On several occasions, he ignored Cronkite’s interruptions and continued speaking, to the secret delight of the CBS studio crew. “[H]e did cut across Walter Cronkite’s bow a number of times…” Ginny told friends when they got home. “But he was darned well going to have his say … The CBS people were cheering about him cutting Walter out!”47 At one point, Heinlein ticked off another index-card point and remarked that designers and engineers could achieve even greater performance by designing the Apollo equipment for an all-female crew—a suggestion that appears to have shocked Cronkite. “Women in space!! Never!”48 Cronkite continued to splutter and Heinlein pressed the momentary advantage, unperturbed. Cronkite must have realized how he would come off and gotten his prejudices under control enough to let Heinlein’s continued remarks pass without objection. When Heinlein’s segment was over and the camera went back to Cronkite, the crew in Downey broke into spontaneous applause. “I think they had never seen anyone who could flap Cronkite before.”49 But it might have been a futile gesture. It was Heinlein’s impression that they had simply junked the entirety of the taped interview with him, without airing any of it. Only a small portion of the appearance was recorded in the memorial book CBS published of the coverage.
By the end of the Downey coverage, on July 20, 1969, they had been up forty-one hours with only a brief nap. The Apollo capsule had a four-day trip back to Earth. They had one day and night in Los Angeles—and two parties that night—before returning to Santa Cruz.
Among the accumulation of mail they found a letter from a fellow SF writer, Frank M. Robinson, with six questions to kick off an interview for Playboy. Ginny wrote that Robert was involved in a new book and couldn’t.
He would have made the effort for Playboy, except that five of the six were questions about his colleagues, which he wouldn’t answer, or about his own stories, which he would not discuss either. But the Playboy editors came back with a new slant that made it doable: They wanted him to concentrate on the Moon landing and space in general, since an anti-space lobby was already ramping up.50
That was different. He was in the mood to take up the bully pulpit. He and Robinson settled on the date of August 9, two weeks away, for Robinson to come down from San Francisco to Santa Cruz with a Playboy staff photographer. On the same day (July 26), Heinlein composed an open statement to begin to counter the custard-heads—essentially a press release:
Anyone who honestly has the welfare of the human race on his mind should be pushing hard for us to go ahead with space exploration as fast as technology permits. Anyone who thinks we should “stop spending all that money” on space and spend it instead on such problems as pollution, poverty, etc., simply does not understand the situation.
… I am not at all certain that Mankind can solve on this planet the problems of population pressure, nationalism, pollution of atmosphere and water, destruction of natural resources—you name it. All of them add up to the simple statement that we are breeding ourselves to death. BUT PUT A FEW COLONIES OUT ELSEWHERE AND THE HUMAN RACE GOES ON.51
The interview with Robinson took two and a half days—coincidentally the very days on which Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, as well as Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, though the reportage of the gruesome “ritual” style of the murders had not hit Bonny Doon by the time the interview was concluded.
Robinson cooperated in keeping the interview on track, and the subject did allow Heinlein to develop some opinions that were not exactly politic: He was still steamed about Billy Graham’s arrogance in verbally slapping President Nixon’s wrist for saying the lunar landing was the greatest day in human history, and that provided the starting point for the interview:
I’m talking here about the people who have been against space travel all along and who didn’t believe in it and so forth. Now it’s done and they now look like the fools they are and I’m tired of being polite to them. Half a century of being treated like a madman for believing what was perfectly evident all along since the days of Sir Isaac Newton is long enough for politeness. They are, and were, fools, and I now say so.… [sic] except that false prophets never do shut up. Their smugness, their conceit, their vested interests and things that they are, their basic stupidity and lack of imagination won’t let them shut up. They are at a dead end and don’t know it.52
Robinson transcribed the eight cassette tapes of interview himself—28,000 words. Heinlein went back to work on I Will Fear No Evil53 but directed that the honorarium for the interview be sent directly to the Ed White Youth Center Memorial Fund in Seabrook, Texas (White was one of the astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 capsule fire in 1967).
