Dreamer of Dune (32 page)

In 1978, Berkley published a trade paperback,
The Illustrated Dune
, with a dozen illustrations by John Schoenherr, the artist who had done such a wonderful job on
Dune
subjects. A
Dune
calendar was printed with the same artwork.

Dad had intended to end the
Dune
series with
Children of Dune
, which he saw as the completion of a cycle. But the characters and settings he had created would not die. His trilogy became so popular that requests for more
Dune
books poured in from fans, and all the editors involved, domestic and foreign, were asking for more as well. In considering the prospect of a fourth book, it occurred to Frank Herbert that the universe of Dune was a canvas and that he might resume the series on the planet Dune three thousand five hundred years later. This would require a new set of characters, but they would be linked genetically with people in the past….

He began reviewing the first three books in the series, making notes as thoughts occurred to him. New file folders sprang up around him like mushrooms, and he started writing more about a most unusual character from
Children of Dune
, Leto II, a noble human of the Atreides family who was evolving into a sandworm…

That year I began collecting wine labels from the dinners with my parents, soaking labels off bottles at home and drying them out. On the backs of the labels, I made brief notations of the events in the family—a few highlights. When we ate at my parents' home, we invariably had Dad's special Caesar salad dressing, which he prepared with great care and divided among the hungry diners. It was so good that no matter how much he prepared there never seemed to be enough.

After many years of being dependent upon Dad and taxis for transportation, Mom obtained a driver's license and her own car—a sporty new light green BMW. At the age of fifty-one. She loved the independence it gave her, but Dad wasn't nearly as enthusiastic. He worried about her constantly and missed her terribly whenever she was away.

When Jan's father, Ray Blanquie, died that year, my mother came from Port Townsend to drive Jan to the airport for a flight to the funeral in California. Entering our kitchen, Mom found Jan at the table going through photographs of her father.

“Oh no,” Mom said, “don't look at those.” Gently, she put the pictures away.

At the airport, Mom took Jan to a restaurant, where they shared a meal. Mom said not to worry about anything on this end, that she would stay with me and the kids.

Jan was looking out on the tarmac, thinking of her father, and my mother remarked gently, “When you lose somebody, you have to gather your skirts and go on.”

In February 1979, Dino De Laurentiis made his second deal with my father for the rights to film
Dune
, after having let the first option lapse. Dad said it was the second-highest price ever paid for the screen rights to a book, behind only the amount paid to Peter Benchley for
The Deep
. Again, Dad was retained to write the screenplay.

That month a ferocious storm with hundred-mile-per-hour winds hit the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, causing half of it to sink. Because of this we had to ride substitute ferries, and it took us at least three-and-a-half to four hours to get to Port Townsend, almost twice as long as previously. A new bridge was in the planning stages, but would take time to complete.

Shortly after the bridge went down, my parents caught a flight to New York City, where they met with some of the top figures in the New York publishing world. They were excited to hear that Dad was working on a fourth book in the
Dune
series, a book he thought he would name
Sandworm of Dune
. Then my parents flew to Paris and afterward to London, where they met with Dino De Laurentiis to discuss the
Dune
movie production.

Upon returning from Europe, Mom prepared a Mexican dinner for us, served with a Chateau Beychevelle red Bordeaux wine. They had a new
Dune
painting on the wall, recently purchased from the artist John Schoenherr. Now they owned ten of these paintings and were negotiating to purchase three more.

In my mother's post-cancer treatment program she was continuing to swim laps of the pool and was taking half-mile walks two or three times a week. She was trying to lose weight so that her heart, damaged by radiation treatments, would not have to work so hard. For some time, however, Mom had been suffering in the cold, damp climate of the Pacific Northwest. She had been talking with Dad about finding a second home in a warmer climate where they could spend the winters. With the millions of dollars received from the movie (if it met revenue projections) Dad hoped to buy that second home for her.

He was receiving huge book royalties every April and October for past book sales, and higher advances for each book he wrote. But too frequently he received an advance on a book and then spent it before actually completing the writing. Despite my mother's counseling, Dad was always spending money impulsively, putting them behind in their cash flow. One of the expense outlays involved a forty-four-foot sailboat, which Dad named “Caladan,” after the planet in the
Dune
universe where Paul Muad'Dib was born. The
Ghanima,
his smaller sailboat, was sold.

