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

  A personal fortune would only be a start on this project—it would have to become as much a glamour investment as a technical venture. The basic story was about a man obsessed with the Great Vision, finagling and flim-flamming the financing for a Moon rocket.

  This prequel story to “Requiem” had to fit into a narrow time gap in his Future History chart. Robert and Ginny came up with many background bits to get the story to the correct length. “Robert would pace up and down the living room,” Ginny later said, “and I would sit there and try to think of ideas that he could stick into this thing.”72 “We spent days discussing it. All sorts of things went into it—the Mississippi Bubble and things like that.”73 Heinlein started writing while Korshak prepared the contracts for the series.

  At almost the same time, Scribner rejected Red Planet74—on just the points the editor had approved in the story outline.75 Worse, Dalgliesh complained that this story was fairy-tale like and wasn’t technical enough—after asking him to reduce the science from the level of his first two books for them. It was infuriating—particularly considering the struggle to make the thing work in the first place. Dalgliesh’s idea of science fiction, Heinlein complained to Blassingame, was antiquated.

  Her definition … fails to include most of the field and includes only that portion of the field which has been heavily overworked and now contains only low-grade ore.…

  I gave Miss Dalgliesh a story which was strictly science fiction by all the accepted standards—but it did not fit into the narrow niche to which she has assigned the term, and it scared her.…

  Enough of beating that dead horse! It’s a better piece of science fiction than the other two, but she’ll never know it and it’s useless to try to tell her.76

  Dalgliesh had commissioned an evaluation reading by a professional librarian, Margaret C. Scoggins, who was enthusiastic about the book but noted potential problems with the boy’s Martian pet, Willis, laying eggs in the protagonist’s bed after “necking” with him (“She’s got a dirty mind,” Ginny remarked77), and a certain trigger-happiness among the boys.78

  The whole children’s lit industry was under intense scrutiny at that time because of the public attention being given to gory and violent comic books. Young people bearing firearms absolutely had to come out; this was a point on which there could be no compromise. And even the suggestion of sex—the miscegenation that could be read into the egg-laying—was unacceptable to the librarians who had become the core of Dalgliesh’s purchasers. “We value him as an author,” Dalgliesh told Heinlein’s agent, “but we have to sell books and we have to keep the reputation for integrity we’ve built up.”79 They weren’t selling many books in bookstores, she told Blassingame, so the library sales were critical. This must have caused Heinlein’s jaw to drop, as he was getting complaints from his family and from readers that they couldn’t find the book in bookstores, the demand was so great.80

  The day after the Scribner rejection, his spirits were bucked up when L. Ron Hubbard repaid the fifty-dollar loan—within two weeks and with an extra dollar for interest.81 Heinlein returned the dollar, saying they didn’t take interest from friends.

  Having Red Planet—essentially a commissioned work—rejected after the outline was approved and the book written to outline infuriated Robert,82 and he instructed his agent that he was going to insist on the advance, even if they had to sue Scribner to get it.83 Blassingame agreed and brokered a compromise: Scribner agreed to accept the book based on its following the preapproved outline, but wanted some significant revisions. Though very doubtful about the practical nature of those revisions, Heinlein gave in:

  I capitulate, horse and foot. I’ll bowdlerize the goddamn thing any way she said. But I hope you can keep needling her to be specific, however, and to follow up the plot changes when she demands the removal of a specific factor. I’m not just being difficult, Lurton; several of the things she objects to have strong plot significance …

  If she forces me to it, I’ll take out what she objects to and then let her look at the cadaver remaining—then perhaps she will revise her opinion that it “—doesn’t affect the main body of the story—” (direct quote).84

  Some of the changes watered down the social philosophy of the book, in a way that was repugnant to him. “It appears that there is now a drive on to make the world safe for morons[,] and Red Planet got caught in the squeeze. Things that were okay in my last two books are now much too nasty for children. It’s annoying.”85 He suggested bylining it by “Lyle Monroe”—or jointly by Robert Heinlein and Alice Dalgliesh—or “as revised by Alice Dalgliesh”86—proposals she rejected. Later, Blassingame told him that Scribner had panicked at the thought of diluting the Heinlein name recognition.87 Dispiritedly he started marking up his manuscript to water down the book.88 The contracts were finally signed on April 29, 1949. “I concede your remarks about the respect given to the Scribner imprint,” Heinlein wrote to Blassingame,

  the respect in which she [Dalgliesh] is held, and the fact that she is narrowly limited by a heavily censorship-ridden market. I still don’t think she is a good editor; she can’t read an outline or a manuscript with constructive imagination.

