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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Robert suggested they look at the coast near Tryon, North Carolina, where a friend of Blassingame’s had settled happily some years before. But Ginny was not enthusiastic about anywhere on the East Coast—and the South was out because of the race problems. She had had more of the desert than she really liked—and she also didn’t care much for the idea of California.50

  One of their friends in the Seattle area suggested Sequim (pronounced “squim”), Washington, on Sequim Bay, an inlet of the Strait of Juan de Fuca that separates Washington from Canada. They would start there, and if that wasn’t right, they could work their way down the coast, all the way to Mexico, if necessary. Blassingame could handle most business matters, as he had done for them in 1954, while they took what amounted to a long working vacation.

  The phone rang one day while they were in the middle of packing, and Robert took the call standing up in the bedroom. They had gotten an unlisted number recently, to cut down on the random interruptions, and Heinlein was surprised when Harlan Ellison identified himself (probably Ellison had gotten the number from Damon Knight, who was busily getting together a new writer’s guild for science fiction, Science Fiction Writers of America (“SFWA”). Heinlein’s loyalties were still with the Authors Guild, but he had made a quiet donation under the table, to help get organized and pay the bills).51

  Harlan Ellison is a living demonstration of E = MC2—a solid mass of energy and nerves. His normal speaking voice—Ohio Valley with a slightly nasal quack—raised the energy level of any room, like a quick one-too-many shot of caffeine buzz. Ellison was putting together a new anthology—a new kind of anthology—of stories too unconventional or too challenging to find publication in the normal magazine venues. For this Dangerous Visions, Heinlein was the first name on his list when he planned the book.

  Go all the way. Say what you want to say. Pull no punches. Heinlein is known as a bootstraps man for openers; now he can do it in every subtle hue and color he’s maybe had to personally dampen for gutless publications.52

  Heinlein promised to think about it when he had time, complimented Ellison on Paingod, recently published—and went back to packing for the trip.

  The Heinleins said good-bye—one last dinner with the Sencenbaughs, their best friends in the area—and left on their seventeenth wedding anniversary, stopping for the night in Gunnison, Colorado, at a motel that was graduating a class from the hotelier school for the Ambassador hotel chain. The next day, somewhat hungover with last night’s celebratory champagne and dancing, they made their way to Utah.

  By October 24, they were just over the state line into Oregon and spent the next night on the shore of the Columbia River. They were only a short drive, then, from Sequim, where they decamped at a motel.

  Sequim had groceries and a good service station—and just one traffic light. Once they unloaded an unending mass of cameras and portable TVs and radios and gourmet cookbooks and the ton-weight atlas, Ginny got the service station man to flag the now-empty trunk with a tiger-tail hanging out behind.

  Ginny had made a “spectacular” recovery of her health and energy. They rented a winter cabin called “Sea Echo,” a hundred feet or so from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where he had sweated through a difficult transit in fog more than thirty years before, and prepared to sample life in Sequim. “We sit at breakfast and watch the ocean liners go past our front door, sea gulls on our lawn, hundreds of ducks just down the bank below our post box…”53

  The overcast was a little too continuous for Robert’s taste, and the real estate costs were even more preposterous than he had expected: “Sequim does have a remarkable climate but it is a junky looking place, with abandoned houses, barns falling down, and scrapped automobiles cluttering up its woods—plus delusions of grandeur about the price of land.”54

  If Sequim did not suit, there were other locales nearby that might: A two-day excursion to Whidbey Island looked very promising. They were not going back to Colorado.

  But Ginny went into a local bar without him one evening and was told Washington state did not permit women to order drinks at the bar. And that was that.

