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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  If he could manage it, Heinlein wanted out of the contract with Shasta. But he sent the manuscripts on January 15. He had elected, he told his agent, to try to achieve a more professional, arm’s-length relationship, rather than force an arbitration on the contract at this time.36

  Shasta was not his only problem. He had expected royalties to start coming in from Destination Moon before Christmas, but no word came from Rathvon. Heinlein didn’t have any hard numbers to go on yet, but a rough calculation based on number of theaters times showings per day times average ticket price suggested the film must have broken even by now.

  At the six-month mark, the initial release showed no signs of fading: Their $1.8 million baby was making a strong showing. Heinlein got a notification from George Pal Productions that they were up for an Oscar: The art director, Ernst Fegté, had submitted three scenes to the SFX (Special Effects) Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—“Take Off,” “Rescue,” and “Landing on the Moon.”

  The prestige was tremendous—and exactly how many square feet of drywall would the honor get up?

  Everybody involved with The Puppet Masters was acting somewhat “cracked.” Blassingame had submitted the book to Galaxy, since Gold’s rates were competitive. And Gold wanted it—and he didn’t want it—or something a little like it, perhaps. Heinlein could cope with the request to cut the story—sixty thousand words was about right for a pulp serial—and he knew he would have to cut some of the titillation for magazines, but Blassingame agreed the revisions Gold wanted were excessive. “In fact,” Heinlein wrote Blassingame,

  … they amount to an order for an entirely new book, one bearing a vague relationship to the one in existence but requiring complete rewriting with new incidents, new complication, a vastly different plot and a different solution.37

  Some of Gold’s criticisms might be addressed by the editing Walter Bradbury wanted done for Doubleday—tone down the horror and tone down the “prurience” (though the book scarcely ever rose above the level of titillation). Heinlein asked for some more specific guidance: What exactly was Doubleday looking for? Bradbury startled (and dismayed) him when he said, “You’ve got to remember your juvenile audience, and you’ve got to recall you’re writing for them.”38 This particular book could not possibly be reoriented to a juvenile audience: It was a horror story for adults, from the ground up. “I have caught myself neatly in a trap,” he told Ginny, “one of my own devising, by writing for juveniles and trying to write for adults at the same time and under the same name.”39

  And then Leslyn surfaced again, with no sign of her supposed brush with death—though whether in some sense “recovered” was an open question.

  Leslyn had written to them, direct to Mesa Avenue, late in 1950—“all sweetness and light to us”40—but it became clear that letters she sent to his friends and business associates were another matter: Doña Smith (the former Doña Campbell) mentioned receiving one and, at Heinlein’s request, sent it on to him in February 195141—a classic poison-pen letter in the venomous mode of Leslyn’s dead mother. Heinlein read it with amazement, mounting to alarm, changing to disgust. Disgust gave way to sorrow and then to an abyss of pity: His Leslyn, his Piglet, was finally and completely gone, the once-beloved body possessed by the untidy ghost of her mother.

  I had hoped that time would eventually make me of little importance in her mind but apparently her hatred of me is even stronger than ever.…42

  I married a sweet and intelligent girl back in 1932, twenty years ago. The first five years were happy on the whole, though I should have spotted the storm warnings. The second five years were kept pleasant in part only by difficult adjustments—and by the fact that we were too poor to give her much leeway—or much liquor. The third five years are better left undescribed. I learned to smile no matter what happened. After the war I tried very hard and with expense no object to get at the root of the trouble. I failed and became desperate and did many foolish things and estranged many of my friends. But once I was away from her I got well in a hurry, almost at once. I have often wondered to what extent my own acts or omissions contributed to her illness. “Not much” is my honest belief; I think it was latent in her, from her mother; I think it simply took a number of years for it to develop.43

  Everyone was getting Leslyn’s poison-pen letters—friends and former friends, editors and publishers, even Lurton Blassingame. Heinlein had been through this cycle before, too many times, and knew there was no point even in entertaining hope: His best strategy was to make no reply at all.

