Dreamer of Dune (30 page)

In a readers' poll conducted by
Locus,
the newspaper of the science fiction field,
Dune
was voted the greatest science fiction novel of all time.

Just before departing for Mexico in mid-October, Dad completed the second draft of
Arrakis
, the long-awaited climax of the
Dune
trilogy. He renamed it
Children of Dune
, and planned to write the final draft upon his return.

Upon returning from their trip in early December 1974, good news awaited them. A French production company led by Michel Seydoux was making a substantial offer for the right to film
Dune.
The offer was accepted, and their advance provided welcome financial breathing room.

Seydoux, a millionaire Parisian, obtained the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky for the project. Jodorowsky, director of the controversial cult films
El Topo
and
The Holy Mountain,
was a brilliant eccentric with left-wing political views. The budget was set at $9,500,000, substantially lower than Arthur P. Jacob's $15,000,000, especially considering inflation in the intervening years. But Jodorowsky planned to film in Spain and the deserts of Algeria, where costs were not excessive. He was confident he could come in under budget.

Jodorowsky wrote the screenplay and proceeded with storyboarding, the creation of special effects, set construction, and costume-making. He also reached tentative casting agreements with an interesting group of actors. Jodorowsky intended to play Duke Leto Atreides himself, while Orson Welles would be Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The Surrealistic artist and filmmaker Salvador Dali would be the Padishah Emperor (Shaddam IV), David Carradine would be Imperial ecologist Dr. Kynes, and Charlotte Rampling would be Lady Jessica. Jodorowsky hoped to reach agreement with either Mick Jagger or Pink Floyd to do the soundtrack.

Dad was slated to be technical adviser, but quipped in an interview with Bill Ransom that this meant “Third Assistant Flunky.”

Now he was on the home stretch of
Children of Dune
(
Arrakis
), and expected to finish the book in five or six weeks.

O
NE SNOWY
winter day in early 1975, Jan took me aside and told me how ill my mother had been. I was stunned, and immensely proud of my father when I learned all the wonderful things he had done for Mom, setting his important work aside and taking her to Mexico to improve her odds at life.

As this new and very human side of my father revealed itself to me, I began inquiring about him. I asked my mother about their early years together and other times when I hadn't been around.

For years my mother's dependency upon him had been obvious. She didn't even have a driver's license, and for much of her life had yielded to his decisions, to his changing whims. Her method of influence had been one of unflagging love and constancy, of enduring his mood swings and pushing him gradually toward settling into a property of their own. Now this was the Port Townsend house. Xanadu. Skillfully, she had brought him around not only by asserting that it would make her happy, but by showing him it was the only way he could have a farm and the ecological demonstration projects he wanted.

Much of her life had been spent waiting for him to complete a story so that they could do things together. This was a micro and macro pattern of relationship. She waited to see him each day until he emerged from his study, when they could share private times together: romantic dinners and walks in the woods, boat trips, times shared in the garden and swimming pool. And she waited even longer for him, months and years, to take trips after Dad finally finished each book. Everything they did revolved around his writing schedule. He was dominant, the one in charge.

But he was vulnerable, I came to realize. Vulnerable without her. They were a remarkable writing team. If my mother was ill, he couldn't write, not until she felt better. They flowed together as one organism.

Howie Hansen put it this way: “There are two Frank Herberts—the one I knew prior to Bev and the one that you know who was created by Bev. Frank Herbert the author would not exist had there not been a Beverly Forbes to marry him and…coalesce him mentally…”

Over the years I had been mailing items from my office joke file to my mother. With her illness, it occurred to me that my light fare might be therapeutic, might perk her up. So I increased my schedule of mailings to her. She posted her favorites on bulletin boards in the kitchen and in her office.

Mom and Dad made their second trip to Europe in late 1975. Just before leaving, Mom took me into her office in one of the bedroom wings and said, almost matter-of-factly, “If we fall out of the sky, Brian, I want you to take care of things.”

I hated hearing her talk like that, particularly with the way I felt about flying. In 1968, I had an unfortunate experience while taking a flying lesson in a single-engine Piper Colt, an incident where, due to the error of my instructor, we nearly collided with an airliner. Since that time I had not flown, and had vowed I would never do so again, in any sort of aircraft.

