In January 1979 Heinlein wrote a letter to Ned Brown, his agent in Hollywood, asking why there had been no recent activity. The letter went unanswered for three months.7 An independent producer, Hart Sprager, contacted Brown to discuss optioning a Heinlein property and received a reply letter so odd and so un-agent-like that he forwarded it to Heinlein directly. “The copy of Ned Brown’s letter which you sent to us,” Ginny told Sprager, “was a real shocker to us. You can see why, I’m sure.”
One, he doesn’t even know the title of Robert’s most recent book, and two, telling you to look in the library for a list! It looks as though Ned is getting senile or something. Not only that, but he goes off and turns down all kinds of things without notifying us. (Robert’s had all kinds of interest expressed in his books, only to have Ned not listen to even a reasonable offer. We’re disgusted.)8
“We’ve mistaken good manners for good management,” Heinlein commented dryly9 and severed professional relationships in March, literally in the same week that they changed English agencies from Farquharson to Tanner. And in the same week they signed with Eleanor Wood’s Spectrum literary agency, from Blassingame, McCauley and Wood.10 They had had settled relationships for decades, and the abrupt changes came all at once. For representation in Hollywood, they signed with ICM (International Creative Management), Bob Bookman handling their account.11
Also in January 1979, a fan in the east, Perry Chapdelaine, was planning a selection of John Campbell’s letters and wanted permission to print some of Heinlein’s to Campbell, since the discussions they had by letter were fascinating. Chapdelaine was a friend of Robert Moore Williams and had let them know about Williams’s death, so they had had prior contact with him. After Campbell’s death in 1971, Peggy Campbell had essentially given Chapdelaine the entire file of Campbell’s correspondence for this purpose, after removing the letters she thought of as “sensitive”—but Heinlein remembered the wrangling and the up-and-down stuff, particularly at the beginning of the war. Ginny wrote refusing permission to quote from Heinlein’s letters to Campbell—and telling Chapdelaine in the strongest language she could muster that they would consider it an invasion of privacy to print any of Campbell’s letters to Heinlein.12
With their accountant handling some of the audit the IRS had demanded for their 1977 taxes, the production work on the new book began taking up all their time: For this auction they had to make forty copies of the nine-hundred-page manuscript, each copy requiring two manuscript boxes. It was an exhausting process that took nearly a month, since each copy had to be laboriously checked page by page.
The American auction for The Number of the Beast was to be held on May 15–16, 1979, with another in England a few weeks later. By that time, Robert’s year of travel restriction would be up, and they planned a quick trip to Chicago for a small convention: A group of fans of Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai books had organized themselves several years before—at MidAmeriCon, in fact—as the “Dorsai Irregulars,” to provide security for science-fiction conventions and had rapidly grown into a jolly social group that included Robert and Ginny Heinlein comfortably. This “relaxicon,” Thing IV, was typically held near the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, but this year it was in May. On May 10, 1979, they flew to Chicago, with a change of planes in Denver that revealed some of Heinlein’s new limitations. He apparently had an altitude ceiling now that was lower even than Ginny’s: He had to change planes in a wheelchair. But the convention made little demand, and they had a thoroughly enjoyable time for four days. Thing IV was held at the same time as a convention of gymnasts, which gave it a certain peculiar flavor. Robert and Ginny were startled one evening when the elevator door opened, revealing three girls, balanced in a pyramid, all upside down. The Dorsai Irregulars made them both honorary life-members and designated “slaves” of appropriate sex for each of them.
