The Way the Future Blogs

Robert A. Heinlein:
In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1,
Learning Curve, 1907–1948
By William H. Patterson
(Tor, Hardcover, $29.99).

When I read a biography of someone I’ve known well, there are two things I look for on first inspection. The first is errors of fact, and I’m glad to say that Patterson’s detailed and well researched study seems innocent of any serious quantity of these. The other is more personal. It’s learning new things about the subject’s behavior that you had never guessed, particularly when they impact on yourself. I did find a couple of those in Learning Curve.

I was pretty sure Robert Heinlein regarded me as a good editor — if not, he would never have rewritten some of his stories to my specifications, especially at the pitiful rates I was able to pay. But I hadn’t known until I read it in the book that Robert had been so upset when I left the company that he asked New York friends to find out if I had been unjustly canned, writing, “If he” — that’s me — “got a dirty deal from them and wishes his friends to boycott them, I don’t care to do business with them.” I hadn’t had any idea of such a thing, and I have to say I was touched when I read it in Patterson’s book.

There was one other thing I learned there that I hadn’t suspected, and that was that in letters to his friends Heinlein referred to me as “Freddie.” That was an even bigger surprise. It’s about a year since I first discovered that. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I like it.

* * *

Patterson’s book starts at the very beginning, or maybe a little before the actual beginning, of Robert’s life, by introducing his parent and grandparents. This is of interest, of course, only insofar as it helped to shape Heinlein himself. Actually, by Patterson’s account he was not seriously unlike any other Midwestern kid, growing up in a family with limited amounts of money, and one of the things I most appreciate about Patterson is the briskness with which he moves us through the pages of genealogy. It is when Robert himself successfully seeks to be appointed to the United States Naval Academy that his life begins to diverge from the rest.

Even someone who has never read a word of Heinlein would value Paterson’s book for the way he describes the life of a midshipman. It was a demanding period in Robert’s life, since any upperclassman could demand their attention at any time — and if they were unsatisfactory in any way — or if the upperclassman just happened to feel like it — the punishment was a good beating on the rump with a wooden bar.

Robert did well at the Academy but he didn’t complete the expected trajectory of becoming an actual Navy officer. His eyes were the first to betray him, then other parts of his body (most famously, the ones he joked about as his “asteroids”) . He never got to fight in World War II, but spent the war years in working on an oddball research team based at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp and a female naval officer named Virginia Gerstenfeld, who, as everyone well knows, before long became Mrs. Robert A. Heinlein.

One of the questions Patterson’s admirable book did not answer for me was precisely how it happened that Robert so thoroughly switched his affections from Leslyn, who was Wife No. 2, to Ginny, who wound up the series as Wife No. 3 and Last. (I am not deliberately mocking Heinlein’s plurality of marriages; as everyone knows who knows me at all, I am not in a position to do that.)

I confess that I was never particularly fond of Ginny, nor she of me, but as we both were fond of Robert, we maintained courteous relations. But I would like to know more than I do about how Leslyn got replaced with Ginny. True, there’s no doubt that Leslyn was an alcoholic and given to fits of bad behavior. Maybe that’s really all there is to know. But just about all we know of those events is what Ginny tells us. I’d love to hear Leslyn’s side of the story, and I am feeling guilty about that because Leslyn did appeal to me for sympathy, and I, unwilling to get mixed up in a private affair, discouraged her letters until she gave up.

Ah, well. Read the book anyway. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I did.

Possibly in Arizona? Possibly late ’60s?

Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan.

For some time now, I’ve been putting on paper recollections that I think will sooner or later go into what will be either an expanded new edition of my autobiography, The Way the Future Was, or a new book which is a sort of sequel to that one. The trouble is that for some of the most interesting events, including some obscure cons, I’ve forgotten a lot of important details, even such matters as when and where they were held.

Take, for instance the one I think of as the “Johnny Weissmuller Con.” It was in many ways a great con, with a terrific cast of guests — Robert Heinlein, Jack Williamson, Gordie Dickson and many another writer (including me) and even such rarely observed media people as Johnny Weissmuller and Tarzan’s favorite Jane, Maureen O’Sullivan.

Maureen O’ had been one of my most-loved stars ever since she starred in that early, and pretty sappy, sf film, Just Imagine. Getting a chance to talk to her was pure gravy. (When you saw the two of them on the stage at the con, it seemed that the personalities of their roles in the Tarzan movies were drawn from the real-life personalities of the pair of them. Smart, competent Jane had to help musclebound but tongue-tied Tarzan come up with answers to the questions in their on-stage interview.)

