The surgery went very smoothly, Dr. Crumley told her around 3:30 in the afternoon when they got him into post-op. By 6:30 that evening he was back in his room, cheerful and alert, though still weak, and of course his nose was bruised and painful. He needed two shots of Demerol that evening to get to sleep.
During several days of observation, Ginny occupied her time at his bedside checking the galleys for a new edition of The Green Hills of Earth. On Sunday the 17th of August, they were allowed to leave the hospital. The next day, Ginny wrote a continuation of her circular to their friends:
We came home in a very luxurious limousine; it gave Robert plenty of room for his legs, and he came through the trip very well. And is now back in his own bed. He’s eating better than he did in the hospital, and seems to feel quite well considering that the operation is less than a week in the past. In fact, through many operations, I’ve never seen him come through so well. He’s cheerful, cooperative, and seems happy to be home. And Pixel will be home soon, and will assist in nursing Robert.…
Now all there is to worry about is hepatitis and AIDS from the transfusions—wish us luck! I suspect that by this time the $25,000 nosebleed has reached around $50,000.33
Gradually they got back to their recuperation routine. The operation had left Robert with an ache on the right side of his face, for which he took codeine—which had given him a saintly and beatific demeanor, somewhat dreamy, but also seemed to confuse him and leave him unable to distinguish reality from his internal life34—alarming at first, but Ginny got used to him staring at the ceiling for hours at a stretch.
Heinlein’s publishers decided to delay issuing To Sail Beyond the Sunset until his eightieth birthday—a longish delay, but justified considering how well Cat and Job were both still performing. In his lucid periods, Robert acknowledged it unlikely he would ever write again.
He never had the chance to bring his big vision for the World As Myth books to fruition—never even got his protagonists to the battle with the “villains” of the piece—even though he did get in Jubal Harshaw casting doubt on the whole idea of the villains.
By the end of August he was sitting up in bed and working—reading the galleys for The Green Hills of Earth that Ginny had read through while he was recovering in the hospital. He was even getting a little exercise: Ginny took him on daily walks around their atrium.
And now Ginny told him this business of being forty-five minutes from the closest hospital could not continue. She had turned seventy this past April and was feeling her age: She just couldn’t take the anxiety of driving so long with him fountaining blood; they had to find a place closer to a hospital.
And she had been having eye trouble and needed to see an ophthalmologist. She left it at that. Living in Bonny Doon depended on her being able to drive, since Robert had let his license lapse. She had learned well enough from him how to conceal the truth by telling the truth so that he did not pursue the details. Her vision had gone from schlieren to a nearly complete loss of vision in her right eye.
Ginny was fed up, she said, with the taxes and crowding in California, but Robert did not want to get too far out of the area. When he got some of his strength back, they would start looking in the Carmel area, twenty miles down the coast—probably in the spring, if he continued to improve. This meant he had to eat more, no more nonsense. He needed to get up and take exercise as soon as he reasonably could.
Heinlein improved gradually. As the doctors isolated side effects, the meds were replaced, one by one. And Ginny began fiddling with his diet, trying to tempt his palate—anything that would get him to eat was ichiban. Ensure milkshakes three times a day. He liked a molasses cake she could make within his dietary guidelines, and she was relieved when persimmon season came on and he would eat them with enthusiasm—another revenant from his boyhood: Persimmons are practically the state fruit of Missouri.35 When the fall weather came on, and fresh, crisp apples started appearing in the supermarkets, she started making homemade applesauce, which he relished.
By the end of September, he was able to get up once an hour and do something for himself—anything. It was notable when he stood in the doorway one day in September and called for Pixel.36 And now that Robert was off codeine, he was cheerful and working.37
By the end of October, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was on all the mass market paperback bestseller lists. An article in The Economist—a magazine Ginny read religiously—said that one in ten novels sold nowadays were science fiction, almost directly due to Robert’s influence, together with Clarke and Asimov.38
Heinlein had been saying for decades that science fiction for the mass market could not be the same as science fiction for a small and highly interactive readership of genre enthusiasts.39 He began after World War II to pare away genre conventions. Over the years, his fiction moved toward a general audience and evolved away from standard genre science fiction, though nobody within the field seemed really to recognize it, and was moving toward something like the relationship H. G. Wells had with the contemporary fiction audience of his day. An academic in 1986, using Friday to ponder the literary/subliterary paradoxes of Heinlein’s career, concluded simply he was “a leading contemporary novelist” without genre qualification.40
By December Heinlein was taking enough interest in things around him to read again. When Leon Stover phoned on Christmas Eve, he was surprised nearly speechless when Robert picked up the phone himself.41
Robert’s oldest brother, Lawrence, died on January 17, 1987. Lawrence had always been his favorite big brother and an inspiration in a way he could not quite articulate. “They’re all going,” Robert told Ginny42 and drew in on himself—which was not good for his recuperation.
