Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century
Page 66
Laning’s testimony, memorialized by Stover in Before the Writing Began, was that Laning would hypnotize dates, and then he and Heinlein would bed them, singly or—Stover’s words—“double dating in bed.” See page 127 of the manuscript.
See, for example, RAH’s letter to Barrett Laning, 08/21/30, quoted and in facsimile in Leon Stover’s unpublished manuscript, Before the Writing Began; the parts Stover quoted in text are given in full in chapter 12 herein.
RAH, letter to William Rotsler, 08/23/74. The name of the artist-friend was not given.
RAH, letter to Richard Pope, 09/25/74.
Graduating portrait of Seraphin Bach Perreault written by Robert Heinlein, The Lucky Bag (1929), 318.
The Norfolk–New York leg is recorded in his scrapbook-preserved list under the heading “Land Trips,” which implies that the Annapolis–Norfolk and New York–Annapolis legs were taken on board a naval vessel.
RAH, letter to Richard Pope, 09/25/74. Michelson’s earliest experimental measurements of the speed of light actually took place in 1877 and 1878, while he was teaching at the Academy.
RAH’s midshipman’s jacket (dossier) obtained from Special Collections of the Nimitz Library, U.S. Naval Academy.
“June Week” section of The Lucky Bag (1929), 119–20.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 04/07/89. Stover says in several places, but most directly on page 127 of Before the Writing Began, that The Quest actually had two purposes—the investigation into what the adults were hiding, combined with lechery. This is probably Cal Laning’s interpretation, sixty years later.
9. Frying Pan and Fire (pages 110–120)
Nearly all the details of this chance encounter, including Heinlein’s own astonishingly open comments on the impact it had on him and on his subsequent character development, come from a single letter written by Heinlein to the woman in question, Mary (Briggs) Collin, 08/06/62.
In a private memoir found after her death, Mary (Briggs) Collin says that she met Robert while visiting her fiancé, Everett Rigsbee (Class of ’30) at the Naval Academy that June Week and happened to be on the same train home as Heinlein. Nowhere in Heinlein’s correspondence does he talk about them together at the Academy, so they may have been introduced there but did not actually become acquainted until they found each other on the same train. The memoir was discussed in e-mail correspondence of Mrs. Collin’s surviving daughter, Peggy Klitsch, with the author on 10/26/10.
RAH, letter to Mary Collin, 08/06/62.
R AH, letter to Mary Collin, 08/06/62.
RAH, letter to Mary Collin, 08/06/62.
RAH, letter to Mary Collin, 08/06/62.
RAH, letter to Earl Kemp, 01/20/57. Actually, Count Basie recalled, they were dressed, after a fashion: “One high-priced place called the Chesterfield Club offered a businessman’s lunch served by waitresses clad only in high heels and cellophane aprons.” Cited by McCullough in Truman, 198.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 02/07/2000.
RAH, letter to Mickey and Cal Laning, 10/16/73.
Cal Laning, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 08/29/78.
In an IM with the author on 06/13/2002, Virginia Heinlein speculated that Sammy Roberts had a car and took them on road trips.
Research report commissioned for this biography from Philippe Paine, 11/16/2000.
Elinor and Robert’s ticket to the 1925 ROTC ball is preserved in Heinlein’s earliest scrapbook.
This marriage certificate was kept in the Heinleins’ safe-deposit box and provided for the biography by Virginia Heinlein in 2000.
In a personal conversation with the author, Jerry Pournelle commented that he had worked with R. N. S. Clark in the 1970s, and Clark told him that he was best man at Heinlein’s first wedding. However, this is difficult to reconcile with Heinlein’s statement (RAH, letter to Mickey and Cal Laning, 10/16/73) that he did not become acquainted with Clark until they served together on the Lexington—that is, a few weeks after the marriage to Elinor Curry. Perhaps Clark did not know about the marriage to Elinor Curry, or else he had forgotten it and was referring to the 1932 marriage to Leslyn MacDonald in San Diego, since Heinlein rarely mentioned the 1929 marriage.
Dorothy Martin Heinlein, wife of Robert’s brother Clare, in an unpublished interview with the author at the Heinlein Centennial in Kansas City (July 5–8, 2007), provided the information that RAH did not tell his family about the marriage. They certainly became aware of it at some time, as Mary Jean Lermer (Robert’s younger sister) introduced Elinor as her “ex-sister-in-law” in 1939.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 02/07/2000.
Virginia Heinlein, IM with author, 05/13/2000.
Philippe Paine, research report 11/20/2000.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 2, Side A (February [27?], 2000).
Probably Cal Laning, as Laning later (03/25/89) told Virginia Heinlein in a letter discussing the presumptive biography that he was “co-respondent” in the divorce that followed. (But see note 14 of chapter 11 discussing what a “co-respondent” would have meant.)
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 04/08/89.
He remained on very good terms with Cal Laning, even in the short term, as is evidenced by his one surviving letter to “Barrett” dated 08/21/30.