Dad was also putting money into the design and construction of a new 10.5-million-byte computer system, tailored to his needs by a young Port Townsend computer expert, Max Barnard. Dad and Max were talking about patenting the system and writing a computer book together.

Around this time I was feeling pretty discouraged about my own writing. I'd written two humor books and a novel, none of which were accepted by publishers. I was considering writing short stories, but one day I mentioned to Dad that I had a number of “funny files” that might be worked into humor books. One was a collection of classic comeback lines from history, and the other was a folder full of amusing insurance claims. Dad, with his interest in history, suggested that I proceed with the comeback lines book. I did so.

I was also beginning to keep a full-fledged journal. Previously, my documentation of family events had involved only sketchy notations made on the backs of wine labels. Now I began asking my mother about genealogical matters, which I combined with current events and personal observations. As these notes accumulated I had too much information to fit on the backs of small pieces of paper.

My creative writing was not selling, but I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Where once I had been the life of the party, the drunkest, funniest one present, I wasn't drinking much at all anymore. The more I wrote, especially in my journal, the less I drank—and the less I blamed my father for any of the woes of my life.

With the assistance of journal entries, I was coming to the realization that no matter our backgrounds, no matter the troubles we endure, each of us has to grow up one day, accepting responsibility for our own lives, not blaming others. When we attempt to transfer fault to others it frequently amounts to making excuses for our failures, thus creating the likelihood of future failures. Thus if we do not succeed, we can always say it wasn't our fault.

That fall my father and I regularly sailed the
Caladan
on the cold blue waters of Port Townsend Bay. Frequently we brought along my daughters, eleven-year-old Julie and seven-year-old Kim. With his competitive nature, Dad often raced other boats, and usually won. After sailing, we would go to nearby wooded areas in search of chanterelle mushrooms. For our evening meal, Mom would brown the mushrooms in butter with a dash of nutmeg and would serve them with pork roast or other dishes.

Dad was completing the
Dune
screenplay, and liked to read it to us in the evenings. Jan and I would sit in deep leather armchairs by a glass-fronted bookcase containing copies of his books, while he sat on a black leather couch, leaning forward over script pages spread across a glass coffee table. Mom sat in her favorite orange naugahyde chair nearby, clicking her knitting needles as she listened to him. Occasionally she would make comments or offer suggestions.

On Sunday mornings, Mom prepared sumptuous breakfasts of blueberry pancakes for us. They were served with real Vermont maple syrup, one of many items my parents purchased by mail order.

Located as they were in a rather remote area, they had mail order catalogs from all over the world, and were constantly ordering things—kitchen items, seeds, gourmet foods, clothing, and much more. They kept the catalogs stacked on a bookshelf and on the bottom shelf of a table—in a reading area just off the kitchen. Mom enjoyed shopping by mail, but Dad was a fanatic about it, to the extent that he would never throw away old catalogs out of for fear he might need them one day. The only time Mom could ever throw away catalogs was when Dad wasn't around.

Some weeks before, I had mailed a manuscript about comeback lines to Price/Stern/Sloan, a publisher in Los Angeles. I didn't know how they would feel about it, but I wasn't sitting around waiting for an answer. My attentions were focused on a new science fiction novel, which I entitled
Sidney's Comet
. It was about a society of over-indulgence, a new angle on a previous unpublished novel I had written. In the new version I was postulating a world that had no more room for garbage, nuclear wastes or even the burial of human bodies. I'd been reading about a new technology of electromagnetic mass drivers, through which capsules of material might be launched from a planet into space. A wild scenario was forming in my mind, as I envisioned all the garbage coming back at earth like an avenging angel, in a fiery garbage comet that threatened to wipe out the planet.

In October, Chuck Gates of Price/Stern/Sloan called to say he wanted to publish my humor manuscript under the title
Classic Comebacks
. It was my first book sale! Dad told me he would look over the contract when it came in. We made arrangements to celebrate my book sale and his fifty-ninth birthday at the same time.

He went on to say that we had other reasons for celebration. Mom had received a checkup which produced good news. Through her exercise program and diet she had lost ten pounds, while substantially increasing her heart and lung functions. They still weren't what they had been before the onset of cancer and never would be, but Mom had survived the disease for more than five years, defying odds that were 95 percent against her.

“She's a miracle cure,” Dad said.

