The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  So the five set off on their European adventure. As the train cut through Utah, Ray wrote the opening scene of the film Moby Dick. He was exhilarated. After sending his books to John Huston over the last few years, and exchanging letters with him, they were at long last working on a motion picture together. Two days later, the train arrived at Chicago’s Union Station. Maggie took advantage of the Chicago stop-off to remedy a major packing faux pas. “We forgot to pack diapers for Ramona,” Maggie recalled with a laugh, “so we all walked to the Marshall Field’s department store on State Street to buy a fresh supply.” The Bradbury family also visited Ray’s favorite museum, the Art Institute of Chicago; Ray had always loved the 1884 Georges Seurat impressionistic piece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

  With disaster narrowly averted and a quick afternoon visit to the art museum, the Bradburys returned to the train and continued the journey eastward. When they arrived in New York City, they checked into the Plaza Hotel. That evening, Ray and Maggie joined Ray’s publisher, Ian Ballantine, and his wife, Betty, along with editor Stanley Kauffmann, at Don Congdon’s Brooklyn apartment for a celebratory dinner to mark the completion of Fahrenheit 451 and to toast Ray’s new cinematic endeavor. While they were in New York, the family also did some sightseeing. Watching his girls’ excitement as they had their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and knowing that he’d provided this trip for his family, Ray felt that his hard work was finally yielding dividends.

  Two days later, they left for Europe. The Bradburys boarded the SS United States, a five-star, 990-foot luxury liner that had made its maiden voyage a year earlier; at the time, it was the fastest ocean liner in the world. The family stayed in two second-class cabins, one for Ray and Maggie and one for Regina and the girls. The ship was bound for Le Havre, France, where the Bradburys would then travel by rail to Paris to meet up with John Huston before heading to London and then, finally, to Ireland.

  One day during the Atlantic voyage, the skies darkened, the seas turned rough, vast green swells rose and fell, and the ship heaved with the waves. The SS United States was headed straight into a hurricane. Regina Ferguson had been on ships before, but this was something else altogether. She feared for her life. Maggie and the girls were fine thus far, but Ray was on the edge of nausea. “It was a very strong storm,” recalled Ferguson. “There were sixty- or seventy-mile-per-hour winds. The first night, a steward came into the room and put pillows along the side of the mattresses where the children were so, as the ship went from side to side, they wouldn’t fall out. He told me to take everything off the dressertop. It was a godawful storm.”

  “There were lots of bumps and bruises,” among the 1,500 aboard, reported the ship’s surgeon, Dr. John E. Sheedy. The master of the United States, Commodore John Anderson, held the stately ship steady; even through the mountainous swells, the United States did not take on any water.

  Ever one to put a positive spin on a dire situation, Ray looked at the tumultuous start to their voyage as the perfect occasion to reread Moby-Dick, the story of obsession and vengeance on the high seas. Ray curled up with the book on the ship’s afterdeck and began devouring it, and with each passing page, he was more and more convinced of its power. It was a book of pure metaphor, which excited him, since this was how he viewed his own work. It was also a book, as Ray put it, “with two midwives—Shakespeare and the Old Testament.” After years of self-education in the library, Ray was more than well versed in both. “My midwives were also Shakespeare and the Old Testament—along with dinosaurs,” he proclaimed.

  Ray finished rereading the book at three in the morning in the midst of the hurricane. “There was no better way to read it,” he said. In the coming months, he would read the Melville classic at least eight more times.

  As the ship powered east, the hurricane grew in strength, lasting three days without reprieve. By the time the skies cleared, the SS United States arrived at port in Le Havre, France, on September 22, 1953. There, the Bradbury family caught a train to Paris. It was late afternoon when the passenger train arrived in the city, and Paris shone in the golden light of the setting sun. With his face pressed up to the window, Ray stared out. He had, at long last, made it to Paris. He cried.

  “Looking out the window,” remembered Ray, “and seeing Sacré Coeur for the first time, oh God! I was in Paris. As I looked out the window, there were men on bicycles riding by with big loaves of bread under their arms. How French! It was right out of the movies. The whole landscape, everything about Paris in those days was right out of the movies.”

