The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  Ray and Marguerite’s afternoon coffee soon turned into lunch, which quickly turned into dinner. In May, they went to an upscale restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. He couldn’t afford it, so she recommended they go dutch. She was eloquent and well off and sipped martinis at dinner. She had gone to UCLA to study literature and languages, but left before graduation after an argument with an instructor. Maggie, a headstrong Irish girl, disliked being told that a swim class was mandatory. When the class instructor suggested that her figure could use it, Maggie retorted that the teacher’s figure needed it more. Of course, she failed the course, didn’t get the credit, and walked away from the university.

  Ray, on the other hand, was a young, self-educated, penniless writer who had worked his way up from nothing. Maggie was an only child who loved long days being left alone with her books. He was a bold, brash kid (except when it came to the opposite sex, of course) who had grown up in Illinois surrounded by a colorful extended family. She was a child of the Depression who had never gone without. He was a child of the Depression whose family barely got by. He still loved comics and pulp fiction. She loved Proust and Yeats.

  Whatever it was—the yin and the yang; opposites attracting—they hit it off immediately. “Once I figured out that he wasn’t stealing books,” said Maggie, “that was it. I fell for him.”

  Marguerite Susan McClure, nicknamed “Maggie,” was born on January 16, 1922, to Lonal and Anna McClure. She had a rich genealogy; among her father’s family were the founders of McClure’s magazine. Another relative had invented the coupler that connected freight train cars. Her great-grandfather had married a full-blooded Cherokee Native American in the wheat plains of Kansas in the late 1800s. Marguerite’s father was a Los Angeles restaurateur. During the First World War, he served as head chef to General John Joseph Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France. In his lifetime, Lonal owned many restaurants in the Los Angeles area. But his greatest source of pride was his only child, Marguerite, delivered into a silver-spoon world that knew no want, no hardship, no poverty.

  Maggie lived with her parents in a nice, comfortable home in the Lienert Park neighborhood of L.A., near the intersection of Slauson and Crenshaw. From the day they began dating, Ray and Maggie were nearly inseparable. When they weren’t together, they spent long periods of time talking to each other on the telephone. But only after several dates did Ray finally find the nerve to hold Maggie’s hand.

  During the early days of their courtship, Ray was still publishing stories in the pulps, while he continued putting Dark Carnival together. It was during this time that he sold his first piece to radio. The producers of the NBC program Mollé Mystery Theater in New York had seen one of Ray’s stories, “Killer, Come Back to Me,” in the July 1944 issue of Detective Tales magazine, and bought the rights. The drama starred the popular radio actor Richard Widmark, who would move to Los Angeles the following year to embark on a long and successful film career. “Killer, Come Back to Me” aired on May 17, 1946.

  Ray’s foray into radio prompted him to submit more material for the medium. “I had sent tear sheets of some of my short stories from Weird Tales to William Spier, at CBS in Hollywood,” said Ray. Spier was a well-known producer and director for the nationally broadcast radio program “Suspense.” He read Ray’s stories and wrote back, inviting him to come to his house in Bel Air for a visit. Spier was married to Kay Thompson, a noted singer, composer, actress, and vocal coach to many, including Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. “She danced just as well as Fred Astaire,” commented Ray. A decade later, in 1955, Thompson would create Eloise, the popular children’s literary character. Ray arrived at their house and Thompson handed Ray a drink. Spier sat him down and went through many of Ray’s stories. “Bill bought a couple of my stories right there,” said Ray. He had crossed over into yet another storytelling medium.

  As his career continued to take off, his personal life was soaring, too. Ray and Maggie were head over heels in love. It’s amazing he was getting any work done at all. They soon knew they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. Maggie had visited the Bradbury house a few times by then, and Esther Bradbury pulled her son aside and demanded to know who this girl was who had stolen her son’s heart. Esther was protective of her little bottle-fed-until-he-was-six boy and she wasn’t going to let him go so easily. But it was too late. In June 1946, Ray and Maggie became engaged.