Leon Stover had held off telling Robert his bad news: Stover’s field editor for Twayne, Warren French, had arranged a session on Heinlein for the next year’s Modern Language Association meeting in December 1987, at which Stover was to give a paper. The Modern Language Association is the premier academic organization for literary matters, and such a panel would represent a major step toward recognition of Heinlein as an American writer. Stover was not a member of the MLA, so would be there as a guest, with both Robert and Ginny. But, Stover told Ginny privately:
You worried that Alexei [Panshin] might attend. That’s the least of it, as it turns out. A greater enemy has stepped in to cancel the session, that Marxist s.o.b. whose name I retch to mention [H. Bruce Franklin].
When he heard that the MLA had scheduled a special seminar built around a book sympathetic to RAH, he used his muscle within the organization to get it descheduled. And so it’s off, just like that.43
It was his impression that Franklin thought there was too much risk of the MLA appearing to endorse a “fascist” writer and his “fascist” critic. “It would besmear MLA’s liberal reputation,” Stover told Ginny.
You certainly judged aright the character of this SOB when he came calling at your place. Prof. French confirms to me that his [Franklin’s] intentions were duplicitous from the start, which were to make RAH exemplary of everything wrong about America—Fascism, imperialism, racism, sexism, etc., etc. The usual Marxist nonsense. In warning the MLA program committee of the ideological error, he was acting as the defender of the One True Faith (and perhaps also to protect the preeminence of his own book).44
Heinlein gradually recovered his strength, and was able to perform an annual ritual: He called in to Jim Eason’s regular fund-raiser for the Leukemia Society. Eason was a popular talk-radio host on station KGO News Talk 810. As Eason explains:
Every year, at some time during the broadcast, Robert Heinlein would call in, chat briefly, and pledge a large sum of money.…
He would identify himself to the producer when he called, but only to the producer, not to the audience. I would get a note that “A Robert Heinlein is on the phone.” I would answer the same way I answered every caller, “Hi, this is Jim Eason, and you’re on KGO.”
I would hear a beautiful, clea
r, strong voice saying, “Hi, Jim, this is Bob.” That was it—no showboating, no big deal, just a caller named Bob. We would chat for a couple of minutes, mostly about his health, how his wife was doing, what he was writing at the moment. He always ended the calls with a heartfelt pitch for listeners to pledge money to fight leukemia.45
The American galleys for To Sail Beyond the Sunset came in April, and Heinlein had to be chivvied into reading proof on them, though by the time the English galleys came, in June, he was interested enough to read proof without prompting. They cautiously began traveling on day trips down the coast to the suburbs of Carmel, to look for housing closer to hospitals.
After a false start with a co-op in Pebble Beach that rejected them because the condominium association didn’t want anybody running a business from the condo (even a writing business), they found a place about a mile east of Highway 1 outside Carmel but within less than three miles of the Community Hospital on Highway 68—a ten-minute drive: “It’s very pleasant, perched on a hill, with the most glorious view of the Pacific Ocean and Point Lobos. Robert will have the master bedroom for his study, which looks out on that view, as does the living room.”46
The first purchase for the new house was a cat door for Pixel so he could come and go as he pleased.
They listed the Bonny Doon house with a real estate agent—in a depressed market, since the federal government was closing down so many nearby military installations. The first thing to do in preparing for the move was to collect all the bits of paper they had been holding on to for years, and send them on to the University Library for archival. On July 6, 1987, Rita Bottoms came with her assistant Paul Stubbs.
Bottoms had become a good friend over the years, virtually one of the family. Robert confided cheerfully that he thought Leon Stover would be suitable to write his biography, if anybody wanted a biography. On that occasion, they discovered that they both liked the song “Cool Water,” and burst into song together, Robert croaking a little because of the emphysema but in good spirits.
Ginny was comfortable enough with Bottoms, too, to let down her guard from time to time. Coming into the kitchen, Bottoms was startled when Ginny suddenly sagged back against the closed door, obviously exhausted. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said.47
The next day was Robert’s eightieth birthday, and the publication date of To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The book had been on bestseller lists since June. Putnam’s sent Robert balloons and chocolates to mark the occasion, and they received a congratulatory letter from President and Nancy Reagan. They had a rare social gathering, with in-person visits from science-fiction writer and veterinarian Jesse F. Bone and his wife, and Charles Brown, a fan friend who visited frequently (and was also publisher of Locus magazine). Yoji Kondo arranged for him to receive an honorary Judo Black Belt. Brown took pictures to memorialize the occasion.
Bottoms had let Heinlein know that they had gotten a number of requests from the general public over the years—for the Opus List in particular. Robert and Ginny decided it was time to tighten up the restrictions on what might be publicly accessible during their lifetimes. The Opus List would be made off-limits.
Bottoms had long ago drafted language for a seal on the correspondence, and on July 13, 1987, Heinlein made that seal a formal restriction on the gift of his papers—for twenty-five years, instead of the fifty years they had originally discussed. At the same time, he reversed a decision he had made ten years earlier: Originally he had marked what was left of the abortive 1977 Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast for destruction after he was gone; instead, he put the manuscript box with the typewritten instructions among the material to be taken to the UCSC Library’s Special Collections, with a fifty-year restriction.