So if any of you remember anything about that con, I’d be grateful if you dropped me a line.

    Algis and Edna Budrys, 1985
    (Photo by William Shunn).

It was a nice spring day in 1950-something and I was up in my third-floor office in the house in Red Bank, New Jersey, trying to telephone my other office in New York.

I wasn’t having much luck. Every time I picked up the phone my then wife, Carol, was already on it. Finally, I gave up, turned off the typewriter and went downstairs to see if the mail had come yet. It had. I was opening it over a cup of coffee when Carol showed up, off the phone at last. “Long call,” I said. “Who were you talking to?”

“Eddie Duna,” she said. “Oh, and I invited her out for the weekend, all right?”

“Oh,” I said. “Listen, I forgot to tell you. I already invited A J. I don’t think they’ve met.”

She gave me a look, but what she said was, “Fine. We’ve got room.” We did, too — a house that was ancient, decrepit, requiring constant infusions of money to keep it standing, but with twelve or so rooms. (I work at home and I don’t like to be crowded. My current home is about the same size, though less decrepit and needing somewhat fewer infusions.)

“Maybe they’ll like each other,” she added. “Maybe they’ll get married. A J could do a lot worse. Edna’s smart and great looking, and she’s got a good job.”

“Well, so could she,” I said, sticking up for my client. “A J is turning into a hell of a writer. What’s for lunch?”

And, you know, they did like each other and, a few months later, they did get married.

Well, that’s not so strange, is it? Happens all the time. A couple introduces friends to each other and sometimes the friends get married.

Well, sure, but what’s unusual about this particular event, at least among my crowd, is that these two stayed married, through four sons and more than fifty years, until 2008, when a long illness finally carried A J off. Hey, I’m some matchmaker! When I make a match it stays made.

 
Algirdas Jonas Budrys was born in 1931 in Lithuania, but he didn’t stay there long. His father was an official in Lithuania’s diplomatic corps and while A J was still small the family was posted to Konigsberg in the German province of East Prussia. A J, who had just about got a good handle on the Lithuanian language, began to learn German. His adult memories of East Prussia — which, like the rest of Germany, had been Nazified with the accession of Adolf Hitler a few years earlier — were troublesome.

He particularly recalled Hitler himself parading right past the Budrys apartment when he was five, he told Mark Williams in an interview shortly before he died. “After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up.” The crowds made “indescribable” sounds. Men lost control of their bowels and had to race for the bushes or writhed and rolled on the ground.

Not long after that, the Budrys family was redeployed to New York. That was a much better posting, especially for a young boy who was beginning to read American children’s stories, but then everything changed.

The Soviet Union occupied all three of the Baltic countries; the Lithuanian diplomatic service ceased to exist, and so did the salary that had kept them afloat in this new country. A J’s father had to find a new way to support his little family. For a while it was farming, but then the Nazis evicted the Soviets and occupied Lithuania, and the other countries themselves, and the American government tardily decided to underwrite people like the Budryses. It looked as though they would be here for a while, so A J began the study of his third language. At which, most critics would agree, he became quite good.

In fact, while attending college, A J began writing stories of his own in English, and even managed to sell a few. Then one day he turned up at my Fifth Avenue literary-agency office to ask if I would take on his representation.

I did. Unfortunately for A J, though — and not all that nicely for me — he came along at a time when I was getting seriously over-extended and in increasingly deep money trouble. In what may have been A J’s last public talk, at the Heinlein Centennial in 2007, the hundredth anniversary of Robert Heinlein’s birth, A J reminisced about those days. “Fred made some great sales for me,” he said. “He even sold John Campbell a story that Campbell had already rejected when I sent it to him myself. But then when Fred sent me his check for the story, it bounced.”

(I regret to say that that’s a true story, though not one I enjoy. Maybe one day I’ll write about my literary-agent days for this blog, but not right now. They were only fifty or sixty years ago and still too painful.)

I couldn’t go on like that. I took the hard decision and packed the agency in, turned all the writers loose and began working to earn the money to pay back the $30,000 I had lost. Mostly I was doing it by writing but, when Horace Gold’s health made him unable to go on editing Galaxy and If, and Bob Guinn offered me the job, I took it. And, of course, A J was one of my principal contributors.

