Dreamer of Dune (39 page)

On the way to an elegant Japanese restaurant where we were to meet the others, I told her Robert Heinlein had called, and his purpose. She mentioned how close they had been once, with pleasant visits to the Heinleins at their place in Santa Cruz, California. She said so many fans discovered where the Heinleins lived that they had to put a high wall around the property for privacy.

At dinner that evening, Dad asked me to call Heinlein and pass along his regrets that he could not meet him at the Claremont Hotel because of a book tour that conflicted. I wondered aloud if my father shouldn't make the call so that Heinlein would not feel snubbed, but Dad insisted that I do it. He looked tired, and Mom said he had been doing a lot of her work—bookkeeping, issuing checks, coordinating public appearances, promotional coordination, answering huge piles of mail and the like.

Soon my father turned his attention to Margaux, who was being held by Jan on his immediate left. We were at a low table with our shoes off. He touched Margaux's hand and began talking with her. For a moment the four-month-old child stared at her grandfather wide-eyed. Then she let out a little squeal of displeasure.

“It's probably Frank's beard,” Mom said. “A lot of babies are afraid of beards.”

Later, as Margaux was crawling around on the straw mat and Jan called her, my mother said, “It seems funny to hear the name ‘Margo' around the family after so long.” More than thirty years had passed since the death of her mother, Marguerite, also known as Margo.

We got to talking about hands, looking at one other's lifelines on our palms. Mom was expert in the subject, said she used to read a lot of people's futures from looking at their hands. “But I was too good at it,” she said, “and had to give it up.” She spoke of some frightening predictions of hers that had come to pass, all of which she had determined by sensing “vibrations” while holding another person's hand. In one case, she warned the person, a close female friend, of an impending accident and counseled extreme caution. A short time later the woman was seriously injured in an automobile accident, with severe brain damage.

Dad said the filming of
Dune
was still scheduled for England, with the desert scenes slated for Tunisia. He was waiting to be called on location as the technical advisor.

We drove my parents to the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle. On the way, Mom talked about needing to have her gold wedding band cut down. It was too loose on her finger, from all the weight she had lost.

Dad suggested that they find the same justice of the peace who had married them in Seattle in 1946. “Then I'll marry you again,” he said.

The following Thursday, my father flew off alone to start his second
God Emperor of Dune
book tour, across the U.S. and Canada. Mom had to remain in Seattle for more medical tests, and planned to leave the next day to join him. After the tests, she and Jan had lunch together at an East Indian restaurant in Seattle, and went clothes shopping for Julie's fourteenth birthday. Because of Mom's limited energy, they had to take cabs on three occasions for short distances.

At the restaurant, which was on the second floor of a building across the street from Pike Place Market (a farmer's market with fresh produce), Mom told Jan she had been given bad news by the doctor that morning, and she hadn't told Dad yet. Her heart function was disturbingly less than it had been on her previous test, and the doctors seemed unable to arrest her degenerative condition.

Fighting back tears, Jan asked, “How bad is it?”

“The doctor told me, ‘You won't survive this one.'” Following a long pause, she added, “I'm afraid to tell Frank.”

Jan looked away at people bustling around the market. She regained her composure. “You can beat this, Bev,” she said, gazing back across the table at the frail, impeccably dressed woman with her. “You have before and you'll do it again.”

The doctor my mother had seen that morning said her heart had been strong or she wouldn't have survived so long, nearly eight years after the diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. But, he went on to say, it was only a matter of time before her heart gave out on her altogether. He could not predict how long she might live.

“I worry most about Frank,” Mom said, with a brave smile. “We've always been like one person. When I go, what will happen to him?”

O
N THE
evening of April 17, 1982, we met my parents at Trader Vic's Restaurant in the Westin Hotel. My father was in the midst of a big book tour, with another week to go. He had signed thousands of books in Toronto alone, so many that he'd been forced to wear a wrist brace. This was a custom appliance that wrapped tightly around his wrist and the heel of his hand, looping around the thumb. It kept the wrist straight and stable so that it didn't constantly flex with each signature he made, tiring it out. Even so, he said he could hardly move his right hand after the signings.

