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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  This was, of course, nerve-wracking—but Heinlein found in it reason for long-term hope: the crisis, Heinlein wrote in a record of a telephone call with Lurton Blassingame that day, “reduces the overall prospects of war but makes the chance of any war much more imminent—today, this week, this month.”

  On Friday, October 26, Khrushchev offered by private letter to remove the missiles in exchange for a guarantee the United States would not invade Cuba. The next day, Saturday, another letter demanded the United States also remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

  President Kennedy was prepared to agree to the terms of the first letter—and the second demand was literally nothing: The Jupiter missiles were ineffective in Turkey, and he had ordered them removed as very nearly his first act as president. But the new demand now placed him in the intolerable position of appearing to give in to Soviet blackmail. Also, it was not possible to determine whether this was a serious offer or a feint while buildup went on.

  That morning, a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, and the pressure increased from Kennedy’s military advisers for an air strike to destroy emplacements. Saturday evening, President Kennedy decided to pursue a two-pronged strategy: a formal letter to Khrushchev offering to guarantee no invasion of Cuba once the removal of missiles was verified—i.e., accepting the terms of the first letter—while backchannel private assurances were given that the Jupiter missiles would be removed from Turkey, but only on the basis of a secret understanding.

  The following day, Sunday, October 28, 1962, Premier Khrushchev announced he would dismantle the Cuban missile installations and return the missiles to the Soviet Union. By November 20, the dismantling was verified, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was formally over. Heinlein wrote to a friend in England:

  This crisis has made me really proud of my country and my compatriots for the first time in some years. The crisis and the ultimatum came as a surprise to most civilians. It was a surprise to me, not because I did not know of the missile buildup—I did know—but because I did not think that Mr. Kennedy would ever stand up to the Soviet Union; I had thought that we had saddled ourselves with a Chamberlain.… The all-prevailing attitude was one of calm resolution—and I was proud to be an American.4

  But President Kennedy was also building another legacy: The month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a young Negro man, James Meredith, had attempted to enroll in the University of Mississippi—“Ole Miss”—but was physically restrained from registering by the university and the governor, Ross Barnett. President Kennedy sent in federal marshals to protect Meredith, and on the day the boy enrolled made a live television address on the subject to the American people. While he was speaking, riots erupted on campus and in the nearby town of Oxford. The president ordered the federal marshals to quell the riots, which injured three hundred and killed two before quiet was restored. Along with the “Freedom Riders” bus trip through the South in May 1961, testing enforcement of the recent desegregation rulings of the Supreme Court, Meredith’s enrollment and the Mississippi riots are considered cornerstones of the civil rights movement.

  On the very day the removal of Cuban missiles was verified, Executive Order 11063 banned segregation in federally funded housing. A little more than a year earlier, probably in response to the violence in Alabama surrounding the Freedom Rides, the Interstate Commerce Commission had banned segregated facilities for all interstate carriers. It was an uphill struggle against resistance—but there was visible progress, line by line.

  And if Khrushchev had his way, all this would be obliterated (the treatment of minorities in the Soviet Union was as extreme as anything anywhere in the world). The progressive liberal values of Western civilization would go up like tissue paper in a nuclear fireball.

  Podkayne of Mars began to run in November as a three-part serial in the bimonthly Worlds of If magazine. Judith Merril wrote saying that her marriage was breaking up and asking for a loan to beef up the fallout shelter arrangements she would be sharing with Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight.5 Robert and Ginny would be delighted to help—as a gift, not a loan. They had very poor luck with personal loans, Heinlein explained. With just one exception, not only had the loans never been repaid, but the embarrassment of being in debt to them had led to resentment and to having their friends cut them. They wanted to avoid that if possible—but

  If all or most of the adult civilians in the United States emulated your example, it would be worth far more to the country than would another couple of squadrons of ICBMs—Russia would never risk war with us if all of us were equally determined.…

  Our political system, our freedom, is rooted in the idea that basic responsibility is lodged in the individual. If we abdicate that personal, individual responsibility, then we abdicate the very notion of freedom—and might as well surrender quietly to the lords of the Kremlin.…

  … I know that gifts rankle the recipient, too, and I fully expect that you will not like us quite as well in the future as you do now, if you accept it. But gifts do not rankle as much as loans, as the matter is over and done with. If you are willing to take it as a gift, then I expect you to be honest with us, with no mental reservations about how you will repay it someday …

  They were doing well enough to afford the gift: Stranger in a Strange Land was still selling at high levels for a two-year-old book6—both in hardcover and in paperback.7 Heinlein went on, reinforcing the point:

  It must be a clean transaction; all finished, with no emotional hangover, no feeling in the back of your mind that it is “really just a loan.” Nor even a feeling that you “ought” to feel gratitude. I am sufficiently cynical that I do not believe that more than a very small minority of the human race is capable of this most unusual emotion. If you are sufficiently eccentric that you are capable of feeling gratitude, try to keep the feeling to yourself and, with luck, it will go away and cease to disturb our relationship as friends.