By then A J and Edna were not only married but in the next year or so expecting their first child. They had moved out of the city and into a small apartment in Red Bank, less than half a mile from my own house. That was convenient for A J. When he finished a story for me he could whip the last page out of the typewriter, walk out his door and in ten or fifteen minutes walk it over to my house for, when necessary, an immediate read followed by my trip to the Galaxy office in New York the next morning to bring back Bob Guinn’s check for the story.

“When necessary,” as it happened, was basically always, because when they moved out of New York, they had moved away from Edna’s job. The Budryses were now living on A J’s writing earnings.

Writing money is not like salary money. Salary money comes in a check every Friday, and you can budget according to what you’ll be able to pay. Writing money comes in indigestible lumps — perhaps not much in January, even less in February, a couple hundred, maybe, in March, and then in April a whopping big check, which makes your average income per month look pretty good. But, of course, the grocer, the landlord and everybody else are on their own timetable which has nothing to do with your monthly averages, and so there are problems.

Still, A J was both prolific and good. After a while, the Budryses had risen to the status of renting a house (in Oceanport, closer to the shore) and buying a car. A J, a true son of the automobile age, was now in his element. He developed a new writing behavior that was all his own. Each night, after dinner, he would kiss Edna and the babies (by then there were two of them) good night and jump into his car, carrying a recorder and a good supply of tape.

Then he would drive around for most of the night, more or less at random, steering with one hand and holding the tape recorder with the other to dictate stories into. When he had filled enough tape to satisfy himself he would drive home, park the car, hand the tape over to Edna to be typed out and hit the sack for a good day’s sleep.

Sometimes he hadn’t quite finished the stories when he turned them in, especially when it came to putting a title on them, so we would wrangle over that before I would concede the story was accepted. Generally, that didn’t take long but there was one story — allusive, subjective, poetic — that gave us particular trouble. After we both had come up empty I asked, “All right, A J, just tell me what the story’s about.”

He said, unhappily, “I can’t. I just know it’s what I wanted to write.”

I was leafing through the manuscript. “All right,” I said at last, “Here in the first couple of pages there are some phrases that I like, One is ‘wall of crystal’ and the other is ‘eye of night.’ How about calling it ‘Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night’?”

He gave me a pop-eyed look. “What does it mean?”

I said, “I don’t know, but I promise you that if we do, no one will ever ask you that question.” And no one ever did.

I have been asked which of A J’s stories were written in this hard-driving way, and I don’t know the answer. He had begun writing novels by then and my guess is that that was the system for two of them, probably Who? and Rogue Moon, but it’s only a guess. I don’t think it was many, perhaps not any, of the pieces I published, with the possible exception of the one of his novels that I ran as a three-part serial, The Iron Thorn.

Which nearly resulted in a homicide.

You know what the first law of editing is? It is this: “Never, ever, announce a story by a particular writer until the completed manuscript is safely in your hands.”

I didn’t just violate that law. I did worse. I wanted to start a new serial in the next issue of If, which was just about to go to the printer, and I didn’t have one. What I did have was Part One of A J’s The Iron Thorn. That was just the kind of story I wanted for that spot, but every warning bell in my mind was clanging away. . . .

I ignored them. I crossed my fingers, sent Part One off to the printers and hoped for the best.

I don’t want to tell you how many deadlines we came a hairsbreadth from missing over the next two issues, but A J, though often coming through at the last moment, and I mean by that the very, very last moment, did unfailingly come through, so I didn’t have to kill him.

But I never did that again.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• A J, Part 2
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard

Virginia Heinlein, 1976.
(Photo by David Dyer-Bennet.)
 

Robert Heinlein’s next, and final, wife was Lt. Virginia Gerstenfeld. She worked with (and outranked) Heinlein at the little wartime research group in Philadelphia that was charged with trying to figure out what a high-altitude (read: space) suit should be like.

Politically, she and I were nowhere near close, but we agreed to disagree and generally talked about something else. That didn’t really matter. Bob had picked her and she was his loyalest fan and ferociousest protector, and as long as he lived that was plenty good enough for me.

But then he died, and Ginny didn’t stop protecting all that was left of him. Specifically his image — or rather her image of him, which I believe was of a chivalrous, well-mannered and quite refined Annapolis man.

This became a problem for me when I was editing the SFWA Grand Masters series of anthologies for Tor. My plan was to include for each of these giants a selection of their most important work. I knew exactly what I wanted, too. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the opening part of the story is told in a sort of modestly Russian-Latino English-language dialect, by its central character. I desperately wanted to reprint those opening scenes, in which the narrator tricks a giant computer into revealing that it has become a person. Ginny would have none of that.

