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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  You have probably had more influence-per-hour on me than anyone I have ever known … We have actually been in each other’s presence very little time indeed, much less than a week—yet you have influenced me and my thinking and most especially my attitudes toward women enormously more than many, many other people whom I have known enormously longer and quite intimately.25

  Particularly when Ginny was in the hospital, Heinlein grew sentimental and wrote love letters to Mary, which he knew Ginny would read if she was interested when she was up and around again. He assured Mary that he was not “sneaking around” on his wife:

  In any case Ginny and I are in love and are not jealous. With me it is an attitude I have had since I was a kid. With Ginny it is an attitude she has gradually grown into over the course of years, having started out with a quite conventional attitude. But I did not argue her into it—nobody ever argues Ginny into anything; she is as stubborn as a cat.

  She reached more mature evaluations, in her own way and at her own time, as she grew up.…

  Anyhow, we are both unjealous, each of the other. But not indifferent. Heavens, no! I would be shocked, shamed, and very much hurt if Ginny were to bed down with some man whom I did not like, admire, and respect in all ways. However, there is not the slightest chance of that happening; Ginny’s standards are higher than mine, if anything. In a complementary fashion Ginny not only does not object but thoroughly approves of my adventuring on occasion into other pastures—but it had better by a damn sight be with some gal she likes and approves of herself.26

  He had other distractions to relieve his excess of sentiment: Andy Ahroon had gotten him invited as a ride-along on a short (fifty-four-hour door-to-door) trip the Secretary of the Navy was giving for a visiting Canadian Air Vice Marshall (NORAD was an integrated American-Canadian command) over Heinlein’s birthday, and Heinlein made arrangements for Ginny to get her shots while he was gone. Andy stayed behind entertaining the SecNav but loaned his plane to ferry the Air Vice Marshall and party to San Diego. In the morning they had breakfast on the sub tender Nereus and then spent the day under 115 feet of water in the submarine Raton, destroyers seeking them out by sonar to depth bomb them (simulated with hand grenades, concussive enough in a closed underwater box).

  They were flown to an aircraft carrier to observe night and then day operations. That was a kind of reunion for Heinlein, the day before his fifty-fifth birthday, since the carrier was Lexington (CV-16). His Lexington (CV-2) had gone down in the Coral Sea in World War II, but the new Lady Lex was as high-tech for 1962 as his had been for 1929—its deck slanted to give a longer “runway” for the supersonic jets she was carrying now.

  It was a tremendous show. I had not realized how greatly carrier operations had changed—the last time I had landed aboard was in a T4M that came floating in at a relative speed of about 20 kts. An F3H screeching in, missing no. 4 wire and roaring off, is another matter. But I had to see it, smell it … [sic] to realize it.27

  It is tremendously exciting and the noisiest thing I have ever heard anywhere.28

  Adding to the pleasure, Heinlein was recognized everywhere he went and asked repeatedly for autographs. He was greeted by an officer on Lex who wanted to interview him for the ship’s paper—fitting turnabout for all the times he had pestered visitors to make fill-copy for his own days trying to cobble up the next issue of the Lexington Observer.

  They left immediately after, flying back to Colorado Springs on July 7. About an hour into the flight, Captain Erwin handed Robert two letters he had been holding on to since they left two days before—birthday love and wishes from Ginny and another from Andy Ahroon’s wife Lou—then broke out liquid refreshments and toasted his birthday. That was his first birthday party. There was another at the Ahroons’ place later that evening, and a third the following day, this one a quiet evening at home with the Ahroons and Ginny.

