Dreamer of Dune (50 page)

From across the table, I noticed my father's eyes gave him the appearance of a guilt-consumed child looking painfully at an adult, fearful of impending punishment. He seemed to be waiting for my criticism.

Dad was sixty-three years old. He was approximately thirty-six years older than she was, which happened to be my age. I was, to say the least, shocked.

Trying to hide my feelings for his sake, I said, “You're not really that far apart in age, Dad. If we accept the fact of genetic memory that you've written about in
Dune
, you're five million and sixty-three years old, while she's five million and twenty-seven.”

This pleased him exceedingly, and he beamed from ear to ear. Soon I heard the story repeated back to me by other members of the family.

He admitted that the young woman was not responding to his advances, though she seemed to like him. He thought it might take time, and then added that there were two other women of interest in his life, both of whom were in their mid-forties. Until now, I had not given much thought to the idea of him remarrying.

My father described an unusual experience during his last flight from Los Angeles to Seattle. On the plane, he was recalling the young book representative, thinking of the way she moved her hands and touched his arm. Somehow he was convinced he was picking these memories up as bits of data from her brain, what metaphysical philosophers called “petite perception.” Simultaneously, he received messages from my mother in which she told him, “It's all right. She's the one. You're still alive, Frank! Live your life!”
^*

I looked away as he spoke, trying to keep my composure. Presently I looked back at him and smiled, reassuringly. “Then it's all right,” I said.

As days passed, however, I became angry with my father about his love interests, and so did Jan. We said nothing to him about it, but it seemed to us that he hadn't waited long enough, hadn't spent enough time grieving. But when my mother passed away, we were beginning to realize, a terrible feeling of loneliness came over Frank Herbert. He had lost his lifelong companion, his reason for living, his true best friend. We tried to empathize, but it was not easy, for a lot of reasons.

Dad seemed terribly fragile, helpless and lonely. He was vulnerable. He telephoned me constantly, and it seemed that he needed to hear someone's voice all the time. This wasn't at all like a writer, perhaps, who should have been accustomed to cloistering himself in his study. In becoming a writer myself, however, I began to realize what he must have been feeling. When my mother lived with him, he could confine himself for hours without speaking to her, feeling great serenity because he knew she was there, just outside his door. It became quite different when someone was not physically nearby, not waiting to give him love and reassurance.

I knew he had been dependent upon my mother, so I expected him to be very low about her death. Since he always kept guns around we worried about suicide, and about a serious disease overtaking him, brought on by stress. Medical studies showed that losing a spouse was the number-one creator of stress. But Dad had always been a strong man, and I expected him to bounce back. I thought his writing would carry him far into old age, but it wasn't working out the way I had expected. He didn't seem to have his heart in it any more.

Howie Hansen, with his Native American perspective, later said, “Frank was a genius, and Bev was equal to but different from him. She had more power than he had. He was only a shell after she died.”

At times, Dad's telephoning drove me crazy. He called me at all hours for minor things, pulling me out of my writing, shattering my concentration. He had a speed dialer on his telephone, with my name on it. While I considered this a compliment, since he depended on me so much, there was a definite downside. If someone in my household was on the line, and my two oldest daughters did talk on the phone a lot, he contacted the operator and put through an emergency call. (“Call waiting” service was not available from the phone company at the time.) None of his calls were emergencies, not even close. He needed paper products from a store in Seattle. Would we pick them up and bring them to Port Townsend? Or, had we seen a certain politician talking on television? That guy was dangerous, and we shouldn't think of voting for him in November.

An ingenious man, my father developed a habit of calling me at 5:30
A.M
., when he knew no one would be on the line. One morning, Jan answered the phone, then woke me up. I stumbled downstairs in my bathrobe, half asleep.

“Hullo,” I said.

A dial tone greeted me. When I finally got through to Dad forty-five minutes later, he told me he hung up to take a call on his other line from an East Coast reporter who wanted to interview him.

When I asked him what he was calling me about, he went into a plot point about
Man of Two Worlds
, and asked my opinion. I wasn't sure why this conversation couldn't have occurred at a more civil hour, but I gave him my thoughts about the story question, not mentioning something else that was on my mind. Afterward, I returned to bed, but couldn't go back to sleep. All that day I was too tired to write, and could only muddle through my insurance agency tasks.

