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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Ten days later, Heinlein had the series proposal ready—thirty-seven pages, plus a thirty-four-page appendix on the world of 2163 AD. He sent this, along with the first fifty pages of script for the pilot—“The Adventure of the Man Who Wasn’t There.”

  FADE IN:

  EXT. TITAN CITY SPACEPORT—NIGHT

  1. MINIATURE—SPACESHIP LANDING 1

  A long, low-key shot of FIELD and SHIP, with SATURN conspicuous in B.G.

  A high wind blows snow, sound of storm is an eerie ululation. The ship lands straight down, guided by pencils of light. We see by saturnlight and by floods which cover the snowy field; spot lights let us see what we wish to see. As the ship lands it partly obscures Saturn. CAMERA CLOSES IN as the ship lands. Ship extrudes jacks which steady it, cargo ports open, cargo skids float up to them. The ship starts discharging cargo as a long transparent tunnel snakes out from the largest dome, a dome surrounded by a control tower. A transparent ladder snakes down from the lower part of the great ship and locks onto the tunnel. A rumbling noise matches these movements. The ladder is an enclosed escalator, the tunnel from the dome is a moving walkway. A light at the control tower and one at the ship’s conn change from blinking to steady as linkup is made. Passengers in a crowded stream begin disembarking, animation to match use of escalator and slidewalk.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  2. SPACEPORT FIELD 2

  We look past the shoulders of THREE GROUND CREW in heavy protective clothing with helmets at the stream of passengers inside the slidewalk tunnel. CAMERA FASTENS on one man, MOVES with him. It is Professor NIKITA ZARKOV, a middle-aged, unworldly scholar, a sweet and friendly man. He is dressed in a 2163 mode, shorts, shoes, singlet, and pouch belt. He is smooth-shaven and his hair is very short. He is towing by a short lanyard a very large bag which floats—there is a small bulge at one end which is its antigrav unit.

  As the CAMERA picks him out, he turns his head and looks at us.32

  Six days later, he wrote “The End” to the script, at an overloaded 141 pages.33

  209. RAISE FROM BLACK TO PICTURE AS MUSIC SWELLS

  EXT. MINIATURE—FLAT LUNAR SURFACE, RINGWALL OF MOUNTAINS IN DISTANCE, BLACK SKY AND STARS ABOVE. IN MIDDLE FOREGROUND IS A MONUMENT, CONVENTIONAL.

  Music starts as a dirge, shifts mood and becomes less mournful as we pull in toward monument. It quickly fills frame and the inscription on it then fills the frame so we can read it:

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  MR. AND MRS. ANDREW GENRO

  WHO, NEAR THIS SPOT,

  DIED FOR ALL THEIR FELLOW MEN

  We hold on this for at least ten seconds.

  As we raise the CAMERA from the monument to the starry sky MUSIC SWELLS in volume and becomes triumphantly exultant as it merges into THEME OF SERIES.

  As quickly as stars alone fill the FRAME, we match with footage from the opening and start traveling fast through the stars. MUSIC UP AND OUT AS WE:

  FADE TO BLACK

  Horwitz and Dozier were having the contracts prepared, and he was going to have to go back to Hollywood to close the deal. He made the necessary final revisions on Farnham’s Freehold while he waited for the call.

  He and Ginny had planned to go out for dinner on their anniversary, as usual, but they got the call to Hollywood for a meeting the day after, so they packed up and had their anniversary dinner in the air.

  The meeting went well. They talked out the series proposal, and Heinlein “pitched” the rest of the pilot story. He had expected some resistance to killing off the episode second lead, but neither Horwitz nor Dozier raised any objections. When he got back home, he fiddled some with the pilot script and on Armistice Day sent the full script to Ned Brown. Brown discreetly let him know it was not filmable as it stood: Horwitz’s comments—“notes,” they are called in the industry—would give him the feedback he needed to rework the teleplay. But he had gotten the story down, and that was the main thing.

