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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  In his 1967 Accession Notes, Heinlein states that “The Man Who Sold the Moon” was written during “three weeks in March 1949.” If March 12 is taken as the halfway point, then the writing likely stretched from about March 2 to about March 22, and the story conference would have been concluded enough for him to begin the writing no later than March 2—which suggests a late February/early March timeframe.

  70. RAH, 1969 interview with Frank Robinson, 6 of submission draft; The Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1, as “Playboy Interview,” 549. Heinlein’s actual words, in response to a question as to whether he was surprised that the Apollo 11 Moon Landing was undertaken by the government, were: “I had it done by private industry [in Destination Moon] primarily for reasons of budget on the movie.” The single-stage Moon ship in Destination Moon was also done for budgetary reasons—and for the look of the rocket.

  71. RAH, letter to Stewart Rose, 05/30/47.

  72. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 3, Side A (1988).

  73. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 8, Side B. The Mississippi Bubble was a speculative boom in 1719–20 in which the promoter of the Mississippi Company, trying to raise investment in Louisiana, became the French Controller General of Finances and issued vastly more bank notes than could be redeemed. The French economy heated up briefly, then collapsed—an early demonstration of twentieth-century monetary practices.

  74. The specific communication and date of the Scribner rejection of Red Planet has not been preserved or recorded, but Heinlein mentions dissatisfaction with his editor’s response in a letter to Rip van Ronkel dated March 1, 1949, and in a letter to Lurton Blassingame dated March 4, 1949, he complains about the terms of the rejection. The rejection must, therefore, have come to Heinlein at almost the same time as the story conference on “The Man Who Sold the Moon”—i.e., end of February/beginning of March 1949.

  75. RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 03/04/48.

  76. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/04/49.

  77. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/15/49.

  78. Margaret C. Scoggins, report forwarded by Alice Dalgliesh to Lurton Blassingame, 03/18/49.

  79. Alice Dalgliesh, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/18/49.

  80. Heinlein had received these comments about each of his juveniles for Scribner, but they were particularly pronounced about Space Cadet, just out. Just before Dalgliesh made this remark, and then again shortly after, Heinlein had correspondence from Robert Warwick (address not recorded) reporting he could not find a copy in any bookstore. On April 18, 1949, Warwick wrote Heinlein that he had been told by Scribner that the book went out of print (i.e., exhausted its initial print run) within two weeks of its release—that is, in September 1948.

  81. L. Ron Hubbard, letter to RAH, 03/03/49.

  82. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/04/49.

  83. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/15/49. Heinlein viewed that he had a “standing order” from Scribner, and in any case they had a “handshake deal” once the outline was approved, so Heinlein had commenced work on the theory that the paperwork—including the contract and the advance—would catch up later.

  84. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/24/49.

  85. RAH, letter to Robert S. Richardson, 04/25/49.

  86. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/01/49.

  87. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 05/16/49.

  88. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/24/49.

  89. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/24/49.

  90. Erle Korshak, letter to RAH, 03/29/49.

  91. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/02/49.

  92. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/02/49.

  93. RAH, postcard to Erle Korshak, 04/02/49, quoted in RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame of even date.

  94. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 04/03/49. “Tomato juice … peed in” is a reference to one of Heinlein’s favorite anecdotes about Hollywood, which Virginia Heinlein explained in her taped interview with the author, Tape 8, Side A: Two producers dying of thirst in a desert find a cache of tomato juice, but one won’t let the other drink until it has been peed in “to make it better.”

  In an earlier letter to Bill Corson (03/24/49) he had been more humorous and less exasperated: “I am now engaged in rows with two publishers: one cannot get it through his head that it is not the principle of the thing, it is the money, and the other can’t understand that it is not the money, it is the principle of the thing. I suffer.”