“Thank God!” I said.

Dad said he always asked doctors for their first names, and afterward he refused to refer to them as “doctor,” using the first name instead. It prevented them from being condescending, he thought, and was a psychological method of making the doctors reveal medical details they might not otherwise tell a patient.

“Call your doctor Jim,” my father said. He thought this might be a good title for something, and I agreed it did have a certain ring to it.

They left for Europe a week later. In London, they met Dino De Laurentiis and the new
Dune
director, Ridley Scott, whose suspense-filled science fiction/horror movie,
Alien,
had recently been released. Scott said he liked eight of the scenes from Dad's screenplay, and said that a number of new scenes would be needed.

My parents returned to Port Townsend in mid-November. At long last, Dad was working nonstop on
Sandworm of Dune
, his working title for the long-awaited fourth book in the series. He was in an intense creative phase where he wouldn't answer letters with the exception of the most important until the project was complete.

O
N THE
first Saturday in 1980 in the icy month of January, Jan and I delivered a case of Beaujolais Nouveau wine to Dad, having picked it up for him at a wine shop in Seattle.

At dinner that evening, Dad said that he and Mom had decided to buy a vacation cottage in Hawaii to winter there, on one of the small outer islands along the sixteen-hundred-mile chain. “Something simple on the water,” he said. “Bev can't stand the cold here in the winter.”

My mother's preference for warm weather had been mentioned before, especially since losing weight and the insulation of her fatty tissue. She kept saying she felt much better when the weather was warm. I was worried about the availability of medical services for her in remote regions, but said nothing of this since the subject of her health was so uncomfortable to me. And inside I felt a gnawing terror of a different nature, a feeling I'd experienced on occasion that forces were at work trying to make me fly, against my will. I hadn't flown in more than ten years. Now it was a deep-seated fear ingrained in my psyche, and my parents were talking about living at least part of each year on a remote Pacific island. What if they decided to live there year-round?

I asked if all the islands had electricity so that Dad could operate his electric typewriter and the custom computer he was having built, or if he intended to go back to using a small manual typewriter. He wasn't certain about the availability of electricity, but went on to talk about setting up solar panels and windmills to generate power, and maybe even a simple system of extracting hydrogen from sea water.

It didn't sound very simple to me.

On Monday, January 14, 1980, Jan and I met my parents at Hugo's Rotisserie, a fine Seattle restaurant in the Hyatt House Hotel near SeaTac Airport. Both of them looked elegant and manicured—Mom in a beautiful new green blouse (one of her best colors, according to a color consultant) and Dad with his salt-and-pepper beard freshly trimmed.

They were scheduled to fly to Hawaii the next morning to spend two weeks looking for property. Terrible storms had been ravaging the islands the past week, and Dad quipped, “This is always the best time to look at a piece of property—when it's at its worst.”

He had selected a rather unusual title for the computer book he was writing with Max Barnard, an idea that was indicative of my father's sense of humor:
Without Me You're Nothing
. This was Frank Herbert's philosophical comment about the secondary importance of the computer in relation to the human, and brought to mind the Butlerian Jihad of
Dune
that opposed computers and certain other thinking machines, under the commandment, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

The Hawaii-bound travelers seemed a little nervous. At the salad bar, Dad was passing out plates to all of us in line, and I guess he lost count, because he tried to hand one to a stranger. Later he knocked over my Creme de Menthe. Mom tried to rest her arms on a chair that had no armrests.

They returned in two weeks. On the first Sunday in February, Dad delivered a speech at Tacoma Community College. He spoke to a packed auditorium about ecology and a wide variety of subjects, and told the audience about my first book sale. He was mobbed afterward by people wanting to talk with him. In a reversal of the usual roles they played, Mom drove him to Tacoma in her BMW.

That evening my parents told us they had made a $425,000 offer on a piece of unimproved Maui waterfront—five acres in the beautiful, remote area of Hana. This was a region of cattle ranches and tropical jungle, separated from the more populated side of Maui by a fifty-mile long chuckhole-infested stretch of the notorious Hana Highway, with more than six hundred turns! Most of the locals did not want the road improved, to keep developers and tourists out. The narrow route ran along cliff faces with sheer drop-offs to the ocean hundreds of feet below, crossing more than fifty bridges and many waterfalls.

The property owner had been asking for $550,000, but the piece had been on the market a while and the realtor thought they were making a good offer.