  Curiously, neither of them remembered the exact moment of the engagement. Maggie recalled that Ray proposed to her one evening after they had kissed good night. Ray insisted that Maggie proposed to him, yet he couldn’t recall the details. “It’s too far back,” claimed Ray (this from a man who recalled his own birth!). He did remember a night that, as he said, was likely the clincher. He had kissed Maggie good night. “It was the kiss that broke my eardrums,” he said. Ray had left in a daze, intending to take a streetcar home. But he boarded the wrong train and, lost in thoughts of Maggie, rode it all the way to the end of the line in Redondo. When the conductor approached and asked the final, lone passenger to disembark, Ray realized the mistake he made in his lovesick stupor. “I just kissed my girlfriend,” he told the conductor. The conductor smiled. “I’ve done something like that,” he said, sympathetically. The man made a deal with Ray. He asked Ray to help flip all the seats as the streetcar reversed and headed back toward Los Angeles. In return, Ray could ride home for free.

  Despite the fact that Ray rarely explored sexual themes in his writing, he was a highly sexually charged young man. Maggie summed it up best: “He couldn’t keep his hands off of me.” Added Ray: “We made love underneath every pier along the coast.”

  On occasions when Ray and Maggie had the Bradbury house to themselves, the young couple made love on the living-room floor. “Why we did that, I don’t know,” he said. “There was a bedroom!” Another time, Maggie’s father, a stern man, actually caught his daughter and her fiancé in the act. Ray was visiting Maggie in the living room of her house, when Lonal McClure entered the room unexpectedly and caught them on the sofa. Lonal McClure didn’t say a word; he simply turned and left. He didn’t speak to Ray again until he had finally married his daughter.

  One day in June, Ray and Maggie went to a ritzy jeweler’s shop in downtown Los Angeles and bought two thick gold rings for thirty-five dollars apiece. These are the wedding bands they both wore for the rest of their lives.

  Earlier that month, Ray had sent August Derleth a completed manuscript for Dark Carnival. He had continued to alter the table of contents up until the last minute, rewriting stories such as “The Wind,” “The Crowd,” and “The Poems.” He had added new stories: “The Maiden,” “Interim,” “Let’s Play Poison,” and “Uncle Einar,” another story about his fictional vampire family, the Elliots. This new tale was an homage to his favorite uncle, his mother’s brother Inar Moberg. Inar had always been the life of the Bradbury party, a laundry delivery driver who frequently stopped by the old house in Waukegan and burst through the back door with great energy, laughter, a hint of liquor on his breath. In the short story, Ray changed the spelling of his uncle’s name, gave him glorious green wings, and turned him into a lovable vampire. “Uncle Einar” was yet another offbeat piece of “weird” fiction centered upon the theme of the misfit.

  Rounding out Dark Carnival was “The Next in Line.” In this newly written story, Ray had drawn from his experiences visiting the mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico. The result was one of the most powerful stories in the book, a psychologically complex creation, dripping with gothic atmosphere that displayed Ray Bradbury at his poetic best.

  In early September 1946, Ray traveled by train to New York. With his appearance in the Best American Short Stories anthology and his string of sales to the respected slicks, he had become a minor darling of the New York literary establishment. As he made his way east, he stopped in Waukegan to visit family, and in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he met his publisher, August Derleth, for the first time. Aside
from their business relationship, Ray and Derleth shared many interests. They both had grown up reading comic strips, and while they were both well regarded for their pulp stories, they shared a keen interest in contemporary fiction. As an armchair architecture buff, Ray was taken by Derleth’s house, built by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

  While he was in New York, Ray met with editors from Harper’s, Collier’s, and Good Housekeeping. He met with Martha Foley, the editor of the Best American Short Stories anthology, and was the guest of honor at a party hosted by Mademoiselle fiction editor George Davis. He had come a long way in four short years, from shilling newspapers on a street corner wearing his brother’s hand-me-downs to this—a party thrown for him by New York’s literary luminaries. When Ray walked in, a drink was thrust into his hand and a crowd swarmed around him. Along with George Davis, Ray mingled with Mademoiselle’s Rita Smith and her sister, author Carson McCullers. Ray also met New Yorker cartoonists Sam Cobean and Charles Addams, who had been commissioned to create the artwork for Ray’s story “Homecoming” in the upcoming October issue of Mademoiselle. “I was kept constantly inebriated by all and sundry,” said Ray. That night, in the small New York apartment, Ray waltzed with Carson McCullers.