A limousine met them in every city. “I'm not playing B.T.O. (Big Time Operator),” he said. “The limo is a matter of survival.”

In Philadelphia, the vehicle was a fabulous 1926 Rolls Royce Landau, with an open area for the driver. It had a cigar lighter in the back, and little snippers on chains to cut off cigar tips. The driver was always using “No Parking” zones, and never got a ticket. They parked illegally and went to see the Liberty Bell. When they came out, a policeman was standing by the car. Dad thought,
Uh oh
! But the policeman was just admiring the car.

For the Los Angeles segment, Dino De Laurentiis sent an immense private limousine to pick them up at the airport. The chauffeur gave Mrs. Herbert an exquisite red rose and served champagne in the car.

Dad caught a cold in Texas and was still hacking from it. He had to take lozenges during many interviews. He also had a skin split on his right eyelid, and Mom had a sore on her upper lip—conditions from the dry, windy cold on the East Coast.

They didn't talk about Mom's medical condition, and she looked much the same as the last time I had seen her—rather thin and drawn, but courageously cheerful. She wore a lovely Hawaiian shell necklace outside her blouse. Dad's beard was freshly trimmed, and he and Mom looked manicured. Dad was giggly and in a good mood, and he spoke cheerily of Mom walking off the plane this time, instead of being pushed in a wheelchair—as if she were doing better. This didn't track with what Jan had told me, and as I gazed into his eyes and into my mother's I detected new sadness there. He was in denial, desperately looking for the slightest encouraging things, while overlooking the negative.

Dad told us that the
Dune
movie director, David Lynch, wanted to leave theater-goers with the same feeling after seeing the movie as they would have after reading the novel. Lynch was going to extra efforts to remain true to the novel.

We learned that their first caretakers in Hana, the young couple, were quitting to return to the mainland. “They got island fever,” Dad said, “couldn't take the confinement of the island.” New caretakers were on the job, Bart and Sheila Hrast.

We all had quite a bit of wine, and were getting pretty silly. Dad was telling some hilarious jokes, when Mom touched his arm gently and asked, “Did you tell the one about the two Mexicans?”

He then proceeded to tell the story, and got it so fouled up that Mom interrupted him and said, “You've got it all wrong, you know. I hope you can get out of this.”

“Oh I will,” Dad said with his eyes twinkling. “That's my business!”

A week later Jan, Kim and I met my parents at Seattle Tacoma International Airport. They were just in from San Diego, last city on the book tour. Mom was standing straight as she walked, and holding onto my father's arm. Weary, they took their car and drove straight to the ferry terminal in Seattle.

On the first Friday in May, Mom cooked an entire dinner for us in Port Townsend, a delicious roast rack of lamb served with mint jelly, corn on the cob and roasted potatoes. She said she was feeling a lot better, with her energy returning. She had been swimming laps of the pool in recent days, an essential part of her rehabilitation program. The water temperature was set at ninety-one degrees for her, which resulted in substantial electric bills.

Margaux sat on the living room floor atop a blanket while we ate. Looking down at her, Mom recalled how cute Julie and Kim had been as babies, and how Margaux resembled them. Dad played a lot with the baby during the evening, pushing his beard in her face and making her giggle.

That weekend, Dad, Jan and I went sailing on the
Caladan
. It was a beautiful day, but a little too cool for my mother. So she stayed home with the kids. Jan and I did really well, as the boat was easier to sail than the ones on which we took lessons. Standing at the helm, Dad said he determined wind direction by feeling it on his face, and that he had learned to do this as a boy. This seemed an extraordinary ability for anyone to have, and I was doubly impressed because he didn't have a heck of a lot of his face exposed around his beard.

