I periodically troll the webs for Heinleinia, because you never know when something new will arise. The other day I spotted this photo:



It says "early 40's" but this must have been July, 1940 during the "Long, Strange Trip" described in Chapter 20 of the biography.

I'm interested in finding out if the experts and old cobbers here have seen this one before. I certainly never have. Quite a different look at Robert and Leslyn than other photos I've seen!

Nice find, and no, I've never seen these photos in any collection or archive.

That's the look I classify as the "thin, ill Heinlein" seen periodically throughout his life. It looks much like the author photo of about ten years later - thin, tense, drawn and a bit distracted. What's odd is that in between these periods of apparent illness or physical strain there are photos where he looks heavier and more relaxed.

That's also one of the clearest portraits of Leslyn I've ever seen. She's usually a bit blurred or washed out, or a very small face in a group photo.

I have done some further checking in the interest of accuracy and the Heinlein Society has a poor-quality scan of the Robert half in their archives.

The picture is the full picture of RAH's and Leslyn's application photograph taken at the Institute of General Semantics Seminar in Chicago 1940.

The RAH half was highlighted along with information about other seminars that he had attended in Kate Gladstone's "Words, Words, Words, Robert Heinlein and General Semantics" published in "The Heinlein Journal" Vol 11, July 2002.

The article also includes his data sheet with a head shot of him.

He lists himself as a 'pseudo-science fiction writer and politician'.

(adv) The same volume also includes my article 'Time Enough For Everything: A look at Time Travel in Science Fiction." Part 1. "Linear Time Travel"

The Secret Life of RAH?

Leslyn was quite the dish. I had not realized.

Photo info is wrong. Leslyn was his second wife. And the most interesting one, if you ask me.

Who's a kid?
Keep that up, and I'll whack you with my walker!

Oh, there's no question that the information was right there in the open... but in many cases, you had to know exactly where to look to find it. The 1932 marriage certificate was a dead-bang giveaway, but the resources of the internet were still feeble and it took old-school searching in records to find the link.

Later, knowing that there WAS a 1st Mrs. and a close reading on the date of the marriage (which, shooting in the dark, could have been any time from about 1926 to 1931 - a helluva lot of records to search in a dozen locations) and finally a name - sure, it's easy now.

It shows up just how peculiar the history of Heinlein studies has been. A major figure, perhaps THE biggest figure in the field for decades... and no one before me in the 1990s took anything like a systematic approach to his work. No one before Bill and RJ ca. 2000 took anything like a methodical approach to his biographical background. It was a closed circle of information - if Heinlein didn't mention it, somehow it didn't exist. And Elinor had stopped being mentioned ca. 1932.

Go back and read the decades of earlier commentary and so forth - it's like a particularly fervid and not very bright bible studies group, endlessly chasing its tail on a very limited and deliberately controlled data set. So it's little surprise that it took 60-70 years for someone to start following up the suppressed clues and, you know, bringing in facts.