This letter was acquired from Cal Laning by Leon Stover and is now, together with the rest of Laning’s complete file of his correspondence with Robert Heinlein, in the possession of David Aronovitz, a collector and dealer in rare books and manuscripts. Mr. Aronovitz has declined to make any of the Laning-Heinlein correspondence available for use in this biography; only material quoted in Before the Writing Began was available for use here.
The more usual Navy way was for the husband to get a free pass for liaisons away from home while the wife remained, at least on the surface, a faithful homemaker. Heinlein never discussed this first marriage, but the open nature of his second is well (if discreetly) documented, and Heinlein later called his own “unjealous” nature a lifetime feature of his character. RAH, letter to Mary Collin, 08/06/62.
RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 08/01/30.
Cal Laning, conversation with Leon Stover, recorded in Stover’s unpublished manuscript, Before the Writing Began, at page 127.
Although the letter and its reply have not been preserved, the transmittal cover sheets from the Academy to Lexington, with a complex series of endorsements, have been preserved. The contents of the letter are inferred from the fact that the draft application exists in Heinlein’s midshipman jacket but there is no carbon of a finalized application; nor does the American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust have any record of the application or the award of a Rhodes Scholarship for him.
Heinlein never discussed the Rhodes Scholarship at all. That he regretted the loss of the opportunity and attributed it to the marriage is inferred from his later letter to Cal Laning, 08/21/30, by which time he had come to regard Elinor as “poisonous, like mistletoe.”
Report dated 07/31/29, C. E. Riggs, Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery to Chief of the Bureau of Navigation. “Re RAH: Physical Examination for flight training in the case of Heinlein, Robert Anson.”
There is a certain irony in this, for Admiral Halsey failed his own entrance examination for the flight school at Pensacola in 1932 due to eyesight. Two years later, the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer), headed by Admiral Ernest King, gave Halsey a waiver to get him into Pensacola. James M. Merrill, A Sailor’s Admiral: A Biography of William F. Halsey, 11.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74. Heinlein’s extremely voluminous and extremely detailed letter about his time on Lexington provides most of the detail on which this portion of the biography is based.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, p. 2.
This seems to imply that the scale of 1930s currency compared to that of the naughty aughties was about 1 to
80 or so; that is, a piece of pie now sells in national chain restaurants (the Automat having disappeared) for between $3.50 and $5.50.
Thirty billion dollars in 1929 dollars would therefore be the equivalent of more than $2.4 trillion in 2010 money. The stock market crash of 2008 was frequently compared to that of 1929, but the scale was not even close.
RAH, letter to Laurie A. MacDonald, 03/01/72.
RAH, letter to Laura Haywood, undated except “ca. Dec. 73.”
Robert’s grandfather Samuel Edward Heinlein remarried after the death of his first wife and moved to Long Beach, where he and his second wife, Maria, had three other children, Robert’s uncle (Ray) Lawrence Ray and two aunts, Mina Ladine and Alice Irene.
Ron Steward, letter to RAH, 02/06/47.
RAH, letter to Ray and Kitty Heinlein, 11/18/59. Heinlein continues, telling them how their example helped him in the grim time when he had to plan his own father’s funeral:
What I learned that week stood me in good stead this week … and I had help, too, because I had Edward Ray walking beside me, steadying me, keeping me going, with a big grin on his face, reminding me of details, helping me out when I needed it. Ed always did say that he and I were partners and that anything he had was mine—and meant it and did share with me. This week, when I needed some of his courage and his strength, he was on hand and shared it.
No, I’m not seeing ghosts nor hearing voices—I simply mean that Ed has been very close to me this week and that fact helped enormously to get me through the rough part.
I don’t know why Dad had to suffer through so many years … and I don’t know why Ed had to be taken from us when he was so young and strong and buoyant. But what I cannot understand it is necessary to have the courage to accept—and I think I have acquired some of that courage both from Ed and from Dad.
May the Lord make His face to shine upon thee and give thee peace.
All my love Bob
The Tacoma News Tribune, 06/21/61.
RAH, letter to Joanna Russ, 04/10/79.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, p. 11.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, p. 11.
10. New York State of Mind (pages 121–125)
Heinlein kept a penciled record of “Land Trips” in his personal scrapbooks from 1923 to 1934.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 3, Side B (February 1, 2000).
RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 09/06/61.
More than once, Heinlein mentions cruising in bars with his lesbian model, but see particularly RAH’s letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 04/06/63.
A black-and-white rotogravure photo of one of Gertrude Vanderbilt’s Rodinesque sculpture groups was preserved in Heinlein’s first personal scrapbook.
RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 04/06/63.
Heinlein never gave any extended reminiscences about his time in Greenwich Village, but the various mentions in correspondence of specific incidents show that he was immersed in the several “arts” crowds ranging from those at the hangouts of artists’ models to Dorothy Parker and the New Yorker crowd, while he included some photos of the new sculpture in his scrapbooks.