I thought of Paul Muad'Dib in a burnoose on the desert planet Dune, with most of his face obscured by the tucks of the robe. Sniffing at the air, Paul could sense the approach of a storm, and could tell wind direction just as my father did.

In ensuing weeks my book
Incredible Insurance Claims
received quite a bit of publicity, and I was interviewed by radio stations in the United States and Canada. Dad said a number of people had seen notices of the upcoming publication of my first novel,
Sidney's Comet
, and they were asking if we were related.

Early in June, my mother called me at work and said excitedly that she had received a letter from an astrologer friend in New York, a letter mentioning her “firstborn”—me. I was supposed to have great success in the future, involving a door opening for me that had previously been closed. Apparently the woman had been very accurate with her predictions in the past.

I never paid much heed to such matters, and was more concerned with finishing my second novel,
The Garbage Chronicles
, which was near completion. I wanted to show it to my father that weekend, and had worked long hours, including a marathon Thursday night until 3:30
A.M
., allowing only three hours before going to the office. There had been more work remaining in the book than I had anticipated, but I pushed all the way through to the end…402 pages. In the process I created some pretty unusual characters, including one I really liked, a young magical comet named Wizzy. One of the chapters was based upon an unpublished short story I had written the year before, “Earth Games.”

I was a zombie at work the next day.

When I next saw my father in Port Townsend, he said everything was progressing on the
Dune
movie, although he had no idea who would star in it. Apparently the desert scenes would not be filmed in either of the most frequently rumored locations, Tunisia or China's Gobi Desert. The latest plan called for using a giant World War II blimp hangar in England, the interior of which would be converted into a desert. My parents were flying to Universal Studios in Los Angeles in a few days to talk with director David Lynch and Raffaella De Laurentiis, Dino De Laurentiis's daughter. She had been put in charge of the film by her father.

Dad was looking forward to a ten-day fishing trip in Alaska with his first cousin Ken Rowntree, Jr., and a friend, Jim McCarren. They planned to leave at the end of June—my father's first real vacation in ten years. He went to bed at 8:30
P.M
., taking my just-completed manuscript with him.

In the morning he cooked blueberry pancakes and prepared fresh juice, a tasty mixture of orange and grapefruit. We were talking about vitamins and nutrients, and Dad said that British seamen (“limeys”) discovered they could avoid scurvy by drinking lime juice. “They used to drink it with rum,” he said.

“Sounds like a daiquiri,” Mom quipped.

After breakfast Dad said, “Let's talk story.”

The two of us took my manuscript in the living room and spread it out on the coffee table. “I didn't get very far last night,” Dad said, while my heart hammered in trepidation, “but far enough to see that you've really improved.” He had read the first chapter.

We worked all day, both of us sitting on the black vinyl couch. He made corrections here and there and passed the pages on to me. At times as he read he would take deep breaths and pick at his ear, and I tried to determine whether these were signs of boredom or fatigue. Five or six times, he laughed boisterously, once at a passage that was
not
intended to be funny. At other times, he would slouch back on the couch and drop his right arm to his side, in apparent disbelief. Sometimes he would stack pages neatly after reading them on the cushion between us. Other times, he would slam them down or hand them to me one at a time. He didn't say anything, just kept reading, and most of the signs seemed bad.

It was hot in the house, and as the session proceeded, I became sticky with perspiration. Partly from nervousness, no doubt. We could hear the excited squeals of the children as they swam with Jan and Mom.

By 6:00
P.M
., Dad had read 328 of the 402 pages, with a couple of breaks. Once he sat back and closed his eyes. Within seconds, he was asleep—an enviable ability of his to nap anywhere.

We drove to the Harbormaster Restaurant in Port Ludlow. Fortunately, we got a nice corner window table with a view of the yacht harbor. Dad was not familiar with a particular selection on the wine list, a 1978 Mount Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon. He was afraid it might be too young, but decided it was probably okay since it was from California. It turned out to be very good.