Mom went on to give me the combination to their home safe and to a padlock on a file box. She had me stand beside the desk while she opened the third drawer down and showed me where keys to the desk and file cabinets were kept, under a book of zip codes. The safe deposit box key was on a separate key chain. More keys on a big brass ring were hidden in the master bathroom—keys to the various locks around the property. She showed me a list of Dad's publications, kept in an orange notebook, and the location of the contract files.

“Be sure to renew the copyrights every twenty-eight years,” Mom said. She told me which ones were coming up soon, and mentioned a recent renewal on the first published work in his opus files, “Survival of the Cunning,” published in
Esquire
in March 1945.

As we came out of the office, my seven-year-old daughter Julie was seated on a kitchen stool next to her grandfather, sharing ice cream with him. His hair was thinning on top, and she asked him, wondering about the origin of his beard, “Grandpa, did the hair from the top of your head slip onto your face?”

He let out a loud guffaw.

A four-part
Analog
serialization of
Children of Dune
in early 1976 was a resounding success, causing issues to sell out on newsstands. Letters poured in from excited fans who loved the story.

But at 3:00
A.M
. on a holiday, President's Day, 1976, Beverly Herbert became extremely ill. Dad rushed her to Jefferson General Hospital in Port Townsend. It was a medication problem, from post-cancer-treatment medicines she had been taking, causing dangerous changes in her vital signs. Medical personnel arranged to fly her to Group Health Hospital in Seattle for more specialized attention. At Group Health she was kept overnight and her medications were adjusted. The Group Health doctor told her the emergency room technician at Jefferson General had saved her life by making a difficult diagnosis and then obtaining the proper care for her.

For months, David Hartwell, Dad's astute editor at Putnam, had been trying to convince company management that they weren't printing enough copies, that when
Children of Dune
was printed soon in hardcover it was going to be a national bestseller, purchased by more than science fiction fans. Like
Dune
, it would be a genre buster, he said.

Dune
itself had not made it onto very many bestseller lists, since its sales had been a gradual ground swell. Its sales since publication were impressive, and
Dune Messiah
had sold relatively well. But
Dune Messiah
hadn't been favorably received by the critics, and consensus held that its sales came on the coattails of
Dune
. Would
Children of Dune
be an even bigger critical disappointment than
Dune Messiah
?

There had never been a hardcover science fiction bestseller, so Putnam management proceeded with extreme caution. Suddenly the
Analog
results provided David Hartwell with the necessary ammunition. Putnam increased the first printing to seventy-five thousand copies (instead of seventy-five hundred), more than any science fiction hardcover printing in history. Publication was scheduled for later in the year, after completion of the magazine serialization.

At Jan's encouragement, in the midst of the 1976 serialization, I began creative writing. I had in mind a satire about the workplace, based upon my experiences at insurance companies. When Dad discovered this he became very excited and wanted to help. Thereafter whenever we were in Port Townsend Dad would say to me, “Let's talk story.” And on his desk or a coffee table I would spread my precious manuscript pages for his perusal.

When
Children of Dune
came out in hardback in 1976, it was an instant bestseller. True to the predictions of David Hartwell and the gut feelings of my father, it became the top-selling hardback in science fiction history up to that time…more than one hundred thousand copies in a few months.

“It's a runaway bestseller,” Dad told me in a telephone conversation. He enjoyed this phrase, and I heard it often in ensuing years, for much larger print runs.

Children of Dune
was nominated for the 1976 Hugo Award for the best novel of the year, as determined by science fiction fans, but lost to
The Forever War
by Joe Haldeman.

At the age of fifty-five, Dad went on his first book tour, and it was a big one—twenty-one cities in thirty days, including an appearance on
The Today Show
in New York City with fellow science fiction writers Frederik Pohl and Lester Del Rey. The Literary Guild made arrangements to offer all three books of the
Dune
trilogy in a boxed hardbound set.

When
Children
came out in paperback the following year, Berkley Books initially printed 750,000 copies. This wasn't half enough, and they went back to press. Six months after release of the paperback, Dad said paperback sales were approaching two million copies. By the end of 1977,
Dune
alone had sold more than five million copies in nine languages, while trilogy sales totaled nearly eight million copies.

At the vanguard of an explosive growth of sales in science fiction, Frank Herbert blazed the trail for other writers in his genre. After his phenomenal success, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and other science fiction writers had national bestsellers.

In October 1976, Mom and Dad made their third trip to Europe, largely to see what was going on with Alejandro Jodorowsky's
Dune
movie project. They had been receiving secondhand information that the production was not going well. As was usual with trips my mother went on, she first underwent a battery of tests at Group Health Hospital and received her doctor's blessing.

