The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  The salesman pointed to the west and Ray began skating in that direction. “Wait a minute!” the man yelled. Ray skidded to a halt and turned. “That’s five or six miles!” the man informed him.

  Ray thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “where’s the closest studio?”

  That was how Ray landed outside the gates of Paramount, where, the moment he arrived, author Irvin S. Cobb, orchestra leader Ben Bernie, and actor W. C. Fields walked out of the studio’s gated entrance. Ray approached them all for autographs. Fields called him a son of a bitch (after acquiescing to the autograph request). This was Ray’s introduction to Hollywood.

  From that moment on, Ray haunted Paramount. It was mid-April 1934, and he and Skip had pulled a fast one on their parents. The Bradbury boys had lied, telling Leo and Esther Bradbury that school in Los Angeles would be letting out in just a few weeks. The boys argued that it would be ridiculous to enroll at the very end of the academic year. Leo and Esther, not bothering to check the story, allowed the boys to remain home. Actually, school was not done until mid-June, but their parents never found out, and Ray and Skip enjoyed an extended summer vacation.

  One afternoon during the first week in L.A., outside the tall white walls of Paramount, Ray spotted another autograph hound—a boy around his own age, lurking about waiting for a glimpse of Hollywood royalty. The boy’s name was Donald Harkins and, as Ray learned, they would be attending Berendo Junior High School together come autumn. Donald Harkins was a shy, self-effacing kid, and his family was, like Ray’s, suffering financial woes. If anything, the Harkinses were even worse off than the Bradburys. Donald and Ray shared an ardent love of motion pictures and they became fast companions, often arranging to meet each other outside Paramount or, when Ray did not roller-skate across town, taking the streetcar there together. Through the summer months, Ray and Donald happily loitered outside the studio walls, collecting autographs at a prodigious clip. Ray also started to collect Flash Gordon comic strips, which premiered that year. The space opera was just one more piece of popular culture that comprised the Ray Bradbury mosaic.

  The Bradburys lived on the second floor of a two-story building. A small balcony looked out to the north from which Ray could see the rooftop of the Uptown Theatre several blocks away. The movie palace had a red light on top, and about one night a week a movie previewed—a showing of a film in the late stages of the editing process. When this happened, the light on the rooftop was illumined. Ray would see the red beacon and rush to the theater. He stood outside many nights, spotting all manner of stars rolling up in their limousines. Helen Hayes and Brian Aherne arrived for What Every Woman Knows. He saw Laurel and Hardy, Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer dressed in a flowing silver lamé gown; he saw Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and many others. They were all there, right before his eyes. He always had his autograph book with him and he asked for signatures from them all. He was even bold enough to ask some to inscribe “To my pal, Ray Bradbury.” But Ray seldom had enough money in the pockets of his patched corduroys (hand-me-downs from his brother) to go into the 1,600-seat theater himself. He decided to remedy this. It would take time, but gently he began making his presence known to the Uptown’s manager. Ray was applying the same sort of pushy charm that he had used in securing his on-air post at the radio station back in Tucson.

  Los Angeles agreed with Ray. Leo Bradbury, however, had applied for work all across town and still could not find a job; he had only enough money to sustain the family for two months and he was worried. Time was running out. After eight weeks, he still had no job. They would have to move back to Waukegan yet again. But Leo Bradbury did not want this. His family loved California. Only twice in his life could Ray ever remember seeing his father cry: The first time was after his baby sister Elizabeth had died in 1928, and the second was in the kitchen of the Hobart Boulevard apartment. Leo was unaware that his son was in the doorway as he sat at the kitchen table and silently wept. Ray looked on, watching as a single tear slowly descended down the bridge of his father’s nose. But before the family packed up again, General Cable Company hired Leo Bradbury as a lineman. They were staying.

  Even with the family’s dire financial state, it was a good time. They had each other, along with Uncle Inar, Aunt Arthurine, and cousin Vivian living just a few blocks away. Ray remembered with fondness one evening when his father, Uncle Inar, and Skip played a game of kick the can out on the street in front of the Hobart Boulevard apartment. It was getting dark. They ran in the street, screaming with laughter, the tin can skittering across the warm pavement. “For that brief moment, Dad became a boy again,” said Ray. They were making such a racket that a police cruiser rolled up and the officer told them to keep it down.

