Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Principal photography was delayed until November 22, which was also Rex and Bam Heinlein’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. The entire family was in town for the event, including spouses and children, most of them meeting Ginny for the first time. For this anniversary, there were so many guests that the children had rented a hall for a formal dinner.

  At family gatherings, the Heinleins had the main table, and all the auslanders from other families were relegated to side tables. Bam presided over one table as the Lyle contingent. At her golden wedding anniversary, the children took a solemn vote and decided she had done pretty well for the last fifty years and voted her an Honorary Heinlein and entitled to sit at the main table. But Bam insisted on keeping her place as a Lyle at the head of the in-law table. Bam was not very talkative—and Heinlein said of her that she “didn’t let her fingers know what she was doing,”22 but her natural reserve concealed a dry wit.23 Ginny helped out with serving and entertained by playing the piano. Coming from a small and diminishing family, Ginny told Robert she liked the idea of being a member of a large family, for a change. “He looked at me as though I were crazy,” she later said.24 She especially cultivated brother Rex’s wife Kathleen, and the two of them made opportunities for the brothers to visit each other,25 as they had been estranged for nearly ten years.26 When he was in Los Angeles a year earlier, Heinlein began planning for this occasion, and the brothers had agreed to “bury the hatchet.”27 Rex and the family had even visited Robert and Ginny in Hollywood at the end of July 1949, to see the preparations for the film. That meant a great deal to Robert.28 Family is, after all—however irritating—family.

  Heinlein was in Apple Valley nearly every day after the middle of November 1949. The production team had built a full-scale set of the rocket’s tail section, and much of the shooting was done at night. The high desert gets very frosty at night. Pal remembered someone bringing in a thermos flask of grog to keep everyone going.29 As filming started, Heinlein came down with a case of influenza, but he would not be diverted from overseeing things personally on the set. He was at the studio or the location every day, without fail, working through his sickness, though the sinusitis that came on with the flu would not go away. He took along with him the manuscript for Farmer in the Sky, working on the cutting in the intervals while sets were changed.

  The front office kept sending down revisions. By now, Rathvon’s wife was writing dialogue, too. On one occasion, a set of purple30 revision pages came down. Each new revision to a page was mimeographed on a different color of paper. Purple indicated that these pages were on their seventh revision of the fourth script. Pichel called for everyone’s attention. He read through the revision and then held it up for everyone to see. “This is what to do with those pages,” he said, tearing them across. Pichel was a civilized, patient, and accommodating person, but contractually he had the director’s final say over what went into the film.

  In the meantime, the important part of filmmaking was getting under way. Ben Babb was in charge of the promotion and marketing budget (often called “A&P” for Advertising and Promotion)—$1.2 million, compared to the film’s $600,000 production budget. Babb wanted to get “buzz” going. During the shooting, Heinlein sent Pal and Babb a requested list of the scientists he thought ought to be asked to observe the filmmaking process. Since he was already working on the preliminary stages of post-production—suggesting sound effects and having conferences with the film score composer, Leith Stevens—Heinlein was at the studio as much as at the set.

  Everybody not directly involved in the shoot did local publicity work. It helped that Babb was an amusing and simpatico person, already developing into a good friend. Generally the effort paid off. “Colossal is a trite word in the industry, but it’s the only adequate one to describe the job you all are doing on that picture,” one of their contractors wrote, thanking Heinlein for his “personally conducted tour of the moon.”31

  Heinlein had three stories out in December—the second part of the “Gulf” serial in Astounding; his women-in-the-space-workforce story, “Delilah and the Space Rigger,” in Blue Book; and “Rebellion on the Moon” (the new title they had given “The Long Watch”) in American Legion Magazine. That one provided him some amusement later: One concerned reader wrote, anxious to know if the Russians could pick up atomic technology from the story. Alger Hiss’s second trial was under way at the time (the first one, in the spring, had ended in a hung jury, but this one would convict him of espionage), and many Americans were anxious. The editor at American Legion wrote Heinlein this was a “very pretty compliment” to the verisimilitude with which he had invested the story.32 Heinlein wrote directly to the anxious reader:

  I assure you that nothing in that story could possibly be of any military use to any enemy of the United States. I have had some ten years military service myself, and you may be sure that I would never under any circumstances offer anything for publication which could possibly give aid or comfort to our enemies. The facts about atomics, rocketry and so forth, given in that story, are well-known to everyone. There is nothing in it even slightly secret.33

  Heinlein was more concerned about the copy editor’s errors that had crept into the story—“libration” changed to “liberation” and “altitude” instead of “attitude” changed scenes into gibberish and invalidated the plot gimmick.

  Being in the current issues of national magazines could only do him good—and Heinlein had a “prestige” item coming out at the end of December: The Saturday Review of Literature picked up his spec review of Bonestell and Ley’s Conquest of Space and ran it in the December 24 issue under the title “Baedeker of the Solar System.” That was the next step up from the slicks.

  Even working on the film, Heinlein was able to maintain his writing career. Lurton Blassingame was whipping up foreign contracts for his older books: An Italian contract and a Dutch contract had come in in August for Space Cadet. Heinlein’s return to Colorado Springs would be well funded—necessary, as he was thinking about buying a house there.34 Heinlein also needed to get his sinusitis cleared up before driving into the mountains again, and both he and Ginny needed some extensive dental work. They planned to leave for Colorado just after Christmas.

  But the shooting dragged on, from its scheduled two weeks to four weeks plus. Finally, the last shot was in the can shortly before Christmas. The local publicity work they had been doing was paying off: The buzz around Hollywood had reached a peak of excitement, and the wrap party, held on the “surface of the moon” (before the set was dismantled), achieved almost an A-list status. “Hollywood royalty turned out in droves,” Virginia Heinlein remembered: “It was surprising that no one broke a leg or a neck: that set was hazardous for people in high heels, and there were plenty of those!… Not being especially a movie-goer, I didn’t know most of them by sight.”35

  At the party, Robert and Ginny separated and mingled, each talking to different sets of people, as they normally did. When it was over, they were walking back to the car and Ginny asked if he had met Dorothy Lamour—The Jungle Princess and Hope & Crosby Road pictures girl in the sarong. Robert stopped dead in the street. “‘Do you mean to tell me she was there, and you didn’t invite me—get me over to meet her?’ and I said, ‘I’m afraid so.’ And for two weeks he almost wouldn’t speak to me.”36 After that, he decided he had two life’s ambitions: to go to the Moon and to meet Dorothy Lamour.37

  But it may simply have been that the dental work kept them from talking much with each other. Both were seeing the same dentist, and Robert finished cutting Farmer in the Sky for Boys’ Life while Ginny was in the chair. He got it down from over three hundred pages to eighty-four a little after New Year’s, and both manuscripts went off to Blassingame together.

  A little before the New Year, Heinlein had the first inkling that the high level of publicity work Pal was doing on the film might have a down side: He got a note from L. Ron Hubbard saying that his film—Rocket Ship X-M—was going to use the publicity
Destination Moon was stirring up.38 There was nothing to be done about it: Pichel ignored it and went on patiently editing the film together. The subplot with all of Cargraves’s home life wound up on the cutting room floor, which meant that O’Hanlon’s net contribution to the script shrank again, to almost nothing.

  Things were not going so swimmingly in the film’s front office: The Great Rupert was released on January 8, 1950, and promptly flopped. Suddenly Rathvon was in a crisis of confidence. Pal was in no better position than Rathvon: He had put up his producer’s share of the picture as collateral for the financing. His career as an independent producer, even more precarious than Rathvon’s, could be over before he actually got it under way.

  They had to make Destination Moon work.