  Trying to feel gratitude when one “ought to”—but does not—is even more difficult than trying to feel passionate when one is not in the mood.8

  But losing friends seemed to be in the cards, money or not. In a burst of unpremeditated concern, Heinlein had offered places in their shelter to Andy Ahroon’s wife and three children. Andy himself was on active duty and would not need a shelter. Robert would give up his place in the shelter and take his chances fading into the bush, following the example of Mark Hubbard twenty years before. He had not consulted Ginny before making the offer—and she was not entirely certain she was up to taking care of a cripple (Lou Ahroon had an advanced case of multiple sclerosis) and the children, two boisterous boys and a girl who was at the rebellious stage.9 But she would back him up—even though it meant they would have to sleep in shifts.

  Robert worked on getting in real beds—cots—and improving the sanitary facilities. He also laid in another gun and doubled their supply of batteries. Ginny had been collecting an entire shelf of survival skills books; she discovered that they had forgotten to plan for water and began distilling water and storing it in plastic jugs.10 When she was done, she had food and water to allow as many as six people to survive (in crowded discomfort) for one month.11 They instructed the kids how to get into the shelter and how to use all the equipment.

  But late in November they had a “social spat” with Andy and Lou. “It was a silly business, just a broken date but some feelings were hurt on both sides.”12 Andy mailed back the key to the shelter. Robert sent it back with a note to the effect that they shouldn’t penalize the kids over a difference of opinion among the adults.

  Yesterday he sent the key back to me for the second time, and made it quite plain that he would rather have his kids exposed unprotected to atomic attack than accept any favors from us.… It is a weird problem. We’ll deal with it as best we can.13

  The details of the writing business continued to pile up and had to be dealt with. In December, Peter Israel wrote, after expressing satisfaction with Glory Road overall, that he, too, wanted to cut the “poin
tless” last hundred manuscript pages of the book.14 Ultimately Israel agreed to accept Heinlein’s “story sense” as controlling, and Putnam’s printed Glory Road as written—as did F&SF when Robert sent Avram Davidson, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, the edit he had prepared for Putnam’s.

  Soon after the holidays, Ginny saw a specialist about her illness. Since her doctors said it was an inoperable kidney stone, Robert had been looking for other urologists and found that Dr. Howard, who had literally saved his life in 1934, was still practicing in Denver. Dr. Howard took a history and performed an endoscopic examination. Ginny did not have a kidney stone at all, he concluded—but when she was young, she had probably had a case of childhood tuberculosis (quite common in the 1920s) that left scars that might look, on an X-ray, like a kidney stone … if you weren’t particularly careful about what you were looking at. There were other problems—a calcified lymph gland that did show up on X-rays but her physicians had missed, an infected sphincter polyp, which he removed, and what looked like a lingering case of amebic dysentery—again. This time they both took the cure simultaneously, hoping to wipe it out completely.15

  The amount and frequency of Demerol Ginny was taking dropped almost immediately.16 On January 23, 1963, Heinlein made a page of notes for a new book, Grand Slam (his family would be playing Bridge, with a seven No Trump contract when they took a direct nuclear hit that blasted them into the future). This book brought together two important topical subjects that had been on his mind since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October and November the last year:17 What he put into the book was an attitude that, in a very strong sense, the struggle for racial equality was the very emblem of the Western liberal values that would be the main victim of a nuclear war. The only thing a rational man could expect was that humanity would revert to its “normal” behavior throughout history. The inheritors of the Earth would think … differently: slavery at the very least—institutionalized cannibalism was not so unlikely. It had happened at various times and places in Earth’s long and unsavory history. He would thrust his “nuclear” family into a world that made their own “limousine liberal” racism a world-system, the chief administrator a mirror of his hero, with only the color values reversed. Leon Stover reported, more than twenty years later that Heinlein told him:

  … it does no more than play on Mark Twain’s prophecy of 1885, that within a hundred years the formerly enslaved blacks of America would turn things around and “put whites underfoot,” unless racial attitudes were changed.18

  Most of the material he drew from his own experience19—a scathing satire, with ironic inversions of all the standard justifications for racial bigotry. He raced through the book in twenty-five days, 126,000 words, retitled Farnham’s Freehold, presumably to throw the focus back where it ultimately belongs—in the individual action of the individual human being, where the future is made.

  Ginny approved of Farnham’s Freehold. It was better, she said, than Glory Road. While polishing the manuscript before sending it to Blassingame, Heinlein took the opportunity to enlist a doctor’s help—Dr. Alan E. Nourse—to make the birth sequence as gut-wrenchingly believable as possible. Nourse suggested a long and difficult delivery, followed by hemorrhage and death by “bleeding out.”20 Heinlein was so appreciative that he eventually dedicated the book to Dr. Nourse.

  In June, Heinlein again renewed his and Ginny’s membership in the American and Midwest Sunbathing Associations, though he hadn’t used them in years (all their nude sunbathing was done at home nowadays). Both Robert and Ginny continued their memberships for years, apparently on the principle that the right to be naked and not to be ruled by Mrs. Grundy deserves financial support from anyone who believes in freedom.