  With his cousin Vivian living so nearby, Ray continued his hormonal antics, sitting on the front steps of Hobart Boulevard in the evenings and trying to kiss her. When asked to describe Ray Bradbury at age fourteen, Vivian was succinct: “He was horny.”

  One summer night Vivian had gathered a few girlfriends, one of whom had an admirer, a fellow named Eddie Barrera. Upon meeting Eddie, Ray realized that they shared a similar passion for radio and film, and they soon became close friends. By the autumn, Ray had started the ninth grade at Berendo Junior High School, as had his friends Donald Harkins and Eddie Barrera. In Waukegan he never really had any close friends, and had only met his first true friend in John Huff while in Tucson. Now he had two more lifelong chums. Meanwhile, Skip Bradbury joined the Emergency Conservation Work, later rechristened the Civil Conservation Corps. The CCC was a peacetime army of the young and the unemployed, established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to help save the country’s natural resources by battling soil erosion and renewing declining forests. The work would take Skip throughout southern and northern California; his three-year tenure began in San Bernardino, and eventually took him to the high Sierra Mountains. He made thirty dollars a month, sending twenty-five of it home to help his parents and Ray.

  While his older brother was away, after classes on Wednesday afternoons, Ray often roller-skated across town to the Figueroa Street Playhouse where George Burns and Gracie Allen broadcast their renowned radio show. “In those days,” Ray said, “… there were no audiences for radio broadcasts. Seeing George Burns outside the theater, I skated up to convince him that he should take me and my friend Donald Harkins in to watch their rehearsals. Why George agreed, I’ll never know. Perhaps we looked as poor and pitiful as we truly were. In any event, George led us in, seated us in the front row of an empty theater, and the curtain went up on George and Gracie playing to an audience of two ninth-grade kids.”

  Tinsel Town was all around him. Even the proverbial girl next door had a connection; the girl’s mother played piano for the Meglin Kiddies, an acclaimed children’s workshop and song-and-dance troupe that spawned child prodigies. Ray’s neighbor took him one afternoon to the Meglin Studio, where he met the Gumm Sisters, a sibling group who had gained fame on the radio and in short-subject films. The group included twelve-year-old Frances Gumm, who would later change her name to Judy Garland.

  By November 1934, with steady work at long last, Leo Bradbury moved his family a few blocks away to an apartment at 1619 South St. Andrews Place. A house with a small front yard, it was divided into four units; the Bradburys lived on the ground floor on the north side of the building. Their neighbors in the adjacent unit to the south were the Hathaways, a friendly married couple whose name Ray would use for the physician-geologist character in the story “—and the Moon Be Still as Bright” from The Martian Chronicles. Ray would later maintain that naming his characters was never a laborious process as it often is for other writers; he contended that most of his characters were given names from his subconscious and only later, he said, did he discover that some of the names had symbolic meanings. Montag, for example, from Fahrenheit 451 was the name of a paper manufacturer. Faber, from the same novel, was the name of a pencil maker. Bodoni, from the short story “The Rocket,” was
the name given to a printer’s typeface.

  In this modest apartment, once again, as with every place they had ever lived, Ray slept out on a foldout bed in the front room. But with Skip away in the CCC, Ray at least had a bed to himself.

  At school, Ray excelled in his English and art classes, but failed miserably in mathematics. After school, he rushed over to Hollywood to pace outside the various studios. One day, Ray and Donald Harkins walked through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery that backed up against the wall of Paramount (a setting used in the novel A Graveyard for Lunatics) and climbed atop a woodpile and then up and over the wall of the movie studio. They had made it into the back lot of Paramount—a symbolic act of arrival in show business. But their visit was short-lived. Ray and Donald had walked just a few feet into the studio’s carpenter shop before a hulking security guard confronted them. The man promptly escorted the teenage trespassers out.

  The two starstruck boys roamed all over Los Angeles, casing the studio gates, gathering autographs. They had learned where actor George Murphy lived and would hang upside down from the trees across from his home. The actor never emerged.