When I first told her my plan, she said she’d have to think about it, and when she had thought she said, well, no, she didn’t want to include anything from that book because she had discussed it with some friends and they agreed that it was, well, a bit … “vulgar,” I think was the word she used. And she was unswayable.

Then there was Grumbles from the Grave. Robert had talked about allowing posthumous publication of his real feelings about a lot of things that he didn’t feel comfortable to talk about while he was alive, and indicated that some of his private letters would be a source for the book. Then some posthumous book with that title did come out, and it was a great disappointment. Someone — it could have been only Ginny — had washed his face and combed his hair and turned whatever it was that Robert might have wanted to say into the equivalent of thank-you notes for a respectable English tea.

I know that Robert wrote some much more raunchy letters than any of those, because I myself got one or two. But all the raunch has been edited out. What’s left is actually rather boring and does a great disservice to the real Heinlein, whose physical person may have been embodied as a conventional hard-right conservative but whose writing was — sometimes vulgarly — that of a free-thinking iconoclast.

Pity. It is good that Heinlein’s novels are now going to be reissued as he wrote them, without the alterations of editors like me. It would also be good if a similar job could be done on his letters.

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

     Leslyn Heinlein, ca. 1933.

As I understand it (my information on this point is a little iffy), Robert A. Heinlein was married at least three times, maybe more. The only early wife I know anything about, though, was the one just before Ginny. Her name was Leslyn.

What I know about Leslyn is really just two things. First, she must have been a pretty nice person, because John Campbell and his then wife Dona named one of their daughters after her. Second, a few years after Robert had divorced Leslyn and married Ginny, I began to receive sad, wistful, lonesome letters from Leslyn reminding me over and over of the wonderful times she and Bob and I and other local science-fiction writers and fans had had sitting around her kitchen table in the old days.

This worried me. You see, it had never happened. I had never been in her kitchen, nor indeed had I met Leslyn anywhere else, either. The woman clearly was not in close touch with reality. I could think of nothing to do about it other than to reply to her letters as pleasantly and noncommittally — and briefly — as I could.

But I did, and still do, wonder what it did to a person with as hypertrophied a sense of duty as Heinlein’s to have been unable to save the woman he had vowed to love and protect.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

Robert A. Heinlein with his parents at Annapolis in 1927. (Photo from The Heinlein Centennial Souvenir Book.)

While I was writing something about my memories of Robert A. Heinlein, it occurred to me that I might also have something worth mentioning to say about his interior and private life. That is, about the aspects of one of my most admired writers that I would never have dared to write about in his lifetime — not because he would have come after me with a bullwhip or a summons, but because it would have caused him serious pain and immediately, and irrevocably, would then have lost me his friendship.

But that was then. Now is now. He is past the period when anything any of us might do could cause him pain. What’s more, I am convinced that he was too important a writer, and too complex a person, to leave major portions of his life and his works undiscussed … so here goes.

The first thing to know about Robert A. Heinlein is that he was a peacetime naval officer and an Annapolis graduate and therefore exposed to the service academies’ old-fashioned and sometimes amusing notions of honor. In Heinlein’s case, they took. Throughout his life, honor was of major importance.

I can perhaps give one illustrative example. Both John Campbell and his then wife Dona considered Heinlein a dear friend and, at a point when the Campbell marriage was getting seriously frayed, wrote long letters to Heinlein about their problems.

Then, years later, something triggered Heinlein’s honor glands. He decided that it was wrong for him to possess so many of other people’s secrets so he bundled up both batches of letters and mailed them back —

To John. All of them. Both sets.

I don’t think Dona ever forgave him for that.

Another example. In the early 1970s, Heinlein and I and a raft of other writers and celebrities (Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan and several dozen others) were comped by the Holland-America Line to cruise to Florida to watch the launch of the Apollo 17 lunar spacecraft from the waters just off the Cape. (A grand experience, which remind me to tell you more about another time.)

At some point on the trip, Robert had a disagreement with the ship’s personnel, I am not sure exactly what about, but the effect of it was that Robert thought they were saying he had failed to do something they expected in return for his free tickets. In a service-academy mind that sort of failure to carry out an agreement for services can translate as theft, so Robert whipped out his checkbook to reimburse the line for the cost of his and Ginny’s tickets. (I think the line refused to accept it; anyway, the whole thing was settled amicably and the Heinleins enjoyed the rest of the cruise. But while it might be considered a question of honor, Robert could not let it stand.)

To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′