“I always dicker,” Dad said, a carryover from the times we lived in Mexico in the 1950s. He went on to say that the property was too nice for a simple cottage. They had decided to live in Hawaii full-time and sell their Port Townsend home.

The words I hadn't wanted to hear.

But the place sounded incredible. As we sipped my mother's favorite Puligny-Montrachet wine, we talked about selling our Mercer Island home and moving to Hawaii ourselves, and about the education available there for Julie and Kim. Maybe Bruce and Penny and the rest of the family could move there, too. Jan and Mom were ready to go even before the property deal closed!

Dad said they had consulted a number of doctors, and with the impairment of Mom's lung capacity from radiation treatment they were sure that a tropical climate would be more beneficial to her than the colder Northwest weather.

“My lungs feel clear when it's warm,” she said.

I showed Dad my new book contract on
Classic Comebacks
. He suggested several changes, including the addition of a clause stipulating Price/Stern/Sloan had to publish the book no later than October 31, 1981. Otherwise, he said, they could just hold on to the rights and delay publication indefinitely. He also had me cross off a sentence that enabled the publisher to copyright the book in their name, requiring instead that they copyright in my name. That gave me more control, he explained, and made it easier for me to go to a different publisher in the future if the book went out of print. They weren't paying an advance, and I would receive royalties based upon actual sales. But Dad said the contract wasn't bad for a first book.

Two weeks after our dinner my parents announced that they had reached agreement to purchase the Hawaii land for $500,000, a substantial sum for that year and for the extremely remote location of the property. At my house, Dad unrolled a set of plans for the new house that they wanted to build.

“I researched old records,” Mom said, “and found a map showing our property. It's five miles from Hana town, in an area that used to be called ‘Kawaloa.' That means ‘a nice long time' in Hawaiian. Isn't that nice? I think we'll spend a nice long time there. It's a magical place, unlike anything I've ever seen!”

I nodded, and thought how mysterious it all sounded. I studied the house plans, and a grand production it was, with a huge sunken living room and custom-made, curved couches forming a conversation ring around a round coffee table—all looking out on the sea and the “Big Island” of Hawaii, with the volcano Mauna Kea visible. There would be a large writing wing for my father, with an extensive library adjacent, a wine cellar and a darkroom. A Japanese motif would be evident throughout, with shoji screens and artwork. Electricity would be generated with rooftop solar panels and a separate windmill structure.

Botanical gardens would surround the home, with covered decks, a swimming pool, coconut and lauhala trees, stone walkways, lava walls, Polynesian sculptures and a carp pond with a fountain. One area would be designated as a vegetable garden, and there would be a potting shed.

Kawaloa was not only a perfect spot for Mom, he said, but an ideal place for him to hide from the legions of people clamoring to reach him. He'd gone to Port Townsend in 1973 for much the same reason, with fame pursuing him. But now he was far more famous—and as before, too many people knew where he lived. He had millions of fans, and many of them had placed him on a godlike pedestal, a myth-status that troubled my father.

They said they were listing the Port Townsend house for sale soon. I felt energy and excitement around them, from the changes they were setting in motion. It was romantic, charming, and heartwarming, with joy and sadness intermingled. They were off on a South Seas adventure such as my father might have written, or perhaps my mother, given the inclination.

In large part, of course, he was repaying Mom for the sacrifices she had made for him when she gave up her own promising career as a creative writer in order to work and support him while he wrote. Despite this and their excitement, I was deeply troubled. With my fear of flying, their move to an island in the Pacific would effectively isolate them from me. Unfortunately this was occurring not long after I had become close to my complex, enigmatic father—after I had begun to understand him better.

In Port Townsend in early March 1980, Mom and Dad showed us revised plans of their Hawaii dream house, and color slides Dad had taken of the land and the nearby Hawaiian scenery. The property was situated at the edge of a lush tropical jungle, and there were breathtaking vistas of aquamarine water, framed in black lava along the island shores.

Many Hollywood personalities owned property at Hana, including Carol Burnett, Richard Pryor, Jim Nabors, George Harrison and Bill Dana (“Jose Jimenez”). Hana was also the secluded paradise where aviator Charles Lindbergh chose to spend the last days of his life, when he knew he was dying. Lindbergh, a man obsessed with privacy since the tragic kidnapping and murder of his baby son, owned a beautiful, isolated piece of property several miles past my parents' place, toward Kaupo Gap. During his final days, he needed to stay close to medical personnel, and rented a small house at Pu'uiki between Hana town and Kawaloa. There he worked on his memoirs.