  Ray, Maggie, the girls, and Regina checked into the Hôtel St. James D’Albany, and that evening, Ray and Maggie strolled the streets, hand in hand, through a light rain. In five days, they would celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary. It was a moment he wished to cherish forever. In the decades to follow, Paris, the City of Lights, would become the favorite vacation destination for Ray and Maggie. They both adored the city, its art, opera, food, and wine. In the 2000 essay “Beautiful Bad Weather,” Ray wrote about his love affair with the city, his frequent visits there with Maggie, and taking long strolls in the rain. Together, Ray and Maggie Bradbury would visit Paris twenty times, and each time would fall ever more enamored with their adopted hometown.

  A few days later, John Huston arrived. Ray and Huston walked along the Champs-Elysées and discussed the work that lay ahead. “The first thing I learned,” said Ray, “was that John didn’t know any more about Moby-Dick than I did. It was the blind leading the blind.” Ray was eager to please his hero, but he was uncertain about the kind of script Huston envisioned. “I asked John, ‘Do you want the Melville Society’s version of Moby-Dick, or the Jungian version, or the Freudian version?’ And John looked at me and said, ‘I want Ray Bradbury’s version.’” This instantly put Ray at ease. Huston, agreeable and respectful, agreed to let Ray write the first fifty pages of the script without seeing any of it.

  That evening, Ray dined with Huston, writer Art Buchwald, actress Suzanne Flon, and writer Peter Viertel (whose estranged wife had warned Ray to turn down the offer to write the Moby Dick screenplay), along with several others. As she often did, Maggie opted out of the social gathering. She was the introvert, the quiet one, satisfied with staying behind and reading a book (and curling up with her cats when she was home), and sipping wine. Her husband, on the other hand, was gregarious, a talker, a man who fed on the energy of crowds. Much later in life, Ray lamented how much Maggie missed. But had they both been wildly bombastic and extroverted, the marriage very likely would have imploded.

  THE BRADBURYS left Paris and headed to London, following Huston, who was traveling there to take care of last-minute details for his latest film, Beat the Devil. By sheer coincidence, it was the same week that The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was opening in London. While there, Ray happened upon a theater in Piccadilly Circus. Posters advertising the film were plastered all over the front of the movie house. Ray had already seen the film, months earlier, at its premiere in Los Angeles. It was a campy 1950s B movie, fun and innocuous, with noteworthy Ray Harryhausen effects, but it was little more than kitsch. It was a film that Ray had nothing to do with, except that it had been loosely based on his story of the same name; one scene in particular, in which the dinosaur lumbered up from the depths of the sea and destroyed the lighthouse, had been pulled intact from his short story. As Ray stood in Piccadilly Circus, he was shocked to see his name prominently displayed on the posters and lobby cards. He was panic-stricken. What if Huston saw it? Ray was worried Huston would think he had hired a mere B-grade sci-fi scribe to adapt what many deemed the great American novel. Ray knew that Huston hired him because he believed he was a worthy writer, but in his heart of hearts he also understood that a part of Huston’s decision to hire him was born of sheer perversion. Huston reveled in the shock value of having hired a writer who had made his name in the fantasy and science fiction pulp magazines, and whom he had charged with adapting Herman Melville’s great Moby-Dick. Fortun
ately, Huston never mentioned that he had seen the ads. Ray’s fears were unfounded.

  While the Bradburys were in London, Huston invited Ray to Elstree Studio for a screening of Beat the Devil, which starred Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, and Gina Lollobrigida. From the beginning, production on Beat the Devil had been troubled. Peter Viertel and Tony Veiller had written the original draft of the screenplay, an adaptation of the Claud Cockburn novel (written under the pseudonym James Kelvick). But the writers had a terrible time adapting the story. Struggling with the plot, they turned to Huston for guidance. But Huston, Viertel felt, was preoccupied with another project—Moby-Dick. “Left to our devices,” said Viertel, “Veiller and I worked relentlessly on the Cockburn story, but the longer we persisted in our efforts, the more apparent it became to us that the material was flimsy despite its bright dialogue.”