  95. Erle Korshak made this remark the first time in his letter to RAH, 04/18/49, but made the same remark on other occasions as well. “It grated each time you used it,” Heinlein later told Korshak. “I ignored it because it was evident that you did not know any better; you intended to be persuasive. Your letters are filled with such unwitting bad manners” (RAH, letter to Erle Korshak, 04/15/51).

  96. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 04/25/49.

  97. Mrs. Heinlein recalled that he was looking for a manuscript for a reprint requested of him (taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side B; Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/29/89), but Heinlein may have been searching for the manuscript for one of the stories to be collected into The Man Who Sold the Moon, as no other likely anthology contract was made conveniently close to the mid-April 1949 timing of this anecdote, whereas Heinlein was making revisions to stories for this collection during the month of April and into May.

  Later, in 1952 and 1953, when L. Sprague de Camp was putting together The Science-Fiction Handbook, Heinlein told him about Ginny’s opus system as a perfect way of organizing a writer’s files. De Camp included it, then, and years after that Ginny passed it on to Beverly Herbert for Frank Herbert’s use. Herbert then wrote it up for the SFWA Bulletin.

  98. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/29/89.

  99. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/18/49, identifies the organization as ongoing at that time.

  100. John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 02/10/49. “Don A. Stuart” was a pseudonym Campbell had used for his experimental “mood stories” in the 1930s; in any case, Street & Smith discouraged Campbell from writing (or more specifically selling) stories either for Astounding or for other science-fiction magazines.

  101. Robert and Leslyn Heinlein’s visit to Los Alamos on the way from Philadelphia back to Los Angeles in August 1945 is detailed in Learning Curve, chapter 26, “Dangerous New World,” 359–61.

  102. “Sworn Statement of Robert A. Heinlein Concerning Robert Cornog,” [mis]dated 05/17/45 (should be ’49).

  103. See, e.g., RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 11/26/50. The year following Cornog’s investigation, Cal Laning proposed that Heinlein seek a security clearance, and Heinlein wrote in detail about his own contacts with Communists during his political activity, a subject which is just alluded to in his recommendation written for Cornog. Heinlein concludes this letter to Laning with an indictment of the current “security” apparatus:

  Two things are very evident from the newspapers, that mistakes are being made both ways. Spies have had access to top secret information, and loyal men are being prevented from working where they can do the most good through “guilt by association” and other methods having roughly the scientific accuracy of witch smelling. It’s ridiculous! It does not matter very much to the country, or, at this late date, to me, whether I am cleared for secret work or not. For myself, I’ve learned to live under a cloud, secure in my own heart; for the country, well, I’m not a top-rank physicist, my talents can be spared. But, goddam it to hell—we need better methods, quicker methods, more accurate methods. The present methods could have been used by Julius Caesar. If anyone in the security business can be interested in the idea of checking on a case by some other method than questioning his former employers and finding out whether or not he has ever bet on the horses or gone to a nudist camp (I’ve done both!), then I’m their boy.

  On the other hand, if
they want to check me by methods which have already proved to be too cumbersome, too expensive in manpower, and too inaccurate to protect us against the communist apparatus, then I will be happy to cooperate in any way available to me. I know I’m loyal; no factual evidence can possibly be turned up to the contrary.

  Heinlein revisited these comments years later, in RAH, letter to “Okie” [Harold J. O’Connell], 07/09/58: “It seems to me a hell of a note that I should be turned down while a guy like Alger Hiss gets by for years.… But I also know that investigating a man takes time, effort, and tax money.”

  Cornog’s efforts, with the help of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Luis Alvarez, as well as that of Heinlein and others, were eventually successful: In December 1949 the Industrial Employment Review Board admitted his clearance had been improperly withdrawn, though it took another two years (1951) before the clearance was actually restored. Robert Cornog, “Discovery of Hydrogen Helium Three” in Trower, W. P., ed. Discovering Alvarez: with commentary by his students and colleagues. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987, cited in Higgins, William S., “Robert Cornog, Heinlein’s Ambassador to the Atom,” English language offprint provided by Mr. Higgins of a chapter he prepared for Solution Non Satisfaisante: Heinlein et l’Arme Atomique, Éric H. Picolle (who translated it into French) and Hugo Bellagamba. Paris: Editions du Somnium, 2010.

