by Sam Weller
Ever the hands-on author, after wrangling over the science fiction cover label, Ray had strong opinions on the cover art for his new collection. He envisioned a very loose and abstract rendering of a man, with primitive symbols stamped all over his body: symbols that resembled age-old cave etchings, drawings of suns and moons, snakes and human figures. Down to the orange and red color scheme, the design was all Ray Bradbury. Luckily, Walter Bradbury liked Ray’s jacket-art concept and forwarded the idea to the Doubleday art department, and they liked it, too. “The Art Department tells me to pass along to you their feeling that you are an excellent jacket designer,” Walter Bradbury wrote Ray on October 10, 1950.
As Doubleday prepped The Illustrated Man for its impending release, Ray and Maggie settled into the new house on Clarkson Road. After living in the tight confines of the one-bedroom apartment in Venice, the three-bedroom home afforded them room to breathe. And they were going to need it: Maggie was expecting again.
ONE AFTERNOON Christopher Isherwood telephoned Ray and asked if he could stop by for a visit. He wanted to bring a friend, the noted author and philosopher Gerald Heard. Heard was a distinguished intellectual, sixty years of age at the time, a former Oxford University lecturer, BBC science commentator, as well as the author of dozens of books, most notably on the evolution of human consciousness. Heard had asked Isherwood specifically to introduce him to Ray Bradbury. Ray was incredulous. He couldn’t fathom that a man of his repute, an intellectual held in such high regard, wanted to meet him.
“We’d only been in the house a few weeks and we had no furniture,” said Ray. “In the living room we only had a sofa but no other chairs. I told Christopher, ‘You can’t bring him over if we have nowhere to sit.’ And Christopher said, ‘He’ll sit on the floor.’ I said, ‘No, I’ll sit on the floor!’”
On a still Los Angeles evening, twilight settling over Clarkson Road, there was a rap at the front door. It was Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, standing on the front steps of Ray and Maggie Bradbury’s new home. Heard was given a seat on the sofa, alongside Maggie, and Ray and Christopher Isherwood sat on the floor. As they conversed, Heard asked many questions of Ray. He wanted to know Ray’s background, and he asked how The Martian Chronicles came to be, attempting to understand the cogs and machinations that made Ray Bradbury tick. As Ray recalled, Heard had the ability “of making you feel as if you were the intellectual, you were the one with the IQ, you were the one who deserved attention rather than himself. There are not many intellectuals who have this gift. They’re so busy talking and listening to themselves, they don’t want to pay attention to you. But Heard, for the first time, I really think for the first time, made me feel that I was worthwhile to myself.”
A few weeks after the meeting, Heard called Ray with an invitation for tea at his house. “I was really frightened,” said Ray, “and I said to my wife, ‘What am I going to say to him? I’m going to go down there and I’m going to spend two hours at tea. What do we have to talk about? I have no education. I’ve never been to college. I haven’t read any of the books that this man has read and my career is just beginning. What could he possibly want to talk about?’”
Despite his trepidation, Ray went to see Heard at his Pacific Palisades home, a small rented cottage behind a larger house. “He put me at ease immediately,” said Ray, “and we talked about life on other worlds and space travel and things I felt comfortable about. I found we got on fine, and I dared to say many foolish, or what I thought were foolish, things about life and myself and creativity, and I found that he felt this way, too—this whole thing about fun in writing, and enjoying and loving your work.”
Ray dined periodically with Isherwood and Heard, and Ray’s friend Sid Stebel occasionally joined them. Stebel had met Ray in 1948 while putting a literary magazine together called Copy. Stebel and another friend paid a visit to Ray’s apartment on Venice Boulevard one afternoon to ask if he might contribute to their magazine. He did, giving them the story “The Highway.” Ray and Sid Stebel remained close friends from then on. The two pals shared all sorts of grand times, including evenings spent with Gerald Heard.
“Gerald Heard was a charming man. He was very wizened,” professed Stebel. “He had a little pointed goatee, a Van Dyke, I think they called it, and very mischievous eyes.” One evening while Ray and Stebel were visiting, turmoil ensued when a moth fluttered into the house, prompting Isherwood and Heard into action. “There was quite a to-do over this moth,” Stebel said. “My instinct would have been to kill it and their instinct was to shepherd it out because it was a life.”
Soon, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard introduced Ray to another member of their intellectual clique, Aldous Huxley. Ray had read and admired Huxley’s work, particularly A Brave New World, in his late teens and early twenties, during his imitative period, just before he began publishing and prior to discovering his own voice as a writer. “I tried to be artsy-fartsy like him,” Ray said, “including science and aesthetics and anthropology and archeology and all those things, which of course I couldn’t do.”
On an afternoon late in 1950, Heard invited Ray to his home for tea with Huxley. Of course, Ray didn’t have a car and even if he did, he never learned to drive, so, as he often did, he asked a friend to give him a lift. Ray Harryhausen obliged, driving Ray to Heard’s home. Even as Ray had been uniformly accepted by this esteemed group of intellectuals, he learned that as cordial and accepting as Heard and Huxley were, there were still the underpinnings of snobbery. “Ray Harryhausen brought me to Heard’s house on a Sunday afternoon and they didn’t invite him in,” remembered Ray. “He had to sit outside and I was so embarrassed. He waited an hour for me to come out and I apologized to him. I said, ‘Those people are so impolite.’ Of course, he was nobody then. He hadn’t made any films. He was unknown. If he’d been famous, they’d have asked him in, of course.”