  Wherever they went, the trip would be leisurely, with stops along the way, for Heinlein was correcting galleys for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and preparing the front matter even as its five serial installments came out in If magazine. Putnam’s had delayed issuing this one so long that it was now doubtful they could catch the annual Christmas book-buying frenzy. Putnam’s did not push this book. They did not even make a full print run, since the sales of his last book—Farnham’s Freehold—had been, for Heinlein, lackluster (4,000 copies).55

  They put the Colorado Springs house on the market by mail, giving it a top asking price for the area of $47,000—justified by all the features Robert had built into it (including the bomb shelter), and left for Port Angeles on December 15, 1965, making their way down the coast in easy hops—to a small town south of Portland, to Fort Bragg, to Novato, about thirty miles north of San Francisco. There, Ginny spotted a billboard ad for forty acres of redwoods near Watsonville, about 130 miles farther south. The big trees had always exerted a certain fascination for Robert, but even these smaller coastal varieties had their charm, they agreed.

  They went on to Watsonville on the Monterey Bay the next day and got in touch with the real estate agent.56 It was a beautiful, if somewhat remote, property, shaded—perhaps a little too shaded—in the “little” redwoods canopy only 150 feet overhead. California was Robert’s obvious choice, but not Ginny’s. “Ginny is somewhat averse to locating anywhere in California,” Robert told Bjo Trimble, “for reasons of smog and traffic and too many people and high taxes.” She was obviously thinking about conditions in Los Angeles—“But the first three can be avoided almost entirely since we have complete freedom to choose our location unconstrained by business necessities or schools—and high taxes might be a penalty we would have to pay to live where we want to live.…”57

  Robert let the scenery make his pitch for him: They continued south through the spectacular Big Sur coastal route—which Ginny had never seen before—stopping overnight in San Simeon, within sight of the Hearst Castle. They talked that night about the property they had seen near Watsonville earlier in the day.

  Ginny liked the site—and she was prepared by now to concede that Northern California was obviously not smoggy and not overcrowded the way Southern California was—though she was still dubious. But the main thing was Robert’s obvious enthusiasm. He was already at least half in love with the place.58 She wanted a night to sleep on it.

  They reached Laguna, California, the next day, where they collected accumulated mail and sent a thousand-dollar deposit check to Harrah’s, the real estate agent for the Watsonville property. As of December 21, 1965, they were owners of forty acres of redwoods, pines, and mixed oaks. That night they celebrated with champagne.

  They made their planned overnight visit to Arcadia, three days before Christmas, to visit with Robert’s mother and sister, then headed back up the coast to Palo Alto, forty miles north of Watsonville, to spend Christmas with Rex and Kathleen Heinlein. Two days later they were back in Watsonville and executed the purchase contracts. The next day they took an apartment there—the Cabrillo Arms Townhouses. They had a headquarters now. After the holidays—New Year’s with Rex and Kathleen again—they would start to build in the redwoods.

  20

  HOUSE-BUILDING–AGAIN!

  There were drawbacks to the Watsonville property: It was mostly dense growth; mail delivery would be a mile away and the nearest store five miles. The private road into the site was almost impassable and shared with six other parties, some of whom did not want it improved.

  It was the road that finally stopped us. We drove up after a rain storm and almost failed to make it although our car was equipped with new snow tires of the type with steel lugs set in the rubber. We slipped and skidded and had a terrible time and twice I thought we were going to slide right off the road into that rocky mou
ntain torrent. Once we reached the top, I simply sat and shook uncontrollably for several minutes.

  That night I found Ginny sitting in the bath tub, crying—so the next morning I saw our attorney and told him we were not going through with it. It cost us, of course—we lost our down payment and the cost of the preliminary title search but our attorney managed to get releases and stave off a law suit. Then we set out again.1

  That entire area on the north side of the Monterey Bay, from Watsonville on the east to Santa Cruz on the west, was redwood country and low, coastal mountains, well within Ginny’s range. They told the local real estate agent, Mr. Zimmerman (Wilson Brothers), what they wanted—a property with its own water being the main requirement, though the redwoods were a consideration (and Robert had a whim of his own: He wanted to live in a town with a romantic Spanish name).2

