The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  In September 1947, Ray received a note from Simon & Schuster editor Don Congdon. “I got a letter from him saying, ‘I’m not going to be an editor anymore, I’m going to become an agent. Do you need one?’ I wrote back to him and said, ‘Yes, I need one, but only for a lifetime.’”

  Ray’s words were prophetic. Ever since Congdon had contacted him in 1945, while Ray was traveling in Mexico, Ray had liked the man. In a May 6, 1946, letter, Congdon, still with Simon & Schuster, had expressed his admiration for Ray and his work.

  I don’t have to tell you, that I am thoroughly sold on the ability of one Ray Bradbury and I would be disappointed if somebody moved in on my chances to publish you, either in story collection or in novels.

  Now Congdon was striking out on his own as a literary agent, and Ray was elated at the prospect of signing on with him. Since Ray had begun publishing in the mainstream literary magazines, he had been forced to submit all his stories on his own, as his pulp agent and friend Julius Schwartz did not handle sales to the slicks. In fact, Schwartz had advised Ray to procure the services of an agent who knew the mainstream literary field. Further, Schwartz had been moving out of the literary agent business; in 1944, he had taken an editing post with National Comics, publishers of The Flash, Green Lantern, and All-American, among others. As the company would later be acquired by DC Comics, he would go on to become a guiding editorial force in the “Silver Age” of comics. Schwartz and Ray amicably parted company, and Ray signed on with Don Congdon, who had joined the Harold Matson Agency. Schwartz continued to peddle a few last remaining Bradbury stories to the pulps; his final Bradbury sale was made in January 1948 with “The Black Ferris” to Weird Tales (the story would later become the cornerstone of the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes). While the business relationship with Schwartz was concluding, a lifelong friendship had only just begun. Julius Schwartz had been a valiant champion of Ray’s early work, landing Ray’s first professional sale, and giving invaluable editorial advice to many of Ray’s best-loved early pulp tales.

  In the autumn of 1947, Ray and Maggie finalized their wedding plans. They had made the necessary arrangements with a minister, but there was one stipulation. “The minister asked if Ray had been baptized and he hadn’t,” recalled Maggie. She accompanied Ray to a church near her house, where a newborn baby and twenty-seven-year-old Ray Bradbury were baptized side by side. “It makes a wonderful picture,” recalled Ray, “the two of us at the baptismal font.”

  On the morning of September 27, 1947, Ray and Maggie went to the Mount Calvary Church in Los Angeles to marry. Ray’s pal Ray Harryhausen served as best man, while Maggie’s best friend, John Nomland, a former classmate from UCLA, served as her untraditional male “maid” of honor. If anything, Maggie’s gay friend acting in this role illuminated just how progressive Ray and Maggie were in 1947. Maggie and Ray avoided a big wedding celebration and they were the only four there. Bride and groom insisted on simplicity and understatement.

  The financial status of the couple on their wedding day was one of Ray’s favorite stories to tell, and he told it often. “Maggie took a vow of poverty when she married me,” said Ray. “The day we were married we had eight dollars in the bank and I put five dollars in an envelope and gave it to the minister. And he said, ‘What’s this for?’ and I said, ‘That’s your fee for the ceremony today,’ and he said, ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Then you’re gonna need this,’ and he handed the envelope back to me because we had no money.”

  Ray and Maggie rented a one-bedroom apartment at 33 South Venice Boulevard, a few short blocks from the beach. After the brief morning ceremony, the small wedding party went to the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel for a reception. For ten dollars, they received a tiny wedding cake cut into four pieces, and a bottle of champagne. “In the afternoon,” Ray Harryhausen recalled, “I drove Ray and Maggie home and dropped them off at their new apartment.”