Through Isherwood, Heard, and Huxley, Ray had infiltrated the inner sanctum of a well-regarded trio of intellectuals. He also recognized, however, that as kind as these great writers, philosophers, and thinking men were, they still wore the armor and attitude of the intellectual elite. But he had been invited into an arena that had been, until that point, largely off-limits to a perceived writer of science fiction and fantasy. It was a turning point for him, as his insecurities over being categorized as a genre writer continued to haunt him. Isherwood, Heard, and Huxley reassured Ray. They listened to him. They told the young writer that he had talent and ought to relax and enjoy the long and splendid ride. They predicted that the name Ray Bradbury would be etched in the annals of literary history. Most important, they reassured Ray that he wasn’t a science fiction writer at all. “You’re a writer,” they said. One afternoon, Heard took the praise a notch higher. “You’re not a writer, you’re a poet,” he said. To prove his point, Heard opened his copy of The Martian Chronicles and read aloud a sampling of the book’s passages.
“It was the first time a group of intellectuals said, ‘This guy’s a great writer,’” said Sid Stebel. “Sci-fi was considered a kind of trashy form and a lot of sci-fi writers were trying to achieve respectability. Isherwood and his friends said, ‘Forget what genre Ray Bradbury is writing in. He’s a fabulous writer.’ They saw all kinds of psychological and philosophical things in Ray’s work.”
The psychedelic drug movement wouldn’t take flight until the sixties, but in the early to mid-1950s, Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, ever the philosophers of alternative consciousness, were already trying mescaline, a natural chemical that prompted hours-long, colorful hallucinations. Heard and Huxley were not interested in experimenting with mind-dulling drugs, but rather with psychoactive stimulants that heightened perception, so they took mescaline, a legal substance at the time, under the watchful supervision of a doctor. One day, they asked Ray to participate. Heard and Huxley must have been tremendously curious to know how mescaline would interact with a mind like Ray Bradbury’s. “They offered me mescaline because Huxley
had done several books, one called The Doors of Perception, that all had to do with drugs and getting a heightened perception by using them. They looked at it all very scientifically,” Ray explained. He declined their offer, puzzling them. “I told them, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ They said, ‘Why not? We’ll have a doctor in attendance.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but what if the top of my head comes off and the doctor can’t put it back on?’ And of course, they had no answer, because a lot of people went insane in those days taking drugs. I told them, ‘I don’t want to have a lot of perceptions, I want to have one at a time. When I write a short story, I open the trapdoor on the top of my head, take out one lizard, shut the trapdoor, skin the lizard, and pin it up on the wall.’” Ray was afraid that if he took mescaline, he would be unable to, as he put it, “shut the trapdoor and all my lizards would escape.”
DOUBLEDAY WAS pleased with its prolific young author, but had to take care—Ray was in demand. Bantam Books had approached Don Congdon about the possibility of Ray serving as an anthologist for a fantasy collection, and offered an advance of $500. Congdon countered, asking for $1,000, and with classic negotiation protocol, the two parties settled on the fee of $750, payable upon publication. Ray set out to pick a book’s worth of tales—stories of terror, magical realism, dark fantasy, hope, and promise. Ray endeavored to find stories by authors not generally associated with the fantasy genre; he also looked for material that hadn’t appeared in other fantasy anthologies. “They were stories that I had read over the years that I loved,” Ray said. “And so it was very easy to, in a single day, decide the contents of the book.” Ray chose a wide-ranging group of tales, by authors as diverse and unexpected as John Steinbeck, E. B. White, Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, and John Cheever, to name but a few. In many ways, the list reflected something few people knew about Ray Bradbury: He did not read exclusively within his own field. In high school, he had expanded his reading list to include nongenre literature, and shortly thereafter he began reading both contemporary and mainstream work as well as the classics. He stopped reading science fiction, fantasy, and horror altogether, except for works by his personal friends in the field. “Instinctively,” Ray said, “I knew that if I read within my own field that I’d never develop. I’d be stealing ideas from other writers or imitating them or else I’d discover that someone in the field was doing a story similar to mine and I’d become discouraged and I wouldn’t finish my own story. You must not read in your field. Read everything else.” With his table of contents selected, the first anthology of fantasy selected by Ray Bradbury, Timeless Stories of Today and Tomorrow, was scheduled for publication in the fall of 1952.
In February 1951, advance copies of The Illustrated Man arrived in the mail. Ray had recently signed on with Famous Artists, the renowned Hollywood talent agency, to market his stories to the movie industry. His agents, Ben Benjamin and Ray Stark, had connections to John Huston, and at long last Ray felt ready to meet his hero. It had been a year since Ray had encountered him at one of Norman Corwin’s United Nations radio broadcasts, but he hadn’t felt up to meeting the larger-than-life film director then. He now had Dark Carnival, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man to show for himself, not to mention his recent radio work, his inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Year anthologies, and his O. Henry Prize stories. “After I had published three books, and I could prove my love to John Huston,” said Ray, “I called my agent, Ray Stark, and asked him to arrange a meeting.”