The book reached the “gargantuan” stage—over six hundred pages of manuscript—and the characters were writing themselves without consulting him at all, which bemused him. In response to a query from Blassingame, Robert left Ginny a note:
Please tell him that I am anxious to learn what the new book is all about, too—especially the ending.
I seem to be translating Giles, Goat Boy [John Barth, 1965] into late Martian.54
He put “The End” to it on September 3, after struggling with the last chapter for days.
This time I am attempting the impossible, I am trying to bridge the “generation gap.” All I can say about it at this point is that anyone I failed to offend with Troopers and Stranger I will probably offend with this one. It is a 360° traverse of skunk spray. With any luck it will be condemned both by the SDS55 and the John Birch Society.56
I Will Fear No Evil had come out at 165,000 words—and it was so odd, so unlike anything he had ever done, that it was very difficult to cut. Part of the reason it had ballooned so uncontrollably might be that he had written his first postmodern novel, that plays with several metafictive levels of storytelling. The events might be “real” for the world of the fiction, or they might be a dream/hallucination/delirium of a dying man, wholly or in part—but there is no firm evidence as to where the delirium might take up. The operation itself might be a dream-fantasy. The metafictive levels interlocked in such complex and deliberately ambiguous ways that cutting around them was a difficult project. It was a pioneeering work guaranteed to be difficult, guaranteed to be rejected by anyone who wanted “more of the same” from him.
Three weeks after finishing it, Heinlein had made several brush-pen passes through the manuscript, eliminating excess qualifying phrases, tightening up the language, catching typos. He had cut twelve thousand words out of the story and hoped to get another twelve thousand out57 before he gave it to the typist in October, taking pass after pass through the manuscript. Anything that was going to be done on this one, had to be done now, as he wouldn’t be able to think about the book for a long while: The fortieth reunion of his class at the Naval Academy was coming up in October, and this he would not miss. Even 140,000 words was too much.58 “In my opinion,” he wrote later, “that novel is about 30,000 words too long.”59
Shaking up any entrenched intellectual position was a good thing in and of itself, and a worthy goal for any professional clown (as Heinlein sometimes referred to himself).60 In furtherance of this goal, he was glad to give permission to Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane rock group in nearby San Francisco to quote lines and passages from some of his novels in their lyrics.
I am pleased by your courtesy in asking permission. Bits and pieces from my stories have been used by many people around the country—names of groups, names of songs, parts of songs, names of churches, endless buttons, decals, etc.—and it is rare indeed for anyone to bother to ask my permission.
I would like to ask two things of you: a) When and if you do make such use of bits and pieces of my material I would like to have typed copies and (eventually) platter or tape. These items would wind up in the vault of the UCSC Library in the Robert A. Heinlein Special Collection, as the University of California is my archivist. I hope this is not too much trouble; the University Librarian seems to want everything.
Item b) is just for myself: I would enjoy ha
ving a Jefferson Airplane platter the jacket of which has been inscribed by all the members of the combo. I now own Surrealistic Pillow, Bless its Pointed Little Head, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, and Crown of Creation. I think you have several more titles; if you can lay hands on one for me, I will appreciate it. And please tell Miss Slick that even if I did not enjoy her singing (I do!), nevertheless she would be an asset to any group just through her smile.
Coincidence: Our college-student-gardener Gene Bradley tells me he knows Marty Balin.61
In the mail was a disturbing letter from a young woman in Inyo County—out by the Mojave Desert near Los Angeles—who asked him for help: She and her friends were being chased by police helicopters. It was a crazed letter—the margins filled with decorative drawn fancies—and yet there was something about this one …
Ginny’s instincts went into overdrive. “Honey, this is worse than the crazy fan mail,” she told him. “This is absolutely insane: Don’t have anything to do with it.”62
But he placed a call to the Inyo County Sheriff’s office and found that the bare outlines of the woman’s story—“Annette or Nanette or something”63—were accurate: The police were chasing down a group of young people, but in answer to Heinlein’s question, the sheriff’s office told him drugs were not the issue—and that was all they would say.64
The “Annette or Nanette or something” who wrote to him was probably Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme—a name that would later become chillingly familiar as the trial of Charles Manson and his “family” got under way the following year.