They flew back to San Jose on the day of the book auction, and Heinlein slept for sixteen hours. By the time he woke, they had a winner of the auction: Their floor bid had been met, and the CBS conglomerate would bring it out under their Fawcett-Columbine division label, in an illustrated trade paperback.13 Locus, the premier publication for the business of science-fiction publishing, covered the auction in their June 1978 issue:
The new Robert A. Heinlein novel, The Number of the Beast, went up for auction on May 15. The auction, conducted by Heinlein’s new agent Eleanor Wood, lasted two days. Fawcett Books, a division of CBS, was the winner with a complex half-million dollar bid. The only other bidder was Pocket Books. Both bids were counter offers to the original proposal by the agent. The advance payment will be spread over 10 years.…
New English Library exercised their matching privileges to buy British rights for $43,000. They also offered a high royalty rate plus higher royalties on earlier books.…
According to senior Editor Micheala Hamilton, the book will be used to launch the fiction part of Fawcett’s new Columbine line of trade paperbacks. It will be heavily illustrated in full color.14
Once the English auction for The Number of the Beast was over (eleven publishers participating) they were able to place serial rights with Omni magazine for 10 percent of the book—about twenty thousand words—which was the amount suggested by the English publishers. Ben Bova, who had left Analog in 1978, was now fiction editor for Omni and would make the cut himself. Bova was already at work on an illustrated republication of “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” for the August issue of Omni. Omni appeared likely to become in the 1980s as much a “home” for Heinlein as Astounding had been for him in the 1940s.
On June 29, 1980, Heinlein gave Bova an extended phone interview for the tenth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.15 Developments in that area bothered him.
Ben, I am terribly worried about the space program. With its current unpopularity (i.e., polls showing that ca. 90% of the voters feel that we are “wasting” too much money on space “stunts”), with a presidential election coming up and an incumbent [Jimmy Carter] who seems willing to do anything to hang on, with inflation rate now 13.2% and the 2nd differential increasing, with the Skylab fiasco blamed on NASA by the public (instead [of] blaming Congress—where the fault lies), I have a horrid feeling that, by the time Voyager 1 nears Saturn, no one will be watching. No money. NASA dismantled, its buildings and grounds turned over to other agencies or departments, its instruments old or mothballed or given to another department such as the new department of education.
Oh, we would still (I think) have ComSats and WeatherSats and LandSats—anything that is already a proved moneymaker (even to Proxmire!)—but no research organization for space. None.
Of course you and I and a very small minority realize that NASA is a “proved moneymaker” in all respects, and especially through its research.
Getting into space was only one of NASA’s jobs: In addition to developing new technologies, it was supposed to be transferring those technologies into the American—and then world—economy.
But we are opposed by an overwhelming majority who do not understand research, don’t want to, and are not merely ignorant but strongly anti-science.
With such people the only effective approach is to show him “What’s in it for me”—and there is plenty in it for him, and his wife and his kids; NASA is one of the very few Federal programs of the past fifty years to show a whopping cash profit on the money invested in it.
But, through the truly incredible incompetence of NASA public relations, the truth has not reached the common citizens.16
The material was fresh in his mind, then, on July 2, when he received, forwarded from Blassingame, a letter asking him to testify before Congress on applications of space technology for the elderly and the handicapped—in seventeen days. Claude Pepper’s Select Committee on Aging and Don Fuqua’s House Committee on Science and Technology were holding a joint session later that month, to hear NASA’s report given by its new (since 1977) head, Dr. Robert A. Frosch. “I don’t know a thing about it,” Heinlein
told Ginny.
It would be a coup for him—a chance to follow in Mark Twain’s footsteps again (Twain—Clemens—had testified before Congress in 1886 about copyrights). And, of course, anything to help the faltering space program. “You’re in a very good position to find out,” Ginny said.17 And, indeed, he was.
Heinlein had developed a number of friends, and friends of friends, who could advise him on various subjects. As he tended to collect as friends people whose minds ranged widely in the first place, he could ask virtually any question about any subject and someone among his circle of “Baker Street Irregulars” (as Ginny and he called them informally, after Sherlock Holmes’s network of street kids) would know the answer—or know where to find the answer. In this case, since time was short, he got on the phone with Alan Nourse, a doctor, the same day, and Art Dula, a lawyer who was specializing in space law, a discipline that barely had begun to have a subject in 1979.