  I expect this to be my last venture in this field; ’tain’t worth the grief.89

  For the time being, Heinlein had no choice: he had to do the work. Money was very tight going into April 1949. The revisions for Red Planet would take time, and “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” which had been promised to Astounding as early as 1941, was tied up in the book publication and could not be sold to a magazine.

  In the middle of the frustrating negotiations over the Red Planet revisions, Korshak wrote saying that Shasta couldn’t possibly keep the terms of the contract they had offered for the Future History books; the royalty rates were too high to be a profitable venture.90 Some of the terms, Robert felt he could live with—though it was no longer even a decent contract for him (he called it a “monstrosity” in a letter to Blassingame91). After weeks of back-and-forth, Heinlein decided to accept the bad terms, just to get on with the other writing he had stacked up.92 “I have made great concessions; you have worn me out,” he wrote to Korshak. “I want to sign your contract Monday morning 11 April or drop the whole matter. No more lengthy negotiations.”93 To his screenwriting collaborator, he complained:

  I’ve lost the last three weeks through the insanities of editors and publishers. On my latest novel [Red Planet] the editor thinks it’s swell tomato juice but should be peed in to make it better. On a contract for five books with another house [Shasta] the publisher writes me 7000-word letters explaining why he should have my other shirt and my one good testicle in the contract. All very time wasting.94

  The contracts for the first two books in the Future History series were signed on April 19, 1949. Korshak irritated him by sending the $200 advance for the first book with the condescending message that the Heinleins could eat steak tonight on Shasta.95 The advance Robert had just secured from Scribner was $500; he could have steak without Shasta.

  Moreover, several of the stories in the first volume for Shasta needed revisions, minor and major. In particular, he wanted to bring the applied physics in “Blowups Happen” up to date, for which purpose he borrowed John Campbell’s book manuscript for Atomic Industries.96

  In April 1949 Heinlein needed to find a story manuscript97 and spent half a day looking through his unlabeled boxes for it.98 Through the middle of April,99 Ginny organized his files for him: Each story, book, or article was assigned a work number on an index card, chronologically, like a composer’s opus numbers. Heinlein went through the old manuscripts one by one with her, telling her from his recollections and from the notes on the storage envelopes which ones came before others or after, and Ginny made up a master opus list to reflect his recollections, putting the opus number on the files and organizing the files sequentially in the boxes, so the index cards would reference into the files without a long search through boxes and boxes. That brought him
more or less up to date, with the Destination Moon script being #65. The Boy Scout story was #66; Red Planet #67, and so on. From that point forward, each time he started a project, he would put the next opus number on an index card and keep a running record on the card, instead of hiding the information away with the manuscripts.

  The clock was running on his deadline for Campbell’s “Gulf” story. Campbell had been fascinated with Ginny’s Martian Mowgli idea—but Hoen had packed so many imaginary stories into his letter that Campbell couldn’t possibly include them all, even if they were all shorts. He wasn’t going to write a Don A. Stuart story for that issue, no matter what Hoen had “asked” for.100

  Heinlein put the Mowgli story away and developed a suspense story (as opus #68) based on Ginny’s comment about supermen thinking better than ordinaries. He started the story in mid-April but stalled for a month. Perhaps the “Gulf” story simply needed more thinking through than it had had to that point.

  Royalty checks came in April, relieving any immediate crisis, so the Heinleins were able to take time off and enjoy the National Figure Skating Championships held that year in Colorado Springs.

