<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein (August 29, 1904 - April 13, 1981) was the second wife of science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, and a role model for the female characters in his early work and an influence on his political beliefs during their fifteen-year marriage. She is probably best remembered as lending her last name to Heinlein's most used pseudonym Anson MacDonald.

Biography

Little is known of Leslyn outside of a few comments by fellow science fiction authors who knew the Heinleins. Robert Heinlein never publicly commented on his ex-wives (it was only recently learned that he had, in fact, been briefly (in 1929) married before he married Leslyn). Isaac Asimov described Leslyn Heinlein as a small, dark woman who chain smoked, and was a political liberal.

Robert Heinlein and Leslyn MacDonald married in Los Angeles on March 27, 1932, while he was still serving in the United States Navy. After his medical discharge in 1934, they lived variously in Los Angeles, Colorado and Philadelphia. Leslyn was instrumental in getting Robert involved in Upton Sinclair's California grass-roots political organization, and recent research has revealed that the Heinleins were avowed nudists who enjoyed the sexual freedom of an open marriage.

About the time (1939) Robert's writing career took off, Leslyn began to drink heavily, descending into alcoholism, some say as a result of feeling neglected by his increasing devotion to his writing career. She was a published poet, herself -- her poem The Ballad of Lalune appeared in a 1941 issue of Weird Tales.

Robert and Leslyn were divorced in October 1947. Heinlein waited one year (as was the law in California in those days) before marrying Virginia Gerstenfeld, a colleague from his World War II work at Philadelphia's Naval Air Experimental Station on October 21, 1948.

Leslyn, who worked in Columbia Pictures' Music Department, remarried, and nothing is publicly known of the rest of her life.