Dad said a British publisher had made an unprecedented offer for United Kingdom book rights on
The White Plague
, higher even than he had received for any
Dune
book. Knowing he was hard at work on a book with Bill Ransom and had “
Dune
5” to do after that, I asked him if he couldn't take life a little easier. He said Mom's illness had cut five and a half months out of his writing time, and they had some huge bills to pay for the construction in Hawaii.

“He's always worked hard,” Mom said.

Jan toasted my new novel,
The Garbage Chronicles
, and to my relief Dad commented, “It's very good.”

Mom mentioned that Bill Ransom and my father were writing alternate chapters in a “leapfrog” method, and that she never had been able to tell who wrote which chapter. “Bill has a smooth writing style,” she said.

They were going better than anticipated, and now expected to complete
The Lazarus Effect
in August.

Keeping his voice from carrying to other tables, Dad told me how much he expected to earn the coming year, a seven-figure income that was equal to his entire net worth. In one year he would earn the equivalent of what it had taken him an entire lifetime to accumulate.

Three days later they flew to Los Angeles to visit Universal Studios and see how the
Dune
movie was going. In the process, my father lost another week from his writing schedule.

While they were gone, I finished
The Garbage Chronicles
and mailed it to Clyde Taylor in New York City.

After my parents returned, Dad was anxious to get back to his study, but Mom needed still another checkup with a heart specialist at Group Health Hospital. With all the ferry rides this would cost him yet another day. But my mother arranged with a pilot friend, Graham Newell, to fly her in a small plane from Port Townsend to the Bellevue Airfield, near our house. Jan picked Mom up in Bellevue and took her to the hospital, and then back to our house afterward.

I arrived home at shortly past 5:00
P.M
., just in time to take Mom to the airport for her return flight to Port Townsend. Kim went with us and gave her Nanna a heart pendant necklace that she bought with her allowance. Kim, now ten, had lost a molar tooth that day, and for the first time said she no longer believed in the Tooth Fairy.

Tremendously excited about the movie, Mom described meetings at Universal Studios with David Lynch and Raffaella De Laurentiis, discussing cuts that might be needed in the film to keep it under budget. Lynch was having trouble with cuts to his “baby,” so my father (after praising the work he had done) offered to help. One evening Dad worked at the studio editing the script, after which he and my mother went to a late dinner with Raffaella and David.

Frank Herbert's changes were incorporated into the screenplay, which would ultimately go into a sixth draft. In all he cut fourteen pages of material, resulting in a savings of fourteen million dollars in the budget. A million dollars a page. They had discussions about giving my father a share of the screenplay credit, but he wouldn't hear of it, saying he felt David and his associates deserved it for doing such a masterful job. He would accept a consulting fee only.

Raffaella De Laurentiis showed my parents a series of storyboards that had been prepared by the art department—pictorial instructions for the positioning of actors in key scenes. It was an intriguing process to Beverly Herbert. All of the castle scenes, for example, would be filmed at once, no matter where they appeared in the story. Then they would tear the castle set down and build another one. It would be extremely costly if they forgot to shoot a scene and had to rebuild a set. After all the filming, the scenes were pieced together where needed, in the film editing process.

An air of secrecy surrounded the production. Lynch, who referred to his scriptwriting team of Eric Bergren and Christopher DeVore as “The Great Team,” wrote regular memos to them. During the first three days of June 1982, his transmittals included this: “Any leaks concerning what we are doing on this project will decrease the curiosity factor and cause us to lose power. I beg you to keep this in mind.”

My mother found it all fascinating, but beneath her excitement I heard layered sadness and concern. She was wondering if she would live long enough to see the film. I prayed that she would.

Much later I ran across an entry in her travel journal from that Los Angeles trip, on binder paper. It comprised less than one page and revealed all the excitement of a schoolgirl confiding in her diary: “I can't believe it's really going to happen!”