Since Dad gave me very little story copy that he had written during the year, I could only presume that he wrote material and subsequently threw it away. He probably rose early to work on
Man of Two Worlds
, ran into distractions and then could not proceed. At one point, he told me that I might have to write the entire book myself, with him adding “finishing touches.”

Dad still hadn't gone in to get the mole on his back removed, and the skin condition on his face could be more serious than he was letting on. It was becoming obvious that he had neglected his own health while caring for Mom's. Whenever we visited him, we brought along homemade soups, pasta dishes, desserts and other foods that we knew he liked. We stocked his freezer with them, so whenever he was alone he could at least know people who loved him had prepared something for his table. Gradually the scaliness on his face cleared, and he began to look much better. But he was more nervous than ever, constantly in a state of hyperactivity.

With Mom gone, much of his behavior became erratic. He had lost her steadying influence. Many of his discussions about new women in his life seemed immature, as if he were a teenager involved in the dating game. Once, unable to find a bag of unsalted potato chips for me in the Port Townsend Safeway, he went into a tirade at the checkstand, announcing that he would “shut Safeway down” if they didn't pay attention to what he wanted. And his habit of nit-picking, which so bedeviled me when I lived with him, actually worsened.

It was all odd, the behavior of a man whose mental health was on the edge, in danger of plunging over a precipice from which he might not return. And understandably so, considering the magnitude of his loss.

He was a great and loving man, and his flaws were infinitesimal. If I ever raised my voice to him, only slightly, he nearly fell apart, so I went overboard to avoid hurting his feelings. Jan and I told the children he was going through a difficult time, and that they should try to do whatever he wanted, being as understanding as possible.

One weekend Dad raved about my children constantly leaving his kitchen drawers open and about me leaving a cereal bowl in Mom's office where I had been working on his accounts. Holding the bowl in my hands, I asked him humbly if he might find it somewhere in his heart to forgive me. Suddenly he laughed heartily.

Thank goodness he retained his sense of humor. On a beautiful, clear day he and I went sailing on the
Caladan
. We didn't encounter a lot of wind, but got the boat up to six knots on the jib alone, without the mainsail. Afterward I joked in the car that I couldn't have done anything wrong, as Dad had not yelled at me once.

“I overlooked a lot of things,” he said, with a wry smile.

For much of 1984 he was not writing productively. The screenplays on
The Santaroga Barrier
and
Soul Catcher
remained in his “To Do” file, as did much of our collaboration. While Jan was in Paris at the Sorbonne that summer, he wrote to her:

Since his personal life was up in the air, he spent a great deal of time thinking about it, trying to decide among the three women, only two of whom were showing overt interest in him. The third, the Putnam book representative, was not responding as he would have liked. He said that she liked him for himself, not for the glamor or luxury surrounding a famous author, and that he wanted to be more than friends with her. This was the young woman he had met on his
Heretics of Dune
book tour. Her name was Theresa Shackelford.

As for business, it was much the way it had always been. Many times when I asked him about this or that involving his finances—important questions—he threw his hands up and I had to solve whatever it was. His head was in outer space, but not in the productive manner it had been there in the past, not in a manner that would permit him to write the greatest science fiction anyone had ever read. Dad indicated to me that he was having trouble disciplining and motivating himself, and I received the distinct impression that he couldn't write on his own. His collaborator for more than three decades, in a very real sense, had been my mother, Beverly Herbert. Now I was the collaborator, thus attempting to pick up yet another of the important functions of my mother.

But a son-collaborator–business manager can never fulfill the functions of a wife, can never be the source of inspiration and intimate tenderness that my father so desperately needed in his life. He was empty inside, a man with a terrible ache.

To make matters worse, all the
Dune
movie publicity was generating a steady stream of telephone calls and letters from movie people, reporters, agents and publishers. Mom used to screen his calls and correspondence for him, coordinating appointments, allowing him to continue writing without interruption. But now he found himself constantly scattered in his thoughts, unable to concentrate. My mother had been ten people for him at once.

Despite all of his distractions, during our collaboration the most remarkable transformations would take place in Dad. Only a short while after he had behaved unusually or immaturely or distractedly, he would become, quite suddenly, coherent and brilliant in talking about a story scene, teaching me something with almost every sentence. His writing, when he could immerse himself in it, was a refuge from the cares and tribulations of life, from the pain and upset he was enduring in the aftermath of the shelling of his life. As I wrote with this man who had been impatient for much of our relationship, he surprised me by listening patiently to every suggestion I made and agreeing with many of them.