  A few days later, he lunched with Charles Addams, and the two struck up a friendship. Addams had created his own ghoulishly wonderful brood—the Addams Family—a recurring series of cartoons appearing in The New Yorker. Ray and Addams discussed the possibility of one day working on a book together. Ray would write more tales of his vampire family from “Homecoming” and Charlie Addams would furnish the illustrations. “It will become sort of a Christmas Carol idea,” Ray wrote Addams, later, “Hallowe’en after Hallowe’en people will buy the book, just as they buy the Carol, to read by the fireplace, with lights low. Hallowe’en is the time of year for story-telling.” Addams and Ray agreed to stay in touch on the project.

  Ray also met with Simon & Schuster editor Don Congdon, who had written Ray while he was in Mexico asking him if he had a novel. “I didn’t have a novel, but I had some ideas,” recalled Ray. Those ideas revolved around a series of stories, set in the Midwest, about a young boy, as Don Congdon remembered, “who was going to try to prevent the continuation of time, and didn’t want to grow older and so on, and keep his boyhood as it were.”

  It was a highly autobiographical premise that was once again rooted in Ray’s all-important childhood recollections. It had started as an outline under the title “The Small Assassins,” but was now renamed “The Blue Remembered Hills.” The title would soon change yet again, rechristened “The Wind of Time” and then “Summer Day, Summer Night.” At the time, it was only a concept, one that would take many years to come to fruition.

  Although Congdon had high hopes of making him an offer, Ray felt he didn’t yet have a book idea that was adequately developed enough to warrant a contract. So the two men promised to stay in touch until that time came.

  Ray returned to Los Angeles and began work on the final stages of Dark Carnival. The book, scheduled for an April 1947 publication, was now in galley form, allowing for one last stage of revisions. Ray continued to make wholesale changes to the book, excising whole paragraphs from stories and replacing other tales altogether. August Derleth had been exceedingly patient with Ray throughout the long editorial process, allowing the author to fine-tune the collection to an unprecedented degree. Ray made so many changes to the book so late in the game that he even offered to personally pay for any expenses incurred by the many alterations. Derleth indicated to Ray that he had allowed more changes to be done to the Dark Carnival manuscript than had been made to all previously published Arkham House titles combined. It was time to let it go, but Ray hardly did that.

  With his first story having been produced for the radio, Ray was inspired to try his hand once again at the medium. He wrote a one-act script, “The Meadow,” and submitted it to a contest sponsored by the World Security Workshop, a program on ABC. The script was selected, produced, and aired on January 2, 1947. Ray had sold his second piece to radio in less than a year. “I listened to radio all the time when I was a kid. And by the time I was in high school, I was seeing half a dozen films a week,” said Ray. “All this junk I put into my system, along with the great stuff—I was learning all the time. The best kind of learning is the secret learning you’re picking up all along and then you go back later and you dredge through all this material and it helps you write radio scripts. By the time I wrote ‘The Meadow,’ I was full up with radio.”

  In March 1947, one month before publication, Ray sent in his final round of revisions for Dark Carnival. Around the same time, he sold two more tales from the collection to major magazines. He had placed “Cistern” with Mademoiselle (a sale he had set into motion during his autumn visit to New York), and “The Man Upstairs” to Harper’s, his first sale to that publication. The latter story was yet another one culled from his Illinois childhood, this time using the memory of the stained glass window in his grandparents’ home as a portal through which is viewed the sinister truth about a boarder in the home.

  Harper’s had been a particularly difficult publication for Ray to break into. Editor Katherine Gauss had taken a pass on several Bradbury stories that would, ironically, later be recognized as Bradbury gems. Stories rejected by Harper’s included “The Emissary,” “Jack-in-the-Box,” “El Dia De Muerte,” and “Powerhouse.” But with “The Man Upstairs,” which fetched $250, Ray had at long last made it into the pages of Harper’s.