The cut manuscript of the new book went to his typist on October 17. Six days later, they left for the reunion in Annapolis.
The reunion itself was raucous, boisterous as only sixty-five-year-olds revisiting their youth can be. For Heinlein, the highlight of the experience was being able to carry a drink into Bancroft Hall. “Never thought I’d live to see the day that this would happen!” Ginny remembered him saying.65
After the reunion they were invited to Norfolk for a visit en famille with Commodore Trottier, the U.S. Naval attaché in Rio they had met at the film festival earlier in the year, with his wife Rebel, and Dorace, their daughter. From Norfolk they went to New York for a little miscellaneous business talk: The rumors of a new Heinlein book after four years were generating a lot of anticipation in the publishing world, and, Ned Brown had told Blassingame, in Hollywood as well.
From New York they flew to Houston, to the Manned Space Center, where George Trimble gave them a very special treat: They were taken to view a Moon rock, a sample of several pounds of gravel and dust sampled on the Moon and brought back to Earth by Apollo 11: “It was un-Earthly!” Ginny told Poul and Karen Anderson. “It had little inclusions or bubbles. I thought they looked silvery, Bob says they looked golden. Beautiful!”66
They were invited to a big party in honor of Sir Christopher and Lady Briggs, who were on their way to join Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mount Everest. The Heinleins stayed over in Houston. If the Moon rock had put them back into July’s dreamlike state, the party was more surreal yet. Sir Christopher had been knighted because he handled the protocol arrangements for Prince Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales in 1958, but the gentle knight and his lady paled into insignificance in the presence of their daughter, the Honorable Jane, a BOAC hostess dressed in glittering London Mod miniskirt and spangled blouse, neckline plunging to the waist and giving clear testimony she was not wearing a brassiere.67
Heinlein discovered that a goodly percentage of the women there were fans of his, and he rapidly collected an entourage of beautiful Texas blondes and spent the remainder of the party trailing clouds of glories. He and Ginny were introduced to astronaut Jim McDivitt, whom they found “very witty indeed.”68
They flew out to New Orleans the next morning and went to their usual hotel, the St. Charles, and were startled and outraged when the hotel required them to present identification before they would check them in—an impertinence virtually without precedent in the days before 1985, when the United States for the first time required citizens to carry identification. Robert and Ginny shook the dust of the St. Charles off their feet and taxied to the Ponchartrain instead, where they unpacked and settled in. This incident was so matter-of-course that it is not even mentioned in Ginny’s various descriptions of the trip, though Heinlein wrote about it to Blassingame.69
Ginny went out shopping—her first impulse any time she was in New Orleans—and Robert took an unexpected telephone call from Eberhardt Deutsch (Hermann Deutsch’s older brother, a distinguished lawyer), who had tracked them down at their hotel. “What are you doing there, young man?” he demanded of Heinlein.
When Ginny got back to the hotel, Robert told her to pack up again: Deutsch insisted they stay in his penthouse with him, complete with hot and cold running servants. He presented Robert with a gold-plated key to the penthouse and insisted they stay there whenever they were in New Orleans thereafter. Eberhardt Deutsch’s insistence was a hard thing to resist in any case, and they surrendered.
