Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century
Page 59
That letter, sent on May 14, 1948, was not reassuring to Ginny in New York. She was not, in fact taking the separation as well as she seemed to be. She kept up a cheerful and encouraging stream of letters to him, but the gnawing doubt that they would ever reconnect was growing, and that letter may have tipped the balance for her. New York simply had nothing for her anymore. The unsatisfactory conditions she had left two years before had not changed: with no family life and a limited social life—her old friends, she said, were all just doing the same old things, and she couldn’t interest herself in the minutiae anymore.3 Nor could she have even a satisfying professional life: she got a job as a typist.4 Four days after Robert sent his letter confessing he still loved Leslyn, Ginny wrote him from her women’s residence hotel in New York:
My dearest one,
In my last letter I told you something of what is going on around this place—how down-grade it is. The girls are leaving it like rats a sinking ship.
But tonight something happened that made me particularly heartsick and sore. A new girl came in, a poor deformed creature. The house is half empty now, and I suppose Mrs. Koepp only let her in for that reason. She isn’t crippled, but she’s terribly deformed. For some reason, she reminded me of Cleve [Cartmill], though.5
At dinner, she sat down, and they left a little oasis around her. I heard the girls discussing her, that she made them feel ill, that they didn’t see how Mrs. K could expect any person to share a room with her, etc. It made me feel ashamed and sorry to be a part of the human race, to see the way they recoiled from the unfortunate woman. I had to leave the room.
Why do I have to go on living? I’ve wondered so many times since Sonny died [her brother was killed in submarine combat during the war] why it couldn’t have been me instead.
I’m paying the price of my sin. I must go on living and accept my punishment without complaining. I don’t see why I do live, though. I’ve no wish or will to, just simply a business of going through tiresome day after tiresome day. Life is simply a burden to me. How sweet it would be to know that I’d attained peace, at last … .
I know now that I’ve lost my battle for you. It’s all over, and I’ve given up. I had hoped, though, that something very sweet might come of it, but now it’s all over. A good life to you, and a happy one. I’ve given up the struggle because I’m too tired to go on with it.
Goodbye now, Ticky6
Her irrepressible spirits reasserted themselves within hours, though, and she posted an all-better-now apology the same night, hoping the retraction would reach him before—or at least with—the “first cousin to a suicide note.”7 Heinlein found her depression alarming. He was not afraid of Ticky, he assured her—though possibly of in-laws and bills.8 Ginny wrote him a bracing, no-nonsense, no-self-pity letter a few days later:
Darlingest one,
Do you realize that it is a month today since you left New York. One half, I hope, of the time gone. You haven’t said anything about returning to the city. When do you expect to be back here?
Your letter dated “May 23rd, I think” arrived today. My sweet, evidently you’ve missed one point, which I’ve tried and tried to put across to you. You’ve been good about writing, and I appreciate it. I’ve tried to be good about writing too.
But the fact is, I feel much the same way you did early last summer. I don’t want to see my old friends, any more than you did. I’ve been divorced too, and I’m hating it too. And I’m every bit as heartsick about the thing as you were. I’ve been pushed out and made to feel all alone, and I’m sick and sore. Much worse than you think.
You’ve said to me that it isn’t as bad as I think. Well, it’s a lot worse than you think. I’m not just making this up—it’s a fact. And the fact that I haven’t anyone to whom I can turn has made it quite dreadful. I’m suffering over a busted-up marriage too … .
What bothers me is that you don’t seem to want to do anything so that you can get over your fears, and try again. After all, you will, someday, and you’ll have to overcome the same things the same fears. It seems to me that the sooner you do something concrete, the sooner you’ll be well again. I’m not trying to push you into something you don’t want, because I believe that deep down inside of you you really want it. But what I am saying is that the longer you let those things go, the greater will be your fear of them.
I will try to be patient with you, but remember that I’ve been through the same thing. And more recently. I need something to tie to, and I think that you do too. You can’t spend all of your life reliving the past.
Believe me, I do love you, otherwise I’d have quit trying to help you long before this. Truly, I’m trying to help you.9
The subject of their relationship—and of marriage—continued to be prominent in their correspondence.
Heinlein’s family was also a matter of concern. His father was still in the hospital, and his mother and sister were living unhealthily in each other’s pockets.
When he realized that his parents’ golden wedding anniversary was coming up in 1949, and he might still be in Hollywood by that time, Robert wrote to his brother Rex, with whom he had not communicated for ten years, and suggested that they pretend to have reconciled, for their parents’ benefit.10 Rex wrote back that, so far as he was concerned, there was no breach between them and therefore no need for reconciliation.
In addition to his increased living expenses in Los Angeles, Skylark IV was in the shop, and no sooner did the mechanics fix one thing than another broke down. The car was ten years old and had been worked hard: he was having to replace the whole thing, piece by piece. It was becoming the biggest drain on his finances.