  It was a completely new life for the couple. Maggie had always lived at home with her parents, as had Ray who, up until that week, still shared a bed with his older brother, Skip. Late in the day, the newlyweds walked hand in hand to a nearby pharmacy to buy new toothbrushes. On their way home, a group of children began to follow the couple. As twilight settled over Venice, the children began to sing: “Happy Marriage Day to you, Happy Marriage Day to you,” to the melody of the birthday song. The children had no way of knowing that the young couple had just married. “We were just dressed in ordinary clothing,” recalled Maggie, bewildered by the children’s uncanny intuition. Added Ray, “How could they know? How could they know? It was very dear.” It was a sweet and profound beginning to Ray and Maggie’s partnership—one of the couple’s fondest memories.

  Venice, California, in late 1947 was much as Ray described it in his mystery novel, Death Is a Lonely Business. Fog rolled in from the sea late in the night and sometimes kept its grip on the coastal community long into the day. Just to see some sunshine, on a few occasions, Ray rode the streetcar inland to Culver City, where he would sit on a bench and bask in the warmth. The train ran just a short distance from the Bradburys’ new apartment. As he described it in his mystery novel, it was “a loud avalanche of big red trolley car that rushed towards the sea every half-hour and at midnight skirled the curve and threw sparks on the high wires and rolled away with a moan which was like the dead turning in their sleep....”

  Venice was a poor community, as it had been when Ray and his parents and Skip had moved there in 1942. The old Venice pier, once a major tourist attraction, was closed and in disrepair. An old movie house stood on the pier, where Ray and Maggie saw the picture shows during their courtship. While they were in their seats, they heard and felt the rising of the tides beneath the cinema and the crashing of the waves against the pier’s wooden support columns. In the 1950s, Venice would enjoy a rebirth as a haven for students and artists. Ray always considered himself and Maggie, with their literary interests and their meager bank account, as “early beatniks.”

  In the early days of their marriage, Maggie took a secretarial job with Elwood J. Robinson, an advertising agency in Los Angeles. She soon found a better-paying position in the advertising department of Abbey Rents, a medical supply rental company with retail stores throughout California. Maggie was the editor of the company’s monthly newsletter, “Abbey Rants and Raves.” She also served as a company secretary.

  Meanwhile, Ray kept up his writing regimen. He had not faltered from his one-short-story-a-week schedule since he adopted it in the early 1940s. In the evenings, Maggie would come home from work and she would either cook a simple meal or they would go to Modesti’s, a family-owned restaurant where they dined for eighty-nine cents apiece. One night Ray endeavored to make a black-bottom pie. The result was a culinary disaster—a burnt brick that was all bottom and no pie. Ray never attempted cooking again. “Other nights we’d walk down to Ocean Park,” recalled Ray, “get a couple of hot dogs and play at the penny arcade where the games were still a penny apiece.” More than once, the couple crammed into a coin-operated photo booth and posed for pictures. To this day, the weathered black-and-white prints capture the unmistakable newlywed glow of the young couple.

  Maggie Bradbury was not the prototypical wife of the 1940s. Without question, it was she who made it possible for Ray Bradbury to blossom as a writer. She was the breadwinner in an era not known for wives working; she worked so that Ray could concentrate solely on his writing. Maggie believed wholly and completely in her husband’s ability. Without her dedication, Ray would have been forced to find full-time employment and the future of the man known for writing about the future might have been very different.

  Maggie and Ray woke each day at seven, and she would catch the big red car by seven-thirty. Most days, Ray would get straight to work on his short stories, but other days, he had a secret. “I didn’t tell Maggie, but occasionally I would go back to bed after she left,” confessed Ray.

  One evening, Maggie
arrived home and walked into the apartment. “I called out for Ray, but there was no answer,” said Maggie. She put her belongings down and walked through the small living room into the tiny bedroom. Ray wasn’t there either. She opened the closet door, and there, sitting on the floor of the closet, was Ray with a carton of ice cream in one hand and a big spoon in the other. The sugarmonger had been discovered. Ray’s insatiable sweet tooth was curtailed only by the fact that the young couple was on a strict budget and there was no additional money for treats. They were so poor, in fact, that Ray had to buy one stamp at a time in order to send out his weekly manuscripts. To Maggie’s credit, the girl who had everything she could ever want as a child never once complained about money to her husband. And so there she was, staring down at her husband, who was hiding in the back of the closet eating contraband ice cream. Maggie had married a man who was still very much a boy at heart and she knew it and she loved him for it.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, pointedly.