Early in our collaboration Dad spoke of chapter lengths and story cohesion. He wanted to make Chapter One medium length, Chapter Two short, Chapter Three very short and Chapter Four long. Thus a rhythm was established in the story, a rhythm he said we could repeat at various points in the book to reflect back to the beginning.

One time when I was spending the weekend with him, I was so bothered by a direction he wanted to take at the beginning of our story that when I went to bed I slept only fitfully. I awoke at 3:30
A.M
. and wrote him a long note with my objections and reasons, which I left on the carpet outside his bedroom door. In my opinion, we needed something fast-moving at the start, and too much background information would be required to establish the scene he wanted to do. Later he said he spent two hours thinking over my note, and that I triggered his thinking to the correct starting point—a starting point we agreed to use.

D
URING
1984, we had a number of conferences about
Man of Two Worlds
. After making an outline we agreed upon a division of labor in which Dad would write some chapters and I would write others. In the end, however, he couldn't find the time to do the writing that year, so eventually I went back and wrote his chapters as well.

On my lunch hour at work one day, I wrote around eight hundred words longhand. That evening Dad came to my house, and he wanted to see what I had produced. It was too rough to give him, so I sat on the family room couch with his old Olympia portable typewriter atop a drawing board on my lap, while he sat to my left, waiting and reading each page as I completed it. I had carbon paper in the machine (so that we each could have a copy) and pecked at the keys. I knew my typing speed was nowhere near his, but it didn't bother me. Once Kim interrupted me, and Dad told her to leave me alone while I was writing.

A few days passed. One day in May, Dad was in a limousine, and on impulse he told the driver to stop at a drug store. Dad went inside and got shaving equipment and shaved off his beard in the car. Jan and I did not know about it yet and were scheduled to meet him at the Ajax Cafe in Hadlock, near Port Townsend. At first we didn't recognize him as he sat at the table, giggling to himself. Then I noticed something familiar about “that man over there”—the eyes and hair, and the shape of the face. He had a belly laugh over this, and it
was
pretty funny. But without his luxuriant, distinguished beard he looked older, and smaller. More like a man and less like the myth he had created around himself.

When he went on the road without his beard, to conventions and the like, he had fun playing tricks on people he had known for years. Often they didn't recognize him at all, until they heard his deep, resonant voice, or until he laughed in the wonderful way only my father could laugh. Arthur C. Clarke mailed him two tickets to the world premiere of
2010
, held at a theater in Westwood, near Los Angeles. In the restroom, Dad saw Ray Bradbury, and said, “Hi, Ray.” Bradbury responded dispassionately, “Oh, hello.”

“You don't recognize me, do you?” Dad said, with an impish smile.

Bradbury leaned close, then closer. He looked at the eyes, combining them with the characteristic timbre and cadence of the voice. “Frank?” he said. “Are you Frank Herbert?”

Early in June, Dad caught a morning flight from Port Townsend to Seattle. I picked him up and drove him across the Evergreen Point floating bridge to Group Health Hospital in Redmond, where he checked in for surgery on the mole on his back. Then I returned to work.

At noon I brought him grilled chicken breasts, pasta salad and Italian fish and chips from Osteria Mitchelli in Seattle, a restaurant he liked. As I did this I thought of all the times he had gone out and obtained goodies for Mom while she was in hospital. Now I was doing for him what he had done for her—setting things up with the nurses, having them refrigerate what was left and warming it in the microwave when he wanted it.

Dad made the nurse give him each of his vital signs, and this seemed to irritate her. Most patients were content to let the medical staff do their thing, but not my father! He wanted to know what they were doing each step of the way.

When I arrived at the hospital at noon the following day to help him check out, he was pacing the hallway by his room, champing at the bit to get going. He said the growth on his back, now removed, had been a tumor, but thankfully it was benign, confirmed by a biopsy. Dad was elated. “Benign is the most beautiful word in the English language,” he said. My father was right, and I thought of the ugly sound of its antonym, malignant.

He underwent a complete medical checkup, and the results were good. I had been noticing, however, that his head frequently shook from side to side. It was involuntary and almost imperceptible, a condition I first began to notice in 1977 at his mother's funeral. I assumed it was just fatigue.