  2. Hooray for Hollywood!

  1. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 04/01/49.

  2. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 05/04/49.

  3. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 05/12/49.

  4. RAH, letter to John Arwine, 05/16/49.

  5. Quoted in RAH, letter to “Ernie” [Voigt?], 05/25/49.

  6. RAH, letter to Rip van Ronkel, 05/13/49.

  7. John Campbell’s reaction was immediate and enthusiastic:

  The mss. on “Gulf” arrived very much okay. It was very much okay as a yarn, too—a lovely little dilly of a piece. Your post-war return will, as it should, open with a bang. And that closing scene is a nasty piece indeed! One item that I regretted; your hero didn’t have a chance to clean out the items in his “Personal” file, under “Bichos to be slowly eliminated.”

  But a nice, nasty piece of work “Gulf” is. The boys’ll love it.

  John W. Campbell, Jr., letter to RAH, 06/06/49.

  Over the years, the feedback Heinlein received from readers led him to the conclusion the ending of “Gulf” was the best he had ever conceived, which opinion he set down in RAH, letter to Howie Horowitz, 01/01/64, discussing the pilot he was writing for a television series derived from “Gulf.”

  8. RAH, “Author! Author!” letter-profile in The Fanscient, ed. Donald B. Day (Fall 1949): 32–38.

  9. RAH, letter to Jinny Fowler, 06/11/49.

  10. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/14/49.

  11. Several recent biographies of Mr. Bonestell, both in print and on the Internet, have suggested wrongly that Bonestell was actually attached to the project before Robert Heinlein, and in one case, in an online article by Block and Rubin accessed in 2001 but which has apparently since been taken down, that the film actually derived from Bonestell’s Life magazine paintings in 1944. Without minimizing Mr. Bonestell’s quite substantial role in the success of Destination Moon, this is not the case.

  It is entirely possible that Fritz Lang may have had Bonestell in mind during the period when he was exploring the idea of a film, but this project came into specific existence when Robert Heinlein put his Rocket Ship Galileo property up for adaptation and suggested Bonestell in the early discussions with Lang. Rocket Ship Galileo has an A card for the picture (i.e., acknowledgment as the source of the story) because it is the originating point for Destination Moon, not Bonestell’s Saturn paintings.

  Bonestell was certainly the most suitable man for the job—at that time he was the only possible candidate—and so it is not surprising that he should be considered by anyone contemplating such a project.

  12. RAH, “Creativity Is Not Divisible,” Guest of Honor Speech at Rio de Janeiro film festival honoring George Pal, March 1969, printed in Requiem (Yoji Kondo, ed.). The title of the speech is a play on the title (as well as the contents) of Irving Pichel’s 1945 article for The Hollywood Quarterly, “Creativeness Cannot Be Diffused.”

  13. For the suggestion of the cartoon in the treatment, see Brad Linaweaver, “Destination Freedom,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 9 (July 2001): 11–12; for Pal’s relationship with Walter Lanz, see Gail Morgan Hickman, The Films of George Pal, 45. Heinlein’s treatment for Destination Moon, along with much other material, is incorporated into the Virginia Edition, vol. xliv, Screenplays of RAH 1. The Pal/Heinlein/Lanz/Woody Woodpecker cartoon did boost the film’s public exposure and made an immense impression—but the cartoon was destined to have a life of its own, as it was used in classrooms through the 1960s to introduce schoolchildren to the basic concepts of ballistics and the physics of rocket flight. Graphic novelist (and Eisner Award winner) Rantz Hosely, in a note to the author in May 2013, confirmed the importance of this cartoon: “In discussing the cartoon over the years (including the final shuttle launch STS 135) almost everyone I encountered or discussed it with had that cartoon serve as their first introduction to rocket physics.” Heinlein’s influence as a teacher of the young was broader even than his popular series of juvenile novels for Scribner.