  Through experience with her and very similar experiences with her mother I have found that the only defense, poor as it is, is silence, complete silence, and a refusal to offer defense or explanation even when she manages to convince some third party … This last letter doesn’t look to me as if it could fool anybody—and yet I would venture a guess that she could be quite convincing in her more lucid moments.44

  Nor was Leslyn the only source of confusion that spring. Not quite a year after L. Ron Hubbard’s book was published, Dianetics seemed to be generating a lot of attention in the world at large—but it also seemed to be imploding. Heinlein mildly characterized the troubles he was hearing about as “growing pains” in a letter to John Campbell on February 26, 1951, and Campbell reported back that the California organization had come under attack by Communists—focused on Sara Northrup Hubbard.45 It was hard to tell what was actually going on: The gossip Heinlein received from friends on both coasts was confusing. Heinlein was too busy to delve deeply into the issue in any case; spring was coming on, and he would soon be able to hire trades and get the interior of the house finished—always assuming the Army didn’t get all the skilled construction workers. The invasion of South Korea was almost a year old now, and yet, there was still no sign of a definite commitment on President Truman’s part or Congress’s—and thus still no telling when Ginny might be called up. As he got the major manuscripts done, Heinlein dealt with business matters that had accumulated, so he could go back to house-building.

  Alice Dalgliesh was happy with Between Planets—mostly (though a little dubious about the ambiguous boy-meets-girl subplot that Heinlein had put in because he was actually getting more fan mail about these books from girls than from boys).46

  Doubleday asked him to edit a science-fiction anthology for their line (science-fiction anthologies were selling better than novels at the time).47 Heinlein initially turned them down flat, but Blassingame persuaded him that the continuing exposure would be good for keeping up name recognition. Doubleday offered to have Fred and Judith (Merril) Pohl run down the rights, with Walter Bradbury overseeing the project. Reluctantly, Heinlein agreed, and that started a months-long cycle of reading and passing tearsheets back and forth with his other three editors and discussing the contents. By August 1951 the project was under way, and Heinlein’s main contact, Truman Talley, reported “The team play between Fred and Judy, Brad, and ourselves is going along without a hitch.”48

  The previous summer, a deal had been negotiated with New American Library to take all of his books to paperback under the Signet imprint (Sixth Column to be retitled The Day After Tomorrow, since the pre–World War II reference in the title was no longer topical). Blassingame included the Shasta books with the deal, but with the advances and royalties paid directly to Heinlein. Heinlein then forwarded to Shasta their contractual share of the advances. It was a pain to do things in reverse—the author pay the publisher instead of the other way around—but he was already doing this with secondary rights for the stories they had under contract. It was the only practical way he could work out to reduce the free-for-all grabbing of his rights. “Shasta is entitled under contract to a percentage split in this matter; there Shasta’s interest ends, and I intend to keep it that way.”49

  However, Heinlein did not yet understand that Shasta could not be reined in: Korshak was already selling secondary rights without telling him or paying for them, and he had just sol
d an anthology right to SF editor Don Wollheim for “Life-Line.”50

  This was not a problem unique to Shasta, though Korshak was by far the worst offender of whom Heinlein had experience—an unacceptable degree of casualness about other peoples’ property rights seemed endemic among the fan press publishers: Fantasy Press’s agent, Abe Klein, had negotiated a reprint sale of Beyond This Horizon to Grosset & Dunlap, with an introduction by Groff Conklin, without even telling Heinlein about it. Heinlein did not like either side of this deal. In the first place, Fantasy Press did not have the contractual right to make a secondary sale of the book;51 in the second place, he thought Grosset & Dunlap’s “SF Classic” line of books flimsy and unattractive.52