  Meanwhile, Ray, the self-described “wimp,” was having problems with a bully in school. “I was a smart-ass,” said Ray. “I was in history class and the teacher asked a question and this Armenian boy sitting in front of me gave the answer and under my breath, I said, ‘Good guess.’ And the teacher heard that and she said to the boy, ‘Was that a guess?’ Like a damn fool, he said, ‘Yes.’ So he got a zero and he started beating up on me. Every time he saw me, he would hit me on the arm. My arm was a series of bruises for years.”

  Though Ray was bullied at school, he was able to escape the trouble in the afternoons, when he and Donald Harkins headed to the movie studios. Occasionally, Ray was able to talk his father into letting him borrow the family camera—a “box Brownie.” It was against Leo Bradbury’s better judgment to let his son skate all over Los Angeles with the equipment, so he made an agreement with Ray. Ray had to tie a piece of string to the camera and leash it to himself. In a photo of Ray standing next to George Burns outside the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood in 1935, this string is visible. Burns is wearing a fedora and clutching his ubiquitous cigar, his arm is locked around Ray’s, and the string is attached to the belt of Ray’s raincoat. The string travels out of the frame and is attached to the camera that took the photo.

  On another afternoon in 1935, Ray was visiting Eddie Barrera at his house on Washington Boulevard when they heard a terrific crash outside. The boys bounded out the front door and saw a smoldering car about a hundred yards up the street, in front of a cemetery. The car had hit a telephone pole head-on and the passengers had been catapulted onto the pavement. Ray and Eddie ran to the car, the first to arrive at the accident scene. Blood was everywhere. Three people had already died; another—a woman—was barely alive. Her face horribly disfigured, the woman looked at Ray as he loomed over her and in that instant as they made eye contact, her eyes fluttered shut and she died. “It was a scene out of a nightmare,” Ray said. “I stumbled home that day, barely able to walk. I had to hold on to trees and walls I was so stunned.” It so stunned him, in fact, it was the main reason why Ray never learned to drive. The experience would also later serve as the inspiration for the 1943 short story “The Crowd,” in which Ray would ponder the very nature of those who arrive first on the scene of deadly accidents. Recalling that the cemetery was nearby, he wondered if those people could even be ghosts. Seventy years after witnessing the horrific crash, Ray was still scarred. “About once a month,” he admitted, “I still have nightmares about that poor woman who looked at me.”

  After that, Ray spent many days with Eddie Barrera. The two tried to forget the accident’s gruesome images. They spent their time scheming to become famous. One afternoon, Eddie paid twenty dollars (his parents had a bit more money than Ray’s) to book a recording studio in downtown Los Angeles and, along with another friend, Frank Pangborn, the trio taped a comedy radio show titled “Our General Petroleum.” The material during the recording is, predictably, juvenile, and squeaky-voiced Ray hammed it up considerably. After making the recording, Eddie and Frank were convinced that this great, unrecognized comedy trio could make it to the big time. They begged Ray to run away with them. “The dreams of boys are so impractical,” Ray remarked. “I said to them, ‘Where are we going to go?’ and they said, ‘To a big city,’ and I said, ‘We’re already in a big city and nobody wants us.’ I refused to run away from home and go with Eddie and Frank out to conquer the world. It’s a good thing I decided that.”

  At the Figueroa Street Playhouse, the radio program Hollywood Hotel was broadcast on Friday evenings, featuring actor Dick Powell as the emcee and a woman many considered to be one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Parsons certainly noticed the outgoing young blond man who wandered about the theater. She invited him in one Wednesday afternoon, where he sat next to Gary Cooper for a broadcast of The Lives of the Bengal Lancer. Ray even befriended Parsons’s chauffeur. Before he knew it, he was riding with the driver in the Rolls-Royce limousine, running errands. “There I was,” said Ray, “in my poor clothes, sitting in the back of the limousine. We would pull up to a stoplight and all the people would look to see who was sitting in the back and it was just poor Ray Bradbury. I would smile back and wave.”

