the rest of his life). It inspired him that day; he wrote most of a chapter.60 Ginny was sentimental over her perfume, too, knowing that it was a widow’s mite. She kept the bottle for the rest of her life.61
In January—January 2, 1948—the dam broke: Heinlein received a telegram asking to buy one of his pulp novels to be made into a book. Erle Korshak had set up a partnership with Mark Reinsberg in Chicago, to found Shasta Press, and they wanted to publish an expanded version of “Methuselah’s Children” as one of their first projects. The advance was small—$200—but he was hungry, and it was a good deal for him, to get into boards. It would be his third hardcover book.62
The very next day, “Gentlemen, Be Seated” sold to Argosy. His post-Leslyn sales slump was broken.
31
ONCE MORE, DEAR FRIENDS …
The sale to Argosy was more than moral encouragement: as Robert’s savings had dwindled, they had been “eating my piano,” as Ginny later said.1 She had asked her mother to sell it for her, and they lived on the proceeds of that sale, and Heinlein’s Navy pension, until the Argosy sale and the advance for Methuselah’s Children came through, at about the same time.
With money in hand, they could get out of the ice and snow. Heinlein felt free to go downtown and stand in line on January 5, 1948, to purchase a necessary luxury—one of the first copies of Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering scientific study of sex, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.2
Erle Korshak had already raised the possibility of publishing the entire Future History in boards. Early in 1946 Edmund Fuller at Crown Publishers had talked about doing such a project, but the editing Fuller contemplated to make it fit into a single, “frighteningly long” volume would have gutted the series.3 Heinlein told his agent to secure the rights from Ralston at Street & Smith before they even tried to work a deal: he did not want to get caught between Korshak and Ralston and have another book deal go down the drain.4
Now that they could afford it, Ginny wanted him to do something about his neglected hair. He had not had a haircut in months.
When I am writing a story, I won’t stop to go and get my hair cut. However, I am willing to pause between breakfast and the days work and let her move my ears down. She got disgusted the first time I wrote a novel after we were married and bought the tools—I was pretty shaggy. Her first haircut was not a real success, but she soon picked up some skill and now noone ever suspects that I get my hair cut at home—until I boast about it, which I do whenever possible.5
The book, now retitled simply Space Cadet, was nearly finished.
The professional logjam continued to break up: on February 1, 1948, the Post purchased book rights to “The Green Hills of Earth” for an anthology of stories it planned to issue, and Heinlein’s Hollywood agent, Lou Schor (then working for Mercury Artists Agency), told him that Howard Hughes was interested in making a Moon picture out of Rocket Ship Galileo. In 1948, Howard Hughes’s name was magic: Hughes had succeeded to Thomas Edison’s reputation as a wizard inventor. He also held at one time every major aviation record. He had begun making films in the 1920s and now, in his forties (he was two years older than Heinlein), was still one of the most dashing figures in Hollywood. Schor speculated wryly that Hughes might “ … become so excited about the project that he’ll forget about the picture, build a spaceship, and hie himself off to Lunar City-to-be. And with his luck, he’ll make it!”6
Heinlein had been in touch with the astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell since May 1947,7 and Schor had informally “packaged” Bonestell into the picture project as early as December 1947.8 Bonestell’s astronomical paintings were astonishingly realistic, and, though originally trained as an architect (he designed the façade and distinctive gargoyles of the Chrysler Building in New York), he was an experienced matte painter for film work as well, having worked (sometimes without screen credit) on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). In 1944 he had published a series of Saturn paintings in Life magazine that created a public stir. The prospect of combining his almost trompe l’oeil astronomical paintings with matte work for a film was enticing. No one else could have done it at all. “I would not have attempted the picture,” Heinlein later told an old Kansas City friend, “had I not had him lined up first.”9 A film began to look more and more like a real possibility, rather than a pipe dream.
Heinlein had intended to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras if the finances would permit. On February 8,10 between snowstorms, they packed up and left Fort Worth, dropping down to the Gulf Coast and then to New Orleans. The wide-open nature of New Orleans during Mardi Gras amused and bemused. He marveled at the crowds and the costumes, some extravagant, and the street theater, and tried to savor it all.
I tried a couple of the gourmet restaurants around New Orleans and in particular one named Broussards. The food was wonderful, and the prices no higher than Hollywood Boulevard, but the thing that tickled me the most about the place was one of the stunts that they do to amuse the tourists, meaning me. I ordered Crêpes Suzette for dessert. When it was served, the lights all over the room were turned out in order to permit the flaming brandy to show up. During this time the waiter sang “Madelon.” This was their regular routine for Crêpes Suzette. When serving Napoleon brandy, they ring a ship’s bell. They had a number of little stunts of that sort. The cooking all over New Orleans is usually remarkable, even in quite ordinary and unfamous restaurants.11
Heinlein had originally intended to put up in New Orleans for a while, but he found, unexpectedly, that the “dirty mud and smell of oyster shells” 12 depressed him, so they continued past New Orleans fifty-seven miles farther, into Mississippi and to the Gulf resort town of Pass Christian.
This is the stretch of country described in Collier’s under the heading of Salt Water, Sin, and Salubrity.
It is a famous resort stretch of coast. Mississippi has prohibition but there are liquor stores and bars everywhere and there are slot machines in every drug store and restaurant. The slot machines around here are very nice. I think they send a man around to put in more nickels every little while, for they appear to pay off about 120%.13
Robert handed Ginny several nickels and put his hat under a slot machine. “There were several men around and they laughed when he did that; but [Ginny] hit a jackpot, and we walked out.”14 They went to take in a picture with the profits—a revival of Gone with the Wind.
Now that they were more flush, they could live in a real house for the rest of the winter. They found The Oleanders, a huge, rambling house on stilts. It was seventy years old, with thirteen-foot ceilings, a fireplace in every room, and nine-foot doors, with a front yard running down to the Gulf. The house itself was only one hundred yards from the high-tide mark, and the estate was surrounded on three sides by what looked very much like jungle. The house was infested with termites and ghosts and rented for $40 a month: they made arrangements to take possession by St. Valentine’s Day and went back to New Orleans, an hour’s drive away, to enjoy themselves.
There are a million people in New Orleans on Fat Tuesday—in a space that could not possibly, Heinlein told Bill Corson, accommodate more than 100,000.15 The town was wide open. They enjoyed themselves immensely this time through, though the most lingering memory of Mardi Gras was of aching feet, since there was no place to sit down in that crowd. They wore masks, and Heinlein wore a feathered cap to complete his costume. 16
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 57
