MemeMachineGo!

I’ve been reading up on Heinlein online, learning a number of surprising things.

Apparently, he had a first marrage immediately after Annapolis, prior to his marriage to Leslyn MacDonald. From this Heinlein FAQ :

Heinlein was first married immediately after his graduation from Annapolis in 1929. This marriage was short and ended in divorce, and few other details are available. Heinlein never spoke of this marriage, and most later friends and colleagues were unaware of it.

and this bio :

Heinlein himself never commented publicly on Leslyn or the later (1947) divorce, but the marriage certificate shows her working in the Music Department at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. Curiously, it also shows Heinlein’s marital status as “divorced,” and this as his second marriage (her first). Nothing is known about a prior marriage.

He made reference many times to having worked in politics, and having run for the California State Assembly, but he never offered details.

Apparently, he was in Upton Sinclair’s organization :

So Robert Heinlein was not “a moderate Democrat,” as Pournelle tells us; he was actively involved over a period of several years with the movement of a candidate that President Roosevelt refused to endorse, even though Sinclair had changed his registration from Socialist to Democrat in 1933 and then won the nomination of the Democratic Party that FDR headed. The ‘34 campaign, as Mitchell’s book tells us, frightened the rich and led movie studios and other businesses to threaten to leave California if Sinclair should be elected. Earl Warren, the future Governor of California and United States Chief Justice, then a young district attorney, announced: “This is no longer a campaign between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in California. It is a crusade of Americans and Californians against Radicalism and Socialism.”

In I, Asimov, Asimov attributed his shift in politics to his change in wives :

Furthermore, although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far-right conservative immediately afterward. This happened at just the time he changed wives from a liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far-right conservative woman, Virginia… I used to brood about it in puzzlement (of course, I never would have dreamed of asking Heinlein - I’m sure he would have refused to answer, and would have done so with the uttermost hostility), and I did come to one conclusion. I would never marry anyone who did not generally agree with my political, social, and philosophical view of life.

Something, I’d dearly prefer to disbelieve — Earl Kemp, the chairman of Chicon III, the World SF Convention in 1962, says :

Heinlein required me, as a condition for his appearance at ChiCon III, to absolutely guarantee him, ahead of time, the Hugo award for Stranger in a Strange Land. (Doing so was easy, only very unethical; the book won hands down; I didn’t have to hassle with myself to see if I would interfere.)

Heinlein’s papers are actually not far away from me, in the UC Santa Cruz Special Collections . I’ll have to make a holy pilgrimage some time.

Some aver that Heinlein was familiar with Aleister Crowley’s magickal beliefs, through association with Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard, and that this inspired Stranger in a Strange Land:

The premise of this article is that Heinlein wrote Stranger as an allegorical recapitulation of Thelema. (The word Thelema is Greek for “Great Will” and refers to the body of philosophy and magickal practices codified by the late Aleister Crowley and continued by many.) This article details Heinlein’s magickal interests, his relationships with the most famous of Crowley’s American disciples, and his many coded references to Thelema in Stranger and other written works. Moreover, we will establish that Heinlein wrote Stranger with the intent of initiating a Thelemic ‘whole systems transition’ in human thought and expression. This means that Stranger cannot be regarded merely as the work of a master storyteller, the product of a literary genius. Rather, Stranger is much better understood as a consciously wrought, carefully considered and brilliantly successful casting — a talismanic spell in itself, still dynamic, with its direct purpose being to spark human evolution along Thelemic lines.

I cannot find a web citation, but Sex and Rockets, a biography of Parsons, says that Virginia Heinlein asserted that Heinlein had never met Parsons. It’s easy to find other assertions they did spend time together, and in Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher (under the pseudonym A.H. White), a thinly disguised Heinlein character and a thinly disguised Parsons character are depicted as friends. (Naturally, I’m skeptical of evidence derived from an explicit work of fiction.)

There’s a persistent rumor that Stranger was Charles Manson’s favorite book, which apparently originated in an uncredited San Francisco Examiner Story :

Heinlein was medically incapacitated when the Tate-LaBianca murders, an ongoing and gruesome story for four months by that time, took a grotesquely personal turn. Taking its cue from an un-bylined (staff-written) article in the San Francisco Examiner, Time Magazine in January 1970 told America that Charles Manson killed following a “blue-print” provided by Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land. The allegation had no basis in fact, as the District Attorney assigned to prosecute Charles Manson discovered. Several members of Manson’s Family had read Stranger and privately used water-ritual jargon, but Manson later told an inquirer (J. Neil Schulman) that he had never read Stranger.

But without having read it apparently he was influenced by it :

Doubtless, Manson controlled those he attracted, but he also learned from them. For instance, writer Ed Sanders mentions [in The Family] Manson’s fondness for Stranger in a Strange Land, a satirical science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Actually, Manson barely read at the seventh-grade level—though certainly he incorporated many ideas when he heard them.

and :

When he started his “family” in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Manson borrowed some of the terminology and ceremonies from the book. It is reported that his followers held water-sharing ceremonies as well as group sex orgies. He referred to his parole officer as “Roger Smith Jubal,” after Jubal Harshaw, Mike’s mentor. When Mary Theresa Brunner, one of Manson’s followers, gave birth to a baby boy in 1968, Manson named the child Valentine Michael Manson.

Alexei Panshin even suggests Heinlein was remiss in not taking responsibility for Manson’s actions :

While it would be possible for an impressionable reader to feel he’d been given license by the fantasy to ignore conventional constraints, Heinlein would not accept responsibility for any social damage which might take place if the book were adopted as a model. When it was reported that Charles Manson had used Stranger as his guide in discorporating people he found unworthy, Heinlein’s response was to act indignant and say, “Who, me?”

Here are some other interesting links and sources of further reading (I’m making no attempt or claim to be comprehensive):

Nitrosyncretic’s Heinlein Archives

Alexi Panshin’s Critic’s Lounge and Critic’s Lounge Annex

We Grok It ‘s Book Cover Museum