  Louella Parsons soon learned that the teenager was stealing rides in her car and banished him from the theater, but this did not prevent Ray from rummaging through the Dumpsters behind the theater after the program was finished. He was looking for scripts from the show. Those Hollywood Hotel scripts were stored in his file cabinets for decades.

  Soon after, during the summer of 1935, Ray chased actress Marlene Dietrich inside a building and up the staircase at the House of Westmore Beauty Salon. The reclusive actress was trying to flee the eager teenager, but he eventually won out, getting the star’s autograph before being escorted away by salon employees. Not long after chasing Dietrich up the stairs of the salon on Sunset Boulevard, Ray spotted the actress again outside Paramount and asked her to pose for a picture with him. Ever bold and brash, he made a request of the camera-shy celebrity. “I suggested since the sun was on the wrong side of the street, she might be willing to cross over. On the verge of refusal, Dietrich inexplicably relented and made the trek.”

  Ray did receive encouragement for his early writing career. George Burns was kind and actually gave Ray the time of day when they met outside the Figueroa Street Playhouse. Ever driven, Ray sensed an in. He had just started his first year, the tenth grade, at Los Angeles High School. It was the fall of 1935. During his typing class, Ray began writing speculative scripts for Burns and Allen, and each Wednesday afternoon he would skate over to the Figueroa playhouse to hand them personally to George Burns.

  “He told me I was a genius and the scripts were brilliant. Of course they were lousy and he knew that but he was polite,” said Ray. Eventually, though, Burns and Allen took one of Ray’s jokes, an end-of-the-program routine that aired on February 26, 1936:

  GRACIE: Ohhhhhhhoooooo!

  GEORGE: Quick, somebody … Gracie has fainted.... Hurry.... Bring a glass of water.... Gracie! … Talk to me.... Gracie … say something.... Gracie.... Can’t you say something?

  GRACIE: Sure … this is the Columbia … Broadcasting System!

  Listening to his words live on the Burns and Allen show only solidified this fifteen-year-old’s determination. He wanted to write, to direct, to act, he wanted to be a part of this world he was looking at from close up. He wanted it so desperately. It had been nearly twelve years since he had first fallen under the spell of the cinema when he saw The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Moving to Hollywood, at play in a vast field of stars, only heightened his obsession, convinced him further of his own destiny. In Bradbury parlance, he was “madness maddened.” He had unflinching determination but, as Ray was the first to admit, there was one problem. His
writing was dreadful. But that didn’t stop him from pursuing his dream.

  “When I think back on how I must’ve looked, sailing through Hollywood on my roller skates, a big chubby lunk of a kid with my autograph book under one arm and my cheap box Brownie under the other,” he said, “I mean, who would’ve predicted that lout would ever write anything anyone would ever want to read?”

  8. LEARNING TO FLY

  Ray Bradbury’s collection of short stories R Is for Rocket led me to a lifelong love of science fiction. It was my pleasure to work with Ray during the first One Book, One City Los Angeles project. One Book, One City is a sort of giant reading club for the whole city and I knew that the choice of books that very first year was perhaps the most important decision in determining the success of the program. So I chose a classic. One of my very favorite books, Fahrenheit 451, proved to work beyond my wildest dreams. It captured the hearts and imaginations of the whole city. Never since have we seen such a successful reading program as we did the year we chose Ray’s masterpiece. On a personal note, I got to spend some time with Ray and I can honestly say that I’ve rarely encountered such warmth, intelligence, and personality as I found in Ray. I loved working with him, and I so appreciate the joy of reading that Ray helped spark for the people of Los Angeles.

  —JAMES K. HAHN, mayor of Los Angeles

  IN 1936, Ray experienced a night terror so vivid that it stayed with him for years. In it a bulldog—black, vicious, and as big as a small house, all sinew and muscle and fang—was chasing him. Running as fast as he could, Ray could not run fast enough. The beast was closing in. Like a great tyrannosaur, the bulldog moved with a hunter’s intent, tilling the ground with its talon claws. Ray couldn’t escape. The black bulldog’s ferocious mouth opened as he bore down on Ray, and in an instant, he was gone. Devoured by the great, black dog.