Dining tables on wheels–portable furniture–has been around since Jane Austen’s time. Furniture was considered to be multi-use then. I think shoving a fully set table from room to room, as shown above, takes more than one dainty hand.

I don’t think the phrase given the heave-ho means what you think it means… and this house was built for Ginny, the last wife, before they determined Ginny had altitude sickness which required them to relocate to higher pressure near sea level.

— details from the pending biography, mostly paraphrased —

He was married three times, the wife you are talking about would be the second wife, he divorced her to marry his last wife, Ginny, the one in the picture pushing the table through the pass through.

The second wife was head of the Music Department at Columbia pictures, resigning to marry. Highly intelligent, highly educated, she had her BA from UCLA and Masters in Philosophy at USC. She had teaching credentials for academic subjects, but also taught fancy needlework and crocheting. Heinlein said many of his early stories were essentially collaborations with Leslyn as “silent partner” because she had good — really excellent — story sense but no interest in writing. Indeed, it is said that she was an informal “story doctor” when she worked at Columbia, though there is no documentation at all on this point. Before Heinlein took up writing, they were involved in the EPIC radical-liberal socialist political movement fronted initially by Upton Sinclair. EPIC took over the Democratic Party in California and made it as powerful as the Republican Party for the first time. After Sinclair left, EPIC continued to manage the Democratic Party, and gradually the Dems took control back from EPIC. The Heinleins worked their way up the Democratic party apparatus until Heinlein decided to get out of politics and into writing, with Leslyn essentially Robert’s “chief of Staff.” Although she worked at her own political projects, Leslyn apparently had no desire to be the front man. Gradually John Campbell replaced Leslyn as story doctor, starting from about 1940.

From about 1936, an undefined personality instability — a vague sense of “something wrong” — began to be visible even to a few other people, though it was well-controlled until about the middle of World War II, when she was overworking herself and almost her entire remaining family died or were killed. She turned to alcoholism which increased in severity until Heinlein asked her to get a divorce in June 1947. After the divorce, she worked for a while at the newly established Pt. Mugu missile range and had a very messy and very unhappy life. After a short bigamous marriage, she married Jules Mocabee. She suffered a series of strokes in about 1950 and during the long two or three years she was essentially housebound recovering, she wrote wave after wave of “poison pen” letters to everyone Heinlein worked with professionally. This reached a climax in 1953, about which time she seems to have made a significant improvement in her heath, and the poison pen letters stopped. As this was the only contact Heinlein had with her, she thereafter falls out of his life. She died in 1981, still named Mocabee.

Is that the way you remembered her giving him the heave-ho? Let’s not have any more half truths, lies and falsehoods spread.

The one thing I couldn’t stand is the “sealed” home aspect. Give me fresh air.

And like Erin, I like variety and fresh air when possible.

Will read more later today.

Ruth

Built-ins? Very Frank Lloyd Wright.

Cork floors? Do you scrub them or vacuum them? How clean are they?

Green paint inside and out? Must have left a medicinal feeling.

But the article is a hoot.