The university was starting to send pleasant but very persistent functionaries angling for a big bequest. Perhaps it was becoming too obvious that he was getting old and had little time left. Over the years Heinlein had come to think that the money might be better spent in a donation to a smaller library—his birthplace of Butler, Missouri, for instance, had only a small county library. He had been talking with Ginny for some time now about donating enough money to them to build a really nice facility, and he told Bottoms that was what he was determined to do—the major bequest to the Butler library (though a smaller donation—say, on the order of $10,000—was still a possibility for the well-funded university).
It was probably all this thinking about his “legacy” that reminded him of Leon Stover, and Heinlein called on July 17, 1987, just to talk for an hour, ranging over this and that. One thing he made sure to get into the conversation: “You’ve got it all wrong,” he told Stover genially, about Stover’s Calvinist interpretation.48 There was still too much of it in the draft manuscript, but Heinlein did not attempt to argue Stover out of it. Possibly he was satisfied that Stover did get some of the important points others missed seeing—about him no less than about the stories—and most of Stover’s colleagues didn’t even seem to be aware of the background material Heinlein was moving around, or even of the history of science fiction to which he was often reacting.
Stover wanted to position him with American writers such as Mark Twain, rather than as a genre writer,49 which was not altogether unreasonable. When Gerald Jonas reviewed To Sail Beyond the Sunset for the New York Times Book Review later that year, he observed that Heinlein had been migrating out of the genre for some time, that “he now writes books that bear only the most superficial relation to either science fiction or the conventional novel.”50
The house in Carmel went into escrow late in July, so they had about ninety days to clear out twenty years of collected junk. Charles Brown came to help, and Heinlein gave him some cover paintings for his earlier work and a pile of some of the less valuable books—second impressions and book club editions, mostly—sitting for hours on the living room banquette and signing book after book, to increase their eventual sales value (the more valuable first editions were to go to the Archive). He also sent his personal copy of one of his favorite books to Leon Stover: Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, inscribed to Stover.51
Packing up his working desk brought up a matter that had been lying fallow for decades: He got out the file of manuscript and notes and correspondence about that first novel he had written in 1938 (For Us, the Living). Over the years, he had mined it for story ideas—the whole trajectory of the Future History had come from that book. It couldn’t be anything more than a curiosity at this point.
Ginny agreed. “It wouldn’t have done his reputation any good to publish it—and I had begun to be aware that he had a reputation at that point, so I recommended that he chuck it.”52 They burned the entire file, together, all the copies he had had made over the years, in the Swedish fireplace in the living room of the Bonny Doon house.53
Toward the end of September, the house was bare walls and a pile of boxes. Ginny asked him if he had any regrets—about marrying her, about having had no children. He took a little time to think about the question: No regrets, he told her. He had had a good life, and enjoyed almost every minute of it—and she had been a big part of making it so, particularly these last decades, which he wouldn’t have had at all without her.54
And then the movers did come and cleared out the house to the bare walls. Ginny had taken Pixel to a kennel, to spare him the upset of the move.
But Pixel accepted the new environment with only a few reservations. A few days after the move, they went back to the Bonny Doon house to clear out any leftover bits and get it in shape to turn over to the real estate agent. They stayed there for an hour or so. “It was sad, having to leave our home … [sic]. We both cried.”55
Within a very short time they were more or less up and running in the Carmel house, with phone installed and Robert camping out in Ginny’s way, at a breakfast bar between the office and the kitchen. He had decided it was time to use some of the contacts he had been accumulating and nurturing for the last several years and get back into politics:
He started out with the SFWA Directory and the membership of the Citizens Advisory Council and worked hard to organize a candidacy for Jeane Kirkpatrick for the 1988 presidential campaign—when Ronald Reagan’s second term would expire. He was pushing the campaign into funded existence by sheer force of will—but ultimately Ms. Kirkpatrick asked him to leave off and let her out of the commitment: Her husband had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and she wanted to retire to take care of him in his last days.
That Christmas they had a small tree, because Ginny didn’t want to risk a ladder. Apparently Robert had packed some things she didn’t know anything about. When she opened her main present from Robert this year, she found a largish, empty—almost empty—gold-colored and gilded bottle of men’s cologne, King’s Men, with the gilding wearing off. It was inscribed “Merry Christmas to Ticky, the queen of my heart.” On the other side was one of his “Ticky pictures,” with his perennial motto, “Semper toujours”—“always, ever.”
This was the very bottle she had given him forty years and a few months earlier, when Robert had moved out of the house in Laurel Canyon and was living in motels in the San Fernando Valley. They had been driving on some errand and stopped at a drug store. She had bought this cologne for him then, and gave it to him when he got back into the car—just something to perk him up. He had scolded her then, for spending her hard-earned cash on something frivolous like that.56 But he used it—used it up and saved the bottle, to give her forty years later.57 It was a folly of sentiment—and so very like him.
It was a second answer, an and I really mean it to the question she had asked him a few months back at Bonny Doon—a question that really never needed to be asked, and for which no words could ever be sufficient, whether he regretted marrying her. “Cherish Ticky” was more than a family game between a married couple; it was their way of life.
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 59