  The screenplay they presented Huston was not up to his standards, and he threatened to scrap the project. Frustrated, Viertel and Veiller resigned. Luckily for Huston, he was able to bring in author Truman Capote, who happened to be in Rome at the time, to write a new script; coincidentally, shooting was to take place in Rome. Yet even with the last-minute heroics of the twenty-eight-year-old Capote, Beat the Devil was a failure for John Huston. After the Elstree screening, Ray went to the theater rest room and stood at the urinals side by side with director William Wyler and Peter Viertel, who had remained friends with Huston. No one said a thing. The film was dreadful.

  Days later, the Bradburys traveled by overnight train from London to the town of Fishguard, Wales. As the train sped through the dark and unfamiliar countryside, the Bradbury girls prepared for bed. Outside, it was snowing, and Susan and Ramona peered through a window, which was broken, and watched the snowflakes. Never having seen snow in Southern California, the girls were alarmed. “There was snow everywhere,” recalled Susan years later. “It was so bloody cold that we all slept in our clothes and our overcoats that night.”

  After arriving in Fishguard, they boarded a ferry for the final leg of the trip to Dublin. At customs, the agents searched Ray’s luggage and pulled out his copy of Moby-Dick. In the midst of a political crackdown, Ireland had banned certain books, and Meville’s masterpiece was one of them. Ray was unaware of this ban, and he found it terribly ironic, given the fact that he was in Ireland to adapt the book into a screenplay, and that he had just finished writing Fahrenheit 451, an anticensorship novel. After a brief holdup and an explanation of why he was carrying Moby-Dick, the customs agents moved Ray and his family along. Ray was allowed to keep his book.

  In Dublin, the Bradburys checked into the old yet opulent Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street and were given two rooms. Ray and Maggie’s room—number 77—had a fireplace, and in this room Ray would do much of his work on the screenplay. Regina and the girls were placed in a separate room, with a coin-operated heater into which Regina continually fed money to keep the room warm. Regina Ferguson was the ideal nanny; she was attentive and patient with the nearly four-year-old Susan and two-year-old Ramona, nicknamed “Monie.” “I was really very fond of the kids,” Ferguson recalled, decades later. “I loved Susan and I adored Ramona.” Ferguson’s recollections of Ray Bradbury, the young father, were equally fond. “He was a super dad. The kids just adored him. He was just a lovely man. He was kind and compassionate, sort of a spiritual hemophiliac. He was very gentle and very thoughtful.”

  From the lift operator to the hotel manager, the staff of the Royal Hibernian Hotel treated the Bradburys as family. Exhausted from travel, the Bradburys planned on relaxing their first day in Dublin. But as Ray was reading the Irish Times, he discovered this ad: TODAY, ONE DAY ONLY—STAN LAUREL AND OLIVER HARDY. The famous comedy duo was making a rare appearance that night at the Olympia Theatre in a benefit show for Irish orphans. While Maggie, Regina, and the girls rested, Ray went to the Olympia and bought the last available ticket. His seat was front-row center.

  That night, Ray felt as if he was fourteen again. “When the curtain went up,” he recalled, “Stan and Ollie did all their great routines. When it was over, I went backstage, and I stood by their dressing room door and I watched all their friends going in and out. I didn’t bother them. I didn’t introduce myself. I just wanted to be in their ambience.”

  Ray and his family settled into their new home at the Royal Hibernian. Soon after, he joined John Huston and his wife, Ricki, for dinner at their rented manor house in the countryside. Over dinner, Ray made his first script suggestion to Huston, to remove Melville’s Parcee Fedallah character from the film. Ray deemed the character unnecessary, and, instead, wanted to give Fedallah’s good lines to Ahab. Huston wholeheartedly concurred. But from that point on, the dinner degenerated rapidly. The subject of Spain came up, and Huston’s young and beautiful wife stiffened. Huston raved about Spain—the bullfights and Hemingway, the colorful cities, the wonderful people. Huston explained that he and Ricki had visited Spain a month earlier when a little mishap occurred. When Huston mentioned this, Ricki stood up. Huston told his wife to sit down, to tell the story to Ray. Puzzled, Ray sensed a palpable tension in the room. Ricki dutifully sat. They had been crossing the border by automobile, she said, when a Spaniard without proper papers pleaded with them to smuggle him across the border. Spain’s political climate was volatile, and Huston wanted to assist the man. But Ricki protested. It was illegal to smuggle someone out of the country. What if they were caught? She had children to worry about and could not risk landing in jail.