Still, sometime in the last half of May 1948 Heinlein settled in to write some salable fiction. Casting around for a subject, he must have thought back to the Shrine Circus he and Ginny had taken in last December, when they met the baby elephants. Separated now from her, with only her Christmas Ticky doll for company, he wrote one of his most sentimental stories, “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants.” It was very meaningful to him, and it remained one of his favorite stories,11 but he was not certain of its prospects. He worked on the story, off and on, for more than a month. “I think it’s a good story,” he told his agent, “as good as some of Benét’s. But fantasy is very tricky stuff and may make ’em laugh where it should make ’em cry. We’ll see.” 12 He asked Blassingame to try it on the slicks first—the Post, Collier’s, possibly even Cosmopolitan. 13
The story must also have been on Heinlein’s mind when he wrote his update for the twentieth anniversary Muster Notes, the book compiled periodically for reunions of the Annapolis Class of ’29: “For my money, the United States—the country itself—is the finest possible hobby and the greatest show on Earth!”14
Lurton Blassingame had been shopping Space Cadet around for serial publication now that Scribner’s had purchased the book rights. Irving Crump, the editor at Boys’ Life, wrote saying he had read the galleys for Space Cadet and couldn’t use it because of the comic drinking scene—Boy Scouts do not drink alcohol under any circumstances—but he was still open to a twenty-thousand-word serial.15 Heinlein didn’t have a suitable story in mind at the moment, so he put it in the back of his mind, to grow an idea.
While Heinlein was writing, his Hollywood agent, Lou Schor, was working, as well. Possibly Schor had become interested in developing the business of what is now called “packaging” in film. Without Lang, he could not make a package deal, but he could keep juggling the elements until something likely came up.
Schor’s friend George Pal had mentioned that he was looking for something unusual—off the beaten path. The kind of fiction-documentary Heinlein and Lang had been talking about might be just the thing. Schor introduced Heinlein to an established screenwriter who was just coming off a long project, Alford van Ronkel, nicknamed “Rip.” They began the talktalk process of story development, starting off again from Rocket Ship Galileo and developing a more adult story line while van
Ronkel’s current project wound down.
It might take a month or more to write the screenplay, van Ronkel told him, which gave Heinlein some free time. He got his ice skates out of storage and began skating again at the Westwood and Hollywood rinks. One time, his skating instructor took him to coffee with another student—Harriet Nelson, of the Ozzie & Harriet radio show.
Van Ronkel wrapped his picture, and Lou Schor prepared a collaboration contract giving both Heinlein and van Ronkel equal rights in the project they were developing. They executed the contract on June 21, 1948, and began working on development five days a week at van Ronkel’s house—a much more stable working environment than the residence hotel Heinlein had found in Hollywood.
During the weeks between Lang and van Ronkel, Heinlein had decided his next book for Scribner’s would be about a family of undersea farmers in the next century—to be titled Ocean Rancher.
I contemplate using as a postulate of the story the notion that continued abuse of the soil and continued increase in population pressure have forced the human race to turn back to the ocean for the major portion of their food supply. Using such a postulate, I can show an ocean-farming family, all the members of which are as casual about going under water as western ranch families are about climbing on horses.16
As the month of June wore on, and while he was finishing up the last revisions on his second collaboration with Cal Laning, Heinlein was looking around for suit-diving instructors in San Diego—suit diving was more appropriate for living underwater than skin diving—and Buddy Scoles recommended a real expert, Edward “Jake” Jacobs. Jacobs’s wife, Sylvia, it turned out, was family—another writer represented by Lurton Blassingame. She set him up with a local L.A.-area diving school, and by the end of June he began taking practice dives in the cumbersome suits in use then.
Another sale, the day before his birthday—“Our Fair City” sold to Weird Tales—put a little walking-around money in his pockets, and he had a big royalty statement for Rocket Ship Galileo coming in August, so all he had to do was hold out and keep up production. Lou Schor told them that he could begin setting up a financing deal as soon as the script was ready to be copied.
Sometime early in July, van Ronkel must have asked Heinlein to help move the script along by writing a formal treatment, which was a major project all by itself.
In Hollywood, screenwriters work on projects in stages. A “treatment” is a narrative version of the script, going scene by scene through the story, but written out in paragraph form. An experienced screenwriter like van Ronkel could pick up a treatment and recast the story into screenplay format almost effortlessly.
Heinlein’s conception of the film project was much broader than usual for a writer: he was coming up with ways to create novel screen effects and solving technical problems of film making as he went along. As a screenwriter, van Ronkel must have been aware that that is both good and bad. Producers and directors don’t want a mere writer to tell them how to go about their business, and putting too much “direction” into a script is an amateur mistake. On the other hand, some of the stuff Heinlein was coming up with was new and useful. Van Ronkel must have foreseen that part of his role in their partnership would be to function as a filter between Heinlein and the producer when the marketing process began.
