Dreamer of Dune (34 page)

While working on
Sidney's Comet,
I had a scene that wasn't going anywhere, and I telephoned Dad to ask for advice. After describing the situation to him, he said I had a plot problem, and that I should go back and examine closely the motivations of my characters. “That's how I always free a story,” he said. I tried it, and to my excitement it worked.

Another time I was having trouble making my dialogue sound realistic. Dad said it would help me to listen in on conversations in restaurants and other public places. “I've always been a shameless eavesdropper,” he confided, a phrase that he repeated at writing workshops. He also suggested that writers speak their dialogue aloud, to make it flow more smoothly.

My father taught me a great deal about his craft, and sometimes as I write now, many years after our earliest and most basic writing sessions, I hear him speaking to me, counseling me in ways that I might improve my work.

A
T
X
ANADU
in July of 1980, Dad sat in the living room with Jan and me, drinking coffee and talking about art. Jan had recently been accepted into the interior design program at the prestigious Cornish Institute in Seattle, and I had just received my second book contract, for
Incredible Insurance Claims.
He said if I kept working at it, I would eventually be a published novelist.

“Now that you're both getting into artistic endeavors,” my father said, “you'll experience more exaggerated highs and lows than most people have. You'll need to lean on one another for support during the low times, and when you succeed, the good times will be all the sweeter.”

He gave us other advice, and said that Jan and I would become best friends through an understanding of one another's work. Then he looked over at Mom, who was needlepointing a pillow. “There's
my
best friend,” he said.

Director Ridley Scott was in the early production phases on the
Dune
movie, operating from an office at Pinewood Studios in London. He had retained the services of the noted production designer H. R. Giger (who had worked with him on the 1979 science fiction film
Alien
), to make drawings and storyboards. Scott had also conducted an exhaustive search for a screenplay writer capable of handling
Dune,
and after many interviews had settled upon Rudolph Wurlitzer.

Other movie people were interested in
Soul Catcher,
with two rival groups looking at the screenplay. One production company was headed by Robert Redford, the other by Marlon Brando and Henry Fonda. Dad expected a call at any moment from Redford.

My mother and I stayed up talking that evening after Dad went to bed, and she told me that Hana, the town nearest their new home, was named after a Japanese word for flower. A very spiritual place, it was inhabited by native Hawaiians who seemed locked into a bygone time, with a slower, less hectic pace of life. I understood this, but expressed a great deal of sadness to her about the move.

The following day Dad called me at home. He said he'd been talking with Mom, and they had decided to keep the Port Townsend house now, with the place at Kawaloa and a third home—an apartment in Paris or London.

In ensuing weeks, Robert Redford called my father to ask about acquiring the option to film
Soul Catcher.
Dad referred him to Ned Brown in Beverly Hills, his movie agent. “Redford is the buyer,” my father said, “and I make it a practice never to negotiate directly with buyers. That's what I hire agents for.”

On a Saturday later that month Jan and I pulled onto the gravel driveway in front of my parents' house at shortly before 6:00
P.M
. The children were not with us. I noticed an ominous presence on one side of the parking area—a large trans-ocean shipping container. From telephone conversations, I knew it was almost full and would be picked up in a few days.

In the house later that evening, we spoke of many things. I noticed the final draft of
Sandworm of Dune
open to page 516 beside my mother's chair, near the conclusion of the just-completed manuscript. Dad said it was a totally new type of love story, unlike anything ever written before.

Just before ten o'clock Dad bid us good night at his usual time, so that he could rise early the next morning and write. He kissed Mom and whispered something in her ear, which caused her to smile. As he shuffled off to bed he yawned, simultaneously making a drawn-out, mid-range tone that was punctuated with a high pitched “yow” at the end. He entered the master bedroom and closed the door behind him.