  The break probably gave him time to think about another important matter: The Department of the Navy had suspended his physicist friend Robert Cornog pending an investigation into his security clearance. After inviting the Heinleins to drop by Los Alamos on their way back from Philadelphia in 1945,101 Cornog came out to Southern California and continued to be active in the movements to cope with the dangers of atomic weapons. The Los Alamos Scientists organization led to the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization asking Cornog to join in September 1945. That committee was later exposed as a Communist front organization. Cornog now asked Heinlein for an affidavit attesting to his character—and to his patriotism—when he contested the suspension.

  That was a ticklish problem: Heinlein had belonged to some organizations in the thirties that were heavily infiltrated by United Front Communists. He carefully crafted a statement for the hearing coming up on May 26, 1949, that laid the groundwork for his own patriotism and leveraged Cornog’s on that basis, giving the names of respected individuals who knew his opinion directly—John Anson Ford, who was still a Los Angeles County Supervisor; Susie and Robert Clifton; and John Kean, who had been his supervisor at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia.

  Cornog was, he argued, a prudent and close-mouthed individual—at the very most a “dupe,” not even a fellow traveler. His involvement was excusable because “I can say from personal and bitter experience that it is very hard to spot immediately a clandestine communist.”102

  Identifying and getting Communists out of American political institutions, he conceded, was an important and increasingly urgent problem—but Cornog was certainly no Commie. The effort spent investigating him—and rocket expert Jack Parsons, a friend of Heinlein and Cornog both, who had recently been through the same mill—was better spent chasing down real traitors.103

  Having defended his friend’s integrity and dealt a blow against the Communists simultaneously, Heinlein learned that he would have to go back into the world he had left behind in Los Angeles: Destination Moon was going to be made into a movie. Ad astra per Hollywood!

  2

  HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD!

  The day before Heinlein sat down to write his Statement for Robert Cornog, which is dated May 17, 1949, he was able to tell Forrest Ackerman (in the same post in which Heinlein told his parents), that his movie script had sold and he would be coming to Hollywood as Technical Director for the film.

  Heinlein’s writing partner, Rip van Ronkel, had been making noises for months about an imminent sale of Destination Moon. RKO had passed on the project, but when the studio’s president, N. Peter Rathvon, left to produce movies independently, he approached George Pal for a two-picture deal, including Destination Moon and a Christmas fantasy called The Great Rupert, on the theory that profits from a second picture could insure any losses Destination Moon might incur. By the beginning of April 1949, although no money had yet changed hands, Pal and van Ronkel were taking “notes” from the new producer. Rathvon didn’t like the original ending, and Heinlein was skeptical about the prospects for finding a satisfactory “fix”: “I find that when an unscientifically-trained buyer wants to rewrite science fiction, there is almost no way to satisfy him.” But he gave van Ronkel several ideas for alternate endings (“I got a million of ’em, all equally stinky”1).

  Heinlein remained pragmatically skeptical about the deal and would remain so until the check cleared the bank. “I’m a cash-at-the-bedside girl,” he told van Ronkel, “which means that I won’t actually leave Colorado Springs until I see some of it. I can’t afford to.”2

  The Technical Director credit would entail a consultancy retainer for six to eight weeks’ worth of work, in addition to the purchase of the screenplay and rights for Rocket Ship Galileo, the property from which it was derived. The motion picture and television rights were assigned to Pal as of May 9, 1949, and that made the deal official. That left only three weeks to make Pal’s June 10 start date. “Pal must get on the dime now, or I’m out,”3 Heinlein told van Ronkel.

  Time pressure from minor staff doesn’t usually mean anything in Hollywood: The producer sets the schedule, and everyone else either conforms or gets out. But in this case, Pal wanted Heinlein, who had already come up with dozens of innovative solutions to technical problems, with many more to work out. The assignment was likely to last only through July, but the Heinleins planned to stay until after Labor Day.4

  Housing solved itself: On May 17, Willie Williams and Pat Morely, friends from their ice-skating circle in Hollywood, visited in Colorado Springs on their way to New York where they would stay until October. They offered their apartment, close to the Paramount studios at Sunset and Gower, where the set work would be done.5