In early 1951, Ray met Huston at Mike Romanoff’s restaurant, a posh Hollywood eatery that was a favorite of the 1950s Tinsel Town elite. Minutes after being introduced to Huston, Ray expressed his admiration for Huston and his work, and followed it by boldly declaring that he believed they were destined to work together. It was yet another towering proclamation made with Bradburian bravado. He then slid his three books across the table and told Huston that if he liked the books, to give him a call. Through it all, John Huston listened with keen interest, taking the books in his hands and admiring them with curiosity. The dinner lasted an hour and as it wound down, Huston invited Ray to a screening of his latest film, an adaptation of the Stephen Crane classic The Red Badge of Courage, the following evening at the Pickwick Theater.
“I went to the theater the next night and John Huston was there with his girlfriend, Olivia de Havilland. He had left his wife somewhere,” Ray said with a laugh. “I went in and sat by myself. John sat in back with his friends and they ran the preview of The Red Badge of Courage and by the time the film was half over, the theater was almost empty. People were leaving and they were bored and they didn’t like the film. And I sat there in despair and thought, ‘Oh my God! Here’s my hero with a flop on his hands, because the film was far too long and needed cutting.’”
Dore Schary, then vice president in charge of production at MGM, the studio behind the film, described the preview debacle as “disastrous.... The audience began to file out toward the end of the first hour, the pace of exodus increasing as the second hour wore on.” By the end of the screening, Huston knew his film was doomed, and he made haste to travel overseas to begin work on his next picture. Ray wandered out into the lobby, where Huston spotted him and told him that he was traveling to England and then to Africa to make the film The African Queen. “I’ll write you,” promised the director.
As Ray recalled, it was a week later that he received a handwritten note from the director thanking him for the books. Huston went on to give Ray high praise. “Impressed is hardly the word for my state of mind,” he wrote. He cited the stories “The Tombstone,” “The Traveler,” and “The Other Foot” as just a few of his favorites. John Huston ended his letter with a sentence that caused Ray to do a double take: “… [T]here’s nothing I’d rather do than work with you on a picture.”
IN THE days, even weeks, after reading the director’s missive, Ray was walking at least a few inches off the ground. John Huston had told him that he was a great writer. He had also said in no uncertain terms that there was a good chance that someday Ray Bradbury would be writing a screenplay for a John Huston film.
17. THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN
Ray Bradbury has been one of my idols since I first came upon The Martian Chronicles while I was still in high school, and I fell hopelessly in love with both his stories and his storytelling. Ray challenges the imagination—indeed all the senses—in the simplest way of all—by finding the inner truths about humanity. From Mars to East Los Angeles, from the lilt of Ireland to a grim place where books are burned, from October Country to the magic of a new pair of tennis shoes … Ray knew who we all were, and where we came from, and most of all he knew all the secret places where we—and he—wanted to travel to.
—ROY E. DISNEY, former vice chairman of the board of directors of Walt Disney Productions
THE ILLUSTRATED Man was published on February 23, 1951. Ray was all of thirty years old. More and more of Ray’s work was appearing on the radio, as Don Congdon sold Ray’s stories to several dramatic programs. Ray’s story “Mars is Heaven!” (titled “The Third Expedition” in The Martian Chronicles) aired on the National Broadcasting Company radio program Dimension X. “Mars is Heaven!” followed a group of American astronauts who landed on Mars only to discover the green grass, Victorian homes, and front porches of their own childhoods. More startling, they also found all of their dearly departed loved ones—grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters—apparently alive once again. It was a nostalgic/futurist vision that could only come from the mind of Ray Douglas Bradbury. The story crackled over radio speakers across the nation, in New York tenements, Iowa farmhouses, California bungalows, Texas ranch homes. And, in Portland, Maine, a boy named Stephen King placed his small fingers on the radio dial and tuned in to listen.
“My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury—it was an adaptation of his story ‘Mars Is Heaven!’ on Dimension X,” King recalled years later in his book Danse Maca
bre. “This would have been broadcast in 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. ‘It’s on too late,’ she said, ‘and it would be too upsetting for a little boy of your age.’ I crept down to listen anyway, and she was right: it was plenty upsetting.... I didn’t sleep that night; that night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face.”
Ray’s work was moving beyond books, and his influence was starting to permeate the outer reaches of popular culture. At the same time, his family was growing. On May 17, 1951, a second daughter, Ramona Anne, was born. Once again, neighbors were called upon to bring Maggie to the hospital, as the Bradburys still had no car. And this time out, unlike the long labor Maggie endured with the birth of Susan, the arrival of little Ramona was relatively quick and easy. The new parents had assumed that their newborn would be a boy, and had chosen the name “Ray Jr.” for their new child. But when their second daughter arrived, they quickly improvised, adapting the name Ray into a feminine version.