The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  “I decided I might well use the temperature at which book paper catches fire,” Ray recalled. “I telephoned the chemistry department at several universities and found no one who could tell me the right temperature. I made inquiries, also, of several physics professors.

  “Then, still ignorant, I slapped my forehead and muttered, ‘Fool! Why not ask the fire department!’”

  After a quick phone call to the downtown Los Angeles firehouse, Ray Bradbury had his answer: The temperature at which books burn is 451 degrees Fahrenheit. “I never bothered to check to see if that was right,” Ray said, with a laugh, many years later. “The fireman told me that book paper ignited at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. I reversed it to Fahrenheit 451 because I liked the sound of it.”

  While he was obsessively cleaning and polishing Fahrenheit 451, the editors of the eminent magazine The Nation contacted Ray. As science fiction gained global prominence and popularity, the genre was also drawing detractors, and Ray was asked to write an article in defense of the field. The editors asked Ray to explain why he wrote science fiction. The resulting article, titled “Day After Tomorrow: Why Science Fiction?,” was published in The Nation in May 1953.

  In June, Ray opened his mailbox to find a letter addressed in a spidery handwriting from B. Berenson, I Tatti, Settignano, Italia.

  Ray turned to Maggie.

  “Good Lord,” Ray said. “This can’t be from the Berenson, can it?”

  “For God’s sake,” said Maggie. “Open it!”

  Ray tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter. Indeed, the note, dated May 29, 1953, was from renowned Renaissance scholar and author Bernard Berenson. The nearly illegible handwriting was ornate and spindly, and written on the stationery of the Italian hotel Grand Hôtel Des Etrangers. It was, in Berenson’s words, his “first fan letter,” written in reaction to Ray’s article “Day After Tomorrow” in The Nation. “… It is the first time I have encountered the statement by an artist in any field, that to work creatively he must put flesh into it, and enjoy it as a lark, or as a fascinating adventure. How different from the workers in the heavy industry much professional writing has become! If you ever touch Florence come to see me.”

  Ray and Maggie were delighted, if not flabbergasted. It was a most unlikely fan letter, from an eminent intellectual and an esteemed scholar of the arts. “The letter terrified me,” said Ray. The words “come to see me” rang in his head. Come to see me. But it was impossible. There was no money for travel and certainly no money for Europe.

  Ray recalled watching a film with Maggie and “looking at far places—Rome and Paris and London and Egypt—with tears streaming down my cheeks. I turned to my wife and said, ‘My God, when will we ever have enough money to travel [to] all these far, wonderful places?’”

  Not only did the Bradburys have no money to travel and meet Berenson, but if they did, what would Ray say to a man of such stature? He had felt the same when Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley invited him for tea. “And so I put off writing Berenson,” said Ray.

  Ray continued working on Fahrenheit 451. The book was set for publication in October, and by mid-June, Ray was still toiling away. He sent the first half of the unfinished manuscript to Ballantine’s editor in chief, Stanley Kauffmann, who acted as Ray’s editor on the novel. The two agreed that Kauffmann would travel to Los Angeles in August to review the proofs with Ray. “We did that,” said Kauffmann, “so Ray would have a final deadline and so that he wouldn’t continue to polish it forever.” After nearly fifty years, Kauffmann’s memory of the editing process was blurry, but he was adamant about one thing: “Every single word in Fahrenheit 451 is Ray Bradbury’s.”

  After Ray posted the unfinished manuscript to New York on June 15, Kauffmann recalled making some structural changes and suggested shifting some scenes, with which Ray agreed. Ray continued to send pages to his editor throughout the summer, and, as promised, Kauffmann flew to Los Angeles on August 10 with the typeset proofs of the book in hand.

  Despite the anti-McCarthy sentiment of the book, Kauffmann claimed he was unaware of what he had on his hands. “None of us at Ballantine had any idea how political the book was,” remembered Kauffmann. “You must recall, World War Two had just ended and we all thought the story was a response to Hitler.”