  And in the third place, he had avoided being associated with Groff Conklin since the Crown anthology. Immediately after the war, Conklin was just a little too willing to tolerate and even justify Stalin for Heinlein’s taste.53 When Conklin wanted another story for a new anthology—“Columbus Was a Dope”—they had a little frank conversation on the subject and cleared the air. It appeared that Conklin had modified his uncritical political positions, and Heinlein felt he could now work with Conklin. “I may be mistaken,” he wrote to his agent, “but I propose to give him the benefit of the doubt. Just the same, these soft heads have put this country in danger much more than the outright Russian agents.”54

  A smart man learns from experience; a wise man learns from the experience of others. As of 1951, Heinlein learned he was still only “smart” when it came to management of his business affairs. Tom Corbett had already spun off comic books and a newspaper strip as of April 1951, and the merchandising rights to the “Space Cadet” name he had essentially given away began coining money for the show’s producers as their space suits and ray guns became what Newsweek magazine called “a national craze.”55 Over the summer, Blassingame reported: “I also heard that the space suit[s] are selling madly; the police had to be invoked to save a Los Angeles store the day they went on sale there and the kids were lined up for blocks.” He concluded ruefully: “Too bad we didn’t hold on to these rights or demand a lot more cash for them.”56

  Heinlein had already shrugged it off philosophically:

  As to the commercial rights, money is a relative thing. I can remember once being terribly hard up for fifty cents—stranded, broke, and hungry. I remember another occasion when I hocked my (sacred!) Annapolis class ring for seven dollars. At the time the money they paid me for the commercial rights was ransom money which got me out of a most unpleasant hole. I don’t regret it for myself but it may not have been fair to you in the long run.57

  Blassingame kept delivering royalties and advances, and construction on the house moved along. At one point in May 1950, though, H. L. Gold was weeks late with his payment for the Puppet Masters serial, and the finances became “iffy.” A few weeks later, the squeeze had become critical:

  H.L. Gold’s delay in paying off on Puppet Masters is becoming quite embarrassing—if he does not get the money to me by this coming Friday the 25th, I’ll probably have to let my mechanics go (and God knows when I’ll be able to get them back!). This housebuilding game is wonderful—just like pouring money into the sea.58

  Blassingame wired them $500 out of the blue, which Heinlein later concluded had been a loan, or advance, out of pocket. It was a good risk, though: Three days later, the prestige general-fiction magazine Blue Book took the serial rights for Between Planets, which they would retitle “Planets in Combat” when it came out in September and October.

  In May 1951, John Campbell resigned from the Dianetics organizations. His “explanations” were hard to follow: When the subject came up in letters, it sounded as though he was accusing Hubbard of ideological impurity or counter-revolutionary tendencies or something.59 Isaac Asimov undoubtedly put his finger on an important factor in the split, in a witticism widely quoted at the time and repeated often since: “I knew Campbell, and I knew Hubbard, and no movement can have two Messiahs.”60

  The science-fiction field was expanding explosively in 1951—radio, television, comic books—and Heinlein was contacted by a woman who wanted to adapt Red Planet as a stage play for the Tenth National Play Competition sponsored by Seattle Junior Programs, Inc. It was not a medium he had much interest in himself, but he wished Minta Meier good luck with the contest as he granted and then next year renewed rights for her one-hour-and-forty-minute adaptation.61

  In the meantime, Shasta had been too quiet. Korshak had again refused to let Heinlein see corrected proofs, and on June 26, 1951 (just a week after Heinlein had sold a radio right for “Green Hills” for the Dimension X program), a delivery man showed up on the Heinleins’ doorstep with eleven cartons of advance-order copies of The Green Hills of Earth and Other Stories for him to autograph—shipping charges COD. Heinlein refused delivery: He was not contractually obligated to pay Shasta’s shipping charges.62 A month later, the cartons came back, shipping prepaid this time, both ways. He looked the books over before starting to sign them and found Shasta had changed the order of the stories and had not made some of the proofreading corrections. Even more embarrassing, they had dumped the introduction L. Sprague de Camp had written and substituted a new one written by Mark Reinsberg. That angered him more than any wrong done directly to him. Reinsberg was a friend, too,63 so there was nothing wrong about that—but it was a slap in de Camp’s face. Heinlein wrote to de Camp:

  Sprague, I see that Korshak (a man always full of little surprises) has substituted an introduction by an ex-fan named Mark Reinsberg in The Green Hills of Earth for the wonderful introduction you wrote. Can you tell me what happened? Korshak never tells me anything; he just goes ahead and does things—the fait accompli is his Standard Operating Procedure and he rarely answers my letters.…

  His infinite variety in thinking up new ways to be an unbearable jerk continues to amaze me. They range from “selling” rights of mine not controlled by Shasta to long-distance phone calls in the middle of the night. His latest stunt is to refuse to honor author’s corrections over proof. Grrr!64

  Blassingame just wanted to clean up the immediate mess: He suggested that Heinlein sign the books, send them back to Shasta, and start an arbitration when he was next in New York. Business was booming, and that’s where Heinlein’s time and attention should be going:65 The Post wanted another Heinlein story; the Doubleday anthology was shaping up after a time-consuming but rewarding round of reading and correspondence about its contents; and foreign rights and anthology reprint requests were coming in steadily. Martin Greenberg had recently requested “Columbus Was a Dope,” too, for a Gnome Press anthology—the same story Groff Conklin had wanted. Heinlein was a little mystified at the demand for that story: “The story was slanted for the general magazines and intended for the public rather than the regular readers of science fiction … it will seem like pretty thin beer to the jaded appetites of the s-f afficianados [sic].”66 If all Greenberg wanted was the drawing power of Heinlein’s name on his contents list, Heinlein was not inclined to cooperate: He told Blassingame to offer it under the “Lyle Monroe” name. If it somehow turned out Greenberg wanted the story, Blassingame could give him the Heinlein name gratis: “I’m often wrong; if he believes in the story … I’ll back him with my own name.”67 Heinlein was wrong—or at least Greenberg so convinced him: “Columbus Was a Dope” appeared in the Gnome Press anthology Travelers in Space later that year. The many mansions of science fiction had added several new tracts of public housing since the war, and Heinlein’s fluff-for-John-Q.-Public was not merely accepted, but had become part of the way science fiction presented itself to the public.

  Now that the house was done, they had had their first house guests (a very unsuccessful visit from Bill and Lucy Corson early in August 195168). The house-building had drawn local attention. The Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph sent a stringer, Dorothy Shanahan, to get an extensive interview with both of them, and ran an article that went on for pages, heavily illustrated w
ith photographs, mostly of Ginny and her proud possession of a “push-button” home. The built-ins and amenities were sources of gushing wonder, as was the sound system G. Harry Stine had helped build into every room in the house, with independent controls in each room. Shanahan seemed particularly fascinated by Ginny’s dining table on wheels.69

  The article appeared on September 30, 1951, as they were ramping up for their first real opportunity to entertain in their new home: They hosted a wedding reception of G. Harry Stine and Barbara Kauth, his college sweetheart, before the newlyweds had to take off for New Mexico and Hank’s brand-new job as a rocket engineer at White Sands.70

  It might have been the newspaper article that brought the Heinlein house to the attention of Popular Mechanics. In November 1951 PM sent their Western editor (and photographer) Tom Stimson (who had written their very flattering coverage of Destination Moon in 1950), to do a similar piece. Stimson’s article appeared in the June 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics.

  The Stimson interview had been a welcomed break from the Martian Mowgli story, which had gone sour on Robert after he got an introduction on paper.71 He put it aside and cranked out an idea that had been tickling in the back of his mind since Robert Cornog had loaned him a copy of Cycles in 1949—a book on cycles of all kinds—sunspots, cicadas, economic cycles, women’s hemlines, and so forth.72 A number of unrelated cycles were scheduled to peak—or trough—simultaneously in 1952.73 “The Year of the Jackpot” would be topical, if a little depressing, since he imagined a rather permanent bottoming-out of all humanity’s cycles while everyone around his protagonist goes nuts.