  Ginny’s condition, though stable, was not improving. A trip to Bethesda Naval Hospital didn’t offer any hope of substantial improvement or any way of avoiding an eventual hysterectomy. Robert wrote Earl Kemp that they probably would not make it to Chicago for the WorldCon that year. If they were able to travel at all, he said, Ginny wanted to make the Aerospace convention in Las Vegas instead, to which she had a special guest invitation. He could probably make an overnight trip to accept a Hugo Award, if he knew about it far enough in advance—even, perhaps, as late as the morning the presentation was to be made—but that was the only reason he would come. Kemp told him he would give him a tipoff one way or another, after the Hugo Award balloting closed on August 5.29

  Luck intervened. Tom Stimson, who had done the Popular Mechanics article on the Colorado Springs house in 1952, called to say that PM had assigned him to do an article on the Gemini program, and Stimson wanted Heinlein to write it instead—it was right up Heinlein’s alley. Stimson had made extensive notes for the story already which Robert could work from.30

  Heinlein was not completely satisfied with the notes and anticipated a trip (at PM’s expense) to the new Manned Space-flight Center in Houston and the McDonnell facility near St. Louis where the new spacecraft was being built. “Truth is,” he wrote to Stimson, “this is turning into more of a job than I had planned on, too—but I don’t see how I can do this in living, breathing technicolor with wide-screen stereo and power glide31 without getting much closer to the job than I am here.”32

  He let himself be talked into it: With a little canny advance planning, he could schedule the research trip for the end of August and then, if absolutely necessary, make an overnight trip from St. Louis to Chicago for the World Science Fiction Convention.

  Blassingame found Glory Road “delightful” but some of the editors who saw it had mixed feelings. Avram Davidson at F&SF told Blassingame he wanted Heinlein to chop off the last hundred manuscript pages. Heinlein responded that the whole point of the book was in Oscar’s dissatisfaction with the hero’s reward, the “happy ever after” of domestic bliss. He did not object to the labor of cutting, but—“If I do this, what is left is merely a sexed up fairy story, with no meaning and no explanations. I do not want this story published in such an amputated form … It leaves the story without meaning.”33

  The message of sexual freedom was much too strong for Analog, John Campbell wrote him. He would have to edit out a lot of stuff he knew Heinlein did not want edited out. Too bad. The first half was a terrific saga—

  … it marches. It sings! It’s a hell of a yarn!

  The last half sits down on its duff and meditates about the uncertainties of life … [sic] which is exactly what a Hero and a Saga don’t do!

  I thought I was getting a saga … [sic] and I got a sermon.

  Nuts!… [sic]34

  This was basically the same rejection letter Heinlein had gotten from Campbell over “Goldfish Bowl” in 1941, and he was even less inclined now to accept the sacred inviolateness of an editor’s—or reader’s!—expectations of genre as a creative Iron Maiden. Surprising the reader with a shift was entertaining—to him at least—and if the mail he got could teach him anything, it was that it entertained his readers, too, no matter what Alice Dalgliesh or Learned Bulman or John Campbell thought they ought to like instead. Glory Road would sell.

  Earl Kemp upped the ante for a trip to Chicago: Not only had Stranger won the Hugo, he told Heinlein in confidence, but the chief editor at Playboy magazine, A. C. Spectorsky, had specifically asked for him at a “symposium” of SF writers—a taped, closed-door session followed by an early morning party at the Playboy Mansion on the Sunday night following the banquet.35

  That decided him. Playboy was looking at Glory Road, and it was a very high-paying market. Earlier in the month, Ginny thought she might be able to make the Chicago convention—until Robert pointed out that Kalamazoo, Michigan, was nearby and he might be able to see Mary Collin for a long-delayed reunion, for which getting reacquainted in bed was not out of the question. “Ginny looked just barely surprised. ‘Oh—I hadn�
��t realized that was a factor. All right, I’ll stay home. Mary is a good gal and I approve of her, you know that.’”36

  He called Kemp immediately, while Ginny was still in the room: He would come the night of the banquet, but he wanted it kept as low-key as possible, saying he didn’t want to “take the shine off” his friend Ted Sturgeon, who was guest of honor that year.37

  Ginny was improving slowly, so Heinlein decided to take the risk of being away. On August 30, he left for Dallas, scheduled to view engineering mockups in Houston then go to St. Louis to see the actual spacecraft under construction at the McDonnell facility there. He wrote most of the article “Appointment in Space” in a hotel room in St. Louis, while the experience was fresh in his mind, then flew to Chicago on Sunday, September 2, checked in to the convention hotel, and dressed in white dinner jacket for the Hugo Awards banquet. As the award for Stranger was announced and accepted in his absence by Betsy Curtis,38 he entered the ballroom and strode to the head table, amid a shock wave of surprise that turned into a spontaneous ovation.39