  Zimmerman said he thought he had something that might suit their needs. This property was smaller—only five acres—but situated on a county road, winding and hilly but not actually impassable, and with telephone and electrical right at the property line, with eight or nine redwood cathedrals and dozens of other kinds of trees.3 The property had a spring—not a natural spring; someone had driven a pipe into a wet place in the hillside forty years before—with a slow but steady flow of seventeen gallons per minute of soft, pure, perfect water, being used as a neighborhood well. There was also, interestingly, an abandoned shed the real estate agent told them had housed a Communist spy ring during the 1950s. The FBI had spied on the spies from a neighboring house farther up the hill, just barely visible to the north.4 And over the tops of the trees across the road there was an ocean view, just visible from the top of the hill that faced the road. That was where they would site the house.

  Heinlein called the agent that night, January 11, 1966, and bought the property on Bonny Doon Road.5 The next day they found a rental in Santa Cruz, twenty miles closer to their new property, at 115 Echo Street,6 near the new university.

  If they could sell the Colorado house at top of market, the proceeds would pay for land and materials and make a dent in the labor costs that had grown so enormously in the construction trades since 1950. The rest he would have to make up from royalties—which meant at least one new book to be written, soonest. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress finished its five-part serialization in April, so he had nothing in the pipeline except the off-again, on-again Future History omnibus (off at the moment) that might not clear any major royalties at all if Putnam’s had to issue it at the then-high price of $10.

  Heinlein began the search for a professional architect and started making preliminary sketches for his own use, surveying the property himself and then working on the design to Ginny’s specification that she wanted a round house.7 He used many of the same design principles they had used for the Colorado Springs house—minimizing housework and bringing in light with a north-south-oriented clerestory. Ginny remembered that the design required nine drafts before they were satisfied with it.8 They built the structure out of California slump stone, giving tribute to adobe, with a color scheme for the trim that would harmonize with the redwoods around them. There was enough room for a turning circle and porte cochere in the driveway, and there they would have their own flagpole. Heinlein also tried a trick he had picked up in a hospital—build the vacuum cleaner into the walls. You could plug in a hose wherever you wanted to clean, without carrying the noisy vacuum pump around with you (and frightening the animals!).

  They did build a swimming pool. Ginny was initially dubious about this California innovation, since they were inconveniently far from repair services—but she quickly got used to the idea of going directly from gardening to pool, dropping clothes by the poolside and calling for a towel at her leisure.9 Robert gave each of the bathrooms its own outside entrance, so he and Ginny would not have to track water into the house. This house was custom-made for their lifestyle—and expensive. It was an all-electric neighborhood in an all-electric era, with no gas lines available from the city. Ginny wanted two chest-type freezers, since they were forty miles away from major shopping. Robert brought in seven electrical circuits for just the kitchen alone.

  Fortunately, Blassingame made more foreign sales, and a clutch of contracts turned up while they were getting ready to build. There were complex arrangements between the trade publisher and the British SF book club combining two of the Future History books into A Heinlein Omnibus, plus another issue under the same name that made a jumbo with Beyond This Horizon. And the American SF Book Club wanted to bundle The Puppet Masters with his old Waldo & Magic, Inc. collection as Three By Heinlein, which would be issued in England as A Heinlein Triad. Since Doubleday already had the plates for both properties, Heinlein didn’t have to do any work putting that one together, except issue the permission. It was found money—at a time when he had a use for it.

  The rented house in Santa Cruz had turned out a mixed blessing. Its location more or less on the edge of Santa Cruz gave them access to the town’s services—and in 1966, Santa Cruz was still a “charming” coastal town. But the lot was very narrow, and Heinlein’s study faced the house next door, less than ten feet away. The neighbors played loud rock music that made concentration next to impossible.