On Sunday morning Jan and I were intending to leave after breakfast, because of long ferry lines in the summer. The worst times were Sunday evenings, when many people returned to Seattle from weekends on the Olympic Peninsula. When I got up, Jan told me she'd been out on the deck with my parents, looking over the pond and the trees, and Dad said he wanted us to stay for dinner. It might be our last moments together in Xanadu for a long time.

We told them we would stay, and my father generously set out a very special bottle of 1970 Chateau Mouton Baron Philippe Pauillac, a Bordeaux red.

Robert Redford would be in Port Townsend on July 21, Dad said, for a “very secret” meeting with him. He didn't elaborate and seemed hesitant to discuss whatever was in the wind. I only knew it had something to do with a potential
Soul Catcher
movie.

Dad had just reached agreement with Berkley Books for a huge advance on the paperback rights for the fifth
Dune
book, to be entitled
Heretics of Dune.
It was scheduled for completion in 1981. The title of the fourth, soon-to-be released book was now
God Emperor of Dune
instead of
Sandworm of Dune.

Under the terms of the
Heretics
sale, payments were to be stretched over a number of years. Mom was feeling the financial pinch of everything they were trying to do, and she mentioned a much-needed royalty check that arrived ahead of its due date in recent days, for French sales of
Dune.
“Just when we need money, it seems to arrive,” she said.

It was a warm day, and we all went swimming in the pool. Mom did two-thirds of a lap underwater, while Dad remained alert, ready to help her at any moment. When it was nearly time for dinner, he got the kamado (a Japanese barbecue) going, and cooked steaks, which we enjoyed with the Pauillac wine at a picnic table on the patio.

Dad told a funny story about two Irishmen who met two Mexican girls in Scandinavia. Then he asked me how I was coming on the rewrite of
Sidney's Comet.
I told him I was around 190 pages into it, and I didn't think I could complete it before they left for Hawaii later in the month.

“Use the mails,” he said. “Maybe you can send it to Lurton Blassingame after I look it over. He's still active and involved with young writers.”

The ferry lines were terrible that evening, and it took us five hours to get home.

By late August 1980, the first draft of the
Dune
screenplay written by Rudolph Wurlitzer was in front of my father. Dad was not at all pleased with it and said Wurlitzer had oversimplified the story, almost turning it into a “juvenile.” Too many key scenes were missing, he said. It rubbed him too that the screenplay omitted Dune's baliset, the stringed instrument used by Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. My father wanted the film to be the first to introduce an entirely new musical instrument.

Two more drafts would follow.

Just before their departure for Hawaii, my parents visited us at our Mercer Island home. They mentioned two going-away parties given for them recently in Port Townsend, one a highbrow affair at the Farm House Restaurant and the other a chili feed at a friend's house. It amused Mom to have close friends on both ends of the social scale, from gourmets to chili-eaters. Dad said that the computer book written with Max Barnard,
Without Me You're Nothing,
was essentially complete, just one of many projects he had taken care of before leaving Port Townsend. “I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” he said.

My parents kept changing their minds about whether or not they would sell Xanadu, the Port Townsend house. Initially it was to be six months in Xanadu and six in Kawaloa. A short while later they thought full-time in Hawaii might be better. Then, when
Dune
series royalties and a big movie advance poured in they came up with the three-residence idea—Hawaii, Port Townsend and London or Paris. Now they told us they had changed their minds once more and decided to sell the Port Townsend house after all. This was a blow to me, though I couldn't say it was entirely unexpected.

It made the move seem so final.

Dad also said the
Caladan
, only a year old, wouldn't be a suitable sailboat for Hawaii, with its fin keel and large expanses of glass. Consequently he was listing it for sale with a Seattle yacht broker.

Mom was pretty worried about whether we were going to be able to visit them in Hawaii, since I couldn't fly, and she emphasized how much she wanted us to live there. She checked with three cruise ship lines about trips between the mainland and Hawaii and found that all were either unsafe or no longer operating.