  This award can only have been particularly meaningful to him: As much as the Hugo for Starship Troopers two years before, it validated his decision to kick over the traces and slip the surly bonds of editors and children’s librarians. He had a quip prepared: “My wife Ginny,” he held the rocket statuette up to display it, “is getting tired of dusting these things.” Again, as last year, he invited everyone back to his hotel room for an open house and again he “received” in one of the ankle-length bathrobes Ginny made for him—a blue and white mattress-ticking stripe this time, with cotton pajama bottoms. Tradition. And good theater.

  Heinlein enjoyed this kind of thing, though the receptions were always wearing on him, and he would pay for it later with days of exhaustion or weeks of respiratory infections: Parties with wide-ranging and sometimes scintillating conversation with these fearsomely bright—though sometimes unworldly-naïve—young people, and of course the dress-down element of dress-up was a very theatrical counterpoint to the extreme formality of the awards ceremony. Heinlein might not yet have realized it, but this kind of thing might be an important experience to the fans, possibly even something akin to his own emotional attitude toward Doc Smith and Sarge Smith, older figures whose life wisdom he respected and sought out.

  Heinlein could not have given these young people what his own mentors gave him: The slow development of a world view could only be done through long and searching questioning together. There were too many of them, the press of flesh and the press of time were too great. The very circumstances that made it possible made even the attempt impossible. The most one could do under these circumstances was to banter with a witticism. Sometimes that was enough.

  Heinlein had, over the years, developed his own version of Captain—Admiral—King’s “voice of command”:

  The “voice of command” somehow carries with it to the hearer the subconscious knowledge that its owner is used to being obeyed, has the power to require obedience, expects to be obeyed, and does not encompass any possibility of not being obeyed.40

  With Heinlein it was something more inward, which George Scithers characterized as “quiet persistence and presence of command.” Scithers related an incident he saw at a lunch counter, possibly at this very convention. Heinlein sat down nearby, and there was a paper at the other end he wanted; the waitress didn’t seem inclined to put herself out to get it, but by the time Heinlein was finished with the contest of wills, she got the paper for him—and he tipped her accordingly.41 It was more attitude than technique, something that came from inside. There was something primal about Heinlein that the fans wanted from him—they came to warm themselves at his fire.42

  The Playboy Symposium interview, moderated by Murray Fisher, was held that night after Heinlein’s informal reception, from midnight till 3:00 A.M., and included a dozen science-fiction writers from the convention (Heinlein said “several of us—Pohl, Paul [Poul] Anderson, Ted Sturgeon, Tony Boucher, etc.”43) and followed by a dazzlingly chic party at the Playboy Mansion that didn’t even get under way until the small hours:

  This fabulous house illustrated a couple of times in Playboy—and it really is fabulous, with a freeform swimming pool in the basement, a bar under that with a view window into the pool, and all sorts of weird and wonderful fancies. Several “Playmates” were around here and there (clothed) and I saw my chum Shel Silverstein (much annoyed that Ginny wasn’t with me and distressed to learn that she was ill) and I met Spectorsky (who expressed great eagerness to receive copy of mine but no mention of Glory Road, so I suppose it bounced.…)

  I got into a long, drunken, solemn discussion with Hefner in the bar and stayed until 7:30 A.M.—much too late or early, both from health and from standpoint of proper behavior of a guest. I like Hefner very much—my kind of a son of a bitch. No swank at all and enjoying his remarkable success.44

  Heinlein didn’t get to Kalamazoo that trip: He went back to Colorado Springs, wiped out from missing two nights’ sleep in three days.45 The Playboy Symposium was published in the November and December issues of Playboy for 1962.