  Ginny started packing. They gave up 1313 Cheyenne Boulevard and put everything they weren’t taking to Hollywood in long-term storage. Heinlein settled down to write the “Gulf” novelette, saying he had been “egg-bound for a month” on the project.6 The superman–unaware he had introduced in the opening became part of an organization of other supermen, bent on guarding the rest of humanity from its own predators. He finished it at 5:30 in the morning of May 23. Three days to revise and retype left him a comfortable nine days before Campbell’s deadline.7

  * * *

  The Heinleins made the travel to Hollywood a road trip, visiting friends in Los Alamos, then picking up some detailed photos of the surface of the Moon at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, for Chesley Bonestell’s use in painting the movie sets. Sightseeing at Boulder Dam on the border between Arizona and Nevada and a brief stop in Las Vegas for the slots rounded out the entertainment portion of the trip.

  Heinlein plunged immediately into the production planning at the studio and was immediately overwhelmed. “Dateline is now Hollywood,” he wrote on June 15, 1949, “and life is triple-geared. Some Monday I’m going to wake up and find that it’s Thursday.”8 It was much easier to write about space than to film it, he found:9 “This business of making a movie is a lot of fun,” he told Lurton Blassingame, “but confusing. Sometimes I feel as if I were fighting a feather bed—so many people, so many details!”10

  But the details did begin to come together. Chesley Bonestell (1888–1986) in particular was exactly on target. Heinlein said in a later speech that he had told Pal, early on: “if we could not get Chesley Bonestell, we should give up the project entirely.”11

  Heinlein originally chose to site the landing in Aristarchus Crater, but Bonestell, seeing the site in his mind’s trained eye, decided Aristarchus was wrong for the film: It was in the wrong hemisphere to get Earth in the background. He preferred Harpalus Crater in the Moon’s northern hemisphere. Heinlein was awed by this implied feat of mental projective geometry.12 Harpalus it was.

  But Bonestell was not the only essential enhancement for the film. In his original ninety
-eight-page treatment, written in the summer of 1948, Heinlein had suggested a cartoon to get the ballistics concepts across in an entertaining fashion. Pal talked his friend Walter Lantz (1899–1994), into introducing a real star into the film: Woody Woodpecker.13

  After two weeks, the production team was rolling along, and Robert was able to spend more time with Ginny, who was somewhat at loose ends. Within a week, Pal told him the production would be delayed and his production team, once they got the current work out of the way, would be put to work on the second film Rathvon had ordered, The Great Rupert.14

  That was a setback: Heinlein’s consultancy fee didn’t cover extra time in Los Angeles. He would have to do some fiction writing to bring in living expenses.

  But in the month before the crew had to shift over to Rupert, Destination Moon moved rapidly into production. Set design had worked up a model of the principal sets, including a spectacular semicircular backdrop of six panels, each about six feet long and eighteen inches high, that Bonestell was painting for the interior of the crater. He was also doing an astonishing trompe l’oeil painting of the face of the Moon, more than six feet high—taller than he was, in fact: He had to use a ladder to paint the astonishing details on the upper limb of the Moon.

  The demands on Heinlein’s time eased off in July, and he and Ginny were able to take on a social life. They began to entertain, principally inviting Heinlein’s old friend Bill Corson for dinner. They had the Bonestells over for dinner fairly frequently, and had lunch one day with one of Heinlein’s personal heroes, mathematician, semanticist, and senior science-fiction writer Eric Temple Bell (“John Taine”), at the Cal Tech Atheneum Club. Taine’s science fiction was being published in hardcover—in the 1920s!

  Once they traveled south to Laguna Beach with another couple,15 to visit with friends and fellow writers, Henry and Catherine (C. L. Moore) Kuttner. Over drinks Robert made some disparaging remarks about the tame-dog writer Rathvon kept in his office to write up his “stupendous” ideas for changing the Destination Moon script. “Hank blinked at me gnomishly and said ‘I didn’t know writers could live in captivity’ and Catherine said, ‘Oh, they’ll sometimes live—but they won’t breed…’” Ginny laughed so hard that she spilled her drink.16