  Kauffmann stayed in a hotel on Wilshire Boulevard about a mile from the Bradbury home, and he and Ray spent long days in the hotel room editing the proofs of Fahrenheit 451. There, Ray paced back and forth anxiously. “Ray’s attention span has always been short,” said Maggie Bradbury, citing Fahrenheit 451 as her personal favorite of her husband’s canon. “So when it came time to edit proofs, it drove him crazy because he had to do it; he had no choice if he wanted the book to get published.”

  Kauffmann remembered one more detail: Ray was constantly asking him to go out for ice cream—his one lifelong vice. “Some people are addicted to cocaine. Others choose marijuana. Ray is addicted to ice cream,” said Maggie dryly.

  Kauffmann and Ray walked to a nearby soda fountain at least once, sometimes several times, a day. “I’ve never eaten more ice cream in my entire life,” Kauffmann exclaimed. By the end of the week, after strenuous work and many pints of vanilla, the editing process was complete and Fahrenheit 451 was done. “We knew it was brilliant,” remembered Kauffmann, “but we had no idea what it would become.”

  In mid-August 1953, Kauffmann flew back to New York City; in his luggage was a classic. To fulfill his agreement with Doubleday that the book be a collection rather than a novel, the first edition of Fahrenheit 451 included two additional short stories—“The Playground” and “And the Rock Cried Out.” (The original plan was to include eight stories plus Fahrenheit 451, but Ray didn’t have time to revise all the tales.) “The Playground” and “And the Rock Cried Out” were removed in much later printings; in the meantime, Ray had met his contractual obligation with the first edition. Fahrenheit 451 was a short novel, but it was also a part of a collection.

  Upon its publication on October 19, 1953, Fahrenheit 451 earned high praise from critics across the nation. Noted New York Times critic Orville Prescott lauded the book: “Mr. Bradbury’s account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating. His story of the revolt of his fireman, who refused to burn any more books and actually wanted to read them, is engrossing. Some of his imaginative tricks are startling and ingenious. But his basic message is a plea for direct, personal experience rather than perpetual, synthetic entertainment; for individual thought, action and responsibility; for the great tradition of independent thinking and artistic achievement symbolized in books.”

  Though not immediately, Fahrenheit 451 went on to be Ray’s best-selling book. The first hardcover printing was 4,250 copies, while 250,000 paperback copies were simultaneously released. Sales were steady over the decades, gradually building as the book gained cultural prominence. By the end of the 1980s, the novel was in its seventy-ninth printing, with four and a half million copies in print. “I could retire on the royalties of that one book alone,” Ray revealed in a 2002 interview. Beyond its enduring sales figures (both Ray and Don Congdon contended that they were unaware of the total worldwide sales of Fahrenheit 451, and added that sales numbers were unimportant), Fahrenheit 451, perhaps more than any other Bradbury title, has become a literary classic. It is comfortably couched next to other dystopian masterworks, such as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. And it is just as easily situated on high school reading lists alongside Hemingway, Faulkner, Harper Lee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  While Ray Bradbury has always considered himself a fantasy writer rather than a science fiction author (“Science fiction,” Ray stated, “is the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible”), Fahrenheit 451 helped establish its author as a visionary. A half century after it was written, it may be seen that Ray’s impassioned story of social commentary predicted much of the future in striking detail. Certainly, the book’s main book-b
urning premise is pure Bradburian metaphor—that is, a rendering of an imagined world that explores problems vexing our own. Ray succeeded in addressing Hitler’s wave of book burnings during the Second World War, while at the same time examining the growing rash of censorship on the home front led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But some of the uncanny details of Fahrenheit 451 suggest that Ray had somehow looked into a crystal ball and seen the future. The book predicts, among other things, society’s reliance upon television, plasma-screen wall televisions, the invention of stereo headphones (the seashell radio has long been rumored to be the inspiration behind the invention of the Sony Walkman), and even live media coverage of sensationalistic news events. Fahrenheit 451’s climactic finale, in which the story’s hero, Guy Montag, is being chased by media helicopters as the event is broadcast into millions of homes, was an eerie precursor to the real-life events surrounding O. J. Simpson and the now-infamous slow-speed Ford Bronco chase on a Los Angeles freeway.