One Thursday when Jan was still in Paris, Dad needed me to come up to Port Townsend to help him with a number of banking tasks that could only be done when the bank was open. It was on short notice, but after making arrangements at work, I picked up my daughters and we all drove to Port Townsend for a long weekend.

The next morning, Dad went into Port Townsend with me, and we did the banking and ran a number of errands. He was cheerful and obviously well-liked by shop owners and people he saw on the street. He even held a door open for two teetering old ladies. On the way home, however, he drove the city streets like a madman, passing one car at the crest of a hill and then tailgating a pickup truck while beeping his horn at the driver for going too slowly.

On a cool, rainy afternoon that year, Dad was driving his Mercedes coupe through Port Townsend, when he saw an old woman pulling a heavy cart of groceries up a hill. He stopped and assisted her, loading her things into the trunk and helping her into the front seat. She was wet and shivering. While carrying her groceries into her tiny, cluttered house, he asked why she didn't ride the bus, since it ran close to where she lived. She said she barely had enough money for groceries. It was cold in her house, and he learned that her heating oil tank was empty. The next day, Dad put money into a bank account for her, so that she could always afford to ride the bus. He also made arrangements with the local heating oil company to pay the bills for her and for other needy people in the area, so that they would not freeze during the winters. He did it all anonymously.

One Sunday morning in July, after I had been working on Dad's accounts far into the night, he popped his head into the guest bedroom where I was sleeping and woke me. It was early, and I was groggy.

“Do you want to go to breakfast with me and Kyle MacLachlan?” he asked.

I knew he was referring to the young actor who was playing the lead role of Paul Atreides in the
Dune
movie.

“No,” I said, and I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Julie did accompany her grandfather, and it was thrilling for her. They ate at a pancake restaurant in Port Townsend, and she returned with a movie poster signed by both the actor and her grandfather. Dad gave other signed posters to the rest of us.

We were scheduled to hold the service for Mom in Hawaii on the first anniversary of her death, the following February. The delay was primarily due to my inability to fly, making it necessary for me to find a ship for the passage. This was not an easy task, due to a downturn in the number of cruise ships that were operating. When Dad heard about my difficulties he said he would have a doctor fill me with tranquilizers and pour me on a plane. He tried to encourage me to take a fear of flying course, but I declined. In an attempt to avoid a discussion of the subject, I said I didn't feel like hurrying from one place to another. I said Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury did not like to fly either, but were pretty good science fiction writers.

“I fly, and I'm a better writer than both of them,” Dad said.

After trying many travel agents unsuccessfully, Jan found a cruise line with a ship that could take me, and she made reservations.

Toward the end of the summer, I left my lucrative insurance agency job to work for my father, receiving a salary from him for the first time. Dad also made arrangements with Penny and Ron to make them caretakers of the Port Townsend property, which Dad planned to keep. They would wrap up affairs in California and move north early in 1985. Frank Herbert was drawing his family close around him, as Beverly wanted.

Around this time, he was in close contact with the renowned mountain climber Jim Whittaker, who lived in Port Townsend and had been the first American to climb Mount Everest, back in 1963. Dad wanted to go on an expedition to the Himalayas in the spring of 1986 before the monsoon season, doing a documentary film on the trip. He intended to fly to Kathmandu, capital of Nepal. In Kathmandu he would visit the Old Royal Palace and a number of nearby Buddhist temples, including the spectacular Taleju temple. The Gurkha regiments of the British Indian Army came from that part of the world, he said, troops that had been of special interest to him for years.

Dad fixed dinner in Port Townsend for Whittaker, and together they drafted a letter to Nawang Gombu in India, a man only five feet tall who had been Whittaker's sherpa guide in the 1963 Everest assault. On the very first ascent of Everest, by Sir Edmund Hillary of Great Britain in 1953, Gombu had been a seventeen-year-old porter. In 1955, Gombu reached the top of the mountain for the second time, the first person to accomplish the ascent twice. He was also a nephew of Tenzing Norgay, the famous sherpa guide who reached the top of the mountain at the same time as Hillary.