In Paris, Dad and Mom met with representatives of the French film consortium holding the rights to film
Dune
, and received bad news. Jodorowsky's script was too complex, and would result in a mind-boggling fourteen-hour film. He had spent two million dollars getting the project under way, and it was becoming increasingly clear that the film could not be produced for anywhere near the $9,500,000 budget.

To make matters worse, Jodorowsky (a left-winger politically) and Salvador Dali (a right-winger) were refusing to work with one another, having had a vociferous argument in front of others involved in the project. Investors were getting wind of the production and personality problems, and funds were drying up.

When my parents returned to the United States they learned that Italian movie producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted to purchase the
Dune
film option from the French consortium. Dad had no objection, and as part of the new deal, he was retained as technical adviser and paid to write the screenplay. De Laurentiis had recently produced the twenty-five-million-dollar special-effects extravaganza
King Kong,
and my father quipped, “Anyone who can make a giant ape should have no trouble with sandworms.”

Early in his career De Laurentiis had produced the critically acclaimed film,
Bitter Rice,
starring the Italian bombshell Silvana Mangano, whom he married. He also backed two classic films directed by Federico Fellini,
La Strada
and
Nights of Cabiria,
much loved by critics and movie-goers. Subsequently he became involved with big-budget spectaculars, such as
The Bible, War and Peace,
and a number of other films. While these and others were not well received by critics, they were money-makers.

Though he didn't say so publicly, Dad was concerned that the movie mogul might turn his book into a “worm that ate the desert” movie—a horror film about monster sandworms. Consequently he insisted upon being technical adviser and screenplay writer for the film. Still, he was pleased that De Laurentiis had the financial resources necessary for the complexities of his epic desert saga, which seemed to require a long movie. De Laurentiis promised a film to compare with
Gone With the Wind.

With part of the movie advance, Dad purchased a new sailboat, which he christened “Ghanima,” after Paul Muad'Dib's daughter. Ghanima also meant, according to the “Terminology of the Imperium” in
Dune
, “Something acquired in battle or single combat.” My father's field of combat, for nearly four arduous decades, had been writing.

Through 1976 and 1977 I used every moment of spare time to work on two humor books. After mailing each manuscript out in search of a publisher, I had a tendency to worry about its fate. Dad counseled me not to do that, and that he always went right to work on another project immediately after mailing out a story.

My humor books didn't sell. The writing was hard work for me, did not come naturally. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again. In the process, I began to understand what my father had been through in all the years he spent sequestered from this world, creating other worlds. I didn't forgive him, but I understood his life and motivations a little better. I gained new respect for what he had accomplished. This was an important step toward reconciliation with him. There would be others.

Around this time I had a conversation with Dad about my difficult childhood. It was a dry, crisp day late in the fall, and we were on a walk in the woods on the Olympic Peninsula, at the crest of a hill where the trees thinned out and a broad grassy field opened up before us. Dad was bundled up in a puffy down coat, bright orange in color, while I wore a nylon jacket, open at the front.

Craggy, snowy mountains and a ridge of clouds were visible beyond, profiled against a pale blue ice-beautiful sky. A cool breeze sent leaves scuttling across our path and rattled dry leaves that still clung to a nearby aspen.

We took shelter in a stand of cottonwood trees, where I told him my feelings and he listened. I told him it was wonderful what he had done for Mom to save her life and that I appreciated the interest he had recently taken in me. But I told him that Bruce and I had been in a lot of pain for a long time. I asked him rhetorically why he had used a lie detector on us when we were little. There were other questions as well, in a similar vein.

I had practiced what I would say to him a hundred times, running over the exact words as I drove to and from work, as I sat at my desk, and as I lay awake agonizing in the middle of the night. Now they didn't come out as I wanted them to; they needed editing, polishing, reworking. They were too harsh, too direct, too emotional. As I spoke I felt a shortness of breath from the outpouring, and I expected him to explode at any moment with an all-too-familiar burst of temper.

Without protestation he listened to my diatribe. His arms were folded across his chest, and he shifted on his tennis-shoed feet, uneasily. His eyes were filled with pain, and as I glared at him he looked beyond me or at the sky or at the ground, rarely meeting my gaze. When I finished, he looked up and said, in an unsteady voice, “They were difficult times. My work. I had to do my work.” His lips quivered, and words caught in his throat, not making their way out. This man of many stories, this master of words, could not speak.