  The monumental week Ray finished Fahrenheit 451, he heard that John Huston was in Los Angeles for a brief visit. Since his dinner meeting with the film director two and a half years earlier in February 1951, the two men had exchanged more than just cordial pleasantries. Huston had made it quite clear that he wanted to work with Ray and that he would consider adapting The Martian Chronicles for the screen. Ray was hopeful that while Huston was in Los Angeles the director would contact him, perhaps even with a firm offer to write a screenplay. However, with each passing day, Huston neither called nor sent a postcard, and Ray grew more discouraged.

  On Tuesday, August 18, feeling restless, Ray decided to visit one of his favorite bookstores, Acres of Books in Long Beach, with Ray Harryhausen. As usual, the two childhood chums were looking for dinosaur books. It was a pleasant reprieve for Ray, who was spent from his last-minute work on Fahrenheit 451 and the subsequent days of fervently hoping for a message from Huston. That evening, after Harryhausen drove him home, Ray learned that his wait was over. Maggie had taken a message from John Huston: Ray was to call him the next morning before 10:30.

  The next morning, Ray phoned John Huston and plans were made to meet that evening for cocktails at a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Huston was staying. Recounting the fateful meeting was one of Ray Bradbury’s favorite stories to tell. In fact, over the years, he had recalled the events of the meeting with scripted precision, and when he told the story, Ray always donned a gruff baritone when imitating John Huston. “I walked into his room. He put a drink in my hand. He sat me down and he leaned over and said, ‘Ray, what are you doing during the next year?’

  “I said, ‘Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.’ And he said, ‘Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of Moby-Dick?’ And I said, ‘Gee, Mr. Huston, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.’

  “He’d never heard that before and he thought for a moment and then said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Ray. Why don’t you go home tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and tell me if you’ll help me kill a white whale.’”

  Stunned, Ray left the hotel. “Later,” Ray said, “when John Huston described the moment when he made the offer to me, he said my jaw dropped ten feet to the floor.” On his way home, Ray stopped in a bookstore to buy a copy of Moby-Dick, though he already owned the book. His edition was unwieldy and slip-cased, and Ray wanted a smaller, more portable copy. In the bookstore, he mentioned to someone in the shop, possibly a clerk, that he had been offered the job to go to Ireland and write the screenplay based on Moby-Dick for John Huston. A woman browsing in the shop overheard Ray and approached him.

  “Don’t go on the trip,” she said adamantly.

  Ray was completely taken aback. “Why?”

  “Because he is a son of a bitch.”

  The woman was screenwriter Peter Viertel’s estranged wife, Jigee. Viertel had known John Huston since childhood and was Huston’s co-writer on the 1949 film We Were Strangers; Viertel had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on the Huston film The African Queen. “John Huston will destroy you if you go on that trip,” she warned Ray, and identified herself.

  Surprised, Ray pondered his response. “Well,” he said finally, and perhaps too cavalierly, “he’s never met anyone quite like me. Maybe I’m different. Maybe he won’t try to destroy me. I’ll make do.”

  With that, Ray left the bookstore and headed home.

  “I went home that night,” Ray fondly recalled, “and I said to my wife, ‘Pray for me.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve got to read a book tonight and do a book report tomorrow.’”

  Ray was nervous. Of course he wanted to accept Huston’s offer. But Herman Melville’s book was infamously daunting, and Ray wanted to make certain he was up to the task. He hunkered down in his living room and read all night, but instead of reading from beginning to end, he leapfrogged through it, diving into the middle of the book, skipping to a chapter here, a passage there, absorbing the metaphorical components of the Melville classic. “It’s an ocean of fantastic bits and pieces,” said Ray, in a 1972 interview. “It’s Shakespearean pageant with flags and pennants and fleets of ships and whales. One minute you’re examining the various colors of nightmare, panics, terrors, and the next you’re studying whiteness. The whiteness of the Arctic and the Antarctic, the things born beneath the sea, that surface without eyes, and on and on. I finally got back to the scene where Ahab is at the rail, saying, ‘It’s a mild-looking day and a mild-looking sky and the wind smells as if it blew from the shadow of the Andes where the mowers have lain down their scythes,’ and I turned back to the beginning and read, ‘Call me Ishmael,’ and I was hooked!”