  14. Heinlein told L. Ron Hubbard about the shooting on Rupert preceding shooting on Destination Moon in a letter dated 06/20/49, whereas the subject of a production delay is not mentioned in Heinlein’s letter to L. Sprague de Camp dated 06/14/49 about a forthcoming trip to Hollywood.

  At the time, Heinlein and Hubbard were in frequent contact, sharing intelligence about Shasta’s business practices. Hubbard had been approached by a New York-based independent filmmaker to make one of Hubbard’s Ol’ Doc Methuselah stories into a film. Somehow (Heinlein’s correspondence is not clear on this point), Hubbard became associated with the Rocket Ship X-M production, though he is not listed in cast and crew credits.

  15. In her taped interview with the author, Tape 7, Side B, Mrs. Heinlein could not remember the name of the other couple.

  16. RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 09/06/61; another recounting (Laura Haywood newspaper clipping, undated in the RAH Archive, but 1995) attributes the straight line to C. L. Moore and the witticism to Henry Kuttner.

  17. This sarcastic term is never defined, even though it is still widely, if erratically, used in the industry (“Moom picture” is used occasionally also). It is thought to be a mocking imitation of Walter Winchell’s pronunciation of “moving picture.” The best inference I have been able to draw is that it refers to a full, serious production—as opposed to a short, documentary, cartoon, or other less-than-full production. Thanks to Phil Paine and David Hartwell for clarifying the derivation.

  Hubbard was exaggerating slightly: His Moom Pitcher he later identified as Rocket Ship X-M, which reported to have had a budget of only $94,000 (though Dalton Trumbo wrote the script, uncredited). Hubbard’s name is not listed anywhere in the final credits for the film.

  18. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 08/01/49.

  19. RAH, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, 06/14/49.

  20. Cal Laning, Shipmate “Class News” December 1988, 78–79.

  21. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/17/89.

  22. Just when—and why—Pal talked about turning Destination Moon into a musical comedy is not fixed by the correspondence, except that it was before a passing comment made to Forrest J. Ackerman in August 1949—which would have been while O’Hanlon was reworking the script. See also RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 05/21/51. This was not as odd, in 1949, as it now seems to us: the most recent commercially successful science fiction film was a musical comedy: Just Imagine! (1930)

  23. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/28/01.

  24. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 8, Side B.

  25. Virginia Heinlein,
letter to the author, 11/28/01.

  26. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 8, Side B (February 27? 2000).

  27. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/13/49.

  28. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/26/49.

  29. RAH, profile for More Junior Authors, 1957. Heinlein does not mention it, but the terraforming of Ganymede in Farmer in the Sky may also owe something to an article titled “Morphological Astronomy” which CalTech astronomer Fritz Zwicky published in The Observatory (August 1948). Zwicky took up not only altering individual planets, but also the hoary science-fiction trope of moving them, even whole solar systems.

  30. Virginia Heinlein, letters to the author, 11/07/99 and 12/11/99.

  31. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A (February 27? 2000).

  32. This working title, Ganymede, is found on the Opus List index card, and Robert Cornog, who reviewed the manuscript for Heinlein in October 1949, uses Ganymede rather than Farmer in the Sky.

  33. RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 10/01/49.

  34. The O’Hanlon script is preserved, with Heinlein’s pencil markup, in the Destination Moon file of the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, and is available for download from the heinleinarchiveonline website. Heinlein wrote an exasperated critique of the O’Hanlon script, beginning “This screenplay, as it stands, is an unintegrated piece of nonsense,” thirty-eight pages in double-spaced draft, which he sent to both Pal and Rathvon. Much of the detail given in this paragraph is derived from, or synthesized from, this critique.