  At any rate, he was getting extra sun, nowadays,21 unclogging silted-up catchbasins and improving their water-recovery system by running a siphon system directly from Ginny’s tub to the garden, to save the strain on her wrists carrying gray water during droughts.22 She was recovering that summer from wrist surgery for carpel tunnel syndrome. She was also back on Demerol more often than not, up from twice a week back in April.

  Her local doctors had essentially given up on finding out what was the problem, simply renewing her prescriptions for Demerol, which bothered Heinlein: It was habit-forming. No good could come of this in the long run.23 But—

  … a light gleam of light about Ginny’s health—she decided tonight [August 8, 1963] to try another approach … (Some of our friends have been telling me for months that I must make her do thus & so—haven’t they ever heard of the Emancipation Proclamation? Women are not chattels. Ginny does her own deciding.)24

  To Bill Corson, he added:

  She finally fired the joker who has not been treating her but loading her up with habit-forming drugs, and on Monday she goes into the hospital again, with new doctor, new tests, new hope for both of us. She hates it—she is not a patient patient—but this is a glimmer of light, maybe.25

  Ginny probably had agreed to the change because she had taken up a new political cause, and the spasms of pain that came on at night interfered with her fund-raising activities for the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign. Heinlein approved of Goldwater, both personally and politically—a New Deal liberal who had evolved in a sensible way, responding to the actual political realities the country had found itself in after World War II.

  Ginny was setting up a “Gold for Goldwater” fund-raising campaign with five other field workers—a grassroots organization, outside the somewhat hidebound local Republican hierarchy. “Spend what you think we can afford,” he told Ginny. He had been disillusioned with party politics for nearly a decade, but this was a campaign worth fighting.

  One reason I hope he makes it (a personal, non-political reason) is that he is half Jewish. Since Ginny and I are half Jewish, too, it would please me personally to see a Jewboy make the big one … when I feel like kicking an anti-Semite in the teeth—an exercise I enjoy—I prefer to have it be a totally disinterested act, a blow for freedom).… 26

  Heinlein was between books, but fan mail was becoming a real problem. “Ginny thinks I ought to stop answering reader mail entirely—but I can’t. I’m just not cold-blooded enough to ignore entirely a letter from a stranger in which he says that he enjoyed something I wrote.”27 Nor was mail the only interference with writing and the ongoing project of improving their water-recovery system. In addition to what sometimes seemed “hordes” each summer, of friends and relations coming through, an increasing number of strangers felt free to drop by unexpectedly. Working time was constantly being eaten up. “Da Capo” was not going to get written this year—or the 10,000-word story he was working up for Boys’ Life—or a novel, or all three.

  Earlier in the spring, George Pal had looked at Podkayne for the screen, though he had not optioned the property. Now Heinlein’s Hollywood agent, Ned Brown, was contacted by someone at Screen Gems, a television production company. Heinlein had developed a strategy by this time for dealing with Hollywood types: He was not interested in spending his working hours stroking the vanity of any illiterate with a checkbook he might or might not see the inside of. He devised a simple acid test to sort the frivolous from the serious. Ginny Heinlein recalled:

  … Hollywood producers would call frequently. Somehow they would obtain our unlisted telephone number if they were anxious enough to get in touch with Robert. They would talk about something, some project they would have in mind, and Robert would listen politely and then they would say “why don’t you come out here, hop a plane and come out here, and we’ll talk about it?” And Robert would say, “why don’t you hop a plane and come here to Colorado Springs, and we’ll talk about it.”28

  That was usually the end of that.

  The gambit failed, however, when the producer for Screen Gems, Howie Horwitz,29 agreed to fly out to Colorado Springs to continue the discussions for a new kind of science-fiction television series, representing also his writing partner, William Dozier. Horwitz was in Col
orado Springs on September 5 and 6, 1963, and he turned out enthusiastic, knowledgeable about science fiction—and very persuasive. Screen Gems, Horwitz insisted, was looking for something completely different from any science fiction that had been on television so far—adult drama, not watered down at all, and “undiluted science fiction.” To make it possible, the interference was minimized by taking on multiple sponsors so that no one sponsor could control things. The Horwitz-Dozier team30 had two hit shows on at the same time: Route 66 (1960–64) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958–64). Screen Gems had given them a free hand to come up with their next big thing. The show was to be called Century XXII, since it was to be set in about 2160 AD. Furthermore, Horwitz and Dozier were the producers; there would not be any “Hollywood committee” sticking fingers in this particular pie.

  The day after Horwitz left, Heinlein began working on Century XXII. His strong suit as an SF writer, he knew, was the “literature of ideas” end of SF. He decided to build the pilot script and the series proposal around “Gulf,” the strongest story ending he had ever thought up.31 The “Gulf” story would adapt nicely to the international spy thrillers that were popular at the time—Danger Man from the U.K., and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy. Kettle-Belly Baldwin, reworked to a younger, more vital character (Horwitz had Robert Stack in mind for a major role), was the core character, MacLeod. The series would go from crisis to crisis as MacLeod’s organization of superhumans guarded and guided humanity. The story of “Gulf,” with its tragic sacrifices of a comparative new recruit and one of MacLeod’s more experienced “children,” would be the pilot story, expanded to a ninety-minute format.