  The next day, over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ray enthusiastically accepted John Huston’s offer. For Huston, it was a gutsy move to ask Ray Bradbury to adapt this monumental piece of nineteenth-century literature for the screen. It would be a Herculean task. And Huston had offered it to a man whose reputation had been made on rocket ships, tattooed freaks, vampires, and dinosaurs. In fact, though, it was Ray’s lifelong love of dinosaurs that landed him the job. When Ray had sent a copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun to John Huston, the film director opened the book and read the first story, “The Fog Horn,” which had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post under the title “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.”

  “I had read a number of short stories by Ray Bradbury,” Huston wrote in his 1980 autobiography, Open Book, “and saw something of Melville’s elusive quality in his work. Ray had indicated that he would like to collaborate with me, so when it came time to do the screenplay, I asked him to join me in Ireland.”

  It was a staggering week for Ray Bradbury. No sooner had he finished work on Fahrenheit 451 than Huston called with the offer to write the screenplay for Moby-Dick. But there was little time to celebrate. Huston wanted Ray, along with Maggie, Susan, and Ramona, in Ireland in three weeks. The problem was that Ray would not fly; instead, he would travel to Europe by boat.

  Ray’s contract for the film work on Moby-Dick was drafted on September 2, 1953. He would be paid $12,500 for the screenplay; six hundred a week for seventeen weeks, and an additional two hundred a week for expenses. He and his family would be put up in a Dublin hotel. Ray’s parents, Leonard and Esther, who now lived in an apartment five minutes from the Bradbury house on Clarkson Road, offered to house-sit while Ray, Maggie, and the kids were overseas.

  Before the Bradburys’ departure, Ray’s father, Leo, stopped by the house to say good-bye. Leo Bradbury had aged gracefully. At sixty-three, he was still svelte, with silver hair combed straight back and perfectly bronzed skin, a result of his afternoon passion—18 holes of golf. He and his wife had never been particularly emotional parents to Ray and Skip; after all, they were products of a more staid generation, but they loved their boys in their own quiet way.

  So it was a sentimental moment when Leo said good-bye to Ray. Leo was carrying
something small in his hand, and as his fingers opened, Ray recognized it immediately. It was a gold pocketwatch that had belonged to Leo’s father, Ray’s beloved grandfather, Samuel Hinkston Bradbury. It had a round, white face bearing Roman numerals and in the middle of the dial were the words “Waukegan, Illinois.” “I want you to have this,” Leo said, placing the watch in his son’s hand.

  “I looked in my dad’s eyes,” Ray recalled, “and they were filled with tears and I suddenly realized, he was going to miss me.” It was a quiet, loving moment between father and son. In a matter of days, Ray and Maggie and their children would be across the Atlantic, where they would stay for more than half a year.

  19. THE WHITE WHALE

  I have been in awe of Ray Bradbury ever since my brother introduced me to his books when I was a young boy. I remember distinctly the joy of reading Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles at that time in my life. In 1973, I had the pleasure of doing one of his plays, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a production that turned out to be a major touchstone for my career. The circle completed itself when twenty-five years later I was able to reprise my role of Gomez in that piece for our filming of Ice Cream Suit for Disney. My idol as an author had now become a friend and an associate. Of all the joys my career has afforded me, my relation to Ray Bradbury will stand as one of the most shining aspects of it.

  —JOE MANTEGNA, actor

  ON SATURDAY, September 12, 1953, Ray, Maggie, and their two girls, Susan and Ramona, boarded a Union Pacific train bound for New York City. Joining them was a young woman, twenty-five-year-old Regina Ferguson, Susan’s preschool teacher in Los Angeles, whom Ray and Maggie had asked to be the girls’ nanny for the trip to Europe. Eager for change, Ferguson readily accepted. “It took me all of about an hour and a half to make the decision,” she recalled.