RAH, letter to Dr. Chris Moskowitz, 09/06/61.
Or here already: in 1895 the future Edward VII had said “we are all socialists nowadays,” repeating an earlier aphorism of Sir William Harcourt. Dewey’s essays were published later that year (1930) as Individualism: Old and New. Heinlein never mentioned that book—or Dewey—specifically, but the late Phillip H. Owenby, in his 1996 unpublished doctoral dissertation, Robert A. Heinlein: Popular Adult Educator and Philosopher of Education, identifies the Pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and Dewey as a major influence in Heinlein’s philosophy. In any case, it was a subject of interest by a prominent current intellectual, and Heinlein might well have read Dewey’s book or the essays as they came out. In any case, the book is illuminating for some of Heinlein’s later writings, such as Beyond This Horizon, as showing the state of thinking about individualism and socialism that was “in the air” when Heinlein was a young man.
Wells, The World of William Clissold, 536. Although Heinlein several times endorsed Wells’s books of social philosophy (see, for example, “The Discovery of the Future,” his 1941 Guest-of-Honor Speech for the Third World Science Fiction Convention), it was always in very general terms, without mentioning specific books (except for the trilogy of sociological books, The Outline of History [1920], The Science of Life [1930], and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind [1937]). There are no direct and specific references to, say, Ann Veronica (1909) or Christina Alberta’s Father (1925) or Meanwhile (1927), even though it is highly probable that he read them. Similarly, there are no direct references to Wells’s clearest explanation of his Open Conspiracy concept, The World of William Clissold (1926), so it is impossible to tell whether Heinlein read this book specifically. Nevertheless, Clissold is the clearest and most convenient statement of Wells’s social philosophy, and it, together with The Open Conspiracy (What Are We to Do with Our Lives?) of 1928, kicked off a political movement very active especially in England well into the 1940s. By looking at The World of William Clissold we are able to get an outline of Heinlein’s dialogue with Wells’s thought—his “wellsianism,” rather than specific references to specific books.
RAH, letter to Robert Lowndes, 03/15/56.
RAH, letter to Dr. Chris Moskowitz, 09/06/61: “I considered the elephant to be the perfect subject for sculpture then. I admit that my tastes widened somewhat later—I began to feel that h. sapiens, female model, was probably the epitome of 3-dimensional curves for sculpture or anything—but my interest in elephants did not lessen thereby.”
RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 04/06/63. Wine recurs often in these reminiscences, few though they are. Prohibition was still in effect in 1930, and wine, beer—indeed, liquor of all kinds—was obtainable only with a certain amount of effort and expense: the 75¢ bottle of muscatel mentioned above as standard inducement for a date would have cost the equivalent of about $60 in 2010 dollars—not a minor consideration at the time.
Although economic conditions were to worsen steadily over the next several years, Heinlein came to a New York already on a depression footing. Nineteen thirty was the year that men selling apples on street corners became a common Depression-era sight (a little after Heinlein rejoined Lexington). Washington State apple producers had a bumper crop in 1930, and distributors sold crates of apples to the unemployed on credit:
A man could buy a crate for $1.74, stand on a street corner, and sell apples for five cents each. With luck he could sell a crate full of sixty apples within a day, take in $3.00, pay the distributor, and have $1.25 … and those who could afford to do so bought the fruit out of sense of responsibility. Apple selling became a common big-city activity, indeed a symbol of coping with the depression. (David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How America Lived Through the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great Depression, rev. ed. [2002; repr., Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004]), 225.
There is only one surviving letter-record of these experiments (which Laning continued long after Heinlein had moved on to other things), dated 07/13/41. It is possible the file of Laning’s correspondence with Heinlein now in the collection of David Aronovitz may contain more—and more illuminating—material.
In a letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, 06/07/40, Heinlein said he began reading Appeal to Reason in 1919—that is, at the age of twelve.
J. B. Rhine had just begun conducting experimental trials at Duke University, but the first results would not be published until 1934, under the title ExtraSensory Perception.
Upton Sinclair, Mental Radio (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1930), 5.
See, for example, his workup notes for “Lost Legacy,” in the RAH Archive, UCSC.
Leon Stover, letter to author, 05/25/97.
In 1974 Heinlein was contacted by a biographer, T. B. Buell, who was assigned to write an updated biography of King. King had becom
e Fleet Admiral King during World War II and was therefore one of the most important naval figures of the century. Buell routinely contacted all surviving men who had served with King.
Heinlein wrote a long letter in reply, sixty-three pages, single-spaced, in which he poured out observations of King and discussed his personal history with King on board Lexington. It would be cumbersome to cite every fact that comes out of this irreplaceable resource; suffice it to say that most of the information in the following chapter comes from that long letter.
11. Robert and Uncle Ernie (pages 126–143)
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, p. 61.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, p. 30.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, p. 31.