  “Eating ice cream,” he answered, sheepishly.

  Lack of money didn’t just keep Ray from devouring sweets. The tight finances also put a squeeze on his writing career. Here he was, at twenty-seven, establishing himself in the world of literature and radio; he needed to carry himself off like a pro. But Ray and Maggie couldn’t even afford a telephone. Ever imaginative, Ray improvised.

  “Right across the street from our apartment was a tiny gas station,” Ray said. “At the time, there was an outdoor phone booth. So I kept the window open in our front room and when the phone rang, I jumped up and ran across Venice Boulevard and answered the phone and people thought they were calling my home. That’s how poor we were.”

  But the little apartment within earshot of the thundering Pacific surf was perfect in all of its cramped imperfection. These were thrilling days, with new surprises and accomplishments around every corner.

  One evening, Ray joined Bill Spier and other members of the Suspense cast and crew for a drink after the radio broadcast, at a restaurant near the radio studio in Hollywood. He brought a copy of Dark Carnival as a gift for his friend. “I went in and found Bill Spier,” remembered Ray. “He was sitting with Orson Welles and Ava Gardner.” Ray was introduced to the Hollywood heavyweights and he handed his book to Spier. After Spier admired it, Welles asked to see it. He held the book in his hands, admiring the cover with the images of haunting Mexican masks. After a few moments, Welles looked up at Ray. “I, too, have masks,” he said, in his deep, resonant voice. And that’s all he said. Ray, of course, said more, taking the opportunity to tell Welles how much he admired his work. “When I saw Citizen Kane in 1941,” said Ray, “I told all of my friends I’ve just seen the greatest film ever made and that’s the way it turned out. It tops every list all over the world.”

  On November 13, 1947, Ray’s third radio piece, “Riabouchinska,” aired on Suspense. Ray and Maggie were in the theater the night the program was performed and broadcast.

  The days and months of 1948 flew by; it was a splendid year. Ray’s script “The Meadow,” written for ABC’s radio show World Security Workshop, was included in The Best American One-Act Plays of 1947–1948. His short story “Powerhouse,” which had been summarily rejected by Harper’s and Collier’s, was finally published in Charm magazine, and it went on to win third prize in the 1948 O. Henry Prize Stories collection, behind Truman Capote and Wallace Stegner, respectively.

  And, as if these accomplishments weren’t enough, Martha Foley, the editor who had selected “The Big Black and White Game” for the 1946 Best American Short Stories anthology had again named Ray to her 1948 collection, this time giving the nod to his New Yorker story “I See You Never.” But even with the sales to major magazines and the new radio work, Ray and Maggie were still broke. In 1948, according to their income tax return, they earned as a couple only $4,883.94.

  In early 1949, Don Congdon had shopped a new collection of Bradbury stories to Farrar, Straus with poor results. The respected New York publishing house had deemed Ray’s material subpar. “They sent it back and said that the writing wasn’t good enough,” said Ray. “They said that some of the stories were good, but others had overtones of pulp writing. It was a very snobbish letter, and I was angered because some of the stories that they half indicated as being pulp were stories that had been in the quality magazines, or quality stories that had been in the pulp magazines. So I knew they were not sure themselves, and that there was some sort of prejudice against me because I had come up through the pulp magazines.”

  It was fast becoming a recurring theme. In high school, Ray’s short stories were misunderstood because they were science fiction. When Ray first submitted material to mainstream literary magazines, he did so under an assumed name so he wouldn’t be recognized as Ray Bradbury the pulp writer. He had long been concerned with being stigmatized for writing genre material and, with the rejection from Farrar, Straus, his fears of being discriminated against had materialized.

  In the spring of 1949, still smarting from the rejection of his second collection of short stories, there was more pressure put on Ray to increase his annual income, and quickly. Maggie was pregnant, and the baby was due in November. “I was panicked,” said Ray.