Heinlein’s treatment for Operation: Moon (as the project was called at that stage) was highly detailed—ninety-seven pages, completed on July 21, 1948. That speeded up the writing process: the first draft of the script was nearly done by the end of July, and Lou Schor went into action. At a Hollywood party given by cinematographer Lee Garmes,17 Schor introduced van Ronkel to his producer friend George Pal. Pal had already had some modest success under his belt producing the Puppetoons series, but he had been looking for something new and different to take on as a feature film project. Pal was intrigued enough by van Ronkel’s pitch to ask for a more formal pitch meeting with him and Heinlein. The three of them clicked and quickly struck a deal: Pal would take on Operation: Moon as producer: he would start looking for financing for the project.
The main function of a film producer is to provide the financing for the film and control all the spending on the project. After that, he may or may not take on the function of a “line producer,” seeing to the various details of the production. Pal went to New York to pitch the project to Paramount in the first week in August.18 He had a tough sell in front of him: there was no long tradition of lucrative science-fiction films behind him in 1948, and “everybody knew” that trips to the Moon were “crazy Buck Rogers stuff,” suitable only for low comedy.
Nevertheless, Pal was enthusiastic about the documentary style Heinlein and van Ronkel had worked out for the project and thought he could sell it. If Pal struck out with Paramount, Schor still thought he might be able to sell it to Hughes.19 The Hollywood buzz had it that another producer was mounting a Moon trip picture and might steal a march on them—which must have been alarming, but might actually work to their advantage, since producers tended to follow a herd mentality and wander where they thought everybody else was wandering.
Heinlein had a windfall at the end of July: royalties from advance sales of Beyond This Horizon. He autographed a sheaf of inserts for the edition and, when his own advance copies came in the mail, he inscribed one for Ginny, with a Ticky picture of her typing away perched on two telephone books and captioned: “Amanuensis Extraordinary and Copyist Plenipoteniary.” He also, without telling her in advance, bought a new portable Smith-Corona typewriter for her, to replace the used Underwood she had banged to death retyping Beyond This Horizon, and shipped it to her in New York, his first “unbirthday” present. She was delighted with it, showing it off to the other women in her residence hotel. 20
Perhaps this was the occasion for the only piece of Virginia Gerstenfeld’s verse extant:
To the sweetest Wuzzum in the whole country
From whom I’ve had letters recently
But seldom. It surely would be awful nice,
And Ticky’d answer in a trice,
If he’d write more often. But very busy is he
Writing stories and a movie,
And he hasn’t time for letters.
(Oh, when will he burst those fetters?)
Today after hunting long and lean,
I’ve acquired some dichloroethylene,
With which to mend my Plexi box,
Which I broke with awful knocks.
Then some knitting he will see,
At which to rejoice mightily,
For out of that very box will come,
A sweater to replace his Navy one.
It would be nice to know a date,
How long for Wuzzum must I wait?
This thing makes sense, in little ways,
But I’ve been planning it for days—
It’s fun to write you these quatrains,
Like forgetting heat in chiliblains.
Speaking of heat, the weather’s been awful,
And of New York I’ve had a crawful.
The subways are like a Turkish bath,
And I’ve lost weight til I’m like a lath.
Sleeping, too, is an awful chore,
And I’ll be glad when it’s cool once more,
Ticky’s appointments to fix her teeth,
Start on Saturday. Please bequeath
A posy to her if she dies before 21
The project was in good hands. Heinlein could contemplate leaving Los Angeles while Pal was pitching the script in New York—as soon as his royalties for the last six months’ sales of Rocket Ship Galileo came through in mid-August. He had three “back orders” for stories, plus the undersea farming book for Scribner’s.
Heinlein was a little shaken up because of a recent accident while suit diving: the diving suits in use then consisted of a shaped bag with an enormous spherical helmet, the whole set of diver and gear weighing about four hundred pounds. The version Heinlein’s instructor was using had peepholes t
hrough the helmet, rather than a circle of glass in front; both versions were essentially nineteenth-century technology that Jules Verne might have recognized .22 On one of his three practice dives, when he was on the bottom of a cove off Santa Catalina Island, he found he had not been strapped in properly, and he was pulled out of the helmet and into the mass of the heavy, shapeless suit, banging the back of his head and crushing his nose. He struggled to get a grip on something—anything—but was blind and helpless.
Sensing his struggles, his instructor hauled him up by main force, but Heinlein was too heavy to lift out of the water. He struggled ineffectually to get back up into the helmet.
Finally, they got him into the boat, with just a skinned nose and a lump on his head—but so exhausted by the struggle that he had no strength left in his arms and had to have help just to stand. Heinlein found out something about himself that day: he was one of those people who do not panic in an emergency—but he was scared, without entirely being aware of it. Half an hour after the accident, when he had been skinned out of the suit and changed from the red flannel “aviator” long johns he wore as undergarments for the diving suit, and back into Skivvies, he suddenly lurched to his feet and made for the rail and threw up.23