  The same day Ned Brown’s comments were written (November 18, 1963), Robert and Ginny gave a dinner party for a number of people from the Navy League western regional meeting being held at the Broadmoor, including three of his Annapolis class—all admirals now—Ricketts, Brandley, and Loomis.34 At this party, Robert somehow got these dignitaries on their hands and knees on the living room floor, as ships re-enacting a famous Pacific naval battle while Robert read the progress of the battle to them.35

  Ginny was more healthy and energetic—and quite suddenly. Just weeks before, she had been “so low that she had picked my next wife and was deciding to whom to give her jewelry.”36 Near the end of September, she had taken on a new doctor who had gotten her off Demerol with no residual effects at all. “… Ginny is well at last. Well, and suffering from a bad case of cabin fever; she went down and got herself a complete new set of flight baggage, so I am sure we will be starting out somewhere before long.”37 Heinlein had been working very hard on the television series. Popular Mechanics had proposed sending them to Antarctica for an article on Little America, but Ginny was talking about lying on the beaches of Tahiti, soaking up sun while he froze for the readers of PM.

  The day after their dinner party was the last of the Navy League meeting, and Heinlein almost skipped it because of the late-night party. The keynote speaker was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Col. Ken BeLieu.38 BeLieu surprised everyone by ripping up his prepared speech and giving a rousing “go Navy!” talk that said all the things the admirals would like to have said but couldn’t. He was given a standing ovation.

  In the receiving line afterwards, Col. BeLieu did a double-take when he heard Heinlein’s name. He hung on to Heinlein’s hand and blurted out, “The Green Hills of Earth!”—Heinlein told a friend about the incident, continuing: “and I sez, ‘Huh? You read the stuff?’—and he sez, ‘I’ve read everything you’ve ever published. I’ve been wanting to meet you for years.’”39 Robert and Ginny invited the colonel and his wife back to their place for drinks, and a passel of brass invited themselves along, so they had another wingding, second day in a row. The assistant secretary was indeed familiar with all of Heinlein’s writing—including the boys’ books most adults never saw. Flattering—downright flabbergasting when the Assistant Secretary of the Navy told him his favorite was Starship Troopers!

  The boost to his morale stood him in good stead. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 23, 1963, and the national shock and grief filtered even into Colorado Springs. Heinlein kept working: Howie Horwitz visited on December 4, on his way to tour the Denver Mint, pleased with the project so far. Robert finalized the long-delayed revisions on Farnham’s Freehold and got the completed manuscript off to his typist a few days before Christmas.

  On December 30, Horwitz sent him, not notes, but a completely revised script. His cover letter was not encouraging: He had fiddled with it a bit, he said, to improve the drama for television purposes—“though at some expense to dialogue.”40

  This was the first indication that Heinlein and Horwitz were simply not talking the same language: Horwitz had not simply reworked the blocks of dialogue, he had completely gutted the story—and the worst of it was a new ending that fell flat, “killed the story.”41

  Heinlein wrote to Horwitz of his—their—warm personal regard for him, hoping their friendship could survive anything that became of the series—but:

  The new script does not merely have a handful of major faults which might be corrected by changing these few scenes either back to what they were, or by changing forward to something entirely different. This new script is bad all the way through, in endless ways. Characterization, motivation, and logical construction of plot have all been destroyed.…

  Every time you get your hands on his dialog you turn him from a superman into a schnook.… since I can’t look inside your head, I’m not sure just what your “Kenro” is like—but from the external evidence of the dialog and actions in your script he seems to be a muscly young man, with quick reflexes, fairly slow mental processes, and
difficulty in making up his mind about anything.

  But the worst thing you have done to the Kenro character in this scene is to divest him of any nobility.… he flunks the superman test.…

  I am saying that intelligence without compassion is the most viciously dangerous thing in the world—and that is the moral of this story and should be the moral, one way or another, of every story in the series. This is spelled out in my original presentation for the series; apparently you have forgotten it since now all you seem to want is an adventure story with exotic locale and characters.42

  And the new ending was flatly unacceptable: The whole story had been conceived around the original ending, in which Kenro and Edith sacrifice themselves to save humankind. Without it, you had only disarticulated shards of story elements, people moving around without consistent psychological motivation.