  By September 20, 1962, they were in Las Vegas for “Ginny’s” aerospace convention, the Air Power Council. They saw a thrilling firepower exhibit at the Indian Springs range—the Mach 2.5 F4H in flight. They also saw the DynaSoar X-20 mockup, and met Dr. Edward Teller, who had been so supportive of the Patrick Henry campaign, as well as one of Teller’s colleagues, Herman Kahn. Heinlein’s ears pricked up when he was introduced to this jolly, bearded fat man who looked, he said, more like a young priest than one of the sharpest minds in current political thinking.46

  Robert Cornog had cautioned him, ten years earlier, to pay attention to this young man’s career, reconstructing one of his seminars out of his eidetic memory. And Cornog had been absolutely on target: Kahn was one of the world’s most important theorists of the change in the geopolitical realpolitik that was going on in the early 1960s. His just-published book, Thinking About the Unthinkable, Heinlein said every concerned person ought to become conversant with.47 Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War was one of the books Heinlein listed as having influenced him greatly, in response to a request by a librarian.48

  Kahn was a science-fiction reader and most emphatically a Heinlein fan. And since Heinlein was developing a circle of friends who intersected with Kahn’s circle developed at the Rand Institute and brought over to his new Hudson Institute, they would see more of each other in times to come.

  Playboy bounced Glory Road as “too romantic,” and Robert concluded that somebody was confused about their editorial policy (the same editor had rejected “All You Zombies—” as too sexy). He could understand Playboy might be hypervigilant about sexual content; they had a tightrope to walk between chic titillation and smut, a line that was somewhat blurry at the time. “Apparently the word ‘romantic’ does not mean to me what it means to you,” he wrote the editor, but “If forced to a choice, I would rather read Playboy than sell to it.”49

  On October 19, 1962, Tom Stimson forwarded a “slight re-write” of the “Appointment in Space” article for his approval.50 It was cut nearly in half and so changed it no longer felt to Heinlein like his own writing.

  But they got what they paid for, and he made no objection. The cut version was published in the May 1963 issue of Popular Mechanics as “All Aboard the Gemini.”

  17

  OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD, OLD WORLD

  The Cuban Missile Crisis erupted on October 22, 1962, and Heinlein spent all his time glued to the radio tuned to CONELRAD, poised to drop everything and get into the shelter on a moment’s notice.

  The most remarkable thing about this thirteen-day crisis was that it was a crisis at all. All through the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union had steadily gained the upper hand on the world political stage. By the time of Sputnik in 1957, when it was absolutely certain that the USSR had technical superiority in ballistic missile technology, it bega
n to look to the Heinleins (and to many others, as well) as though there was nothing the “kindly old gentleman” in the White House would not permit the Soviet Union to get away with—a failure of national nerve on a scale that could wipe America, and with it Western liberal ideas, off the planet forever.1

  In 1959, the weak and corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on the island of Cuba, ninety miles south of Florida, fell to Communist forces led by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. In 1960, the Castro government nationalized all foreign-owned property. The new Kennedy government responded with an economic blockade of Cuba, embargoing imports of Cuban sugar (the island’s principal cash crop) and fine Havana cigars.2 Cuba’s huge tourism and casino industry also dried up. Overnight, Cuba went from a marginally prosperous nation to one of the poorest countries on Earth. An attempt to retake Cuba the following year, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, failed because of logistical bungling. Castro was desperate for economic and military help, to keep his revolution alive. Uncle Nikita (Khrushchev) stepped up—but his aid came with strings.

  The Soviet Union had lost its lead in the missile technology race: By 1962, U.S. nuclear missiles could reach all of the USSR, but Soviet land-based missiles could reach only sites in Europe. In April or May 19623 Khrushchev closed a deal to put missiles along the coast of Cuba, to reach cities in the United States. Building of the emplacements began in the summer of 1962.

  The crisis was at full boil for a week before President Kennedy made the public announcement. A U-2 reconnaissance overflight had photographed missile emplacement construction sites on October 15, and President Kennedy immediately organized a dozen of his most important advisers into EXCOMM, to work out the U.S. response—a naval quarantine around Cuba, physically preventing delivery of the intermediate-range missiles to the island (there were already nine nuclear missiles on the island and under Cuban military control). President Kennedy’s public announcement of the crisis on October 22, 1962, made it clear that any launch from Cuba would be considered an act of war and demanded removal of all offensive weapons. He stepped up reconnaissance overflights to one every two hours and on October 25 raised U.S. defense readiness to DEFCON 2.