For my father's purposes, Gombu, now forty-eight, appeared to be a fine choice. Gombu responded positively, and they made plans to make a nineteen-day, two-hundred-mile trek in the Everest Base Camp region on the Nepal side of the mountain. From Kathmandu they would fly to the town of Namche Bazaar, at an elevation of 11,300 feet. From there, accompanied by porters, they would hike to the lakeside village of Gokyo at 15,720 feet and then up to the top of Gokyo Ridge at 18,000 feet, for a 360 degree panoramic view of the upper Gokyo Valley, the massive Ngozumpa Glacier and three mountain peaks rising between 25,990 and 27,826 feet. They would ascend afterward to Gokyo. A climb to Chola Pass at 17,783 feet would follow, and then across the high, scenic pasture of Dzonglha. Toward the end of the trek they would climb to the highest point, the top of upper Kala Pattar at 18,450 feet, from which point they would be able to see the South Col of Everest.

Dad invited me to participate in the trek, with a caveat because of the altitude at which we would be climbing, “Get yourself in shape for this one.” He went on to talk about the dangers of altitude sickness—and of the many trekkers in the Himalayas who had died of this. It was especially important to acclimatize yourself to altitude, he said—and to ascend gradually and go back down at the first symptoms of illness. Many people disregarded warning signs, he said, and died as a result.

I wanted to go on the trip, and began thinking about how I might travel by surface to Asia. Even if I managed to get to Kathmandu by surface, and I wasn't sure if I could do that, Dad planned to fly from there to Namche Bazaar, and there might be other connections by small plane. It all sounded perilous, but tremendously exciting. Late in 1985, just before the trip, he intended to live at an altitude of eight thousand feet in Switzerland for a month, to build up the hemoglobins in his blood.

And following the Everest Base Camp trek, perhaps a year later, Dad hoped to return to the Himalayas, becoming the oldest man to ever climb Mount Everest, at 29,028 feet.

Around this time my father, almost sixty-four years old, began talking about buying a new Porsche. I vowed to myself I would never get in such a vehicle with him, for obvious reasons. Recently he had gotten a ticket for going more than sixty miles an hour on city streets.

He also made arrangements to rent a nice apartment near the Strand in the Los Angeles area (Manhattan Beach), so that he could work on the two screenplays near Hollywood and be around many of the people who were putting the finishing touches on the
Dune
movie. He had the Hollywood bug, and even spoke of directing a film one day.

But above all, he had fallen completely in love with the Putnam book representative, Theresa Shackelford, who lived in the Los Angeles area. He wanted to spend more time with her, with the object of marriage. She was now twenty-eight years old.

My father was emerging into his second youth, desperately attempting to grab another chance at life. He fell in love with a young woman, wanted to drive fast cars and climb mountains. He and Theresa took skin diving lessons and Dad developed a liking for popular music, especially the songs of Engelbert Humperdinck.

One day my father asked Penny, “When you were so in love with Ron after meeting him, did you have butterflies in your stomach and hear bells ringing?”

“That was a long time ago,” Penny said. “I don't remember.”

“Well that's the way I feel now,” Dad said.

In early September 1984, I helped Dad move some of his things out of Xanadu into a big yellow Ryder rental truck, which he was having driven to California. He would accompany the truck, driving his Mercedes coupe. It was an interesting scene, watching this famous man do once more what we had done so many times in my youth when we were poor, packing boxes “with a shoehorn” and moving. He still had his remarkable strength and endurance, and hardly broke a sweat as he ran in and out of the house carrying heavy boxes and other articles. He was planning to keep both the Port Townsend and Hawaii houses. While he was in California he wanted me to go to Port Townsend once a week to pick up his mail, handling what I could myself and sending the rest to him.

All during 1984, the
Dune
movie was advertised as the greatest film production of all time, and perhaps the most expensive. Comparisons were drawn between it and
Gone with the Wind
, and there was a great deal of secrecy about who was playing the lead role of Paul Atreides—Kyle MacLachlan. When the actor was interviewed on television, his back was to the camera. It was one of the most coveted screen roles in years. His Seattle phone number, known only to a few people, was 547-DUNE.

It may have been the most heavily promoted movie in history. Months before the film came out, toys and other novelty items were made available, in addition to Avalon Hill's
Dune
board game, which had been out for years. There were toy sandworms and Paul Atreides dolls,
Dune
weapons, obsidian paperweights with House Atreides gold hawks on them, tee-shirts, posters, games, soundtrack record albums and tapes, calendars, puzzles and mazes. Merchandisers had to pay Universal Studios as much as $100,000 apiece for the rights to produce spinoff products.