  Ben Babb was doing his part. His efforts to create buzz were very successful: Julius Schwartz, who had agented for Heinlein in 1939 and 1940, was now an editor at DC Comics, and he shepherded a comic-book “preview” of the movie into print (Strange Adventures no. 1). At Astounding, John Campbell wanted an article on the production. Dave Epstein from Pal’s office suggested Campbell nominate a freelancer to do the writeup; he and Heinlein and Bonestell would help freely with information.

  Ginny coined a new verb that January, “to Korshak,” as Erle Korshak began pestering them with last-minute details for Shasta’s first volume of Heinlein’s Future History stories, The Man Who Sold the Moon. Korshak’s business methods grated on their nerves: He had only two speeds—ignore everything, then emergency full-rush must-be-done-yesterday.39 Heinlein simply could not accommodate that kind of irregularity in the middle of the rigidly organized chaos of a film production. He had corresponded with L. Ron Hubbard over the summer,40 trying to get some perspective on what looked like gross irregularities in the royalty accounting Heinlein was receiving from Shasta, and he told Hubbard they had gotten a triple-Korshaking that previous January weekend: a frantic phone call followed by an after-midnight special delivery of title pages to be signed for advance subscriber sales of the first edition—and another special delivery before 5:00 A.M. the same day.41

  Rogers Terrill, the editor at Argosy, had snapped up Heinlein’s offer to do a novelization of the Destination Moon story “… if we can beat the film,”42 and John Campbell had solemnly agreed with Ben Babb that Heinlein would be the ideal person to write the article on the film for Astounding. Campbell would need the manuscript by March to make a July issue—a difficult writing schedule if Heinlein were to leave Hollywood in February. And it would be easier to coordinate with Pal’s publicity department for photographs and so forth if he did those two projects while he was still in Hollywood, but Heinlein didn’t see how he could make it work. He and Babb had been amusing themselves working out a comic satire of “the filmmaking experience” for the Abbott and Costello comedy team. That would have to be turned into a formal treatment43 before it could be marketed. That could not be done before he got back to Colorado.

  He would have to write the Astounding article in March.

  4

  RENT OR BUY OR BUILD?

  At last the various writing jobs were done, and the Heinleins left Hollywood early in February 1950. They did little sightseeing this time and spent a few days in Albuquerque with Robert’s sister Louise and his nieces and nephews. The oldest nephew, Bill Bacchus, was an Eagle Scout now—just the boy to try out some of the new story ideas he was cooking up for Boys’ Life.

  As they were preparing to leave Albuquerque for Colorado Springs, a phone call came from Rip van Ronkel, alerting Heinlein that Pal was going to give O’Hanlon a screen credit—and Robert might be left off the screenwriting credits entirely, except for the book.1

  Robert was as angry as Ginny ever saw him.2 He could not count on the Ripper to handle the situation: A clipping from the Dar Smith column in the Los Angeles Daily News revealed that van Ronkel was working on the screenplay for Pal’s next venture, When Worlds Collide. Van Ronkel clearly considered his writing partnership with Heinlein at an end, and sauve qui peut!

  They made for Colorado Springs, arriving February 12. Within three days they found a grim little house in the same neighborhood they had left in the spring of 1949.3 Heinlein promptly collapsed with another case of influenza—a typical (for him) reaction to stress. And more poured on: Cosmopolitan rejected the predictions article, though they paid the $250 guaranty for expenses. That covered about half his out-of-pocket costs.

  The Heinleins had another Korshaking when they arrived in Colorado Springs: They found Heinlein’s author copies of The Man Who Sold the Moon waiting for them. The books were cheaply printed on a low grade of paper, “quarterbound” with a cloth spine and paper covers, a format Robert had specifically objected to—and the dust jacket said he had done postgraduate work in mathematics and physics at the University of Chicago. The deal with Shasta was turning out an unalloyed disaster.