Dad gave me a floppy Hawaiian hat, and with misty eyes said he wanted us to get together for Christmas in Hawaii, maybe around January 6. That was Twelfth Night, the date we had celebrated Christmas several times in my childhood. I reminded him I couldn't fly.

“You'll have to bite the bullet and do it,” he said. And he spoke of how safe flying in Hawaii was, how Royal Hawaiian Air Service, which flew between the islands, had never experienced a fatal accident.

My mother spoke of the beauty of Hawaii, made more breathtaking when seen from the air. She described Royal Hawaiian flights over cliff faces with waterfalls pouring down them, vast stretches of water between the islands and spectacular sunrises. Hana Airport was a swath of runway at the edge of a jungle.

A week went by before I was able to continue my journal entries, since I was too upset to write. I finally made the entries on Sunday, September 6, while we sat in the car in yet another ferry line. This time Jan, the kids and I were coming back from the Port Townsend house. We had picked up some vegetables and a couple of boxes of canned goods my mother and father had left for us. We slept in the house Saturday in sleeping bags. Xanadu was not entirely empty, but may as well have been for the lack of life in it. They left some basic furniture groupings in the main rooms so that it would look better for realtors to show to buyers.

They also arranged for a caretaker for the property, a friend named Doug Sandau, and while we were there he was getting moved into the apartment downstairs. He slept on a mattress on the floor during our visit. Nice fellow, and conscientious about details.

All the wonderful
Dune
paintings that had been on the south wall of the living room were gone, having been placed in storage. They were in a top-secret facility on Elliot Avenue West in Seattle, an unobtrusive, rather rundown-appearing building with no sign, used by local art museums to house the works of renowned painters.

Dad's loft study was almost bare except for an electric typewriter, so that he could write if he came back to visit before the property was sold. The pool was drained. Xanadu seemed so dark and cold. It was still special in and of itself, but it was the people who had illuminated it. I couldn't hold back the tears.

Jan wanted to see the wine room, where Dad and I had always gone to make the wine selections. It was empty except for a few bottles of ordinary wine.

Saturday night we ate at the Sea Galley Restaurant on the bay in Port Townsend, and had to wait more than an hour for a table because crowds were in town to visit Port Townsend's third annual Wooden Boat Show. When the public address system announced, “Herbert, table of four,” many people we didn't know turned their heads to look at us.

We left early Sunday morning because it was too difficult remaining in the empty house. Cartoons and notes were still on the kitchen bulletin board, and there was a note under the door from a couple who visited on August 31, unaware my parents had flown to Hawaii two days before that.

As we rode the ferry across Hood Canal that Sunday morning, I looked east at the half-missing Hood Canal floating bridge. When that was closed by a storm in February 1979, it hastened my parents' feelings of isolation in Port Townsend. Thereafter a three-to five-hour multiple ferry and driving trip to Seattle was required—twice the normal length of time.

Julie piped up from the backseat, “I wanna see Nanna and Grandpa again. We used to visit them all the time.”

And Kim said, “When I go to Hawaii, I'm gonna wear my ‘mula' (she meant muumuu) dress. Julie, are you gonna wear Nanna's mula dress that she gave you? She'd like that.”

Julie grew very quiet.

A week later I spoke with my parents by telephone and learned they were living in a rented house midway between Hana town and their property, and would stay there until January, when the contractors expected to complete their twenty-four-hundred-square-foot caretaker's house. The plan was that they would move into the caretaker's house, and from there supervise construction of the main house.

Dad said his new Mercedes coupe wasn't working out in Hana, because of extremely rough road conditions. Each day they had to drive over ruts, potholes and washboard areas that would probably never be repaired, since the locals liked the road that way. He wished he had brought a four-wheel-drive Jeep instead, and asked if I could locate a new one for him and have it shipped. I agreed to do so.

The worst bumps and sections of road around Hana had names for them, and he spoke of the most notorious stretch of roadway, known as the “Molokai Washboard,” which had a surface like an old washboard. It was between his house and town. “It'll shake your eyeballs out,” he said.