  His star continued to ascend. Dark Carnival, originally intended as a retrospective of his best pulp fiction, had evolved into a book that showcased a rising literary force. On April 29, 1947, Ray received his first author’s copy of Dark Carnival in the mail, one of the 3,112-copy initial print run.

  He was wildly in love and engaged to be married. His first book had been published. He also received word that his short story “Homecoming,” which, of all ironies, had been rejected by Weird Tales and subsequently published by the more respected Mademoiselle, had been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories of 1947. It was a magical time. Late one afternoon, with his copy of Dark Carnival held tightly in hand, Ray hopped on a red streetcar and headed to the intersection of Norton and Olympic, where he had sold newspapers from 1939 to 1942. He got off the railcar and rushed to the corner and waited until the late-day crowd of commuters began to emerge from their office buildings. One by one, he found many of his old customers, people who remembered the vociferous newspaper salesman. With great pride, Ray showed them his new book. He visited the drugstore on the block, the meat market, and the plumber. He couldn’t contain his excitement. It was his first book. And it was just the beginning of a long rocket trip toward pop culture stardom.

  14. LOVE AND MARRIAGE

  In my opinion, Ray is the greatest practitioner of the short story in the twentieth century.

  —MARGUERITE BRADBURY

  THINGS WERE going well for Ray Bradbury, both personally and professionally. In early May 1947, Ray, who was engaged to be married to the love of his life, and August Derleth were contacted with the news that Hamish Hamilton, a British publisher, was interested in buying the rights to publish Dark Carnival. Ray’s reach now extended overseas.

  His professional progress didn’t stop with his first foray into the world of international rights. Ray’s recent inroads into radio led him to a meeting with one of the biggest players in the business—Norman Corwin. Corwin had already cemented a name for himself as an incomparable radio dramatist, a pioneer of the medium’s Golden Age, who had redefined radio as an art form. His prominence was due in no small part to his wartime radio work, culminating in the airing of his acclaimed program “On a Note of Triumph,” broadcast the night of Germany’s surrender in World War Two. Corwin’s distinguished career has prompted many to refer to him as the poet laureate of Golden Age radio.

  Norman Corwin resided in New York and kept a Los Angeles office in the same CBS building
on Sunset Boulevard where Bill Spier worked. Like many Americans in the 1940s, Ray was an ardent Corwin fan. When Ray learned that Corwin worked in the building where Suspense was produced, he befriended Spiers’s secretary and got Corwin’s home address.

  “I sent Norman a copy of Dark Carnival with a note saying, ‘If you like this book half as much as I love your work, I’d like to buy you drinks some day,’” recounted Ray. A week later, Corwin called the Bradbury bungalow at 670 Venice Boulevard. “You’re not buying me drinks,” he said, “I’m buying you dinner.” Corwin was dazzled by the work of the young fantasist. “I just felt that this young man had a lot of power,” said Corwin. “Great reserves of power. He was very flexible. He could write what was conveniently called science fiction, he could write poetry, and he had a great sense of humor, which he employed very effectively.”

  Of course, Ray accepted Corwin’s offer to have dinner, meeting the great radio director at a fancy restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Over dinner, Ray was as ebullient as ever, sharing his ideas and enthusiasm with Corwin. One of the stories Ray told Corwin was about a new short story he had written, about a Martian woman named Ylla, who was having premonitions that Earthmen were coming to her planet. Corwin loved the idea and suggested that Ray write more Mars stories. Ray took the advice to heart. He didn’t know it at the time, but The Martian Chronicles was coming together.

  Ray was on a roll. By the summer of 1947, after reading Ray’s tale in the Best American Short Stories collection of 1946, New Yorker editor Katharine S. White—wife of noted American author E. B. White—wrote Ray suggesting he submit some material. Ray took White up on her request, and sent her the short story “I See You Never,” the tale of a Mexican man deported back to his homeland. By mid-September, Ray received a response to his New Yorker submission. The story had sold. The “Poet of the Pulps” had waltzed right into the most revered literary magazine in the country.