Getting back to Santa Cruz was like being dumped out of a warm bed and back into the cold realities. “Kids, I’m spoiled,” Ginny told the Corsons. “I hated to come back to doing my own dishes, even with a dishwasher, and as for cooking!”70 And the retyping of the manuscript, Heinlein found, had not even been started in the three weeks they had been gone. Their typist was sadistic, Blassingame told him.71
Xerox delivered a behemoth of a copying machine on Armistice Day—too big to fit in any room except the living room, which, even so, it overwhelmed—but no paper. There was a nationwide paper shortage that year, and their paper stocks were on back order. Heinlein had no manuscript and no paper to make the ten copies of a five-hundred-page manuscript the two agents were clamoring for. Ginny feared she would have to retype the manuscript herself.72 The rental fees on the copier were horrendous—
But they would not be driven into the poorhouse by it. The October royalty statements had arrived while they were away: The three existing editions of Stranger in a Strange Land had earned Heinlein in the last six months nearly $13,000 (nearly half a million copies). The new Berkley issue had sold out completely at a staggering $2.75 cover price.
When he began sending correspondence to the Archive at UC Santa Cruz, Heinlein became concerned about privacy issues. There were some pretty frank opinions expressed in some of his letters, particularly in his correspondence with Blassingame. And some of the people talked about unflatteringly were still alive, even thirty years later. The best interim solution to the problem seemed to be a restriction on public access to the correspondence. Rita Berner Bottoms (she had married Tom Bottoms earlier in 1969) drafted language for a restriction during their lifetimes.73
The first half of the I Will Fear No Evil manuscript came back from the typist a month later—very badly done, with far too many typos for a clean submission manuscript. He would have to make do with it, but Heinlein found a new typist and sent the rest of the book to her six days before Christmas 1969.
23
TROUBLE, WITH A CAPITAL “P”
On January 6, 1970, the Heinleins attended a special dinner given by the chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, Dean McHenry, and his wife Jane, in honor of Robert’s old EPIC cronies, Judge Robert and Susie Clifton. The next morning, Robert told Ginny he had not felt well during the night. He had a chill and was shaking so badly he was afraid he would bite right through the glass thermometer.1
Ginny put him back to bed and talked their local GP, Dr. Calciano, into making a house call, since Robert wasn’t up to the fifteen-mile trip into town. Before Dr. Calciano got there (after his regular office hours), Robert had another serious chill, shaking alarmingly for half an hour.
Dr. Calciano did not examine Robert, but concluded he had some kind of “unknown virus” and prescribed Darvon for the abdominal pain and Bonine for the nausea. Robert would get better on his own in a few days, the doctor assured Ginny.
But he d
idn’t improve, and in fact was barely lucid for days at a stretch. Ginny fretted—and called Dr. Calciano every day for instructions and her daily brush-off.
On January 8, the San Francisco Herald-Examiner published an unbylined piece on the front page, claiming that the Tate-LaBianca murders committed last August were directly inspired by Stranger in a Strange Land. “Manson’s Blueprint?” the headline screamed. “Claim Tate Suspect Used Science Fiction Plot.”
A few days later, the same story, slightly revised, went out over the UPI wire services, copyrighted by Robert Gilette, a science writer for the Herald-Examiner:
SAN FRANCISCO PAPER SAYS MANSON PERHAPS APED SCIENCE FICTION HERO
This was a bandwagon everybody in the press saw was worth jumping on. Playboy immediately wanted a comment on the Manson issue to print with the interview.
Robert was in no shape to make any comment at all (though later he was “very incensed about it”2), and, besides, he had made it clear at the time of the interview that he did not, as a matter of policy, comment publicly on his own work—ever. Ginny wrote a “furious letter”3 to Blassingame:
Will you also please tell Mr. [Hugh] Hefner that the only reason Robert agreed to be interviewed was not publicity for himself, but the offer of a forum to boost the space program. Publication of this interview in an early issue might have helped. As it is, the space program is in ruins, and Hefner is attempting to make something of what might have been by the use of Stranger and the Manson case. We will not go along with this. He has not bought himself a tame rabbit by that contribution to the Ed White Memorial Fund. He can take his [magazine] and stuff it, having first folded it until it is all corners. Under no condition will we make any public statement about the Manson case and Stranger. We consider Mr. Hefner’s suggestion very much out of line and an invasion of our privacy. It’s not a matter of reluctance to discuss Robert’s work, but a downright refusal to do so, which has been a policy of his for a very long time.4
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 40