  Within a day or two, Heinlein learned that William Dozier had resigned from Screen Gems.

  Horwitz—and Ned Brown—must have looked at Heinlein’s letter with a sinking feeling. Heinlein just didn’t seem to understand anything about television. All his story criticisms were perfectly valid, Horwitz told him, but the practical realities of making television in 1964 simply could not accommodate many of them.43

  In retrospect, Robert Heinlein was absolutely the wrong person to approach for this kind of a project. Isolated in the mountains of Colorado, he had hardly watched television at all, and had no internalized “sense” of the dramatic textures of a television show.

  They might have been able to come up with something workable if they had taken up Heinlein’s suggestion in his first reply, to scrap the “Gulf” story entirely and make up a new one from scratch. “We have a group of undefined characters in search of a plot and some fairly juicy elements to play with in constructing one.”44 But Horwitz insisted the story was salvageable—so long as you chop up the action, remove the longish speeches that establish the characters’ deep motivation, get rid of the symbols that back up the plot line, and remove any trace of moral position from the conflicts.

  Heinlein was skeptical: “A properly constructed plot is as tight as a syllogistic sequence,” he told his agent, Ned Brown. “If you change the premises, you change the result. This is what Howie has done—but he fails to see it.”45

  I suppose a vaguely similar story could be written, using the same names for characters, most of the locales, and the futuristic stage dressing. But plot structure, motivation, characterization,—and of course dialog—would have to be changed throughout … and it won’t be written by me. If I am told to change the ending, I will change it, collect my blood money, take my name off it, and walk off. Howie approved my ending in December, reversed himself, then again reversed himself over the telephone a couple of weeks ago and again agreed to let my ending stand, now has reversed himself still another time and now insists on changing it. I’m sick of it.…

  Ned, don’t even suggest to me that I go along with them on this point (other than as a trained seal, to complete a distasteful contract). Don’t. Or I’m likely to bite right to the bone.46

  Heinlein contractually owed them one more script revision and was “willing to do any damn thing they ask me to do,” but “Suffice it to say I don’t think Shakespeare could have worked for Screen Gems—and I have grave doubts about my own ability to.”47

  Heinlein drove with Ginny to Hollywood for a working meeting with Horwitz scheduled for Monday, January 27, to be followed by an extended stay—as long as it would take to complete the obligation. While there, they renewed some old acquaintances, both long-standing friends in the Hollywood area and new ones met at recent fan conventions.

  Heinlein completed his basic contract, delivering the revised script just before midnight on Valentine’s Day—Friday that year—but the script was still not satisfactory. Heinlein continued working sixteen-hour days on a third revised script which he turned in on February 27.

  Ginny’s health had improved greatly, but her right knee was acting up. That was the deciding factor: It was time to go home. Two weeks later, Horwitz had not asked for a further revision. The contract was judged fulfilled, and they left for home on March 18.

  He still had a career in print: While he was battening down with that last script revision, Fred Pohl had picked up Farnham’s Freehold for If magazine. If had started out as a sister magazine of Galaxy; by dint of hard work and exceptional editorial skill, Pohl was turning If into a real contender, and a steady market.

  Heinlein was reluctant to start a new book, since he might have to be back in Hollywood that summer for pre-production work on Century XXII—and Jack Williamson was coming out for a visit at the end of May 1964 for his graduation from the doctoral program at Boulder, so they would have a visitor to entertain. Heinlein began to catch up on his backlog of technical reading and plowed into the mail that had accumulated in their absence.

  The process of answering fan mail became so time-consuming that he instituted a postcard-only policy. Heinlein worked out a division-of-labor deal, with Ginny taking over most of the routine correspondence.