Dr. Nourse began compiling notes the next morning, and Dula began gathering “strategic information” by calling on his contacts in Washington, D.C. Heinlein had been invited to speak on the first day of the two-day hearings, which he would share with Dr. Frosch, Hugh Downs, and Buckminster Fuller—to give the joint committee an overview of what had been done and what remained to be done in this field. The second day—the tenth anniversary of the Moon landing—would be given over to testimony among government agencies about expediting this kind of technology transfer.
Most of the “spinoffs” from NASA-developed technology were due to NASA’s push to miniaturize all the components going on spacecraft—which amounted to a huge chunk of economic and moral “lift.” (A Chase Econometrics study already being prepared, though not released until 1981,18 suggested that for every dollar spent directly on space up to the Moon landing in 1969, NASA’s technology transfer program returned fourteen dollars to the U.S. economy—and that was before the Silicon Valley boom, based on the microprocessor, started up.)
Dr. Frosch’s testimony was to be narrowly focused and comprehensive19—a forty-eight-page, professionally produced booklet titled “Technologies for the Handicapped and the Aged” by Trudy E. Bell would accompany Frosch’s oral testimony. Heinlein could be “demonstrative evidence”—a living example, to complement Dr. Frosch’s comprehensive report, since he would not be alive now without those spinoffs.
The Heinleins had a tight schedule, but went to Pasadena to see the Voyager 2 pictures come in at JPL (with the usual wearing assortment of television and radio interviews). They made it back with just four days to turn Heinlein’s study notes into written testimony. He wanted to give his testimony from memory, if possible, not even referring to notes, as a further demonstration of just how recovered he was. Later he told Ben Bova:
I spoke without MS or notes in order to show that the brain surgery had worked—had I read from a MS it would have proved merely that I was bright enough to read aloud … [sic] but it would not have proved that I myself had written the MS. (In fact Art Dula did prepare for me a formal written presentation … [sic] which reached me after my written testimony had been Xeroxed.20
Washington, D.C., in July is hot and muggy. Heinlein got only two hours of sleep the night before, and his stammer came back, as it often did when he was tired. The morning’s testimony ran long, with Dr. Frosch barely audible. Frosch also disappeared after his testimony, not troubling himself to greet and make nice with the other persons testifying—an obvious mistake, Heinlein thought, but a telling example of what was wrong with NASA’s Public Relations: Common courtesy, let alone common sense, should have made it a priority for Dr. Frosch to welcome and thank members of the public who went out of their way to support his agency. But NASA had been under the gun for years, with budget cuts and public criticism, and the NASA administration, Art Dula observed, felt forced into a zero-risk strategy.21 Testifying before Congress is always a risk.
Frosch could have made two firm friends for life in thirty seconds just with a smile and a couple of hand shakes, a “Thanks for appearing,” plus an invitation to drop into the National NASA offices and get acquainted (we could not have accepted but we would never have forgotten the offer).
Ben, you and I can’t offset that sort of clumsiness. But we can ignore it and go on beating the drum for NASA … [sic] until NASA goes down the drain … [sic] which is exactly where it is going and soon, unless NASA makes a fantastic reform in its public relations. I’m sorry to say that I think NASA is a terminal case, beyond the point of no return. But I intend to go on trying as long as NASA is still in business.22
Eleanor Wood and Ralph Vicinanza had come down from New York for the circus on July 19, 1979; they were able to discuss business over lunch. Heinlein was also able to introduce Dr. Yoji Kondo to Dr. Charles Sheffield, space scientists and colleagues as science-fiction writers. Sheffield was another client of Eleanor Wood’s, and Heinlein’s brother Lawrence had introduced Dr. Kondo by correspondence several years earlier.
Heinlein wanted to get his testimony into the expanded collection Jim Baen was preparing for Ace. Ben Bova had also asked to publish it in Omni. When the transcript of his testimony arrived in a few days, Heinlein was appalled at the slips and mangled syntax, the result of his lack of sleep and the long morning. He hand-corrected the transcript to something resembling his usual prose, cutting here and there to improve the reading quality.