  “Very simply,” said Huston to Ricki, “you were a coward.”

  Ricki protested, but Huston refused to back down. Ricki said they would have been breaking the law, and Huston upbraided her for being a coward. The director then turned to Ray. “Wouldn’t you hate to have a wife who’s yellow, Ray?” Of course, Ray could hardly reply. Sympathizing with Ricki and horribly uncomfortable, Ray looked at her. Her eyes were welling with tears.

  John Huston and Enrica Soma had married less than three years earlier, after Ricki had become pregnant with their son, Walter Anthony. Huston was married at the time to his third wife, actress Evelyn Keyes. He filed for a hasty divorce and, one day after receiving the decree, married the seven-months-pregnant Ricki. She was nineteen years of age to his forty-three.

  With Ricki in tears, Ray sat saucer-eyed and appalled, naïvely assuming that Huston’s malicious behavior indicated some sort of marital strife. Huston would never zero in on him like that, would he? In 1992, thirty-nine years after the fact, Ray would finally document the entire Huston/Moby Dick melodrama in the book Green Shadows, White Whale. But then, as John Huston was belittling his wife, Ray had no idea of what was to come. He could only hope that Huston’s mean-spirited machismo would never be turned in his direction.

  IRELAND. JOHN Huston had fallen in love with the cold, rugged landscape and the kindhearted people. A tall, tough man, Huston was a sportsman—a prize-winning boxer, an amateur bullfighter, a globe-trotting big-game hunter, a reputed womanizer. Lately, Huston had been charmed by the ritual of the Irish foxhunt. “I had hunted the fox in the States,” he said in his 1980 autobiography, “in England and on the Continent, but Irish hunting came as a new and joyful experience. It had little of the formality of the other hunts. You heard laughter and shouting as the hunt went on; there was a festive feeling about it all. Everyone was in high spirits.”

  Seduced by the allure and magic of the Emerald Isle, Huston had, earlier in the year, rented an old, spacious country house near the town of Kilcock, in County Kildare. Called Courtown, the gray-stone house came replete with a staff of servants and sat on a patchwork quilt of green—three hundred acres of meadow and forest, and, as Ray said, beyond that “more meadow and more forest.” In the coming months, Ray took many cab trips from Dublin to Courtown, a thirty-mile ride through the lush Irish countryside, to discuss the screenplay’s outline and progress with the director. The reason Ray had been summoned to Ireland to work on a screenplay for a film that was to be shot la
rgely in the Canary Islands was so Huston could make the foxhunting season.

  Ray found the first weeks of writing the screenplay nerve-wracking and the novel almost insurmountable. He read passages over and over, some hundreds of times. He worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, which was foreign for Ray, who had always worked on multiple projects simultaneously, to skirt boredom and frustration. Once he began the Moby Dick screenplay, it was all white whale, all Ireland, all John Huston. He had no time for creative respite. In his limited free time, Ray occasionally accompanied Huston to the horse-racing tracks, another world foreign to Ray. Sometimes, he would catch an occasional movie, take weekend walks with his family in the countryside, or down a pint of Guinness at Heeber Finn’s Pub in Kilcock. Ray and Maggie had met an American couple, Len Probst and his wife, Beth, and become friendly with them. Len was the head of the United Press International office in Dublin, and coincidentally was working on a story about John Huston. The two couples met once a week for dinner. But these joyful moments were fleeting. Ray was consumed by two towering American icons: Herman Melville and John Huston.

  Making matters more grim, there was no autumn in Ireland. The days turned short and gray; the weather turned cold, damp, and dreary; and fog and rain descended upon Dublin. With each day, Ray sank further into depression, which he had never before battled. As a child, he had bouts of feeling blue, but those waves of emotion were nothing compared to his frame of mind in Ireland. “I was suicidal,” he said, “for the first time in my life.”

  Maggie was helpless—she could do nothing except watch her husband sink deeper into the Moby Dick–induced doldrums. Ray was overwhelmed; mostly, he was beleaguered by the idea that he might disappoint his hero. What if Huston despised his work? What then? The pressure was nearly unbearable, and by early November, the moment arrived to present John Huston with the first fifty pages. Ray took the long, lonely cab ride out to Courtown.