  Proximity gave Heinlein a chance to observe the area’s one exotic ethnicity at close range: the “beatniks” (Herb Caen had not yet popularized the term “hippies,” though that would come later in the year—and Flower Children and the Summer of Love were still a year away). Heinlein said in 1967:

  They have a sort of informal headquarters, the Hip Pocket Book Store, right downtown directly across the street from our bank … It is quite a good book shop. Ginny won’t go into it; the appearance of the beatniks make her ill—but I am studying their manners and customs and odd speech in their native habitat … [sic] and, anyhow, it is indeed a good book shop with a wide selection, plus of course all the books and pamphlets of the new left wing, the boys who are so far out that they regard the Russian Commies as counterrevolutionaries. The town also has a John Birch book store—haven’t visited it yet, but shall—and the Congressman is a Goldwater conservative.10

  On net he preferred a certain amount of distance while things worked themselves out. They obviously thought they were much farther along in developing a self-sustaining culture than they actually were—and with no historical consciousness of the long-standing patterns in American culture they were recapitulating, they might never develop into one:

  The hippy trend I find most interesting but I don’t want them in my lap. I am wondering what permanent effect it will have, if any, on the total culture of the country. Hippydom is not itself a culture (as the hippies seem to think) as it has no economic foundation; it can exist only as a parasitic excrescence to the “square” culture. (I am aware of the “diggers”—there are two communities of them just up the mountain from me. Both are on the skids, going though the usual, historical economic collapse of anarchistic communisms. I know of several others that have failed the same way. Anarchism and socialism are both viable—but not together, it would seem. At least for humans. The diggers aren’t the first to stub their toes on this; history is full of analogous cases.)

  I don’t think the hippies are so much a vanguard of something as they are a complex result of social trends they had little to do with.11

  And he was particularly skeptical of the claims made for psychedelics:

  LSD and pot? Marijuana has been readily available to anyone who wanted it throughout my lifetime and apparently for centuries before I was born. LSD is new but the hippies didn’t develop it; they simply use it. But it seems to me that the outstanding objective fact about LSD (despite the claims of Leary and others) is that it is as much of a failure as other drugs in producing any results of any value other than to the user—i.e., I know of no work of art, essay, story, discovery, or anything else of value created as a result of LSD. When the acid-droppers start outdistancing the squares in any field, I’ll sit up and take notic
e. Until that day I’ll regard it just as I do all other euphoric drugs: a sterile, subjective, sensory pleasure holding considerable hazard to the user.12

  There were other interesting bits of Americana to study—the first newspaper ads he had seen for whorehouses since the 1930s—in the San Jose Mercury! One place offered free parking as an amenity.13

  They continued to plan the house, adding details to rectify some of the deficiencies of the Colorado Springs house. It must have been about this time that Heinlein hired a “water-witch” to dowse the property for the spring.

  I hired him for purely pragmatic reasons. I had a great deal of data indicating that this man, no matter how he does it, can indeed find water … Oh, he found the place, and then I tried it, and Ginny tried it, and the thing did for her; it wouldn’t for me; I apparently don’t have that power. He found the place and he drilled so many feet down and he told us about what we could expect out of it, nineteen gallons per minute, and he was dead on the nose.14

  Robert added a guest cottage that could be kept cat-free for guests with pet dander allergies. That brought the structures on the property (once they added a pump house for the spring and protection for the wiring) up to nine.

  Ginny also had some definite ideas about the interior design. In the house’s main bath, she wanted to eliminate shower doors and curtains by installing a “nautiloid” spiral—arc-shaped—wall that would contain splashes very efficiently without much upkeep.

  She had her heart set on one futuristic kitchen gadget she had been awaiting for more than a decade. They first saw a “radar range” microwave oven demonstrated at a housing show. Heinlein’s brother Rex told them he had rigged one up in his physics class. On a shopping trip to San Francisco at the end of March 1966, Ginny saw a Tappan Radar Range offered for regular commercial sale, and she had her microwave.