  But the film business would not wait. As soon as they got back to Colorado Springs Heinlein objected—loudly—to the proposed writing credits van Ronkel had told him about. Pal’s office offered a compromise: Heinlein and van Ronkel would take an “original story by” credit and share script credit with O’Hanlon. But Heinlein did not want O’Hanlon associated with his picture in any way. He took the position that O’Hanlon was hired to do work not found acceptable—either written out or dropped from the final edit—and that his payment for the work was all the remuneration he was entitled to. “I venture that not one line of dialogue can now be found in the edited version of the motion picture which appears as O’Hanlon wrote it.”4

  This is an astonishing argument for a Guild author to make; O’Hanlon’s domestic soap opera material did wind up on the cutting room floor—but Pichel had shot it, and some of O’Hanlon’s material was in the final edit of Destination Moon—particularly the irritating faux-Brooklyn comic-relief character that could be traced back to O’Hanlon’s “trio of hepsters.”

  Perhaps it was the influenza talking, but perhaps also it was the first major indication that Heinlein was just not in sync with the Hollywood way of doing things. He imprudently insisted the matter be arbitrated by the Screen Writers Guild.

  Before the SWG could act, though, another crisis erupted: Irving Pichel had earlier expressed himself satisfied with his director’s credit, even though Pal went on to offer him an “adapted for the screen” credit. Now, though, Rathvon recut Pichel’s final cut, editing out the context-setting speeches at the end—all the material “that make[s] the self-sacrifice more than Roverboy adventurism.”5 Disgusted, Pichel threatened to pull his own screen credit—a very loud and unmistakable message in the Hollywood community.

  Within two days, both crises cleared: Rathvon restored enough to mollify Pichel, and the Screen Writers Guild gave their compromise recommendation: “Written for the Screen by Rip van Ronkel, Robert A. Heinlein, and James O’Hanlon, from a Novel by Robert A. Heinlein.”

  Even with influenza, Heinlein knew when to concede the field: He wired acceptance of the SWG compromise on February 27—the same day he signed the Scribner contract for Farmer in the Sky.

  Alice Dalgliesh had been enthusiastic about Farmer in the Sky. She even suggested he could do publicity for a national children’s radio show out of Chicago, Carnival of Books, hosted by Ruth Harshaw.6 His professional writing was back on track, and he could move on to the next thing—in his case, house-building.

  The Heinleins had considered buying an existing house before they left for Hollywood, but they decided instead to build and quickly found an appropriate site on Mesa Avenue near the edge of the Broadmoor resort property—a granite outcropping overlooking a canyon, with a view filled with giant pines and picturesque boulders.

  Heinlein intended to design this house himself. Ginny had wanted a circular house, but this site could not accommodate a circular design.

  The property had some other inconvenient features: The next-door neighbors’ curving driveway encroached on the property—which didn’t matter when the
site was undeveloped but would make the Heinleins’ access from the street difficult—and an open drainage ditch ran straight through the middle of the lot. Those features could be engineered away. “We planned the house to enjoy the more distant views, too,” Heinlein later told a real estate agent. “The living room view window faces Cheyenne Mountain.” He cleverly made use of the natural features of the site, enhanced with careful plantings, to make the house so private—screened from outsiders’ views—that they could virtually live nude, if they wanted. Even Ginny’s bathroom had a floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooking the arroyo.7 Another bonus: The lot did not have a street number assigned—they could pick any number in the 1700s they wanted (the house on one side was numbered 1700, on the other 1800). They chose 1776.8

  For years Heinlein had been accumulating ideas for single-family housing and had several plans and sketches in his files.9 He settled down with his notes to get enough of a design on paper that he could turn it over to an architect as soon as they could find one. “[T]hat was a dream of his for a long time before we actually did it,” Ginny Heinlein later commented:

  He had “built” dream houses on paper, and he was a very good designer for those. Before we did anything, he insisted that I read Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. We both did read it, in fact, and when it came to building, we did not make those mistakes, but we made others that that author had not thought of.10