So my father was not the first famous person to seek refuge from fame in the Hana area. But this, of course, was not his primary purpose in going there.

Later that month, Dad opened a bottle of 1973 Piper Heidsieck champagne with us and toasted Victor Temkin, the Berkley Publishing Company president who had been instrumental in paying Dad a huge advance for “Dune 4,”
Sandworm of Dune
. Dad said it was a package deal with a future non-
Dune
science fiction book, and said he had to work fast. “Victor's nervous about paying all that money up front.”

During our second bottle of champagne, a Taittinger, I told him
Sandworm of Dune
sounded “Ozzie,” and he said he'd been told by publishers and editors that he had an Oz situation in hand, where the reading public was clamoring for the next book before it was written. He had plans for even more
Dune
novels in the works. This book sale made it possible for them to begin construction on the Hawaii house without first selling the Port Townsend place.

By the spring of 1980, construction of a caretaker's house at Kawaloa was underway on the upper side of the property, which sloped down from the Hana Highway toward the sea. This was Phase I. Under the next phase to be begun later that year they would live in the caretaker's house while the main house was built a little lower on the land, but still well away from the water.

Each time we got together with my parents I recorded the events of our lives in my journal, and committed to paper a plethora of details they were relating to me about their early years together, their childhoods and our ancestors. This chronicle was becoming a growing, living force, demanding my undivided attention. I became obsessed with it, and before retiring to bed in the evening, I would scribble rough notes on odd sheets of paper, for fleshing out when I had the time. The sooner I got it all written down the better, I realized, when memories were fresh.

As I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, the events of the day kept flowing through my mind, scrabbling to remain. I found myself unable to drift off until I had converted them to detailed notes. In a sense, I was becoming a prisoner of my journal, and in ensuing days when I was finally able to convert my notes to narrative I felt wrung out. Often-times this was as much from the emotion of the events as from the writing chore. But I was driven to keep up, fascinated by what I was learning about the esoteric world in which my parents lived, a world I shared at times and heard stories about at other times.

I was intrigued by something else as well, by the insights my journal gave me to my inner being. It helped me to understand myself as I never had before. It became a tool for relieving stress and depression, for better analyzing situations, for removing the emotional component from decision-making and replacing it with reason. Written words, if carefully laid down, represented the civilized ideal of reason. They were instruments of analytical, organized thought.

I told my journal my innermost secrets. It became a living entity, a comforting presence in times of need, someone to talk to who wouldn't laugh at me and wouldn't tell others what a fool I was. My journal did not begin at the beginning; it grew from the inside-out. I had a love-hate relationship with it.

On the morning of Sunday, March 2, 1980, I saw Mom in a long white robe, standing in the living room by the sliding glass doors on the west side of the house, gazing out at the duck pond. Sunlight glinted off the water, and she said, “It's beautiful here. I'm going to miss it.”

In the middle of April, Mom and Dad made a quick four-day trip to Hawaii to check the progress of construction on the caretaker's house. They stayed in the elegant Hotel Hana Maui, and met my brother, Bruce, there.

Around that time, I sold a second humor book to Chuck Gates at Price/Stern/Sloan, a collection of authentic and bizarre insurance claims entitled
Incredible Insurance Claims
. The book would be published in late 1981 or early 1982, while my other book,
Classic Comebacks
, would be published in the spring of 1981.

On April 26, 1980, a Saturday, we arrived in Port Townsend at 7: 15
P.M
. Dad barbecued filet mignon in the kamado Japanese cooker and made an exquisite Caesar salad—served with a Clos Duval Cabernet Sauvignon. We celebrated my second book sale. They said they traded Mom's BMW (and a Volkswagen that we had given to them) for a small 1980 Mercedes coupe, which they were going to ship to Hawaii.

Mom spoke again of her hopes for a boy Herbert baby to carry on the family name, and of her long-standing desire for Bruce to get married. She was losing hope that he ever would, and commented, “I'm afraid he's running with the boys from San Francisco.” This was a suspicion only and a reference to the gay community there, one of the most politically active in the world. I said nothing.