  Ray’s new friend Norman Corwin had some sage advice. “He insisted that I go to New York.” Corwin and his wife would be in New York in June and offered to accompany Ray around the city. Maggie would soon be quitting her job at Abbey Rents, and as she was the primary wage earner, Ray desperately needed to make some big sales.

  Corwin suggested that Ray put a face to his name, shake some hands in New York, pitch some stories, make his presence known. In June 1949, just as he had done a decade earlier in June 1939, with just eighty dollars in the bank, Ray boarded a Greyhound bus for New York City.

  15. THE RED PLANET

  Well, of course without Ray Bradbury, there is no Stephen King, at least as he grew. Bradbury was one of my nurturing influences, first in the EC comics, then in Weird Tales, then in Arkham House editions which I saved up for over a period of months (and in the case of Dark Carnival, years—that was a lot of summer jobs). I never “studied” him, I just absorbed what he was up to, mostly in the early small-town horror stories but also in the early science fiction stories (mostly The Martian Chronicles), as if through my pores. What was striking was how far down into the viscera he was able to delve in those stories—how far beyond the prudish stopping-point of his 1940s contemporaries. In that sense, Ray was to the horror story what D. H. Lawrence was to the story of sexual love.

  —STEPHEN KING, author

  ONE COULD never accuse Ray Bradbury of an inability to multitask. While he was assembling his first collection, Dark Carnival, he had been simultaneously writing and submitting new stories to major literary magazines. He was also pitching stories to radio programs and continuing to sell tales to the pulps. As if that weren’t enough, he had several book-length concepts in various stages of development. And, of course, there was the highly autobiographical novel based on his Illinois childhood.

  He also had a new short-story collection in mind, which would include a broad-ranging survey of his science fiction, fantasy, and weird tales, as well as his realistic fiction. The working title for the book was The Illustrated Man. And, in 1948, Ray came close to working with New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. The project had garnered interest from Helen King, an editor at William Morrow. The Bradbury/Addams collaboration was to be a Halloween gift book of Addams’s illustrations accompanying Ray’s vampire family stories. But Addams’s asking price was three hundred dollars a drawing, which was much too high. The artist refused to lower his fee, and the project was shelved. Both men would soon become entrenched in their own projects and, sadly, outside of the beautiful artwork Addams furnished for “Homecoming” in Mademoiselle (later used as the cover artwork for 2001’s From the Dust Returned), the collaboration between two creative powerhouses never occurred.

  While juggling all of his vario
us projects, Ray had been steadily writing a series of short stories set on the planet Mars. The first tale, “The Million Year Picnic,” had been published in the summer of 1946 in the pulp magazine Planet Stories. It was followed by many more tales, as yet unconnected, set on the Red Planet.

  The long road to Mars began in 1944, when Ray’s friend and mentor, Henry Kuttner, had given him a copy of Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio. After reading it, Ray had made a note to himself to one day combine midwestern Americana with his love of Mars, which had first been sparked by his discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars stories. Ray hoped someday to write a book like Winesburg, but to set it millions of miles in outer space, on Mars.

  In June 1949, Ray arrived by Greyhound in New York City, with a suitcase in one hand and his (new) portable typewriter in the other. With very little money to his name, he checked into the Sloane House YMCA. “I took my stories around to a dozen publishers,” Ray recalled. “Nobody wanted them. They said, ‘We don’t publish short stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. I’m a sprinter, not a long-distance runner.’”

  Fortunately, Don Congdon had managed to drum up some interest from Doubleday in a collection of Bradbury short stories. The publishing house was launching a list of science fiction books. They would consider a Bradbury collection but wanted only his science fiction material; they weren’t interested in Ray’s fantasy stories, his weird tales, or his contemporary fiction. Near the end of Ray’s weeklong stay in New York, Don and he met Walter Bradbury (no relation) for dinner at Luchow’s restaurant, a time-honored German establishment on East Fourteenth Street near Union Square. During dinner, Walter Bradbury said, “What about all those Martian stories you’ve been writing for Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder? Wouldn’t there be a book if you took all those stories and tied them together into a tapestry?”