Someone at Omni, he discovered, had made changes in the abridgement of The Number of the Beast after he had approved it.23 That could not be permitted to happen to “Spinoff”: The article was Congressional testimony; he couldn’t have some editor making random changes in the manuscript. When he sent the manuscript to Wood, he told her, “Because of its nature it cannot be edited. It can be cut by me and no one else according to editorial instruction. If I find myself unable to comply, then we withdraw it & try elsewhere—Galileo probably, then Analog.”24 He asked for proof sheets for “Spinoff”—not a usual procedure for a magazine publication.
It appeared in the September 1979 Omni, which made a clean sweep of the fall months, since the “Notebooks” was in the August issue and Ben Bova’s abridgment of The Number of the Beast was to appear in October.
Waiting for the galleys, Heinlein started a long, fiddling household project he had been putting off: They had run out of shelf space for books and could not find anything anymore. Heinlein built some more shelves, using up the last uncovered walls in the house (close to the entranceway), and catalogued title and location of every book they had in the house.25 And then he turned to the big project of putting together the rest of the manuscript materials for the new collection, Expanded Universe.
Ace, which had been acquired by Grosset & Dunlap in 1972,26 had signed the SFWA Model Contract for Expanded Universe and then promptly renegotiated the deal upward, to make it conform to the customary terms Heinlein was then getting for book contracts. It had served its purpose.
Heinlein wrote a number of new pieces for the book in addition to providing file copies of unsold material. He also updated his 1950 predictions in “Where to?” as he had done in 1965 for The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein, publishing the follow-ups together and so tracking his predictions over thirty years. A number of these pieces Baen wanted to publish in his quarterly “bookazine,” Destinies (later titled New Destinies). But much of the new material consisted of forewords and afterwords to the various pieces. Baen called Heinlein, and they talked about the bits over the telephone, working out the language, which Baen then edited into typescript. Heinlein gave as close to a memoir of his long writing career in these forewords as he was ever to make27—and since there was a certain amount of Dutch Uncle/Cassandra talk in this “interstitial material” about the woeful state of things in the United States, he prohibited sale of the book outside the United States and Canada.
Robert’s fiftieth class reunion was at Annapolis that October. Matters kept him busy right up to time to leave. The letter-essay Heinlein had worked up in the spring about th
e Future History series was published in the SFWA Bulletin’s fall issue (whole number 71)—the “keynote address” of the “SF Future Histories” special issue edited by John F. Carr. The Heinleins received an appeal from Sheldon Dorf, the founder of the San Diego Comic-Con, which had successfully and enthusiastically held blood drives for years. The convention’s expense money had been stolen. Robert and Ginny sent a check to cover the shortfall.28 An assistant professor of physics at L.A. State University, Peter D. Zimmerman, showed up at their gate unexpectedly one afternoon in September, to court Heinlein’s support for the John Anderson presidential campaign, because of Anderson’s pro-space position. But he had not made an appointment—or, indeed, any prior arrangements—and Ginny had learned her painful lesson about drop-ins by now: She did not let him in the gate. Mr. Zimmerman left a letter-brochure, but Heinlein decided not to respond to it.29 On the evidence, he was having second thoughts about politics at that time. Ronald Reagan was running for election, and it may be that Heinlein thought Reagan represented a new flicker of the same pragmatic willingness to address real problems that had drawn him to Goldwater fifteen years earlier. He switched his party affiliation to Republican with a $1,000 donation.30
And about then, Verna Trestrail asked him for an article-appreciation of her father, E. E. Smith, who had passed away in 1965. A small convention at the end of September in Moscow, Idaho—Smith was born in Idaho, in 1890—was honoring him, and Trestrail was going to be guest of honor to accept the posthumous citation for him. Heinlein wrote a thoughtful appreciation for the MosCon 1 program book, “Larger Than Life,” that summed up what he thought about Doc Smith. It arrived just as Trestrail and her husband were leaving for Moscow, and had her, she said, in tears.31
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 53