  One correspondent wrote to give them a heads-up that Stranger in a Strange Land was starting to take on some unusual significance: At a recent seminar given by Alan Watts (America’s Zen expert), Watts had mentioned Stranger and gotten knowing nods from the audience.48 The April 1 royalty statements came in from Putnam’s, for the second half of 1963: Stranger’s sales were respectable, but they didn’t give any particular evidence of activity picking up—probably about twenty-five hundred sales of paperback and hardcover, combined, for the last six months—up from the November low last year of about six hundred.49

  The Screen Gems deal was still technically alive, but Screen Gems was undergoing a major reorganization, Ned Brown told him, and had been managed by a committee for a time. Now the new director, former child star Jackie Cooper, was coming in like a new broom, with his own cadre of management. Howie Horwitz no longer had an office there: He was working out of his home. The Century XXII project was in limbo.50 Development hell. Heinlein had his Hollywood agent invoice Screen Gems for expenses and per diem on the trip.

  And the science-fiction universe demanded his attention again: Glory Road was nominated for the Hugo Award. Even if the screenwriting venture was not successful, his writing was.

  The universe was apparently intent on driving the lesson home: He received a partial reimbursement of expenses from Charles Fries at Screen Gems, along with a very nasty letter accusing him of dishonesty as to the rest. Robert politely acknowledged the check but pointed out the grounds for casting doubt on his honesty were not at all accurate (to say nothing of personally insulting). He might have stood still for the chiseling, he told Ned Brown: “A man can cheat me (and several have) and I will hardly blink. But if he cheats me and at the same time accuses me of cheating him—then I take any and all action open to me.”51 Two weeks later, Fries sent him the remainder of the expenses he had claimed.

  Heinlein’s long-standing proposal for an omnibus volume of the Future History stories got a boost when Truman Talley at NAL offered to pick up the entire series if Robert finished the fifth projected book. Since that book was substantially done with the British and American publications of Orphans of the Sky (1962), the omnibus project was on track. A glitch had emerged in December, over the 1958 Gnome Press issue of Methuselah’s Children. By March 1963, it was back on the table: Doubleday had reconciled themselves to a seven-hundred-page volume, but Blassingame entertained suspicions: Already Doubleday had established a history of dumping its trade editions—giving them no substantial promotion—so they could issue in the cheaper and much more profitable SF Book Club (with a reduced author royalty).52 Earlier in 1964, Blassingame had negotiated a contract with Doubleday to bring out a Future History omnibus. The contract was prepared, and Willy Ley asked to write the introduction,53 but Heinlein rejected the contract as unsatisfactory54 and outlined the minimum conditions—“two nonnegotiable points, five subject to
discussion”—he would accept in such a contract (among the latter: whether the books were to be issued separately again, or only in the large, omnibus format).55 When Doubleday wanted to take over the paperback rights for the original volumes, Blassingame, on Heinlein’s direct instructions, pulled the plug on those negotiations and reapproached Putnam’s, who had both Orphans in the Sky and Farnham’s Freehold in process.

  Putnam’s was ramping up to market Farnham’s Freehold with scare tactics, and in the process the jacket blurbs tipped too much of the suspense factor in the book—while ignoring the important secondary themes:

  … survival under very adverse and widely varying circumstances and the ever-changing problems of right conduct on the part of a free individual when faced with conflicts involving the equal rights of other individuals—problems involving the nature of democracy, the relationship between responsibility and authority, conflicts and tensions involving rate, sex, marital duty, miscegenation, family vs. outsiders, many others—and all of them based on the assumption that a man possesses free will and a never-ending duty to himself to behave always with full and impartial justice to everyone no matter how difficult the circumstances.…56

  To a correspondent, Heinlein confided: “Glory Road and Farnham’s Freehold are possibly the least ‘escapist’ (along with Stranger) of any of my stories and the three together are a trilogy. But all three of them are heavily allegorical—and I’m damned if I’ll explain the allegories!”57

  But by that time, he had received another kind of wake-up call. It had started early in June 1964, with what could only be termed a “routine” alarum-and-excursion (for a political campaign) at the downtown Gold for Goldwater headquarters—alarming for Ginny. William Scranton, the governor of Pennsylvania, was tossing his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination, which was splitting the Goldwater candidacy: It was, in fact, a “stop-Goldwater” movement. Governor Love of Colorado was going to defect—jumping on the Scranton bandwagon before the groundswell of support he expected—and the entire Colorado Goldwater organization might fall apart.58